Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Dom dropped Efrem on the floor of Evie’s plane, disgusted that the lycan had gotten captured and then couldn’t free himself.
He’d observed the scrappy blond for a long time since he was the person closest to Evie.
Sneaky like a fox, Efrem accomplished things that were sometimes surprising, but above all he remained loyal only to Evie.
It’s why Dom let him live. That, and the fact they didn’t seem to have any sexual attraction.
It shouldn’t matter. But it did.
“Can someone explain to me what just happened?” Efrem picked at the dried blood on his face where several cuts had once been.
Evie walked to the closest leather seat with the grace of a snowflake on a light breeze. She removed her jacket and crossed her legs. Her gaze slowly roamed down Dom’s body, and she nibbled on her lower lip. Her nipples pressed against the tight black shirt. Color suffused her cheeks.
Don’t look into her head. Don’t do it.
She blasted him with an image of him with his face between her legs.
Fire roared down Dom’s spine to his balls. He fought the urge to take her to his house, or even the in-between, somewhere he could show her what non-abusive sex was supposed to be like. He wanted to give her pleasure until she screamed his name so many times that she was hoarse.
He squeezed his hand around the cilice on his thigh. It didn’t help. Why the fuck do I even wear this thing?
Too many ripples in the Source.
He rubbed his right eyebrow, which didn’t ease his headache.
The pain could be from denying the magnetism between them or from the energy expense over the past hour.
He’d used too much power to hop places with others in tow.
Several jumps within a few hours could drain him for days, but he pushed himself to continue to mask his presence from Efrem.
“You truly have no idea how to free them?” she asked him.
“Free who?” Efrem held up his hands. “What happened out there?”
Dom shook his head. “It’s a type of old magic no one alive understands.”
“Who said that?” Efrem spun around.
“If no one understands it, how did it get into the hands of humans? How did they know that witch could activate it?”
“I don’t know. You need to take off right now before they close the airport.”
Dom mouthed, Goodbye.
Her thought shoved itself loudly into his head, “I want you to kiss me like you mean it one day. The more I think about it, the more I want to know what it feels like.”
He backed into the in-between realm to do one final jump. Once he landed at his place in Spain, he stumbled to the shower he’d had installed a few years ago. Cold water ran over his body for long minutes. It did nothing to quiet the heat rushing through his veins.
All he could see was Evie looking at him with wide, vulnerable eyes. I want you to kiss me like you mean it.
“I’ll never hurt you,” he said out loud. “I won’t allow anyone else to hurt you either.” If she knew the power she had over him, it’d be disastrous. His hands shook as he removed the cilice.
With it gone, dark desire cut a deep path inside him. He let it grip and torture him until its sting became too much. At that moment, he took his shaft in his hand and pumped hard until he released. Still, he wasn’t at ease.
He pounded a fist against the tiled wall.
This longing to be allowed the freedom to worship her body with everything deep in his soul was forbidden.
She would be his doom. If she was the mother of his prophesied child, they could trigger devastation and awful destruction in the world. He would never allow that to happen.
He pounded the tile again and howled.
To punish himself, he stood outside the shower and let the cold seep into his body. By then, he was dry. He replaced the cilice and cinched it tight. Tomorrow, he’d soak the links in more potion. For tonight, they’d hold.
He needed rest. He was scheduled for a shift as an emergency room doctor in Vienna in twelve hours.
He did one shift every few weeks. At the suggestion of the Fates, he’d attended medical school a few years ago and earned a legitimate degree.
The straightforward healing of injured humans helped him understand humanity and why he needed to preserve them.
Through it, he learned how to be around women and have no interest in sex.
It wasn’t hard. The only one who consumed him was Evie.
Exhausted, he fell onto his bed and into immediate, deep sleep.
Sometime later he woke to the sound of bells. He didn’t have a doorbell.
The bells continued from the front door.
How long had he been out?
After a shuffle to the front door, he yanked it open.
“Deeply sleeping, were you?” As if he were a top Korean model, Dojin wore colorful, expensive clothes with gaudy accessories like the thick silver band on his right middle finger. He shook a handheld bell again. “What were you doing to use so much energy that it knocked you out?”
“What do you want from me? Do you think I did something again? Was there another ripple in the Source that, of course, had to be my doing?” He scanned around. “I’m too tired to deal with a sneak attack by you and Marik today.”
“Just me. I’m sorry about that time long ago.
I wanted to have a meal with you back then and tell you what they wanted, but then he showed up.
” He lowered his voice. “You pissed him off something awful when the truth potion didn’t work.
He sure as shit didn’t want to see that you’d ascended to become a level three mage.
Did you do something last night that we should be concerned about? ”
“Piss off.” Dom kept his mind blank, which wasn’t hard considering he felt weak enough to pass out.
“Can I come in?” Dojin peeked past him into the dark house.
“No.” I won’t have you put some sort of monitoring device or spell in my house.
“How about we sit on your steps? I need a few moments of your time.” Dojin cocked his head. “You look like you’ll fall over if the breeze picks up.”
He pulled the door closed behind him and leaned against the side of the house.
Dojin took his place next to him, leaning on the opposite side of the wall, the doorway between them.
“You look like shit. You’re not eating enough vegetable-based protein.
If you don’t eat, you won’t recover. There’s this chef out of Japan that just put out a vegetarian cookbook I can send your way. ”
“Do I seem like someone who enjoys cooking?” Mages avoided animal-based proteins. It clogged their pathways.
“You look like someone who probably hasn’t gone shopping for food, much less eaten any, in weeks. I anticipated such and brought you some.” He waved at two cloth sacks filled with food.
His mouth watered at the thought of eating the carrot hanging out of one bag. Why would Dojin bribe him with food?
“Last time, you tried to poison me.”
“That wasn’t me.” He blew it off as if attempting to murder a fellow mage was normal. “Cooking is good for the soul. To learn the alchemy of ingredients—”
“I know how to cook. I learned the art from my master before he died. I don’t do it often because I find it tedious.”
“Would it surprise you to know I care that you not die?”
“You care about not losing your cushy job. It’s always seemed to me that the Conclave would throw a party if I was destroyed.”
“Cushy job, my ass. You’re tough to follow or understand. I’m the only one who would accept the position after you led my predecessor into a pixie-infested mountain.”
He chuckled. That mage had been way out of his depth when having to battle spirit-possessed pixies.
“They spend too much time worrying over you when they should work on sorting the magic of the world.” He crossed his arms to put his hands in his armpits.
“No one can figure out your relationship to the Fates, but the fact the three deities chose you…let’s just say they want a contingency plan for how to contain you should the prophecy come true. ”
“Maybe the Fates send me to do their errands because the other mages who could make a difference are too obsessed with bullshit.”
“Were you on an errand yesterday in Afghanistan? I gather a blood curse was cast?”
“Perhaps.” He forced his mind away from what it wanted to think about, focusing instead on the red clay and the dry earth.
“Tell me what happened.” The hardness of Dojin’s eyes said the wide smile was all show, an attempt to lure Dom into revealing secrets.
“I was sent there by Atropos to monitor the curse that was cast. I had to make sure only the ones who were supposed to be cursed got cursed.”
“You did that.”
“Yes.”
“Nothing else happened?”
“A bunch of lycans got cursed into working for the queen of England.”
“Do you think they pose a problem we need to eliminate? Doesn’t sound good to have a human in charge of a bunch of lycans.”
“They were enslaved to the queen, but there are rules to what they can do that I’m not sure the monarch anticipated. The lycans have high morals, except for the father. He’s a real piece of shit. They’re going to police paranormal creatures that have slid into insanity and threaten humans.”
“Sort of like what you do.”
“Sounds like a great excuse for me to take a vacation.”
“There was a female lycan there who works as a human contract killer.”
How would he know that? No thoughts. No thoughts. Vacant mind.
Dojin cocked his head while scouring him for emotion. “How would you react if I told you I fucked her for two nights in a row? The night of the full moon simply wasn’t enough. I took her on the bed, in the shower, and out in the moonlight.”
His jaw clenched, but he didn’t dare look away. He couldn’t reach into Dojin’s mind to sort out truth versus lie, not from any lack of skill, but a deficiency of power.
This mage better not ask him to eliminate her. His power swelled. Do your breathing. No losing control.
“She’s a handful, but she has a thing for mages. Amazing ass.”
Dojin better be bluffing.
Dom broke the stare to examine his nails. “How did you get past her bulldog?”
“Her what?” Dojin’s face scrunched up. “Oh, you mean her errand boy who follows her around like a dog?”
Gotcha. Efrem was so much more than that. He knew nothing of their relationship.
“You know what’s interesting about the ones she targets?
” Dojin crunched on a carrot while he waited for a reply, but continued when he got no response.
“She only goes after the foulest humans. Often, they’re the ones other humans can’t seem to get to.
” There was admiration behind his words.
Dojin had watched Evie. On his own? Or under orders?
“An assassin with scruples and a great ass.” He shrugged. “What does the Conclave want from me?”
“I’m just dropping off food. We want you to eat better.”
“And?”
“They want you to stop moonlighting in human hospitals as a doctor. Puts you in contact with too many women. Also, stay away from that particular lycan. And…” He held out a copper ankle bracelet. “They want you to wear this from now on.”
An actual shackle? “No.”
“They said you have to do it. They don’t trust you after you visited the same female lycan twice.”
“You dare seek to imprison me more than I already am?”
Do you have any idea what my life is like?
He released the storm of energy he’d been holding back.
The skies darkened. Lightning hit all around them.
He held out a hand and called for the bespelled sword he kept hidden in the yard.
Calling forth an object wasn’t something he was good at unless experiencing high emotion.
Like now. The sword raced across the space to land hilt-first into his hand, glowing with the power of the Ember elves from whom he’d commissioned it two centuries ago.
He flashed his teeth in the grin he gave an enemy when about to end them. “How skilled do you consider yourself?”
Dojin blanched and backed down the steps. “Now, Dom. Let’s calm down and talk about this. You made an oath to avoid any emotional connection. We fear you’re outgrowing your current regulators.”
“They fear, or you fear? If they want to put a binding band on me, all seven of those fuckers better show up instead of sending their minion. Then we can see how much they should fear me. Get off my porch, or I’ll unleash the dragon I befriended in New Guinea a few decades ago.
I’ve got him in a state of stasis where he wanted to sleep for a few centuries, but I’m sure he’d be delighted to eat you. ”
“Nope. We’re good.” Dojin ran down the steps. At the bottom he yelled up, “I’m warning you…be careful, or they’ll pick up on the special attention you give her. How far are you willing to go for that girl, Dom?”
A lot further than I already have.