Free Divine Savior by Kathi S. Barton

little at all, really. Still, he felt drunk and happy, both stronger and lightheaded at the same time. She packed quite a punch, he thought with a short giggle.
    Standing now, he bowed before her. “Now, my lady, what can I do for you? Anything you need, I will provide. Death to an old lover, scaring a bill collector, anything; you name it and then consider it done.” He realized he was giddy. He was actually drunk from the taste of her.
    “Nothing so nefarious, sir, I assure you. I need but a name. Who was the magic that was here before I came?” She moved about the room, touching the woman’s things, his mate’s things. Colin watched as Mel picked up a folded shirt, and then returned it. Heat welled in his veins. Colin watched her touch his mate’s things, and felt an overwhelming need to ask the queen to stop, to please leave things alone. It was then that he realized Mel was there because she had felt the power too, the woman’s power.
    “How did you know...you felt it too? How?” Colin flushed when he realized he was babbling. “She’s strong, isn’t she? I didn’t know how strong until she tossed me across the room just now.”
    “Yes, I felt it. She is a part of me, magic. Not like me, just a part of the magic somehow. I’m not sure how as yet.” She was leaning against the wall now, regarding him as she spoke. “What can you tell me about her? Does she live here? Do the two of you live here together? I can smell her on you; that’s why I ask.”
    They both turned just as the room shimmered once again. This time, Mel’s grandfather, Phillip, a former royal guard himself before he married Mel’s grandmother, came toward them. He looked pleased. At what, Colin had no idea.
    “She isn’t a royal guard, that’s for sure. I know that taste of magic. Where is she, my love?” Phillip commented as he looked around the room.
    He searched as if the person he was looking for would pop out at him at any moment. Colin felt a giggle erupt again without being able to stop it. The powerful blood was doing that to him, he realized, and tried to get a hold on it.
    “I was just asking the young vamp here the same thing.” She turned to Colin with a raised brow, as if to say, well, time to fess up.
    Colin knelt back down to the floor. Suddenly, it was too much. They were right; the woman was right. He didn’t know who she was. Because as soon as Colin had pulled her into his embrace, he knew that she was not the stoned woman in the apartment. She and the drug addict, they were two different women. And this one, the one who he had just threatened, was the protector Sara had sensed while she had been searching the room for Colin.
    Colin had come here to kill an unknown woman because he had assumed incorrectly. He had assumed that she had been the cause of the death of a young child. When she had been the stronger one, the woman who had fought the were. He had caused harm to his mate. More importantly, she was strong magic and Colin was sure she would be using it on him again.
    “I don’t know who she is. I met her several weeks ago, well, not met. She ran into me, literally. She was running out of the back of a restaurant, stealing food...I can only assume now for the small humans. Since then I’ve been sort of stalking her. I came here to kill her for something I thought she had done. I thought she had killed her own child, you see? But I was wrong...wrong about so many things about her.”
    Colin was babbling, talking fast and likely making very little sense either. He hated himself for what he had done, what he had thought. Now he had to explain himself and his actions not only to these two beings, but his master as well.
    Colin sat now and looked up at the ceiling. He wondered now about her scent. She had been coming and going from the back of the building, not the front. The front entrance would have brought her closer to the apartment and the stairs. Colin should have thought of that earlier. Drug addicts