The Spell (21 page)

“I could so easily learn to love you,” he chuckled. Hell, he was pretty sure he already did. “And I want you to give me that chance. I want you to give
us
that chance, understand?” Lucas held tight, scorching her with his gaze. He wasn’t going to let her go until she agreed. Maybe he wouldn’t even let go then.

It took a few seconds, but Danny finally nodded. Just a little. “Yes,” she whispered.

Lucas’s smile broadened, his body thrumming with victory. It felt good. In fact, he could have sworn that his wounds were healing faster now. He barely noticed them any longer, which probably meant they were nearly mended.

“All right then,” he said, the fingers of his hand caressing the smooth, taut skin across her stomach. “We need to get somewhere safe.” He let her go, slowly and reluctantly, and she straightened. When she could, she turned to face him.

Her cheeks were still flushed and her eyes were still shining bright, but she was composing herself, pulling down her shirt and fingering the tiny gold pendant at her throat. “I need to check on Imani and the others,” she said, her voice hoarse with slowly receding desire.

He nodded. She cleared her throat and turned away, heading toward the front door. Lucas took a slow, deep breath and tried to get his body back under control. Then he followed her outside.

Everyone was on their feet now. The lot of werewolves and magic users was gathered a few yards from the front porch. No one was speaking.

When Lucas and Danny appeared at the front door, the Overseer turned and pinned him with a hard look. “We’ll head back to Council headquarters,” he said. His edict brooked no room for argument. Lucas nodded his consent and reached for Danny’s hand.

She let him take it.

*****

Jason’s grip on the edge of the polished mahogany table tightened. He could feel the telltale pulse in his power and knew that the wards he’d placed around Dannai had fallen. But he was trapped here, in this meeting of dark, dangerous minds, and there was no way in hell he was going to show any weakness by letting on that something was troubling him.

As it was, he had no fewer than three separate shields thrown over himself. It was simple self-preservation. In company like this, the weak and the bleeding were picked off and fed upon by the rest. Any chink in the chain link fence of his defenses would be noticed and utilized and he would fall. This high up on the ladder, such a fall hurt. In fact, it was frankly fatal.

Around the expensive table sat six others. Two were warlocks, one of which the dark and dangerous Lucas Caige would surely have been interested in meeting. Three were vampires. The sixth was the Akyri king. Jason made seven.

“I believe one of us would like to adjourn the meeting early,” said one of the vampires. He did nothing to hide his true form here, amongst his peers. His irises glowed red, his teeth were pronounced, and the nails of his hands where he had them calmly intertwined atop the table were long and pointed. “Troubled, Alberich?”

“Always,” Jason replied calmly. He met the vampire’s gaze head-on and unflinchingly.

Several beats of impressive silence passed before the vampire finally smiled.

The Akyri king spoke up next. “No matter,” he said, his voice sounding like an echo in the large stone chamber. “I believe we are finished for now. Are we not?” He glanced at one of the vampires, a man who was seated at the head of the table and whose very presence Jason had to admit was stifling.

The vampire nodded just once. “Meeting adjourned.”

The Akyri king nodded in return and gracefully stood. His dark eyes settled upon each of them one after another. “My queen awaits.”

He turned from the table, offering them all his back. It was an unbelievably gutsy act. Almost every one of them could have benefited from the man’s death. But of course, they did nothing. And the king walked calmly out of the chamber.

Jason’s insides were boiling with impatience. He stood next, pushing his chair away from the table and claiming his full height. With nothing more than a nod toward the others, he called up his transportation magic and left the room in a word and a flash.

When he flashed back into solid form in the front yard of Danny’s two-story house, Gabriel Phelan’s men were waiting for him. Jason glanced at the empty house with irritation, and then turned to regard the werewolves. There were four of them. Their presence felt odd; normally werewolves gave off a nature-like vibration, neutral and wild. But these wolves felt shrouded in something more. It was less chaotic and a lot darker.

“Your boss told me that he could kill Caige,” Jason said, his tone laced with disappointed malice. The shields were down and Danny was gone. To make matters worse, the air reeked of werewolf power and magic. Other covens had been pulled in. That meant that word was now out about Jason being a warlock.

There would be nothing but battles for him from here on in.

“Phelan wants to speak with you,” one of the men said. “He said that you would know where to go.”

Jason felt his gaze heating up as the cold fires inside of him began burning their way to the surface. He needed to release some anger and soon, or he would blow. “Very well,” he said. But before he flashed back out in another show of transportation magic, Jason allowed a bit of his wrath to escape. It raced from Jason’s form in a blue-white trail of fire, licking at the ground as it sped toward a random werewolf.

Jason had no idea who the man was, and he didn’t care. But he felt a bit of relief and satisfaction at seeing the man’s form engulfed in flames before Jason once more flashed away.

*****

Gabriel Phelan was reclined on the leather sofa of Jason’s mansion when Jason popped back into existence. The werewolf was utterly unperturbed by the show of magic. Jason’s ire rose instantly at the obvious invasion that the werewolf’s presence indicated. How Phelan had managed to not only find the mansion, but get in, was beyond the warlock. It was painfully clear to him by now that the man he was dealing with was not to be taken lightly.

“Did you kill them?” Phelan asked just before he took a sip from what appeared to be a glass of water. Jason knew it was Everclear. It was just about the only thing a werewolf could drink if he hoped to glean even the slightest buzz.

Ah
, he thought.
The werewolves
. Phelan was talking about the four wolves who had met him in front of Danny’s house only seconds ago. They had felt strange to him, almost like dark magic, but not quite. It made sense now. “Let me guess,” he said as he made his way to a love seat opposite the alpha and plopped down into it. “You no longer trust them and want to be rid of them.”

Phelan smiled a disarming smile, his blue eyes twinkling in the light of the overhead chandelier and the crackling fire in the hearth. “Something like that.”

“Then I’m glad I only killed one,” Jason admitted. “They’re your problem, not mine.”

Phelan chuckled softly, took another drink from his glass, and then placed the glass on the coffee table before him. The werewolf leaned forward, placing his elbows on his legs and casually clasping his hands before him. “You gave the Healer an artifact that allowed you to extend your magic so that it encompassed her,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but Jason knew that it was more or less meant as one.

“In fact, I will be,” Phelan replied, obviously refusing to be baited. Instead, he stood and Jason tensed, ready to unleash the barrage of magic that was just about clawing his insides to shreds with the need to be let out.

But Phelan only smiled down at him – and then began to change. At first, it looked as though he were surrounded by water, and the water had begun to warp. But then there was a flash, not unlike the flashes werewolves experienced when transforming into their wolf selves. When the light faded, Gabriel Phelan the alpha werewolf no longer stood before Jason.

Danny did.

Chapter Fourteen:
“Mirror, Mirror”

The Council headquarters weren’t small, by any means, but they weren’t set up to house so many different alphas at one time, either. The thing about alpha werewolves was that they couldn’t cross into one another’s territory without permission. Each of the werewolves there would have gladly given permission to the others – but their defenses were up and their powers leaked out of them like faulty electrical wiring.

Every now and then, one of them found it impossible to walk through a certain door or go down a specific hallway. It was beginning to get ridiculous when the Overseer finally told them all to get out, but to take enforcers with them and to stay in constant contact with the council.

Danny had been planning to transport herself and Lucas back to Trinidad, as had Imani, when the Overseer told them that they were in no uncertain terms to waste any of their magic. He swore to them that they would need it. And that boded very ill. The one thing he did ask Danny to do was put back up her dormancy shield. He pulled her aside and told her that she was an incredibly tempting subject for too many werewolves at that moment and that he needed every one of his men to be focused. She was a distraction.

Danny gladly threw the shield back up.

Then the Overseer ordered them all to find rental homes in the area and procure them. Counil headquarters was located just north of Portland, Oregon, in a massive complex overlooking the Pacific. Danny couldn’t have been happier to leave. The atmosphere at headquarters was more tense than she’d ever seen it. Gabriel Phelan had turned up the heat, adding warlocks and who knew what else to the pot. What was brewing was something nasty and Danny wanted out of the kitchen.

A world-wide edict had been issued. The Overseer wanted Phelan brought down. Werewolves were flying in from other countries to tend to the task. Airports were being monitored in case Phelan decided to leave, though they all knew it would do little good. Phelan was a shape shifter as well as a werewolf. Some werewolves possessed special, different abilities – and that was his. He could assume the form of anything or anyone he wanted and wear their scent as well. A more dangerous man they had never come across, and it didn’t look as though he was going to back down until he got what he wanted. What he wanted was Charlie.

It wasn’t only the werewolves who were suddenly up in arms either. Jason Alberich, one of the most powerful wizards any coven had ever known, had been revealed as a warlock. Danny felt a hollowness in her chest when she thought about this. She and Jason had played together as children. He had never been anything but good to her.

As Lucas wound his way through the streets of a Portland suburb, Danny leaned into him from behind, let the bike’s vibration ease up into her body, and closed her eyes. She couldn’t help but go back in time.

She remembered her tenth birthday party. Lalura had never really known when Dannai had actually been born, so she’d celebrated her adopted daughter’s birthday on her own favorite day – Halloween. As luck would have it, it had turned out to be Danny’s favorite holiday as well and when she was old enough that Lalura told her to pick any day she wanted as her birthday, Danny decided to keep it as it was.

On her tenth birthday, Jason Alberich, son of their herald, presented Danny with a jack o’ lantern piñata. Only, this one was different from the store-bought kind. Its hollow eyes and mouth glowed, as they would on a real carved pumpkin. It was magic of course. Jason had always been very good with magic; it came to him naturally, especially anything involving fire.

Danny hadn’t wanted to break it open. It was so beautiful! But Jason, already taller than the other children, and already dressed in the black of his father’s office, smiled at her with his green eyes and insisted she hit it as hard as she could. So, she let him blind fold her and hand her the bat.

He was gentle when he spun her around, and she remembered now how he had leaned over and whispered in her ear. “Go for it, Danny.”

Once she was sure he was out of the way, she pulled the bat back, sent out her mental feelers, and swung with all of her might. There was a popping sound and a vibration hummed up her arms. Danny dropped the bat, ripped off the blind fold, and stared in wonder as the piñata – now cracked neatly in half and wide open – released a whirlwind of butterflies.

They were the colors of rainbows, each of them different, each of them stunningly beautiful. They glowed like fairies as they spun around the witches and wizards at the party and the younger children squealed with glee. Danny had never seen anything like it. She remembered staring up at them, her jaw dropped open, her eyes as big as saucers in her head.

And then, when the butterflies had at last begun to take up residence in the tree from which the piñata was tied, Danny chanced a glance at Jason. He’d been laughing, his green eyes shimmering, his smile genuine.

Later, he had approached her and told her that he didn’t want her to think he’d forgotten about the candy that normally goes in a piñata. “I don’t want you to think I gypped you,” he said jokingly. “So when we go Trick-or-Treating tonight, you can have my bag.”

Now Danny felt something akin to tears gathering behind her closed lids. She couldn’t believe she’d never seen it before. How could she have missed Jason’s interest in her? It had always been there. It was so obvious now.

He’d always been watching over her. She remembered him saving her from bullies once. She’d been in a private garden, having a verbal battle of wits with a group of twelve-year-old wizards who were trying to prove boys were better at magic than girls. Danny had been trying to keep her calm. She felt her magic there and she could have used it, but Lalura would have had a stroke. Seemingly just in time, Jason had appeared in the garden’s entrance, laughing his head off. “You boys have no idea what you’re dealing with,” he chuckled, shaking his head.