Storm Road (Old School Book 3) Read online

  “I came home from class one day. Samuel had been home for a fortnight. He was between cases. Stag had yet to assign him a new one. At least, that’s what he told me. According to the Stag boss I talked to later, Samuel had refused cases to give himself a month’s vacation. We’d moved from his apartment in the city out to the suburbs. The house was a wreck but it was private and it was big. Samuel had a study upstairs, but he also claimed the basement as his own. I never went down there. Until that day. Until he grabbed me as I walked into the house and told me he needed me.”

  Her face scrunched up, but instantly smoothed out. She wouldn’t cry over anything that bastard had done. “I was so hopeful. Idiotic. I had a secret, too. I thought he’d be happy, and when he invited me down into his space, where I’d always been barred…I had these ridiculous dreams.”

  “Dreams aren’t ridiculous,” Dean rumbled. His voice was low and rough.

  He was there, holding her, and yet, she jolted. She’d forgotten him. “They are when they’re based on lies. Samuel wasn’t lying when he said he needed me down in the basement. All those books were there.” She pointed at the boxed collection. “And he’d drawn symbols in chalk on the concrete floor. It was an old house.”

  She’d reached the bit that she hadn’t told anyone. The part that haunted her nightmares and isolated her from everyone. The part that, even more than the enchanted wedding ring, destroyed her ability to trust.

  “Samuel called me down to the basement because he had a spell set up there to drain my power. He’d been working on its final refinement while I’d been cooking and cleaning for him, sharing his bed.” Nausea rose in her, along with pain. She fought back both.

  “That’s what I see in your memories.” Dean tightened his arms around her, no longer cuddling, his body a shield. He was a warrior ready to fight.

  But her memories couldn’t be fought. They had to be endured. She’d tried locking them away, and the hell-damned ghoul had used them against her. “I’m so sick of being used.” She thumped Dean’s chest. “Oh no. I’m sorry.” She flattened her palm over where she’d hit him.

  “I’m okay. You deserve to be angry.”

  “Not at you.”

  He looked at her steadily. “I’m here. If I can’t do anything else useful, I can be a target.”

  “You’re holding me. You’re listening. I haven’t told anyone—” She broke off. “Sharing memories is intimate.”

  “Yes.” His arms flexed around her. “I won’t betray your trust.”

  She observed the square stubbornness of his jaw, the stern line of his mouth, the intense concern—for her!—in his blue eyes, and believed him. “What did you see?” she whispered.

  “You walked down wooden stairs. One of them wobbled and you held tightly to the railing. Samuel walked behind you, his footsteps were heavier than yours. Impatient. You hesitated on the second from last step when you saw the chalked symbols on the floor. You smelled something on the air.”

  “Hair. I worked it out later. He’d burned my hair as part of the preparation for the spell.”

  “He pushed you down the last two steps and into a corner of the symbols.”

  “'Stand there’, he said.” She turned away from Dean’s clear blue eyes. They were too honest when she had the misery of remembered betrayal coursing through her. The fire was dying in the fireplace. She stared at the glowing red coals. What Samuel had done to her had burned. The betrayal, the pain, the fear and her determination to survive, to protect— “I asked him what he was doing. He never answered. He just triggered the spell. It crawled over me.”

  “You cried out.” Dean had her memories and was fitting them into the story. They were jigsaw pieces, but soon he’d understand. “Your husband was a skinny, nerdy guy. He looked like he ran marathons. His expression was avid.”

  “Hungry,” she corrected bitterly. “He wanted my power. He’d planned the set up for so long. He had to find someone he could bind to himself long enough to study their power, to understand how it moved through them. He found me. All the time that I thought he was helping me train so that I could control my weather magic, he was analyzing my power so that he could steal it. He designed the spell just for me, to channel my magic to him. I tried to step out of the spell, to scuff the chalked symbols.”

  “'Just stay still’,” Dean quoted Samuel from her memories. “'This won’t take long.’ The bastard laughed.”

  “I curled up in pain. I stayed on my feet, but I could feel the magic pulling from me. It was suctioned out from my solar plexus. It poured into Samuel. I couldn’t see the magic, but I could feel it, and I could see him exulting. I cried. I couldn’t believe what he was doing. In a sense I was bleeding out and—”

  Dean jolted, his whole body shaking once, violently, before he ever so gently turned her face to his. “You were pregnant,” he whispered. “I hadn’t caught that when your memories streamed through me. You were pregnant. You told your husband.”

  Her fingers curled, claw-like, hooking in his jacket. “I’d only just found out. I knew the night it happened. That first night he was back, the first night of his fortnight setting up the spell to drain me. He…we…”

  “You made love,” Dean said hoarsely.

  “I did. I don’t know what Samuel was doing. He must have got off on what he was doing, screwing me before he screwed my magic,” she said crudely. But her crudity couldn’t lessen or hide her pain. “But I knew that night—I felt it—that I was pregnant. I waited just over a week, till a test would register a result. It was that day, the day he tried…” Her voice stuttered. “I did the test at college. I couldn’t wait once I’d bought the kit. I came home and I was blindly, ridiculously happy. Nineteen and I was going to have a baby and I was happy. I thought Samuel would be, too.”

  Dean wrapped her in a tight hug, cradling her. “He should have been.”

  Samuel, don’t! she’d cried. I’m pregnant.

  In the cabin, sharing her memories, Dean smoothed her hair. He rubbed her shoulders and tried to comfort her.

  Dimly she appreciated his efforts, but she was back in that tortured moment. “I told Samuel I was pregnant and he didn’t care. He just kept pulling my magic from me. The spell pulled so fiercely. It pulled at my life force, and I felt it. I realized that the spell would kill my baby. I screamed at Samuel, telling him, begging him to stop. The magic kept draining out, more and more. I felt my baby die. My magic overwhelmed the spell. It tore through it and into Samuel.”

  Her voice rasped in her throat, dry and scratchy. “Samuel had calculated everything so precisely, but he hadn’t allowed for the changes of pregnancy. I had more magic, more life force, than normal. The spell shoved an avalanche of power into Samuel, more than he could handle, and his magic flared out, consuming him.”

  “He spasmed and was flung through the air. It looked like he’d been electrocuted,” Dean said.

  It was odd that he saw in his mind what she’d seen.

  “The authorities concluded that he had been electrocuted. They blamed faulty wiring since the house was old. Samuel’s employers helped with that conclusion. I hated them, hated everything to do with Samuel, but I didn’t want my friends, the Old School, contaminated by him. When the basement caught fire from all the raw magic lashing around, I ran back up the stairs and dialed 911. I told them there’d been a bang and now there were flames and my husband was trapped down in the basement. Then I used one of Samuel’s burner phones, untraceable, to call Stag and have them come and deal with whatever Samuel had done. I claimed he’d been experimenting with I didn’t know what in the basement. I hid the phone just before I collapsed.

  “Stag ruled that Samuel died of magical misadventure. No one suspected me. My grief for my baby they took for grief for Samuel. I was frozen with it, and by my anger. I was so angry. When Samuel died, the enchantment on my wedding ring shattered. I pulled it off and I saw the engraving inside. Minervalle School trained us well. I understood there’d been an enchantm
ent on it. I asked Olga—the friend who made the protection charm you wore—and she looked at it. She told me what Samuel had done. She was furious and she didn’t even know about…about my baby.”

  “Oh God, Beulah.” Dean rocked them both.

  “I’m not crying.”

  “I wish you would,” he said frankly. “Have you cried for your baby? For the husband who wasn’t a husband? For everything you lost?”

  “Tears don’t help.” But she rested against him. She hadn’t had the catharsis of crying, but telling her story had changed something in her. Perhaps she would never have told the story, her tragedy of betrayal and loss, except that he shared her memories.

  And she had his.

  Had she told her story to the memory of the little boy who’d lost his mom, who’d watched her leave him?

  Beulah trusted Dean to understand betrayal, and he had done more. He’d offered unconditional care.

  Dean held still as Beulah’s body grew heavier and her breathing evened out. When he was sure she slept, he continued to hold her. She was warm and passionate, a woman who’d survived her grief by hiding it away. He respected the courage with which she lived her life. If her husband had survived, Dean would have been sorely tempted to kill him. The idiot deserved nothing less for his abuse and sheer stupidity of rejecting what every normal person wanted—love—for the temptation of power.

  “You are so much more than magic.” He kissed Beulah’s shining red hair before standing awkwardly and carrying her to her room.

  Chapter 6

  Dean lay flat on the floor of the cabin. He’d spent three hours looking through Beulah’s ex-husband’s book collection, seeing them with new eyes now that he knew the story of that power-hungry bastard.

  “Hell and damn.” He closed his eyes against the glare of the electric ceiling light. Its after-image burned against his eyelids. Had Beulah recognized how like a ghoul her ex-husband had been? Both sucked the life from people. Both would never, could never, satisfy their hunger for power and life.

  Of course a big difference was that Samuel was dead.

  “How do we kill a ghoul?”

  “Can you kill something that’s not really alive?” Beulah asked.

  He sat up. “You’re awake.”

  She offered him a wry smile, faint yet real. “Guess so.” She looked at the books piled around him on the floor. “Did you find anything?”

  Seeking distraction from his thoughts via research wasn’t new to him. It was partly why he’d done so well at law school. Focusing on the books pushed out everything else.

  It hadn’t managed to push out his thoughts of Beulah.

  He got up from the floor. “I’ve been trying to think how to stop the ghoul escaping. We assume it fled back to the cemetery. Will it stay there or will it hide somewhere else if it feels threatened?”

  “Huh. I hadn’t thought of it running from us.” She rubbed at her bare arms. Her t-shirt was rumpled and her feet bare, but it looked as if she’d dragged a comb through her hair. It hung loose and slightly wavy down her back.

  He wanted to touch it.

  He curled his fingers into a fist and turned toward the kitchen table. “There is a book here about demonic possession.”

  “I bet you never thought you’d be researching demon lore.” She sounded slightly uneasy.

  He recognized the aftermath of sharing confidences. His clients could be like this. After they’d confessed to him, the next time he saw them there was an element of unease. But this was Beulah, not a client, and he hated her awkwardness around him.

  “I skimmed this yesterday.” She sat at the table and pulled the book toward her. She frowned over the old print for a few seconds before she understood. Her head jerked up and she glared at him. “No!”

  He raised a hand in a defensive, conciliatory gesture. “I’m not suggesting trapping the ghoul in an animal. I’m not sure that it would even work—containing the ghoul in a physical body, then killing that body to kill the ghoul. The entity was never alive. I suspect it would just abandon the animal’s body—if we could lure it into the animal in the first place. Given Nate Smith’s fate, odds are that the ghoul prefers human hosts.”

  “Ick.” She screwed up her face. “So what are you thinking?”

  He hesitated. “The ghoul is going to be wary of us. The protection charm hurt it. We may have to approach it at its base in the cemetery.”

  “Okay.” She looked at him expectantly, evidently guessing there was more.

  He drew a deep breath. “I’m not sure of this next bit, but I think there’s an idea we can take from this book.”

  “It’s a death magic grimoire,” she said bodingly. “It’s not wise to trust it.”

  “Duly noted. Actually, I was thinking more about how it recommends luring a demon.”

  She frowned from him to scowling concentration on the page. “Blood,” she said finally.

  “Which is what the ghoul wanted from me the first night.”

  “You are not giving the ghoul your blood!” she exploded. She pushed the grimoire away from her, sending it skidding across the table, and stood. She stalked around the table to where he sat opposite her and stabbed him with her finger. For emphasis, apparently. “No blood. Not you.”

  “It can’t be you,” he said, even as he admired the energy returning to her eyes and strengthening her body. She was angry with him at the idea he’d risk himself, and a part of him that hadn’t had anyone worry about him in what felt like forever, kind of opened up and slyly basked in her anger. “You have magic, knowledge and contacts. If this goes wrong, you’re our best chance of Plan B.”

  “Plan B? Whatever your Plan A is it’s insane. You don’t give the ghoul fresh blood.”

  “How else are we to hold it in place?” he asked quietly.

  Perhaps it was his quietness that shocked her into awareness. Their knees were touching with her leaning over him to stab her finger at his upper chest. She straightened, then tugged at her t-shirt, suddenly self-conscious.

  He didn’t think, just put a hand out, gentle at her waist, before she could step back.

  She looked down at him. Blinked, looked away, looked back. “My concern for you isn’t personal.”

  Lie. He was a lawyer and she was a bad liar. Then again, he figured he could cut her some slack. She was obviously lying to herself just as much as to him.

  He got it, too. She’d spent a long time not personally caring for anyone; distancing herself. Hell. He’d lived that way most of his life.

  But not now.

  He moved his thumb slightly in a subtle caress.

  Her breath hitched. “This isn’t real.” She put a hand over his at her waist. Her fingers were warm and soft.

  He could imagine them stroking him. “What isn’t real?”

  “This feeling of attraction between us.” Her breasts rose and fell deeply.

  He kept his gaze on her eyes, resisting temptation. “At least it’s mutual.”

  If she’d been going to deny the attraction, she’d have stepped back, wouldn’t she? But she stood her ground. They stayed connected with her hands at his waist, their knees touching.

  “We shared memories,” she said. “That’s intimate. And then there’s fear. It’s a form of arousal. I’ve seen it happen at sea, after a storm. People mistake the arousal of fear for sexual attraction.”

  “So you’re saying you want me because we’ve been scared together?”

  Her fingers tightened over his hand. “No!”

  He widened his legs and drew her in between them, abruptly enough that she put her free hand on his shoulder for balance. Then her hand lingered. “I agree that our emotions are running high. I won’t take advantage of them. Of you. But when the ghoul is gone, I won’t be. I’m staying.”

  Her gorgeous gray eyes widened.

  Whether at his words or his tone or being so close, he didn’t know. He meant his promise though. “I want a chance to discover if our attraction exists
beyond the intensity of encountering the ghoul, because I think it does. I think you’re beautiful and strong, and I can’t get out of my head the thought of your voice, with its British accent, whispering your response and your demands in my bed.”

  Ever so slowly, leaving her free to move away, he ran his hand up from her waist, up her spine till he cupped the back of her head. His fingers threaded through her long red hair. “I want to feel your hair against my skin.” A strand fell forward, tickling his jawline, and then, the last fraction of distance evaporated and he kissed her.

  Beulah forgot to breathe.

  Major Dean Fortescue kissed like a thief of hearts. His lips, that formed a stern line when he concentrated on a problem, now both commanded and coaxed her own. He asked and he teased. He gave her pleasure and an aching promise of more.

  She was tired, she must be, because it felt as if his lips pleaded with her. As if in among the heart-stealing, pulse-racing kisses was a plea, love me.

  It couldn’t be. They were two strangers. They’d shared memories. She’d trusted him with the truth of her grief. But they didn’t know each other. She couldn’t be everything he needed. He was a former marine, a JAG lawyer, a fighter in a military world she didn’t understand and had no interest in learning. She didn’t fit his life. He had to know that.

  Yet she found herself obeying the tender urging of his hands and sinking onto his lap. This time, though, he wasn’t holding her to give comfort.

  He caressed her throat, his thumb stroking the soft skin under her jaw and behind her ear. Then he kissed her there and she moaned. “Tell me where you like kisses,” he invited.

  But she was all out of practice. She hadn’t loved a man since her husband’s betrayal. She shifted uneasily.