“Yes, people do that,” he agreed.
“Are you prejudiced against those of us who don’t fit into that category?”
“That would be absurd, wouldn’t it, since I don’t fit, either.”
She continued to stare at him.
“If I step back again, you’ll go? Just like that?” Rhys said.
“What’s to hold me here?”
“I was hoping my appearance in this doorway might be enough to instigate a real dialogue. You know, immortal to immortal.”
“Circles,” she reiterated. “When your monsters are calling.”
He wasn’t going to let up, didn’t want to lose her quite yet. Touching her was not an option. Laying a hand on her would be out of the question. But he wanted to do those things and was driven by a strange inner impulse to get closer to her.
“Those monsters will sense your presence the way I did. By now, the news will have spread,” Rhys explained.
“Let them come.”
“We can fight them together, if you like,” he suggested. “Teamwork.”
“I fight alone, and only when I have to.”
He couldn’t keep her there much longer. The stink of death permeated the air, seeping through the seals of the closed windows. Several bloodsuckers were out there, and not too far away.
“Get out of my way,” the pale beauty said.
“All right,” Rhys conceded without moving.
He couldn’t stop staring at this mesmerizing mix of unknowns. She looked like an angel with a purpose. An angel with one foot down in a place not quite as fluffy as the clouds. Her little trailing lights weren’t in evidence. The black-rimmed blue eyes were unsettling.
Maybe the tattooed wings make you feel more like an angel. Maybe you imagine you’ll use them to fly away.
“Let me help you,” Rhys said.
When white lashes lowered over her eyes, he thought again about reaching out to detain her. He wanted those eyes back on him. He wanted to understand her. Nevertheless, he let her brush past him because he was not her keeper, her friend, an actual ally or her lover. With regret, he watched the enigmatic, ethereal immortal female walk out of the room, heading for the shop’s front door.
Rhys said, “The monsters will be out there, you know.”
She hesitated in the shop’s doorway to look back at him with a final word. “They always are.”
He had to let her go, let her leave, when his body urged him to bring her back. Once she walked out that door, he might never see her again. Odds for that were in her favor.
Now that he had seen her, spoken with her, having her disappear would leave a dent in his understanding and a hole in his hammering heart. That damn heart was acting like a schoolboy’s with a first crush. After just a few minutes, she had become an addiction.
Did he see sadness in her eyes when she gave him a final glance from the sidewalk? He was sure the light he had witnessed in the blue depths of those eyes now reflected regret. Probably he was wrong. Nevertheless, he was after her in a blur of speed.
On the sidewalk, he stopped. Two mortals passed by. A Night Shade slipped through the shadows and into the alley beside him. That Shade should have been of concern to him, but distraction was a hell of a thing. The female he’d just seen in that shop was gone, leaving no trace other than the lightest wisp of fragrance.
Whispering a litany of curse words, half of them in Latin, Rhys spun to face the next problem. Monsters were indeed rallying. Half a block away, and with the swiftness of an oncoming black tide, vampires were closing in.
Chapter 5
The black tide swept the two mortals who had just passed Rhys into the vampires’ vortex of flashing fangs and overruling hunger. One of those unlucky people had enough time to scream before they were on him.
And that was not acceptable to a Guardian.
There in seconds, Rhys joined the fray, pulling a silver-tipped dagger from his right boot and a sharpened wooden stake from his left.
The bloodsuckers were quick, but out of their league when facing a vamp-killing machine from a larger supernatural gene pool. Rhys swung his arms as fluidly as if he had been made for the intricacies of fighting. He had been created with the strength of ten men for just such a purpose.
“Go back to the same black breath that created you,” he said calmly, lunging sideways with deft strikes of the blade to take down the first vamp, whose yellow fangs were too near the throat of its young mortal prisoner.
“Rest in peace.”
The street exploded with a snowstorm of dark gray ash, which caught the attention of the remaining sharp-canined monsters and made them angry.
“Not what you were expecting?” Rhys quipped, waiting out the seconds until they released the two stunned, but as yet unharmed, mortals.
These vamps’ faces were gaunt, almost skeletal. As usual, Rhys regretted that their afterlives had been so cruelly tweaked. Dull black eyes, lacking all hint of their former color, were fixed on him. Grossly sharp teeth snapped with displeasure. All of these bloodsuckers were new to the walking undead status. Hunger ruled them. Feeding was everything. Common sense had departed with their dying breaths.
“It’s not your fault. I get that,” he said, stepping forward to meet the remaining crush of fang-snapping abominations. “However, you are cursed to be the bane of human existence. You must be aware of that.”
His body rocked as the awareness of other company came to him like a moving wall of heat. Without looking for the source, Rhys could venture a good guess as to who had returned. Not many creatures would have been close enough to sense trouble, with the ability to do something about it.
She had come back, as if he needed help with five malnourished fledglings.
“Damn you,” she said, appearing beside him from out of nowhere with the ease of having just dropped from the sky.
The sky thing wasn’t possible, of course, Rhys knew, since the wings on her back were fake.
He feinted to the right. Simultaneously, she moved left in a choreographed fighting pattern that split the oncoming vamp fledglings into two groups.
“Hell, do I now have to worry about you?” he silently griped.
“I was thinking the same thing. About you,” she returned in the same manner.
“You can hear me?”
“No need to shout, Knight.”
“You heard things I might have thought earlier?”
“Anyone within a five-mile radius could have heard you.”
She went for two of the bloodsuckers as if she had been born to the art of wielding a blade.
Rhys struck the sweet spot in one fledgling’s chest with his knife, and that fledgling went down in a flurry of musty-smelling gray ash. Spinning on his heels, he embedded the stake in the second vamp’s chest and left it there as the vamp staggered back a few steps before what was left of it became a funnel of ash.
His new fighting partner had taken the brunt of things, with another of the vamps going after what it incorrectly assumed might be the weaker link. Big mistake.
The woman beside him moved like lightning, like a storm in human guise, and with a fighting grace Rhys had never before seen in any but his brothers. Fast, sure, talented, she was all liquid motion. Prepared to jump to her aid, Rhys instead watched at a standstill, his body reacting to each move she made as if he’d made it.
His pulse was again racing. This immortal woman was fast, flexible, canny and dexterous. Tracking her movements roused emotions long compressed deep in his soul. How had he missed this creature’s existence? Who the hell was she, and why couldn’t he reach the answer to that question when it was buried somewhere inside his mind?
Like a white whirlwind, the female parried, spun and thrust her blade to victory over those ornery bloodsuckers. And when the street had
been cleared of fanged parasites, and the two mortals had run off to safety with a story to tell that no one would believe unless they had seen such a thing for themselves, she turned to Rhys with a stern expression on her incredibly beautiful face.
Speaking with the same throaty voice that had caused his muscles to twitch in the shop behind them, she said, “The mortals won’t remember. I’ve seen to that, and you owe me one.”
She wiped her short silver blade on her leather-clad thigh and turned from him.
“You truly imagined I’d need help?” Rhys asked, amused and far too fascinated with the curve of that lean thigh for his own good.
“Well, maybe I just needed to exert some energy,” she admitted, turning back. “I was in that damn shop for far too long, and those needles were a bitch.”
She was feisty. Sexy. The black leather getup molded tightly to her body, showing off angles and curves Rhys hadn’t been able to see when she was sitting down. Her hood had been thrown back. Silky strands of platinum hair crossed her face in the night’s moist breeze, partially hiding the features Rhys wished he could see.
“Now what? You’ll disappear again?” he asked.
“Disappearing is what I do best,” she said.
“Why? Are you hiding from someone?”
“Good thing it wasn’t you. Look how that turned out.”
Rhys grinned, liking her quick-witted comebacks.
“You might want to can the light show if stealth is your objective. Your appearance in the alley was pretty flashy.”
She stared at him with her lips parted for a retort she didn’t make—lush lips nearly as pale as the rest of her. He wondered what those lips would taste like, and if she’d use her knife on him if he tried to find out.
When seconds passed and she hadn’t spoken or made her retreat, Rhys figured those things would have been points for him in the challenge game, if anyone had been keeping score. Then again, she had known about Blood Knights and had pegged him as one with a single glance, so maybe he’d have to concede some of those points.
Finally, when the silence had grown uncomfortable, the provocative white-haired enigma took a backward step, keeping her eyes on him, possibly afraid to turn her back.
“I won’t let this go, you know,” Rhys warned. “You’re far too intriguing.”
“You’ll have to,” she said. “I’m already here and gone.”
“And if I were to ask you to stay?”
The waist-length, silver-white tendrils of her hair had taken on a luminous sheen under the streetlight. Hell, Rhys thought, she looked more like an elf than anything else. Another impulse came to touch her, just to make sure she was real and not a mirage. She hadn’t addressed any of his questions, but didn’t really have to. What had she said? She owed him nothing.
“Ghosts can’t fight. Noncorporeal bodies and all that,” he said, thinking hard about which gene pool she might have sprung from and again coming up short. “But you are very good with a blade.”
“Hate ghosts.” She took another backward step.
“What about Blood Knights? Do you hate them, too?”
“Would you deserve it?”
“You know about us, about who we are. Was that by rumor?”
“Plenty of rumors,” she said.
“If you travel in the kind of company that would spread those rumors, why haven’t I heard about you?”
“Maybe I’m not rumor-worthy.”
“I’m fairly sure no one could forget you after a glimpse. If your soul had been around for a while, someone would have seen you.”
“You’re right,” she agreed. “They wouldn’t have forgotten someone like me, which is why I don’t allow them that glimpse.”
As fun as this was, it was now clear to Rhys that this immortal wasn’t going to volunteer any real information about herself at all, even after sharing in his fight with the vampires. He was going to have to get those details some other way.
Smile widening, he said, “I do love a challenge.”
“Good for you. Now, you must let me go.”
“Or?”
“It will be a regrettable mistake in judgment.”
“Really? When we seem to be on the same side?”
“I value privacy above all other things.”
Rhys nodded. “If you stay in London, I will be able to find you.”
“I didn’t realize Blood Knight was synonymous for bloodhound.”
“Scent has strong power,” Rhys said. “Smells create memories. I can smell the power in you. Though as yet nameless, what you are rolls in my mind like a misplaced vision, sparking images I can’t see clearly. It has to be obvious to you that I need to sort that out.”
“Quite obvious,” she said. “Which is why you followed me in the first place. You’re not sure what I am or who I am. For a Guardian, that kind of void in information would be regrettable.”
“You would be curious in my place, I think.”
The whittled animal-bone handle of the blade that she clenched in her fist was a further sign of her Otherness. Most supernatural species could not touch any kind of metal.
Rhys wondered if she might use that blade on him if he pursued this line of inquiry.
“I watch here, for now,” he said. “I discern friend from foe and try to keep the peace when that task gets harder with each passing year.”
She waved her blade at the dusting of fine gray ash covering the pavement. “Yet, aren’t you and these creatures you call monsters distant cousins? In which case, one might reason that you and your knightly brothers have an obligation to cull their numbers in order to protect the humans these vampires prey upon.”
“More rumors?” Rhys said.
“Aren’t rumors often sparked by truth?”
Before he had time to reply, she closed the distance between them. From only inches away, her scent was much stronger. Her next move was unexpected. She touched him.
No, it was her blade that had touched him. Its sharp tip pierced a coin-sized hole in his coat. Rhys looked down at the knife, then at her. He quirked an eyebrow.
She lowered the blade and placed her cool, bare fingertips on his mouth. Rhys swayed and swallowed a rising groan of surprise. He held his breath as she traced the outline of his lips before gently pressing them back. He knew what she searched for and what she saw hidden there. Fangs.
“It would seem some rumors actually are true,” he said.
Wickedly placed inside the mouths of each of the seven men who had accepted the vows issued by their Makers at Castle Broceliande, those fangs were, like this female’s inked tattoos, not really good for anything. They were merely reminders that blood sipped from a holy relic is what had resurrected the seven men and sent them on a quest.
“This is what the Grail Quest did to you,” she said.
“In return for preventing that Grail from falling into the hands of others who might use its power to bestow immortality for another purpose,” Rhys said. “Imagine a world where the bad guys couldn’t be harmed.”
“No rumor, then.” She drew her hand back.
Rhys watched this female closely. The effects of her company were incredibly rich for an immortal who had never beheld a female of similar kind. She was enough like him to threaten his moratorium on seeking the companionship of others. Her touch, like her earlier light show, left an imprint, not only on Rhys’s mouth, but on his soul, as if she had branded him with the same fire that flickered in her eyes.
Rhys took a firm hold on her shoulders and pulled her closer, so that she had to look up to see his face. She did not use the knife or try to escape from what she had to know would come next.
All that fire...
All that heat...
He was so damn hungry for those things.
> Daringly, Rhys rested his mouth on hers lightly, testing his resolve and hers. He waited, expecting a slam of protective power from her in honor of his transgression. But nothing like that came.
Her lips were as cool as her fingertips, and soft. She didn’t encourage him. Nor did she pull away when he deepened the pressure, breathing her in, tasting the sweetness of what lay behind the lushness he was invading. She was so very appealing.
She leaned into him and made a sound that was part groan and part whisper. In that sound lay a silent command...not for release, but for more.
He gave her that. And when her lips parted, the uncanny sense of familiarity returned so strongly that Rhys echoed the sound she had made. He knew her, didn’t he?
As his mouth captured hers, his hunger raged. Her spirit seemed to capture his spirit. She bent him to her will, commanding him to forget that familiarity he sought and bury it deep.
But she kissed him back, and the intimacy of the physical connection spiraled Rhys into a world where nothing other than the two of them existed, and the past, present and future became one.
Hell, if she was a demon, someone on the other side knew too much about the longings of a Blood Knight.
A draft of cool air drifted over him when her lips left his. Rhys opened his eyes to find himself alone. In a totally unacceptable move that had to have involved some kind of mind trick, the woman whose lips had so moved him had, like liquid moonlight, just melted away.
He stood beneath the streetlight, looking around, surprised to have been bested by the pale stranger. That was a first.
“All right,” he said, retrieving the dagger from his boot. “This game point goes to you, but the game isn’t over.”
Then he turned to face the vampire watching him from the shadows.
Chapter 6
Avery fled the scene without looking back.
Taking that Knight’s mind off her imminent escape had worked a little too well. With his lips on hers and his warm breath in her lungs, she’d almost forgotten what she had planned for these guys, and had escaped only in the nick of time.
Dreams of getting close to him had been with her for so long, remnants of those dreams had nearly been her downfall. By now, she knew him well, although he knew nothing of the woman he had kissed. Still, having the upper hand didn’t make her feel better about that kind of closeness, and what a mistake it had been to allow it.
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