by Eve Langlais
No wonder he’d pulled away. It was one thing for people to suspect she was crazy or a liar or–God forbid–an actual conspiracy theorist, but to be thought desperate and lonely, one step away from talking to herself all the time, if only because there was no one else around to answer?
Yeah, the truth hurt.
She’d never made time for an LTR. There was always some new assignment pulling her away, or the niggling worry that schizophrenia would claim her too. The few guys she’d tried sharing herself with hadn’t been able to handle the intensity. But what she was feeling now–the urge to get closer to Hugo–she couldn’t keep blaming that on crazy or the job. Not anymore.
Despite the awkwardness, she wanted to help him even though the plans on the TV made little sense to her. The clock at the bottom of the screen said it was just after two a.m. In college, she’d called it the stupid hour, when the last jolt of midnight caffeine and sugar from the quick mart around the corner had worn off. These days, she considered that was prime time to write ludicrous copy for CQ, but tonight–or this morning, actually–she just didn’t have any more words.
She blamed the scotch. And the sex. If only she had someone to talk to, someone who would believe her, and help her figure out if the rest of the world was ready to believe.
She touched the tiny heart charm on her necklace. In all the Christmases since her mother had vanished, never had Avery missed her so much.
She fell asleep with the unshed tears salting her lashes tight.
Chapter Ten
Hugo let her sleep. He paused in his study of the casino plans to tug a soft, embroidered blanket loose from the back of the couch to spread over Avery where she slumped against the cushions. Her quiet breathing was more of a distraction than it should be, but less than the vibrant energy of her when she was awake.
Even after he tucked the blanket around her, leaving only the gleam of her still–damp hair and the curve of cheek touched with her short, thick lashes, he didn’t return his attention to his work.
He’d told her the link between them would fade, but he felt it still. He’d forced himself to put some space between them, and yet the tastes and textures of her lingered in his mind, in his body.
In his soul.
He didn’t even know if he still had a soul. The theology of his time had distinct judgments on witches like his betrothed and creatures of iniquity like himself. A monster he most certainly never wanted to be. After the way he and Sibilla had been treated, he wasn’t inclined to give humans the benefit of the doubt–or the harm of the faith, as it were.
So why had he given Avery such detail about the origins of his curse? It would have been enough to say a witch had done the deed and he knew the location of her unmarked grave with the various treasures of his time to prove its provenance.
He had revealed too much of his remembered horror. But at least he hadn’t told her how he’d staggered through the first day with his skin blackened and bones broken from the villagers’ stones. The spell Sibilla had cast worked as she’d intended: he would not die from such non–lethal wounds. No matter how much it hurt.
The dormant magic, gorged anew on blood and fire, had weakened the barrier between the sunlit realm and the phaedrealii. Since the curse had made him a monster in his own right, no longer human, he’d fallen into the phae court.
When the old queen had given him a choice–to stay and bleed off the treacherous energy of her fractious subjects, or be thrown back into the world he’d known that would willingly burn and stone him again–he’d numbly made himself a bottom–feeder of the court.
But the new king and his mate believed the passion of the phae could bring magic back to the sunlit realm and renew the balance of this world. A world that had changed since his time in it. What else would explain Avery’s willingness to open her arms to him given what he was?
He had come back to the world only because he required the phae to set him free. And yet… despite the imminence of his wish being granted, it took all the brute strength in his ravpyrii body to force himself to turn away from this woman at his side.
If the Undone Queen did attack on the morrow, perhaps she would kill the last flickering vestiges of his own emotions and thus save Avery from the doom that awaited her if she stayed by his side.
***
He had done as much as he could and then turned off the screen to just sit and watch Avery sleep, curled into the corner of the couch, her hair tossed like dark red waves on the white blanket embroidered with tiny lotus flowers in gold thread. As the sun rose over the desert, the thin cloud cover brightened to a sheet of pure silver. The changing light would wake her, he knew, but if he got up to pull the curtains, he was afraid he’d interrupt her dreams.
Better to be awakened by the light than by him, a creature of darkness.
So why was his hand reaching out to touch the wild locks of her hair?
The room phone rang, the musical chime dissonant in the silence.
Tira Dyer didn’t identify herself when Hugo lifted the phone, but her brisk, blunt voice was unmistakable. Ravpyrii didn’t need sleep as such, but her tone was ragged.
“I got your notes on our security efforts earlier,” she said. “I forwarded them to Mr. Barrows. He’ll meet you in two hours. I’m sending up breakfast and some other items, and I’ll ring you when Mr. Barrows is ready for you.”
She disconnected without waiting for his reply.
He lifted one eyebrow at the phone as he hung up and turned to see Avery watching him from her cocoon. Her cheeks were still soft and flushed from sleep, but her green eyes were sharp. And a touch guarded.
Though it was for the best, her caution went through him like the iron–tipped spear that had devastated the imp.
“The sunlight doesn’t hurt you.” Her voice was almost as frayed as Dyer’s.
“Were that the case, the desert would be a poor place for a ravpyrii sanctuary.” Since she was going to have to write the story explaining his kind and everything else, he added, “We seek the shadows because the dark hides our otherness.”
“Not as well as you think.” She was still tucked in the blanket, the little lotuses pulled up to her chin, but from the movement of the folds, he guessed she touched her neck where he couldn’t see. “We have less than ten hours of daylight, so what next?”
He relayed Dyer’s message, and Avery climbed to her feet, her bare toes peeking out beneath the blanket clutched around her. “I don’t know if I should pray for mimosas or not,” she muttered as she padded off to the bedroom.
Hugo walked to the window to stand in the wintery sunlight and pulled out his own phone. But it was not the tigress wereling or the phae king who answered.
“Sun–Down Tavern,” an unfamiliar man said. “This is Beck.”
Nonplused, Hugo asked, “Is Yelena there?”
“Is this the vampire?”
Hugo scowled. “If it wasn’t, that would be a very irresponsible question.”
“Chill. Nobody who shouldn’t hear it would believe it anyway.”
While that was true enough, it didn’t reassure Hugo. “Where is Yelena?”
“With her boyfriend, dealing with some… trouble in the court. Needless to say, they don’t have good cellular connections there, so she gave the phone to me and told me you might be calling. What do you need?”
This news was worrisome on many levels. The troubles in the phaedrealii must be bad indeed to distract them from their plans to return to the sunlit realm. And now a stranger had Yelena’s phone and was Hugo’s only contact.
And God in heaven, who would call the king of the phae a boyfriend?
As if hearing his doubtful reverberation through the phone line, the stranger–Beck–said, “I know Yelena from my army days. She can drink me under the table–apparently tigers have a higher tolerance for homebrew than wolves–but while I was under there, she got me to believe her crazy plan to unite our worlds just might work. So tell me what you need.”
Hugo considered for another moment, but he didn’t see he had any more choices than when he’d faced the phae queen seven hundred years ago. If Yelena had trusted this wolf wereling with the king’s secrets, he could do no less. “I need that army you mentioned.”
Beck’s bark of surprised laughter faded as Hugo explained their situation.
“The days will be getting longer again,” Beck said, “and the new moon is waxing.” Of course a wolf shifter would know the phases of the moon. “If the old queen is going to make a move any time soon, it has to be now, while her powers are strongest.”
“It will be tonight,” Hugo declared. “She is a creature of madness and delusion.”
Beck snorted. “That being the case, what better time or place to attack than Vegas at Christmas?”
“Indeed.”
“But I can’t muster much of an army before nightfall. Raze is still struggling to stabilize the phae gates. I don’t know how much of a force he can move that way. And my pack is up in Oregon. We won’t reach you before the sun goes down.”
Hugo flattened his palm over the cool glass, staring at the pale light on his skin. So he was essentially alone, with a vulnerable female relying on him for her survival.
His hand clenched into a fist against the clear pane.
“Get word to Yelena when you can,” he said. And he wondered that his bleak tone didn’t ice the glass. “Tell her revealing the phae in the sunlit realm might be happening sooner than she wished.”
“Hold out as long as you can,” Beck said. “We’ll be coming. And I might have some people nearer who can assist. Keep this phone on.”
But as they disconnected, Hugo wondered if anything could help.
A knock at the door roused him from his doubt. When he answered, one of the ravpyrii security guards from the night before pushed a long, linen–draped cart through the doorway. The top of the cart was laden with covered serving platters and several large bags decorated with insignia from the shops downstairs.
Hugo’s interest perked when the ravpyr twitched aside the linen to reveal the interior strewn with dark metal.
“Cold–forged iron,” he said. “Almost impossible to find. Everything is steel these days. Mr. Barrows had us spend the night refining what we could dredge up.”
While Hugo had spent the night with something even more precious.
He thought he should feel bad about that, but if it was their last hours in the world…
He lifted a wooden stave topped with a sharp, barbed shaft of iron. “Primitive.” When the guard bristled, he waved his hand to forestall a protest. “The phae are old too. I suggest you create shackles and chains to match. An iron point like this glaive will kill lesser phae, but some of the more powerful will be harder to subdue.”
The guard scowled but nodded. And he didn’t leave. When Hugo raised one eyebrow in question, the ravpyr’s scowl deepened. “They say you’re almost as old as Mr. Barrows.”
They say? Hugo wasn’t sure he appreciated being the target of gossip any more than of burning and stoning. “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t yet met him.”
“I haven’t either. But we wondered…” The guard shifted, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides, marking off seconds of silence. “We heard you have a cure.” After one last white–knuckled clasp, his fingers sprang apart, as if releasing something. “I watch all these people coming, especially the last couple days, and they are so… so everything. Happy, sad, cinnamon…” He sucked in a harsh breath, revealing his incisors. “And wearing so much red, like…”
Hugo suggested gently, “Like blood?”
“Like freakin’ stop signs!” The guard paced a few agitated steps in the confines of the doorway. “Like they’re telling me to… stop, that I don’t have the right to the life force just flowing off them.” He wheeled to face Hugo. “But I want it so bad.”
What could he tell the other ravpyr? Apparently ComeTrue wasn’t a sanctuary for everyone. “I have no cure,” he said.
The man frowned. “But we heard the phae and the werelings–”
“We aren’t like them. We were turned by the magic that the phae manipulate, but the magic isn’t ours by right. We have the physical prowess of the werelings, but that isn’t natural to us either. We don’t belong in any world and yet we have no way out.”
In a moment of seething silence, the ravpyr’s hands clenched again, knuckles whitening as if his bones sought to escape. “I was looking for something a little more hopeful,” he said.
“Hope?” Hugo shook his head. “I could suck on that for a century and still not have enough to share. But after tonight, it may not matter for either of us.”
He was not at all surprised that the guard slammed the doors when he left.
Hugo turned to find Avery standing where she’d be just out of sight.
“He sounded scared,” she said.
“We should all be.”
“But you’re immortal.”
“Which doesn’t mean we can’t be killed.” He wheeled the cart toward the table in front of the couch, and she angled across the room to join him. “And it doesn’t mean we don’t want more.”
“More?” she asked softly.
“More than to not die.” He lifted the cover on one of the serving dishes. “Cinnamon.”
She drifted closer. “‘Tis the season.” She grabbed a fork and leaned past him to nip off a section of the icing–drizzled pastry. The scent of her skin–its own kind of warm, delectable spice–made his senses whirl. “If I eat this and finish the scotch, I’ll be so ready to write your story.”
He clamped the lid back on the dish, narrowly missing her second stab at the pastry, and she gave him a lopsided grin.
“We meet with Barrows soon,” he reminded her. He slid the glaive out from under the tablecloth. “And you need to be able to wield one of these as well as a pen.”
Studying the weapon, her eyes widened, the green brightened by the clear, cold light outside. “I’ll have to tell my editor I’m expensing a suit of armor.”
“Those were made of steel, so they’d do you no good against the phae. You’re better off running.” He met her gaze steadily. “Maybe you should leave right now.”
She stiffened. “Leave?”
“Tonight will get ugly.”
“I thought you came to me because you needed a witness.”
“To a press junket, not a war.”
She sniffed. “You’re picking up our lingo with shocking ease.”
“I’ve had a good teacher. I was reading back issues of Conspiracy Quarterly while you slept. You have a way with words.”
She plucked a second platter and a bowl of fruit off the cart and took it to the couch table where she knelt gracefully to the floor. She unveiled a more nutritious breakfast of eggs and toast but didn’t look at him as she picked slowly through her meal. “I didn’t think there was that much to learn from CQ.”
“I also looked up your stories at your previous newspaper.”
Her fork screeched across the plate. She put the steel down gently and picked up an orange instead. The bright, cheerful scent as she dug her fingers into the rind was a jarring counterpoint to her grim expression. “So you’re an internet sleuth as well as a medieval warrior.”
“I didn’t have to look very hard. You wrote under the same name.” He watched her methodically peel the orange in one long swath. “If you don’t like the stories you write for CQ, why do you use your real name?”
She divided the orange, hesitated a moment, then tossed him half, which he took to mean she wasn’t too angry at his online stalking. “Stupid,” she said at last. “Or stubborn. Or maybe burning my bridges so I can point at the reason I can’t ever go back.”
“Why did you leave?” When she glanced up sharply, he ate an orange slice and shrugged. “I am not such a good sleuth.” He met her gaze squarely. “And I’d rather you told me yourself.”
He wondered if he’d have to remind her that he�
��d already shared his past, but after a moment, she sighed. “When I was eleven, I was visiting my mother for Christmas. She was in an institution. A mental institution.” She looked at him to see if he understood, and he nodded. He’d read her CQ article on haunted asylums. “She seemed happy. Unusually so, which should have warned me. But I just thought it was because of the holidays, because I was there with her.” She looked down at the half orange cupped in her hands. “Silly me.”
“You mentioned your adventures with her when you were a child.”
Avery grimaced and ate a section of the orange, chomping with more vigor than was necessary. “Now I’m thinking some of the things she claimed might’ve been true: unearthly creatures following her, glimpses of strange worlds, that sort of thing. This time, she was telling me she’d finally found a way in.”
Hugo stiffened. “Into the phaedrealii?”
Avery shook her head. “She didn’t give it a name. But it was getting late and my grandparents were coming to pick me up. She gave me my present–” she touched her neck “–a little heart charm that nested inside a larger heart charm. She said the big heart was for her and the little heart was for me, so we’d always be together. Then she made me go for a walk with her outside in the snow. Said she wanted to show me the doorway.
“There was a garden down near the pond, and I thought she was going to take me to the gazebo and say it was a time travel capsule or something. But she’d dug a hole under the holly hedge, and she crawled right in. I freaked out, thinking she was going to fall out the far side into the pond, so I stuck my head in after her. The holly wasn’t a hedge, it had grown up in a circle, hollow in the middle, and…”
Hugo sat on the edge of the couch beside her. “A gate to the phae court.”
“Whatever it was… she just… vanished. Disappeared right in front of me.” She held up another section of orange, looking at it as if she wasn’t quite sure what it was, then put the remains on her plate. “I backed out and ran around to the pond. The edge was icy, and the ice wasn’t broken. There was no way she could have fallen in, but there were no footprints in the snow anywhere except where we’d walked up. The staff called police, and we looked everywhere, but…” She shook her head. “No one believed what I was saying.”