Slade (10 page)

The
prisoner gulped. It wasn’t much of a noise, but it was definitely audible to shifter ears.

The cougars switched their attention as one
, from Kate and Slade, to their captive.

“You murdered my mother, you spineless bastard,” Grif advanced on the cringing man. Slade was a solid barrier at his back. The toad wasn’t going anywhere.

Slade would rather have done this elsewhere, but it would be best to take advantage of the shock of the past few minutes. Kick the bastard while he was down. Don’t give him a chance to regroup and start thinking. Question him now and see what he spilled.

Slade scanned the area around the house and realized they were well hidden from the road. The vegetation was overgrown—probably on purpose in this guy’s case—and acted as a shield to prying eyes.

The front door had an extended entry way that was like a little porch with two big, white columns on either side. Slade backed the man up to one of the columns, pulling his arms behind him, around the fluted white pole. He pulled a plastic zip tie from his pocket—something he’d put in there even before he left Montana, knowing he was going on a mission where he might need restraints—and secured the guy’s hands behind the pole.

He wouldn’t leave him there long. Only while they had the advantage of his shock to work with. They couldn’t stay here too long
anyway. He might have backup that would come to see what happened. Slade wanted Kate long gone and the cougars well hidden long before anything like that happened. But they had an opportunity to exploit the prisoner’s imbalance right now and Slade had been playing this game long enough to know when to take advantage of a situation like this.

“What do you say to that?” Grif went on. “What do you say to the sons of the woman you killed?” Grif’s voice got deeper and scarier rather than louder, which served them well in this case.

“I didn’t kill her,” the man whined. “She did it. She wanted her pelt. Not me. I only got the leftovers. And now it’s gone. Gone.” He began to whimper and sob as he probably realized all his power was gone, never to return.

Slade was almost glad to see him suffer after what he’d done, but another part of him felt sorrow for everyone who had lost so much in this terrible situation. The man’s actions had brought about his own downfall and so much pain for so many peop
le. Such was the way of evil. Preventing it from running rampant through the world was Slade’s
raison d’etre
. Had been ever since he’d grown up and grown weary of the senselessness of war for war’s sake.

The only battles Slade engaged in
now were against evil. He’d been very careful since his early days in the business to pick his opponents with great care. There had been many in the world who qualified as evil in his book. He’d fought them all at one time or another, but since retiring from active duty and specializing for the Company—and the Lords—he’d been even more selective.

This was a just
ified takedown, even though everything about this situation left a bad feeling in his soul. It also left a pain in his heart for the innocent woman who’d been this toad’s victim. The former mage had wanted the matriarch’s power and he’d taken it by taking her blood. That could not stand. That kind of evil could not be allowed to exist. Not on Slade’s watch.

“Who is she?
Who is your partner?” Kate asked in a quiet, powerful voice, drawing Slade’s attention away from his dark thoughts.

“She’ll kill me.” Terror showed in his wild eyes.

“You’re already dead to her,” Slade said quietly. “You have no magic. Never will again. She won’t want you. You’re no good to her now.”

The prisoner sobbed again.

“I’ll tell you what. You tell us what we want to know and we’ll take you away from here where she can’t find you,” Slade whispered.

“You’re going to kill me,” the man objected.

“Maybe. Maybe not. Right now, you’ve got information we want. You play nice with us, we might let you go. Too much trouble to hide a body in this day and age.” Slade inspected his fingernails, trying to convey how little it meant to him. “And you’re no danger to anyone anymore. You’ve got no power and no way to get it back. You’re Goddess touched, my man. Your old friends will smite you on sight.”

The man began to cry in earnest. Pathetic. He was going to crumble like a cookie in a two-year-old’s fist at any moment.

“I’m sorry,” he cried. “I’m so sorry.”

Slade looked
over at Kate, surprised to his core. Could the Lady’s power have had that much of an effect on this guy so quickly? Kate smiled. She knew something. Maybe she’d seen this kind of reaction before with Wayne. She held his gaze and nodded, and he had his answer. She’d been expecting this kind of change.

Amazing what the Goddess could do when She put her mind to it.

“Sorry?” Robert tried to stalk forward but Grif held out his hand, motioning him to stillness. All the brothers watched the prisoner warily, clearly confused.

“Are you going to come quietly? I’ll be honest with you,” Slade said to the man, who had quieted. “We’re your best option at the moment. And frankly, we’re not going to give you any choice. You either come with us voluntarily—which will be easier for you—or we take you anyway
, and probably bang you around a bit, just for kicks.”

The prisoner seemed to think a moment, then sag in defeat. “I’ll come quietly,” he said finally. “You’re right. I’m already dead if they find me like this.”

“Good,” Slade said approvingly, cutting the zip tie with a partially shifted claw.

He nodded to the younger brothers, refastening the man’s hands with another zip tie now that he was free of the column. Matt,
Robert and Steve moved closer at Grif’s nod to take custody of the man, but he turned to Kate, suddenly tense.

“Take the chalice. Don’t let her get it. She needs it for her crazy plan. It’s in the circle.”

Kate nodded, seeming to understand. “When is she coming? When is she planning to do her ceremony?”

“Tomorrow night. At the new moon,” he replied. “Take the chalice and hide it. She won’t be able to do what she wants without it.” The man’s terror was fading and with it, his consciousness.

He seemed open now, telling them things without being prodded, but his strength was failing. Even as the cougars moved close to him, he collapsed, passing out at their feet. They let him fall and he landed hard. Slade didn’t really blame them. He had helped murder their mother, after all. Forgiveness—if it ever came—would be a long time coming.

“Pick him up and put him in the truck,” Grif ordered his brothers and they followed his instructions none too gently. “Guard him. We’ll be down shortly.”

That left Slade and Kate with Grif and Mag, the quiet brother who came somewhere in the middle of the brood of siblings. Slade hadn’t gotten a good read on him, but he seemed as steady and strong as the rest of the Redstone brothers.

“I have to go into the house,” Kate said, taking the bull by the horns even before the prisoner was out of sight.

“Is it safe?” Grif asked, concern on his face.

“
No,” Slade answered, scowling. He didn’t want her going in there, but he knew they had to at least look into what the prisoner had said.

“We can do it,” Kate said, meeting his gaze and smiling
gently. “Together. Like we did before.”

Oh, he liked that. Something inside him purred happily at the way she paired them up as a team. The cat liked having a partner in crime that had already proven their skills and courage. The cat inside him liked
her
.

It was
the man who worried for her safety. He wanted to protect her. Keep her safe. Keep her to himself.

Hmm. He would have
to think about these strange, new impulses she brought out in him. Later. They didn’t have time for self-examination right now.

No, now was the time for action.

“Okay,” he gave in, gratified by her smile. “We do this together.” He glanced back at the cougars. “You two will have to act as rearguard this time and wait for the all clear. You can’t see the magic the way we can, and this place was booby trapped in ways I’ve never encountered before. It was hard enough getting across his yard. I can only imagine what he’s got inside.”

“Understood,” Grif nodded, clearly unhappy with having to take a support
ing role, but willing to allow the experts in magic to do their thing.

“There was a shield here,” Kate observed quietly as they approached the front door. “It’s gone but I still can feel traces of it.”

“It was probably blown when you called down the Light. Not much could stand in the face of that.” Slade knew there was admiration in his tone. Hell, he was damned impressed by what she had done and he wouldn’t soon forget how powerful she was when her skills were pressed into service. “There might be something like a blast radius at work here. The farther we get from the front porch, the weaker the effect. Keep an eye out.”

“Yeah.
” She walked a few steps into the house and stopped, looking around carefully. “I think you’re probably right. There are shields on every doorway and arch. Some of the closer ones are flickering. You see that?”

Slade looked where she pointed. Oh, yeah. Dark power swirled like a fog but the openings closer to the front door
were definitely damaged. Weakened. They would come down easily.

Not so the archway that led into the great room. While somewhat damaged, the shielding there had probably been thicker to begin with. There was
a violent swirl of red, brown and black. A cloudy miasma that made Slade seethe just looking at it.

It was evil. Blood magic.

“We need to get into the great room,” he reminded her unnecessarily. “Through that.” He pointed to the swirling cloud of dark magic.

Kate took a deep breath at his side and squared her shoulders. “We can do it,” she whispered,
almost to herself.

She had courage, he’d giv
e her that. Most human women he had known—if they could have seen something like what faced them now—would have run away, screaming in terror. Not Kate. She was cautious, of course. She wasn’t a fool. But she had a strength of character, a toughness of spirit, Slade had seldom found in any female who was not also a shifter.

Without warning, Kate made a sign of protection in the air in front of her. Slade felt, as well as saw,
the bright spark of protection as a shield of Light surrounded them both like transparent armor.

“I think we’d better take some precautions, don’t you?” Kate smiled over at him. “Just in case.”

“Good thinking.” Slade liked that she’d spun her shield to protect them both, but he was concerned about how much energy it would take out of her. Even with him feeding her power, eventually they would both be too weak to keep up the protection. They had to work quickly, but safely.

“The cougars can always pull us out if we collapse,” she joked, somehow reading his mind. “I figured we were close to the end of our usefulness here—and very close to something potentially more dangerous than anything we’ve faced to this point—so the extra expenditure of magical energy is justified in my mind.”

He thought about her words for a moment, agreeing with her logic.

“Let’s get in, get the chalice and get out as quickly as possible.”

“Agreed.” Kate turned her head, focusing on the dark archway that led to the great room. “I don’t see anything from here to the arch,” she observed as she moved one step forward, advancing slowly into the foyer. “I think the Light destroyed whatever was here, closest to the front porch.”

“I don’t se
nse anything either,” Slade told her, moving with her, step by cautious step.

They made it to within five feet of the arch safely. As they had surmised, the action on the porch had nullified anything within the blast radius, as Slade had put it
, but that archway was definitely up and running, with all its evil intent intact.

Slade knew a few different ways to counteract such things
. Of course, adding Kate’s magic into the mix allowed for new and better possibilities. The shield she had put around them, for example, was not something Slade had ever seen before.

“Can we project out from behind your shield?” he asked. “Or do you have to drop it to work?”

“We can send energy out but it should slow or stop anything coming back at us.”

“Neat trick.
” His respect for her abilities was increasing beyond the high point it had already reached. She continued to impress him. Each time he thought he had her figured out, she’d pull another rabbit out of her hat.

One thing was for sure, being around her was never boring. He would have laughed at that thought if the circumstances weren’t so dire.

“What do you propose?” She didn’t turn her head, intent on studying the darkness they would have to penetrate without unleashing it on themselves or others, but he knew he had her attention.

“How about the old bait and switch?”

That made her look at him. “You mean one of us trigger it while the other acts?”