she heard the thud of his pistol and felt the heat of a bullet pass through her thigh. She fell to the ground beside the leader and lay still, her weapon hidden by her body. She could hear Bailey moving closer and lay quiet.
“Alfrigg, are you all right?” he asked.
Raven rolled and leveled her pistol at him. “He’s better than you’re going to be if you don’t drop that weapon.”
Bailey raised his weapon and Raven squeezed her pistol’s trigger. It bucked in her hand and she watched the bullet punch through his face a split second before he exploded and showered her with sparks.
When it was over, she lay back on the grass and let her body heal. She could hear sirens and knew the cavalry was coming.
She opened her eyes a few minutes later to see Rupert Levac standing over her, weapon in hand. As usual, he had a three days’ growth of beard on his chin, mustard on his tie and was huddled in his threadbare London trench coat that smelled of cheeseburgers, but she was happy to see him nonetheless.
“You missed the fun,” she said.
Levac holstered his pistol. “You didn’t call for backup. Again.”
Raven sat up and looked at the wound in her thigh. It had stopped bleeding and was beginning to heal, which meant she would need claret in the near future. “I tried to call, this bastard wouldn’t let me.”
Levac squatted beside the recumbent figure. “Who is this bastard and where, exactly, is our suspect?”
Raven jerked a thumb at the tree. “Our suspect is that pile of ash by the tree. This bastard is the guy who told him to kill Nina Starr and, incidentally, to harass me and hunt Aspen.”
Levac made a face. “They weren’t vampires though, so what were they?”
Raven shook her head. “No clue. Some sort of sorcerers, I would guess. This one full-on teleported behind me and turned my wrist into jelly with one hand.”
Levac looked at her. “What, like…teleported, teleported? Comic book style? Isn’t that impossible?”
Raven shrugged. “I can only tell you what I saw. Maybe it was his day to do something impossible. Either way, I doubt it is safe to put him in lock-up with the other scumbags. Maybe Mom has a nice holding cell we can toss him into.”
“Alas, you will not get that chance, Fürstin Ravenel.”
Alfrigg sat up with blood streaming from his nose, mouth and ruined eye socket. “I cannot let myself be taken.”
Raven was a shade too slow. She hadn’t noticed the blade he’d had sheathed at his waist. In a swift movement he drew the blade and rammed it into his heart. He smiled as if he’d been kissed and exploded into a shower of sparks that fell to the ground into a pile of white ash.
Raven looked at the pile in disgust. “Swell.”
II
Blackwood Estate, Portland Plaza, St Louis: 10:00 a.m.
Aspen leaned against the SUV’s door and tried to keep her heart from jackhammering in her chest. The only other time she’d met a Master vampire without Raven, she’d ended up the vampire’s pet mage. Xavier hadn’t been a kind master and it had taken all of her magik just to keep him from invading her mind whenever he wanted. It was an experience she didn’t want to repeat. She would die before she would let that happen again.
She closed her eyes and summoned up her power. It was harder than it had been as a child. Her connection to the Faewild was weak, she hadn’t been back in years, and she was out of Faerie dust, the magikal component that supercharged her abilities. She was still a powerful mage, however, and she’d learned to tap human magik through Wicca. Now she let that power flow through her, warm her. It was comforting to feel it coursing through her skin.
She straightened in her seat, feeling braver with every moment. But something was different, there was an edge to her magik that she hadn’t felt before. Something less controlled and far more primal than Faerie magik. When she tugged at it, it disappeared, then came back, like a shadow seen from the
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