Bewitching the Dragon
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Jane Kindred
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28
Chapter 1
There was another dead crow on her doorstep this morning. A piece of red thread encircled its neck, not as though it had been the instrument of the crow’s death but as a macabre decoration, tied into a neat bow. After finding the dead birds three days in a row, Ione had come out to get the paper this morning armed with a pair of disposable latex gloves and a small paper sack.
Given the time of year, she might have assumed this was some practical joke from a neighborhood kid, maybe someone who knew she was a high priestess in the Craft. A setup, in poor taste, for a Halloween trick of which Ione was the punch line.
But it was no mystery who was behind this. This was a message from her ex. Carter Hanson Hamilton was up to his old tricks.
With the crow carefully deposited into the paper bag, she carried it around the side of the house to the outdoor altar—which did double duty as a brick-enclosed barbecue pit—and performed the Dispersal of Energy ritual to nullify whatever magical influence Carter might have in mind with these little gifts. The smell of smoke from the small blaze in the pit wouldn’t be completely out of season. Though the air was sharp and crisp this morning, it hadn’t quite gotten cool enough for a fire, but it was only a little late for a barbecue.
“Go in peace,” Ione murmured as she finished the ritual. She wasn’t sure if birds had spirits, but it couldn’t hurt to commend this one’s to a better rest.
The “Gladys Kravitz” of the Village of Oak Creek was watching her through the blinds of the house across the street as Ione came back around to the front. Ione gave her an exaggerated wave from the porch in her bathrobe and slippers. The blinds snapped shut. Maybe Ione had watched too much Bewitched on TV Land, but that woman was a dead ringer for Samantha Stevens’s nosy neighbor.
The phone was ringing when Ione stepped inside and she managed to catch it before it rolled over to the answering machine. Her younger sister Phoebe gave her endless amounts of crap about that machine, as if Ione were the last person in the world to still have a landline.
“Ione? Sorry to bother you at home. Um, oh—it’s Cal. Sorry. This is Calvin.” The tentative, apologetic tone was typical of Calvin Yee. The elderly Asian gentleman had been Covent kin for years, far longer than Ione had even been a member of the Sedona coven, but he still treated her as if she were his boss or a school professor.
Ione smiled into the phone. “Not a problem, Cal. What’s up?”
“Uh...the others thought I should let you know—we should let you know. I, uh, volunteered to be the one to let you know.”
Ione’s heart dropped into her stomach. It was finally happening. The coven had voted to boot her out on her butt. After weeks of walking around on eggshells, they’d finally decided they couldn’t work with a high priestess who’d been stupid enough to fall for a psychotic necromancer like Carter Hamilton.
With a deep breath, she gathered her courage. “To let me know what, Cal?”
“We’ve received a summons. All of us. Each of us.”
“A summons?” She let out the held breath cautiously. “From the Superior Court?” She’d thought this business with Carter was done. He’d confessed and was sitting in prison awaiting sentencing.
“No, somebody from the Covent leadership. We’ve been ordered to appear at the temple tomorrow morning at ten.”
“I see.” Crap. Maybe she was being ousted, just not by her personal coven members.
Calvin cleared his throat a few times with a couple of false starts before he continued. “You didn’t get one, I take it.”
“No, I didn’t. Thanks, Cal. I really appreciate you letting me know.”
Ione tried not to speculate about the possible intentions of the Covent’s pending action, but it was hard not to see a summons of her coven members that excluded her as anything but a kick in the teeth. She’d worked hard to be accepted into the Covent on her own skill and merit, and even harder to prove herself worthy of leadership. At twenty-nine, she’d become the youngest high priestess in the history of the Sedona Coventry. But at thirty, thanks to being dumb enough to fall for Carter, everything was falling apart.
One thing was for certain, there was no way she was going to sit at home and wait for someone else to decide her fate. She would be at the temple in the morning, whether the Covent leadership wanted her there or not.
In the meantime she had work to do. Carter might be safely behind bars but the creeps who’d patronized his little sideline business—paying for a shade possession called a “ride-along” for the ultimate in nonconsensual sexual thrills—were still out there. One of the call girls who’d participated as a living host before dying under suspicious circumstances and ending up on the other side of the equation had implicated cops, businessmen, even lawyers and judges. And none of them had been held accountable. After Carter’s arrest, they’d scurried away like roaches into their cracks and crevices of respectability. Ione was determined to find out where they’d gone into hiding and bring them out into the light.
Sedona’s nightlife was hardly that, but Ione had followed the rumor mill to a dive bar near Oak Creek Canyon that was unusually lively and catered to the kind of clientele Carter’s side business had thrived on. The mixture of college students and favorite sons plus a steady, inevitable stream of tourists provided a wealth of potential clients—as well as plenty of unwary young women to exploit. It wasn’t really the sort of place Ione Carlisle looked at home in. But she wasn’t Ione Carlisle tonight.
Magic, she’d learned, was merely a matter of perception. Change the perception of a thing and you might change the thing itself. With a simple spell that amounted to little more than magical cosmetics and dressing the part, Ione had remade her image into the one she wished to project. She still had her favorite clothes from her aborted year at college before becoming insta-mom to a teenager and twin ten-year-olds after the death of her parents. With a pair of leather pants and a black tank, a red, zip-up leather jacket and a slick of bright cherry lipstick that pulled the look together, Ione had invoked a shadow glamour.
The pert-nosed, blue-eyed blonde with loose waves around her shoulders—nothing like Ione’s gray-green eyes and straight midnight-brown and bronze ombré mane that hung down her back—was attractive in a generic way and utterly forgettable. It was a spell she’d perfected as a teenager when she’d needed an alter ego to channel the impulses of youth she hadn’t known how to deal with. Even in adulthood, however, it had its uses.
The bartenders at Bitters knew her as Kylie when she came in with this face—she’d been on the prowl enough that the bartenders knew her by name. And knew her drink, Balcones, which arrived almost as soon as she sat at the bar.
Ione set her motorcycle helmet on the stool beside her. It kept guys from hitting on her unless she wanted them to. Sitting at the end of the bar took care of the other side. She could have used a repelling spell, but too much magic in one night made her feel even worse than drinking too much.
“Is that your Nighthawk outside?” The cultured, Hugh Grant–esque British accent sent a tingling vibration through her that completely missed her spine and went straight for the genitals. God, was she really this hard up that a fancy accent was all it took?
Maintaining cool disinterest in the man standing beside her helmet’s stool, Ione took a sip of her drink before turning her head slightly in his direction. Giving him the once-over out of the corner of her eye did nothing to dispel the disconcerting vibration. A pair of golden-brown eyes to match her glass of Balcones looked back at her, pieces of tiger’s-eye quartz rimmed in dark lashes against the warm teakwood hue of his skin. Thick black hair, impeccably styled, with a charming streak of gray at the temples, completed the picture. And the expensive suit said business tourist—but the kind of business that didn’t require sitting behind a desk in an office.
She was a sucker for a sharp-dressed man. And a posh accent, apparently. But ogling hot guys in expensive suits wasn’t what she was here for. She tried to assess whether he could be part of the network of what one of Phoebe’s clients in the Public Defender’s Office had referred to as “a bunch of power-tripping dicks.”
Ione realized he was waiting for her answer. “Maybe.”
“Sorry, that wasn’t a line.” He leaned against the bar as if he had no intention of moving on and gave her a crooked smile that made the tiger’s eyes shimmer. “I just haven’t seen one of those in a while. You’ve kept it in excellent shape.”
Ione gave him a dismissive shrug. “You never know what’s under the chassis. Maybe I just keep it looking pretty and ride it into the ground.” She went back to her drink, deciding he seemed a bit too straitlaced to fit the profile she was looking for, but he didn’t take the hint.
“I doubt that. The bike shows signs of being well loved.” He moved to the open seat beside the helmet and ordered a beer.
“Do you ride?” Ione hadn’t intended to talk to him, but her vibrating pussy apparently had a different agenda.
He shook his head. “I’ve ridden on the back of a friend’s bike, but my parents would never let me ride myself.”
The corner of Ione’s mouth twitched. “You live with your parents?”
“What?” Her companion choked a bit on his beer and set the bottle down. “Oh. No, no. You’ve misunderstood me. I meant growing up. Of course, even now, my mum would probably kill me before I could get myself killed on one if I even so much as...” His voice trailed off and he looked chagrined. “I just made it worse, didn’t I? Let me try this again. I’m Dev.” He held out his hand and Ione stared at it for a moment before he let it fall. “I’m just in town for a few days. Don’t really know anyone here—and I am really sounding like an arse.”
A little smile slipped out before she caught herself.
The bartender threw Dev a challenging look. “This guy bothering you, Kylie?”
Ione shrugged. “Nah, he’s fine. Thanks, Gus. I think maybe he just needs something a little...stiffer.” She tipped her glass toward him. “Get him one of these.”
“I’m really quite fine with the beer, actually.”
“Are you?” Ione looked him up and down. “Quite?”
His dark brows drew together. “Sorry...are you making fun of my speech?”
“Absolutely not. There is absolutely nothing funny about your speech.”
Gus brought the Balcones and Dev started to object, but Ione interrupted. “It’s on me.”
With a shrug, Dev lifted his glass to Ione and nodded before taking a drink. “So, do you come here often?” He grimaced as the words left his mouth. “God, that sounded like another line. I mean a line. The first one wasn’t a line. Neither was this—I mean...there were no lines. Oh, hell.” He concentrated on the drink and Ione laughed and shook her head. “What I meant,” said Dev, “was that it seems you come here often enough for the bartender to know you.” He paused for a moment as if he’d just heard himself and rolled his eyes. “I seem to be determined to keep digging this hole deeper.” Downing his drink, he slipped off the stool and straightened his suit. “It was lovely meeting you, Kylie. Thank you so much for the beverage.”
Ione strangled the urge to laugh at the word “beverage.” “You don’t get out much, do you?”
Dev paused in the act of turning away. “Sorry, do you mean me?”
She threw him a sidelong glance. “I’m pretty sure Gus’s job gives him plenty of opportunities to hit on women. So, yes, I meant you.”
The warm hue of his skin became even warmer. “I really wasn’t hitting on you—”
Ione turned on her stool and leaned back with her elbows propped against the bar. “My God, you’re adorably awkward—Dev, was it? Do they make them all like you across the pond?”
She seemed to have rendered him speechless.
Dev glanced around as if trying to find the actual person she was talking to before laughing at himself and shaking his head, the tension of his stiff posture finally easing. “I don’t think they make any more like me anywhere, thankfully. I am rather dreadful at this, aren’t I?”
Ione gave him a wry smile. “So you admit you were hitting on me.”
Dev looked down at his feet with a smile, rubbing the back of his neck. “I might have done. Just a bit.” That little vibration inside her began to quiver once more, like a tuning fork buzzing with a faint, pleasant note.
Ione swiveled around toward the bar and raised a finger as Gus glanced in her direction from the other end where he was ringing someone up. “One more over here, Gus, when you get the chance.” She looked back at Dev, still standing there regarding her with a quizzical smile. Those eyes were really unfair. No one needed eyes that incredible. “Well? You in?”
Dev eased himself back onto the stool and smoothed back the gray curls at his temples with a grin. “I’m not sure what I’m in for, precisely, but I believe that I am, in fact, ‘in.’”
Ione finished off her Balcones. “The ride, of course.”
Dev paused with his hand on the glass Gus had set in front of him. “I’m not sure it’s the wisest idea to be riding a motorbike after imbibing alcohol.”
She rolled her eyes and Dev’s cheeks went scarlet. He lowered his head over his drink and paid great attention to it as he sipped. With her elbow on the bar and her chin propped in her hand, Ione studied him. It probably wasn’t the wisest idea to be contemplating what she was contemplating, either. He was not what she was here for. But that vibration was only getting stronger.
She couldn’t take him home, though. She’d nursed her drink over the course of an hour and she had a sobriety elixir that allowed her to ride safely regardless, but she couldn’t exactly explain the elixir to this charming, awkward stranger who had her halfway to climaxing without even touching her. Or even knowing he was doing it. Which was what made her want to get to the other half so damn bad. She had a feeling his witting participation in getting to that goal would be toe-curlingly, ass-numbingly incredible.
“Do you have a car?” She’d blurted the words before her non-lizard brain could stop her. And of course he had a car. Did she think he’d walked all the way here?
Dev wiped sweat from his upper lip with a sensual gesture he probably wasn’t even conscious of as he glanced up at her. “I probably shouldn’t be driving at the moment, either.”
“You’re assuming I’d even let you drive.” Ione picked an ice cube out of her emptied glass and sucked on it. It was now or never. She crunched the ice between her teeth and slipped off the stool, pulling out her wallet to leave Gus a generous tip. “It’s kind of loud in here. I thought we could talk outside.”
She headed for the door without waiting to see what his reaction was. If he didn’t follow, she’d just take the sobriety elixir and get the hell out of there. And if he did, well...
