Chapter 20

We checkedinto a roadside motel on the outskirts of a town called Lawrence, just before dawn.

After some arguing with the manager and handing over cash, Lucy got us two rooms next to each other on the ground floor and a promise we would not be disturbed. I dragged my pack, the cat-dragon's basket, and my sorry carcass inside, took Daisy for a bathroom break around back of the motel, and returned to my room.

"I'm going to go explore a bit," Malcolm told me. "I don't want to just hang out here and watch you sleep. I'll check back every so often. If you need me, summon me."

"I plan to be unconscious until further notice." I pulled my filthy shirt off and tossed it in the trash. "Be careful, okay?"

He rolled his eyes with characteristic exasperation. "Yes, Mom."

"Hey," I said, my voice sharp because I was tired, and because I worried about him.

He sobered. "I will be careful, I promise. Get some sleep. The big wolf and the teensy dragon will watch over you."

"Okay. See you in a while."

He gave me a little salute and left.

I was almost too tired to see straight, but I forced myself to shower so I didn't go to bed smelling like graveling goop. I damn near fell asleep leaning against the tiled wall in the shower.

I had no sleepwear, so once I was out of the shower and dried off, I put on underwear and my last clean shirt. With the window shuttered, the room was pitch-black. I left the bathroom light on with the door cracked because a pitch-black room was not comforting to me at the moment.

I put wards on the doorway and window, barred the door, and crawled into bed. My cat-dragon was already curled up on the other pillow, purring, her head on her paws. Her eyes glittered in the dim light.

My eyelids weighed a hundred pounds each. I checked on Daisy, to see where she'd decided to lay down. Instead, she stood by the door, staring at it expectantly. "Don't tell me you have to go again," I groaned.

Someone knocked. Daisy didn't growl, so it had to be Lucy.

"Damn it, you said we'd get some sleep." I flung the covers back, marched to the door, lifted the bar, and yanked the door open.

Ronan stood on my doorstep, bottles of tequila and what looked like local hooch in one hand, and nothing in his sword hand. His Harley was parked in front of my room. Either he'd wheeled it up or he'd shown up while I was in the shower, because I sure as hell hadn't heard him arrive.

He raised an eyebrow. "Very nice. I like the Wonder Woman underwear."

I slammed the door.

Daisy growled.

"Don't you start with me," I warned her. "I'm so tired, I can't even think. I don't want to talk to him. He's an asshole."

She stared at me pointedly, then at the door.

"Rrrrr?" the cat-dragon asked, standing on the edge of the bed, her eyes flashing with fae magic.

Torryn's prophecy. I ground my teeth.

Tap tap tap.Three measured knocks.

With a growl, I pulled on my clean jeans, decided I didn't care if I wasn't wearing a bra, and yanked the door open again.

Ronan held up the bottles. "Peace offering?"

"I don't want anything to drink. I want to be asleep." I crossed my arms before I realized that pose emphasized my lack of undergarments. Son of a bitch.

To his credit, Ronan kept his eyes on my face. "Then I'll drink."

"Why can't you go drink by yourself?" My sluggish, sleep-deprived brain finally kicked up the thing I should have demanded the moment I opened the door the first time. "How the hell did you know where we are?"

"Can I come in and not have this discussion on the sidewalk?"

I wanted to thump my head on the doorframe. "Ronan, I have been awake for three straight days, fought a werewolf pack and a horde of gravelings, and had my magic retooled. I am so not in the mood to ask again, but I will. How the hell did you find us?"

"I paid Charles Vaughan to put tracking devices in the bags of food you bought at the roadhouse."

My mind conjured up the memory of seeing Ronan slip Charles a roll of cash. I stifled a growl. Unbelievable. Charles Vaughan: not trustworthy in any world.

"Please bite him," I told Daisy.

She showed me her teeth.

Ronan held up the bottles again, indicating the unlabeled one with a nod. "This is from Charles's personal stash. I'm told it's worth dying for. It certainly cost me a lot of money." He looked down at the ward I'd placed on the threshold. "May I come in?"

His politeness and apparent honesty had me on guard. Then again, Daisy had insisted we go to the roadhouse so we could cross paths with him. Torryn had told me we would need him. The universe had clearly conspired to bring him to my door. My natural contrariness—not to mention my exhaustion—urged me to slam the door again, crawl into bed, and pull the covers over my head.

Instead, I flicked on the light and traced a rune on the doorframe with my finger. My ward shimmered. "Fine. Come in."

He brushed past me, smelling of leather, tequila, the sea, and the open road. I shut the door, raised my ward again, and turned around.

He set the bottles on the little table and studied the cat-dragon, who stared back at him with emerald eyes. "You have a pū?is."

"No wonder you're such a good bounty hunter, with observational skills like that." I knew I was being petty, but I was bone tired.

To my annoyance, he ignored my taunt. "Got any glasses?"

I spread my hands to indicate our surroundings. "Does this look like the kind of place that provides glasses?"

"Cups, then." Without waiting for permission, he went to the bathroom and returned with two paper cups. His ice-blue eyes sparkled with some secret joke.

I sighed. "Yes, my bra is hanging in the bathroom. What are you, twelve? You've seen bras before."

"I was actually amused by your travel bag, which is rather minimal in its contents, for a woman." He released the stopper of the moonshine bottle, poured a generous amount into a cup, and offered it to me. "I didn't see your bra, but I will go back and look if you'd like."

Scowling, I took the cup. "Stay out of my bathroom."

He poured himself a cup of tequila and raised it. "To long journeys and wondrous travels to faraway lands."

I tapped my cup to his and sipped my drink. Ronan hadn't lied. This moonshine was far and away better than what Lucy and I had drunk at the roadhouse. Something else this Charles had in common with his counterpart back home: a taste for the good stuff.

In one gulp, Ronan drained his tequila. He reached for the bottle to refill his cup. Daisy settled in beside him. My cat-dragon returned to her pillow and curled up with her eyes half-lidded.

"Why did you track us?" I asked as he refilled his cup. "I thought you wanted nothing to do with us."

"I wanted to collect my hard-earned bounties first." He set the bottle down. "Then I wanted to see you in action, so I knew who you were, how you fought."

"You didn't see enough when the werewolves attacked?"

"They weren't much of a challenge for us, were they?" He knocked back his drink and poured another. "I learned a little about you, like the fact you aren't from this world, but you were on your guard with me there."

"So you tracked us." My eyes narrowed. "How long have you been following us?"

"I caught up with you in Oakdale."

My hand closed on the paper cup, crumpling it. Liquor ran down my fingers and dripped to the carpet. "Were you watching when the gravelings attacked?"

He took a drink. "Yes."

I manifested my whip of earth magic and lashed at him before my brain even formed the thought that I wanted to attack. My anger gave me speed. It was my magic, and I'd formed the whip with ease. Yay for Tom's magical tuning.

He raised his arm, moving with the lightning swiftness I'd seen when he fought the drummer and the wolves. My whip wrapped around his arm, crackling with power that seared the air. It should have cut him to the bone, or lopped his arm clean off.

Instead, he grabbed it and held on. His eyes flared bluish-silver. Some kind of magic I didn't know blazed up my whip and stung my hand.

"Look," he said, holding my earth magic whip inches from my nose. "You see those black threads? That's black magic. Sorcery. You think I don't know how you got that?" He released my whip, almost throwing it back in my face. His face was cold, his eyes like a thunderstorm. "Blood magic. Sorcery. Travel not just between realms, but between worlds." He set his cup on the table. He hadn't spilled a drop during our scuffle. "I hunt things like you for a living."

That did it. "Things like me?" I raged. "What about you? You're far from human. You watched us fight for our lives against the gravelings and didn't lift a finger. We nearly died. You think I want to die in this nightmare world? You think I wanted this black magic that's killing me, and is probably eating away at the soul of the man I love while I'm trapped here chasing the only thing that can get us back home? You don't know a damn thing about me, you self-righteous killer for hire. What gives you the right to judge me, or anyone else, for that matter?"

My chest heaved—not with exertion, but with the force of my anger. The dark magic surged in response. I shoved it down and let my own magic crackle on my skin. "What gives you the right?" I repeated, more quietly.

We stared at each other.

"You didn't nearly die." His voice was even.

I blinked. That was not a response I'd expected. "What?"

"When the gravelings attacked. You didn't nearly die." He took my crumpled cup from my hand and tossed it in a trash can. He went back to the bathroom and returned with another cup. He poured moonshine into it and held it out to me. "You fought with courage and resourcefulness, and like someone who's fought for her life against the odds many times. Your wolf revealed she has other forms and fought with you, as did your little pū?is." He nodded at the cat-dragon, who'd watched our dust-up with bright green eyes but hadn't moved from her pillow. "You had no need of me. If you had, I would have joined you."

"Sure you would have." I belted down the cup of moonshine. On a nearly empty stomach and after three days with close to no sleep, it hit me like a wrecking ball. I steadied myself against the table. "What do you want?"

"I want to find out why your wolf and the little witch Torryn think I should join your merry band."

"You talked to Torryn?"

"She was waiting for me when I came through her territory. We talked." He poured more moonshine into my cup. "Now I want to know how you got here, why you're here, and what it will take to get you home where you belong."

"My dark magic had nothing to do with how I got here. Back in my world, I'm one of the rare kind of blood mages who have enough earth and air magic to use mirror travel."

He refilled his cup with tequila. "That's the how. What about the why?"

"I bartered my gift of mirror travel to a vampire in return for her help saving someone's life. She sent me here to chase someone who stole something from her and bring it back."

"And how will you get back, once you've found your prize?"

"The same way we got here. But why do you care? What happened to me being a thing you hunt for a living?"

"Just now, you had every reason to strike out at me with that black magic, but you didn't. You used your own magic instead, and you did so without thinking." He tapped his cup to mine once again. "That means the evil hasn't taken hold of you yet. Once it does, you'll have to force yourself not to use it. You won't be satisfied with the magic you were born with. You won't mind if it eats the soul of the man you love. None of that will matter. You won't even care if you die from it."

I drank the moonshine in my cup, trying not to let on how much I feared the very outcome he described. "The witch Torryn said I'll have to cut it out," I said. "I'm afraid of what that means. And if I have to cut it out of myself, what will I have to do to save Sean?"

His eyes darkened again, but this time, it wasn't with anger. "All good questions, Alice, but not questions you must answer now." He took my cup and set it next to his on the table. "Rest. Regain your strength." He gestured at the bags of food I'd bought at the way station. "Eat. The magic consumes energy. You're hungry all the time now, aren't you?"

I nodded.

He put the cap on his bottle of tequila. "Eat when you're hungry, rest when you're tired, as best you can. That will buy you some time."

"Time for what?"

"To figure out how to get the black magic out. To find what you've come here looking for. To get you home." He headed for the door, bottle of tequila in hand. "Sleep."

I followed him. "Where you are going?"

He turned. For the first time since I'd met him, the corners of his mouth turned up in a ghost of a smile. "Missing me already?"

"Asshole." I touched the doorframe to lower the ward. "Get out."

He opened the door. The early light of dawn spilled across the horizon behind him. "I'll be nearby. Sleep tight."

I wanted to slam the door. Instead, I closed it quietly and raised the ward.

Daisy chuffed.

"Quiet, you." I flicked off the light. The bottle of moonshine, half empty, remained on the table, next to our cups.

Outside, the Harley rumbled to life. After a moment, it departed, and the motel fell silent.

I didn't remember taking off my jeans, but they were draped over the back of a chair. Warm from the moonshine, I returned to the bed. Daisy curled up in front of the door, on guard. The pū?is purred on her pillow.

I pulled the covers up my chin and fell asleep.

* * *

I woke from a sound sleep to someone pounding on my door and my stomach cramping from hunger.

"Rrrrr," my cat-dragon said with a yawn, blinking sleepily on the pillow beside my head.

"Alice!" Lucy shouted through the door. "Wake up! We've gotta hit the road!"

I stumbled out of bed. Disoriented, groggy, and lightheaded with hunger, I nearly fell. Daisy was suddenly at my side to steady me.

I thought maybe only an hour or two had passed since I'd fallen asleep, and was prepared to yell at Lucy for waking me up so soon. To my surprise, the clock on the nightstand said it was a little after two in the afternoon. I'd gotten about seven hours of sleep, which should have been enough to get me back on my feet, but I felt almost as tired as when I went to bed.

The half-empty bottle of moonshine on the table confirmed Ronan had been in my room this morning and I hadn't in fact dreamed his visit. I dug a protein bar from one of the shopping bags from the way station and unwrapped it on my way to the door.

When I opened the door, I found Lucy outside, already dressed, her bag at her feet. "You look like hell," she told me.

I took a bite of the protein bar. "Thank you," I said around my mouthful of food. I dropped my ward so she could come inside and stepped back to let her walk past.

She brought her bag inside and shut the door. I got my jeans off the chair where I'd left them and put them on as I ate the rest of the bar.

Lucy eyed the bottle on the table. "Where'd that come from?"

I went to the bathroom to put on my bra. "Ronan," I said.

"What? How—?"

Between bites of a second protein bar, I explained how Ronan had found us. As she cursed Charles, Ronan, his motorcycle, and all of their ancestors, I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and combed and braided my hair. My eyes were deeply shadowed and looked almost feverish. At least the hunger pains had eased.

When I emerged from the bathroom, Lucy was still livid. "Tracking us," she fumed. "Spying on us while we fought the gravelings. Rat bastard." She glanced at my rumpled bed. "You didn't sleep with him, did you?"

I gave her a look. "No, I did not. I have a partner back home who I love very much, and Ronan is an ass."

"You wouldn't be the first person to sleep with someone you thought was an ass, especially if he showed up with a bottle of what looks like Charles's very special reserve." She rubbed her face. "Where is he now?"

I packed quickly, stuffing my clothes and toiletries into my backpack. "No idea. He said he'd be nearby, whatever that means."

"Judging by how much he drank at the roadhouse, probably the closest dive bar." She picked up my shopping bags and opened the door of my room. "He's good with a sword, even after a bottle of tequila. He killed more of the werewolves than I did."

I got the cat-dragon into her basket and covered her with the blanket. "I didn't know it was a contest."

"Of course it was a contest." She carried my shopping bags and her own duffel to the vehicle. "Where's Malcolm?"

"Out exploring. I'll summon him." I put my backpack and the basket in the jeep, then returned to the room to remove my wards on the door and window and make sure I hadn't left anything behind. Lucy went to check us out of our rooms.

With my room emptied and the wards gone, I leaned against the side of the vehicle, closed my eyes, and tugged twice on the blue-green trace that connected me to Malcolm.

Almost instantly, he appeared beside me. "Hey, Alice. What's going on?"

I let out a breath, relieved to see he was unharmed. "We're hitting the road."

He frowned. "Did you not get any sleep? You look awful."

"If one more person tells me that, I'm going to start throwing punches." I yanked open the back door for Daisy. She jumped into the back seat and settled in. Malcolm floated into the jeep beside her.

I shut the door, turned around, and found myself nose-to-chest with Ronan, in a black T-shirt, black jeans, and his leather jacket.

I jumped and magic flared on my fingers. "Son of a bitch!" I yelled.

His brow furrowed. "You do not look rested."

I punched him.

He didn't expect an attack, and I didn't really expect my blow to make contact, so we were both caught off guard when my fist connected with his jaw. It felt like punching a tree. I shook my injured hand and swore. Belatedly, I noticed his Harley backed into a parking space several spots down from ours.

Ronan barely flinched. I figured his reaction was more from surprise than anything else. He raised an eyebrow. "Did that make you feel better?"

I scowled. Damn it, it wasn't like me to be so jumpy, or to take swings at someone—especially when I didn't know what they were capable of doing in retaliation. I reached for another protein bar, hoping food would help me feel more like myself.

"We're leaving," I informed him, as if loading up our bags hadn't probably tipped him off.

"Did something happen?"

I shook my head. "We're heading south, toward where we think the gravelings are coming through from the Underworld."

Lucy's voice cut in. "Don't you ever track me again, Ronan. Not for any reason." She approached the jeep from the direction of the motel office, her fingers twitching like she wanted to reach for her sword.

"My apologies, Lieutenant." He inclined his head. It didn't escape my notice that he didn't say he wouldn't do it again. "Shall we continue south, then?"

"You follow my orders if we run into trouble," she warned. "This is a League operation."

He studied her. "And if I refuse?"

"Then you can go back to swilling tequila and collecting bounties." She opened her door. "People are dying. I don't have time to measure dicks with you, and I don't give a shit about your ego. Either join the team or don't. Let's roll, Alice." She slammed her door.

I eyed Ronan. "So what's it going to be?"

"I don't play well with others, which is why I'm in the business I'm in." He put his hand on my door. "But if a wolf made of magic and a ten-year-old clairvoyant witch tell me I'm supposed to go with you, I should go, just to find out why. Maybe I'll get to bag a few more bounties along the way."

Gotta pay for that tequila somehow, I thought, perhaps uncharitably. Out loud, I said, "I'm interested to find out what use you might be."

He smiled slightly. "I look forward to proving my worth."

I got in the jeep and buckled in. He shut my door and watched as Lucy put the vehicle in gear and pulled away without looking at him. Ronan turned on his heel and headed for his Harley.

By the time he'd reached his motorcycle, Lucy had already turned onto the street headed south, following the directions provided by the GPS.

"He smells like tequila and no sleep," Lucy said. "Pass me one of those protein bars, will you?"

I handed over one of the bars. "It's five o'clock somewhere, right?"

She sighed. "How do you feel about having him at your back?"

I gulped water from my refillable Hawthorne's bottle and eyed the box of protein bars. Thirsty, hungry, and achy seemed to be my new normal. "Better than I should," I admitted. "Though I'll be damned if I know why."

Her mouth became a grim line. "Same here. Goodness knows he's given us little reason to trust him."

Daisy growled quietly.

"You may trust him, wolf, but I don't," Lucy said.

"Do you know what he is?" I asked.

"No, I do not, which is more worrisome than how much tequila he consumes. He sure as hell is something." She glanced over her shoulder. "Malcolm, you have any thoughts about what Ronan is?"

"I wish I did," Malcolm said, floating close to the gap between the front seats. "He looks plain-Jane human to me, but he obviously isn't, so he's capable of hiding what he is."

"There could be a lot of reasons for that," I pointed out. "Not all of them are bad."

Lucy snorted. "Yeah, not all of them—only most."

"Some people with special skills just don't want to be noticed."

"Touché."

In my side mirror, I spotted Ronan's Harley behind us. The rumble of its engine grew as he gained ground on us.

Lucy's eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. She scowled and put her foot down. The jeep accelerated sharply. The Harley closed the distance again. I expected him to pass us, but instead he fell in behind, content—for the moment—to follow her lead. How long that would last, I had no idea. There wasn't much about Ronan I did know, other than he was leaning hard into the lone-wolf bounty hunter vibe and he knew when to bring a girl a bottle of damn good hooch.

Weaving through traffic at well over one hundred miles an hour, we raced south, hopefully toward Mariela, the scroll, and a door to the Underworld.