by Nalini Singh
It was a good thing she couldn’t see in the dark or she’d probably leave.
He didn’t want her to leave; he wanted to play with her.
“Down.” She pushed at his shoulders.
Going under, he washed out the grass from his hair. This time when he came back up, she was paddling over to grab his pants so she could wash them out. Her wings were spread out on the water, the blood having sluiced off, and he really, really, really wanted to touch. Sidling closer, he ran one hand over her primaries.
She jerked and shot him a look over her shoulder. “You know that’s bad behavior.”
Heading to the bank, he reached up and grabbing his wet but clean T-shirt, threw it at a tree. It hooked on a branch and opened out. The night air would dry it a little at least. “I’m often bad,” he said honestly. “I like your wings.”
Instead of continuing on the topic, her skin suddenly flushed red hot. “Um, here are your pants. I rinsed them out.”
“Thank you.” He knew it was polite to say that when someone did a nice thing for you. “Why are you red?”
She swam away instead of answering. Throwing his jeans toward a tree and managing to get them hanging over a branch, he swam after her, his pulse racing. Was she playing with him? But when he came up beside her after having dived under the water, she gasped. “You said you wouldn’t look!”
“I didn’t. I closed my eyes.” It had been tempting to break his promise, but promises were to be kept. It was one of the first things Dmitri had taught him—by keeping his own promises.
“I’ll bring you the cured meat you want when I return.”
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
Dmitri had been gone a long time in the child’s mind—it must’ve been three months at least. Naasir hadn’t forgotten the promise, but he hadn’t really expected Dmitri to remember. He’d just been excited at the return of the man he saw as his father.
“Dmitri!” He pelted out the door, escaping the hapless vampire set to watch over him. “Dmitri! Dmitri!”
Strong arms grabbing him tight and lifting him off the ground, Dmitri’s dark eyes sad even though his mouth smiled. Naasir didn’t know why Dmitri was sad but he’d seen the way Dmitri’s eyes began to warm after they were together for a while, so he knew he wasn’t what made Dmitri sad.
“Have you been behaving, Naasir?”
Naasir ducked his head. “No.” He’d eaten the school’s pet bunny. He hadn’t meant to—but it was right there in front of him and he’d been so hungry. “I’m in big trouble.”
“Ah.” Deep male laughter that made him look up and bare his teeth in a feral smile because he could see Dmitri wasn’t angry. “You can tell me about it while you eat this.”
Naasir took the package and tore it open to find the gift for which he’d asked. “You remembered!”
Sadness in his eyes again, Dmitri ruffled his hair. “A man keeps his promises, Naasir.”
“Naasir?”
He shook off the memory of childhood to hold Andromeda’s pretty, sparkly gaze. “I didn’t look,” he repeated. “If I look, it’ll be because you invite me.”
Cheeks hot, she smiled at him. “Want to race?”
“I’ll beat you,” he warned. “Your wings will slow you down.”
“Give me a head start to make it competitive. You don’t start until I’m halfway across.”
Delighted at the idea of a private game with her, he nodded. “Okay.” Elena had told him cheating was allowed when one party was weaker than the other in some way. As when they’d sparred, Andromeda was cheating, but it was the good kind of cheating. It meant they could play together.
When Andromeda struck out for the opposite end of the pond, he saw she was more graceful and faster than he’d expected. His mate had been keeping more secrets. Laughing inside at her trickiness, he waited until she was at the halfway point, then began to slice through the water. He’d been born knowing how to swim.
Having reached Andromeda, he could’ve overtaken her at any point, but he did something sneaky. He lowered his speed as if tired, so he could swim with her. And when they reached the end of the pond, he let her lunge out and grab the bank first. “I win!” she said, her whole face alight. “You owe me a forfeit.”
“What do you want?” he asked, bracing his arms on the bank as she did the same beside him. “I have a treasure of shiny things.”
“Really?” Her eyes widened but she shook her head. “I don’t want a shiny thing this time—maybe next time I win.”
Naasir liked the idea of more games.
“I want you to do something for me,” she said.
“What?” He moved surreptitiously closer, so that her wing brushed his arm.
“Go with me to a dinner held by my parents.”
Naasir blinked. Women liked to rut with him, but he’d never been invited home for dinner, and since Andromeda didn’t want to lie with him, he didn’t understand her request. Unless . . . “Do you want to shock your parents?” Naasir was different and unique. Many in the world wanted him for his skills, but he was also deeply other.
He accepted himself. His mate would have to accept him, too, not treat him as a freak.
Andromeda laughed as if he’d told a great joke.
Scowling, he began to get out of the water.
* * *
Seeing the water sluicing off Naasir’s muscular body, Andromeda lost her mind for a second. Only when the upper curve of his buttocks was exposed did she squeak, and, placing a hand on the taut strength of his arm, hauled him back down. “You’re naked!” she reminded him.
He shrugged, looking at her with silver eyes that glowed white-hot. “I don’t care.”
“Well, I do.” Her heart was still racing at the sight of him. He was built like the most beautiful statue she’d ever seen, only he was flesh and blood.
“I’m cold. I want to be out.”
She’d forgotten the cold, she’d been having so much fun with him. “Oh.” Disappointment a lead weight in her stomach, she closed her eyes. “You can get out.”
He didn’t move. “Why did you laugh?”
“What?” Her eyes flicked open at his harsh tone.
Seeing the anger he made no effort to hide, she belatedly realized he’d taken her laughter in the wrong way. “My parents are incapable of being shocked,” she admitted with a shrug that hid the echoes of childhood hurt. “Ever.”
Expression altering to disbelieving fascination, Naasir leaned in close. “Even by me?”
“Even by you,” she assured him. “If there is a debauched thing on this earth, they’ve indulged in it.” Sex, brutal violence, rare narcotic substances, that was Lailah and Cato’s way of life, their compulsive desire to do more, feel more, endless. “They’ll probably proposition you.”
Frown lines on his forehead. “But I would be with you.”
“They have no boundaries.” She thought of the young angel with whom she’d been in puppy love, of how she’d walked into the great living room one day to find him and her mother naked and in the midst of copulating. Her father had been sitting in an armchair watching while a male vampire sucked on his erect penis.
Her gorge rising, Andromeda had to go under the water to wash off the memory. Some things no child should ever have to see. The awful thing was that the nauseating incident had been far from the first or the only one. Andromeda had too many such images stored in her mind, images that she resolutely refused to think about, but that would not fade.
Taking position beside Naasir again after wiping the water off her face with one hand, she went too close. So close that her arm pressed into his and her wing touched his back . . . but he didn’t push her away, instead looking at her with those wild eyes that were suddenly painfully incisive.
“I will not rut with your parents.” A solemn promise. “That would hurt you and I will not hurt you.”
Her eyes stung, her throat thick. She couldn’t speak for a long time. When she did, her
voice came out husky. “The dinner is technically in my honor. It’s mandatory for those of my blood to return home on our four-hundredth birthday.”
She knew she should tell him she wouldn’t leave again for five hundred years, but the words stuck in her chest, hard and taunting. “I thought you’d make the dinner more fun.”
Naasir’s cheeks creased, his eyes glinting. “We’ll have fun,” he promised. “I’ll bring your parents a present.”
Her instincts shouted an alert. “Ah, Naasir—”
Laughing at her dubious tone, he pulled himself up and out of the water without warning. She saw the hard curve of his buttocks, the strong muscle of his thighs, the sleek strength of him as he stood on the bank and shook himself dry like a big cat. His silver hair glittered even in the darkness.
He began to turn toward her.
Skin so hot it seared her from the inside out, she forced herself to shut her eyes and go under the icy water, staying there until she was no longer in danger of combusting. When she came back up, she saw Naasir had pulled on his wet pants. He didn’t look happy about it, though. Nostrils flaring, he picked up a couple of things he must’ve left on the ground and slid them back into his pockets, then examined his T-shirt and finally started to pull it on, no doubt figuring it’d dry faster on his body.
“I won’t look,” he told her, keeping his eyes scrupulously on the trees in front of him.
Trusting him, she got out of the water and found her things. She stared at her panties, belatedly realizing he must’ve handled them earlier. Also remembering that he’d had no underwear. Skin hot again and breasts aching, she pulled on her heavily damp tunic. It hit her several inches below her butt, saving her modesty.
“I don’t want to wear the rest,” she admitted aloud.
Naasir glanced over, taking her words as permission. “Don’t. I’ll carry your things since you have the sword, and we can dry them in the sun after dawn.”
“Do you really want to wear your T-shirt?”
It was as if he’d just been waiting for her words. Stripping off the T-shirt to reveal a chest that threatened to make her a breaker of vows, he watched as she, blush furious, tied her pants and panties, as well as his T-shirt, into a small bundle. Taking it, he said, “You must wear the slippers. They protect your feet at least a little.”
Nodding, she slipped her feet into them; they were falling apart, but as Naasir had said, they did provide a faint measure of protection for her tender and bruised feet. As they began to move again, air kissed her most private places, her nipples rubbing against wet silk. She felt scandalous and wild and adventurous.
Beside her, Naasir prowled along at what was clearly a lazy pace for him. They didn’t speak as the world turned from black to gray. Wet and half-naked . . . and she’d never been as comfortable with someone in her entire life.
Until he glanced over and reached out a hand to bounce the tight spirals of her hair on his palm. “I like this better than your braid.”
Her stomach dropped . . . but then she realized it no longer mattered if someone saw her and was immediately reminded of Lailah, daughter of Charisemnon; her mother had the same distinctive gold-streaked brown curls and facial bones. Though instead of Andromeda’s freckles, Lailah had smooth, silken skin perhaps two shades darker than Andromeda’s.
Lailah’s curls also never frizzed like her daughter’s, were always glossy and perfect.
Those differences made Lailah a beauty many a man had coveted, Andromeda the far more ordinary child. One who’d known from childhood that people looked at her and saw an inferior imitation of the original. “Really?” she whispered, wondering if Naasir would compare them, too. “My hair is totally out of control.”
A grin from the wild creature next to her.
The tight band easing from around her chest, she laughed and they continued on.
“We stop here,” Naasir said as dawn’s fingers stroked the horizon. “There’s too much activity in the sky. Villagers will also have been alerted to be on the lookout.”
“We’ll travel only at night?”
A nod. “I have an advantage at night and they won’t expect a scholar to seek the darkness.”
“I’m tired, too,” she admitted, Galen and Dahariel both having taught her to be honest with any partner in battle—and this was a kind of battle. “Being grounded and having to hold up my wings while walking for such long distances is straining my wing muscles.”
Naasir went as if to reach out and ease her muscles, stopped halfway, obviously recalling the intimacy of such a touch. Brushing part of a wing was one thing—squeezing the arches and other muscles far, far different. “We’ll rest,” he said, then cocked his head. “Wait here. Don’t get caught.”
“I’ll do my best,” she said dryly, holding up the sword.
A sharp flash of teeth against that flawless, pettable skin, and he was gone, so adept at disappearing into the trees that she didn’t see him vanish.
17
Raphael wasn’t expecting to be called into a Cadre meeting anytime in the future, so when the call came—especially when it came from Titus—he knew it must be deadly serious. He cut an over-sea night-training drill short the instant Aodhan relayed the message, and headed to the Tower communications room.
Sirens rose up from the streets as he winged his way past lit-up high-rises, a yellow cab rear-ended another, and tugs on the Hudson sounded warning horns. All familiar sights and sounds, his city back in one piece.
That didn’t mean the war had been won.
Elena, he said after landing on the Tower roof, aware she was in the Tower helping young Izak with his physical therapy. I’m about to speak with the Cadre. He folded in his wings and strode forward. I want you to listen in. Not only did Elena need to understand the political climate, his hunter had a sharp mind and an acute gaze.
On my way.
He didn’t wait for her, but knew when she slipped into the room out of sight of the cameras that linked him to the others. He glimpsed the lightweight crossbow strapped to her thigh and the blades in her forearm sheaths before the screen in front of him split to display Favashi, Titus, Astaad, Elijah, Michaela, Neha, and Caliane.
Missing were Lijuan and Charisemnon.
Lijuan’s absence was no surprise, but since Raphael’s ascension, Charisemnon hadn’t missed a meeting regardless of wars and battles. It gave credence to the theory that the Archangel of Northern Africa had been ravaged by the very disease he’d created—he wouldn’t appear in public again until he was in full health.
“Titus,” Neha said, her hair swept off her face into a soft bun at her nape, and her body clad in a sari of gold-shot green silk. “What is the emergency?”
When the archangel who controlled the southern half of the African continent began to speak, his voice wasn’t the tempered quiet he usually used in meetings. It was a booming bass that vibrated with raw anger. “One of my scouts has long been a friend of Jariel and was invited to his home for a stay. He arrived to find Jariel’s people massacred, and Jariel’s head placed in the center of the entranceway, a pile of ash the only evidence of what may have happened to his body.”
Onyx eyes glittering and muscles bulging under the jet of his skin, Titus slammed down a glass jar. It cracked to spill black ash over the wooden surface on which the Archangel of Southern Africa had slammed it. “We all know ordinary fire does not create a neat pile of ash in a defined area. It also does not destroy the brain while leaving the rest of the head untouched.”
A stunned silence.
Archangel?
Jariel was believed to be on the cusp of becoming an archangel, Raphael told his consort. Perhaps in the next two decades.
“You’re certain?” Astaad asked Titus, his black goatee neat against the sunless white of his skin. “We must be certain.”
Titus’s nostrils flared. “My man will send images, but I am dead certain. From the condition of the other remains, it was done at least a week ago, more lik
ely ten days.”
Not long before Andromeda’s abduction, Elena said, her mind clearly walking the same path as his. Coincidence?
I don’t believe in such a lethal coincidence.
Someone sucked in a breath as the images Titus had promised began to scroll across their screens. Jariel’s decaying head looked at them with sightless eyes filmed over with white. Images of the rest of his home showed dead vampiric retainers and broken angels with crumpled wings. All killed in ways that were final even for those seen as immortal by the humans.
It was Michaela who said it, the piercing green of her eyes focused on the ash. “There is only one way to confirm.”
Titus silently scooped up the black ash and held it close to the camera on his end. Ash created by a fire, and ash created by an archangelic ability might appear identical to the naked eye, but look closely enough at the latter and sparks of power lingered within it for up to a month afterward.
“So.” Neha’s voice was a blade, the Archangel of India’s view on the massacre unmistakable. “It was one of the Cadre.”
They were the only beings on the planet who could incinerate with that much power. It didn’t even necessarily require angelfire, not if the archangel was close to the target—a simple discharge of concentrated archangelic power would equal the same end.
“Why?” Astaad shook his head, clearly deeply disturbed. “He wasn’t Cadre yet, had no say in our politics.”
Raphael thought again of the scholar’s abduction and of Lijuan’s plans for Alexander. “Perhaps someone decided to get rid of a competitor before he reached maturity,” he said, careful not to give away too much—alliances were fluid things and someone in this meeting could well have formed one with Lijuan.
“If that’s the case,” Neha said in a silky whisper that dripped venom, “you had better watch your Bluebell to make sure his head remains attached to his body.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” he said in a bland tone that betrayed nothing.
Elijah stirred, stroking his hand over a small puma—perhaps a cub—who’d just climbed up to settle on his desk. “Only one of us is capable of such a heinous act.”