My Forbidden Desire (24 page)

“I’m not answering it.” What Kynan needed was to get laid. Despite his current disinclination for the act, he sometimes thought if he didn’t get someone else to work him, he’d go as psycho as Iskander. He was having some serious fantasies about making it with a human, especially with Carson Philips. Too bad she was off limits. And these days, calling her
human
was stretching things a bit. There weren’t many women who’d be down with what was going through his head these days.

“My friend,” Iskander said, “your phone is very annoying.”

“That’s the ringtone for numbers I don’t recognize. Whoever it is will give up, and it’ll go to voice mail.” As if on cue, the phone stopped ringing. “See?”

Kynan was not in a good mood. Some would say he was in a permanent bad mood. Yes. He was. So what? Even this was better than the hell his life used to be. Fact was, he wasn’t getting past his need for Carson Philips. As ordered, he’d killed her parents when she was three and brought her to Magellan. He’d watched her grow up isolated and lied to and smarter than was safe for her. He’d watched Magellan poison her and had even dosed her himself. He’d watched her turn into a beautiful young woman and had constructed elaborate fantasies in which he worked out a way around Magellan’s strictures on him in order to get Carson into bed, where he’d either take hours to kill her or bind her to him permanently. He’d come closest to fulfilling the first. After everything he’d done to her, she’d severed him from Álvaro Magellan. Killing Magellan didn’t begin to repay his debt to her for setting him free. He’d sworn fealty to Nikodemus, but so what? He owed his debt to Carson Philips, and she wasn’t ever going to be his.

“Please, next time answer the phone,” Iskander said. The cobalt stripes down the left side of his face got brighter.

“You looking for a fight?” he snarled.

“Not with you, Warlord.” Iskander pulled, and that got Kynan cranked up. A little violence might just take his mind off his troubles. “What I want is for you to answer your phone when it rings.”

Kynan looked at his mobile, which was sitting there all innocent and quiet. He cocked his head like he was considering the request. “Nah.”

“What if that was Xia calling you on some other phone?”

A good point, but Kynan couldn’t bring himself to care. “If it rings again, you answer it.”

“With all due respect, Warlord, I don’t take orders from anyone but Nikodemus.” Iskander had the cojones to back up that kind of talk. Few of the kin cared to cross a warlord, which Kynan was, whether he’d sworn fealty to Nikodemus or not. For a psychotic, Iskander was even-tempered, slow to take offense. He lived in a world with different rules. And yet, Kynan had no doubt Iskander didn’t give a shit about making his displeasure over ringing phones known in a physical manner. A fight with Iskander would take off the edge that was killing him.

“Like you should talk.” One thing he liked about Iskander was the way he was nuts. His mental instability came out in all kinds of interesting ways without regard to time or place.

Iskander shrugged. You never could tell exactly where you stood with a blood-twin. Even a former blood-twin. Maybe the phone thing was going to push him over the edge.

Bring it on.

He and Iskander were supposed to be waiting for word of whatever the hell had happened to Xia. Not so privately, Kynan thought Xia had gotten into a fight with Harsh’s sister and then offed her. Considering Xia’s attitude about witches and the rumor, backed up by the evidence Kynan had seen at her place when he went looking for Xia the other day, he liked the odds of finding out Xia had killed Alexandrine Marit. It might be a while before Xia decided it was safe to show himself around here. Nikodemus wanted answers, though, and Harsh was ready to come home to kill Xia with his own two hands.

He clenched his Wiimote. Lucky bastard. If anybody got to kill a witch, it ought to be him. He needed it more than Xia.

Iskander slumped on the couch, working his Wiimote for
Legend of Zelda,
intent on fishing as only a psycho former blood-twin could be. Kynan’s cell went off again. Iskander stared at it for several seconds. Oddly enough, the phone did not explode or melt. The call went to voice mail, and they went back to fishing. Five minutes later, the phone rang again.

“My friend,” Iskander said in a low voice that didn’t sound friendly at all, “answer the phone.”

“No.” Whose idea had it been to play
Legend of Zelda
, anyway? He couldn’t catch enough fish, and besides, his shoulder was getting sore.

Iskander grabbed the phone and started squeezing. Kynan didn’t doubt he could crush the phone without pulling magic. The guy was seriously strong. They all were, compared to a human. “Say good night, Gracie,” Iskander said cheerfully.

Kynan held out a hand for the phone, and Iskander dropped it onto his open palm. He flipped it open at what had to have been the last second before the call would have been sent to voice mail for a third time. He held it to his ear and said, “What the hell do you want?”

Dead silence on the other end.

Kynan’s finger went to the disconnect button, but something stopped him. The silence gave him itchy skin. It wasn’t Nikodemus. Nikodemus would have taken his head off for answering the phone like that. Harsh would have found a way to freeze him over the airwaves, and Carson wasn’t ever going to call him. What woman wanted to call the freak who’d tried to rape her? “Who is this?” he asked.

Through the phone, someone cleared his throat. Her throat. Definitely a female. “I think I have the wrong number. I’m so sorry.”

Crap. He didn’t think this was a wrong number at all. “Who is this?”

“Um.” Another itchy silence followed. “Alexandrine Marit. Harsh’s sister?”

Okay, so Xia hadn’t killed her yet. Kynan sat up. He let Iskander feel the mental charge that zapped Kynan through and through. They got a connection going, and that was just what he needed, wasn’t it? A psycho’s thoughts leaking into his head. Like he wasn’t disturbed enough all on his own. “I know who you are,” he said into his mobile.

Iskander turned off the Wii and slipped the Wiimote strap off his wrist. The three blue stripes tattooed down the left side of his face started to glow. Yeah, that felt good and twisted. The burn of psycho magic. Kynan got the urge to go out and do some harm.

“Who am I speaking to?” Alexandrine Marit asked. She spoke as if she was afraid of being overheard. What the hell had Xia done now? Or maybe she thought he could reach through the phone and rip out her heart. He wouldn’t mind killing a witch about now. Might be a nice way to improve on his shitty day. “Is this Nikodemus?”

“Nikodemus is in Paris with your brother.” He wasn’t sure how much she knew about Nikodemus and Harsh, or the kin, for that matter. They were better off if he didn’t say more than what she seemed to know already.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “I know.” Another silence stretched out. So. She wasn’t a stupid woman.

“This is Kynan Aijan. Put Xia on the phone.”

“I can’t.” She hesitated, and this time Kynan waited out the silence. “Something’s wrong with him.” She was supposedly Harsh’s sister, but she didn’t sound anything like what he expected, which was overeducated and bossy as hell. Her voice was calm, but a quiver of anxiety underneath cracked at the end.

“What’s wrong?”

He could hear her swallow. “I can’t wake him up.”

Kynan’s body flashed hot. Seeing as how the kin didn’t sleep, at least not the way humans did, either she was lying to him or something had managed to take down the meanest bastard Kynan had ever met. Besides him. “Where are you?”

“North of San Francisco. I don’t know the exact address.”

More points for being smart under pressure. “Sausalito, right? Blue house? On the water?”

“You know it?” Relief filled her voice.

Kynan decided he wouldn’t mind the drive to Sausalito. He needed to get away from Iskander and all his psycho energy, anyway, and besides, he wanted to know what the hell had happened to Xia. Maybe he could pretend Alexandrine Marit was Carson. On the other hand,
he
hadn’t promised to keep the little witch alive. Maybe he could do Xia a favor and off the witch to get him out of guard duty.

Now, wouldn’t that be a fun way to pass some time?

Chapter 19

K
ynan snapped his phone closed and stood, smoothing wrinkles from his jeans as if he were wearing a five-thousand-dollar suit. At Magellan’s insistence, he’d lived in Italian suits for years. For him, custom Brioni. Now, whenever he was reminded he wasn’t wearing tailored wool, he got a jolt, especially now that he was back where Magellan had fucked him over every minute of every day. Denim instead of superfine wool under his fingers disoriented him. Sometimes he’d catch himself reaching to straighten a tie he wasn’t wearing.

He seriously wished he could kill Magellan again, only slower this time. Make it last. Make it painful.

Now that Magellan was dead, a suit meant one thing and one thing only: enslavement. Anything else, on the other hand, meant freedom. The day he stood in his old room, in possession of his own life at last, Kynan’s instinct had been to burn every goddamned suit Magellan had ever forced him to wear. So he did. He’d gotten a nice little fire going after a bit.

He incinerated fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Italy’s finest menswear, and then he went grunge. Totally outof-fashion grunge. Old jeans. Cargo pants. T-shirts and hoodies. And, naturally, he was growing his hair. He didn’t do anything to it. At all. After all those years with a shaved head, he’d forgotten what color his hair was and whether it was curly or straight or something in between. Thick. Straight. Golden brown. Hell if he wasn’t a pretty boy. Took vanillas by surprise when they found out he wasn’t as nice as he looked.

“How will I know it’s you?” Alexandrine Marit asked.

“I’ll ring your cell right before I knock.”

She thought about that. He wasn’t sure what to make of her cautious question, which was a good one if she was on the level, or her long silence thinking about his answer.

“Okay,” she said at last.

He figured she had to be trolling for more of the kin. Xia down, Kynan Aijan to go. The thought of killing a witch gave him a hard-on.

“Please.” Her voice cracked with anxiety again. “Hurry.”

Iskander turned off the rest of the equipment while Kynan tucked his mobile into the front pocket of his jeans. “You need me along?”

“No.” This ought to be easy enough. Retrieve Xia. Give the Marit woman a reassuring pat on the head. Or maybe take her into a room and spend some time putting a period to her existence. Then come home. Text Harsh that his sister was either accidentally dead or that she’d left on her own on account of her being a pain in the ass. “I’ll call you if I do.”

Kynan took one of Magellan’s three Jags out of the garage, and when he got to Sausalito, parked three houses down. He felt the mage about a hundred yards out. Creepy. Made him wonder that the hell Xia had gotten himself into. The fiend could handle any nastiness that came his way; he didn’t doubt that. But still. As a warlord, Kynan’s body ramped up for a fight whenever something felt off. And this situation felt off in a major way. Spilling some mage blood would improve his mood a hell of a lot, not to mention take off some of the edge he’d been living with lately.

What worried him as he got closer was that he didn’t feel Xia. At this distance, given what he was and given what Xia was, he ought to be feeling the presence of one of the kin. Since he didn’t, he was probably walking into a trap. Stupid witch didn’t know who or what she was dealing with.

There weren’t many reasons for him being unable to sense Xia. Everybody’s favorite witch killer was too strong for Kynan not to feel him by now. Either Xia had somehow gotten himself taken by the mage inside or he was dead. The one or two other possibilities weren’t worth considering, given the risk of walking into a house with a mage of unknown ability inside. He regretted not bringing along Iskander now. A psycho might be just the thing to have watching his back.

Well. He didn’t have a psycho watching his back. If Alexandrine Marit had either killed Xia or taken him, she’d die a lingering death if he could do anything about it, and he figured he could. Another mage would be a sweet addition to his kill count. Harsh would just have to spend the rest of his life moaning about his late sister. Kynan spent an extra thirty seconds trying to catch any hint of what was going on in there. Even this close, he didn’t get any sense of the kin at all. Damn. Nikodemus wasn’t going to like losing Xia.

Payback for the witch was certain. And he had some sweet ideas about how to make her suffer for it, too. Predictably, he got turned on. Yeah, honey. Life for the witch was about to take a major downturn.

Xia’s place was right on the water, a spectacular home that must have cost a fortune anytime during the last twenty years or so. For all he knew, Xia had bought it back when a house in Sausalito went for fifteen thousand, tops. He descended the narrow stairs to the door and got a tingle from some serious proofing. Xia was damned strong, enough to challenge his warlord status if he wanted to. With this level of protection, the witch hadn’t come through the front door. When he reached the door, with some sort of climbing vine in his face, he found the last received call in his phone log and punched CALL. From inside the house, he heard a cell phone start a series of musical tones. He knocked and waited for the witch who may have taken Xia. Possibly, she was under duress. He didn’t think Rasmus was inside, but it never paid to assume, did it? The guy got around like nobody’s business.