Keith was the one who didn’t get it. The dimwit didn’t realize he was collateral damage. He had constructed this fantasy world in which he was a player while his gambling debts grew worse, and he fell more and more under the control of his business associates.
Those “associates” were shadowy connections a couple times removed from Keith’s bookie. She imagined them as a cackle of hyenas gathering around their prey with languid purpose. Keith was lunch, but they had decided to play with their food before the kill.
She didn’t know who his contacts were and she didn’t want to. It was awful enough that she knew there was real Power somewhere up that food chain. Human or Elven, Wyr or Fae, it didn’t matter. Something nasty had turned its attention this way. It had enough magic and muscle to take on one of the premiere Powers of the world.
And here was Captain Fantastic, a mere human with not a single spark of Power in him and not a lick of sense, either. The fact that she had ever hooked up with him, even for a few months, would keep her humble forever.
She told him, “You sound like the dialogue from a bad movie.”
Keith’s flirtatious manner fell away and he glared at her. “Yeah? Well, fuck you too.”
“And it goes on,” she sighed. A headache had begun to pulse in her sinuses. “Look, let’s get this over with. Your handlers wanted me to steal something from Cuelebre—”
“I bet my associates that I could get them anything from anywhere,” Keith sneered. “And they suggested something from Cuelebre.”
Today had been a long bad day on top of a long bad week. It had started the moment Keith had put an object of Power in her hand and told her she was going to find Cuelebre’s lair with it. The shock still clung as she remembered the pulse of serious magic that had seared her hand.
The feeling was compounded by a rush of terror for whoever, or whatever, had the kind of mojo to create that artifact and hand it to Keith.
That was sure a special moment, when she discovered Keith had betrayed her. When she realized that, between Cuelebre and the cackle of hyenas, she was screwed. If she stole from Cuelebre, she was dead. If she didn’t, she had no doubt Keith would tell his hyenas, and she was still dead. Rock, shake hands with hard place.
Having the charm sit in her hand was like holding on to a cluster bomb. The design had been deceptively simple. It had felt like a finding charm with a onetime activation, but it had had the Power to slice through all of Cuelebre’s protections.
Her breath shook as she remembered the terrible walk she had taken earlier that day, through an innocent sunlit city park where coffee-drinking adults watched over shrieking children as they threw sand and pelted from the merry-go-round to the jungle gym.
The sounds of traffic and barking dogs had punctuated the blistering pain in her hand, as the charm’s activated Power flared and drew her along a flower-lined path to an anonymous, utterly forgettable rusted metal maintenance door set into a park viaduct. The charm drew a thin shimmering path that led through an invisible mist of cloaking and aversion spells, which had her convinced with increasing urgency that she was lost, mistaken, cursed, trapped in her worst nightmare, in mortal danger, damned for all eternity—
Pia’s fragile control snapped. She slapped Keith’s chest with both flattened hands, driving him backward a few feet. “You blackmailed me into stealing from a dragon, you asshole!” she shouted. She pushed him again and he staggered back. “I trusted you with my secrets.” Although not all of them, thank the gracious Powers, not all. She’d somehow retained a few last scraps of self-preservation. “I thought we loved each other. God, what a wretched joke. I could crawl under a rock and die from embarrassment, except you. Are. Not. Worth it.”
Her last shove knocked Keith into a wall. The look on his face would have been comical if she’d had a sense of humor left.
His astonishment turned ugly. His hands shot out faster than she expected. He shoved her back so hard she tripped and almost fell. “Well, I must have done a good goddamn job of faking it,” he snarled. “Because you’ve got to be the most miserable fuck I’ve ever had.”
Pia never knew until that moment that she was capable of killing someone. Her hands curled into claws. “I am an excellent fuck,” she hissed. “I am the best thing that ever happened to your sorry, deluded, preejaculating ass. You just didn’t have the good taste to recognize it. And you know what? Now I don’t even know why I put up with you. I had a better sex life with five minutes and my hand in a hot shower.”
Captain Fantastic’s face turned puce. She stared. She’d never seen that color on a person before. He cocked back his arm as if to hit her.