Stone Cold Lover (26 page)

Spar had explained to her how Wynn had chanted incantations over her sleeping form while trying to sever the bond with the demonic energy in her hand, but Fil was personally fresh out of chants. She didn’t know any incantations or any spells, and all her life she’d sucked at rhyming poetry. No, she would just have to take care of this in her own fashion.

A quick twist popped the cork from the jar. Tilting it to bring the salt to the opening, Fil reached in and grabbed a hefty pinch between her thumb and first two fingers. Her arm came back like a pitcher on the mound and she bared her teeth at the twining mass of Dark power.

“Let go of my friends and go back where you came from, you nasty-assed piece of shit!” she roared, and she flung the salt hard at the base of the Darkness.

The night filled with shrill, throbbing screams as the mass seemed to draw back on itself, like a living creature touched by flame. Several loops of vine fell off Wynn’s still form, loosening their hold on the witch. Excitement rushed into Fil’s chest, and she hurried to pour a handful of salt into her palm.

“I said begone!”

This time, she flung a whole pile of the black salt on the earth where the tendrils had emerged. The shrieking grew louder, and the vines dropped Wynn to the earth with a thud. Fil winced and hoped to God the woman hadn’t been seriously injured by the fall. Wasn’t being relaxed and lying down supposed to help distribute the impact? Still, falling twelve feet onto a bunch of rocks and tree roots couldn’t have been comfortable.

Spar roared and darted forward to scoop Wynn up into his arms. “Felicity! Come!” he shouted, turning back toward the path. “Hurry!”

Like she planned to stick around. First, though, she wanted to make sure that this time nothing followed them. Shifting the jar into her right hand, she pointed the opening at the base of the retreating Darkness and threw the remaining contents of the jar onto the earth.

“And fucking stay there!” she ordered, right before she flung the jar after the salt and bolted after the Guardian.

She barely slowed down to scoop Wynn’s bag into her grasp. Opening her inner vision, she let the magical glow that emanated from Spar’s body light her way back to the parking lot. She saw the way he hesitated at the head of the trail and groaned.

“
Šū
das!”

Even now that dark had fallen and the park had officially closed, they couldn’t take the chance of Spar being seen.

“I would fly her home, but I will not leave you unguarded,” he snarled, his eyes glinting with an almost feral light. Battling to save two humans had apparently gotten her Guardian all stirred up.

“Give me two minutes. With your night vision, you can keep an eye on me from here.”

Spinning on her heels, Fil ran the remaining distance to the parking lot and hopped in the van. She practically left skid marks as she maneuvered the big tank of a vehicle until the rear cargo doors backed up as close to the tree line as possible. She bumped her knee on the center console as she scrambled into the back to open the doors from the inside. Leaning her head out, she put her fingers to her lips and whistled.

Within seconds Spar appeared to lift Wynn into the empty cargo area. “Stay back here with her,” Fil ordered, after checking to make sure the witch still had a pulse. Thank God, she did. If she looked closely, she could even see her chest rise and fall with shallow breaths. “I’ll take us straight home.”

She did, managing the trip down off the mountain in record time. She didn’t bother returning Wynn to her apartment, just drove the unconscious woman, the Guardian, and herself directly to Fil’s building in Montreal’s Latin Quarter, maneuvering the van through the narrow alley to the garage in the rear.

Once she cut the engine, the van’s headlights blinked off and the building’s small rear courtyard plunged into relative darkness. Lights from the neighbors alleviated the gloom somewhat, but Fil had neglected to leave any of her own lights burning, so it was dark enough not to worry about Spar making the short trip to the back door in his natural form. Between the lack of illumination and the high wooden privacy fence closing off the yard, being spotted was pretty unlikely. Fil hurried across the open space to unlock the back door, then waved for Spar to follow. It looked like this time, she got to play nurse for the unconscious witch. It was funny how quickly fate had turned the tables, right?

Yeah, Fil wasn’t laughing, either.

*   *   *

Spar laid the witch down on the sofa where Felicity had stretched out only days before and fought back the urge to howl. At every turn, he found his mate threatened, and if the Darkness didn’t kill her, she appeared to be doing a fine job trying to kill herself.

When he thought of the risk she had taken, charging at the Darkness with nothing more than a jar of salt for a weapon, he could feel his heart turn to ice in his chest. He had barely believed the sight, convinced that she knew enough to keep herself back, out of danger, while he battled for their safety. But no, not his little mate. She had thrown herself into the fray, bellowing like a madwoman, hurling profanities and black salt in nearly equal measure. If he had been human, the sight would have caused him a stroke.

Seeing her now, kneeling beside the sofa, her concern clearly for the unconscious Wynn and not at all for her own well-being, threatened to drive away what little remained of his sanity. Tugging her to her feet, he turned her in the direction of the bathroom and shoved her none too gently toward the door. “I will see to the witch. You will check to ensure you have sustained no new wounds and that the old one on your side was not reopened during our encounter. Go.”

He could hardly be surprised when she dug in her heels and turned to face him, her expression a study in confusion and stubborn will. “No, I’m fine. For God’s sake, I’m standing right here in front of you, walking, talking, and acting perfectly normal. Don’t worry about me. Wynn is the one who’s been unconscious for nearly an hour. And did you see that fall? She could be seriously injured, and we wouldn’t know because she can’t tell us. I really think we should take her to the hospital. Get her checked out.”

“Getting her to safety was the most important thing. If she requires medical care, we will see that she gets it. After you assure me that you yourself were not harmed or reinjured.” He crossed his arms over his chest and ruffled his wings impatiently.

Felicity’s mouth dropped open as she stared at him. “Really? My God, you’re an idiot sometimes!” She shrugged out of her jacket with jerky movements and flung the leather to the floor. Reaching for the hem of her shirt, she yanked the material over her head and tossed it after the jacket before flinging her arms out to the sides. “There. See for yourself. The cut is fine. It’s been two weeks, for fuck’s sake. All that’s left are some itchy scabs. Satisfied?”

That she could ask that question while she stood before him half naked, with nothing more than a scrap of lacy satin covering her beautiful breasts, told Spar she lacked a certain basic understanding of his nature. He wouldn’t be satisfied until he had her pressed flat against the nearest horizontal surface while he buried himself inside her sweet flesh. Just the thought of her in danger reduced him to his most primitive instincts: protect, defend, claim. He’d done the first two, so maybe it was time for the third.

Eyes narrowing, he took a step toward her.

“Um, guys?”

The words came weakly, but the sound of Wynn’s voice had both Spar and his mate snapping to attention. Felicity hurried back to kneel at their friend’s hip and laid a hand over hers.

“Hey,” his mate murmured with a smile. “Thank God you’re awake. I was starting to get worried. How do you feel?”

The witch grimaced. “Like I just got hit by a truck. Or half devoured by a nasty
nocturnis
spell. And for some reason, my right ankle feels like someone tried to twist my foot off my leg. In fact, I almost wish they’d succeeded. It might hurt less that way.”

Felicity reached down and carefully raised the hem of Wynn’s jeans. From the swelling of the joint, it was clear the ankle was injured. “Crap. It could be broken. We should get you to the hospital. I bet it happened when the plant from hell dropped you.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it’s just sprained,” Wynn said. “All I need is an Ace bandage and about seven billion ibuprofen. I’m more interested in hearing how you got the spell to let go in the first place.”

“Was that a spell? I don’t get why it didn’t go after us when we first entered the clearing, if it was.”

“It was a trap, probably set to go off if anyone with magical ability entered the area. Most likely the
nocturnis
have a password that lets them go in and out without setting it off, but when we tried to leave, it tripped the trigger. I should have seen it, but I wasn’t looking. I was so intent on finding something to trace back to the ritual site that I didn’t even look.” She made a face as if disgusted with her own oversight. “So really, I just got what I deserved.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Felicity snapped. “None of us bothered to look for traps, and we should have. I’m the one who asked you to come along in case you picked up something I missed. We all saw the energy on the ground, and we all wrote it off as leftover Dark magic schmutz. You don’t get to play the martyr on this one.”

Wynn appeared to disagree, but she let it drop and looked up at Spar. “I’m in your debt, Guardian. Thank you for rescuing me. The Darkness had me overwhelmed. Without you, it probably would have devoured me whole.”

Spar shook his head and shot a pointed glance at Felicity. “You owe me nothing. Even had I saved you, to do so would have been no more than my duty, but Felicity is the one who freed you, not I.”

“Really?” Wynn’s eyes went wide, and she fixed her gaze on the other woman. “How did you do it?”

Felicity’s mouth twisted in a wry half smile. “Sheer dumb luck, mostly. You dropped your bag of tricks when that thing grabbed you. Spar ran right past it into the fray, and he did a pretty good job hacking away at the tendrils, but it just kept growing and growing. I figured you must have brought something with you for emergency defense against the Dark arts, what with your Harry Potter vibe going on, so I decided to check. The first thing I grabbed was a jar labeled
DRIVE AWAY SALT,
which I figured sounded worth a try.”

The witch laughed in surprise. “Wow, good guess. You picked the best possible ‘trick’ you could have used, from the sounds of it.”

“Huh. Go me. So what is drive away salt, anyway?”

“Some people call it black salt or witch’s salt, and that’s basically what it is—just salt with some ingredients added that turn it black. Lucky for you, or for all of us really, the jar I brought with me was specifically mixed with the Order in mind. I made it to drive away demonic energy.”

“How?”

“It’s all in the added ingredients. The black color comes mostly from charcoal, which I used to burn sage, rue, and benzoin. Sage is the cleanser, the purifier. It’s why people for centuries have been using it to smudge houses and circles and anything else that needs to be blessed. Rue removes hexes and drives away black magic, and benzoin is a resin that also purifies, but specifically it works against demons. It’s noxious to them. Once the ingredients are burned, I mix the ashes and charcoal with pure sea salt, and voilà. Black salt.”

“Wow. And I just grabbed the first thing I touched. That worked out pretty well.”

Wynn smiled. “Like I said before, instinct is the basis of magic.”

Spar watched the two women grin at each other and fought back the need to shake sense into both of them. Did his mate not realize the chance she had taken? What could have happened if her first touch had landed on the wrong item? And the witch needed to be taught not to encourage Felicity’s recklessness. His mate seemed to be having no trouble carving years off his immortality without Wynn’s assistance.

“Either of you could have died,” he bit out through clenched teeth, but the expressions the two women turned to him were blank.

“But we didn’t,” Wynn pointed out with exaggerated patience. “Fil did exactly right.”

“We’re fine,” Felicity echoed. “All’s well that ends well, and all that crap.” She frowned back at Wynn. “Except for that ankle. If you’re sure it’s just a sprain, I’ll go fetch an elastic bandage. I think I have one in the bathroom.”

“Can you grab my bag, too? I think I have a jar of everlasting ointment in there. If I rub that in before we wrap it, it should help a lot.”

“You got it.”

“Oh, and um, maybe you want to put on a shirt? I mean, not that we don’t have all the same parts and everything, but I’m not used to hanging out with other chicks in just their bras.”

Felicity’s cheeks flushed a delicate pink. “Oops. Forgot about that, but it is kinda chilly in here. I’ll be right back.”

Spar looked at Felicity, then at Wynn, then back at Felicity. The women simply carried on as if nothing serious had happened. Wynn pulled herself into a sitting position against the arm of the sofa, and Felicity headed toward the door where she’d dropped the witch’s bag as soon as they’d entered the apartment. Spar felt like he was trapped in some strange alternate universe where danger ceased to exist and female humans ruled the world.

He had to get out of there before he got trapped. Or lost his bloody mind.

“I am going up to the roof,” he snarled, heading for the window that led to the fire escape in the alley. “I will check to be certain we were not followed or…” He slammed the window open and simply growled. “I will be on the roof.”

Maybe the cool night air would clear his head. If nothing else, a little distance might save his mate the ravages of a thoroughly spanked bottom.

Chapter Nineteen

“Hm. He seemed … cranky.”

Fil looked toward the window and frowned. “Yeah, he gets a little wound up when it comes to safety and stuff. I think this whole episode with you and me both having to go up against
nocturnis
magic might have gotten to him.”