I kissed him, feeling more from the simple brush of his mouth than I’d felt from every relationship before him. Oh, I never thought I’d have this! In all the years of my life, I hadn’t even dared to wish for it. No wonder I lost my mind on a regular basis when it came to Ian. Everything else could be replaced. He couldn’t.
“Unless you want to continue this in the backseat, we need to stop,” Ian said, breaking the kiss. Then, he opened the backseat car door with a grin. “You already know my preference.”
“Later,” I said with a laugh.
His eyes flashed a brighter shade of green. “I’ll hold you to that.”
I was still smiling as I walked down the street toward the building. Silver and other metal objects in my coat pockets slapped against my legs with my brisk movements. Denise and Spade had loaned us clothes and, more important, weapons.
I didn’t want to use any of them against Xun Guan, but I didn’t underestimate her, either. She’d been a warrior for the past two thousand years. She wouldn’t stop being one despite her feelings for me . . . if she even still had feelings beyond anger.
Right before I reached the building, I used a quick glamour spell to change my appearance back to my blond Law Guardian disguise. This was the appearance Xun Guan knew. She’d only ever seen my real one twice, and I didn’t want to remind her of the last time, when I’d ripped Dagon’s soul out right in front of her.
Then again, she probably didn’t need my real appearance to remind her of that. It was doubtless seared on her memory.
Several windows in the three-story building were broken. It looked abandoned, and I didn’t hear any heartbeats, but her cell was here, so it couldn’t be empty. I sent my senses out, searching for the aura of energy all vampires emanated.
There. On the third floor.
I felt only one vampire, but I had my energy tamped down to where it was undetectable, too, and I was far from the only vampire who knew that trick. After a quick glance confirmed that no one on the street was watching me, I jumped up to the second floor, entering through one of the smashed-out windows.
I felt the snap of magic as soon as I did. I tried to leap back out the same window, but it was suddenly a wall. So were all the other windows that, moments before, had been empty square spaces that let in the cool night air.
Nice, I thought even as I jumped up because the floor now felt like quicksand. I couldn’t go far, though. Magic-infused webs hung from the ceiling, nearly reaching the floor.
At once I stretched out until I floated horizontally above the floor. This sparse, half-meter-high space was the only section of the room free of both webs and the quicksand-like floor . . . and both should have been invisible to me. Since Law Guardians were allowed to practice defensive magic, I’d taught Xun Guan the web spell myself, so I well knew its strengths. Invisibility was one of them. But somehow, I caught glints of the magic that infused each strand of the complex nets.
Such beauty, my other half thought. Like raindrops on a spider’s web when the moonlight shines through them.
That’s why I could see the spell now! Thanks to my father’s enhancement, my other half must now be able to see magic as well as see through Phanes’s illusions.
We can see through magic, she corrected. I could almost feel her huff as she added, Will you never learn?
Don’t you mean will we never learn? I countered.
Her laugh bubbled in my throat, until I found myself chuckling out loud.
“How can you be laughing?” a feminine voice asked in an ancient dialect of Mandarin. “And how did you avoid my traps?”
I turned my head. Xun Guan was in the doorway, wearing a tactical-style gray unitard with a scabbard belted at her waist, and throwing knives holstered around her thighs and upper arms. She’d swept her long black hair into a bun—her usual style when fighting so it didn’t restrict her vision and no one could use its length to grab her. Her sword was drawn—not a good sign—but for the moment, it was also pointed downward.
“Xun Guan,” I said in the same language. “We need to talk.”
Chapter 26
Her midnight brown eyes were hard, as if I was nothing to her and never had been. I hadn’t expected a warm welcome, but it was a bit disconcerting to see her look at me that way. We’d been more than on-again, off-again lovers over the centuries. Long before that, we’d also been friends.
“You insult me, wearing this false image,” she said.
I dropped my glamour, then immediately had to tie my hair into a knot after its much longer strands touched the floor and that quicksand magic tried to grab them and pull me down.
“Should’ve worn it in a bun like you do,” I commented.
She just stared at me, her features as tight as her coiled muscles, while she continued to hold herself in a fighter’s stance. She was so still, she resembled a beautiful statue, but my wariness increased. She only held herself this immobile right before she executed someone.
“I mean you no harm,” I said, in case that was the issue.
She didn’t even blink. “I cannot say the same.”
“Xun Guan—”
Silver knives ripped through the air from an unseen third trap. I shot away to avoid them, but I could only move in a horizontal line, while they came from all directions.
Very good! my other half noted as several blades sank home. We’ll kill her quickly in appreciation of her cleverness.
We’re not killing her, I snapped.
Why? Because with you in charge, we’d already be dead?
I ignored that and concentrated. This building might be abandoned, but it still had plumbing. I didn’t have to kill Xun Guan to stop her.
Trust me, I told my other nature, then grabbed the water in the pipes with our combined abilities and pulled.
The pipes exploded as it burst free. Xun Guan turned at the loud sound, her sword rising. Another blast of concentration turned the water into ice shards that tore through the ceilings, walls, and floor, aiming for Xun Guan. Her sword spun in a blur, but not even her incredible skill and speed could stop them all.
She fell to the floor as the shards ripped through her, too numerous for her to heal from their damage. The knife trap that had been razing me ceased. Her will must have powered the spell, and now she was unconscious, her body strafed from so many ice shards that her ripped unitard revealed more than it covered.
At the same instant, a car crashed through the wall opposite Xun Guan, hitting her and sending both of them hurtling through the other wall and into the next room. I turned in disbelief. Ian was floating in front of the huge new hole in the wall, a torn-off fender still in his hands.
“What the hell?” I managed to say.
His brows shot up. “Did you think I’d watch her cut you to shreds with that knife trap? Knew I couldn’t teleport in without getting caught by her spells, so I stopped her another way.”
I love him, my other half said with smug satisfaction.
So did I, but all of us would have a real hard time getting Xun Guan to help now.
“Go back down and mesmerize the bystanders that will definitely show up after this racket,” I said, wincing as I began pulling the silver knives out of me.
He rolled his eyes. “You’re welcome.”
“Okay, thank you, but I did have it handled! She was on the ground, wasn’t she?”
He snorted. “You’re saying I overreacted in order to protect you? If gods struck hypocrites with lightning bolts, your arse would be on fire right now.”
I shot a quick grin at him as I finished removing the knives and zoomed over to check on Xun Guan. “True, but you still have to deal with any bystanders. Everyone has camera phones now, and we can’t afford to make someone YouTube famous by proving the existence of vampires.”
“You get five minutes,” I heard him mutter before he vanished from the hole in the wall.
I flew into the second room, keeping a careful eye out for any new spells. So far, nothing. Just
Xun Guan trapped under a smashed sedan that I didn’t recognize. Figures Ian wouldn’t use our rental car. That had been insured. Now, I owed some poor stranger a check because this car was a total loss.
“Two gods escaped from the netherworld with the help of a lesser deity named Phanes,” I said as I pulled the car off Xun Guan’s upper body. I left it on her lower half because I wasn’t about to make it easy for her to try killing me again. “All three are here, and they don’t come in peace.”
“Murderer,” she rasped in reply.
“Yes, I killed Dagon, but you don’t know how much he had it coming. To summarize, he used me to murder thousands of innocent people back when I was human, and that’s not even mentioning what he did to me.”
“Not . . . the demon.”
Her voice gained strength as the bones in her upper body healed. They must have splintered after Ian basically swatted her flat with this car.
“You murdered Claudia and Pyotor,” she finished in a much clearer tone.
“Claudia and Pyotor from the council are dead?”
My raised voice made her wince. Her head must not have finished healing yet.
“Do not feign surprise with me!”
She swiped at her fallen sword as she spoke. I kicked it away, and then stood on both her wrists to hold them down. Between me and the car, she wasn’t moving anytime soon.
She gave me her opinion of that in a rage-filled glare.
“I saw the security footage. It was you, in your real form, murdering Claudia and Pyotor two days ago. That is why I messaged you, telling you to meet me here for battle instead of slaying others in their sleep the way a coward would!”
“I didn’t get your message, and I didn’t kill them, because I wasn’t even in this world two days ago,” I snapped.
But Phanes was, and he knew my real form.
A simple glamour spell could have duplicated it. He wouldn’t have even needed his powers of illusion. Oh, the clever bastard! He’d used my appearance to create chaos in the vampire world by having it appear that a former Law Guardian had assassinated two council members, all while Ruaumoko was regaining power by setting off volcanoes in Iceland and earthquakes in New Zealand, and Morana was leveling herself up by refreezing the arctic circle!
I had to hand it to the trio: they’d been busy, and smart. If Ian and I hadn’t returned, no one would know they were behind all of this, and we shouldn’t have returned. Minus a few lucky breaks, we’d still be stuck in the netherworld or dead.
“It might have looked like me on that footage, but it wasn’t me,” I said to Xun Guan. “I told you, I wasn’t even in this world. I was in the netherworld until last night.”
“Liar,” she hissed. “Only the dead can enter the underworld, and the dead do not return from it. And if you were with the dead, how did you know where I was, if you were not in this world to receive the message I sent you?”
She’d challenged me to a duel. No wonder she’d had this place rigged with traps from top to bottom. It also explained why she’d been staying in an empty building in this nearly abandoned, derelict section of Athens. She hadn’t wanted any innocent people to get hurt when we fought.
“I never got your message,” I told her in a steady voice. “I had a hacker trace your mobile to this location because I needed to speak to you, and I was able to travel in and out of the netherworld because my father is its warden.”
The truth I never thought I’d tell her hung in the air between us. She stared at me, unblinking.
“King Yan is your father?”
I sighed. “That’s one of his names, yes.”
Granted, King Yan, or Yanluo, was the ruler and judge of the underworld in Chinese mythology and my father claimed not to judge anyone. But he did rule the punishment section of the netherworld, and I didn’t think Xun Guan wanted a discussion on religious minutia right now.
“I should have known.” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “When I saw you tear that demon’s soul out and hurl it into the underworld . . . I should have known what you were.”
I almost missed her staring at me with murderous intent. The new, almost reverent horror was worse. With one admission, I’d ceased being a person to her. Now, I was a thing. A feared, honored thing with her beliefs, but a thing nonetheless.
I steeled myself against how much that hurt. She’d been one of my oldest friends, but my feelings were irrelevant right now.
Then, she looked away. “What you are still does not prove your innocence. You lied to me for over a thousand years. How am I to believe you’re not lying to me again now?”
I sighed. “Because you know me. I might not have told you what I was because I knew you’d feel honor-bound to report me, but you know who I am, Xun Guan. That hasn’t changed.”
Sadness clouded her gaze. “I thought I knew you. Once.”
Frustration sharpened my tone. “You refuse to trust in my character? Fine, then trust in my methodology. We fought many battles together. Have I ever killed an enemy in their sleep?”
Her silence confirmed my point.
“And if I were going to murder a council member, it wouldn’t have been Claudia or Pyotor,” I added with brutal honesty. “It would’ve been Haldam, and you’d better believe he’d be awake, because I’d want to look that sexist, malignant narcissist in the eye when I twisted silver through his heart.”
A wheeze escaped her that she stifled too late. I wasn’t the only one who disliked Haldam for those same reasons.
“I might not be what you believed me to be, but I’m still the person you know and loved,” I said. “I still care for you, too, Xun Guan. I also trust you. That’s why I came to tell you that these gods are real, they’re here, and they need to be stopped before they do much worse than kill two council members. You have to warn the remaining council about them because they will no longer listen to me.”
“No, they won’t,” she breathed out. “They are meeting now to appoint two new members, and to determine the bounty they are placing on your head for assassinating Claudia and Pyotor.”
I barely processed the bounty part because I was too appalled by the first bit. “The remaining council is meeting together now? All of them? Tell me they’re not meeting at the official court location on Mount Lycabettus?”
Her gaze widened with understanding. “Yes, they are—”
“Fucking hell!” I shouted, leaping off her wrists. “Ian!”
He was there before my voice died away, his grim expression revealing that he’d overheard everything.
“They’re serving themselves up for slaughter,” he said.
“Unless we stop it,” I replied, yanking on the car.
Ian’s hand landed on it, stopping me from freeing Xun Guan. “First, swear by your blood that you will not try to kill or arrest Veritas,” he said to Xuan Guan.
“Ian!” I shoved at his arm. It didn’t move. “We don’t have time for this. The council could die.”
“Then she’d best get to swearing that, shouldn’t she?” he replied, not looking away from Xun Guan.
Her mouth curled in contempt. “How dare you demand my word of honor when you have no honor yourself?”
“Very little,” he agreed with a wolfish smile. “But you’re awash in it. So give your word, or I’ll bounce up and down on this car until I grind your bones to dust while the council probably gets murdered.”
If I could teleport, I’d have left them both behind for their stubbornness. Still, only Ian could get us to the top of Athens’s famed Mount Lycabettus in seconds, and even at that speed, we might be too late.
There was only one way to hasten this standoff.
“He’ll do it,” I said to Xun Guan. “He didn’t like the council before they branded me a fugitive. Now that they have? He couldn’t care less if they died.”
Ian’s grin said, all true.
“So swear it, Xun Guan,” I went on. “Saving them is more important than arresting me, and now that you know I didn’
t murder Claudia or Pyotor, you’re not going to hurt me anyway.”
I also wouldn’t hurt her, now that I wasn’t defending myself against her impressive attempts to kill me. Ian might want to grind her bones into dust for that, but I wouldn’t let him. Not that I’d tell her that. After believing I’d murdered two of them, the council really wouldn’t be inclined to listen to me, so we needed Xun Guan. But if she couldn’t bring herself to make such a simple promise, I’d leave her behind.
Xun Guan’s gaze promised vengeance as she stared at Ian. I’d be tempted to make her swear the same concerning him, if she were his match. But she wasn’t, and we were out of time.
Ian must have agreed. “Now or never,” he said, giving the car a warning jostle.
“On my blood, I do swear to your conditions,” she said, then ripped her lower lip with a fang and spat the blood at Ian.
He only grinned as he yanked the car off her with one hard tug.
“Now, hold on to Veritas since neither of us wants your hands on me. We’ve got a slaughter to stop.”
Chapter 27
When the blinding whirls ceased, we were at the top of Mount Lycabettus, on the gravel path above part of the amphitheater. The cable cars, church, restaurant, and other attractions across the way were closed, emptied, and with their lights off, leaving only the theater illuminated on the famed peak. Normally, that was a subtle statement to all Greece’s vampires that the council was now in session. This is where the council had met for centuries, even before there were electric lights to turn on or an amphitheater for them to meet in.
That was the point. Everyone knew that Mount Lycabettus was the official court for the council, and no demon, ghoul, or vampire had ever dared to attack here. But this was no normal conflict. We were fighting against gods, and they didn’t care about honoring the old rules. Right now, the theater lighting up the famed mountain’s peak might as well have been a neon sign flashing “Attack here!” to Phanes.
Xun Guan took a step toward the amphitheater, and promptly fell on the weathered stone. Either her legs hadn’t finished healing during the brief moments it took Ian to transport us here, or she was unsteady after her first time teleporting.
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