There was no way to refuse her, and no need to do so.
The world spun in circles around them, coming apart at the seams. His mouth was sealed to hers. His soul shook. Black scrolling sigils whined.
The only sound that could possibly have broken into his thoughts now, did. From somewhere in that dark, swirling mass of moving reality he stood in, with his lips on Avery’s, came a nasty chucking comment meant for him.
“Thank you, Guardian,” a Shade’s wispy voice intoned, “for making this so easy.”
Chapter 19
Avery reacted in a crackle of speed, spinning around with her knife in her hand. Rhys did the same. Shoulder to shoulder in fighting stances, she and Rhys had the location of the ghostly vulture pinpointed before the echo of its raspy voice had faded.
They lunged forward in unison, moving as one body. But the Shade disappeared before they could confront it, replaced by several more shadows that quickly surrounded the puddle of light she and Rhys found themselves in.
“You’re not thinking straight,” Rhys said to those shadows, as they both waited for what might happen next.
“It’s you who have slipped your tethers,” another voice returned.
Avery recognized the dusty odor and the slight hiss of a vampire speaking through sharp fangs. The bastards had to be careful with those fangs since they didn’t like the taste of their own regurgitated blood, preferring warm, red, fresh fare—which she and Rhys did not possess.
“Be off,” Rhys directed, as motionless as if he was carved from marble as he added, “before we decide that tonight’s agenda can be postponed in favor of a close-up kind of monster hunt.”
“In fact,” the voice cut in, “that agenda of yours is exactly why we’re here.”
The remark had Avery’s full attention. Rhys’s head came up as if he recognized this voice.
“You realize that it doesn’t matter how many of you there are,” she said. “And that you’re no match for either of us?”
“Now who isn’t thinking straight?” the vampire challenged. “We haven’t attacked, and have come to offer a truce.”
“Vampires have nothing to bring to the table,” Rhys said.
“What if we do?”
“Not going to happen,” Rhys concluded.
“Perhaps not all of us are the monsters you hunt down and stake. I believe you know this.”
“I have met a few old souls among you,” Rhys admitted. “But I don’t sense anything like that here.”
“Then perhaps your senses need tuning.”
Avery broke in. “What is it you want?”
“A deal,” the vamp spokesman said.
“What kind of deal?” Rhys snarled.
“Perhaps we can offer assistance with the things your companion seeks,” the vampire suggested.
Avery knew the vamp was alluding to her.
“In trade for what?” she asked.
“For a taste.”
“A...” Rhys began.
“Taste,” the vampire repeated. “Of her blood.”
Rhys moved. His shoulder brushed hers as he positioned himself in front of her as if she were a damsel in distress and in need of a champion. The knight of old had reappeared, ready to fight for her, or in her place.
Hell with that.
Avery stepped up beside him, flashing the knife she wielded. “How do you know what I seek?”
“We have been watching for you,” explained the vampire, who had far too many of its wits intact to be anything other than an old bloodsucker. “We are guardians in our own right, you could say.”
“Anytime now you will start to make sense,” Rhys suggested wryly. But Avery felt his attention sharpen. Rhys also recognized that there was something different about this vampire.
Deep inside her, a premonition formed that sent chills cascading down her back. Since arriving in London, more than one monster had mentioned her quest.
“Where are they?” she asked without lowering the blade that could cut through this gathering like a silver tornado.
My wings...
Although Rhys didn’t glance her way, some of his attention transferred to her.
“I may be an example of death warmed over,” the vampire began, “but I have retained a few of my former brain cells. Enough of them to withhold that information until a deal has been struck.”
Rhys rocked back on his heels, but she was the only one who could have witnessed that since he stood ramrod straight again in the blink of an eye. The heat of his anger radiated off him. He didn’t yet comprehend that, if not for a transfusion of the same blood these bloodsuckers desired as part of the deal they were proposing, Rhys might have been like them.
Blood Knights. Named after the proclivities of their fanged Makers.
And yet Rhys had never used his fangs, and he had never looked back.
It was likely he and his brethren had never seen the occupants of Castle Broceliande in person, and had been invited, summoned there, by the dark magic those Makers possessed. Rhys also had been a victim of that dark time, as had his brothers. Avery vowed right then and there that she would never be the one to tell him any of this.
“What am I looking for?” she asked. “How can a deal be made without a sound basis for a decision that falls one way or the other?”
Out of the gloom stepped a bloodsucker draped in black velvet. The vampire’s hair was gray and fell to its thin shoulders. An ashen face with sunken features held dark eye sockets hiding light-colored eyes.
This being was a rare and formidable sight among his kind. Without exuding enough power to be the creature vampires called their Prime, it still suggested a confidence that did not bode well for the vampire allowing itself to be struck down in any circumstance without a real fight.
Beside her, Rhys stiffened. “We meet again, vampire,” he said.
“As I promised,” the vamp returned with a slight nod of its gray head, before again speaking to Avery.
“You search for what you lost long ago,” the vampire said to her.
“And that is?” Avery quickly fired back.
“Evidence of your species. The things that define you as a creature of the light.”
Avery’s insides had begun to quake. Keeping those quakes from spreading and becoming visible was a chore that required careful control.
“And that would be?” she pressed.
The wily vampire raised its bony arms to shoulder height and then lowered them, making an unmistakable flapping gesture. One horrid flap of its velvet-clad appendages and the horror of what Avery was seeing sent her insides skittering.
Rhys spoke again. “How would you know anything about that, if it were true?”
“One look at the angel’s face, Guardian, will show you the truth about how much I know regarding what she has lost.”
Angel. Flapping velvet gestures. “This vampire knows too much,” Avery’s mind warned. It was all adding up to something foul.
“No,” Rhys said adamantly to the old vampire. “No deal.”
Avery didn’t look at Rhys. Couldn’t look at him. She understood that by making such a deal, by offering a few drops of her blood to this parasite, a new breed of vampire would be born in this century. That breed might become as strong as Rhys. As strong as she was, until she found her wings. All hell would break loose in the world if that happened. Vampires would win in the war against humans in less than a year.
“It’s too late,” she said. “I have already found the information about what I need.”
“But can you get in?” the vamp challenged. “Will you be admitted to the darkest place you’ve ever seen, or welcomed there?”
“You’re implying you’d be welcome,” Avery said.
“Oh, yes. I
can guarantee that.”
“And we always believe what a vampire says,” Rhys chimed in. “Due to the fact that your kind never lies or shifts the truth around for personal benefit.”
The vampire shook its pasty head. Facing Avery directly, it said, “He does not know. One might find that pathetically intriguing.”
Avery fingered the handle of her knife. The creature in front of her indeed knew a hell of a lot more than it should have, and had just offered her proof of that. Its pithy remark alluded to Rhys’s connections with the creation of this vamp’s species, and the slip of a fang by one of Castle Broceliande’s infamous Makers.
“No deal,” Rhys dangerously reiterated.
The vampire again raised its arms, this time in a gesture of acceptance of that decision. “So be it, Guardian.”
The beast had the audacity, as well as just enough left of its human features, to offer Avery an expression of sympathy and commiseration...as if they were pals.
“So be it,” the vamp repeated as it backed away slowly.
Rhys strode forward, going after the vampire. Avery stuck out a hand to hold him back. With her fingers wrapped in his coat, she shook her head. “No. Let them go.”
When he turned to her, she said, “I wasn’t kidding about finding what I seek. We’re almost there, and this meeting proves it.”
“If that fanged beast knows where you’re headed and what we can expect when we arrive, what makes you think others won’t know and be waiting there? Damn it, Avery. This place you want to go might be crawling with them.”
“I have to take that chance.”
He knew that was the case, of course, and he would have done the same thing in her place. Avery felt his emotions shift toward acceptance.
“All right. Where are we going?” he asked.
Avery pointed to the ground. “Down there. We just have to find a way in.”
* * *
“We could follow them,” Rhys suggested, waving at the empty darkness the vampires had disappeared into and dreading what they might find in those tunnels. “What sort of black market carries on in such a location?”
Avery’s expression was grim. He hadn’t voiced any opinion she hadn’t already considered.
“Markets dealing in supernatural treasures that attract other monsters would relish a creepy space to ply their trade,” she said. “Weaker monsters might be for sale, as well as Lycan pelts from unturned purebred Weres. Vials of blood from old saints. Holy relics.” She looked at him directly. “Angel wings.”
“Christ,” Rhys said. “We’ll have to do a one-stop mop-up of the whole event. That way, we’ll rid the world of a whole mess of pests at once.”
They were facing a daunting situation. An unknown one. He watched the corners of Avery’s mouth twitch. She was worried—not for herself, for him. He had to wonder, given how long Avery had kept to the sidelines of everyone else’s life and the reasons she skirted the fringes of society the way he did, if she had ever asked anyone for help, and why other angels hadn’t come to her aid before now.
“That’s not the way it works,” she said, with that uncanny ability she had of reading him. “One angel, one mission. There aren’t many of us to go around.”
“Not even when that mission was one of high priority?”
Her eyes brightened with his challenge. “Do you think the Grail is the only mission worthy of our attention, Rhys?”
True, he hadn’t stopped to think about that. The Grail was the only relic that had concerned and consumed him since his rebirth.
“Whoever sent you assumes you’ll finish this,” he said. “However long that takes.”
Her smile was a sad, joyless one that confirmed his hypothesis. This Grail challenge was her deal, and hers alone.
In her favor, possibly the concept of time wasn’t the same in the heavenly realms as it was on Earth, and centuries here meant nothing to the other place in the long run. Only Avery, grounded, wingless and relatively undaunted about the task she had been given, had to live through the endless years on Earth while pursuing her goal.
“We are, indeed, strange bedfellows,” Rhys muttered, moving beside Avery, heading for the path through the shadows the intelligent bloodsucker and his minions had taken—a path that wily vampire would have set with the understanding that the immortal duo would follow.
“This will be a trap,” he said. “There’s no way around it.”
Avery nodded.
“I doubt if our fanged friend wanted a deal,” he observed.
“It wanted a closer look at its enemies, and got that,” Avery agreed, picking up speed as they both strode forward.
“We can’t take them all down at once, Avery, if that place is crammed with bloodsuckers.”
That remark earned him a wry sideways glance. They had to try, Avery’s expression told him. They had to take the bait and follow the fanged parasites to that underground black market. Doing so was their only way in.
“At least we’re immortal,” Rhys said, half in jest. “That’s in our favor.”
“Yes. We are that,” Avery whispered back with the sigh of an angel hiding something from him. That sigh was all the notice Rhys needed about Avery continuing to keep some secrets to herself. Secrets that might have shed more light on how they had arrived at this point in time, together, side by side, as well as what they could look forward to.
It was too late to ask the questions bogging him down. The damn vamps had set a path that was so easy to track, it was as though they’d tossed a trail of bread crumbs.
The symbols carved into Rhys’s back flared to life, scalding his skin, firing his nerves, readying him for the next fight as only symbols wrought by magic could. Those inky, scrolling marks had no special allegiance to Castle Broceliande. They had been carved by Far Eastern sorcerers with clever, clearer means.
Through the sigils, Rhys could call his brothers, and they would come. Avery’s cause was worthy of the pledges he and his brothers had made. It involved all of them.
But just as Avery had confessed about the missions of her kind, the Knights also had their own agendas and were scattered round the globe. With the Grail safely hidden and the strongest of his brothers standing guard over it, everyone else was doing their best to turn back the tide of monsters in the shadows.
He and Avery were on their own here.
The scent of fangers grew noticeably stronger near a dim, narrow alley. Rhys slowed. Beside him, Avery, Heaven’s warrior angel, was outrageously beautiful. Rhys couldn’t imagine what her wings would be like and how she’d look in them. If the image he’d seen of those gigantic feathers turned out to be an indication of the real thing, she’d be truly magnificent.
“We will get them back,” he said to her. “Every damn feather.”
They walked together, knowing that in minutes the real fun would begin.
Chapter 20
Five vampires showing their teeth stood in the shadows of the entrance to an unused back door that would have turned off most of the people unlucky enough to find it.
There was no human presence here. This was vampire territory and lethal to any living thing with red fluid in its veins.
Boarded-up buildings and glassless windows gave the place its eerie, abandoned vibe. Graffiti sprawled across brick and pavement alike, as if the street had seen gang activity before these vampires moved in. Maybe the vampires they were facing had been one of those gangs, with a new drug of choice. Blood.
Human blood.
Avery halted several paces from them without her knife in her hand. Rhys followed suit, opening and closing his fingers around his blade’s hilt.
These bloodsuckers didn’t advance or speak. Minions, servants of their Prime, they were guards in an unnatural lineup that told Rhys they had found the entrance
to that black market gathering without a hell of a lot of effort.
Behind where he and Avery stood, shadows closed in to darken the area, making the night seem blacker than it already was. Shades were doing this, creeping in to wait for vamp leftovers. The presence of Shades meant there were mortals at this underground gathering, taking their lives in their hands by being part of such an illegal escapade.
“Is there a magic password?” Avery asked drily. “Or will a silver knife in your chests be all the invitation we need to get inside?”
Rhys didn’t actually expect a response. The pasty bastards looked like statues in advertisements for London’s wax museum.
Avery was a determined seeker, though, and had a lot to gain by coming here. Fearlessly, she walked right up to the bloodsuckers and looked into their faces as if this were nothing more than troop inspection. Rhys stayed close to her, uneasy about what lay ahead if they made it inside.
When Avery flashed a smile, all of the vamps stepped back at once. They might not have known exactly what sort of being was facing them, but they wanted no part of whatever she turned out to be.
She was all fight now—fierce, competitive, daring and brilliant at getting what she wanted. When she waved a hand, the vamps parted as if mesmerized. Two of them shielded their eyes from the inner light she radiated so artfully.
“So much for needing an invitation,” Rhys said. He felt the need to add, “You do understand what we’ll find down there?”
“Stolen goods,” she muttered. “Belonging to me.”
The door was made of iron, and heavy. Its composition alone would have prevented the passage of some supernatural species, unless it had been closed behind this market’s invited guests to seal them inside. Not many supernaturals could stand to touch or be near iron or steel.
Was that how things worked? Rhys wondered. Money came in and never left, expanding the coffers of whoever ran this shindig? With a reputation like that, who would dare to attend a gathering of this kind, where the odds of surviving might be dismal?
The answer that came to him was that Weres wouldn’t find a place like this to their liking, and neither would the Fae, if London housed any. Who, then, could they expect to find here, besides vampires desiring to use Avery for some unknown purpose?
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