Of Witches and Warlocks: The Demon Kiss (6 page)

I heard him let out a small groan, and he
pulled back away from my mouth so he could kiss my cheek.

“We need to stop this,” he said and moved
back down my neck to suck on that same spot again.

“No. I don’t want to.” I held him against me
even harder.

I knew I was supposed to be just testing him,
but I could feel that control slipping as he sucked at my
throat.

“Don’t stop,” I said, breathless.

He sighed, and then it was over. He got
quickly up off the bed and walked to the window where he stood
staring out at the night sky.

I really was sad to see him go, but as my
senses cooled I felt a moment of triumph. I had been right. He
loved me too much to take me. He could control it. He just had to
know he was the one in control.

“Did I pass?” he asked, offering me a small
smile in the dim light.

My heart did little flip-flops at the sight.
“You did.” I smiled back. “I might have failed however.” My smile
turned to a small frown.

I heard the latch on the door begin to
jiggle. Shelly and Brad were trying to get back into the room with
their key.

“Portia?” Shelly’s voice called through the
door.

Vance walked past me, picking up his jacket
and slinging it over his shoulder, before opening the door for
them.

Brad and Shelly both careened their heads
around it, looking into the room, trying to check on me.

“I’m fine, you two. Come in.” I smiled
reassuringly.

“So, Brad. How about you and I see what it
would take to get checked into the room next door?” Vance said with
a small grin.

Brad gave him a puzzled look before looking
over to me.

I just smiled and nodded my head.

“Okay,” he answered, with a shrug of his
shoulders, and turned to follow Vance out the door and down the
hall.

“So, what happened?” Shelly asked, coming in
and closing the door.

“Nothing and everything,” I replied, my smile
growing soft with the memory of it all.

“Are the two of you good then?”

“We’re good,” I said with a nod. “Now let’s
go to sleep.”

In the morning I called my dad to let him
know we had found Vance and the four of us would be continuing to
search for any information that might lead us to his father’s
current location.

Afterward, Shelly and I met up with Brad and
Vance, and we decided to go to a local pancake house for
breakfast.

I hardly tasted my food. Vance held my hand
every second he possibly could, and I loved every minute of the
simple connection with him. Never again would I take such a sweet
gesture for granted.

We chatted over breakfast, and I informed
everyone I had called home to catch the family up to speed. I also
told them my dad had been in contact with some other covens and
they had pledged to help in any way they possibly could if we
should need it.

After we were finished eating, we set a plan
for the rest of the morning. There was still one warehouse that
hadn’t been searched. We would go there to see if anything turned
up.

We decided to leave Vance’s motorcycle at the
hotel and piled into the Mustang together. It wasn’t exactly the
most comfortable way to travel since Mustangs aren’t really built
to be a passenger car, but we made do. Brad scooted up his seat as
far as he could so Vance could have a little leg room, and I sat
sideways in the seat next to him with my legs slung over his
lap.

Shelly, being a cautious driver, insisted we
all have our seatbelts on, and once the buckling up was done, we
were on our way.

I noticed Vance kept absently patting one of
my legs as we drove through town, visiting with one another. I
enjoyed the familiar contact, happy that he had really missed me,
too.

Shelly soon turned off the road and drove
down a smaller street until she pulled into an empty parking
lot.

When we drove up to this address, I was
surprised to find it was a much smaller building than the others we
had visited. Upon entry we discovered the reason why.

It wasn’t a warehouse at all but an office
building. There were two floors in the building, so Shelly and Brad
said they would look through the bottom floor if the two of us
wanted to take the top.

We split up, and Vance grabbed my hand as we
made our way to the second story. Most of the offices looked
abandoned on this floor, wiped pretty clean actually. There was the
odd piece of office furniture here and there, the occasional metal
desk, along with some empty filing cabinets with the drawers still
open, as if someone had emptied them in a hurry.

“I don’t think we’re going to find much
here,” Vance said in a discouraged voice and magically popped open
each door on the floor before we went inside.

“It’s kind of looking that way,” I agreed. I
brushed past him to study the last room.

I was turning to leave the room when
something that seemed a bit odd caught my eye, back behind
Vance.

“What is it?” he asked, turning to follow my
gaze.

“It’s this wall sconce,” I said, walking up
to look at the fixture. “I didn’t see anything else like it in the
building. Why would it be left here, in this odd place by
itself?”

I reached out to run a finger over it. It was
then I noticed the slight scuff marks next to the light. I placed
my hand firmly on the lamp and pushed on it, surprised to find that
it turned to the right in my hand.

Slowly, a panel in the wall slid to the left,
revealing a secret closet behind it.

The closet was piled high with box after box
of files.

“I think you found something,” Vance said
with an arched eyebrow, stepping forward to pull several files from
the box on the top.

Shelly and Brad entered the room.

“The downstairs looks like it’s pretty empty
…,” Shelly started before trailing off. Her eyes rested on our
find.

“Grab a box,” Vance said to them and handed
one down from the top of the pile to me.

He passed one along to each of us, and soon
we were all seated on the carpet going through mountains of files,
which appeared to be more of the same stuff we had seen before …
receipts, invoices, and the like.

Vance pulled another box, for himself, from
the closet and opened it.

“Hey, look at this,” he said after a moment,
handing a paper he had been looking at over to me.

Shelly and Brad looked over my shoulder.

“It’s a shipping invoice,” I exclaimed, after
I had examined it a little closer, realizing what Vance had
seen.

“We have a thousand of those,” Shelly
complained. “What makes this one so special?”

“It’s a shipping invoice from here to a
different location. All the rest have been invoices shipping into
Albuquerque,” I explained. “It says the entire contents of one of
the warehouses were shipped to a place in Puerto Peñasco.”

“Puerto Peñasco? Where is that?” Shelly
asked, a perplexed look on her face.

“You know it as Rocky Point,” Brad explained
absently as he looked the paper over.

“It looks like we’re going to Mexico!” Vance
said with a grin, winking at me. “Do you have a passport with
you?”

“I do,” I replied, and we turned to look at
Shelly and Brad, wondering if they were carrying theirs also.

“I’m a world traveler!” Shelly giggled. “Do
you really have to ask? And Brad and his family came with us on our
last vacation, so he has one, too.”

“Yeah, but I left mine at home,” Brad replied
giving an apologetic shrug. “I didn’t anticipate a trip out of the
country.”

“So what should we do?” Shelly frowned.

“I think we should go back to Sedona. We can
drop off Vance’s motorcycle and get a bigger car. That way Brad can
pick up his passport,” I suggested. “Then we can travel down I-17
until we hit the I-10 in Phoenix. After that we can go through Ajo
to get to Lukeville to cross the border there. Rocky Point will be
much closer from that direction.”

“That’s a good idea,” Vance agreed. “Then we
can check in with the coven and see how things are going
there.”

We heard a car door slam outside, and Vance
leaned over to look out the window.

“We have company,” he said. “Let’s move.”

We hurriedly restacked the boxes and closed
the wall tightly, then quickly ran down the hall to the stairs,
just in time to hear a couple of male voices float up the stairwell
toward us.

“They’re coming up the stairs!” Vance
whispered and ushered us through the door of the nearest empty
office.

The four of us leaned our backs up against
the wall, to hide ourselves from view, until the men passed. Then
we hurried out the door one by one, tiptoeing down the
staircase.

Slinking as silently as possible, we went out
the back door and over to where we had parked the Mustang. Shelly
started the engine just as one of the men came running out the back
door after us.

“Gas it, Shelly!” Vance yelled to her, and
suddenly we were pealing out in reverse, the tires scrabbling and
spewing gravel everywhere.

Shelly slammed on the brakes to change
directions, throwing us forward.

We raced past the front of the building. The
other man was jumping into a dark-colored sedan. He pulled out in
pursuit.

We spun out onto the main road, and Shelly
gunned the GT 500, its motor roaring loudly.

Vance watched the car behind us.

“You take care of the obstacles in front, and
I’ll cover the rear,” he shouted out to me and nodded ahead.

I faced forward to look at the traffic which
was moving much slower on the double-lane road ahead of us.

“They’re slowing for the light,” Shelly
yelled, sounding panicked. “What should I do?”

Immediately I flicked my hand toward the
light, and it turned green again. The first few cars started to
move, but the ones behind were too slow.

“Don’t slow down, Shelly,” I said.

I leaned forward and thrust both of my hands
out, the magic making the cars slide to the side so we could pass
through them without hitting them.

Vance used his powers to wave the cars back
onto the road behind us.

The black sedan tried weaving madly through
the vehicles which were being thrown in its path. It avoided
several before Vance finally just threw his hand up in a stop
signal. The car’s front end screeched to a halt, and the back end
of it flipped up high into the air. The car landed upside down in
the road with a loud crunch.

“That ought to do it,” he said, with a
grin.

I could feel the adrenaline coursing through
him as he reached a hand out behind my head and pulled me in for a
kiss.

When we moved apart again, I noticed that
Shelly hadn’t slowed down at all, and I started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” she asked, sending me a
piercing stare in the rearview mirror.

“Not a thing,” I said, nodding my head
slightly and gesturing for Vance to look at Brad.

Brad was hanging onto the door handle with
one hand and the emergency brake with the other, his mouth gaping
wide open in shock.

He slowly turned his head to look back at
me.

“That ROCKED!” he exclaimed and flashed a
giant, boyish grin.

We all busted up laughing.

We arrived back in Sedona to the waiting arms
of our family and coven. Everyone was so happy to see Vance again,
and he received lots of hugs as well as a chastening from my dad
for leaving on his own, which he took rather well, I thought.

Jinx, who acted as if she hadn’t seen me in a
year, personally mauled me. She purred like a motorboat on my lap,
while we explained our findings to my family and told them of our
plan to go to Mexico.

We ended up trading Shelly’s car for
Marsha’s, which Vance had inherited after she had been killed. It
was a silver-colored Audi S8. Vance loved driving it because of all
the power it had. I figured it was a guy thing, as I reflected back
on my little green scooter. I felt like I hadn’t driven it in
ages.

We packed up and left Sedona the next morning
and headed down the I-17 toward Phoenix. It was a sunny December
day. The closer we got to the valley, the warmer it became.

We stopped to stretch our legs and get some
lunch at a Cracker Barrel restaurant just off the I-10. Afterward
we continued on to Maricopa and then over to Gila Bend, where we
turned to head down to Ajo.

In Ajo we got some ice cream before
continuing on to Lukeville, where we purchased gas at a station
right before we crossed over the border into Sonoyta, Mexico.

We drove through the town until we reached
the turn that would head us toward Puerto Peñasco.

The drive took about an hour through the
beautiful Sonoran Desert. Watching the hilled scenery pass by, I
could tell when we started getting closer to the ocean because the
soil quickly turned sandy, becoming ever thicker, until there were
rolling hills of sand surrounding us.

We had reached the outer edges of Rocky Point
when we came to our turn that would lead us out to the beautiful
oceanfront resorts of Sandy Beach.

The colorful hotels loomed over us on our
drive along the winding, palm tree lined street until we came to
the gates, which led us into our parking lot.

My dad had reserved us a room at the Sonoran
Sea Resort. He said he felt better about us staying someplace with
on-site security. We pulled up at the towering ten-story hotel and
checked in.

Our condo was a spacious three bedroom deluxe
suite on the sixth floor and was lavishly decorated in a palm tree
theme. There was a sage green down sectional at one end of the room
with a large custom made entertainment center along with an entire
wall of windows that led out to the balcony.

At the other end of the room was the kitchen,
complete with granite countertops and furnished with all the
necessary appliances. The adjoining dining room had a beautiful
glass-topped table with plush dining chairs.