Read [Southern Arcana 3.0] Deadlock for Free Online

should smack you for it.”
    “According to half the town, that’s pretty much business as usual.”
    “You could try to—” Jackson’s words cut off as magic shuddered through the truck. “Someone just set off the wards I laid around Kat’s balcony doors.”
    Alec popped his door open. “Take the front. I’ll circle around to the balcony.”
    Jackson grinned. “He shouldn’t be too hard to run down.” With those cryptic words, he slid out of the truck and disappeared.
    Once Alec rounded the side of the building and got a good look at the courtyard under Kat’s window, he figured out what Jackson had meant. A tall blond man lay huddled on the grass a few feet away from one of the downstairs neighbor’s plastic chairs. Whatever spell Jackson had twisted into the wards had clearly triggered as soon as the man had gotten his hands on the railing.
    Fear spell. Alec had seen it enough times to recognize the aftermath, and it made it easy to drag the man to his feet. He stumbled as if drunk, which would hopefully explain to any onlookers why Alec was dragging him bodily around the yard. It wasn’t late enough for Kat’s apartment complex to be quiet for the night—not on a Friday—so Alec hauled his captive around to the parking lot to meet Jackson. “Upstairs or into the truck?”
    “Depends. Are you going to knock him around?”
    “He punched Kat in the fucking face.”
    “Point taken.” Jackson reached for the stumbling man. “Load him up in the cab, and we’ll head to your place. I can keep him unconscious until we get there.”
    At least there wouldn’t be any argument about whether or not the man deserved a good punch or two. Maybe it would teach him to keep his fists off of women.
    And if it didn’t, he wouldn’t get a second chance to hurt any of Alec’s people.

    Carmen managed not to drop her dinner as she wrestled her keys from her pocket and got the correct one in the lock on the front door. As soon as she did, the door swung open, and Lily reached for the tipping pizza box. “I heard there was trouble at the clinic. How bad?”
    “Bad enough to call Franklin.” She dropped her keys and bag on the polished table in the entryway. “Did he come by?”
    “After you called him off, yeah. He’s in the kitchen, making margaritas.” As if on cue, the soft whir of the blender drifted from the other room. “What happened?”
    “A girl and her date were attacked and roughed up a little. Franklin knows her, apparently. Kat Gabriel?”
    The blender stopped. A moment later Franklin appeared in the doorway, his usually mild expression exchanged for a frown. “You didn’t tell me it was Kat. Is everyone all right?”
    “She’s fine.” But that wasn’t what Franklin was asking. “So are Tara and I.”
    His steely grip on the doorframe eased somewhat. “If Katherine Gabriel comes in, you should always call me. And get her into a shielded room as fast as you can.”
    “I know. She gave me her history.” History. The word seemed too innocuous to refer to the sort of death and psychic destruction Kat had mentioned.
    Franklin seemed to echo her thought. “Words don’t quite do it justice. I was there, in the aftermath. A Conclave strike team tore open a man’s abdomen, and she attacked them. They were catatonic when I arrived.”
    Carmen dropped to the sofa. It was an extreme response, one born of fear, and that’s exactly what Kat would have conveyed to the attackers—fear. Gut-wrenching, mind-numbing terror . “She said she killed them.”
    “No. Someone else did that, once we realized what we were dealing with. I saw it happen once before, in the eighties…” He shuddered. “They made the mistake of keeping the guy alive. Trying to heal him. Three weeks later a psychic finally broke through and figured out he’d been reliving that one moment of terror on an endless loop. There’s no coming back from it.”
    Lily touched his arm on her way into the kitchen. “Shouldn’t she be