This Wicked Magic

Chapter 22

I am made of the dark witch.

CJ could not stop replaying that statement War had made while contained within the salt circle. Grief had said much the same.

Did he carry these demons inside only because he possessed some element of them already? Of course he grieved, and didn’t every man possess a hint of menace? Lust, why yes. And even carrion he could justify, for though he practiced vegetarianism, his mouth still watered when passing cooked meat.

He wondered if Vika had caught on to that statement, and what she thought it meant.

But War? No.

Really?

You have been warring against Grim for decades.

Perhaps. And now, for the first time, he was considering asking the warlock for help.

He twisted around a corner deep in the seventh quarter that led toward Les Innocents and knelt on the cobbles, tugging a small vial from his pocket. Inside were a few strands of Ian Grim’s hair, collected decades ago when he’d had opportunity. Crushing one with the hilt of his athame and spitting upon it, he then recited the location spell. And waited.

Grim also had DNA from him, probably hair, and for sure the blood taken from the scene of the accident. They generally did not cloak themselves, because they liked the play of never knowing when the other would come looking for them. But CJ wasn’t cheating by cloaking since his return from Daemonia. This was a new twist to their decades-old game. And never before had he involved someone he cared about. New rules had been created. Besides, all was fair when dealing with a warlock.

A raven crowed and coasted down the narrow alley, swooping over CJ’s head. The sign he’d been waiting for. Tucking the vial in a pocket, he took off after the bird.

They skirted the park and wound down an industrial neighborhood that edged the fifteenth quarter. The air was heavy with gasoline fumes and the rush of traffic from the distant ring road. He tracked the raven to an abandoned building covered in graffiti, where he heard a man’s laughter echo out from the glassless windows.

Dropping his cloak would alert Grim immediately, unless the man was too focused on whatever was going on behind the closed door. Worth the risk. CJ whispered the cloak release, and he felt it shed from his body as if a sudden gush of rain falling over his shoulders and dropping at his feet in a splash, without the wet.

Inside, the laughter suddenly ceased—to be replaced with a female scream.

CJ kicked the rusted metal door open.

The female’s body fell backward, away from the man who stood over her. Her dripping heart pulsed in his hand. She groped for her chest, but as she did so, her body ashed, and before flesh and bone hit the floor, it had shaped into an ashy female form and dispersed in a plume about Ian Grim’s feet.

The warlock, who held the heart to his mouth but apparently hadn’t drank or bitten into the heavy muscle, grinned at CJ and tossed the prize aside. It landed on the floor in a splatter of sticky ash and blood.

“Certainly Jones. It’s about fucking time.”

“How many vampire hearts do you consume in a century?” CJ asked, knowing he’d worded that one wrong. He should have been more precise, narrowing it down to a year, or even a month.

“As many as I can manage. A man has to stay vital to keep his partner alive.”

Yes, Grim’s strange woman who, rumors told, had once been beheaded during the French Revolution, only to be resurrected—her head sown upon a different body—and was now kept alive with blood transfusions.

Grim glanced to the ashy mess. “Damn it, now you’ve gone and spoiled my count. I may have to start over if I’m ever to get to Daemonia. How the fuck did you manage it?”

“I didn’t eat their hearts.” CJ wandered into the room, noticing two more piles of ash along the wall. A senseless waste. But who was he to judge? He’d made sacrifices to get to Daemonia.

He hadn’t seen Grim in ages, and the man was always different. Tall, yet short for his blocky build, he wore his blond hair in a military cut, which drew CJ’s observation to the man’s disturbing eyes. Green, yet gray. They changed like a cat’s eyes. Or a Fallen angel’s eyes.

Yet a constant was Grim’s self-important smirk.

“So you got it.” Grim paced before him, making an arc on the floor with his path, as both men were never keen to get too close to the other, wary of any possible magical retaliation. His fingers waggled near his thighs, as if a gunslinger judging when best to draw. “The Nacht März.”

“Is that what you think?”

“Wow, you’re trying an evasive tactic with me? I know you better than your own twin brother, Jones. I can feel your lies on my skin like faulty spellcraft missing its mark.”

Grim was confident of his skills, and smart. He could read CJ, as CJ could read the warlock’s nervousness in his pacing.

“As a matter of fact, I do have it. I’m enacting the march tomorrow evening.”

Grim’s expression was a treat. Rarely could he surprise the man. And then his surprise turned to fury. “That should be my call! I was the one to discover its existence.”

“Only because of my father.”

“Indeed. Following in Daddy’s footsteps, eh? You’ll be warlock soon enough.”

“Never.”

CJ dodged the incoming blast of air magic. A simple cast that further detailed Grim’s lack of confidence at this moment. He was grasping for whatever was to hand, not thinking.

“You wanted the damned thing? My snatch,” CJ said. Keeping his left hand open and ready to repulse retaliatory magic, he stood calmly. “It’s always been first come, first served with us, yes? You did take the Sidon’s Eye right out of my hands.”

“Your lover’s fickle hands, you mean.”

CJ sighed. The winter of 1936. Sidon’s Eye would have granted the holder great power to see beyond this mortal veil and into the Edge, a place much more interesting and far less explored than Daemonia. Unfortunately, Certainly’s lover’s greed had been more vast than his curiosity over the object. That had been the last time he’d trusted a woman, or had the time for one.

“I’d like to invite you to witness the March,” CJ said, putting up his palm to block, this time, an arrow of vampire ash stirred up from the floor and aimed for his eyes. The ash dispersed about his palm and went around his head on both sides. “That is, if you stop acting the child and accept the fact I won this round.”

“How did you do it? In order to gain entrance to Daemonia, a man must consume a vampire heart a day, increasing in succession daily for a month.” Grim glanced aside to the bloody heart, still pulsing on the floor. “I’ve not the stomach for it. And I’m only on day twelve.”

CJ shook his head. Not about to divulge how he’d achieved that one. His father’s grimoire had revealed a dangerous secret entrance. “Tomorrow at midnight in the C tunnel beyond Val de Seine. Come alone. You can claim the Night March after I’ve summoned it.”

“And why would you give me that control? You’re up to something.”

“I most likely am.”

And Certainly drew up the cloak once again, turned and walked out of the building, confident Grim could not see or sense his departure. He chuckled when the warlock let out a frustrated shout and kicked at the ash pile. He’d won this round.

Regrettably, he could take no pride in such an accomplishment because it had dragged the woman he loved into the center, and it now threatened her very soul.

Libby held the flashlight while Vika fastened the prism before the bulb. She’d removed the glass and, after trying string and cord, found wire worked best, along with a bit of solder.

“You think this is necessary?” Libby asked. “A backup plan? Don’t you trust CJ?”

“Of course I trust him.”

“But we found the ward.” Libby nodded to the open grimoire on the spell table. The ward could be placed on an individual, unknowing, and would protect the person from malefic magic.

“The ward is against Grim. I don’t know why he went to talk to the warlock, but for whatever reason, I want to have that tool to my arsenal should it become necessary to use. This—” she studied the completed flashlight “—is to keep me safe.”

Libby’s eyes teared. “This is too big for you, Vika.”

It was, but she didn’t want to admit it. If CJ could handle it, she could. She touched her sister’s cheek, catching the teardrop and feeling its sadness enter her pores.

“Remember what you told me about love,” Libby said. “Don’t get lost in it.”

She was already lost. And she liked being there.

“We both ignored that sage wisdom,” she said. “Have you any regrets?”

Libby shook her head and couldn’t stop her swooning grin.

From the sixth-floor window, Vika tracked CJ’s race home from the café at the end of the street. The sun had slipped behind the Louvre, and the sky was yet pale, but darkness clung to the recesses between buildings as if plaque in a demon’s teeth.

As he crossed the street below the building, she grabbed the remote and clicked the saving chandelier light back on, granting necessary solace.

“Two left,” she muttered as if the light fixtures cared. “And then my dark one needs to do some remodeling. Much as each of them are all gorgeous, this mass gathering of prismatic light is hideous.”

She did like the one with the black crystals and silver arabesques that soared six feet high. That one would look lovely over the gray couch.

What was she doing? If and when CJ no longer had need for the prismatic light, he may well want to keep the chandeliers.

Libby had foreseen she was hooking up with CJ to clean him. Her greatest cleaning project ever. But something had changed. While she still wanted his soul clean of demons, she didn’t need for him to change, to become less messy or to stop practicing dark magic. She liked him exactly as he was.

“Seems I don’t have a type after all,” she said with a smile. “Or maybe I’ve changed that type.”

Either way, she was satisfied with letting go the urge to change him. It slipped from her without so much as a goodbye, and she turned to greet her lover as he walked through the door and landed in her arms.

“Everything go as you had hoped?” she asked, nuzzling into his cedar and chartreuse embrace.

“I won’t know until tomorrow night. I needed to know where Grim was while I had the Nacht März uncloaked. What better way than to invite him to the party?”

“You’re not serious? You told the warlock where we’ll be?”

He nodded then kissed her before she could object to his foolish actions. Falling into the depths of his claiming kiss, Vika abandoned protest. Seemed to be the way to manage this beautiful dark man.

“You straightened up around here,” he said.

“Made the bed and did a few dishes. It’s a compulsion, CJ. You have to accept that about me.”

“Okay, but I’ll have you know my compulsion is to mess up the bed again.” He lifted her into his arms and carried her over to the bed, tossing her to land on the clutter of pillows. Shirt stripped off before she could speak, he crawled across the bed toward her. “Let’s make sexmagic tonight.”

“To increase your magic for tomorrow?”

“No. Just for us.” He waggled the fingers of his tattooed hand. “Don’t you want me to master this magic?”

Vika settled against the pillows and tugged up her skirt, revealing her bare feet. “Let the mastery begin.”

Vika drew her fingers over her lover’s bared chest, tracing a few of the tattoos and marveling at their intricacy. The werewolf scythe gleamed silver with each flex of his muscles. “Didn’t that hurt to get the silver embedded in there?”

He slipped the dress from her shoulder and kissed her there. “Tattoos always hurt. But whiskey helps numb the pain.”

“I see.” She tapped a tiny design slightly left-center of his chest. “This looks like...is this a tiny battery?”

“It’s my kick-starter,” he said proudly.

“What?”

“Command central, if you will. You know how our bodies are ruled by the earth and electricity?”

“Of course. I sing the body electric,” she quoted Walt Whitman.

“Since I dabble in so many dangerous magics, Sayne suggested I have a kick-start in case, well, my heart ever needs it.”

“A little tattooed battery is going to give your unbeating heart enough juice to revive you?”

“With the correct connecting tat.” He displayed his left hand, and his pinkie fingertip was tattooed with what looked like electrical coding one might see on a building schematic. “I touch this to the battery, and bam!”

“That is...” Vika cringed. “It creeps me out, actually. To even think your heart would stop beating makes me sad.”

He spread his hand through her hair and drew her in for a kiss. “Don’t worry about me. I don’t like it when you frown. Let’s try some electrical magic of our own, eh?”

“You mean like work it into sex?”

He nodded and tugged down her dress to puddle about her feet. In turn, he dropped his jeans, and just when she reached for his semihard erection, he grabbed her fingers and pulled her hand up between them. “Let’s form the connection first, then the sex will be electric.”

“All right. You show me the way.” She had heard of witches sharing their innate electricities and knew how it worked, but she had never the opportunity to attempt it.

Both held their palms flat before one another, as if pressing against a mime’s wall placed between them. Their palms were but half an inch from one another, their bodies as close, yet they did not touch. The body generated amazing heat, and it could be brewed to an alchemical mix by combining with another—without even touching.

Immediately, Vika felt the heat warm her palm. She looked into her lover’s jade eyes, and he winked. “Draw it over one another,” he directed, then recited the word to contain their powers within their beings. “Contineo.”

It felt like static electricity snapping against her palms as Vika moved them slowly before CJ’s chest without touching skin. And he, in turn, moved his up her arms and neck, and when he neared her breasts, her nipples grew so hard and wanting, she felt the desire tweak at her core and she had to press her legs together to contain the pleasure. The paired electricity snapped and vibrated until it found a rhythmic hum that wavered as if the nerve system under her skin, and perhaps it was just that, was awakened by CJ’s innate biology.

“That feels so good,” he said, drawing his hands lower over her stomach, where her muscles eased and tightened in anticipation of how good it would feel—right there. “That doesn’t hurt?”

“No, it’s...so good,” she said on a gasp as the vibrations hummed through her loins. “Makes me want to scream, in a good way. Oh, CJ, if I touch you will the connection break?”

“No, we’re just charging up now.”

“Then I need to touch you.” She gripped his erection, and he hissed and swore. “As good as I think it sounded?” she wondered.

“Fuck yeah. My whole... It’s as if... So crazy. I need to be inside you now.”

She pushed him backward and he pulled her with him onto the bed. Every bit of her skin and muscle and bone hummed as if orgasm had taken up residence permanently. It couldn’t last forever, and she didn’t want it to, but right now she needed to stop thinking and fall into it all before it was lost.

Crawling over CJ’s legs, she fit herself onto him and let out a guttural cry of delight as his cock filled her with such intensity, she felt weak in the head, in the best way possible. Above her the chandeliers tittered as if a minor earthquake, reacting to their combined magics.

“I hope those things are secured,” she said.

“They are. Vika.” He gripped her arms and held her still upon him, his jaw tight and eyes closed. “Right there.” And he swept his tattooed hand across a small box above his right side.

Suddenly enveloped by a spectacular pulse of pleasure, Vika thrust out her arms and threw back her head. Overtaken by exquisite electricity, their bodies sparkled as if a thousand wandering souls had suddenly entered, yet the feeling was all CJ as he came inside her. She could feel him claim her with the power that he wasn’t quite able to control, and then she felt his inner demons shudder and slink away. They wanted nothing to do with this wicked magic.

“Who needs a kick-start,” CJ gasped, heaving and coming down from the high, “when I’ve got you, Bright Spark of My Being.”

“That was—” Vika fell forward, collapsing onto CJ’s sweaty, hot chest “—phenomenal.”

“Well said, witch. Well said.”