The Spell Read Online Free

looked back up at Charlie and Lily. Charlie’s real name was Claire St. James. The turned werewolf stood a touch taller than Lily, her long and lithe musculature the result of being a female born werewolf, enhanced by the fact that she was also a dormant and had been turned by her fiancé, Malcolm Cole, two months ago. The fact that she’d been training in martial arts for more than a decade didn’t hurt.
    Her long, thick, strawberry blonde hair was pulled back into a pony tail at the moment and she wore no make up. She didn’t need any. On her wrists were leather bands, much like the ones that her mate, Malcolm Cole used to wear. For Charlie, they served two purposes. They absorbed any sweat she created while playing the drums. And they hid the ancient gypsy curse that marked the insides of her arms.
    Beside her, Lily Kane, formerly Lily st. Claire, spun toward the children on the mattress a few yards away, her long, gold hair fanning out in a halo of honey-shimmer behind her. Lily’s stark amber eyes flashed with both pain and anger as she took in the tiny forms that she had most likely witnessed in her vision, bound and helpless and naked on the filth of the mattress beneath them.
    Lily had become a werewolf two years ago, when she’d mated with one Daniel Kane, police chief of Baton Rouge, and alpha male to the extreme. They made a striking pair, even if both were so head strong that their marriage often times found itself on rocky ground.
    One clean swipe of Lily’s sharp extended claw had the children’s wrists unbound. But the two tiny forms remained where they were, trembling violently and otherwise unmoving, too traumatized to do anything else.
    The man in the chair stood. “You haven’t come to help, then.” His reedy voice shook with insanely calm rage, and the knife in his hand glimmered, flashing against the magical aura surrounding the women.
    “You sick, sorry son of a bitch,” came Charlie’s voice. Her ice blue eyes were glowing in warning. Her teeth were bared, her fangs elongated.
    Dannai took all of this in within seconds. Sheer, precious seconds that gave her a feel for the situation so that she could summon any magic they might need to get them all through this without inviting tragedy.
    The man lunged toward Charlie.
    But Charlie was a martially trained werewolf and mate to Malcolm Cole, perhaps the most powerful werewolf aside from the Overseer. She carried his magic in her veins. And his curse on her wrists. Both were a boon to her now, in a time like this, when right needed a lot of help and wrong needed to be vanquished.
    Charlie lunged forward as well. However, where as the naked man stumbled across the concrete, his knife hand flashing in warning, Charlie seemed to move without any warning at all. Her beautiful form blurred into motion. It stood in one place one second – and was on top of the would-be rapist and killer in the next.
    Dannai closed her eyes when Charlie ripped out the man’s throat. She always closed her eyes. She couldn’t stand to see it; couldn’t stand to watch it. She could still hear it, and that was bad enough.
    She knew that Charlie didn’t want to do what she did, that she didn’t want to be the assassin in their trio of supernatural saviors. But Danny, the witch, was not allowed to kill. If she ever used her magic to do such mortal harm…. Well, it was a road she could not go down, for so many reasons. Their choice was to either allow Charlie to destroy every criminal they engaged, or restrain those criminals and chance the authorities.
    In the end, all three women felt that they could not afford to allow an imperfect judiciary system to help criminals as sick as these back onto the streets where they could do more irreparable harm.
    It was a pact they’d made two months ago, when they’d begun this routine. If they were going to be called by the Fates to fight this kind of fight – then they were going to fight it
their
way.
    So, Charlie killed.