Chapter 8
“Holy shit! You nearly sideswiped that Mercedes!” Luke closed his eyes. “I know time is of the essence, but we have to get there in one piece!”
“We’ll be fine.” Clint changed lanes. In the middle of the night, Chicago wasn’t a particularly busy city.
Some neighborhoods were livelier than others, but the night was cold and discouraging for partying.
Bars weren’t emptying onto the streets; no festivals or celebrations brought out more people than usual.
It wasn’t even a weekend. Clint had clear roads to work with.
I have to get there before Oz leaves for the ritual.
Clint clenched his hands on his steering wheel.
What if all of this is futile? Sloane always joked that Oz was too lazy to be a genius.
What if he put his intelligence to work? What if he’s outwitted me already?
Of all of Clint’s treasures, Oz must have picked Valgaruz’s prison for a reason.
Too many loose threads had been involved in putting Valgaruz away.
Those that had been in his cult had closed ranks.
While Clint knew of about two dozen members, they’d refused to name who else had been in league with the demon.
They’d claimed the trouble had passed with Valgaruz’s disappearance, that he’d used a supernatural influence to overwhelm them into doing his bidding.
Clint hadn’t bought that excuse, but short of becoming the kind of monster he’d just stopped, he couldn’t force them to tell him the truth.
He couldn’t turn them in to any sort of authority either.
Other than the Greater Circle of the Unyielding, the mage circles saw communion with a demon as just another way to seek power in a world that was constantly losing its magic.
And there were those outside of the mages’ circles.
Warlocks weren’t regulated at all; they had no unified authority over them.
Other supernaturals—the fey, shifters, and vampires—belonged to covens, courts, or packs that would take aggressive action on their members as an act of war.
The other maguses of Clint’s circle had determined that informing the leadership of those groups was all they could do.
So Oz could have very well been a member of the cult.
But the only one who could have told him so many details of Clint’s home was Sloane, and Sloane had been gone for years. Why did he wait so long? If this demon was so important to him, why didn’t he convince Sloane to help him?
“Oh my fucking God,” Luke whined. “That was two red lights you just ran. In a row.”
“Do you want to drive?” Clint demanded.
“I don’t know how, or I would.” Luke sunk in his seat and put his hands over his eyes.
“I didn’t take you for one of those vampires who got behind on technology.”
“For the record, cars have been around since before I became a vampire.” Luke clutched his armrest hard enough that little indents of his nails cut into the leather. He still had his eyes closed, and he had his head tilted back. “They wig me out. Never been fond of them.”
“Never?” Clint asked.
“Never!” Luke squealed. “And you are not helping with the dislike! I can still get beheaded or staked through the heart if we get in a wreck!”
While Luke was bordering on adorable, being the cause of his fear was burrowing under Clint’s skin.
Fun ways of bringing out someone’s fear were possible, but this wasn’t the way.
Clint could give Luke a long description of all the magic infused into the car that would prevent accidents, but what if the magic had been tampered with?
I didn’t have time to go all over all the wards.
I was in a hurry after securing the tower, and I did a rush job on that, too.
As much as he hated to, Clint eased off the gas. He was still above the speed limit, but only by a threshold of five miles rather than twenty.
But taking longer would only leave Clint’s mind spinning about the possible dangers they would run into. He needed somewhere else to put his focus.
“Why don’t you like cars?” Clint asked.
“They make my skin crawl,” Luke replied. He took his hand off his left eye and glanced at the speedometer. “You slowed up?”
“You were screaming at me. I thought I might listen.”
“Good.” Luke sighed with relief and dropped his hands to his lap.
“This skin crawling—is that a literal thing or a figurative?” Clint said.
Luke raised an eyebrow. “Why do you want to know?”
“Because I need to think about something other than the scheming prick who has apparently been planning to rob me for years.”
“If you’re going to ask me questions, do I get to ask them back?”
“Sure,” Clint replied.
“Okay. The skin-crawling feeling is more literal. I used to rub my arms to the point it annoyed others.”
“You’re not doing that now.”
“Broke the habit in the ’80s,” Luke said.
The more pieces Clint learned about Luke, the clearer the picture was becoming. But how had he come to be? He may still be the most unique magical mystery I’ve come across in ages.
“My turn.” Luke rotated in his seat so that he was facing Clint. “How the fuck did Price come back to life? He was dead, but you didn’t seem surprised when he popped up.”
A cold, sparkling scratching scraped Clint’s mental walls. The sensation was like opening a card and dumping glitter all over his lap and being unable to knock it all off. “You’re trying to get at my emotions. Looking to manipulate me?”
“I want to know if you lie to me.”
The scratching couldn’t breach Clint’s defenses. At least, it couldn’t anytime soon. Maybe if Luke had a week, he might finally get through or wear Clint out. “You waited until now to try that?”
“Didn’t need to before.” Luke huffed and sagged against his seat. “I’m not going to be able to read you, am I?”
“You won’t.” Clint came to a full stop at the red light rather than blow through the intersection like he’d done a handful of others since they’d gotten back in the car. “Takes me more than a couple of hours to drop my guard.”
“Noted. Now, answer my damn question. It had something to do with his ring, right?”
“He had a resurrection spell stored in the pearl,” Clint said. “I’m assuming he had it coupled with a delay, which is a clever piece of work. You don’t want to pop back to life when your killers are still in the room.”
“How did you know he had it?” Luke asked.
“I saw the ring. I’m familiar with the make of it.”
“But you don’t wear one.”
“I don’t need it.” Clint rolled his shoulders back.
He was carrying more tension there than he’d realized, so he did it once more.
He needed to stay loose for whenever he reached the impending battle looming in their future.
Because Oz will not give up easily if he’s gone to this much effort.
“You knew all the magic inside the brothel was old. How?”
“It doesn’t sizzle like live magic,” Luke replied.
“Sizzle?”
“Zing. Buzz. Vibrate. Magic that’s done and over with rumbles at a lower frequency until it fades out in the world. If we’d gotten there a day later, then I likely wouldn’t have felt anything.” Luke frowned. “You’re a magus. Can’t you detect magic?”
“Not as explicitly as you, apparently,” Clint said.
“I can sense the presence in general, but I would need a spell to determine its age. If I hadn’t been worried, I might have been able to discern that the level it was at meant that it was recently cast rather than ongoing, but it would have taken concentration. ”
“You were worried?”
“You ran past a dead body like the damn Road Runner, and I had no idea what was inside the place. I didn’t want you to come to harm.”
Luke grinned widely. “You worried about me.”
Clint opened his mouth to say that he would have worried about anyone in their situation, but in the corner of his eye, he caught the joy in Luke’s green eyes.
He was handsome, on the verge of being unbearably cute.
“Well,” he drawled, “you did jump a warlock and take a jet of flame to the face for me, and you have promised to help me. A little worry is only natural for an ally.”
Luke poked Clint’s side, nearly hitting a tickle spot. “You worried about me!”
“Yes.”
Luke settled in his seat. His mirth calmed to thoughtfulness. “Why don’t you need a resurrection ring like Price had?”
“That is a secret you haven’t earned,” Clint replied.
“You’re asking me probing questions. You can’t answer mine?”
“I wasn’t the one who broke into my house to steal valuable artifacts.”
Luke laid his head against the seat. “I’ve already admitted why I was desperate enough to try, and we’re allies now. How long are you going to hold on to that?”
“I’m entitled to at least one night. Ask me again at dusk tomorrow.”
“For that to happen, I’d have to talk to you tomorrow night,” Luke said, his grin returning. “Magus Ravenwing, I’m getting the impression that you like me.”
Clint shifted uneasily in his seat. He couldn’t deny that Luke had a point.
Despite how they met, Luke interested him.
He wasn’t just easy on the eyes—though, like many vampires, he was—he was a spark in the dark, and Clint had been fumbling through caverns of grief and self-loathing for years.
He’d walled himself away, and Luke had somehow managed to slip through the cracks and offer a way out.
The only question was if Luke was another false flash, another illusion of potential happiness instead of a worthy partner.
Sloane hadn’t been the first to betray Clint’s heart.
After living for nearly two hundred years, he had a list as long as his arm in six-point font of former lovers, friends, and family who had broken his trust. Sloane was only the most recent and most devastating.
Because he used me to further his own ambitions.
Clint took a deep breath in an attempt to steady his mind.
Luke doesn’t want to unleash evil upon the earth.
He’s trying to survive any way he can. And in this fucked-up world, sometimes that means becoming a thief.
Sometimes that means lying until you believe it yourself.
Sometimes it means not coming out of your tower for weeks at a time.
But surviving … was that all Clint wanted? When Bastian had called, Clint had immediately picked up the phone because he hadn’t talked to anyone in weeks. He’d wanted companionship. Just a little. He thought that was enough.
And having Luke at his side felt good. Clearly, there was more to Luke than even the vampire himself knew, but that added to his allure.
A good-looking, magical, mysterious vampire twink with a little bit of sass and a whole lot of heart?
If Clint pushed aside all the danger they currently faced, he wanted to snatch up Luke faster than pixies would devour a bag of chocolate-covered marshmallows.
Luke rotated in his seat to face front. His joy had faded completely away. “I apologize if I’ve misunderstood.”
“You haven’t,” Clint managed to say past the knot in his throat. He dared to slide his gaze from the road for a second to catch Luke’s. “We have to focus. But after … I want to talk about after when we reach it. Not before. All right?”
“I guess I can’t fault that,” Luke said smoothly.
A little too smoothly. He was putting up a calm front, hiding his hurt. Clint was sure of that.
But he didn’t have time to nurse Luke’s bruised ego. He double-parked, threw on his blinkers, and gruffly said, “We’re here.”