The Demon Abraxas Read Free

of power prickled between her tongue and palate. Magic recently used left this trace in the air like the charged ions before a storm. Ana didn’t have magic, so someone had used it on her.
    Sabel hurried back to her car where she could focus. In the driver’s seat, she opened her purse and pulled out the short golden hair she’d taken from the back of Ana’s dress earlier in the evening. She’d taken it to use in case she needed to follow Ana to Helen—if Helen wasn’t really at her apartment—but now she could use it to find Ana herself. She wrapped the hair around her fingers doubling and tripling its potency, then she brought her hand close to her mouth and breathed over it the words, “Lead me.”
    The hair tugged her hand toward the north. She started the car and drove, feeling the pull of the hair around her fingers. She’d just crossed the Golden Gate Bridge when the sensation cut off abruptly.
    “Shit!” she said, “shit, shit shit,” and hit her fist against the steering wheel with each repeat of the word.
    If they had killed Ana too, the hair would still tug for hours. No tug meant Ana was deep inside someone else’s magic. For that to happen to a woman with no magic of her own… Sabel had no way to know exactly how bad that could be, but it was very bad.

Chapter Two
     
    Ana opened her eyes on the dark blur of a moving road. She was slumped in the passenger seat of a car—from the look of the hood it was the BMW she’d been watching—and she couldn’t move. I’ve been drugged , she thought in some far corner of her mind. Through force of will, she made her head roll left enough to see the man driving.
    Pay attention , she told herself, you have to stay awake and find a way out of this.
    He was extraordinarily beautiful, in a rugged, thick-featured way. In profile a brutally strong cheekbone framed a darkly-lashed eye and thin, sculpted lips. At least he wouldn’t be hard to describe to the police, even if she only saw one side of his face. The fingers of her right hand twitched and then crept together into a fist.
    “What did you do to me?” she asked, slurring and stumbling through the words.
    His visible eyebrow lifted. “You can still talk? Delightful. Too bad I can’t keep you around.” The way he sighed at those last words made her cold inside.
    Her fear came with a bottomless grief. There had been kids in her hometown, the well-dressed ones with good colleges in their futures, who had expected her to die young and would be surprised to know she’d made it to thirty. She’d promised herself she’d outlive all of them and she had a long way to go yet to pull that off.
    “Where are you taking me?” Ana asked. Her mind seemed blessedly clear in contrast to her uncooperative body.
    He laughed and the rich baritone sound was bitterly silky in Ana’s ears. “I’m not going to tell you,” he said. “You’re a gift for some friends.”
    “You must not like those friends very much.”
    He didn’t reply and they drove into Marin, winding into a neighborhood of well-kept houses with large yards. Soon he would stop the car and she was going to fight her way out. The old familiar adrenaline of anticipated pain flared inside her, burning off the remaining sluggishness in her limbs. She hated men who thought a busty blond woman like herself could neither think nor fight, and she aimed to make this one pay for his mistake.
    He pulled up a long driveway lined with young sycamores, their leaves yellow-gray in the moonlight. As the car slowed, Ana clicked open the door and threw herself out. Her body hit the ground at an angle and she tumbled. The ridiculous part of her mind swore about the dirt grinding into the silk dress as she scrambled up, her muscles still slow and clumsy.
    “Grab her!” a new voice shouted from behind. Molasses seemed to encase her, like running in a dream, her legs wouldn’t do what she wanted and she stumbled down the driveway at half speed, moving by the