“I hope that’s enough,” she said, suddenly very worried.
Alejandro opened his hands to show her that he’d brought all of her remaining vials.
“I figured that if Mac outweighs the cat by a factor of ten or so, you might need all of it,” he said, but then he blew out a deep breath. “It was probably stupid. I have no idea how your magic works.”
Rose stared up at him, intrigued. A word had been floating around the edges of her consciousness, and she finally realized what it was.
Fierce.
That was the word. Fierce suited him perfectly. He was beautiful and ferocious, and she wanted to run away and step closer all at the same time.
“It was a good idea,” she told him, because part of her wanted to soothe and comfort this man who quite clearly had never needed either. Instead, she took a deep breath of her own.
“Let’s give it a try.”
One by one, she began uncapping vials, pouring each carefully on stone Mac’s head. One by one, the potion failed to do anything but drip, in pink sparkly failure, off of Mac’s nose and ears and on to the grass.
Finally, when she’d used every drop of potion, she and Alejandro waited and watched for several long minutes. At some point, she realized she was holding his hand—or he was holding hers—and her breath caught in her throat at the feel of his strong, elegant fingers wrapped around her own. At that moment, two things became very, very clear:
Alejandro was trouble, and Mac was still a statue.
Dark and Deadly: Eight Bad Boys of Paranormal Romance by Jennifer Ashley, Alyssa Day, Felicity Heaton, Erin Kellison, Laurie London, Erin Quinn, Bonnie Vanak and Caris Roane
CHAPTER 5
Alejandro clicked his phone shut and stared at it in disgust. He’d checked in with the office and told them a flat-out lie. Three, in fact. He was fine, Mac was fine, the mission was going great, and very funny on the basilisk.
He stared at the slightly pink stone statue of his partner and realized that everything was very far from fine. Rose had turned about seven shades of pale, yanked her hand out of his, and run back into the house, muttering something about stirring up a more potent spell. Alejandro was back to wondering whether she was crazy or just incompetent.
No. After all, he'd seen the cat transform from an ugly statue to a scruffy and enraged live animal. The potion worked. It was just something in the proportion that was off. Or at least, that was what he had to tell himself, because any other result was unacceptable.
He patted Mac's stone arm. “We are going to fix this, buddy. You can count on it.”
Then, feeling like a complete idiot for talking to a statue, he turned to follow Rose inside. A flicker of movement at the edge of the bush where he'd seen the lizard chicken caught his eye, and he whirled around, raising his gun at the same time.
“Oh no you don't, you ugly little flying rat,” he said. “Not this time. I've brought the true death to hundreds of vampires. You can bet I'm not going to let a rodent get the better of me.”
He rolled his eyes and muttered a string of oaths in Spanish. First he was talking to a statue, and now he was talking to a lizard. Maybe they had special padded rooms for P-Ops agents who went insane on the job.
The basilisk peeked its head out again, and Alejandro pulled the trigger. But just as he fired, a hair-raising scream startled him enough that he flinched and missed his target altogether. The rodent ran back behind the bushes, squawking like mad, and Alejandro whipped his head around to find who had ruined his aim with that gut-wrenching scream.
A blond teenager who looked a lot like Rose was running across the garden path toward him, her hands held up, palms forward, as if to stop him.
“Don't you dare kill him,” she shouted. “What kind of a monster are you? A big man like you picking on a defenseless animal. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
Her lips moved as if she were chanting, but he couldn't hear the words. A moment later, a bright yellow blob of energy, about the size of Alejandro's closed fist, came hurtling toward him. He jumped to one side, and it should have missed him altogether, but the energy ball changed direction midflight and smacked him in the arm.
It felt like a mild shock, but these were witches. Who knew what they could do with their powers? He looked down at his arm, expecting to see a hole burned through it, but found nothing more than a small scorch mark on his sleeve.#p#分页标题#e#
The door to Rose's kitchen banged open behind him.
“Buttercup Astrid Cardinal! How many times have I told you not to attack the guests?”
Alejandro turned his head to see Rose standing, hands on hips, on the small patio outside her back door.