Blood of the Wicked, page 11
The truck lumbered through the barren streets and it was all he could do to keep the wheel from coming off in his rigid grip.
As if it weren’t bad enough, as if he hadn’t screwed up enough already, he’d gone and shoved her against a wall in the fucking ruins of a fucking dead city and watched her come apart against him. Around him.
Silas clenched his teeth. Her body had been slick and tight, her voice breathy and fragmented as he filled her. Bent against a goddamned wall.
Gentle, Smith. Really tender.
But he didn’t goddamned do tender.
“Oh, stop.” Her voice cut through his thoughts like a sharpened knife.
He glanced over, met her eyes. They remained shadowed, dark smudges of exhaustion like bruises at her cheeks, but her mouth curved up. “If you’re scowling because you’re trying to come up with a way to apologize for what we did, save your breath. I’m a big girl.”
“I should.” Silas shifted his gaze back to the road. “It wasn’t exactly—”
“Yes,” she cut in with entirely too much gratification. “Yes, it was.”
“Damn it, Jessie.” He scowled. “You’re bleeding, exhausted.” And he could have gone his whole life without knowing how warm her skin was around the odd bar code tattoo imprinted into her spine.
Or how tight her body was around him.
And how she breathed his name when she orgasmed.
His jaw clenched hard enough to audibly pop.
Her eyes narrowed. She shifted in her seat to face him, old springs creaking. “Wait a minute. Is that your problem? That I was hurt?”
He guided the rattling pickup onto the main carousel and breathed deeply through his nose. It didn’t help. He smelled old leather and rain-drenched woman. Her warm, welcoming scent. His cock stirred; damn it, he wanted her again. Still.
“No,” she decided, shaking her head. “You’re mad you weren’t in control.”
“You’re covered in blood.” It whipped out of him like a fist. “You wouldn’t have even been down there if I hadn’t taken you—”
“Whoa!” Jessie leaned across the cab to shove her face directly into his line of sight. A thunderstorm frothed wildly behind her summer eyes. “Hold it right there, Agent High-and-Mighty. You didn’t take me anywhere, I went because I knew where to go and you didn’t. I took you.”
Silas didn’t like that any more than he liked seeing traces of blood cling to her neck from the hand she cradled against her chest. Didn’t like knowing she was right.
He glanced over his shoulder once, cut across three lanes of traffic, and firmed his grip on the wheel. “This is how it plays out,” he said, low and tight. “We’re going back to the safe house. You are going to stay there—”
“Fat chance.”
“You are going to stay there,” he repeated louder, overriding her hot challenge by volume and single-minded authority. His head pounded. “Where it’s safe and where the bastards that peeled apart that woman can’t find you.”
“No.” She straightened her shoulders. Daring, determined.
Jesus. She was going to haunt him forever.
Especially if she died, which was a sure possibility as long as she stayed with him.
“You don’t have a choice,” he said. “If you won’t stay put, I’ll handcuff you to the goddamned bed.”
Her eyes gleamed. “Dare you.”
“No.”
She didn’t laugh. Challenge practically screamed from every line of her body as she settled back into her corner of the cab. Watched him. “You need me. I know things you don’t. We’re partners.”
“Bullshit, we’re not partners,” Silas growled, so low that it ripped out of his throat. She flinched, as if he’d reached out and slapped her. She turned away.
That’s right, sunshine. I’m a total bastard.
He forced his attention to the road. “I’m the agent here, I’m the goddamned one trained to hunt and retrieve and kill.” Her face jerked back toward him, her eyes narrowed to catlike slits. “You’re a stripper, Jessie, you’re trained to sucker men. Don’t ever think there’s more to this than what it is.”
Icy realization crystallized behind her drawn, exhausted features. “You son of a bitch,” she said. Only part was hurt. The rest was pure feminine insult.
Hell, she was spectacular.
“That’s right,” he said tightly.
“Yeah.” She turned in her seat, faced the front again with her arms folded stiffly over her chest. “Well, fuck you, too, Agent Smith.”
Silas swallowed back an angry kick of his own conscience as he set his sights on the windshield and drove them back to safety. The rain had eased to a light drizzle, barely even enough for the windshield wipers he clicked off.
He’d call in someone else to watch her.
As he guided the truck onto the off-ramp, he wondered if he could trust anyone else to do it.
Jessie lasted all of five minutes in boiling, seething silence before she lost the battle with herself. “For the record,” she said tersely, shattering the uneasy silence like a gunshot, “I’ve never stripped in my life.”
His knuckles went white against the steering wheel. “I don’t care.”
“I do,” she shot back. “I worked at the Pussycat Perch as a bartender.”
“You say tomato—”
“Tomato doesn’t even sound like bartender, you asshole.” Jessie struggled to rein in her temper. Staring at the stacked blocks of tenement housing passing out the window didn’t do anything to make it easier. Images of knocking him on his ass danced across her vision. “I sling beer, but I’ve never slung my body.” So there seemed juvenile. She settled for a scathing “Unless you’re planning to leave some money on the table . . .”
The safe house complex eased into view, its dim lights a steady blue-tinged beacon in the lower city gloom. Silas’s teeth clicked together. “Leave it, Jessie,” he said through them, downshifting so fast that the truck dipped.
“You leave it,” she shot back, reaching for the dash before the lurching momentum made her kiss it. A car blitzed past them, horn blaring loudly. She ignored it. “You’re the one who—”
A shudder rippled up her spine.
Magic.
Jessie’s eyes abruptly unfocused, left her blind as the murky lights of the street shimmered.
Power coalesced, tangling like a net spun too fast. She felt it, prickling like needles over her skin, saw it with senses that she couldn’t name. She sucked in a breath.
“Jessie?” Silas’s voice, muted as if through a layer of cotton.
Magic spun, invisible but there. Tighter, faster, sparking. A trap. Right now. Right, now. “Go right,” she said hoarsely. “Silas, turn right.”
“What?”
“Now!” Jessie grabbed the steering wheel in both hands. She jerked it, hard enough to fall back into the passenger side of the cab as Silas swore and struggled to guide the careening truck around the other cars around them. The tires squealed with the effort, caught air and listed to the side.
The air scorched white-hot around them. A nanosecond later, Silas stomped on the gas pedal as a ball of fire exploded through the Mission safe house.
Jessie whirled in place, seized the back of the seat. Framed in the rear window, she watched as flames ate at the old brownstone. Glass and wood rained to the street below, sparks and cinders smoldering to smoke on the wet pavement. Debris peppered the surrounding tenements and shattered windows as tires screeched, car horns shrieking in futile warning as fenders collided. Silas deftly guided the shaking truck through sudden chaos.
Lights blazed from nearby windows, doors slammed open as wild-eyed people staggered out to watch the sudden show. There would be casualties. A death toll.
A magical trap. Just for . . . Who? Her?
Silas?
How had she known to look?
It took her a long moment to realize she was shaking.
“What the hell was that?”
Jessie stared out the back window as the flames licked higher. Hotter. Hungry. Just fire and heat. The sense of magic was gone. “I—” She what? She saw it?
“Jessie.”
She licked her lips, slanted him a sidelong smile. “You won’t believe me.” Truth.
“Try me.”
And the lie. “I’ve lived on my own for a very long time. You learn what to look for, or you end up dead.”
He watched the rearview mirror closely as he navigated through the flickering orange streets. Cars stalled, slowed to watch the carnage, but he didn’t use the truck’s horn. “What did you see?”
Jessie turned around when she heard the sirens blaring in the distance. New Seattle took fire seriously.
God forbid anything happen to the foundation that kept the sparkling glass towers high.
She sighed. “I don’t even know for sure. I just saw the building and something seemed off. Kind of out of place.”
He grunted.
Was it enough? Jessie cradled her wounded palm in her lap. “I figured your security’s tight enough, if something was out of place there had to be a big reason.”
When he only scowled at the windshield, she gloated. Just a little. “I guess that puts a kink in your plan, doesn’t it, Agent Smith?”
That telltale muscle leaped in his jaw.
Gotcha, she thought. She pulled the ancient seat belt over her chest. “Where to, then?” A beat. “Partner.”
“Fuck.” Silas glanced at the GPS on his dash. “The upper city is the only option left to keep you safe.”
Jessie stiffened. “Topside? With your agents?”
He glanced at her. “We’ve got a suite of offices on the executive levels. It’s considered part of topside, yes, but I can get us both through the security checks without a problem.”
Hell, no. “How do you know it’ll be any safer there?”
He opened his mouth to retort something guaranteed to annoy her, or at least make her life even more complicated than it already was. But then he closed it, surprising her, and said nothing.
Jessie seized the opportunity. “You’re thinking the same thing I am,” she said. “How did they know where the safe house was? Will I actually be any safer topside with all that security?” Where she’d stick out like a sore thumb, watched every moment by cameras and witch hunters and rich people.
No way.
“What do you suggest, then?” he said, clearly aggravated as he rolled his shoulders. “We can’t drive forever, damn it.”
“No, but we don’t have to.” She cast a short, mental prayer that what she remembered was as accurate now as it was then. “Stay off the carousel and head east.”
He frowned at her, clearly unhappy with her direction. “What’s east?”
Witch hunters had their safe houses. Witches had theirs.
At least, Jessie desperately hoped so. “A few years back, I worked for a place called the Pink Beaver.” She shot him a glance, but his eyes remained on the road.
Smart hunter.
“It operated on lower streets than the Perch, a real dive. I met a girl there who slummed it for kicks or something.” Jessie silently apologized to the witch who’d taught her how to blend into the lower city flesh markets. “She set up an apartment for some of the more trouble-prone girls. Said anyone who needed it was welcome to stay until the trouble passed.”
“Nice of her.”
“She was a nice stripper,” Jessie replied mildly, and glanced to the streetlights flicking on along the street. More lights shattered the darkening city around them, red and blue speeding toward the orange glow framed by Silas’s window.
His profile cut a hard silhouette against the lit glass. “Which way?”
Jessie ran the odds. What were her options? Topside, levels above everything she knew and surrounded by witch hunters? Or the safe house possibly occupied by witches.
No contest. She gave him the address.
Chapter Eleven
The back roads were a bitch to navigate, but the satellite system guided him unerringly through the maze of the mid-level streets. The carousel would have been the easier route. Shorter, quicker.
Instead he called himself a fool as he drove through the darkening city streets and watched her sleep beside him.
Exhaustion had finally taken its toll. One minute she’d been watching the light dim toward night, and the next she’d tilted toward the dashboard and would have fallen to the grimy floor if he hadn’t been ready to catch her.
Now she slept curled on the seat. Her boots were tucked against his hip, her cheek nestled in the crook of her arm beneath the passenger side window.
Silas knew that kind of fatigue. She’d been on the go for nearly twenty-four hours, never mind the piss-poor sleep she might have managed tied to that heater. That she lasted this long made something in him warm.
Pride. Approval.
Annoyance.
He turned his eyes back to the road. Deliberately ignored the silken strands of gold clinging to her mouth.
By now, the local Mission chapter knew he wasn’t checking in. Peterson was probably popping a gasket and demanding his team perform a miracle to provide him with answers.
He needed them to leave him alone. Especially if there was a leak in the Mission offices.
A hunter working with witches? Some sort of electronic espionage? God only knew. If he shared his suspicions with just anyone, he could tip off the mole.
If there was one. Fuck. He hated politics, but she was right. Since that first magical attack at the Church hall, the seed of doubt had been germinating.
Silas held the wheel steady with one hand, reached below the seat with the other. It took some fumbling but he managed to haul the dark green duffel bag from its place with minimum noise. One eye on the road, he found the comm unit tucked into its customary side pocket and flipped it open.
A whole mess of calls. Each angrier than the last, he’d bet.
Ignoring the alerts, he punched in the number from memory and clipped the earpiece to the shell of his ear. The tiny microphone tucked against his temple vibrated, a near-silent signal that the call connected.
“How long has it been since your last confession?”
Silas curled a lip. “Smith, checking in.”
“Hot damn, Smith! Where the hell have you been?”
Beside him, Jessie murmured something husky and low as she shifted on the narrow seat. “Around,” he said quietly. “Who is this?”
“Alan Eckhart,” replied the man that Silas could now place as the bald hunter with the three-note tune. “I’m on the tubes tonight.”
Silas nodded. Good. “Here’s what I’ve got, are you ready?”
“Fire away, chief.”
Quietly, careful to keep his voice at an even level, Silas told him about the body below the streets, the witches outside the grisly scene. The Mission house up in flames.
Silas left out the details no one else needed to know. Like Jessie’s surprising tattoo. The sound she made in her throat as she’d climaxed around him, and the way she’d turned her face into his hand as if she trusted him. God damn it, she shouldn’t trust him.
“That it?” Eckhart asked. At Silas’s affirmative sound, the older man whistled his odd tune again. “Hell on toast, Smith, you get around.”
“Tell me about it.”
“You said one of the witches pulled lightning out of thin air, right? Red hair? Smile like a jack-o’-lantern?”
“You know him?”
“Like recurring herpes,” Eckhart replied dryly. “We know his name is Nick Wallace, but that’s all we’ve got on him. He’s one of the more ballsy witches in this city. His blood’s linked to at least fourteen ritual killings in the past year alone.”
“Fuck me running,” Silas muttered. “Well, he’s dead now.”
“And the Leigh witch?”
Silas hesitated. He glanced at Jessie beside him, grimaced. “Nothing yet. Your lab ready to receive some blood?”
There was another, longer pause. “Whose blood?”
“The dead woman’s, and some random samples from the scene.”
“Oh, sure. Where?”
Silas found his gaze sliding back around to Jessie’s sleep-furrowed forehead, the downward curve to her mouth. “Got a street number. Take it down.” At the missionary’s confirmation, Silas rattled off the address pulsing on the navigation screen.
“We’ll hit the burning wreck you left us first. Peterson’s got us on double duty, so we’ll see you by oh-six,” Eckhart said, so cheerfully Silas almost believed he wasn’t talking about six in the morning. “You safe there tonight?”
“I think we lost anyone tailing us,” Silas said, slowing the truck as the satellite system flickered a notice. “The seal’s been quiet and she’s out cold.”
Eckhart grunted, something that sounded more curious than sympathetic. “Hurt?”
“Her or me?”
“Yes,” he replied without missing a beat.
Silas turned the engine off, and withdrew the keys, annoyed with himself to realize he did it all while trying to make as little noise as possible. He sighed. “Minor,” he replied shortly. “Peterson talk to you?”
The line was quiet. Eckhart’s voice was a carefully modulated verbal shrug as he said, “About what, exactly?”
“Fuck, Eckhart.”
The man whistled. “No, not really. But he didn’t need to. Your reputation precedes you, man. Just remember you don’t have to work alone.”
Right. Just like he didn’t have to wrap himself in Jessica Leigh or kill her homicidal brother. Pain spiked through his hands, sudden and sharp, and he blinked to find his fingers curled so tightly around the steering wheel that they’d gone bloodless with strain.
He peeled them off, one by one. “Sure. I’ll see you guys in the morning. Smith, out.” He disconnected the line before Eckhart could say anything else.
Annoyed with himself for the knot in his chest, angry at the pictures that slid jumbled and colorful through his mind, Silas took a deep breath and held it.
His eyes scanned the street.
Were they safe? Here? Compared to a dark alley in the middle of a witch-infested city block, sure. By any other standards, he’d seen better.
