He should be equally disgusted with himself.
“Wait.”
He didn’t touch her, didn’t force her to his will. He wanted to do so, and on some level he understood that she liked his dominance and naturally aggressive nature, but physicality was one thing and personality something else ... and respect something else entirely. He had shown her none of the latter and wished to correct that.
“Please, wait,” he edited himself.
Perhaps the “please” took her by surprise. She certainly looked surprised when she turned around to look at him. Her reaction only served to make him feel even lower.
“I feel I must ... apologize.” It came hard to say it. He wasn’t used to second-guessing his actions. Even less used to admitting his faults to others. “It was never my intention to cause you pain. Whether you feel strongly or very little, that does not excuse thoughtless behavior.”
Jasmine hardly understood her own feelings, never mind how they pertained to him. She barely comprehended her own anger with him. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t appreciate what it took for him to take a hard look at himself and then admit any flaws he found to her. She might be something of a coldhearted, jaded bitch, but she could still appreciate a generous gesture when she saw one. Especially when she wasn’t expecting it. Especially when she usually behaved in ways that made her less than deserving of it.
She sighed.
“I don’t deserve much of an apology,” she admitted in return. “I have taunted you quite a bit.” She shrugged, brushing the entire matter off with the turn of her body. “Let’s focus on Ruth. I think we both will feel very much better when we get her in our sights.”
And so the matter was dropped ... for the moment. They were both quite happy and eager to turn their focus toward an enemy that well deserved their enmity. Both of their lives had been bent and twisted in some way because of the Demon traitor. It was well past time she paid for her crimes.
Chapter 8
Windsong was content to spend her long lifetime going no farther than her own little village. She was even happier confining herself to the edges of her property, the borders of her herb garden, the walls of her simple but comfortable cabin home. She had, unlike the majority of her people, done her share of traveling in her life. She had spent time, however short, in almost every other Nightwalker court, lending them wisdom and guidance where she could, or her significant healing abilities. She counted the current leaders of the other Nightwalkers as some of her closest friends. Damien. Siena. In these past years, Noah. She even looked forward to making friends with the Shadowdweller Chancellors. She had met Tristan and Malaya more than once as the Nightwalkers strived to maintain their current peace with regular meetings and communications.
The Mistrals, Windsong’s people, did not have a central body of government. There had never really been a need for it. There were one or two village Elders who spoke for an individual village, and sometimes those Elders collaborated on matters of import to all the Mistrals. But that was a rare occurrence. A rare necessity. So when offers to exchange ambassadors between Nightwalker courts had begun, it only made sense that the most experienced and most centrally important village Elders take the foreign ambassadors into their homes.
This was how Windsong had ended up with not only her usual student, Lyric, under her care and roof, but a peculiar little Vampire named Izri. Of all the Nightwalkers, the Vampires were most resistant to the spell of Mistral voices and singing, provided they were old enough and mentally strong enough. Izri was about three centuries old, not very old by Vampire standards and certainly not very old compared to Windsong and the power of her voice. But Windsong had weeded the spell out of her voice, an act that required constant concentration and had slowed her speech down considerably over the past eighteen months, and Izri had focused her impressive mental strength, so they had managed to find a way of living together in an almost musical fashion.
Windsong and Lyric had been used to days full of constant song, and that was the reason Lyric was there. To learn songs. Healing verses and natural power blended together to heal any and all creatures. Some songs were stronger than others. Some were certainly out of Lyric’s young reach. She was only twenty years old. Quite the child. She needed time and study to become a true Siren one day. A Mistral who was truly proficient in song and her area of study and expertise would, with time, attain virtuosity. If that Mistral was female, she earned the title of Siren. If male, he earned the title of Bard. There was no fixed age for these things. It happened when the village Elders tested the Mistrals and considered them proficient enough to earn those titles.
Lyric was a long way off from that. And at first Windsong had worried that her teaching would suffer with the presence of another. She had found herself and Lyric constantly curbing their song whenever Izri was present. But the quirky Vampire had noticed this and had begun singing Lyric’s study songs herself.
Rather badly.
Lyric seemed to enjoy the fact that there was someone less skilled than she in the house. Though she had been shy and afraid of Izri at first, she now felt compelled to give the Vampire points on how to sing better, passing on what little she knew quite eagerly, and, in time, with a growing confidence that Windsong had never seen in her student before.
Izri’s presence in the house had also forced Windsong to expand her dwelling. The two-room cabin had been adequate for a master and one pupil, but for all three of them? It was overdue for a bit of an overhaul and some modernization. However, their village did not have any carpenters so they had been forced to call on outsiders. And so two carpenters, a Bard named Baritone and his apprentice Dove, had come to live in their village. Other homes had opened their doors to them, inviting the carpenters in, something her xenophobic breed was not usually in a hurry to do. She was actually quite proud of her people for the ways they had pushed their own boundaries the past couple of years.
In some ways they had been forced to do so.
One of the more practical reasons Izri had come was to help the Mistrals learn how to defend themselves against Vampires, because it was a well-known fact that not all of her kind were as thoughtful as Izri was. Of all the Nightwalkers, the Mistrals were potentially the most vulnerable to the Vampire rogues. Mistrals relied solely on the spell of their voices and their shapechanging for self-defense, both of which the Vampires could easily circumvent if they were strong enough.
Windsong found it compelling that Izri had volunteered to be a guinea pig. She would allow the Mistrals to learn how to hurt her and her kind, trusting they would not kill her in the process.
As she watched the petite blonde goof off with Lyric in the nighttime meadow, it was like watching two young high school girls, rather than two women centuries apart in age and experience. Their heads were bent together, one fair and one dark, and they were trading whispers as they watched the carpenter Bard and his apprentice work on the cabin. Others in the village usually came to help, more than likely to hurry the process along so everyone could go back to where they belonged, but also out of gratitude. The village of
Brise Lumineuse
owed Windsong a great deal. She was the oldest and most powerful of her kind. She had always protected them. She had always led them wisely.
But tonight no others had come yet, so it was just the Bard and his apprentice.
Windsong suspected Izri had something of a crush on Baritone. She found the thought amusing. In the past, she wouldn’t have taken such a thing seriously or given it any worry, but much had changed in just a few years. The Vampires had learned that the only way they could ever hope to know feelings like love was through the blood of other Nightwalkers. It was an attractive cookie to dangle before such sensualist children. Who wouldn’t want to feel love for the first time? Why wouldn’t Izri be curious about such things?
But Windsong suspected Baritone might not be similarly inclined.
“You had best speak to her.”
Windsong looked up from her position in the grass. It was an unseasonably warm night so close to Samhain. She and the girls had decided to picnic in the meadow beside the cabin, to get fresh air while they still could before the winter set its claw into them and forced them inside. Luckily for Baritone and Dove, they were almost done with the exterior work on the cabin, and all that was left was the interior. When all was said and done there would be three bedrooms, a spacious great room, and two baths. It seemed like so much house, but since she had rarely been without a student these past centuries, it made sense. It would just be a little bit of an adjustment. And to be honest, it would be nice to have some privacy back, a place to go where she could close the door and be alone.
She hadn’t realized she missed her privacy until it was on the verge of being restored to her.
“Good evening, Harrier,” she finally greeted her childhood friend who had appeared at her back. There was only one other Mistral as long-lived as she was. Harrier. At one time their mothers had had high hopes that they would cultivate a great romance between them. Perhaps that was exactly the reason why it had never happened. The idea of making love with Harrier was as ridiculous to her as making love to her brother might be. They were the best of friends, but seriously lacked the chemistry needed for anything like a romance. “I disagree. Izri is a mature Vampire female, and she is very aware of the potential consequences of her infatuation. She has lived among us long enough to know it is very likely any advance she made would be heartily rebuffed.”
“You are speaking as a woman of logic. You forget what it is like to be smitten. One does not always think so logically when one’s heart is involved.”
His observation made Windsong smile a little. “This coming from the most confirmed bachelor in all of history,” she said.
“I was not always a bachelor,” Harrier reminded her gently.
She didn’t need the reminder. No more than he did. It had been centuries since he had been wed, since he had fathered his children—and since he had suffered the unimaginable horror and pain of their deaths. But she knew for him it might as well have been yesterday. He would not let himself forget, even after all this time. And how could he? He had blended it into every component of every song he knew. It was part of what gave his songs such incredible power. It was what made him an incomparable Bard.
Windsong studied him a moment, his tall, well-made physique, his closely cropped hair the color of a new penny, and the aristocratic lines of his features. He was incredibly handsome, what any woman would find alluring, perhaps even in spite of the torch he carried for a family long made into dust. His most startling physical characteristic was the vivid purple heather color of his eyes. But even that was outgunned the moment Harrier uttered a single word. His voice was deep, rich, and hypnotic when he spoke. When he sang, it was positively spellbinding.
“That is true. I suppose that makes
me
the most confirmed bachelor of our kind.”
“A mystery to me,” he assured her. “You never lacked for suitors in the first half of your millennium. And they are sparse now only because you intimidate them. That and you remain cubbied away here where no one can find you.”
“Or they suspect you and I are lovers and do not wish to tread between us.”
He chuckled. “I never understood that,” he said as he lowered himself beside her. “We both have apprentices and we both lived, until your recent renovations, in close quarters with them. Just when did they suspect we were finding the opportunity for lovemaking?”
Windsong shrugged. “I doubt they are thinking it through that far.”
“Perhaps. Which returns me to my earlier warnings. I do not think your Vampire guest is thinking things through very far at all.”
“So what if she is or is not?” Windsong looked directly into his eyes. “Life is nothing if not a learning experience. And who are you and I to assume only the negative could come of this? Have you spoken to Baritone? Did he ask you to have me warn her off?”
“No. Nothing of the kind. I only meant ...” He shrugged a shoulder. “We keep very much to ourselves. We do not like to entertain the idea of outsiders even walking through our village. What makes you think he would welcome one in his bed?”
“Two years ago, would you ever have imagined this village welcoming a Vampire as a member of our family? Granted, it has taken some time, but people have grown quite used to her. I would even dare to say they are fond of her.”
“I think they were perhaps blinded by that hair of hers. Or maybe it was the clothes.”
Windsong smiled. She looked over and gave serious thought to Izri’s lemon yellow and chartreuse streaks of hair, half of which reached her chin on the left side and the other half of which reached the middle of her back.
“I hardly think they would be fazed by exterior appearances. That is not what our people fear, after all. We fear our vulnerability. We do not have the physical strength of other breeds, nor their uncanny speed and senses. We have our voices and our ability to shift into birds.”
“And then there is the sun.”
“Yes. The sun.” They were not as sensitive to the sun as the other Nightwalkers were. They did not burn or become poisoned. They did not feel lethargy or die.
But they lost their only defensive ability.
They lost their voices.
They became completely mute in sunlight. No matter how young or old, how much they struggled, the touch of the sun robbed them of their voices. It made them, for want of a better term, completely human. They had no defenses, no strengths, and no preternatural senses. All of it disappeared. And if they lived regularly in sunlight, they would begin to age as a normal mortal might.
Windsong shuddered. Who would ever want to live in sunlight? Who would ever choose to be mortal? She had lived through so many incredible ages, seen so many extraordinary things. She had great respect for humans and their inventiveness, the ways they strove to better themselves and the things around them, but she also found them sad and tragic. They were destroying the very world that sustained them. The same world that sustained the Nightwalkers. Windsong was very well aware that one day the Nightwalkers might have to choose sides against the humans or risk their own ability to live. It was a frightening thought because Nightwalkers like the Vampires could not survive without their human food sources, and now the Demons were finding their mates in humans who had Druid blood. It could be a tricky little house of cards. But the human trend was moving toward more awareness of the world they lived in. Hopefully it would continue.