Julie Leto - Something Wicked

To find him, she’d tapped into skills she’d tried to deny since the day she’d been released from juvie for the last time. Once she was independent-minded enough to realize that her mother’s “games” deprived other people of their hard-earned cash and sense of self-worth, Josie had tried to stop the endless stream of cons and grift operations her mother had employed to keep them from living on the streets. But she’d never been strong enough or clever enough to change her mother’s chosen way of life. By the time she was a few months away from turning eighteen, Josie had known her chances of a normal childhood had run out.

Determined to at least keep her adult life cleansed of bad karma, Josie had celebrated her birthday by saying sayonara to her mother and moving back to Chicago. She took control of valuable real estate left to her by an aunt, opened her store and embraced the Wiccan religion of her grandmother. She’d completely reinvented herself, erasing a past fraught with illegal activity and devoid of hope. If she could accomplish such a transformation alone, then no matter what had happened to Rick to send him into this downward spiral, she knew he could come out of the darkness.

She’d make sure of it.

Revitalized, she tucked the necklace Regina had given her down into her T-shirt. Valentine’s Day. For others, it was the holiday of love. For Rick and her, it was D-day.

She knocked on the door, then pressed her ear to the scarred wood to hear if anyone moved inside.

Was that a groan?

She knocked again. “Rick?”

A grunt? Was he hurt?

“Rick!”

She tried the lock. It wouldn’t budge. She glanced down the hall, but nixed the option of running for help. The last time she’d hesitated for this long, Rick had eluded her, disappeared with nothing but a barely warm trail in his wake.

She backed up, aimed her foot at the area near the knob and kicked hard.

Pain shot from her heel to her thigh. She hobbled backward, cursing, when a crash sounded beyond the door. Instinct took over. She attacked again and this time, the lock surrendered, the door swung open and Josie toppled into the room.

The smell caught her instantly—the potent sweetness of leather, gun oil and shampoo. And…sage? She bent down to find wilted leaves strewn liberally across the threshold, then followed a trail to another collection beneath the window. Sage protected against evil. That together with the crisp smell of aftershave, the unexpected scent of a man she’d chased through Detroit, Pittsburgh, Boston and now, New York City, brightened her outlook. Maybe he wasn’t so lost after all. She clung desperately to her impressions of Rick Fernandez—salt of the earth. Even tempered. Open-minded. And at this moment—passed out.

The grimy windows, shaded by blinds with broken and bent slats, blocked out most of the neon glow from the signs outside. But in the center of the room, on a bed devoid of any covering except for crisp, surprisingly white sheets, lay Rick, facedown and fast asleep.

A clock radio, blinking the midnight hour for likely the last few years, had been knocked to the floor. Appropriate, since time stood still the minute she spotted him on the bed, covered only by a towel. His skin damp, his hair spiked from a shower and an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s clutched in his hand, he was breathtaking.

His dark skin and muscles, which looked hard as stone even in alcohol-induced sleep, made her mouth water. A gold chain cut a contrasting line across his neck, and she imagined that the cross he always wore was tangled somewhere behind his head. They’d only had one real date six months ago and, despite their instant attraction, they’d opted to take things slowly. Now that she’d seen him nearly naked, Josie wondered what kind of a fool of a woman agreed to such a Puritanical condition.

Truth was, from the moment she’d met him, she’d fantasized about Rick naked in bed.

Just not exactly like this.

She shut the door. When she turned back, she gasped. He was sitting up, a gun leveled at her heart, his eyes glazed by a mixture of exhaustion and alarm.

“Rick!”

“Josie?”

She stepped into the dim light streaking in from the window. He scrambled across the bed and snapped on the table lamp.

“Josie.”

For a second, she thought she might have heard relief in his voice, but looking at the deep frown on his face, she figured the sound was simply wishful thinking.

With all the will she possessed, she remained rooted to the spot. She had to be smart. Keep her head. Think coolly. Logically. Just like Rick would have. Before.

“Yes, Rick. It’s me.”

He laid the gun on the mattress but didn’t take his hand off the grip. “What are you doing here?”

She pressed her lips together tightly, unsure at first what words would come out of her mouth. Why was she here? Really?

“I came to find you.”

He snorted. “Congratulations.”

Rick leaned over to the nightstand, exchanged the gun for a package of cigarettes and, finding it empty, threw it, disgusted, onto the floor. Glancing around, Josie doubted this hotel had smoking or nonsmoking designations. She was certain this dump had no maid service, much less the room service she needed to order up a pot of coffee to counteract the slight slur in Rick’s speech and the thick red rims around his once bright and shining dark eyes. Only six months ago, he’d been a cop. A detective. Decorated. Respected. Likely well acquainted with man’s inhumanity to man and yet, when she’d literally run into him at the police station on the day of her first and only paranormal premonition, his gaze had held a smart optimism that had instantly grabbed Josie’s attention.

Now, she saw none of that inner glow. She saw shadows. Anger. A deep, ravaging sadness. Hadn’t she expected this? She’d prepared herself for the jaded darkness that had to come with a man who’d just learned that the evil he’d been fighting all his career was a drop in the bucket compared to the evil that existed in secret. So why was a lump forming in her throat, which was so tight she was scared to breathe?

“Mac wants to meet with you,” she said, having practiced this speech to so many hotel mirrors since she began her search that she had it down pat. Mac Mancusi had been the Chief of Detectives when Rick had disappeared. He’d also been the only other Chicago cop to have witnessed the murders that had sent the city into a tizzy. The mayor dead. The lifeless body of one of the most powerful defense attorneys right beside him. Obviously, a murder-suicide. Obviously—only because Regina had manipulated the scene, with Rick’s reluctant help, to reflect just that scenario.

In reality, the mayor, a murderous warlock, had tried to kill Mac and Lilith so they couldn’t stop him from using the city’s criminals to do his bidding, and the attorney, a rogue witch, had been his right-hand man. Mac and Lilith had stopped the evil plot, but at great cost. Particularly to Rick.

“Mac, huh?” he asked coolly. “I figured he was the one who was two steps behind me this whole time.”

She eyed him quizzically. “No, that was just me.”

“I had no idea you had bloodhounds in your Latina genes,” he snarled, emphasizing the Cuban-American accent he’d long ago learned to play down.

She, on the other hand, suppressed the instinct to tell him off in rapid-fire Spanish.

“Our ancestors did find the new world,” she snapped back. “What’s one rogue cop to a whole continent?” She cursed. Now was not the time for petty exchanges. She did not have a lot of time. “Mac nearly died that night, Rick. Took two months before Lilith recovered completely. If not for them, a lot of people would have fallen under the influence of a very evil man.”