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  “What about the sorcerer, my lord?” Juro asked, glancing over his shoulder.

  “He’s staying to inventory Marshall’s collection,” Raphael replied. “He’ll call a car when he’s ready.”

  Juro nodded without comment, and a moment later, they were on their way back to Manhattan.

  Chapter Nine

  Manhattan, New York City, New York

  NICK SHOWED UP the next night without warning. He must have been waiting outside for the lights to come on, or maybe he had some sorcerer’s trick that told him when warm bodies were moving about, because he rang the doorbell only minutes after she and Raphael had come downstairs. Everyone was hustling, because they were flying out later that night. Raphael wanted to get home with her, and she was one hundred percent behind that idea. She was more freaked out than she wanted to admit by Marshall’s determination to make her part of his collection. She’d known the guy was out there sexually, but nothing in her research had indicated he was batshit crazy. She’d woken several times during the last hours of the night, torn out of an exhausted sleep by nightmares of being trapped in her own body and shivering with cold. Raphael had been there every time, pulling her close and holding her until she fell asleep again.

  But maybe the worst part of the whole mess was . . . no shopping. It had broken her avaricious little heart, but it had been her idea to cancel the outing with Sarah. She loved shopping, but all she really wanted to do tonight was go home.

  And now Nick was here for what was probably going to be yet another dick-measuring contest between him and Raphael. Forget the fact that they’d had a small rapprochement at Marshall’s house last night. That was ancient history. She sighed as Juro opened the door wide to admit him, after first checking with Raphael.

  Nick looked good in his low-riding 501s and a leather jacket over a designer T-shirt. But then he always looked good, and now she understood why. Sure, part of it was just good genes and probably a lot of gym work, but the other part was his magic keeping him young and handsome forever. Or however long a sorcerer lived. She hadn’t asked, and doubted she’d get a straightforward answer if she did.

  He walked into the living room, his gaze skimming over her where she sat on the couch, then went directly to Raphael who was standing next to her.

  “Vampire,” he said, by way of greeting.

  “Sorcerer.”

  “Human!” she sang out in disgust.

  Both of them turned to look at her.

  “I’m fine, thanks for asking,” she continued in a singsong voice.

  Raphael’s mouth curved into a brief smile that didn’t reach his eyes. He knew she wasn’t fine, but he’d never admit that to Nick. In his mind, it was none of Nick’s business. And, in this case, she agreed with him.

  Nick returned his attention to Raphael. “I figured you’d be leaving soon and thought you’d probably find this interesting.” He handed over a piece of paper, which Raphael scanned before holding it out to Cyn. It was a printed copy of an online news report from some local Dobbs Ferry website. The kind that kept track of the police blotter and the local high school football team. But this morning, they had far juicier news to report on. It seemed a local resident, the highly respected and connected, i.e., rich, Isaac Marshall had died the night before in an explosion at his home in Dobbs Ferry. There was no official police statement, but an “inside source” at the police department reported finding indications that the explosion had been intentional. Yet another source—sources did love to gossip—reported that Marshall and his wife had been engaged in an ugly divorce battle, with Marshall vowing he’d burn the house to the ground before letting her have it.

  Cyn shook her head in amazement. She held up the printed article. “Your doing?” she asked Nick.

  He nodded. “The divorce part is real. My people turned up a filing from just a week ago.”

  “I didn’t find anything about that,” she said somewhat suspiciously.

  “Don’t feel bad, darling,” he teased. “They wanted it discreet, and Marshall knew enough judges that he could keep it that way. As for the explosion . . . I might have had a hand in that.”

  “And all that magic crap he’d collected?” she asked, pretending like she didn’t care, like that damn room wouldn’t be starring in her nightmares for weeks to come. Raphael reached for her hand, squeezing her fingers in reassurance.

  “The magical crap has been dealt with,” Nick told her, his lips tipping up slightly in amusement. “What could be destroyed safely was taken care of on the scene. The rest was moved to my home vault. It will be safe there.”

  “Safe for whom?” Raphael demanded.

  Nick didn’t respond directly, saying instead, “You’ll be happy to know the manacles were there—”

  “I told you I saw them,” Cyn muttered.

  “—and they’ve been destroyed.”

  “How’d you manage to do that?” she asked.

  “I made them. I could unmake them.”

  No one spoke for a moment, until Nick said, “Cyn, could I have a moment?”

  Raphael’s fingers squeezed her hand reflexively, hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. She didn’t say anything, just used his strength to pull herself to her feet.

  “Sure,” she told Nick. “Give me a minute.”

  Nick nodded his understanding. “I’ll meet you outside.”

  Raphael had stiffened at her response, and once Nick had left the room, he stared down at her wordlessly.

  “Do you trust me?” she asked him quietly.

  “Yes.” Immediate and unequivocal.

  “He’s a friend, and he’s troubled. Besides, you and I both know your vampires are lurking in the shadows out there.”

  His fingers skimmed up her back to grip her hair, pulling her head back as he brought his lips down to hers in a bruising kiss. “Just remember to whom you belong,”

  “I love you, too, fang boy.”

  He swatted her butt. “Make it short. We’re leaving in ten minutes if I have to throw you over my shoulder to do it.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yes, master,” she said, laughing at his scowl as she opened the front door.

  Nick was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, leaning against his red Ferrari as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “Did you know,” he said as she stepped off the bottom stair and walked over to him, “that there are vampires lurking around your front door?”

  “One or two,” she agreed, smiling.

  “Four, actually.”

  She shrugged. She wasn’t going to play judge in the dick-measuring contest. “What’s really going on, Nick?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked a little defensively.

  “I mean you didn’t need me, didn’t need us, to recover those manacles for you. Marshall was nothing, nobody. I managed to take him out, for God’s sake, and you claim to be some big sorcerer. What was it you told me? You were a god, with armies in the thousands. But you couldn’t deal with a tubby financial guy with delusions?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Yeah, well, I can handle complicated if you use small words.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that and you know it. It’s complicated because . . .” He paused and looked away from her, staring sightlessly down the nearly empty street for a long time. “When I first examined the spell that my enemy, Sotiris, used to curse my warriors, there was something familiar about it, as if the magic was my own. But that made no sense. I knew what he’d done; I knew how he’d done it. But still, I couldn’t escape that lingering sense of familiarity. So, rather than casting my own spell immediately, the one that would follow my warriors into the mists of time, I stayed long enough to investigate. And what I found . . . the magic of his spell felt familiar because it was my own. He’d collected every artif
act I’d ever created and discarded, devices crafted as gifts for those who served me well, or simply as toys for my own entertainment. In my arrogance, I’d never bothered to keep track of them, leaving them scattered throughout the realms. But Sotiris did. Just as he knew he couldn’t triumph over me one-on-one, he knew he didn’t have the power to steal my warriors from me in a single blow the way he’d need to in order to finally defeat me. So he gathered those artifacts and drained their power—my power—saving it up and harnessing it against me.

  “I’m responsible for every day my brothers have spent trapped in their stone prisons. It was my power that made those hellish curses possible. So, even as I’ve made their freedom the very purpose of my existence, I’ve also set out to find and destroy every single artifact I’ve ever created. Never again will anyone use my own power against those few people I truly love.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cyn said and meant it. She couldn’t imagine what he must have felt, the weight of the guilt piled on top of his grief at losing his men. “But still, why bring us into it? You didn’t need us.”

  He shook his head. “When I recovered from the spell I cast, the one that brought me forward in time . . .” He frowned and started again. “I patterned that spell on the one that my enemy, Sotiris, used. I hoped that by copying his spell, I’d emerge in the same vicinity, timewise at least, as my four warriors. But I’d no sooner begun to search for them, than my enemy arrived, close on my heels, determined to destroy me before I could find them. We fought, again and again. Time had no meaning as we sifted in and out of the continuum, until finally I realized there was never going to be a clean victory between us. But more importantly, I knew I’d never find my warrior brothers if I spent all of my time and energy trying to destroy my enemy. And so, the next time I cast the spell and emerged into yet another time, I forswore the use of magic, except for the small amount necessary for my safety, and to maintain the search.”

  “And to stay young,” she reminded him.

  He shrugged. “I don’t have to try to do that. It’s simply a part of who I am.”

  She wanted to make some pithy comment, but Raphael’s patience wasn’t endless, so she said, “How long ago did all of this happen?”

  “From the first time I cast the spell? A few thousand years?” He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. “It was before the advent of recorded history, and I’ve never bothered to count.”

  Cyn didn’t know how to respond to that. To live for thousands of years alone? No thank you.

  “You were right,” Nick said suddenly.

  She gave him a questioning look.

  “About me not needing you to deal with Marshall. But I’ve grown so used to not using my magic that my first instinct is to pursue other means of getting what I want. In this case, that was you and Raphael. Your skills and his power. But no more. If nothing else, this adventure made me see that I’ve had it wrong all this time.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I stood in that room last night, with all of those magical artifacts bouncing energy off one another, just waiting for that one small push that would make the whole lot of them explode . . . and I had an epiphany. All these years I’ve spent searching with no results, and maybe it was because magic was slowly disappearing from the world, hoarded by idiots like Isaac Marshall who have no idea what they’re playing with. But even more, maybe by not using my own magic, I’ve been contributing to the void.”

  “So . . . you’re going to be magicking all over the place now? Showing up on Ellen and shit?” she asked, only half joking.

  He gave her that devastating grin. “Maybe not Ellen. I’m a late night kind of guy. But I’ll tell you this much. The next time the earth shakes, it might not be your vampire doing the shaking.”

  Cyn winced. “You heard about that?”

  “Sweetheart, everyone with an ounce of magic heard about that.”

  “He saved my life.”

  Nick gave her a look filled with more emotion than she could interpret. “He loves you,” he said finally.

  “I know.”

  He laughed softly. “Well, we’d better end this before things get maudlin. You take care, Cyn. And if you ever need me, you call, all right? I’ll always answer.”

  “Thanks, Nicky,” she said, feeling tears welling in her eyes. She leaned over to kiss him on the cheek, then stepped back.

  He gave her a wink as he straightened away from the car, then walked around to the driver’s side, lowered himself into the seat, and closed the door. A moment later, the engine started with a crackling roar. Cyn backed away to the stairs and stood watching as the powerful sports car prowled to the end of the block, then turned and disappeared from her sight.

  “He’s gone?” Raphael’s question didn’t even surprise her. She’d known he was there. He walked down the stairs and wrapped her in his arms.

  “Gone,” she said. “Are we ready?” She didn’t even care that her words were muffled against his chest.

  “We were just waiting for you.”

  “Then let’s go home, fang boy.”

  Chapter Ten

  Pompano Beach, Florida

  NICK WALKED INTO his office and shrugged off his leather jacket, tossing it carelessly onto a chair. The housekeeper would take care of it . . . or not. As long as he could find it when it wanted it, he didn’t care where it resided in the interim. Beyond the big windows, the Florida night beckoned, a lighthouse blinking in the distance.

  Turning away from the melancholy sight, he crossed to a wall of built-in bookcases. Going directly to a specific shelf, he pushed gently against the back panel, which popped open to reveal a biometric lock. He pressed his left thumb to the scanner and the adjacent bookcase popped open. Pulling the bookcase all the way outward, he entered the secret room, his sanctum sanctorum. The amber key to the manacles was here, what was left of it. He’d chipped the amber away himself before giving the key to Cyn so that she could free her vampire lord. Not that it mattered anymore. The manacles themselves were gone. He’d destroyed them along with most, though not all, of Marshall’s collection. There’d been a few pieces worth holding on to, especially now that he’d decided to add his magic to the mix.

  He experienced an unfamiliar buzz of curiosity at the thought of using his magic again. Not only for the inevitable thrill it would give him, but because, for the first time in longer than he could remember, he couldn’t predict the results. His ability was unique enough to change the entire balance of power in the magical world, and he was . . . excited at the possibilities.

  Smiling at the thought, he gazed around his vault. The artifacts stored here were the product of centuries of acquisitions, and every one of them was stored far more securely than Marshall’s primitive glass and steel. His hunters continued to bring him items from all over the world. Most he destroyed, but some he kept, either because he didn’t have the power to destroy them safely, or because he thought they might be useful someday. Evil still existed in the world. It would be unforgivably naïve of him to think otherwise.

  He walked deeper into the vault, all the way to an alcove in the far corner, where four small statues stood on a shelf that was never without light. Rough-looking, crude, made of little more than compressed sand, the figures represented his four warriors. Sotiris himself had gifted the statues to Nick, not as an aid to his search, but to torment him with the knowledge of what they were suffering, to taunt him. He knew what they looked like and still he couldn’t find them.

  He reached out and touched them one by one—Damian Stephanos, born of sunlight and shadow. They’d grown up together, and no greater fighter or friend had ever existed. He moved to the next . . . Gabriel Halldor, called by Nick’s magic all the way from the frozen north, a giant of a warrior who’d known nothing but battle his entire life. Nick’s fingers hovered over the third figure, Dragan Fiachna,
descended from Irish kings, a beautiful man with more than a little of the beast inside him. And finally, the youngest of them all, Kato Amadi from the hot sands of Africa. His journey to Nick’s side had been long and perilous, but he’d reveled in the bloodshed of the battlefield, in the violence that fed the dark magic that resided deep in his soul.

  Nick stepped back from the alcove, head bowed, hand over his heart, his thoughts twisting restlessly.

  When he’d begun this adventure with Cyn and her vampire, he’d anticipated nothing more than a quick bit of thievery, one more artifact destroyed. Not a soul-searching experience that made him re-evaluate his choices for the last two thousand years. He’d lied when he’d told Cyn he couldn’t remember how old he was. He remembered every damn year of it, every moment haunted by the knowledge that his brothers were suffering a far more horrific fate than his own. Trapped in stone for centuries, able to see the world passing by, but never to interact with it, never knowing how much longer their imprisonment would last . . . would they even be sane after all this time? Did it matter?

  Hell, no. His goal was the same. Find them and free them. Only his methods were about to change. No more hiding in the shadows. He was taking this battle to the enemy.

  To be continued. . . .

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