Never Look Back

She paused to add more light, more shadow. This one was supposed to protect her. She scanned the length of his body, his slightly scarred chest, his deeply bronzed stomach, the ripple of hard-earned, sweat-glistening muscle. He was supposed to boff her brains out, too.

With a girlish grin, she chewed on the end of her brush. It was a joke, of course. A lark between herself and her sister. Allie didn’t really expect him to come alive. If she wanted a lover, she would have to look elsewhere.

Then again, for the last year, she’d been steeped in magic. Good magic. Bad magic. She’d seen it all. She knew anything was possible. In the past, her paintings had possessed paranormal powers. She’d done a portrait of her dead father that had attracted his ghost.

The wind swept through the studio once more, and Samantha hissed. Samantha was Allie’s cat, a finicky feline she’d found on the streets of Los Angeles.

The City of Angels.

She went back to her watercolor, shushing Samantha with a flick of her wrist, dropping a spot of paint on the already mottled floor.

The cat hissed again, only louder this time. She sighed, turning to face her pet. “Come on, Sam. It’s a nice spring breeze. A little air won’t hurt you.”

Perched on a cluttered art-supply shelf, the suspicious animal tensed, her sleek black body arching, her fur spiking on end.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t a nice breeze. Maybe it was strong and aggressive. But it fit Allie’s angel. She could imagine him soaring into the sky, his arms raised to the heavens, his threadbare clothes blowing, his hair whipping like a midnight tornado.

Lord, he was gorgeous. Rough and primitive.

“If only you would come alive,” she said.

And that was when it happened, when her wish took a twisted turn. Without warning, the wind howled, pushing against the window screen, popping the device from its hinges. It landed at Allie’s feet, where the hem of her dress billowed, mimicking Marilyn Monroe’s fanning garment in The Seven Year Itch.

Talk about feeling sexy.

Samantha went into a tizzy, growling like a demon, her ears pinned to her pretty little head. But Allie didn’t scold her. Foolish as it was, she was too busy waiting for her angel, her heart thumping in anticipation.

Only, it was a big, black bird that flew into the loft and circled the studio, its wings whooshing past her.

Allie blinked. A raven?

So much for getting laid.

She looked up, watching the raven perch on a rafter, one of the highest spots in the studio. The cat hadn’t quit growling. She hated birds. And this big, bad baby was no exception. It stood about two feet tall, with an impressive wingspan.

“That’s not Zinna,” Allie told Samantha, as the wind calmed down. Zinna was Allie’s great-grandmother, a dead witch, an Apache shape-shifter who took the form of an owl. An evil spirit who’d tried to steal Allie’s sister’s soul.

Not that Olivia Whirlwind was easy pickings. The older sister was a kick-ass, gun-toting psychic who assisted law enforcement officials. Currently she was working on a covert FBI mission. Allie couldn’t reach her if she tried. But there was no need. Allie had this situation under control.

Samantha batted her paw in the air, ready to do battle. Convinced, or so it seemed, that the feathered creature was Zinna.

“That’s a raven,” Allie said, glancing up at the rafters. The bird was too far away to react to the sound of her voice, to make out her words. Not that it would know the difference. Allie often put thoughts in Sam’s head, assuming what her pet was thinking, but she wasn’t going to do that with the bird, too. “Ravens are part of the crow family. That’s not the same as an owl. Besides, Zinna’s magic was contained by a binding spell. She can’t hurt us.”

Samantha narrowed her wary green eyes. All right, so the cat had a point. The binding spell could wear off at any time. Zinna’s magic was too powerful to contain forever.

“Don’t worry. I’ve been preparing for Zinna, honing my skills.” Allie paused, smoothing her waist-length hair. “But that raven isn’t her. Nor did she dispatch it.”

Samantha gave her a look that asked, “How can you be sure?”

“I have witch radar.” Allie, who’d been dubbed Addle-brain by the man who’d trained her to fight, puffed up her chest. “It’s part of my magic.”

If Samantha had eyebrows, she probably would have raised them. Allie had just painted an angel and conjured a bird. That didn’t bode well for her magic, for the skills she’d been honing.

She copped a defensive stance. “This isn’t my fault. Birds fly into people’s houses all the time.” To prove her point, she made a grand gesture, trying to shoo the stupid raven back out the window.

But it flew straight at her instead. Startled, she smacked it with her flailing hands, sending the wild creature to the floor, where it landed on the linoleum with a thud.

She gasped, stunned by the force with which she’d hit it. Even Samantha reacted with a you-killed-it meow. Of course, Sam sounded happy. Ding dong, the bird is dead.

“I didn’t mean to.” Guilty, Allie knelt over the fallen raven.

Samantha abandoned her post to get closer to her mistress’s kill. Whispering an apology, Allie stroked the bird, and it opened its eyes.

It was stunned, not dead.

Oddly enough, the raven simply stared at her, as though it understood her apology. A strange chill crept up her spine. But before she had time to analyze the feeling, Samantha grabbed one of its tail feathers with her teeth and yanked as hard as she could.

Suddenly the bird rose to the occasion, diving at Allie and taking a screw-you bite out of her arm.

Damn. She jerked back, realizing she’d taken a hit for something Samantha had done. The cat seemed to sense it, too. She took off running with the feather in her mouth, and within the blink of an eye, the bird was back in the rafters, tracking the cat from above, waiting to make its next move.

Clever beast.

Allie’s arm was bleeding like a bitch. She wrapped a small towel around the wound.

And while Samantha leaped from shelf to shelf, Allie searched for something to attack the raven, something that would reach the rafters, which wouldn’t be an easy task in a loft with museum-height ceilings. But what else could she do? By now, the bird was dive-bombing Samantha, behaving like the star of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. And its caw. Lord Almighty. It sounded like the messenger of death.

And then she recalled that in some forms of folklore, ravens were omens of death.

Like owls.

Shit.

She warned herself to stay calm, to think clearly. Wasn’t Raven the creator of the world to some of the Northwest Indians? Wasn’t he highly revered?

Of course Allie wasn’t from a Northwest tribe. Anxious, she scrambled to remember what ravens represented in her culture. She was half Chiricahua Apache and half Oglala Lakota Sioux, and sometimes their traditions didn’t mesh.

To the Apache, crows were associated with the hunt. The appearance of a crow was a good sign. But did that go for ravens, too? Allie didn’t know. She found a broom and swung at the bird, missing it by a long shot.

Wily beast.

As for the Lakota, she couldn’t remember what ravens meant to them. Or maybe she never knew to begin with.

Samantha knocked over an entire shelf of acrylic paint, scattering the tubes all over the floor. The oils came next. Then the cat dumped a bottle of brush cleaner, where it spilled into a pool of clear liquid.

That was Allie’s downfall. She took another missed swipe at the raven and hit the brush cleaner, sliding like a skunk on roller skates. With a feminine-pitched screech, she slammed into a sturdy oak cabinet, where her head rammed the wood.

She could have sworn she saw stars. The room was starting to spin. She glanced around for Samantha and noticed the cat was hiding behind the biggest chair in the studio. But the bird was no longer stalking her.