All Things Wicked Page 2

“Oh, God,” she whispered, jerking her hand from the hilt as if it had burned her.

  Caleb fell to his knees, expression transfixed: shock, anger, and pain. Lips white with strain, he reached up and wrenched the knife out, swearing as flesh and muscle shredded beneath the jagged edge. It made a sound like wet paper, like gristle parting. Blood splattered the peeling wall.

  Juliet slapped her hands over her mouth as his eyes, shockingly blue, met hers. Stunned. Accusing. “You . . . missed,” he managed, and slumped over.

  She sobbed out a laugh. It cracked. Her knees folded, dumped her gracelessly on the floor, and the unforgiving surface jarred every aching bone in her body. Raising a hand to her face, she saw the blood—Caleb’s blood—gleaming wetly on her fingers and squeezed her eyes shut.

  She swallowed down a violent surge of bile.

  Blood. His blood. Wasn’t that what she’d wanted? To kill him for everything he’d done to her friends? To make him suffer?

  Yes!

  Not like this.

  Oh, God. She wasn’t a killer. But it was too late now.

  Or was it? She opened her eyes, very cautiously forced herself to check. His chest rose and fell. He was breathing. White-faced and clammy, but breathing. The shoulder wasn’t a vital organ, after all.

  And yet he’d pitched over as if she’d gotten him through the heart.

  She scrubbed her hands along her thighs. Had she really taken down the soothsayer? The man who could read the future like it was a book? He hadn’t seen her coming, had he?

  Now what?

  She couldn’t kill him. The queasy knot in her stomach told her that; the screaming denial in her head told her she couldn’t just . . . just murder a man. Okay. She got it.

  But she could give him to the people he’d hurt the most.

  Now, she needed her comm line. She needed to contact whatever was left of the coven. Would they be glad to hear from her?

  She’d be bringing them the betrayer. Of course they would.

  Maybe they’d take her back, forgive her for not being there when everything had fallen apart.

  She could be part of them again.

  That meant something. Didn’t it?

  But only if the comm frequencies she remembered actually worked. It had been over a year. She’d returned to find the coven in ruins, most scattered or hiding or captured or dead.

  She took a shaking breath, and the metallic smell of Caleb’s blood drilled into her nose. She pressed shaking fingers into her eyes, gouged deeply until she could see through the panic forging chaotic lines through her brain.

  No. She had to be honest.

  She hadn’t tried to reach them. Hadn’t bothered to do anything but look for her sister. In the empty, desperate months that followed, with her world turned upside down and everyone she’d known dead or gone, Juliet had focused only on her sister. She’d traced every lead, every rumor, every damned ghost, but it was as if Cordelia had just . . . disappeared into thin air. Leaving no trace of her passage.

  There was no reason. Delia wasn’t a witch like Juliet, she was a prostitute—one of the amazingly pampered women who worked at Waxed. She’d enjoyed her life. Loved Juliet.

  Then she’d vanished.

  Despair had set in. Ridden Juliet hard until she’d found that the lower street bathtub gin was the best medicine she could find. It cured everything. Sorrow. Anger.

  Guilt.

  “Oh, God, get a grip,” she whispered, hand to her throat where a manic beat threatened to choke her. There wasn’t time for this. The soothsayer was out cold, but for how long? Could she tie him with anything? She hadn’t brought any rope, no cuffs, nothing.

  She’d thought no further than killing him. Hell, it was all she’d thought about in her alcohol-fueled anger. She didn’t have a plan for this!

  Maybe she should have borrowed some of the fake fur sex cuffs off the girls at the bar. Hysterical laughter threatened to bubble out of her throat. It wouldn’t be the first bondage play this filthy place had seen, she was sure.

  The motel room wasn’t any different from the thousands of rooms just like it in the streets below the civilized edges of New Seattle. It was the kind of place that charged by the hour, loved and loathed by prostitutes and the johns they serviced.

  The faded carpet was threadbare and stained beneath her boots, and the neon glow of the omnipresent electrical net of city lights couldn’t hide the water stains eating at the plaster, the slimy mold gathering under the single curtained window or the dingy pile of blankets flung into the far corner.

  It smelled like dirty laundry and old vomit; like sweat and rot and the lingering aroma of hours upon hours of cheap sex soaked into every available surface. It was a scent as familiar to her as her own name, branded into her brain from too many years surviving in a city that didn’t care. Juliet resisted the urge to cover her nose, but her stomach clenched, roiled.

  Later, she promised herself. Later, she’d curl around a toilet and puke until her stomach didn’t remember the quantity of gin she’d cleaned out the night before.

  Then she’d start on a new bottle until Caleb Leigh’s face was a distant memory.

  It’d have to be a really, really large bottle.

  He wasn’t moving. Sprawled out in the flickering light, his skin gleamed white and red and sallow yellow, and the wound at his shoulder bled sluggishly in a steady rivulet.

  The months hadn’t been good to him.

  Caleb had always been lean, but the past year had scraped the last vestiges of excess weight from his body and hardened him into something rangier. Wiry. Her fingers trembled, and she shoved them against the floor by his inert form before she did something stupid. Like touch him.

  Instead, under the sparking wash of red and orange neon, she surveyed the sinewy muscle defining his pale skin.

  His shoulders weren’t overly broad, but they were strong. She wasn’t made of feathers, and he’d practically pinned her to the wall with one arm. His chest tapered to a narrow waist framed by the unbuttoned vee of his jeans. Shadows gathered in the well-defined edges of a physique that put most of the men she’d ever known to shame. He’d changed.

  And it had hurt.

  Before she could catch herself, before she realized what she meant to do, the very tips of her fingers skimmed the morass of scars carved into his body. Rough ridges rippled across his left shoulder, twisted the flesh and muscle of his arm into a grotesque pattern of hardened tissue and shiny, melted skin.

  She flinched as his muscles leaped under her touch. And the wildly knocking pulse low in her belly warned her that whatever her mind was telling her, her body remembered a whole different side of Caleb Leigh.

  The man who’d stripped away every defense she’d ever had. Who had filled her mind and body and tapped into something she never knew she’d wanted, and then. . .

  And then betrayed her.

  “You sorry son of a—” She bit her lip.

  Son of a bitch. Yeah, I know.

  He’d always been cold.

  She traced the nodules of tight, healed rivulets across his left pectoral. They rasped against the sensitive nerve endings at her fingertip. The wounds climbed up his shoulder, up the left side of his throat to splay like twisted claws over the hard line of his jaw.

  Any boyishness the high cheekbones and sculpted planes of his face might have maintained was stripped forever, marred by monstrous furrows of bone-white skin at his cheek. It touched the corner of his mouth, giving his lips a permanently flippant quirk.

  The tip of her finger settled there, tracing the line where smooth skin met rough. Her throat closed on an unwanted wash of sympathy.

  She swallowed it down. Hard.

  He deserved a hell of a lot more than a few ugly wounds.

  The amount of charms he wore said he knew it. Colored threads knotted around both wrists, thick with beads and bits of unpolished rock. A rough cord wrapped around his neck, braided twine that she knew without having to look would have threa
ds of hair woven in. White flint hung from a wire catch, effective at breaking bonds.

  Amber, jade, and labradorite shared strings with stone beads rudimentarily carved. He used every trick in the book to stay hidden. With warding charms like those, it was no wonder it had taken her a year to track him. Never great at rituals and charms herself, she’d had to settle for plain sleuthing, and even that hadn’t worked until now.

  Finally, he was out of tricks.

  Jerking her hand back, she got to her feet, stepped over his inert body, and pulled the bloodstained sheets off the dingy mattress. Using the knife, she cut strips and bound his arms behind him. Her fingers hovered over the puckered, oozing wound at his shoulder, and her stomach pitched again.

  She’d done that.

  Before she could talk herself out of it, she wadded more material against the seeping hole and wrapped strips of the dingy sheet over it. He muttered something in his sleep, and Juliet jerked back quickly.

  This had been easy. Not as easy as she would have liked it, but a hell of a lot easier than she’d ever expected.

  Was it paranoia that made her wonder when the other shoe would drop?

  Shaking her head, she fished out her battered comm unit and flipped the lid. The hinges popped threateningly; the old thing would break soon. Getting another would be hard, but she’d deal with that when the time came. She dialed an old frequency, typed out a message, and sent it with the press of a worn, disintegrating button. Hopefully, someone still monitored the feed.

  What would she do if no one came? Kill him herself?

  Could she?

  She snapped the lid closed.

  “How soon until they get here?”

  Surprise spun her around. She met intense blue eyes across the dim floor and fought the urge to raise her chin in challenge. To make excuses.

  His gaze was speculative, and filled with pain.

  But his mouth thinned into a hard, white line. “You called them,” he prompted, voice impatient. It wasn’t a question. “Did they know you were coming here? Did you tell them you found me?”

  Juliet very carefully pushed the unit into her jacket pocket instead of answering. Why, damn it? Why now?

  Why had he only reappeared now?

  She picked up the discarded knife, dropped to her knees in front of him again, and this time, his blond-tipped lashes narrowed as she seized a handful of the rope around his neck.

  “Don’t touch that,” he warned, leaning back.

  Ignoring him, she set the blade to the twine and jerked, hard enough that he flinched. The edge tore through the weakened material like it was nothing. Beads clattered to the threadbare carpet, a rain of pebbles and wood.

  She didn’t have to be a good witch to sense the magic spill free around her; a whisper of something intangible turning to vapor, to nothing, even as she recognized it.

  “Or what?” she asked, every syllable clipped to a venomous barb.

  Caleb wrenched his shoulders, but she grabbed his bound arms and slid the knife under the handmade bracelets wrapped around his wrists. More rock bounced and clattered, and she watched a muscle tic in his jaw. “You have no idea what you’re doing.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “No,” he said tightly. His eyes met hers. Blazed. “You never did.”

  Her fingers flexed against the knife handle. “But you always did, didn’t you? Caleb Leigh,” she spat, “the almighty prophet.”

  The skin around his eyes tightened. Pinched.

  “You just crooked your fingers and we all danced for you, didn’t we?” Juliet couldn’t stop the words once they formed in her head. Couldn’t beat them back as she jammed a finger under his nose. “Now it’s your turn. Murderer.”

  He looked down at her finger, then at the bandage she’d wound around his shoulder. His smile lacked anything even remotely close to humor. “You can’t give me over, Jules.”

  She jerked. “Don’t call me that.”

  “You’re too soft.” His eyes flicked back to hers, gaze filled with something she didn’t know how to label. Something raw. Something angry. “You always were. Even Cordelia—”

  She didn’t recall raising her hand. The crack of her palm against his stubbled cheek echoed like a gunshot, shooting aching little bursts of pain through her forearm to the elbow.

  In the oppressive silence that followed, Caleb slowly turned his head back, a lock of honey gold hair curled over one eye. His cheek glowed red, contrast to the ice in his gaze as he finished, dangerously soft, “Even your sister knew it.”

  “My sister is gone,” she said through clenched, aching teeth.

  A flicker. Pain? Anger? She didn’t know, but he didn’t apologize. Why would he? He’d screwed Juliet up against a wall and then betrayed them all.

  “Not,” she added, so quietly that she marveled at her own brittle calm, “that you were there for me to ask for help. Not that you cared.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” he told her, and Juliet wasn’t sure what she’d intended to do. The world flashed red, her skin itched with the pressure of it as anger crawled through her veins. It burned, throbbed behind her eyeballs. Like fire and ice and—

  The door swung open behind her, cracked into the wall.

  Juliet lurched away, spun in surprise and relief that faded as a tall, thin man barreled at her. Caleb threw himself toward her as Juliet yelped, but the man grabbed her jacket, yanked hard even as one booted foot slammed into Caleb’s chest.

  She hit the ground on her knees. The rough hand transferred to her head, shoved her down, kicked out her knee as she struggled. Pain twanged through her legs. Rage subsided to confusion. Fear.

  “Get them both!” a raspy voice yelled over her head.

  In her peripheral vision, Caleb strained at his bonds as a thin man dressed in stained brown corduroy struggled to subdue him.

  “I got the girl.” The voice was like a rusted razor blade, completely unfamiliar. “Damn it, Louie, just kick him in the head!”

  Juliet wrenched free. A fragrance both sharp and sweet filled the muggy air, and she launched herself at the discarded knife, closed her fingers on the cold edge of the blade.

  It skittered out of reach as something hard and unyielding slammed into the back of her head. She sprawled, crying out, earning a taste of grimy carpet. Yellow fireworks slid behind her eyes, joining the pop and crackle of orange neon.

  Adrenaline flooded her veins, gave her the strength to push herself to her hands and knees, but the room spun wildly. Sickeningly.

  “We have to have her alive, man, watch the dosage!”

  Someone grabbed the back of her coat and hauled. Her back arched, knees aching. In the wobbling field of her vision, a tattooed face leered at her.

  “Motherfucking Christ, little girl,” he grunted, shaking her hard enough that her head snapped back on her neck. “Where the hell have you been hiding?”

  He didn’t give her time to answer, shoving a dirty blue rag over her mouth and nose. He clasped the back of her head with his free hand, forcing the cloth harder against her face.

  More figures pushed into the motel room, hazy silhouettes that ignored her as she clawed at the callused hand at her mouth. She gasped for air around the soaking material, gagging as something chemical and acrid seared through her nostrils. Stung her eyes.

  Across the room, Caleb lurched to his knees, fighting off the hands that struggled to hold him. She watched his lips move, eyes flashing blue fire and muscles bulging as he fought the ropes she’d tied herself, but she couldn’t hear him. What was he saying?

  Was he yelling? At her?

  A hand slid over her jaw. The tattooed face was back, dimming now. So muddled. Ink smearing. Running, oozing across his teeth.

  He said something, shaped something with a smile that sent ice sliding down her spine, but her limbs dragged. Refused to move. The rag tasted bitter as she opened her mouth—had she intended to ask something?

  It didn’t matter. Her muscles gave up,
gave in with a fluidity that sent her sliding bonelessly to the dirty floor. Sleep closed in.

  And with it, peace.

  Chapter Two

  Maybe the Coven of the Unbinding had been more than killers and thieves in the past. Maybe years ago, it had struggled for equality and peace and whatever noble bullshit principles the oppressed spouted, but Caleb had never known it to be anything more than what it was: a gang, worse than guerrillas in an urban jungle.

  Thugs. With magic. How had everyone else been blind? Were freedom and power so seductive? They must be. There wasn’t any other excuse for Juliet’s willful ignorance.

  He’d known that Curio sheltered her. Known, also, that he’d used her single magical ability for himself. Her inherent gift to fuel others’ magic became Curio’s own personal battery.

  He’d suspected that Curio kept her as a mistress, a lover.

  The man was old enough to be her grandfather.

  Killing him had been cathartic in so many ways.

  But Caleb didn’t know why. Why did Juliet Carpenter stay with a coven that only used her? Why did she let herself be sucked dry, again and again, as Curio reached for more and more power?

  Why did she play with the younger witches the coven sheltered, why hadn’t she taken her dying older sister and gone somewhere? Anywhere?

  Anywhere but near him.

  Yet here she was again. Near him. Tied up, yes, and unconscious; lashed to a chair in a dark basement deep below the bowels of the city, but too. Fucking. Close.

  His fingers flexed, already aching from the loss of blood flow, but it was a small pain in the scheme of it all.

  He’d promised Cordelia Carpenter anything she asked for, and had been fool enough to be relieved when she’d demanded only two things: get her sister out of the Coven of the Unbinding, protect her from Curio’s madness. And never, ever tell Juliet what she’d done. What she’d asked him to do.

  It seemed easy. After he destroyed the coven, he never expected to see Juliet again.

  So he’d sworn it. He’d repeated it as Delia lay bleeding out in front of him, reassured her as he’d taken the worn gold promise ring from her finger, and said it again as he drew the last vestiges of her life from her dying lips. It was part of the bargain, the deal she’d offered him. Her heart’s blood in exchange for her sister’s safety.