When Wicked Craves (4 page)

She was still going to die.

For a brief, fleeting, glorious moment, Petra had believed that her knight had come, not on a white steed, but in a black bodysuit, which didn’t matter at all as she wasn’t disposed to being picky about rescues.

This rescue, however, had fallen flat, and though she
wanted desperately to blame Nicholas—to hurl curses at him and scream that he was an idiot for getting her hopes up and demand that he figure out a way to fix whatever the hell went wrong with the plan—she couldn’t even conjure enough brain power to do that.

Her mind was fuzzy from the poison, and her muscles weren’t strong enough to hold her up, and all her support came from the vampire who clutched her with a firm grip on her arm as he spoke out loud, answering some security person who must be talking into his earpiece.

Behind them, the door had slid shut again, trapping her and Nicholas in the room with the guards. The vamp had called for backup, and soon she’d be returned to the coffinlike box, probably hauled back to the stage, probably executed right then.

These were her last moments, she was so close to freedom she could taste it, yet she couldn’t do a single goddamned thing.

Around Nicholas, the guards were slowly climbing back to their feet. Apparently, preternatural creatures recovered faster from the poison than humans, because there was no way she was doing anything other than stand there like a damn useless noodle.

Her own rescue, and she couldn’t even lift a finger. What a total freaking crock.

Magic?

She tried to think through the cotton in her head. Magic was hard for her—so hard—but she had to try. Had to do something. An electrical surge. A fireball. Some sort of distraction that would give Nicholas a moment to get to her. What he’d do then in a locked room
with seven guards, she didn’t know, but at least she’d have done something. At least she’d have gotten them back where they were before everything went to hell.

Squinting her still-tender eyes, she tried to focus her energy. Kiril had refused to teach her, insisting that the curse would interfere, and without the ability to control the magic it was too dangerous to wield.

About that, he was probably right.

At the moment, she really didn’t care.

“Bind him,” her captor said. He lifted his head, sniffed the air. “Hematite shackles.”

“He be vampire?” a squat guard asked.

“I cannot tell. The suit masks his scent, as does the lingering poison. But we will take no chances.”

Shit.

The guards began to advance on Nicholas—five of them keeping him covered, another approaching with the binders. “You fight, you die.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Nicholas said. He kept one hand in his pocket, obviously holding on to something. His eyes stayed on Petra, his expression determined. She wished she knew what was going through his head, but she didn’t, and all she could do was focus on the magic and hope, hope, hope that if it worked he would take whatever advantage she gave him and run with it.

The guard was almost at his side—if she was going to manage anything, it was going to have to be now.

Fire. Elements. The powers of the earth.

In her mind, she pictured a column of fire, rising up from the floor, the flames keeping the guard from Nicholas.

In reality, nothing like that happened. She was getting
something
, though, because she could feel the burn moving through her body—a slow, thick heat that seemed almost as languid as her uncooperative muscles, but
there
. And if she could only manage to focus it, she might—

“Witch!” The vampire howled, lashing out and knocking her to the ground and then clasping his arm. She gasped, confused, terrified, a whole flurry of emotions. But when she saw his arm—when she saw where the material had burned thin so that they had almost,
almost
, touched flesh on flesh—that was when the terror set in, because that same arm now wielded a knife, and it was coming right after her, procedure be damned.

“No!” The cry came from Nicholas, but when she instinctively turned that direction, he was no longer there, and before her mind could even process the movement, a thick mist rose up between her and the vampire guard, taking form and turning into Nicholas—his body falling under the blade meant for her.

Another scream of protest filled the room, and she realized it was coming from her. Her wrists might be bound, but in her mind, she lashed out, beating on the guard, ripping the damn suit, laying her hands upon him and taking her revenge for thwarting her escape.

She couldn’t touch him, and yet he stayed away, and between Nicholas and the vampire guard, she saw the air shimmer, like heat rising from a desert highway, then burst into dancing tongues of flame.
She was doing that.
Which was, frankly, not nearly as cool as she’d hoped, because although her neat little wall of fire might keep the vampire guard away, the other six guards were racing
toward them with hematite nets, ready to hurl them through the heat. Ready to trap Nicholas and take them both down.

“I’m sorry,” Nicholas said, and she could only shake her head. He’d tried to save her, and for that, she’d always be grateful.

“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered. Without thinking, she reached for the knife he’d pulled from his chest. If she was going to die, she was going to do it on her own terms, and—

She stopped, her hand almost to the knife, her sore eyes widening as she met Nicholas’s equally astounded expression.
The binders had fallen free.

“The binders,” she said, or she tried to. She couldn’t get the words out, because as she spoke, Nicholas leaped upon her. Instinctively, she tensed as he clutched her, but she put her shackle-free arms tight around his waist even as the hematite nets flew through the air toward them.

And within the space of a heartbeat, she broke apart, her body and mind dissolving. No touch, no sight, no being.

Petra Lang was gone.

Existing now only as mist and consciousness, Nick felt rather than heard the sirens that screamed out, announcing a total lockdown of the facility. It didn’t matter—they’d successfully vaulted the bump in the road, and his plan was back on track. He’d done his homework and knew how the automatic lockdown worked—the doors slamming shut, the vents sealing tight.

The very vents they were now racing through as they headed toward the exhaust grid that opened into Los Angeles’s Red Line subway terminal. They were, in fact, almost there now. He couldn’t
see
it—the senses exist as part of the body, and he was currently operating without flesh—but he could
vision
it.

That exhaust terminal, a fourteen-inch mesh square, was designed to be sealed by a steel cover that slammed into place as soon as lockdown was instituted. Nick had no doubt the system worked as designed. And that was why he’d entered the building through that very portal, then transformed from mist into flesh inside the cramped tunnel. Now, when the steel door tried to seal, it would fail, the mechanism blocked by the insertion of a small metal rod that left a gap of approximately one-half inch between the metal flashing of the vent and the perpendicular steel seal.

Half an inch was more than sufficient for mist to slip through.

Swiftly, surely, he maneuvered them through the tunnels, and then—
yes
—through the small gap until they were soaring beneath the streets of Los Angeles, racing a speeding Red Line train, finally, gloriously, free.

They’d made it.

Thank the gods—and thank Sara—
they’d actually made it.

Of course, the security team would register the breach and they would send agents to rectify. But it no longer mattered. They’d escaped the building, and the guards wouldn’t find them. Not tonight. Hopefully not at all.

Too bad rescuing Petra had been the easy part. Now, the work really began.

But even the knowledge of all that lay ahead couldn’t dampen his spirit. Within his consciousness, he smiled. Hell, he grinned like a fiend, his entire being overwhelmed by the euphoria of the moment—of the rescue, of having beaten a system that was supposedly unbeatable. Of simply winning. And even though he and Petra weren’t cohorts—even though he’d pulled her from the execution floor for his own purposes—he wished that she could feel it, too.

Petra.

He could feel her, entwined with him, their beings mixed and meshed, an awareness of her running through him that seemed almost erotic. She might have no understanding of how her consciousness was reacting, but it
was
reacting. Strange that a human could retain any level of awareness in the mist. But she did. He could feel it.

Excitement. Fear.

Not arising from the dissipation of her body, but rather from the twining of their two beings. This wasn’t touch, and yet it was intimate. Complete. More personal than sex, more erotic than a kiss, and as her consciousness moved through him, he felt the fear turn to understanding—there was no danger here. No flesh in which the curse could mount.

As the fear dissolved, the melancholy took over, a dark pit of sadness that turned his thoughts gray and slid like oil into the wisps of his being. This was it, he realized. This was as close to intimacy as she’d ever been, her touches limited and always, always protected by a barrier of tightly knit cloth.

She longed—by the gods he could feel the longing pulsing through her, her yearning so keen it conjured his own memories of Lissa, the only woman for whom his own need had been so intense it bordered on pain. Now they flooded back—memories he’d worked hard to push aside and that now sent desire coursing through him. Desire, and also the pain of loss.

He forced his mind to focus not on Lissa or himself, but on the girl. Her need cut through him, so desperately did she want that touch, that intimacy, and for a moment Nick felt shame that he so often took what women willingly gave. He’d been trying to erase the memories of Lissa, of course, but never once had he considered what a gift it was to feel flesh against flesh, heat against heat.

A flash of sympathy burned through him, and he pushed it brutally away. He could be sympathetic to her
plight, yes, but he couldn’t let the emotion rule him or influence his decisions. He hadn’t rescued her out of kindness or out of anger that his carefully constructed legal arguments had been denied. He’d pulled off this stunt for one reason only—he needed her.

Whether it took her knowledge, her touch, or her blood, in the final analysis, Petra was the key, and Nick wouldn’t rest until they’d unlocked the curse and set Serge free.

“Sir,” the med tech said, his voice unsteady. “Sir, if you could just stay still, the medicine—”

Dirque lashed out, the blue flame rising in fury from his fingertips visible despite the hazy veil that covered his eyes. “Give me the goddamned salve and I’ll do it myself.”

He could feel the tech’s hesitation as he tried to avoid the flames dancing between Dirque’s fingers, and it took all of his restraint not to lash out against the quivering brat. Not because the tech deserved it, but because Dirque’s temper was running so high that he needed the simple, cathartic release that would follow the sound of an innocent’s screams.

No.

This was a mission, not a vendetta, and he was too smart to give in to emotion. Too cunning to fall prey to fear.

But he was afraid. Dammit, despite everything he’d seen and done in over two millennia upon this earth, he was afraid of one goddamned curly-haired girl.

No, he corrected himself. Not the girl. He was afraid of what she could create.

More important, he was afraid of what she could destroy. Him. The Shadow Alliance. The whole fucking world.

Exhausted, he fell back against the pillow, the poison still working upon his eyes. He scooped up some salve and slathered it on.

“The others?” he asked. “Trylag? Narid?”

His eyes were closed now, the salve soothing and healing, but he could hear the med tech shuffle about near the foot of his bed. “They will recover,” the tech said. “Member Narid is already almost fully healed, and the physicians anticipate member Trylag will be back to full strength within the hour.”

“Good.” Dirque’s body relaxed. He’d feared the worst, but realized now that the poison the executioner had shot into the room was not meant to kill, only to hinder.

A mistake.

Had Dirque perished, his wrath would have died with him. As it was, he would spend the rest of his days—and as a jinn, they could be numerous indeed—seeking retribution for this crime against him, the Tribunal, and the Alliance itself.

“I must speak with them,” he said.

“But—”

“Bring them here. As soon as they are able.”

“I—” The tech lowered his eyes.
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

“And the rest of the Alliance? They have been notified?”

“Yes, sir. I believe so, sir. I only work in Medical, and—”

“Send for Tiberius.” The vampiric liaison to the Shadow Alliance hadn’t sat on the Tribunal, but as the governor of the Los Angeles territory, he had remained on premises during the execution. Or, rather, during the attempted execution.