Lure of the Wicked (26 page)

Chapter Twenty-One

S
ilas found her, just as she’d known he would.

It didn’t take long. Naomi didn’t have very many places to go, not without surrounding herself with crowds of people. Not without wrapping herself in synth-leather and metal and sex and throwing herself into the hungry, frenetic beat of desperate people.

She didn’t want people.

So she sat on the roof of her crumbling apartment complex, buried in the heart of the city she loathed as night broke on the back of a rainstorm.

High above, where the clouds all but obscured the topside towers, a golden glow pulsed and flickered. A fiery heartbeat in the night.

Gravel crunched behind her. “The wind’s down. No chance of spreading.”

Naomi said nothing. What was there to say?
That’s nice
seemed somehow empty, disingenuous. Suggesting the city was better off burning seemed . . . harsh.

“You got Agatha and the other two. If there were any more of the Unbinding, they’re either dead or in hiding again.”

Naomi stared into the black wall of towering city blocks and still said nothing.

Behind her, he sighed.

Silas was a man who took up space. Even if she hadn’t heard his voice, she would have recognized him just by the pressure at her back. The awareness of his big body and the intensity that shrouded him like an electric charge.

Even after years separated, a missionary never forgot the people she trained with. She’d lived with him, learned with him night and day. Her feelings for Silas simmered into hatred, blame, and a fierce, protective friendship.

Family. He and Jonas and Eckhart had been all the family she’d known. As Mission supervisors came and went, as other missionaries died or transferred, even when Silas had left for fourteen years, that stuck.

So when his warmth filled the space behind her back, Naomi tensed.

Large hands settled at her shoulders. “Hey.”

She shuddered.

“You can’t go back,” he rumbled, his version of quiet.

She almost laughed. “Back,” she bit out. “Back where? To the place that’s now on fire or to the place that should be?”

He squeezed her shoulders, as close to comfort as she’d known from him in so many years. Her throat ached with it, with the certainty that she’d lost so much.

And ruined anything else she may have found.

More her parents’ child than she’d ever wanted.

“Nai, you have somewhere to go.”

Her snort faded on the edge of thunder. Slowly, fat drops of rain trickled to the gritty cement she perched on. Clattered into the gravel.

Onto her head.

This was her life. Pissed on by a sky that couldn’t care less in a city that tried too damn hard to pretend everything was all right.

“Nothing is all right,” she said aloud, her gaze dropping to the cold, matte black gun on the ledge beside her.

Bullets and blood. That’s the life she’d known.

“Phin Clarke is all right,” Silas said gruffly.

“Phin Clarke is an idiot.” She shrugged off his hands with sudden, violent anger. “Phin Clarke nearly got himself killed because he can’t be bothered to—”

“Naomi.”

She tipped her head back on her neck, closing her eyes as rain spattered over her face. “What do you want, Silas?”

There. A modicum of normal.

He shifted. When he eased to the ledge beside her, his feet planted firmly on the gravel side, she frowned at him expectantly.

His foggy green eyes didn’t reflect sympathy. They edged, challenged. “I want you to give up the life of a missionary.”

She laughed. It broke.

Turning her head, she struggled to swallow the rush of emotion, of pain and fear before it overwhelmed her.

She’d be lost without the Mission.

She was lost if she stayed with the Mission.

Silas bent, bracing his elbows on his knees, and continued, “I want you to join us. Help us.”

“Us.” A flat note.

He nodded. “Jessie and me. And Matilda.” He hesitated. “She’s . . . this old lady that took us in, gave us a safe place to hide. It’s not a bad life, Nai.”

“Really.” Naomi wiped at her nose with one wet arm. Lightning eased through the dark clouds in a purple sheen, clashed with the gold heartbeat of the fire slowly devouring Timeless’s beautiful walls.

Hell of a metaphor for life.

“Thing is . . .” Silas said, easing back to his feet. Gravel crunched beneath his weight. Rain splattered off his rough denim, shook off his hair as he scraped both hands through it. “I guess everyone thought this fountain of life would be a thing. Turns out it’s a person.” He shot her a smile that wasn’t kind.

Naomi’s fingers itched for the gun.

“You have a choice. You can start running now, and you’d probably do all right for a while, but between the Mission and the Coven of the Unbinding, it won’t be easy.”

“Are you threatening me?” And if he was, why the fuck hadn’t she moved? Why didn’t she step away from the ledge, where it’d be so damn easy for Silas to push her over?

End it all on a single, bloody splat.

“No, Nai. Just laying it out for you.” He flattened one hand at her back. She stiffened, heart exploding into a furious pulse, but he only rested his large hand there.

Careful, manly comfort.

“Like it or not, you’re a witch, now. But you don’t have to go it alone. We have a place,” he explained quietly. “It’s safe.”

She swallowed. Her eyes closed, but she said nothing.

The warmth of his hand left her back, and she heard as much as felt him sigh. “There are a lot of questions, Nai. A lot of things that aren’t adding up. Like how the old Mission director could be a witch—”

Naomi’s eyes snapped open. “What?”

“—and why the Church sent a missionary after another missionary,” Silas continued over her shock. “Why he claimed someone else in the Church sent him.”

“I didn’t tell you that,” Naomi said quietly.

“You didn’t have to. Nai, what I’m saying is— Christ. I’m no good at this shit.” He got to his feet, gravel crunching beneath his boots, and looked down at her. “Look. It’s pretty simple. Jess and me, we could use a hand. If you don’t want to, fine, but you better get off your ass and start running.”

Again, slowly, as if afraid she’d spook beneath the weight of it, Silas laid his hand on her shoulder. “Nobody’s going to let this lie,” he finished, his voice a dark promise.

Naomi chewed on the inside of her lip as Silas turned away. Rain dripped off the end of her nose, and she scraped her sleeve over her face with a sudden, harsh breath. “Silas.”

He hesitated. “Yeah?”

She didn’t want to be lost. Closing her eyes, her fingers clamped tightly together, Naomi sat on the ledge that could end everything she hated, end the dull ache eating a terrible hole inside her chest, and knew above everything else, she was tired of being lost.

But could she fix it now?

She licked at the center of her lower lip. Took a slow, ragged breath and opened her eyes again. “I don’t want to kill anymore.”

“Yeah.” One callused hand eased into her peripheral vision. “I figured.”

Laughter battered away a twisting threat of tears. Hysteria and relief. She slid her fingers into his. “You wordy jackass. That’s all you had to say.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

“N
aomi, wait!”

The door swung hard on Silas’s unhappy order, cutting off the bevy of voices that had been drilling holes into her brain for the past hour. Jumping off the porch jarred every ache and bruise she’d sustained in the last few days, but Naomi staggered only once, caught her footing, and strode the hell away from the weird green house and its weird, irritating occupants.

This was shit. Bullshit, horseshit, any kind of shit. They could take their pick.

Come join us,
he’d said.
Be part of a team.

And do
what
? Sit around for three days and talk about all the things they
couldn’t
do?

Naomi crossed the rocky shore, a sharp glance taking in her surroundings out of sheer habit. The crescent-shaped canyon inset into the Old Sea-Trench had been surprising enough. A small bay of crystal green water filled the basin, as still and smooth as glass, and the entrance to the sanctuary was so cleverly carved even she couldn’t see it.

Silas had told her about the witchcraft—
wards
, he called them—that kept it hidden. It would explain why no flyovers had ever reported seeing anything but the shattered remains of rock and struggling vegetation around the city. Hell, she didn’t even know how far down the fault line she was. A mile? Less?

The place was a secret hideout. Admittedly that was pretty damn astounding, all things considered.

But then he surprised her with the volcanic hot springs.
Astounding
wasn’t even a word that could describe it. Heaven, maybe. Exactly what she needed to wash off the blood and dirt and soot and
memory
that clung to her skin. The first thing she’d done was soak in the vivid green water until her fingers got wrinkly.

Getting used to the persistent smell of sulfur wasn’t a problem.

Getting used to an all-new team—if she could even call it that—was the issue.

Naomi pushed through a thick mass of green foliage, palm leaves and fronds bigger than anything she’d ever seen in the city. The fragrant leaves slapped back at her, smelling like wet earth and something rich and alive. And, of course, that thick, sulfurous note that filled everything.

It was alien and mysterious, as if she were in another world. Another time.

Another life.

One still without Phin.

Her chest ached; she tamped down on the thought as firmly as her boots stamped into black volcanic sand. Leaving a trail of deep footprints behind her, Naomi marched blindly toward the far cliff wall, fists tight at her sides and every muscle trembling in leashed . . . something.

Tension. Anger. Impatience.

Heartache. “Shitfuck.”

“That’s a new one on me.”

Naomi whirled, a spray of black sand spiraling around her feet. Her hand clenched over the bulky sweater she’d borrowed from Silas, found no gun, and immediately dropped again.

But she still
did
it, damn it.

Matilda watched her from only a few yards away, her expression inscrutable. She was always inscrutable. Tall and rail-thin, with a waist-length braid gone to more gray than red, Naomi had no idea how old she was. Sixty?

Seventy?

Hell if she knew. Naomi only knew that she didn’t like the woman. And she suspected the feeling was mutual. “Where the hell did you come from?”

Matilda’s smile was as serene as if she couldn’t sense the thundercloud roiling around Naomi. Which was also bullshit. “This is my home,” she said simply, and stuck her hands into the pockets of a pair of oversized overalls. Her galoshes were bright yellow, speckled with black sand, and her shirt today was something old and worn. Real cotton, rare as hell if it wasn’t imported topside and sold for a fortune.

The woman collected prequake garbage like junkies collected needles.

“Yeah,” Naomi said, feeling waspish. “It’s yours. I get it. You want to leave me alone now?”

“Is that what you want?”

“Yes.”
No.

She wanted a do-over. She wanted to be back in her own bed, at her own office, with her own team. She wanted things to be back to normal; investigate, track down, kill.

She wanted to not be crazy anymore, to have her bed filled with a man whose smile made his eyes warm like— No.
Stop it.

What she wanted didn’t matter. Naomi turned her back, staring out over the green water. The autumn wind didn’t make it into the canyon easily, so only the faintest ripples touched the shoreline. Even despite the brisk chill, the hot springs kept the air warm enough to beat the worst of the weather so far.

Footsteps crunched behind her.

Naomi stiffened.

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” Matilda offered quietly, coming to stand beside her.

Despite the thoughts swirling like needles and knives in her tired, aching brain, Naomi couldn’t help her brief, laughing snort. “Life?”

“Choice.”

“Same thing.” Naomi glanced at the old woman as Matilda shook her head, her dark brown eyes searching somewhere beyond the rock face at the far end of the water.

The single, know-it-all gesture snapped Naomi’s control like a rubber band pulled too far. She could all but feel the welt as she snarled, “All right, fine. You’ve obviously got some sort of bullshit ulterior motive here, so can you just spit it out and go away?”

To her surprise, the witch grinned, rocking back on her heels. “What makes you say that?”

Son of a
bitch
. “Because!” Naomi exploded, and once the word rushed out of her chest, she couldn’t stop the rest from following. “Ever since I’ve gotten here, you’ve done this whole
mysterious stranger
bullshit. You don’t answer anything, you sit there and poke and prod and offer the occasional insight and let everyone else come to the decision you have
already made
.”

The witch was silent, her grin fading to that serene curve once more.

Naomi spun, paced three steps away, came up short and paced back, fists clenched at her sides. “You keep dropping these stupid hints about who I am and what I can do and what this whole
team
thing is and isn’t and it’s
pissing me the fuck off
.” She flung a hand toward the house. “Silas and me, we’re not
used
to sitting around! We need shit to do, and the only thing we’ve got going is that the world’s a goddamned mess and we can’t do jack and shit all about it.”

Matilda turned her head, tranquil eyes studying her quietly. Knowing.

Jesus God, always with the knowing.

Naomi ground her teeth so hard, her jaw popped. “Jessie,” she gritted out between them, “is the biggest fucking do-gooder on this godforsaken planet, and all we can agree on is that we gotta do
something
. The Church sent a man to get a magical whatever-the-fuck, and the Mission sent
me
to stop him. A witch became a missionary—” She stopped abruptly as one faded red eyebrow lifted, and Naomi laughed bitterly. “And a missionary became a witch. Jesus bastard Christ, Matilda, what the hell are we supposed to do?
You
know everything, you tell us!”

The woman raised a gnarled hand, rubbing at her nose. For a moment, all the reply Naomi heard was her own voice, bouncing from canyon wall to wall and vanishing into the cloudy gray sky.

Naomi spat a curse and turned away.

“Naomi.”

She stopped, shoulders rigid.

“How did you feel?” When she glanced over her shoulder, eyebrows snapped tightly together, Matilda had gone back to watching the water, her lined features inscrutable. “When your father killed himself?”

Naomi’s mouth twisted. How did she feel? Between the bone-crushing grief and the fury that she’d been placed into an orphanage? She took a deep breath. “Relieved.”

“Why?”

That was easy. “Because he didn’t have to deal with the pain of his wife’s rejection. That killed him way before any rope did.”

“His wife.” Her tone was light. “Not your mother, but his wife.”

“She was never my mother,” Naomi replied flatly, turning to face the old witch the same way she’d face an opponent. Chin up. Fists tight. Eyes level.

She’d be
damned
if the old biddy bested her now. She’d been through too much to eat this. “Even when she was there,” she added. “
He
loved her.” And so had Naomi. Once. When she was too little to understand that the polished, beautiful creature who came by now and again was every bit as shallow and merciless as a reflection.

“What about Phin?”

This voice came from behind her, feminine and younger. And with enough matter-of-fact sting to tell her without looking that Jessie had followed her. Which meant Silas wasn’t far behind.

Naomi didn’t turn. “What
about
Phin?”

“How did you feel when you left him?”

Empty. Hollow. Aching. “Relieved,” she repeated, but even to her own ears, it lacked the same certainty. Naomi shook her head, answering the question she knew would follow. “Because it cuts him from this life. He made a mistake; I didn’t hold him to it. Clarke was a good time, for the circumstances.” Her voice flattened. “He was there, I was there. He’s a good lay, and that’s it.”

Silence filled the corner edge of the bay, filled only with the faint brush of the autumn breeze. With the wind above and the odd, silent pulse of growing things.

And with the beat of Naomi’s own heart, solid and strong. Even now, she could feel it underscored by something liquid smooth, golden, and warm. The fountain.

Witchcraft.

Finally Jessie sighed. “Okay, fine,” she said, in a tone that said she’d let it drop . . . for now. “So we’ve ascertained that this isn’t about you.”

Naomi bit her tongue before she said something she’d regret. That Silas would regret—she owed him more than that.

“Now we have to figure out what it
is
about,” Jessie continued.

“And what we can do about it.” Silas’s voice rumbled as it always did, always so much louder than he meant. Naomi jerked as one large hand settled on her shoulder. “Naomi, I know it’s hard. We’re all displaced here, and we’re lacking everything we’re used to having. Orders, for one,” he added, and she glanced over her shoulder to find his lips quirked up.

“Jonas, for another,” she admitted reluctantly. “We have limited information.”

“Just what I can glean,” Jessie said as she crouched by the water’s edge. She trailed her fingers into the water. “And that’s as much chance as it is anything else. I can’t spy on your . . .” She paused. “On the Mission because I don’t know where to look now. The one place I knew of was Peterson’s.”

“Little Miss Parker got her own pad,” Naomi muttered.

Matilda watched silently, gnarled hands firmly in her pockets.

“But we’re all agreed,” Jessie continued, rising, her golden brown eyes serious as they touched on each of them in turn. “We have to do something. Sometimes I get lucky and a vision comes my way—”

“Which is how we learned about Timeless,” Silas interjected.

Jessie nodded. “But we can’t rely on that.”

“There’s more to consider,” Matilda offered. Naomi glanced at her, shoving her own hands into the pockets of a pair of jeans the witch had loaned her. “As far as the Church is aware, you both are dead.” Her head tipped toward Naomi. “But you’ve gone outlaw, my dear.”

“Which means,” Silas said, voice edged, “a bounty.”

“And a sizeable one,” Naomi offered. She grinned, a wide slash of teeth as Jessie tilted her head curiously. “Next to Silas, I was pretty hot shit. That means they’re going to hedge their bets.”

“You were better than me, Nai.” Silas furrowed his brow. “It was close, but you were better.”

She shrugged, but the compliment—the statement of fact—did at least a little to ease the knot in her chest. She’d been good at
something
. A damn fine missionary.

“Lousy at everything else,” she said, half to herself.

Jessie blew out a hard breath. “We need an information network somewhere.”

“We need a place to start,” Naomi pointed out.

“We
need
,” Matilda said, and somehow her quiet, easy authority cut through everything else, “to get Naomi into shape.”

She bristled. “I don’t—”

Understanding dawned on Jessie’s face. “Right. Look,” she added, turning to face Naomi fully. She wrapped her hands around Naomi’s arms, just above the elbow, and leaned in until she was nearly nose to nose with her. “Listen to me closely. Okay? It’s important.”

Bemused, Naomi said nothing, letting the much shorter woman keep a grip on her. Partly because Silas was within easy reach, and he’d toss her on her ass if she so much as lifted a finger against his woman, and mostly because Jessie’s occasional flex of steel spine amused her.

And impressed her.

“You’re a witch now,” Jessie said, slowly and clearly. As if talking to a child, which didn’t amuse Naomi quite as much. “And you’ve pretty much sworn off guns, so you have to get yourself strong in the magic department.”

“I can still fight—” she began, only to cut herself off as Jessie shook her head.

“We’re small enough a group as is, Naomi. If one of us dies because you don’t know how to use that fountain, we’re screwed.”

Naomi didn’t have an argument for that. “So.” She shrugged off Jessie’s grip and bit back an edged smile as Silas stiffened, then visibly forced himself to relax. “I’m a magical healing genie, then.”

“No,” Matilda said, but amusement made her eyes dance. “Close. I’ll help you hone your control, my dear. That I can do freely. And,” she added dryly, “without motive. Every witch needs to learn control, no matter what the gift.”

Slowly Naomi flicked her tongue over the divot in her lower lip, her gaze sliding from witch to ex-missionary to witch again.

What were her options?

Run, as Silas had offered. That wouldn’t last long. Go back to the Mission, which would end in her inevitable discovery and subsequent execution.

Sit on her ass and do nothing?

Like hell.