Blood Craft: The Shadow Sorceress Book Two (6 page)

T
he last of
the blue lights receded and a hollow ache opened up in the middle of my body. There was always so much needless death. Why the shifter had decided to come after me … well, it just didn’t make any sense. He’d known I was an Elite; I hadn’t kept it a secret after he’d punched Dex, so why attack me?

Of course, there had been the odd way he’d looked at me, as though he could see through all of my pretences to what I truly was. Although I hadn’t heard of anyone having this ability before, there was still so much I didn’t know and understand about what I was. Perhaps if I could feel his flavour of magic, he had felt mine?

I shuddered at the thought. It seemed like an altogether too personal thing to be sharing willy-nilly with strangers. But still not impossible.

Turning back towards my apartment block, I came face to face with Nic. There was a long cut down one cheek, and it had clearly been caused by the shifter; the edges of the mark were far too clean for anything else.

“You need to get that seen to,” I said, gesturing gently to his face.

“I’m not the only one,” he answered with a grin, but there was a faint flicker of a flinch around his eyes that told me it hurt to smile.

“I’ve got stuff back at the apartment, and you did say you had something you wanted to tell me,” I offered, moving past him on the road.

He fell into step next to me, our silence an easy one. At least that was one good thing; with Nic, I knew exactly where I stood. He liked me. I had no idea how much, but he certainly didn’t allow it to interfere with the working relationship we’d formed. Nic was a professional; personal relationships or thoughts did not matter if he had a mission to fulfil and, more often than not, he had a mission.

Of course, it helped that we knew the truth about each other. I knew he was a player and he knew I was a witch. Perhaps I knew a little more of the truth than he did, but in the end it all boiled down to the same thing, or at least that was what I was telling myself.

My chest ached as I pushed open the door of the apartment block and headed straight for the stairs. The thought of standing in an elevator, if it was even working, didn’t sit well with me. The last thing I wanted was to get trapped in an enclosed space. Even though I knew the shifter was dead, I couldn’t shake the ill feeling that filled the pit of my stomach and it was that same trusting-of-my-gut instinct that had kept me alive so far.

Nic didn’t say a word as we climbed the stairs, and I was grateful for that. All I really wanted to do was climb into bed and pretend the world didn’t exist anymore, but he had information. And that wasn’t something I could afford to ignore.

Reaching the apartment door, I slid the key into the lock and jiggled it around. Ever since Graham had burst into my apartment to rescue me from Nic, the door hadn’t really recovered. The memory of our first meeting was enough to make me smile before the tears started.

Graham wouldn’t be bursting in the door to save me anytime soon. Not when he was lying in a hospital bed with a machine keeping him alive.

That thought alone was enough to bring the entirety of the day’s grief down on top of me, and I jammed my hand into my mouth in an attempt to stifle my sob.

“What’s wrong?” Nic asked, catching my arm and swinging me back to face him.

I tried to shrug free of his grip, but he held on, grabbing my hand and drawing it away from my face as he peered down at me.

“Amber, how hurt are you? Tell me what’s wrong?”

I shook my head and finally broke away, moving further into the apartment as though I could get away from my own feelings and emotions. Somehow outrun them and leave them behind.

“It’s not that … I’m fine, it’s….” I cut off at the thought of Graham lying so still on the ground, no rise and fall of his chest to tell me he was going to be all right.

“Then what is it?” Nic asked, following me inside and closing the door behind him.

“There was an issue today. Graham is….” My voice faltered. I was being an idiot, I was behaving as though he was dead when in reality he was fighting to stay alive.

“It was all over the news, but I didn’t realise it was….” He cut off and dropped his gaze to the floor. “Is he?”

“No, he’s alive, but they have him on a ventilator. He was hurt pretty bad; the creature tried to tear his heart out, left him with a lot of internal bleeding.”

Nic nodded and then closed the distance between us, his hand brushing softly against the side of my face as he cupped my cheek with his palm.

“He’ll be fine, Amber, he’s a fighter. There’s no way some freak of nature is going to take him down, not without him taking it with him.” His voice was soft and comforting, and I pressed my face into his touch, allowing his warmth to spread through me.

The practically non-existent gap between our bodies suddenly felt like a gulf. Lifting my face to his, I stared up into his eyes, the colour drawing me in. Colour flooded my face as I remembered the last time I’d tasted his lips—well, first and last.

He’d kissed me with a possessive ferocity that had stolen my breath and left my knees weak. I wanted to feel that again. I wanted to feel anything but the cold hollow ache in the middle of my chest.

His face dipped to mine almost as though he could read my mind and I wrapped my hands in the front of his jacket, drawing his body to mine.

The shrill of his cell phone had us both dive apart as though we’d been caught with our hands in the cookie jar.

Get a grip, Amber, you’re an adult. If you want to kiss him, hell, if you want to take him to bed, you can. No one is going to stop you and no one is going to care.

The voice in the back of my head spoke up, filling my head with all sorts of debauched images, the kind that sped my heart and brought heat to my cheeks. But the voice was wrong if it thought no one was going to care. I would.

I liked Nic. If I was perfectly honest with myself, I liked him a hell of a lot. Too much to risk screwing everything up. We had a good thing going; he was an ally I couldn’t do without. And now that Graham was hurt, Nic was suddenly even more important to me. He was one of the only ones in this whole giant mess who knew what I was, and he didn’t judge me for it.

“Sorry,” he said, grabbing the phone and staring down at the screen. I watched him hang up on the number and quickly tap out a message on the screen before returning his attention to me.

“Amber, I….” He started to speak and a wave of nausea washed over me.

“I’ll get the bandages and antiseptic; grab a seat, I won’t be a minute,” I blurted out, cutting his words short.

He stared at me in confusion and I spun away from him, racing from the room in my attempt to get away.

“Great job, Amber. If your plan was to not screw it up, I think you failed miserably!” I muttered to myself as I gathered up the items we’d need in the bathroom. Sucking in a deep breath, I forced my nerves to settle. I could do this, of course I could.

I’d fought a shifter and lived to tell the tale. This would be a cake walk….

Christ, I just wished I could convince even myself.

C
arrying
the contents of the first aid kit back into the room, I paused in the doorway and watched Nic silently. He stood with his back to me, his broad shoulders tense as he stared down at the only picture I had in the living room. It was the only one I’d managed to salvage of my mother and father.

I’d never understood why my mother had burned all of his pictures until Lily had brought all of my memories crashing back down around my ears. Now it made perfect sense. If I’d been in her position and found out my husband had a whole other secret family that he was leaving me for … burning pictures would be the least of it.

I blinked back the memory of what had happened that night, my father’s screams echoing inside my head as I stepped into the room and cleared my throat.

“Is this your parents?” Nic asked, his gaze never leaving the picture, the edges of it in the gilt frame charred.

I’d lifted it straight from the fire and my mother hadn’t stopped me. Part of me couldn’t help but wonder, now, if she’d let me do it because she was afraid of me.

“Yeah, before it fell apart….”

“They looked happy,” he said, finally turning toward me.

“I don’t really know. My dad was clearly one of the great pretenders. I’m not sure if you could ever tell what he was truly feeling or thinking.”

“Well, he looks happy, and so does your mom….”

I smiled and dumped my haul onto the couch. “She was; she loved him and he broke her heart. Now, get over here so I can look at your face.” I cringed inwardly even as the words left my mouth.

The smile Nic gave me told me he knew exactly what I’d meant, but he wasn’t the type to let an opportunity pass him by.

“Why, do you want to paint me?” he asked, giving me his best trout pout pose.

Laughter bubbled up out of me, the movement causing pain to flare along the gouges on my chest. Wincing, I covered my mouth with my hand and sat down on the couch.

Nic’s smile disappeared, and I knew he’d seen my discomfort. Closing the gap between us, he dropped to his knees and rifled through the packs of gauze and sterile water on the couch next to me.

“Let me see, Amber. We’ll patch you up first….” His voice was soft, gentle even, and it seemed at odds with who I knew him to be.

He was a hunter, a complete playboy, and yet, as he peeled back what was left of my leather jacket, I couldn’t help but notice the look on his face, the utter concentration and delicacy of his touch as he ripped open some of the sterile water packs and soaked the gauze in it before carefully cleaning the wound across my front.

It didn’t hurt; part of me had expected it to, but I didn’t feel anything as he worked. Instead, I continued to watch him. This was a side to Nic I’d never thought existed. Granted, I didn’t know him that well, but the image he portrayed to everyone else was that nothing ever touched him. Staring down at him now, I wanted to know more about him. I wanted to know his story.

“Why did you start hunting?” I asked, my voice soft.

He glanced up at me, and the flash of emotion that crossed through his eyes—I couldn’t place it.

“It just seemed like the right thing to do….”

His words were a warning, and yet, this was something I couldn’t leave alone. There was so much I didn’t know about him, so much I wanted to find out, and that wasn’t going to happen with me biting my tongue every time I was around him.

“You know everything about me—hell, you know more about me than most of my family. No one falls into this line of work; we all have our reasons.”

“And some reasons should stay hidden,” he said, and this time there was no mistaken his tone of voice. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I swallowed back my questions—as much as they burned at me and I so desperately wanted to know more about where he’d come from, if he wasn’t ready to share then I wasn’t going to be the asshole that pushed him out the door.

He dropped back onto his knees and admired his handy work. “I think you’ll live,” he announced, all the warning from his voice was gone, but I could still the detect the hint of an edge. He expected me to carry on pushing the topic with him.

“What did you want to tell me?” I asked, straightening up and shrugging free of my jacket.

“What?” He sounded genuinely confused and the look on his face made me smile.

“You came here looking for me. You said you had something to share with me, and I can only assume it had something to do with Lily?”

He recovered quickly and nodded before climbing to his feet.

“Yeah, I just wanted to tell you that she seems to have gone to ground. No one has seen or heard anything about something like her. It’s as though she never even existed.”

“Well, we both know that’s impossible. She’s a plan and if she’s gone quiet, then it’s only because she has something else that’s more pressing right now.”

“Are you sure the demon didn’t kill her? I mean, he was pretty badass and it did take a joint effort from us all to even slow him down….”

“I’m certain,” I said. And I was. The demon might have been badass—where the demonic was concerned it was simply par for the course—but she was a different kind of deadly, and one pesky demon wasn’t going to take her out of the game.

“Well, I’m not going to question how you’re so sure, but there’s something else.”

I sat up a little straighter and shot him a curious glance.

“The case you’re working on; I think I might have a lead.”

I steadied myself against the couch, my fingers digging into the soft cushions as I fought the urge to hop up from my place, grab him by the front of his shirt, and shake him until he spilled his secrets. I barely understood what was going on, and I’d seen it happen. How the hell could he possibly know what was happening?

“Are you going to share it with me or keep me guessing?”

“I was at Sanctuary a couple of nights ago….”

I shot him a surprised look. “She still allows you in? I’d have thought fraternising with me would be enough to earn you a ban.”

Nic grinned and shook his head. “Nope. What can I say, Madeline has taste.”

“Is that what they’re calling that these days?” Snorting back a laugh, I bit my tongue to keep from quipping back my true thoughts on Madeline and her taste. The last time I’d met her, she’d tried to drink my magic from me the way normal people drank a tall glass of water. Since then, seeing her as anything but the threat she so clearly was was more than a little difficult.

“If you just apologised to her, then there wouldn’t be such a problem. You’d be welcome into Sanctuary just like everyone else.”

“Apologise? Christ, Nic, that shifter hit you harder than I thought.”

“I know you two have your differences, but….”

“She tried to steal my magic, she practically tried to drain me….”

“But she didn’t.”

“Only because I was able to stop her. There’s no way I’m apologising to that Fae….” I cut myself off before I cursed her. That was the funny thing about curses and magic—they had a nasty habit of coming back to bite you in the ass, particularly if you didn’t know exactly how to word it. And that was something I was not a master at.

I didn’t like Madeline, but she’d certainly cut me a wide berth since our little run-in and I wasn’t going to run the risk of bringing her full wrath down on my head all because I wanted to burn off some steam and score verbal points against her.

“She’s a powerful ally to have, Amber; you and I both know that. If you swallowed some of your pride, you’d have a lot more answers….”

Nic’s words stung, and they hung in the air between us like a bad smell. What the hell did he mean anyway? I knew when to swallow my pride and this situation was not it.

“Look, I’m pretty tired, and I have to be up in a couple of hours, so I’d really appreciate you sharing….”

The look he shot me was anything but friendly and the air suddenly sang with tension. I swallowed past it and rolled my shoulders to try and shake off the worst of it all.

“You’re welcome to crash on the couch…” I said, attempting to soften my bitter words, but the damage was already done.

“I just thought you’d like to know that there are rumblings of witchcraft. But not like any anyone has ever seen. This stuff is new and it’s more a mish-mash of different flavours.”

“What, like Lily?”

He shook his head and moved for the door. “No, not like your sister. Like someone amateur got bored and decided to experiment.”

“So they don’t even know what they’re doing?”

Nic shrugged and reached the front door. “No idea. That’s your job, hot shot.”

Tugging open the door, he disappeared out into the hall before I could say anything else to him.

Watching him leave, I felt my thanks drying on my tongue. I’d well and truly screwed everything up, just like I always did.

Obviously, my abilities to deal with the monsters did not extend to my personal life. Where that was concerned, I didn’t need any creature feature turning it into a car wreck. That was something I could do all on my own.