Also available from Lauren Dane

  and Harlequin

  Goddess with a Blade

  Goddess with a Blade

  Blade to the Keep

  Blade on the Hunt

  At Blade’s Edge

  Wrath of the Goddess

  Blood and Blade

  Bad Blood

  Diablo Lake

  Moon Struck

  Protected

  Awakened

  Cascadia Wolves

  Reluctant Mate (prequel)

  Pack Enforcer

  Wolves’ Triad

  Wolf Unbound

  Alpha’s Challenge

  Bonded Pair

  Twice Bitten

  de La Vega Cats

  Trinity

  Revelation

  Beneath the Skin

  Chase Brothers

  Giving Chase

  Taking Chase

  Chased

  Making Chase

  Petal, Georgia

  Once and Again

  Lost in You

  Count on Me

  Cherchez Wolves

  Wolf’s Ascension

  Sworn to the Wolf

  The Hurley Boys

  The Best Kind of Trouble

  Broken Open

  Back to You

  Whiskey Sharp

  Unraveled

  Jagged

  Torn

  Cake (novella)

  Sugar (novella)

  Second Chances

  Believe

  Bad Blood contains descriptions of violence, blood, stalking, threats of violence, a great deal of foul language and death.

  Bad Blood

  Lauren Dane

  This one is for Ray.

  Who always believes in me.

  Dear wonderful readers,

  Hello there! I’m so glad to see you back for another installment in Rowan’s story. When we last saw Rowan and her ever-growing cohort of allies, they’d finally vanquished a very powerful faerie who’d been at the head of a conspiracy that had cost the lives of many innocents, including some of Rowan’s loved ones.

  It’s just a few weeks later as Bad Blood starts with Rowan getting pulled into a whole new mess. Bad Blood will be the start of a new two-book story arc where you’ll get to know more about Darius and the Las Vegas Trick of Dust Devils, along with Genevieve Aubert and the Conclave of witches. The stakes are, as usual, quite high as we get drawn into another shadowy corner of the supernatural world.

  I’ll be back in 2024 with Blood and Magic, the conclusion to this mini story line.

  Read Hard!

  Lauren

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Genevieve Aubert made a cutting motion with her hands, pulling them apart, and as she did, she pushed her intent to end the magical working she’d just performed. To seal it off so nothing could leak out and harm an unsuspecting passerby.

  With an internal pop, the outside world reasserted itself all around her in the kitchen of a rickety house in Long Beach, California.

  “Well?”

  “Always so patient,” Genevieve murmured to her friend and partner on their current investigation, Rowan Summerwaite.

  Three young people had gone missing, two of them witches. Which brought the total of missing witches—that the Conclave knew about—over the last six months to one hundred and ninety two.

  “I’m not done yet. Their presence is strong here in the kitchen. I’d say they were all here recently. Within the last week. To be as specific as I can as I know you’ll ask,” she said quickly before Rowan could speak. “It’s been four days since they’ve been here. Give or take twelve hours.”

  She walked through the living room and headed into the first of three bedrooms before throwing open her internal shields to view the space through her magical sight.

  Where there’d been bright ribbons of life energy clinging to surfaces and furniture in the other rooms, in the bedroom she stood in there was...nothing. No errant wisps of magic that had settled from the two witches who lived there. No life energy.

  Continuing to use her othersight, Genevieve walked the short hall to the other bedrooms, finding the same psychic emptiness.

  When she’d finished, she repeated the cutting motion to end the spell. The details of the magical world all around them settled into the background as her day-to-day perspective snapped back into place.

  “Their imprint...” She paused, thinking on the right way to describe it to Rowan. “All living beings leave some flotsam just from their presence in a place. Life energy. Witches in particular leave another sort of evidence behind, an imprint of their magical power. Like spiderwebs in a corner. That’s been erased—magically—from the bedrooms and bathrooms, but not from the common living areas.” She waved a hand around the television room attached to the kitchen and dining area. “They spent a lot of time together in this part of the house. At least one of the witches has done some spellwork in the kitchen. There’s no magic here that is unhealthy. Nothing violent. But once you step into that back hallway where the bedrooms are it’s as if someone has used bleach, or another such cleanser. Magically, that is.”

  Rowan’s gaze sharpened. “Why would their imprint whatsits be gone from the bedrooms but not the kitchen and common areas? I get that you can customize a working and all, but why choose those spaces and not others?”

  “I don’t know. It could be they were taken at night so all three were sleeping. Or early in the morning when one was showering and the other two sleeping or getting ready for work in their bedrooms. Or perhaps there was something magical that could have identified the perpetrators.”

  Rowan wandered around the area, looking in drawers and on shelves. She pulled out books and peered behind photo frames. “All the missing witches, at least the ones that have been reported, they’ve been healing or green witches, right? Hang on a sec, I want to text David to add some filters to the searches we’re running.”

  David was Rowan’s valet and the manager of U.S. operations of the Hunter Corp., the organization responsible for enforcing the Treaty that protected humans from supernatural beings. He’d only agreed to stay back in Las Vegas because it was daylight and because their guard was far more than adequate. He was very protective of his boss—who was equally protective of the young man she considered a son—but also intelligent and good at his job, so he’d handled the details best handled back at the newly opened Hunter Corp. chapterhouse.

  “Check the connection we can find between the humans and witches who’ve gone missing together,” Genevieve said. “I assume you’re filtering out the disappearances connected to the Blood Front and the black market siphon spells.”

  Rowan nodded shortly. “First thing I asked him to do in the text. He’s most likely already thought of that. He’s pretty smart that way.”

  Just three weeks prior, Rowan, Genevieve, and Clive, the Vampire Scion of North America—and Rowan’s husband—managed to work their way to the top of a conspiracy that had involved scores of missing witches. Witches who’d been drained of their magic to power a Faerie who’d been cast out of his realm.

  They’d left a trail of dead, responsible parties. Some loved ones had been lost and Genevieve had been working with the Conclave Senate, the governing body of magical practitioners worldwide, to address internal leaks that had led to the deaths of so many they should have been protecting.

  Instead of the disappearances finally coming to a halt after they’d vanquished a nearly immortal being, seven new missing witches had been reported over ten days. All recent disappearances, which meant they couldn’t be tied to the prior business with the Blood Front because they’d only recently destroyed it by killing off said nearly immortal being.

  Which meant there was more going on. Whether it was a whole new problem or something connected was something they’d have to figure out.

  Just that morning, Genevieve had left Las Vegas for what was supposed to be no more than a few hours of meetings with other witches in the Conclave Senate on the topic of the internal leaks within their ranks.

  By the time the plane had touched down at the Burbank airport, the report of the missing witches had been delivered to her inbox, changing the trajectory of her whole day. Two hours after that, she’d met up with Rowan, who’d traveled from Las Ve
gas, and they’d driven to the rental house the three missing people had shared.

  “I’ve got some contacts inside the local police department,” Rowan said from where she’d crouched to look through a drawer. “The family of the human called it in. Cops checked here, found nothing amiss. The guy works at a bicycle shop about half an hour commute away. One of the witches works at a garden center nursery type thing and the other does dog grooming. Let’s pop by their jobs to see what’s what after this.”

  Genevieve moved to stand at the doorway of the central bedroom and finally, at the edge of her vision she caught sight of...something. A splinter of magic she wanted to pluck and examine.

  Inside her head, the voices within her, the spells, teachers, all that energy rose at once, clamoring for dominance and attention. She was over seven centuries old, and she’d been learning different types of magical practice since she was a child. Each layer she learned, each new discipline, each new teacher had become her armor, but sometimes when she performed a working the combined knowledge and energy got so loud, so painful and overwhelming it took discipline and steel to wrestle it back. Mostly they comforted her. Reminded her of her strength. But it could be overwhelming so she’d come up with various ways over the years to quiet the voices so she could perform the magic.

  The back door swung open, and it was clear who was coming inside long before he entered the room.

  Sage and salt. His scent. That tang that was uniquely Darius rose and fell like the tide. That magic—his magic—left bits and pieces of itself on her. In her. Made itself at home within Genevieve’s essential magical talent.

  He was an ancient being. A sense of very deep time emanated from his bones. Throbbed like a pulse. Against that, her magic seemed softer, younger, though many of the traditions she used for various workings were as ancient or older than he.

  His general expression was inscrutable though menacing. Sometimes outright menacing. At times when she allowed herself to look deeply into his dark brown eyes, it felt as if she saw forever reflected within. When he used his magical energy, his pupils were ringed by amber fire. His hair lay in twisted coils, dreadlocks he often had tied back, exposing the harsh beauty of his features. Regal. Otherworldly in its perfection. High cheekbones and a sharp nose. His medium brown skin had a bronze cast when the light hit him just right. His lips drew her attention time and again, the fullness of his lower one a temptation she’d not felt the like of in so very long.

  His very slight smile as he approached told her he’d caught her staring.

  How could she do anything but stare?

  Though he was wearing designer trousers and a thin, navy blue cashmere sweater instead of his more usual motorcycle boots and jeans, he still emanated a wild power. A strength and threat of danger impossible to miss.

  He’d come for her. Because he’d sensed she was overwhelmed by the inner voices. The knowledge of that stunned her, even as she was finally allowing herself to believe that he would always do so.

  Darius touched her elbow and a pulse of Dust Devil magic rolled through her until she could think clearly once more. Not that the voices died, but they subsided.

  It hadn’t been the first time he’d done such a thing, or the first time using Dust Devil magics had created a similar sort of harmony within her.

  Dust Devils were beings of chaos magic. A long-ago branch of the wild hunt. In an unexpected turn of events a few months prior, Genevieve had become the priestess to the local trick—what they called groups of Devils.

  Being their priestess had amplified her talent exponentially. Every few days she discovered something else, a new ability or an ease with a magical working that had been far more difficult before. In turn, she’d become what Darius likened to a conduit for the Trick. Her magic enabled them to access more—and retain longer—the power they gathered as they rode their motorcycles up and down the Las Vegas Strip. All that excess emotion was a banquet.

  Genevieve was too old to pretend away the fact that something deep and potentially life-altering was developing between her and Darius. It was more than romance. More than sexual—though there were a great many romantic and sexual feelings between them—it was an acknowledgment of a connection. A soul connection.

  She might not pretend it was just casual, but it still terrified her to have such depth of feeling for Darius. Worried that she was weakening herself to rely on someone else.

  Yet, every day she let him into her life a little more, and despite all the fear, it had been a good choice. At the very least one she had no plans to give up.

  “Thank you,” she said. Despite the rules about putting oneself in the debt of another, Genevieve wanted him to know what it meant to her that he came when she needed him to.

  He leaned very close to whisper in her ear. “It is my pleasure to help.”

  Shivers ran from the place on her neck where his breath had brushed straight to her nipples. The man was a menace. A delicious, delightful, wickedly sexy menace.

  “There is something here,” she murmured loud enough for Rowan to hear and understand what was happening. “Faint. If I can tease it back into existence there should be evidence of the witches who made the working.”

  “That’s handy,” Rowan said as she stepped out of the hallway. “I’ll wait in the kitchen.” Rowan was the human vessel to a goddess. The magic and power she gave off could be blinding. And so bright it often obscured things that lived in shadows and places in between.

  Darius did not retreat as far. His personal magic tasted of hers, was bound with hers. It was distracting for other reasons if she spent too much time pondering that. So she put aside the wonder at their connection and focused on her job while he kept watch on the area around them. Letting her fall into the world of her magic without worry.

  Once her othersight was open, Genevieve bent to examine that little fleck of magic. Committed it to memory. The feel of it. The flavor. It was brittle, as if the burst when the spell detonated pulled the juice away, leaving it a husk. A dried-up leaf at the end of autumn.

  Somewhere inside, the voices rose, but only a few. Just the ones who knew the song she began to sing in a language that hadn’t been spoken in a thousand years, calling her magic to fill those veins within that desiccated spell fragment, reanimate it enough for Genevieve to get a good look at just exactly what it was.

  She coaxed and soothed, drew gently but firmly, slowly rebuilding the fragment enough to finally get a good look at it, cataloging all the elements she could before that little wisp finally brightened and then popped from existence.

  “Are we done here?” she asked Rowan. “I don’t recognize the caster of the working used. But there are elements of it that feel familiar. I will need to go to the Conclave building to confer with my assistant so that we can begin a search. I’ll figure it out in the end.”

  Rowan nodded. “I have my own car. You go handle witch business at witch central. I’ll do some poking around at their jobs to see what I can find out. I’ll check in with you after that and if you don’t need me here, I’ll meet you back in Las Vegas.”

  “Fine. Do be careful or your husband will complain, and I will never hear the end of it,” Genevieve told her. As Rowan was frequently involved in very dangerous activities, it bore repeating on a regular basis. On top of that, the Vampire she was married to was an arrogant apex predator whose loyalty and focus, above all else, belonged to his wife.

  “He’s a pussycat.” Then Rowan laughed. “Just kidding. I’m always careful. It’s been three weeks since someone has tried to kill me. I probably shouldn’t have said that out loud to jinx it. Update me or David when you can.”

  After Rowan left, Genevieve turned back to set a series of spelltraps. If anyone came home, or walked through the house, it would trigger and notify her after embedding a tracker into whoever was there.

  “And wherever did you learn that?” Darius purred at her.

  Proud he’d noticed and was impressed, she barely resisted preening. “I trained under a battle mage for many years. Better than fingerprints any day.”

  Chapter Two

  Normally, Genevieve would have given Darius the grand tour of the Conclave building. It was one of her favorite places on the planet. A Beaux Arts masterpiece chock-full of magic and witches. The archives took up several floors, lined with some of the oldest records and spellwork they’d managed to gather and hold on to, even during purges, burnings, and other types of persecution they’d fled from over their history.