This Wicked Magic by Michele Hauf Read Free Book Online Page B

squealed and spun, the engine making an awful hissing noise. The back of the vehicle swung around. A car horn honked. Vika braced for impact against the chest of the man, who hooted and beat the ceiling of the car with a triumphant fist.
    The hearse stopped with a dull, crushing metal noise. Stretched across the front seat, Vika landed flat upon CJ’s chest. She winced, anticipating a crash from another car. What a horrible way to die, sprawled across a man she barely knew and trusted not at all.
    When the impact didn’t come, she immediately opened the glove compartment and took out the flashlight. Clicking it on, she shone the bright light at the dark witch’s eyes. “Get out, you bastard!”
    Crawling backward and kneeling, yet keeping the light aimed on the witch, she shoved at his knee as he struggled to untangle himself from under her. When he was free and gave a hefty exhale, she did not relent with the light.
    CJ put up a palm to block the light. “It’s okay now. It’s gone. I’m me again, thanks to your quick thinking with the light.”
    “Yeah? Well, get out! Right now, dark one. I don’t need your kind of trouble. We could have harmed innocents!”
    “Vika, I’m sorry, I had no control—”
    “Damn you!” She slapped his shoulder with the flashlight. “My car is probably totaled. Get out!”
    “Okay!” CJ opened the car door, which slammed against the concrete barrier fronting the river. He had to ease his way out through the narrow space.
    Around them, a crowd had started to gather to assess the situation. Smoke hissed from the hood of the hearse.
    “It was the menace demon,” CJ said, bending to offer the weak explanation. At his temple a streak of blood glistened. “The shadows in the alley were enough to give it control. Vika, please, let me help you with this. Can you start the car? Let me drive it off the street and deal with the authorities.”
    “I said to get away from me,” she said firmly, directing the light at his eyes again for the annoyance factor. “I don’t want your kind of mess in my life. Please, walk away. I can handle this myself.”
    He put up his hands and stepped back. A bystander approached him and asked if he was hurt.
    Vika settled in the passenger’s seat and blew out a breath, anticipating dealing with the concerned mortals outside. She could hardly tell them a demon had been in control of the car.
    “Goddess, I hope it’s drivable. I do not need a repair bill right now.”
    Opening the door, she nodded she was fine, but when the ambulance arrived on the scene, she realized it would be better to submit to their triage than try to walk away, as Certainly had.
    He was out of her life. And life would be better off without his danger.
    So why, then, did she search the crowd in hopes of spying his dark tangle of hair and regretful eyes?
    * * *
    Ian Grim looked up from the crushed raven bone he was preparing to burn along with rowan bark and amber in the mortar. Perched over his spell table all afternoon, daylight had slipped away from him. His lover for centuries, Dasha, was away to Venice photographing a piece for a Gothic magazine. When the cat was away, the mouse did like to play.
    Candlelight flickered, yet he had to blink a few times to adjust his focus on the tracking spell set before the windowsill.
    It was moving.
    “Finally.”
    Dropping the steel pestle in the mortar, Grim rushed to the windowsill and leaned over the brass pendulum. It was suspended from a fine chain above a map of Paris. Paris being the most likely place to find Certainly Jones. It was his home, after all, and a man rarely strayed far from home. But since Grim had become aware of Jones’s return from Daemonia six months earlier, he’d been off the grid. The dark witch had warded himself into a literal black hole. And only Jones was capable of concealing himself with such powerful magic.
    Grim had been patient. This vita spell utilized a strand of hair he’d gotten off Jones and had