by Nalini Singh
3
It was the fear that saved her. Fueled by the threat of being imprisoned inside her own mind, she wrenched herself out of the endless whirlpool and back into the present. As the rush of air receded from her ears, she heard Nazarach say, “Perhaps I’ll ask you to rejoin my court, Janvier.”
Janvier gave a perfect bow, and for an instant, she saw him in the clothes of a bygone era, a stranger who knew how to play politics with as much manipulative ease as he played cards. Her hand fisted in instinctive rejection, but the next moment he laughed that lazy, amused laugh, and he was the vampire she knew again. “I never was much good as a courtier if you recall.”
“But you provided the most intelligent conversation in the room.” Settling his wings close to his back, the angel walked to a gleaming mahogany table in one corner. “You aid the Guild Hunter?”
Ashwini let Janvier speak, using the time to study Nazarach, his power snapping a whip against her senses… a whip laced with broken glass.
“The idea of a kiss arouses my curiosity.” Janvier paused. “If I may—this situation between Antoine and Callan seems beneath your interest.”
“Antoine,” Nazarach said, his face turning expressionless in the way of the truly old ones, “has begun to overreach himself. He has come dangerously close to challenging my authority.”
“He’s changed, then.” Janvier shook his head. “The Antoine I knew was ambitious, but he also had a healthy regard for his own life.”
“It is the woman—Simone.” The angel passed a photograph to Ashwini, eyes of inhuman amber lingering on her own face a fraction too long. “Barely into her third century and yet she twists Antoine around her finger.”
“Why isn’t she dead?” Ashwini asked point-blank. Angels were a law unto themselves. There was no court on earth that would hold Nazarach to account if he decided to eliminate one of the Made.
Vampires chose their masters when they chose immortality.
The angel flared out his wings slightly, then snapped them shut. “It seems Antoine loves her.”
Ashwini nodded. “You kill her, he’ll turn against you.” And he’d die. Angels were not known for their benevolence.
“After being alive for seven hundred years,” Nazarach mused, speaking of centuries as if they were mere decades, “I find I’m loath to lose one of the few men—his recent mistakes aside—I actually respect.”
Returning the photo of the sultry brunette who was apparently making a very old vampire dance to her tune, Ashwini forced herself to meet Nazarach’s gaze—the amber acted as a lens, focusing the screams to piercing clarity. “How does this tie in with the kidnapping?” she asked, blocking the nightmare with everything she had.
“Callan Fox,” Nazarach said, “intrigues me. I don’t want him dead yet. And Antoine will kill the young pup to retrieve his granddaughter. Get Monique out and bring her to me.”
“You’re asking us to hand you a hostage to use against Antoine.” Ashwini shook her head, relief a cool brush down her spine. “The Guild doesn’t get involved in political disputes.”
“Between angels,” Nazarach corrected. “This is a… problem between an angel and the vampires under his control.”
“Even so,” she said, unable to stop her eyes from going to those wings of amber and light, unable to understand how such beauty could exist alongside the inhuman darkness that stained Nazarach from within, “if you want Monique, all you have to do is ask. Callan will hand her over.” The leader of the Fox kiss might be willing to take on Antoine Beaumont, but only a very stupid vampire would stand against an angel. And Callan Fox was not stupid. “You don’t need me.”
Nazarach gave her an inscrutable smile. “You will not mention my name to Callan. As for the rest—the Guild has already agreed to the terms.”
“No offense,” she said, wondering if he’d look as brutally beautiful while he choked the life out of those who displeased him, “but I need to check that with my boss.”
“Go ahead, Guild Hunter.” Smooth permission, no mercy in those eyes full of death.
Stepping back until she was almost in the hallway, she put through the call on her cell phone, aware of Janvier and Nazarach talking in low voices about things long past, shadows of which experiences clung to Nazarach, but not to Janvier.
Angel and vampire. Both touched by immortality, both compelling, but in vastly different ways. Nazarach was a being honed out of time, perfect, lethal, and utterly, absolutely inhuman. Janvier, in contrast, was earth and blood, deadly and a little rough… and still somehow of this world.
“Ashwini?” Sara’s familiar tone. “What’s the problem?”
She laid out Nazarach’s orders. “Has it been cleared?”
“Yes.” The Guild Director sighed. “I wish to hell we didn’t have to get involved in what promises to turn into a giant clusterfuck, but there’s no way out.”
“He’s playing games.”
“He’s an angel,” Sara said, and it was an answer. “And technically Monique is in breach of her Contract, so Nazarach has the power to send out anyone and anything to retrieve her—even if he could achieve the same aim with a single phone call.”
“Damn.” Ashwini liked working on the edges, but when angels got involved, those edges tended to cut bone deep, drawing the dark red of lifeblood. “You got my back?”
“Always.” An unflinching response. “I’ve put Kenji and Baden on standby—give the signal and we’ll have you out of there in under an hour.”
“Thanks, Sara.”
“Hey, I don’t want to lose my main source of live entertainment.” A smile she could almost hear. “No new hunt order has come in for the Cajun. Just thought you’d want to know.”
“Uh-huh.” Ashwini hung up with a quick good-bye, wondering what Sara would say if she knew exactly who Ashwini was consorting with at the moment.
Janvier turned right at that instant—as if he’d sensed her attention. Shaking off the thought, she walked back to join vampire and angel. “Do you have any idea where Callan might be holding Monique?”
The angel’s eyes dipped to her lips, and she had to fight the urge to run. Because while Nazarach might be agonizingly beautiful, she had the gut-wrenching sense that his idea of pleasure would mean only the most excruciating pain for her.
“No,” he finally said, his gaze moving to her own. “But he’ll be at the Fisherman’s Daughter tomorrow night.” Amber lit with power. “Tonight, you will be my guest.”
Not even the Atlanta heat could fight the chill that invaded her veins, a cold blade of warning.
Sleepless, Ashwini sat on the balcony off the guest suite Nazarach had provided. She’d have preferred a tent in the park, a bed in a shelter, anything to the opulence of the angel’s home—all of it stained with a screaming terror that refused to let her sleep. “How many men and women do you think Nazarach’s killed over his lifetime?” Usually, she sensed things only through touch, but like its master, this place was so old, so bloody with memory, that it echoed endlessly in her mind.
“Thousands,” came the soft answer from the vampire leaning against the wall beside the antique lounger where she sat. “Angels who rule can’t afford to be merciful.”
She turned her face into the night breeze. “And yet some people see them as messengers of the gods.”
“They are who they are. As am I.” Turning, he walked over to brace his hands on the gleaming wooden arms of her lounger. “I must feed, cher.”
Something twisted in her chest, a sharp, unexpected ache, but she held it, held control. “I’m guessing you don’t have much trouble finding food.”
“I can give pleasure with my bite. There are those who seek such pleasures.” Lifting a finger, he traced the scar just above the pulse in her neck. “Who marked you?” A quiet question formed of pure ice.
“My first hunt. I was young, inexperienced. The vamp got close enough to almost rip out my throat.” What she didn’t say was that she’d let the target get tha
t close, let herself feel the kiss of death. Until that moment—when her blood scented the air in an iron-rich perfume—she’d thought she wanted to die, to silence the voices forever. “He taught me to value life.”
“I will ask Nazarach’s indulgence,” Janvier said after an endless moment, “to use the store of blood kept here for his vampires.”
Her senses honed in on something she’d barely seen, words unsaid. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“The angel wants me to leave you alone.” Janvier’s breath brushed over her in an intimate caress. “Otherwise that blood would’ve already been provided. He wants me to go out and hunt.”
Shivers threatened at the idea of what Nazarach wanted from her. “So you’ll anger him.”
“He likes me too much to kill me for such a small transgression.” Still, he didn’t move. “Why are there so many shadows in your eyes, Ashwini?”
It startled her each time he used her given name—as if every utterance bound them tighter on a level she couldn’t see. “Why are there so many secrets in yours?”
“I’ve lived over two hundred years,” he said, his voice as sensual as the magnolia-scented night. “I’ve done many things, not all of which I’m proud of.”
“Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.”
He didn’t smile, didn’t even breathe, still, so still. “Talk to me, my Blade.”
“No.” Not yet.
“I’m very patient.”
“We’ll see.” Even as she spoke, she knew she was laying down a challenge, one Janvier wouldn’t be able to resist.
He leaned in close enough that their lips could’ve touched, his breath a hot burn, his almost-immortality a living beacon in his eyes. “Yes. We will.”
Stepping into the shower, Ashwini turned it to freezing. “Yikes!” Her libido sufficiently dampened by the ice-cold shock, she switched it to superhot.
As her skin sizzled under the delicious heat, she supposed she should’ve been giving serious thought to the lunacy of what she was doing playing with a vampire, who was, for all his charm, as lethal as a stiletto across the throat. But then again, most of her friends already thought she was half a nut short of a fruitcake. Why disappoint?
She grinned against the pounding spray.
Rules and regs, the intricacies of living an “ordinary” life—she’d tried it for the first nineteen years of her existence, and had almost paid with not only her sanity, but her life itself.
A flash of memory and she was in that white-on-white room again, the straps biting into her arms, cutting into her flesh. The smell of disinfectant, the soft hush of rubber-soled shoes… and always, always, the screams—screams only she could hear. Later, them sitting there, judging her, as if they were gods.
“The drugs keep her lucid.”
“Are you sure she’ll stay on them once we release her?”
“She’s going out on her brother’s recognizance. And Dr. Taj is, as we all know, a most well-regarded physician.”
“Ashwini, can you hear us? We need you to answer some questions.”
She’d answered their questions, said what she knew they wanted to hear. It had been the last day she’d ever pretended to be “normal.” So they’d let her out, let her go. “Never again,” she whispered.
And the hell of it was, people still liked her.
Her hand fisted. Not everyone. Dr. Taj wanted only the sister he’d known before, the rising star whose glitter matched his own. Who the hell cared if that star had been dying piece by slow piece as she tried desperately to hang on to a sky she’d never quite understood?
It was the heat that wrenched her out of the abyss, her skin beginning to protest its treatment. Flicking off the water with a grateful sigh, she rubbed herself down using the fluffy peach-colored towel that went with the elegant décor of the room. It would’ve been normal to head out into the bedroom in the matching robe hung on the back of the door, but Ashwini was a hunter. And, within the Guild, paranoia was not only accepted but encouraged.
It was as well. Because when she walked out—barefoot, but otherwise dressed, her gun hidden in the curve of her lower back—it was to find the most dangerous being in Atlanta waiting for her.
“Nazarach,” she said, stopping in the bathroom doorway. “This is a surprise.”
The angel stepped out onto the balcony. “Come.”
Sensing it would be suicidal to refuse, she followed him out into the summer air, the night heavy with the warm scents of the flowers that ringed the estate. “Janvier?”
“I know his tastes well.”
Ashwini’s hands clenched on the railing—a courtesy for guests, one she hadn’t expected. “Why am I here?” Why are you?
Nazarach leaned his elbows on the railing, his wings relaxed but no less magnificent. “I asked for you on this hunt. Do you know why?”
“I’ve done previous work in tracking down kidnap victims.” In most cases, those vampires had been taken by some hate group that planned to torture the “sin” of vampirism out of them. “I intended to do some background work on Monique tonight.”
“Leave it. She’ll stay alive and unharmed until Callan gets what he wants.”
“You sound very certain.”
The angel smiled and it was like no smile she’d ever seen, heavy with age, with the shadows of death that twisted around her senses like razor-sharp thorns.
“Callan,” Nazarach said, “didn’t survive my court by being without wit. He knows that while now Antoine plays politics, the oldest Beaumont will find a way to kill him if he harms Monique. So long as Antoine lives, Monique will, too.”
“You could stop this feud,” she said, focusing on breathing, on staying alive. “All you have to do is give your support to either Antoine or Callan.”
“Everyone needs to evolve.” A cool statement, one that held the chill winds of time. “Antoine is growing too settled—it may be time for the mantle to pass to Callan.”
“I thought you liked Antoine.”
“I’m an angel—liking someone is only one part of the equation.” His face turned toward her, his expression lethal in its very neutrality. “I asked for you because you bloodied an angel who tried to take you a year ago.”
4
Her heart was a rock in her throat. “He was young and stupid—it wasn’t hard to disable him long enough to get away.”
“You pinned his wings to a wall with seven crossbow bolts.”
Swallowing the rock, she decided to hell with it. “Was he a relative?”
“Even if he had been, I don’t abide lack of intelligence in those around me. Egan was punished for his idiocy.”
Ashwini truly didn’t want to know what Nazarach had done to the slender angel who’d attempted to make her his playmate. But the wildness in her couldn’t help asking, “Because he tried to go after a hunter… or because he failed?”
Another cold smile. “You should ask Egan—his tongue has regrown.” Rising from his relaxed position, he held out a hand. “Fly with me, Ashwini.”
Even from a foot away, it felt as if he were wrapping her in a thousand ropes, strangling, crushing, killing. “I can’t touch you.”
His eyes gleamed and she saw her death in them. “I’m so distasteful?”
“You have too much in you,” she whispered, fighting for breath. “Too many lives, too many memories, too many ghosts.”
That hand lowered, his expression intrigued. “You have the eye?”
Such an old way of speaking. But then, Nazarach had wit-nessed the dark march of seven centuries. “Of a kind.” She backed up, trying to find air in a world that suddenly seemed to have none.
When Janvier’s hand came around her nape, she accepted the touch without startlement, as if something in her had known, had reached for him. One touch, and suddenly her throat opened, the summer air sweet as nectar to her parched lungs.
“Sire,” Janvier said, his voice soft, his address one of respect. “Don’t destroy a treasure for a mome
nt’s fleeting pleasure.”
“Audrina was not to your taste?” the angel asked, his eyes never moving off Ashwini. “I find that hard to believe.”
“My tastes have changed.” Janvier’s free hand came to rest on her upper arm. “Even if Ash isn’t cooperating.”
Nazarach went motionless for a moment—and at that instant, Ashwini knew she’d fight the death he threw at them. Because she’d brought Janvier into this. He was hers to protect.