by Nalini Singh
Amariyah’s tone tried for a false lightness but her bitterness was too deep to be hidden. “She’s an angel. Vampires are no match for their beauty and grace.”
“It depends on the vampire,” Noel said, turning to face the open balcony doors. His gaze caught on the tableau inside the main room— Asirani touching Christian’s arm in an invitation that was unmistakable. Dressed in a cheongsam of deepest indigo bordered with gold, her hair swept off her face, her vibrant beauty was a stunning counterpoint to Christian’s almost acetic elegance.
The angelic male leaned down to hear what it was she had to say, but he held himself with a severity that was unnatural, his mouth set in an unsmiling line.
“Look at them,” Amariyah murmured, and he realized she’d followed his line of sight. “Asirani has ever tried to gain Christian’s affections, but she falls a poor second in comparison to Nimra.” Again, the words held hidden blades.
“Asirani is a stunning woman in her own right.” Noel watched as Christian tugged off the vampire’s hands with implacable gentleness and walked away. Asirani’s expression shut down, her spine a rod of steel.
Amariyah shrugged. “Shall we walk back inside?”
Noel had the feeling she’d expected far more support for her views than she’d received from him. “I think I’ll stay awhile longer.”
She left without a word, stalking into the main room in a flash of brilliant red that was the tight silk of her ankle- length dress, the fall of her coal black hair stroking over the lush curves of her body. He watched her walk up to Asirani, lay her hand on the other woman’s shoulder, squeeze. As she dipped her head to speak to the vampire, he sensed another feminine presence, this one a complex, mysterious orchid to Amariyah’s showy rose.
5
When he glanced over the balcony, it was to see Nimra walking arm in arm with Fen along an avenue of night- blooming flowers, the elderly man’s steps slow and awkward in comparison to her grace, his hand trembling on the cane. Yet the way Nimra compensated for his age and speed told Noel that this was something they did often, the angel with her wings of jewel- dusted brown, and the human man in the twilight of his life.
Compelled by the puzzle of her, Noel found himself walking down the steps to the garden to follow in their wake. An unexpected meow had him stopping on the last step and looking down into the dark, his vision more acute than a mortal’s. Mimosa lay under a bush full of tiny starlike flowers closed up for the night, her body quivering.
The intrepid cat hadn’t come to Noel in the days he’d been here, but tonight she stayed in place as he bent down and picked her up, holding her close to the warmth of his chest. “Are you cold, old girl?” he murmured, stroking her with one hand. When she continued to shiver, he opened up the buttons of his formal black shirt and put her against his skin. Dropping her head, she curled into him, her shivers starting to fade. “There you go.”
He continued to stroke her as he walked the way Fen and Nimra had disappeared. Mimosa was fragile under his hand, as fine boned as her mistress. It was strangely soothing to hold her, and for the first time in a long while, Noel thought back to the boy he’d been. He’d had a pet, too, a great old mutt who had followed Noel around with utter faithfulness until his body gave out. Noel had buried him on the moor, steeped the ground in his tears where no one could see him.
Mimosa stirred against his chest as he turned the corner, catching the scent of her mistress. Nimra was on the other side of the moon- silvered pond in front of him, her wings sweeping over the grass as she bent to check some drowsy blooms, the lazy wind shaping the dark blue of her gown to her body with a lover’s attention. Fen sat on a stone bench on this side, and the quiet patience with which he watched her held complete devotion.
Not Fen, Noel decided. The old man had always been an unlikely conspirator in the plot to disable or kill Nimra, but the expression on his face this night destroyed even the faintest glimmer of suspicion. No man could look at a woman in such a way and then watch the light fade forever from her eyes. “Strength and heart and courage,” Fen said without turning around. “There is no other like her.”
“Yes.” Walking closer, Noel took a seat beside Fen, Mimosa purring against his skin. “I think,” he said, his gaze on the angel who even now tugged at things deep inside of him, “you need to send Amariyah from this court.”
A quiet sigh, a weathered hand clenching on the cane. “She has ever had a jealousy toward angels that I’ve never understood. She is a beautiful woman, a near- immortal, and yet all she sees are the things she can’t have, can’t do.”
Noel said nothing, because Fen spoke the truth. Amariyah might see herself as an adult, but she was a spoiled child in many ways.
“I sometimes think,” Fen continued, “I did her a disfavor by asking Nimra to take my years of service into account as part of my daughter’s Contract. A century of service might have taught her to value what she is— for the angels value it.”
Noel wasn’t so sure. He’d seen Amariyah hold up a cup of coffee in front of Violet only the day before, tell the little maid that it was cold, then pour the liquid very deliberately onto the floor. There had been other acts when she thought herself unseen, and then the conversation tonight. The selfishness in her nature seemed innate, as immutable as stone. But whether it had turned deadly remained to be seen.
“Yours was a gift of love,” he said to Fen as Nimra rose from her investigation of the plants, looked over her shoulder.
It was familiar now, the way his skin went tense in a waiting kind of expectation at the touch of her gaze. They hadn’t made physical contact again since that walk in the garden, but Noel was discovering that, doubts about her true nature or not, his body was no longer averse to the idea of intimacy. Not when it came to this one woman.
He’d never had an angelic lover before. He wasn’t pretty enough to be pursued by those angels who kept harems of men, and he was glad for it. On the flip side, most angels were far too inhuman for the raw sexuality of his nature. Nimra, however, was like no other angel he’d ever met, a mystery within an enigma.
He’d seen her in the gardens more than once, her fingers literally in the earth. Once or twice, when he’d muttered something less than sophisticated under his breath, her eyes had sparkled not with rebuke, but with humor. And now, as she circled the pond to come to stand with her hand on Fen’s shoulder, her hair tumbling around her in soft curls, her expression was curious in a way he found unexpected in an angel of her age and strength.
“Are you seducing my cat, Noel?”
He stroked his palm over Mimosa’s slumbering body. “It is I who have been seduced.”
“Indeed.” A single word twined with power. “I see the women of the court are quite taken with you. Even shy Violet blushes when you are near.”
The little maidservant had proven to be a fount of information about the court when Noel tracked her down in the kitchens and charmed her into speaking with him. He’d already pushed the other two servants down the list of suspects after a subtle investigation— utilizing his access to Tower resources— had revealed no weak points in their lives that could make Sammi or Richard vulnerable to being turned, or signs of any sudden wealth. And after his discussion with Violet, he was certain beyond any doubt that she’d had nothing to do with the attempted assassination, either. Unlike Amariyah’s faux guilelessness, Violet’s was very much real— in spite of the ugliness of her past.
A runaway from a stepfather who had looked at her with far too much interest, Violet had collapsed half- starved on the edge of Nimra’s estate. The angel had been flying over her lands, seen the girl, carried her home in her own arms. She’d nursed Violet back to health and, when the teenager shied at the thought of school, hired a tutor for her. Though Nimra expected no service from one so young, the proud girl insisted on “earning her way” with her duties in the mornings, the afternoons being set aside for her studies.
“I adore her,” Violet had told Noel with fierc
e loyalty. “There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for Lady Nimra. Anything.”
Now Noel looked up. “Violet is more apt to ambush me on a dark night, if she considers me a threat to you, than flirt with me.”
Fen cackled. “He has the right of it. That child worships the ground you walk on.”
“We are not gods, to be worshipped,” Nimra said, a troubled look on her face. “I would not wish it of her— she needs to spread her wings, live her own life.”
“She’s like a rescued pup,” Fen said, coughing into a trembling fist. “Even if you cast her out, send her into the world, she’ll return most stubbornly to your side. You may as well let her be— she’ll find her own happiness faster if she’s able to do what she can to ensure yours.”
“So wise.” Nimra made no effort to assist the old man as Fen struggled to get to his feet.
Help, Noel understood as he rose as well, would neither be welcomed nor accepted.
The walk back was slow and quiet, Nimra’s wings brushing the grass in front of him as she walked arm in arm with Fen. Strolling along behind them, Noel felt content in a way that was difficult to describe. The humid Louisiana night, the air filled with the sounds of frogs croaking and leaves rustling, Nimra’s soft voice as she spoke with Fen, it was a lush sea that embraced him, blunting the raw edges within, the parts yet broken.
“Good night, my lady,” Fen said when they reached the small, freestanding cottage that he shared with Amariyah. To Noel, he said, “I’ll think on what you said. But I’m an old man— she’ll go when I am no longer here in any case.”
Nimra’s wings made a rustling sound as she resettled them before joining Noel to return to the house. Skirting the main rooms in unspoken agreement, they turned toward her personal wing— Noel’s room was next to her own, the area private. “Amariyah may have her faults,” Nimra said at last, holding out her arms when Mimosa stirred again, “but she does love Fen.”
Noel passed the cat over with care.
Purring happily in her mistress’s embrace, Mimosa returned to her slumber. Noel did up a couple of the buttons on his shirt but left the rest undone, the night breeze languid against his skin. “Did you know that Asirani is in love with Christian?”
A sigh. “I was hoping it was an infatuation, would pass.” She shook her head. “Christian is very rigid in his views— he believes angels should mate only among our own kind.”
“Ah.” That explained the intensity of the angel’s response to Noel. “It’s not a common view.” Especially when it came to the most powerful vampires.
“Christian thinks angel- vampire pairings are undesirable, as such a pairing cannot create a child— and we have so few children already.”
Noel thought of the angelic children at the Refuge, so vulnerable with their unwieldy wings and plump childish legs, their trilling laughter a constant music. “Children are a gift,” he agreed. “Is it something you—” He stopped speaking as Mimosa made a tiny sound of distress.
“My apologies, little one,” Nimra said, petting the cat until it laid its head back down. “I will not squeeze you so tight again.”
A chill speared through Noel’s veins. When Nimra didn’t say anything else, he thought about letting it go, but the slowly reawakening part of him insisted on engaging with her, on discovering her secrets. “You lost a child.”
* * *
It was the gentleness in Noel’s voice that tore the wound wide-open. “He didn’t have the chance to become a child,” Nimra said, the words shards of glass in her throat, the blood pooling in her chest as it once had at her feet. “My womb couldn’t carry him, and so I lost him before he was truly formed.” She hadn’t spoken of her lost babe since that terrible night when the storm had crashed against the house with unrelenting fury. Fen had been the one who’d found her, the only one who knew what had happened. Eitriel had left a month prior, after stabbing a knife straight into her heart.
“I’m sorry.” Noel’s hand on the back of her head, strong and masculine as he stroked her in much the same way he’d stroked Mimosa moments before. But he didn’t stop with her hair, moving his hand down to her lower back, careful not to touch the inner surfaces of her wings— that was an intimacy to be given, not taken.
He pressed against the base of her spine. She jerked up her head, startled. Instead of backing away, he curved his body toward her own, Mimosa slumbering in between them. He had no right to hold her in such a familiar way, no right to touch an angel of her power… but she didn’t stop him. Didn’t want to stop him.
It had been a long time since she’d been held.
Laying her head against his chest, the beat of his heart strong and steady, she lifted her eyes to the silver light of the half- moon. “The moon was dark that night,” she said, the memory imprinted into her very cells, to be carried through all eternity, “the air torn with the scream of a storm that felled trees and lifted roofs. I didn’t want my babe to leave me in the dark, but there was nothing I could do.”
He held her tighter, his arm brushing against her wing. Still he didn’t withdraw, though all vampires were trained to know that angels did not like their wings touched except by those they considered their intimates. Part of her, the part that held the arrogance of a race that ruled the world, was affronted. But most of her was quietly pleased by Noel’s refusal to follow the rules in a situation that wouldn’t be served by them.
“I had no children as a mortal,” he murmured, his free hand moving over her hair, “and I know it’s unlikely I’ll ever have them now.”
“Unlikely, but not impossible.” Vampires had a window of opportunity of roughly two hundred years after their Making to sire children, those offspring being mortal. Noel had been Made two hundred and twenty- one years ago. She’d heard of one or two children being conceived after that period of time. “Do you wish to sire a child?”
“Only if that child is created in love.” His hand fisted in her hair. “And I do have children I consider family.”
“Yes.” The thought of children’s laughter dancing over the moors eased the ache in her heart. “I think I should like to spend time with them.”
“I’ll take you if you want,” he offered with a laugh. “But I warn you— they’re a wild, wild lot. The babes are likely to pull at your wings and expect to be cuddled on the slightest pretext.”
“True torture.”
Another laugh, his chest vibrating under her cheek.
“You do not sleep, Noel,” she said to him after long, quiet moments held against the steady beat of his heart, that big body warm around her own. “I hear you walking in the hall.”
The first night, she’d wondered why he didn’t leave the wing and head out into the gardens. Only later had she understood that he was acting as what she’d named him— her wolf. Any assassin would have to go through Noel to get to her. Though she was the more powerful, his act had left her with a sense of trust that the Midnight had stolen from her.
“Vampires need little sleep,” he said, his voice distant, though he continued to hold her.
She knew that wasn’t the reason he stalked the corridors like a beast caged, but decided to keep her silence. Too many lines had already been crossed this night, and there would be consequences, things neither one of them was yet ready to face.
* * *
It was the next day that Nimra’s heart broke all over again.
She was in the library, working through her contacts for hints about who in her court might have links to someone who could access Midnight— a fact she’d checked earlier without result, but that Noel had requested she recheck, in case anything new had floated up— when Violet ran into the room. Tears streaked the girl’s face. “My lady, Mimosa—”
Nimra was running around the desk before Violet finished speaking. “Where?”
“The garden, by the balcony.”
It was a favorite sunning spot for the aged cat. Sweeping through the hallways, Nimra ran out onto the balcony to find both
Noel and Christian crouching at the bottom of the steps. Noel had his arms full of something, and Nimra’s heart clenched at the realization of his burden, her sorrow tempered only by the knowledge that Mimosa had lived a full and happy life.
Then Christian saw her and rose into the air to land on the balcony in front of her. “My lady, it’s better if you don’t—”
Nimra was already rising over him, her wings spread wide, her sorrow transmuting into a strange kind of panic at his attempt to stop her from going to Mimosa. When she landed opposite Noel, the first thing she saw was the limp gray tail hanging over his arm. “I am too late…”
A weak meow had her jumping forward to take Mimosa from his arms. He passed the cat over without a word. Mimosa seemed to settle as soon as she was in her mistress’s arms, her head lying heavily against Nimra’s breast as Nimra hummed to her. Five quiet minutes later, and her beloved companion of many years was gone.
Fighting tears, for an angel of her power and responsibility could not be seen to break, Nimra raised her head, met blue eyes gone flinty with anger. “What do I need to know?”
6
He nodded at a piece of meat sitting on the ground beside where Mimosa had liked to soak up the sun. “It’ll have to be tested, but I believe it was poisoned.” He brought her attention to where poor Mimosa had thrown up after chewing on the meat. “Violet.”
The maid ran down with a plastic bag. Taking it, Noel bagged the meat. “I’ll handle it,” he said to Violet when she went to take it from him.
Nodding, the maid hesitated, then ran back up the steps. “I’ll make my lady some tea.”
No tea would calm the rage in Nimra’s heart, but she wouldn’t taint Mimosa’s spirit with it. Holding her dear old pet, she turned to walk in the direction of the southern gardens, a wild wonderland that had been Mimosa’s favorite playground before age clipped her wings. She was aware of two deep male voices behind her, knew Noel had won whatever argument had taken place, for he appeared at her side.