Alphas Unleashed (21 page)

It occurred to her that of all the people who’d been here, only the demons had stayed behind. One of them did the local warlord’s dirty work, and the other one could turn your brains into jelly without you knowing he’d ever been there. “I’m sorry if I broke the rules. I didn’t mean to.”

“We know we’re working with people who often don’t have command of their abilities.”

She flicked a look in Tau’s direction. He lifted his hands as if he knew what she’d been thinking. He didn’t. She’d be sick to her stomach if he had a psychic hook in her. “I have been given no directive.”

Palla didn’t say anything, but then he was behind her, and she figured she’d be better off not trying to guess what he thought. Something horrible, for sure.

Of all the witches working with Maddy these last weeks, she was the only one originally from East Oakland. The token. And she was going to be the one who got kicked out. She tried a smile, but it didn’t work very well. “I’d be dead if I’d done something bad. Right?”

“Wallace.” Maddy had to be made of patience. How did anyone deal with all this training of newbie witches and stay in such a good mood? “We don’t sanction witches who are practicing here.”

Sanction.

Her stomach dropped to her toes, and she got lightheaded again.
Sanction
was the word they used when the warlord decided someone needed to die for breaking one of his rules. Nikodemus didn’t fuck around. A demon who harmed one of the magekind—a human who could do magic—got sanctioned. Enslave or murder a demon, and that mage or witch got dead fast.

She looked between Tau and Maddy and it dawned on her to wonder if there was a reason they were at the table with her. Were they a couple? Beautiful people tended to pair up. Or maybe she was involved with Palla, and they were playing it cool. Or not.

“Did you dead drop Randi?” Maddy didn’t sound like she thought it was possible.

“All I know is the water did not go up in flames. If there was magic involved, I don’t see how it could have been from me.”

Maddy reached across the table and touched her fingers. A tingle of magic swept along her arm. “Nothing like that has happened before?”

“Well, sure.” Panic streaked through her when Tau’s attention shot to Palla. She shifted on her chair so she could see him, too. If she was going to die, she wanted to see it coming. “It’s not what you’re thinking. It’s not magic. It’s just…me.”

“Meaning?”

“The two things aren’t related. The water and that dead dropping thing. They can’t be.”

“Why is that?”

She was dying of thirst. Dying. Dry as a bone. Tau stood up, and she flinched. But all he did was walk to the sink. “I can make people stop arguing. Make all the emotion go away. I’m person in the room making everyone else calmer. That’s a thing. A real thing.”

Tau returned with a glass of water. He set it in front of her.

“Thank you.”

“You are welcome.” His voice was pure melted sugar. He sat down, and if he was rooting around in her mind, she couldn’t tell, and he wasn’t letting on. Maybe she’d just looked thirsty.

“It is. A thing.” Maddy swept her long, straight, black hair over her shoulder. Native American and years older than she looked. To the tune of a few hundred. She’d stopped the practice of extending her life long before Nikodemus came here and changed everything. “Am I right that until I made contact with you, if you were around the magekind or demonkind, you didn’t know?”

“I can’t tell who’s what.”

“Is it fair to say that until today you’d not calmed anyone down, to use your term. While you were here.”

“Yes.”

Palla snorted. “Fucking liar.”

“No, sir. I am not lying.”

Maddy lifted a hand. “If she was, she didn’t know.”

“You’re always giving the witches a pass.”

Maddy looked past her, cool as ice. “Are you saying, Palla, that you know she used, and you didn’t tell anyone?”

“I thought it was fucking obvious.”

“You should have shared your observations.”

He grunted.

“So, Wallace. You don’t know what effect you might have on a magic user? Is that right? Demon or magekind.”

She took a drink of water and set the cup down too hard. “Look, I didn’t do it on purpose. If I did anything at all, and I didn’t. It felt like what I do normally, only this wasn’t a normal situation. If I hadn’t done something, she’d have hurt me this time. Fire is no joke, and I am sick and tired of her picking at me. I know I’m no good at this. She doesn’t have to remind me and the rest of the world every ten seconds. I put up with enough shit as it is.”

“If you paid attention to anything I said, you know there are people whose power manifests in ways we think of as unusual.”

She settled down. She was good at that. Keeping an even keel when everything was going to hell. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Can you do it again?”

She shook her head, not because she couldn’t but because she wondered if Maddy was being thick on purpose. “It’s the reason I’m not dead.”

This time, Maddy, Tau, and Palla all looked at each other, and she got that hollow feeling in her center again. Palla growled. The asshole. Tau’s eyebrows arched, and Maddy, she looked more thoughtful than ever.

“I’m not going to say what would happen. Nothing most likely.”

Maddy set her clasped hands on the table. “That’s intriguing.”

“Not really.”

“Do you think you could come here on Mondays and Tuesdays instead Fridays? Same time? I’d like to work with you in private.”

Chapter 3

Six Mondays later, Wallace sat on Maddy’s couch, sick to her stomach and limp as a noodle. It was nine o’clock, an hour-and-a-half past the usual stopping time. If she didn’t find the energy to move, she’d miss her bus and have a hell of a long walk home. Or else she’d have to use the rest of her cash for the week for a cab; money she wouldn’t be able to spend on food. Her job at a non-profit dedicated to non-violent solutions to conflict did not pay well enough for cab fare, not with rent, utilities, and student loans to cover.

Six weeks and not much had changed. The answer to the intriguing question about what happened when she did her thing was still “nothing.” She could not start a fire, move a coffee cup, or make pretty sparkles in the air. Just like before. All the basic magics were beyond her ability. She didn’t understand why Maddy didn’t send her home with twenty bucks and a thank you very much.

This Monday was worse than usual because—hello—Monday, and because Tau wasn’t here, and because there’d been three other witches here, and they’d left going on two hours ago and the only one left besides Maddy was Palla, and he didn’t know when to give it a rest. Ever.

She lifted her head off the back of the couch when he came back from the kitchen with two beers. He was a horrible person. Demon. He was rude and impatient and seemed to think she was being deliberately incompetent. “Go away. I can’t do magic.”

Palla handed one of the beers to Maddy. He took a long pull from the other. She was so, so thirsty, and a beer would taste so good right now. He gave her his usual stink-eye.

Fuck you, too, asshole
.

His faded jeans did a lot of favors for a girl who liked big guys. And that blue tee-shirt that fit close to his torso? That was a favor to straight women everywhere. Even though she hated him, he was fine. A very, very fine man. White as can be, though. Ironically, she was pretty sure he was what they called Black Irish, and wasn’t that funny as hell? Black Irish.

“Don’t get discouraged, Wallace.” Maddy sat on one of the chairs opposite the couch. “Sometimes it takes a while.”

She held out her hand, thumb and finger raised to her forehead in an L shape. “This is me. No talent.”

Palla stood behind Maddy’s chair, a malign, beautiful presence. If you liked a pale man with dark hair and green eyes and a killer face and body.

“You’re very interesting to us. Isn’t that right, Palla?”

“No.”

“I collect soup cans. That’s what’s interesting about me.”

Palla, because he lived to make her life miserable, was plenty smug about everything. And that was why today had been so awful. They’d worked on her linking up with Palla, that psychic connection demons had. They lived a whole other existence on a psychic level. Trying to link up with a demon made her sick to her stomach. With Palla, her problem was even worse. She couldn’t maintain a link with him for longer than ten seconds before she was dry heaving. For two and a half long hours, he’d made her try again and again and again.

She preferred the sessions with Tau. In his own quiet way, Tau was just as exacting as Palla, but he wasn’t an asshole about it, and he didn’t make her feel like a piece of shit when things didn’t go well. He was never anything but unreasonably gorgeous, deadly quiet, or insanely polite, or all three. Tau made her want to be better and work harder. He made her feel like she was better. She wasn’t, but he made her feel like it. Today and for the next two weeks, she had Palla to fail with.

She hated Palla and his green eyes. And she hated his
we both know you’re incompetent
sneer with the fire of a thousand burning suns. She hated him so much she’d rather die than fail, and she failed every single time. She was the only street witch she’d seen who was African American, and every single failure might as well be a big neon sign that said,
black girls are no good at magic
.

Palla bent over, elbows on the tufted top of Maddy’s chair. Maddy slouched down and looked up at Palla with a smile. She actually liked the guy. But then he didn’t treat Maddy like he thought she was toxic waste.

She used to wonder if Maddy and Tau were a thing. The answer was no. No, they were not. Maddy and Palla were also not a thing, despite the cozy way they were arranged right now. Wallace figured that out the first time the demon Kynan Aijan showed up. Have mercy. Maddy and Kynan weren’t a thing either, but the sparks were lethal.

“I should go.”

“We kept you late.” Maddy reached up and pushed Palla’s arm out of the way. “You’re dripping water on me.”

“Sorry.”

Palla pushed off the top of Maddy’s chair and hurled his beer straight at Wallace’s head.

He put all his strength behind it, too. She yelped, and so did Maddy, and then her mid-section emptied out as she ducked, and there was, all at the same time, the sound of her screaming, “You asshole!” and then sound of nothing at all.

She didn’t end up with a beer bottle broken against her cranium. Or beer all over her. Or on the couch.

Maddy said, “Oh my God.”

Palla smirked. “I fucking knew it.”

She sat up. Anything other reaction might come at the cost of her life. The hollowness in her stomach threatened to consume her. Maddy stared at her with big, big eyes, and Palla was still smirking. There was a pile of broken glass on the floor midway between her and Maddy. Not much was left of the bottle that would have killed her if Maddy hadn’t intervened. “Thank you, Maddy.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

Wallace leaned forward, empty inside, and she gave back every smug, hateful look the demon had ever given her. She spoke with preternatural serenity. “Eat shit, Palla.”

The demon advanced on her. “Take me down, witch.”

“No.”

“I’ll snap your fucking neck if you don’t.”

Palla was drawing on his magic, she knew that because the color of his eyes changed from green to gold. She felt it gathering, and it was immense. It had to be for her to have that shiver across the back of her neck.

Maddy cried out. “No!”

Jesus, he’d been playing with them all up to now. He was holding onto killing magic. She stood, and she was hollow, and that black hole in her flexed. Palla roared, a sound that tore from his throat and wasn’t remotely human. If he killed her, then fine. Fine. She was not going to answer violence with violence.

Nothing happened.

Maddy, on her feet, also burned with magic. She turned on Palla. “You are insane. Insane! What the hell are you thinking?”

The demon’s eyes burned solid gold. “She dead dropped me, Maddy.”

“She could have killed you.”

“No.” The two paid no attention to her protest.

“Probably not,” Palla said.

“I would never kill anyone. Never.”

“Wallace, are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“My God.” Maddy looked at her with awe.

“What?”

“You dead dropped Palla.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

Palla let out a sound that was half growl, half laugh. “Mission fucking accomplished.”

She focused on him. His eyes remained gold. “Stop being a dick.”

“Oh. It speaks to the demon.”

“Fuck you.”

“Human scum.”

From her state of serenity, she said, “You did that on purpose, didn’t you?”

“What do you think?”

Maddy put a hand on his chest. “Palla, please be quiet.” And then she said, “You can stay the night here.”