Strange Brew (14 page)

I stood up. Lottie’s dark gaze followed me as I crossed to the door. There was a thumb-lock on the inside, and I flipped it over.

Lottie laughed. “You going to kill me, Holly? You going to spend your life in prison over dead men?”

“No,” I said. “Funny thing about comas, Lottie. You can slip back into them without warning. It’s really tragic.”

A flash of something in her eyes that might have been fear. Her hand reached for the call button.

I got there first.

I held her down. She struggled, and snarled, but when my lips touched hers, it was all over.

I was the best resurrection witch in Austin. One thing about being able to give life to the dead… you can take it from the living. It’s forbidden, but it can be done.

I didn’t take all her life. Just enough.

Just enough to leave her wandering in the dark, screaming, trapped inside her own head. Her body would live, mute and unresponsive, for as long as modern science could maintain it, but Lottie Flores would never, ever bring back the dead again.

Not even herself.

Andy was in the morgue downstairs, and I had to see him. What I’d done to Lottie had hurt me in ways that might never be right again, but somehow seeing his face, even in death, would give me peace.

He was so lovely. And he was at peace, the way I knew he should be.

I kissed him lightly. I didn’t have any potion, and I put no spell behind it; it was just a kiss, just the brush of lips.

But the
emotion
behind it—darkness and passion and need, so much need, it seemed to bleed silver from my pores.

Magic.

I felt him reaching for me, in the dark, and I couldn’t help but respond. It wasn’t my own doing. I wasn’t this strong.

I felt the connection snap clean between us, silver and hot, vibrating like a plucked string.

His eyes opened, and he smiled.

“You came back,” I murmured.

“ ‘Course I did, Holly,” he said. “I’ll always come for you.”

“I didn’t—there’s no potion—”

“Don’t need it,” Andy said. He stirred, and the sheet across his bare chest slipped down, revealing raw bullet holes that were, before my eyes, sealing themselves closed. “Got myself some skills, you know. More than most.”

I kissed him again, tasting potions and poisons and my own tears. “How long can you stay?” I asked.

He smiled. “Long as you want me.”

Forever.

Rachel Caine
is the author of the popular Weather Warden series, with the most recent book,
Gale Force
, released in August 2008. She also writes the
New York Times
bestselling young adult Morganville Vampires series; the fifth installment,
Lord of Misrule
, was released in January 2009, with
Carpe Corpus
following in June 2009. She has another series, Outcast Season, starting in January 2009 with the novel
Undone
. In addition, Rachel has written paranormal romantic suspense for
Silhouette
, including
Devil’s Bargain, Devil’s Due
, and
Athena Force: Line of Sight
(which won a 2007
Romantic Times BOOKreviews
Reviewer’s Choice award). Visit her Web site:
www.rachelcaine.com
. Myspace:
www.myspace.com/rachelcaine
.

Vegas Odds
Karen Chance

The pounding began at 2:11 a.m. and continued until I hauled my weary ass out of bed. My hand fumbled awkwardly around the nightstand until it finally closed over my gun. I was fuzzy from lack of sleep, but I never left my weapon behind these days. Besides, I was going to need it to shoot whoever was banging on the damn door.

I threw on a robe and stomped downstairs, only to be almost smothered by the huge bouquet of hothouse extravagance that was waiting on the front stoop. “D-delivery?” someone said, about the time I realized that the forest of roses had legs.

“Do you know what time it is?!”

“Uh, a little after nine?” a man’s voice said. I belatedly noticed the sunlight cascading over my nonwelcome mat. It was a gift from a sarcastic werewolf and read, MY bite actually
IS
worse than my bark. I’d never been sure if he meant his or mine.

Dammit; my clock must have stopped. And with my schedule these days, my body was so confused that it hadn’t woken me up, either. “Hey,” I croaked, like I wasn’t still holding a gun on him.

I quickly lowered it, trying to remember how to smile. It didn’t seem to help. The overabundant foliage was shaking enough to send a cascade of petals over my doorstep, and a glimpse in the hall boy mirror explained why. My long brown hair was a tangled mess, my eyes were so bloodshot that it was impossible to tell they were gray, and weeks of almost no sleep and constant menace had reduced my smile to something closer to a snarl.

But the delivery guy refused to be deterred by irate, possibly crazed homeowners. “Ms. Accalia de Croissets?” Surprisingly, he didn’t mangle the pronunciation of my name.

“Lia,” I corrected automatically, reaching to the hall boy for my purse and a tip. I wondered what the right percentage was after pulling a gun on someone. My purse slipped out of my sleep-clumsy grasp and I bent to pick it up—and thereby dodged the spell that tore through my foyer and into my living room.

I had a glimpse of drywall bits cascading over the carpet as the partition between rooms was obliterated; then my gun was up and I was firing. It shredded roses but did nothing to the mage posing as a delivery guy. He had shields, a fact I realized about the time one of my own bullets hit them and ricocheted off, grazing my cheek. So I turned the hall boy over on top of him and ran, cursing my stupidity.

My new job was training recruits to the War Mage Corps, the magical equivalent of the police. Most of my students started out painfully naive, yet even they wouldn’t have answered the door woozy and only half-armed.
I’ll probably end up an axiom
, I thought. “Give a demon an edge, and he’ll slit your throat with it.”

“It’s amazing how many things a stake through the heart can kill.” And “Don’t do a Lia; keep your damn weapons with you!” Only mine were on the floor of my bathroom, where I’d dropped them last night before taking a shower.

I could hear the mage thrashing through the mess behind me as I hurled myself at the stairs. I was halfway up when a burst of energy crackled overhead, electrifying my body and making my hair stand on end. The steps in front of me disappeared in a roar of heat and noise.

A splinter the size of a knife stabbed me in the calf as I fell, one leg in the smoking hole, one slipping to the side to wedge itself between banisters. I didn’t try to pull free—there wasn’t time—just muttered a spell that sent the contents of a bookcase flying down at the mage. Pages fluttered like bird’s wings as they soared past my head and slammed into my attacker. They didn’t get through his shields, but a few of the larger ones staggered him, and the wildly flapping pages made it impossible for him to see. It bought me a few seconds to rip my bleeding leg free of the hole and hobble the rest of the way up.

The damn splinter had done something nasty to my knee, which was screaming in protest and gave out entirely by the time my foot touched the top step. I dropped to the floor and a spell shimmered and blurred the air overhead. It passed close enough to ruffle my hair on its way to destroy the now-empty bookcase.

Tiny splinters peppered my legs through the thin cotton of my pj’s as I threw an impediment spell behind me and started fast-crawling down the corridor. I’d made it a couple of yards before I realized there were no sounds of pursuit. I glanced over my shoulder—because no way had a small diversion like that stopped a war mage—and therefore failed to see the floor in front of me vanish.

The deafening sound of the explosion whipped my head around in time for me to shrink back from the bullets spraying upward through the hole. They ricocheted everywhere in the small space, but I managed to raise my shields before any of them connected. I’d hoped to put that off a little—shields eat power like candy, and my reserves were already low. But my weapons wouldn’t do me any good if I didn’t live long enough to reach them.

My ears were ringing as I started edging around the gap, trying to balance on the two feet of burnt carpet that remained, when another spell took out even that. The blast was a direct hit, and despite my shields, it was like a punch to the face—stunning, dizzying, knocking my head backwards. I fell a story to land hard on my dining room table, along with a ton of plaster, a couple of ceiling joists and my brand-new chandelier.

The impact knocked the air out of me, which is the only reason I didn’t scream. My knee had caught the edge of the table, and of course, it was
that
knee on
that
leg and
oh my God
. Something in the joint thwanged before the pain hit me broadside and the world went weirdly bright for a second.

My slide off the table was more of a fall, my injured leg softening under me. I tried to put some steel into it, to straighten up and find my balance, but the best I could do was a drunken stagger as the room spun around me. I teetered, turned shakily, and barely recoiled in time to avoid the folding door from the hall. It came spinning past my head to crash against the far wall in an explosion of slats.

Imminent death is an excellent cure for dizziness. I threw myself at the kitchen door, planning to make for the back steps and a judicious retreat. But I collided with a fireball spell instead. It bounced off my shields and burst against the kitchen table, flooding the air with the acrid smell of not-found-in-nature materials on fire.

I belatedly realized there was a second assassin in the laundry room. And yet another figure was silhouetted against the frosted glass of the back door, working to get past the wards. So I had at least three dark mages after me, and I still didn’t have any weapons.

Well, shit.

The long-standing hostility in the supernatural community between the Silver Circle of light magic users—of which the Corps forms a part—and the Black Circle of dark mages had recently escalated into all-out war. As a result, new recruits to the Corps were being housed at HQ until they acquired enough skills to maybe not get themselves killed. But there wasn’t room for everyone, and old hands like me were expected to fend for ourselves.
Which I’m going to start doing any minute now
, I thought, hitting linoleum as the back door blew in.

I looked up to see a werewolf in the doorway holding a couple of fast-food bags. “What the—!” he began, but suddenly the air was full of french fries and gunfire, and the newcomer dived for the floor. I scrambled to reach him, my brain screaming,
Get in front of him, get in front of him, don’t let them kill him
! even as he was pulling me backwards into the dubious safe zone between the pantry and the fridge.

“Get down!” I yelled, but the latest spell missed us and hit the ceiling instead, dropping beams and plaster as well as a flood from a waterline. It didn’t manage to put out the fire, but it did leave my bathtub teetering on the edge of the abyss.

“Is this a bad time?” Cyrus asked. My boyfriend had plaster in his dark hair and dusting his motorcycle jacket, but his Glock was in his hand and his brown eyes were calm. In fact, he looked more composed than me.

“I don’t remember us having a date,” I said, dropping my shields for an instant to send a spell at the laundry room door. It exploded inward, and I heard someone yelp. I grinned viciously.

“It’s Valentine’s Day.”

“I hate holidays. Crap always happens to me on holidays.” I peered out the window and saw what I’d expected: two shadows fell across the pebbly dirt that passed for a lawn in Vegas, although there was nothing to cast them. Mages under cloaking spells, just waiting for their buddies to flush me out into the open. So not happening, assholes.

Cyrus dragged me under the burning table to avoid a spell from mage number one. He’d taken up a position just outside the dining room door, giving him a good angle on the pantry. “What’s going on?” he demanded.

“Delivery guy was an assassin.”

“And you fell for that?” He emptied a clip into the mage’s shields, forcing him to draw back slightly to conserve power.

“I thought the flowers were from you! I should have known better.”

“Are you hinting that I’m unromantic?” He fished a backup 9 mm out of his jacket.

“The guys trying to kill me send more flowers than you do.”

“I never really pictured you as the flowers-and-candy type.”

The bathtub ended the discussion by taking that moment to kamikaze the kitchen table. The scorched Formica splintered, catching almost none of the tub’s momentum before it slammed into my shields, popping them like an overstretched balloon. I had a momentary heart-clench of “Cyrus!” the taste of bile and gunpowder thick in my mouth. But he was okay. Somehow, we both were.

I realized that my shields had lasted for a split second after impact, enough time for him to get a grip on the slick bottom of the tub, keeping it from cracking our heads. That was lucky for more than one reason. A hail of bullets from above and a spell from the side were both deflected by our porcelain-and-steel umbrella.

We crouched near the floor, blind except for a two-inch gap at the bottom. It allowed me to see bullets pelting down like metal raindrops, a cloud of flour sifting into the air, and punctured cans oozing their contents everywhere. So much for the pantry.

I considered our options, and they weren’t promising. Going out the back way was to walk into a death trap, but the guy in the dining room had us cut off from the front. I hadn’t heard anything more from the mage in the laundry room, but even if he was out of commission—a big if—there was no exit that way.

“I’m open to suggestions,” Cyrus said, a little strain creeping into his voice.

I realized why when I brushed against the side of the tub and almost burned myself. The spell had heated the metal like a huge soup pot. “Hold on,” I said, resigning myself to trashing yet another portion of my new house. And cast a spell that dissolved the floorboards beneath us.