Page 65 of A Touch of Brimstone

“She agreed if I’d do a mix.”

“What are you thinking about doing?”

She guided my elbow as we took a different route back to the coffee shop, one with noticeably fewer people around.

Taking a sip from my coffee, I waited for her to speak. She seemed to be having an internal debate.

“A few artists have been discovered. Performing without the entire band seems like a betrayal,” she admitted. “Gus is on board—he doesn’t see it that way.” She rolled her eyes. “But maybe she saw something in just the two of us performing that I missed. The two of us might find more success. It will give us an opportunity to write more songs for the both of us. Two days a week, I’m turning my back on my band.”

She shrugged and blew out an exasperated breath. “I’m twenty-six and unfortunately—” She frowned the rest of her statement; we’d gone through this a thousand times. She was always pointing out that her race, age, and “exotic” look might limit her. I wasn’t sure about the others, but her looks definitely would not hold her back, but it wasn’t the time to point that out. Her biggest complaint was that people were placed in boxes and artistic expression was limited for a myriad of superficial reasons.

She looked at me earnestly. “It’s a great opportunity and could open doors for me.” There was still a hint of hesitation. “What should I do?”

I gave her the impression of thinking about it for a long time, although the moment she asked, I had the answer. “I think you should do it.”

Something snapped against my back, pushing the wind out of me as I fell face forward onto the ground. I quickly rolled onto my back, spilled coffee soaking into my shirt as I moved. Four supernaturals sped toward me. A vampire was to my right. Her finger under Emoni’s chin, she drew Emoni’s eyes to hers.

“Thank you, Emoni, for bringing her to us. Forget that you saw Luna today. You called her and she said she’s visiting family. Return to the coffee shop.”

She continued instructing Emoni, implanting a new situation in her mind. She wouldn’t remember our conversation or seeing these creatures. Anger and fear warred in me. I didn’t want them exposed, I wanted them gone.

I scuttled back on my butt, trying to put some distance between me and the supernaturals, and looking for anything I could use as a weapon. Nothing. My coffee had spilled. My phone was in the car.

Stopping the vampire from further compelling Emoni had to be my secondary objective. I wanted her to forget this.

We had navigated to where factories and businesses had been converted to industrial-looking lofts. No one was around. Even if anyone wanted to come outside, magic would be preventing them.

One of the four, a shifter, approached, his cold, predatory eyes fixed on me. I was cornered. He was about to shift, when his head snapped toward the vampire who had been staked. The vampire’s dusted body speckled the air. It was the first sign of Dominic’s presence. His claw sliced the vital arteries in the shifter’s neck. He collapsed to the ground, covering his neck, waiting for his preternatural healing to kick in. The silver blade Dominic shoved into his stomach would make that more difficult.

No longer under the dead vampire’s compulsion, shock cut Emoni’s scream off. Open mouthed, her eyes widened at the violence before her, at Dominic’s violence. I hurried to her.

“It’s okay,” I soothed, but it only made her direct her disgust to me.

“Luna, what the fuck have you gotten yourself into?” She wouldn’t let me get close to her, shuffling back several feet for every step I took toward her. I felt the magic against my back, heard the violence of a gasp being cut off, and if I hadn’t already seen variations of what was taking place behind me, I would have been able to imagine the brutality from what was playing out on Emoni’s face.

Wind gathered, whipping in the air, its cyclonic pull tugging us toward it. I looked over my shoulder. The remaining supernatural—a witch, her fingers whirling around. Emoni and I ran, fighting against the growing force. Before we could get any distance between it and us, the small cyclone disappeared and the elemental witch collapsed face forward on the pavement.

Emoni had no problem with her scream this time. It resounded like an alarm. I launched at her, slapped a hand over her mouth. “Stop. Please. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

No part of this was okay. And nothing in my voice made it seem that way. She had seen the violent underbelly of the supernatural world. She was an unwilling pawn in an attempt to assassinate me. This was so many shades of wrong, and I didn’t have the skill to make it out to be anything other than the massive clusterfuck that it was.

Her scream became a soft whimper against my hand as tears gathered in her eyes and spilled, wetting my hand. I knew the feeling.

Dominic was on the phone; I assumed requesting a cleanup. Who knows, maybe he was feeling a little peckish and was ordering a pizza.

“What’s going on?” Emoni breathed out in a weak voice once I removed my hand.

“It’s going to take a while to explain.”

“You can’t do it here,” whispered Peter, who had managed to sidle up next to Emoni, a protective hand on her back. I wasn’t happy to see him because he’d be another person pulled into the damage control process. I wasn’t sure what they’d do to him to clean up the situation. Whatever he witnessed hadn’t rattled him to the extent it had Emoni. Perhaps he missed the violence and display of magic and only saw Emoni’s response.

“Let’s get away from here,” he urged, still in a whisper, but it was enough to carry to Dominic, who was removing identifying information from the fallen assassins and looking at their faces as if committing them to memory. His head snapped up and he stood quickly, racing toward us at full speed.

Emoni and I looked back and forth, trying to make sense of it. Dominic’s face. It was twisted into a cruel and wrathful sneer. Emoni focused on the sphere of fire forming in Dominic’s hands. She missed the yellow illumination of magic and the innocuous mask fall from Peter, the Books and Brew book nerd. His eyes darkened several shades and the otherworldly feeling I had felt when ensorcelled by magic wafted from him. Feeling it again made me recognize there had been hints of it when I spoke to Jackson outside the store.

I whipped in his direction. “It’s you!” I moved back.

“I really didn’t want you to find out this way,” he admitted. His hand reached out to the air, smoothing the fire that Dominic had launched at him. When he returned an offensive-looking sphere of gray and white that looked like oxygen-siphoning magic, Dominic darted out of the way. Clearly, he wasn’t immune to Peter’s magic.

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