This Wicked Magic

This Wicked Magic
Michele Hauf

His destined mate…Certainly Jones pushed it too far this time. Clawing at his soul are the demons he unknowingly carried back from his last quest. Weak and exhausted, the dark witch’s only hope is the striking woman with the fiery red hair. Vika senses him before she sees him.The good witch with emerald eyes has never dabbled in dark magic, but one look at CJ turns her world upside down. Soon Vika is lured into his dangerous world… and powerful arms. But sultry kisses are not enough to save CJ – it’s going to take potent sorcery…and they’re running out of time!

“What was that?” Vika asked, giving him a stunned once-over.

“It was an awful, botched attempt. A horrible kiss, as far as kisses go. Sorry.”

“Never apologize for a kiss.” She clutched the front of his shirt, pulling him down to her mouth, and kissed him.

More intrigued than startled—although he was still kicking himself for such an awkward first contact—Certainly stepped in closer and slipped an arm around her slender back. All he’d needed was a test kiss, and an acceptance from her. He relaxed now, and Vika’s mouth melded against his. Of course, he should expect nothing less than perfect from her. Perfect looks, perfect life, perfect kiss. And suddenly he wanted to mar that perfection, to imprint his own rough and messy darkness.

About the Author

MICHELE HAUF has been writing romance, action-adventure and fantasy stories for more than twenty years. Her first published novel was Dark Rapture. France, musketeers, vampires and faeries populate her stories. And if she followed the adage “write what you know,” all her stories would have snow in them. Fortunately, she steps beyond her comfort zone and writes about countries she has never visited and of creatures she has never seen.

Michele can be found on Facebook and Twitter and at michelehauf.com. You can also write to Michele at PO Box 23, Anoka, MN 55303, USA.

This Wicked Magic

Michele Hauf

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

Believe in something. It doesn’t matter what that something is, so long as you never stop believing in the magic of love.

Chapter 1

Paris

There are things he had done. Bad things. Dangerous things. Wicked things. He’d made mistakes. Broken rules. He regretted.

And he did not regret.

Everything he had ever done had been to expand his knowledge. Learning was never a bad thing. Most of the time. Sometimes a man needed to sacrifice for the greater good. Or that was how he’d talked himself into his latest disastrous adventure.

Now Certainly Jones desired peace. It was not to be his.

Hands shoved in his jeans pockets and senses alert to the warm summer air and gasoline fumes rising from the tarmac, he hustled toward the glow of a streetlight a hundred yards down from the Lizard Lounge.

The faery club had been inordinately bright—which was why he’d chosen to go there after sundown. He never went out after the world had grown dark, but after months of solitude he’d craved a night away from home. The Lizard Lounge was mind-numbingly weird. He could deal with all paranormal breeds and their ways and manners—but faeries? There were some things a witch who had been practicing the dark arts for well over a century and a half should not see. Situations, illicit couplings and magics in which even he daren’t dabble.

Gut muscles clenching, Certainly felt the familiar warning twinge of an internal takeover. Of late, his body was not his to command.

He increased the pace of his footsteps through the dark alley. Fifty strides ahead beckoned the streetlight. His fingers curled against his abs and he bit his lip.

“Stay back,” he hissed. The passengers inhabiting his body—his very soul—rippled within his being.

Spellcraft had proved ineffectual to prevent an imminent intrusion. Directing his instincts inward, Certainly attempted to, at the least, identify the imposing entity. It gnawed at his insides and clawed to get out. As his mouth began to water, he pinpointed that it craved a dark, seeping, metallic thing. It wanted … carrion.

“Hell. Not good.”

With a rallying dash, he landed in the safe glow and hooked his arm about the black metal pole, swinging halfway about and chuckling in triumph. He’d won. For now. Yet he stood a stranded sailor adrift in a dark sea, and navigating the infested waters always proved perilous.

The next streetlight punctuating this moonless night wasn’t for another long block. He stood on a back street, well off the main avenue. He should have gone the other direction, toward the Seine, where the night was always bright with tourists and passing cars. But the thing inside him had been persistent, pushing him this way the moment he’d exited the safety of the Lizard Lounge’s peculiar brightness.

The demon inside smelled something Certainly wasn’t able to pick out of the atmosphere now that he had a grasp on his own senses, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to if his instincts were correct regarding the carrion demon.

Pushing his fingers through his long dark hair, he pulled at the strands, wincing. It wanted control, and the light made it stomp its hooves and bleat to rattle Certainly’s bones. Venturing out after sunset had been foolish. Yet he’d needed the escape from the solitude of his loft.

He wasn’t sure how much longer he could endure this torture before he gave in and surrendered. Walked away from the light and into the darkness. Once there, the darkness would swallow him whole. He would never make it back to the surface sane. As it was, he treaded the line that tipped over to insanity. But he wouldn’t go down that way, would not let the dark passengers he carried inside take him or claim his soul.

He’d stolen from Daemonia, and so yes, this was his deserving punishment. But he’d find escape to the surface. He always did.

Thinking he could hail a cab and request that the driver keep the interior light on—a feeble and temporary mend to his curse—Certainly scanned down the lonely street, paralleled by brick walk-ups and here and there a limestone three-story, which hailed from medieval times. The street was cobbled, remnants of centuries past when kings and musketeers once paraded before the peasants and Revolutionaries swung sticks instead of swords and lapped up the blood from severed heads. Not so metaphorically, either.

He’d missed that tumultuous time and had instead grown up during Paris’s Bohemian phase in the late nineteenth century, la Belle époque. A hippie at heart, there were days he pined for the halcyon days of artistry, freedom, absinthe, ether and living from sofa to sofa, wherever his body may fall.

The thought of his wilder youth made him smirk and release the pole. He stepped out onto the street, his well-worn leather boots clicking the cobblestones, and scanned left then right. Cabs generally tracked the main avenues.

The darkness had grown to an inky maw separating him from the brightness of the Lizard Lounge’s neon sign and his glowing outpost. Putting up his left hand, he spread his tattooed fingers wide. The entire hand was gloved with spellcraft tattoos used for a multitude of magics. He focused on the electrical connection his body had to the world and tried to see a map of all the streetlights as if a hologram in the air before him. Faint lines formed but quickly puffed away. His demonic passengers weakened his magic. With a huff, he gave up the read and dropped his hand to his side.

Across the narrow street and down the alley, he sighted a vehicle with its headlights on, facing an alcove he couldn’t see from his point of view. The long white car was a dash away through darkness, but it was the only action he suspected he’d see on this street for a while. And without firm control of a tracking spell, he would be left to walk home blindly. Perhaps he could hitch a ride?

The carrion demon again scented its target, and Certainly felt his body sway and stumble. Away from the light.

If only he’d mastered the art of fire magic, he could draw up a fireball to lead his way home. Fire was about the only elemental magic witches avoided, for it could bring their deaths. Though some witches had mastered it. CJ hadn’t time for it over the decades when he’d been gorging his knowledge on all other magics.

“Hitchhiking it is,” he muttered, and made a daring dash for the deceptive safety of the car’s headlights.

“Yuck. A werewolf,” Libby said.

Viktorie St. Charles walked around her sister Libertie, who stood posed, hands on hips, body encased in a white Tyvek cleaning suit, before tonight’s job. Her sister’s toe tapped the asphalt in time to the tunes blasting through her ever-present earbuds.

Vika tugged a white mesh cap over her hair, tucking up some stray red strands. With a step, her Tyvek-covered flat shoes squished in a pile of werewolf guts.

No one had ever said financial stability was glamorous.

“Twenty minutes,” Vika stated, inspecting the slick mess oozing about her foot. Lemon and myrrh would take out the smell and the blood. “You pick up the chunks. I’ll start spraying down the brick.”

Giving her the thumbs-up signal, Libby wielded the black zip-up morgue bag with her pink latex-gloved hands and bent over the task. “This guy is still in solid form in places.”

“The silver must have worked quickly. Usually what happens in werewolves if it doesn’t have time to course completely through the blood.”

Vika aimed a handheld spray canister filled with vinegar, water and rosemary, bespelled to remove all trace of DNA, at the brick wall behind the parking lot for a down-on-its-luck bistro. She worked efficiently from top to bottom, directing the stream toward a center point that collected all the refuse for easier cleanup with the portable wet vac that waited in the back of their work vehicle.

They worked in tandem, having done this for years, both sisters knowing the job well. Cleaning was to Vika as music was to Libby.

Years previously, a date with a sexy werewolf had ended in him getting staked with a chunk of silver by a vampire rival. Vika hadn’t been attached to the big lug—first date, don’t you know—but she had liked him and had been hoping for a one-night stand, with him in were form, not werewolf, that is. She did not do fur during sex. The vampire had chuckled and offered to fulfill her desires, until she’d kicked him in the ‘nads. Didn’t matter what sort of paranormal breed you were. A kick to the gonads would take down any man for a few minutes.