Embrace of the Damned (10 page)

Jessa couldn’t tell from one minute to the next whether Broder liked her, was simply enduring her company, or downright hated her. His face held pretty much three expressions only—brooding, pissed off, or lustful. All and all, she couldn’t say she minded the lustful one. She enjoyed that one way more than she should’ve. In fact, seeing him come out of the bathroom wearing only a pair of jeans had nearly made her brain melt.

She’d never been in the same room with a man like him, all lean muscle and leashed strength. He had cavemanlike ways that she chafed at, yet there was something dark and primal in the center of her that thrilled at it. There was something in her female lizard brain that recognized Broder was good mate material, could protect her against all comers. Danger, beware! Here was a man who could keep her safe, give her strong babies, all that base, animalistic stuff.

The fact that he lured her so powerfully said a lot about the strength of her reasons for wanting to leave him.

They traveled through the empty house in silence, Broder tromping a little in front of her and her trying to match his strides. “Where is everyone?”

“The rest of the house is sleeping. The Blight are nocturnal, so we are, too.”

“The Blight.” She was still trying to get her head around what they were. Her mind had cordoned off everything she’d learned in the last twenty-four hours and she was dealing with each item one at a time. Apparently that was helping to keep her sane. “How do you hunt and kill them?”

They reached the kitchen and Broder began pulling things from the refrigerator as he’d done the night before. Apparently she was supposed to dig in and make something from the offerings. He didn’t seem to be much of a cook, did Broder, despite his many years on planet Earth.

“Remember that dagger you killed the agent with in the cab?”

Stomach growling, she selected some bread, jam, and peanut butter and nodded as she sought a butter knife. “It’s forever emblazoned in my mind.”

“We each have one of those. They’re blessed by Loki to kill the spawn of his daughter, Hel.”

“They alone make the demons go poof?”

Broder nodded and leaned back against the sink to watch her make a sandwich. “Pretty much.”

“So … how do regular Loki-dagger-less folk kill them?”

“They don’t. Regular folk just die. Look at the missing persons in your country and you’ll discover who the Blight feed on. Mostly they go for the vulnerable, the people who won’t fight back. Indigents, children. People they can make disappear easily.”

The bite of peanut butter and jelly went dry in her mouth. She swallowed hard and set the sandwich down on her plate. His voice had been so matter-of-fact. “That hardly seems fair.”

Broder shrugged one broad shoulder. “If life was fair, I would have been rotting to dust in the ground centuries ago. We’re what makes it fair, the Brotherhood. We fight them, kill them, so the Blight don’t kill so many of you.”

So many of you.
Technically Broder was still human, but he didn’t count himself that way any longer. It made her sad. “So what do you do if you get caught without your dagger?”

He took a bite of his bread and chewed. After he’d
swallowed, he said, “We try not to let that happen, but if it does, we can decapitate the demon. That will kill it.”

“Do the Brothers of the Damned ever die in the line of duty?”

His lips twisted in a cold, hard smile that didn’t even begin to reach his eyes. They were haunted and tormented. “If we could die in the line of duty, we would.”

She blinked and looked down at the granite countertop. “So immortality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, then.”

“No.” His voice came out cold and hard. There would be emotion there, if she scratched at the surface; she was sure. He moved to pour himself a cup of coffee and offered one to her, which she declined. “Your turn to share now.”

“There’s not much to tell.”

“There is.” His voice brooked no disagreement. “Think of it this way: The faster you tell me everything, the faster I can figure out why the Blight want you and the faster you can get out of here.”

A spark of rage made her straighten and meet his eyes. “I’ll leave when I want, since I’m not a prisoner here.”

His lips peeled back in a feral grimace to show his white teeth. The action seemed almost animalistic—territorial. “Don’t kid yourself. You’ll leave when I deem it safe. Now talk.”

She sensed this was the moment to back down. Settling into her chair, she gave in to it. She was going to have to tell this man what she’d never revealed to any other person in her life, not even Lillie. She had to hope she could trust him.

“Okay, fine. Here it goes.” She drew a breath and let it out slowly. “My aunt died three months ago. I was devastated. I held her funeral; I grieved; a part of me died inside. She was my last living relative. My parents died in a car accident when I was just a baby, so she’d been a mother to me. Her death hit me harder than I thought it would. I had to take a leave of absence from work and school to deal with it all. I had to manage the sale of her house and decide what to do with all her things. As I was going through the attic, I came across …” She stopped.

What she was about to say wasn’t as strange as the tale Broder had told her, not really, but it was personal and painful.

“Yes,” prompted Broder in his dark, deadpan voice. It only made her not want to tell him even more. She wanted to scream at him to show some of that emotion she knew teemed under the surface. To act human in some way. She knew he had it in him.

She drew a breath and plunged on. “In records stored in the attic, I found a file of documents and pictures that led me to believe my aunt wasn’t really biologically related to me, that she’d lied to me my whole life. That would be disturbing enough, but the pictures I found of my mother and father made me wonder …” She swallowed hard and gave a laugh. “It’s totally impossible….”

“I believe in the impossible.”

“Good point.” She pressed her lips together and tried again. “I thought maybe the pictures were staged, or they were for a play, or maybe my parents were into historical reenactments, but the photos seemed genuinely old and there were so many of them. So I had them assessed by an expert—two experts, in fact, to get two opinions. Both of them said the pictures were very,
very
old. That means that the people who were supposed to be my birth parents, they lived a long time ago. The pictures showed they should have been my great-grandparents, not my parents.”

“How do you know the pictures weren’t of some long-lost relatives or even two random people not related to you?”

“Photos of folks who just happen to look
exactly
like my mother and father? No way.”

Broder bit into an apple and studied her with his head cocked to the side a little. He looked as if she’d just told him she planned a trip to the library later.

She glared at him, pissed off that he wasn’t as mystified as she was. “Sounds crazy, right?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’m a thousand-year-old Viking who fights demons. Not much sounds crazy to me.”

Pressing her lips together, she continued, “There’s more.
I’ve had some odd … abilities … cropping up lately. They surfaced right after my aunt Margaret died.”

He zeroed in on her, hawklike, apple forgotten. “What kind of abilities?”

She swallowed hard and glanced away. Saying this stuff aloud—something she’d never done before—made it all seem completely insane. “Uh, I can make people do what I want them to do. I don’t know how I manage it, but all I have to do is will them to perform some task and they will. Everyone but you, anyway.”

“That’s why you were at the Office of Vital Records so late at night? You were breaking in to do research? Compelling someone to bring you restricted records?”

She nodded, her cheeks growing warm. “His name was Roger. Divorced. He had a six-year-old son. He was really nice. He searched for my parents’ records of birth and couldn’t find them.” She slumped against the counter. “He found my aunt’s records, but they didn’t tell me much.”

He studied her. “Anything else?”

“Yes.” She hesitated, and then just plunged right into the heart of it. “It appears I have an affinity with certain types of electronics.”

“Excuse me?”

“Apparently I can adjust the electrical flow of things, stuff like toasters, radios, et cetera.” She paused. “I, uh, managed to fix my aunt’s DVD player with my mind.”

Broder stared at her.

She babbled on. “I’m thinking maybe the two things are related, the ability to control and redirect electrical impulses in both humans and inanimate objects. I have no idea what that makes me. A temporary zombifier?”

He kept staring, apple limp in his hand.

Sighing, she rolled her eyes. “A penny for your thoughts,” she said with no shortage of sarcasm.

He hesitated a moment, then threw his apple to the counter and moved toward her with purpose. Suddenly alarmed at the raw need in his eyes and on his face, she jolted from the counter and retreated backward as he approached her.

She put the center island between her and him. “What are you doing?” He was way too close.

He caught her up in his arms and whipped her around, pressing her to the counter. His thigh slid between her thighs as one broad hand cupped her nape and forced her to look into his eyes. “Hold still,” he murmured.

Her heart thudded in her chest, ready to break through her rib cage. Hold still? Was he kidding? She was scared—and excited—right out of her mind. “I thought I made it clear last night. No k—”

His mouth came down slanted across hers. His lips, warm and searching, tasted her slowly, gliding over her mouth so thoroughly that it made goose bumps rise all over her body. Then he parted her lips and slid his tongue within her mouth to stroke slowly up against her tongue. Broder kissed her the way she imagined he probably made love—deliberately, methodically, over and over his tongue colliding with hers.

He tasted like coffee. Her knees went weak and she gripped the counter behind her to hang on so she wouldn’t fall—even though she was certain Broder would catch her. Desire rose up from the center of her like a flower blossoming. Her body ripened for him, became warm and willing.

He kissed her deeply, his hands roving her body in a territorial way. His smooth yet hard body pressed against hers, making her shiver. His hands eased their way over her arms, stomach, and outer thighs, rubbing and massaging, until Jessa felt breathless, until all she could think of was the big bed upstairs and all the ways she wanted him in it.

She twined her arms around his shoulders as he deepened the kiss, greedily slanting his mouth over hers. He brushed his palm over one of her breasts, making her nipple pebble instantly, and she arched into him, a moan caught in her throat.

If he’d forced her jeans off her right now and taken her up against the counter, she wouldn’t have raised a syllable in protest. Instead, he released her so fast she nearly collapsed, then turned away.

“Witch,” he snarled.

“Wait…. What?” She was still holding on to the counter and feeling sluggish and warm from his kiss. The word barely made it through the drugged haze. “Witch?” The insult registered and she stood up straighter. “Wait a minute! There’s no reason to throw insults. None at all! You’re the one who’s been aggressive, not me.”

“No, I don’t mean it like that.” He pushed a hand through his hair and stalked away from her, as though trying to work out what he was going to say. Stopping a short distance from her, he let his hand drop to his side. “I mean,
you’re a witch.
Literally. I can taste it on you.”

There were so many things wrong with that statement that she couldn’t even form a response. She stood, staring dully at him and resisting the urge to screech
Are you crazy?
at him.

He could see that he’d lost her. “A witch,” he replied patiently, “a woman or a man who possesses magick.”

“I know what a witch is.”

He shook his head. “You’re a Nordic witch, not like anything you’ve seen in popular culture or in myth … well, other than Nordic myth, anyway. I don’t know what you’re doing so far away from your people.” He said that last bit under his breath, as though talking to himself. He looked pretty shaken up by this revelation.

She was going to remain calm. Her life had shattered into ten thousand pieces of strange in the last few months,
but she was going to hold on to her sanity, goddamn it all to hell … or Hel, as the case may be.

Absurdly, she wondered what witches tasted like. Then she knew she wasn’t dealing as well as she’d thought and sat down.

“I guess … I guess me being a witch could be true. It actually sort of makes sense. It’s bizarre, but bizarre is now a staple in my life.” She took a moment for the news to sink in, and it was a little as if the universe had somehow aligned. “I’ve always been out of step with people, my classmates, my friends. I’ve always felt different but never knew why.”