Stray Magic Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Acknowledgments

  Announcement to Stray Moon

  About the Author

  By Kelly Meding

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  After a four-day stakeout in Arizona that resulted in the arrest of two traveling tooth peddlers and the confiscation of sixteen sets of gremlin teeth—apparently worth a small fortune with the right black magic buyer—there was nothing better than coming home to a hot, naked man in my bed. Specifically, hot, naked Vincent Ortiz, the man I’d been seeing for the last nine months.

  And I knew he was naked under the sheets, because when I’d called him two hours ago with my ETA, I told him to be naked. A girl has needs, after all.

  I put my gun in the dresser drawer and shut it with a loud enough thud to stir Vincent from his nap. It was after midnight, and he’d arranged to have the day off tomorrow, so we could spend it together. Post-stakeout, I got at least three days off and I planned to enjoy every second of those seventy-two hours.

  “Hey, Shiloh,” Vincent said in his lightly accented voice. “Didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

  “No worries.” I tugged my shirt off and tossed it carelessly to the floor. “Just don’t plan on going back to sleep for a while.”

  He pulled the sheet back, displaying the excellence of his naked body—chiseled abs and arms from long days working construction, black hair shorn short, lickable caramel skin. My heart pitter-pattered the same way it had the first time I saw him at the diner here in town. And what I’d meant to be a one-night stand had turned into . . . this. Him waiting for me to come home after a long assignment.

  Vincent scooted to the edge of the bed. Tugged me closer by my belt loops and kissed my stomach. “Wouldn’t dream of going back to sleep, sweetheart. I’ve missed you.”

  “Ditto.”

  “Oh yeah? Show me.”

  My djinn half responded immediately to that challenge and I tackled him to the mattress. Our first kiss became a bit of a wrestling match, because I was actually stronger than Vincent. He didn’t know it, because he thought I was completely human, so it became a game to let him win. For him to get me naked and on my back so he could slide inside.

  For me to roll us so I could control the fuck.

  Sex with Vincent was always like this. Fast, fun, and just a little bit of a fight. I liked having someone who challenged me, instead of treating me like I was fragile. Someone who touched all the right places, but only after I made him earn it. Someone who always gave me one hell of an orgasm before—

  My cell rang with the most annoying ring tone possible in that moment: Work.

  “No fucking way,” I said as I stopped moving. “I just got home.”

  Vincent squeezed my hips, his construction-calloused hands somehow the perfect balance of rough and comforting against my skin. I shivered as a thrill shot through me. “Don’t answer it, Shi.”

  I didn’t. Whoever it was could leave a blessed message. I was off the clock and way too busy at the moment. I ground against Vincent, and he groaned. The phone finally went silent . . . only to start ringing again five seconds later.

  Vincent groaned again, but this time in disappointment, and stilled, his hands falling away from my body. “Just answer the fucking thing.”

  “I will murder whoever is on the other end of the phone.” I very reluctantly climbed off Vincent and retrieved the stupid phone from my jeans. “This had better be good, whoever this is.”

  “A bunch of vampires are holding a trailer park hostage.”

  I nearly dropped my phone. While it wasn’t the strangest phone call I’ve ever gotten in the middle of the night, it certainly ranked in the top five. And if the voice on the other end of the line wasn’t from Novak, our team’s third-in-command, I’d have accused the caller of playing a sick 2:00 a.m. joke. But as a disgraced incubus, Novak’s rare displays of humor leaned toward the bawdy side. Hostage-taking vampires just wasn’t his style.

  “Which trailer park?” I asked as though the taking of small communities was an everyday occurrence. I padded across the room and yanked open a dresser drawer, knowing without saying that my time off—my time with Vincent—was officially revoked.

  “Little place called Myrtle’s Acres.”

  “Am I supposed to have heard of it?”

  Novak snorted in my ear. “I’m surprised the vamps heard of it. Forty-six trailers, rough population of a hundred and twenty people, in the middle of Nowhere, Delaware, surrounded by forest and two cornfields of all blessed things.”

  “And they’ve got the whole trailer park?”

  “Surrounded and locked down. It’s blessing unreal.”

  Years of practice made the act of putting on panties and jeans one-handed relatively easy. The bra was going to be harder. So far, Vincent hadn’t commented. He accepted my job as a US Marshal in the Paranormal Investigations Unit and the odd hours I kept, and I appreciated him for not asking questions I couldn’t answer. Questions about the creatures I encountered on a daily basis, the methods we used to trap the nasties, the lengths we’d go to save the nice ones, and most importantly, why I was part of it.

  In the nine months Vincent and I had been together, the whole “my father was an earth djinn and I inherited some of his powers” conversation hadn’t been broached. Even though we’d been intimate in both the hold-my-hair-while-I-barf way, and in the much more exciting lick-me-until-I-scream way, I wanted to keep my parentage under wraps as long as possible. It had a nasty habit of being used against me when people found out I could grant wishes.

  “Shiloh?”

  I snapped back to the phone. Had Novak been talking? “What?”

  “I said how long before you can be at the crux?”

  “I’m almost dressed, so fifteen minutes. I’ll call you when I’m there.”

  “‘Kay.”

  I hung up, tucked the phone into my jeans pocket, and finished dressing. Green lace camisole under a fitted black jacket. Over the jeans, it seemed a little dressy, but our unit boss Julius Almeida never stood on formality. He cared more about how we did our jobs than what we wore while we did it. Plus the jacket hid my shoulder holster and gun, its clip filled with standard issue silver-jacket bullets.

  “Real estate problems?” Vincent asked.

  “That’s an understatement,” I replied, wishing like hell I could jump back into bed and finished what we’d started, but I’d told Novak fifteen minutes.

  As though he’d read my mind, a frown turned down the corners of his mouth. “You just got back. Literally. We were supposed to have all day tomorrow, Shi. I took a vacation day and everything.”

  “I know, babe.” I sat on the corner of the bed to zip up my mid-calf boots, taking care to adjust the slim knives tucked into several hidden spots. Done with that, I circled to him and leaned down to plant a kiss on his mouth. “I’ll make it up to you when I get back.”

  “As usual.”

  I pulled back, surprised by the dismissive tone. “Vincent, I’m sorry.”

  “I know.” His expression and tone remained frustratingly neutral.
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br />   Okay, I really didn’t have the time nor the inclination to fight. Had I inadvertently released my pheromone last night? It had been years since I’d lost control of the Quarrel—another gift from my djinn father besides wishing. Earth djinn are known for their ability to affect the combative nature of humans, often causing arguments when none should exist. I hadn’t realized I could do it until I was ten years old. My parents had taken me to a Phillies game and a small riot broke out over a home run ball I’d really wanted to catch and didn’t. Two years of practice with my dad taught me to control the Quarrel and only use it on command. It hadn’t stopped me from carrying the guilt of their divorce when I was eleven, though, always wondering if my powers had caused it.

  I only lost control when my emotions ran too high on the negative side. Tonight’s sexual escapades with Vincent had been a supreme leap from negative (definitely within the realm of lick-me-until-I-scream), so I couldn’t have affected him. So why the hell was he so argumentative?

  “They wouldn’t have called us in early if it wasn’t important,” I said. As a defense, it was pretty weak. Other government agencies had shadow groups who dealt with paranormal-based problems, but the Marshals’ Office had been the public face and official law enforcement of paranormal issues for the last forty years (and handling them quietly long before that).

  “I said I know.”

  “You sound angry.”

  Vincent scrubbed his hands over his face, accentuating the growth of black beard he needed to shave. “I’m just tired, Shi. Stress at work. Don’t mind me.”

  He hadn’t mentioned stress at work, but I hadn’t really given him time to chat before I pounced. Our relationship was pretty casual and, even though I found myself missing him while on assignment, I preferred it stayed that way. Except he looked pretty down about our aborted sex-capades. Maybe he’d needed something from me tonight besides a hot fuck.

  Or at least in addition to it.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Thank Iblis, he interpreted that as the rhetorical question it was. “Nothing, baby. Like I said, tired. Go save your town.”

  He tilted his head. I took it as permission and caught him in another kiss. He returned this one, opening for me and tracing the tip of his tongue along the seam of my lips. I adored the taste of him and the shape of his mouth, and allowed myself a few extra seconds to worship both. I broke the kiss with regret.

  “Gotta go, babe,” I said.

  “Be safe, okay?”

  “Always.”

  I turned and strode to the bedroom door. As I stepped into the hallway, a glance over my shoulder showed he’d curled back up on his side of the bed, back to me. An irrational urge to ignore my summons and curl up next to him lasted the space of three breaths.

  Maybe this trailer park hostage crisis would sort itself out quickly and let me get back to him by dawn.

  Yeah.

  Right.

  Ley lines are places where magical energies converge and run in invisible lines. Cruxes occur where these lines intersect. Usually it takes at least three crossing in one crux in order to provide enough magic output for anyone less powerful than a mage or full-blooded demon to sense and use. One of these special places existed half a mile from my apartment, in an alley behind a convenience store. I’d discovered it by accident four and a half years ago during an ill-advised chase of a robbery suspect I happened to catch trying to hold up said store. I had felt its magic the moment I stepped over the crux.

  And now it was the only reason I was able to keep my apartment in Denton, Maryland, which was fifty miles north of our unit’s headquarters. Even though Novak had been stripped of his incubus duties and banned from Hell, he had retained many of his powers, including teleportation. Not himself anymore—to his eternal consternation—but of others. As long as he had a crux to act as a battery, he could teleport me to his present location.

  It wasn’t entirely pleasant for me, but it allowed me to live where I wanted to live and still get to emergency situations that didn’t allow for the time expense of driving. And as crappy as it was, it was still better than dealing with DC-area traffic.

  In a big city, walking half a mile at two in the morning probably would have creeped me out, no matter my abilities. It’s why I loved Denton, as I loved most of the smaller towns on the Eastern Shore. The vast majority of the population went to sleep after the evening news, casting the streets in quiet and shadows. The heels of my boots clicked softly on the sidewalk as I quick-strolled toward the convenience store. The few people in town who knew me by name knew I was a federal agent, but I didn’t need to draw extra attention from any potential prying eyes by running.

  Orange streetlights made the night glow with an ethereal quality I always found calming. More so tonight, with the almost-argument I’d had with Vincent still ringing in my head. I needed to stay focused so I didn’t accidentally release the Quarrel and cause more problems. Vampires were immune to djinn powers, but any other local human law enforcement we met there wouldn’t be.

  The silent convenience store came into view. I turned off the sidewalk, crossed the parking lot and gas pumps, and slipped into the shadows behind the squat building. The rank odors of the garbage container soured my stomach. Couldn’t the crux have been created somewhere less stinky, like the middle of a bakery?

  Just the thought of warm, gooey chocolate chip cookies reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since dinner’s grilled steak and salad. Maybe Jaxon would save me with his seemingly ever-present supply of snacks. He was always eating something—a side effect, he said, of skin-walker shifting.

  I felt the buzz of the crux the moment I passed the first ley line. I pulled my cell and texted Novak that I was there before I got to the crux—the magic played games with cell reception, even with our hyper-stylized phones—then stepped onto the heart of power. Its strength flared to life inside of me like a current of electricity. The tiny hairs on my arms stood on end. Everything smelled crisper, keener. I closed my eyes and waited.

  Novak called to me a second later. I heard his voice in my head, a distant bass as seductive as any fully powered incubus. It caressed my mind, my heart, and my body, and it sent a flare of arousal straight between my thighs—the part of this I hated. Incubi are seducers and their power lies within their ability to arouse and claim you. In order to teleport me to him, I had to want him. It was god-awful embarrassing to arrive on-scene like that, even if no one except my teammates knew.

  And you can bet that none of my male teammates liked to be teleported by Novak for that very reason. The first time it happened to Jaxon, I gave him grief for a month. It’s the only thing that kept us all sane about it—the fact that we all had to go through it, and we all gave each other shit.

  Intense heat surrounded me, followed by the sensation of falling. The trip lasted only a few seconds, and then I was blinking against the bright lights of our headquarters’ conference room. I rubbed my eyes, giving myself a moment for the arousal to fade away. It didn’t help that I’d already been halfway to an orgasm less than twenty minutes ago.

  “Morning, Shi,” Jaxon Dearborn said, an unexpected voice somewhere behind me.

  I spun around. He was lounging in one of the wheeled, leather chairs that surrounded the long, oak dining table that took up half of the conference room’s space. A quarter of the remaining space was K.I.M.’s setup—the very expensive, very unique Knowledge Interface Matrix computer system connecting our headquarters to the West Coast unit’s HQ, as well as our phones. Invented for us by a penitent Mammon (demon of greed, for those following along at home) in lieu of banishing him back to Hell, K.I.M. was worth as much as Luxembourg, and she allowed our network to operate as efficiently as it did.

  The two Paranormal Investigation Units had officially formed six years ago—thanks to Julius and a few well-placed friends—on the argument that unique abilities were needed to handle other unique abilities. We had practically no oversight from the Department of Justi
ce as long we as kept paranormal-related violence under control and under wraps.

  The notoriety of the Para-Marshals gave us an edge over those shadow teams—not in effectiveness, necessarily, but in recruiting and keeping powerful new members of the team. Someone would ask questions if one of us disappeared; same can’t be said for the shadow groups. No one in the federal government or human police forces could do what we did with the same efficiency. None of the shadow agencies would get involved in a case so public.

  Our units also thrived on secrecy, which was why our headquarters was a renovated, two-story house, set at the end of an otherwise empty cul-de-sac near the very small town of Hebron, Maryland. The Department of Justice had quietly bought out all of the other owners, demolished every house except this one, and added a bunch of security features that kept pretty much everyone from spying on us. It also kept K.I.M. undetectable to computer hackers, telekinetics, and electrically inclined demon infestations.

  Bad guys can’t attack what they can’t find.

  The conference room was the dining room and living room areas combined, with only a small jut of wall separating the two. Most of the other downstairs rooms were for storage of weapons and research items, with three bedrooms upstairs sleep-ready, but Jaxon was the only person on the team who lived here full-time. I’d never asked his reasons for moving in here, and he never offered them. They likely had to do with his life prior to being kidnapped and held captive for six months by a magic abuser. Whatever life he’d been taken from, he was in no hurry to return to it.

  His rescue from the magic abuser was the event that had sparked the creation of the Para-Marshals. It also brought me, Julius, and Jaxon into each other’s orbits. Sometimes I think that was why Jaxon and I could never make our attempt at a nonbusiness relationship work. I’d seen a very proud man at his lowest point, and he was always trying to prove himself to me. Chemistry and love aside, we became too toxic to each other to stay together.

  Working well on our Para-Marshals team was too important to jeopardize by forcing the relationship to work.

  Still—it didn’t stop the occasional flutter in my chest when I looked at him, and my fading arousal from Vincent and Novak wasn’t helping matters.