Colin: Her Warlock Protector Book 4 Read online

  When he realized what was at his door, Colin could feel a cold hand grip his heart. He knew that there was no reason that Bitsy would wander from Selene's side. Familiars were incredibly loyal animals, and though they had the same lifespan as their normal brethren, they were possessed of a human love and devotion to their masters and mistresses.

  No, Bitsy would never have left Selene unless Selene had sent her, and there were only a few reasons why Selene would send her beloved pet instead of coming herself. The call he had had with Stephan leapt immediately to his mind.

  Colin had lived too long to believe in coincidences.

  He didn't bother with his coat. Instead, he strapped his daggers to his forearms, where they would be hidden until he needed them, and he picked up his sword again. He didn't bother with a sheath, because wherever he was going, he knew that he wasn't going to need it.

  He paused for a moment, and then scooped up Bitsy to place her on his shoulder. She took a moment to gently nibble his ear, and then she began hissing, as if demanding to be reunited with her mistress.

  What he was doing was against the covenant of the Corps, but Colin had never felt that the organization was further away. For the first time in his life, he knew that there was something that was far more important than the Corps, and that if he didn't take care of it, then his life wasn't worth the long, long years he had lived and the long years that stretched ahead of him without her.

  He knew what he needed to do, and he could only hope that he wasn't too late.

  He picked up the amulet, searching for the magic in it, and then in a shoal of copper sparks, he disappeared.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  SELENE FELT LIKE she was in the car for at least a few hours. At first, she tried to keep track of the turns that the car took, but it wasn't long before she simply lost track. Her stomach dropped when she realized that the sounds of the city were fading rather than getting louder. They were taking her away from the places where others could see and save her.

  No, she thought in despair, these men are too good for that. They knew who I was and what I could do, they hit me fast and hard.

  Her brain tried not to think about her worst fear, but there it was. There was a small chance that they were some dark and shadowy agency who knew about her talents and wanted to acquire them, but she didn't believe that.

  They were Templars.

  Before she had gone rogue, she had listened with a fascination that bordered on obsession to the other coven members' tales of the Templars. The general wisdom ran that they were descended from the Crusader order of the same name, though some hinted at origins that were far darker and far more sinister. No matter where they came from or what face they wore, however, their deadliness and their brutality were legendary. As long as there had been Wiccans, there had been Templars, and Templars had always been witch killers.

  Selene's teeth began to chatter as she remembered Nadine, one of the other women in the coven that she had been a part of. Nadine looked no older than her early thirties, but half of the hair on her head was stark white. One day, Selene had thoughtlessly complimented her on it, making the woman go still.

  “It was Templars that did this,” she said, a trace of her mellifluous Welsh accent still in her voice.

  At the time, Selene had been shocked, and some of that shock must have shown on her face, because Nadine nodded brusquely.

  “They had me for two days and a night before a major from the Corps found me and dealt with them. I was almost four years recovering, and, well, lass, that was just my body.”

  Silently, she pulled up the hem of her skirt and showed Selene the dark scars that circled her leg from ankle to knee, spiraling up like a livid brown rope.

  “They do things that ought not be spoken of,” Nadine said firmly, and Selene's gut clenched with fear.

  She wondered wildly what they would do to her, whether they would decide that her eyes were too risky to allow her to keep. She tried to force herself calm, and to think about Bitsy. Her familiar was clever and quick, but could she navigate the city to reach Colin in time? Even more frightening, would he come?

  Selene had always known the risk that she ran as a rogue. There was no one to guard her, no one to save her when she might fall. The thought sent a spike of pain through her heart, but it also made her grit her teeth and start thinking.

  She figured that they had used cable ties to bind her hands and feet. When she twisted her wrists experimentally, the thin plastic bit into her flesh. They had tightened them cruelly, but still there was room to maneuver. When she twisted them too far, the plastic felt a sharp as a knife.

  Panic nipped at the edge of her brain, but she forced it back. The urge to lie still like a stunned rabbit and to let fate take her tugged at her heart, but instead, she counted backwards from ten, and felt her control return. She knew that anything wet could help her slip free of the bonds, and after a moment, she started to twist her hands around. The pain was dazzling, but it kept her focused and it kept fear at bay. At the moment, fear was her enemy, and she needed to make sure that it stayed far away from her. Instead, she concentrated on the pain of the straps cutting into her wrists, and then of the wetness of blood from the cuts that were developing.

  It was working, she thought, but it was slow, so slow.

  The car finally stopped, and though her wrists were slick with blood, there wasn’t enough to let her slip free. She heard a murmur of voices, the crunch of boots on gravel, and then the trunk lid opened. Instead of greedily sucking in the fresh cold air the way that she wanted to, she kept still. When the men—she could tell there were two of them—lifted her out of the trunk, she allowed herself to stay limp and for her breathing to stay shallow. They may worry less about a woman who seemed to be unconscious. With her hands and feet tied, she had no illusions of getting away any time soon.

  One man carried her like a sack of potatoes, and though she maintained her illusion of staying conscious, it took everything she had to avoid stiffening as she felt herself being carried down a flight of stairs. Her captor dropped her on what felt like a packed earth floor, and stepped away. Though she knew that her captors were going to hurt her, still there was a moment of panic.

  With no warning, she was suddenly drenched in ice cold water. She couldn't keep up the illusion any longer. She cried out with the cold, wrenching herself up to a sitting position that only made the pain in her wrists flare up. She was met with low, cruel laughter.

  “There you are, little witch. Thought you were faking.” This voice was low and hoarse, like that of a thirty year smoker.

  “I knew she wasn't. Witches, they're all liars. They lie like they talk, and they never talk until they want to tell us everything!”

  This voice was quick and jittery. It made her think of the needle on a seismograph that measured earthquakes, juddering up and down as the world shook.

  “Do you know why we brought you here, little witch?” asked Smoker.

  There was something almost courtly about the way he spoke to her, but the chill that ran up her spine told her there was nothing kind about him, nothing that was going to save her. There was no mercy in that voice, and she knew that expecting it would be foolish.

  “You're Templars.”

  It had occurred to her to lie, to say that she was just an innocent woman and that there had been some kind of mistake. She was what she was, and she knew how precisely the Templars struck. The result would be the same whether she lied or not. If she was going to die, she was going to do it as herself and no one else.

  They both laughed, their amusement buffeting her and grating at her frayed nerves.

  “Sounds like our reputations precede us,” exclaimed Shaker. “That's nice. That's new.”

  “Ha, most girlies in your position cry,” said Smoker informatively. “Most of them cry and yell for their gods, or their mamas or the Corps. Maybe you're too smart to do that.”

  As best she could, Selene lifted her chin and was si
lent. For her silence, she was rewarded with a hard kick to her shin that made her groan.

  “Who's coming for you?” Smoker asked reasonably. When she didn't answer, he kicked her again. “Now, I know you can hear me, girlie,” he said patiently.

  Perhaps that was the most horrible thing. He sounded like a farmer instructing a new hand on how best to break up the soil in spring. There was nothing in those words or that tone that told Selene that he was going to kill her, but she knew it was there.

  “What do you mean, who's coming for me?” Selene cried. “No one, no one's coming for me.”

  A hard slap sent sparks flying around her head.

  “That's for lying,” Shaker said with triumph. “We don't listen to witches who lie. We hurt them.”

  “That's very right,” said Smoker. “Now answer our question. Who's coming for you?”

  “No one,” she said, cringing back from another blow. Miraculously, it didn't come, and she gasped out her explanation. “I'm a rogue. We don't have covens or people to protect us. We're outside the bounds of the Corps, and they don't care whether we live or die.”

  There was a long pause, and she wondered if the two Templars were staring at each other or at her.

  “Well what the hell,” Smoker said with a sigh.

  Shaker was silent until he shouted with a rage that made her skin crawl. He cursed in languages she couldn't identify, and at the last, he kicked her so hard in the stomach that she thought she would vomit.

  “You little bitch, do you know how hard it was to find you? Do you have any fucking idea?”

  “As my companion says, we've been after you for a while. Had to do some highfalutin spy work to get to you too, missie. That organization that you work for was none too keen to give their little princess up, but we made it happen.”

  They yanked her into a sitting position, and Selene choked back a scream. She could feel someone's hot and rancid breath blast across her face through the hood. When he spoke, Shaker's voice was just a few shades short of insane.

  “Oh they were so frightened,” he crooned. “They were so frightened, and they never knew what they were dying for.”

  Selene didn’t know any of the people she worked for, but now she could picture them so clearly. They were a dark and shady organization, but there were people there, people with lives and families. Now those people were dead.

  “You monsters,” she whispered, and Shaker let her drop to the ground.

  “Now that's not really fair, girlie,” Smoker said. “As far as right-thinking folks are concerned, the only monster in this room is bound and hooded so she can't do people a lick of harm.”

  “I'm not a monster–”

  “We saw your files,” said Shaker.

  To her shock, his voice came from behind her. He had moved so silently that she hadn't known at all.

  “That we did. We saw what you did for those folks, and we saw how good you were. You think those people wanted their memories? You think maybe they should have kept them?”

  Selene stifled a sob, because Smoker, despite her terror, was not speaking anything but the truth.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  She had always known that there would be an accounting someday, and she realized with a crystal clarity that this was it.

  “You're a monster,” Smoker said. “We’re monster-hunters, and at the end of it, there's just one way for this story to end”

  His voice held all the gravity of a judge.

  “Let me kill her,” Shaker said, a whine in his voice. “I want to kill her.”

  “You take too long,” Smoker said, and for the first time, there was a shade of disgust in his voice. “I don't want to be here all damn day if there's not going to be someone coming for her. We pulled a singleton. We should cut our losses, slit her throat, and get out of here.”

  Selene could feel tears start to soak her hood. It was her death they were discussing so calmly, even with commonplace irritation. They could have been talking about what to get for dinner.

  “I want to,” Shaker whined, and Smoker made a disgusted sound.

  “Fine, get to it,” he said, and Selene straightened herself up as much as she could.

  She would give him as little satisfaction as she could. She would hold out for as long as she could. She had no false hope that she would last for any real length of time, but she hung on to it.

  This time she heard his steps coming for her, and she made her breathing go low and calm. It was all she could do.

  Then she heard both men start to scream

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  SOMEONE HAD ONCE asked Colin what he saw as he jumped from place to place. He had always said nothing, but then he had started thinking about it, keeping his eyes open as he teleported. Some people expected there to be a white flash, but now that he had been doing it for centuries, he could say that it was more like one place melted into another.

  In less time than it took his heart to beat, he was in a filthy cellar. Selene was tied up on the floor, kneeling with a hood over her head. Next to her he could see a lean man with a scarred face walking towards her, holding a thin fillet knife. That was all the reason he needed to lunge at the man with his sword. The man was skilled, and he somehow managed to dodge Colin's blade, though Colin opened a satisfying slice on the man's arm.

  An angry squeal from Bitsy was all the warning he got before she lunged off of his shoulder, jumping at the man who was trying to flank him. The man immediately stumbled back with a face-full of angry ferret. Colin was free to turn his attention to the man with the knife.

  “Murdering Templar,” Colin spat, and the man grinned at him.

  “Got that right,” he said, “Done it before and I'll do it again.”

  He lunged at Colin with his knife, a move so suicidal that it almost worked. Colin had been expecting the Templar to pull out something more substantial, something that had a chance against Colin's gladiolus, but instead, the man's weapon was a nearly supernatural quickness.

  The man got under his guard and would have slashed him straight through the guts if Selene hadn't lashed out wildly with her bound feet and tripped him. He went down, Colin's sword came up, and then the man lay still on the cold floor.

  The other man had flung Bitsy away, and now with his own sword in hand, he charged at Colin like an angry bull. Colin sidestepped neatly, and as the man went by, Colin’s short quick sword lashed out at the man's ankles, and the man went down with a groan.

  Colin would have stopped to finish the man off, but one glance told him that the Templar was down and with a blow like that, might never walk again. He reached for Selene.

  She was shaking hard when he pulled off the hood, and even in the light of the single light bulb, her eyes were huge and bright. There was a bruise darkening along her jaw, and he felt that killing anger rise up in him again. Her wrists were wet with blood, and he pulled out his knife to slit her bonds.

  “Selene, love? Speak to me. Are you all right?”

  To his shock, she shuddered twice, and then she started to laugh. There was a slight hysteria to it, but then she lurched into his arms.

  “Oh god, to think I thought that you would not come,” she said softly. “I can't believe I thought you wouldn't come.”

  “Wouldn’t come? I had to come for the woman I love.”

  “I love you, Colin,” she whimpered, voice quaking. “Please, please forgive me for ever thinking that. Please–”

  “There's nothing to forgive, I swear,” Colin murmured into her hair. The fact that she was still whole, still sound, brought a rush of relief through him so fierce that he was shaken to the core.

  “There is something that needs to be forgiven,” she whispered, “but that can wait.”

  “Wait?”

  “I have business here.”

  The way she spoke sent chills down Colin's spine. Shakily, she tried to stand, and Colin helped her. She turned to the Templar who was lying and cursing weakly on the floor.
She stepped closer to him, and despite how bloodied and battered she looked, there was blazing purpose in her movement.

  “Bitch,” he spat weakly, but it only made her smile.

  “You thought you were going to hurt me and kill me,” she said softly. “You're never going to do that to anyone again.”

  He started to speak, but then he made the fatal error of looking straight into Selene’s extraordinary golden eyes. He went still, and for a long moment, Selene stared at him. Colin got the impression that she was looking into the Templar's soul. Her eyes were seeing something Colin could not, and her hand, streaked with her own blood, came up to mark the man's forehead. When she touched, him, he screamed weakly, just once, and was silent.

  Finally, she stepped away from him, her face gray. Bitsy squeaked at her foot, and with a sigh of relief, she scooped the little animal up and cuddled her to her breast.

  “All right,” she said in a voice that was much smaller and more tired. “I'm ready to go home please.”

  Colin's arm came up around her shoulders to support her, but he hesitated.

  “I should take care of him,” he said, but she shook her head.

  “He'll never be of any use to anyone ever again,” Selene said with a brutal practicality that any Corps member would have envied. “Anything he could use, anything that he was, anything that made him a person let alone a Templar, I've taken that from him.”

  Colin's breath caught at the enormity of what Selene had done, and he realized that she was right. The man was disabled in a way far darker than death, and as he prepared to take Selene home, he heard the Templar's soft weeping behind him.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  SELENE WAS CALM until she saw the apartment door. It was kicked in, a splintered mess in the middle of the home that she had so carefully and lovingly created for herself. Only when she saw it, did she begin to sob.