When he was finished, he gave the bodies one last, frowning glance. How had they found him? Had he somehow given away his location, or had the encounter been sheer bad luck? And who had called the fog down to cloak what had obviously been intended to be his murder?

Morgan would have had more than enough magic to conjure the fog, but Nikolas didn’t sense his presence anywhere nearby, and if Morgan had been near, he would have been present for the attack. Nikolas would give Morgan credit for one thing—he was not the type of man to stand back and let others fight his battles for him.

Had it been the unknown woman Nikolas had seen?

He had felt her first, a cool breath of presence entirely different from the red-hot killing rage that had ruled him only moments previously.

When he had turned to confront this new threat, he had seen her—dark, curling hair, pale skin and a scattering of freckles across a thin, angular face. Black Irish coloring, with high cheekbones pressing against the delicate skin that stretched over them. Lips, plush and pink. Eyes a light, indeterminate color, possibly gray or hazel. Height, irrelevant.

His first reaction had been irrelevant as well. She looked tired, possibly ill, he thought, and her face was too thin, almost gaunt.

Then their gazes had collided, and those pale, uninteresting eyes of hers had widened. She looked stunned that he had seen her, and as she opened her mouth, he moved to forestall whatever she might have said. It might have been a spell or a curse, or a simple how do you do. He didn’t give a shit.

After he had lashed out at her, the vision had splintered. Now he couldn’t sense her anywhere.

But he knew what she looked like. He knew what her Power felt like. If she had been working in collusion with Isabeau’s Hounds, she had just signed her own death warrant. Didn’t matter when or how long it took. If Nikolas ever ran into her, he would make sure she regretted her collusion before she died.

The fog was beginning to disperse, the veil on the carnage in the clearing growing thin. His clothes were wet with the slain men’s blood. It was time for him to leave, but first he had to cleanse the scene.

Kneeling, he placed his flattened hands on the ground and sank his awareness deep into the land. When he connected with the land magic that was so rich and abundant, he asked it to take the bodies. After a few moments, the land responded. The ground shifted, and the slain Hounds sank below the grass.

Once he had rid the clearing of the evidence of the battle, his attention turned to the Sainsbury bag on the ground. He had almost forgotten why he had stopped in this village in the first place. Gathering it up, he strode rapidly along the path to the nearby car park.

At least he had bought petrol before he had gone in search of a supper he could eat on the road. He didn’t take time to change out of his blood-soaked clothes. Several moments later, as the fog dispersed completely and the late afternoon sun came out in full force, he pulled onto the motorway and sped north.

* * *

Later that night, Nikolas’s black Porsche flowed along the hairpin curves in the forest road. Dense, heavy foliage pressed in from all angles, drenching the air with the sense of an immense, green life that carpeted the land for miles around, while an early harvest moon hung low over the horizon.

He kept his windows down to let the fresh air stream in, on high alert for the slightest hint of anything out of the ordinary. Gatherings were a calculated but necessary risk, and they always put him on edge. After the Hounds’ attack, he was even more on edge than usual.

Once he had put several kilometers between him and the scene of the attack, he’d pulled over to change out of his bloody clothes and examine the contents he’d stripped from the bodies. The magic items had been relatively uninteresting—either amulets of protection or strength enhancement. There were four mobile phones, all with passcodes that he didn’t have time to try to break at the moment.

He tucked those away to examine more closely later, then he rifled through wallets, pocketed the men’s IDs and cash, and tossed the wallets away. He found nothing to indicate how the Hounds had located him and nothing that seemed to connect them to the unknown woman in the vision.

After examining everything, he continued on his journey, and he’d had several hours to think about what had happened.

Earlier, when the questing, feminine Power had brushed against him, he had bristled and whirled to attack, but now that the heat of battle had died down, he was fairly certain that the woman’s psychic signature had felt distinctly different from both the magical fog and the Hounds.

And the woman he had seen—at first she hadn’t looked afraid or guilty as if she had been caught doing something underhanded. Instead, she had simply looked amazed. He had received the impression of black, curling hair falling into wide, startled eyes. Then she began to reach out to him as if to see if he were real. It had been a gesture of wonder, not aggression.

Perhaps the psychic connection had been an accident. The thought was outlandish, but it wasn’t impossible, in which case, no harm, no foul.

Or perhaps his impressions were wrong and he had indeed disrupted a spy, and the only accident had been that he had caught the other magic user before she could throw another spell. That was the possibility that kept him poised like a weapon, ready to go on the offensive at the first sign of trouble.

While he was lost in thought, the road he traveled narrowed to one paved lane, then the pavement turned to gravel. The steady purr of the car’s turbo engine never faltered. After driving some distance farther, he finally came to a large open clearing. One end was covered with gravel along the edge of a crumbling fieldstone fence.