Dead Drop (15 page)

“No.”

“Your friend?” She waved a hand and switched to English. “If you brought her here for me, I can tell you, I am not interested in any human with so little power. Neither are they.” She gestured to the magehelds behind her. They arranged themselves in front of the door Palla had disintegrated. The largest two blocked the way. As if he didn’t get that Jeanne wasn’t going to let them go anywhere. He could take the magehelds no problem, but not until they were someplace where Wallace could escape to the car.

Wallace slipped her arm around his waist. She could kill with her magic. With one stroke, she could take down everyone, but she would never do it. He would without a single regret, but she wouldn’t. He was ready. Willing to die. “You have such a beautiful house,” she said. “I told Palla I wanted to see the place.”

The flow of her magic shaped the chaos at the edges of the void that everyone mistook for the locus of her magic. No one but him realized what she was doing. Three of the magehelds lost their severe expressions. Wallace leaned against him. “It’s okay, isn’t it, that we’re looking around? There wasn’t anyone at the door when we came in.”

“No, dear child. No, it is not all right.”

“I am so sorry. It’s my fault. He told me I was being an idiot, but I just never listen.”

They did not know, Jeanne or her magehelds, that Wallace was taking away their hostility. Jeanne sent a sharp look in the direction of her magehelds, but she, too, was not as angry as she had been. “You should not be in my home.”

“No, ma’am. We should not be.”

She’d smoked her copa down to a butt too small to continue. She peeled open the paper and extracted the rest of the copa. She placed it, ashes, ember, and all, in her mouth. “Whatever you are doing, demon, cease immediately.”

He lifted his hands. “No can do.”

“You swore to protect her? Why?” She studied them. “Have you taken her to bed?”

“Blew my mind.”

“I do not approve.”

“Demons fuck witches all the time.”

She gave Wallace a long look. “Some things are just not done.”

“Times have changed.”

Wallace’s magic flowed through the room like smoke, and it was nothing like what he was used to. “Palla, sweetie, she’s right. We should not be here. We need to be going.”

“What is this?” Jeanne focused on Wallace, and her eyes narrowed. “An indwell of some kind?”

Wallace smiled at Jeanne full on. “Thank you for letting us have a look around your spectacular house.”

“You are welcome, naturally.”

“It’s so beautiful.” She took Palla’s hand and walked to the doorway. “Did you decorate yourself?”

“This room, yes.”

“You must love living here.”

“I do.”

“You’ll walk us to the door won’t you? I love your staircase. The marble’s from Italy, am I right?”

Palla kept his mouth closed, and his magic on tap enough that he could take quick action if needed. The witch walked with them through the house as if they were honored guests. It was the most fucked up, amazing, ballsy thing he’d ever seen.

At the front door, Jeanne leaned in to kiss Wallace’s cheek. A ward, a normal one, popped. The sound startled them all. Jeanne blinked twice, and then her smile twisted into a grimace as she realized she’d been had.

His oath triggered.

“Why, you little bitch.” She gestured to her magehelds. ”Kill them. As slowly or quickly as you like, but make sure you start and end with her.”

Palla punched the largest mageheld with a backward elbow strike and drew enough power to bring down the house. Jeanne’s eyes widened.

“Sorry.” Wallace lifted her hands like she was apologizing for forgetting to bring dessert. Then she dead dropped Jeanne and every single mageheld in the room.

Wallace yelped when Jeanne broke free. To her right, Palla had already dealt with two of the magehelds in the first seconds of her dead dropping them. A fourth did not go down as easily as the others. The crack of Jeanne’s power scared the hell out of her, but she and Palla had practiced defending against an attack so unrelentingly that she reacted on instinct. Trust that her magic would be there. And it was.

Her link with Palla went electric. She faced Jeanne, calm, because that was how her magic worked. He touched one of the magehelds, and the other demon’s chest blossomed red. He intended to die. Even without his oath to protect her, that had been his plan all along. Well, that was not acceptable, and she wasn’t going to let him get away with it.

The ugliness of encountering magehelds in real life shook her to her core. Was it any wonder some of the demonkind believed violence was their only recourse in the face of such evil?

This time when the center of her flexed hard, she knew why, she understood what she intended to happen. She’d made this work before, and she could do it again. She grinned big and wide, and the river of magic Jeanne sent at her hit hers and vanished, subsumed in the power she’d been surrounded by her entire life.

Jeanne drew more magic; the air around her hissed.

Wallace shaped the air. Sparks appeared then vanished at the border between Wallace’s magic and Jeanne’s. Hers gathered speed, sliding along the backwash of Jeanne’s. At the termination point, Jeanne grunted and staggered back.

Meanwhile, one of the magehelds had flanked Palla and opened up a wound across his back. More magehelds rushed them. The twisted, blackened core that was Jeanne’s enslavement of them enraged her, terrified her. Palla was in the thick of that mass of demons who were compelled to the witch’s bidding.

Jeanne called more magehelds, and they flooded in from elsewhere in the house. Some shifted into non-human forms, attacking with claws or fangs or talons. Wherever Palla touched them, red blossomed. The smell of blood permeated the room. He was drawing the magehelds away from the door, giving her a way out because she had agreed to help him get the talisman to Nikodemus.

Wallace gathered her power and displaced the remaining magehelds’ magic with hers. Not a reach for power to shape and use as a weapon but a container that displaced what had been there before. She did not give her magic form the way Maddy had taught them. She created the boundaries of the container and at that intersection; a deadly, targeted chaos.

The magehelds she reached with her magic could not fight. The air around them prevented them from moving. Palla touched the nearest unaffected mageheld, and the demon collapsed. Another mageheld down. She wrapped up more of them, and Jeanne called in more.

With a rising sense of desperation, she saw how she could kill the witch and end this right now. The knowledge lodged in her heart, choked her. She could not. Could not take a life any more than she could allow Palla to die. Her magic flexed. More magehelds went down and some stayed down; stunned. Others slowed, and a very few fought free of the effect. One of few who remained conscious rolled to his stomach, cut off from his magic, but also cut off from his enslavement. His gaze locked on Jeanne.

The witch drew power again. She’d spent weeks working with witches like Jeanne. She’d failed at every turn, but all those weeks she’d learned how they used their power. Jeanne’s magic burned through the air, and Wallace stopped it dead because she could do magic, too. She followed that with a dead drop focused on nothing but the witch, and that massive void blossomed out, and she saw that she hadn’t been bold enough. She hadn’t trusted enough. She could stop all the magic in this house. All of it.

She displaced everything that any demon or magekind had ever done to perpetuate the magic here. Somewhere else in the house something popped. One of the overhead lights exploded. Then another. And another. The effort burned through her, and then whipped through the house.

Every mageheld standing went down. Jeanne staggered and let out a howl of rage at finding herself helpless. The air over the witch rained sparks, but there was nothing Jeanne could do because she did not understand how to combat magic used the way Wallace used hers.

Her ears rang, her skin buzzed, and from the corner of her eye, she could see the glowing band of color Palla had helped draw around her upper arm. Glowing through her shirt. Then she couldn’t hear anything, and she wondered if she’d gone deaf. In the silence, one of the demons who had stayed conscious continued his belly-crawl toward Jeanne.

Across the room, Palla launched himself at her and there was nothing natural about that leap. He landed at her feet, half crouched, facing Jeanne and the magehelds. She heard him shouting, the only words in a vacuum of sound. “Go. Go. Go!”

Not without him. Never. Wallace grabbed a handful of Palla’s shirt and yanked. He came with her, running for the door while the silence softened around the edges and her fingers and toes went icy cold.

Jeanne had done something to keep the door from opening, but Wallace drew on her power, and there was a boom, and the door was open.

They headed for the car at a sprint.

Palla drove down the hill like nothing had happened. He’d cut their psychic link, and that was strange, not having that. The gash across his back was deep and glistening with blood and two separate streams of blood trailed down his near arm and converged at his elbow.

She could see him healing, feel the magic. She was cold through and through, and even though she could hear, the world was muffled. The farther they got from Jeanne’s house, the colder she felt.

Reality returned with a painful thud. Too much noise. Too much everything. The magic she’d been holding snapped like a rubber-band stretched too far. Oh, God. Her dead drop of Jeanne and her magehelds ended, and that meant every demon who’d survived Palla’s retribution was once again under Jeanne’s control.

She sagged on the seat.

“You okay?” he asked.

“We didn’t die, so I guess so.” She was okay. Mostly. She kept her hands on her lap because they wouldn’t stop shaking. If she closed her eyes, she saw Palla moving among the attacking demons, a machine. Those magehelds had been ordered to kill, and Palla’s oath to her meant he hadn’t had a choice about what to do, either. No more choice than Jeanne’s magehelds. She should have understood that knowing he’d kill on her behalf was the same as her killing them herself. She should have known that putting Palla in a situation where he felt a blood-oath to her was his only option was hardly different from a mageheld’s enslavement. She’d taken away his choice. “You?”

“You have the talisman, right?”

“Yes.” Her purse was on the floorboard of the car, between her feet. The talisman was inside, still in the box. Still wrapped up with her magic.

“You sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” Blood continued to drip off his elbow so she scrounged up some napkins and put them where they’d catch most of the blood. She didn’t know how to reach out to him, or even if she should. If he wanted to talk about it, he’d tell her so, right? “Do you think her magehelds will find us before we get to Nikodemus?”

He gave her a look. “Change of plans.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can crack the talisman myself.”

“Is that safe?”

“No.” He stuck his phone in the Bluetooth car cradle and a few minutes later music came over the car speakers.

Death metal was not her thing, but she wasn’t going to complain. At least he was alive to listen to music she hated. She slunk down in the seat. More tortured, raspy, voices grated along her nerves, and just when she was sure the sound would send her around the bend, he switched off the music and said, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She didn’t deserve his gratitude, not at the price he’d had to pay.

Quiet ate up the inside of the car. She stared out the window, sick at heart to realize that she’d screwed up. Having sex with Palla hadn’t been a mistake. She didn’t regret that for a second and besides, she half suspected it was inevitable. He was hot, for one thing. For another, even after that first fantastic encounter when he could have been an asshole about it, he hadn’t been. The better she’d gotten to know him, the more she’d understood and respected him, the more she’d trusted him, the better the sex got. And that could only be a bonus, finding out you got along okay with someone.