“I make it my business to know things, Miss Dante. And you’re welcome.”
Rhiannon smiled as the speaker shut off. She straightened and was making her way to the closet when it unexpectedly hissed to life once more. She paused, looking over her shoulder.
“Rhee?” It was a small voice this time, and one belonging to someone who was not supposed to be playing with the intercom system.
Rhiannon grinned. “Mimi,” she returned, “how’s my favorite Pokémon master?” She grabbed a pair of jeans and a button-down from her closet, pulled undies and socks from her dresser drawer, picked up her Moma boots, and returned to the bed to get dressed.
“I rigged the intercom system so I can talk to you on my walkie-talkie,” Mimi replied. She was whispering, clearly hiding somewhere within the building and not wanting to be found. “Now I can search for Zigzagoon. She’s always wandering off.”
Zigzagoon was a type of Pokémon and completely imaginary. To everyone but Mimi, who lived in a world filled with X-Men, My Little Pony characters, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was a sweet world.
Rhiannon had overheard a conversation once in which Mimi’s aunt, Bess, had told her she needed more friends. Mimi casually replied, “I have friends, they’re just invisible.”
“Is Strike with you?” Rhiannon asked. She pulled on her boots and stood, bending over to take the towel out of her hair.
“Yep. He’s here. He’s being a good, quiet dog, aren’t you boy. Yes, you are….”
Rhiannon took another big swig of her cappuccino, and unplugged her iPhone to slip it into her crossbody purse.
“Can you help me train today?” Mimi asked.
“I think I can carve some time out to whip your butt in the arena,” Rhiannon teased. “I’ve got a Xerneas now.”
“No way!”
“Yes, way. So get ready for a new Pokémon master.”
The intercom crackled a bit as Mimi made some surprised and frustrated sounds and then turned off her walkie-talkie. Rhiannon headed for the front door.
Two minutes and ten floors later, she was stepping off the elevators and into the building’s atrium. This was always where she met her employer. Never anywhere else.
At once, a wave of warm, humid air hit Rhiannon, but she was used to it. When she’d first begun coming here years ago, the temperature change would cause her to break out into a sweat. Now, she barely gave it a second thought.
The elevator doors shut behind her, and then a second pair of doors opened before her, double wooden doors that worked on an electronic timer. Rhiannon waited until the gap was large enough to move through before she stepped into the vast space beyond.
A greenhouse of enormous proportions greeted her, replete with thick, brown soil below, vast tropical plants that grew to towering heights above, and a concrete path that allowed for easy passage.
All around, butterflies of every color fluttered about wildly. This was home to generations of hundreds of species of the brightly colored insects and had been for as long as Rhiannon had lived and worked there. Her employer was fond of butterflies. Because his daughter had been too.
The medicine she’d taken was starting to help with her soreness when Rhiannon made her way through the indoor rainforest to a small white gazebo at its center. There, her employer waited for her as always, slowly sipping a Mint Julep. He was the very image of a southern gentleman, from his white suit to his thick white mustache and white penny loafers. He’d always reminded Rhiannon of a living version of Mark Twain.
And just like a southern gentleman, when he saw her approach, he put down his drink and stood, gesturing for her to sit in the chair across the small round glass table. There was a manila folder on the table, but Rhiannon ignored it, knowing the subject would turn to it soon enough.
The waiter who had been standing off to one side was beside her immediately. She sat down, ordered an unsweetened iced tea with a lot of ice, and pulled three packets of Splenda from the nearby condiments tray so she could put them in her drink when it arrived. She hated drinking her calories unless they were in coffee, but she also hated drinks that were unsweetened. This was her compromise.
“You look a little more worse for wear than usual,” said Verdigri in his pleasant, gravelly voice.
“I feel that way too,” she admitted softly and met his gaze. He had very green eyes, and while not as stark as some eyes she’d seen, they were a clear emerald that belied his age. “Wish I could remember why.”
“Mmm,” he said. “And as I knew would be the case, you’ve chosen not to use your healing abilities upon yourself.” His voice was soft, and his eyes were slightly teasing, but Rhiannon could tell he was worried about her. It was a good thing her clothing hid her bruises.
“I’ll live,” she assured him. “I promise. And the pain killer is doing its job.”
He studied her for a moment, then took another drink from his Mint Julep. “All the same, I’d like you to check in with Newton before you leave today.”
Dr. Abraham Newton was Verdigri’s personal physician. And hence, he was Rhiannon’s as well.
Rhiannon was good at her job, and sometimes that meant doing things you just didn’t want to do. She disliked doctors, even though Newton had always been as empathetic as doctors generally came. But this was part of what she did. So she nodded her consent.
Verdigri seemed satisfied to let the matter drop. He changed the subject. “Do you remember how you got home last night, Miss Dante?” he asked. The waiter returned and set Rhiannon’s glass of iced tea in front of her.
Rhiannon frowned. As a matter of fact, she didn’t. She only remembered…. “I was… I was in a park… or something like that, anyway. I was there one minute….” She paused, so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t even realize when she began tearing the Splenda open and pouring it into her tea. “And I was waking up in my bed the next.”
Verdigri nodded and sat further back in his chair, crossing his legs. He looked around them at the butterflies, smiled a soft smile to himself, and said, “No one saw you come in, and the cameras never captured you. It’s a mystery to us all that you woke up in your bed this morning.”
Rhiannon sat up a little straighter. “The cameras didn’t catch anything at all?”
She knew that some of the supernaturals out there could mess with a person’s mind. But to totally evade every form of visual contact?
“Not a thing.” A large blue butterfly landed on the tip of his white and tan wingtip shoes, and the expression on Verdigri’s face grew distant. Rhiannon knew where he went in times like this. To the past. To be with his little girl.
She let him have a few seconds, and then as politely as she could, she said, “It’s possible that I didn’t come back alone. And that whoever brought me back had powers of invisibility. It’s also possible… that we transported here. Or moved through some sort of portal.”
“Or through the very shadows themselves,” he offered quietly. His voice, like his gaze, was distant.
That was something she hadn’t considered. And that raised all sorts of new questions. Why would someone bring her back here rather than just kill her? The kinds of creatures that could move through shadows weren’t normally known for their generous natures.
“You said you had another job for me?” she asked, deciding to change the subject and get back to work.
Verdigri took a deep breath and sighed. “Yes, indeed.” He looked down at the manila folder that had been teasing Rhiannon since her arrival.
She scooted it closer to herself and opened it up.
“There are several women and four girls, ages nine to fourteen,” Verdigri told her as she looked over the information inside. “Everything you will need to infiltrate the building is within the folder.”
Rhiannon’s heart began pumping as she looked through the file. She could feel cortisol and adrenaline releasing itself into her blood stream. The file encompassed the cases of women who were being confined and sold int
o slavery through an underground sex trade. The building where they were being kept was in Chicago.
Rhiannon had a lot of cases like this. This was why she worked for Verdigri. Years ago, he’d somehow learned of her abilities, and he’d contacted her. The initial meeting had been so strange, Rhiannon had felt overwhelmed. She had no idea how he’d learned of her powers, and she was veritably frightened. But there was something to the man, to his genteel manner, and especially to his cause, that had won her over. She’d been in his employ ever since.
Thirty years ago, Mr. Verdigri had lost his own daughter to a sexual predator. A week after her seventeenth birthday, she went missing. A month later, her body was found. She’d been dumped in a ditch outside of Las Vegas.
The traumatic event brought about the eventual death of Verdigri’s wife, a beautiful Mexican woman that Rhiannon could tell even now, her employer was bone-deep in love with. They’d been soul mates.
Since the death of his daughter and wife, Verdigri had made it his life’s work to save as many girls as possible from a world that seemed bent on destroying them from the inside out.
Verdigri was an effective fundraiser, but Rhiannon didn’t know where the bulk of his money came from, and frankly she didn’t care. He was making the world a better place, one rescue at a time.
She closed the folder and took it with her as she stood. “Thank you for the tea. I’ll get on this right away, but I have something I need to take care of before I leave.”
“Ah yes. Miss Mimi mentioned something about a destined battle.”
Rhiannon smiled. She turned to go, but as she did, she said, “I’ll check in some time tomorrow night.”
Mr. Verdigri’s green, green eyes pinned her to the spot where she stood beside the table. “See that you do,” he told her. It was a command without sounding like one. And it told Rhiannon something the file folder failed to: this assignment was dangerous. Perhaps dangerous enough that he was afraid she wouldn’t come back.
She digested that and turned to leave when her employer spoke up once more.
“Friday night, there’s to be a masquerade gala in honor of a potential new benefactor for the Swallowtail Foundation. I’ll expect you there, of course. He wants to meet you.”
The Swallowtail Foundation was the covert name under which Mr. Verdigri ran all of his operations. He’d named it in honor of his daughter’s favorite species of butterfly, the Purple Spotted Swallowtail.
Rhiannon glanced back at him over her shoulder. Today was Tuesday. That gave her two days to finish this job. “I’ll be there with dancing shoes on.”
Verdigri grinned, and his face broke into charming laugh lines. “I do love a woman who can dance.”
Chapter Two
He couldn’t see her face. He never could.
These dreams that came to him now, after thousands of years of darkness and silence, were both the bane and the immeasurable pleasure of his nighttime existence. Whoever she was, she haunted him. The feel of her taunted and teased and fed his hunger with flesh so supple, so perfect, it defied reality. Her hair was so soft, it brushed his chest like feathers. She was warm, real, and tender. She was strength and passion and surrender all in one.
The smell of her reminded him of fresh fallen rain, clean and promising. The sound of her was… sighs so soft and moans even softer. A touch and a gasp and a pounding heartbeat later and Sam was in heaven. And Hell.
He awoke that morning as he always did of late, his sheets soaked, his breath catching, his hands fisting in something that was no longer there. The night before had been a long one.
Upon arriving at Central Park, where he knew Michael would be fighting off a score of “bad guys,” Sam had been struck with something odd. He’d sensed something in the air that he’d never felt before in waking life. It was a scent on the wind, and a hint of a memory. It was like feeling silken locks of hair slip through his fingertips. It had shaken him. Not enough that he’d allowed it to be seen, and certainly not enough that he hadn’t been able to do what he’d gone there to do.
But it had entered his mind and planted a seed of doubt.
Once he’d taken care of business with the Warrior Archangel, he’d left the menial, remaining tasks to his assistant, Jason, and returned to Chicago.
It hadn’t been until very late that he’d taken to his bed. Alone. With those seeds of doubt sprouting trees in his head. And then, as usual, he’d dreamed of her. Of her… whoever she was. And, once more, she had slipped through his fingers. Gone like the wind.
He wanted to lash out in anger, in desperation, and shove himself back into sleep. He was exhausted in a way that no one knew and in a way he could never let anyone see. He wanted to fall into a coma and surrender to oblivion, if only for the slightest hope of having her in his bed once more.
Now Sam sat up in his vast plane of silk sheets and promises, shut his eyes tight against the real world and everything about it that wasn’t his dream, and fisted his hands in his ash blond hair. He was losing a part of himself in this routine every night. Every time the sun went down, another piece of himself would slip away.
Or maybe… maybe it was something else.
Samael opened his eyes and blinked, his shaking breath hitching as he realized it might be something else. It might not be that he was losing himself.
Maybe it was that a part of him was already lost. It had been for a very long time.
And he was on the verge of finding it at last.
*****
The redness behind Michael’s lids grew redder and brighter, and as he tried desperately to swim his way up from the depths of the powerful sleep in which he was trapped, his skin began to prickle. The prickle became a stinging sensation, which quickly turned into a steadily worsening burn.
He hissed and attempted to raise his arm over his eyes to block out the sun, but initially failed. His body was having trouble responding.
Fleeting fears of paralyzation and fractured thoughts of mortal injuries skated through Michael’s mind. He tried again, pushing with everything he had, and this time, he just managed to raise his right arm before his face.
The sun ceased searing into his brain, but the burning on his skin was becoming decidedly painful. He gritted his teeth and tried to roll over. Something pricked his bottom lip, and he tasted blood.
What the hell, he thought. His body just did not want to do what he told it to do. Move, damn it! he commanded. At last, he rolled onto his right side, but the effort was so draining, it felt like a weight-lifting exercise. By the time he’d managed to sit up, eyes still closed, arm still raised before his face, his muscles burned as much as his skin, and pain was beginning to lance through his skull.
Now the thoughts of injury were warning bells, chiming louder and more frantically than anything else, and adding to his growing agony.
Something’s wrong. Michael got to his feet, the effort like another squat with a five hundred pound barbell on his shoulders. He stumbled from the bed, tried to find the restroom, and when he failed, baffled confusion added itself to his incredible discomfort.
He continued to move though, and within a few more seconds, he was dropping to his knees on a cracked linoleum floor and kicking the door shut behind him in order to block out the sunlight.
Silence and cool darkness embraced him like a salve. Michael leaned against the bathroom wall and breathed. In and out…. One…. Two….
Within a few seconds, the burning on his skin lessened, his head was clearing, and he was able to open his eyes. That’s when he realized several things at once.
He’d never been in this particular bathroom before. It was no wonder to him now that he hadn’t been able to locate it at first. He’d probably never before been in the room beyond, nor in the bed upon which he’d awoken.
Another thing he realized was that everything he was looking at now was in very sharp focus. The yellowed porcelain sink, the dingy floor and peeling walls, the shower with a shower curtain covered in mold �
� all of it was so clear, it was like getting a new pair of glasses and suddenly having perfect vision when you didn’t even realize you’d been having trouble seeing in the first place.
He could smell it all too. Which was unfortunate.
The last thing he realized, and perhaps the most disturbing, was that the reason he’d pricked his lips and tasted blood was because he was sporting a very long, very sharp set of fangs.
Michael closed his overachieving eyes again and placed his hand to his forehead. His skin was flushed, hot against the cool of his palm. It almost felt burned. Moving on instinct now, he pressed his back up against the bathroom wall and used it as leverage to get on his booted feet.
Two steps, and he was gripping the sides of the sink and squeezing his eyes shut tight. Dizziness and weakness moved through him like the pull of a tide. He weathered it, then raised his head and opened his eyes.
A stranger stared back at him.
Michael’s grip on the sink tightened, and a hairline crack moved through the porcelain. The whites of his eyes were gone, replaced by solid black that outlined his irises like a wolf’s eyes. His pupils were shrunken, even in the dim light of the shut bathroom, and at their centers were red pinpoints of light, flickering like candle flames.
His skin, once tanned by his many hours of work outdoors, was now pale in places and covered in painful red patches in others. The burns healed rapidly before his eyes, retreating to leave behind more of that perfect but pale and unfamiliar skin tone. His hair, also once touched by the sun, had darkened several shades.
And then there were the fangs. He’d been able to feel them with his tongue, but seeing them in the mirror was another matter.
I’m dreaming.
But he knew he wasn’t.
This isn’t possible.
But he knew it was.
He remembered now. There, as he stood staring at the alien reflection of a man he thought he’d known, he recalled every single thing that had transpired in Central Park the night before. Rhiannon. The Phantoms. The Dragons. The stranger and Hesperos.
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