Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Tinker Bell
The sun was going down over New Orleans. Cool air came off the river and I shivered. Should have worn a jacket. Red T-shirt, black jeans, and too much of a hurry to think about it.
Somewhere down the block a horn was working through a Christmas song, slow, the way they play it here. It made me smile. I love this time of year. People are a little nicer, and so are the supernaturals.
Then I looked up at St. Christopher’s and stopped smiling.
My mouth went dry. Then my magic pulled back, the whole of it, retreating into my chest and sitting there like something that had heard a noise in the dark. My feet wanted to go the other direction. I made them hold.
It had been a beautiful building once. Twin towers, a rose window over the doors, and every pane in it lit up on a Sunday morning. Now the towers were open to the sky and the window was a black hole with the lead still in it, bent and empty, holding nothing.
Katrina had taken most of the roof. What moved in afterward took the rest.
Angelo Santi had called me that morning. Peter Pan was out of the Hollows. Angelo was obsessed with protecting his daughter. I understood that. I would be too if I had a powerful daughter. Pan was a threat to everyone’s daughter young and old alike.
He’d caused a riot in the Hollows a couple of months ago.
Along with Keir Rankin and Brynn Whitveil, I helped put him back in his cell.
My spell was part of what held the door, and I’d slept better knowing it.
Only black magic could have broken it — real black magic that would cost a witch something she would never get back.
Nothing from a book. The magic you let in. It roots, and it grows, and then there’s no telling where you stop and it starts. Something I had seen too many times and it never ends well.
A witch named Wendy Darling had done it. Come up out of the Elder Dimension and spent whatever it took to let him out.
My hands went cold and my magic drew back into my chest, the way it does when it already knows. Wendy and I would meet. My premonitions are never wrong.
I’d stood across from a witch like her before—Marsha Cadieux, out at the old Saint Louis Cathedral in Lumina Glade. Marsha didn’t want to be saved. That was the whole of it. Nothing I had could reach a woman who’d already agreed. I did what had to be done. I still see her face. It haunted me.
Gooseflesh broke out on my arm. I didn’t know one thing about Wendy Darling except that she’d opened a door for Peter Pan, and there’s no telling from the outside whether a woman like that is being held or being obliged.
That’s how these end. Somebody stands across from her, and somebody doesn’t walk away, and I’ve been given the job twice now.
I wanted to know what he’d promised her. I wanted to know what she’d paid. And underneath that, in a place I don’t say out loud, I wanted to get my hands on her — because my work had held and one woman had undone it, and she’d let that thing walk free to do it.
I rubbed my arms that were covered with goosebumps and entered St. Christopher’s Church.
My boots crunched on the rubble. Broken glass, busted wood, plaster gone soft and gray.
Reds and blues underfoot, and one shade of green that had been a saint’s robe.
All of it filthy. All of it sharp. The shard of the Christmas Star was here somewhere.
Over a hundred years ago a priest had carried it out of Bethlehem and had a glazier set it into a stained glass window.
The altar was gone. Somebody had taken it apart and stacked the pieces, and what they’d painted across the wall behind it was still legible after twenty years. Candle wax in the corners. Small bones in a ring on the floor, picked clean, arranged by somebody with time.
Whatever they’d called down, it had come. And it had stayed long enough to want the windows.
Nothing. Not by looking. Or digging.
Time was of the essence. Doing this manually wasn’t happening.
I closed my eyes and held out my palms.
Stella lucis, ostende te. Star of light, show yourself.
My heart quickened. The tips of my fingers tingled and the hair on my arms stood up.
The air turned colder and I shivered. Something was fighting me.
Darkness was pushing back, not wanting me to find the shard.
But I pushed harder and my nose started to bleed.
My palms shook. Power moved through me like a pulling thread.
I stood and opened my eyes and let the power lead me through the debris. I was drawn to the far dark corner where there were bricks piled together into what looked like a pyramid.
My magic recoiled so hard it hurt, and my mouth went dry.
Don’t get sick. Don’t get sick. Don’t get sick.
Those bricks weren’t there by accident. Someone or something had stacked those bricks. I didn’t want to touch them, but something was being hidden. I grabbed a brick. A shock shot through me and I gasped. My throat burned as my dinner of étouffée threatened to make a second appearance.
Footsteps in the rubble behind me. The hair on my neck rose and I turned with my hands already up.
Caspian Hook, leaning against what was left of the doorframe. Shirtless, jeans, black boots, and a look on him that said he’d been standing there a while.
I lowered my hands. Not all the way.
“Hello, Tinker Bell.” He smiled. I’d seen that handsome smile take witches apart who should have known better than to lose their heart to him. “Angelo Santi sends his greetings.”
“Of course he does.”
He bowed slightly. “He sent me to protect you.”
Something went tight and hot under my sternum. I’d pulled Angelo Santi out of two messes he couldn’t magic his way out of, and he’d never once sent a man to hold my hand while I worked. He’d asked me for help. I had never asked him for any.
I crossed my arms. “Protection. I don’t need a playboy vampire to protect me.”
“Ouch.” He put his hand over his heart. “You don’t approve of me.” He sounded hurt, but it was a ploy—he wanted me to say I approved of him. His way of luring me in. I wasn’t falling for it.
“I’ve seen the line of broken hearts you’ve left. You go through women like water. Never looking back after you’ve had them.”
“I see my reputation precedes me.” He cast an appreciative eye over me. His gaze locked with mine. “Maybe I haven’t met the right woman.”
“Puh-lease.” I made myself hold his eyes. “That’s such a charmer line.”
He stepped closer. Close enough that I got his breath—something spicy, warm—and my stomach dropped and my whole arm came up in gooseflesh where he hadn’t even touched me yet.
Then he did. He ran his palm down my arm. “Charmer, am I?”
Don’t move. Don’t you dare move.
“No, you’re not. Not even a little.”
He dropped his hand and I could still feel where it had been.
He pushed a loose strand of hair behind my ear and I leaned into his hand before I knew I was doing it. Half an inch. Enough. “How disappointing. But you are. Ever since I’ve met you—”
Liar. I rolled my eyes. “You couldn’t stop thinking about me?”
“It’s true. You’re exceptional.”
“An exceptional witch. That’s why Angelo contacted me. So, if you don’t mind—” I put my hand on his chest, his heart thumping beneath my palm. But I don’t know whose was beating louder—his or mine. I brushed past him. “I have to deal with magic—not blood.”
He clasped my hand and kissed my wrist. “Are you so sure?”
More tingles rushed through me, but I yanked my hand away. I wasn’t going to play his game. I refused to get hurt again. “Positive.”
“You seemed to have a reaction to that pile of bricks.”
He noticed too much. Something that made me uneasy. I preferred to go unnoticed.
I bristled then flicked my hand. “The bricks radiate black magic. Anyone would have a reaction to that.”
“Sure.” He came a few steps closer, looking past me at the corner instead of at me. “Somebody stacked them. Somebody who wanted them stacked. That’s not a thing you do to bricks unless there’s something under them worth the trouble.” He tipped his head. “Something you came here for, maybe.”
I headed back toward the bricks. Even if I puked my guts out, I was tearing them down. “You don’t know what you’re looking at.”
He caught my arm. “I’ve been around dark objects—”
Heat spread from where his hand closed again. Not magic. Something else, and I had no room for it. You only got hurt with love.
I pulled free. “Yes. I know. Smuggler for Angelo.”
He shrugged. “It’s a living.”
So nonchalant. Didn’t he know what that could do to a person? I gritted my teeth and reached for another brick. The dark magic rolled over me again and my étouffée made another run at freedom.
“Allow me.” Caspian brushed past me and pulled the bricks down one by one. They cracked against the floor and the dust came up gray.
He didn’t hesitate. Not once, not even a flinch, and he was handling the same black magic that had me swallowing bile three feet away.
Either he’d done this so many times it didn’t register, or vampires don’t feel it. Neither one made me like him better.
Except I did like him. That was the trouble, and I’d been walking around it since the second I spotted him leaning against the doorway. I liked him and I wasn’t about to let him find out, because a man like that gets one inch and takes the whole road.
A light peeked through the plaster where somebody had tried to bury it. But not the dark magic, not the bricks, not even the plaster could hide it. The shard.
My breath went out of me and adrenaline coursed through my veins. My hands shook. It was here. Really here.
I was right. About the church, about the bricks, about all of it.
Don’t smile. Don’t you dare smile.
Caspian was watching me. The corner of his mouth had gone up and it stayed there. I had no idea what my face had already done.
I snatched the shard out of the pile of bricks. Power surged through me and I shook. Pain burned through my palm. I cried out, but held on anyway, clutching it tighter.
“What happened?” Caspian carefully touched my wrist.
Something pumped through me. Stars floated around my eyes.
That wasn't my magic. I've known my own since I was a girl and this wasn't it — it came in through my palm and went up my arm and kept going, and it didn't ask.
I shook my head. I wasn’t sure what happened and wasn’t going to tell him anything. Not until I knew what it was.
But the burning intensified and I dropped the shard. Blisters had formed on my hand in the shape of a star.
Not a burn. Burns don't have edges like that. Five points, even, right in the meat of my palm, and I've put enough sigils on enough surfaces to know a mark when I'm looking at one.
Something had signed me.
“It’s nothing.” I pulled away from him. That’s twice his touch had ignited a response I didn’t want to acknowledge. He must have that effect on women. I didn’t want to be one of those women who succumbed to his touch.
He looked at me. Not at my face. At my hand, at the shard, at the smoke coming off my palm, and something moved behind his eyes that had nothing to do with the shard at all.
“You’re hurt,” he said as if he cared.
“I’m fine.” Not true. The pain intensified as if I had refused to pull my hand away from a burning stove.
The shard glowed on the dirty floor like a fallen star.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
No container. I’d come all this way and never once thought about what I’d carry it in.
Beads of sweat trickled down my temples. My body turned hot as if the shard was turning up the temperature inside me. I bent down to pick it up.
“Wait.” He tore a strip off his pant leg and grabbed the shard. “It’s burning you. Let me carry it for a while.”
“I told you I’m fine. I need the shard.” My flesh continued to sizzle and nausea sloshed inside my gut.
He looked at my hand and his mouth flattened, and for a second he wasn’t the man who’d been leaning in that doorway.
Interesting. I had always thought that Caspian was selfish and uncaring—a total narcissist, but he had ripped a pair of his pants to stop me from being in pain. Not something I’d ever suspect Caspian Hook of doing.
Something that made me like him a little more. Something that scared me.