Hexed

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” I whispered to it. “Who the hell did this?”

“Beats me, honey bun. That was scary.”

So helpful. I finished with the mirror and started on the rest of the bathroom. The other two wandered out to the bedroom, tracking blood on the carpet. Fremont sat on the bed, dazed, his bloodstained coveralls planted on the quilt one of my aunts had made. Cassandra gazed out the window at the distant mountains in silence.

“Cassandra?” I asked, continuing to spray and wipe. I at least was one hell of a bathroom cleaner. My grandmother, who’d raised me, had been a stickler for cleanliness, and she’d trained me how to scrub at an early age.

Cassandra turned to me, and I stopped in mid-swipe. Her face was pale with fear, my always cool, always contained manager-receptionist looking like she wanted to be sick.

“You all right?” I asked her.

Cassandra shook her head. “I’m sorry, Janet.” She gave me another look of anguish and ran out of the room.

I HANDED FREMONT the rags and told him to keep wiping. I caught up to Cassandra on the stairs, but she wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t talk.

I’d never seen her like this, my unflappable manager who’d managed luxury hotels in California and who ran this place better than I ever could. I ordered her to accompany me into the saloon, which wasn’t open yet, and tell me what she knew.

We entered the saloon to see a broad-shouldered biker with black hair leaning over the bar to help himself to a beer. He took one look at me covered in blood, slammed down the mug, and rushed me. I found myself lifted in arms like hard steel, and I gazed into the blue eyes that had looked back at me the night I’d first lain with a man.

“What the hell happened?” he demanded.

Mick’s fire magic tingled through me, searching for injuries and ready to heal them. Because I was unhurt, my body started to respond the way it wanted to, with desire.

“I’m fine,” I said swiftly. “The blood isn’t mine.”

Would Mick set me on my feet and let me go? No, he slid his big hands along my back and pulled me closer. “I felt it in the wards. Something got in.”

He wanted to shift, to fight. Mick was a dragon, a giant black beast with black and silver eyes and a wingspan that rivaled a 747’s. As a human, his dragon essence was contained in the dragon tattoos that wound down his bare arms and in the fire tattoo that stretched across the small of his back.

“I was about to ask Cassandra all about it,” I said.

Cassandra had seated herself dejectedly at one of the empty tables. I’d restored the saloon to its original Wild West glory, complete with tin ceiling, varnished bar, and wide mirror on the wall. The magic mirror had shattered in its frame one night, the product of one of my harrowing adventures, but the fact that it was broken hadn’t dimmed either its magic or, unfortunately, its personality.

“I’m sensing a wicked imbalance in the force, sweet cheeks,” it said. “Micky, maybe you should get naked in case you have to shift.”

I envied the way Mick could utterly ignore the thing. To Mick, the mirror was simply a powerful talisman, good to have on hand, and the fact that it kept up nonstop sexual suggestions rarely bothered him. Mick and I had awakened it from dormancy one night while working some Tantric magic, which meant that the mirror now belonged to us. It never let us forget how we’d awakened it, and its ongoing innuendo drove me insane. But I’d never throw it away. Magic mirrors were rare and powerful, and the mage who owned one could work amazing magic.

I took a seat next to Cassandra. I badly needed a shower, and a beer wouldn’t hurt, but more than that I wanted to know why Cassandra had been so spooked by the blood. I’d never seen anything frighten my ultra- efficient hotel manager.

Cassandra studied her bunched fists that rested on the table. “I’m sorry, Janet. I never should have come here in the first place.”

“Yes, you should have. I can’t run this hotel without you. Why do you think the message was for you, anyway? It appeared when Fremont and I were up there alone.”

Cassandra looked straight into my eyes. “Because I used to work for John Christianson.”

She obviously expected me to clutch my chest and fall over in shock. I blinked. “Who is John Christianson?”

Mick answered for her. “He’s a filthy rich hotelier and real estate magnate. Owns half of Southern California—commercial real estate, hotels, anything high-dollar in Los Angeles and down the coast to San Diego. Prominent in social circles, contributes to more charities than anyone in the state.”

I spread my hands. Big business, especially big business in other states, was far away and unimportant to my day-to-day existence.

“He’s a first-class bastard,” Cassandra said with venom. “I worked at one of Christianson’s hotels, the ‘C’ in Los Angeles.”

All right, so even I’d heard of the “C,” which featured in Fremont’s favorite television shows about the rich and famous. The “C” was a boutique hotel in Beverly Hills that attracted celebrities, high-profile politicians, and the ultra-rich. They could check in for the weekend and have every need met and every decadent wish granted, without ever having to leave the building.

“What has the ‘C’ got to do with messages on my bathroom mirror?”

“Because the secret of Christianson’s success is deep, dark magic,” Cassandra said. “He can’t work magic himself, but he’s hired some of the best in the business—mages into the blackest arts. At first, when Christianson asked me to manage the ‘C,’ the top of his chain, I was thrilled. It would be a huge step forward in my career.”

“But . . .” With a setup like that, there was always a “but.”

Cassandra shivered. “Please don’t ask me what really goes on at the ‘C’—what you get with the most secret and expensive of packages. Let’s just say there are people out there who will do anything— anything—and pay any price, for pleasure. And please don’t ask me what Christianson expected me to do, with my magic, with . . . myself. One day, I’d had enough, and I left. Escaped is more like it. I didn’t tell anyone, didn’t plan anything. I just walked away.”

“And came to Magellan,” I finished, finally understanding why she’d turned up on my doorstep, looking for a job. “Interesting choice. Why here and not half the world away?”

“The first place they’d look is half the world away,” Cassandra said. “I thought I’d give a small town in the middle of nowhere a try. I changed my name and got you to hire me.”

“So you’re not really Cassandra Bryson?” I’d taken her information for tax purposes, and it had all checked out, but I conceded that a competent witch could have taken care of such trivialities.

I’d read Cassandra’s aura when she’d first arrived and saw what I saw now: a powerful witch who liked things clean and tidy, but without a taint of true evil. I’d liked her, she’d had experience running hotels, and I’d been out of my depth with this place and knew it.

“If you don’t mind, I won’t tell you what my real name is,” Cassandra said. “They can hear names, and use them.”

Mick gave her an understanding nod. He’d explained to me once that his name—the full version of it unpronounceable to me—wasn’t his true name, which would sound more like musical notes. Only a dragon and its dam knew its true name, because knowledge of a dragon’s name—and Cassandra had told me this part—could enslave it.

I also had a true name, a spirit name, one my father had given me the day he’d brought me home, which was between me, him, and the gods. Names were powerful things.

“I came to Magellan because of the vortexes around it,” Cassandra said. “What better place to hide my magic than in a place permeated with it? When I drove by your hotel and saw the wards all over it, I knew I’d struck lucky. Even if you hadn’t been looking for a manager, I’d have washed dishes for you, anything for a chance to live here. Plus your aura held so much innocence, Janet, I knew I could trust you.”

“My aura?” I stared. “Held innocence?” This was the first time in my life I’d heard