Shaking his head to clear bleak thoughts, he took a moment to admire some of the photographs and paintings. Ember’s photos of sunrises and sunsets, even with the colors as pale as they were to him at night, evoked something he’d long thought buried. What spoke to him even more than Ember’s work was the other artist’s. Her paintings were all shades of shadow, something he understood. He’d walked into the shadows over thirty-five hundred years ago and never looked back.
The song in his mind grew by the slightest increment of volume and tempo at the same time his eyes fell on a lone, blond man with a medium build who had entered the gallery. His heart beat a little too fast as his eyes skimmed over the crowd and stopped on Ember.
From his place at Ember's side, Stryx’s head snapped up and around, gaze zeroing in on the man, who averted his eyes. Vampires might not have taught Stryx about love, but they’d done an excellent job with the lessons about recognizing a threat. The man wasn’t a mage, but one had touched him. Jael’s swords hummed a little faster.
He scanned the room again, eyes landing on Ember’s partner, the tall woman with the striking platinum hair. Viktoria wore nothing but some strings on the upper half of her body, and the floor-length skirt did little to hide her legs when she walked, pale, bare skin flashing ankle to thigh.
She must not have a man, because she was unaccompanied and no man in his right mind would let his woman out of the house looking like that. The thought of no man in her life pleased him. If she were his, he would rip those strings right off her and use them to tie her down to something waist high so he could —
Jael ripped his thoughts away from the image of her naked and ready for him. He’d never lived like a monk, but he hadn’t had those kinds of thoughts about a woman since just after he’d turned vampire. He was no hormonal teenager. What the fuck was wrong with him?
That one was dangerous. He’d have to be careful around her. Jael had a thing for platinum blondes in bondage.
She laughed at something one woman in her group said, a low, sultry chuckle that seemed to float across the room to him and stroke his cock. His swords changed the tempo of their song to something trilling as he shifted his stance, trying to find some extra room in his now too-tight pants. “Think that’s funny, do you?”
He stared at Viktoria, eyes boring into her naked back as he followed the curve of her ass to her hip and up the column of her spine.
The mage-touched minion approached Viktoria, hand extended to touch her.
Jael growled, the low rumbling sound startling him.
Viktoria turned to face him, seeming to sense his gaze on her. She shouldn’t be able to do that. The magic in his swords hid him from view.
Their eyes met and held. Something in a soul he’d thought long dead stirred to life.
Pale colors turned vibrant.
A warm vanilla scent filled his lungs.
His heart beat once in his chest.
Oh. Fuck.
Dragă.
CHAPTER SIX
ASIM
SITTING ON HIS THRONE, Asim saw and listened with his spiders as Thomax made his way through the crowded gallery. The golden witch wasn’t among the humans gathered there. He’d feel his magic on it, and these people were too old.
Thomax’s gaze stopped on a red-haired witch, and Asim stood from his seat, dislodging his children with the lurch. It looked exactly like his witch, except for the hair color. The twin.
He sent an urge via the spider for Thomax to step forward, but froze him in place when the man with the witch fixed a dark blue stare on the acolyte. One predator knew another.
With no mage magic on the witch, Asim sent the order to watch and settled back onto his throne. The view blurred as Thomax swung in a new direction and moved through the crowd. A tall, silver-blonde woman missing half her clothing caught Thomax’s attention.
Asim had no interest in sex these days. The mage magic had eaten away at him for decades, leaving him powerful, but skeletal, robbing him of self and sensation. The only thing he ever felt anymore was a craving for magic. Unless, like now, faint stirrings of lust traveled from an acolyte through the spider to him.
It might be time to consider having one of the acolytes kill him so he could change bodies. His followers had the same misconception he’d carried for years — thinking whoever killed him and took his sigils as their own would control the magic. But the magic didn’t start over with each new body.
Ten thousand years of mages, every one of them from the first, lived in the magic, and when it transferred, they all waged a battle for control of the new body. The strongest won possession, and it wasn’t always the latest murderer.
Magic, strong but unfamiliar, emanated from the blonde who so transfixed Thomax. A witch then, not a woman. The glyphs on his skin hungered. This one would do until the golden witch was recovered.
The Spider Mage sat back to see if Thomax could snare the witch in a web.
CHAPTER SEVEN
VIKTORIA
“ARE YOU THE PHOTOGRAPHER?” the man touching her arm asked. The question was innocent enough, but his tone was flat and told her he was not interested in her answer. He smiled, or rather his face moved to form itself into the approximation of one. It seemed more like he had put on a mask, his face frozen in an expression he was unaccustomed to wearing.
His ill-fitted suit hung from a medium frame that didn’t fill it out. Mud-brown eyes held no warmth, and one had off-white lines through the iris. The edges of black tattoos, not quite hidden by the collar and long sleeves of his button-down shirt, were a stark contrast to his pale skin. The parts she could see looked like the ends of fangs and legs tipped in claws.
Her fingers twitched, wanting to summon her magic, but she resisted. Better to find out what she was dealing with first.
He took her hand, and she repressed a shudder as the sensation of something with multiple claw-tipped legs skittered up her arm. She forced herself not to brush it off, giving him an overly bright smile as she extracted her hand from the man’s grip. “No. I’m Viktoria. The painter.”
“I’m a friend of Musette’s.” The man’s eyes flicked to her wrist before he met her gaze again. “Name’s Thomax.”
Viktoria resisted the urge to glance at her wrist and raised an eyebrow at him. Any friend of Musette’s would know her sister, the photographer, was also her twin. “Hello, Thomax. Have you come to see the photos paired with the paintings? I think we still have a few sets that haven’t sold yet.”
Thomax’s pretend smile widened, like a predator opening its maw and preparing to bite. “Well, I was really hoping to see Musette. I thought she’d be here tonight. Do you know if she’ll be arriving later?”
“The night’s still young.” Viktoria flashed him another brilliant smile. Did this man have something to do with Musette’s accident? She needed to talk to Ember. “I suppose anything is possible.” Someone waved at her from across the room. “Please excuse me. I must see to some other guests. Enjoy the refreshments. If I see Musette, I’ll tell her Thomax was looking for her.”
As she crossed the room, she felt two pairs of eyes tracking her every movement.
EMBER BEGGED OFF THEIR traditional after-showing drink to leave with Stryx and the pale giant of a vampire before the show was due to end. With Ember’s time dominated by her scowling, growling vampire, their guests had flocked to Viktoria, and she hadn’t had a chance to tell Ember about the man claiming to be Musette’s friend before he disappeared.
The blond vampire followed Thomax when he left, so they were aware of him. The fourth one stayed, his eyes settling on her more often than she liked. Even though he was tall and powerfully built, he didn’t crowd her with his body. It was his presence, everywhere in the room at once, and she knew that he knew that she knew he was there, even while she pretended he wasn’t.
He was attractive, and Viktoria felt drawn to him. He might be fun to play with if it wasn’t for the vampire thing. They were hard to get rid of once y
ou let one in, especially one with that look, a look that spoke of desire and possession.
She’d seen the exact expression directed at herself and her sisters many times. Men who thought of them as trophies or prizes, and didn’t care whether the women they coveted wanted them in return, had lusted after them for as long as she could remember. Their mother dealt with the men by setting impossible tasks to win the hands of her daughters. Some ‘suitors’ tried to skip that part and kidnapped them instead. She smiled. That was usually fun for a little while, but it never ended well for the kidnappers.
Viktoria liked the life she’d made for herself in Port Storm. She adored Ember and Musette, and her work fulfilled her. She didn’t want to leave everything she’d built here behind because a vampire couldn’t accept he was a dalliance and not a life choice. Where there were four, there was a good chance there were more, perhaps an entire clan. They wouldn’t be moving on if that was the case, so she might have to. Where there were vampires, there was drama, and she needed to avoid that.
When the showing ended, Viktoria walked home. She didn’t live far from the gallery, and enjoyed strolling along the ocean at night. The vampire followed her. She thought he might. He wasn’t obvious about it and tried to stay out of sight in the shadows.
A smirk played on her lips. She could show him a thing or two about shadows. They were the opposite of where he should hide if he didn’t want her to see him. She turned a corner and stepped into a shadow, touching the edge with her magic to fold it over herself like a blanket.
The vampire rounded the corner moments later and paused right in front of her.
Viktoria wondered what to do about him, if she needed to do anything about him at all. She could let him meet her mother. That usually took care of any over-amorous Lotharios. No. She wouldn’t accept help from her mother.
There was really only one reason she could think of why he would be following her. Ember had become involved with a vampire, but that didn’t mean Viktoria wanted to be. Although... she could think of one use she had for him. Okay, maybe there were two uses for him — sex and information, and she could use one for the other.
The vampire inhaled.
He was tracking her by scent. Her perfume! Damn vampire senses.
Without making a sound, she untied the string holding her tiny evening bag closed and removed a small bottle of the same scent she was wearing.
The vampire stalked away, moving further down the street, and Viktoria got her first glimpse of the curved blades he wore on his back. She’d seen plenty of men wearing swords before, but none projected the air of lethal quite like this one.
Viktoria slipped off her stilettos and set the bottle of perfume on the ground. She uncapped it and stepped out of the shadow, sliding back around the corner and across the street and hurried down some stairs that led down to the beach.
The ocean could mask her scent.
She carried her shoes in one hand, gathered her long skirt up by her thighs with the other, and let waves wash over her legs as she ran along the shore.
CHAPTER EIGHT
JAEL
JAEL FOLLOWED VIKTORIA when she left the gallery. She was walking... walking home. In that dress. Alone. In that dress. At night.
In.
That.
Dress.
With mage minions on the loose. Jael, and his swords, recognized the type. It had been all he could do not to unsheathe them and take the man’s head at the gallery. Better dead than sorry, as far as he was concerned.
Zeke followed the minion when he left. Stryx departed with Ember and Melchior, mumbling something about a gift for his strygoi, leaving Jael to stalk his new favorite prey. Although he hadn’t decided if he wanted to catch her yet.
His instincts screamed Dragă, and he would only get one, but in spite of the thousands of years that had passed, he remembered having a woman taken from him by mages. And not just his woman, they’d taken his daughter too. He’d welcome feeling nothing for eternity than ever feel that way again.
But he’d not been an assassin then. Or turned vampire. He was just a nineteen-year-old human. Hardly more than a boy nowadays, but three millennia ago, he’d been considered an adult, a leader, and already married for five years. He’d been taken in by words of peace, then betrayed and devastated in a way that ripped away everything he loved. Any mage trying to take someone from him now would find it much harder. But a Dragă, his Dragă... he’d lived for so long without the possibility of finding her, he wasn’t sure what to do now that he had.
Caught up in the past, he slowed and lost sight of his prey when she went around a corner. He made the turn a moment later, but she wasn’t in sight. There were several buildings she could have entered, but her scent stopped right here.
He couldn’t track her like Stryx could Ember — not yet. That required her blood. But the scent of her, vanilla and something cool, was unmistakable. More than that, though, he could feel her. Feel her eyes on him.
There was nothing here, nowhere for her to hide, so where did she disappear to? He waited to see if her scent returned to him, but it didn’t come. He took a deep breath. Still nothing. Puzzled, he moved down the street, hoping he could pick up her scent at whichever of these buildings she had entered. It had to be one of the closest. She’d only been out of his sight for a few seconds and hadn't been in a hurry.
As he reached the third building, the barest swish of material caught his attention. He spun, but there was no one behind him. He backtracked, stopping at a shadow near the corner. The scent of her perfume was stronger here now.
He crouched to pick up a small bottle and its cap. He didn’t know how she’d managed to pull this off, but his lips curved into a smile. His Dragă was clever, and she wanted to play.
She would be fun to hunt.
Capping and pocketing the bottle, Jael looked around. His nose was ruined for tracking her perfume now. The scent from the bottle flooded his senses. Where would his clever Dragă go? He walked back to the corner. She hadn’t gone past him. Would she go right, back to the gallery to throw him off? No, she would be too easily found there. To the left were residential areas. Ahead of him was nothing. Well, not nothing, but it was the ocean, there was nowhere —
He smiled. If his Dragă knew about scents, she would go to the ocean.
Crossing the street, he scanned the beach. There, to the left, almost out of his range of vision, a flash of pale skin and almost-silver-hair on the beach.
Jael sprinted up the sidewalk.
CHAPTER NINE
VIKTORIA
VIKTORIA STROLLED ALONG the beach. Small waves surged toward her, flirting with her bare toes as she searched the smooth, cool sand. The snow and ice of her homeland had inured her to the cold a long time ago, and sometimes she found gifts from one of her sisters along the shore — bits of driftwood and sea glass, usually in the shape of swans or polar bears.
Gifts from her sister. Oh, no! Distracted by the vampire, she’d forgotten the chocolate treats for Musette. She whirled toward the gallery. The guests and caterers had departed before she left. But Michel might be there.
The vampire’s footsteps, quiet to humans in their world, echoed to her through the shadows he stepped in. He’d been moving quickly as he pursued her, but slowed as he came into view on top of the cliff. She stopped and glared at his lurking silhouette. Why didn’t he just say what he wanted, like a normal person?
Because vampires aren’t normal, Viktoria. They like to be hunt-y and creepy. Ember, why did it have to be vampires? Why not something safe and predictable, like a bunch of berserkers?
Soră laughed.
And you, Viktoria thought. Who are you?
Soră.
What are you?
Magic.
Not exactly a newsflash.
What do you want?
Twelve more sisters.
To do what?
To teach me new things... so... so I can be brave, and... not die. Soră’s girlish
voice, so happy and light before, sounded world-weary and devastated.
Viktoria caught her breath, and her heart broke at the utter despondency in those final words. It could be the magic playing on her emotions to get what it wanted from her. Memories of being helpless and under the control of others were familiar and never far away. Soră didn’t press her advantage, though, and her presence diminished.
A chance encounter when a crazy wizard had kidnapped Viktoria and imprisoned her on the Amazon’s island had taught her how to fight for and protect herself. That heady taste of power catapulted her into freedom and the human world. Hopefully, her sisters would soon know freedom, too. Provided she could keep her end of a bargain. If she couldn’t, not only would her sisters remain confined, and never forgive her, they’d all be trapped.
If all the magic wanted was some self-defense lessons, Viktoria wouldn’t begrudge Soră that.
Soră? Come back.
She didn’t, but she would. Viktoria had the sense she hadn’t heard the last from the strange magic Ember had shared.
Viktoria returned her attention to the cliff. The vampire lurked. He may as well have been a statue. Well, if he wasn’t going to talk to her, she saw no reason to talk to him. May as well have no one speaking to anyone.
She left the waves and crossed loose sand toward the escarpment and a wooden staircase. Instead of climbing the rough-hewn steps, Viktoria waited until the vampire couldn’t see her because the angle was too steep, and stepped into her world of Shadow.
CHAPTER TEN
JAEL
Viktoria's Shadow: Jael Page 3