Dumfounded by his reaction—or lack thereof—Eliana slowly shook her head.
“They were the spirits of nature, she said, gods and goddesses that exist in an invisible world that coexists with the world of humans.” His gaze, piercing now, traveled back to her face and pinned her with its raw, intelligent power. “They were stunningly beautiful and equally fierce, gifted in ways we humans could never understand. The
bean sidhe
announced a coming death by wailing, the
bean nighe
washed
the clothing of a person doomed to die, the
leanan sidhe
was a fairy lover or muse who sought the love of mortals…and the
cat sidhe
could transform into a cat and steal your soul.”
He stared at her, and Eliana, wide-eyed and breathless, felt a rash of goose bumps rise on her arms.
“My grandmother was a crazy old woman, princess. She was from the oldest part of an old country, steeped in folklore and the ways of ancient magic. I was a city boy, never believed a word she said.” His voice dropped an octave. “Until I met you. Until, maybe, right now. So I’ll say it again, princess, and I hope you’ll indulge an old friend.
Tell me a story.
”
Eliana’s lips parted. Everything inside of her burned and trembled. She felt electrocuted. She felt terrified. She felt alive.
She’d told someone. A human.
He knew.
He
believed
.
Flushed, nearly euphoric with a heady mixture of hope and fear, she stared at him.
“Once upon a time,” he softly prompted.
“Once…” When she faltered, Gregor nodded reassuringly, as if to say,
Go ahead
. Unable to bear his keen gaze any longer, she turned her face to the fire and stared into the crackling flames. She moistened her lips and began again.
“Once upon a time, in a kingdom of magic and mystery and permanent darkness, there lived a princess. She was powerless and overprotected and also, as fairytale princesses are, incredibly naïve. She didn’t know not to trust strangers. She didn’t know how to properly choose friends. She didn’t know, unfortunately, that behind the most beautiful smiles sometimes lurk the ugliest, most dangerous lies.”
She closed her eyes, remembering, the ache of betrayal still so deep after all these years.
“Born to a family of great wealth and a people of great—and unusual—Gifts, the princess only knew that though her world was privileged and she was pampered, another world lay beyond the confines of her gilded cage. A world of adventure and possibility. A world of
what if.
The human world. The world to which she did not belong, yet yearned to see with every fiber of her being.”
She glanced at Gregor, and he nodded again, encouraging, so she took a breath and continued.
“But because she was the daughter of a great and powerful king descended from an ancient line of great and powerful kings who had learned to survive the human world by hiding from it, the princess was not allowed to dip her toes into the forbidden waters of humanity’s enticing delights. She was kept under lock and key in her sumptuous underground palace and satisfied her craving for adventure with books and movies and daydreams about what could never be.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “One day, however, fate intervened.”
The fire mesmerized her, orange flickering wraiths that danced and spun and drew her back, back, into the past, into the bittersweet memory of the time before she split into two people. Eliana
Before
and Eliana
After
, one happy and blissfully ignorant, one frozen forever, encased in a coffin of ice.
“The king was murdered. Like the human king Caesar Augustus who once hunted their kind near to extinction, he was betrayed by those closest to him. The kingdom was stolen, and the princess…the princess fled, never to return.”
Her throat tightened. The flames wavered and swam in her vision. Gregor hadn’t moved, and she didn’t look at him. She was afraid if she did she’d dissolve into tears.
He murmured, “What happened to her?”
“She…she changed. She learned the ways of the world. She began to steal.” Her gaze flickered to Gregor’s. “To survive. For money. And for…other things. Things she needed.” She looked back at the fire.
“And these other things she needed,” Gregor murmured, “were they for protection from whoever killed her father?”
Eliana closed her eyes and felt a lone tear track down her cheek. Silas’s voice whispered in her head,
There is a war coming,
principessa.
Survival of the fittest is the only thing that matters now.
“That’s only part of it,” she whispered, drawing the cashmere closer around her shoulders. Suddenly she felt very cold.
“And the rest? What’s the rest for?”
“Revenge.”
The word hung there in the air between them, simple and sinister. Gregor regarded her gravely, weighing it. “That’s an awful lot of burners for revenge.”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
A slight shake of his head and Eliana knew he didn’t fully understand and wanted her to explain. Because she was feeling like she was having an out-of-body experience anyway, she went ahead and said, “Every country derives power in a myriad of ways, from population size to natural resources to financial stability. Without those things, power is impossible.
Freedom
is impossible. But there is one thing that can even the playing field so that even the weakest David can trump the strongest Goliath.” She glanced at him, and he was staring back at her, rapt. “Weapons.”
Gregor started, understanding dawning on his face. “You’re building an army,” he accused.
He was quick, she had to give him that. “I’m just telling a story, remember?” She swiped at her face with the back of her hand and refused to look at him.
He sat stiffly forward in his chair. “So I’m helping you stockpile weapons so you can, in turn, do what? Kill people—humans?”
Shocked, she stiffened. “No! Of course not! We merely have to protect ourselves! We want to come out of the shadows and coexist peacefully, but we have enemies—”
Gregor stood and glared down at her, radiating tension. “Protect yourselves with automatic weapons? With
land mines
?”
“Gregor,” she said, hard. “Sit
down
.”
He must have seen something in her face because he complied, begrudgingly. He folded his arms across his chest and gazed unblinking at her, all the softness from before gone.
She downed the rest of the whiskey and set the glass on the low table beside her chair with a sharp
clink
. “We have a lot of enemies, and they’re very nasty, Gregor. This isn’t about hurting people, this is about protecting ourselves from those who want to hurt us.”
He looked dubious, so she said, “Do you remember the man who was in your office that day I came with the Cézanne? The one who was with the police—the German with a shard of ice where his heart is supposed to be?”
Lips as tight as his jaw, Gregor gave a curt nod.
“When I was taken to the police station, he tortured me.”
It was as if he was an overfilled balloon that had been pricked with a pin. He visibly deflated. Weakly, his face paling, he said, “What?”
“They know, somehow, about us. They were”—she grimaced, then went on, determined—“experimenting on me. Running tests, seeing how I reacted to different stimuli, that sort of thing. They know about us, but they don’t
know,
and we have to protect ourselves if we’re going to take the risk to be out. Maybe it started with that video a few years ago,” she muttered, “stupid Constantine and his stupid disco fight—”
“Wait. Wait.” Gregor sat forward in the chair again, hands spread wide. “The infamous video in the disco in Rome? With the…the uh…” He trailed off into silence, unable to say it himself.
Eliana gazed at him from beneath her lashes. “Panthers. Yes.”
He visibly blanched. She saw him replay it in his mind, the grainy cell-phone video caught by a bystander at a popular nightclub that showed the bizarre sight of six impossibly huge black panthers engaged in snarling, bloody battle on a dance floor before the police had shot one and captured two others. She’d seen it herself because it had received a lot of air time before being roundly dismissed by the authorities as fake. At least publicly.
“Huh. Huh,” he said, turning it over in his mind, wrapping his head around it. He leaned back in his chair and exhaled a long, quiet breath. “
Cat sidhe
after all, eh?”
“Every culture has their shape-shifter myths,” Eliana said gently. “Some of them are just closer to the truth than others.”
He sat on that for a minute, recalibrating, and Eliana waited, watching his expression flit from one emotion to another, her heart in her throat.
Had she done something very, very stupid?
After a while, his lips quirked. “Should have known when you stole my soul,” he murmured.
Relief coursed through her, and she let out the breath she didn’t even know she’d been holding. “Silver-tongued devil.”
“Thieving feline.”
She grinned at him, and he leaned over and grasped her hands, suddenly grave again. Vehemently he said, “Promise me you’re not going to pull a Montecore on me. Or anyone else for that matter.”
“Montecore?” She was confused. “What’s a Montecore?”
Utterly serious, firelight shining red and gold off his ginger hair, Gregor stared at her and said, “The white tiger that ate that fruit loop Las Vegas magician. Roy what’s-his-name. You know, in the show at the Mirage hotel.”
She laughed weakly and leaned over and pressed her hot forehead to their joined hands. His fingers against her flushed skin were ice, ice cold, and she guessed he wasn’t nearly as composed as he was pretending to be. With a low, rumbling laugh tinged with the merest hint of entreaty, he said, “Because I fancy keepin’ my head attached to my body, lass, if you don’t mind.”
“I promise I will not eat you,” she said solemnly. “But that little dog of yours…”
Gregor gasped in mock outrage, and she lifted her gaze to his face. His hazel eyes sparkled down at her. “Although you might be doing me a wee favor there.”
Eliana shook her head, overwhelmed by gratitude and the dawning realization that her father’s dream of living in the open—the dream she was working toward—might actually be plausible. If one human could accept her, why not ten? Why not a hundred?
Why not
all
of them?
“Well, then, let’s see what you can do, princess. Go ahead and show me.” He made a gesture with one hand, encouraging, but she shook her head.
“I can’t,” she said, knowing what he wanted. “I can’t Shift when I’m hurt.”
He snorted in disbelief. “Oh, how convenient! A few little scratches on the soles of her feet and the great shadow cat is spayed!”
She sighed and shrugged her shoulders beneath the throw. “That would have done it, yes, but the bullet holes didn’t help, either.”
His merriment instantly fled, and his voice dropped low and menacing. “
Bullet
holes.” His gaze swept her and settled on the bandage on her lower leg. He hadn’t mentioned it earlier, and now she didn’t respond to the question in his eyes. After a moment he said in that same low voice, “So the king’s assassins have caught up with the runaway princess.”
“It would seem so.”
Tension radiated from his body as if a switch had been thrown. He stiffened, looking around the sumptuous boudoir as if expecting to find them hiding behind the curtains. “Can they all do the vanishing Cheshire cat bit?”
Demetrius could. As for the rest of his new gang, The Hunt, whatever he’d called them, she didn’t know for sure, but if they were on his team, she had to guess yes. Miserable again, she nodded. “But they didn’t follow me here. I’m sure of it. I wouldn’t have put you in danger that way. And I disguised my scent so they wouldn’t be able to track me like that.”
When his brows pulled together in confusion she explained, “Water dampens our scent. I ran through every
damn sprinkler, fountain, and wading pool in the city on my way here.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he muttered, staring at her in dismay.
“Tell me about it.”
A knock on the door produced Merck, returning with a dry set of clothes purloined from Céline’s closet. They both rose, and Gregor took the proffered items—gauzy loungewear, gossamer thin, and a drapey silk knit sweater in the palest pearl gray, things she would never choose for herself—and set them on the bed. Merck excused himself, and Gregor turned to her.
“You’re staying here tonight. I’ll call the doctor, but it might take an hour or so before he gets here, so get some sleep in the meantime.”
“The doctor?” she said, alarmed, remembering the German from the police station.
“For the bullet holes,” he explained gently, glancing at her bandaged leg. His gaze traveled up her body, searching for the others.
“Hip. But it’s already stitched up, the wounds are clean. I’ll be healed in a day.”
“From a bullet wound?” His face remained neutral, but his tone was clearly disbelieving. She only nodded. He accepted that with a shake of his head and then said, “You stitched your own bullet wounds? I’ve known hardened mercenaries who weren’t able to do that.”
She faltered. “I…no. It’s, um, complicated.”
His brows slowly lifted. He said, “Go to a veterinarian?”
She rolled her eyes. “If you must know, the same person who shot me and broke me out of jail was the person who stitched me up.”
He stared at her, nonplussed. “Walk me through this, princess. Someone who wanted you dead took the time to
blow up
the largest jail in France to spring you, then shot you—more than once—then took you somewhere safe, removed the bullets, and sewed you up?”
Put like that, it sounded less than reasonable. Eliana chewed her lip. “He only did that because he was trying to get information out of me. About the rest of us. Where we are. Where we’re staying. So then he could—”
“Assassins generally don’t have to perform surgery in order to get their marks to divulge information,” he interrupted, reasonable. “A pair of pliers would be sufficient. If this guy worked for me, he’d be fired.”