“Nash is immune to your fire,” I pointed out.
“I can’t hurt him magically, no,” Mick said. “But I can break things, like his neck.”
“Let him, Janet,” Maya said. “I wouldn’t mind seeing Nash beaten up a little. But don’t hurt him too much. I want a turn at him, too.”
“Enough with the bloodthirstiness, both of you.” I coughed from the thickening smoke. “Right now, we need Nash whole, and we need him here. Mick, you spent lots of time feeling up the wards. Were you able to strengthen them? Can we fight the hex through them?”
Mick let me go, but he remained standing against me. “I don’t think so. It was a stealthy spell, latching onto the wards themselves. From there it spread through the building like a net, affecting everyone within its drag. If we could find its key, we could unlock it, but the hex itself makes anything we try to do against it or every attempt to decipher it go wrong. I’m lucky I could find out as much as I did.”
“So what do we do? How long will a spell like that last?”
He shrugged. “No way to say. It’s growing in intensity. I’m watching everyone become a little crazier as the night goes on.”
“Including you,” I said.
Mick looked surprised. “It’s not affecting me. I feel a bit of demon in the spell, but Cassandra said the ununculous could steal demon powers. And here’s one more interesting thing about it: The caster had to be very close, as in within the building.”
Mick dropped that bombshell and closed his mouth.
Maya’s eyes widened. “You mean, like he’s hiding in the basement? Dios mío, why don’t we go get him, then?”
“I don’t mean that the ununculous is here,” Mick said. “I’d know. So would Janet. I meant that someone brought the trigger for the spell in with them and set it off. One of us.”
Six
“Don’t look at me,” Maya said quickly. “I didn’t set off any curse. I think you two are nuts.”
“We know it wasn’t you,” Mick said, voice soothing. “Of all of us, you are the only one untouched by magic. You’d have to be at least a minor mage to bring it in.”
“A minor mage,” I said in dismay. “Like Fremont?”
Maya snorted. “Fremont? You don’t mean all that crap he says about being magical is true?”
There was nothing like a good, old-fashioned curse to bring out the paranoia. “He wouldn’t do that,” I said. “Fremont’s a nice person who would never hurt anyone.”
“He could be wholly innocent of the fact that he brought in the curse,” Mick said. “He might have carried it like a mosquito carries a disease. This all started when he came to fix your leaky faucet, right?”
“Right,” I said glumly. “Let’s go talk to Fremont.”
I glanced at the brazier. My fire was smoking merrily, sending a heavy gray-white plume into the darkening sky. As I’d suspected, it stopped about fifteen feet up and simply vanished. But that might be enough. “Maya, can you stay here and make sure that the fire doesn’t go out?” I asked.
“Fine with me.” Maya hunkered against the stone wall, out of the smoke. “I don’t want to go back down into Hotel Crazy.”
“Thank you.”
“But go easy on Fremont,” she said as we passed her. “He can be an idiot, but he’s not a bad person, you know?”
“I know,” I said, and I followed Mick inside.
***
“I swear to you, Janet, I never met the guy!” Fremont, white-faced, stared at the tribunal of me, Mick, and Coyote. We were in the kitchen again, where the others had decided to at least nibble on the sandwiches. Cassandra leaned against the wall, her arms folded, her face pale, and her eyes sunken into dark sockets.
Coyote remained a coyote, his yellow eyes a study in irritation. The fact that he’d chosen a form in which he could neither berate me nor give sexual suggestions worried me a bit.
As for Ansel—he was still banging on the door of the refrigerator from the inside. He’d slowed from frantic pounding, settling for a bang every thirty seconds or so.
“You wouldn’t have realized who he was,” Mick said, keeping his voice mild. “Someone you talked to at the diner, a tourist passing through, someone you saw at the gas station . . .”
Fremont shook his head vehemently. “I know everyone in Magellan and Flat Mesa, have for years. I know when someone’s new, and I remember every single person I talk to. I didn’t talk to a nasty sorcerer who wants to kill Cassandra. I’d have noticed his aura, wouldn’t I?”
Bang.
“Not necessarily.” I was amazingly good at reading auras, and I could see Fremont’s magic one now, like pale smoke in sunshine. But Fremont’s magic ability was small, and I doubted he could see them all that well. “If Cassandra’s sorcerer is as good as she says, he’d be able to hide his aura. Very powerful people can do that.” I knew this from personal, and frightening, experience.
“What does he look like, Cassandra?” Mick asked.
Cassandra gave a listless shrug. “Ordinary. So ordinary you wouldn’t look twice.”
“Can you be more specific?” I asked, trying to be patient. Her apathy was grating on me.
“About five foot seven. Dark brown hair. Receding hairline. He looks like any other suit-wearing forty-year-old man in an office.”
Bang.
“Well, I haven’t seen any men in suits in Magellan,” Fremont said. “They’d stand out. I haven’t talked to any man who looks like that who I didn’t already know. All right?”
“Can the ununculous change his appearance?” I asked. “If he’s tracking you, he might use a glamour or even a simple disguise.”
Cassandra gave me a watery smile. “Him? He’s the most arrogant man I’ve ever met. What does it matter to him if one of us identifies him? He’ll crush us and not care.”
Bang.
“All right,” I said, drawing a breath. “Could he have seeded the curse in Fremont without Fremont seeing him or noticing? Maybe by brushing by him in a store, something like that?”
Mick answered, “Eye contact is better. If the sorcerer greets you, shakes your hand, he can make sure you received the spark. It’s more emotionally satisfying for him as well. But I suppose it could happen with a brush-by. Like a pickpocket in reverse.”
Fremont waved his hands. “What you’re not getting is that I haven’t seen anyone like who you describe. Not brushing by me in the diner, not even passing me in a car on the road. I would have noticed.”
“I believe you,” I said. He was right, he would have. Fremont loved to watch, and then talk about, his fellow man.
“Thank you.” Fremont let out a sigh and rubbed his hand over what was left of his hair.
“Mick?” I asked. “Have you seen anyone like Cassandra describes?”
“No.”
Bang.
“Okay, then. Neither have I.”
Fremont glared. “Wait, you believe him without grilling him like you did me?”
“Sorry, Fremont. I’m on edge. Mick’s a dragon—if someone seeded a curse on him, he’d notice right away.” I glanced at Mick. “Right?”
Mick affirmed. I’d like to think I would have noticed right away, too. A spark like that would sting both my magics, wouldn’t it? Then again, if this sorcerer was as powerful as advertised . . .
“It was probably me,” Cassandra said.
Fremont looked at her in surprise. “You saw him? Why didn’t you say so?”
“I mean the last time I met him. Christianson might have had the ununculous seed a hex on me, so that if I double-crossed him, it would activate, like a time-release pill. It would wait until I felt safe and then go off. The ununculous would feel it, and come for me. Revenge served cold.”
A bolt of lightning slammed to the ground not a mile away, followed by a boom of thunder that rolled on,
and on, and on. Before its rumbles died, another bolt cracked not far from the first one. My body pulsed with electricity, my Stormwalker magic reaching to suck it in before I could stop it.
Wind struck the hotel with such force that the building creaked. It howled through the eaves and every crack in the edifice, and I felt a breeze cross my face.
“Janet,” Fremont said, staring at me. “Your eyes.”
“What about them?” Sparks laced my fingers as I raised my hands. “Are they green?”
“No. Black. All black. Like nothing’s there.”
I could see out of them fine, no change there, but Mick was watching me in concern. I snatched out the piece of magic mirror I’d shoved into my pocket and stared into it. Sure enough, my eyeballs had gone all black, no pupils or irises. I looked into the black void that was me, until lightning struck again, and white electricity encircled my face.
“I see,” I whispered in a voice that didn’t sound like mine. “I see so much. Darkness. Pain. Terror. The end of all things.”
“Janet,” Fremont said, worried. “What the hell are you talking about?”
I wrenched my gaze from the mirror and looked up. I had their attention now, even Cassandra’s.
“I don’t know why I said that.” Or did I? I had seen it, deep in the mirror, flashes of terror, darkness, fire, white light rising from the ground. Everyone I loved in torturous pain. And then, nothing . . .
Lightning struck again, its white flare rendering the candle flames ineffectual pinpricks. Electricity crawled up my arms, and I bunched my hands to keep from blasting the table, floor, my friends, everything in sight.
I wasn’t certain how I was pulling in the storm magic when the hex wasn’t letting anything physically in or out, but maybe it was because magic isn’t physical. It’s the coupling of the mage and the elements that mage uses for power—Mick and his dragon nature, Cassandra and her spell accoutrements, me and a storm. A psychic connection no one understands. I don’t actually direct the storms themselves—I absorb their elemental might and use it to fuel my own magic.
Or the hex might be letting me use my storm magic so it could busily fuck it up.
I couldn’t control the power. I’d felt this before—at age eleven, when I’d first called a storm’s power, not on purpose. I remembered flailing my hands, trying to get rid of the lightning that clung to them. I’d succeeded only in blasting a tree and burning down a shed. I’d run off into the desert in terror, the storm following me.
This storm was big and close, and I was locked inside my hotel by a curse. No running away to keep my loved ones safe.
“Janet,” Cassandra said, watching me with a hint of her usual witchy focus. “What did you see?”
“I don’t remember now.” The visions were fading, dying as fast as they’d come. “Fire, darkness. The vortexes. Nothing.”
Bang.
Cassandra didn’t answer, but she held on to the back of a kitchen chair, her knuckles white.
More lightning struck, and electric arcs crawled all over my body. I moved my hand, and a tail of lightning caught the end of the counter and blew it into pieces.
“Whoa.” Fremont threw up his arms to shield himself from the rain of wood and tile. Coyote, still a coyote, grabbed Cassandra by the skirt and towed her back out of my way.
Only Mick stood his ground. Mick, whose eyes had gone as black as mine, watched me with a predatory stare.
“Mick,” I whispered.
He moved to me and took my hands. His body jolted as the lightning jerked into him, but he smiled a wide, bestial smile. “Want me to draw it off?”
“This is a full storm. The last time you were with me in a full storm, I nearly killed you.”
“That was different.” Mick leaned down and bit my cheek, and the heat of his mouth awoke every need I’d ever had. “That was battle. This is me, drawing off your power so you can function. Give me your lightning, Janet.”
Bang.
I turned to Mick and kissed him.
The kiss canceled out every worry I had, every terror of the night. This was me and Mick, and this was raw. His lips bruised mine as he drew me up into him and explored my mouth with deep, hot strokes. I clung to his shoulders, and my lightning flowed straight into him.
Mick cupped my breast, his palm rough through my shirt, and I wound my leg around his thigh. I wanted him; gods, I wanted him. The lightning was driving me crazy, the storm outside was escalating, and I craved Mick.
I wrapped my arms around his neck and melted against him, finding him hard for me. Sex with Mick could be fast, brutal, and exciting, and then he could turn around and be so incredibly tender it made me cry.
Tonight, I wanted him with everything I had. If the others hadn’t been in the kitchen with us, Mick would have had laid me across the stainless steel table and taken me then and there.
Bang.
“Um,” Fremont said. “I appreciate that you guys are in love, but . . . a time and a place?”
“He’s toning down her storm magic,” Cassandra said, sounding weary. “He’s afraid she’ll kill us with it. Dragons can imbibe storm magic. It won’t hurt him, I don’t think.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
I was aware of Coyote watching us closely, a far-too-interested look in his yellow eyes. As if in answer, Mick lifted me into his arms and strode with me out of the kitchen. I clung to him, my mouth still seeking his, blue crackles of electricity crawling over both of us.
Maya came charging down the stairs as Mick carried me toward the back hall. “I’m not staying up there to get struck by lightning,” she said. “Anyway, it’s raining now, so the fire’s out.” She stopped. “Janet, what the hell?”
“Go to the kitchen,” I said breathlessly. “Talk to you later.”
Maya rolled her eyes as Mick whisked me into the hall that led to my bedroom. Before we hit the threshold, I shouted back, “Keep Coyote away from us.”
Mick kicked closed the bedroom door, cutting off Maya’s deprecations directed at me in Spanish.
***
Mick dumped me onto the bed and started pulling off his clothes. Even while my bedcovers started to smolder from the lightning in my hands, I didn’t mind sitting back and watching my boyfriend strip.
His body was delicious. I remembered the night I’d first seen it, in a hotel room in Las Vegas. I remember sitting on the bed, nervous as hell, while he pulled off his shirt to reveal a chest and six-pack abs a bodybuilder would kill for. As he’d turned around to toss the shirt somewhere, his jeans had dipped to reveal the jagged fire tattoo riding across his lower back. Plus the fact that he wasn’t wearing any underwear. By the time he’d turned back around, I’d had my shirt off, too. Mick had smiled at me, his eyes so damned blue. He’d put his knee on the bed, touched my face with his big hand, and said, “Gods, Janet, do you know how beautiful you are?”
His eyes were black tonight, but my heart still pounded as hard as it had then.
Mick threw his shirt on the dresser. “What are you smiling at?”
“Memories,” I said.
Lightning struck right outside, and Mick stripped me, not slowly, not gently, but with the skill of long practice. He jerked out of his own jeans and laid me down on the mattress, his mouth all over me. My lightning fired into him as he covered my skin with openmouthed kisses, his breath hot when he kissed the stud in my navel.
He looked up, my lightning sizzling around him and sparking in his eyes. “More,” he whispered. “Give it to me good.”
The power in me wanted to dive into him, like the best sex, but I worried I’d hurt him. Mick never touched me when the storm was at its peak; it would be too much.
Mick pulled me up until we were kneeling together, naked, sweat slicking our bodies. “Don’t hold back,” he growled. “I want it. All of it. As much as you can give me.”<
br />
“Mick, I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t. I want it, Janet. I want you.”
When I still hesitated, Mick grabbed me, opened my lips with his, and sucked the power out of me.
I screamed against his mouth. Mick imbibed my lightning as though it were the best wine, his body hard, his whispered groans driving me crazy.
Gods, I love him.
The fire tattoo on his back was hot under my touch, his body sizzling with my lightning. We risked blasting a hole in the floor and tumbling into the basement, and it was the most erotic thing I’d ever experienced. Mick laid me back down on the bed, his eyes devouring me, and he entered me in one swift thrust.
He pinned me down, my Mick who liked to play the master with me, made even more exciting because I knew he’d never, ever hurt me. He’d taught me that first night to trust him with everything I had, and the reward was pleasure I’d never dreamed existed.
Tonight bore the wild edge of danger because of the hex. Mick had been reluctant to try sex-enhanced spells, but now we tossed away caution like a used tissue and gave in to the ecstasy. This was different from spell casting—this was Mick simply driving into me, and me giving him every bit of power I had.
I met his thrusts with my body, my nails raking down his back, my cries ringing to the ceiling. Outside the storm wound up, and inside we did the same.
Mick’s eyes shone with fire. “Love you,” he grated. “Love you so much.”
The snakes and whorls of electricity slowly dimmed, Mick’s dragon magic absorbing them all. But Mick was a long way from being finished. He pinned my wrists over my head and kept going, this lovemaking session growing ever more crazy.
I think we would have gone on until we died, if the magic mirror hadn’t chosen that moment to let out a high-pitched keen. The sound spiraled up until it knifed through my head, and even Mick cursed and jammed a hand over his ear.
“What the fuck?” he snarled.
I rolled out from under Mick, and Mick landed next to me, panting, while I leaned from the bed and scrabbled for the piece of mirror in my pocket. “Hey!” I yelled at it.