Double Hexed
A Stormwalker Novel
Jennifer Ashley writing as Allyson James
InterMix Books, New York
INTERMIX BOOKS
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
DOUBLE HEXED
An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
“Double Hexed” previously appeared in Hexed, published by Berkley.
InterMix eBook edition / May 2014
Copyright © 2011 by Jennifer Ashley.
Excerpt from Wild Wolf copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Ashley.
Excerpt from Rules for a Proper Governess copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Ashley.
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eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-18291-2
INTERMIX
InterMix Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group
and New American Library, divisions of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
INTERMIX® and the “IM” design are registered trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) LLC
Version_1
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Excerpt from Wild Wolf
Excerpt from Rules for a Proper Governess
About the Author
Also by Jennifer Ashley
One
It started, innocently enough, with a leaky faucet.
I called my hotel’s plumber, Fremont Hansen, who agreed to come right away, and asked the guests in room 6 to go out for a while. Fremont had a balding head and gentle hazel eyes and believed he had magical powers. His true power lay in fixing the plumbing, but today, after nearly two hours, he crawled out from under the sink, still baffled.
“Don’t know about this one, Janet,” he said, pushing back his cap to rub his high forehead. “I’ve taken everything apart and replaced the faucets and resoldered the pipes. I’ve used plenty of plumber’s enchantment, but nothing is working.”
“Plumber’s enchantment?”
Fremont wriggled his fingers. “You know what I mean.”
“Oh brother,” came a drag-queen drawl from the mirror above him.
Fremont did have a touch of magic in his aura, but I’d never had the heart to tell him how minor it was. The magic mirror, on the other hand, had no such compassion. The true magic mirror hung downstairs in the saloon, but it had learned to project itself through every mundane mirror in the hotel, kind of like a magical CCTV. Fremont couldn’t hear it, because only those with very powerful magic could—lucky us.
“Honey,” the mirror said, “he’s got as much magic in his fingers as a shriveled-up transvestite has in his—”
“Stop!” I said.
My one maid, Juana, who was bringing in clean towels, thought I was talking to her and halted in the doorway.
Fremont leaned to peer at the bathroom mirror. “I swear something is buzzing behind there.”
I’d told the guests they could return by six, and it was five forty-five now. “Anything?” I cut in.
Fremont heaved a sigh. “Let me try something.” He got back down on his hands and knees while Juana went out for more towels. By the time she returned, Fremont scrambled up again, looking triumphant. “I think that’s it.” He grabbed the faucet’s handles and cranked them wide open. “Here we go!”
The faucet exploded in blood.
Hot, red gore fountained over the bathroom, soaking us, the floor, walls, ceiling, shower, and Juana’s clean towels in scarlet horror. It was blood all right, with its metallic tang, and warm, as though it had just erupted from a human body.
“Shut it off!” I yelled.
Fremont dove under the sink again. “Damn it, damn it, damn it . . .”
The aura that radiated from the blood was horrific—black, sticky, evil. Juana kept shrieking as the rain continued and so did the mirror.
“Shut up!” I shouted at both of them.
Juana’s eyes blazed through the blood running down her face. “I go home! I don’t work for you no more, you crazy Indian!”
She flung the blood-soaked towels at me, turned, and hightailed it out the door. Fremont’s wrench clanked against pipe, and the shower of blood abruptly ceased.
Fremont pulled off his cap to reveal that only the top of his balding head had escaped the red rain. “I don’t know what the hell happened, Janet. Or what’s making the water that color. Corrosion?”
“It’s not corrosion. It’s blood. The real thing.”
“Plumbing don’t bleed, not even in Magellan—”
Fremont broke off when he saw me staring not at him but at the mirror. He turned around, and his face drained of color.
The mirror now bore words, washed across it in red blood. You are doomed.
***
The guests of room 6 chose that moment to walk back in. They were well groomed, well dressed, and pale white from northern climes, the kind of people whose money I needed to keep my little hotel in the hot Southwest open. They took one look at the mirror, at me and Fremont spattered with blood—not to mention the walls, mirror, and part of the bedroom carpet—and walked back out again.
I grabbed the cleanest of the towels and rubbed at my face as I chased them down the stairs.
Cassandra, my neat and efficient hotel manager, didn’t betray any surprise when the couple approached reception and demanded to check out, me covered in blood and panting apologies behind them. My offer to move them to another room was declined.
Without asking questions, Cassandra calmly told them we’d charge them only half the fee for the night they’d spent and give them vouchers for the restaurants in town. I let her. She suggested the restored railroad hotel in Winslow as an alternative and offered to have their bags delivered there if they liked. They accepted.
Cassandra disarmed the guests with her cool charm, but
they still left.
Once they were gone, I beckoned to Cassandra with a stiff finger. She followed me upstairs, her fair hair perfect in its French braid, her silk suit crisp. A far cry from me with my black hair, jeans, cropped top, and motorcycle boots now coated with blood. I probably looked like a murder victim, except that I was still up and running around.
Fremont stood in the bathroom where I’d left him. His arms were folded, his eyes closed, and he rocked back and forth.
“Fremont,” I said in alarm.
He opened his eyes but kept rocking, his face drawn in terror.
“Stop it,” I said. “It’s just a little blood projection. Some witch is messing with us, that’s all. Or maybe Sheriff Jones hired a sorcerer to drive me out of town. I wouldn’t put it past him.”
Fremont drew a shaking breath. “You shouldn’t joke about dire portents, Janet.”
I grabbed the glass cleaner and paper towels Juana had left in her cart. “This is how I deal with dire portents.”
Fortunately for me, the cleaner cut right through the blood. I wiped away the words, the paper towels squeaking against the glass.
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” I whispered to it. “Who the hell did this?”
“Beats me, honey bun. That was scary.”
So helpful. I finished with the mirror and started on the rest of the bathroom. The other two wandered out to the bedroom, tracking blood on the carpet. Fremont sat on the bed, dazed, his bloodstained coveralls planted on the quilt one of my aunts had made. Cassandra gazed out the window at the distant mountains in silence.
“Cassandra?” I asked, continuing to spray and wipe. I at least was one hell of a bathroom cleaner. My grandmother, who’d raised me, had been a stickler for cleanliness, and she’d trained me how to scrub at an early age.
Cassandra turned to me, and I stopped in midswipe. Her face was pale with fear, my always cool, always contained manager-receptionist looking like she wanted to be sick.
“You all right?” I asked her.
Cassandra shook her head. “I’m sorry, Janet.” She gave me another look of anguish and ran out of the room.
***
I handed Fremont the rags and told him to keep wiping. I caught up to Cassandra on the stairs, but she wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t talk.
I’d never seen her like this, my unflappable manager who’d managed luxury hotels in California and who ran this place better than I ever could. I ordered her to accompany me into the saloon, which wasn’t open yet, and tell me what she knew.
We entered the saloon to see a broad-shouldered biker with black hair leaning over the bar to help himself to a beer. He took one look at me covered in blood, slammed down the mug, and rushed me. I found myself lifted in arms like hard steel, and I gazed into the blue eyes that had looked back at me the night I’d first lain with a man.
“What the hell happened?” he demanded.
Mick’s fire magic tingled through me, searching for injuries and ready to heal them. Because I was unhurt, my body started to respond the way it wanted to, with desire.
“I’m fine,” I said swiftly. “The blood isn’t mine.”
Would Mick set me on my feet and let me go? No, he slid his big hands along my back and pulled me closer. “I felt it in the wards. Something got in.”
He wanted to shift, to fight. Mick was a dragon, a giant black beast with black and silver eyes and a wingspan that rivaled a 747’s. As a human, his dragon essence was contained in the dragon tattoos that wound down his bare arms and in the fire tattoo that stretched across the small of his back.
“I was about to ask Cassandra all about it,” I said.
Cassandra had seated herself dejectedly at one of the empty tables. I’d restored the saloon to its original Wild West glory, complete with tin ceiling, varnished bar, and wide mirror on the wall. The magic mirror had shattered in its frame one night, the product of one of my harrowing adventures, but the fact that it was broken hadn’t dimmed either its magic or, unfortunately, its personality.
“I’m sensing a wicked imbalance in the force, sweet cheeks,” it said. “Micky, maybe you should get naked in case you have to shift.”
I envied the way Mick could utterly ignore the thing. To Mick, the mirror was simply a powerful talisman, good to have on hand, and the fact that it kept up nonstop sexual suggestions rarely bothered him. Mick and I had awakened it from dormancy one night while working some Tantric magic, which meant that the mirror now belonged to us. It never let us forget how we’d awakened it, and its ongoing innuendo drove me insane. But I’d never throw it away. Magic mirrors were rare and powerful, and the mage who owned one could work amazing magic.
I took a seat next to Cassandra. I badly needed a shower, and a beer wouldn’t hurt, but more than that I wanted to know why Cassandra had been so spooked by the blood. I’d never seen anything frighten my ultra-efficient hotel manager.
Cassandra studied her bunched fists that rested on the table. “I’m sorry, Janet. I never should have come here in the first place.”
“Yes, you should have. I can’t run this hotel without you. Why do you think the message was for you, anyway? It appeared when Fremont and I were up there alone.”
Cassandra looked straight into my eyes. “Because I used to work for John Christianson.”
She obviously expected me to clutch my chest and fall over in shock. I blinked. “Who is John Christianson?”
Mick answered for her. “He’s a filthy rich hotelier and real estate magnate. Owns half of Southern California—commercial real estate, hotels, anything high-dollar in Los Angeles and down the coast to San Diego. Prominent in social circles, contributes to more charities than anyone in the state.”
I spread my hands. Big business, especially big business in other states, was far away and unimportant to my day-to-day existence.
“He’s a first-class bastard,” Cassandra said with venom. “I worked at one of Christianson’s hotels, the ‘C’ in Los Angeles.”
All right, so even I’d heard of the “C,” which featured in Fremont’s favorite television shows about the rich and famous. The “C” was a boutique hotel in Beverly Hills that attracted celebrities, high-profile politicians, and the ultra rich. They could check in for the weekend and have every need met and every decadent wish granted, without ever having to leave the building.
“What has the ‘C’ got to do with messages on my bathroom mirror?”
“Because the secret of Christianson’s success is deep, dark magic,” Cassandra said. “He can’t work magic himself, but he’s hired some of the best in the business—mages into the blackest arts. At first, when Christianson asked me to manage the ‘C,’ the top of his chain, I was thrilled. It would be a huge step forward in my career.”
“But . . .” With a setup like that, there was always a “but.” Cassandra shivered. “Please don’t ask me what really goes on at the ‘C’—what you get with the most secret and expensive of packages. Let’s just say there are people out there who will do anything—anything—and pay any price, for pleasure. And please don’t ask me what Christianson expected me to do, with my magic, with . . . myself. One day, I’d had enough, and I left. Escaped is more like it. I didn’t tell anyone, didn’t plan anything. I just walked away.”
“And came to Magellan,” I finished, finally understanding why she’d turned up on my doorstep, looking for a job. “Interesting choice. Why here and not half the world away?”
“The first place they’d look is half the world away,” Cassandra said. “I thought I’d give a small town in the middle of nowhere a try. I changed my name and got you to hire me.”
“So you’re not really Cassandra Bryson?” I’d taken her information for tax purposes, and it had all checked out, but I conceded that a competent witch could have taken care of such trivialities.
I’d read Cassandra’
s aura when she’d first arrived and saw what I saw now: a powerful witch who liked things clean and tidy, but without a taint of true evil. I’d liked her, she’d had experience running hotels, and I’d been out of my depth with this place and knew it.
“If you don’t mind, I won’t tell you what my real name is,” Cassandra said. “They can hear names, and use them.”
Mick gave her an understanding nod. He’d explained to me once that his name—the full version of it unpronounceable to me—wasn’t his true name, which would sound more like musical notes. Only a dragon and its dam knew its true name, because knowledge of a dragon’s name—and Cassandra had told me this part—could enslave it.
I also had a true name, a spirit name, one my father had given me the day he’d brought me home, which was between me, him, and the gods. Names were powerful things.
“I came to Magellan because of the vortexes around it,” Cassandra said. “What better place to hide my magic than in a place permeated with it? When I drove by your hotel and saw the wards all over it, I knew I’d struck lucky. Even if you hadn’t been looking for a manager, I’d have washed dishes for you, anything for a chance to live here. Plus your aura held so much innocence, Janet, I knew I could trust you.”
“My aura?” I stared. “Held innocence?” This was the first time in my life I’d heard someone refer to Janet Begay as innocent. Janet, the Stormwalker with the goddess-from-hell mother and magic she was just beginning to understand, was a long way from innocent. Most people called me “troublemaker,” “pain in the ass,” or “oh-my-god-it’s-her-let’s-run.”
Cassandra smiled at me. “Trust me, Janet, after knowing the people I knew, your honesty was refreshing.” Her face fell. “But I’ve put you—and Mick and everyone here—in the worst danger.”
“You think the blood message in the bathroom means Christianson has found you?” I asked.
She nodded. “And I can’t risk that he won’t kill everyone in this building to get to me. I have to go.”