WICKED DEEDS

I’ve always dreamed of monsters. Nightmares chase me through the dark. Well, at least since I turned thirteen and my mother secretly bound my magic to a demon. Dark things have stalked my dreams, the terror waking me from sleep to twisted sheets and my heart thumping so damned loud in my ears it’s deafening.

I rarely remember much of the detail when I wake—a small mercy I’m happy to take. But some nights, the fear still lingers. It drives me from my bed to work or read or watch mindless vidstreams until the sun rises and I feel safe again. I’m used to it now. Both the nightmares and the lack of sleep. And to tell the truth, since I met Damon Riley—tech god, billionaire and the man who I know would guard me in my dreams if he could manage it—the nightmares have come less often.

Correction. Were coming less often. Because for the last month or so, they’ve been back. Only this time it’s not a demon haunting me.

It’s a photograph.

One that, to anyone but me, contains nothing alarming at all. Two people on a beach, smiling at the camera, wearing skimpy swimwear, tans, and the satisfied air of people having regular good sex.

The woman is beautiful. Long red hair, dazzling green eyes, a face that could launch a thousand ships if invading by ocean to steal a woman away to marry her was still a thing. The man beside her is no slouch either. His pale blue eyes are almost shocking against his deep tan and his dark hair is pushed back from his face as though it’s still damp. His grin could charm a brick wall.

So, no, the photo itself isn’t alarming.

But the woman is my mother, and her companion is Jack Miller, a dangerous witch who corrupted VR technology to a virtual prison, kidnapped Damon, and burned down my house with the assistance of imps. A man who consorts with demonkind can be nothing but evil.

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn they’d crossed paths at some point. My mother—Sara—always had time for men with money and an inclination to spend it on her. Until she became a mother.

Once she’d had me, she laid low, dragging us through a series of middle of nowhere small towns across half the country. But she’d often told me how she’d lived the high life before I’d arrived to cramp her style, how she could have any man she wanted. When she was drunk and bitter and ranting at me over something I didn’t remember doing. I’d tried to let those moods wash over me, focusing on her body language, not what she was saying, trying to judge when I could safely retreat to bed and leave her alone with her resentment.

As for Jack, well, I don’t know him. We’ve only crossed paths in person a few times, but he’s charming. The kind of man not inclined to say no to bedding a beautiful woman who lets him think she’s charmed. Sara was a master at that, though I doubted she’d ever been truly charmed by anyone. She was far too focused on working a situation to her own advantage.

I didn’t know how they met. I wanted to believe they didn’t. But Damon’s security team had analyzed the image and hadn’t found any signs of it being a fake.

So I had to assume it was real. Resulting in broken sleep and a brain spinning in too many directions, struggling with memories of not only the recent pain Jack had caused but also of my mother and a childhood I’ve done my best to forget.

Though my mother had always been unforgettable. Even when she was trying to blend in in small town after small town, I watched people turn to her, drawn like moths to a flame. Willing to let her spin her web of dazzling-sounding fortunes and useless potions, handing over their money and thanking her for the privilege.

She never told me who my father was. From her I inherited my magic, though it took me accidentally breaking that bond with a demon to discover my magic and my mother’s lies. So I came late to my power. But I’d understood tech instinctively from the first moment I’d learned to use it. Which I didn’t get from Sara—who would no more have learned to code than fly to the moon—or her parents, who were reluctantly competent users of gadgets at best.

Jack, though. Jack was a tech genius. He’d made his money inventing a refinement in holographics that helped revolutionize the industry. He’d taken the money when he and his partners received an offer they couldn’t refuse and sold up. He’d grown it making smart investments in new technologies. To the rest of the world, he was a smart, savvy Samaritan, helping small tech businesses succeed. But I knew the dark side he hid so well.

Which is why the photo was haunting me. The metadata for the image was limited. We knew the location—a small private island in the Bahamas, which these days was mostly underwater—and the date it was taken.

Ten months before I was born.

The date made my stomach twist every time I thought about it. Sara had never been one to hold on to men for long—usually because she got what she wanted and got out—but being with Jack in the Bahamas suggested some degree of seriousness.

It was possible she’d dumped him not long after, gone home and found someone new in time to get knocked up.

The island, being private and now no longer inhabitable, had no records of who had come and gone thirty-odd years ago. Damon’s sources confirmed Jack and Sara’s passports had been processed in Los Angeles, leaving the country on a private jet a week before the photo had been taken and returning two weeks after.

That was the sum total of information we had.

Nothing to calm my suspicions. My mother had been estranged from my grandparents well before I’d been born and they’d always told me they had no idea who my father was. My birth certificate had Sara’s name only.

I had no way of knowing for sure if my hunch was right, unless I could get a DNA sample from Jack.

But there’d be no DNA if we couldn’t find Jack. He’d been eluding Damon’s efforts to hunt him down for almost a year now.

Did I even want to know? Jack was a criminal. Of both the human and magical varieties. I’d always clung to the hope my dad had been some poor normal dude Sara had duped along the way. She fell firmly into the category of wicked witch. I didn’t want to believe I had criminals on both sides of my gene pool.

Ugh. I swiped the image closed. The datapad landed with a thump as I tossed it onto the far end of the sofa I was occupying in Damon’s living room. He’d gone to bed an hour or so ago. Any sane woman would have joined him by now.

Instead, I’d told myself I’d finish some work on an analysis I’d done for a client first. I’d lasted about five minutes before I pulled up the picture again. Staring at it for most of an hour hadn’t yielded any blinding insight.

Nope. All it had done was make me edgy, anxious. The kind of jittery that told me sleep was going to elude me, unless I did something to burn it off.

The sane solution was, once again, joining Damon and jumping him. My favorite form of exercise.

But Damon had been yawning when he’d arrived home. Being CEO of a global empire was hard work, even when he wasn’t dealing with extracurricular issues like Jack and all the other complications the magical world kept dumping in our laps. He’d been pushing himself too hard since we’d arrived home from the UK. At first he blamed jet lag for the shadows under his eyes, but I knew better.

He was angry—and felt guilty—that Jack had once again evaded him. Angry I’d risked myself traveling through the Fae realms to try to catch Jack. Angry he couldn’t protect me from things like Usuriel, the Lord of the Nichtkin, deciding to kiss me when I’d made a bargain to share memories with him to free a tanai-fol girl who wanted to return to the human world from his clutches.

I couldn’t fix any of it, other than being there when he wanted to talk about it. I could, at least, let him get some sleep.

Cassandra Tallant, the head of the Cestis—the witches’ ruling council—in the United States had told me to give him some time to process it all. Simply being in the Fae realm was enough to throw most humans for a loop. As she was one of the strongest witches in the country and had three decades or so of life experience on me, I was taking her advice.

So if I wanted to work off my own frustration tonight, I was going to have to do it the old-fashioned way and make use of Damon’s high-tech home gym.

I’d already had a training session with Callum Dune—the s’ealg oiche warrior who was training me to fight demons the Fae way—earlier in the day. I was starting to enjoy fighting with him, now I’d grown more comfortable with using a sword. Though now Callum was working on getting me to use magic at the same time as fighting, so it was harder than ever. But his sessions usually left me physically worn out. Tired enough to sleep through the night.

I could try that approach here. Use the treadmill to settle my nerves. That and one of Cassandra’s always-effective herbal teas might get me to sleep. The tea was the last resort. Cassandra was an herbalist whose talent was undeniable, but she favored efficacy over taste for her concoctions. At least she did for me. Most of the things she made me drink ranged in flavor from grassy to outright compost. I put honey or sugar in them when I could, but it didn’t help much.

But her teas were better than taking sleeping meds. I’d had too many nights where I’d admitted defeat, taken a pill to sleep, and wound up trapped in an unending nightmare, unable to startle myself awake. I slept, yes, but never felt any more rested.

I had to hope the treadmill would work.

I padded down the corridor toward the gym. I’d already changed into leggings and a tee before dinner, which made things simpler, and I kept sneakers in the gym. The room took up a good chunk of the rear of the house, the windows looking down into the back garden—the square footage of the grounds was too large to be thought of simply as a yard, unlike the tiny patch of land at the back of my house in Berkeley. Solar lights twinkled discreetly among the trees and flower beds and along the walls, but the light was set to low levels at this time of night, when the garden should be empty. The property had more than enough wards and mundane security measures to keep most threats out.

Damon had made his fortune young and was well-versed in keeping himself and everyone he cared about safe.

The various pieces of sleek black and silver gym equipment gleamed at me as Madge—the not-quite AI who ran Damon’s systems, including the house comp—brightened the lights in response to my presence. Every weight machine you could ever want, plus a huge open area for sparring or free weights or yoga or whatever else people more excited by exercise than I was, chose to do to amuse themselves.

Then there were the cardio options. Treadmill. Elliptical. Rowing machine. All positioned in front of the windows so you could admire the gardens as you sweated. Of course, if I asked, Madge would darken the windows and project a vidstream onto them instead. Or send music to my headphones.

I slipped the headphones on. At this hour of the night, there wouldn’t be much to see outside and I wasn’t in the mood for a movie or the news. I stared out at the garden, not paying much attention, while I tried to decide if I wanted to choose treadmill or elliptical.

Before I’d picked my form of torture, something caught my eye. A flicker of movement between garden beds. I frowned and stepped closer to the windows. Well, French doors. They opened out onto a small deck with stairs down to the garden.

For a moment I saw nothing but waving grasses, but then another flash caught my eyes. A patch of darkness that didn’t fit.

If it had been my house, I’d have assumed a stray cat but, between the height of Damon’s fences and all the security, I’d never seen any animals other than birds in this garden.

Well, I’d seen an imp once. That didn’t count.

The patch of darkness moved. Flowed almost too fast toward the house. I stepped back, ready to get Madge to alert the guards, when it took a running leap, landing on the deck, and suddenly I had no trouble identifying it.

Bigger than a cat, though mostly cat shaped. A foxier face with two large golden eyes. Long black and gray fur shifting slightly as it stared at me. And the dead giveaway that it wasn’t a cat: two long tails, shifting slowly to trace sinuous patterns in the air.

A nixling. A creature from the Fae realm. I’d met one once before, traveling through Lady Cerridwen’s territory with Callum and his twin sister, Gráinne. That nixling had been friendly, though Callum had told me they were excellent hunters.

Right now, I wasn’t so worried about whether the nixling was friendly, as I was about what the hell it was doing here. The door to the realm was located in Berkeley, not San Francisco.

And it was, as far as I knew, still closed. Only Fae with explicit permission from the Elders were able to leave. Unlike witches, normal humans didn’t know about the Fae. So random Fae creatures shouldn’t be wandering the streets of the city.

The nixling yawned, flashing long sharp teeth, and sat back on its haunches, tails curling around its feet like a cat. It stared at me, head cocked slightly.

If it had been a cat, I would have read it as curious, but this was a Fae creature. Curious, maybe. Something to be wary of? Absolutely.

“Madge,” I said softly, not moving in case I spooked the creature. “Call Callum.”

Callum was Fae. He probably wouldn’t be asleep. He should answer my call, if he wasn’t entertaining himself in ways that were none of my business.

And he did. “Maggie? Is something wrong?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think one of your cats got out.”

Magic just keeps getting more complicated, fight for justice, continuing relationship, found family

Magic, demons, kidnapping, blood, past loss of parent, past loss of grandparents, parental abandonment, family secrets

You’ll get this closer to pub date!

Series: TechWitch Book 6

Next book in series: Wicked Lies

Publisher: emscott enterprises

Publication date: 15 April 2025

ISBN eBook: 9781923157248

ISBN Paperback: 9781923157316