Darkness curled around Marga.This, however, was different from the cold black swallowing her whole amid her crumbling world. Instead of the icy, numbing nausea that had crawled into her every cell, the darkness enveloping her now was rich, velvety, warm. Cocooning her, humming around her, it pulsed in sync with the beat of her heart.A part of her recognized the lethal edge in this dark energy, reminded her of the destruction this power had wrought just shortly before. She knew the danger whispering underneath it. And yet, as the darkness stroked along her senses, mingled with her own magic, nurtured it, something within Marga unfurled in the complete absence of fear.Taking a deep breath, she inhaled Atticus distinctive male scent, and opened her eyes—to darkness, again. She still couldn’t see a thing. A slight shifting of her position told her why. Atticus had curled her up in his lap, her head pressed facedown into his chest, and he’d wrapp

She banged her head back against the seat and uttered a cute sound of frustration. “Gods, getting some straight info out of you is like pulling teeth. What did you do to piss off your own kind?”  “Must be my stunning good looks. They just can’t take the combined force of my gorgeousness.”  Even without looking, he knew she glared at him. It made him want to laugh.  “Spill it already, Mr. Self-Absorbed!”  “All right, all right,” he whined, “I’m telling! Just please, please don’t witch-slap me.” Putting a hand up as if to shield his head from a blow, he gave a mock sob.  The Marga-glare intensified, and he grinned, slanting a glance at her.  “What I’m doing for you now…Well, I used to do that for a living.”  “Annoying the hell out of people?”  He chuckled at that. &ldqu

Marga awoke to the faint sound of her cell phone ringing. With an effort, she pried her eyes open. The pull of sleep was so strong, it took her a moment to see anything at all, to get her brain working in a logical way. Her bones were molten in her body, every single muscle weighed down by blocks of concrete. She peered at the clock on the nightstand. It was half past four in the afternoon—they’d only slept about three hours. No wonder I feel like something the cat has dragged in.  The phone was still ringing, the sound coming through the open door to the hallway where she’d dumped her purse earlier. With a groan of exhaustion, Marga disentangled herself from Atticus, who had wrapped himself around her in his sneaky, monopolizing way. She wriggled free of one of his arms and one leg, but as soon as she pried off the other two limbs, the first two snuck around her again.  “Atticus. Phone. Need to answer.”  He grunte

Words drifted through the black velvet veiling Marga’s mind. Murmurs, spoken in hushed tones, the voices familiar. Something about them should have alerted her. If only she could remember what… If only her head didn’t feel as if it were about to split from the inside out, as if weighed down by a hundred tons of concrete and still pulsating painfully with every slow beat of her heart.  It was always like this after giving back to the Powers That Be.  Giving back… Yes, that was what had happened. A sliver of a memory pierced the haze inside her mind. A car. Pain. Magic, bleeding from her body. Strong arms, holding her with such care.  Atticus.  Marga sat up with a start as it all came crashing back, at the same moment as the identity of the voices registered. The niggling feeling she’d had formed into a certainty that chilled her blood. Her rash movement spiked another throbbing wave of pain in her hea

Atticus first clue to Marga being more than royally pissed at him was the fact she made him magically walk into a door. Twice.  Except for their first meeting, and that one time in the cemetery, when she’d made him trip—which had been playful teasing—she’d never harmfully used her powers on him, not even when he’d pushed her out of her comfort zone and tried to irritate the hell out of her.  Now, however, for some unfathomable reason, she’d lashed out at him with her magic two times in a row. And—fucking hell—his nose hurt like a bitch after clashing twice with the front door of the bar they’d entered in search for someone he could take pain from. The irony of that particular thought wasn’t lost on him as he rubbed the bridge of his nose and set it straight again with a crack, grimacing just a little at the sharp jolt of pain. Wiping the blood off with the back of his hand, he turned around to star