My Wicked Enemy by Carolyn Jewel Page A

she’s like having his own personal reserves to call on when he needs it. Until the poison kills her, that is. Or else all that pent-up magic. I’m guessing she doesn’t have much longer.” The thought made him a little sad. She didn’t deserve this. Nobody did.
    “She really can’t pull?”
    Nikodemus sorted through the information he’d gleaned from scouring Carson’s mind. A born witch, and he’d found no indication she’d ever pulled magic in her life, not even a suggestion that she knew what she was. Durian waited for him to come out of his reverie. He didn’t want to. There were some good moments in there. He shook his head. “Her power ebbs and flows like crazy. When it’s ebbing, she feels vanilla. Totally human.” He stretched again and tried not to react to the witch’s sputtering power. “She could almost pass for normal. But come high tide, she’s got headaches and shit from the magic she can’t touch. Starts stumbling. White as a goddamned sheet. I thought she was gonna pass out on me at least once.”
    Durian studied Magellan’s witch for a while. “That must have been distracting.”
    His shoulders slid lower on the couch. “Yeah.” A mage’s magic had a widely known attraction for fiends. The magic felt good. Gave you a tingle down low. These days you learned to control the reaction, or sooner or later you got too close and ended up with a shaved head, enslaved to some mage until he decided your life was over. The days when fiends could trust the magekind were millennia past. While a fiend was enslaved, the short hair was permanent, a side effect of the magic. The permanent buzz cut made it easy for mages to tell which fiends were enslaved and which were free for the taking. Durian was right. He ought to kill the witch on principle. What was the old saying? The only good witch is a dead witch. Or something like that.
    “And she doesn’t know what she is? Nobody ever told her? She never figured it out?”
    “Why would Magellan tell her anything? The whole point is it’s easier for him if she doesn’t know shit. He’s the one who fed her poison until there was no hope of her ever touching her magic. She’s gonna die because of him, the bastard.” He drank more beer. “You think he’d tell her all about it? What Magellan’s done to her is just all kinds of evil.” He shook his head. Hell, he did feel sorry for her. “In a sick sort of way, she has a lot in common with us.”
    Durian stared at him. Hard.
    “That’s called irony, Durian,” Nikodemus said. “Magellan’s screwed her but good, and just like his magehelds, she’s not going to survive it.”
    “You have my respect and fealty, Warlord. I will fight with you when the time comes.”
    “Well, that’s good.” Because he had to.
    “I don’t care what the mage was giving her or what it did to her. She’s a witch. She ought to be dead. One less of them in the world is one less enemy for us to kill when the time comes.”
    He made a face. Like he didn’t know Carson was a witch or what her kind did to his. He knew he shouldn’t be making excuses for her. But she’d whacked Kynan Aijan across the back of his head when she didn’t have to do anything. And she did it even though she was clueless and defenseless against the fiend. “I hate the magekind same as any of us. I’d be happy if they all shriveled up and died in the next five minutes, but I still think what Magellan’s done to her is sick and perverted.”
    At last, Durian sat down. How long had he known Durian? Not as long as some. Just since he came to San Francisco, but Durian was solid. And smart enough not to get caught. Smart enough to understand, as Nikodemus did, that their kind needed to get their collective acts together if they were going to survive. No more of this clannish refusal to work together. The remaining warlords needed to join forces against the mages. There was no other way out of the annihilation the kin were facing. Durian was