No Rest for the Witches Read Online Free

here.”
    â€œNo!” Phin snarled, raw with pain. With more emotion than Silas felt right hearing, somehow. “No, I have to—”
    He watched it happen; saw the way Naomi’s face closed. The life leached out of her expression, drained it of everything until all that stuck was a mask. Barely human. It reminded him of the Naomi he’d found once he came back to New Seattle. That perfect missionary.
    The one that had been so lousy at everything else.
    He half-turned. “West—”
    Too late. She crooked her arm and delivered a punch that made Silas’s jaw tingle in shared misery. It wrenched Phin half sideways, snapped his teeth together and rolled his eyes back into his head. Silas could only watch as Phin’s thrashing limbs went limp. His head thudded on the carpet, the fibers squelching where his legs splayed and went still.
    Joel froze, half-standing.
    Silence filled the room. Silence, and the coppery stench of blood.
    Naomi rose to her feet, perfect missionary mode.
    Or nearly so. Silas saw her fingers shake as she wiped her bloody palms down her artfully shredded black jeans. “Is the operative dead?”
    He hesitated, then nodded. “If he hasn’t come after us, then I hit something vital. Odds are, he had enough time to radio in.”
    Her eyes flicked away. “Fine. We don’t have the time to heal him here, so let’s get the hell out of here before his backup shows up.”
    â€œJoel, did you come with anything?” The man shook his head, white with strain where his own blood hadn’t streaked him red and brown, and Silas handed him his gun. “Shoot anything that moves.”
    He bent, pulled Clarke into a fireman’s carry, and straightened to meet Naomi’s hard, desperate gaze.
    A million words floated there; he didn’t need to ask to know it.
    But she didn’t vocalize any of them. Full mouth tightening, she turned away.

 
    Chapter Three
    A mong the scars she’d earned from Timeless, beside the grief and anger and the soul-wrenching realization that she’d fallen in love with a man who represented everything she hated, Naomi West had walked away with something else.
    Witchcraft.
    Timeless had been New Seattle’s foremost spa and resort, the premier gateway to a vacation of leisure, relaxation, beautifying treatments, and massages. And, of course, discretion. Phin Clarke and his mothers, Lillian and Gemma, had made it a haven for the wealthy and the elite.
    More like a prison. Pretty and gilded, sure, but fuck all for freedom.
    When the Mission had sent her in to infiltrate the ranks, she’d been under orders to locate Joe Carson, a missionary gone rogue. What she and the Mission didn’t know was that under all the glitz and glamour, the Clarkes were running an underground escape operation for people the Church accused of heresy. And for good fucking reason: Gemma Clarke had been a witch. The keeper of something they called the fountain.
    A heretical power that she’d passed to Naomi when Carson killed her.
    Now, as Naomi surfaced from the healing trance that always left her feeling out of sorts, she blinked down at Phin Clarke’s sedated figure and swallowed hard as a rush of tears clogged her aching throat.
    The stupid son of a bitch.
    But he was an alive son of a bitch.
    The part of her that had been given over to the fountain knew it; it translated the certainty of his recovery to her in gentle waves of serenity, of calm. It wasn’t her that mended the ragged flesh of Phin’s wounds, or that filled his body with something that would allow him to heal his wounds at an accelerated rate.
    Most of the time, Naomi felt like she wasn’t anything but a glorified vase for the damned thing.
    But it did its job. She lifted her hand from Phin’s warm, bare chest. It rose on a slow breath.
    Relief nearly buckled her.
    Getting him down to Old Seattle, navigating him along the one safe