Bound by Flame (4 page)

What?

The sight of Nick, the most arrogant bastard in the universe, so torn up made Cynda’s heart do funny things. She wanted to reach out to him, comfort him, but for once in her life, she had no idea what to say.

“Sorry,” he murmured, his voice hollow against the stones. “Let you…down.”

Cynda’s pain faded into the distance.

Did he really just say that?

Nick’s expression changed, and for one pulse-thumping moment, Cynda thought he might lean forward and pull her to him. Not just hug her, but hold her. Maybe even kiss her.

Her mind cartwheeled across the image, how hot it would feel to touch his bare skin, scrub her fingers across those hard muscles as his heat flowed into her and chased away the cold.

Her breath got shallow, and warm tingles traveled all over her skin.

Nick didn’t move, and his expression didn’t change.

He
is
attracted to me?

Shit!

Shouts came from the end of the alleyway where Nick-
other
had taken out the host of red flashes.

Nick kept staring at her another second, two, three—then turned his head away, and something inside Cynda snapped. She wanted to lunge forward, take his face in her hands, and make him look at her like that again.

The cold got colder.

Cynda realized she was shaking all over. Muddleheaded. Disappointed, yet too exhausted to be anything but glad to hear reinforcements approaching.

“About damned time you got here,” she managed as Riana, the earth Sibyl of her triad, rushed to her. Riana’s husband, Creed, Nick’s twin, hurried to Cynda’s side next, followed by Merilee, the triad’s air Sibyl. Merilee had her bow ready, an arrow already nocked.

“What happened?” Riana asked as she knelt next to Cynda and Nick. She was wearing a red evening gown, but she had daggers in both hands.

“Fuck.” Nick shook his head as if to clear it.

“We got jumped by invisible demons.” Cynda rubbed her chest and shoulders, sending healing energy through her skin, into the gashes and cuts and punctures, wishing it would work right that second. As for Nick, Cynda knew his wounds had healed spontaneously the moment he shifted into his Curson form.

“Invisible…demons.” Merilee lowered her bow and retrieved her arrow, sounding like she didn’t believe a word of what Cynda just said. Wind danced around her face, stirring her blond hair.

“Yeah. As in, assholes we couldn’t see.” Cynda picked up her demon-hunting goggles from the ground and shook them in front of her triad sisters. “And—and I think they were here for me. As in me specifically.”

“She isn’t kidding,” Nick said as he rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “Invisible, and after her. Creed, get her sword. It’s up there on the fire escape.”

Creed jogged away, following his twin’s instruction.

Nick glanced at Cynda, and she saw the worry etched across his face. Worry for her.

Damn, but she totally didn’t know what to do with that.

“Why is Nick naked?” Merilee asked as if just noticing the fact that the gorgeous hunk of a man had nothing on. In an ice storm.

Cynda ignored her like she was trying to ignore Nick. “The beings showed up only like red traces in these stupid lenses,” she explained. “And I had this sense I was the target.” She shook her head, then groaned from the pain in her neck. “Sorry. I’m a little fuzzy.” She met each woman’s eyes as she raised her head. “When we killed the things, they broke down into air, fire, and wind.”

“Invisible demons made out of three elements,” Merilee said again, more serious now, actually sounding worried. “Targeting Sibyls specifically?”

“No.” Cynda rubbed her hands together, then rubbed her throbbing arms. “
Me
. Cynda Flynn. I sensed that they wanted me.”

Riana frowned and released a tiny burst of earth energy. The ground beneath them groaned once, and a few pebbles shook loose from the alley walls. “You’re bleeding all over the place. Let’s get you back to the brownstone.” She looked at naked Nick and the alley gave another quick shake. “I think we have other business to take care of, too. Like, pants.”

All of a sudden, the night seemed even colder and darker to Cynda. “It’s frigid out here.”
Anywhere but the brownstone. Please
. “My ass hurts. My friggin’ hair hurts. I want to go home.”

“No.” Riana got to her feet and slipped her daggers into thigh-sheaths. “The brownstone. Now. Before we run into more trouble.”

The leader of her triad had spoken, but Cynda didn’t want to obey. “Come on, Riana, I’d rather go to my place.”

Nick was getting to his feet, still shaking his head—and staying out of the argument.

“You need to rest and heal, and you need your family around you.” Riana looked around the alley with a worried expression. “If you’re a target, we’re staying together tonight.”

Cynda’s chest ached, inside and out.

Not fair, playing the family card.

But it worked, just like Riana knew it would.

It
always
worked.

“Need some goddamned clothes,” Nick growled at his brother as Creed returned with Cynda’s sword.

With a sigh, Cynda sheathed her blade.

Then she let Riana and Merilee lead her out of the icy, dirt-littered alley, toward the one place—other than
hell
—she really didn’t want to go.

2

Nick fought to stay on his feet as a wall of water slammed into the building.

Tons of liquid beat the air out of his lungs. His pulse drummed in his ears. His chest burned from the need to breathe.

Nick grabbed a concrete pillar and held tight as the water flowed around him and rose above his head.

This is it. I’m over.

He opened his mouth to shout. Water rushed into his throat, his nose, and he couldn’t stop himself from sucking it down. He waited for pain to crush his lungs, for darkness to take him.

Only, the water didn’t kill him. He could breathe it, taste it, feel its cool flow rushing through his blood and body like life itself.

This must have been how the water Sibyls felt, before that tidal wave wiped them out centuries ago.

Not bad. He supposed he could get used it.

Then the dead people started floating by.

First came two little boys.

No. Damn! They’re so young
. Nick could barely make out their faces, but the kids could have been doubles for Creed and him when they were toddlers, right down to the mirror-image scars along their upper arms.

Before he could register any more details, the boys drifted off, replaced by a pretty brown-haired woman Nick didn’t recognize. He didn’t even have time to give her his full attention before the current swept her away, too.

After that, his grandmother flowed into view.

What…the…hell?

His grandmother had been dead since he was a boy.

But there she was, right in front of him, seeming more asleep than dead, like the morning he found her cold in her bed.

Nick’s gut tightened.

Even drowned, the old woman’s face looked so damned sweet it made his heart ache. She died because of him—well, him and his twin. Having two half-demon teenagers had been too much for her heart.

It would have been too much for anyone.

As his grandmother drifted off in the flowing currents, he almost reached out for her limp body—but another corpse floated in front of him with unnatural speed.

This one he really didn’t want to see.

The woman’s ash blond hair swirled over her head like a mermaid’s crown, and her opaque blue eyes opened to stare at him.

To accuse him.

His biological mother. His true parent. Not the surrogate who died giving birth to Nick and Creed. This was the woman he had been forced to kill four months ago.

“Go,” he tried to tell her, but his words got lost in the steady flow of water.

His mother’s pale claw of a hand moved to her throat, to point out the blue bruise, the impossible angle of her neck.

Nick’s insides burned. He clenched his fists, wishing he could shove away the sight, the thought, the memory.

He looked away.

Anxious, loud voices broke into his consciousness. The water he was breathing turned to fire. Nick grabbed his throat as he gulped molten flames and coughed—and opened his eyes.

Twisting pains in his ribs and shoulders cleared his senses.

He was flat on his back, lying on something soft. No water. No fire. No dead mothers.

He was dry.

Wearing a T-shirt and jogging shorts that weren’t his.

He blinked and saw nothing but sunlight and wavy lines.

“Not her,” someone moaned as Nick rubbed the bridge of his nose and shook off the dream or hallucination or whatever the hell it was. He thought the woman talking was his brother’s wife, Riana, the earth Sibyl who didn’t like him very much. “Nori trained with Cynda, for the sake of the Goddess. Bela Argos will be devastated—and now we’re short in the South Bronx. Our whole north flank is weak.”

“I couldn’t make out everything that came through. Communications aren’t my specialty.” That breezy voice belonged to the air Sibyl, Merilee. She sounded five miles past stressed. “But I understood the attacks happened up and down the East Coast, and over in Ireland. All very specific.”

“How stupid can those idiots get?” Sarcastic. Total bite. Had to be his brother’s OCU partner, Andy Myles. “Jesus, I so need a vacation. I can’t understand why the Legion would target fire Sibyls. That’s like yanking a tiger’s tail.”

“Watch out for the teeth,” Nick mumbled. He tried to sit up, but sagged back against the overstuffed sofa that supported him.

Somebody grabbed his arm and steadied his weight.

Nick forced himself upright, pushed his twin brother Creed’s fingers off his shoulder, and shook his head to clear his senses. When he sucked in a breath, the scents of sage, jasmine, vanilla, and fruit washed over him, and he remembered where he was—in the brownstone in upper Manhattan, where Cynda and Merilee used to live before Creed got it on with their Sibyl triad leader Riana, and actually got himself married. Though he obviously hadn’t managed to defeminize the place any.

Creed sat down beside Nick, obvious relief on his familiar features. “About time you rejoined the living, bro. What was that about teeth?”

“An old saying.” Nick’s head throbbed as he spoke. “If you yank a tiger’s tail, you’d better have a plan for the teeth. Tom Clancy wrote a book about that.”

His jaw hurt, and his chest, and his right shoulder ached along the scar that ran from his shoulder to his elbow. Underneath that flannel shirt, Nick’s twin had an identical scar, only on his left shoulder. The mark of a Curson birth. Cursons were half-human and half-Asmodai-demon, always twinned, always joined. And always fatal to the surrogate, the “donor womb” as those poor women were called by the Legion.

We’re death walking—or at least I am.
Images of his dead grandmother and staring, floating mother flipped through Nick’s consciousness.
Death follows me everywhere.

That thought brought reality blasting through his every fiber.

“Cynda?” He searched the room with his eyes, even though it made his head swim. “Is she all right?”

“
She
is,” Riana Dumain Lowell, Nick’s new sister-in-law, said in a sharp, pained tone. “But we lost one of Bela Argos’s triad in the South Bronx.”

Nick winced. His chest tightened. “Did I hear you say last night’s attack was widespread—against the fire Sibyls?”

When he looked up, the wavy lines parted enough for him to see Riana nod. She was sitting on a giant oak table the size of a small dance floor. The Sibyls used it as a worktable and a communications platform. Above her, on the walls of the alcove at the back of the living room, hung runes and mirrors that Nick had seen come to life when a fire Sibyl—when
Cynda
—danced on that oak platform.

His brother Creed occupied the other end of the couch. The blond air Sibyl Merilee sat in a chair opposite Riana, holding a notebook. Creed’s partner Andy sat beside Merilee in another chair, also with a notebook.

Dark circles ringed Andy’s eyes, and her freckled skin was a shade past pale. She looked seriously pissed. “Yank a tiger’s tail, have a plan for the teeth.” Andy gripped her notebook so tightly it curled in her hands, as if the pages were damp and limp. “No doubt the Legion does have a plan. What the fuck are they up to now?”

“We have to find out.” Riana’s ink-black hair fell loose about her tanned face, and her cool green eyes gazed at Nick without blinking, like he was somehow responsible for what happened tonight, like he might have an answer to Andy’s question.

Nick returned her gaze and did his best to keep his temper, for his brother’s sake, and for Cynda’s. Going at it with Riana might relieve tension, but it wouldn’t solve anything. Gideon—his
other
—rumbled inside him, like distant thunder rattling against his skull. Nick took a breath and ran through a set of calming, meditative statements he used to settle his demon-half, all the while keeping his expression passive.

Cynda has green eyes like you,
he thought, studying Riana.
Only hers are brighter.

Images of Cynda helped him relax another fraction.

After a few more breaths, he let his attention shift around the room. Cynda had red hair, like Andy, but Cynda’s looked like dark flames around her face, shorter and a bit curly, giving her an impish appearance he enjoyed.

So delicate, yet so deadly.

Where was she?

“Cynda’s resting downstairs,” Riana said, as if reading his mind. They all did that, the Sibyls, answered questions before he asked them. Irritating, but he guessed it was part of the package. These women had fighting skills and powerful abilities still beyond his full understanding. That didn’t bother Nick. It intrigued him, and yes, raked his nerves, but it didn’t put him off.