“Seeing you here today, like this…” Tzadkiel gestured vaguely to the man’s person as Benjamin joined them. He ignored the hunter and continued. “What did you do to secure your fountain of youth after I disappeared?”
Galloway’s gaze darted over Benjamin. The mayor nodded in acknowledgment before his focus slipped to a point just past Tzadkiel’s shoulder. The scents of paraffin and licorice root coated the back of Tzadkiel’s throat, making him wish for a hearty gulp of the hunter’s quality Scotch to wash away the taste. Despite what his senses told him, the coven leader’s reflection remained invisible to detection in the window.
“M-Mr. Morgan. This—That is, I had no idea he would be here. I swear to you.”
“I would never question our friendship, Mayor.” The Morgan’s friendly reply was like a promised drink of water to a desert-stranded traveler. About as real as a mirage, its attraction immediately fell away, leaving only blistering heat behind.
“Accolon.” Tzadkiel addressed the Morgan by his given name and had the gratification of hearing a sharp intake of breath. “This is a private discussion between myself and Mayor Galloway.”
“It seems to me that Mr. Fuller also has an interest.” The Morgan came to Tzadkiel’s side and smiled in Benjamin’s direction, but the expression didn’t reach his eyes. “It would hardly be sporting to allow him to remain while asking me to leave.”
It had been a mistake to bring the hunter here. It seemed Tzadkiel’s enemies surrounded him. Among them, only the hunter and the Morgan truly had the power to kill him, but that was two too many for his taste. At least they were unlikely to take such drastic action in the midst of the museum gala. It seemed Tzadkiel’s only correct action in this whole mess had been to meet the mayor in a public place.
“Have you patched up your argument with Nyx?” the Morgan inquired of Benjamin.
“No.” Benjamin trained his attention straight ahead, appearing to focus on the window. Could the hunter see what Tzadkiel, himself, could not?
“Too bad. I was going to ask my offspring to carry a message from me to Lady Morgana…much as Mayor Galloway used to take messages between me and your mother.”
Benjamin’s fingers squeaked around his cane. The Honorable John Galloway, mayor of Boston and member of the Boston Brahmin—those who were descended from the city’s founding fathers—straightened his spine until Tzadkiel thought he’d hear the man’s bones creak with the effort. Pieces of the story heretofore unknown to him clicked into place. Stepping back, Tzadkiel turned so he took in all three of his enemies.
“You two”—he wagged his finger between the Morgan and Galloway—“conspired to get rid of me. In exchange for his”—the pointed finger indicated the mayor—“transformation.” He pinned the Morgan with his gaze. “You bribed him with the promise of eternal youth.”
The Morgan smiled, his hands coming together in a satirical volley of claps. “Very good. Only took you twenty years.”
Tzadkiel’s jaw pulsed with his fury. “Where is my kylix?”
The Morgan tsked in feigned sympathy, while the mayor seemed to shrink backward from the violence thickening the air.
“It seems a great many things have been going missing around the city of late,” the Morgan said, suddenly clasping the hunter’s shoulder in feigned affection. “Benjamin. How convenient that you are here. It would seem I lost my keys after we last met?”
Benjamin paled under the weight of the man’s hand. “I found them in the street after you dropped them and mailed them back to you.”
A man and a woman in cheap suits who wore badges proclaiming them press arrived. The Morgan dropped his hand from Benjamin’s shoulder.
“But you’re right about these odd disappearances.” Benjamin leaned close, conspiratorial. “I heard your wife is missing too. Sorry I can’t get Nyx to help you out…Oh wait, no I’m not.”
The Morgan bristled and raised his hand to beckon the security goons that lurked in a nearby corner.
“Get them out of here,” the Morgan said, jerking his head toward Tzadkiel and Benjamin. Then, he turned to the mayor. “Come, Galloway. It’s time for your speech on how you’re going to turn Boston’s homeless problem around.”
“Whatever he promised you, he won’t keep his word,” Tzadkiel warned Galloway. “There’s still time to come to the aid of those who will not betray a friend.”
The mayor’s eyes widened briefly, but his expression quickly shuttered. “I have what I want.”
Tzadkiel smiled, willing to entertain a bargain he had not dared to consider twenty years past. “Not immortality. Not yet. Only the flimsy illusion of youth.”
The Morgan leaned in, anger sparking in jagged black streaks down his arms to his fingertips. “Don’t make me regret keeping you around, Galloway.”
The mayor bolted from the room, giving Tzadkiel wide berth. The security detail moved to take Tzadkiel’s and Benjamin’s arms, but Tzadkiel jerked away. The press still lurked nearby, eyeing himself and Benjamin, apparently trying to determine if there was a story in the making.
“I know where the exit is,” Tzadkiel growled.
They were escorted to a side door and unceremoniously dumped out onto an alley where garbage bins hulked, their snow-crusted silhouettes a fitting backdrop to the hash Tzadkiel had made of the evening and his plans. Surviving Troy had been easier than this, but then he’d also had his father’s and brothers’ support. Thanks to the mayor’s betrayal, his family was now dead. Glaring at the door, Tzadkiel mentally added another vendetta to his growing list.
Chapter 17
The MFA’s metal exit door slammed in Benjamin’s face, and he turned to Tzadkiel. Fists clenched at his sides, the vampire seemed to regard the closed door as a castle battlement to be breached. The only thing that lay on the other side, however, was a whole lot of trouble neither one of them was prepared to meet. Wind gusted down the service alley, chilling Benjamin through the tuxedo jacket’s thin fabric. He grabbed himself around the middle and tried to think of something to say.
“I’m going to freeze my nuts off,” would suffice, for now.
Tzadkiel’s head snapped up. “What?”
“Unless you want to go back in and demand our coats from security”—Benjamin jerked his head toward the door—“we need to find a way home that doesn’t involve frostbite and tender parts of my anatomy. I accidentally left my phone in my coat pocket. We’ll have to flag down a cab instead of calling for a ride.”
In response, Tzadkiel merely lifted his face to the sky. Benjamin followed the vampire’s gaze and frowned. A low, roiling cloud bank reflected violet hues, promising another storm. There should be a law against snow and ice south of Montpelier, Vermont.
“The moon is in its third quarter.”
If he’d had eyes, Benjamin would have rolled them. They were in danger of hypothermia, and the man commented on whether the moon waxed or waned?
“I haven’t seen the moon since I was a kid. If you’re worried about it, I’ll check a calendar when we get back.” Benjamin arched one brow above his sunglasses. “Provided we haven’t frozen to death by then.”
The vampire scrubbed a palm down his face and breathed deep before dropping his arm to his side. “Right. I apologize.”
Without further comment, Tzadkiel walked away. Had the man even heard a word he’d said? Benjamin followed him to the street. Maybe they could flag down a taxi. Rather than stopping at the curb, however, Tzadkiel stalked across the pavement, his strides long and angry. Benjamin caught up at a brisk trot.
“If we’re jogging home?” Benjamin said, panting, “You’re going the wrong way.”
They reached the sidewalk, where a T stop’s glass enclosure provided shelter for those who boarded at the Green Line’s local aboveground segment, and paused.
Tzadkiel turned to him. “I assume you have tokens?”
“Huh? Oh!” Benjamin scrunched his nose. “How do you know what a cellphone is but not that they use cards instea
d of tokens for the T now?”
“People never take the little boxes from their ears and faces.” Tzadkiel shook his head, clearly disdainful. “I intuited what they were fairly quickly.”
“Okay…” Benjamin dug in his inner jacket pocket for his billfold and produced the piece of plastic. “I can get us on. But why do you want to take the T instead of a cab?”
The vampire took the card from him and examined it before handing it back. “A crowd is a deterrent to ambush.”
Benjamin turned to regard the museum. Tzadkiel’s aura didn’t quite reach the building’s façade, leaving everything beyond the driveway shrouded in darkness. If they were being followed at a discreet distance, he’d never see it. Leaving the ass-covering and counter-surveillance to the vampire, he huddled into his tux jacket and prayed the MBTA had its act together tonight.
“So you really didn’t see that coming, huh?” Benjamin asked, figuring a little post-action rundown was probably in order. His brain hadn’t nearly caught up to the events in the museum, for one.
Tzadkiel seemed to stare stonily into the distance. “I thought he was honorable, or at least smart enough to know that the Morgan will dispose of him as soon as he can do so without implicating himself in the process.”
For a creature who drank blood to sustain his ritual magic, the vampire puzzled Benjamin. Standards of honor and protocol seemed to create rigid lines around him that governed all he did. Over the last several days, stuck in the house with the vampire, Benjamin had the unsettling experience that he was living with a…well, a human. When Tzadkiel had brought him coffee this morning, Benjamin had nearly fallen out of bed. Weren’t monsters supposed to be irrational, slavering beasts?
“For the record?” Benjamin offered. “Anyone who asks you to make them an immortal doesn’t have world peace in mind.”
Tzadkiel grunted.
Benjamin sighed. Getting the man to talk tonight was like pulling teeth. Remembering what his uncle had done to Tzadkiel’s fangs, he cringed inwardly at the comparison. Just about everything he knew of the vampire so far painted him as having more of a sense of fair play and honor than anyone in Benjamin’s memory—excepting perhaps Nyx.
“They have your kylix for sure then,” he tried.
The vampire’s aura flared, stretching fingers of purple to the base of the museum steps. “I never had any doubt.”
“But you didn’t know the mayor was involved.”
“Benjamin,” Tzadkiel growled, whirling on him.
“What?”
“Shut up.”
The command shot Benjamin’s eyebrows to his hairline. Tzadkiel was rattled, angry, and perhaps even frightened. Complex emotions rolled through his aura in cresting wave after cresting wave, breaking over the shell of the whiter corona until it almost seemed to threaten to fracture the man’s soul.
Turning away, Benjamin nodded. “Sure.”
By the time the T pulled up to the stop, Benjamin was pretty sure his lips were blue. The crowded car offered standing room only. No one got on the train after them at the stop. If someone was following, they either would get on at a later time or had boarded earlier—both unlikely scenarios.
I’m riding Boston’s public transit system with a vampire.
The thought was so ridiculous it made Benjamin chuckle. Fingers numb, limbs tingling with returning blood, he giggled some more until full-blown laughter shook his frame. Moisture ran from his nose in the absence of tear ducts, and he brushed at it. It wasn’t really that funny. The word hysteria bubbled to mind, and he shook some more.
“What is wrong with you, hunter?” Tzadkiel bit out, leaning close so the words were for Benjamin’s ears only.
Truthfully, he didn’t know. He felt strange—tired and cold to his core. The laughter turned to shaking, and he realized he was so cold he was going a bit crazy. His lips refused to form words, and now that he’d started, he couldn’t stop trembling.
Tzadkiel’s arm came around him offering warmth and surrounding him with the scents of earth and rain, musk and ash. Heat melted the cold and Benjamin sagged without thought, the line of his back meeting Tzadkiel’s front. Why was the vampire doing this? There could be no possible personal gain to Tzadkiel for keeping Benjamin warm.
By the time they got off the train, Benjamin’s sinuses were coated with the scent of vampire. Oddly, however, he found he didn’t want to drown it out with Scotch. Rather, when he and Tzadkiel separated to disembark, he felt a pang much like regret.
“Let’s get you home,” Tzadkiel said, taking them up in the elevator rather than using the stairs.
The elevator doors opened and they stepped out of the car into the chill. A realization struck Benjamin square in the face and refused to retreat in mayhem’s aftermath. The vampire was a good man—a better man than Benjamin himself had ever been. If it had been up to him, and Tzadkiel had needed his aid, Benjamin would have walked past without caring. The thought made him ashamed.
“All my life I was taught to hate you. To fear you.” Benjamin stopped short, unable to take another step. “I don’t understand who you are, if not a monster.”
Tzadkiel, who’d apparently been about to drop a protective arm around Benjamin’s shoulders paused, his forearm inches from its target.
“Careful, hunter. Do not mistake my care for you now for an unwillingness to use you for my purposes later. You have not earned clemency from me, nor shall you.”
Benjamin swallowed hard. He’d somehow forgotten the man meant to murder him. All that inner monologue about fair play and honor perhaps. He notched his chin, and stepped out of the vampire’s range.
“I am not a villain.” The assertion rang hollow to Benjamin’s ears.
“No. You are a coward,” Tzadkiel replied. “Refusing to confront a difficult reality for fear you’ll have to own your part in the suffering of others.”
A slap couldn’t have heated Benjamin’s cheeks more thoroughly. He knew he was a drunk and even, on occasion, a jerk, but he’d never thought himself a coward. It wasn’t like killing vampires was easy. Someone had to do it; they deserved to die.
Didn’t they?
In response to the question, his conscience answered, Reply hazy. Try again later.
He and Tzadkiel made the rest of the trip home in silence. Each time Tzadkiel attempted to bring Benjamin close to give him warmth, Benjamin shrugged away. By the time they reached the front door, he couldn’t feel the key to put it into the lock.
He inhaled, preparing to say as much, when the vampire spoke.
“If I am honest with myself,” Tzadkiel said, stepping closer to take the key away from Benjamin and insert it into the lock, “my thoughts about you are clouded too.”
Benjamin’s chin snapped up. Around numb lips he formed the words, “What do you mean?”
Inside, Tzadkiel snapped on the light and brought Benjamin to the library. He lit a fire and got them both hot tea from the kitchen. The moment was so domestic that Benjamin might have choked on it if he wasn’t too cold to think. By the time he warmed up enough that his insides no longer shook with the effort to generate heat, he’d nearly forgotten what Tzadkiel had said.
Afghan around his shoulders, Benjamin lounged sideways on the couch. He clutched his empty mug to wring the last tendrils of heat from the ceramic, and felt Tzadkiel considering him. When he lifted his attention from his lap, the vampire observed him from a guarded stance.
“I realized,” the vampire said, “when I left you on your doorstep the other evening, you thought it was because you were too ugly for me to want. It has nothing to do with anything like that. You’re…stunning.”
If Benjamin’s mouth gaped any wider, he was pretty sure he’d unhinge his jaw. He was stunning? He put his mug down and shifted to better take in the vampire.
“So why didn’t you come?” Benjamin shook his head. “Inside, I mean.”
He’d been embarrassed over the rejection ever since that night. He’d wondered time and again why
Tzadkiel hadn’t pressed the advantage. It would have been so easy. Too easy, perhaps?
“Sometimes what we desire and what is wise differ,” Tzadkiel stated carefully, almost as if his words were his fingers, and he handled delicate glass. “Even if you weren’t my sworn enemy by birth and circumstance, I refuse to take advantage of a drunk man. But if I’d truly been thinking clearly—my mind unclouded by this attraction—I would have found a way to take advantage of the situation that did not involve sexual congress. It was a tactical error on my part.”
“Gee, thanks. I’m sorry I screwed up your plans by getting drunk.” Benjamin pulled a couch pillow under his head as he lay down. “You don’t need to worry about wasting your so-called tender mercy on me. You could have had your cake and eaten it too. Having sex while obliterated hasn’t killed me yet. It helps me forget I’m going to wake up alone.”
On the heels of that unintended and revealing tidbit, Benjamin made the mistake of adding up the number of encounters he’d had, and pulled a face. The tastes and scents of the men in his proverbial little black book didn’t amount to a terribly large sampling. If the vampire knew how inexperienced Benjamin actually was, he would have laughed. An internal code had nothing to do with why he wasn’t getting laid regularly.
Tzadkiel’s inhale gave away his intention to speak.
“Fine. You like to pretend at honor. I get it.” Then, as a tonic against expected rejection, Benjamin sneered. “So what’s your excuse now?”
The taunt had been meant as just that—an idle challenge Benjamin didn’t believe Tzadkiel would accept, especially in light of the man’s renewed threats on their way back to the house. So when the vampire neared, bringing both hands down to frame his head, Benjamin froze, too startled to move.
“Stupid hunter,” Tzadkiel said, considering. “You really do have a death wish.”
Benjamin lifted his chin. Looking away from the dazzling aura had become impossible. He’d rather burn up first. Tzadkiel dipped closer, and Benjamin inhaled deep. Pungent cedar and loamy earth bathed his sinuses once more.
Surrender the Dark Page 15