Ganriel

by D. B. Reynolds

  Nick gazed back him. He understood a challenge when he heard one. The damn vampire was inferring that Nick was too cowardly to lock himself in one of the fucker’s interrogation cells. He was quite sure they were as secure as Fort Knox, but he was just as sure he could blast his way out if it came to that. Which it wouldn’t. Because the vamp might be an asshole, but he wouldn’t want Hana injured any more than Nick did.

  His smile was just as phony as the vampire’s. “That sounds great.” He swung his gaze to Hana and smiled. “We’ll start in two weeks. That’ll give you some time to recover, and me a chance to catch up on things back home in Florida. I have several hunters in the field, and the FBI gets twitchy if I don’t report in once in a while.”

  “And Sotiris?” Raphael asked.

  “I don’t expect another attack in the immediate future. That’s not his style. Sotiris likes to prepare to the nth degree. Cross all his t’s and dot his i’s. Plus, he has other irons in the fire, and he lost one of his main residences with the Hidden Hills house. He won’t go back there, because he’ll fear we’ve laid traps for him. Besides, once a lair has been compromised, it’s never secure again.

  “He’s not done with us, but the attack won’t come from the same direction,” he finished, thinking of Sotiris’s parting shot about Dragan.

  “Good,” Raphael said then stood, indicating the meeting was over. Suddenly, Gabriel and Hana were exchanging hugs and kisses with his warrior brothers and making plans to get together. Kato and Grace would be remaining in Malibu, of course, remodeling their damaged home, while Damian and Casey would continue working for Nick, going wherever the job took them.

  Gabriel stopped Nick as he came around the table. The two men clasped hands and bumped shoulders. “We’re still brothers,” Gabriel said, meeting Nick’s gaze. “If you ever need me, I’m here. And when that bastard Sotiris finally raises his ugly head, you give me a call. Hana and I will be there.”

  “Brothers,” Nick agreed, squeezing the big warrior’s hand again, and getting crushed in return until he thought his bones would break. Fucking Gabriel never would let him get away with that. He grinned. “See you in a couple weeks.”

  When he finally made it through the doors to the courtyard, he was just in time to see that damn Damian driving away in his Ferrari, with Casey waving good-bye in the passenger seat.

  Pompano Beach, FL, USA

  Nick walked into the house he called both home and office, grateful for the blast of cool air that greeted him. But not even Florida’s humidity could take away the pleasure of being home. This was his place. If Sotiris ever wanted to hurt him badly, it was this house that was the closest thing he had to a lair. His enemy’s problem was that Nick’s lair wasn’t on a huge lot, sitting far from any neighbors. It sat right on Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway, surrounded by a lot of equally wealthy and much more high-profile neighbors. There was also the fact that Nick didn’t keep this place a secret, which took some of the fun out of destroying it. Which said something about a sorcerer’s twisted idea of fun.

  “Hey, Nick!” His assistant Lili’s soprano voice sang out a greeting as he passed by.

  “Lili,” he said, stopping in the doorway to her office. He watched her a few minutes and said, “Do you ever regret what I did to you?”

  She stopped tapping on her computer and looked up, her pale eyes wide and blinking in surprise.

  “When I took away most of what made you a vampire.”

  What little color she had bleached out of her face, and Nick’s stomach clenched. Christ, had he fucked up Lili’s life, too?

  “No,” she breathed. “You know what it was like for me, how the males in my nest . . . sold me for the night whenever they got bored or wanted cash. Your spell saved my life.”

  Nick blew out a relieved breath.

  “Do you regret it?” she asked in a tiny voice.

  “Fuck, no,” he said, crossing over to kiss the top of her pale- blond hair. “It’s just . . . Gabriel has chosen to live as a vampire. The curse messed with his spell, and . . . well, anyway, he’s signed on with Raphael out in Malibu.”

  “That fucking vampire?” she asked, those pale-blue eyes twinkling with mischief now.

  “Yeah. Him.” He laughed. “Okay, you know where to find me for the next few minutes, then we can get to work catching up on what­ever happened while I was gone.”

  “You got it,” she said cheerfully, and when he left her office, she was tapping away as if he’d never been there.

  Nick’s smile had faded by the time he closed the door to his office and headed for the bookshelf built into the far wall. Sliding his hand to the back of one shelf, he pushed gently, exposing a secret panel that popped open to reveal a biometric lock, keyed to him only. He pressed his left thumb to the scanner and a second bookshelf also popped open on a concealed door. Pushing that door open, he stepped into the closest thing he had to a true inner sanctum and closed the door behind him.

  Only in here was he truly alone. The fact that he reveled in that aloneness, he considered, might be why he’d never found the kind of love he’d seen between couples like Gabriel and Hana. What woman would tolerate the secrets he held, not only in this vault, but in his head? Secrets he’d never share, no matter how much he loved.

  “Fuck me,” he muttered, wondering what had happened to take him from a carefree bachelor to a mooning teenager overnight. Shaking off the moon, he walked without seeing past treasures that other men would have killed to possess—many of which he had killed to acquire— to an alcove in the farthest corner where a soft light always shone on a solitary shelf. He stared, fighting the emotion of this moment.

  Where once had stood four crudely made statues, there was now only one. Surrounded by the three piles of sand representing his freed brothers, Dragan Fiachna stood alone. Dragan’s beauty had drawn every eye, no matter the company he stood with. But it wasn’t his looks that had given him the heart of a warrior and made him such a fierce fighter. It was his blood. Descended from a long line of Irish kings, he’d had the fury of a beast inside him, and it was that beast that had followed him into his curse. Great wings rose behind his shoulders, his long, black hair tossed as if blown by winds that would lift him into the air with his next heartbeat.

  Nick frowned, his mind replaying Sotiris’s taunt about Dragan, just as it had endlessly since that night. “Dragan,” he whispered. “Where are you?”

  There was no response, just as there hadn’t been for the many centuries he’d been searching. He realized he had to rely on hope—such an ephemeral thing to trust a warrior’s life to. But it was all he had left. Hope that he’d been right, that Sotiris’s spell had lost power with every one of his warriors freed, leaving the curses to unravel, one by one. Until only one was left.

  Dragan would be free soon. Nick had to believe it. It was either that or give up. And he’d never—not once in the two thousand years since his warriors had been cursed, or in the long decades he’d lived before that—considered giving up.

  Epilogue

  The Finger Lakes, New York, USA

  MAEVE FINISHED THE last bite of her sandwich and leaned back, putting her feet up on the opposite balcony chair and raising her face to the warm sunlight. The weather was perfect today, the sun full in the sky, but with just a little bit of chill left over from a winter which had hung on far too long. Small clumps of snow still clung to the ground here and there under the thick trees, where sunlight hadn’t yet managed to reach, but it would soon. Spring had finally settled in for good, with birds flitting about everywhere she looked and flowers dotting the landscape with spots of color. She’d even caught the first boat venturing out from somewhere farther down the lake, leaving gentle ripples on the water as they’d motored quietly past.

  Ah, well. She let her chair drop back to the balcony floor and put her feet down where they belo
nged. Time for her to get back to work, which was just as well since her fair skin would burn bright pink if she sat out here too much longer. A month from now, she wouldn’t dare sit even this long without sunscreen covering every bit of exposed skin.

  Tucking her apple in a pocket for later, she balled up her napkin, drained the last of her diet soda, and was just sliding her chair into place when the soft purr of a familiar engine caught her attention. Heart thumping, she backed quickly out of sight, closing the balcony’s French doors and ducking behind the heavy, drawn curtain. A moment later, the sleek, black sedan arrived, gravel crunching beneath its tires as it turned off the long driveway and onto the paved courtyard of the stately mansion where she worked.

  What was he doing here?

  Her employer, Mr. Sotiris—she assumed he had a first name, but in the three years she’d worked for him, he’d never invited her to use it—rarely visited and even more rarely bothered to speak to her. She assumed he was satisfied with the work she was doing, cataloguing his many rare and, to her mind, wonderful oddities, because her paychecks were electronically deposited like clockwork every month, and no one had yet asked her to vacate the house where she lived and worked. Alone for the most part, except for the housekeeping service which visited once a week, disappearing as quickly and efficiently as they arrived every Monday morning.

  The gentle click of the front door lock echoed up from a foyer that vaulted up to the full three-story height of the house, followed by the hard crash of the door being slammed in its wake. Maeve winced, hearing the delicate panes of glass rattle in their diamond-shaped frames. Footsteps gritted on the nineteenth-century Italian marble floor, and keys rattled as he strode into his private office where something fragile ended its life with the shattering of porcelain. Maeve’s lips tightened with anger. It was one thing to stomp around like a spoiled child, but quite another to destroy what was probably a priceless artifact because he was feeling pissy. She couldn’t be sure what that artifact had been, since she’d never seen the inside of his office, but everything in this house, right down to the daily silver in the kitchen drawers, was far too beautiful to be tossed about in a fit of pique.

  Still, she remained out of sight, as he preferred, though he’d never come out and said it. Probably because he didn’t want to lose her services. It couldn’t be easy to find a person with her very specialized expertise, not to mention one who was mentally stable enough to live up here all alone and remain sane. It might be her dream job, but she had visions of some of the other antiquity experts she knew going all Jack Nicholson and taking an ax to the bathroom door.

  He didn’t spend long in his office. He never did. And she knew where he’d go next. She slipped on silent feet down the carpeted hall to the servants’ stairs, and then to the butler’s pantry behind the high-ceilinged room on the ground floor, where he maintained a small collection of statuary in perfect, climate-controlled and air-filtered stasis. Statues weren’t generally part of Maeve’s fascination with odd things, but her Wellesley degree in antiquities had, of necessity, included the usual courses of art in the ancient world. So, she knew these pieces were from all different periods and regions. Each was exquisite in its own right, but none of them truly belonged together. Especially not the one Sotiris stormed over to now, the same one he always came to on his (thankfully) rare visits.

  It hurt Maeve’s heart to watch him stand before the magnificent warrior and vent his rage, pacing back and forth, shouting in a language that not even she, with her encyclopedic brain, had ever read or heard anywhere else. She tallied up every word he screamed, knowing she’d visit the warrior after the man was gone and replace the taunts with words of love and compassion, soothing away the verbal wounds in the same way she’d have bandaged a physical blow. The warrior was her favorite among the statues, the only one that had caught her eye for the fantastic. He was beautifully crafted, tall and strong, with every muscle and sinew carved in exquisite detail. His face was a masterwork of classic perfection, with a sculpted jaw and full, sensuous lips, and eyes that were fierce and yet filled with a terrible sadness, despite the cold stone of their creation. His stance was wide and challenging, head up, face forward, bold sword gripped in one, long-fingered hand as if ready to take on his enemy.

  But it was the wings that had first caught her attention, that told her he didn’t belong in this sterile room among the other expertly crafted, but somehow ordinary, pieces of art. Taloned like a dragon’s in one of her favorite fantasy novels, those enormous wings nearly touched the ground at his heels and arched high over his back, flared out as if ready for flight.

  Her employer lingered later than usual on this visit. He never stayed long enough to eat anything, never spent the night. But today, the sun was dipping toward the horizon by the time he’d vented his spleen, as her Tennessee grandfather would have said, and stormed out of the house the same way he’d blown in. Maeve watched through a small window in the stairwell as he drove away, remaining there until she was sure he was gone. And then she slipped back to the sterile room and over to her warrior, where she stood for a minute gazing up at his beautiful face.

  “I’m very sorry about that,” she said quietly, mindful of the way sound echoed in the big room with all its hard surfaces. “I don’t know what bug crawled up his ass, but he’s gone now, and with any luck, he’ll stay away a good long time.” Pulling out the apple she’d never had a chance to eat with her lunch, she settled against one of his powerful legs, her head leaning back against his thigh, her body tucked beneath the glory of his gorgeous wings. “He’s a nasty bit of work, that one. You’re a hundred times the man he is. No, a million.” She snorted softly and chewed. “In most myths, it’s dragons who hoard treasure. I bet you had better things to do, like protecting good people from avaricious assholes like that. I know I feel a lot safer with you around than with him.”

  She remained there until she’d finished her apple, then stood with a long sigh. “I’ve got to get back to work. I’m not sure why, since no one ever checks, but I like my job, so I’ll keep doing it until someone says otherwise. You take care now, and remember, he’s the beast, not you.” She stroked the edge of his taloned wing. “You? You’re simply mag­nificent.”

  She left the same way she’d arrived, taking the servants’ stairs, which were the most convenient way to move about the big house. As the heavy door closed on silent hinges behind her, it muffled the gentle crack of sound when the warrior’s wing flexed for the first time in thousands of years . . . in the exact spot where warmth still lingered from her touch.

  Malibu, CA

  “I GOT THE WEIRDEST phone call today.”

  Raphael glanced up at Cyn’s reflection in the mirror, where he was tying his tie. “Weird how?”

  She stepped in front of him and took over the task with a quiet smile. He was perfectly capable of knotting his own tie, but his Cyn seemed to enjoy it, and he loved having her take care of him. He rested his hands on her slender hips.

  “Weird how, lubimaya?” he repeated.

  “This girl I went to school with in France.” She lifted her gaze to his. “I told you about that school.”

  He nodded.

  “She called me today. We were close back then. Her father was some diplomat or other. One of those mega-rich guys who becomes an ambassador mostly for the prestige and because they can negotiate business deals over cocktails. Anyway, they lived in Paris at the time, so she went home more than I did—which was never—and I’d go with her. We’ve stayed in touch, sort of. Birthday calls, and the occasional meal together when we’re in the same city, which isn’t often. She followed her dad into the diplomatic corps, although, to be honest, I think she’s CIA and the State Department thing is a cover.”

  He tugged on her hips, bringing her against his body as she smoothed his tie. “And you’re telling me this because?”

  “Because she asked about
you. She wants to arrange a meeting between you and some Scottish vampire named Lachlan.”

  Raphael blinked in surprise, as he ran the vampire’s name through the database in his head. There were a lot of vampires in the world, but only a very few with the power to propose a meeting with him. Especially one from that part of the world and in the current, hostile climate between the ruling vampires of Europe and North America. Lachlan. The name clicked into place with an audible snap.

  “Where does he propose to meet?” he asked mildly.

  Cyn studied him a moment. “I told her that if this guy was worth your time, and if you agreed to meet with him, it would have to be here.” Her expression was set into stubborn lines, as if expecting an argument from him.

  He smiled. “I assume you want any meeting to be here for my safety?”

  “Damn right.”

  “So you think this Lachlan can best me?”

  “No.” She gave him a withering look. “But I don’t trust anyone these days, so why take chances? Besides, he’s the petitioner; let him come to you.”

  “I’ll take the meeting. No one except Lachlan, and your friend, if you’d like. No other vampires come with him, not even to North America.”

  Cyn gave a short nod. “Good idea. I’ll pass it along.”

  Raphael’s smile broadened into a grin. “I’m glad you approve. Would you like to sit in on tonight’s meeting as well? To ensure my safety, of course.”

  Her eyes rolled. “Very funny.” She rose onto her tiptoes and gave him a lingering kiss. “I’ll see you later.”

  “Yes, you will.”

  Her laughter followed him as he crossed to the elevator and stepped inside. As the doors closed behind him, he considered Lachlan’s request. There was only one reason for the Scottish vampire to call—he was planning to take out Erskine, who was the current Lord of Scotland. Raphael had only met the Scottish lord once, a very long time ago, when he’d been young and not yet secure in his power. But he’d known enough to recognize Erskine’s weakness. Much later, he’d even briefly entertained the possibility of taking over Scotland for himself, knowing he could easily defeat the vampire lord. Fortunately, he’d recognized the extent of his own ambitions and left for America instead.