Authors: Jocelynn Drake
“Have you spoken with the coven?”
“No. I have met with only Mira.”
I chuckled, shaking my head. “So you’ve struck an alliance with the one vampire Elder that half the coven would like to see decapitated. How is that going to help us?”
“Let me worry about the coven,” Mira interjected. “You have other concerns at the moment.”
“Like what?” I asked, the muscles in my shoulders tensing.
“You’re staying in Savannah.” Ryan paused for half a breath. “With Mira.” He watched me closely, trying to gauge my feelings. It was as if he was waiting to see if I was going to lose my temper again. I had a better handle on things now. I wasn’t thrilled with the choice Ryan had made, but right now, there was nothing I could do about any of it. When the warlock was sure that I was calm, he continued. “Two nights ago, a young woman was murdered in her apartment. It looks like her attacker wasn’t human.”
“Vampire?” I demanded, resisting the urge to look over at Mira.
“Maybe,” he conceded, “but some of the initial information that we have received makes it look doubtful.”
Mira rose from the sofa and strolled over to Ryan’s desk. She perched her hips on the front of it so that she was in my line of sight. Her hands were folded in front of her and she looked calm again. “Normally, my contacts would be able to hush this up, but the girl was the daughter of a senator. He’s making too much noise and the press is digging in. We have to take care of the matter quickly and quietly.”
“It’s your city,” I snapped. “If you were here, maybe this would not have happened. You should clean up the mess.”
“First off, I requested Mira’s presence, at the risk of both herself and her city,” Ryan said, his voice growing strained. “Secondly, with the recent increase in naturi activity, I thought it best if you two worked together. While the preliminary information does point to a vampire, I’d rather be cautious.”
“And if it is a vampire, is she going to let me do my job?” I ground out.
“If it is a vampire causing all of this chaos and attention,” Mira began, her voice a cold, hard wind, “you’d better stay out of my way so that I can take care of the matter. I’m not as neat and clean about the task as you are. I don’t mind getting messy.” Mira slipped off the desk and walked over until she was standing directly in front of me. She lifted up on the tips of her toes so that her nose was nearly brushing mine. The air around us chilled as her powers swelled, pushing against me. “Like you said, it’s my city. You’re here to back me up.”
I stared into her eyes, the muscle tic in my jaw twitching as I struggled to keep control of my rising tension and anger. This was all too insane. I was once again working with Mira when I should be hunting her. At least she didn’t look pleased by the prospect.
“Get your things. We leave in twenty minutes,” she sneered then walked out of the room and into one of the two bedrooms in the suite, slamming the door shut behind her.
Beside me, I heard Ryan sigh heavily. The warlock leaned his head into his hand, his elbow resting on the arm of his chair. His eyes were closed and he looked very tired. I think the constant meetings were starting to wear on him, and to make matters worse, he had now formed an alliance with the nightwalkers.
“Did you have to anger her?” he asked, not looking up at me.
“An alliance with the vampires?” I demanded, ignoring his comment.
“We’re out of options. If you can think of a better idea, I’d love to hear it. At the moment, it’s all we have.” Ryan opened his eyes and stared at me. The warlock waved his hand and Mira’s door briefly glowed gold before fading away. A dampening spell. I had seen him use it several times since we had met. It ensured that no one could overhear what we were discussing. “Keep her alive, Danaus. This task will most likely be completed in a couple of days and we can discuss this more when you return.”
“If this is such an easy mission, why am I being sent?” I asked, my brows knitting over the bridge of my nose.
“Just in case it’s not. If it is the naturi, then they will want her dead. At the moment, she is our only ace.” Ryan paused, a strange smile lifting his lips as he finally looked up at me. “I think Mira also trusts you. Well, maybe not you, but your sense of honor. I don’t think she would let me send anyone else with her.”
“Great,” I grumbled, turning on my heel. I walked out of Ryan’s suite and back down the hall to my room. I needed to pack my bag yet again.
Mira trusted me. Just great. While I was off staking vampires throughout Europe, Ryan had formed an alliance with the nightwalkers so that the hunters were now working together with their prey. And Mira “trusts me.” I had seen entire nations rise and fall with less maneuvering than the schemes that Ryan and Mira were concocting, and I had no wish to be a part of another fallen nation.
SEVEN
J
ames was gone, but my duffel bag had been repacked and the weapons bag sat open beside it. James knew that I had several weapons stashed in secret locations around the room in case I suddenly found myself under attack. He had obviously not attempted to search out all the hiding places, leaving me to the final task of gathering up my toys.
Within five minutes, I had the last of my weapons packed and the bag zipped. I shoved my hands through my hair as I stared down at the leather jacket that lay across the bed. It wasn’t my usual duster, but a softer one that fell only to my thighs. James had left a note saying that he was having the duster mended after the attack in Spain and that he had replaced some of my worn clothes with fresh. So much for a break from the fighting.
But I had had my chance. After returning from Peru in September, Ryan had offered to let me rest and recover from the massacre at Machu Picchu, but I didn’t take it. I couldn’t sit still, had to keep moving, anything to push back the thoughts humming in my brain. So the warlock sent me out to hunt the naturi and vampires on the Continent, still moving, still hunting, but close at hand should he need me.
In Berne, Switzerland, I found an earth naturi wreaking havoc in one of the local hotels. The owner had initially blamed the chaos of broken dishes, upset furniture, and over-r grown gardens on a poltergeist. I was there only two nights before I spotted the lithe creature. Standing barely above four feet and dressed in all red, it resembled a sapling willow tree with long, slender arms that ended with sharpened fingernails. It took me another week of stalking the spindly little monster through the quiet courtyard garden before I finally disposed of it.
In a lonely town south of Liege, Belgium, I encountered an animal clan naturi. In English mythology, the creatures are often referred to as will-o’-the-wisps or hinky punks. The creature was leaving a trail of corpses through the outskirts of the forests of Ardennes. The naturi would often take the form of a large black dog, pretending to be lost or wounded as it lured its prey deeper in the woods. I had initially thought it was a werewolf gone mad without its pack, but the naturi soon proved me wrong.
Then the South of France, to track down a creature that was leaving behind a number of bodies that had been drained of most of their blood. Most had been an assortment of animals like large cats and dogs, but then two children and one adult went missing on three separate occasions. I passed more than a month in the region searching for the vampire that continued to kill even though I was in its current hunting ground. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t sense the undead creature.
Dawn had just begun to creep over the horizon one cool morning when I felt the naturi lurking nearby. It was another week before I discovered that I was hunting a naturi from the wind clan. The four-foot, bony creature had bat-like wings that it wrapped around its thin frame when it walked on the ground. It was an odd mix of human and dog with its long, narrow snout and fangs poking just over its bottom lip. This strain of the wind clan had started the old popular fairy tale of the
streghe
, from the island of Corsica. This one either had moved farther north in search of better hunting grounds or had come through one of the doors that had opened in Europe and was on its way to Corsica. It never made it. I could only guess that it was trying to frame a nightwalker for its crimes against man by taking the blood, since it had no use for it. After two weeks of hunting, I finally destroyed the creature shortly after midnight near the Mediterranean shore.
I had forgotten about Mira until that moment. I had successfully pushed her to the furthest reaches of my mind, burying her under centuries of memories that I never wanted to recall again. Yet, after incinerating the body of the wind naturi, I wandered down to the rocky shore and washed my hands in the warm waters that clapped softly in darkness. Mira had once said that I smelled of the wind and the sea. I had been born in a small village near the sea and could only guess that some part of that beginning was imprinted on my being. And she could smell it, sense it when no one else could.
Up until my travels with Mira, my experiences with vampires had been extremely limited. In fact, they generally didn’t extend much past a few dark threats of torture and death. None had told me about how my powers felt or that I smelled of the sun. For countless nightwalkers, I had been death.
But my relationship with Mira would always be different. More than three months ago, we had bonded in a way neither of us had thought possible. We joined powers and destroyed countless naturi across England. And while she managed to remain sarcastic and indifferent, I could taste her fear that night like stomach acid in the back of my throat.
Both our worlds had changed that night. She became a threat to her own kind and I now had a deep connection to a creature I had sworn to kill. Even now, I could sense her emotions with very little effort. While the emotional world of the vampires had always been open to me, it had been somewhat thin and hazy compared to Mira. Her emotions entwined with my thoughts and soul in such a way that it became difficult to distinguish hers from mine. If I wanted, I could let her wash over me until I was drowning in her. Yet I fought the temptation, erecting mental walls to keep her out, but not before I took a small taste. She was walking down the hall toward my room. She was worried—worried and scared.
My only warning was a soft knock at the door before the lock clicked and Mira walked in. I guessed that she had gotten the room key from James. She had changed out of her blue jeans and into a pair of tight-fitting black pants and dark blue silk shirt that buttoned up the front. Mira paused beside me, looking down at my two bags before walking over to the windows and pulling open the curtains. The view was nothing spectacular, just the front of another building looking down on Bay Street, but for Mira, I don’t think it mattered. She was home.
“I spoke to Ryan about Thorne’s death,” Mira suddenly announced. Her voice was just a pale ghost drifting through the room toward me, soft and ethereal. I jerked at her sullen tone, almost surprised that she had broken her silence.
Standing at the end of the bed, I could see only her profile. Mira leaned forward, touching her head to the glass as her eyes fell shut. I folded my arms over my chest and strengthened the walls around my own thoughts. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want her slipping into my brain, but there was something in her emotions, some chaotic quality that I didn’t want leaking into me either. “What did he say?”
I was stunned she even wanted to discuss Thorne. We had been sent to protect Thorne so that he could replace his maker in the triad. Unfortunately, he was killed shortly after we found him, poisoned with naturi blood. By the tension in her shoulders, the failure continued to haunt her.
“Ryan located the witch coven that killed Thorne. A naturi had contacted them that night and had told them to kill me,” she said, the words stumbling to me. “They hadn’t even been hunting him. He was probably killed because that witch couldn’t be sure which mug I would drink from, so she spiked them all.”
The guilt lacing her tone was unmistakable. She had blamed herself for not protecting him when she first met him and now she blamed herself because he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Despite her general blasé attitude about life, she took each task assigned to her seriously.
On the other hand, I couldn’t muster an ounce of guilt when it came to the death of the nightwalker. I hadn’t known him beyond the fact that he was a vampire living “out in the open.” In truth, if I had known about him prior to meeting Mira, I probably would have killed him for the danger he posed to the people of London.
“What happened to the witch coven?”
“Ryan said it looked like three of the original eight had been in the club that night and were killed by the fire. Two more were gutted, their hearts stolen,” she said, counting off each one. She didn’t need to go into any more detail than that. They had been killed by the naturi they served and their hearts harvested for spells.
“And the remaining three?” I prompted when she paused.
“Ryan says disbanded and scattered.”
My arms loosened and my hands slipped into my pockets. “You’re not hunting them?”
Mira cracked one eye open and turned her head slightly without lifting it from the glass to look at me, a grim smile quirking one corner of her mouth. “Why bother? The naturi will finish them. Let them die at the hand of those they serve.”
What she wasn’t saying was that she was confident that whatever death the naturi meted out, it would be slow and painful. What more could we ask for?
“Danaus?” The sound my name on her lips drew my narrowed gaze back to her face. For a moment, she sounded hesitant and even little lost. It was a foreign sound coming from her. Mira exuded strength and confidence in whatever she did, even when she hadn’t a clue, and her weakness made me wish for a knife, to defend her against whatever threat had caused the slight tremor in her voice.
“James said that you’ve been out hunting naturi throughout Europe,” she said then suddenly stopped, seeming to wait for me to comment. Placing her hand against the glass, she lifted her head and stared down at the city, her jaw tight.