Alejandro's Sorceress

  ALEJANDRO’S SORCERESS

  A Cardinal Witches Novella

  Alyssa Day

  This one is for my readers, who said “Killer leprechauns? Bring it!”

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Excerpt: William’s Witch

  Excerpt: Damon’s Enchantress

  Thank you

  About the Author

  Books by Alyssa

  1

  Poe’s Avenue, Virginia, FBI Paranormal Operations Division HQ

  Alejandro cocked his shotgun and followed his teammate into the burnt and jagged opening in the side of the building, hoping that—for once—there weren’t any trolls.

  He hated trolls.

  “Clear,” Mac, already moving through the narrow hallway, called back to him. It was Mac’s turn to go first. They kept score.

  Lately he’d been keeping score on a lot of things. Like time. The year, two weeks, and five days since he’d seen the sunlight outside of the academy, for instance.

  Not that he was counting.

  Anyway, the course at the FBI’s sister division, P-Ops, had kept him plenty busy.

  “Shotgun! You coming or scratching your ass back there?”

  “No, my friend, I was just thinking of asking your sister to scratch it for me,” Alejandro said, grinning at the nickname he’d won for obvious reasons. “She reaches all the itchy parts so well.”

  “I will kick your ass if you get any of your itchy parts anywhere near my sister. Or she’d kick it for you. Jenny scares even me.”

  The sound of Mac’s Glock firing three shots in rapid succession caused Alejandro to break into a run as he slapped his night-vision goggles in place.

  “On my way,” he called, not bothering to try to be stealthy. “Save some for me.”

  He caught the shifting glimmer of light in the corner of one eye and whirled around, aiming and firing in one smooth motion. Whatever it was, he missed. Too short to be a troll, so there was one mercy. If he were the type to have nightmares, he’d still be having them about the last one’s breath. Green, moss-covered teeth. What the hell was that about? Toothpaste was cheap.

  “Shotgun! Could use a little help here!” Mac sounded just the slightest bit out of breath, which was unusual for the man who’d beat the all-time speed record for the FBI’s obstacle course at Quantico in an inter-agency competition. Alejandro had won a hundred bucks on that one.

  He took off running, cocking the Remington as he moved. The vampire who jumped him five feet down the hall took a blast to the head. Alejandro vaulted over the disintegrating body, not wanting the acidic slime of decomposing vamp on his new shoes.

  A high-pitched scream warned him of the approach from overhead of a deadly Mngwa, but he had a silver throwing knife at hand. One lethal toss later, a couple hundred pounds of mutant killer cat lay on the floor, blood gurgling out of its throat.

  He skidded to a stop at the end of the corridor, not willing to rush headlong into a blind turn, and Mac called out to him again, his deep voice rough and strained. “Alejandro, if you’re coming, now would be a really good time.”

  Alejandro instantly switched from student-taking-his-final-exam mode to deadly-predator mode. They had a code between them, he and Mac. They were only Alejandro and Maxwell to each other in the event of a dire emergency. Whatever faced Mac around that corner was no training-ground obstacle. Somebody had set a trap, and Mac was caught in it.

  Alejandro was going to kick somebody’s ass for this one.

  He dove for the floor, rolling to the side to protect the Remington, and did a modified army crawl around the corner. The natural expectation was to look for an enemy at man-height, not on the floor or the ceiling. It’s why the vampires and other supes who could climb down a building or fly always had the advantage. Nobody would expect a P-Ops rookie to come in at ankle-height.

  Alejandro was far, far more than a rookie.

  His first glance assessed the situation and told him everything he needed to know. A trio of wolf shifters surrounded Mac, and one of them had gotten in either a good swipe of his claws or a bite—Alejandro hoped it was only claws—and Mac was down and bleeding, his gun a crushed hunk of metal on the floor.

  “Come out, come out, little human,” snarled the shifter who stood with one claw-tipped foot on Mac’s head.

  Another was on all fours, his massive head hanging down near Mac’s struggling form. As Alejandro watched, that one’s long tongue snaked out as he licked blood off the side of Mac’s face.

  “Yummy,” the shifter said in his garbled voice, and then he laughed.

  It was the laugh that put Alejandro over the edge. Cool, clear-headed, Paranormal Operations training flew out the window. Hot, primal rage from years of battling murderous vampires in San Bartolo took over. He triangulated his shots in his head a split-second before he took them.

  A couple of heartbeats later, three werewolves lay dead on the ground.

  “Glad you talked me into that silver shot,” he said mildly, as if his partner hadn’t almost died and wasn’t now in danger of becoming a shifter himself.

  Mac forced out a laugh and hauled himself up off the ground. “Damn wolves. I was so focused on the possibility of big, bad, and ugly that I missed the pitter-patter of little feet.”

  “Brownies?”

  “Leprechauns. Bastards tripped me up, and the wolves jumped me when I was down.”

  Alejandro shook his head and then blasted a hole in the side of the building. Welcome sunlight poured in, and he stepped over the bodies of the shifters to reach his friend. “Let’s move.”

  Mac nodded, but shrugged off Alejandro’s hand. “Thanks, but screw that. We’re going to walk out of here like it was no problem, and then we’ll get me to the infirmary after. I don’t want any of those punks laughing at us.”

  “There are worse things than laughter,” Alejandro said, eyeing Mac’s wounds. Looked like claws. He hoped.

  “Yeah. Fucking leprechauns.” Mac bared in his teeth in a grim imitation of a smile. “At least one of them won’t be tripping anybody else, ever again.”

  He jerked his head to indicate the far corner, and Alejandro could just make out a small green shoe pointing at the ceiling.

  Alejandro headed for the hole in the wall. He needed to get Mac to the infirmary before anything worse showed up.

  “Could have been worse. Could have been trolls.”

  Alejandro ducked his head to exit the building, so the huge wooden club smashed into the wall instead of his skull.

  “Fee, fie, foe fucking fum, little Mayan,” the attacker growled in a voice deeper than the interior of a volcano and just as hot.

  Alejandro hit the floor and swept a foot at the troll’s ankles, sending it crashing to the ground with a resounding thud. With anything that big, the trick was to go for the feet, ankles, or knees. Before he could cock the shotgun, Mac pointed his Glock at the troll’s head and shot it through one eye.

  Alejandro stood up and nodded his thanks.

  “I owed you one,” Mac said, but he was now noticeably leaning to the right, and the blood dripping out of his wounds wasn’t showing any signs of stopping.

  Alejandro sighed. “Why is it always trolls?”

  2

  Garden City, Ohio

  * * *

  Ros
e Cardinal added a pinch of cayenne pepper for interest as she stirred a potion for sparkling conversation and tried not to glare at her mother.

  "You didn't have to call P-Ops for a garden pest, Mom," she repeated for the eighth or ninth time." We could have handled it. Now they're going to put us in some kind of file as nuisances. Do we need to be in a governmental file? No. Look what happened when the sheriff wrote us up for indecent exposure for dancing sky clad at the solstice."

  "It's the law," her mother reminded her, also for the eighth or ninth time. "Also, I took care of the sheriff, didn't I? His wife didn't speak to him for a month. Anyway, we have to report any occurrences of potentially dangerous supernatural activity. You can't say this isn't dangerous, after that incident yesterday with the paperboy who was trying to deliver the Witchcraft Daily News."

  Sue Cardinal might dress like a hippie, but there was pure steel underneath the deceptively sweet face, waist-length white hair, long, brightly colored skirt and dozens of bangle bracelets.

  "We fixed him! He never even realized anything happened to him." Rose protested, turning the heat off under the pot and placing a lid on it to trap the aroma inside. The last thing she needed around her house was more sparkling conversation.

  "Marigold Rose Cardinal, what have I taught you? With great power comes great responsibility," her mother said, untying the red-and-white checked apron she insisted on wearing whenever they mixed spells and potions.

  Rose threw her hands in the air. "That's Spiderman. We're witches. And don't call me Marigold."

  "It's your name. Also, I don't care. I phoned them, they're coming, and that's that." Her mother stalked out the kitchen door, chin held high and an air of injured righteousness surrounding her like the dozens of butterflies that usually flocked to her in the garden.

  Rose closed her eyes and counted to ten, then to twenty, before giving it up as hopeless and cleaning up the kitchen. The bright, airy room was her favorite in the entire cottage, which was saying a lot since she loved every single room. She'd painted the walls a sunny yellow with bright white accents and trim, and her sparklingly shiny copper pots shone from the open shelving on one wall.

  Her house was tiny, but it had been all hers for nearly a year now, and after twenty-three years of living with her mom and three sisters, it felt like a paradise. True, a path connected her house to her mom's, where her younger sisters still lived, but it was across the acre of their shared kitchen garden. Right now, during a lovely late spring in Ohio, the garden was blooming so wildly that travelling between houses was almost like crossing a jungle.

  "You aren't much like a jaguar, though, are you, Bob?" she asked her black and white cat as he padded into the room, probably from her bedroom, where he'd been napping earlier.

  He meowed at her and jumped up on to the cushioned window seat so he could survey his kingdom. She always thought he must have had a little bit of cat royalty in his background, from his regal carriage and "you may pet me now, peasant" attitude, but he, like the house, was all hers. He'd shown up one night on her porch in a rainstorm, tiny and bedraggled, and he'd been hers ever since. Or she'd been his. You could never tell, with cats.

  Her youngest sister burst into the house, slamming the door against the wall.

  Again.

  "Astrid, I asked you not to do that," Rose said, without any real hope that her bubbly sister would pay any attention this time, either.

  “They got Ninja,” Astrid said, wiping tears off her face with the sleeve of her white peasant blouse. Astrid was the only one of them who’d inherited their mother’s sense of style and, at fifteen and long, lanky, and gorgeous, she wore it well.

  “We’ll help Ninja, honey,” Rose said soothingly. “We fixed the paperboy. It’s all good.”

  She wiped her hands on a towel, retrieved a slender glass vial from its position in the refrigerator next to eleven more just like it, and followed her sister outside to rescue the dog.

  She stopped on her porch and took a deep breath, unable to resist the wonderful scents of flowers and herbs coming from the garden. Her mother was a garden witch--derogatorily referred to by some as a kitchen witch--and her powers came from spells and potions made from plants.

  Rose and her sisters had inherited the same magic, but each of them had something a little extra, as well. In Rose, it was the ability to discover a person’s deepest desire within five minutes of being in his or her presence.

  Not everyone appreciated this gift; especially since she’d often blurted out her magically acquired knowledge in public when she was a child. Plus, sometimes the knowledge was a surprise even to the person whose desire it was.

  That usually turned out badly.

  “Rose! Are you coming?” Astrid’s voice rang out from behind the small stand of blooming apple trees. “Watch out for the mean one by the tomatoes.”

  Rose kept an eye out for any strange movement as she headed for Astrid, but the nasty little beasts had learned to watch out for her after she’d thrown an itching spell at the one chasing Bob.

  She rounded the corner of the path and found her sister kneeling on the ground beneath a tree, her arms around a tiny stone statue of a pug.

  Astrid turned her tearstained face up to Rose. “You have to help my sweet Ninja.”

  Rose grinned at the sight of the dog, frozen in mid-bark, his tiny pug ears standing straight up.

  “I’ve got it, Astrid. Now stand back.” She uncorked the vial and shook the sparkling pink liquid on the statue’s head after her sister moved out of the way, and they both watched as Astrid’s black pug puppy transformed from a stone statue back into his roly-poly self, apparently no worse for wear.

  “Honey, please keep him out of the garden until we deal with this,” Rose said, trying to be stern but unable to resist smiling as her sister covered the pup’s silky head with kisses.

  Astrid promised and ran back to their mother’s house, carrying Ninja. Rose watched her and then sighed and turned around to go back to her kitchen and check on her new conversation potion. Their neighbor’s son Connor, a very sweet computer nerd and recent college grad who wanted to use it for job interviews, would be stopping by at four to pick it up.

  When she reached the cottage, she automatically glanced into the window at Bob and then stumbled to a stop. Her cat, frozen in mid-stretch, had been turned into a stone statue.

  Damn garden pests. Why couldn’t they get grub beetles or snails, like the typical gardener? Oh, no. Never anything ordinary for the Cardinal witches.

  They had to get a freaking basilisk infestation.

  3

  Alejandro turned the standard-issue sedan right on Wildflower Lane, mentally running through a checklist of the equipment and ammo in the trunk. He and Mac were loaded for bear--or basilisk, to be precise--and yet he still wondered why the regional office in Columbus had assigned two rookie field officers to handle something so incredibly dangerous. He said as much to Mac.

  “They know we can handle it,” Mac said confidently. Alejandro’s partner stared out the window at the tree-lined street with its immaculate lawns and careful landscaping. “It’s like a different planet, isn’t it?”

  Alejandro made a noncommittal noise. Mac had grown up in Vegas, so he was used to desert scenery. Alejandro had been born and raised in a remote village in Guatemala, isolated by vampires from technology or progress, so every place he went in the U.S. felt like a different planet. The computer lab at the academy had been a wondrous revelation, and he’d spent all of his spare time catching up to his American classmates.

  Except in weapons training and vampire tactics classes. There, most of his classmates had been forced to work hard to catch up to him.

  “That’s it. 8121 Wildflower Lane,” Mac said. “The one set back from the street.”

  Alejandro pulled in to the driveway while he automatically scanned the area for danger or signs of disturbances.

  “Seems like a basilisk would have done more damage,” he said. “Or th
ere’d at least be a lot of running and screaming.”

  “Maybe it ate everyone and moved on,” Mac suggested, grinning. “We can go get some lunch and then take the rest of the day off.”

  Alejandro rolled his eyes. “We’d still have to spend all afternoon writing up the paperwork.”

  P-Ops was as bad as its parent agency, the FBI, when it came to paperwork. Alejandro’s typing was slow, and working on the many reports that came with the job was his least favorite part of his new career. Probably always would be.

  They got out of the car and looked around. Alejandro had only taken a single step toward the front door of the small house when a woman who looked like sunshine walked out, and his entire world shifted on its axis.

  She wasn’t beautiful or even conventionally pretty, and he wasn’t even sure what it was about her that had knocked him on his figurative ass. This woman—she was somehow unique. Her hair was a silky fall of golden blond, but her athletic figure was neither model-thin nor lusciously curved. Her face was captivating, though—something about the combination of her individual features packed a punch right to his gut. Maybe her lips, or the strength in her bone structure. Maybe her eyes.

  Her eyes.

  They were so blue that he almost couldn’t believe they were real, and they were snapping with fire, impatience, or annoyance. He couldn’t decipher her emotion from her eyes alone—hell, he was lucky if he ever understood anything about women--but something about her made him want to spend hours trying.

  It took him another beat to realize that her lips were pressed together in a firm line. When she put her hands on her hips—gently rounded hips that clearly had been made for a man to hold--even he, blinded by the most immediate case of raging lust he’d ever felt, could see that she was angry about something.