Raven Cursed

CHAPTER NINETEEN Want to Play?

Back at the hotel, I picked up my cell and made a few calls, the first to Evan—and he actually answered even though he had to see my number on the readout. I described the scene at Evil Evie’s and he said, “I need to think about this. You will not interfere, do you understand? Break the spell at the wrong point and you could kill Molly.”

“Sure. Whatever.” I hung up, ticked off, though I knew he could handle the demon situation better than I could any day.

I left a message for the sheriff that the wolves were currently caged and no danger to the public. I deliberately didn’t leave any details, and figured that would irritate him—I enjoyed baiting cops. I punched END with a little grin, turned on the gas logs and the laptop, curled on the bed, and went Internet hopping.

There were a gazillion sites about demons on the Internet, most stupid, but maybe a half gazillion that could offer something to me. I refined my search, adding in beak, wings, moon-called, werewolves, and started a list on a pad. There were demons of all kinds: Christian, pagan, Jewish, tribal, ancient, fictional, mythical, modern, European, American tribal Indian, Eastern, Middle Eastern, Asian. I began a list, trying to ignore the weird feeling that a predator was standing across the room with its eyes on my neck. Just nerves, but still. Demons were scary.

When I had a page full of demon names, I closed the laptop and leaned back on the bed, pillows piled behind me. This wasn’t working. There were too many possibilities. The gas fireplace cast both heat and flickering shadows, warming the room enough for me, even wearing only boy-shorts and a thin tank top. I should be desperate for sleep, but I was too wired to close my eyes, and the sunlight that poured around the edges of the blackout blinds assured me I should be up and around, not exhausted and depleted. All I could see was the demon in the circle as I/we walked away from it.

I wasn’t used to sitting on my hands, doing nothing, but charging in to Evil Evie’s basement and attacking the thing in the circle would likely cause more harm than good, and maybe release a demon to wreak havoc on Earth. I could call the cops, but that would just endanger humans. I could call Leo. And if he came and killed Evangelina, any hope of future parley between vamps and witches was ended for this generation because the witches would hold all vamps accountable for the death. It would be the next generation before younger witches would be willing to try again. In all honesty, that didn’t bother me. But if Leo interfered, and the spell went kaboom, it might hurt Mol. Or, I could go to the café and tell the sisters but that was going to be a problem no matter how I might phrase it. “Hi, girls. Your crazy-as-a-bat sister—the one screwing a vamp—has kidnapped two werewolves, stored them in cages in the basement, drained their blood, and summoned a demon. Oh, and she’s sleeping outside buck naked, covered in spelled blood, and has a dead man rolled up in a carpet in her house.” Yeah. Like that was gonna work. Not.

Worse—Evangelina had stolen Shaddock’s blood as well. What did the mixture of were and vamp blood do to a spell cast by a water witch who had a demon in a magical cage? As usual, I was in the dark and flying by the seat of my pants. I dialed Molly and was shunted directly to voice mail. I hung up without leaving a message.

I was between a demon and the deep blue sea. I was screwed no matter what I did. I’d have to depend on Evan to handle it. I curled up and closed my eyes. Despite my worry, I fell asleep.

The door opened and Rick walked in, shutting the door behind him. I was dreaming, that kind where you know it’s a dream but you’re paralyzed, unable to move, unable to participate. He stood in the firelight for a moment, his eyes adjusting, before he dropped his jacket to the floor and toed off his boots. Pulled his T-shirt off. His pants slid to the floor.

Naked, he crawled onto the bed. Toward me. “Want to play?” Shadows danced over his body as he crawled, catlike, up the mattress, looking long and lean and somehow deadly. I had never seen Rick by firelight. It warmed his olive skin to golden, shadowing and highlighting. The planes of his face were sharper, his cheekbones leaner. The muscles of his chest and abdomen were ridged muscle. He was bruised purple and green across his ribs, but in my dream, he wasn’t sore, his movements smooth and effortless. Big-cat claw-scars crisscrossed his chest, looking too white, smooth as old marble. I could feel the heat of his body as he crawled up over me, hands and knees to either side, straddling me, trapping me beneath the covers. His dark eyes seized mine, a reflection of fire in his irises. His hair fell forward over his face, black and wavy, curling on the ends. He looked oddly like Leo in a long ago dream.

Slowly, he lowered his face and touched his cheek to mine, sliding along my jaw to the other side and back. Scent marking motions. I pulled in a breath that tasted and smelled of man and cat. I struggled to move, snared by the dream, my hands sleep-paralyzed beneath the covers. His lips brushed my chin and up to my mouth, featherlight, soft as a kitten’s fur. I chuckled. And the sound woke me. And he was still here.

Heat flooded through me. It wasn’t a dream. I raised my head to meet his mouth, but he pulled away, teasing. Heat became irritation in a flash. I dropped my head and pulled my arms free, my limbs now obeying me. I set my palms to his chest, pushing him way. Rick’s hands captured mine, pulling my arms to the side, pinning me to the mattress with his weight, the comforter separating us. He was much stronger than before, and although I jerked, I was held in place. “No, no.” His mouth touched me again. His breath warm, soft puffs. “Not until we talk.”

“Talk?” He wanted to talk now?

“We can only play,” he whispered, his words brushing my face. “I can infect with sex, maybe even with protection, so nothing more. Just play.” His voice dropped to a low growl. “I’ve missed playing with you, Jane.”

The growl melted my annoyance away like water on hot stones. Beast raised up and looked through my eyes, hungry for the mate she had claimed. She showed me an image of two cats hissing at each other, a large male and a young female. He smelled musky and strong. She wanted him to chase her. She swiped out at his muzzle, drawing blood. Spun away. He lunged. She let him catch her.

I chuckled. Rick traced my jaw with his lips, teeth nipping gently. “Sounds nice for me,” I said. I tilted my head back so he could nuzzle my neck. His blunt human incisors bit down gently over my carotid and jugular, my pulse caught in his teeth. He bit down harder. Just to the edge of pain. I gasped. “What do you get out of it?” I managed.

He slid lower, taking the comforter with him. And sucked my nipple into his mouth. My gasp became a moan, the texture of my tank top abrading my skin, heated and wet. Sucking hard, he pulled more of my breast into his mouth. Arched his back, pulling his head away, maintaining the suction, elongating breast and nipple, his teeth grazing as he released. His mouth descended again, this time taking mine. His mouth punishing hard. My lips opened. His tongue plundered before sucking mine into his mouth. I wanted my arms around him. When I tugged them away he pressed them harder, into the mattress. His chest brushed mine, my nipples tightening painfully. I moaned into his mouth, and he laughed. Pulled away.

“I get a lot out of it. I get to follow Kem’s orders,” he whispered, releasing my hands, sliding his fingers up my arms, “and spend part of the day in your bed.” He brushed his hands down my sides, along my breasts, close, not touching the sensitive peeks, one cooling and wet.

“Oh.” I licked my lips; they were bruised and tender. “What orders did Kem give?”

He shoved the comforter away and gathered the hem of the tank. Pulled it from me. The air, though warm, was still cooler than Rick, and I tightened as it swept over me. His hands skimmed lower, warm, calloused fingers sliding into the top of the boy-shorts. “Later,” he whispered. And I forgot everything else.

Much later, Rick was lying beside me, his head braced on one arm, the comforter pulled half over us. The firelight still dancing with the shadows, I stroked my fingertips up and across his chest, across the bruises old and new that discolored the flesh over his ribs. “Explain,” I said, pressing gently in the center of one blacker than the others.

Rick flinched slightly. “Kem in a temper.” I frowned. Rick shrugged. “I heal fast now.”

I didn’t dispute that, but Kem was full were. Even in human form, he’d be hard for Rick to defend against. Slowly, I traced across his ribs, up his chest to his shoulder with the mountain lion and bobcat tattoos and the scars that marred them. He tensed when my fingertip traced the mountains in the background, almost pulled away, but reined in his reaction. My fingernail scraped lightly across his bicep and up to his collarbone, back down to circle the eyes of the mountain lion. Rick stilled, watching me with the intensity of a hunting leopard. Curious, rapt.

The eyes of the lion and the bobcat, and globes of blood on their claws, were the only unmistakable things left of the exquisite tattoo. In the mass of scar, warped design, and distorted colors, I could make out the shape of the teeth that had bitten him, the werewolf bitch trying to tear the tattoo from his flesh. Firelight lit on the irises. I touched one. My fingertip stilled as the texture of witch magic tingled up from his skin. The eyes glowed hotly, as if throwing back the flames, a molten gold, and seemed to look at me. The taste of magic sparked, tart, citrusy.

I lifted my fingertip and the irises returned to the gold of expensive ink. I tapped it again and the glow returned. The tattoo had been put into his flesh by a witch, a spell that had been interrupted, but I didn’t know the whole story. “The witch who made this, who put a spell into your skin using a tattoo.” Rick made a hmmm of encouragement, the sound half purr. My heart hammered unsteadily. How could I ask this without sounding needy or whiny or stalker-nuts? “Was she a seer?” Which was marginally better than asking him if she saw me in his future. How else would he have my two cats on his body? I wondered if—

“I don’t think so.”

My heart plummeted. Of course not. That was stupid.

“Her name was Loriann. She was doing the dirty work of a half-crazy vampire named Isleen, one of Katie’s get.”

I settled deeper in the pillows and pulled the comforter higher, thinking, Okay, I don’t get some kind of proof that we belong together. But then no one ever does.

“Isleen wanted scions, but there was something wrong with her blood. Hers either never rose or died while chained. So she found herself an old witch, a crone, living out on the bayou with her two grandchildren, and tried to force her to create a spell of binding. When Gramma refused, she killed the old woman in front of the kids and told the eldest, Loriann, she’d kill her brother, Jason, if she didn’t do the job.”

I flinched slightly. One side of Rick’s mouth quirked up with an expression that said, Yeah, life’s a bitch. “Then she fed from Jason and took him away. He was seven.”

I watched his face. “She fed from a child?” A first feeding was almost always sexual in nature, vamp saliva tightening all the pleasure centers in the body and working on the brain like a drug. Feeding from a child under twelve was against the Vampira Carta.

“Yeah. She did. Couple nights later, Isleen and I met up in a bar. And I spent the next few days in an abandoned horse barn, stretched out on a black marble square, chained inside a witch circle as Loriann’s spell was built into me. Then, just like in the movies, at the ninth hour, I was saved and Isleen died.”

Rick had been tortured before, long before the wolves got to him. But he wouldn’t want pity. His eyes held mine, and the breath I took was steady and slow as I forced my emotional reaction to his tale deep inside. “You were saved?”

“Yeah, I was partially free by day and I managed to make some stakes. Isleen and I fought, and I was losing just when Leo and Katie blew the barn doors in and finished her off.”

“Spells of binding. Rick, that’s why the moon can’t call you. You’re already partially bound to something else.” At his expression I said, “And you knew that.” He nodded. “But did you think that Molly and her sisters”—I stopped for a heartbeat. Not Evangelina. I have to be sure of that. I found my place with only a bare hesitation—“might be able to break it for you?”

“It crossed my mind. But I might go furry, and if the spell goes active when I change, it might keep me in cat form, which is not how I want to live my life. At this point, I’m waiting it out. See what happens at the full moon,” he shrugged mildly, which was false body language. Had to be.

I thought about that for a while, about not knowing what your body might do, about living forever in Beast form. I had spent over a hundred years as Beast, and it had changed me. “Okay. I can see that. So. What did Kem send you to do? Buy beer?” Instead of answering, Rick lowered his head and touched my lips with his. I sighed into his mouth and pulled him over me. “I like playing,” I murmured. Rick laughed again, the amused vibrations throbbing through me.

By late afternoon, I was exhausted and lethargic and energized all at once. I watched from beneath half-closed lashes as Rick dressed and left the room. I heard him speak to one of the twins on his way out, and caught the tenor of the exchange, one of those manly tones that said they knew what we had been up to for the last few hours, which they would. Blood-servants can hear better than humans and we hadn’t been trying for silence. We’d been playing. Yeah. For hours. Still smiling, I rose and made my way to the bathroom for a hot shower.

I was still steaming when my phone rang. “Yellowrock,” I said, cutting the water.

“I understand that you believe you have located the grindylow’s lair,” Kemnebi said.

“Yeah. Pretty much.” I had told Rick I had a good idea where the grindy had holed up. It hadn’t taken him long to report back to the black were-leopard. “Do you wish for me to go with you to track him down?”

I pulled my hair to the side so it would drip into the tub instead of on the phone. “Yes.”

“Provide me with the coordinates. My cat will lead the hunt. My . . . associate,” he spat the word, “will assist us.”

I figured that the associate was Rick, the man he planned to kill as soon as Rick shifted. Which was not gonna happen, even if I had to start a supernatural international incident to prevent it. “Fine by me.” I gave him the location, an address in Hot Springs where he could leave his car. “I’ll be there in ninety minutes,” I said.

“Excellent.” The call ended, and so did my long steamy shower. I dressed and dried my hair with the hotel’s blow dryer, braided my hair out of the way into a fighting queue. Slid vamp-killers and wood stakes into my clothing and hair, made sure I was wearing crosses. Last thing, I double-checked that half of my ammo was silver and half was regular. The sun would set in a few hours, and there was no telling what might happen after dark with a pissed-off black were-leopard and empty hunting territory. Into a zippered pocket I placed a mountain lion tooth, my backup emergency tooth for shifting into Beast.

Dressed for hiking and hunting, I found three more messages from Angelina, messages I couldn’t deal with, not and let Big Evan do things his way. But I was going to have to make an appearance at Molly’s. Soon. I exited my room, texting instructions to Derek, not thinking about the blood-servant twins with big ears and bigger libidos. I made it five feet into the common room when Brian was in front of me, nearly vamp-fast. Leering. I almost dropped the cell.

“I just earned twenty from the ugly brother,” he said. I didn’t respond except for the blush starting somewhere below my waist and quickly spreading up my chest. It suffused up my throat and into my cheeks. Brian’s smile widened. “You are a screamer.”

I pursed my lips to keep in an instinctive retort, and pushed past him. This was just teasing. Or jealousy, which made me grin. I was closing the door to the suite when I heard him say, “Derek retrieved your SUV. Do you want to tell us why it was hidden in the driveway of a burned-out homesite?” I didn’t. I closed the door and sent a second text to Derek, thanking him for getting the vehicle back and thinking of all the uses of GPS and how they could trip me up. I had to do better about arranging recovery of my own vehicles. I was getting complacent in the world of vamps, weres, humans, and tech. I needed to take better care.

A little over an hour later I was parked a mile downstream from Evangelina’s, and ready to hunt. The battered, rusted, red pickup truck pulled in beside me, rolling through the mud, with Rick driving, Kem sitting pretty on the front seat. Minutes later we were on the hunt.

The day was warming up enough that I carried my leather jacket through the straps of my backpack, and extra water bottles attached by biners to loops on my hiking pants. Layered T-shirts could be pulled off one by one as needed to cope with warming temperatures. Even in the mountains, the temps could change from cold to warm fast; it was the South, after all.

A frost last night had turned the dogwoods scarlet, started the other deciduous trees into a color change, and shriveled the kudzu. Plants that flowered in fall were budding, opening in fast forward. If the chill held, in two weeks the mountains would be a riot of red and golden hues.

Rick slid a backpack onto his shoulders and we moved down the hill to the noisy, rushing creek, and upstream. Even in human form, the scent of the grindylow was pungent and potent, fishy, with a base scent that now smelled like blood. Kem-cat leaped from rock to rock, Rick and me scrambling to keep up, communicating by hand signals rather than voice to be understood over the water’s roar. We might both have better reflexes and speed than humans, but no human could keep up with a big-cat on the prowl. And there was no doubt that Kem-cat was on a scent.

Like the Puma concolor, the black were-leopard was a solitary hunter, seldom seen in groups larger than three or four, and most often spotted alone. They were the most adaptable of all the big-cats, and unlike their spotted brothers and sisters, lived most often in deeply forested areas, where their dark coloring was most effective. They’d eat anything meaty, storks, baboons, wildebeest, jackals. They liked the taste of domesticated dog. If they could kill it they would eat it. But they were also preyed upon by other big-cats, most commonly the African lion. Ever since finding out that Kem intended to challenge and kill Rick, I had been doing my homework, looking for weak spots in the leopard’s defenses. So far, not many had presented themselves.

I can be male sabertooth lion. Beast hacked deep in my mind, watching Kem leap nearly twenty feet across the rushing stream. I can be big. Beast will protect mate.

Which I knew. And which scared me to death.

The creek was still running high, twisting and turning, carving a deep gulley into the earth. It curved back on itself, and then back again, like a snake in a hurry, whipping back and forth. Where a larger river had the power to cut through obstacles, slowly straightening its path over decades and centuries, small creeks were left to search out the path of least resistance, and this creek had done just that, resulting in a surprisingly compact switchback carved between high banks into the base of the mountain. We passed Evangelina’s house, and Kemnebi stopped on the rock in the middle of the creek. Sniffed the stone. I knew he was smelling Beast when he turned to me and hissed, his golden-green eyes knowing and taunting.

Kem-cat knows we are Beast, she murmured to me.

I didn’t react, except to stare Kem down. He knows we’re something, but doesn’t know quite what, I thought. As with wolves, a big-cat stare was a challenge, and the hair across Kem’s shoulders rose, a prickling black ruff. He lowered his head in threat, stretched his back, and depressed his rib cage below his shoulders. This time when he showed his teeth and hissed, there was real menace in it, heard over the sound of the rushing water.

Beast shoved down on my mind, her claws sinking deep. My shoulders and head moved forward. I/we drew a steel claw with each hand and hissed. Confrontation and challenge sparked between us, almost alive in its intensity. The pheromones of conflict rose on the moving air, so strong I/we could taste them. I am your alpha. Do not forget.

“Jane?” From the corner of my eye, I could see Rick looking back and forth between Kem-cat and me. When I didn’t answer he said, very carefully, “Did I miss something?”

After a long moment, Kem looked away, staring into the trees. His ruff settled, claws retracted. Beast withdrew and I found myself. I managed a guttural, “He’s my beta. He wants to kill you. I’m just letting him know it won’t be easy.” Rick was silent, weighing my words. I straightened, sheathing the weapons. I moved along the path, showing Kem I wasn’t afraid of him, but not being dumb enough to give him my back either. The air around him was musky and sour with loss of face as the pheromones of anger faded. Keeping Rick alive was going to be difficult. Two leaps later, the leopard was again ahead of us, his long ropy tail held high, showing me his butt, proving that two could play the game of taunt-the-cat.

I followed, watching Kem-cat move upstream, muscles bunching beneath his skin, Rick close on my trail. The path quickly narrowed between thigh-high weeds, briars, poison oak and ivy, native plants and ones that had escaped from gardens, flowering with yellow, purple, and shades of pink and red. It was rocky going, the soles of my hiking boots gripping and releasing. We worked up a sweat, despite the cooler temps near the water.

We had been on the path for a couple of miles when Kem rounded a curve of the creek and disappeared, melting into the shadows of midday like smoke. When Rick and I got to the curve, we discovered a feeder creek, a foot or two wide and only inches deep, with a ten-foot waterfall that was breathtaking. And a pile of scat, marking Kem-cat’s territory for us to step over. The smell of grindy was so intense here, I was sure he was right around the corner, but Kem had trodden through mud and leaped up the ten foot height. He was crouched beneath a laurel, staring down at us, a predator estimating the weight and danger of prey.

Beast slammed into my mind again and glared. Growled. Kem blinked. A moment later, he slid into the shadows. I looked at Rick who was watching me, amusement, speculation, and something warmer hiding in the deeps of his eyes. He held out a hand, indicating the nearly sheer wall, wet with falling water. “After you.”

I grabbed a root and gave a tug. It held. I started the climb. At the top, a fresh breeze slapped me in the face. It was heavy with the stink of old blood and rotting flesh.