8. CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER EIGHT
Maxar
We tolerated each other because we had to.
For her.
If there was one thing and one thing only that the bear, vampire, and I agreed on, it was that we would do anything for Omaera.
We still didn’t like the idea of having to share her, or that we would be tied to each other for what could very well be eternity, but the most important thing was protecting the Queen and getting her the answers she needed.
Even if it meant riding the fucking bus to do it.
Good gods, I hated public transit.
I could run faster than the average bus, and most modes of public transit stunk like stale urine, garbage, and bad weed.
But none of us had a vehicle.
Omaera refused to drive because of how her mother died. The bear was a bear without even a fucking phone or wallet; the vampire was rich, powerful, and had a driver; and I just did whatever the fuck I wanted, which usually meant running or hopping on the back of some guy’s motorcycle to get where I needed to go.
“Let’s just call a cab,” I said, as we walked to the subway station that morning, all of us flanking Omaera like she was some popstar and we were her bodyguards. Because we kind of were. And she was more important than any popstar. She was a fucking queen.
“No,” Omaera said. “The subway is fine. I take it every day.”
I turned up my nose and rolled my eyes as we made our way down the stairs headed underground.
“It’s cold like a cave down here,” Zandren commented. “Smells worse than any cave I’ve ever lived in though.”
“Wait, I thought bears shat in the woods,” I said with a laugh.
He turned to me and looked me dead in the eye. “We do. But not in our caves.” Then he shook his head and scoffed like I’d asked the stupidest question in the world.
We paid and went through the turnstile, slaloming through people. A train whizzed by, its wheels squealing on the track.
“It’s well-lit for a cave too,” Zandren added. “I prefer my caves darker.”
“It’s not a fucking cave, dumbass. It’s a tunnel.” I snapped my fingers at my sides, creating small benign flames to keep myself busy and distracted.
A small child not too far away caught me, his eyes wide, mouth open.
I smiled at him and put one finger to my lips for him to keep it a secret, then I snapped my finger again and produced a rainbow flame. His eyes went even wider, and he whispered, “Wow!”
“This is our train,” Omaera said as one came to a stop on the platform. I went to step on when the doors opened, but she grabbed my hand. “Wait for people to unload first.” Her eyes asked me if I was just born yesterday. “Patience, sparky.”
A rush of pure pleasure raced through me from her touch. It was the first time she’d ever touched me, and it was like coming home. I’d never felt such peace. Such joy or bliss. I knew that no other woman could touch me now without me experiencing pain, at least until Omaera and I mated. But I had no idea how truly wonderful her touch would be. How magical and powerful her skin would be against mine.
And when she removed her hand, it was as if all the light in my life, all the energy in my body, had drained away like water in a sink.
I was bereft and weak for just a blink of a moment, but it was enough to make me dizzy.
“You coming, mage?” Zandren asked after he, Omaera and Drak had stepped onto the train.
Nodding, I stepped on as well and joined them. It was standing room only, and the four of us were drawing a lot of attention. Probably because Zandren was a beast and hadn’t bothered to button his shirt, Drak looked like a model for an undertaker magazine, and my fiery red hair and odd clothing choices always made people do a double take. Genie pants were just so fucking comfortable.
But if Omaera wanted me to wear something else, I would.
For her.
The train jerked to start, and we were all jostled. Omaera put her hand out against my chest, to stabilize herself, and that same intense rush of pleasure filled me up to near bursting. I can only describe it as energy, light, heat, and the buildup to the greatest orgasm of my life.
Her hand only lasted there a second before she pulled it back and held onto the pole with just one hand.
I pouted inside, but remained unfazed on the outside.
It was only a fifteen-minute ride on the train before our stop and we all followed Omaera like lost lambs.
I’d always enjoyed the company of women. I’d been with many over the centuries and certainly found them to be the fairer, but stronger, sex. However, I’d never been taken with one, or rendered to a puppy following one around so obediently, like I was with Omaera.
Was it because she was my mate? Was that the only reason?
Or was there more to it?
Was it because she was the Queen?
We’d only ever had kings for as long as I’d been alive. And as far as anyone knew, King Donovar never had a mate. So there was no queen. Yes, the mages had Queen Anysa and she was a wonderful and fair leader, but she was a leader mainly in title only. The true shift of power and reign over all belonged to King Donovar, or in this case, Queen Omaera now.
We emerged back out into daylight, in a new borough of the city. This area of town was much nicer than where Omaera lived. Less hipster-ish and more family friendly. There were supermarkets, drugstores, pet stores, a dog park, an elementary school, and a medical clinic, all within spitting distance of each other. Flowerbeds covered every available non-road or sidewalk area, and baskets teeming with more greenery and petals hung from the ornate, green streetlamps.
“Why don’t you live here?” Zandren asked. “It smells better than where you live. And it’s nicer.”
I snorted. Maybe there was a second thing that we agreed on.
“Because I like the apartment Gemma and I share. It’s ours. What’s wrong with it?” She glanced up at the bear. “You don’t have to stay, you know?”
“Yes, I do,” he said plainly. “And it’s fine. This place is just nicer. And smells better.”
Leave it to the bear to keep it real and honest.
We reached a tall, narrow, yellow house with white shutters, a plum-colored door, and matching plum-hued wide steps up to the porch. It had a white picket fence all the way around and red geraniums in every plant pot and basket.
“If this is where you grew up, why’d you leave?” Zandren asked.
I snorted. He was digging himself a hole, and I was happy to sit back and watch. The vampire hadn’t said a damned word since we left the house, but none of us were complaining. He was a big Debbie Downer, and until I caught him scowling, I often forgot he was even there.
“Do bears live with their parents and families for life?” she asked him, opening the gate on the picket fence.
“No,” he said plainly.
She raised her brows at him. “So why should humans be different?”
“Because this place is nicer than your place. This place has a yard. It has grass.”
She made an impatient noise in her throat and climbed the stairs. “Again, Pooh Bear, you are welcome to leave my apartment at any time. Nobody is forcing you to stay.”
I chuckled, but his deep angry growl made me pause. His eyes narrowed, and he sniffed the air, turning his head back and forth .
“What is it, Lassie? Is Timmy in the well?”
But my smile fell the moment he faced me, dead-serious and contemplating shifting. “I smell demons.”
“Yeah, me. Apparently,” Omaera said, reaching for the doorknob, but Zandren’s big hand grabbed her wrist and he pulled her back until she smacked into his chest.
“Not you, Little One. You smell of lilacs, honeysuckle, and cayenne. This is not your scent. But it is the scent of demons.”
Her palms were on his chest, and she glanced up at him. “What does that mean?”
“It means someone has been here to visit Delia before us,” Drak said, opening the door and stepping into the brightly-lit home with all the stained glass, wainscotting, and old-fashioned-but-recently-repainted crown molding.
I didn’t have such a keen sense of smell as the shifter, but I knew what death smelled like.
Drak, Zandren, and I all exchanged looks.
Omaera tried to break free of Zandren. “Why does the house smell like that?”
Now that she was coming into her powers, her sense of smell would intensify too. If she mated Zandren, it would get even stronger.
Zandren held her tight. “Little One, you don’t want to go in there.”
“Yes, I do,” she growled, shoving against him. “Aunt Delia, are you home?”
Drak was already in the house, and he made his way through it, down the hallway toward the kitchen in the back. Zandren stayed with Omaera on the porch. I entered the house as well, checking out the study, the living room, dining room, the one bedroom on the main floor, and the bathroom.
Drak hadn’t said anything yet, which meant he hadn’t found the body.
We met at the base of the stairs leading to the second floor and took it together.
“Lerris?” I asked.
“Someone looking for Omaera,” he said with a dark tone. “More than one, from what I can smell. Both demons.”
“This is three stories. There’s a basement too. ”
Drak shook his head as we reached the top of the wide staircase. “No. She’s up here. I can smell it.”
I swallowed and followed him down the hallway to another bedroom where, sure enough, there was a body of a woman lying on the floor. Blood pooled out of her ears and nose, and onto the tan and sky-blue rug.
The demon had done to Delia what Omaera was involuntarily doing to Drak, Zandren, and Gemma. They’d tortured her for information until her brain hemorrhaged and she died.
“I thought mages could do mind blocks,” Drak said, crouching down to close Delia’s gray, lifeless eyes.
“We can,” I said. “But if they beat her first, which it looks like they did, she’d have been too weak to keep up the block. It takes a lot of energy to block a powerful demon trying to enter your mind. We still don’t know if she even was a mage. I don’t smell mage in the house. Then again, there are spells to block the scent.”
I pointed out the bruises on Delia’s weathered face, the cuts on her mouth and through her eyebrows. She’d definitely been beaten.
Gently, I lifted up her striped blue T-shirt to just show her abdomen and there was bruising there too. Probably internally as well. She’d have been in too much pain to maintain the block.
“What are we going to tell Omaera?” I asked.
“The truth,” he said with no inflection.
“You need to let me go,” Omaera argued with Zandren downstairs. “I need to see her.”
“Little One, it’s not a good idea,” he protested.
“Let. Me. Go.” Her feet thundered up the stairs and her wild curls bounced as she entered the room, slightly out of breath. She took one look at her aunt and her hand flew to her mouth as she gasped, her eyes going wide. “Is she?”
“She is dead,” Drak said. “I am very sorry.”
Omaera rounded on him. “You’re sorry?”
“Careful,” I said quickly. “You can’t get angry. You can’t. I know you want to. I know you probably are. But you can’t. You’re not able to control your powers or rage yet. And you could kill him.”
Her nostrils flared, and her chest rose and fell rapidly as a rush of color filled her cheeks. “Who did this to her?”
I shook my head. “All we know is that it smells like demons.”
Zandren entered the room and rested his hands on her shoulders. Instantly, she turned into him for comfort and he wrapped her up in his arms, bringing her over to sit on his lap on the bed.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t jealous as fuck, but I stowed that green monster. We had other things to deal with right now.
“I told you we needed to get to her last night. Nobody listened to me. I could feel her fear. I could feel her pain. We could have saved her.” She sobbed and shook in Zandren’s arms, and I ached to go to her too. To relieve more of her agony. To absorb some of her heartache.
Then it hit me!
I snapped my fingers, creating a neon-yellow flame. “Kase Blackwood lives here.”
“And who is Kase Blackwood?” Drak asked.
“He’s a necromancer mage.”
Drak’s gaze narrowed and his top lip curled in disdain, but then his gaze shifted to where Omaera sobbed in Zandren’s arms. He nodded. “Call him.”
I brought out my phone and called Kase. We may not be able to get the answers that we needed from Delia now, but at least we might be able to see the last things she saw right before she was killed. If I couldn’t comfort Omaera the way Zandren was, then I could at least get her some answers and help her figure out who killed her aunt.
Normally a nocturnal creature, Kase didn’t pick up his phone right away because he was sleeping. But when I told him what I needed and who it was for, he said he’d put on pants and be over in fifteen minutes.
In the meantime, we headed downstairs into Delia’s home to see what clues we could uncover. Did the demons who killed her take anything?
Zandren should have been doing his drug-dog sniffing thing, because he had the best sense of smell out of all of us, but he was too busy with Omaera. So it was up to the vampire and me to do the digging.
We found nothing nefarious beyond a few men’s-shoe-sized footprints—that didn’t match ours—at the back kitchen door.
Not even an open cupboard or drawer.
I made Omaera a cup of tea and brought it to her in the living room, where she sat with Zandren.
“Was Delia an artist?” I asked, taking in all the beautiful floral paintings.
“She was,” she said, accepting the tea. “Landscapes and florals, mostly. But occasionally she did commissions for other things. She liked to be cheeky and sneak in a vulva or penis into her flowers whenever she could.” She pointed to a purple bearded iris. “What does that remind you of?”
“Very Georgia O’Keeffe,” I mused. I turned to Zandren. “I dated her for a while actually. After her husband died, of course. I’m no homewrecker.”
Heavy boot steps on the front porch pulled our attention. We’d left the door open to help air out the house. Kase stepped inside. He was a tall, lanky man with black hair, a slightly sunken face, high cheekbones, and a long nose. But his smile was friendly, and his eyes weren’t nearly as haunting as one might assume. But like one would assume, he wore all black. Because, of course he did. Anybody associated with death the way a necromancer, or even Drak was, wore black. It was so cliché, it’d be weird if they didn’t.
I stifled my snicker at the idea of Drak or Kase rocking up in a Hawaiian print shirt one day. Or a hot-pink tank top.
Kase gave a slight bow to Omaera. “Your Majesty. My condolences.”
“Wh-what are you going to do to her?” Omaera asked.
Kase pressed his lips together and nodded. “A necromancer mage is someone who can help those still living understand the last few moments of their loved one’s life. I will simply lay my hand on your aunt’s forehead and I will capture the last few remaining minutes of her life.” His gray eyes turned hesitant. “I must warn you though, in cases like your aunt’s where . . . she didn’t die peacefully, the last few moments can be difficult to witness.”
“For you?” Omaera asked.
He smiled. “I have seen the worst humanity and the magical realm have to offer in my nine hundred and fifty-six years. Not much fazes me now. But for you, I will tell you exactly what I see, and it may be difficult to take.”
She clenched her jaw, took a deep breath, and nodded. “I want to know.”
“Very well,” Kase said. “Come with me, please.”
I took him to the body, and Omaera and Zandren followed. Drak was already upstairs, still searching for clues.
Kase frowned when he saw Delia’s body. “I know her.”
“You know my aunt?” Omaera asked, pushing past Zandren. “How?”
“Not well,” Kase said, with a headshake. “We would bump into each other maybe once or twice a month at Fiddleman’s Apothecary. She was there for various herbs and ingredients for spells and potions—”
“So she is a mage,” Omaera said in awe. Then she turned to me. “She’s one of you.”
I nodded. “It would seem so. Though, spellcaster mages are more powerful than fire mages. She probably put a very powerful cloaking spell over you when you were born, hiding you from all other realm beings—including your father. Only when he died, and the power transferred to you, Delia’s spell was no match for that power.”
Omaera’s mouth dipped into a tight frown. “I wish I’d known this about her. I wish she’d told me the truth about who she was and who I am.”
“I’m sure she had her reasons as to why she didn’t,” Zandren said softly.
Omaera turned back to Kase. “Tell me more about what you know of her. Tell me everything . . . please.”
Kase frowned, his eyes filled with regret. “As I said, I didn’t know her well, I’m afraid. We chatted from time to time just about spells she was working on. That kind of thing. I never knew her name, or her mine. But we were friendly.” His eyes turned sad even though he smiled. “A lot of people in our world don’t like necromancers. They look down on us. Even though so many use us. But Delia treated me like anybody else. She was kind.” His smile grew. “And she almost always had dried paint on her forearm or neck or something. I figured she was a painter.”
Omaera’s bottom lip wobbled. “She loves to paint. ”
Kase dropped to his knees beside Delia’s head and pulled a small, velvet pouch out of his pocket. He placed five crystals, all varying in size and color, around her head. Then from another pouch he sprinkled a weird, yellow dust into his palm, which he then placed in a heap over Delia’s heart. The last thing he did was take a small pocket knife, prick his thumb, and draw a very tiny pentagram on Delia’s bruised and bloody forehead.
He glanced up at Omaera. “You’re sure about this?”
She nodded. “I need to know what she knows. I need to know who did this to her.” Her nostrils flared and a fire I’d never seen before flickered in her moss-green eyes.
Drak entered the room and silently stepped off to the side.
Kase’s head bobbed, and he turned back to Delia. Then he placed one palm, then the other, over the pentagram on her forehead and closed his eyes.
Even though it was daytime, and sunlight poured in through the bedroom windows, the whole room went pitch black. I couldn’t see a thing in front of me.
“Do not be alarmed,” Kase said. “Stay silent.”
It was probably for the better that there was no light.
I knew necromancers, and I had no problem with them, but I’d never seen one work before. And I could only imagine that Kase was probably making some pretty spooky faces right now. Faces that would scare the shit out of Omaera.
After probably five minutes of pure silence and absolute darkness, it was like the blindfold was removed and the room reappeared. As if nothing happened.
Kase kneeled over the body and when he looked up at us, tears streamed down his face. He looked viscerally shook and his chest heaved as if he’d just sprinted up the stairs.
I went to him and helped him up, guiding him to the end of the bed. “Kase, man, what did you see?”
He swallowed and turned to Omaera. “I am so sorry.”
Her chin trembled. “What did you see?”
“The brutality,” he whispered. “She didn’t deserve that. ”
“What. Did. You. See?” Omaera asked again.
“Two men. Demons. One with dark hair and dark eyes. A long nose and big ears with hair long enough to cover the ears. He was . . . he was so cruel. And he enjoyed it.”
“And the other?” Drak asked.
“I couldn’t see his face very well. But he was blond and tall. Fit. His voice was deep and gritty. He did the kicking while the other did the punching and other beatings. They hit her at the same time with the brain frying though.”
My gut spun and anger bubbled and frothed in my stomach until flames raced up my throat.
“What did they want from her?” Omaera asked, her voice soft, almost hollow.
“To know where you were,” Kase said. Then he looked at the nightstand abruptly. “In her memory there was a photo frame there. Delia glanced at it.” His gaze shifted around more. “It’s gone.”
We all looked around the room—all of us but Omaera.
“What was the photo of?” I asked her.
Omaera’s gaze was fixed on her aunt. “Of Gemma and I at the beach last year. It’s probably the most recent printed photo Delia has of me.”
“So they know what you look like. They’re coming,” Drak said. “We need to get you into hiding.”
Omaera stood up, shaking her head. She wiped away a tear from her cheek. “I’m not hiding from anybody. They killed the only parent I’ve ever known. The only person who has ever loved me. I’m not hiding. I’m coming for them. And I’m going to kill them.”