Cursebound (Magical Entanglements Book 2) Read online

  Dim lighting, golden damask wall paper, a lush maroon carpet, and classic white table cloths rounded out the ambiance. Cole sat at the table for two, staring at his empty plate and his empty glass. He fidgeted, bouncing his leg up and down. Despite the full bar, no sommeliers entered. No waiters placed delicate bites onto his plate. There wasn’t even music. Just Cole, left to his own thoughts. The intoxicating scents made his stomach grumble. Nerves clogged his throat with every tick of the clock and beat of his heart. Cole sucked desperate breaths through his nostrils. He imagined this room was like those in the FBI with one way mirrors. Someone was watching him. And he couldn’t slip up.

  After an excruciating wait, the door swung open and the burly bouncer who’d approached Derek to kick him out and then escorted Cole upstairs entered. He walked with a heavy gait, his meaty legs stomping toward Cole. His thick beard hid any kind of expression on his face, and two beady eyes sat above his bulbous nose. He made up for the lack of hair on his head with the abundance of hair on his chin.

  Cole scrambled out of his seat, his gaze affixed on the door in the assumption that Kendrick would walk in after. But no one did.

  The bouncer cleared his throat. “Nothing was to your liking?” He jutted his chin to the empty plate and back to the buffet, then pressed something in his ear. “Rollins, call Dominos. Order a large plain.” The man eyed Cole once more. “Scratch that. Make it pepperoni.”

  “Oh.” Cole rubbed the back of his neck. “Sorry, I was waiting for Kendrick.”

  “Well, wait no further. I’m here.” The bouncer lumbered toward the table. “But I’m not canceling the pizza.”

  Cole blinked at the bouncer. “You’re—” He didn’t finish his sentence. Of course this was Kendrick. Of course. He needed to find a way to get close to the competition without being spotted. What better way than being the guy that always stayed invisible, the security guard standing in the back that no one ever paid attention to even though he watched everyone else. It was the perfect choice for a new glamour. Especially if it meant being able to eat the way Kendrick did as he loaded his plate in a high pile of quivering oysters.

  Cole grabbed one of everything too, playing the fish this time instead of Naomi. He needed to stay complacent. Keep his bluff. Ignore the sweat beading on the back of his neck.

  “I’d extend my hand,” Kendrick said as he lifted a muscle to his lips and slurped out the guts. “But I’ve got a no touching policy right now. You understand.”

  Cole swallowed hard. Was that a threat? A jab that Cole knew more than he let on. He decided to play the only card he could: playing dumb. “Oh yeah. My sister has OCD too. Won’t hug anyone.”

  Kendrick gave Cole a tight smile beneath his beard. “That so?” He suddenly bolted upright. “My my, how could I have forgotten?” He snapped his fingers and the finest bottle of red he had floated in the air toward him. Kendrick didn’t tear his eyes off Cole as he performed this simple parlor trick.

  Cole shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Was he supposed to gasp? Not react? He chose the former, widening his eyes and letting out what he hoped sounded like a shocked, “Whoa!”

  Kendrick uncorked the bottle with a twirl of his finger over the top. “Little parlor trick I’ve learned over the years. Las Vegas is full of magicians, you know?”

  “But most of them are hacks,” Cole said in response, then stuffed a white truffle croquette into his mouth, anything to avoid talking. As he chewed, a light tingle began to dance over his skin like his flesh was alive with pins and needles. His fingers urged to itch but he placed his palms flat on the white tablecloth.

  “Cheers, my friend. You put on an impressive show.” Kendrick lifted his newly poured glass of red.

  As Cole lifted his own full glass, he felt magic surging through his veins like the rush from an IV dripping nutrients directly into the bloodstream. This was what Delilah felt? The icy rush was exhilarating. Cole felt like he could break through the very walls and still come out on top.

  The men clinked glasses. Cole tilted his toward Kendrick’s in only a tiny tap but the power surging through him cracked the glass. The liquid sloshed onto the table, sopping the white tablecloth.

  “Crap. I’m so sorry,” Cole said, the words zinging past his teeth as if he was spitting hot fire and not simply uttering a sentence.

  “No worries. I’ll just—” A coughing fit overtook Kendrick, forcing him to duck his head into his elbow. He scrambled for his glass of wine and chugged a few sips, coughing a few more times. Redness covered the parts of his face not covered with a beard. “That was weird.” He coughed again. “I never get—”

  Kendrick gasped, a sharp sound. He clawed at his throat, his eyes going wide. The redness drained from his face, growing paler and paler as he desperately tried to breathe. And then, he collapsed.

  Whatever Delilah and Britta had done, it had worked.

  It was show time.

  Cole didn’t hesitate. He took a deep breath and pulled the safety pin out from where it held his jeans closed. The security guards had flagged it when Cole first stepped into the arena but he shrugged, proving how his pants would fall right down without the pin. It was too late to go home and change so they let him keep it. All part of the plan, including the part where he bought jeans a size too big and ripped off the button.

  With shaky fingers, Cole approached Kendrick. In every corner of the ceiling, a camera loomed, capturing every minute. He only had one second, one chance, to get what Delilah needed. Two drops of blood. He ripped the stupid rice-with-his-name-written-on-it in a glass vial off his neck and dumped the rice onto the floor. Also part of the plan. The magic flowing through his veins made every step feel like he was walking on a volcano without risk of getting scorched. He pointed the safety pin outward and then stabbed it down into Kendrick’s exposed hand.

  A drop of blood beaded beneath the point of the needle, glistening in the dim light. Holy shit, it worked. With shaky fingers, Cole scrambled to scrape the blood into the vial but before he could, the blood simply seeped right back into Kendrick’s hand and the wound closed up.

  Cold panic clawed at Cole’s spine a moment before Kendrick blasted Cole away with a sharp surge of magic. He flew through the air and landed with a sickening crack against the wall. Pain radiated from his back, pulsing against the magic fading within his own veins.

  Kendrick stood up and brushed himself off. “Do you really think I’m that stupid?”

  Cole’s gut twisted under Kendrick’s menacing gaze.

  “Or that easy to defeat?” Kendrick took a thunderous step toward Cole.

  Cole kept his face stoic despite the way his body tried to crumble under the pain thudding through his back. He had no place to hide. No place to run. He was trapped.

  “Well, I guess you must have, since you didn’t even try to hide the fact that you’re working with Delilah.” Kendrick let out a small chuckle.

  Cole leapt to his feet, cringing against the pain. “I don’t know who Delilah is!”

  Kendrick gave him a tight smile. “You were never very good at bluffing, only reading other people’s bluffs and playing it against them. You’re living with her! Did you think I just dropped her off for shits and giggles? To save her? She was the fucking bait!”

  A gust of wind twisted around Cole, blowing his cheeks inward, whipping napkins and silverware and individual bubbles of caviar in the air. The tornado raced around Cole until it blurred his vision and embraced him with a coldness that chilled him to the core. He felt like he was on a roller coaster that spun off the tracks and dove straight to certain death on the earth below. His stomach lurched in league with the vision until the tornado stopped and Cole found himself in a dank dungeon. His arms rose to the ceiling, secured with thick steel cuffs. His feet swung in the air, tied together with more steel. The magic that had pumped through his bloodstream a moment ago fled his body.

  A fire crackled near his feet, burning Cole’s feet. He let out a yelp. Fire pokers hung me
nacingly in a metal gate. Across the way, Avery slumped unconscious, her hands tied up in steel chains. Two others—a male and female—sung beside her, also unconscious. Lashes and burn marks covered their bodies, some of them still steaming. Only the smallest rise and fall of their chests indicated they were still alive. Barely.

  Cole thrashed against his chains, letting out a scream that fell on deaf ears.

  Kendrick strolled in, this time wearing the face Cole had seen in one of Delilah’s old photos. Chiseled jaw. The darkest of dark eyes. Epically coiffed hair. Even Cole had to admit he was handsome. A strange geode choker circled his thick neck.

  “Your buddy Derek might be wondering how his enhanced luck suddenly ran out, but I’m not. I made sure you would be the winner.” Kendrick took one look at Cole and laughed. Then he picked up a pointed steel fire poker, dipped it into the flame, and stalked toward Cole.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DELILAH

  Cole never returned from the poker tournament. A day passed, then a night. With the help from a few healing potions, Delilah—and Britta—returned to full health. The bed beside Delilah remained empty until Britta lay down next to her, a comforting body to warm the sheets until Cole returned to claim the spot once again. A few days ago, they weren’t even enemies or rivals, but now, they were more than allies. They had each other’s backs.

  “He’s going to be okay,” Britta reassured Delilah for the thousandth time, her brown hair spilling around her shoulders. Delilah was almost used to Britta’s new appearance now…her real appearance. “You’re going to be okay.”

  Delilah swallowed hard. They’d stormed into Kendrick’s hotel. Tried to defeat him and failed. Cole wasn’t going to be okay. He was collateral. Bait. The same way Kendrick had probably baited Cole when he returned Delilah home safe and sound for no reason other than ulterior motive. It was so obvious now this was all a poker bluff of Kendrick’s. He must have known Cole’s plan the entire time. And now he was keeping his cards up his sleeve, keeping Cole hostage. Keeping Delilah under his torturous control.

  Delilah bolted upright. “We have to try to rescue him.”

  “But we don’t even know if…” Britta bit her lip and snapped her mouth shut before she finished her sentence. …We don’t even know if he’s still alive.

  Delilah squeezed her eyes shut as her heart snapped in two. “We have to try.” Her pulse thumped beneath her veins, the only constant she had now without magic running through her. “I know where he took him. He’s got a lair. A room he uses for torture. I don’t know where it’s located but it has to be in the hotel because he teleported to it and magical teleportation can only take you to another room in the same building.”

  Britta blinked. “Hate to break it to you but I don’t know any teleportation spells.”

  “But I do.” Delilah leaped from the bed, her bare feet padding on the cold hardwood floor. “We had to study it back in law school. They’d taught it to us for our protection, in case the vigilante curse put us in a dangerous situation. This was a quick way out. Sometimes the only way out.” In fact, Delilah had been the one to teach the spell to Kendrick. The first contract against nature to enable the teleportation was a bitch to set up, but once the contract was created, the caster only needed to utter a few boilerplate clauses to invoke the contract again. You could use it on yourself, someone else, or both.

  She headed to her library of magical tomes, sometimes referred to in literature as grimoires. She liked to refer to them as her old textbooks. Her finger traced the worn spines of the binders. The professors had passed out delicate leather bound books and collected them again at the end of the year—but not before Delilah photocopied every single page. “Ah, here it is.” She plucked a fading black three-ring binder from the shelf and flipped through the pages until she found the spell. They needed to gather a few ingredients for the ritual and Delilah needed to describe the room in perfect detail in order for Britta to imagine it exactly to teleport them both there. But there was just one problem. “We still need to get past the wards for this spell to work.”

  Britta snorted. “Oh, only that? No problem. Went so well the first time.”

  Delilah kept thinking out loud as she paced the floor in front of her bed. “Outside the wards isn’t close enough to teleport into the room and we can’t go in there unarmed. We need magic.”

  “We need more than just my magic,” Britta said. “I couldn’t defeat him before and I’d used everything I got.”

  Delilah winced. “I know.” A terrible thought coursed through her mind and made her slump onto the bed. The wards were powerful and multiple. Kendrick had shown Delilah the layout of them once, a different type of ward placed every one hundred feet in a radius surrounding the building. They had to take out each ward and still reserve enough power to confront Kendrick. One person could knock out one ward but it would also knock them out for the count. They needed at least twenty witches just to take out the wards alone. And a separate army to storm Kendrick’s lair. “We need a minimum of thirty different witches. Double that if we want to stand a chance once we get to Kendrick.”

  Britta grabbed her phone and began rifling through it. “I can get maybe five people. Six?”

  Delilah sucked in a breath. That would even make a dent. “How powerful are they?”

  Britta shook her head. “Not very. They specialize in glamours only. They’ve never bothered with anything more advanced.”

  They needed more power. More witches.

  They needed Jewel.

  Cole’s sister Jewel was the most powerful witch Delilah had ever encountered, but all that power had gone to her head. She’d turned evil, destructive, and had become a danger to herself and to others. Cole and Delilah had set her up at a magical rehab facility to help her learn how to control it all. She’d only been there a week and a half. The program was supposed to take a minimum of six months. Often it took years.

  Delilah swerved the mini van she’d rented into park in the parking lot of Sunnydale Rehab Facility an hour away from Las Vegas, stationed in the middle of the desert. Britta pulled a separate mini van beside her and the two women stared up at the foreboding facility. Stars twinkled behind the gothic gray spires that pierced the sky. Scalloped gray shutters lined each window and an art deco awning covered the doorway. The place was the very definition of a haunted house. It looked like it had been plucked straight out of Transylvania and dropped in the middle of an expanse of red rocks.

  Britta rolled down the window. “At least it isn’t creepy. You sure this is safe?”

  Delilah shuddered. “I’m not sure of anything.” When Delilah and Cole had dropped Jewel off, the magic emanating from inside nearly knocked Delilah off her feet. Now she felt nothing except the heat of the desert wafting into the car. It had no wards like The Golden Leaf but it had other measures of protection to keep its charges inside and potential victims out. The wards quelled magic of all kinds inside the premises…but outside in the parking lot was still fair game.

  A few more mini vans pulled up beside Britta, each one boasting a gorgeous model of a girl with slim legs and flowing hair that couldn’t come from anything but extension or magic.

  “That’s Angie, Clara, Imogine, Beatrice, and Emily,” Britta said through the window, jutting toward each new mini van in turn.

  “They need to preserve as much energy as possible.” Getting rid of their own glamours would give them enough energy to create glamours for others in order to break them out of the facility.

  Britta’s face drained of color but she nodded and got out of her car, delivering the bad news to each girl in turn. One by one they removed their geodes. Their faces turned pale and their glamours flickered like a hologram before their real selves remained. Each girl was beautiful in their own right, but lacked some of the essential features that caused them to create the glamour in the first place. The gorgeous, leggy brunette turned out to be four foot nine inches tall. The girl with the perfect upturned nose now had t
o showcase her long, pointy one instead. Zits popped on the third girl’s face as her voluptuous breasts deflated into A-cups. Delilah didn’t understand why they went to such great lengths to alter their appearance. They looked perfect without their glamours.

  She passed out photos of all the Sunnydale patients as well as photos of the doctors plucked from the website. Photos were often stored with magical contracts when a patient entered a rehab facility. Britta had infiltrated the records room with Delilah earlier that day and plucked all the ones they could out of the files. Each girl took on three of the patients, except Delilah and Britta. They had a different role.

  She was already wearing the uniform of choice, a pair of scrubs and a white lab coat, purchased from a medical supply store an hour in the opposite direction. The other witches were already busy lighting a circle of white candles hidden behind the brigade of cars. Several hot pots sizzled with a variety of ingredients including angelica root, goldenseal root threads, and lemon balm, all of which aided in the creation of glamours. Each witch dipped a geode in the liquid, recited an incantation, and then anointed the geode under a fire. The witches visualized the patients’ current face while uttering a spell and then visualized the new face of the doctor while uttering a different spell. The geode locked in the spell.

  Once all the geodes had been infused with the spell and sealed in labeled Ziploc bags, Delilah tossed them into a tote bag along with lab coats on top.

  Britta handed a geode to Delilah and kept one for herself. “Ready?”