“I have two. I can’t ride down on your back.” She looked up at him and her cheeks dimpled. “You can carry me like a bride!”
“Oh, Angelina.”
Her dimples slid into an expression he could only call grief. “We’re never gonna get married, are we?”
“It is unlikely,” he said gently, helping her to stand.
“I woulda made a beautiful bride.”
Edmund choked back a laugh and lifted her into his arms. “Coming down,” he shouted, and leaped. His bare feet caught the surface, skidding along the frozen energy like snow skiing. He dropping to his backside when the angle became too great to maintain balance. They hit the ground in a run.
“Twenty minutes until sunrise,” Liz said. “Cutting it close, fanghead.”
Ed said to Angie, “Give me one minute to get in back to take out the time-frozen humans. Then I want you to say, ‘One, two,three,’ and yank the strands of magic on three.” He looked up. “Cia and Liz will rush in the moment the magic falls and help your mother. Evan, you’ll have to carry Angie to safety. Are you up to it?”
“Yeah. I can do that.” But Edmund wasn’t certain. He looked as if he’d topple in a slow breeze.
“On three,” Ed said again. “I’ll hear you.”
Angie nodded.
—
Angie said, “One, two,three!” She jerked the last strands from the time-space deactivation. Thehedge of thornsshrieked. It fell.
Daddy picked her up and carried her away from the screeching energies and the sparks and the lightning power that burned her skin. He placed her in the front seat of Edmund’s car with George and EJ and left her there.
She heard shouting. Heard her mother crying. And then Edmund was back, bloody and fanged, inside with them, raising the convertible roof. His fangs clicked closed and he turned on the engine and the heat. Softly, he said, “You did it, Angelina. I’m proud.”
Angie began to shiver. She had fixed the mistake she made. A moment later, Angie threw up. All over Edmund’s expensive leather upholstery. And Edmund.
—
Edmund sat with Big Evan at the bar of Shaddock’s barbeque restaurant. The big witch was aptly named, a mountain of a man who had just finished a mountain of ribs and brisket and side dishes. He wiped his mouth, taking extra pains with the sauce on his beard, and said, “How’d you get Angie to stop wanting to marry you?”
Edmund stopped a smile. Such a union would have been the very worst possibility to a witch father. “She has recognized the implausibility of such a mating. She matured considerably when she accidentally endangered her family with her magics. And those of your wife. She recognizes the responsibility of heritage and family and witch clan. Your daughter is an impressive child.”
“She’s scary is what she is. How’m I gonna keep her from doing something like this again?”
“You will talk to her.”
“Not bind her magics?”
Edmund smiled and drank his beer. It had a hoppy, sharp taste, citrusy and tart. “She sees magical energies without the need for aseeingworking, making her capable of undoing your magics. She is powerful and that power deserves respect, rather than fear.” Ed placed a fifty on the counter. “I am yours to command, Evan Trueblood. Call me. Especially if there’s another temporal deactivation. This was... interesting.” With Mithran grace, Edmund departed.
Bound into Darkness
A Novella
First published inDirty Deeds, an anthology from Pen and Page Publishing (2021). It takes place sometime between books 13 and 14 of the Jane Yellowrock series.
Chapter One
Liz
Liz Everhart finished the email, tucked her cell into a back pocket of her jeans, ignored the weird buzz of blood-curse taint that still pulled at her flesh, and tried to decide who she wanted to call for backup on this gig. Finding a lost dog sounded easy on the surface, but it could involve hiking up and down mountain ridges, maybe camping overnight, and then hauling a seventy-pound, possibly wounded dog back to civilization. That wasn’t something she wanted to do alone. Liz dialed her twin, Cia, and discovered she was spending the weekend with her boyfriend, so help on that quarter was out. Her other sisters were covering the family business, Seven Sassy Sisters’ Herb Shop and Café. That left asking Jane Yellowrock, who she didn’t particularly like, and who was way too busy being some big hoo-ha in the vampire world. Or she could ask the man who had been avoiding her for weeks. Yeah.Him.She thought about being rejected again. Or, not so much rejected as suddenly, inexplicably ignored.
Staring out over the vineyard, watching her older sister, Molly, work, she remembered the various comments he’d made a month ago, ones that suggested he was now totally disinterested. She didn’t know what had happened, except that he’d been in some pretty dangerous situations protecting Jane Yellowrock. Maybe he really thought the danger to “civilians,”as he called people who were not part of Yellowrock’s vampire-human-witch clan, was too great for her to handle.
