Shattered Wards Page 4

  He tossed his phone at the other end of the sofa and sighed.

  “I just got called in for my first job for the Council. Thanks to my bloodline, they felt I would be a good choice to go and handle the fae politics around some theft.”

  He squeezed the bridge of his nose.

  “I’m not an ambassador, I’m a combat witch, for fuck’s sake.”

  “When do you have to leave?” I asked.

  “Now. Someone stole some feather from the fae, and my bloodline is the only one they’ll deal with. Someone from the Council will be arriving at our door in ten minutes,” Kane said.

  Gideon frowned and reached across me to touch Kane’s hand.

  “Take care,” he said.

  Kane smiled. “I’ll live.”

  Kane kissed me hard before he got up and jogged up to his room, I assumed to get dressed and pack. I stroked Gideon’s hair and tried to push aside the feeling of loneliness. I’d lived alone for years, but I’d grown used to having my three guys around. I adored Gideon, but it wasn’t the same.

  The hound nipped my throat.

  “I’ll keep you safe,” he said.

  I raised an eyebrow at him. He grinned at me, an expression full of mischief.

  “You know I can look after myself…”

  His grin only widened.

  EIGHT

  Gideon had insisted that a run would do me good, and to his credit, we did only go ten miles or so, which was very short for him. Still, I dropped onto the sofa when we got back and couldn’t move after that. Give me a fight against a rabid lycan over long-distance running any day.

  The hound had cooked us a wonderful meal. It was a simple stir-fry, but it tasted amazing. He didn’t leave my side except when I showered. It was as much for me as him. I was glad to curl up with him in bed and get some good sleep.

  I woke up when Gideon jerked to.

  “Your phone’s ringing.”

  I groaned, the temptation to ignore it strong, but it could have been Kane or Dante.

  Gideon got out of bed and ran out of the room. I heard his footsteps heading down the stairs to where I’d abandoned my phone in the kitchen. He returned a moment later, and I got a full view of his nakedness, making me blush. I didn’t need the bond to feel the amusement and pleasure he took from my reaction.

  “Hello?” I answered the phone.

  “I suggest you keep your phone closer to hand,” an unfamiliar male voice said.

  “Who is this?” I said a little too sharply.

  I really hated being dragged out of bed.

  “Councilman Daniels. You and your hound are being called in for a very important task. You will dress appropriately, and you will be here in no more than an hour,” he said, his local accent getting thicker with each word.

  “Ok,” I said, my head clearing.

  He hung up, and I dropped the phone onto the bed.

  Gideon looked at me with his eyes narrowed.

  “Does ‘dress appropriately’ mean I’m supposed to wear awful dress pants?” he asked.

  “We’re mercenaries, appropriate for us is leather and blades,” I said.

  Gideon grinned.

  “You can get the first shower, and I’ll make us coffee,” he said.

  “Not quite as strong this time,” I called after him.

  The stuff he’d made the night before was pure caffeine. I liked strong coffee, but I liked some flavour, too.

  I had a quick scalding-hot shower and pulled on my best jeans and a button-down shirt, both alchemically enhanced to act as light armour. I gathered up my daggers and boots and made my way down into the kitchen to find Gideon scowling at an omelette.

  “How do I tell when it’s done?”

  “It starts to bubble up around the edges. You pull it back and let the liquid run into the gap left there. Once you’ve run out of liquid, it’s cooked,” I said as I went to look at the omelette.

  He folded it, and it looked charred on the bottom, but mostly edible.

  I nipped his throat.

  “I appreciate it, I’ll make you one if you want to grab a quick shower,” I said.

  “I’ll remember how to tell for next time,” he said with a smile.

  I picked at the omelette and stole the last croissant to fill up with before I quickly made Gideon an omelette. He came into the kitchen in a pair of jeans and a dark grey button-down shirt that made his eyes shine. My breath caught as I looked him up and down. He could have anyone he wanted with his long lean muscles and beautifully elegant bone structure, and yet he was mine.

  He smirked at me before he stopped in front of me and ran his hands over my hips before moving them around to my ass where he pulled me tight to him. I was unused to such confidence from my quiet little hound. He kissed me, a gentle tease of his lips, before he grinned.

  “The Morrigan smiled on me when she gave me to you,” he whispered.

  Of course, we didn’t have the time to explore where his head was clearly going. He stepped back and devoured the omelette as I finished attaching my blades to my thighs and hips. Two more for my boots, just in case, and I was ready to go.

  I picked up the keys for the sleek black BMW Dante had given me and headed out the door.

  We weren’t as lucky with parking as we had been with Dante and Kane. A quick look at my phone told me we had two minutes to run through the streets to get there in time. Of course, Gideon loved that plan. He had a huge grin on his face. I told him to take the lead and off we ran, down the streets, dropping onto the edge of the road when we needed to move around large clusters of tourists. We arrived at the door of the council building mussed and slightly out of breath; well, I was, Gideon looked like he’d just strolled off a photoshoot. I tried to calm my wild hair and caught my breath before we stepped inside.

  A pair of shifters turned to face us when we walked into the room with the desk. They each stood with their strong arms crossed over broad chests. Unlike us, they were dressed in crisp suits, their silvery irises turning gold as they looked us up and down. I gave them a broad smile and thrust out my hand for them to shake. The younger shifter looked down at it with disdain.

  “You were told to dress appropriately,” the old one with flecks of grey around his temples said.

  “These clothes are alchemically enhanced to help us in a fight, and I have my blades,” I said.

  He exhaled slowly and gritted his teeth.

  “Follow us,” he growled.

  Gideon bit his bottom lip and tried to restrain a grin as we watched the shifters walk stiffly down the hallway. We followed them to a large room two doors away from the office we’d done the paperwork in.

  A puka woman and a sidhe woman were both dressed in elegant suits that had a slight shimmer in the bright sunlight streaming through the window. Like the other office, the room was far bigger than could possibly fit in the small building shown on the outside. The window looked out over a turquoise ocean with long hardy grasses crowding around the window and the short patch of land between it and the pale sandy beach. They were using heavy duty magic just to give themselves pretty views.

  “Ms. Kincaid and her hellhound,” the old shifter introduced us to the puka and the sidhe.

  The puka smiled politely at us. “Good morning. You’ll do just fine.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Is that really all you have?” the sidhe woman asked the younger shifter.

  “The hellhound will allow for tracking,” the younger shifter said.

  I bit my tongue and held back the snarky comment that was bubbling up.

  “The hellhound has a name and is a person,” Gideon said with a sickly-sweet smile.

  The sidhe looked at him like he was a lump of rotting meat, her lip curled and her eyes narrowed.

  “You are being hired for a very important job. Dante Caspari will join you when he is able,” the older shifter said.

  I fought against the desire to shift my weight. An important job meant more eyes on us, whi
ch made keeping my magic secret even more difficult.

  “A ward stone has gone missing,” the puka said.

  The world paused. I must have misheard her. The ward stones were what held up the veils between the Earth plane and the other planes. They were untouchable, permanent. They were as much as fact of reality as gravity.

  “How?” I asked, it came out as barely more than a whisper.

  “That’s for you and your hound to determine,” the sidhe said sharply.

  Oh, fuck no. That was too big a job. I was a hack and slash girl, this was something that could rock the entire world.

  Gideon wound his fingers through mine.

  “The stone was taken last night. The area is entirely devoid of magic, and the veil in that area is weaker, which will allow beings that are normally held in their own plane to slip through. You are being hired to find the stone and return it to its rightful place. I have been assured that Mr. Caspari has the knowledge and talent to do the latter. You are not to mention this to anyone. No one can know a stone has been taken,” the sidhe said.

  “People are going to notice the veil is weaker…” I said.

  “We will restrict the flow of that knowledge,” the puka said.

  The younger shifter handed me a map and a sketch.

  “That is where the stone was taken from, the boundaries of territories it sat on the nexus of, and who owns those territories,” he said.

  I looked at it, seeing that the stone had sat in the middle of five adjoining territories: three fae, one shifter, one witch. Those politics were going to be a nightmare.

  “Well, go on then,” the sidhe said.

  “Is there anything else you need?” the puka asked.

  “The magical scent or thread of the stone,” Gideon said.

  “That is impossible. You will have to find it at the site,” the older shifter said.

  Fantastic, just fucking fantastic. I cursed the Morrigan under my breath. She was no doubt involved in this little clusterfuck.

  NINE

  We missed the turning for the road that led to the location of the stone twice. It was a single-lane road with old pine forest on one side and bare scrub land on the other where the forest had been harvested. A feeling of heaviness started to weigh on me as we made our way down the road. The sensation that something very bad was coming slowly encased me. Gideon put his hand on my knee, and I realised I’d gradually been slowing down as the feeling became suffocating. I pressed the accelerator and tried to pull myself out of it. The turn to the actual stone location was a sandy track off the road. I drove just off the road and pulled to the side so anyone could pass me if they needed to, although given we hadn’t seen another car in twenty minutes or more it seemed unlikely.

  Gideon paused and pricked his ears when we got out of the car.

  “We’re close,” he said.

  I could feel it, too, a wrongness that simultaneously called to me and pushed me away. The magic in my veins felt more alive, and I struggled to push it down inside. There was no reason to risk having it within easy access, and I didn’t want to get into that habit. Gideon and I headed off the sandy track into the tall lean pine forest, which was dark and grey. The ground was bare save for old pine needles. I kept listening for the usual sounds of life and heard nothing, not so much as a chittering squirrel.

  As we progressed deeper into the forest, the air temperature dropped, and I rubbed my arms, trying to warm up. Then we were there. A small indent in the earth stood stark in the sliver of sunlight that had come through the trees. The stone had been there. It seemed to strange that something as important as a ward stone was simply lying on the earth. Of course, there would have been obscene amounts of magic surrounding it, but now there was nothing.

  Gideon crouched down and ran his fingers over the indent while I looked around for something that could constitute a clue. I understood why they’d chosen Dante for this, and Gideon, but I was entirely lost. Maybe if I knew more about my damn blood magic I could put that to good use, but I didn’t know how to do anything with it that might relate to finding lost things. All I knew was some basic healing and killing beings. I sighed and continued to walk a slow circle around the area, looking for a footstep or maybe a nice note saying who took the stone.

  “They’ve wiped nearly all of the magic from the area. I can’t get a trace on any being, but I do have a thread on the stone,” Gideon said.

  “You can find it?” I said with a bit more glee than was absolutely necessary.

  He grinned at me. “You drive; it’s not close.”

  We jogged back to the car. Gideon put his window down and began directing me down the road the opposite way we’d come. Maybe we were really going to pull this off. It would be a huge deal if we did. The veils were essential; the Earth plane wasn’t ready or able to handle the other beings that were held back by the veils. I didn’t want to be in a world where infernal beings walked the streets free to maim and murder as they saw fit - or the meaner fae, for that matter. Add in the increase in magic witches would receive, and the non-magical humans would wage an all-out nuclear war. To call it mayhem would be the understatement of the century.

  Gideon wasn’t great at giving directions in a timely manner.

  “Right!” he called out, just as we passed the turning on the right.

  “Left, we need to go left!” he said when we were surrounded by mature forests with no way to get the BMW left.

  We flew down the smaller roads with a blur of dark green and black boughs on either side of us. There were a few times when I had to throw the car in reverse and shoot back down the road to take a road that we’d missed. Then there were the times the road we’d been heading down came around in a full circle or stopped dead with nothing but trees and a few large stones near us.

  Gideon growled in frustration.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said to me softly.

  I knew he wasn’t growling at me, but being stuck on the roads instead of running free was making this far more difficult.

  We pulled into a small country petrol station and refilled the petrol tank. Gideon went inside and bought an armful of crisps, chocolate, and premade sandwiches.

  I picked at what I could while I continued to drive. We hit the larger roads and went north along the coast line for a bit. The views over the grey ocean were soothing. I never felt quite as at ease as I did when I was near the ocean.

  Gideon growled, “I’m losing the thread.”

  “Do I need to slow down, or…?”

  “No, something’s damaging it, or trying to cover it up.”

  That sounded like someone with a lot of magic knew exactly what they were doing.

  “What can I do?”

  “Keep going north, it’s definitely north, I’m just not sure how far north,” he said.

  The dark grey clouds were gathering on the horizon, and the air temperature dropped. Having the window open while driving just over the speed limit down a main road was making me shiver. Gideon took pity on me and closed the window before he tore into another chocolate and glared out the windshield.

  “The thread is being contaminated. I can’t feel it well enough to understand or feel who is damaging it. I hate losing,” he said.

  “It’ll be easier once we get closer, right?” I said.

  He smiled. “Yes. Although, we’re going to have to find somewhere to stay tonight; we can’t return home. I’ll lose the thread.”

  The Council hadn’t been kind enough to give me an expense card this time, although they’d given it to Dante last time.

  I was growing more tired as the drive went on. I had to slow down a little as the weariness washed over me. Rushing around the countryside was more tiring than people give it credit for.

  “Do you want me to drive?” Gideon asked.

  “Can you drive?”

  “I’ve watched you, Kane, and Dante,” he said with a big grin.

  “I’ll drive,” I said with a laugh.

&n
bsp; He closed his eyes and relaxed some with his hand on my knee. He looked so calm and peaceful.

  “We know they have a lot of magic. They weren’t infernal, as they can’t hide the trail they leave, and shifters and lycans don’t have magic of that level. Nor do made or part-breds, so it was witches or fae. I’m sure it was more than one; the magic required to wipe the area clean like that is too much for one person. We also need to move fast and repair the veil. The Council cannot keep something like that hidden,” Gideon said.

  “Well, that narrows it down a bit,” I said.

  “Every magical being has a unique signature, so if we can access those signatures, we’ll have them,” he said with a smile.

  “You make it sound so easy.”

  He shrugged.

  “Your signature feels like sunshine on a warm spring day and tastes like raspberry and copper,” he said with a gentle smile that lit up his eyes.

  I ran my fingers over the back of his hand and tried to stay focused on the road ahead of me.

  “Kane smells of fresh heather and tastes like caramel, whereas Dante’s scent was hot metal and chocolate, and smells like fresh lilac,” he said reverently.

  I wished I could experience that world. It sounded beautiful.

  “I’m grateful for my pack,” he said quietly.

  “And we’re proud to have you,” I said.

  TEN

  We made our way into a quaint little town at the end of the main road. It was made up of tall cream stone houses with small white windows and neat little gardens. The roads were relatively quiet, and the air was thick with salt water. It was the perfect place to stay for the night, I just had to find somewhere. We drove past some old-fashioned shops, one complete with a bright orange and sky-blue facade. It stood tall and proud next to a small cream building that proclaimed fresh locally made ice cream. Ice cream sounded like exactly what I needed, and I remembered the gelato place in Dubrovnik where Dante had opened up to me. I desperately hoped he was ok in the infernal realm.

  We approached the harbour, and I saw a sign for a B&B; even better, it had a parking spot nearby. I took it as a sign and got out of the car, glad to stretch my legs. Gideon put his arm around my waist as I led him over to the rose stone B&B. It was a simple sturdy building, but it had stunning views over the harbour, and I wouldn’t have to find breakfast in the morning.