CHAPTER ONE

“WE HAVE PROBLEMS.”

Caden MacTavish rolled his eyes. If Bram Rion thought that was news, it came two weeks too late.

Hovering on the edge of a bottle green armchair, Caden watched Merlin’s grandson slam the door to his palatial home office, locking the Doomsday Brethren into the edgy silence with him. Each were warriors in their own way, most magical. All had the kind of mettle that would have been welcome in the Marine platoon in which Caden had served.

Without Bram’s Hollywood smile, magickind’s Brad Pitt looked both jumpy and grave. In fact, all the wizards, and Marrok, the former immortal and King Arthur’s champion, looked grim. The tension ratcheted up, and Caden’s thoughts drifted to his absent brother Lucan, a Doomsday Brethren warrior.

Please God, let this end soon.

A loud crash upstairs thumped the ceiling, shook the walls. A woman screamed, terror bleeding from her voice. On the upper floor, a door crashed open, the shrieking grew louder, and footsteps pounded above him. She was running down the stairs. Heading out the door.

Tearing out of the library, Caden raced to the shrieking blond woman, ignoring Bram’s shout calling him back. He grabbed the frantic witch by her shoulders. Though likely over two hundred, she looked deceptively young. Her wide green eyes were glazed with fear.

“Wait. Please.” He caught her anxious gaze. “My brother—”

“I can’t.” Her voice quivered. “He’s big and feral and— snarled that I smell of another man. He ripped his ch-chains.” Her words broke with new tears. “And lunged for my throat.”

Caden closed his eyes and held in a curse. The fifth energy surrogate Lucan had frightened away in two weeks. Now what?

At the top of the stairs, Bram’s sister Sabelle appeared. Her lace shirt and golden hair were askew, but her demeanor was calm. “I have Lucan under control. Let her go.”

Instead, Caden clasped the witch tighter. If he released her, what would become of his brother? “He needs her. Without the energy she generates . . .”

Caden couldn’t finish the sentence. The thought.

“He’ll die.” Sabelle sighed. “He misses Anka so deeply that it’s unhinged him mentally. My Aunt Millie says she’s never seen a case of mate mourning this severe.”

More dreadful news. Where was the freaking light at the end of the tunnel? Bram and Sabelle had dragged him away from his peaceful life in Dallas two weeks ago; the hell hadn’t let up since. Frustration ate his gut like acid. He didn’t want to fail Lucan. Years ago, he’d been unable to save his younger brother. Damned if he’d let his older one die, too.

“If Lucan isn’t taking the energy to survive from these women, how can he have enough strength to fight them?”

“Primal rage,” Sabelle supplied. “When the surrogates come, it’s as if he’s defending an attack. It’s a delusion, and we can’t explain otherwise to him. All his senses, except smell, have shut down. Surrogates bring the smells of their other clients along unwittingly. Lucan fights back.”

“Maybe . . . it’s time to consider that he wants death,” Bram murmured behind him.

Fury slashed through Caden. What kind of friend even thought that? Caden had held the hands of fallen comrades in Iraq and prayed for their recovery . . . even as some rattled their last breath.

“My brother will not die like this! I will find Anka and bring her back.”

“It may be too late. Let the witch go,” Bram demanded.

“Please,” the scared blonde pleaded.

Caden shook with rage. He wanted to crush something, punch a wall, lash out at magic, which had again screwed up his life. But the sobbing witch in his grasp shrank back in fear, like he, too, was a monster.

For about the two hundredth time since returning to England a fortnight ago, Caden cursed magic. To a human male, the loss of a beloved wife could be emotionally devastating. But as a wizard, Lucan’s loss had reduced a perfectly sane person to a rabid animal. The man upstairs wasn’t the older brother Caden had idolized as a child.

Though he’d left his childhood home a dozen years ago, and disavowed anything or anyone associated with magic, now that tragedy had struck, and he might lose his only remaining brother, a guilt seared Caden. The thought of never speaking to Lucan again? Unthinkable.

He must restore Lucan’s mental health. To do that, he had to find Anka and return her to his brother’s arms— quickly. And clearly, the witch Caden currently detained couldn’t help.

With a sigh, he released her. “Go.”

She sprinted out and closed the door. Silence reverberated.

“Come back to my office,” Bram said.

Caden whirled on the wizard. “I won’t give up on my brother, damn you!”

With a twitch of Bram’s finger, Caden was magically hauled back into the office. Caden seethed with resentment as Bram slammed the door behind them. He opened his mouth to give the wizard a furious earful, but Bram held up a hand.

“I understand your frustration. But our difficulties aren’t merely about you and your family. These problems affect us all.” He gestured to the other three men in the room. “And the rest of magickind.”

“My brother is chained to a bed like a lunatic, Anka is missing, and we haven’t a single clue where she’s gone. We cannot make Lucan whole without her return. Nothing is more important.”

“I wish. Our other problems are many and grave.”

Ice Rykard, another of the warriors, was a big man, but when annoyance stamped his square, hollow-cheeked face, like now, sane people backed away. “You summoned me here to tell me what I already know?”

As Ice rose to leave, Bram blocked his path. “Something new has arisen. Prudence requires that we attend to it. All of us.”

Bram refused to help his brother, then sought his assistance? Caden would have laughed if he weren’t so furious. “I came only to find my brother’s missing mate—”

“Former mate,” Bram corrected. “Their bond is broken.”

“Involuntarily,” Caden stressed. “I’ve no doubt Lucan still regards Anka as his, and they were in love. Why would she not welcome him back? I’m here to find her so they can bond again, not solve your problems.”

Bram sighed. “Lucan is my best friend, and I want more than anything to make him whole again. But that is a mission of mercy. The other matters are of life and death.”

“If you do not help me find Anka, Lucan will die!”

“If we fail to act on this new problem, thousands, maybe millions, will die. Including Lucan.”

Sacrificing one for many. Bram had shoved this “necessity” down Caden’s throat before. His patience was wearing thin. Exhaling, he rubbed gritty eyes. Every day, worrying. Every night, not sleeping—he often paced, Lucan’s mad countenance swimming in his mind. Meanwhile his brother’s “friends” worried about everyone else.

“Please.” Simon Northam, or Duke, the youngest of the Doomsday Brethren, drilled him with a stare. “We need you as much as Lucan. The sooner we tend to these issues, the sooner we can help him.”

Caden felt four pairs of eyes locked on him. Except for the fact Bram had kept a roof over Lucan’s head, he owed these men nothing. He’d known them a mere fortnight, wanted nothing to do with magickind and their problems. But their stares accused him of abandoning them . . . and Lucan’s cause. Guilt twisted in his gut.

Blast them! He merely wanted peace and solitude since witnessing half his friends dying in Iraq. Of the few who had survived, two had returned home, only to commit suicide. Another was in prison, unable to make the transition from shooting terrorists in a desert shithole to walking the dog in suburbia. The last had gone missing following a training exercise at his home base. The tragic death of Caden’s younger brother nearly two decades ago had proved that magic’s body count was even more shocking and heartbreaking. He’d had enough of loss, of death. As soon as Lucan recovered, Caden would return to his sedate life as a staff photographer for a Dallas newspaper. No one died taking pictures of city council meetings.

“The Doomsday Brethren means a great deal to Lucan,” Bram reminded.

Manipulative bastard.

“Besides, you may soon need us. Your magic is coming . . .”

Caden prayed that his sleeplessness was merely anxiety, stress, and not a harbinger of his own coming transition into magic. But there was no denying the electrical surges and flashes of emotion racing through his body of late. He feared that the witching hour—in this case, his thirtieth birthday—was approaching. “Not if I can help it.”

“You can’t.” Bram shrugged. “If you have the magic gene, it’s coming.”

Marrok, the human warrior-giant who looked every inch a medieval knight, from the slash of straight hair that reached his shoulders to the sword strapped to his hip, frowned at Bram. “Does this new problem concern Shock? Have we yet heard from the varlet?”

The shadiest member of the Doomsday Brethren had been MIA since their battle two weeks ago with the evil wizard Mathias, who sought to control magickind with the help of his minions, the Anarki. During that skirmish, Shock had suddenly appeared to switch his loyalties to the other side. No surprise there, given the man’s dark background. Because Shock was both Anka’s previous suitor and cozy with Mathias, Bram thought he might be willing to divulge Anka’s whereabouts. Caden disagreed. Mathias had brutalized Anka after abducting her and forcing her to break her mate bond with Lucan. Shock had apparently done nothing to help her.

Bram, Ice, and Duke all shook their heads.

“Nothing? That is vexing,” Marrok snarled. “Surely he has told Mathias much about us.”

“It’s Mathias’s quiet that disturbs me,” Ice cut in. “Two weeks of it . . . Right dodgy. Makes me itch.”

If Caden cared about magickind, he’d agree. But his only mission was to determine what Mathias had done with Anka and return her in the hopes of restoring Lucan’s sanity.

“During our last battle, Olivia laid a bolt of power on Mathias that should have flattened the bastard,” drawled Duke. Clad head to toe in designer everything, he looked perfectly urbane and wealthy, the artful muss of his dark hair cut perfectly, just like his aristocratic features, all the way down to his cleft chin. “It appeared to deplete his magic and should have prevented him from rising again, but . . .”

“This is Mathias,” Ice finished.

Exactly. If Mathias regained even half his power, the small but determined cabal of warriors assembled under Bram’s direction were screwed, and every man in the room knew it. How could the Doomsday Brethren kill a wizard who had already returned from the dead once? He had an army of slaves at his disposal. Caden could count the Doomsday Brethren on one hand.

Bram winced. “I’m afraid, gentlemen, our problems are worse than that.”

Marrok muttered, “Would that we knew from whence Mathias found so many disposable recruits.”

Those were troubling, indeed. Mathias had stripped the souls from human bodies to create walking dead Anarki, for the purpose of helping Mathias enslave magickind and destroy the Doomsday Brethren. During their last battle, the black-blooded zombies had been plentiful—and immune to magic.

“All true,” Bram conceded. “But I called you here to discuss something even more critical.”

Ice cast him a cutting stare. “Your magical signature tells me you took a human mate last night? A problem, indeed.”

Caden’s jaw dropped. Bram, one of the most pedigreed wizards today, had taken a human mate?

“Wouldn’t your grandfather be proud?” Ice sneered. “Merlin prized that pure bloodline. Pity.”

Bram charged toward Ice. “Shut your bloody mouth, you fu—”

“Cease!” Marrok grabbed him and held him back.

Caden was inclined to help. Bram and Ice were always at each other’s throats. If Bram needed wizards loyal to him for the Doomsday Brethren, why the devil had he picked Ice to join?

“Piss off!” Bram growled.

“We can fight no enemy if we are too busy fighting one another,” Marrok advised.

“Beating in the tosser’s skull would make me feel better.”

“What has you on edge?” Duke asked.

Caden wondered the same thing. Bram was usually the voice of sanity amidst all this magical muck. At the moment, he behaved as if he was crawling out of his skin, one step away from the mental ward.

“Where is your mate?” Ice added fuel to the fire. “I’d like to offer her my condolences.”

“My mate is none of your concern. However, the Book of Doomsday is.” Bram hesitated, then rolled his shoulders. “Last night, while I slept, she found it.”

“Found it? Lying about?” Duke demanded.

“It was hidden.” Bram rubbed the back of his neck. “She must have searched for it.”

An ominous gong clanged in Caden’s gut. Magickind wasn’t his issue, but if that book disappeared . . . everyone, magical and human, was at risk.

“She cozied up to you to find the book?” Ice looked ready to laugh.

Bram didn’t have to answer; the humiliation on his face did it for him.

“Shut up!” Caden glared at the stubble-headed wizard, then turned back to Bram. “What happened? Where is the diary?”

“She took it and disappeared.”

Bram’s quiet admission resounded through the room.

“Fuck,” Ice muttered.

“You have no idea where it is?” Caden struggled to pick his jaw off the floor. “Where she is?”

“None.”

“Double fuck,” came Ice again.

The Doomsday Diary was the ultimate weapon in the magical war. Used properly, it was rumored to grant any wish, up to and including the world’s annihilation. People had died in Mathias’s quest to obtain it. Lucan’s life was in shambles because of it. The Doomsday Brethren had formed and were fighting a war to protect it. If Mathias obtained the book and used it to bring about doomsday—well, that was everyone’s problem.