Storm Kissed n-6 Read online

  Surging against the cuffs and ropes, Dez shouted, “Pasaj och!”

  Thunder cracked and a fat bolt of lightning dead-eyed the warehouse, sparking the old wires and haloing the steel girders with foxfire. Then the sizzle was inside him, radiating from the carving to his head and heart and back again. He was dimly aware of the bonds melting off his ankles and the metal handcuffs arcing with blue-white flame. Then pain lashed, flesh burned, and the shackles sprang open. They hit the floor with a metallic clatter. And he was free!

  He lunged to his feet, roaring Reese’s name.

  Keban spun, eyes widening.

  “Wait,” said the winikin—because that was what he was, a winikin. It was all true, Dez suddenly realized as the lightning—the fucking magic—raced in his blood. Every last godsdamned story was true. He was a Nightkeeper. The last in an ancient line of magic users.

  Keban had finally made him into a mage . . . And he’d used Reese to do it. Blood sacrifice. Nearby, she lay far too still, her body a dark blur in the shadows.

  “No!” Pain and rage lashed through Dez, calling to something inside him, something that fed on the greed and hatred and then suddenly ignited. Power soared inside him, pressed on him, begged to be set free.

  Going on instinct, he pointed at the winikin, stiff fingered. The power surged, a vicious crackle split the air, and a bolt of blue-white lightning shot from his outstretched fingers. It nailed Keban in the chest, blasting him back.

  The winikin screamed and landed writhing, wreathed in sparks of blue-white electricity. His body arched; his hands and feet beat at the warehouse floor, and came away bloody.

  Magic flowed through Dez. He gloried in it, heart racing. He was a mage, like Keban had always said. He could do anything, be anything, become—

  Then, like someone had thrown a switch, the energy cut out, the crackle went silent, and his body shifted from fever hot to deathly cold in an instant. He sagged as fatigue hit him hard and he became, once again, just himself.

  What. The. Fuck?

  Weeping raggedly, Keban dragged himself to his feet and staggered for the door without a backward look, cackling a high, lunatic laugh.

  “Son of a bitch!” Yanking himself out of the last dregs of magic, Dez jammed the statuette into his pocket, lunged for the fallen .44, and came up to his knees firing. The shots pinged off steel, the noise disappearing beneath a crack of thunder as Keban vanished into the storm. On one level, Dez knew he should chase the bastard, finish him off. But on another, more visceral level, he had a different priority.

  “Reese!” He scrambled to his feet, bolted across the warehouse and dropped to his knees beside her. Ignoring everything he’d ever learned about first aid, he dragged her up off the floor and into his arms, cursing when her guns dug into him, feeling somehow more substantial than she did. Her body was limp and heavy. Deadweight that smelled of blood. “Godsdamn it, Reese!”

  She stirred, then squinted at him through pain-blurred eyes. “Jesus, don’t yell. My head’s killing me.”

  He shuddered, groaning her name and holding on to her for a long moment while his heart hammered in his ears. Then he tried to pull himself together, easing away far enough to check for injuries with shaking hands. He was bleeding from his shoulder and his wrists howled where the cuffs had burned him, but she was hurt worse. She had a raised knot on her head that matched her blown pupils, and a through-and-through in her upper arm, the wound wide and angry and weeping blood.

  She’d live. But they had gotten lucky.

  “He’s gone. I’ve got you. You’re okay. We’re okay.” He said it over and over, not really sure he believed it until he stuck his hand in his pocket and touched the statuette. And for a second he felt a trickle of the power—the magic—he’d tapped into before. He sure as hell hadn’t imagined the way his cuffs had come off, or the way he’d blown Keban off his feet. A guy who could do stuff like that could do anything.

  Pressing his cheek to her temple, careful of the sore spots, he tightened his fingers around the statuette, as he said, “I’m sorry about what I said before. I didn’t mean it—I love you. I need you. We’ll make it work.”

  But suddenly he wasn’t so sure about that, either. Because if the magic was real, then the other stuff was real, too . . . and what the hell was he going to do about that?

  CHAPTER TWO

  Present day

  Cancún, Mexico

  December 5; one year and sixteen days to the zero

  date

  Reese had long thought that themed wedding hotels were tacky as hell, but she was pretty sure this one took the freaking multitiered, pink-frosted cake.

  In case the velvet sombreros and striped serapes plastered on every available surface of the hotel lobby were too subtle, the decorators—and she used the term lightly—had lined the halls with a series of cringe-inducing tropical signs directing her to the wedding chapel. And when she got there, she found the entryway decorated with what she suspected was meant to look like an ancient Mayan temple, but came across as papier-mâché gone horribly wrong.

  Inside the chapel, a faux stone archway took the place of the usual flower-and-lattice bower, the aisle was lined with fake palm fronds, the rank-and-file chairs were wearing parrot-hued slipcovers, and the roll-away screen behind the main stage was painted with an art student’s version of Chichén Itzá in its heyday, with the city intact, the ruins unruined, and cartoonish pre-Columbian natives thronging in the foreground, staring at the papier-mâché archway with creepy, goggle-eyed intensity.

  Thank Christ the room was empty. It was bad enough she was semi-crashing. Be worse if she walked in and started laughing her ass off during the I-dos.

  This so wasn’t what she had been expecting. But then again, the expectations were her own fault: The moment she opened the FedEx to find a plane ticket to Mexico and a request for her to come talk about a job, her brain had gone straight to a tropical fantasyland, complete with umbrellaed drinks and bare-chested bartenders, far from Denver′s drab gray winter.

  Hell, it was probably just a run-of-the-mill deal for aging parents who had lost track of a kid and were feeling guilty in the middle of the sib’s wedding prep. Typical locator gig.

  But those cases still paid better—and were way safer—than her old job.

  Tracking a low drone of voices that said “the party’s over here,” she crunched across the fake palm fronds to where an open doorway led to the reception area. Looking for a little advance intel—run-of-the-mill job or not, it was pretty extreme to fly her across the border just for a meet-and-greet—she tucked herself into the shadows and peered through to where a couple of dozen bodies thronged an open-air dining area.

  Then she exhaled in surprise and eased back further into the shadows. Because whatever these guys were, it wasn’t run-of-the-mill.

  The twenty or so people, an even mix of men and women, were knotted together on one side of the room, the men in decent suits, the women in an eclectic mix of high-end, with no rent-a-tux’d groom or Barbie-doll bride in evidence. They were all wearing long sleeves, which was weird; it might be shitty with early December back home, but it was still pretty damn tropical down in the Yucatan.

  Going into the figure-it-out-fast survival mode that used to be her only option, she scanned the room. Six of the wedding guests—three men, three women—were small and compact, their gestures quick, their eyes always on the move. Four of the six were in their sixties or so and hung together like family or old friends, while the remaining two were younger and new-coupleish: a military type in his early forties holding hands with a thirtyish cutie who had dark hair and laughing eyes. Overall, aside from a strange air of uniformity, those guys weren’t too far off ordinary.

  The rest of them, though . . . Whoa. Way not ordinary. Most in their late twenties, early thirties, they were uniformly huge—in height and muscle, with zero flab—gorgeous, and somehow glossy, like the overhead lights bounced off them differently from the others. More, they all
held themselves at the ready, their body language saying they knew how to fight and would do it at a split second’s notice.

  There were a few exceptions: Two of the women, one blond, one dark, were closer to average size, while a third—coppery dark hair, maybe a few years older than the others—sat at a table, staring vacantly, with a funny half smile on her lips. Beside her sat one of the men; he was huge and muscled like the others, but had his left leg strapped into a high-tech brace and propped on a chair. A pair of crutches leaned on the wall behind him.

  None of those details changed the overall impression of deadly competence, though. Not one iota.

  Reese’s instincts checked in, making sure she was aware that she might, in fact, be an idiot. Suddenly, accepting the anonymous invite south of the border seemed less like a welcome getaway and more like a dumb idea.

  Her new, more cautious self said she should do a vanishing act. But at the same time, another part of her—a trusted part—said that she should stay put. Because what if these guys were trying to locate someone worth saving? She’d seen it before. Hell, she’d been it before.

  You can’t help everyone, she reminded herself. But instead of doing a Casper and ghosting it, she hitched her small black carryall a little higher on her shoulder and checked out the setup.

  The reception area was an open-air stone patio surrounded by a high, vine-covered fence. An overhead latticework hung with a gazillion fairy lights failed to disguise the fact that the hotel was smack in the middle of a bunch of other high-rises. There was only one door, which didn’t compute, and not just because she was big on backup exits. In her experience, groups like this didn’t let themselves get boxed in. Which meant they had another way out . . . Unless she’d misread them? She didn’t think so. Even while doing the civilized wedding-brunch thing, they practically screamed “paramilitary.” Or maybe something official, with an acronym most people wouldn’t recognize.

  She should walk away. Call Fallon. Let the pros handle things.

  That common sense sounded awfully thin inside her, though, because the pattern didn’t make any sense. When that happened, she got real curious—and, according to some people, stupidly brave. But some people weren’t there right then, and they didn’t run her life; she did.

  So, glad she had stopped at a pawnshop to buy a decent .38 a mile or so past the airport, she stepped out of the shadows and into the doorway, pasted a pleasant expression on her face, and said, “Excuse me?”

  Within seconds, every one of them had marked her, eyes flicking to her and then to each other, and there was a subtle shift in the room as some jackets got twitched aside, other bodies got out of the line of fire. The smaller six faded into the background with the exception of the soldier-type, who stepped in front of his girlfriend with an expression of “you want a piece of her, you’re coming through me.” A couple of the others looked over at the table, then away when the guy with the bad leg got big and capable-looking all of a sudden, and a dark-haired woman coasted over to join him.

  Nobody drew down, though. They just waited, staring at Reese with an intensity that gave her a funny little skin-quiver, as though she had walked too close to a transformer.

  Pulse upshifting, she held out her empty hands. “I’m not looking for trouble. I was invited.” Sort of.

  A pretty blue-eyed blonde off on one side glanced at the brown-haired man beside her. “We didn’t invite you.”

  Okay. Bride and groom weren’t the prospective clients. Didn’t look like newlyweds, either; the rings weren’t new, and they came across like a solid team. Were they renewing their vows, maybe? Or was this whole thing a setup? Reese didn’t know, but she wasn’t moving away from the door until she did.

  “I invited her,” said a big guy on the other side of the room, breaking the silence.

  At that, the others gave way a little, telling her that he was the boss of this outfit. Wearing a charcoal suit with the slight awkwardness of someone who did better in jeans, maybe six six, two thirty, he was built like a bouncer and had killer blue eyes, dark, shoulder-length hair, and a jawline beard that made her think of a Renaissance fair. And he was vaguely familiar, but not from her present life.

  Oh, shit. Again, her new self said to run. Again, she stayed put. “Do I know you?”

  He gave her a once-over with those brilliant blues. “Where’s all the black leather?”

  She was wearing low boots, trim pants, and a subtly studded blazer, all in muted earth tones. Professional, grown-up clothes. “Dog’s show turned it into a cliché.” Tipping her head, still not placing him, she said, “I could dig up the boots if you’re interested.”

  “He’s not.” The smaller blue-eyed blonde moved up beside him and shot her a narrow-eyed glare.

  Reese knew that look. Fallon hit her with it often enough. “You’re a cop.”

  That intel eased her nerves a degree. Granted, there were cops who crossed the line, but fewer than the TV made it seem. More, she wasn’t getting the “bad guy” vibe off this crew, and her instincts might not be infallible, but they had a damn good track record. So who were these guys? A task force working the wrong side of the border? If that was the case, why did they need her? And why not go through channels?

  Unless they had, and Fallon had told them to fuck off. That, she could believe.

  The cop nodded. “And you’re the bounty hunter.”

  Most of the others relaxed a smidge at that one. The bride’s mouth went round in surprise and, Reese thought, recognition.

  Filing that, she stayed focused on the boss. “I used to be a bounty hunter. Now I’m strictly private.” She paused. “Where do I know you from?”

  “Three years ago. A burned-out warehouse in Chicago.”

  “Three—” She broke off as her stomach knotted. Keeping the poker face that had saved her life more times than she wanted to count, she nodded and made herself breathe past the stab of pain. “Right. Strike. I remember.”

  Would’ve been better if she could have forgotten. She still had nightmares where she was back in the burned-out shell of Seventeen, breathing stale smoke as she crept up on the two men, one far too familiar, one an unknown who had a gangsta name—Strike—but wore normal duds and had shown up in a rented minivan.

  With the other hunters closing in faster than she had anticipated, she had nailed her target from behind with her souped-up Taser and had her two quasi bodyguards drag his ass back to lockup. After that, she had chased the other guy—this guy—back to his rental, labeling him harmless. Then she had locked herself in her hotel room, binged on Ding Dongs, and cried herself empty. Which wasn’t the point right now. The important part was where she had filed Strike under “harmless” back then, now her instincts said that the man facing her was deadly dangerous in his own right. Which meant that either he’d changed over the past three years, or he’d been playing her before.

  What the hell was going on here? And why did it have to be that day? The coincidence sucked.

  A chill skimmed along her skin as a dead man’s voice whispered, There’s no such thing as coincidence. It’s all just the will of the gods. Mendez had been big on quoting his writs when they made his point, especially toward the end of their time together.

  Keep your head in the real world, she told herself. That part of her life had ended long before his death. Shifting the small black carryall so she could get to the gun tucked at the small of her back, she said cautiously, “I don’t do find-and-grabs anymore.”

  “All you need to do is locate him,” Strike said without a shift of expression or inflection. “We’ll take care of the rest.”

  She should turn him down. Hell, she shouldn’t have come out here in the first place. She was just starting to hit her stride in Denver after moving back from LA just under a year ago. She had a string of solid—if boring—jobs lined up and ready to go. And this crew had “questionable” written all over them. But that same questionability was what had her sticking. She knew what it felt like to b
e lost. Now she tracked down the lost and reunited them with their friends and family . . . or, if they were better off lost, she helped them stay that way. Saving the world one person at a time, Fallon had called it. And he hadn’t even been mocking her. Not much, anyway.

  “Tell me about the target,” she said. Routine question, nice and open ended.

  Strike’s expression didn’t change. “It’s the same guy you bagged out from under me that day in the warehouse. Snake Mendez.”

  He said something else, but she couldn’t hear him over the roaring that suddenly filled her head.

  Mendez. Oh, Christ.

  She had to lock her knees to keep from sagging when it all tried to come rushing back—memories, pain, guilt, betrayal, grief. Keep breathing, she told herself, struggling with her poker face. She couldn’t go there again. Not now, when she was just starting to put her shit back together. Not now, when losing him had nearly killed her before.

  More, there were warning bells beneath the pain. What the hell was going on here? How much did this guy know? Who was he working for?

  Her instincts chimed in with a Time to go!

  Feeling far shakier than she wanted to let on, she retreated a step toward the doorway. “Mendez is dead.” She forced herself to say it, though the words tasted foul. “He was killed last year in Denver. The Varrio Warlocks got him.”

  His parole officer swore that Mendez had been playing it straight, but as far as she could tell, he had died as he had lived: trying to run the world one city block at a time.

  “Wait.” Strike stretched out a hand. “Don’t go.”

  “You don’t need me to find a dead man.” Another step back put her in the doorway.

  “He’s alive.”

  The words didn’t compute at first, coming one at a time, disconnected, echoing in her ears like someone screaming inside an abandoned warehouse. He’s. Alive. He’s. Alive. He’s alive. He’s alive . . . alive . . . alive. Not dead.