Chaos Bites Part 29

"You did that on purpose," I accused.

"Stay out of my head. I've got a h.e.l.luva lot of stuff in there you don't want to see."

Of that I had no doubt.

"Fine," I snapped. "I agree. But there's just one problem. I don't know the plenus luna malum spell."

Jimmy's lips curved. "I do."

"How did you-?" I began, and then I knew. "Summer." She'd do anything he asked.

But Jimmy was shaking his head. "She didn't tell me, I-" He shrugged and pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. "-figured I might need it later and wrote it down."

"Why didn't you just tell her to do you again," I muttered.

"I'm having trust issues. Call me silly, but I'd prefer not to let the soul-selling fairy perform an encore of s.e.xual magic on me."

"When do we do this?"

"Beneath the moon." Jimmy glanced at the window. Sun poured through the gla.s.s like honey. "Tonight."

"Okay." I was suddenly uneasy. This was a s.e.x spell. Jimmy and I hadn't had s.e.x since- My mind s.h.i.+ed away from those memories. We'd been having a lot of vamp s.e.x lately. Extremely good, but also violent. Blood and l.u.s.t, pain and desire were, for a vampire, all rolled together so tightly as to be indistinguishable.

"After we-" I began, but I couldn't finish. "You know. Then we'll deal with Mait."

Jimmy stilled. "Mait? The sosye?"

"Huh?"

"The wizard," he translated. "Haitian?"

"Yes. I thought he was a sorcerer."

"Sorcerer." Jimmy flipped one hand palm up. "Wizard." He flipped it palm down. "Same difference."

"You know him?" I asked.

"He's the one who got away."

"From what?"

"Me," he snapped.

"That happens?"

"Har-har."

"Well, you did say he was the one. You didn't go after him? Hunt him down like a dog. Devote your life. Become obsessed. Never give up, never give in."

"f.u.c.k you," Jimmy said.

"We'll get to that."

He winced, and I almost felt bad. Then he opened his mouth . . . and I felt worse. "It was the first year I was away from-"

Breaking off, he looked out the window, suddenly fascinated with the freckles of golden sunlight on the wrought-iron balcony.

"Ruthie," I supplied. "The first year you were away from Ruthie."

"Yeah," he agreed. "I was in training." He stopped, and it appeared that he was having a hard time going on, so I helped him again. Training for DKs and seers meant- "Sawyer."

Jimmy had never admitted outright that he'd trained with Sawyer, though I'd gotten hints of it from things he'd said. I wasn't sure what had happened between them, but whatever it had been there remained an unrelenting animosity that I'd never been able to get to the bottom of with either one.

"You were in training with Sawyer," I pressed.

Jimmy cleared his throat. "You know how that was." This time I winced. For me, training with Sawyer had been a bizarre combination of hand-to-hand combat, magic, and s.e.x. I didn't think Jimmy's had been similar, but if it had that would explain why Jimmy never stopped wanting him dead.

"Constant running, swimming, jumping, fighting," Jimmy continued. "Very little food. No sleep. And weird stuff happening all the time."

I nodded, my chest feeling less strangled when he didn't mention seduction, s.e.x, or worse.

"He said I was ready, and he sent me after a sosye."

"Mait," I murmured. "What happened?"

"Guy kicked my a.s.s and left me for dead."

"If he meant for you to be dead, you would be."

"He didn't know what I was."

In other words Mait had killed Jimmy once, and for a dhampir once is not enough.

"How do you kill a sosye?" I asked.

"Charmed dagger through the left eye."

"Ew." Still-"Doesn't seem that difficult."

"You wanna try it?"

I was probably going to have to.

"You'll have better luck than me," Jimmy continued.

"Why's that?"

"Magic. You've got it."

"So does Mait. He had no trouble shoving what magic I tried right back in my face. I might possess the power, but I don't possess a clue of how to use it."

"That's okay."

"No," I said. "It really isn't." I'd killed for this power. I should at least be able to do something beyond smacking people without even touching them. Although that was handy.

"There's a charm that will protect you," Jimmy said.

"From the protection demon?"

"I've been studying ways to take this guy out for years. I know what I'm doing."

I guess he had been obsessed, and that obsession made Jimmy the best choice to help with Mait. Which was probably why Ruthie had sent him.

"I always wondered if Sawyer wanted Mait to get away," Jimmy mused.

"Why would he want that?"

"Who knows with him."

"Maybe you were supposed to check out the background of a sosye," I said. "Make sure you knew all you needed to before you skipped off to stick him in the eye with a dagger."

"I'm a DK. I'm supposed to follow the instructions of my seer without question. d.i.c.king around will get innocent people killed."

"What if Mait was a test of your abilities? Sawyer couldn't exactly let the guy die if he was helping train federation members."

"Nephilim who help?" Jimmy snorted. "Since when?"

"I don't know. But Mait didn't kill you. There's gotta be a reason. Just like there's a reason Sawyer didn't tell you all you needed to know."

"Besides him wanting me dead?"

"He didn't even know you yet." Not that knowing Sanducci ever prevented anyone from wanting him dead.

"He knew enough."

I wondered what that meant, but knew better than to ask.

"I still think Mait was a training test. He was probably a friend of Sawyer's."

"A Nephilim friend of Sawyer's who's now protecting evil's version of The Idiot's Guide to the Apocalypse." Jimmy scratched his chin, which had taken on a bluish tinge from at least two days' growth of beard. "Strangely enough, that's an explanation I can get behind. I was never quite certain Sawyer wasn't playing both sides of this war."

I hadn't been, either, until he'd died for us.

But I was never going to convince Jimmy that Sawyer was anything other than an enigma, so I wasn't going to try.

"What do you know about sosyes?" I asked.

"Haitian wizards," Jimmy said. "They command night demons, which are-"

"Creepy shadow birds that fly right through you and peck your insides raw."

"You've met."

"Oh, yeah. How the h.e.l.l do we kill them?"

"Mait dies, they do."

"Otherwise?"

"They don't."

"Of course not," I muttered. "Go on."

"A sosye is part witch and part loa, a voodoo G.o.d."

"If he's Nephilim he's part demon," I pointed out.

"In the old days, people had to have a word they used to refer to those beings with supernatural powers. Sometimes they called them G.o.ds. In Mait's case, his father was Kalfu, ruler of the night spirits."

"Otherwise known as night demons."

"Yep," Jimmy said. "According to legend, Kalfu is the grand master of charms and sorceries. He's the origin of darkness. He upsets the natural order, thwarts fate. Basically he is chaos. He protects the gate between this world and the next."

"And his son?"

"Controls the malevolent spirits of the night as well as the displaced souls of the next world."

"He can raise ghosts," I clarified.

"And thanks to his mother he can perform magic."

"Which is how he threw up the protection spell around the old church. Unlike his father, he's protecting a book instead of a gate."

"For all we know," Jimmy said, "the book is the gate."

CHAPTER 26.

"There are things I need to get for tonight." Jimmy stood.

"You want me to come?" I asked, but he was already shutting the door.