Roses & Haunts Read online

  He blinked at her once, slowly. “Where? There’s no side road that I could see, and this ride isn’t exactly equipped with 4-wheel drive.”

  “If we’re truly stuck, we aren’t going to get off this road anyway,” she pointed out. “If we aren’t, this may be our only chance to escape Bob Ross’s personal hell.”

  Again he blinked, not getting the reference. Alynia gestured around her in exasperation. “Do any of these trees look ‘little’ or ‘happy’ to you?”

  A hint of a grin tipped his lips, and he shifted the gears once more. “Leave it to you to make jokes.”

  “It’s that or start screaming. Your choice.”

  “How about Option C?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Praying.”

  His foot hit the gas, and he wrenched the wheel to the right. A small path, barely large enough to fit their car down, opened up before them within the trees. It had to have been an individually worn hiker trail, possibly an illegally made road through government-owned land. For camping purposes, maybe? She tried to tell herself it didn’t matter as her teeth clicked around in her head, the car’s suspension shrieking in time to the undercarriage bouncing on the uneven dirt path. Branches clawed at the roof, at the doors of the car, threatening to crack the windshield. She didn’t want to think about what they were doing to the paint job. Iowin agreed, keeping his foot on the gas, urging their silver steed faster. Until the branches grew to be too many, the leaves thicker, crushing inward. Until they couldn’t see anything.

  “S-s-stop!”

  For the second time that day, dirt and dust obscured the rear window, the seatbelt slamming hard against her chest. Breath whooshed out of her lungs, the car skidding on the loose dirt and stones. But stop they did.

  “You okay?” she glanced at her husband.

  “Aye,” he replied. “You?”

  “Yeah. We’re alive. Yay us.”

  His hand found hers again, his other unlatching her seatbelt and pulling her across his body. His mouth crashed into hers, the kiss frantic and filled with all the adrenaline-fueled worry he couldn’t give voice to in light of what they’d just faced. She answered that kiss with a relief all her own, arms wrapping around his neck, holding him like he was the only thing holding her to reality.

  If they were in their reality anymore.

  “So,” she whispered as they came up for air, the steering wheel her new seat. “Do you hear that?”

  “Birds,” he answered, arms resting around her waist. “I hear birds.”

  “Do you think we’re out of the… whatever the hell that was?”

  He closed his eyes, throwing his senses across the winds. “I think so. There’s life here where there wasn’t before. An abundance of life and… magic.”

  That gave her pause. “Good magic or bad magic.”

  He lifted both eyebrows at that, lids slowly following suit. “All this time studying and you still don’t understand that magic isn’t good or bad. It’s in the heart of—”

  “Yeah, yeah, in the heart of the user. Intent is everything. Obey your thirst. I get that. And you know what I mean. Is the magic you feel slathered with good or bad sauce.”

  Again, he closed his eyes. “I can’t tell. It’s old and lingering, but I can’t tell either way. It feels… I don’t know, like a spell that started pure and ended less so?”

  “Great. Possibly a felony witch with good intentions to arrest,” she pulled herself from his grasp, albeit a touch reluctantly. “Let’s see where we are.”

  He put the car into gear, moving at a much easier, less bone-jarring pace. The trees thinned slowly, the path pretending to a be a road widening into something that aspired to a decent travel path. A narrow cobblestone lane replaced the natural forest floor, winding with a casualness that would have been picturesque under normal circumstances. Up in the distance, an old-fashioned covered bridge spanned a shallow bubbling—or was that babbling (she never really understood the difference)—creek. Beyond that, thank all the stars ever, was the most beautiful highway road sign she’d ever seen.

  White lettering on a blue background proclaimed “Gas” to the left and “Motel” to the right.

  “Take it slow,” she urged, eying the bridge cautiously. “That thing looks like it was built when dirt was young.”

  “No kidding.”

  She was so focused on the road that she didn’t see the shape charging at them until it was too late. A black streak exploded from the left, darting directly into the path of the car. Iowin cursed, slamming on the brakes and locking the damn things up. Alynia groaned, the shoulder harness biting into her chest and side of her neck. There was going to be a bruise there in the morning, she just knew it.

  “What the hell?”

  Iowin was already acting before she finished her statement, his crossbow in one hand and a ring of angry red flames wreathing his other. It took her a moment to wonder why he was ready to blast someone to ash with that spell, her gaze flicking forward through the windshield—

  “Fuck me,” she breathed.

  The horse was all black, from hoof to mane to rolling dark eyes. The bridle and bit were black, the saddle also the color of mourning. Which fit the theme of its rider quite well, in fact. Black boots clung to the leg all the way up to the thigh, black riding breeches revealing heavily conditioned and bunched muscles. A long black coat and shirt with one of those frilly lace collars covered the chest, crisscrossed with black leather bandoliers. One other feature dominated the rider, and it wasn’t the gorgeous black cloak and gloves that completed the blast-from-the-past he was rocking.

  Or rather, it was the lack of one other dominating feature that caused her to leap out of the car and point her gun at his chest.

  “Where the hell is your head?!” she shrieked.

  “Show us your hands,” Iowin said a second later, the faint rattle in his voice the only betrayal of the fear he obviously felt, too. At least he pulled it together enough to do the responsible thing and ask for hands.

  Blue-white light blazed to life, a halo surrounding it.

  “I’ll repeat,” her finger found the trigger, the gun a steady reassurance versus all the insanity this trip had become. “Show us your head. Knock off this bull-crap and you won’t get hurt.”

  The headless man lifted one hand in response, and pointed a finger directly at Alynia. Blue-white light flickered to life against that black-gloved digit, exploding outward like a tiny star. A star intent on landing right between her pretty gray eyes. A second later that offending digit was wreathed in crimson flame, Iowin’s magic searing into the whatever-it-was and lighting the rider up like a bonfire. Somehow, the headless freak managed to shriek, the flames spreading wildly across his body. It wasn’t enough to stop the thing’s spell, but it was enough to knock his home run into a foul ball. The bolt of blue-white streaked past her face, slamming into the hood of the car. Oily, nauseating smoke rose in its wake.

  “That’s my wife,” Iowin hissed, red flames crackling in his eyes, mirroring the fire in his palm. “Leave her alone.”

  Their attacker turned his horse with jerky motions, bolting towards the covered bridge.

  He disappeared the instant they crossed the threshold.

  Alynia lowered the gun, stepping slowly away from the smoking hood of the car. Silver paint peeled and cracked, acid-like hissing filling their ears. She didn’t want to say it. She really didn’t. But the words just tumbled out on their own.

  “Did we just get run off the road by the fucking Headless Horseman?”

  Wide emerald eyes connected with hers and his mouth twisted on the words as much as hers did. “Looks like.”

  Chapter 2

  The car was fried, and that was putting it mildly.

  Every hose in the engine was melted, every spark plug blown, and every piece that should have moved fused to the pieces that shouldn’t. Which were now moving quite well on their own, if one considered dropping out of the bottom of the car as ‘m
oving well.’ Whatever this ghost or whatever had tried to do to Alynia, it wasn’t sent with warm fuzzies. It had been a killing stroke, and that was more than enough to set Iowin on a warpath. She was used to people trying to kill her on a regular basis. Part and parcel of having been a homicide cop for nearly a decade. He should have been used to it, too.

  Adding a new piece of jewelry on each of their left hands had surely changed more than her last name.

  All said and done, it appeared Mr. and Mrs. Tintreach were going to start their honeymoon on the outskirts of a little village known as Sleepy Hollow, NY. Home of a single covered bridge, about two stoplights, one mechanic, and a motel that sported Ted Nugent-eque decor. It was either the beginning of a really bad horror movie, or a supremely horrific porno. She couldn’t tell which.

  It was a good thing her father had packed them off with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue. It was his way of making peace.

  The motel room wasn’t much to look at, but it was warm and dry and smelled faintly of good strong cleaner. That, and it had the best free Wi-Fi she’d ever found at a rooming establishment. Though that could also work with the fact that, by her estimation, she and Iowin and the elderly woman behind the desk were the only inhabitants of the twenty-room little sleep-and-go. Considering the clerk, a Mrs. Irving, handed them an old-fashioned metal key and had them sign a paper register, she doubted very much that they’d share bandwidth with her tonight.

  She flopped on the full-sized bed, her laptop out before her. Whisky burned down her throat as she split the screen between local maps of Sleepy Hollow and all the information she could find on the Headless Horseman. There wasn’t much that was reliable, and yet there was a metric crapton of fiction to be found.

  The original story of the Headless Horseman loaded, and she skimmed it quickly. If she was to take it as gospel, her would-be Headless Assassin was the ghost of a Hessian soldier who died when someone blew his head off with a cannonball.

  “That’d piss me off too,” she murmured.

  “What would?” Iowin called from the tiny closet pretending to be their bathroom.

  “Having my head blown off with a cannonball. I think our ghost has reason to haunt.”

  “But does that justify freezing a moment in time?”

  She shrugged before she realized he couldn’t see it. “Makes you wonder why that particular stretch of road? Why that particular woman and her family? And why were we caught up in it? Unless your family fired the cannon that lopped off his think box, I have no idea why we were caught in it.”

  The thought of pure coincidence danced in the bond between them, quickly discarded before she lifted a mental eyebrow. Coincidences existed, even for a Caprice witch. But rarely, if ever, did they happen when magic was involved. Real magic required the use of will, of desire, of some sort of need to create an effect. Magic was specific that way, and targeted and coincidence were about as far apart in definition as good TV and reality shows.

  “Too many questions for my liking,” he answered, stepping around the corner. “At first light, let’s grab a rental and return to the crime scene. Now that we know this has to do with an apparition, there may be clues that we missed.”

  “Maybe,” she swallowed the last of the whisky in her glass. “I doubt it, though. We might have better luck scraping some residue from the hood of the car and…”

  Words faltered as her gaze swept over him, and she was more than keenly aware that her husband wore nothing but an ill-fitting motel towel. The thing barely wrapped around his hips, gaping wide on the side and exposing a very generous expanse of muscled thigh. She’d often referred to his skin as Irish-Pale, the type that burned in the sunlight rather than tanned, but against the stark white of the standard-issue motel towels, his flesh glowed a delicious tan, like a very light caramel.

  She wanted to taste him on her tongue again and again, licking wide generous stripes across those muscles until he was begging beneath her, until his hips bucked and his gasps begged her to do other things with her tongue.

  Iowin shifted slightly, one foot falling behind him, knees flexing. Her desire must have shown on her face as he set himself to accept a charge, or at the very least a leap. Iowin cocked his head to the side, eyes never leaving hers, and she wondered if she’d growled faintly beneath her breath. Or possibly he was listening to the bond, the metaphysical energies streaming between them betraying every thought and desire. Well, if that was the case…

  She pumped every delicious thought of what she wanted to do in that moment directly into his brain space, watched his eyes darken with that knowledge, and was rewarded by a faint shifting of his shoulders in the doorway. A suppressed shiver of anticipated pleasure, perhaps? Her tongue slipped over her lips as she rose to her feet, tasting the whisky all over again.

  “Guess that means we’re stuck here for the night,” she said softly, taking one step towards him.

  “Guess so,” his eyes tracked her every moment. “Ghost hunting at night is fantastically stupid, especially if we don’t know exactly what we’re up against. Though I suspect you have an idea what to do with those hours.”

  She crossed the distance in seconds, taking his mouth with hers. Tasting him as her hands slipped over his damp skin, fingers twining in damp silken hair. A growl escaped his mouth into hers, his hands wrapping around her waist and nearly crushing her against him. Post-shower steam was a delicious sensation, battling with the A/C at her back. She pushed herself against him, framing him in the doorway. Searing his back with the heat and his front with the cool, and in between them both she moved.

  One tug had the towel falling from his hips, exposing the rigid length of him, hard and throbbing, his hips already moving in tiny thrusting motions. Her eyes lifted to his, her mouth pressing his in a tender kiss—

  —before she found other parts of him to taste.

  “Jesus God in heaven,” he gasped, hands slamming into the doorframe hard enough to crack the wood.

  Taking that as the sincere compliment and permission that it was, Alynia wrapped her mouth around his cock, ever so slowly coaxing him in deeper with her tongue. His body trembled, her tongue flicking beneath the head, to that ridge right where the head met the shaft that seemed meant for this sort of torment. Slowly, ever so slowly, she moved her head back and forth, pulling him with the motions. He went up on tiptoes, and within the bond, she felt him struggling to hold still when all he wanted to do was give into the pleasure, to writhe as she worked him as only she knew how.

  Her hands caught his hips, pinning them in place with just a touch. Don’t you dare let go, she whispered across his soul. Those hands will stay there until I say otherwise.

  Tiny flakes of white paint drifted down from the doorway, his fingernails digging in as he did his best to comply. You vicious woman, he moaned. What have I done to earn your ire?

  You refused to admit we were lost. This is all your fault.

  Wait, I promised you’d pay for that.

  If you think I need to make promises to follow through on an act, you married the wrong woman.

  Spasms wracked his body as she increased the pace of her movements, her sucking rhythm, bringing him so close to the edge and then slowing down. Her tongue explored him as it had so many times already, savoring the smooth shaft that glided against her tongue. Hot satin within her mouth, his taste better than caramel, burning her up better than the whisky. She moaned around him, her own body undulating as much as she could on her knees, pressing her breasts against his legs, the thin cotton of her T-shirt and bra like sandpaper against her nipples.

  God, she wanted free of those ridiculous clothes. Why hadn’t she stripped before she’d started this?

  Oh, that’s right. Because he’d started this. Came out of that shower with just a towel and water clinging to his form. Again, all his fault.

  “Yes,” he growled, hips pumping in perfect harmony to her movements. “Yes, god, all my fault. I deserve this. I deserve all of this. I’m such a st
ubborn husband.”

  Her fingernails dug into the taut flesh of his ass, and his cry ratcheted up her desire another level. Her hips moved in time with his, faster and faster, the pleasure building and sharing through the bond. He growled more than gasped with each sweep of her tongue, with each movement of her hips. And one hand lost its grip on the doorframe, fingers wrapping into her hair and wrenching her head back at the last possible second. He came hard, screaming out her name as he crashed to his knees, his seed shooting over her shirt, over the breasts she used to torment him just as desperately as she did with her mouth.

  He fell against her and sent them crashing to the floor, one hand slamming forward to catch his weight. Breath heaving in and out of his lungs. It seemed like forever until his eyes focused, until blood flowed equally to all parts of his body again.

  “Christ, Nia,” he breathed, fingers caressing her lips. “What you do to me, love. What you do to me…”

  “I do because I love you,” she whispered, kissing those fingertips.

  He chuckled deep in his throat. “Liar, you do it because you love seeing me like this. Helplessly weak, and hopelessly in love with you.”

  “Well, there is that,” she smiled, drawing his mouth into a deep kiss. “I do love the way you move for me. Only for me.”

  “Only for you,” he echoed, the simple words reverberating in her soul like a sacred vow. “Always only you.”

  And it was her turn to gasp as he rose up on his knees, straddling her. Those strong fingers, sexier for the paint dust coating them, for knowing she was the reason he’d mangled a perfectly good doorframe, gently plucked her T-shirt from the waistband of her jeans.

  “You’re dirty, Nia. We can’t have that.”

  And he tore a straight line through the thin cotton of her shirt, parting it from her body like opening a present. He fell on her then, mouth hot and hungry, his tongue working lazy circles on her taunt stomach. Tracing the old scar from a knife wound she’d caught when taking down her first drug dealer. Tracing up to the rough patch of flesh just below her left breast, the burn mark of a witch who’d tried to literally pull her heart out of her chest for a dark ritual. They’d taken her down together, too. Always together. A road map of scars like badges of honor across their skins. Each a testament to the lives they saved in both the human and magical world. Scars the media would consider ugly and shameful, to be hidden rather than glorified.