Katie's Hope (Rhyn Trilogy, Book Two) (3 page)

“You’re not surprised to see me,” Sasha
surmised.

“If Kris let me in, he’d let anyone in,” Rhyn
replied.

“Miss Hell, brother?”

“Warmer than this place.”

Sasha chuckled, his gaze taking in the
sarcophagus. He neared it with a small frown. Rhyn stayed where he
was, wary yet unafraid of Sasha, who’d been the zookeeper among the
animals with him in Hell.

“I wonder if he were still alive if things
would be the same,” Sasha mused, his eyes on their father.

“I’m glad the asshole’s gone,” Rhyn said.

“I suppose.”

“What’re you doing here, Sasha?”

“I’m here to see Kris, of all people.”

“You can’t manipulate him like you do
everyone else,” Rhyn said, well aware of his brother’s ability to
twist the minds of others.

“No? Wanna bet?”

“People like us don’t pay up.”

“True. We are more alike than the others.
How’s your little human treat?”

Rhyn eyed him. Sasha gave a faint smile.

“I’m not here for her,” he said. “Wouldn’t
you like to have Kris out of the way, so you and your human treat
can live in peace somewhere?”

“I wouldn’t trust anything you offered.”

“Very well, then, how about we make a deal
for you to come back with me as my personal bodyguard, and I’ll
make sure she’s safe and happy the rest of her life? I learned in
Hell how you can un-mate her. She’d be better off without you,
Rhyn.”

She’d be better off without you.
He’d
heard these words more than once over the past few days and
couldn’t help the small part of him that agreed. The rest of him
didn’t give a shit what anyone said: Katie was his.

“You know Kris’ll kill her when he’s done
with her. One human is nothing to him in his version of the big
picture,” Sasha continued. “Not sure which of us is more
twisted.”

“Fuck off, Sasha. You did me no favors in
Hell, and you’ll do me no favors here.”

“Think about it. I’m off to see Kris.”

Rhyn watched him go, wondering just what his
brother was planning, and how he’d figure it out before Katie was
hung on the wall next to his mother. Agitated and chilled by the
chamber, he transformed into his jaguar form to terrorize more
Immortals on his way to hunt the demons in the forest.

* * *

From the shadows of the crypt, Gabriel waited
until the half-brothers were gone to dump the contents of the
velvet dice pouch into his palm. Two small green gems-- holding the
dust of human souls-- glittered in the torchlight of the dead-dead
Immortal’s chamber. Kris had given them to him weeks ago as payment
for two assassinations. Wanting to give his friend, Rhyn, a moment
of peace with his dead-dead parents, he waited until Rhyn was gone
before withdrawing from the shadows.

“He looks so un-dead-dead,” Death said, a
rare trace of interest in her sweet voice.

Gabriel put the gems away and looked up to
see her slight frame standing beside the sarcophagus. Her white
hair and snowy skin glowed in the dim chamber.

“I wondered where you’d been going,” she
said.

“You always know where I’m going,” he
replied. “You can read my mind.”

“You come here a lot.”

“I do.”

She turned and raised an eyebrow at him, her
rainbow eyes flashing with every color between white and black. “I
want to hear you say why,” she ordered.

“To see my friend and protect his mate.”

“You’re not independent anymore, Gabriel. I
own you now,” she reminded him. “The other assassins go nowhere
without my permission.”

“You know where to find me when you need me,”
he said.

“You can’t influence destiny, Gabe,” she
said. “You shouldn’t be here at all.”

“I have one friend in the universe. There’s
nothing wrong with-- ”

“You sacrificed your immortal soul for him.
You’ve done enough.”

He clamped his jaw shut.

“And he’s still not doing what he should be,”
she continued. “I think you wasted your freedom. Poor choice, but
you were a human once. Maybe your human compassion led you
astray.”

“I thought you appreciated my
human
perspective.”

“I
did.
But I think you’ve become a
liability to me, Gabriel.”

He’d heard the speech before, though this
time, it was different. Three weeks ago, he’d bargained his soul in
exchange for her taking Rhyn off her list of those to be made
dead-dead. In all the years he’d served her, she’d never owned him
until three weeks ago. He still didn’t doubt his friend or his
decision, but he was the only one.

“I’ll stay away,” he said. “If it pleases
you.”

“Stay today, Gabriel, but know that the next
time you return, you will take the lives of two of them,” she said.
“Kris paid for Katie’s death and the death of another, whose name
he did not mention, but I will.”

Heaviness settled into the pit of his
stomach. He wondered if Death would’ve been more lenient if he
stayed home with her and played nice instead of spending half his
day in the mortal world.

It was too late for him to know.

“Who else would you have me take?” he asked
in a monotone. Death smiled, and when she spoke, he looked away.
“You would ask this?”

“You’re lucky this is all I ask. Normally,
when an assassin goes soft, I make him dead-dead. You’ve been my
lover for ages, and I am doing you a favor.”

“Next you’ll say you’ve kicked me out of your
bed.”

She said nothing, and he met her gaze once
more, genuinely surprised.

“I guess you no longer interest me, since
you’re just another of my slaves. You’re no longer exciting and
different to me,” she said with a shrug. “I am sorry for this of
all things, Gabriel. You are still my top assassin, assuming you
don’t fail in your executions.”

“I wonder why you agreed to my deal, if it
rendered me boring!” he snapped.

“Everything comes at a cost, Gabriel, which
you know. I broke Immortal Code to grant your favor of not killing
Rhyn. You had to pay the price for it, and so did I.”

Her words did nothing to quell the anger
boiling within him. It’d been too long since he’d felt such strong
emotion, and it caught him off guard. At his silence, Death went
on.

“Today’s your last day here. Next time, you
make them dead-dead.”

“I understand, mistress.”

“Very well.”

At his tone, she softened. “Gabriel, you know
there are things I cannot tell you. You must understand there is a
reason behind what I ask of you that will not become clear for some
time. Trust me. This is the only way.”

“As you wish, mistress.”

She left him alone in the dark with his
thoughts, and he began to understand more how his friend Rhyn felt
in a world that was pitted against him. He’d expected things to
change once he pledged his soul to Death, but he hadn’t expected
anything so drastic, so soon. He clenched the pouch with its
gems.

Instead of going to see the Immortal leader,
Gabriel crossed through the shadow world, squinting as he emerged
into the bright mid-morning sunlight. He put on his sunglasses,
which did little to alleviate the headache sunlight gave him. The
lush Scottish Highlands around him were covered in a blanket of
snow that stretched for miles, the white world interrupted only by
a few narrow roads snaking in different directions.

It was rarely sunny in this part of the
world, and he chalked the irritation up to his sudden plunge in
luck. He breathed in deeply of the scent of snow. The chances of
him ever returning were slim to none. He was early this year, but
he’d rather visit now than risk he’d be grounded during winter
solstice in a month.

He’d miss the smell and sight of his homeland
and yearned already to stay here rather than return to his dark
corner of the Immortal underworld! He began to think Death was
right-- he was going soft. Before he gave his Immortal soul to
death, he’d never noticed how sweet the air was or how the grass
sang as the wind whipped through it. He missed the smells and
sounds in winter.

He walked a familiar path to a graveyard so
old, not even legends remained about its location or the importance
of those buried there. A stone cottage up the road was the only
sign of inhabitation, and a herd of sheep raised their heads as he
neared. He ignored them and went to a place only he knew, stopping
when he was atop the graves he sought.

“Mother, Father,” he said quietly, “I may not
be able to come back again.”

He never expected his long dead parents to
respond but waited anyway. When only the winter wind greeted him,
he continued.

“Father, I did as you told me not to do long
ago. I gave Death my Immortal soul. It was for a worthy cause, and
I don’t regret what I’ve done,” he said.

His gaze lifted, and he recalled vividly the
last time he’d seen his parents in this very spot, when they were
cut down by bloodthirsty demons during the only period in Immortal
history when demons attacked humans. They’d been led by the demon
leader Darkyn, whom the Dark One had punished when Death discovered
what the demons had done. He didn’t know what happened to Darkyn,
but Death adopted him, raised him, and trained him to be the most
ruthless of all assassins.

Rhyn had become like a brother to him, and
the idea of killing his mate reopened wounds that hadn’t bled since
he stood in this place thousands of years before. He tried not to
think of that sad time, instead blinking away dark memories and
focusing on the snow at his feet.

“I’ll come back whenever I’m allowed,” he
said with resignation. He gazed around once more and then turned
and walked away, back into the shadow world.

* * *

Still in her jogging clothes, Katie made her
way to the super-lab on one of the castle’s upper floors. She
knocked and waited.

“You stood me up this morning. Kris yelled at
me for it,” Katie said, leveling a glare on Ully as he opened the
door. His bright features turned pink beneath his wire-rimmed
glasses and straw-colored hair. At barely above her height and
slender, the mad scientist was very unlike the Immortal warriors
that filled the castle.

“You know, I just … well, Rhyn …”

“You can say he scared you shitless,” she
said.

“Yeah, he did,” he said, then brightened.
“But I have good news for you!”

“You figured out how to make an immunity
injection?”

He whirled away from the door and strode into
the lab. She followed, uninterested in the sterile glass and
stainless steel landscape. As she did every day, she went to the
table near his cluttered desk to await her blood draw and any other
experiments he wanted to do. He scampered across the lab to a
fridge that held cold tools and bottles of mysterious serums,
everything except what a normal person put in a fridge.

“Nowhere close.” He retrieved a small bottle
of what looked like perfume and brought it back, holding it out to
her. She took it skeptically.

“I was hanging upside down this morning with
Rhyn snarling at me and I thought, this doesn’t just suck, but it’s
gotta suck even more for a little human like Katie,” Ully said.
“Kris said the normal Immortals aren’t allowed around you, because
they tend to attack you. This will help. Try it.”

She sprayed the perfume on her wrist and
coughed.

“Oh, god, Ully, this smells like a skunk
crawled into my clothes!”

“I know!” Ully said, excited. “I created a
pheromone repellant. It should cause temporary blindness in
Immortals as well as mask your pheromones.”

“I can’t wear this.”

“You don’t have to. Just spray any Immortal
that gets too close.”

She looked at the bottle anew, thoughts going
to the long list of Immortals she could’ve used it on instead of
bearing their attacks.

“This is the first useful thing I’ve seen you
do,” she said. “You have more of this?”

“I have travel-sized, too. Sit down. Time for
some blood.”

She sighed and held out her arm, setting the
perfume on the table as she sat. She still couldn’t watch Ully draw
her blood and covered her eyes with one hand. He was quick about it
and placed a Hello Kitty Band-Aid over the small puncture before
dropping the vials into his coat pocket.

“And you’re no closer at all?” she asked,
holding her breath for the answer.

“Nope. I had to start over yesterday. I told
Kris I don’t think it’s possible to duplicate the antigen that
makes you immune to Immortals. I can probably get close with a few
years of research, but not in two months.”

She suspected Kris might override his promise
to let her go in five weeks, if Ully couldn’t figure it out. She
released her breath, satisfied on more than one level to postpone
her return to the human world.

The wind chime above the door tinkled. Kris
entered, followed by someone whose appearance made her gasp. Sasha
looked over her, uninterested, and both her hands went to her
throat at the memory of what he’d done to her in Hell. Fear
fluttered through her, and her gaze flew to Kris, whom she trusted
little more than his sadistic brother. Kris’s gaze was amber, a
visual indicator of his anger despite his calm features.

“Ully,” he said in a clipped tone. “Test
this.” He tossed a vial whose contents were the color of blood.
Ully caught it and held it up.

Katie snagged the perfume off the table as
the two brothers neared and eased off the chair, placing it between
her and them. Sasha seemed to be ignoring her, though a small smile
of amusement was on his face.

“What is it?” Ully asked curiously.

“The solution to our problem,” Kris
answered.

“My lab in Hell didn’t have the ethical
reservations you do in using Immortal or demon test subjects,”
Sasha said.

“How could you let him in here?” she demanded
of Kris, unnerved by his sudden appearance in a place where she was
allegedly safe.