Ash to Embers (Courting Shadows) (11 page)

"Fuck you."

Take me to your leader, motherfucker.

She shook her head settling for, "Not if you can't prove it."

Not even if he could, but he didn't have to know that. Tian bit back the bile that rallied on the heels of the suggestion in her tone and something sly slid under his features like a shadow in shark infested waters.

"And what if I can?"

A phone buzzed against the heavy wool of his peacoat and Tom jumped like he'd been tasered. He whipped the thing out and stared blankly at the screen, eyes wide and pupils massively dilated. He was breathing hard, reacting to the Sidhe pheromones in her skin like any run-of-the-mill human, as if the shit were catnip. His hands were shaking as his thumbs flew across the display screen. The aphrodisiac properties inherent to her DNA were chipping away at his brain a lot faster than normal. If she had to hazard a guess, it was because he'd already been exposed to mammoth levels of the stuff.

Tian licked her lower lip and felt the dread curling in tendrils at the back of her jaw. She let her mind drift, reassuring herself the result of what she was about to do was a means to an end. She placated herself with the lie that there was no way the kid in front of her was going to believe the next statement out of her mouth if she couldn't gift wrap it in the kind of heat and believability she didn't have to give.

Tian drifted, knowing that she was already caught in the gravity of the crystalline image of the black flame male from the arena. She let herself linger over it, inwardly cursing the perfection of him. She'd already gone down in flames once and didn't seem to be doing any better now. Her whole body flushed, vibrating with need. The reaction was inconceivable. And better or worse, she'd instigated this new form of torture.

Tian forced her derailed train back onto its tracks and placed a hand onto one of Tom's cracked out paws. His head shot up and he looked her straight in the eye.

You poor ignorant bastard
, she thought.

"Prove it and I'm going to do things to you that you never even saw coming. How's that for a trade?"

She hadn't thought it was possible, but the warlock's eyes went even rounder, flaring like twin saucers. He let out a barely audible squeak and swallowed hard.

"Like what?" he choked.

Like rip your liver out through your asshole.

It was the lucid moments like this one that the knowledge that she was a psychopath asserted itself with the utmost clarity. "If I told you it wouldn't be a surprise," she said.

A piercing heat flared in her wrists to match the one smoldering everywhere else. He nodded vigorously.

"When do we get off?" she asked.

For a second the kid looked so damn enthusiastic she actually thought he was going to start clapping. He scaled it back to a smug grin.

"Next stop," he told her with an eyebrow waggle.

The human leaned in, looming right up in her grill. Tian froze and all that banked internal heat dissipated like it had never existed. She struggled against the desire to escape as he pawed at the sides of her face to hold her steady. Warlock Tom moved in for the kill and she checked out, let him mash his pie hole up against her mouth in an overly wet and discombobulated attempt at a kiss as she counted to ten while he molested her face. She pulled back and focused on the searing pain in her wrists.

"You know," he said, sliding his arm across the back of her seat, "I can see us being together for a very long time."

Magic using human or not, he had nothing going in the precognition department.

"We're going to miss your stop."

The warlock's phone rang, belting out some tinny emo-pop nightmare as they got up to debark. He fumbled with it, and the messenger bag he was carrying because they'd both become second priority to the attempt he was making at holding her hand. The call went to voicemail, shutting the shit up for thirty seconds before it started ringing again. Tian made her way out of the Colma station with Tom the apprentice warlock and his wailing smartphone nipping at her heels. She was hyper aware of the Progeny spell burning full tilt in her forearms as she turned to her overly eager tour guide.

"Don't you want to answer that?"

He flushed, fixating on her mouth as if he were imagining it places it was never going to be. "It's just my ride."

"Where?" Tian scanned the line of cars at the curb. She flinched as Warlock Tom's hand whispered over her left ass cheek.

"Right there," he answered, gesturing with his non-assaulting other hand.

The black Toyota Camry he was pointing towards was idling quietly, piloted by a comfortably plump middle aged woman with wide beige glasses and a collared sweatshirt with a photo print of an animal on it. Tian had been expecting a lot of things, but this sure as fuck wasn't one of them.

"How old are you, Tom?"

"Twenty-seven."

He shrugged and grabbed her hand hauling her towards the car. "You said you wanted to meet my Coven," he added when he caught her looking at him like a couple of bats had shaken loose from his belfry.

She hadn't exactly said those words, but it was close enough to the result she'd been aiming for so she rolled with it.

The woman in the car eyed them both with sour distaste as they slid into the back seat. "You're late," she said.

"It's not even dark yet." Tom rolled his eyes in an overtly patronizing manor and put a proprietary hand on Tian's thigh. "Some of us last longer than others, Claire."

"We both know that you're not one of them, Tom."

Claire pulled away from the curb with a screech. She shot the warlock a venomous glare through the rearview and proceeded to exit the parking lot amid the chorus of blaring horns from the cars she'd cut off in the process. Warlock Tom continued to paw at Tian, who deflected by readjusting the angles of her body as they drove in uncomfortable silence. The sigils were burning clean, searing bone, and pulsing their encouragement. Tian gritted her teeth and rolled down her window to avoid filling the car with the stench of her own simmering flesh.

The Camry coasted to a stop in the middle of a residential neighborhood not ten minutes later. The stucco houses were cookie cutter, difficult to differentiate from one another. Even so, Royal's spell barked in recognition, turning bits of muscle and bone in her wrists to pudding.

"I had to get supplies," Clare said. "The least you and your 'guest' can do is help."

The witch hit the release lever for the trunk and stalked up the walkway. Tom let out a long sigh and looked at Tian. "Baby, I've got a bad back. You can get those, right?"

Tian cracked a shoulder and grabbed the bag in the trunk without a word. She followed Tom through the front door and down into the basement where a rag tag group of a dozen men and women were seated in various states of undress around a mottled pentagram drawn into the floor. Every face in the circle had the pursed, slightly constipated expression of blind concentration. If they hadn't been so fixated she would have sworn she'd stumbled into a real suburban eyes wide shut kind of acid trip. No one turned or acknowledged her presence. They were too focused on an object in the circle.

Tian swore as the sigils exploded with recognition. They set the bag on fire and caused her to drop the damn thing on the floor. Several pairs of eyes turned to glare at the interruption. Tian ignored them. The Sidhe Chalice was unmistakable, banded in both silver and gold, alive with the kind of power that sparked legend.

"What was that?"

Tian dragged her eyes off the cup to glance at Warlock Tom where he stood at the top of the stairs. He slid the deadbolt to the basement door into place and removed the peacoat he was wearing.

"You tell me," Tian answered. "You're the warlock."

"You don't sound particularly impressed," said a voice from inside the room. The owner wasn't particularly impressive either.

Warlock Tom still looked to him for assistance. "Was that supposed to happen?"

The other guy shrugged, lanky auburn hair slipping into his eyes. He gestured for the chalice and took a sip of its contents. The air around him pulsed and he watched Tian with a fevered gaze. "Your desire is so strong that it physically manifests in the presence of magick. Pretty thing like you is going to make this the best ritual yet," he said, throwing his arms out wide. "Strip."

The bastard obviously wasn't used to being disobeyed at this juncture of the program. He was also reaching. Tian got the inkling that the only thing most of these people had going for them magically was the possession of the Chalice. The danger was that they were deluded enough not to realize it. It was a damn miracle they'd gotten this far without having to account for their sins with the Preternatural powers that be.

"Too bad about the scars," someone said from inside the circle.

Tian cocked an eyebrow. "This bullshit you've got going on down here does what exactly?"

The guy with the auburn hair glowered at her. "Don't make it rape."

Tian unzipped her coat as the coven watched. "Sexual assault. Good job. All I want is the cup."

"What's she talking about, Lenny?" a trembling female asked. "They want us. That's not assault, right?"

"Shut up, Karen," Lenny told her. He grabbed a shitty looking hank of hair and shoved it out of his face.

"Bad things happen to humans who dick around with free will," Tian continued. She palmed the handgrip to her gun and flicked the safety. "Especially when they use stolen power to do it."

If any of them had ever seen violence up close, they would have known enough to get out of the line of fire. No one moved. They all just glared at her, full of self-righteous indignation and open hostility. The witch Claire made an angry topless grab for the Chalice as it was being passed around. Her breasts swung pendulously as she wrapped a delicate fist around the base and raised the cup to her lips. She paused. "You stupid bitch, this ritual is our power. This ritual makes us irresistible. It makes us GODS."

Claire took a large slurp of whatever was in the cup, swallowed, and died, as the slug from Tian's 1911 plowed its way through the front of her skull. The fist-sized hole that exploded out the back, spewing bits of bone and brain matter, was less dainty. The limp body hit the ground with very little bounce or give.

"It doesn't make you immortal," Tian said into the horrified silence.

A high pitched keening started along with a flurry of panicked motion rippling out from Claire's corpse. Several members of the group began chanting in low tones. The sigils churned in Tian's wrists as a result of the low level power current, but as she'd suspected, they were impotent without being amped by the Chalice.

"I don't want your blood, only the Chalice." Tian shot a hard look at ringleader Lenny. "Don't make me take it from you."

She didn't want to kill anyone else, but she wasn't laboring under any illusions of her own decency. She'd slaughter every soul in the room if she had to.

"It's a prop. I got it at an estate sale," the guy told her in a tone laced with undisguised hatred. Lenny glanced at Warlock Tom, who was wringing his hands in the corner, and gave him an almost imperceptible nod.

"How could you do this to me," Tom wailed.

The spindly bastard threw himself into Tian's gun arm as the rest of the coven bum-rushed her in a desperate bid to get up the steps and to the door. None of them were fighters, but they had zeal. Tian took a blow to the gut and several stinging and uncoordinated repeats to the face, which couldn't have been avoided given the number of assailants and the enclosed nature of the space. Fortunately, if there was one thing she could do, it was take a hit. She moved with the momentum of the assault, elbowing one of her attackers in the eye socket, and landing a solid strike with the butt of the 1911. The witch who'd been clocked with the gun hit the deck. The elbowed warlock gurgled, took one look at the blood spewing from his face and passed out.

Tom wrapped himself around her knee caps in a half-hearted attempt at grappling as a burly rubber-clad goth threw himself across the dog-pile. The human condom clawed at the concrete for leverage and kicked hard. Tian holstered, and lunged after him, grabbing hold of his wildly swinging calf and getting belted in the face as he whipped around, connecting with the Sidhe Chalice, of all things. The force of the impact threw her and Tom back into the far wall and left her dazed. She wrenched herself back into focus as she was relieved of the 1911's holstered weight.

"Everything I read says that sex and blood make for the most powerful rituals, and bitch, you have no idea what kinds of things we're going to do to you before you die."

Lenny was right up in her face, gripping the front of her hair so he could hold her skull against the wall. He had her gun pointed at her chin. The copper taste of blood split her attention as it streamed from her nose and mouth. Tian slid the silver hunting knife from its sheath in her boot.

"I already know what the tender mercies of a power hungry coven feel like."

She buried the blade in his sternum. The gun went off and nicked her in the side of the jaw. She took back the 1911, breaking the corpse's index finger in her haste to get it out of the trigger guard.

"Please don't kill me," Tom gasped. He was still wrapped like a toddler around her left leg.

"Not unless you make me. Now let go," Tian said.

The remaining members of the coven balked at the sound of her voice. The stragglers bolted up the stairs with the chalice in tow. Tom stumbled back, face puffed up and streaming with snot laced tears. Displaying the first glimpse of a self-preservation instinct she'd seen from him all night, he curled into the fetal position and stayed there. Tian hauled ass out of the basement. She threw herself out the front door of the house and down the walkway into the night. An ear splitting metal on metal whine preceded the gust from an airborne Buick that nearly took her head off. Tian hit the deck and rolled, coming to her feet and sprinting in the direction the thing had been thrown.

A disheveled looking warlock stood slack jawed, marveling at his own inhuman display of false fae strength. His reverie didn't last long. She tackled him, putting him on the ground and wrenching his head around until it kissed the pavement. Rubber shrieked against asphalt to her left. She drew down, depressing the trigger in a series of smooth, controlled movements. The tires blew, throwing the vehicle off course and into the nearest light pole. Tian lunged for the car, hoping she had a couple of seconds before anyone got curious. She barreled straight over the trunk and dropped a combat boot through the already mangled moon roof. Tian crouched on top of the car and aimed the muzzle of her 1911 at the driver's skull.