To Dance with the Devil (The Blood Singer Novels) Read Free

into two little sounds.
    I sighed. “I’m scared. I think…” I paused, trying to find the right words. “Okay, maybe I’m nuts, and I don’t have any proof, but ever since our office building was blown up, Chris has been pushing Dawna to quit. She told him no before, but I think she may give in to him after all.”
    Emma’s expression grew pained enough that I had the sinking feeling I’d hit the nail on the head … hard. Crap. I must have looked curious, because she blushed and frowned.
    “I can’t talk about it,” she said. I wondered if Dawna had said something to her or if Emma’s clairvoyance had picked something up. In either case, she wouldn’t tell me what she knew. If it was Dawna, Emma wouldn’t break a confidence, and if it was her magic, well, Emma and I both knew that sometimes talking about a vision of the future could make it come to pass. Or not. Either way, it was usually a good idea to say nothing.
    I gave Emma a look that spoke volumes, then went into the kitchen to get us some drinks.
    I poured Emma a glass of the wine she had brought, but I was in the mood for something different. Let it go, I told myself as I rummaged in the freezer for one of those pouches of premixed frozen cocktails. Available at the grocery store, you just stick ’em in the freezer for a half hour and they’re ready to go. Tasty, too. I found what I was looking for, salted the rim of a glass, and poured myself a margarita before heading back into the living room. I passed Emma her glass and raised mine.
    “L’chaim!”
    “To life!” Emma agreed, clinking her glass with mine before taking a long pull. “So, I understand you’ve put some ads out and are hiring. Are you looking for anything specific? Maybe someone male, and a mage?” She put a teasing note in her voice, but she was at least partly serious.
    I shook my head. “No. Bruno made it very clear. He wants to work at the university. Besides, I couldn’t afford him.”
    Bruno DeLuca: my fiancé in college, now my lover, my friend, and one of my favorite human beings on earth. He’s got power—he’d made those amazing knives of mine—plus brains and money. He’s sexy as hell. He can raise my pulse rate just walking into a room, even after all these years. You’d think I’d jump at the chance of bringing him into the company. Other people certainly do. I’ve seen some of the offers that have come his way from really major players.
    It was her turn to give me a narrow-eyed look. “Uh-huh, like he wouldn’t change his mind if you asked him. That’s not why you’re not doing it.”
    Ouch, that stung—probably because it was the truth. Bruno did want to work as a professor, to get out of the rat race in the private sector. I respected that. He’d made a ton of money making artifacts, but he’d wound up having no control over who used them or for what purposes. He didn’t like the idea of something he made being used for evil, but more than that, my honey is all about control.
    That’s one of the main reasons I didn’t want him as a business partner. He’s a take-charge kind of guy, and I wanted to be the one in charge of the company. I’d already dealt once with a man who wasn’t able to follow my lead in a crisis. The results had been spectacularly ugly. I wasn’t going through that again. No way.
    “Fine,” I admitted. “You win. I want to run the company and I don’t think he’d follow orders any better than John did. Been there. Done that. Wasn’t fun.”
    Emma didn’t even try to argue. Instead, she stared across the room, her eyes growing just a little vacant. She could have been looking at the future—she’s a clairvoyant, after all. Or it could have been just a reaction to the alcohol.
    I didn’t ask. If she wanted me to know something, she’d tell me. Instead, I put my empty glass down on top of a magazine on the coffee table and reached for a box.
    There were a lot of boxes. I’ve been living in the same place for