Darkness Unbound Read Free Page B

Company, to liberate a child, who turned out to be a teenage pre-magus. The kid might be minus a leg after the ordeal, but he seemed happy enough puttering around with these eight testosterone gladiators.
    She pulled on the new clothes, shocked that they fit. Perfectly. Hot damn. Give Christian a few gold stars. The skin-tight black jeans hugged her long legs like a second skin. She knew it must’ve been hard to get extra-tall in these. At almost six feet, her size was hard to find. The black leather boots were a wow. How in the world did Christian know she wore a size ten?
    What to do with the blond hair disaster? No hair dryer around. No flat iron. The strands had already started a mutinous wave. For work she usually pulled the mass scalp-tight into a ponytail or bun. She looked younger than thirty-two, and was self-conscious about maintaining an air of authority. Her life as of forty-eight hours ago had been about getting respect from the testosterones. That required taking femininity out of the picture.
    She’d just resumed field duty after six months’ probation. What a relief to get off a desk. She and her field partner, Kane Langford, had been benched after screwing up an op. Bad intel. Wrong place. Wrong time. Too many on her team died as a result of their mistake. She still didn’t forgive herself.
    Last month the Company sent her and Kane back into the field without explanation for the probation lift. She suspected her boss had reached maximum tolerance of her shitty computer skills. In her defense, if they’d invested in something other than second-rate Asian crap, then the computer systems probably wouldn’t have been so easy to mess up.
    For now, she had no options for her hair, and left it down. The blond strands fell past her shoulders. She shrugged. Her goal wasn’t to impress tonight.
    As she pushed out of the bathroom Christian emitted a whistle. “The Amazon goddess has arrived. Not bad.”
    “How’d you know my sizes?” Her cheeks burned under his appreciative perusal. She resisted the urge to squirm.
    He gave her a told-you-so smile that pushed her smack-him button hard. She granted him her patented fuck-off glower that had him snapping his lips closed over his teeth.
    “You might say I’m a connoisseur of everything female. I knew you had the chest to fill at least a C. That bra is way better than the uni-boob look you had going on. What is it with hotties hiding themselves in ill-fitting clothes these days?” With a head shake he headed for the door. “Let’s give your new look a test drive on the other guys. The single ones. If I prance you in front of Dakar or Ashor, we’d be lucky if either noticed you were female.”
    She followed him down the hallway of the colonial style house toward a staircase, dodging packed cardboard boxes. “Moving?” she asked.
    “Yep. We’re going to Mexico. Hashishins found us here. They’re this Arabic black magik cult and a major pain in the ass. They keep us in business by summoning daemons. Every night they send ensorcelled snakes after us, which is one reason we’ve got to move. Those snakes are deadly to the kids and the ladies. Well, the humans, not you once you’re one of us.” He paused at the top of a massive staircase. “You just wait until you get a turn on nighttime snake duty. It sucks, especially when they bite.” He shuddered.
    “Yeah, I saw one attack one of you guys while we were rescuing Cy. Why not eliminate all the Hashishins?”
    “That’s against the rules. No killing humans unprovoked.”
    “Seems to me like they’re the ones striking first. What if I don’t want this job?”
    He snorted. “As if any of us has a choice…welcome to the biggest life fuck of all time.” He led a downward jog and paused before entering a swinging wooden door. “You can’t say no to the gods when they decide you’re the reincarnated soul of one of their half-human offspring.” He pushed into a modern kitchen where several guys stood