My Immortal Assassin

by Carolyn Jewel

  They approached the house. From the silence, she guessed they were lucky. No one was home. Durian did something to the alarm system that she didn’t catch—his use of magic was over practically before he started. Then Gray led the way around the back. Her old self on that last day walked beside her like a ghost made of the memories she’d kept locked for so long. Why hadn’t she known something was wrong?

  The latch on the gate shone with new metal on old wood. This door was alarmed, too. Durian let her take care of this one. It turned out to be easier than she thought. The granny unit was attached to the house, but you had to be outside to get to it. There wasn’t any interior connecting door between the two buildings. Almost nothing had changed in the backyard. There was a birdbath she didn’t recognize. The Witmarks’ cat was sunning itself underneath it. The same gravel path was lined with miniature roses.

  Durian did his thing with the separate alarm on the unit. He didn’t need a key to open the door because with a quick pull of his magic, the tumblers in the locking mechanism aligned and clicked into place.

  All the breath in Gray’s lungs vanished when they stood inside the apartment where her sister had lived. The place was spotless. But for the eerie neatness, she could imagine Emily still lived there. All her things were still here. The television, the stereo. Her furniture. The wall she kept between old and new disintegrated.

  The past rushed at her in a maelstrom of memories and emotions that were breaking her apart. In this room, Emily—or someone she thought was Emily—had put her arms around her and told her how much she loved her baby sister. As kids they used to fight all the time, but as adults, that changed. They got to be friends. Gray had kept Emily’s secret when her sister admitted she was practicing magic, and Emily had never, ever belittled Gray for being the less talented of the two. No matter how much she remembered, or how vivid the recollections, she couldn’t reach back into the past and bring her sister safely to her.

  Durian touched her elbow and the storm eased. Some of his darkness seeped into her. She welcomed the separation he gave her, the numbness. She followed his circuit around the apartment. He wasn’t using any magic yet that she could tell. Getting the layout, she guessed, since all he did was look into the rooms. Bedroom, kitchen. Living room. He stopped at the wall of pictures between the kitchen and living room and after a bit, she joined him because she was safely without emotion.

  “That’s Emily,” she said, pointing to one of the pictures. “The two of us at the beach when we were kids. She was gorgeous then, too. My mom and dad there. Her graduating from college. She did her undergrad at Mills. Grad school at Berkeley.”

  “And this one?”

  “Emily backstage at the Met.” She touched the frame, remembering that night and how proud Emily had been of her. She didn’t dare look at Durian. She didn’t want to know what he thought, but she kept explaining anyway. “That’s me at the Opera House not long after I came home from New York. I was in Lausanne the year before. With Béjart.”

  Her two lives pushed against each other, crushing her.

  “And the gentleman with his arm around you is?”

  The man in the picture was a stranger to Gray Spencer. And not. “Val.”

  He wrinkled his forehead. “Val.”

  “Emily took that picture of the two of us.”

  “And this?” he said at last. “This is you, Gray?” And of course he meant the framed cover of Dance Magazine.

  She nodded. “The year I made soloist at New York City Ballet. I was twenty years old. It’s how Val and I met. We did Billy The Kid the next year, but he also staged something of his that season. Marakova was his principal dancer, but I had a solo.”

  “I should have known,” Durian whispered. He stared at the picture as if the dancer on the cover was the President of the United States in pink tights and toe shoes. “This,” he said. “I did not expect this.”

  She couldn’t have said anything if she’d wanted to. Her throat closed off.

  “Not just good, but gifted.”

  “That was then.” She couldn’t deal with the admiration. He made it too real. “Who cares what I used to be?” She stared at the picture of the smiling ballerina and it didn’t even look like her anymore. She remembered the day of the shoot. She’d hit that arabesque dead on and could have held it all day.

  “Gray.” His finger brushed along the line of her jaw. “It explains a great deal about you.” He kept touching her, and she kept wondering what would happen if she smashed the picture. “I did not understand how much you lost. Not truly.”

  “Would it have been all right if I was just some regular person with a regular job?” She grabbed the framed cover and yanked hard enough to rip the fastener halfway out of the wall. “Why does it matter what she used to be?” Rage and agony boiled in her, white hot with the futility of wishing she could have it all back. She raised the picture over her head and hurled it downward.

  Somehow Durian caught the picture in the millisecond after it left her hands. He returned the frame to the wall and slowly turned to her. His presence in her head got bigger and darker. Panic welled up because she knew what came next. Tigran would push her into a corner of her mind, and she couldn’t even pretend her life was her own. Air whooshed out of her lungs and refused to come back in. Her vision completely cut out.

  “Gray.”

  Someone touched her, and it was warm and not angry. Not looking to hurt.

  Her mind was still her own.

  Durian. Not Tigran. Durian’s arms were around her. Gentle. Holding her, and she wasn’t being made so small or insignificant that she didn’t matter. Durian pressed his lips to the top of her head. “Hush, love. Hush.”

  She got herself under control, and by the time she stepped away from his embrace, she was almost normal. Durian didn’t look angry. He almost never did, but his magic wasn’t telling her any different. He waited, as if he had unlimited time and patience.

  “Better?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He continued watching her and she had the strange feeling that he was seeing her for the first time. Whatever he was seeing, it wasn’t really her. “Val.” He said the name with puzzled emphasis. He closed his eyes for a moment and cut off her psychic link with him. She was alone. So alone. When he opened them again, his irises swirled with streaks of purple. “That man in the picture with you is Valantis Antoniu.”

  “You’ve heard of him.” Of course he had. He liked opera and ballet and fine art. And women like Emily, with beauty and brains.

  “I saw Antoniu dance when he was a young man. Before he retired and turned to choreography.”

  She willed her tears gone. “That was a long time ago.”

  He nodded. “He was a great deal older than you.”

  “So?” Her eyes burned hot. She didn’t dare blink again because she didn’t want to look like any more of a fool. He needed her to be calm. She would be calm.

  He was quiet for so long, she gave up trying to understand what was going on with him. He wasn’t letting her see much now anyway. “We will discuss this another time.”

  Her pulse got going hard. “Understood.”

  “Nikodemus is right. You and your sister do look alike.” He turned from the photographs.

  She didn’t move right away. No dust clung to the corners or muted the color of any of the frames. She touched the picture of Emily and wanted her sister to be safe and happy. What if that meant being married to Christophe dit Menart? What if it meant Emily hated what Gray was now?

  “We do not have much time, Gray.”

  She did a slow turn and looked around. “Someone’s been in to clean, obviously, but that’s all. This is pretty much how it looked when Emily lived here.”

  He inhaled, long and slow, and she felt the quiver of his magic flow over her from that dark pool inside him. “Yes, that’s so.”

  Durian knelt in the center of the living room and closed his eyes. She stayed to one side. “This is not unl
ike tracking.”

  “Great. I’ll suck at this, too.”

  He opened one purple eye. “Pay attention, please.”

  She saluted and then, slowly, the air around him became charged until the hair on her arms prickled and her hair crackled with static electricity.

  He let out his breath. “Did you see how I did that?”

  “Not really.” Not enough to try by herself.

  “This is as good a time as any for you to learn.” He opened his eyes. They weren’t purple. They were the color of new pennies. She caught her breath because she knew that color meant he was close to changing.

  “Change if you need to, Durian.”

  His eyes flickered, and she had never thought he looked less human than he did right now. “That is not necessary.”

  He repeated what he’d done before, and she tracked his magic as best she could. This time she was prepared for the eerie sensation of the air tight with tension. After a few minutes of that, he rose from his kneeling position to move through the house. Every so often, he’d stand immobile, breathing deeply, and the air around him sizzled with expectation. Once or twice she caught an echo of something, a glimpse of energy that had lain dormant until Durian’s magic raised it. So, he was right. What he was doing was similar to tracking. The way jogging was similar to running.

  Because she was in his head, she worked out some of what he was getting from his examination of the apartment. Psychic residue clung everywhere. It drifted from the ceiling and swirled around their feet. She fell deeper into her link with Durian.

  She shivered when she felt Tigran, an echo of him, far away and yet, it was him. Undeniably Tigran. Things got stranger still. She swore she heard the faint whisper of conversation. Anna, you look great. A beating heart. The distant scent of blood. Fear rippled down her back, but it was distant, a memory of fear, of being certain she would die. Emotions that didn’t belong to her. You, too, Emily. A scream that didn’t end and wasn’t her or Emily.

  Hey, Val.

  She knew Durian was blunting her emotions. There was more here, but he knew she couldn’t relive the final day of her old life without the scream that was building in her head getting free and endangering them both. He was hiding other details from her, too, and frankly, she was grateful. After a second painstaking circuit of the apartment, Durian put a hand on her shoulder, sliding his palm to the nape of her neck. “A few moments more and we’re done.”

  They began again, following an odd pattern from the back door through the room, to a niche by the front door where Emily had stashed an umbrella and a pair of sneakers. When they reached the place where Val had been taken down, Durian cut their connection to a trickle. His eyes burned copper-red. Her skin felt slick with the residue of the magic he’d been pulling and shaping and letting fall onto everything in the house.

  “This, I will do on my own, Gray.”

  She could barely move her mouth. “Please.”

  Durian crouched at the spot where Tigran had brought her down to the floor, kicking and screaming. He’d muffled the sounds while he did something to her that had burned like fire through her head and chest. By then Val and Emily had already been dead. Durian stayed where he was for what seemed like forever but wasn’t any more than five or ten minutes.

  He rose and resumed his pattern through the house. The unit was small but he made it seem microscopic. Kitchen, bathroom, laundry area, bedroom. The wall of pictures from a life that wasn’t hers anymore.

  “Well?” she said when he released the magic he held and stood motionless. Her entire body tensed, but the memories, the sounds, scents, and emotions faded with his magic.

  He opened his eyes. “Understand, Gray, that I cannot yet be sure.”

  “Of what?”

  “Three deaths happened here. I did not know Valentis or Emily before this happened so I cannot say that it was them who died. Given what we know, probably it was Valentis who died. Christophe had no reason to keep him alive if he was human and even less if he was magekind.”

  “The other two?” Gray covered her mouth with both hands, afraid to ask the questions that roared through her yet desperate to know the answers. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat.

  Here, exactly where she stood, was where Val had kissed her cheek that day and told her how rehearsals had gone and that he was sorry to be late. He was having trouble with his principal dancer for his newest work and not only that, the understudy was better. She’d been standing there with flour all over her hands, helping with dinner. Emily, still in the kitchen, had called out Hey, Val.

  Through the window, she could see the stepping stone path to the house. The day Christophe had come for them, she’d stood there waving at Val through the window before she’d let him in to be killed by a monster.

  As she stared past the reflection in the glass, Gray was half-convinced she would see Val just as she had that last day, him smiling and pantomiming a big air-kiss for her, his white hair mussed as if he’d been running his hands through it. A permanent condition, he liked to say, so he could frighten the corps de ballet.

  A bone-white face appeared in her line of sight.

  She screamed because for a moment she actually thought it was Val, but with pewter hair instead of white and ashen skin too loose on his skull. Durian whirled and the moment he saw what she did, he touched her shoulder, and then she didn’t feel anything at all.

  A key slid into the exterior door. The mechanism turned and clicked, and whoever it was came inside. “Who’s there?”

  She didn’t move. Neither did Durian. They didn’t make a sound.

  Gray’s mother stared into the house, standing there in her low-heeled pumps, her cheeks pink now instead of the ashen white she’d seen through the window. Her breath was loud. She walked across the living room. Her head turned this way and that, eyes darting toward the shadows.

  The framed cover of Dance Magazine hung lopsided on the wall.

  Her mother’s hair was gray now, instead of the platinum she remembered. More lines creased her face, and she was thinner than ever. Her heels clicked on the wooden floor, echoing as she walked, and the curious thing was, she followed a pattern similar to the one Durian had taken. She went into the bedroom and stayed there a little longer than it would take to be sure no one was there.

  On her way out, her mother stopped in front of the cluster of photos that had so drawn Durian. She reached out and touched the framed cover of Dance Magazine and then straightened it.

  The silence suffocated her, plugged up her ears, stole all the air in the room. Thank God she could not feel.

  Her mother turned around and whispered, “Anna Grayson?”

  There wasn’t any answer.

  Gray thought her heart would break. She took a step forward only to have Durian check her. He was right. She knew that, but she wanted to have her mother’s arms around her. To breathe in her scent and believe that everything would be all right. If she gave in to the impulse, she might endanger her entire family. She knew for dead certain that Christophe would retaliate with lethal force if she made any contact with them.

  Her mother waited before she sighed and walked out. The door clicked closed after her, leaving a breath of air to ripple through the room and die. After a bit, the key turned in the lock again with a hollow echo.

  She steeled herself. “Now what?”

  “We plan.”

  CHAPTER 26

  9:59 P.M. Piedmont, California

  Durian let himself into the granny unit where Gray’s sister had once lived. He’d come prepared and didn’t need to turn on any lights. His clothes were across the street in his car. In his altered form, his vision was more than acute enough to see even if the room were pitch dark. But it wasn’t. In a city, there were too many lights for any place with windows to be dark.

  Floodlights from the main house shone into the apartment windows, casting a sickly light on the floors. Despite no one living here, gadgets and appliances glowed with red
or green lights.

  Gray’s fragile state had meant he hadn’t done everything he wanted or needed to do. He made a slow pass around the rooms he’d been through earlier. The small area was an advantage to balance against the difficulty of the age of the evidence trail. He’d analyzed much older scenes before, locations where the residue was more contaminated and attenuated than was the case here. Here, the challenge was in overcoming his preconceptions. He believed he knew what had happened and those convictions might warp his interpretation of what he found tonight.

  There was the additional problem of him recognizing and then separating the physical and psychic residue from Gray’s presence here in both the distant and recent past. Even before Tigran, she’d left traces of an insistent presence. Despite the passage of time and the changes Tigran had forced on her, Durian recognized Gray’s psychic patterns.

  Familiar to him. Intimate. Disturbing. All the more disturbing because of what had happened to her here. What Tigran had done. The magic required for one of the kin to bind a human to him was dark enough by itself, but the terror and horror experienced by the victim left behind a multiplying effect. Then later, what Christophe had done to cover the truth.

  He went still. He needed to be in a state that cut off sensory input of all but what was necessary to analyze Christophe and Tigran’s attack here. If someone came in, human or anything else, he might not know until it was too late. He closed his eyes and breathed deep, opening himself to what had been destroyed here. Her sister’s magic carried a distinct enough quality that he could easily filter that out. That left two humans without magic and Gray.

  Gray’s aura clung to things she’d been emotionally attached to or had frequently touched. He filtered out the more recent signals, what Gray was now, her mother, and other signifiers too old or too new to interest him until at last he was down to the remnants that were relevant.