Colin: Her Warlock Protector Book 4 (3 page)

Her bathroom was a modern wonder. There were two steps leading up to the deep round bath, and it filled quickly with gushing hot water. She poured plenty of bubble solution in, and when she stepped into the water, she sank to the bottom with a happy sigh. This was one of the pleasures that she had craved during her girlhood. She had imagined it in vivid detail when she was a young teen. But now that she had it, there was definitely something missing.

As she slid into the water and under the bubbles, she thought of the colonel and her lips curved unconsciously into a smile. She remembered how muscular he was, and how good he had smelled. There was the way he had watched her—like a hawk—the way she knew he would move. Oh, it was a dangerous game to dream after a man like that, but it was fine, she reasoned, if she never saw him again.

Selene imagined those broad and strong hands on her body, and the thought made her warm with pleasure. She wondered what he looked like under his clothes, whether he would be stoically silent or whether she could make him cry out with need. She was becoming lost in her fantasy. She could practically feel the way his hand would cup the back of her neck, how his lips would trace over her breast…

“This is a little indelicate, for which I apologize.”
 

Her eyes flew open, and she made an undignified sound. The colonel—Colin—was not a figment of her imagination. Instead, he was standing far too solid and real in her bathroom, watching her with a glint in his eyes. She could see now that they were the green of summer leaves, and it struck her idiotically how pretty they were before she realized what was going on.

“How the hell did you get in here?” she demanded. “How did you find me?”

“You're not that hard to track,” he said easily. “Not for someone like me. I assume that you didn't mean to run out on our conversation, Miss Lapointe. As a member of the Corps, I am offering you a chance to return home. We Wiccans are just like other people after all, and you've been away from your own kind for so long.”

“I don't have a kind,” she snapped. “There's no one like me.”

He ran appreciative eyes over the length of the tub, and she had to reassure herself that she was covered in bubbles before looking back at him.

“I would well believe that there is no one like you,” he said. “You're quite right. But that must mean that you want the company of those who understand. Why would you live among people who could never understand or appreciate who you are and what you can do?”

“I know a few who appreciate me well enough,” she said, and his eyes darkened.

“Lovers?” he asked silkily, and she squirmed at the heat in his voice.

“None of your business. Get out of my house.”

“I'm afraid I am not going to do that,” he said with a playful grin. “I need your answer. I will not move forward without you saying yes or no to returning with me, and I will not leave your side either.” Up until this point, he had mostly been avoiding her gaze. Now he looked at her fully, green eyes wide. “What happens next is entirely up to you.”
 

She was too panicked to reach for the spell with the command word praxis. Instead, she reverted to an old form of her powers, one that simply removed a few memories and rendered the subject quiet and still. Colin stood as if turned to stone. Selene gingerly got out of the tub and stepped around him. She thought longingly of her bed, and then she shook herself. She needed to move, and she needed to move now.
 

She put on a tattered black sweater and a pair of black jeans, and though it gave her a pang to leave behind her growing shoe collection, she stomped into a pair of black boots. With a black beanie covering her bright hair, she looked as nondescript as she could possibly get. She threw some clothes into a small bag, and smiled when Bitsy immediately climbed in with her shirts and socks.
 

On her way out of the apartment, she wondered if she would ever see it again, and then she told herself that she was being foolish.

I should be willing to give up a dozen apartments if it meant I never saw Colonel Colin MacDaniel again,
she thought, but then an image came to her mind of tumbling Colin down on her enormous bed.
 

She shook the thought out of her head, and locked the door behind her. She had to relocate, and she knew it.

SOMETIME AFTER SELENE fled, Colin snapped awake. His recall of what had happened was patchy. He could remember her tone of voice, but not necessarily what was said. He wondered if he should be more disturbed by that, but then he remembered how she had looked: luxurious but then surprised when he had caught her in the bath. The bubbles had hidden everything he’d wanted to see, but he remembered the flush of pink on her cheeks well enough.

He took out his smartphone.

“Stephan here.”
 

 
“I'm at her den, and I'll send the address along. She hit me with something that makes me a little dazed, but I'm holding up just fine. I'm going after her now.”

“Roger that,” said Stephan efficiently. “If I don't get a message from you at least every forty-eight hours, I'm going to send someone to look for you.”

“I don't like it, but that's smart,” he admitted. “If she does something truly nasty to me, you need to send someone to clean up.”

Stephan paused.

“Are you sure this is worth it?” he asked. “She's a single rogue.”

“Those powers of hers turned against the Templars? I'm sure. I saw her heal a young woman tonight for no other reason than that she could. She lifted that woman's pain off of her, out of her. That counts for something, and I would like to see if she could be brought over to our side of things.”

“The commandant wasn't certain about you taking this mission at all,” Stephan said bluntly. “I thought it would work if it was a strict kill mission. I don't like it, but it has to happen sometimes. You're the only one who thinks that it’s possible.”

“I am. Trust me a little longer.”

“Guess I'm going to have to.”

After he hung up, he pulled out the little amulet again, and he thought about Selene. He thought about the fire in her, her courage and her beauty. The amulet gave off a shoal of sparks, and his own power responded to it. He was gone.

THE TRAIN STATION was mostly empty at three in the morning. Selene sat slouched in one of the blue chairs off to one side. She had been up for almost twenty-four hours, and she knew that the exhaustion was catching up with her. The panic that had propelled her flight was wearing off, and it was leaving her a shaking mess.

She reached into her bag where Bitsy was doing her best impression of a pair of white socks, and she got a gentle nibble of comfort. Despite her dire circumstances, her little pet's presence soothed her, and she stroked the ferret's narrow head.
 

Selene had dealt with the Magus Corps before. She had sent most of their officers running, though she had to admit at least to herself that was because the majority of them had been lieutenants. All she’d had to do was to wipe their memories of simple things, small things, and that was all it took to send them away as quickly as they could go. It would have been laughable if it wasn't so sad.

She had taken away names of close friends, important phone numbers, all sorts of useless and trivial details as far as she was concerned, but as soon as she had done it, she had been allowed to disappear as she liked. They never made it a point to come looking for her, and more than once, she had suspected that they had simply reported her as a problem dealt with, rather than admitting to their own failure.

But this colonel was different.

Selene shivered.

There was something about his frame, the way he smiled, the determination in his vivid green eyes, that told her that he would not be so easy to throw off the trail. There was no way that she was going to send him running with her little tricks. At this point, she wasn't even sure if they were working on him. This was something else again, and she felt a shiver of fear run up her spine.

Fear? Was that all?

In the cold, late night, she decided to be honest with herself. It was more than fear. There was a certain animal attraction about it as well. There was something profoundly compelling about the man, about the way he enacted his will on the world. She had long thought that the Corps were a group of men who set the rules and then had no way to enforce them, but now she wasn't so sure.
 

She knew her Wiccan history as well as the next rogue, and she knew that the Corps had carved order from nothing. Where before there had only been lawless magic-workers, then there were the iron rules of conduct enforced to keep the entire population of witches and warlocks safe. She could well imagine Colin as one of the first members of the organization, warlocks who had imposed their law with nothing more than brute force and strength of will.

Given how old witches and warlocks could become, there was nothing that said he couldn't have been one of them.

“Where are you from, anyway?” she muttered.

“Pure English through and through,” Colin said, and she nearly shrieked.

The seat next to her had been empty. She knew it had been empty. Now Colin sat next to her as if they were both waiting for the train, his arms folded across his chest, and a look of intense interest in his face.

“Of course that was during the thirteenth century, and I think it meant more then. There was always someone declaring a crusade or marching off to attack someone else in righteous fury. Well, I don't know, there's plenty of marching these days, but I prefer to stick with matters of the Corps.”
 

“Where did you come from?” she asked numbly, and his grin was boyish.

“Your apartment, or don't you remember?” he said, a smile on his face.
 

Dammit. He was meeting her eyes without fear, and she couldn't tell if it was bravery or foolishness.

“I do remember,” Selene said sharply. “I remember you interrupted my bath like…like…”

“Like a man who needs to convince you?” he suggested, and she scowled. “Anyway, you were wondering where I was from. The answer is England. I grew up, I left on crusade, I met a woman who turned out to be a powerful witch, and the rest is, as they say, history.”
 

Selene blinked. “I don't think I've met a warlock as old as you,” she said surprised.
 

“There aren't many, though we're around. Many of us choose to retreat to study or other meditative arts. I like keeping my hand in, so to speak.”
 

He paused, looking her over. For a moment she had the idea that he was looking straight down into her soul. She wondered what he would find there.

“You're not going to get away from me,” he said at last. “I was given this mission, and seeing as it has scared off so many of the younger officers, it is one I have to see completed.”

“Then we have a problem,” she retorted.

He chuckled a little bit at that. “I suppose we do. However, I do hope to convince you to return. There is a world that misses you, you must understand that.”

“There is a world that wants to tie me down and bind me,” she stated flatly. “It's a world that needs me so much that the alternative is to eliminate me.”

He was still for a moment, and she could see something darken his eyes. There was something there, though she didn't know what.

“Something troubles you,” she said. “Is it possibly guilt at what you are doing?”

The grin he gave her was toothy but rueful.

“You simply do not live to be as old as I am without having some regrets,” he said. “Old memories trouble me, and they will trouble you too if you choose to live that long.”

Selene bit her lip. She wondered if she was trying to curry favor with someone who was practically holding a sword to her neck. At least currying favor would make more sense than this strange compassion that she felt for him.

“I could relieve you of some of that,” she said softly. “I could…I could take some of it away.”

He didn't recoil in fear the way that some of the witches and warlocks had. Nor did he dismiss her offering as something that only the weak-minded required. Instead, his eyes took on a faraway look before he spoke.

“When I was young, as these things are reckoned, I was chasing a witch much like you through the wilds of what is now Hungary. She was strong, but she was terrified. She commanded the winds, and she didn't know how to control them. She had already been chased from her village by an angry mob, and when I found her, she was walking the roads like a starveling cat. I tried to talk with her, but she was too afraid. She called me a devil, a tempter, and she fled from me. Every time I got close enough to speak to her, she would catch me up in what felt like a tornado, lifting me off of my feet and whirling me away. Shortly after she sent me away one last time, a village saw her work. They tortured her, and they killed her. I finally found her a day later, and it was far too late. She was dead, and she had died in pain.”

Selene covered her mouth. She had heard stories of what it was like centuries ago, when people actually knew of witches and their powers. She knew how safe the modern world had made them, and she had never known someone who had stood close to something so brutal.

“Why would you want to keep a memory like that?” she asked.

Colin turned to face her, and she could feel herself falling into his green eyes. They were honest, and if she didn't know better, she would say that there was a plea in them as well.

“Because it is mine,” he said softly. “That girl died more than five hundred years ago. She was only sixteen when they hung her body over the wall. She had freckles, a little like you, but she was a skinny little thing. I'm not sure she ever had a real meal in her life. She could have honed her powers and become one of the most powerful witches on the continent. I certainly thought she was powerful when she whirled me away. Perhaps I am over-romanticizing, and she would have found a humble but happy place with a coven.”