Читать книгу Midnight Hunter - Kait Ballenger - Страница 8
ОглавлениеTHE VIBRANCY OF her green eyes haunted his memory. He’d seen that face before. He knew he had. Nathanial Weil recollected the woman’s features as he tried to recall where he’d seen her, where he knew her from. She’d said she wasn’t any relation to Johnathan, but he knew better. She had some connection to him, whether familial or not. He hadn’t seen her since he’d relocated to Rochester, of that he was certain, which meant he must have known her from back in Detroit. But how? The question clawed at the back of his mind, slowly irritating him. “What do you think of that girl we saw tonight, Trista?”
“What was her name again?” She paused for a moment, staring off into space before returning her gaze to him. “Vera. That was it. Vera.”
Vera. He rolled the name around in his mind. Everything about her, her name included, seemed so familiar. Still, he couldn’t place her. Those eyes...he’d seen those eyes before, and he intended to find out where. “So what do you think? She might be a good choice.”
A coy smile crossed Trista’s lips. “I don’t know, Nathanial. She’s clearly addicted but isn’t far enough in yet to really know what she’s doing.”
He nodded. “And that’s what makes her perfect. She’ll be easily manipulated, don’t you think?” That was exactly what he needed, someone he could bend to his will, who wouldn’t expect what he had in store for her, someone he could control. He could use her to his advantage and satisfy his own aching curiosity in the process. All too perfect.
Trista shrugged. “I’m not so certain. She may be an addict, but I don’t think her heart is really in it. She’s just here for the high. I doubt she’ll agree to it.”
“We’ll force her heart into it, then. She doesn’t have to be willing, now does she?”
Trista shrugged her shoulders again. “I really don’t know, Nathanial. She seems strong-headed, full of opinions. She doesn’t seem to know much, but I doubt she’s the type of girl who would fall for...”
“Do you doubt my judgment?” he growled.
She stopped what she was doing and turned toward him then. “No, I don’t doubt you, but...”
He stood and launched himself across the room until he was nose to nose with her. “But nothing!” he roared.
Her eyes widened as she cowered beneath the enormity of him. She shut her mouth and looked to the floor, refusing to meet his gaze.
That’s right. Learn your place, you dumb bitch. He was sick of these insubordinate witches challenging his every move. He was in charge, and the sooner they learned that fact, the better off they would be.
“But is exactly the word you need to drop from your vocabulary. There are no ‘buts’ when I give you an order. Understood?”
She nodded once, continuing to stare at the floor.
“Good. You’ll go ahead with the plans, then. Send your familiar to her. It will work.” He snaked his hands up the smooth skin of her upper arms until they rested on her neck. “Look at me,” he ordered.
She raised her gaze to meet his. Cupping her face in his hands, he pressed his lips against hers, pushing his tongue into her mouth. He released her face, groping for her breasts and giving them a good squeeze.
He pulled back. “Is that a new bra I felt?”
She smiled, her lips still full from his kiss. “Yeah, I thought you would like it. It’s...”
He slapped her. Stumbling back from the intensity of his blow, she clutched at her cheek. Tears poured down her pathetic face.
“I didn’t ask you to think,” he snapped. “You don’t do anything without my permission. Understood?”
Whole body shaking, Trista nodded, refusing to meet his gaze again. She stood like that for a moment, not moving. He watched her with the eyes of a hawk. If she dared to look him in the eyes, to challenge him, he would end her. After she collected herself, she inched toward him, eyes still downcast and arms out as if to offer an embrace.
He raised a hand to stop her. “No, you’ve spoiled my mood. Do as I say and summon your familiar. I want Vera here by tomorrow, under my control. Understand?”
Trista nodded. Eyes still glued to the floor, she whispered the words the devil had gifted her to summon her precious pet. From a crack in one of the floorboards, a large orange-and-black tarantula emerged. It stretched its eight hairy legs as it slowly made its way across the wooden floor to her. The creature crept up the side of her slender leg and along the length of her body until it nestled itself at the base of her neck. She lifted the edge of her curled hair, and it sank its fangs into her skin, latching on to feed from the small teat that marked her as one of the devil’s black magic servants. The teat allowed the familiar to feed from her soul, bending it to do her will. When the creature was satisfied, it released its hold on her neck. She affectionately stroked a finger over one of its many legs.
“Go to the girl,” she whispered. “Fill her, and then come back to me.”
With a small affirmative hiss, the arachnid scampered onto Trista’s extended hand. She bent, placing it on the floor. It crawled toward the open door without haste.
* * *
WHEN VERA STUMBLED into her apartment later that night, she was flying as high as a kite. Not just any kite, but one of those fancy multicolored ones that looked like a parrot or some other beautiful tropical bird. She fell back onto her sofa bed, giggling at the idea of herself as a parrot. Stretching her arms wide in a tired catlike reflex, she reveled in the leftover tingles of power coursing through her. That had been such a great high.
Before she could snuggle any farther into the sofa, someone pounded loudly at her front door. She groaned, not wanting to leave the warm confines of her position. A moment later the knock sounded again, this time even louder. Oh, for Pete’s sake.
“Coming!” she yelled to whoever stood on the other side of the door.
She dragged her still-slightly stoned ass to the front door before pressing her eye to the peephole. She nearly shit bricks when she saw who was waiting on the other side. She parted her lips to release a resounding, “Fuck, you have got to be kidding me,” then clapped her hand over her mouth, realizing he would hear her through the paper-thin walls. Why in the name of all things holy—or, well, more like unholy, considering what she had been up to in the past hour—was her drop-dead gorgeous religious studies professor knocking at her door?
A shiver ran down her spine. Every bit of the power high she had experienced from her relapse into black magic disappeared as if a massive bucket of ice water had been dumped over her head. There was only one reason Dr. Grey would show up at her door like this in the middle of the night and, well...it wasn’t because her midterm paper was two days past due.
She’d been Dr. Grey’s student for the past several months. Aside from being an intelligent, astute and caring professor, far more lay underneath Dr. Grey’s muscled, sexy-nerd exterior. She knew firsthand the badass-ery of which he was capable. The man had once cracked one of her bar patron’s skulls open after the sick creep had palmed her ass in a very unwelcome way. The patron had returned a few nights later for his usual debauchery, but he had never once tried to lay a hand on her since. So yeah, there was much more to Dr. Shane Grey than met the eye, including the fact that he was a witch hunter, and she’d had one too many run-ins with the Execution Underground already. The elite organization of hunters fancied themselves as the police of the supernatural community, and they didn’t take kindly to black magic practitioners.
Was it coincidence that he’d showed up at her apartment right after she’d fallen off the wagon? She thought not. Shit. Had he been watching her? Waiting for her to screw up?
Only a month earlier, Dr. Grey and two of his fellow hunters had approached her, asking for her magical aid in one of their cases. Well...asking politely was what Dr. Grey had done. As for his colleagues, they had made it clear that if she didn’t cooperate, there would be negative consequences. Considering she already had a not-so-bright past history with the Execution Underground, she’d agreed to cooperate. But she knew full well that her cooperation didn’t grant her a free pass when it came to future wrongdoing, and unfortunately, it had placed her back on the organization’s radar.
Several years ago she’d done some pretty stupid things and landed herself in their godforsaken hell-hole of a detention facility after a run-in with the Detroit division. She’d relocated to Rochester shortly after her release, and had ended up aiding Dr. Grey and the Rochester division shortly thereafter. She couldn’t go back to the detention center. She couldn’t.
Bolting down her hallway, she scrambled into her bathroom, clamoring for some perfume to cover up the herbal spell scents that clung to her clothes, scents Dr. Grey was bound to recognize, given his glorious intelligence. She snatched a bottle of Britney Spears’s Fantasy that one of the dancers had given her for Christmas but she’d never worn, and spritzed the sugary sweet scent all over her body. She quickly straightened her mussed hair until it looked halfway decent, wiped some smudged eyeliner from the edge of her temple and ran back to the door.
Momentarily, she considered cracking open her living room window and rushing down the fire escape, but since Dr. Grey already knew she was home—she seriously needed to check the door from now on before yelling, “Coming!”—there was no way a seasoned hunter like him would fall for that. If he was here to collect her for practicing black magic tonight, she might as well go peacefully. She really hoped it didn’t come down to that.
Finally, she wrenched open the door, trying to feign surprise. “Dr. Grey, what brings you here, especially in the middle of the night?” She leaned against the door frame as he scanned her up and down. Heat rushed to her cheeks. She was suddenly very aware of the fact that she was still wearing a plaid miniskirt that barely covered her ass cheeks. Just great.
He met her gaze as he adjusted the gold-rimmed eyeglasses hooked to the collar of his long-sleeve polo shirt. “Can I come in? We need to talk.”
Okay...so clearly he wasn’t here to arrest her or he would have done it by now, but for the life of her she couldn’t understand what in the world he would need to talk about.
She crossed her arms over her chest. “Look, if this is about my midterm essay being late, I’m really sorry, but I’ve been working. I know you care about my success in your class and all, but regardless, I think it’s a little weird for you to show up...”
“Vera, this isn’t about your paper,” he interrupted her nervous word-vomit. “I would have really appreciated it if you’d turned it in on time, but if you get it to me by class tomorrow, consider the tardiness forgiven.” He pinned her with a sharp look. “Just this one time.”
Yep, there it was. That stern teacherly look that all truly good educators possessed, the one that simultaneously made you feel like shit for being a disappointment, made you think that you could have done better and also told you they expected better from you because you were better than that—all rolled into one. Damned if he didn’t make her want to be a good student. Aside from the fact that he really was a great professor— always expressing the ideas and concepts clearly, helping his students when they needed it, being firm yet forgiving, making the subject matter interesting and really just overall caring about their success as undergraduates—the man was all things sexy and perfect in one package. She would be severely lying to herself if she tried to deny that in many ways she had a bit of a crush, along with pretty much the entire female student body at the University of Rochester.
Really, what woman in her right mind wouldn’t have a bit of a crush on him, though? Dr. Grey was smart, kind, just nerdish enough that it was cute, with those gold reading glasses of his, and if you couldn’t see the sleek mean muscles beneath his button-down shirts and blazers, you were freaking blind. Couple that with the short ponytail, which she was pretty sure every girl in his class wished she could run her fingers through, a sleek jawline, warm brown eyes and an award-winning smile that could make a woman’s panties drop to the floor, and you had the recipe for lots of young horny twenty-somethings fantasizing about being privately tutored by him.
He appeared pleasantly oblivious to all the attention, though. The man had no clue as to why his classes were always filled to the brim and in fact had a waiting list every semester, and were disproportionately filled with women, just like every other class in the religious studies department—not. Honestly, she’d taken his class just to see what all the hullabaloo was about. And boy, had she seen. She wasn’t sure whether she regretted that or not.
“This isn’t something to do with that demon thing you wanted my help with last month, is it?” She remembered all too clearly watching the crime scene she had used her white magic to recreate for him. The thought still haunted her. She had cooperated with Dr. Grey and his fellow Execution Underground hunters then for the sake of getting them off her back. Not to mention the plight of Dr. Grey’s fellow hunter...what was his name again? David? His clear love for the woman he had been trying to save had given her heart the warm fuzzies, so she’d felt she had to help. She was a huge sappy sucker for a good love story.
He shook his head. “Not exactly, but I do need your help. Can I come in?”
Man, she really didn’t want him seeing the piece of trash apartment she called home. It was already bad enough he knew which crap area of Rochester she lived in without seeing that she wasn’t exactly Suzy Homemaker—if he couldn’t already tell that by looking at her. “Um, I’d prefer not actually—the apartment is a bit of a mess.” Talk about an understatement...
He pressed his lips together as if he were thinking. Before she could figure out what he was doing, he stripped off his brown leather jacket. “Come for a walk with me, then? Here.” He held his jacket out to her.
A tiny cage of butterflies suddenly buzzed around the inside of her gut. Her superhot professor wanted to take a nighttime stroll with her and he was offering her his jacket. Before she could decide whether she wanted to be the type of girl who did that sort of thing with her professor, which was clearly inappropriate, she grasped the leather jacket in her hands and slipped it on. Aw, shucks, who was she kidding? She totally was that kind of girl.
“Let me just grab my keys.” She slipped back into her apartment and darted to the coffee table. She retrieved her apartment keys, stopping only for a moment to lift the open flap of the jacket to her nose. Holding it to her face, she took a good long whiff. The smell of old leather, lemon-scented laundry detergent, Hugo Boss cologne and the unmistakable ruggedness of a well-groomed male filled her nose. Whoa, buddy. That smell almost made her as high as the black magic she’d been fooling around with earlier that night.
This was dangerous, so dangerous, because not only was Dr. Shane Grey her professor and her attraction to him highly inappropriate, but a witch like herself hanging around with a witch hunter was equally, if not more, deliriously dumb.
Without delay, she rushed back out the door, eager for the little business rendezvous and relishing the feeling of his leather jacket bundling her in its warmth.
She’d never claimed to be smart.
* * *
THIS WAS GOING to be even harder than he’d anticipated, because...well...he was already harder than he’d anticipated, and wow, did that make him feel like a grade-A creeper. Shane dared another glance at Vera as she walked beside him down the block. He should not be this attracted to a student, let alone a student who also happened to be a witch, yet here he was, as hungry for her as the day he’d first seen her in his classroom months ago.
It was only a little over a month since he’d discovered that she was not only temptingly beautiful, but a witch with black magic history to boot. During a brief meeting about class work, he’d put two and two together when she’d known far more about the occult than your average religious studies student. One would think that would have been a huge deterrent to his libido, considering he hunted witches for a living, yet somehow it wasn’t.
Despite having grown up the son of a Vegas showgirl and spending countless hours hanging out in dressing rooms with some of the most beautiful women from around the world stripping naked before his eyes, the sight of Vera Sanders fully clothed and in his jacket made him sweat. He wasn’t really sure what it was about her that drew him so strongly, but the combination of long jet-black hair, nearly glowing green eyes and milky-white skin sent his pulse racing to parts of his body other than his heart. If he envisioned what he thought Snow White would look like embodied in the flesh, she was it...well, if Snow White wore fishnets and a plaid miniskirt. Couple that with painted red lips and the long legs of a Rockette, and he was basically a goner.
Clearly, when it came to Vera, in spite of all his intelligence, he had no common sense. If he did, he wouldn’t be here.
He wasn’t even quite sure what it was about her that flipped all his switches to the on position and made his brain short-circuit like he was a twenty-year-old Compaq computer instead of the iMac it normally functioned like. He didn’t even really know her, but from the moment he’d seen her, he’d wanted to get to know her, even though he knew that was a very bad decision.
“So what is it you wanted to talk to me about?” she asked.
He shoved his hands in his pockets to shield them from the cold air blowing off Lake Ontario. “I’ve just been assigned a case I could use your help on. I’d like you to point me in the right direction.”
She raised an eyebrow at him like he was nuts. Maybe he was. After all, being near her in a personal capacity, let alone working with her, was a compromise to both his professions, yet part of him wanted to do so much more. But he couldn’t and he wouldn’t. Damn, he was messed up.
“What sort of case could you possibly need my help with?”
“A case involving black magic. I need someone to help me navigate, or at the very least locate, any and all black-magic covens in town.”
Vera stopped in her tracks. The silence left when her high-heeled boots were no longer clicking against the pavement was awful. Nothing but the sounds of the occasional car driving by with blaring, bass-thumping rap music, a staple in this neighborhood, and the wind remained.
Her jaw fell open slightly. “First off, why in the world would you assume I know anything about the black-magic covens in this city?” Color rose in her cheeks as her words filled with anger. “And secondly, even if I did, why would I give you any information about them? I don’t owe you anything.” She glared at him.
That wasn’t the reaction he was expecting. “I’m sorry. I just assumed with your past history you might know...”
She scoffed. “Yeah, that’s right, you assumed. You know what assuming does? It makes an ass out of ‘u’ and ‘me,’ so now you’re an ass for thinking I’m involved in anything to do with black magic, and I’m an ass because I’m standing here yelling at my professor. So thanks for that, Dr. Grey. Thanks.”
He met her gaze. “As I’ve mentioned before, you can call me Shane when we’re not in class.”
She huffed and threw her hands into the air, stripping off his coat. She bundled it into a ball and threw it at him. Without another word, she turned and stomped back toward her apartment.
He hurried after her. “I’m sorry I offended you. That wasn’t my intention. I was hoping you could shed some light on...”
She spun to face him and pegged him with another menacing glare. “I can’t shed any light on anything for you, nor would I willingly help the Execution Underground again. That was a onetime-only deal.” She almost sneered at the mention of the organization he had sworn his life to. “Do me a favor and forget this conversation ever happened.” She turned on her heel again and strode off.
As he watched her go, he couldn’t help but wonder why simply asking for her help had angered her so much. Logic told him it was reasonable to think she might know something about black magic, considering she had a past history of it, so much so that at one point she’d gotten herself into trouble with the Execution Underground. He had seen how black magic affected someone, and he knew how bad addiction could get. It was a nasty, vicious cycle.
Black magic caused a person to feel powerful, grandiose even, like some sort of magical high. In many ways it was just as addictive, perhaps more so, than the cocaine his mother had snorted throughout his entire childhood in order to work all the long hours needed to put food on the table as a single parent. While street drugs deteriorated your health, black magic damaged the soul in a way that, if not stopped, was irreparable.
He hoped Vera wasn’t irreparable.
* * *
VERA’S HEELS RAPPED against the pavement as she stormed back to her apartment. Frustration and anger throbbed in her temples. She slammed the building door behind her for added drama and stomped up the stairs. Who cared if it was the middle of the night and her lousy neighbors were sleeping? They woke her up on a regular basis with their bad seventies porno antics, anyway. Debbie Does Dallas, anyone?
When she finally reached her apartment she shucked off her boots before promptly pitching them at her sofa as if the torn-up cushions were the perpetrator of her current woes. Ripping her shirt over her head, she marched into her bedroom, stumbling out of her skirt and fishnets as she went. A massive blob of fur and fat lay sleeping directly in the middle of her feather-down pillow. The gargantuan tomcat didn’t take any notice when she flopped down on the bed beside him.
“I’m angry at myself, Binks.”
Binks cracked open one lazy yellow eye to glare at her before closing it again.
She frowned. “Aren’t you supposed to do my bidding, you big lug? Isn’t that what a familiar is for?”
Binks opened both eyes this time and crouched into a long cat stretch, his large belly swaying against the pillowcase. He turned in a circle, his tail held high in the air, then flopped back down again with narrowed eyes that clearly said, Don’t interrupt my sleep, infernal human.
She covered her face with her hands. Binks had never been any good at doing her bidding. Black-magic familiars were said to be a gift from the devil, a means for a witch to enhance her power. Binks had showed up on her doorstep several years earlier at the height of her past forays into the dark arts. At the time she’d wondered why of all the animals Satan could have sent her, she’d ended up with an overweight white-and-orange tomcat. Binks was supposed to be a part of her, a reflection of her magical abilities. She often wondered what it said about her abilities that Binksy’s most stunning accomplishments were finishing off an entire Sam’s Club pallet of Fancy Feast in a week and spending copious hours attempting to lick his own balls.
Speaking of accomplishments, she had really hit it out of the ballpark in the I’m-a-freaking-idiot competition tonight. There was no reason in the world for her to have taken such offense to Dr. Grey’s assumptions she might know something about black-magic covens in the area, because, well...she did. When she’d exploded with anger, she’d known very well that her anger wasn’t directed at him. Anger at herself bubbled inside her for being so fucking weak, for being an addict, for doing things she knew she shouldn’t be doing and not caring about the consequences. She wasn’t certain what it was, but something about Shane—no, Dr. Grey, she needed to call him Dr. Grey if she were to have any semblance of hope of maintaining her distance—made her feel like she was better, like she was worth more than that.
Of all the things about him—his obviously superior intelligence, the fact that he was a hunter, his badass combat skills—it was the feeling he inspired in her that scared her the most.
