“Not one of his best decisions.” He wasn’t ready to admit his own objections.
“Why?” Ana said, and she seemed puzzled.
He wasn’t sure whether she meant a motivation for the consort or Azrael. The word—the answer to both questions—came awkwardly. “Love.”
She barked a laugh. “Necromancers can’t love. They gave it away with the power of creation when they ascended to master death.”
“Even so,” Gregor said. “Azrael is changed.”
She shook her head. “He’s a fool then.”
Gregor considered.
“When Azrael was wounded, the consort held off three demons with a blade, so big—” He lifted his hands to demonstrate. “She was safe when he fought the Queen of Diamonds. As consort, she would have had our protection until the end of her days if Azrael fell. Yet she broke her human body to help him stop the angel from manifesting. She may not have mastered death, but she did not let fear of it stop her. What Azrael gave, she earned, a thousand times.”
Ana sat back in her seat, focusing on the road. “Enough to send you out to do her shopping then?”
He tapped his fingers on the dashboard, debating. She let the silence stretch.
At last he cleared his throat. “I used her brother as bait for a necromancer trapping shifters to sell on the black market,” he admitted. “He ingested a geas that trapped him between forms. Several days passed before he was able to resume either shape. It was payback for a cake the weres made to look like my family’s crest, in red velvet.”
Ana’s laugher set her silver strand earrings tinkling. Her hair had been swept up onto the top of her head, shorter strands flying free around the fringes of the bangs dusting her eyebrows. She hit the turn signal and exited in the shopping district. “Well then. I’d say you’d earned it. Shoes it is.”
This was their last stop before whatever errand she had been sent on. Stalking away from the counter, she laid her fingertips on his forearm and smiled at the clerk. “You will have these delivered, and the others expedited. Say, Friday. The compensation will be generous. So also will be the punishment if they are not received.”
Back in the car, Gregor glared at her.
One narrow shoulder rose as she steered back onto the road. “We accomplished the letter of your task, didn’t we? Enough suffering for one night. What do you say to dinner?”
Dinner at an exclusive restaurant on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
The valet met them, bowing as he held the door with a tremulous murmur. “Madame Gozen. The pleasure is ours.”
“Our table will need to be arranged,” she said, handing off the key.
A subdued urgency swept the staff the moment she stepped inside.
The hostess showed them through the discreetly lit tables. Faces made ghostly by the dim glow of illumination rose to watch as they passed. He recognized a few among them as the most powerful and influential players in the Allegiance’s world order, from the reports of Azrael’s head of intelligence. Only a few dared follow Ana for more than a glance, though eyes lingered on him with curiosity.
She gave a heavyset balding man a little smile. The man blanched.
He wondered what patron had been moved to accommodate them as they were seated at the best table in the house, overlooking the other diners on one side and the evening-cloaked surf on the other. He instinctively took the side facing the room. It also cast her in the fading glow of sunset.
She toyed with her silverware and cast a sideways look at him. “Soul steel and luxury automobiles. How refined.”
“I am a simple man with expensive tastes.” Gregor spread his palms. “I didn’t figure you for a muscle car aficionado. Is it true your blades have names?”
“American muscle inspires one to rise to the occasion.” She grinned at him, lower lip pinched between her small white incisors. “And yes, they do.”
She turned her attention to the trembling server presenting a bottle of red wine. She nodded her approval with a cursory glance at the label.
“Mr. Schwarz, will this suffice, or would you prefer something with less body?”
His brows rose with a nod to the waiter. “When in California…”
When the server departed, he leaned in to conspiratorially whisper, “If it comforts you, my last automobile was gasoline powered.”
Again that little smile bent her mouth, and she met his glass with her own. “Not a lost cause then after all.”
“Not by half.”
By the time appetizers arrived, he’d abandoned studying the room in favor of looking at her small ears, her elegant neck leading into muscular shoulders. By the second bottle of wine, her cheeks were pink and her smile came freely. How long had it been since a woman had not feared him? How long since he’d felt drawn to make a woman laugh?
He mourned the artifice of her flirtatiousness, a structured response to his designed seduction. There had been a pleasure in it even then, the parry and thrust of conversation like a round with a fencer whose skill matched his own.
Still, there had been a moment—she’d leaned toward him across the table, her skin set aglow by candlelight and wine—that pure pleasure had sideswiped him. It left him wondering for a heartbeat or two what it would be like if this moment were real.
“This has been a delightful interlude.” She sighed, settling her napkin on the table when the dishes had been cleared. “But I have a small matter to attend to. If you will?”
He rose at her side, curious to see how this played out. Every eye in the restaurant rose with them, and silence drew the tension in the room taut in anticipation. Gregor exhaled and fell in step behind her. It wouldn’t be the first time he was the last one in the room to know what the hell was going on. He recognized her target within a few steps.
Sweating profusely, the heavyset man gave a tremulous smile, ample jowls trembling. “Madame Gozen. It’s a pleasure—”
In full view of the dining room, she drew her sword and sliced a clean line across his throat in a single movement. His mouth kept moving for a few moments before streaks of red appeared below his jaw. Someone in the room choked. More than a few gasps went up. But no one moved. Even the man’s companion stayed rooted in her chair, wide eyes taking in the way he paled as the blood soaked into his clothes and pooled beneath him on the floor.
Gregor slipped the button of his suit jacket free as he scanned the room, calculating the quickest way to the exits and how many he’d have to eliminate to get them clear. He settled on Ana last as she calmly cleaned her blade on the tablecloth.
No one in the room reacted beyond wide-eyed stares.
“I’m quite sure it wasn’t pleasurable at all,” she said, facing the man’s companion with a dangerous little smile. “And you, Betta, you knew what risk you ran when you unleashed your pet in my city.”
The woman’s throat bobbed, her face tightening. “I have no idea…”
Ana cocked her head. “Ah, but you thought perhaps Raymond was too busy to notice.”
The woman’s pale face flushed and hardened. Something bulged and rippled beneath her skin, snakelike. Not a shifter then. Reptilian grace bloods appeared often in mortal mythology, diluted or misunderstood as they might be. Gregor cycled through those he knew capable of wearing human skin. Kadijah, the necromancer whose territory included much of the Middle East, had taken out the last echidna spawn. Perhaps Tsuchinoko, or the White Serpent.
His trigger finger twitched. In any case, a bullet to the brain would slow down most, if not all, of them. As with most grace bloods, separating the head from the body was the only sure way. Or heads. Hydra were rare, but a nasty surprise.
The woman hissed. “It was just a few… No one missed—”
“Hunting humans for sport is forbidden in this territory.” Ana raised her voice loud enough to carry. “No exception. The punishment is death.”
The heavyset man was now gray and still, his eyes glassy. Ana lopped off his head, and the scrape of
chairs from the neighboring tables chorused as the occupants hurried to get away while the head rolled to a stop.
“There now,” Ana said, soothing. “Leave by dawn and you may keep your own head, Betta. If not, well, I cannot be responsible for Raymond’s ire. I am, after all, just the messenger.”
“Mistress Gozen.” The woman bowed her head, the human voice giving way to a sibilant whisper. “Your mercy—”
“Speak nothing of mercy. You tested us and we’ve answered. Consider this your warning.”
“I understand and obey.” The woman bowed, and her neck seemed too long for her body as her chin dipped almost to her sternum.
Ana sheathed her sword with one final look around the room. Not a soul dared eye contact.
The Nightfeather’s Talons. Judge, jury and executioner. Intelligence got that right at least.
Her gaze crossed Gregor’s, and he lifted a brow in question. A little tip of her chin and he holstered his sidearm. He followed her out of the restaurant.
The car was waiting by the time they reached the front door, but there was a mysterious absence of restaurant staff. Gregor caught the door himself, ignoring Ana’s scowl. At the sight of her, the valet tumbled out of the car, slinking backward with catlike fluidity.
“Nagas keeping mosquito men as pets.” Disgust hardened her voice, but her eyes remained locked to the road as she pushed the muscle car along the winding coastal highway. “One thing you must learn quickly, Mr. Schwarz. Never assume you understand a thing because of where or when it came from. Here, both meet and clash and form new alliances. This place will always surprise you.”
Some things never changed.
Chapter Nine
The following morning, Ana tossed an electronic key his direction as they stepped out into the full-blown California sunshine. “I presume you’ll want to drive.”
She didn’t pause to watch him catch it, hefting her own bag toward the car without a backward glance.
She’d returned to the standard uniform: baggy jeans, jacket, swinging hair. He spared a moment on the memory of her from the night before. Today the sunglasses were back in place.
Gone also was the Mustang. Instead, the RS 7, so black it seemed to swallow light, waited in the drive. He hadn’t yet determined Ana’s reason for driving when an airplane would have gotten them there faster, but if she insisted, he’d rather take one variable out of the equation. She slid into the passenger’s seat without a word.
The navigation greeted him by name. Good—the techs had managed the remote install of his custom system. It wasn’t identical to the model at home, but it would be close enough.
He ignored her smirk. “Seat belt.”
Her brow arched over the frame of her movie-star sunglasses.
“What’s the speed limit here,” he asked as they pulled onto the road.
She laughed. “For us?”
“Good.” He began to accelerate and did not stop until the cars around them blurred.
The car estimated a tick under eighteen hours to Seattle. His mental calculation with stops to charge the battery put them at about nine.
“About last night,” she began.
Which part? His breech of protocol seemed paltry compared to her carrying out an execution in an exclusive seaside restaurant after dessert. Pausing to dine while their target stewed in his own terror for the better part of two hours seemed gratuitous to say the least. And Lysippe chided him for having a “flair for the dramatic.”
He decided to stick with his contribution to the evening’s adventure. “I overstepped my bounds in approaching Raymond without you. I apologize.”
She had turned her face to the passenger window. “I don’t blame you for trying to get some sort of advantage. Raymond has never valued transparency in his dealings.”
“Yet you trust him,” he said, leaving with your soul implied.
“He promised me no lies, though there would always be secrets.”
“And you don’t ask.”
“As you said, I trust him.”
Gregor returned his focus to the road. He watched another hundred miles breeze by, irritated with America’s stubborn resistance to the metric system. What was a mile, anyway? No wonder they all spoke of distances in the time it took to cover them.
Ana removed her sunglasses and spared a glance at him. “This time something feels off. After the third attack he called me off the investigation. And then he called in his favor to Azrael, and now you’re here. He knows something he’s not telling us. Or he suspects it. I’m not sure yet.”
Gregor waited, letting silence be an invitation.
“Ray’s been different since we came back from Prague, and now this. Azrael said something to him in the park. He’s really stirred things up, your boss.”
Azrael’s actions might have sent shock waves through the thin peace held by the Allegiance, but he hadn’t started the trouble. He’d revealed the conspiracy brewing behind it and stopped a plot by two members of the Allegiance to cut the other six out of power. With one of the conspirators dead and Raymond reaching out to Azrael for an accord, the balance of power in the Allegiance was shifting. The next few hundred years would be full of incalculable risk, and the stability of the mortal world hung in the balance.
“Azrael treats them—mortals—as if they deserve to be here,” she said.
Gregor wanted to agree. It was one of his most irritating qualities. But it made him interesting. “You speak as if you were not once one.”
“Even then we were different. Unusual. Haven’t you figured it out? We didn’t come to walk beside necromancers because we fit in.”
“True enough.”
“Mortals are foolish, impulsive, shortsighted,” she said. “They brought the world to the brink with their stupid war—because they learned to call down gods out of greed and hunger for power.”
“And necromancers are immune to such lures?”
She stared out the window again, the fixed angle of her jaw indicating her displeasure.
After another hundred miles or so blurred past, he asked, “Any idea what it is he’s not telling you?”
Her expression said she wanted to put a sword through him no matter how fast he happened to be driving. It had been a long time since anyone made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end with a look. He found it refreshing.
“You have a death wish.”
“I’m not afraid to die,” he corrected.
She tossed her sunglasses on the dashboard with an expulsion of Japanese so quick he caught only every third word, give or take. Japanese had been a recent language acquisition and Ito, Azrael’s head of intelligence, seemed to delight in seeing him rendered speechless during their lessons. Still, the lessons had served him well: he understood the most salient points.
He tested out a reply. “If you do not enter the tiger’s cave, you will not catch its cub.”
She swore before trading him idioms in crisp, unaccented German. “Du gehst mir auf den kekes.”
“Ah, we’re informal then.” He laughed. “That’s progress.”
Her hawk eyes narrowed, lips pulled tight. The corner of her mouth rose after a moment. “I can see it, you know, the black blade of yours. When you bait me it flares up, like it realizes exactly what you’re about to get yourself into.”
Surprised, he sat up a little. Soul steel forged in a necromancer’s bargain might be visible to other necromancers, but not their Aegises.
He curled a reckless smile her direction. “And what might that be?”
Her lips caressed the words. “A fight.”
His mouth went dry as the blood rushed from his brain.
“It has more sense than you do,” she said, sitting back in her seat. “Your sword.” She checked the dashboard clock and sat up, all business again. “Perfect timing, I’m starving. Pull off here.”
He regained his senses with reflexes honed over two hundred years, dropping out of the fast lane and shedding speed to make the
off-ramp. He guided the car toward the large red-and-white sign in a retro fifties motif promising burgers in two directions and frowned. “A drive-through?”
“It seemed your master’s consort wanted to give you an authentic American experience,” she said lightly as he pulled into the line. “Roll down the window.”
Gregor complied, glaring up into the fresh face of a mortal teenager.
“Nice wheels,” the boy started before catching sight of Gregor’s expression. He jerked half a step backward and squawked a greeting. “What can I get for you…” He swallowed. “Sir?”
Ana leaned across him, and Gregor forgot to be irritated. Her shoulder brushed his chest, the weight of her upper body resting on the hand placed on his thigh as she ordered.
“And for you, sir?” the boy squawked again.
With her hair under his nose, Gregor picked up the faintest trace of lilac. He forgot the question.
Ana sucked her teeth and glanced at the boy. “He’ll have the same.”
“Will you be eating in the car?”
“Of course,” Ana replied, hitting the button for the window as the boy stammered out the price and a request to proceed. She leaned back in her own seat, looking at him. “Informal seems best, given the circumstances. Don’t you agree?”
Gregor put the car in gear.
After sliding a greasy, open-topped cardboard box filled with food to Ana, he pulled the car into a space with a charging terminal near an empty cluster of white tables shaded by umbrellas.
“The whole point of the drive-through is to continue driving,” Ana protested when he shut off the car.
“I’m not eating that in here. Also, we should top off the battery.”
Under the scant shade of the umbrella, he watched the heat bake waves off the pavement. Away from the ocean, the sun beat down on them. A trickle of sweat rolled between his shoulder blades. Almost-immortality didn’t grant him immunity from the basic functions of the body.
Ana shrugged off her jacket to reveal a spaghetti-strap tank top and hopped onto the tabletop. She wasn’t wearing a bra, which placed the small mounds of her breasts too close to his face for comfort. He stood up from the bench and joined her.
The Talon & the Blade Page 6