“Yes,” Irena said.
Alejandro stepped closer, close enough for Irena to touch, and looked up at the Virgo. “She did her duty. She judged them all when she said they were evil. Perhaps humans should be grateful she didn’t also carry out a punishment.”
“Perhaps people would’ve been more grateful if she had killed the evil humans among them.” Irena gave him a wry look. “You argue with the devil’s tongue, Olek.”
“No.” Khavi’s smile had an edge that was sharper than amusement. “He sounds like an angel.”
“Angels? You’ve met—” Jake’s phone buzzed. He looked at it and grimaced. He caught Drifter’s eyes, then jerked his head toward Lilith’s office. “I’m heading in. You want a ride back to Seattle?”
“I do.”
“Okay.” With his hand in Alice’s, Jake backed away, pointed at Khavi. “I’m going to ask you more about that.”
Irena held Alejandro’s gaze as Jake and Alice took their leave. Jake wanted to ask more about Khavi’s claim to have seen angels, but Irena did not care about that. There were no angels here. Only Guardians. Guardians and grigori.
Though when she looked at Olek, Khavi seemed very far away. “Did you think I would pull my knives out?”
“No. If it came to that, I think you would use your teeth.” His gaze settled on her mouth as if he expected her to snap her teeth at him—or to laugh. “If you will join me in the gymnasium, we will spar.”
She laughed now, in surprise. “Slaying the nosferatu didn’t satisfy you? You’ve had a victory today; do you now look forward to a defeat?”
“When did you last use your sword rather than your knives?” His smile came into his eyes. “You’ll find that I’ve improved.”
She knew he had. “I’ve beaten you with only a knife before.”
“That was before,” he said. “And you were not satisfied then. Now you will be.”
Her heart pounded. When had he last challenged her? Before the bargain with the demon, before she’d created an iron room to keep Olek out, before she’d left him to burn it all. Now, finally, he challenged her again.
The centuries fell away, and she was breathless, her world filled with him. Needing movement, she circled his lean form, her gaze measuring his length. Physically, he had barely changed. He still moved like smoke and flame.
Except for now, when he was a statue beneath her gaze.
“You are older. Which means that you use swords that are not matched to your speed or your strength. If we do this, I will measure you for new weapons.” She stopped behind him. His muscles were taut. Her fingers remembered gliding up smooth metal that was a match to his aroused form. “Or I will try to. It will be difficult to take your measure when you are begging for mercy upon the gymnasium floor.”
“Did you wear braids then?” Khavi’s harmonious voice smothered Irena’s good spirits. “Or is that something you will do?”
Irena held herself still. She wouldn’t anger just because the grigori had spoken to her. “Unless you have lied about being unable to see the past, then it must be the future, demon spawn.”
And it couldn’t be Irena’s future. She would never wear braids again.
“I saw it long ago, and it was not your future. I do not know when it happens. Perhaps it has, or it will.” Khavi drew her fingers down the sides of her jaw and brought them to a point a few inches from the end of her chin. “His beard was longer.”
Alejandro remained still, but he was like smoke again, dark and gathering. “Mine?”
“No. The demon’s whose future I saw. Though the rest of him was like you, the beard was not.” She drew the end of a braid to her mouth, ran the tip over her lips like a paintbrush. Her eyes met Irena’s. “The demon will say that he loves your—”
“Nyet!” The denial burst from her. Her knives were in her hands, and she was already springing forward.
She would silence the demon spawn herself.
Alejandro brought her up short. His arms wrapped around her waist, a steel band that she couldn’t bend to her will and wouldn’t break. He yanked her back against him.
“I suggest you leave, madam.” His voice and his psychic scent were sharp with icy disdain, but Irena felt the blasting heat of anger through his clothes.
“It was your past, then. And Michael has already slain that particular demon.” The grigori’s eyes flooded with black from edge to edge. Her Gift pushed out and swept back, scraping across Irena’s psyche like crushed shells caught in a tide. “Your future holds just as much death. You should be pleased; a demon’s spawn will fall beneath your spear. And soon, I think. I must see—”
She vanished silently. Irena stood, her chest a heaving bellows. Alejandro’s hands tightened, and she ripped out of his grasp, whirled on him.
“Never again.” She held her knife out, pointed at his throat. “I will tear your arms off.”
His skin stretched over his cheekbones so that they stood out like blades. He pushed her knife aside. His hands trapped her face, held her tight.
“What did he love?” he demanded.
“Nothing. A demon cannot lo—”
“They can.” His gaze searched hers. Looking, always looking. As if he never had before, as if he never would again. “It was your braids. I thought he’d—”
He broke off. Was that relief in his expression?
She hated him in that instant. Wanted to hurt him. “Tied me with them? Whipped me? Strung me up? No, he did none of those things,” she said bitterly.
Alejandro’s eyes told her that he’d thought all of that and more, and each imagining had been agony for him. That the truth relieved him tortured her more than a demon could have.
And not even the whole truth. Would that be a relief, too? It choked her to think so—and infuriated her.
If she told him what had happened in that iron room, Alejandro would understand her shame. He was not a fool, and he knew her well. But if relief accompanied that understanding, Irena feared her response. Her fury now was pale in comparison to what it could be—to what it had been with the demon when he’d finished with her.
She would not risk losing her head to anger with Olek.
“What did he say, Irena?”
“That they were like ropes of fire.” And like flames, the demon made them lick and dance. A brush across her lips, a flick against her skin. And she’d burned. “Let me go, Olek, or I will break each of your fingers.”
“They will heal.” His thumbs stroked her temples in heated streaks.
There was nowhere she didn’t feel that hot touch. She hadn’t felt it in four centuries, but her body remembered. Need carried it over her skin, pooled like heavy liquid fire in her core. She wanted that touch. Needed that touch. And resented that it made her so weak.
But she didn’t need to break his bones to make him let her go. “You hold me against my will?”
Instantly, his hands dropped away. He took a step back, his face pale. “Forgive me.”
She wanted to turn, to go, but she’d already run once today with a crushing weight in her chest. “Do you still wish to spar?”
Stupid to ask. Stupid to try to recapture what they had for a few seconds here, for a few months centuries ago. It could not be done, and nothing good would come from digging up the ruins of what they’d shared.
“No.” He bowed slightly. “I have assignments to complete—and I do not want to fight with you anymore.”
Not fight? She watched him walk away, her stomach in a knot. Then what would they do?
The answer was too obvious: nothing.
CHAPTER 5
Jake teleported him to London. Thanks to Special Investigations and a plethora of falsified documentation in his cache, Alejandro had credentials that would stand up under scrutiny, but it was too late in the evening to pretend a police interview. Instead, he followed one of the men who’d reported the human sacrifices to a pub.
He’d planned to buy the man—Walters—a pint, but didn’t hav
e to make even that small effort. As soon as Walters entered the pub, a group of men hailed him. They set ale in front of him and began their questions. Alejandro sat in a nearby booth, read through the newspaper clippings and police reports from the file, and listened. The men were clearly having Walters on—and clearly disbelieved every word he said. And Walters said more than enough. The more he drank, the more his tongue loosened, and the more Alejandro was persuaded that the Guardians had nothing to be concerned about here. He’d yet to meet a demon who skulked around in a cloak beneath a full moon—and a demon couldn’t kill a human unless that person willingly offered his life.
Most of these reports ended up being unrelated to demons. Some were vampires who’d been trying to cover up their nature. When Alejandro encountered them, he offered assistance.
That wasn’t the case here.
An hour later, he left the pub with nothing more substantial than a renewed dislike for the scent of vinegar. He’d visit the site of the alleged sacrifice to make certain—though he suspected that if he found any blood, it would be chicken or pig.
Alejandro formed a long coat and turned up his collar as he stepped out onto the street. The cold didn’t affect him, but he didn’t like the rain on the back of his neck any more than when he’d been human.
At this hour, the streets were mostly empty, and the night quiet. Alejandro walked, and tried to occupy his mind with anything but Irena, and the way he’d left her earlier. He’d even have welcomed Jake’s endless—and entertaining—chatter, but the young Guardian no longer trained with him daily. Alejandro hadn’t yet taken on another student.
The urge for sex drove hard through him, as it always did after a fight with Irena. He had no one to go to, however. And even if Emilia had still lived in his house, he wouldn’t use her as a substitute.
God, what a laughable idea.
There wasn’t a substitute for Irena. No woman could be. Every one of his companions had been friends with him first. He hadn’t often fought with them, and he didn’t provoke them. Until the inevitable end, his relationships were comfortable.
Even when he and Irena hadn’t fought, life with her hadn’t been comfortable.
The street opened into a square. From a pedestal, a bronze statue overlooked a fenced garden. The male figure strode purposefully to nowhere, a sober expression fixed to his dark face. Alejandro drew closer, but he no longer saw this statue.
And, yes—life with Irena had been torture, sometimes.
He’d stood for nearly an hour in the forge, his clothes vanished. Irena could have recreated his form within seconds, but she took her time with the statue. Long enough that Alejandro’s initial arousal, the half-hardness of knowing that she looked at him so intimately, had faded. Long enough that his focus had expanded from her and he’d begun to enjoy the quiet, the soft heat trapped by the thick wooden walls of the lodge, the pattering of rain on the metal roof. And so at ease that an ember popping in the hearth startled him; he cocked his head, to hear better.
Irena’s soft growl came from in front of the statue. “Do not move your head if you wish to keep it.”
“Perdóneme, maestra.” He gave a mock bow and regained the pose she’d instructed him to take: standing, his weight on his left foot, his arms hanging at his sides. They felt useless there; his hands were meant to hold a sword. But she’d wanted to sculpt a man at rest.
It seemed a lie. He was at rest, but no semblance of life existed in this pose, or in the statue she created.
She looked around the statue’s shoulder, the firelight glinting off her braids. The color of the flames was not half as deep or as varied as the oranges and reds of her hair. “Do you tire of waiting?”
Was that what this exercise was about—his patience? “Sí.”
He tired of waiting, but only for her to be satisfied with his training. He didn’t tire of standing here, with Irena’s gaze running over him, her Gift pouring from her hands.
Laughter rippled through her psychic scent, like a smooth pebble tumbling down a mountain stream. But her voice was even as she replied,
“But that is what a Guardian does: wait. Endless hours, until you finally detect a demon, finally track down a nosferatu. And a few brutal moments later, you will either be victorious or you will be dead.”
He watched her fingers sweep down the arm of the bronze figure. “I will be victorious.”
“You cannot even defeat me yet.”
A flush started up his neck. It was true. In the two weeks since their meeting in Caelum, he had disarmed her, had bloodied her, had ambushed her—but she’d always recovered and prevailed.
Her brows crashed together, and her fury surprised him out of his embarrassment. Despite her anger, her words were as flat and barren as the tundra outside the forge.
“There is no shame in being overpowered by one who is stronger or more skilled. No shame in a battle well fought, even if it ends in defeat.”
Her lips compressed, and she moved back in front of the statue.
She was . . . hiding, he realized. That outburst had not been for him. He thought of what he’d already learned of her history. Thought of how she might have been overpowered. She hadn’t been overpowered by a demon or nosferatu; if she had been, she’d be dead.
So it had been a man—or men. She’d been a slave, and he had no doubt she’d been a vibrant, strong woman. Who wouldn’t have wanted her? What man wouldn’t have wanted to prove his strength by overpowering her?
His hands fisted, as if to hold his own rage within them.
“Then what shame would you accept?”
“If you stopped fighting.” Her gaze swept over him, and with the next pulse of her Gift, the statue’s fists closed. “Even if you cannot physically struggle, if you stop fighting you should feel shame.”
She honored defiance, then. He knew well how she appreciated his—not thoughtless defiance, but resistance to anything that went against his core. In the first days of training, her eyes had gleamed when he’d told her how he’d burned, tied to a wooden post. The gleam hadn’t been pleasure, and he’d been surprised that he’d understood it: The pain of his execution had faded a hundred years ago, but he would always have his moment of defiance, his refusal to betray his family to save his life. That was something a man could take pride in. Something she’d admired.
But he’d not done much worth admiration in the hundred years since. Only study and train.
Why, then, had she promised more after his training was completed? She was twelve hundred years old. One of the strongest in Caelum, with stories, battles, and victories attached to her name. She’d had lovers and feuds with Guardians, humans, and vampires all. But she did not carry her age like Michael did, in quiet and grace. No, she was rough, in a sleeveless, backless tunic that could barely be called a covering, and a man’s leather breeches, her bare feet on the dirt floor. She was barbaric. A pagan, who could not read or write despite the library open to her in Caelum and the thousands of Guardians who’d have been willing to teach her. He did not understand his fascination for her, and couldn’t see why she might be tempted by him.
Did she toy with him? That first day in the courtyard, had she recognized his desire and used it to keep him in line while he trained with her? She did not even look at him, naked, with interest in her eyes.
And her hands only touched a limp replica of a man.
Her fingers traced the statue’s biceps. Her nails were short, her hands square. A snake’s thin tail wound around her wrist, increasing in size as it wrapped the length of her arm, joined by other serpents, all intertwined around each other. He often thought they changed and shifted with her mood, but he’d never been certain. He could not see any difference in them now, only felt that the serpents winding her arms were at rest.
The statue was not. She stood at its side, and her hand slipped down its bronze back, over the sculpted hip. The posture hadn’t changed, yet the muscles beneath the metal skin weren’t at ease now, but taut. A ma
n, with his hands clenched at his sides and poised to fight.
She stepped back and raised her arm. The light from the fire flickered over the blue scales on her arm. “You look at these?”
“Are they a warning?” Do not touch.
“They were, once. An incomplete one.” Half the tattoo suddenly disappeared from her skin, as if she’d vanished the upper part of a sleeve. There was no softness in those arms, in her limbs. He’d never seen any woman built as hard as Irena was. “We were only to my elbow when the nosferatu came to kill us.”
To kill the tribe of slaves that had escaped Rome . . . and Irena had died saving them.
“To what purpose?”
The upper half of the tattoo slowly appeared again, winding around the sleek, pale skin until one of the heads rested on her shoulder. The others tucked their heads beneath her underarm. “As a group, we were weak. It did not matter how well I fought, how strong I was; I was a woman, and with such a leader we would be seen as prey. And so we thought to make me a Gorgon instead.”
A monster—a woman with hair of poisonous serpents and a gaze that could turn men to stone.
“For hours every night, a friend used her awl and her dyes. The image was to eventually cover my arms, my face. Fear would be our defense until we built stronger defenses.” She laughed to herself—a low, throaty sound. “It did not scare the nosferatu.”
And it wouldn’t scare demons now. “Why keep them?” She could easily shift her skin and conceal them, but instead she had used her Guardian abilities to complete the decoration on her arms.
“I cannot remember her name.” She ran her hand from her elbow to her shoulder. “But these remind me of her, and so she is not lost. None of those who fled Rome with me are.”
So they were her own defiance, her pride. And a link to her human past. Most Guardians maintained some connection. Habits, thoughts—they reflected their human history, as did their Gifts.
She’d said that hers had come because she’d sworn never to be chained. With such a Gift, she couldn’t be. But Alejandro thought now that some part of her was cold, hard, like the metal she manipulated.
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