by Cara Villar
“What would he do? Steeple his fingers and silently contemplate the novelty of the female posterior?”
Felix removed the key-card from my pack and started on the elevator keyboard. Red lights flashed, and then went out. “Or all the ways to boink them.”
I laughed at that, remembering his mock-horror when I used it to refer to him a few days back. “You have no shame!” I shook my head, reaching for the seam in the middle of the elevator doors.
“What have I got to be ashamed of?” He asked with a wicked smile, reaching across to get his own grip, his tone hinting at all kinds of brazen behavior.
“And I reiterate; pervy Vampire.” I began to pull on my side of the elevator doors, casually wondering if I might be out of my league when it came to this Vampire. He was older, far more experienced—in more than the carnal sense—and made me feel all kinds of warm and fuzzy inside.
“If I’m pervy,” Felix said, pulling his own side, “what does that make you, since you let me look?”
I grinned. “That makes me clever.”
And the doors slid open.
“Nineteen and a half minutes before you have to get to the roof,” Fletch softly informed us as we scrambled onto the lushly carpeted executive floor, and I did waste precious moments gawking around at how completely different this office floor was to the one just below it.
The whole floor was quartered, but not by anything as mundane as a wall, or as cheap as a cubicle divider. No, no. Glass was abundant there, like a veritable crystal ball. It was walls and doors and ceilings, tables and chairs and shelves and ornaments. A single sweeping walkway ascended to the top level, it’s frosted glass floor flowing up like water to the thick frosted floor of the executive offices up top. God forbid anyone wore a skirt up here. It’d be a show for anyone assisting. The whole two levels looked immense. An enormous semiprecious stone maze, glittering and shimmering in the moon and starlight that occasionally showed through the storm clouds in the sky, and shined down through the uncovered skylights in the upper floor’s ceiling.
I was in awe.
Maybe I’ll decorate my house in Italy like this…
“Eighteen minutes now,” said a voice in my ear, making me jump. “Nearly ten ‘til rounds.” I looked frantically around the shadowed glass cage and spotted Felix rummaging around an oval desk, the padded black leather chair shoved aside, and hurried over to join him.
“How do you know this is Natasha’s?” I asked.
Felix glanced up at me, and then pointed at an art-deco figurine. A dancer up on her toes, one arm stretched high, the other trailing behind her, a sash of cloth spreading out as it fell. It was quite stunning. An iridescent silver expression of the same beautiful pieces I’d seen bathing in moonlight in her house.
“Ah…” I murmured, and reached out a hand to skim the tips of my fingers down the elegant dancer’s spine. I wonder what it was about the flowing, elegant pieces that drew Natasha to them. Having not known the woman, I couldn’t help but be curious. I’d never know her now, thanks to Ambrose.
Ambrose, who was once my husband. And back to work.
Felix riffled through Natasha’s trays, shook out her planner and business card box before up-turning her index and scattering address and phone number flash cards all over the desk. I yanked open drawers and cabinets around her desk, and searched intensely through them, inspecting each item, from pens to staple boxes to highlighter pens to files and what was under it all, searching for secret compartments. Any flash drives found were shoved into my pack to look through later.
But my eyes kept returning to the figurine.
Caving to my drives, I abandoned my search of the drawers, and circled back around the desk to the figurine. I traced her lines, my fingers searching for something my mind could not fathom, but that my instincts were all but screaming I find. There was something about the figure, something that didn’t seem, right. It didn’t seem as fluid as the other figurines in Natasha’s house had. Yet, it would have blended in perfectly unless singled out for inspection. A close inspection, like what I was doing now.
I hefted up the statue and was surprised by how heavy the base was. I turned it this way and that, looking for catches, buttons or fine seams where something might pop out like the business card one.
Nothing.
I wonder if all this hanging with the big boys has screwed my instincts…
With a sigh, I gave up on the figurine. Following my gut was not getting us anywhere, obviously, however much it burned right. I turned the figurine back up-right by its arm and—
Bong! Thump!
I froze at the ridiculously loud reverberating sound of the heavy figurine base hitting the desk and then the floor. It vibrated through my feet even as I jumped out the way, and I was pretty sure that, even without supernatural hearing, anyone downstairs would have heard that. And the rounds weren’t that far off.
“What was that?” both Vince and Fletch asked in my ear.
Felix glared at me, and I was mid-wince when I realized something was in my hand. Frowning, I opened my fingers, stared down at the figurines arm, then down at the armless figurine, and then back at my palm. Most distinctly, the USB connection at the base of the arm.
I looked up sharply at Felix, eyes wide. “I just found our gold.”
“Good,” Fletch said. “Because in about thirty seconds you’re gonna have company.”
“We got two unmarked sedans and a van down here, y’all,” Vince added. “About a dozen black-clad males and—whoa!”
Clattering ensued on the line just as the elevator doors chimed an arrival.
“Vince!” I snapped down the line.
Faster than I could see, Felix was around the desk, grabbing my arm, and yanking me to a sweeping walkway even as I was tucking the figurine flash drive into a pocket in my pack and pulling it on.
“Hey! Who are you?” said an unfamiliar male voice.
We didn’t stop.
“Freeze now! I mean it!”
A beat of silence as we rounded the top, and then the harsh bark of a hand gun going off in a glass maze. Utterly deafening. A bright spark rebounded off the steal handrail beside me and I squeaked.
“No!” came a harsh command, and then a grunt of pain. “He wants the girl alive.”
We were running, because I didn’t want to know who ‘he’ was. I wasn’t ready to face the possibilities. I shoved the very idea of who ‘he’ might be and concentrated on racing across the office for the emergency exit lit up in green like a bright ‘GO’ sign. My stomach felt so bloody tight I thought I might puke.
“Vince! Answer me!”
“I’m here, Red, but,” more crackling, like he’d just exhaled, “there’s something circling the building.”
We slammed through the emergency exit of the executive offices as Felix growled, “What do you mean, ‘something’?”
My skin felt tight and cold as I took the stairs two at a time behind the Vampire, my heart beginning to hammer with a sick feeling of comprehension of denial. This had been too easy. Getting in and getting up here had been too easy.
“It’s like…human, but with wings and claws.” Vince growled, low and furious. “Really sharp claws.”
I swallowed, unbelieving as male voices and clomping feet followed. Had we been set up? Had they known we were coming all along?
“Felix!” We skidded to a halt before the roof door, and I shoved the card reader at him.
My hands were shaking so bad I knew I wouldn’t be able to disengage the pin-lock on the door to get us out in time. Felix wasted precious moments simply to cup my cheek, his emerald eyes dark and sharp and promising. And then he was turning away, accessing the encoded lock with the swift efficiency I was coming to know him for.
I busied myself getting out Felix’s fold-away crossbow. I didn’t have a clue where he’d gotten it, how he’d snuck it through customs, or how he had known he’d need it. Didn’t matter. He was going to shoot it at the office bui
lding across the way. Mark was going to secure it. Then we’d zip wire it over.
I wasn’t crapping myself. Really.
But right then, as the roof door security pad chimed an affirmative, my heart was hammering and my breath was wheezing, my hands were clammy and my head kept trying to spin. I always thought becoming Immortal spared me sweat and ill-health. It never occurred to me that emotion was so inherently involved, though it should have. When you’re sad you cry, when you’re angry you flush, and when you fear you shake and sweat.
I was scared all the way down to my little black DC’s.
A part of my mind had refused to dwell on the possibility that Ambrose might come after us. Come after me. I never thought to plan for the likely event that we might get caught, or by whom. I’d refused to use any kind of forethought in my plan, unable to face the fact that, though Ambrose was no longer the man I had married, he still bore the face of the only man I’d ever loved. Felix was right; I was compromised.
Relieve me of my duty, First Officer.
Felix took the crossbow from my shaking hands and pushed through the door. I didn’t hesitate to follow him, but the instant I cleared the door, I was swept off my feet and hurtled into a vent box that jarred my spine and sent me spinning over the top of it. I screamed. A scream that was cut off when I landed.
I couldn’t breathe. My vision faded in and out of focus, blurring to black at the edges. A horrible tingling was racing up and down my legs, and pain like nothing I’d ever known radiated from my back.
“Red?” A ringing in my ears. “Red! Answer me!”
“Fletch?” I couldn’t hear my own voice.
“What the hell is going on up there?” Vince snapped.
I could just imagine him pacing on the sidewalk like some caged beast, and that thought had me opening my eyes. The Chicago skyline spread out before me. Storm clouds were gathering behind it, blocking out the moon and stars. The concrete was still damp under my cheek. Something swooped past my view, something big and vaguely human shaped, with black feathered wings like that of a crow or raven, and claws…
God save me.
The ringing in my ears began to dissipate, and I could just make out the sounds of Felix fighting, grunting, panting noises. Then he was skidding on the concrete next to me, crouching down to touch my back.
I cried out at the burn that sprang to hideous life at his touch.
“Shit.” His features were shadowed as he scanned the sky, then looked back down at me. “You’re nearly healed, but we need to move. I’m sorry, pet. This is gonna hurt.” He grabbed my arm and pulled, then hooked his hand under my body and lifted me.
I screamed again. The world spun and flickered to black.
A pop and a whoosh made me force my eyes open. Felix had released his crossbow, sending the zip-wire sailing through the night sky to Mark darting out across the roof of the opposite building. He leaped for the rope, caught it, and whirled away from the talons of a winged beast intent on gutting a wolf.
The crossing would be a humbling sixty-five foot slide.
“Red?”
I swung my gaze to Felix, who was securing the other end of the line. His crossbow was hanging from the wire —a makeshift grip for us. I swallowed hard and looked at my Vampire.
“You need to hold on tight to me, all right, pet?” he said, pulling me and the crossbow grip to the edge of the building, his eyes darting up to the sky and then back to my face as we clambered up onto the wall. “Don’t let go.”
I nodded, “Okay.” And he tugged me close, careful to avoid touching my back. My legs felt wobbly as I shifted my feet to stand on his, bracing my arms about his waist and gripping my wrists. I looked up into his face, and he looked down at me. His eyes swirled like a whirlpool of jade and lime and olive, gold sparking angrily. Felix was on the edge, his control threadbare. I wondered why, lifting my fingers to brush his cheek, leaving faint streaks of red on his pale skin, and then I felt it. He was terrified. For me. His nostrils flared as my blood patterned his skin.
“What are you waiting for, Alistair?”
Gold flared brightly, consuming green for an instant. “Brace yourself,” he said, and hurled us off the end of the building.
The feeling of weightlessness was fleeting. The vertigo-sensation was overwhelming. The flair of pain in my back and arms, the needle-prickling in my legs, nothing more than a vague secondary thought as the solid ground of the roof disappeared and a sixty-five floor drop appeared under our feet.
That’s six-hundred and fifty feet. One-hundred and ninety-eight meters.
Park Tower was originally going to be this tall.
Jeepers…
Gold instantly consumed my vision, the monochrome doing nothing to deflate the breath-taking height with which we were sliding at. My grip on my Vampire tightened as my eyes went wide. Suddenly, I was all too coherent.
The sudden impact had us swinging a mere ten feet from our launch site. I yelped in pain, shock and fear, my hands sliding on my wet arms. Felix cursed, but barely had enough time to check his grip before another massive wing batted us, like we were nothing more than dust motes.
Our smooth slide became a bouncing, rocking descent, my stomach dropping out my shoes and bile rising with each sickly rebound. Blood perfumed the air, intensifying the anise enveloping me. Felix was bleeding, and I turned my head to look at his face. His jaw was clenched and his pupils were nothing but pinpricks in orbs of gold lightning.
“Felix, you’re—” A scream was ripped from my throat as my body was ripped from Felix’s. I was air-born for an instant, swung out wide, legs swinging up to meet the night sky, and then I was yanked back. I screamed again as a jerk on my pack had me sliding free of the straps so fast my heart stopped beating.
“Red!”
My hand snatched out and gripped anything it could, grappling with straps and finding purchase. I jolted to a stop and swung, and looked up into the strained expression of my Vampire as he hung from the zip wire grip with one hand, and held the opposite pack strap with the other as if his life depended on it.
But he couldn’t hold me forever.
“Felix.”
“Don’t.” He gritted. “Don’t even say it.”
“I have to,” I said, even as my vision began to blur with tears. I blinked furiously and felt the hot slide of tears down my cold cheeks. Felix was terrified. I could feel it in my head as surely as if the emotion were my own. “Neither of us will make it to that building otherwise.”
“No!” He adjusted his grip on the pack strap, and an involuntary cry of fear erupted from my throat when I began to sway. “No.” He said again, meeting my eyes. “Don’t you dare let go, Red.”
“I have to.”
“Don’t you dare!”
I swallowed against the fear clogging my throat, stealing myself against the pounding of my heart and the sure knowledge that this was it for me. Felix might survive the fall. I knew I wouldn’t. I was half-wolf, and as much as I’d love to believe otherwise, I wasn’t invincible. Werewolves just weren’t. I squeezed my eyes shut, the memory of his kiss before we left the house a transitory moment of pleasure in my mind, bursting through his anger and fear clouding the back of my consciousness as thick as fog.
I opened my eyes, looked at my Vampire, and realized I’d been falling for him since day one. In his eyes, I saw the promise of what could have been. I saw how the kisses we’d shared could have bloomed into something truly life-altering. I saw in the tension in his face as he stared back at me the loss of such a silently offered pledge, and I felt my heart break even as I felt his do the same.
“You have to stop him, Felix.”
“Please,” Felix pleaded, something in his voice catching, his eyes bright. He looked so pale, the streak of my blood on his cheek abnormally bright. “Don’t do this.”
“You have to make him pay.” I wish I’d had the chance to love you, too.
“Red!” Felix’s roar of denial echoed in my mind a
s I released the strap and began to fall.
I fell for an instant. I fell forever, and then the world went black.
26
I looked at the chest, at the familiar iron and wood, and tried to remember what I had put in it. But I couldn’t remember. All I knew what that something important was inside, and in order to understand why I was here, I had to know what that something was.
I reached out my hands for the corners again, determined to open it.
“You don’t want to do that, Willow,” said the voice, and I stilled once more, the tone making me pause out of habit. “Not yet, anyhow.”
“Why not?” I asked, and the presence rippled, pressing in on my, heating my cold, cold flesh.
“You are not ready.”
“Not ready for what?”
“To believe.”
I smoothed my hand over the carved lid as I listened.
“You’re not ready to accept what is in the chest.”
“Is that why it won’t open?” I asked.
“It will open when you’re ready,” soothed the voice, “and not before.”
“But I want to know now.” I could hear the petulance in my voice, and felt the ripple of amusement in the air around me. “Can’t I even get a peak?”
“One trial at a time, Willow.”
I stared at the wooden flowers. “What trials must I endure before I will know?”
“Well, first…” The heat of a large hand pressed down on my shoulder, flooding me with comfort and warmth, but would not allow me to turn and look at who it belonged to. “First you must deal with your husband.”
Coming awake was like swimming against the tide.
I hadn’t known how to swim when I was mortal, but all it had taken was falling in the ocean after being turned and realizing I couldn’t die from drowning. Merely drown, revive, drown, revive, drown, revive. The process of suffocation was agonizing. The course of reanimation even more so.
So I’d forced myself through the gelatinous cold of water until I reached the surface. My arms had ached, my legs were sore, my fingers and toes numb, and sucking in air felt like inhaling fire, but it burned so good I couldn’t stop myself, hungry for what had been deprived me for however long I’d been under. Forcing my body out of the heavy weight of water on shaking limbs and collapsing onto cold, slimy cobbles left me exhausted and elated and ridiculously shell-shocked that I was even alive at all.