C.L. Roberts-Huth's Blog, page 9

Wicked & Wonderful: Chapter 25 - Licking Wounds

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“Milo.”  The necromancer wiped his palms down the sides of his pants.

“Got it, boss.”  The mage crossed the room in five strides and squatted down close enough that her fingertips could have brushed the dirtied edge of his boots.  He kept his eyes averted.  “Madeleine…”

She looked up at him, confused.  “What did you just call me?”

“Madeleine,” he grunted, drawing circles on the carpet between them with one forefinger.  “I called you Madeleine.”

She shook her head, the adrenaline from the fight dissipating just a little.  Focusing was hard work, but she’d drank enough to keep the rest of her hunger at bay.  Her confusion helped as well.  She repeated her earlier comment.  “I know you.”

“You do, but…” His voice held a note of sadness, and a sudden sense of fear pierced her heart.

“You’re mad at me.”

The mage flinched.  “You almost killed him.  My friend almost died, because of you, and you wonder why I’m mad at you?”

He had a point, of course, no arguing that, but they’d reached an impasse of sorts.  That moment in every fight when all parties just stop.  The air grows pregnant with unresolved tensions, lips curl in growls of disdain, hands flex talons and claws, and both sides lick their wounds.  It’s a jaggedly defined fork in the proverbial road, where choices must not only be considered but made.  Fight or flight.  Compromise or surrender.

Madeleine was torn between waning blood lust and that itch in the back of her head that screamed that this fight with these humans, these supers, was contrary to the bigger picture.  Not that the ‘bigger picture’ was anything more than a hazy thumbprint against the window of her mind’s eye, all meaningless whorls and lines that she knew added up to an entity, if only she could wipe away…well, if she could just wipe away this stupid fight.

But the vampire had never been good at apologizing, and really how do you even begin that conversation? “I didn’t mean to eat your friend” just didn’t seem like a good ice breaker.  And honestly, these guys didn’t look like the ‘forgive and forget to stake’ type.

She relaxed her pose, drawing in both fangs and claws.  Dawn was coming, she could feel it, and though she had fed rather recently, the ordeals that had occurred over the past twenty-four hours had taken their toll.  She needed rest, earth and more blood, none of which she’d find here.

None of which she’d find at all, if she didn’t find a way to save herself from being torn apart, like the necromancer’s pet werewolf wanted so badly to do.  That left her only one option.

“I surrender.”

Milo turned and looked at her.  “Excuse me?”

She sighed and raised her hands up in the universal gesture to be taken away in handcuffs.  “I surrender, Milo.  I give up.  If I had a white flag on a stick, I’d wave it right now.”

She inhaled slowly, and the scent of him that had earlier brought on a fervor carried with it memories this time.  Videos played in her head, alternating with stills of the man in front of her, and that pit inside her, that regret for the chaos she had caused within these four walls tightened.  Madeleine looked up at the mage.  “Let me rest.  Let me stay here until night falls, and I’ll leave.  I’ll take my craziness with me, and you won’t have to see me ever again.”

Milo shook his head.  “Uh, no.”

She raised a brow.  “Excuse me?”

He shook his head again.  “It’s not that easy.  I mean, maybe for you.  Maybe you’ve convinced yourself that you can just walk away from this.   Maybe you think you’re sparing us—sparing me—further chaos by taking yourself out of the picture.  Hell, I don’t have a frickin’ clue what your ulterior motives are behind this sudden surrender.

“But the simple truth of the matter is that this is no longer just your fight.  I brought my family into it, because I couldn’t imagine living without you, and they aren’t going to leave because you asked them nicely to go.  They know I’ll do everything in my power to help you, to end this, and they aren’t about to let me do that alone.  Especially when it’s clear that we’re not out of the woods, not by a long shot.”

Madeleine tilted her head to look around the man.  Though his friends, his family, all wore grim masks, arms crossed and clearly unhappy about what was transpiring, they stood as a united front.  What a strange concept, such unity.

Vampires pretended unity for the sake of appearances or until their mood changed.  Alliances and battle lines were drawn and redrawn so often, she understood why so many of her kind hid in secluded castles and caves all over the planet. And those they wanted to trust were bound by blood, which wasn’t trust at all but like internal surveillance.  Hard to ambush someone when they could feel you out there.

It was one of the reasons Patrick sent Tamus to do his dirty work.  He would know she wasn’t dead without having to see her face.  He could live with the torment the Minotaur dished out, because he didn’t have to see it happen.

It was oddly detached yet intimate, and one of the reasons she had left the dark court.  Distance, she had found, dulled the connection, though there was no place so far as to disconnect it completely.  Not even the ancient trial of vampire fire walking, a complex and inane ritual practiced by those in desperate need of a broken bond.

She had been that desperate once upon a time and sought out fire walkers, but what she found were vampires who had not broken anything but their own minds.  And in that chaos, well, it was understandable why they believed it had worked.  Their former masters weren’t hearing anything, because there was nothing but gibberish to be had.

“So…” she looked up at Milo again.  “Where does that leave us?  Where do we go from here?”

He looked at her, weariness marking his features.  His mouth moved, as if to say something, but he must’ve thought better of it, and shook his head.  “For now, we recover.  I don’t know about you, but the rest of us need to eat.  It’s been a long ass day, and if I’m going to get my ass kicked all over creation again in the near future, I’d like to have a couple of La Juanita burritos first.

“And then we sleep.  You can rest here, or go home, not that there’s much of a ‘home’ for you to go back to right now.  Just let me know, before you go, so I can check in with you when I’m awake again.  Sound good to you?”

Madeleine nodded, and the mage walked toward the other humans.  There was a minor whispered discussion that she didn’t bother to eavesdrop into, and then the group broke into a flurry of silent action. She didn’t watch what they did, where they went. Milo’s fatigue, the physical and emotional, had rubbed off on her perhaps, and she just couldn’t be bothered to care.

Doors opened and closed. Feet shuffled passed her, sometimes cautiously, sometimes with exaggerated animosity. A mason jar of blood appeared in front of her with a pair of passing bunny slippers. She took it with quiet thanks and sipped it as she contemplated where she stood now in her undead life.

Madeleine frowned.  She’d forgotten about the destruction Tamus had wreaked on her home prior to their escape.  A hotel would suffice, and she even knew of a place that was friendly to supernatural creatures. But the simple fact remained that the life she had built here in Arizona was over.

Being homeless was only the tip of the ice berg. There would be curious, if not irate, neighbors in her neighborhood. How much damage had the minotaur done? Could she salvage any of it? Her netbook? Would Abby have heard about what had happened?

Abby.

She fumbled through what remained of her outfit and growled. Somewhere in all the mess, between the escape and the fight, she had lost her cell phone. She looked up and saw that she was alone in the room. She could feel them outside the walls, doing whatever it was they were doing. Their energy orbited like fiery little planets.

Across the floor, she could see a telephone. She looked around for any cameras, but the little voice in her head mentioned that they were probably as tired of her and their current fate as she was. The vampire stood carefully, brushed the dirt from her clothes and stretched her wings. She finished off the blood as she crossed the room.

She had met the psychic witch before the advent of the cell phone revolution, so she knew Abby’s phone number by heart. She cradled the receiver against her ear and dialed. The phone rang twice before she heard it pick up.

“Um, hello?” Abby’s voice spoke.

“Abby?”

“Maddie?” She spoke the two syllables with restrained caution. “Madeleine d’Court, is that you?”

The vampire allowed herself a small smile and gave a sigh of relief. “Yes, it’s me.”

“How do I know it’s really you? I know dopplegangers are real, you know, and I know for a fact that two live in Arizona.”

Madeleine repressed a chuckle at her concerned friend’s suspicious tone. “When you were giving birth to your last child, you asked me to be there, but only after I promised that I wouldn’t eat any of the hospital staff.”

“Unless…” the witch led on.

The vampire closed her eyes and covered her mouth and the emerging smile with a hand before replying, “Unless they screwed up and forgot to give you an epidural. And how many people got eaten, Abbs?”

It was the witch’s turn to laugh. “None, not a single body hit the floor. But it was a close call, wasn’t it?” She paused, and Madeleine could almost hear the gears turning in her head. “What the hell is going on, Maddie?

“Your house is gone. The ‘official’ word” she could hear the air quotes, “is that a freak tornado touched down out of the clear night sky right on top of your house.”

The smile faded. The local media had never been really good at explaining away the unique happenings in Sierra Vista. “And the unofficial word?”

“I will have some karma to pay back to the Universe, but there used to be folks who claimed to see a giant monster turning your house into a pile of kindling fit for a giant bonfire and a dark angel flying away on black feathered wings carrying away some strange man.”

Madeleine grimaced. “Used to be.”

Abby’s response was as nonchalant as her response. “Like I said, karmic payback is due. Maddie, don’t worry about it. We’re friends. You would’ve done the same for me. Your tricks are better than mine, of course, but a good Wiccan’s gotta do what a good Wiccan’s gotta do. Universal balance and all that jazz.”

The vampire sighed again. There was no point in reminding her human friend that she believed in karmic due, as well. The witch meant what she said without judgment. It was just truth. And a good witch never lies. “Abbs, I’m in trouble.”

“Oh, I get that.”

“No, seriously, Abbs, I’m in over my head.” She paused. “Can you pick me up? I promise to tell you everything, every nitty gritty detail, but I can’t do it now. I can’t do it over the phone. The line could be tapped.”

“You’re a spy now?”

Madeleine grunted. “Yes, secretly, I now work for the CIA. No, pain in my ass, I’m, well, you know what? I have no freakin’ clue where I am right now. I just know it’s where Milo works. Hell, I don’t even know what this place is called. Wait a minute, let me look and see if there’s anything interesting in this desk.”

“Wait, they left you alone in an office? Bigger question, who is ‘they’?”

The vampire ran a hand through her hair. “Abigail, I will explain everything soon, I swear it, just let me figure out where I am.” She opened drawers and found letterhead with the words ‘Primogen Construction’ emblazoned in gold across the top. At the bottom, in the same gold inking, was an address. She passed the information onto her best friend. “How soon can you get here?”

“Let me plug this into my GPS and I’ll be on my way. How are you going to get out of the building?”

Madeleine remembered what Milo had said earlier. “I don’t think they’re keeping me hostage. I just think they left me in here because they didn’t know what else to do with me. And the room’s pretty heavily warded, too, so I’m safe, they’re safe, hell, I think Tamus would have issues breaking in here without some help. As long as I tell them where I’m going…”

“They want you to tell them where you’re going? That sounds suspicious.”

She waved off the question, even though the charade was pointless over the phone. “It was part of the deal, of my surrender.”

Abby ooh’d over the line. “This story just gets better and better. All right, well, let me come white knight your vampire ass out of that magickal office of doom…”

“Abby…”

“Oh, come on, I don’t get to play the rescuer very often! Not to you, anyway. GPS says I should be there in about ten minutes. Meet you out front.” She hung up before Madeleine could say anything else. She passed her hand over the paper and the gold lettering flickered in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with the lighting in the ‘magickal office of doom’, as Abby had put it, and the vampire dropped it onto the desk.

Something about that simple magick made her think she might have underestimated her allies. Part of her cheered. She could use strong allies. But part of her cringed. When this was all over, would they simply take her out? Or worse, was this bargain some ruse? Would they turn her over to the minotaur and his minions from the Other in exchange for their own lives?

That first part of her wanted to believe that they were honorable humans, that such a thing was beneath their ethical reach, but that second part whispered that it was unfair of her to expect such things when it was her carelessness that got them all so entangled. She folded her wings until they disappeared and walked toward the door.

Hurry, Abby!
Continue: 26

Wicked & Wonderful: Chapter 24 - Of Monsters & Masters

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Patrick admitted to more amusement than irritation, as he watched the minotaur pace the length of the library floor.  The great beast had healed most of the great many wounds he had received in what had—much to the vampire’s intrigue—turned from a banal bullying to a battle epic enough to be spoken of in quiet, hurried whispers in the shadows throughout the Other.

But the amusement soon gave way to anger.  “One vampire,” Patrick spoke, fingers tapping rhythmically against the wooden armrest.  “One 330 year old vampire…”

“And one mage,” the minotaur snorted.  One hoof dug a deep groove in the floor.

“Oh, yes, let’s not forget the human mage, who helped a whelp of a vampire best the mighty Tamus.”  He didn’t bother to make it a question, which allowed no room for argument.  “You are older than I am, have no human taint – 100% magickal creature – and you let two measly humans kick your sorry ass all the way back to the Other!  Do you see the problem I’m having with this?”

Patrick had risen unconsciously from his chair, his hands clenching the front of the arm rests until the wood creaked beneath them.  If his heart could beat, it would’ve raced with his rage over how poorly this had ended, and he stopped cold as the minotaur met his eyes.

“It would serve you well,” Tamus replied, his power riding his words as they fell from his muzzle in a deceptively even tone, “to remember that all of this,” he swept one arm out, “this mess, began with you.  You and your inability to control the progeny in your kiss.”

“Watch your tongue,” the vampire hissed, but the minotaur had clearly had enough.

“You didn’t control her at all, Patrick.  Nay, you neglected her, left her to her own devices, and she fled the dark court the first chance she got for the sun-soaked deserts of Arizona.  You don’t want her, but you’re miserable without her.  And if you are miserable, then she deserves no happiness either?

“I appreciate madness.  You know I do, but what do you hope to gain from this downward spiral?”

The vampire settled back into his chair with a frown, and regarded the creature with unmasked disdain.  “I want her to suffer.”

The minotaur shook his head with a loud guff.  “To what end, Patrick?  To what end do we continue to wage this war?  We cannot just let this go now, you realize.  Her allies rally, and our numbers clamor for blood and revenge for what has been wrought against me.  There will be no rest until the heads of your wayward beloved and her cast of humans ride spikes before the gates of your manor house.  Or there will be mutiny set to drag you from your self-made throne.  I will not be able to protect you.”

“If it’s blood they want,” the vampire growled, “then it’s blood they shall have.”

*************************************

It wasn’t that simple, of course.  Patrick was painfully aware of that fact, as he watched the minotaur leave the library.  Tamus was a good ally and an old friend, but there was no way to explain to him the nuances of his decision making, the very human aspect of it all.

Granted, that was a very big part of it, the ‘human taint’ as he had called it earlier, and addressing said issue required him to admit to some equally human flaws that he wasn’t ready to hear outside his own skull.  Anger was better.  If he could focus on those dark feelings of betrayal over her departure, he could get through this disaster, right?

He admitted he’d been surprised when she had actually left after years of veiled threats had fallen idle on his ears.  He must’ve stood in the threshold of her chambers for a good half hour before the sheer emptiness as far as the eye could see sank in.  But there had been no time to wallow, no time for denial.  Such human things were considered weakness among the courtiers, and he had to force those thoughts away until he was alone.

Patrick loved her once, he could admit that, when she was shiny and new to his world.  She had been brilliant, a bright light in his dark court, and while he had known she was broken—what vampire wasn’t—he had had no clue just how broken her Maker had left her all those years ago in Paris.  She had hidden it so well, until his interest began to wane, his eyes found other shiny baubles, and then the cracks began to appear in her cool, detached exterior.

He’d dismissed her needs, even given her permission to fulfill them with vampires outside their kiss, and for a while, it seemed to sate her.  But even that had been a lie, a façade she’d put up in an attempt to stay at his side, no matter how hard he pushed her away.  She had withered away in the last quarter of a century, a shadow of her former self, left in the dust to pine for him and him alone.

Maybe he had thought she’d pine forever.  At least long enough, perhaps, that his interest in her would wax again.  And maybe, just maybe, he had considered her too weak to ever even consider making good on her threat.  It had never occurred to him that she might lose her interest in him by the time they had had their century anniversary.

Not that any of that mattered now, of course.  She was gone.  She had made it clear she didn’t want to be with him anymore.  Hell, she’d even moved on to a new lover after another quarter of a century to a human who wasn’t even a food source.  No, he had meant something to her, though Patrick found the mundane human beneath her, enough that she had roasted him like a human pyre in the middle of the desert.

The bonfire had caught Patrick’s attention after twenty-five years of relative quiet from the young vampire, and it had brought him more than a little pleasure to feel the rumbling turmoil pulsing along their blood tie.  And it didn’t hurt that her first real outing without him had crashed and, pardon the pun, burned to the ground.  No, that didn’t hurt at all.  He had half-expected her to show up at his doorstep, all haggard and teary-eyed, begging to come home, and he’d been more than a little disappointed when she had chosen instead to stay in Arizona.

Then she had met this new one…

Madeleine had been hesitant at first, so afraid, and Patrick thought he would just be another human, another mistake.  It had taken just one kiss, that one burst of supernatural magick, and the vampire had realized, as he sought to slough her happiness from his body like mud, his original assessment had been flawed.  She was happy, despite her reservations, a joy that sparked like fireworks so bright he could’ve seen them in the night sky between them.

And that had changed everything…

Continue: 25

Wicked & Wonderful: Chapter 23 - Blood, Magick, and a Little Fur

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The hunger was immense, a painful twisting in the middle of her body, and the scent of blood only made things worse for Madeleine. There were humans in the room, several of them. She could smell them and the candied heat of their racing pulses. And beneath that tempting heat, she could smell an elixir of supernatural power. She closed her eyes, hung her head between her arms and inhaled all those exquisite aromas.

It would be a feast, a buffet, all laid out for her like proffered dishes for visiting royalty. Her head raced in fervent calculation of the odds. She glanced around the room without lifting her head and counted four bodies. They would fight—she knew that somehow—but in the end, no matter how powerful they might be, she was vampire, and she was hungry. And that trumped just about every flavor of human super she knew.

She was faster and stronger, though the werewolf to her left might leave a mark or two, and…wait…there, underneath it all, rode a cold current, a magick that could only belong to one kind of human super, the only kind that could cause issue with the hunger she wanted so badly to indulge. She looked up, past the man—he had a name, but for the life of her, she couldn’t pull it out of the hunger--in front of her to the taller man standing just behind him.

His name she didn’t know. There was no niggling in the back of her head, but honestly, it didn’t matter, not really. It was better when food didn’t have a name. She sat back and pushed the hair from her eyes. “Necromancer.”

He shuddered. Dead power worked both ways, after all. “Vampire.”

She smiled, and then she licked her bottom lip. She pushed again, a thread of fear in the middle of her power, and her smile widened as his eyes widened. He frowned, and an icicle shoved its way back up the pipeline they held open between them. She inhaled sharply.

“You’re strong,” Madeleine growled, settling back on her calves. “Your magick lingers in me, like a parasite beneath my skin. It whispers of submission, obedience, but it’s only a strong suggestion in my ear, not a compulsion. Though,” she cocked her head to the side, “I’m pretty sure you’re holding back. But I still think I could take you.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he replied, his face a blank mask.

The tone of his voice didn’t hold an even keel with his restraint in his power. He wasn’t sure what she was up to, where she was going with this—or rather was not happy with the direction she was taking the conversation—and she could taste it like ice water in their link. “Which do you think will prevail? My hunger or your power? Supernatural thirst or the need to protect your people? What are you willing to wager, death mage?”

The necromancer shrugged, and she found his apparent nonchalance irritating. “I’d say the odds are in my favor, vampire. Your advantage may lay in the immensity of your hunger, post-torpor, but it’s a tentative, temporary thing. If I sacrifice one person to your bloodlust, I think I could tap into enough power to subdue one blood-drunk bloodsucker.

“That just leaves the question of who gets to play sacrificial lamb, doesn’t it?” He regarded her in mock seriousness. “Can’t give you the werewolf. Last thing we need is either of you hitting frenzy. Can’t be a martyr, because no one else can handle you on your own. So that leaves me…” he glanced around the room, “…well, two mages.”

He tapped a finger against his chin. “Seeing as I would rather not lose either of them, I think we’re at a standstill. Unless you’re willing to give me an alternative that doesn’t involve bloodlust and havoc.”

Madeleine’s irritation turned to amusement. Did he really think he could possibly talk their way out of this one? Her hunger whispered beneath the edge of her consciousness, a sinewy wall standing between the thirst and the threads of rational thought. It clawed at that impossibly thin curtain with long, lashing talons, whispers turning to low, rumbling growls that poured from her throat.

The necromancer tensed, and it was as if the very air in the room stopped. There, just beyond all that quiet, she could feel his power growing. He was readying a defense for an attack they both knew without saying was more than a little imminent. And all that did--all that fear, that caution, that entangled web of mounting power--was feed the torrential need inside her.

She shook her head. “I’m starving. There’s no way this ends without more than a little bloodshed.” She drew one long, wet line with the tip of her tongue. “So feed me, death mage, or be fed upon.”

He opened his mouth. “Milo.”

The man in front of her twitched. “Yes, boss.”

“Your mess.”

“Yes, boss.”

“Clean it up.”

“Yes, boss.”

The authority was there, a ring of truth inside the web of the necromancer’s power. And without a hint of compulsion, Madeleine noted, which was ever more intriguing. Just an undertone of mild irritation. She stood and stretched her arms, eyes all for chosen lamb. She’d half-expected to feel fear at his approach, and it was there, yes, but buried beneath a sense of heroic disregard.

How noble. The thought brought a smile to her lips. She lunged forward in a blur of speed that brought her to him, until her body pressed a cool line against the heat of him. Her eyes closed in the opulent decadence of his scent that beckoned her hunger forth: all impassioned fire, knightly intent, and…something low in her body tingled and tightened with a want that had nothing to do with blood.

Her nose drew a delicate, goosebump-raising line down his neck, as she inhaled the proffered mage. "Delicious," she whispered, her voice low, husky. She retraced the path with the tip of her tongue, and while he didn't flinch, this Milo, his energy shifted and changed. It deepened and whispered back to that low place in her body, and she didn't have enough presence of to stifle the contented growl that slipped from her parted lips.

There was a decadence to the connection between them. Something that overwhelmed, drowned out the hunger. No, she shook her head against the firmness of his chest, not drowning out. It was more of a trade: one hunger--all gnashing teeth and bloodlust--for another--all impassioned heat and desire. She pressed against him, fingers tracing the lines of him, falling deeper into this, well, whatever this was.

What the hell?

Her lids fluttered open again and she stepped back, shaking her head as if to rid her nose of the scent of him. “You smell…familiar. Bed clothes and soap, earth and flora.” Her thirst whined in protest, but she pushed it away.

“I know you,” she whispered. She reached out with one hand, fingertips a breath away from touching his skin again, and it surprised to her to realize that it didn’t matter. She didn’t need the press of flesh to replay the physical memory of him. She shivered. “I know you.”

The mage called Milo smiled, a cautious turn of lips. “You do.”

“And I…I don’t want to eat you. I want…” She didn’t have the words, or rather, she could not put into rational thought the series of emotional and physical wants rushing through her. Madeleine chewed on her bottom lip, head cocked to the side. “I want…” She shook her head and buried her forehead against his chest.

She wanted him—there was no denying that—but how she wanted him had more to do with tangled sheets and bated breath. Though the sheer scent of him, the very taste—all salt and heat—of him muted the hunger, as she turned her head, her eyes found the other mage and her restraint failed in one fell blow.

With one hand, she shoved Milo backwards. His momentum caught the necromancer and both men fell to the floor. The death mage’s magick exploded with an audible pop, like so many balloons, and sent her scrambling into the air to avoid the backlash. She didn’t have much time, she knew, before he’d get that spell rewoven, and Madeleine flew across the room until her hand held tight a thick wading of the nameless mage’s shirt.

This one smelled different. Unlike Milo, his magick wasn’t earthy, but emanated light and air. If electric blue had a scent, this man was bathed in it. And it was like cotton candy to her senses, decadent, tempting. His fear glistened in the center of his aura, a candy center to her treat. He opened his mouth as his eyes grew wider, but it was too late.

She pulled him closer, her arms snaking around him, one over an arm, one under, and her wings started to cocoon them both. She forced his head to the side, and the biting edge of her incisors found the quiver of his neck. She closed her mouth around that pulsing jugular bead and broke skin. His blood filled her mouth in an overwhelming explosion of sensation, intoxicating, raising every taste bud, every nerve ending, in voracious standing ovation.

He moaned, the sound a poignant twist of pleasure and pain. His hands, which moments before had pushed at her, softened their grasp and clung instead to pull her somehow closer. She drank him in deeper with every mouthful, eyes closing, and ignored the wispy tickle of dead magicks climbing the air behind her.

“Miii…” the mage whispered.

Madeleine leaned back. “What did you say?”

If he heard her, he gave no clue. “Miiii…” He raised one arm up and reached past her. “Miiiiiloooo!”

Well, hell, he wasn’t talking to her at all. He wanted Milo.

The tickle turned into a torrent, and a spike of necromancy ripped through her wings, rending feather from flesh. Strong hands grabbed at her shoulders in a musk of fur and claws, pulling until her body raged almost parallel to the ground within the werewolf’s grasp. She lashed out, wing and talons, doing damage of her own, but she could not feast and fight at the same time. The mage, free of her grasp, pushed at her in flurry of his fists and painful screams.

She tossed him to the ground and turned to face the werewolf. He was in half-form, her blood dripping from his claws. “Bastard.”

“Don’t talk about my mother that way,” he growled from his toothy maw.

“I could kill you,” she hissed.

He chortled, a peculiar sound from his form. “You could try.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she shot forward toward him. But then two things happened: her wings failed her, and her feet were summarily stuck to the floor. The necromancer had his spell back in working order. She turned her head toward the death mage. “I will kill you for this. I will kill you and everyone you hold dear. But I will kill you last, so you can watch them suffer.”

She threw a hand out and pushed back through the threads that bound her with her own magicks. The necromancer shuddered.

“You’ll have to do better,” he said through gritted teeth.

She grinned and pushed harder. He paled and…were those beads of sweat on his forehead? Madeleine licked her lips and freed one leg. “Oh, necromancer…” She shook her head and freed the other leg. “Me thinks I have you bested.”

He leaned into his sleeve to wipe his face and smiled. “You’d be wrong.”

She smelled the werewolf before she saw him, and the side of her head met the floor with a thud. She screamed as he pinned her down, giant claws clamped hard over her biceps to render her own talons useless. She kicked at him in an attempt to jam something into his tender bits—werewolves had tender bits, didn’t they?—but the sheer girth of his thigh and the angle in which he straddled her made her efforts for naught.

“Get off me,” she hissed.

“Ah…” he dragged that one syllable out in an equally slow shake of his great furry head. “No.”

Madeleine struggled some more, out of sheer frustration over her current lack of options than anything else. Were-creatures could not be compelled by vampires, something about super versus super cancellation of powers. She’d learned that lesson early on in her undead life. None of the humans in the room were close enough for the necessary direct eye contact. If she had spilled even a drop of her own blood into the bitten mage, perhaps, but she could feel no tie there. The necromancer’s magick tied him to her, but that too was pointless. Compelling him was akin to attempting such mind tricks on another vampire. Dead magick to dead magick, and all that jazz.

So, in short, until she could figure out how to get the behemoth off her, she was screwed.

“I wonder,” mused the behemoth in question with the tilt of his head, “what you’d taste like. I’ve never had a chance to eat undead before.”

“Fuck off,” she growled and threw all her strength into him, budging them both a good foot off the ground.

He slammed her back down onto the carpet. “Would you be tough and gamey, like atrophied flesh? Or would you be soft and slimy, fresh rot?” He eyed her curiously. “Does whatever reanimates you make your body like a living human?” He made a big show of sniffing her, the nose of his muzzle leaving wet marks on her shoulders and in her hair.

She did not like feeling like prey. “I will kill you for…”

He interrupted her with a chuckle. “Déjà vu. I swear we’ve had this little witting repartee before.”

“Let her up, Vince,” the necromancer called out. She turned her head to see the mages had gathered themselves off the ground and regrouped, stoic faces all.

Vince’s eyes never left her face. “So she can munch on someone else? I don’t think so.”

“Vincent.” The tone carried power, and the werewolf shuddered above her.

“Yes, little doggie,” she snarled. “Go and obey your master.”

He growled back, snapping his maw a breath away from her face. “My master saves your life, you bloodsucking bitch. Be thankful.” He leapt off her body, the weight of him disappearing in instantaneous relief.

Madeleine went to move but found she was still pinned. She turned to look at the gathered mages. “If I promise to play nice, will you let me up?”

Continued:  24

Wicked & Wonderful - Chapter 22 - Blood Magick

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“Is this going to be an issue?” Arthur asked.

Milo opened his mouth to argue, but thought better of it. Arthur was asking out of courtesy, not as an option. He looked at Madeleine’s still form, and it tugged at his heart strings. She would want to be taken down, taken out, from everything he had learned about her over the past week. She didn’t seem like the type of person who wanted to be the cause of wanton destruction, especially when it could have been avoided. She would hate herself, like Bri had said earlier, if she awoke to the bloody aftermath.

“Milo?”

The mage took his gaze off the vampire, refocusing on his boss. “No issue, boss.”

“Are you sure?” The necromancer did not look like he was certain. “I don’t want you to have a sudden change of heart and come to her aid to the detriment of your teammates.”

Milo shook his head. “No issues, boss.”

Arthur smiled and turned to the rest of the team. “Bri, I want you outside the door. You keep those wards tight and strong.” She nodded and walked out of the room, closing the door behind her. “Vince…”

The werewolf nodded and positioned himself in front of the doorway, thick cable arms crossed. “Yeah, gotcha, boss man.”

“Boys?” Arthur nodded to the remaining untasked mages. “Be prepared. Use your instincts. This’ll be a cakewalk.”

Milo closed his eyes and exhaled, letting his power fill him up in a hot electric hum. He could feel Zeke tap into his own power, and on another plane, they would have looked like twin towers of fire. Then slowly, a different power crept between them, like winter after summer, and Milo opened his eyes.

Arthur stood between them and the vampire, his arms outstretched above him, his power all cool waves. “Wake up, Madeleine.” Those three words floated on more than just human breath. An underlying thread of power carried them from the necromancer’s lips to the undead body before him. Nothing happened. He chuckled. “Stubborn vampire.”

He pushed again, but it was no thread this time. His power rode a tidal wave into her, and Madeleine’s body convulsed in a flurry of arms and legs. When the seizure stopped, she rose off the ground, as if a giant hand held her within the palm and poured her gently into an erect posture. It was slightly disconcerting, as her eyes were closed beneath the curtain of hair over her face, arms swinging loosely at her sides. So much like a marionette.

An apt assessment, as it turned out. The necromancer waved his fingers in a variety of patterns that made her appendages dance…and her mouth speak.

“Well, hello, Milo,” said Arthur through the vampire’s lips, in a sing-sing high-pitched voice clearly projected from a man with a deeper range. The vampire puppet waved at him and blew him kisses. Milo was less than amused.

“Arthur,” the mage growled.

The boss shrugged and released the smaller nuances of his hold on Madeleine, leaving her a limp rag doll in the middle of that space of carpet. “Zeke, against that wall.”

The other man stepped forward, cautious, his eyes on the vampire while his hands worked furiously to weave a thick webbing between them. He walked to the left of her and touched one hand to the wall. The fibers stretched as he walked around her to the other side, and almost like a rubber band, the webbing slid her, heels dragging, across the carpet until her back was pressed against the wall. He touched his other hand in an opposing spot, and then he grabbed the bottom and tugged until it covered her from the neck down in the intricate gold mesh.

“It’ll hold her,” he said, eyes still all for Madeleine. “But I don’t know for how long.” He moved beside Milo.

“All right,” Arthur looked at Milo. “You’re up, but there’s something I should tell you first. We can’t just feed her the blood. There’s a very delicate balance between the undead and necromancy, more so with vampires, because they have freewill and are inclined to fight rather than submit to death magicks. Getting the blood into her orally requires a finesse and delicacy I am unsure I can manage, given the state of her torpor.”

Great. Milo crossed his arms and glared at his boss. “How do you propose we ‘feed’ her then?”

The necromancer shrugged. “Be creative, mage. Think of this as a rare opportunity to expand your power base.”

The mage’s jaw dropped. “Are you shitting me? This is some experiment? Some exercise? What if I fuck it up? What if I inadvertently kill her?”

Arthur shrugged again. “Then she’s dead. You don’t figure out how to do this, and she’s dead anyway, right? Think of it as some on the job training.”

The floor beneath them shuddered with Milo’s restrained anger. “You knew this all along. You knew, and yet you decided that now was the best time to tell me? Do better!”

A frigid wave slammed against the heat of the mage’s growing rage. “No, you do better,” Arthur whispered, though his words carried power that singed the surface of Milo’s skin. “I know what preceded this…” he gestured toward the vampire, “this mess. It’s all the rumble in Other World. So you punted a minotaur out of the park. So what? He was already hurt, the imps say, already on the last dredges of his own power, courtesy of your comatose girlfriend, and you really just got a lucky shot in. But you didn’t kill him. Tamus isn’t dead.

“Worse, while he’s licking his wounds, he’s got time think. Word is that he’s all sorts of pissed off because some human mage flung him around like a ragdoll, and do you know what dark supers do when they’re pissy? They come back, all vengeance and hellfire, and they don’t come back alone. He’s going to bring an army to crush you, to crush her, for this indiscretion, no matter what his marching orders were. Before, he was meant to simply maim you, do some damage and leave you alive to relive the tragedy. But now he’s just going to kill you. Kill her. Kill anyone who stands in his way.

“So before you go all righteous and indignant over what I’m forcing you to do, think really hard about the danger you’ve brought on this company and your teammates. Because you never considered them really, did you? Not when you decided that pursuing a vampire was more important. No, you had to push, had to see what would come of this. And that, Milo, is why we are in this predicament, isn't it?"

Milo wanted to protest, but the words that the necromancer had said were true. All the people currently in the room and those who remain outside of it—the were-bunny and the psychic--were all affected by his choice. Sure, they were supers, too, but he hadn't really given them any other option. Somewhere in the back of his head, he had known that they would be involved, that it would be beyond their character to lead him to his own devices. They would always come to save him, just as he always would for them.

So instead, he sighed. “All right. You’ve made your point. Let me figure this out.”

He walked up to the suspended vampire and studied her. The blood had to be in her body, right? He could conceivably just pour it on her, let her skin absorb it, but that ran the risk of wasting too much of the blood as it dripped off her body. Add in that Zeke had done a great job enclosing her with his webbing, so it would only hit her head and shoulders. Not enough exposure.

Maybe if he made the blood smaller? He had done it with water, when he was younger, just to see if he could manage such fine control of his gifts. And what was blood if not just another element?

He dipped a finger into the lukewarm blood and willed the liquid off his finger. It hovered in the air, a shiny, red bauble. He concentrated and said bauble divided in two, then four, continuing until he could no longer see it clearly with the naked eye.

But he could feel it spread out in the open space before him, the finest misting of hemoglobin he had ever seen. He pushed it forward with a flick of his finger, and it sped quickly toward the intended target, hitting Madeleine on one bared and bruised shoulder. His eyes widened as the blood slipped into her, the bruise darkening then fading into smooth, albeit still dirty, skin. It worked.

She sighed, and Milo took a step back. One glance over his shoulder showed that the rest of the team had done the same, with the exception of Vince, who had moved a pace forward. The mage exhaled slowly, eyes on Madeleine.

“Milo?” Arthur whispered from behind him.

He didn’t even bother looking at the necromancer. “I’ve got this, boss.”

With his left hand out, palm up, he poured the first jar of blood into the open air with his right. The liquid formed a long, red cloud in the space above his hand, hovering just as the first bauble had. He placed the jar back on the table without looking and with both hands, he pushed his magick into the blob. It shuddered, then stilled, before spreading outward like one of Zeke’s nets. The lines thinned and broke into a hundred thousand minute droplets, more than enough to cover the bare skin of the vampire.

He willed it forward, and the almost invisible wall of blood wafted toward Madeleine. And as it hit her, as the pinheads of blood touched her, there became a wave of change. A tiny thread of red upon white skin that was all too quickly absorbed. He could see her body knit itself back together, not just from the shoulders up, but a rippling mass of muscle and bone shifting beneath the binding web below.

She sighed again, this one longer, softer, a sound of relief, and in that instant, Milo found he could taste the blood held within his power as it penetrated her skin. It rolled, hot and metallic, over his tongue, and he caught himself one step closer to the vampire, the need, the want of the blood like liquid lightning through his body.

“Not mine,” he whispered through gritted teeth. He dare not look away, because he was unsure what would happen, so he threw up shields until her hunger waned. It had been her hunger, even through the fog of torpor, and that meant that his efforts were succeeding.

“Another jar,” he said to no one in particular, and though he did not see who did it, another mason jar slid into his palm. He poured it in the air, as he had the last one, and processed the blood into another wave of tiny particulates. Milo covered the vampire in the second curtain, and the flesh of her face filled out, her cheeks suddenly rosy.

“One more.” Again, no question, no commentary, just another glass jar to empty into yet another wave of blood. A sickening ripping sound filled the room, and thick, black wings tore through the webbing in a flurry of feathers and broken magick. She fell to the ground, but instead of falling into a heap, she caught herself with her hands.

A hundred pinpricks of magick lit up behind Milo, all defensive, as they awaited her next move. She lifted her head up and leaned into her right shoulder and then her left. She sniffed the entire length of each arm in a long, slow breath, and Milo saw the pink tip of her tongue touch her lips. She looked up through the disheveled curtain of hair, her eyes bright and pitch black, until she made eye contact with the mage.

“I want more.”

Continue: 23

Happy New Year, Gentle Readers!

Wicked & Wonderful: Chapter 21 - Necromancers Make Nice Bosses

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Once she had herded the four men around the mound of fresh earth containing Madeleine, Bri pulled a wand—“It’s birch,” she informed them—from her purse and drew a circle in the dirt around them. She smiled as she tapped the air above the line five times, equidistant along the perimeter—“Pentacle, duh”—and a sudden whoosh of her power engulfed them in the largest iridescent half-bubble Milo had ever seen. Magick swirled along the surface, mimicking the familiar pattern of…

“Soap bubbles,” Nate cheered. He clapped his hands and jumped up and down until the three other men shot him a look. “Seriously, you guys need to get in touch with your inner child,” he pouted.

But he had been right. Her magick looked for all the world like a freshly blown soap bubble, akin to the one the psychic had brought forth in the grocery store, but on a much grander scale. It was beautiful and more than a little mesmerizing.

“Don’t touch!” Bri snapped, smacking Milo’s hand with the tip of her wand. “You’ll pop it! And then we’ll have to walk home. Do you want to walk home?” She didn’t wait for an answer, as seemed to be her way. “Now, no touching! Any of you!” If she hadn’t looked so damn cute—in that witchy were-bunny kind of way—it might have been more intimidating, but the boys got the point and kept their hands to themselves.

Even Nate. And that was a minor miracle in itself.

The bubble shimmered, shifted and as Bri raised her hands into the air, levitated not only the humans and weres within but also a goodly amount of the earth beneath their feet. “Don’t worry,” the were-bunny assured Milo with a wink, “she’s all there, too.”

He half-expected them to fly through the air, all Glenda the Good Witch, but instead the sphere seemed to shrink in mid-air. And it wasn’t the claustrophobic oh-my-god-I’m-going-to-be-mushed shrinkage either, but rather they all decreased in proportional size and all of a sudden. The view of the area around them blurred until an audible pop echoed inside.

And then they were standing in the middle of the cleared out conference room at Primogen Construction: All four men, Bri the good bunny witch and a pile of dirt. No longer encased within the bubble, the scoop of earth spread across the carpet with one hand visible to the wrist and a tuft of hair poking through the top. Milo kept watching, expecting the tumbled mound to heave with her breath, which was ridiculous, of course, given the obvious vampires-don’t-breathe thing.

A large hand clapped on his shoulder. Vince gave him a knowing smile. “She’s all right in there, still in torpor. It’s all good.” The werewolf wandered off, snagging the psychic by the shoulders as the younger man tried to get to the elemental mage. “Say good night, Gracie.”

“Good night, Gracie,” Nate pouted, following the man out of the conference room.

“Hey, dude,” Zeke said, grabbing his arm. “If you need anything, you let me know, okay?

Milo nodded. There wasn’t anything to say, really, and if push came to shove, he could just blame it on the exhaustion. Granted, he felt better than he had after punting Tamus out of the canyon and laying down to die, but he still felt worn out. It was a drawback of magical healing, he knew, because no matter how super of a human he might be, he was still human with very human parts that needed more than magick to cure what ailed them. And what he needed now was sleep.

When he looked up, he realized he was alone in the conference room. He knelt beside the dirt and touched the unconscious curl of her hand. Her fingertips and fingernails were covered in blood that had long turned brown and had begun to flake away to leave dark color in the whorls and arches of her skin.

“I hope you’re all right under there,” he whispered. “Bri says you’ll be fine, and I guess that’s good enough for me. But after we get a good nap in, when this shit storm is all over, you and I are going on a real date. Just you and me. No monsters. No mayhem. Maybe it’ll even be a little boring.” He reached up and brushed away the dirt where her head should have been. “Would you like that?”

Someone cleared their throat, and he saw the were-bunny leaning against the door jamb. “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” she said.

“What? Talk to her?”

Bri smiled, like he had just done something amusing. “No, silly, not the talking, the touching. She’s worn the hell out, so much so that she’s in torpor, and you want to give her flesh and blood scent? I don’t care who she is, or what you might mean to her, but if she wakes up right now, she’s going to kill you.”

He blanched. “She wouldn’t.”

She shrugged. “Yeah, she kind of will. And she’ll hate herself for it later, but she will kill you. Well,” she rubbed her chin in contemplation, “unless we wake her up properly.”

Milo sighed. “And how, exactly, do we do that?”

“We could feed her someone else.” He glared at her, and she rolled her eyes. “Well, fine, we could always give her an IV.”

“Like a blood transfusion,” he offered.

“Yeah, like a blood transfusion, so that part of her that is all about the blood-sucking would be sated before she saw you.”

“Or,” the booming voice of their boss intruded, “you could ask the nice necromancer you work for. “ Arthur Kent poked his head into the doorway above the were-bunny. “Especially given that his conference carpet is going to have to be deep cleaned now due to an unscheduled team building exercise that has left a hibernating vampire in my headquarters and within my protective wards.”

Aw, shit. Milo stood up and placed his hands behind his back. “Um, boss, I’m sorry about this…”

“Team building exercise,” the necromancer said with a firm gaze. “I trust that everyone feels better about themselves now? All the kinks in the team dynamics are worked out? Right?”

Bri popped up between the two men. “Oh, yes, Mr. Kent, sir. Morale’s high, mortality’s low, and…” He turned his attention toward her, and she chewed her bottom lip. “Er, I’ll get right on those wards in this room.” She disappeared around the corner of the doorway with a squeak.

Arthur looked at the mage again. “Love is a crazy thing, Milo, and while I expect the carpet cleaning costs to come out of your paycheck, I am willing to assist you in this matter. Because our little bunny is right.” He gave him a small smile. “And if she kills you, where am I going to find another elemental mage in this town?” He hovered a hand over the mound of earth, head cocked to the side, eyes suddenly milky white. His power, like so much cold water, poured from him and over the mound and the mage. “She feels old. Not ancient by any means, but she’s older than me, than all of us in this company put together. And she feels…broken.”

“Sir?”

He blinked a couple of times, and the clouds left his eyes. “Vampires, for the most part, are broken creatures, don’t get me wrong. Somewhere between the struggle to keep their humanity and the acceptance of their fate, mixed in with a little suicidal tendencies and abject arrogance, they aren’t whole. But with this one, with her, the breaks are in what remains of her soul, for all intents and purposes.”

“That’s good, though, right?” Milo ventured. “The whole soul thing.”

Arthur shrugged. “If you enjoy spending your eternal night with a broken heart, sure. It’s a double-edged sword, something we magic users understand, though probably not to the extent vampires experience.” He unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt and pushed up the sleeves. “So here’s where we come to the fork in the road. I can put her out of her misery, without ever waking her up, or…”

“Or…” Milo didn’t make it a question.

His boss smiled. “Or we bring her back to life with enough necromancy that she can feed herself—I advise never trying to spoon feed a vampire, by the way—and give her enough clarity to not, I don’t know, eat you, and then we can put her back to sleep in a place of your choosing, so she can wake up naturally and most importantly, full.”

It seemed almost too easy. “You can do that?”

Arthur smirked and then pointed at Madeleine. “Dead vampire.” He pointed at his chest. “Necromancer.” He pointed back to Madeleine. “Dead.” And then to himself. “Dead’s master.”

Milo resisted the urge to roll his eyes and raised his hands in surrender. “I get it. So what do we do now?”

The necromancer cocked his head to the side. “Night’s coming. We need to hurry. Go to the mini-fridge in my office and grab about five jars of blood.” He shook his head. “You won’t see them at first, because of a glamour, but if you reach past the ‘cheese’,” he made air quotes, “you’ll break the illusion and see the glass jars. You’re going to have to heat them before bringing them back in here. Cold blood is nasty.” He waved the mage off. “Quickly now.”

Milo nodded, ignoring the urge to ask just how his boss knew that factoid about blood drinking, not to mention why there was blood in the mini-fridge in his office. Necromancers were an odd offshoot of the mage lines, straddling the ethical line between black and white magick use. He did not envy the balancing act, as most were unable to keep from falling all the way into the black. Arthur Kent was honestly the first one he had met who was older—rumored to be over one hundred years old—and remained neutral.

He ran to Arthur’s office and true to his word, there was a well-woven glamour. As he passed his hand toward the back, it actually felt like he was reaching through real objects, like he could have picked out a soda on his quest for blood. His fingers touched the block of cheese and the image popped out of existence.

Varying heights of glass mason jars lined the shelves. He grabbed the trash can under his boss’s desk, tied up the trash bag, and piled the ordered jars of blood into the can. After a nerve-wracking pit stop at the break room to heat them all up, he dashed back into the conference room to find Arthur brushing away the dirt around her body.

He noticed that the necromancer was doing his best to avoid skin to skin contact and basically carved a Madeleine-shaped silhouette in the earth.

Milo sat the trashcan on a nearby office chair and then knelt beside them. “Got the blood.”

Arthur did not even look up. “That’s good. We need to move the dirt without touching her with our hands. Do you have that kind of control?”

It was the mage’s turn to smile. “Piece of cake. It’s what I do, after all.” He stood up and examined what lay before them. “I’ll assume you’d rather not have dirt everywhere.” Milo tapped into his overflowing reserves and a single bubble appeared. It expanded like the soap bubble until the earth and the vampire were completely contained within an iridescent half-sphere on the carpet. “And I’ll also assume that I can touch her with magick without any negative repercussion, since you did so earlier.”

His boss smiled and nodded.

Left hand extended to maintain the integrity of the bubble, Milo slowly spun his right hand until it was palm up. He lifted it, keeping his left still, and willed the currently invisible half-bubble into inverse. In his head, it worked. He could push it up and over her, and simply trap the dirt within the concave double layer of bubble. But if there was an significant amount of dirt within her clothing, he risked tugging hard enough with his magick and quite possibly waking her up that way. And this bubble, though it could hold all that earth, would be no match for a sentient being fighting to get out. Much less a ravenous vampire.

So he tightened the flow of air and wove the bubble tighter. He bit his bottom lip as he pushed it upwards, through the carpet, and he was pleased to see the dirt sliding off the inverted bubble to the edges, caught cleanly and rather thoroughly as he had hoped. He inched it over her, and through the magickal link, he could almost taste her slumbering life essence, like so much liquid metal waiting like a silver pond for a stone to disturb the surface.

She sighed, fingers curling, and he almost dropped what he was doing. A hand dropped on his shoulder. “Steady, Milo, you’re almost there,”

Arthur whispered. “She isn’t going to wake up.”

He didn’t ask, trusting his boss to keep them safe, and he finished pulling every vestige of her grave from her body, minus the minute traces that caught in the blood spatter that remained. He brought his hands closer together, and the mass formed into a bubble about four feet in diameter.
But what to do with it now?

Disposal was not as simple as touching his hands together. That would only cause a mess. They couldn’t toss it out of a window for the same reason. And the effect of his errant thinking was visible in the ripples washing over the orb. “Arthur…”

“Hold on.” His boss was quiet for a minute, and then Bri’s head popped into the doorway.

“Yes, boss?” She looked from Arthur to Milo and then the sphere. “Oh, you want Zeke.” She disappeared before the necromancer could answer, and in about the span of time it took to wonder how long it would take to find the other mage, she reappeared with Zeke in tow.

“Oh, I got this,” Zeke said, and in two strides, he was next to the bauble, magickal netting alive in his hands. Together, the two mages managed to encase the ball of dirt in a skin of web that fit comfortably within the hollow of the other mage’s hand. “Can I keep it?” he asked their boss, and Arthur nodded.

“But before you wander off,” the necromancer said, his finger motioning for Zeke to come closer. He looked around the man to his secretary. “Bri, could you retrieve Vince as well?”

“No Nate?” she asked.

Arthur shook his head. “No, no Nate.” The were-bunny dashed off, as their boss turned his attention back to the mages. “Gentlemen, what we’re attempting to do here is not impossible, but it does have some--how shall I put this?—delicate issues as we would like her in one piece, I imagine, and I would like my entire team intact. Is that understood?”

“So, why am I here?” Vince asked from the doorway. He leaned against the doorjamb and crossed his arms. “I’m not exactly your ‘delicate work’ kind of guy.”

“You, werewolf, are the insurance policy.” Milo wasn’t the only one who gave Arthur a curious look. “Vince, if this doesn’t work, if we can’t get the subtleties of this magick to work in our favor, and she comes out of this ready for a supernatural buffet, I need to ensure that she doesn’t get out of this room. Am I clear?”

Milo shook his head. “You’d have him kill her.”

The necromancer favored him with a long, cold stare. “To save you, this team, my company and the innocent people outside these four walls, yes, I would.”

Continue: 22

Wicked & Wonderful: Chapter 20 - Fight! Part Two, Yo!

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Milo watched her eyes close slowly. “I should just kill you,” he yelled across the space between him and the minotaur. “I should just kill you and end all of this now.”

Tamus shook his head and chortled. “You don’t have it in you, mage.” He wiggled a shoulder until his left arm was free. “And that’s the truth, isn’t it? You simply don’t have enough juice. And do you know what’s worse?”

The mage shook his head. “What?”

The minotaur looked to the east. “The sun is coming, human. The sun is coming, your vampire is dead weight—no pun intended—and there is nowhere within walking distance to save her if you stay and pursue this insanity with me. Then you’ll both be dead, because I’ll have broken your puny back over my knee, and your girlfriend will go up in an acrid blaze. Ever seen a vampire bite it?” Tamus shook his head. “It is not pretty. So what’s it going to be, Milo the Magician? Are you going to try and save the day? Or save the girl?”

Milo swallowed hard. The monster was right for the most part. He wasn’t strong enough to hold him forever, and he was too exhausted to fight him off, magick or no, once the super was free of his binding. But what Tamus had forgotten was that Milo was already dying. This last bit of power he had managed to pull from the earth below his feet had been so harnessed because he could not stand to see her about to die trying to save him. It had slowed the rate he was losing blood, yes, but the gaping hole in his abdomen where the minotaur had so gored him earlier in the night remained, and it had begun to stink that putrid scent that only came from innards exposed to oxygen.

Add in that he was pretty sure there was a fair amount of rock and dirt shoved inside his body via that opening now, and the chances were pretty slim that he would make it much past dawn. So his choice was clear. He could not save the day, so he was going to save the girl. But not without one last parting blow. Here goes nothing.

He closed his eyes and summoned the air current closer, not to hold the minotaur who had freed his other arm whilst Milo had done his internal contemplation, but to better aim him across the opening of the canyon. “Remember well the enemy who showed you mercy,” he spoke, eyes opening, “that you may someday repay that debt.”

Tamus shrugged as he twisted his torso out of the gelatinous mass. “Not likely. More likely is the chance that I am going to kill you once I get out of here, just like I promised. I am honorable like that.”

Milo pulled the magick back, the shimmering edge of the band stretching between him and the minotaur. He had to time this just right, or it would be for naught. “There is no honor among thieves.”

The minotaur regarded him curiously. “You must want to die quickly, mage. You could gain little else by taunting me now.” He stalked toward Milo, and the mage held his breath. Three, two, one! He released the hold he had, er, held and the band of air, all tightly woven, flew forward and caught the minotaur across the body, just below his massive pectorals to his waist and flung him through the air. Milo watched as the monster’s silhouette grew ever smaller across the skyline until he could see him no more.

“This is not over!!” Tamus yelled as he disappeared, his words echoing and then fading into the twilight.

One task down, he thought, rather pleased with how that little experiment had turned out. He stumbled over to Madeleine’s still form and fell to his knees. One to go. He brushed her hair from her face and kissed her head gently. “I could’ve fallen in love with you,” he whispered. “And now we’ll never know, will we?”

He looked around, but they were in the middle of nowhere, a copse of saguaro providing the only real shade when the sun hit this place, and that would not save her. “Come on, Mother Earth, just this last thing, okay?” He shoved his hands into the ground and pulled at the silver line of energy flowing below. The ground beneath Madeleine shifted and groaned. “Come on!” The desert floor divided, like a hungry mouth, and swallowed her completely, leaving only overturned earth in its wake. He patted the mound and rested his head atop it.

What a hell of a day, huh? All the craziness he could imagine, and some that he had not even considered, but at the end of it all, he was leaving this world having done some real good. And he was all right with that. Death did not come to him in an instant replay of his life, or a white light leading him elsewhere. No, Death came to Milo in the heavy draught of a much needed slumber…and a white bunny.

Bunny? It did not matter. Not anymore. So Milo sighed and gave in to it, one hand buried in the earth over the most amazing vampire he had ever met, the other over the gaping hole still wet and warm to the touch. And for now, that was enough.

*****

He awoke in a grassy field beneath a warm sun. A white rabbit sat next to him, and he found it really weird that the bunnies in Heaven had ear piercings. “Bri?” The bunny cocked its little head at him and pressed a leaf against his forehead with one paw. “Bri, is that you?” A sudden thought occurred to him. If he was dead and in Heaven, that must mean… “Oh, God, what happened, Bri? How did you die?!”

“Death makes everyone a little crazy,” Nate’s voice came from behind him. “I mean, I must’ve almost died a couple of hundred times, give and take, minus all the nutty coincidences, so that explains my crazy, but our friend, Milo, here, well, he went all the way.”

Milo looked for the voice and saw Nate and Zeke sitting on a mound of rocks near the copse of saguaro. He shook his head and sat up, much to the displeasure of the rabbit, who gave him a dissatisfied squeak and promptly munched on the leaf she had had on his head. They couldn’t all be dead, could they? What kind of giant bad ass could have wiped out his entire crew?

“Oh, hey, Milo,” Nate waved, “Good to see you alive. Though you weren’t dead for very long, were you? Oh, you don’t know how long you were dead, do you?”

“Nate,” Zeke flicked his cigarette in the albino’s general direction.

“But dead to humans, and dead to supers like us tends to be completely different things,” Nate continued on, unfazed by the obvious hint from the other mage. “But it’s a good thing I tracked you down, though that shade friend of yours didn’t want to let us in the apartment, did he, Zeke? Um, Milo, why are you staring at me like that? I know I’m white and all, but I’m not a ghost.”

“Nate.”

“What?” The psychic threw up his hands, but Zeke shot him a nasty look. “Oh, fine.” He crossed his arms and turned his back on the other man.

Zeke nodded at Milo. “Nice to have you back, bro. We thought we were too late. Good thing our secretary doubles as a super night nurse, huh?”

Milo shook his head. “Um, how…how did you find me?”

The other man shrugged. “Nate had a vision when he was going a little OCD in the office and touched your mug, and that led to a field trip to your apartment, which in turn led to a lovely introduction to Douglas the most depressive shade known to mankind, who did not, as Nate said, want to let us in. But a little threatening by the werewolf,” he pointed toward the opening of the canyon, “currently playing watch dog, got us inside.

“Nate touched a few things, and the visions got worse—clearer but worse—so we followed the clues like a good Scooby Gang and ended up here. Bri resuscitated you, but you were kind of touch and go there for a while. And in the process of your apparent recovery, we got all this nice grass. Dude, if you’re going to grow post-traumatic death grass, couldn’t it be the good toking kind?” He laughed and shook his head. “No, seriously, what the hell happened out here? I mean, Nate saw imps and fuckin’ minotaurs, not to mention your girlfriend’s a bad ass vampire? What the hell are we doing in the middle of BFE at one o’clock in the afternoon on a Saturday?”

“Our date night kind of got waylaid,” Milo started. He ran a hand over his bald head, and was curious to see that the grass had grown everywhere but where he had buried Madeleine.

“So I see,” Zeke said with a nod. “But you have to do better than that. Give up the details.”

So Milo filled him in. From the tele-mechanical bugs in her walls to the story she told of the ugly Girl Scout and the monster—had it been Tamus?—who tore her house to all hell, all of which caught and kept Nate’s attention. He told them about flying with her, and fighting with her, and how that had all gone horribly wrong. His fingers moved over the part of his abdomen where the hole had been, where nothing but smooth flesh remained, as he told them about Tamus kicking his ass all over this canyon. And last but not least, and oddly enough most interesting to his audience, he detailed how he had kicked the minotaur out of the park, and buried the woman he still hoped would be his girlfriend in it.

“This is why I don’t date,” Nate whispered with a shudder. “It’s too dangerous out there!”

“So she’s buried under there?” Bri asked, back in her girl form. She slid one hand over the bare earth and sighed with her eyes closed. “You’ll be happy to know she’s alive, and almost completely healed.”

Milo gave her a curious stare. “Um, how do you know that?”

“Nate’s not the only touch clairvoyant in the company, you know,” she winked. “But I am the only teleporter.”

His eyes widened, as the gears started to turn in his head. “Teleporter?”

She giggled. “Yes, silly, it’s another of my gifts.” She caught his eyes drifting toward the mound. “And yes, when you are ready, I can take us all back to the office. And then I’ll drop the two of you off at your place, cos her place,” she dragged a thumb across her throat, “there’s really nothing left of it. Which is too bad, because it was a cute house.”

Milo was struck with a sudden sense of urgency. He wanted away from here, wanted Madeleine to wake up somewhere other than buried in unfamiliar ground. “Now, Bri, now.”

“Just have to get Vince,” she said standing up, “and then we can go, okay?” She wandered off without waiting for an answer. “Nate?”

The psychic jumped off his rock. “Oh, yeah, let me come, too!”

“Did you know?” Milo asked his remaining friend.

Zeke’s shadow fell over him before he sat down next to him. “About Bri?” He shrugged. “Nah, man, it’s a surprise to me, too, but given that our boss does not seem to keep anyone around him with only one gift, I guess we shouldn’t be all that amazed.” He stared at Milo while taking a long drag off his cigarette. “How are you?”

“Given that I should be dead, for all intents and purposes,” he sighed and dropped his eyes back down the casually waving grass between his feet. “I guess I’m all right. That was a lot of shit.”

“Yeah, a lot of shit for some girl.”

Milo looked up at Zeke, ready to fight again, but he saw the big, goofy grin on the other man’s face, and realized he was just kidding with him. “She’s some girl.”

“Must be, as far as I can figure.” He took another drag. “I admit that I doubted how this could work out, but if she went to bat for you, if she almost died to get to you, that’s love, dude. And I can see why you dig her.” He nodded toward the mound. “No pun intended.”

The elemental mage smiled. “That’s good, because I’m not about to give her up. Not now, not ever.”

“Unless she tries to kill you,” Zeke offered.

“Well, if she tries to kill me, I’m going to have to call things off, and then it’s a new ball game,” Milo shrugged. “But I don’t see it happening. “

“Yeah, me either.”

“Nice to see you alive and kickin’,” Vince’s deeper voice called from across the canyon. “I thought green grass, dead bodies, yeah, probably best to just give you a nice service and call it a day, but then this one,” he thumbed in Bri’s general direction, “did the whole touch clairvoyance thing, and assured us that you’d live to fight another day.”

Milo shaded his eyes with one hand. “So no burial.”

The werewolf shook his head. “Nope, no burial. Which is too bad, because I had a nice eulogy all planned out in my head.”

Bri cleared her throat. “Ready to go boys?”

Continue: 21

Wicked & Wonderful: Chapter 19 - Fight!

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His blood ran hot through her body like molten lava, hot and carving new lines into her inner landscape. She felt it fill the fissures in her broken wing, the cracked ribs. It pumped into her muscles and washed away the fatigue, the ache.

Tamus raged against her, but every time he tore through flesh, it healed in a curtain of his own blood. “Get off me! Get off me, you bitch!” He grabbed her by the waist and pushed, but she dug her hands into him, slipping to the knuckle between his ribs. She curled her fingers around each long, slender bone, mouth still firmly attached to his jugular—ah, the joy of fangs—and when he pushed, she pulled and the minotaur fell to his knees in a massive thud in a roar of pain.

She pulled back from him, a bright red stream down her chin. “You were warned.” She wiped at the mess with the back of one hand. “Tell me why I should not just kill you now.”

Tamus pressed a hand against the gaping wound, his breath coming fast and furious. “You’re a crazy bitch.”

Madeleine licked her hand in one long, sultry lap of her tongue. She could feel it, that two step distance away from being blood drunk. Her legs threatened to give way beneath her, and she pled with them silently to stay their course. She could not take Tamus right now, as much as he deserved to die, despite the fact that the surface damage she had done was already healing beneath his massive hand. She could not take him because it required more coordination than she had in her at the moment.

She staggered backwards, away from her enemy, and tried to clear her head. There was no doubt that she wanted the minotaur dead, preferably rendered into as many tiny pieces as she could scatter across the little canyon they were in. But he was already healing, the anti-coagulant in her bite spewing from the wicked mouth she had left behind in a foamy cloud. Soon enough, he would strike back, and she needed to be ready for it.

But then there was the matter of Milo. The thought of him pulled her eyes away from Tamus and the slight blur of healing magick he was casting to the prone body of the mage yet unmoving on the desert floor. She blinked depthless black eyes and saw faint, red lines emanating from him. There was still a pulse, but it was thready, failing.

She wanted to cry, but the tears would not come. Ridiculous that it had ended like this. All he had wanted was to date her, take her out for a good time. Do nice, normal human things. Not this, not all this chaos and madness. To think his life had been endangered because someone from her past—damn you, Patrick—had been unable to deal with the chance that she could be happy. The tears she could not shed burned inside her, like droplets of embers falling into a stomach full of emotional lighter fluid. They hit, and anger flared its ugly, blue-white head.

She smiled, but there was no happiness in it. And she was all right with that. Anger was better than sadness in her book, anyway. By a long shot. She knew what to do with anger, how to focus it, how to use it as a weapon, and she could push the rest away in denial, into little boxes deep in the darkness of her head. It empowered her, that rage, and she felt the threat of blood drunk awkwardness dissipate like steam, leaving her all amped up and ready for a fight.

“You killed him for nothing,” she seethed, stalking back toward Tamus. He looked up, just as she swiped at him, one hand carving a giant arc in the space before his face. Her fingernails had extended, thickened, sharpened, as was part of her more primal nature. He leaned back and pushed at her with one hand, but her nails grazed his face, drawing pretty red lines across his muzzle, before she flew backwards from his blow.

“He died because of you!” The minotaur rose to his feet and stomped toward her. “You could have walked away. You could have done what was right…”

“Right?!” she screamed. Her wings fluttered, and the air picked up around her with every wave of feathers. The dust danced in dust devils before her, and the smaller rocks rolled past her feet. She was not calling them, just moving them forward. Pure science. Some things should be above that, she guessed, beyond that, especially if they were supers. But the gusts kept coming, the dirt and rock moving ever faster against Tamus.

“I am tired of arguing with you about this!!” She stamped her foot, and the ground trembled. “There’s nothing to argue about! He was not yours to toy with! He was not even mine! And now he never can be! Now I never even get that option!” Her wings shifted, raising her off the ground in a slow ascent. “Goddammit, I really liked this one, Tamus! I really liked him!!”

She flew at him, all fangs and fury, but he was ready for her. His two great hands grabbed her in mid-flight, snatching her from the air, and then he slammed her wings first into the ground, knocking the wind out of her. He picked her up and slammed her down again. “I do not care!! He is human, nothing. The span of his life but a grain in ours. Yet you continue to choose them over us! You continue to pretend you are one of them, deny your place and then like some mewling baby, you whine and complain about how your ‘human’ life is not working out?!”

He grabbed her hair in one big handful and dragged her up to his face. “I tell him time and again that if you want so badly to be human that we should help you out with that. If you were still human, you would be dead right now, would not you?” He shook her by her head. “Would not you!?”

She slashed at his arm, and while she found herself showered with his blood, he did not relent his forcible beating. The edges of her sight grew fuzzy with each impact, her skull bouncing off the ground, threatening to snap her neck. She screamed at him, and tore at his chest with her claws, until almost the entire front of her was covered in steamy red blood. He lifted her skyward and just as he began to drop her again, she heard something.

Faintly, from the distance, came, “Madeleine…”

“Wait!” she yelled at Tamus, who, startled by her response, froze, leaving her to dangle from his hands in mid-air. Could it be? “Did you hear that?”

“What?” The minotaur cocked his head. “I do not hear anything. Wait…that?”

What a sight they must have been, mid-fight, all bloodied and broken, horns and wings tangled, suddenly stilled by the breath, the whisper of her name. Still faint, ever distant, but unmistakably her name falling from a man’s lips…

“Milo?” She pushed at Tamus, and he dropped her to the ground. She turned to where he had lain, and sure enough, his body moved, one arm outstretched in her general direction, head up with his chin in the dust.

“Milo!” She started toward him, but she was jerked back, feet off the ground. She looked over her shoulder and saw the minotaur behind her, his hands on her wings and a wicked grin on his face. “Tamus...no…”

“There are few things worse than death,” he growled, his grip tightening against the feathered arc in his hands. “But I think dying trying to get to someone you love ranks up there, do not you?” In one fell swoop, he snapped both of her wings and forced her to the ground. She screamed as he stomped onto the backs of her knees. A nasty crushing sound echoed in her ears as bone shattered under his hoof.

The pain was excruciating, paralyzing her where she lay. Milo! Her fingers reached for him, digging lines in the dirt, but she was not getting any closer. Her wings labored arduously above her, but the extent of the agony twisted her stomach, and she fought the urge to vomit where she lay. She shuddered, and they dropped in a feathery mass around her.

She was still healing from all the blood she had taken from the minotaur, faster than she usually did, albeit slower than he was beating the shit out of her, but her wings were already on the mend when he kicked her and broke three ribs on her left side. Her knees were knitting the bone and cartilage back in place as he grabbed her hair and slammed her face into the dirt. If she could get him to just stop, to get him to quit turning parts of her into so much pulp, then she could heal.

Then she could save Milo.

But right now, she really, really needed to save herself.

Madeleine pushed away the pain from another cloven blow into her torso, and with her back arched, forced her wings away. It sucked. It hurt like a motherfucker, but it was one less thing for him to use against her.

“Madeleine?”

She dropped her guard and stole a look at the mage. Tamus grabbed her by the wrist and flipped her onto her back, knocking the wind out of her again. She was getting really tired of that. Milo, hold on, I’m coming. I’ll save you.

She heard Milo chuckled, light, slightly pained, but a chuckle nonetheless. It was encouraging, empowering, and exactly what she needed. She wrapped her hands around the minotaur’s ankle and twisted. It was not enough to drop him to the ground, but it got him to one knee.

She kicked up with one healed leg and caught him in that sweet spot right behind every minotaur’s ear. Something about balance, he had once told her all those years ago on a boring day in court, between the ivory horns on his head and the tough bone of his jaw line, had given him a soft space of skin and tissue just behind his ears. And when the flat of the top of her foot made impact, he roared, tumbling backwards, one hand clutching his ear.

His eyes glowed red above his muzzle, and with a primal rage, he pawed at the ground and began his charge. The earth vibrated beneath the vampire. He was not just going to hit her, he was going to plow through her, and she had burned so much blood healing—had that been part of his plan?—that she had no more strength to move. At least not fast enough to get out of his barreling forward momentum. This was going to hurt.

She stole one last look at…wait, where the hell was Milo? She turned her head to the right, and just as the sound of Tamus’ feet hitting the ground suddenly stopped (yet neither his roaring nor the humming underground did not, oddly enough), Madeleine caught sight of Milo’s boots. That led to a pair of legs, his torso, and his hands outstretched before him.

Oh. He looked exhausted, pale as hell and about ready to barf whatever might possibly be left in his stomach. But he was standing and very much alive.

“Milo?”

“You looked like you could use some help.” He kept his eyes diverted, but sweat was beading on his bald head from the effort, and when she looked behind her, she understood why. The minotaur, all seven feet of him, stood semi-frozen in a semi-translucent gob of air. Only semi-frozen, given that he was tossing his head and horns above the bonding substance and his cloven feet kicked to and fro below.

It might have been funny, if the edges of her vision had not begun to fade off into the darkness. “Milo?” she whispered, but he did not hear her. She heard him talking, something forceful, to the point, but the words escaped her as the darkness swallowed her whole.

Continue: 20

Troll or Derby, Thyself!

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Wicked & Wonderful: Chapter 18 - Aftermath

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Above the glowing form of the mage stood the towering frame of the dark supernatural creature that had torn her house to pieces. “Tamus.”

“You know this guy?” Milo asked within his glowing sphere.

“Remember Patrick?” The mage nodded. “Yeah, this would be his minion, Tamus.”

“You were warned, Madeleine.” The minotaur took a step forward. “You were given the option to make all this stop, but you chose to do what you wanted. As usual.”

She moved to put herself between the mage and the minotaur, and motioned for Milo to back up. “Then you admit that Patrick planted bugs in my house to keep tabs on me? I mean, since neither of you called to see what I’d decided.”

Tamus snorted. “You know he did no such thing.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, trying to keep her movement smooth, slight. “Patrick wouldn’t dare do his own dirty work. So, no, he didn’t do it, but let’s not pretend that you think I am stupid. He hired someone to do it. Maybe the guy who cleaned my carpets last year, or the maid, or the cable guy, people I wouldn’t pay much attention to. But it was his hand that moved those pawns.”

The minotaur shrugged. “Perhaps.”

She shook her head. “There is no ‘perhaps’, Tamus, but I will let it slide and consider the truth all laid out. As for this, what is going on right now, your issue is with me. It has nothing to do with Milo. You let him leave, no harm, no foul, and we can have this out, once and for all.”

Tamus spat fire on one of the saguaro cactus. “You know I cannot do that. The imps are owed their pound of flesh. After all, he did kill many of their kin.”

She swallowed hard and stopped. Milo’s voice replayed the story of his mission at the grocery store in her head. Well, crap. “Imps aren’t familial, Tamus, and they really don’t do revenge, because let’s face it, of all the dark supernatural creatures in the Other, they aren’t the smartest. No, if they want blood, it’s because other people planted that thought in their head and reinforced it with a little darker magick.”

He smiled, that ugly spread of lips that showed his sharp teeth. “That changes nothing, vampire. We are still in this little space, you and I, your mage and a horde of imps. Does it really matter how we got to be so cozy? Really? You know how to end this; why not spare us the bloody mess?”

She ran clammy hands over her jeans. Come on, Maddie, think!! “You destroyed my house.”

He shrugged. “You wouldn’t invite me in. And you wouldn’t come out.”

“You can’t kill me, you know. No matter what Patrick thinks of me, he doesn’t want me dead.”

“Very true,” the minotaur mused, “but that doesn’t hold true for your human.”

“He’s going to kill me anyway,” the mage in question whispered from behind her. “You know he will. He’s just that kind of douche bag, like that bad Italian mobster that promises to leave everyone all right, if you just do what he says, and when you leave to go and do it, he orders his minions to kill them all.”

I know, she replied back in his head. But what can we do? You and I aren’t strong enough to take on all those imps and a douche bag Minotaur alone.

“Let me think. I will come up with something.”

Hurry, because I am all out of ideas right about now.

“Keep him talking, buy us time. The imps aren’t going to attack until he gives the go-ahead. Let him have the biggest bad guy monologue of all time.”

Okay. Milo…

“I swear, woman, if you fuckin’ apologize again, I am going to have to spank you. Consider yourself warned.”

I am sorry, then.

“Oh, yeah, definitely a spanking in your future.”

She chuckled. It was ludicrous to even think about an after in a situation where she simply couldn’t see one, but she needed that little bit of humor to wash some of the fear out of her system. She would have to make sure she thanked him appropriately later. After the spanking, of course.

“What is so funny?” Tamus snorted. “Have you finally lost your marbles? It will be easier to carry you off to Patrick if you are a basket case, though.”

“You wish,” she scoffed. “I wouldn’t make this any easier on you than I have to. Who exactly do you think I am? More to the point, who the hell do you think you are? And why the hell are you still working for someone like Patrick? You were your own master in Other World, held your own place in the dark court. So what the hell happened?”

The minotaur managed to look offended, and Madeleine wondered if she had pushed too far. “I still hold a place in court. I am revered among my kin for the bonds I have built in Other World and beyond. You will not diminish what I have become because you no longer hold such power.”

Nice that your ego’s still in tact. “But to be beholden to a vampire? There are ties, and then there are ties, Tamus. Do you provide a service, or are you simply serving?” A thought occurred to her. “Is there something else? Are you holding out for some prize after all these years? Or have you done something so terrible, even in the eyes of the dark court, that you have no choice but to serve?”

He did not answer, his eyes dropping to his hooves that kicked at the desert floor. “The reasons I do what I do for whom I do such things matters little in the grander scheme. I am not here to satisfy your curiosity, Madeleine. Tell me why I should not set free the impish horde to munch on your new boyfriend. Tell me why I should not make short work of you for all the hassle you have caused me. It would be worth the punishment I would have to endure for maybe the next ten years under Patrick’s rage. Then I would be done with you, my hands clean of you.”

“Even if that means washing your hands with my blood.”

“Especially washing my hands with your blood.” He shook his head. “If I were he, I could care less what a woman I once cared about did anymore. Even spreading the misery gets old after a couple of decades. Yet he persists and I am sent to harass you once more. I do not take glee in this, no matter what you believe. I would rather revel in the pieces of you spurting forth blood before you turn to dust, as you vampires are apt to do, but this, this harassment, this petty annoyance, it is beneath me. And honestly it is beneath you.”

Milo…

“I’m almost ready,” the mage whispered. “When I tell you to duck, do it, okay. But I need a few more minutes.”

Gotcha. “I wish it were as simple as you just walking away,” she said to the minotaur. The ground pulsed under her feet, slight, almost imperceptible. Had Tamus noticed?

“But you and I both know it is not,” he finished for her. “So let us be done with it. No more words, Madeleine. You have stolen enough time for your mage, don’t you think?”

“What are you talking about?” She gave him her best innocent look. Milo?

“Oh, yeah, I heard him. Now’s as good a time as any, I guess.”

Tamus snorted and shook his head. “I am older than you by several millennia. And unlike your kin, I enjoy a good confrontation, so this heart-to-heart is old hat.” He stopped her protest with one hand. “I needed to vent. I don’t believe in keeping all that negativity inside, and now I get to kill you with a clear head. I guess I should thank you for that.”

“So you’re going to kill me?” She widened her stance, hands up, as if she could possibly win a mano-a-mano fight with this supernatural.

“Yes,” he rubbed his monstrous hands together. “I’m going to kill you and your little mage boy toy.”

“What will you tell Patrick?” Milo!

“Get ready. One more minute!” he whispered. The pulse quickened, and she could hear the magick moving under her shoes, gathering at the feet of the man behind her.

“I will tell him the truth, that I gave into my nature and could not stop myself. That the boy mage’s blood incensed me, and I lost all restraint. That I was sorry, truly sorry, to have left this part of the mountain covered in blood and ash. The last part,” he shrugged, “perhaps that is a lie.”

He chortled, deep and echoing off the rocky walls. “No, you and I both know I will not leave here regretting it. Now, let us begin.” He clapped his giant hands together, three times, and the buzzing that had lingered just beyond her eye sight moved closer in a crescendo of noise.

“Milo!”

“Duck!”

She crouched down, and a second later, white, blue spirals of electricity poured from the mage’s hands. He stood like a giant lightning rod behind her, arms out, head thrown back, the magick drawing up from the ground beneath them.

A high-pitched squeal filled the air. She peeked around him and saw the lashes of magick snagging imps from the air, or slashing them with minute electric blades, or crushing them within the tendrils. Whatever magick held them here could not compete with the mass hysteria growing ever larger among the tiny beings. Short attention span and all that.

Behind her, Tamus bellowed in anger. “Madeleine!” She turned to see the minotaur slapping at the electricity, but there were so many lines of it, and he was just a giant. It was like watching a hundred thousand whips eating at his flesh. She almost felt sorry for him, and then she remembered that he had intended to kill her and Milo. Good riddance.

But the barbs were not enough to kill him, and when he had had quite enough, she watched Tamus pull the nearest man-shaped saguaro from the ground. “Milo!!”

It was too late. Tamus flung the uprooted cactus at the mage. Madeleine stood up to meet it, but she had not anticipated her own reaction to his magick and found herself paralyzed by the electric charge. The pain was excruciating, ripping a scream from her lips. Every hair on her body stood on end, conducting the electricity ever deeper into her flesh until her very bones rattled with it. It forced her wings out, which only gave it more area to play upon.

She could not sort her thoughts, could not form words from the agonizing sounds issuing from her mouth. The cactus made contact, slamming her into the mage and dropping them both to the ground. The electric net stopped, but her arms, legs and wings twitched uncontrollably. Tamus stomped toward them, his shadow lengthening over them.

He grabbed her by one arm and one leg and flung her across the open space, against the farther wall. Her head bounced off the rock, and one of ridges in her wing snapped. She fell to the ground in a crumpled, feathery heap. Must. Get. Up. Must. Save. Milo. She pushed up to all fours and straightened her wings. She grunted against the pain as her eyes swept the scene.

Tamus had wasted no time. He was yelling Other World obscenities at the man, and while the magick had forced him down to almost human size, it did nothing to lessen the strength of his cloven kicks. Milo screamed in pain as the minotaur rolled him around the area. The sound of his bones breaking echoed audibly in the air.

“Tamus, no!!” she yelled. “Don’t do it! Please!”

Her last word gave him pause. He reached down and grabbed Milo by the front of his shirt. He lifted the mage above his head. “What would you do for him, Madeleine? What boon would you give me to spare his life? What could you possibly say to me that will convince me from tearing him limb from limb as you watched? What?!”

She raised her hands in surrender. “There’s nothing, Tamus, nothing that will sate your anger. I know that. I will go with you to Patrick, if you let him go. And by doing so, I will ensure your position in the dark court. But you have to let him go. Now.”

“I do not believe you, vampire.” The minotaur cocked his head to the side, one horn scraping a long line down Milo’s body. “I believe not your words at all.” He pulled Milo downward, goring him through the abdomen. The mage screamed, back bending as his blood poured down Tamus’ arm.

The second it hit the air, her hunger growled through her lips. It had been so long since she had tasted fresh human blood, longer since she had fed on a supernatural. But she held back, afraid that her fury, her hunger, would consume not only the minotaur but the man in his grasp. She shook the scent from her nose.

“I would not do such things if I were you,” she whispered, her voice low, guttural, almost a purr.

Tamus lowered the mage to the ground, eyes wide. “Madeleine?”

She licked her lips in spite of herself, her eyes closing in a slow blink as she reveled in the scent pooling around the mage, still moving in rivulets down the minotaur’s arm. “Oh, Tamus, can’t you smell it?” Milo, Milo, Milo, a little voice in her head reminded her. Do not feed on him. Do not feed on him!

But the hunger tore at her with every forward step, her eyes caught in the pooling red shimmer. Alone, she was no match for the minotaur, not usually, not as starved as she was, but somewhere between the magick and the mayhem, the blood and the battle, her hunger served a greater purpose. It propelled her, moved her, and when the voice in her head saw that Milo breathed no more, it lay quiet in anguish, the gates restraining her released.

Tamus took two steps backwards. “Madeleine, you know not what you do.”

“And nor do I care.” She leapt at the minotaur in a flurry of untold speed and fury, and sank her teeth into his neck. And the blood, all that blood, all spiked in that supernatural magick poured down her throat in a decadent flood.

Oh, yeah, that hits the spot.

Continue: 19