Mojo Queen (13 page)

“Sorry for the mess,” he said, his voice raw silk. Not that I noticed that, either.

His hand dwarfed mine, his grip strong, a little too comfortable. I took my hand back. “I need to see about your ankle.” I scooted away to get closer to his ankle, glad for the distance.

This was worse than his other wounds and by the time I got done I knew if this whole paranormal investigator thing didn’t work out, I most definitely did not need to consider the health care field. I helped him to the couch, cleaned the bathroom, then finally myself, debating how very badly I wanted a shower versus Blake being in my home unsupervised. I decided to make it a quick one.

The cut on my thigh didn’t look as bad as it felt but I still covered it with gauze once I was clean. Wrapped in a towel, I risked a glance in the living room on my way to the bedroom. Blake hadn’t moved from the couch. Eyes closed, body relaxed, he looked to be asleep. I watched him for a moment, just to make sure then went on to my bedroom. First I checked the hiding spot in the closet to make sure it hadn’t been disturbed, then dressed in cargo pants and a loose long-sleeve t-shirt. I sat on the bed, making a half-hearted attempt to towel-dry my hair. Sleep pulled at me and I couldn’t ignore its insistence for long. It felt so good to give in to the exhaustion that had been following me around all day.

I sat in a circle of unlit candles. One came to life for me but the others would not. A smudge of blackness lurked at one side of the circle, while on the other side a blur of yellow splashed with rust paced. I shut my eyes to them both, glasses lost. I felt his step behind me, sensed it as he knelt. He brushed my hair back to one side, running his fingers through it. He took my hand and we stood. I opened my eyes, searched the dark for his face. Music floated around us as he took me in his arms, turning the circle into a dance floor. Every candle we whirled past lit, flame shooting high before settling. Was I lighting the candles? Was he? Or were we doing it together? And the dancing…

I’d never waltzed in my life, but I followed his lead like it was the most natural thing in the world to me, round and round inside the circle, energy building. Abruptly he picked me up, guiding my legs to wrap around his waist. Face to face now, my arms around his shoulders, his arms under my thighs. Candlelight flickered across his face. His mouth spread into a smirk. As his lips neared mine I heard him whisper, “I’m going to like your dreams.”

I woke suddenly. Sitting up, I reached for my glasses on the nightstand. The smell of coffee reached me, bringing me fully awake and scattering the remnants of my strange dream. I found Blake sitting shirtless at the kitchen table with his back to me, drinking a cup of coffee and reading one of the paperback novels I’d left lying around. I stood in the doorway for a moment, rubbing my face, wondering what time it was. It occurred to me I’d never called Daniel. Blake raised his cup in greeting. “There’s more in the pot.” He swiveled in the chair to face me. “I haven’t been up long. It’s still pretty fresh.”

How considerate of Blake the Psycho Sorcerer to offer me leftover coffee in my own home. I ignored him, found my messenger bag and my cellphone. I needed to talk to Daniel. His voicemail answered. It surprised me so much I closed the phone without leaving a message. I opened the blinds at the window over the sink. Bright morning light added another rhythm to my pounding headache. Daniel should be home, maybe even asleep, though that would be doubtful with strangers in the house. Whatever, he’d have his phone handy. I thought about calling Seth but I didn’t have his number in my phone and the file I’d created for this case was at my office. That’s when I remembered I didn’t have a car anymore.

I swung around and glared at Blake. “You’re buying me a car.”

“Yeah, about that. I’m really sorry.” Which didn’t sound at all like he was committing to replacing the car his girlfriend’s hellhounds had eaten.

I poured a cup of coffee, heavy on the milk and sugar. Leaning against the sink, I watched him over the top of my glasses. His aura was all over the place, color washed through his usual dark like those great NASA pictures from the Hubble telescope, some kind of nebula spilling red and gold and blue all over the sky. A nebula that needed to put a shirt on. Guy had all kinds of muscles and abs and yet more muscles and needed to put on a damn shirt. “You got a spare t-shirt in your backpack?”

Smirky smirk smirk. “No. Guess I’ll just have to walk around half naked. Does that bother you?”

“I don’t have anything that will fit you.” Which wasn’t an answer to his question, exactly.

His smile widened and I knew what he was thinking. I had inadvertently confirmed there was no man in the house, no boyfriend, not even old clothes left behind by an ex. If he made fun of me for that I might have to turn him over to his homicidal hellbitch. Blake kept any remarks on the subject to himself, though. Smart guy.

“You said you’d tried to banish her. Tell me about it.”

He got up and refilled his coffee, limping with surprising grace and coming to stand closer to me than strictly necessary. I didn’t like the way he kept invading my personal space, so I took his seat at the table.

“I tried a couple of different rituals but they didn’t work.”

“You said she fought back,” I prompted.

“In a manner of speaking,” he said slowly, a suspicious mischief added to the smirk.

“So what’s that mean?” I said, impatient.

He limped back to the table, slid into the seat opposite me. He leaned close, grinning. “It means tying her up didn’t give me the advantage I thought it would.”

I swear the milk in my coffee curdled. “Nice,” I said with a sneer.

“Nice is not the word I would use.” He laughed, his face lit with the memory of pleasure, dirty, dirty pleasure. I so did not want to know about his sex life with his demon girlfriend.

I held up my hand, palm facing him. “Don’t need to hear about the sexcapades. Just tell me about the rituals you tried. What were they, where’d they come from?”

An unexpected melancholy chased away his smile. He stared into his coffee for a long moment. “I tried twice.” He spoke haltingly, leaving me stunned at how he seemed so like any sad, jilted lover. “She tried to kill me both times. I couldn’t believe it, you know? I thought what we had meant something. I thought she wanted me as much as I wanted her.”

I shook my head, amazed. “Why did you want her, Blake? She’s a demon. From Hell.” There was nothing accusatory in my voice then. If he had been a girl, I would have offered ice cream and a sympathy viewing of
Steel Magnolias
.

“The things she was capable of,” he started. He wasn’t talking about sex. I knew exactly what he was talking about. “The magic that she was capable of. The things she taught me went so far beyond spells and rituals.” He grabbed my hand, his eyes burning with a manic intensity I’d noticed briefly during our late-night breakfast at the Waffle House. “Roxanne, she took me right into the heart of magic. Showed me things I’d never even imagined.” He stopped, as if at a loss for words.

“What? What did she show you, Blake?” I wanted to know. Wanted to know so badly that for the first time I had no problem understanding why he wanted her and what she could give him.

“Connections. She showed me the connections.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Everything is connected.” He held up my hand, his fingers trailing down the back of my hand to my wrist. “Every cell, every molecule, every atom in your body is connected. You may think that you’re contained within yourself, wrapped up in this lovely package.” Right then he gave me a genuine smile. No smirk, no sarcasm, no hidden meaning, just a genuine, honest, complimentary smile. “No part of you is touching that candle holder.” He pointed at a pair of Carnival glass taper candle holders that decorated the top of the work supply cabinet. “You think there’s nothing connecting you to it, or me to it. We’re over here and it’s over there and if we wanted to bring one over here we’d have to get up, walk over to that cabinet, and pick up one of those candle holders. But the thing is, everything is connected to everything else. Everything is made of energy and all of that energy is connected. When you realize that, when you
feel
it within yourself.” He paused.

He sat back in his chair, our fingers entwined. “Once you can feel your own connection to all that other energy, it’s only natural that you would start to manipulate those connections.” One of the candle holders raised a few inches into the air and floated to the table, coming to rest right in front of me, hanging in mid-air. “No different than manipulating your own limbs, really.”

Every time I lit a candle with magic, I felt the energy move through me. Felt it curling out in a spiral, from my body, to the candle wick, all the way to the tiny flame it created and back again. What Blake was doing now, I could feel too, like someone brushing up against you in a crowd. It wasn’t a strong sensation, but it was definitely there. As I watched my grandmother’s antique glass turn slowly in the air, as if to display itself for my inspection, I felt something tap lightly on that high wire inside me that had been struck last night.

A smile spread across my face. Gently, the candle holder came to a rest on the table. Then reality intruded and I pulled my hand away from Blake. “I don’t believe that a demon is the only creature that could teach you things like this.”

He took a drink of his coffee, grimacing. It was probably cold by now. “Well, the thing is, she was the only one offering.”

“Do you mean she approached you?”

Blake nodded. “She came to me. She spoke to me when I was deep in trance. Whispered things to me when I was fully aware. In public, even. She taught me things, and offered to teach me more.”

“If you got her a body.”

“Very few demons are strong enough to cross over to this plane in their own form. I mean, sure, you’ve got your lesser beings, like those hellhounds. But those are just monsters. An actual demon is a different thing altogether. They are incredibly powerful but the…the walls, if you will, that are in place between the worlds are strong enough to keep them from crossing over at will.”

“So she needed help crossing over, and a body?”

“Yeah,” he answered. “Yes, she did, and she came to me. She chose me.” Melancholy again.

“And now that she got what she wanted from you, she wants to kick you to the curb.” Ice cream,
Steel Magnolias
and raw cookie dough.

Blake got to his feet, stalked the width of the kitchen in anger as best he could with a bum ankle. “My whole life I have aspired to an existence outside the norm, beyond the mundane. I have set myself apart by choice and by accepting my own nature. I have witnessed things, and done things, that would give a truer meaning to the phrase shock and awe than any banal politician ever could. And now I find myself reduced to the stereotype of a country song.”

I tried really hard not to laugh. Really, I did, but a giggle escaped despite my best intentions.

He came to a halt. “Screw that. That lying bitch is going back to Hell.”

I shook my fist once in solidarity. “Right on, bubba.”

He sank back into the chair. “Don’t mock me, Roxanne. Can’t you see I’m in the middle of a bad break-up?”

This time I didn’t even try to stifle the laughter. It didn’t last long. A flash of Seth’s face as he spoke of burying a friend in an abandoned churchyard dampened my amusement quickly. “You couldn’t do it by yourself?” I heard the hesitation in my voice, wondered briefly where this sudden reluctance to argue with Blake came from. “You had to get those four kids involved?” Maybe I didn’t want to know how deep his darkness went. Maybe I didn’t want to see what he looked like without that shining starfield and crackling aurora.

“A ritual of that magnitude takes tremendous power and energy. I couldn’t do it alone.” A flat monotone answer.

“They were good kids, and they weren’t sorcerers of any kind. They all had biblical names and went to a Christian college.”

Blake cut me off, anger rippling through him. “Oh, spare me the
poor victimized Christian
crap. They could have been Hasidic Jews. Buddhist monks, Jedis. I didn’t care about that. I don’t give a damn about religion.”

“You didn’t give a damn you were getting those kids way in over their heads, either,” I snapped.

“I told you.” He leaned across the table, finger in my face. “I never meant for anyone to get hurt. The ritual was for five people. We each had our part from beginning to end. You must have read it when you stole my journals. Seth was supposed to lead the closing of the circle at the end. No one was supposed to die!”

“Well, one of them did die, Blake!” I was shouting now. “Your demon lover killed him right there in front of his friends, right there in front of you. They buried him in the churchyard, did you know that? And now another one is dead. What’s that boy Gabe’s family supposed to think, their son dying of a heart attack at his age? And the other boy, Titus, do his folks even know he’s missing yet?”

“I never meant for any of that to happen!” There was no trace of his customary smirk. He looked stricken.

I carried my coffee cup to the sink, dropping it in a little harder than I meant to. “Well, it happened. There’s no undoing it.” I met his gaze, regretting it right away. I didn’t want to be drawn in by the shadows in his eyes, the naked pleading in his expression. “The question is, what are you going to do about it now?”

He came to my side, leaning against the countertop. “I was just so tired of being alone, Roxie. Don’t you know how that feels?”

No, no, no, I would not feel sorry for him. I wouldn’t be pulled into those dark brown eyes, drawn in to offering comfort, a touch of my hand on his forearm, trailing my fingers up to his hard bicep. I had to keep telling myself,
he summoned a demon, he summoned a demon,
over and over to distract myself. His mouth did such a good job forming a smirk, how would it do with a kiss? I had a feeling it would do quite well.

He whispered my name as I felt his fingers twine in my hair. Part of me wanted to pull away. Blake could not be trusted. There was work to do, lives to save, a demon to banish. I had no time for kissing. So why didn’t I step away, instead of let him slip an arm around my waist and pull me closer? Why didn’t I fight to get out of his arms, instead of run my hands over the warm skin of bare shoulders? Why couldn’t I ignore the way he was able to strike that high wire inside me?