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My heart began to race. I ran into the kitchen and picked up the land line, but it was dead. So was my cellphone, which I found on the counter. Great, so I was totally cut off.
I took a breath and focused on the thing outside. When I tried to read its thoughts, all I got was the chant it was repeating in a language I didn’t understand, which was battering the wards like a giant hammer.
Was it here for Griffin? Power like his tended to attract attention. Or maybe it was after his husband Ari, who was a fallen angel with some pretty formidable enemies. I’d worked with Griffin to make this home a fortress, but right now I wasn’t sure if our combined magic was any match for whatever was outside.
I wasn’t powerful enough to use my magic at a distance, so I ran to the front of the house, gathering as much energy as I could along the way. When I reached the foyer, I pushed both hands out in front of me. The burst of energy I directed at the thing in the driveway didn’t even sort of disrupt it.
I reached out to try to read its thoughts again and got a lot of noise, in a form I’d never heard before. It was fascinating, and for just a moment I considered opening the front door to take a look at it. The door itself wasn’t what was keeping it out anyway. What was holding it back was an energy barrier—and it was starting to weaken.
A thought appeared in my head that didn’t belong to me. It said, “You’re right, Mateo, the door’s not protecting you anyway. Why don’t you open it and say hello?” That was coming from the dark, inhuman thing in the driveway. I was sure of it.
“Who are you?” I said that out loud, but I could have just thought it, and the entity still would have heard me.
“A friend of a friend.”
“Be more specific. What friend?” He tried to hide it from me, but I caught a glimpse of the name before he locked it down. I blurted, “For fuck’s sake, Elias Reyes sent you? Are you kidding me? This is happening because of my fucking mate?”
Just then, a wave of energy slammed into the front of the house and made it shake. I swore vividly and bolted down the hall with the plan of climbing the back fence and running away.
Another wave shook the Victorian, strong enough to make the dishes rattle in the cabinets. The thing in my driveway was going with a new strategy, slamming the wards at a single point instead of trying to take them all down, and it was working awfully well.
By the time I got my shoes on—which probably took all of four seconds—another wave of energy slammed into the spot at the front of the house. For just a moment, the world outside my windows flared with blue light before plunging into darkness again.
The wards protecting the house were about to fail.
The next wave of energy knocked me to the floor. I scrambled to my feet and rushed for the back door as my heart pounded in my ears. When I tried to run outside, an impenetrable wall of energy shoved me back. Damn it, whatever it was had put up wards of its own to keep me in.
Another huge wave of energy knocked me off my feet again. Then everything went eerily still.
I took a shaky breath as fear cascaded through me like ice water. The thing was in the house. I could feel it.
But it wasn’t coming for me. What was it waiting for?
Since I was trapped, I decided the only thing I could really do was go and confront whatever it was. I took a deep breath, balled up my fists, and went to face off against the intruder.
When I reached the foyer, all the lights came on at once, and I found it sitting in my frilly, pastel living room. He’d chosen to take human form, and he was big and muscular with dark hair, pale gray eyes, and a smirk that seemed right at home on his handsome face. With his impeccable black-on-black suit, shirt, and tie, he seemed to be going for some sort of supernatural mafioso thing.
He smiled at me and said, “Mateo Figueroa, I presume.”
“Who are you?”
“You can call me Carter.”
“And you’re what, exactly?” The dark energy radiating from him was stunningly powerful, and I didn’t detect even a drop of human blood in him.
“We’ll get to that later. For now, you need to come with me.”
“So you can deliver me to Elias? Fuck that.”
“You’ve kept him waiting long enough,” he said. “A century without you has torn him to shreds, metaphorically speaking.”
“Since you’re basically Oz the Great and Powerful, why don’t you just break the mate bond, so he can get on with his life?”
