Page 14

Lydia

I couldn’t keep up the pace for long, even with my new and improved demon body.

Makeover or not, I was still out of shape. I managed to make it almost twice my usual jogging distance before I ended up bent double, panting. I caught a woman about my age moving in the opposite direction giving me a sympathetic glance before continuing on her brisk walk. She didn’t seem to notice the faintly luminous cast to my skin or the nubby horns I could feel on the crown of my head. She saw what she wanted to see. A woman who hadn’t kept up with her exercise routine.

I stayed like that for a while, hands on my thighs, staring at the cracks in the pavement under my sneakers. Forcing myself to breathe, I was able to clear some of the dark fog away, allowing me to think again.

“ Are you done throwing a fit?” Indigo asked when my breaths eased into gasps instead of the impulse to throw up breakfast all over someone’s yard.

I wished I could turn to her voice and smack her. I did not need the sass right now.

Her sigh breezed through my mind. “ Sorry. That was crueler than I meant to be. Are you about done with the panic attack? ”

No, I wasn’t. Because I wasn’t just in a relationship; I was mated, whatever the hell that meant. All I knew was that I was tied to Angelo in a way he hadn’t asked for.

“ Didn’t you hear what Olga said? He did ask for it! If the feelings hadn’t been mutual, he wouldn’t be bound to you. It isn’t like you forced him .”

No, but I felt I should have at least warned him. If he’d known, he might have avoided being tied to me for life.

“ You couldn’t have warned him. You didn’t know.”

“And whose fault is that?” I shot back.

Another sigh. “ Mine. You don’t have to constantly throw it in my face, Lydia. I know what I did was unforgivable. I know I can’t make it right. I’m no better than a shade, trapped in the head of a gypsy who has been blessed by the goddess with a lover, a business, and a comfortable life. Lydia, I would trade everything I have left to be in your place. But I can’t change what happened. Only you can choose what happens now. You can panic and say something you don’t mean, or you can go back and figure this out.”

I hated that she had a point. I also hated the edge of despair that cut me to the quick. She’d definitely gotten the short end of the stick in our current arrangement. The only times she’d been able to emerge were fraught with danger. Something about a life-or-death situation could finally allow me to shrink back enough to let her come to the fore. Maybe there was some way to make it more permanent—a potion or something.

Indie made a soft, scornful sound. “ Your body isn’t an apartment I live in. You can’t make it a timeshare situation. ”

But I could feel the thought churning in her head. She’d think about it, even if she ultimately turned me down. She wanted Anthony, and the idea of being with him was tempting, even if I could only offer her a few hours at a time.

“ You’re mated. I don’t think Angelo would care for another man touching your body. Even if I’m in the driver’s seat, it’s your neck that’s still getting a hickey. Not to mention how it would look to everyone else.”

“Like I had two boyfriends.”

“Right.”

“Angelo said he’d do it if I wanted it. Of course, he’d prefer to share me with another woman. You know, typical man. But if I really wanted to, he’d share me—you—with another man. I think he has to be the one to pick who, though.”

“ Because you’re a sexually submissive woman. God, it’s such an embarrassment to be attached to your fantasies.”

“You’ve never wanted to be tied down?”

“ No, ” she replied, a little too quickly and forcefully.

Then a barrage of images hit me without warning. I had to white-knuckle my thighs as the pictures washed through my mind.

Rope. One length of enchanted rope was all that kept me from freedom. Murrain was taunting me, leaving freedom so close yet still so impossibly out of reach.

Terror slid like an icy blade between my ribs, stopping my heart for a moment too long. Pain blossomed across my chest seconds later, a phantom echo of a very real blade that had plunged into Indie’s body during the week Murrain had tormented her.

“How many times did he stab you?” I asked in a small voice.

“ Too many to count ,” she said, her tone flat and exhausted. “ He handed me over to a Reeper for torture. Not Simon, thank the goddess, but still a Reeper. He came up with a lot of creative ways to hurt me. I healed, of course. I wished at that point I couldn’t. Death would at least have been the end .”

“How did you escape?”

My stomach turned. I couldn’t feel the emotions she was suppressing. I probably didn’t want to know if the mere mention of it made her nauseous.

“ I’ll take that secret to the grave… or whatever else is waiting when this half-life is over. I’m not telling anyone how I did it. I refuse .”

I didn’t try to dissuade her. It was her trauma, and she’d deal with it her way.

“Why did you come to my shop?” I asked for the umpteenth time. I’d asked variations of the question for months, and she dodged almost every time.

“ Because I finally tracked down my mother’s second journal.”

And this was something I’d never heard before. And it surprised me—not so much that Murrain had hunted down her mother’s journal, but that she was admitting as much.

“She had another one she kept from her days at the Academy,” Indie continued. “She met Murrain there—at the Academy. They were close. She joined him, and later I did the same thing. But the difference is, she got out. She survived long enough to pen another book of shadows—the one she had to keep from Murrain. That book has her most powerful spells.”

“Where is it now?” I thought back.

“It ended up in mundane hands somehow, and I tracked it halfway across the country before I found a lead .”

I was pretty sure that’s what had led her to me and my store. I was also pretty sure that Rodney had bought the book at some point and failed to label it correctly. He’d always done things like that. He’d bring in inventory without consulting me and then expect me to do the organizing. I was a firm believer in the adage: everything has its place.

“ The point is, you have an opportunity, Lydia—you have the opportunity to be happy. To live an amazing life with the man you love. Don’t waste it like I did .”

She was right. Again. Yes, the situation looked bad. This mating thing had been an accident, but it was going to completely alter the course of both Angelo’s and my life. Mated pairs had certain rituals they performed to keep a relationship healthy. I had to learn more about them before my magic spiraled out of control again and made everything worse. Because as far as I knew, there was no way out of this.

Unfortunately, I needed to go back to the coven house. Talking with him about this might be painful. It could be personally devastating for me if he wanted space to think about things. But the uncertainty was what would bring the house down around my ears. If Angelo wanted to leave, I’d let him go. If he didn’t want me after what I’d done, it would hurt. At the end of the day, though, I’d survive it—at least, I hoped I would. I’d survived Rodney’s petty cruelties. Oddly, I trusted Angelo to treat me more fairly.

And speaking of Rodney... Was I going crazy, or was I hearing his voice? I almost preferred that explanation—that I was losing my marbles. At least going nuts came with a wide spectrum of good drugs and four-point restraints. It would be a lot more fun than confronting my husband. Soon-to-be ex husband, with any luck.

“Lydia.”

I turned toward the sound and paused when the accompanying visual and emotional gut punch hit me. It wasn’t just seeing him, though that was bad enough. He was the last person I wanted to confront on a residential street. We’d get in a shouting match, and someone would call the cops.

Or maybe Rodney would keel over, saving me the trouble of calling them. He certainly looked like death warmed over. Slick with sweat, his skin was gray and waxy. His lips were a darker color, as though he’d gotten frostbite. His eyes were watery and didn’t focus well on me. But he’d been the one calling my name.

“ What the hell is he doing here? ” Indie asked.

In response, I allowed her access to my memories of everything that had gone on over the last couple of days that she’d been asleep. Well, minus certain sexual details.

“ I’d offer to hex him for you ,” Indigo said with a note of amusement in her tone. “ But I think someone already beat us to it. What do you want to bet that Andrea has witch blood in her? She probably caught him stepping out on her.”

It wouldn’t have shocked me. Rodney’s expectations of women were unattainable. I couldn’t be perfect enough to match whatever ideal he had in his head. I still didn’t want him to get hurt, though. He’d ruined parts of my life, but I still didn’t want him to be seriously injured. I just wanted him to have an inconvenient and itchy condition for a few decades.

“ Why does he look like he’s about to drop dead?” Indie wondered aloud.

“ Andrea said he has anemia. At first, I thought she was lying to save face. It seems like the sort of thing a politician would consider a winning proposition .”

Indie lapsed into a thoughtful silence as Rodney came level with me, barely able to glance my way without his lip curling. Even sick and in a flop sweat, Rodney was still going to be Rodney. I was sorely tempted to let him weave into traffic. He really was the worst partner I’d ever had. The juxtaposition between Angelo and Rodney wasn’t even close to fair. Angelo wiped the floor with my ex in every metric. And Angelo was mine now. My mate, whatever that actually entailed.

“Lydia,” Rodney said, sounding as breathless as I felt.

A line of sweat poured down one temple and into his eyes. He didn’t even have the strength to lift his hand to bat it away. He blinked too fast, eyes wide and glazed with confusion.

I could have escaped him. He didn’t look healthy enough to chase even a regular woman down the street, let alone one who’d recently come into her powers. It might have been the smart thing to do, given the changes in me he was sure to notice. He’d subtly mocked my appearance before. Horns on my head were definitely enough fodder to keep him going. But I was afraid that leaving now would mean abandoning him to collapse in the street.

“What do you want, Rodney?”

Rodney staggered forward a step, trying to seize my elbow. I backed up, and he nearly toppled onto the pavement at my feet.

“I don’t… feel good.”

“That’s why there’s urgent care and emergency rooms. You should go to one or the other. You look awful.”

His face took on the color of a blanched onion. I could almost see his blood moving sluggishly under his skin. His pulse looked labored, and he even smelled sick. The Koloth could sense disease or a festering wound and was eager to investigate. I hoped that wasn’t the ‘hunting together’ Olga had mentioned in the coven house.

“No hospitals. She said no hospitals or she’d…”

Rodney swayed dangerously, completely losing the thread of what he’d been saying. His eyes slid out of focus, and I only had a second to realize what was happening before he pitched forward. I was there to catch all two hundred and fifty-plus pounds of dead weight. It was easier than I would have thought, but it still made my arms ache. I could lift a lot, but I wasn’t practiced at it yet. And I didn’t care how in shape a person was; no one expects the uneven weight of another person to fall on them. I ended up half-collapsed under him.

“ That sounded ominous ,” Indigo muttered. “ Three guesses who she is. You were right to worry about her, just not for the reasons you think. I’d say that woman is a monster .”

“So what do we do about it?”

“ Get your ex-husband to a hospital. Whatever curse or malady he has will kill him if we don’t act quickly. I wouldn’t blame you for wanting to leave him to his fate, but we won’t get answers unless he survives .”

“Add to the list that ‘leaving people to die’ isn’t a good thing, Indie.”

“ Yeah, yeah, that too. But practical reasons matter more right now. Andrea poses a threat to your ex’s life. That’s where the plan started, and I doubt that’s where it ends .”

“So I should call 911?”

“ Yes. And then the coven. We have a ritual to perform .”