She took a deep breath, looked toward the ceiling. “In her entire life, she’s never trusted anyone the way she’s trusted you. So, to my way of thinking, you’re the only one who has a chance of finding out what happened and then figuring out how we can help her make it right.”

He raised a brow as she leveled her gaze back on him. “It must have been hard for you to spit that out.”

“Worse than enduring the seven rings of Hell. Or my client who has a fetish for bear grease. Don’t ask what that is.” Raina gave him an acerbic look. “If I’m wrong, and you can’t help, the one comfort I’ll have is ragging your ass for failing her. And I swear upon every demon and saint, I’ll do it until the end of my days.”

He rose. “The brand was still way over the top.”

“It’s also a very impressive and complex magic that even you didn’t see coming.” At his expression, she was smart enough to lift a quick hand of truce. “Ruby won’t be able to shake it, even if she figures out what it is. The Underworld knows and fears you, Derek. Whatever she’s doing, it’s dangerous, and detecting your protection mark might give them pause.”

“This other guy,” he ground out. “How does he figure into this?”

“He doesn’t. Give the testosterone a rest.” Raina shot him an annoyed look. “I’ve never even met him. He’s some hookup she meets away from here a few times a year to scratch the itch.” She paused. “You’ll think this is an overshare, but it’s relevant. It’s a pretty violent itch. She comes home bruised, but purged, if you get my drift. She’s using him to lance a boil.”

At the flash of rage in his expression, Raina added, “I only have a first name, but I’m going to hold it, because I don’t want every guy with that name in the continental U. S. dropping from the plague.”

“The plague is contagious. I’d have their hearts explode in their chests.”

“Much more elegant. Still not giving you the name.”

He gave her a narrow look, but he didn’t argue it. “The fantasy in that room. Whose was it?”

“Both of yours. I think you know that. Places you’d like to go again and wish you’d never left. Places you two touched upon before, only in that room you went to a deeper level, more vulnerable, more raw.” She nodded. “It’s a truth room as well as a fantasy. It can be dialed for either one, a balance between the two that I can direct with the will of the magics I use for it. So Ruby’s fantasy was a true fantasy, but directed by the deepest truth of her heart. The truth is what makes the room work; without that element, it would be only a drug, because pure, uncut fantasy is destructive.”

Derek studied the witch. Though he still wanted to strangle her, he saw her earnest frustration beneath the caustic exterior. He’d heard the darkness in Ruby’s harsh laugh, and with Raina’s information, so many things were clicking into place.

To say he was rocked on his foundation didn’t come close to covering it, but he’d lived long enough to know the hard things had to be put away to deal with the immediate threat. Grief and loss were painful luxuries he couldn’t afford to indulge right now, and maybe that was good, because he wasn’t sure how to process the deeper wounds.

The Darkness that Ruby carried would spread like an infection. At a certain point, it would become unstoppable. However, Fate had aligned to bring him back to her door. He was enough of a magic user not to discount the timing, though he felt a boiling fury that Fate hadn’t seen fit to put him here when it mattered most, before Ruby lost their child. Their daughter. It wrenched painfully in his gut. He didn’t even know where she was buried. He’d ask Ruby, demand to know.

“I know you deserve answers from her.” Raina proved how good she was at reading a man’s face, his rigid body language. “But save her soul first. Then you can ream her out about the rest. The love she has for you is the only thing that might save her, and if you take out your anger first, you’ll lose her for sure. We all will.”

That raised another concern, a fear he left unspoken. His anger and the universe’s plan aside, his love had failed her. As the witch before him had noted, until he’d come into her life, Ruby had never had a love she halfway trusted. Because he’d fallen short, she might not give him the chance to save her.

Raina was right about something else, though. Despite the many times he’d been pulled from Ruby’s side, that wasn’t happening this time. If the Darkness wanted her highly shielded heart, her fragile soul, it was going to have to come through him.

Chapter 6

IT TOOK AN EXHAUSTING, PUNISHING NIGHT TO PREPARE for the job ahead— her own plans for it, as well as what Derek was sending her there to do. It also took those long hours to ensure everything was protected at the shop the way it should be. None of that involved the paperwork sitting on her desk, so in the end, Ruby banded up her accordion file and threw her manual logs and her laptop case into her van. She’d work on it in the few hours she wasn’t teaching the coven.

Despite all the effort, she was glad for the distraction, because she sure as hell wouldn’t have slept. She jumped at every noise, but neither Derek nor Raina showed as she’d dreaded. Of course, considering how often her time in Raina’s diabolical sex room replayed in her head— Derek’s mouth on her skin, his arms around her, his voice commanding her senses, surrounding her like a magical cocoon she never wanted to leave— his physical presence practically would have been redundant.

She’d let Raina call Ramona, tell her where she’d gone. She just wasn’t up to it, and Raina owed her. At least, she told herself that, even though she knew it was a lie. If she’d been in Raina’s position, suspecting what she did about Ruby, Ruby would have done the same thing to help her friend. Knowing that didn’t make the betrayal hurt less, but it was a different kind of pain. Sometimes what was fair and sensible didn’t mean shit.

She’d known the path she traveled required a cutting of all ties, and yet she’d hung on to Raina and Ramona, too weak to go it completely alone. That was what really hurt about that moment in Raina’s foyer. She’d faced the stark truth that she was completely alone, and she couldn’t allow anyone to penetrate her isolation.

Well, nothing human. As he always did, Theo managed to wrest a painful smile out of her. He’d put his front paws on the back fender of the open van and was giving her his patient look, waiting for her to heft his back legs up into it.

“Sure, you leap on Derek like a track star, but now you’re all two hundred plus pounds of helpless again.”

She’d brought the van with her from California, and it was the flamboyant stereotype. The dented side panels were painted with flowers and unicorns, a swirl of glittering sparks across them to follow the track of dancing fairies. But every stroke of that paint was infused with magical properties. When properly reinforced, the van was as much an impenetrable fortress as a medieval castle, and it could be a backup reservoir and an extra weapon when she needed that as well.

“There you go, big guy. Settle in and I’ll make it better.” The dog circled on the mattress she’d laid in there, then came down on his aging frame with a grunt. When they’d driven from California, she’d slept on it at rest areas, curled up next to his warm body. She didn’t like hotels, had spent too much of her childhood in them, never having a room of her own. Cork was glued on the van’s curved insides so she could keep pictures and mementos tacked all along them. Dried flowers, a piece of ribbon, a napkin from a restaurant. Ordinary things that meant nothing to anyone but her, and of course that was the point. She had some photos of Raina and Ramona. Shopping, having coffee, hanging out at one another’s homes for wine-drenched sleepovers. She’d boxed up all her pictures of Derek, along with other memorabilia she couldn’t bear to see anymore. But she’d kept one out, to have in this van.

He was resting easy on his haunches in a pair of cutoff shorts and nothing else, his bare feet sunk into the wet sand of a tidal pool. Looking toward the camera, his eyes had a softness to them, his firm mouth seconds from kissing her. Hair tousled over his forehead, he sported a day’s growth of beard, because they’d woken at dawn to go play on the beach, take their bath in waves drenched by pink sunrise colors.

She tore her gaze away from those blue eyes that even now saw too damn much. Murmuring the sleep spell, she made a stroking motion over Theo’s reclining body. His liquid brown eyes followed her; then the lids drooped, more than usual, as the energy she pulled from the earth beneath her bare feet took effect. He puddled into the mattress, a soft sigh leaving him.

She’d also given him a sleeping draught a half hour before, so the two together should keep him down for the twelve-hour drive to Lilesville. Once he woke, she’d massage his limbs back to life again. Part and parcel of being a witch, she had a variety of certifications— massage therapy, Reiki, herbalist. On past visits, she’d used the massage therapy on Derek, because he had a couple old wounds that could tighten up his back like a clenched fist.

She’d spread her hands over that broad expanse, her thighs straddling his fine ass. A tender smile had crossed her face at his incoherent grunts while she worked out those knots, the grumbling retorts when she teased him about being ancient and creaky.

A different emotion took over when her fingers passed over the scars, reminders of battles where he hadn’t been quite quick enough, and luck and sheer nerve had saved him. She was all too aware his immortality applied to his age only, not an inability to be harmed or even killed.

Shutting down that memory as firmly as she did the van doors, she secured Theo. She did a quick check of the building, ran back down her list of things to take to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything, double-checked she had the necessary permits to transport the guns she was carrying, then got into the van herself.

As she pulled out of town, the vehicle belching small puffs of black smoke that had stained the “Go Green” bumper sticker on the back, nothing was stirring. That was the way it was in small towns. She wondered if Derek had already left. He’d said he needed to do other things first, would meet her there in a few days. Fine by her.