Brian raked a hand through his hair. “Yeah, I’ll tell him. Be nice to have some good news to balance out the bad, though. Want to tell me where the coins are?”
Silence.
He glanced at her.
“I hate when you do that,” she said stiffly, not meeting his eyes. She brushed past him, scooping her pants and socks from the floor.
He smiled. Guilt. He was making progress. “It’s just a matter of time before you tell me.”
The words were light, almost teasing, but Lena didn’t respond well to his humor. If anything, she grew more distant. “Can we go upstairs?” she asked, pulling on her pants. “I’d like to get cleaned up.”
“I’ve got Emily’s training to attend.”
Lena hugged her socks and shoes to her chest, staring down at her bare feet. Making her preference known without words. He was back to square one, which he probably deserved. It hadn’t exactly been the most romantic coupling on record.
“Fine,” he said on a sigh. “Gimme a sec.”
As he turned and snatched up his shirt, there was another knock on the door. Examining the ripped buttons at the cuffs with a rueful grimace, he unlocked the door.
Carlos stood there, somber and still. “I’ll take her.”
Confused, Brian frowned. “Take who?”
“I’ll take Lena upstairs while you go to the arena.”
While Brian struggled with the question of how Carlos knew Lena wanted to go upstairs, the woman in question pushed past him and out into the hall. “I told you he was strange.”
The young Hispanic frowned. “When Murdoch came to collect Emily for practice, he mentioned Lena needed watching.”
Brian arched a brow at Lena.
She shrugged and headed up the stairs.
He really didn’t get why she had such a problem with the kid. He yanked on his shirt, strapped on his sword, and headed out to the arena.
Night had fallen and, at this hour, Murdoch and Emily were the only two people training. They stood in the middle of the enclosed rectangle, both armed with swords. Murdoch wore nothing but his regular shirt and trousers, but Emily was decked in a padded suit that covered her from head to toe. Having worn one himself, he knew the damned thing was hot as hell under the arena lights.
But it wasn’t the heat Emily was complaining about when he entered.
“This isn’t my practice sword,” she insisted. Her voice wasn’t particularly loud, but inside the enclosed arena, it echoed. “If I hit you, I’ll cut you.”
“Lass, if you hit me, I’ll give you a prize. You’re blindfolded.”
“That’s exactly the problem,” Emily said, reaching a hand to the wrap over her eyes. “I can’t see.”
“Leave that bloody thing on,” roared Murdoch. “If I have to tell you one more time, lass, I’m going to take you over my knee. After today’s fiasco, it’s become damned clear you need to develop those senses of yours.”
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll blow you up, too?”
“No. Now concentrate.”
“But I should be using my practice sword.”
“I explained this,” Murdoch said, sighing heavily. “If you’ve no fear of striking the wrong spot, your efforts to find the correct one will be lacking. There has to be something at stake.”
“But Lachlan never lets me train with a sharp sword,” she wailed.
“That’s because he’s afraid of your mother.”
Taking a seat in the bleachers to watch, Brian grinned. Probably true. Fear took many forms. Rachel couldn’t wield a sword, but if she cut off the sex pipeline or stopped cooking, Lachlan would be finished. And she’d learned a couple of really useful spells, too.
“I’m going to stop talking now, lass. When I attack you, you must defend yourself. Your job is to find my blade with yours. Not my arm or my leg or my arse. My blade. Got it?”
“Got it,” she agreed reluctantly.
The big Scot stepped back and silently maneuvered around her. She didn’t pivot, just shuffled her feet in the sand, so he whacked her on the ass with the flat of his blade.
“Ow.”
“You’re not trying,” he goaded.
“I am.”
“Really? Are you listening, or sensing?” He stepped quickly to the right, ducked under her swinging blade, and came around to the front.
Emily stilled, allowing her sword to fall to her side. To Brian, she seemed as if she’d given up all pretense of practicing, but Murdoch continued to watch her. He slowly circled around, constantly adjusting his pace and distance. Almost eerily, Emily began to circle in perfect tandem with him, keeping him slightly to her right. Even when he abruptly switched direction, she followed, without hesitation.
Murdoch smiled.
Then he attacked.
With incredible precision, Emily whipped her blade up to meet his. Metal clanged and sparks flew. The blades slithered against each other, then drew apart. Murdoch circled again, then abruptly spun left and attacked her on her weakest side.
Emily again met his blade.
The two of them continued their dance in the sand for a good ten minutes, a brilliant duet that even Brian could not help but applaud when Murdoch finally called a halt.
“That was outstanding,” he praised, crossing the sandy floor to the couple.
Emily tugged the blindfold off and grinned like a fool.
“I did it,” she crowed. Seeming to forget that she held a lethal weapon in her hand, she threw herself at Murdoch’s chest and enveloped him in an enthusiastic hug. “Thank you.”
The big Scot grimaced and glanced at his now bleeding arm.
“Fine job, lass. Fine job indeed. Put the sword down.”
“Oh,” Emily said, jumping back. “Sorry.”
Taking a sadistic glee in Murdoch’s wound, Brian smiled. “You’ve been hanging around with immortal guys a little too long, Em. Good thing you didn’t cut his arm off.”
“Did you see that?” She flung him a beaming smile. “It was so cool. When I really tried, I could see him perfectly. Well, not him exactly, but colors all around him. Almost like I was looking at him through a weird sort of X-ray. The sword was actually pretty hard to spot, but when I concentrated, I could see the colors from his body running down the blade.”
Okay, that was just disturbing.
“Neat,” he said out loud, exchanging a look with Murdoch.
The Scot calmly returned his stare, implying that none of what Emily had revealed was a surprise to him. Bastard.
“Murdoch doesn’t have a soul, so what are you seeing, exactly?”
Emily frowned. “Well, at the center of every Gatherer, there’s a really intense white light. My mom and Lachlan have a softer, more golden glow. I dunno, maybe it’s heat?”
“Maybe.” Brian thought back to this afternoon. “What do you see when you sense demons?”
“You mean like those guys from today? I thought they were humans, at first. They had the same glow my mom and Lachlan have. But they also had this creepy blue core, kinda like the smoke that floated out from their bodies.”
“So you’d know if you saw one again?”
“Yeah, no problem.”
“That’s nice to know.” Brian glanced at Murdoch. “You done? I want Emily to try something for me.”
“It’s getting late,” she said, her shoulders slumping. “And I’m tired. It’s been a rough day. Can’t this wait until tomorrow? Carlos and I were going to watch Star Trek on DVD.”
Murdoch frowned. “Carlos is busy.”
She glared at him, her pleasure of moments ago completely gone. “Because you made him busy, and for no reason. We didn’t do anything.”
“He’s a lad,” the big warrior said with a shrug. “Put him in a room alone with a lass and that spells trouble. Make it a room with a bed and—”
“You invited Carlos into your bedroom?” Brian asked Emily, his head spinning. Ah, Christ. He’d even encouraged the kid to give her a hug. MacGregor was goi
ng to break every bone in his body.
“I was in his,” Emily explained patiently, as though that made a difference. “And nothing happened. Honestly, guys, stop acting like a bunch of old ladies. We’ve been alone plenty of times. If we wanted to have sex, we’d have done it ages ago.”
“Trust me, lass, the lad wants to have sex.”
She pitched Murdoch a scathing glance. “Like that matters. Carlos has more self-control in his baby finger than you have in your whole body.”
Murdoch’s brows knit.
“Even if that were true,” Brian said hastily, grabbing her arm and turning her toward the lockers, “Carlos doesn’t need you visiting his room, okay? Go change. You and I are going to work on swapping that coin back.”
“But—”
“No buts, just go.”
Brian and Murdoch watched her disappear into the changing rooms. An awkward silence fell between the two men as Brian tried to think of something nonconfrontational to say. It was a wasted effort, though. As usual, Murdoch opened his big, fat mouth.
“You’ve only been in charge for ten hours. Must be a record, screwing things up so badly in so little time.”
“Fuck off.” Let it go, Brian. Don’t kill him. Change the subject and play nice. “Emily’s doing pretty well.”
“Aye, but as you can see, the lass is an emotional whirligig—all over the bloody place. Very hard to get her focused.”
“Hormones. She’ll outgrow them.”
“Sooner rather than later, one hopes.” The big Scot patted him on the shoulder. “I’m off to the house, then. I’ll leave the babysitting to you. When the mantle of responsibility becomes too heavy for you to bear, as I know it eventually will, come see me.”
He strode out of the arena.
Which was a good thing, because Brian had his hand on the hilt of his sword, ready to strike.
10
Noontime sun streamed through the window, infus-ing garish brilliance into the orange threads of the Mojave blanket covering the bed. The muted sounds of male laughter, tinkling glasses, and footfalls on the wooden deck floated up from the backyard. Lena stared at the photo of Heather and Amanda in her hand, willing herself not to cry.
There’d been no word from Kiyoko.
Yesterday’s deadline to meet Tariq had come and gone, and that could mean only one thing: He’d flown.
The snapshot had been taken less than two years ago, in the backyard of her house. A wickedly hot afternoon in July, the girls sprawled across a large hammock in their shorts and bikini tops, sunglasses propped on their heads, frosty glasses of iced tea in hand. Heather looked so young, and Amanda so ... alive.
“Atheborne’s got the barbecue all fired up,” Brian said, stepping into her room.
Lena jammed the photo back into the puzzle box and slammed the lid shut. Slightly less quickly, she slid the brightly colored box back into her purse. When she looked up, Brian was frowning.
“A picture,” he said slowly. “Of who?”
“No one.”
He crossed to the bed and plucked the box out of her purse, cradling it carefully in his big hands like he knew how valuable it was to her. “A recent photograph, taken in this era and not the last, which is significant to you because ... ?”
“It’s just a picture.”
Turning the box over, admiring every detail, and testing all the corners and possible openings, he said, “No. The pictures of people on your mantel back at the house, the ones in the pewter frames? Those are just pictures. This one is special. Tell me why.”
“No.”
He sat down on the bed next to her, so close that their thighs rubbed. Today he was dressed in a lightweight gray-green suit and a silver-and-white-striped tie. The firmness of his leg muscles and the smell of his cologne sent a little thrill down her spine.
“Come on, Lena. Give a little. I know your dad was a British archeologist and your mom was his housekeeper in Cairo. MacGregor pulled that much from the database before he got cut off.”
Confident that he wouldn’t figure out how to open the box, she left it in his hands. “Then you have guessed I’m illegitimate. My father was married to another woman back in England.”
“So?” He tried pushing on some of the carved elements, diamonds and circles. The lid remained firmly shut. “That kind of thing doesn’t matter much anymore.”
“It did in 1873.”
He peered into her eyes. “Were you treated badly?”
“By the Egyptians? Not really. I developed my own circle of friends.” Thieves mostly. A few murderers, one rapist ... and Azim. Sweet, courageous Azim. “The English ignored me.”
“Where does the photo fit into the mix?”
“It doesn’t. It’s just a snapshot of my neighbors across the street in L.A.” The words were loaded with the dry dullness of truth and completely bereft of attachment. She worked hard to deliver them that way.
But the effort was wasted on Brian. He arched a brow and said, “Really? Huh.”
“Do you have a reason for being in my room?” she asked, exasperated.
“Yeah, I relieved Carlos. He’s no longer sitting outside your door. He’s downstairs putting a slab of beef on the grill. I came to see if you wanted a steak, too.”
“What about the goon outside my window? Is he still there?”
Brian grinned. “You know he is. You just checked on him five minutes ago.”
“I don’t like being a prisoner.”
“Tell me where the coins are and you can go free.” He shook the box, frowning at the soft thud it made. “What’s in here besides photos?”
“None of your business.” She held out her hand, demanding the box’s return.
He gave it to her. “Coming down?”
“No, thank you.”
“Are you sure?” He stood up. “I’m headed into San Jose after lunch, so if you want company, this is it.”
Lena straightened with anticipation. If Brian got behind the wheel of his own car, a trip into town with him would be a guaranteed opening for escape. “Are you driving or taking a cab?”
“Cab.”
Drat. Still, the distraction of a crowd might help. “Can I come with you?”
“No.” This time, it was Brian’s voice that was deadpan.
“Why?” she asked, suspicious. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” He scratched his elbow, his gaze a little unfocused. “I just have something I need to take care of, and you’d be inconvenient baggage.”
“Baggage? Did you just call me baggage?”
He smiled. “I meant that in the nicest possible way.”
“I’m tired of being cooped up,” she grumbled.
He held out his hand. “Then come downstairs with me. If you don’t like steak, I’ll find you some chicken or a hot dog.”
She stared at his hand, trying not to think about all the tantalizing and incredibly satisfying things those fingers had done to her last night. Trying not to feel bitter that she would never mean anything more to him than a casual sex partner. Because it just wasn’t in the cards for them. “Why do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Treat me like your girlfriend, when I’m actually your prisoner?”
Amusement warmed his eyes. “Are you accusing me of wishful thinking?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything. I just don’t understand you, that’s all.”
“That makes two of us.” He grew serious. “You’re among friends here, Lena. Two immortals, both playing on the same team—you’d think that would come with a basic layer of trust. But you insist on keeping the wall up. You have someone willing to stand beside you for the first time in God knows how long, yet you refuse to let me help you. I admit that’s got me baffled.”
“People who stand beside me have a horrible habit of dying,” she said quietly.
He cupped her chin in his hand, his thumb gently caressing her jaw. Soothing and stirring at the same time. “I’m already de
ad, babe. You can lean on me all you want, no guilt attached.”
The temptation to do exactly that—to press her face into the warm skin of his neck and spill all her secrets—almost choked her with its potency.
She had no doubt at all that he’d do everything in his power to help her—short of giving up the coins. And that was where the problem lay. Attempting a rescue without the coins just wasn’t an option. Maybe if she had met Brian last year, back when this nightmare began, things could have been different. But she hadn’t.
And now she had only one chance left. She couldn’t afford to screw it up.
“Thanks for the sweetly sympathetic offer,” she said.
“But I was talking about being immortal. Everyone around me eventually dies, but I go on and on and on. That’s why the money is so attractive. Money doesn’t die.”
He leaned his forehead against hers and sighed.
“I hope to God you’re not making a big mistake, Lena.”
Lena closed her eyes. It was easier than looking in his.
“Me, too.”
Maleficus reported the events at the ranch with factual composure, but Beelzebub responded with far less restraint. He flung an ax directly at the bearer of the bad news. Had his brother not instantly dissolved into a diaphanous figure of smoke, the razor-sharp weapon would have taken his head off. The passing blade severed several strands of Malumos’s long blue hair, but he remained in place, calmly swaying, unmoved by his liege lord’s precipitous attack.
“When we arrived, we sensed but a single coin,” he said, picking up the explanation where his brother had left off. “And the Gatherers were so determined to keep it from us, they destroyed it. I’m not certain what else we could have done.”
“That’s a pathetic excuse,” the massive demon prince roared. “The truth is, you failed.”
“Failure is a relative term, my lord. The coins we do possess are more valuable now.”
“Get me the other thirteen coins, Malumos.” The hulking red demon turned back to the large floor-length mirror and adjusted the set of his cape on his shoulders. “Fail me again and the three of you will be individually bottled and buried in different kingdoms of hell. Separated for all eternity. Understand?”
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