I stiffened as a chill raced through me. The hair on my arms stood on end when his jaw tensed and I heard a cracking sound coming from his teeth. He caught my shift as I moved a few inches away, his glasses turning slightly toward me to watch my next move.
“So, Greer decided to take the day off,” I baited.
He hesitated before nodding his head.
Actually, Greer had changed his mind and decided to go to Crusades after all. For a man who usually knew his boss’s every move, I thought it careless of him to not know Greer’s current whereabouts. I didn’t believe it for a second.
The lenses of his glasses changed from black to dark ruby red as the eyes behind them glowed. I’d caught the lie and he knew it.
“Thank you for keeping me company last night.” I added more bait. I may not have remembered what I did the night before, but I was pretty sure Rhom wasn’t anywhere near me. “I really needed someone to bounce some shit off of.”
“It was my pleasure, Alex.”
I forced a smile as we walked the last half of the block toward the intersection. When we reached Seventy-Second Street, I bolted left and ran toward the park, trying not to look back at what was behind me. My impulse won, and I glanced over my shoulder at the imposter masquerading as my friend and bodyguard. He looked like Rhom, but the cold expression on his face and the guttural noises coming from his throat confirmed that it wasn’t Rhom.
I managed to stay alive as I ran across a busy Central Park West and through the entrance of the park, turning down every path I came across in a useless attempt to lose him. I ran until my legs were numb, conjuring Constantine in my mind as I realized I was losing the race. And then it was over. Something jammed in my knee. A sharp pain shot through my leg as I went airborne. I hit the ground hard and slid a good five feet. When I looked up, my hunter was standing over me.
He pulled the sunglasses from his face, and the red glow was replaced by black sockets. There was nothing there but two holes in the front of his face.
“Very rude of you not to wait for me, Ms. Kelley.”
I searched my hands for a cut or even a scrape. All that commotion and not a single drop of blood to get me out of this.
His face went pale the second his hand touched my arm. Then he was moving backward like a parasailer catching a violent gust of wind, his voice fading and his body getting smaller. Smaller and smaller he shrunk until he was nothing more than a black speck in the distance, fluttering in the air like a piece of ash escaping a bonfire. And then he was gone.
“Why is it that every time we meet, you bring baggage with you?”
Constantine was standing behind me. He was right about baggage. I seemed to bring calamity to his doorstep every time we met, and he had become one of my personal saviors.
“I have to admit, Constantine, I’ve never been happier to see you.”
“Well, it’s about time you admitted your attraction to me.”
“I never said I was att—”
“What brings you to my neighborhood?” He extended his hand. I took it, and he pulled me off the ground effortlessly. “You look exceptionally vibrant today, considering the circumstances.”
I looked back at the spot where the imposter had vaporized. “What was that?”
“Just another minion trying to catch the brass ring,” he replied nonchalantly. “Only this one was smart enough to get inside your head. He knew exactly what you needed to see.”
Constantine nailed it. When I saw that shadow on the sidewalk, I was hoping it was Rhom following me and not another stalker. Apparently my thoughts were pretty transparent.
“Enough of this small talk. Walk with me and tell me why you’ve come. Although the reason for your visit is irrelevant.” He motioned toward the path and I followed.
I felt completely safe and at ease walking next to him. Our relationship had become reciprocal. Constantine filled in the gaps where Greer and his men fell short—like just now—and in return, I amused him. For reasons I wasn’t quite sure of, he genuinely liked me, and for that I held a get-out-of-jail-card in perpetuity.
“Well…I’ve been thinking about you lately, and my friend mentioned you’d dropped by Shakespeare’s Library looking for me. So I thought I’d check in on you.”
He seemed unusually light today. Compared to his usual intensity, the difference stood out like a beacon. He even smelled different—but familiar.
“Your hair is all ruffled up.” I looked at the shiny black locks hanging loosely around his face. Constantine was a real stickler when it came to his appearance. I’d never seen a hair out of place. “What have you been up to?”
He stopped in the middle of the path and smoothed his disheveled hair. Then he turned to look at me, clasping his hands behind his back as he waited for me to come clean about what I was up to. But as I opened my mouth to tell him the real reason for the visit, his face softened into a curious gaze. His hand met the underside of my chin as his thumb traced the swollen center of my lower lip. “You’ve been kissed.”
“What?” I shoved his hand away.
He examined my face a little too closely as his own heated up. “And fucked.”
The absurdity of the comment floored me, and then those two words danced around in my head while an odd warmth cradled my stomach.
“Who?” he asked. The tone of his voice was as heated as his face. Constantine had an uncanny ability to make every syllable an erotic slither up and down a woman’s auditory organs.
I snapped out of it and met his stare. “Are you serious? I think I’d remember being kissed, and—”
“Can’t say the word?”
“Really, Constantine.” He was baiting me. Trying to elicit some sort of sexual game. You’d think I’d be used to it by now considering that was our normal course of exchange. I’d never spend more than a few minutes with him when he didn’t try to get a rise out of me. He was a satyr, after all. Sex and lust were his specialty, as he reminded me repeatedly.
He took my arm and we began to walk again. It was a rare act of intimacy, because he usually didn’t touch, preferring to parade his eroticism just out of reach.
“There was another attack,” I announced bluntly. “Here in the park.” Of course he already knew that. Why he allowed it was the real mystery. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the controlled anger on his face. This was his territory, and to hear him speak of it, he was in control of everything that went on within the walls of Central Park. “It made me think about the night I was attacked.”
He stopped walking and waited for me to ask my question.
“Where were you that night, Constantine?”
“Ah, so you want to know why I didn’t come riding in on a white horse to save you?”
“Don’t be such an ass.” I pulled my arm away from his and got right to the point. “But you’re right. I would like to know why you lurked in the background and let that creep put his hands on me.” It was a bold move to practically call him a coward, and he could easily make me regret it.
The look on his face made me uneasy as I considered how I’d react if he told me he just didn’t care, that I got what I deserved for walking in the park after dark. Even Greer had made a comment about my arrogance for doing that.
“I may not have ridden up on a white horse, but are you so sure I didn’t come to your rescue? You offend me with your assessment of my lack of benevolence.”
“Then prove me wrong.”
He resumed walking and took a panoramic look around the park. “This is all mine. Not a leaf drops from a tree that I am not aware of. But you must understand that unpleasant things happen for a reason, and it’s not my place to change the course of events.”
He pointed to a young couple standing under a tree, embroiled in a heated conversation. “Do you see those two? He’s telling her that he isn’t in love with her anymore. She’ll go through the usual round of human emotions. She’ll cry until her eyes are swollen and convince herself that she’s ugly a
nd unworthy of love. Her apartment will be littered with the sacrificed trees she’ll wipe her nose with. And when the sun goes down and the pain of loss and rejection have settled into a dull ache, she’ll wash down a bottle of Vicodin with whiskey and never wake up.”
I stopped and stared at the couple like an interloper witnessing something I had no right to see.
“Now, I could go over there and change the course of what will happened to both of them, because it isn’t only her life that will be changed forever. I could make him love her again, or seal their destiny with a marriage and two children. I could make her leave him. I might even remove the cancer from her bones before it’s diagnosed. But that would steer the world in a direction it isn’t meant to take.”
I gawked at him in disbelief, wondering if any of it was true or if he was just being a master of tall tales.
“The woman’s sister will continue down a path toward a career that leaves her numb, instead of taking inspiration from the loss and writing the first of many novels,” he continued. “The man will conveniently move on to another woman who will become his wife, and he will treat her like an indentured servant as he fucks his mistress. He’ll never be humbled by the knowledge that he had an indirect hand in the ending of a life, and subsequently become a real man.”
“Is there a point to all this?”
“The point, Alex, is that if you’re going to fuck with the grand path of the universe, it better be for a damn good reason. There is no turning back.” He stepped closer and pummeled me with one of his smart looks. “You, my love, are a damn good reason.”
I shook my head in exasperation. Getting a straight answer out of him was an exercise in futility.
“If I’m such a good reason, why didn’t you try to change my outcome?”
“What makes you think I didn’t? How do you think that man of yours knew where to find you?”
My mouth dropped. “I thought Patrick—”
“Patrick merely told Greer you were back in New York.”
I still didn’t understand why he didn’t just swoop down himself and get me out of there. He’d done it before.
“Because you needed to be found,” he explained before I could ask the question. “And not by me.”
SEVENTEEN
Constantine once told me that he knew everything, but that some secrets weren’t his to tell. I thought he was puffing, but I learned very quickly that even when he sounded like he was full of himself, you could bet on his words. He was always truthful, often to the point of rudeness. He knew where the amulet was from the moment it disappeared last year, and I was sure he knew exactly where the vessel was, too. The trick was in getting him to talk.
“Greer and I went to see a man at Cornell University the other day.” I thought it best to offer a little information of my own. Although it probably wasn’t news, seeing how he knew everything. I bet he knew all about our trip to see Dr. Oxford and our dealings with Isabetta Falcone, but at least it showed good faith and a willingness to participate in a little give and take.
A sly grin spread across his face as he focused straight ahead and said nothing.
“But I guess you already knew about that,” I said.
“And you thought it wise to tell me a secret I already knew?”
“I just thought—”
“No, Alex. Don’t spoil the generosity with a mundane explanation. It shows thoughtfulness and trust. I can’t think of anything more soul-baring than trust.”
Is that what I was doing? Baring my soul? Constantine had a way of extracting things from me that I preferred to keep hidden. But like it or not, he’d become a trusted ally, and I knew it was to my advantage to have him on my side of the fence. I pitied the person who stood on the other.
“I guess you know about Alasdair Templeton, too.” I glanced at him and detected a slight jar in his expression. Was it possible that he didn’t know about Templeton? Maybe I did have a few cards left in my hand, after all. “You know who he is, right?”
“Don’t be obtuse, Alex.”
“That’s a mighty big word,” I said as I stopped walking. “Kind of insulting, don’t you think?”
“My apologies. The name incites a bit of abhorrence in me.” He examined the fingertips of his right hand before casually asking me to expound.
“You mean you don’t know about him trying to get me to come back to Ireland? He tried to bait me with a necklace that’s supposed to have some kind of binding powers.” I could see his body go rigid when I mentioned the necklace. “You know about the necklace, don’t you? Then how is it you don’t know about him coming to see me?”
“Because he’s a walking ward,” he said with contempt. “That man has discovered a very effective way of choosing whom he lets in, and whom he shuts out.”
“Really? You mean a mere mortal has found a way to outsmart you?”
“There is nothing mere or mortal about Alasdair Templeton.” He examined me out of the corner of his eye. “Since you’re strolling through the park with me, I assume you didn’t accept his gift. That would have been tragic. I would have missed our chats.”
“Aww. You really do like me, don’t you?” There was something both comforting and terrifying about having such a powerful creature casting a protective shadow over my head.
“I suppose I do.”
“Well, I think we scared him off for a while. My friend Katie—” I caught myself before the words slipped out.
“You mean your dragon friend? Yes, she is something, isn’t she?”
Oh course he knew what she was. “Can’t hide anything from you, can I.”
“Not if I can help it.” His face took on a more serious note. “He’ll be back, Alex. Get used to dealing with that parasite because he won’t stop until he gets what he came for. You may not be biologically connected, but you are his blood in a much deeper way—through the bonds of power. In his eyes, that makes you his property. Much like a man who thinks he owns his spouse and offspring.”
He turned into me on the path to punctuate his next words. “He’ll dangle that carrot in front of you in other ways. Be very discriminating about what you reach for.”
A woman came down the path wearing a pair of leggings and a tank top that showed off her perfectly sculpted figure. Her blonde ponytail swung back and forth as each foot made contact with the ground.
Constantine seemed oblivious as she passed us, but his eyes suddenly broke from mine and followed her as she moved down the path behind me. “Be very careful, Alex.”
I turned just in time to see her head do a one-eighty and look back at me from an unnatural angle. Her eyes turned as black as Constantine’s, and her ponytail lengthened and ran down her back before protruding from her tailbone like a whip.
He looked back at me and held my gaze with uncomfortable intensity until I broke eye contact. “Point taken,” I conceded.
I contemplated a delicate way to raise the subject of why I was really here. He deplored small talk, but manipulation was even more offensive, especially when he wasn’t the one doing it. “Is it obvious why I’m here?”
“I know why you’ve come to see me. I was hoping you actually felt the urge to be in my presence, but I’ll take your company any way I can get it.” He took my right hand in his and gently stroked his thumb over my knuckles. “Your skin is so soft, like a layer of silk stretched over clay. I cannot imagine anything else covering your bones.” His hand slipped away. “You are too light to be so dark.”
He shifted and continued down the path, gesturing for me to follow. My instincts told me not to. But no risk meant no reward, and the stakes were just too high.
We walked in silence for what seemed like an hour. When I looked to my left, he was gone. But the smell of pine, musk, and lavender emitting from his skin still filled the air, putting to rest any doubt that he’d been standing next to me a moment earlier.
“Constantine,” I whispered as my eyes closed and a rush of cold wind hit my skin. The sound
s of the city faded, mingling into a single note until all I could hear was the vague droning of a distant machine. The ground beneath my feet fell away. I opened my eyes as the wind grew stronger, and I was moving through a black hole with tiny flecks of light glimmering against the dark walls.
Constantine was somewhere in the background, watching me, laughing from the other side of a veil. And then his face went cold as he nodded once before fading farther away, like a specter.
I spotted something in the distance, something I knew but couldn’t quite place. I’d been there before. I kept moving toward it, glancing down at my feet and wondering where they’d gone. The closer I got, the more familiar it looked. As soon as I reached the spectacle of billboards at Seventh and Broadway, I knew what it was. It was the tiered line of lights leading up to the observation deck of the Empire State Building. I gazed in fascination as the lights grew brighter, and in an instant I was breezing past the trail of bulbs illuminating the tip of the antenna.
I gasped as I circled around the structure and headed west toward the Hudson River. The sky went from black to deep blue as the water reflected and mixed with the glow of the city. The lights sprinkled through it like sequins on a blanket of blue velvet, and all I could do was marvel at the sheer beauty of the sea in front of me.
I was flying.
My arms felt like the wings of a bird. When I looked at them, they were as black and polished as the day I first saw them in my dream. I commanded the right one to flap as if it were my own arm. It obeyed because it was my arm, and I knew if I looked at my reflection in the mirrors of the skyscrapers, I would see the shiny black head of a raven looking back.
I sailed over the water and dipped from the sky to see my image reflect across the waves. They shot into the air and nearly took me as I teased the surface with my wings. I was magnificent, and for the first time since finding out who and what I was, I understood it and welcomed it.
The lure of the city pulled me back toward land. I flew over the crowds moving like tiny marching ants along the trails of New York streets, toward the park where I’d found my wings and left Constantine standing below.
The Blood Thief (The Fitheach Trilogy Book 2) Page 16