Flint Lock (Witches of Karma #10) (5 page)

He was about as subtle as diarrhea during allergy season.

I laughed. “We’ll see,” I promised.

I sighed and groaned after he was out of earshot. “I do
not
need another dog,” I said out loud.

“I have a message for you,” the man behind the desk said. “Some guy named Tom wanting to tell you that the mare is doing fine.”

I sighed again, this time in relief. Tom was the old friend that I’d been helping all night. “Oh, that’s good news. It was touch and go for a little bit there.” I drummed my fingers on the counter. “You know what? If you’re not going to tell me your name, can you tell me what I can call you? I can’t go around thinking about you as the ‘stranger’ or the ‘man’. It’s really awkward.”

He paused. The skin seemed to tighten over his taut cheek bones. His hands hovered in the air, mid-task.

“My name is Flint,” he said reluctantly. He ran a hand through the stubble on his head that was all that was left of his heavy dark hair. “Flint Renton.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “
Renton
?” I asked, feeling like I’d been socked in the gut. I knew that name. In fact, I had been hearing all too much about that name recently. “You wouldn’t happen to know someone named Steele Renton, would you?”

His lips twisted slightly. I couldn’t tell if his expression was rueful or guilty. “He’s my brother.”

Crap
. Double crap, at that. “Oh.” I swallowed hard. Suddenly I wasn’t feeling too great. “So you’re Ian’s brother, too?”

He nodded slowly, his expression becoming wary.

That threw a whole new cog into the works. I wasn’t a big believer in Fate, but, then again, I wasn’t that into coincidence, either, and this looked like a big, fat coincidence to me.

Because I knew all too much about Mr. Flint Renton and his brothers. The fact that my sister, Summer, had been desperately trying to get me to travel down to Karma to help figure out their wackadoo problems just compounded the issues. I refused to get involved.

I was done with all of that crap. I was done with getting tangled up with magick and demons and hot guys—that combination never turned out well. Been there, done that. Once bitten, twice shy and all that fun stuff.

And here the whole mess was, literally showing up in front of me, demanding my attention. Time to roll up my sleeves and put my life on the line yet again.

Crap.

FLINT

O
nce, I thought I was pretty good at reading people. After all, I’d built a tidy career on being able to understand what weaknesses and characteristics could drive humans to do stupid or even horrible things. I’d prided myself that I understood what wasn’t being said just as clearly as the words that were spoken.

Living with my father, and learning the truth about him, had proved that I wasn’t as good at reading people as I believed I was. It had been a complete sock to my stomach. Everything I had respected and, yes, even loved about the man had been part of a larger deception. I had been completely in the dark about his true personality.

There’s a saying that the devil we know is always better than the one we don’t. Well, that was false from every direction as far as I was concerned. I’d had a devil—an actual, real demon—standing right in front of me for years, and he had pulled the wool over my eyes so tightly that I didn’t trust myself to know what was up and what was down anymore.

So, I felt more than a little chill of uncertainty as I watched Win’s face twist from one expression to another after learning my name.

Because, apparently my name meant something to her. A person didn’t get that kind of expression on their face when they were hearing something they had no associations with. One thing I felt reasonably confident in assuming was that my name had not come as a welcome shock to her.

“Um,” she said breathlessly. Her voice sounded uneasy. Her full mouth pressed together so tightly that her lips were nothing but one straight line across her heart-shaped face. She tucked a curl of her lavender hair behind her ear. Her eyebrows formed a worried from on her forehead. Her fingers tapped a frantic staccato against the countertop. “As it so happens, I do know something about you. A few somethings, actually. You know my sister… Summer Daize?”

I blinked at her. No wonder she had seemed so familiar to me. Her short stature, birdlike build, and lavender hair couldn’t hide the shape of her chin, or the gentle slope of her slightly up-turned nose, which she shared in common with her sister. Where Summer was dark-haired, long-legged, and curvy, her sister was petite and delicate. Summer had smoky-blue eyes, whereas Win’s eyes were an uncompromising gray, surrounded by thick, dark eyelashes.

But there was no denying their kinship. How could I have missed that?

Ignoring, of course, the fact that I hadn’t been up to noticing anything recently.

She stared at me, the dark slashes of her eyebrows rising. She fell abruptly still, her whole body practically vibrating with tension.

I realized that I was staring at her. And, I hadn’t answered her question. The words hung between us, just waiting for the truth to be acknowledged.

“Yes,” I stammered, ripping my gaze away from her. “I mean, yes, I know Summer. She… You look a little like her, now that I know.”

She breathed out through her nose and rolled her eyes. The tension between us released its hold. “Yeah, I know. I look a little like her, only she’s gorgeous enough to make men melt all over her.” She narrowed her eyes at me, as if I were one of those men.

Honestly, I’d been too bogged down with worry to do more than notice what Summer looked like. I’d looked enough to notice that, yes, she was s stunning woman.

But I hadn’t looked twice at any woman since Natalie died. At least, not until now. Because I seemed to be looking at Win again, maybe even staring.

She was nothing like the women I usually was drawn to, but there was something arresting about her. I couldn’t seem to stop looking at her—with that delicate, graceful face of hers. Maybe it was the impatient energy that made her tap her fingers and huff with annoyance when I took too long to answer. Maybe it was the way she obviously didn’t let the universe give her crap without a fight.

I stared at her hand, long-fingered and competent.

I touched my chest, where my dead heart lay. Looking at Win made me want to feel things again. She made me wonder what it would feel like to not just see her, but to know her, to know everything about her hopes and dreams, about the way her mind worked.

But, that was too dangerous. Feeling things meant pain. Caring meant loss. I couldn’t deal with any more pain or loss.

Better to just lock that door before ever opening it.

Guilt welled up inside of me. Horrible, shameful guilt. How could I even stand here and look at Win, when Natalie was dead? Was I truly so fickle, to feel drawn to another woman when Natalie had been dead for so short a time?

Even as the thought entered my mind, I saw Win, just as I had last seen Natalie, lying flat on a stone slab, pale, cold and staring, in a puddle of her own dark blood. So unnaturally still. Those grey eyes vacant, yet accusing.

I swallowed hard.

No, no good could come of me learning to feel again.

“At least we have a pretty good idea where your baby demon came from,” Win continued, wrapping a curl of lavender hair around her finger as she scrunched her nose up with distaste. “Your
father
must have been prepping you for takeover, just like what he did with your brother, Ian.”

Ice filled my veins, sharp and cold and unforgiving. It made all too much sense. Of course, my father would have had a back-up plan, just in case Ian died or something. It sounded exactly like that cold-hearted bastard. We’d never been more than useful tools to him.

I ground my teeth.

“Are you okay?” Win asked, her eyes widening. “You look like you’re about to pass out or punch a wall or something.”

I shook my head. “I’m fine.”

Damn my father to hell, anyway. He had stolen my reason for living and now he had taken away my chance for an easy death. Win was correct in assuming that the demon inside of me could take over at any time. Even if I killed my body, that was no guarantee that the demon would be vanquished. There was no way I was going to just hand my body and soul over for a demon, so that it could play into his hands and whatever evil scheme he was incubating.

I might have to stay alive, just to keep that bastard from winning.

My mouth formed a very bad word.

Win’s eyes widened further, but the corners of her lips curled slightly, as if she were trying to suppress laughter.

I rubbed my hands over my shorn head, pausing when my fingers brushed against the tail of the stitches Win had put into my scalp. They were already starting to itch. I wondered if that meant that I was starting to heal.

If only she could patch what was really wrong with me so easily.

The clinic waiting room had filled up while we were talking. Win looked over her shoulder and waved at a middle-aged woman with a pathetic looking basset hound on a lead.

“Hi, Laura,” Win said warmly. “Hi, Julian. Let’s take a look at those ears of yours, huh?”

I watched them walk down the hall. Win’s voice was raised slightly as she talked to the dog and his owner. Seeing her walk away from me was strangely unsettling. She moved in a kind of jaunty, unselfconscious energetic way. The smooth curve of her round backside shifted underneath the covering of her jeans as she moved. I shouldn’t have been watching, but I couldn’t seem to look away.

I felt the sudden urge to call her back, to make up something, anything that I needed to tell her, just so she would walk back towards me.

I swallowed hard. In that direction, madness lay. I knew that. I couldn’t afford to form any feelings—even if it was just physical appreciation—for the woman who had rescued me from myself.

If I didn’t need her help in evicting my homegrown demon, I would have left already. Every moment I stayed in her company, was another minute too long. I needed to get out of here, back on my way.

It was too dangerous to linger.

Nothing was going to stop me from my plan, not even a pixie-like veterinarian with storm-grey eyes and lavender curls.

*~*~*

THE DAY PASSED quickly, the sun spinning its way further across the sky as Win cared for her patients, without even stopping to eat something at lunchtime. She was like a juggernaut—an unstoppable force of constant energy.

Just watching her made me feel exhausted—and more than a little guilty at how casually I had treated my own work lately. Would Win let anything derail her from getting her work done?

Well, finding an injured man in the middle of the street hadn’t, so I figured she could take pretty much anything in stride.

Calls came infrequently. Other than chatting with the patients in the waiting room, there wasn’t much I could do. And I wasn’t exactly in the frame of mind for chit chat.

With so much free time on my hands, I did a little snooping. She had essentially given me permission to look at her records, by showing me how to enter the few payments she had received, so what was wrong with looking at all her accounts?

I already knew that she was a good vet. Now I knew that she was a terrible business woman. With all the clients I had seen coming in, just for this one day, she should have been well into the green. But, she wasn’t. Most of her clients didn’t even bother leaving a down-payment on their way out the door.

I’d seen her hand out free samples, and walk some of those non-paying customers to the door with prescriptions that she obviously had to pay for, since they weren’t.

I wondered if Win knew how close she was to losing everything. I had a feeling that she did. Everything around me—the house, the clinic—it was all in danger of foreclosure.

No wonder she needed someone to answer the phones for her. She couldn’t afford to hire anyone to help her. And that was costing her business that she needed—I’d already had to refer a couple clients to the nearest university for needed surgeries. She couldn’t take on the biggest cases when she didn’t even have a trained assistant to help manage anesthesia.

I glanced towards the closed door of the room she currently occupied, with yet another patient. I tapped through her records again, landing randomly on the name of someone who owed her an insane amount of money. Apparently, this man named Jake Barnes had Win care for his horses, but he never paid her a dime in return. It had added up to a ridiculous amount of money.

I seriously doubted that he would have been fine with racetracks ‘forgetting’ to pay him the purses his horses won, the way he treated Win.

What was it about people? How could anyone believe they had the right to do something like that? Was everyone on the planet just out for themselves?

Before I consciously thought about it, my fingers did the walking for me and dialed the man’s number.

“Silver Lining Farms,” answered a pleasant female voice. “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for a man named Jake Barnes. Is he available?” I pressed the button on the computer that sent his records to the printer. It started spitting out page after page of delinquent payments.

“Sorry, he’s not here right now,” the woman on the other side of the line said pleasantly. “I’m his wife, Grace. Is there anything I can help you with?”

“Maybe you can,” I said. “Can I ask, have you been happy with the service of Dr. Daize?”

“Dr. Daize?” Grace sounded surprised. She laughed lightly. “Oh, you mean Dr. Win. Yes, of course we’ve been happy with her. She’s a terrific vet. She’s saved more than one of our horses over the years. That’s why we followed her to her new location and everything.” Her voice grew more serious. “Is there some kind of problem?”

I cleared my throat. “I don’t know if there’s a problem or not. You see, I was looking at her records here, and it says that she hasn’t been paid for any of her hard work for the last three years.” I tapped through a couple of the case files and started mentioning the names of some of the horses that Win had treated.

Grace gasped audibly. “Oh, no. That can’t be true. Can it?” I heard the clacking of her keyboard as she searched her own records. “That man! No, you’re right. There
is
a problem here, and I’m going to remedy it right away. How much do we owe?”

I named her the amount, slightly raised to account for interest on the well-overdue payment.

She groaned. “I swear, I’m going to skin that man alive. He can kiss that new truck he wants goodbye! Can you take a card number over the phone? I can’t pay it all today, of course, but I’ll do what we can.” Her voice grew grim. “And believe you me—this is never going to happen again.”