Blood of the Wicked (3 page)

She’d told him it didn’t work like that, but she’d never been able to tell him why.

“A man can change a lot over a year,” Silas pointed out, as implacable as granite. And as sympathetic.

“He’s not a man.” She gestured, wishing she could shove him out of his own damn moving truck. “He’s my brother, and he wouldn’t change that much. I’m telling you, even if he’s where you think he is, he’s not one of
them
. Whoever they are.”

“If you say so.” He still didn’t look at her as he changed gears again, shifting down, and Jessie wanted to scream. Instead she sat back, gritting her teeth.

“Like I said, we want to use his ties to infiltrate the group and tear it down. There’s a lot of flexibility for a kid who helps that happen.”

Pretty talk. Jessie recognized the curt evasion for what it was: just shy of a promise. If the Church was after Caleb, and if he’d turned stupid and joined an honest-to-God coven, they’d never offer leniency. No matter how useful he tried to be. Not, she reminded herself as she kicked both feet on the dash and deliberately ignored his frown, that she bought any of this.

She tucked her hands under her arms, staring sightlessly out the window as the truck turned onto one of the many mid-level off-ramps.

For a whole year, Caleb had managed to dodge her. It was as if he’d dropped off the face of the planet, swallowed by the Old Sea-Trench that cracked wide beneath the city’s foundation. Even her powers were useless to her.

Her gift was the present. She should have been able to find him, but wherever Caleb was, whatever he was doing, either he’d figured out how to block her . . .

Or he was dead.

And she knew, just
knew
, that he wasn’t dead.

Which meant that he was blocking her. That worried her more than anything else. He needed her help.

I see death and a laughing joker
.

Six feet and some inches of smoky-eyed, rangy witch hunter qualified as death. But was it her death that Caleb had really seen, she wondered, or his own? Someone else’s?

Damn, she wished she had a future decoder ring.

Jessie had heard of other covens over the years. There’d even been a few when her mother had been alive, but they’d never joined. Lydia Leigh had called them poison, neon lights just begging for the Church’s attention. The ones that gathered in the big cities tended to last longer, but only just.

Populations all over the world had come too damned close to Armageddon to tolerate a second go.

Whether it was in the heart of New Seattle or deep in the isolated wastelands of middle America, Jessie’s mother had never given them the time of day. Bands of witches garnered interest.

Interest eventually led to hunters.

Witch hunts never ended well.

Now, a Church-funded killer was telling her that Caleb, the baby brother who had inherited their mother’s magic, was wrapped up in a coven. And not telling her what Jessie knew; Caleb was as good as dead as soon as they finished with him.

Except Caleb had said that he’d seen
her
in the flames. She rubbed her eyes with both hands as frustration clawed at her brain. She hated fortune-telling. With a passion.

It hadn’t done her mother any good.

“We’re here.”

Jessie pulled her attention back to the present, back to the uneven parking lot that spread out from her window. She blinked. “Where?”

“It’s a safe place.”

“Descriptive,” Jessie muttered as she swung open the truck door and leaped lightly to the ground. The hinges squealed angrily, echoing across the near-empty lot. Only the occasional car took up space in the gritty asphalt, most of them run-down and battered. He circled the fender, his stride severely hampered by the limp that twisted his left knee.

Jessie flinched under an unwanted wash of sympathy.

But his eyes gleamed at her as he approached, deadly, even. Dangerous. Compassion? She doubted he knew the word, and she’d have to keep reminding herself that. Especially as warmth gathered in places she had no business thinking about anywhere near him.

She ducked out from under his arm as he palmed the passenger door over her head. “We’ll stay for the night,” he said. If he noticed her jumping around like a scared rabbit, he didn’t show it. He shut the door, shoving hard against the recalcitrant hinges, and took the lead without a backward glance.

He probably earned that limp killing someone.

The cold thought helped Jessie regain her mental balance as she hurried after him. “Is this your place?”

“Belongs to a friend.” He pulled open a metal faceplate screwed into the wall by the plain side door and punched in a code. There was a click, a hiss of air, and the door popped open.

She raised an eyebrow. “Fancy.” And expensive. She’d seen her share of mid-level security, and this blew most of it out of the water.

So the Church wasn’t stingy when it came to its own. Great.

The elevator had another code, and she noted he carefully angled his body so she couldn’t see it. Smart. Annoying, but smart.

“This is going to be the safest place, so do me a favor,” Silas said once they were inside. The elevator groaned, dipped once, and then jerked upward.

Jessie grabbed the railing. “What?”

“Stay here, at least long enough to get some rest. Tomorrow we’ll meet up with the others and find your brother.”

Others? Alarm bells clanged in her head. “Wait a sec—”

He caught her arm. Her stomach somersaulted all the way up into her throat, smothering every mental alarm with it.

“One night, Jessie,” he said quietly. “Give me that much.”

It sounded like a promise. An offer. One night of gasping, twisting, sweaty carnal pleasure. She knew, just knew without a shadow of a doubt, that he could give it to her.

She stared into his eyes, suddenly very, very glad that he wasn’t capable of reading her mind.

Agent Silas Smith raised one callused finger and gently touched the fresh scab at the side of her mouth. “At least let me make up for this.”

Her blood, sluggish in her tired body, warmed. His voice rasped over her skin like whiskey and velvet. Inches. Mere inches were all that separated her mouth from his.

What would a witch hunter’s kiss taste like?

The fact she was even asking herself forced her to muffle a yawn she didn’t feel. One night alone with him? And then meet up with
more
witch hunters?

He was out of his goddamned mind.

“All right,” she lied. “One night.”

Chapter Three

J
ust one night, and then his role in this charade would be done. The witch’s sister would be delivered to people better equipped to play nice, and he could wait for the kill orders to come down the line.

Or, better yet, get the hell out of this wreck of a city and away from anything to do with mile-long legs and dark honey eyes. He wasn’t equipped to deal with civilians. He never had been.

Silas shut the door behind them, touched his thumb to the electronic sensor, and waited for its distinctive click.

“Just out of curiosity, why are we meeting more of your people?”

He turned to find her studying the apartment, hands splayed around the denim stretched over her trim hips. There wasn’t much in the place to study. The carpet was threadbare and patchy, and its grainy noncolor didn’t match the shabby red couch taking up most of one small wall. To her left, a change of flooring from carpet to cracked and scarred linoleum led to a kitchen barely wide enough to fit two people beside the old appliances tucked into the single counter.

A few end tables devoid of anything and two doors took up the rest of the space between narrow, curtained windows. He watched her take it all in with a dubious raised eyebrow, then slanted him a skeptical look from under her fringe of fake red hair.

“This is it,” he confirmed to her silent inquiry, but his lips twitched. Picky stripper. He shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over the back of the couch as he limped to the tiny kitchen. “At the heart of it, the Coven of the Unbinding is your standard terrorist organization. It’s worldwide, but it breaks into splinter cells to achieve whatever small goals they’ve got for the area.”

“Mm-hmm.”

He cracked open the freezer, grimaced when all he saw were bags of flash-frozen instant meals. “Cardboard for dinner, if you’re hungry.”

“I’m not.” A grimace twisted her delicate features. “I ate at work.”

Silas took out one plastic bag and turned back for the couch. The bones of his knee ground together with every step. Grunting with the effort, he sank into the thin cushions and set the frozen bag squarely over his left knee. “Damn,” he muttered, half in protest and half in relief as the icy burn spread swiftly over the swelling pain. He closed his eyes. “We’re meeting with more agents because there’s more of the bad guys. Trust me when I say that taking on an entire group of tangos isn’t a good way to live through the day.”

“How many of them?”

“The Coven? We’re not sure.”

“No, I mean how many of you?”

Usually at least four. A leader, a technical agent, two field agents. Silas didn’t think it had changed in fourteen years. Didn’t know for sure.

He didn’t need to see them to feel the beads at his wrist. Dead weight.

He cracked open an eyelid to find her staring at him. Patient. Calculating, unless he misread the gears grinding away inside that red-capped head of hers. “Probably about four, maybe five.”

She pressed her lips together, watched him closely for a long moment. Stared at his knee. Asking her to dance for him, Silas reflected in grim humor, probably wouldn’t be the right thing to do.

She studied him the same way she’d taken in the apartment, and he wasn’t sure she came away impressed now, either. Pride rankled about a split second behind resignation.

“Why don’t you get some sleep,” he said. He didn’t bother making it sound like a suggestion. Her eyebrows furrowed, so he added, “You can have the bed.”

This time, her lips curved in a way that reached her eyes. “That couch is pretty small.”

It was. And by the feel of it, stuffed with rocks. But Silas closed his eyes again and shrugged. “I can sleep anywhere. You shouldn’t have to. I’ll wake you in the morning.”

If silence had words, Silas figured he’d have been stuck with a monologue of annoyance. He kept his eyes closed, forced himself to look relaxed despite the weight of her gaze. His knee hurt like a bitch, the couch poked broken springs into his back with every breath, and that goddamned neoprene jacket would come off like gift wrap in his hands.

Finally, when the quiet stretched too long, too taut, he sucked in a breath to—

Something. Say something. Warn her. Demand her cooperation. Seduce her right the hell out of her clothes and onto this ugly, uncomfortable couch.

What came out instead growled. “Jessie, I’m not in the mood to talk, so if you want company, you better be naked.”

Her silence changed quality, shifted into something pointed. Barbed.

He heard her feet shuffle over the carpet, heard hinges creak. The bedroom door clicked closed, not the slam he imagined any other woman would have chosen, and Silas breathed out on a long, frustrated exhale.

Nice. Real nice. At this rate, it wasn’t the witches who would cost him the operation, it was his own damned impatience. He had to get a grip on himself, on this whole laughable joke of an operation, or the Mission would lose their only link to Caleb Leigh.

And then Naomi would have his ass for target practice.

Silas opened his eyes to study the pattern of water stains on the ceiling. Not a day in her company, and he’d already hurt a civilian. Maybe not directly, but it was his fault the scumbag had even been there to look at Jessie, much less put a hand on her. A fist to her lush mouth.

She shouldn’t be a part of this.

Just like another girl, another time. Another mission.

Silas stretched out on the couch, wincing as his knee throbbed. Pain didn’t go nearly as deep as the memories he read in rust-brown water stains on the ceiling, but it was enough to remind him.

His knee wasn’t healing right. Part of it, Silas suspected, was the fact he didn’t rest long enough to let the tendons knit back together. The other part, which he didn’t need to suspect, was that he was getting too damn old for this job. Too many years in the Mission took its toll, physically and mentally.

Spending too much time with missionaries and witches definitely dulled the polite side of his brain.

Then again, Jessie’s trimly feminine silhouette turned his brain to nerve soup anyway.

“Fuck me running,” he muttered, and tossed the thawing bag of rations onto the cushion beside him. He clambered to his feet, already feeling like a jackass, and limped across the shabby carpet.

He knocked quietly on her door.

No answer. He winced. “Jessie?” He felt stupid, hanging outside her door like an awkward kid with a crush. “Are you asleep?”

Relief warred with guilt when he didn’t hear her husky voice on the other side of the door. She’d probably worked herself into some kind of feminine snit.

He didn’t think that cleared him of any wrongdoing, though. In fact, it probably just made it worse. Silas rolled his eyes to the ceiling as he said gruffly, “I just wanted to say sorry for my”—suggestion? offer?
fantasy?
—“inappropriate comment.” He dragged his hand over his face. “You’ve been through a lot.”

Still nothing. Only the occasional drum of rain against the window behind him. He turned away, shaking his head.

Then he paused.

Slowly he turned back, studied the door. Tiny seeds of doubt germinated in his Mission-trained brain.

Jessica Leigh was a stripper. She made a habit, a fucking
art
, out of living off the grid. He’d found her only by pure luck, and he’d told her that he worked for the government. Which was about as on-grid as she could get.

He threw the flimsy door open, already knowing what he’d find. Wind and rain blew in through the open window, pushed aside the cheap curtains, and let the mid-city lights stream through. It lit up the small bed. Highlighted the stripped sheets and the knot tied tightly around the furnace beneath the windowsill. The metal creaked.

Unbelievable. Surprise, resignation, pure annoyance all tangled together as he took four long strides to the window. He followed the visual beacon of white sheet against stained rock, picked out her soaked silhouette plastered against the wall.

Her makeshift ladder shorted her one whole floor. She dangled too damned far above the paved ground.

“Jessie!”

She looked up. He watched her jaw set, the pale oval of her face gleaming in the golden light. She tucked her head back down against the rain splattering the wall around her as her feet kicked out, searched along the moldy siding.

Idiot woman. He fisted the sheet in both hands. “Hold on!” The fabric stretched taut as he braced himself against the sill.

He didn’t have to guess what happened when the sheet went slack and he staggered backward, a whiplash of his own strength. The sheet zipped through the window, slapped into his chest in a sopping coil. He let it fall to the carpet, grimacing through the pop and twang of his knee as he stuck his head out the window again.

She clung to the gutter pipe bolted to the wall. Damn it, what the hell was she trying to prove?

“Don’t fucking
move
,” he shouted.

Her hair caught the light in shades of copper as she tipped her head back to look up at him again. Her eyes narrowed.

And then she let go.

Silas’s chest clutched as she dropped like a stone. He was already running for the door before she hit the ground.

T
his would hurt, but she’d known that going down.

Knowing it, ready for the impact, Jessie deliberately forced her muscles to relax. The ground rushed to meet her, hard and fast, and pain shot through her legs as she hit the ground rolling.

She finally came to a stop with her back against asphalt, the world spinning around her. Her feet throbbed, shocked into numbness, but Jessie didn’t have time to think about how much it hurt. She rolled over and pushed herself upright.

She needed to get to the city carousel. Each progressively lower tier of the city expanded, got darker and darker, like some kind of twisted metal layer cake, and she knew how to hide in the depths of those streets just above the walled-in ruins of the old city.

The carousel didn’t allow foot traffic, but the stairs near it bored through cement and structured metal to connect the mess of city levels. Even better, they’d been enclosed. All the commuters using the maze of roads comprising the upper-level streets would never have to see the poor peasants who had no choice but to take the stairs to get around. Like her.

If she was lucky, the missionary and his friends would assume she’d go back to her job as the one safe place she had. Maybe she would have, under any other circumstances. Not this time. She’d have to start all over.

It took her a few tries, but Jessie’s legs remembered how to move before she kissed the ground again.

The rain pounded the city into submission, making visibility difficult at best. She lowered her head as she ran for the nearest street, hoping she hadn’t misjudged the distance from the block of low-income housing to the highway that wrapped around New Seattle like a coiled serpent.

The kind of fly-by-night motel she’d need to hide out in hunkered two levels below the Perch, sleazy enough to pay by the hour and destitute enough not to haggle for the amount of cash she had on her. Going up was out of the question; too far, and she’d end up in front of security checks, sec-comps with tasers set to
strongly dissuade
, and a distinct lack of survivability.

With all of her belongings left at the Perch, Jessie was at a serious disadvantage. It was going to take a lot of effort to build up her resources again, but she could do it. She’d done it before.

She ducked into an alley, lungs squeezing as she tried to catch her breath, and scraped her wet hair back from her eyes. When tangles pulled at her scalp, she realized the red wig had come off her head at some point—probably in the fall—and hissed out a curse.

She might as well have been naked. It had been a long time since she’d hit the streets with her natural hair. Still, she could barely see ten feet in front of her. There was no way anyone else could see her easily enough to get on her tail. Could they?

The thought made her nervous.

Ducking her head, she pulled up the collar of her jacket. There wasn’t anything else to do but run.

She was good at running.

Limping slightly, Jessie ignored the angry beat from her abused ankles and hurried down the alley, stepping over sodden refuse and discarded plastic crates. She squinted against the sharp rain, at the lights of New Seattle that flashed through it.

Layers upon layers upon layers of humanity. Cement and metal foundations, glass skyscrapers at the top like something out of a twisted fairy tale. She could barely make out the glittering upper spires through the sudden storm, but she didn’t need to see them to know they were there. This was the edge of civilization, the City of Glass.

A new hope for a struggling humanity.

Jessie’s mouth twisted. She’d never intended to come to her mother’s birth city, but it was easier to hide in a metropolis. Especially a metropolis as divided as this one. Years buried in the chaos of New Seattle, and she still hadn’t exhausted the city’s cushion of anonymity.

Caleb hadn’t liked it much. Maybe that was why he’d left, in the end.

Maybe he just wasn’t as ready to live hand-to-mouth, to travel from rat-infested apartment to apartment, to work and steal and run. It stung when she thought it, but maybe she’d done everything wrong, right from the moment she’d found their mother murdered, crammed into her own bakery oven like so much useless baggage.

Headlights jarred her out of her introspection an instant before she tripped over the curb. A cargo truck bore down with breakneck speed, its angry horn screeching through her head and vibrating like drums in her chest.

Instinct exploded into movement. Unable to bite back her breathy scream, she lurched back out of the thoroughfare and away from the vehicles that whipped by her with careless indifference. She hit the corner of a cobbled building, an old brownstone, and clung to it. Water splashed over her legs as cars drove through the runoff pooling along the side of the tilted carousel road.

“Maniac!” she shouted, knowing it wouldn’t help.