FUR FOR ALL, Book 5 in FIXED (17 page)

“Not as good as I’m hoping my night will be.” He frowned and reached out to tug at a severely styled curl. “What happened to your hair?” Tess reached up to feel it self-consciously. The normally wild profusion of corkscrew curls had been brushed, rolled, set and sprayed within an inch of its life in preparation for their appearance in front of the firing squad—a.k.a. the Witches’ Council.

“Nothing. I just tried to make it behave,” she said. “Granddad hates when it looks all undisciplined.”

“But I like it undisciplined. I especially like when it misbehaves. Like when I have you under me, and you’re tossing your head against the pillows…” 136

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Tess cleared her throat. Loudly. “Um, shouldn’t we be going?” He sighed. “I thought I was doing pretty well there for a minute.”

“Down, boy. The council will
not
be happy if we show up late, or with our nice clothes all wrinkled.”

He eyed her nice clothes, taking in the way the midnight blue dress clung to her curves, all high-necked and short sleeved like something Audrey Hepburn would wear. And she thought of that as one of her “unsexy” dresses. With the way he looked at her, she was beginning to think wearing her sexy dresses around him would be like pouring gasoline on a forest fire.

“All right,” he agreed. “I’ll be good. But only if you promise I can muss you later.”

Tess ignored the way his smile always made her stomach clench, and the way he never talked about any emotions that weren’t sexual. Like she’d told Missy, she would figure it all out later. After the council meeting. “Show me you can earn it, and I just might.”

He laughed and guided her to the elevator, then down to his waiting car.

He’d left it running, with the keys in the engine in Tribeca, and Tess just shook her head. It would never get stolen, that was for sure. But how the criminals knew Rafe was the driver while he was up in her apartment, she could never get quite clear.

He was unusual just for having a car in Manhattan. Tess had long ago decided they weren’t worth it, but Rafe had offered an easy explanation. “There’s no room in the city. When I need to run, I head upstate.” It explained the four-wheel drive, too.

Rafe drove like he did everything, lazily, gracefully and with such a complete lack of haste you never realized what was happening until it was all over. All she did was give him the directions and he had them across town and back on the Upper West Side before she really had time to get worked up about 137

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the coming meeting. But in the fifteen seconds between reverse and park, she more than made up for that.

He pulled into a completely miraculous parking spot, cut the engine and turned to face her. “Stop freaking.”

“I’m not freaking. I’m thinking.”

“You’re thinking freaking thoughts then.”

“My thoughts are none of your damned business.”

“Sure they are. Especially when I’ve already told you not to freak.”

“I don’t take orders well at the best of times. In case you hadn’t noticed.” She looked at him. “And this isn’t the best of times.”

“Why not?”

She looked harder. “Let me think. Maybe because I’m about to see my granddad for the second time in a month, which is never good; I’m going to discuss an issue of grave social, psychological and martial import, and said issue is likely to prove divisive and heated. Oh, and I’m introducing my grandfather to my lover, who happens to be the very spokesman for the opposite side of said issue. And is a member of a different species.” She pasted on a sickly false grin.

“Sheesh! What have I got to worry about?” Rafe chuckled and leaned forward to brush a kiss across her smiling mouth.

“Relax. I told you, everything will be fine.” He slid out of his seat and walked around to her side to open her door. While she waited for him with her hands clenched into fists inside the long sleeves of her jacket, Tess snorted. “Right. Now if only you’d told the same thing to my grandfather.”

Tess had been to the council’s meeting rooms a couple of times before, but never during an actual meeting. They were located in the basement of a series of 138

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row houses on a quiet street in not the best block of the Upper West Side. Not that the neighborhood was bad, but it bore an air of shabby gentility that stated it had seen its share of wealth, but that had been a while ago. The slightly downtrodden situation of the local inhabitants meant that no one saw it amiss that an anonymous presence had bought their homes and rented them back again with the basements tightly and irrevocably sealed off. With the exception of one, of course, and that’s where Tess led Rafe.

She preceded him through the unmarked alley entrance around the side of the fifth house on the block. Down a dark, steep, narrow stairway, they stepped out into a small open area with floors and walls of bare concrete. A single, bare light bulb swung from a wire in the ceiling. Tess felt Rafe’s eyes on her as she walked to the only door in the room and raised her right hand to touch it precisely in its center. It swung open, and she waved him through, ignoring his raised eyebrow and curious stare.

“I thought you said you didn’t do much magic?”

“I don’t.” Ignoring any further comments, as well as the huge knot in her stomach, Tess closed the door again behind them. By physically pushing it shut.

“This way.”

She felt a sense of urgency she couldn’t define. Something told her she needed to hurry, but she’d glanced at her watch just a moment ago, and she knew she wasn’t late. So what was going on?

Taking the lead once more, she hurried along the dingy corridor with its cement block walls until she came to a choice of passages. Straight ahead, she knew, lay an old wine cellar that now served as a storage room. The left passage led to a maze of corridors that never seemed to end, even if Tess knew it was an illusion meant to confuse anyone who happened to get past the door and wander down here uninvited. The council chamber was just a few dozen feet down the right-hand path. So why didn’t Tess want to take it?

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Rafe noticed her hesitation and frowned. “Is everything okay?” Tess nodded her head. “Fine. I was just thinking for a second.” He raised an eyebrow. “You can’t remember which way to go?”

“No, I remember. I’m just remembering something else, too.”

“Like what?”

“Like,
duck
!”

Faster than she would have thought possible, Tess moved, throwing herself against Rafe so suddenly that she actually managed to knock him off balance.

And that was good, because if he’d been
on
balance, there would have been a great, big, smoking hole right where his head had been. Tess knew that for a fact, because she could see it in the cement wall just beyond where his head and been.

“What the hell?!”

That was just what Tess wanted to know, too, but at the moment she was too busy tugging Rafe down the center passage to bother asking. “Would you come on?” she hissed. “Something really weird is happening here.” Rafe growled and pushed her in front of him as they raced down the hall. “I figured that out when someone shot at us. That
was
someone shooting at us, right?”

“Well, he didn’t have a gun, but otherwise, yeah, I’d say that was pretty accurate.”

“Who is ‘he,’ anyway?”

Tess shoved the door of the wine cellar open and darted inside, urging Rafe in after her. As soon as he made it in, she slammed the door shut and began backing away from it.

“Tess,” Rafe repeated impatiently. “Who is the ‘he’ who was shooting at us?” She blinked. “My grandfather.”

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Chapter Seventeen

Rafe just stared. He could not have just heard what he’d thought he’d heard.

“Did you just say your grandfather is trying to kill us?” He watched her jerky nod. She’d gone ghostly pale, and he thought he could see her skin glistening. He knew he could smell her fear. “Yeah. I mean, technically, with that blow he was just trying to kill you, but the me part of us was definitely next on his agenda. Providing I’m remembering what I’m remembering fairly accurately.”

“Do you usually? Remember accurately, I mean?”

“God, I hope not!”

“Why not?”

“Because I think I remember him killing me.” Rafe swore and shook his head. He refused to even contemplate the idea of Tess dying. It was
not
going to happen. Not for another sixty or seventy years at least. “What are you talking about? What are you remembering, Tess?” She shuddered. “I told you when I see things, it’s like seeing déjà vu a few seconds ahead of time. It’s not enough time to change anything, just to get really scared. And to warn you that he won’t hesitate. He won’t think twice, so you can’t count on him to.”

“Tess! What the hell does that—”

He never got to finish his question.

The door slammed open as if it had been kicked, catching Tess in the hip and sending her sprawling right into the path of the bolt of sickly green energy that shot from her grandfather’s fingers in time to his half-chanted words. She took 141

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the blow directly to her chest, and Rafe saw the singe marks on her clothes when she went down. She hit the floor like a crash test dummy and he roared in denial.

“She’s not dead yet,” Lionel Menzies drawled as he stepped into the small room. He had the sour smell of the mentally unbalanced and the rich, earthy fragrance of someone who was very clever indeed. “I might get to that later, depending on how things go between us. Right now, though, you and I need to do a little negotiating.”

Rafe tried to step toward Tess’s limp form, but Lionel said a few words and suddenly there was a shimmering, malevolent green wall between Rafe and Tess.

“Ah, forbidden love,” Lionel said. “Isn’t it tragic? But I’ll warn you to stay away from her. I want to talk to you.”

Rafe froze and let his hands drop back to his sides. He assessed his options and found most of them sucked. “Isn’t that why I’m here? To talk to the council?”

“Fuck the council. You’re here to talk to me.” And that was news. Rafe had, perhaps naïvely, believed that being invited—

well, maybe summoned was a better word, now that he recalled the letter—to appear before the Witches’ Council meant appearing before the Witches’

Council. “Okay. About what?”

“Don’t play dumb, Mr. De Santos. It doesn’t suit you.” Lionel watched him with cold pale blue eyes that looked nothing like his granddaughter’s. “We’re here to talk about the Accord. It’s always been about the Accord.” Rafe shifted, eyes watching Menzies warily. “Tess seemed to think that our opinions about the Accord aren’t that different. We’re both out to preserve it until we can find the time that best suits revealing ourselves to the human world.”

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Lionel laughed. “Don’t assume you know my goals, boy. I’ve been working to set my plans in motion for longer than you’ve been alive. I certainly don’t intend to let you derail them now.”

“Is this the part where you share your nefarious schemes while the conveyor belt carries me closer to the spinning saw blades?” Rafe glanced behind Menzies to where Tess lay silently on the floor. God, she looked still. And pale. He bit back a curse.

“You watch too many movies, boy. I’m not planning to kill you. At least, I only plan to kill you as a last resort. First I’m going to tell you why you need to help me make sure the Accord fails here and now.”

“Fails?” Rafe shook his head, frowning. “But why would you want the Accord to fail now? Another two or three years and it will be obsolete anyway.

All you have to do is be patient.”

“I’ve been patient for forty years. I have no more time for patience.”

“Then what do you have time for?” He could feel the impatience building inside him, the frustration at being unable to get to Tess and the rage at the man who had hurt her. “Aside from attacking the people who trusted you.”

“They are expendable. And if my granddaughter had been half the witch I had hoped for, she never would have ended up this way.” He glanced down at her still form, lip curling in a sneer. “It makes me wonder if her mother was quite honest with my dear son, Geoffrey.”

Rafe ignored the insult to Tess and reconsidered his options. They still sucked. Until he could get to Tess to protect her, he didn’t feel comfortable ripping out Menzies’ throat. Not that the image didn’t beckon to him like a siren’s call, but he wouldn’t risk Tess’s safety. Not even for that. He couldn’t shift while Tess was vulnerable and unarmed and alone, and shifting was about the only thing he could do. A frontal assault would be a really dumb idea.

Of course, it might be his only idea…

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“Don’t look so glum, De Santos.” That cold voice snapped Rafe back to attention and frustration. “I’m willing to refrain from injuring her, and you. You just need to agree to cooperate.”

“With what?”

“Pay attention,” Lionel snapped. “With dismantling the Accord. As I just said.”

“But you still haven’t said why.”

Lionel stepped forward, his tall frame casting a long, disfigured shadow as he passed under the single, bare light bulb in the small, cluttered storeroom.

“Because now is the last chance I have. We’re nearing the end of the secrecy. You said it yourself. Soon, vermin like you and the damned werewolves will be able to walk among human society. And witches—the true heirs to the world—will be viewed as nothing more than another kind of freak. We’ll be lumped in with you degenerates. If we’re going to act to seize our power, the moment is now. If we strike now and reveal everything to the public immediately, I can control the situation. I can make sure the masses see the distinction between witch and Other. We will become their allies in the struggle against the rise of the unnatural creatures—”

“Holy shit,” Rafe breathed. “You’re absolutely insane.” Cut off from his vitriolic rant, Lionel’s eyes narrowed. “I take it this means you plan to decline to assist me willingly?” The witch stood almost directly under the light now, and the angle cast his face with strange planes and angles.