Sins of the Night (24 page)

No, Danger helped him now because they'd slept together. It didn't mean that she had feelings for him. Or that tomorrow wouldn't find her siding with his enemies. How many times in the past had he thought a Dark-Hunter was safe, and then at the last minute, he or she had chosen to fight against Acheron and die?

No one could be trusted.

And still the woman's voice in his head screamed for mercy and release.

“Shut the hell up!” he snarled both mentally and audibly.

Now she started crying a piercing wail that cut through his head like a machete. The agony of it was unlike anything he'd ever experienced.

How the hell did Daimons stand this?

Alexion groaned in pain as he balled himself up into a fetal position, trying to make it stop. He held the heel of his hand against his right eye and still his head throbbed from the woman's banshee cries.

Danger crawled into bed with him and held him close, rocking him gently. She brushed her hands through his hair, making his resistance to her falter. No woman had ever held him like this. Not even his mother.

It was the tenderest moment of his life. And the most painful.

Danger leaned her cheek against the top of Alexion's blond hair. It felt so good to be this close to a man she knew. The curves of his hard masculine back pressed against her breasts and thighs, reminding her of how different their bodies were. He was all sinewy steel. Prickly flesh. Rough skin. And she loved the feel of it. The feel of him.

She just wished she knew how to help him through this.

Leaning forward, Danger inhaled his warm scent while singing an old French lullaby that her mother used to sing to her whenever she was upset. How she wished she could silence the voice inside him. She brushed her hand against his cheek, letting his whiskers tease her palm.

There was something incredibly intimate about this moment even though they were both fully dressed.

“Danger?”

She mentally cursed Keller as he swung open the door to their room, but she didn't withdraw from Alexion. “Yes?”

“You got a call from Rafael and he says you have to answer it right now. He says it's urgent.”

He would. Damn that man's timing. You would think a pirate would have a better sense of when to leave someone alone. At one time, his life had depended on such instincts.

“I'll be right there.” She reluctantly pulled away from Alexion. “I won't be gone long,” she said softly in his ear.

She wasn't sure if he heard her or not. Her heart heavy, she left him on the bed and went to take the call.

*   *   *

“All right,” Alexion said after a few minutes, trying to talk to his newfound soul. What the hell? He didn't have anything to lose and staying here in the bed until she died didn't seem productive for either one of them. “If you want to be free, lady, you and I have to make a pact.”

She continued to wail.

“Woman, listen to me,” he snarled out odd. “I can't even function if you don't stop doing that. You're going to get us both killed unless you get control of yourself.”

“I want to go home. Where am I? Why am I here? Who are you? Why is it so dark? I don't understand what happened to me. I need to go home now. Why can't I go home…?”

Her questions came at him in rapid succession. So many that he could barely focus on any one of them.

“If a Daimon can do this, I can too,” he growled, forcing himself to sit up. The room swam around him.

He shook his head, trying to clear it. He had to take control of this situation. He had to.

“Who are you?” he asked the woman.

“Carol.”

The wailing lessened a degree, as if she were trying to get hold of herself. “All right, Carol. Everything will be all right. I promise. But you have to calm down and be quiet for a little while.”

“Who are you? Why are you telling me to be quiet?”

How did he answer that one? “It's a bad dream you're having. If you rest quietly for a while, it'll get better.”

“I want to go home!”

“I know, but you have to trust me.”

“Is it really a bad dream?”

“Yes.”

“It will get better?”

“Yes.”

To his relief, she settled down. Alexion took a deep breath as his vision cleared a degree. He could hear the soul rustling around inside him, but at least she was no longer crying or screaming.

Rubbing his eyes, he continued to breathe deeply, and hoped that Carol stayed calm for a while.

He got up slowly from the bed and shrugged his coat off. Stryker had given him only a few days to live or Carol's soul would die …

There was no choice. He would have to kill himself to free her. But he had a lot of work to do before then. It was time he put all the foolishness with Danger behind him. He was here to do a job.

And thanks to Stryker, it would be the last thing he ever did.

*   *   *

After hanging up, Danger took a minute to check on Keller and Xirena, who seemed to be hitting it off famously. They were watching a movie and eating chili while Keller talked a mile a minute.

Apparently the demon didn't share Danger's need for silence while watching TV.

Satisfied the demon wasn't going to eat her Squire, Danger headed back to the guest room. She opened the door quietly, expecting to find Alexion still on the bed.

Her jaw went slack as she found him at the writing desk, making what appeared to be notes.

“You okay?” she asked, entering the room slowly.

He nodded as he continued to write.

Danger moved closer only to realize he was writing in Greek. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

She frowned at his curtness. There was something very different about him now. He was like he'd been the first night they'd met. Curt. Unfeeling. Distant.

Even the air around him was cold.

“Hey,” she said, reaching out to stop his hand. It, too, was icy cold. “What happened?”

He looked at her, stone-faced. “I'm not here to make friends, Danger. I'm here to deliver an ultimatum. I need you to call together the Dark-Hunters on this list.”

He handed her the top sheet of paper. “I can't read—” Before she could finish the words, the writing changed from Greek to English.

Whoa. That was impressive.

She saw that he was still jotting things down. “What's that over there?”

“My own personal list.”

Her frown deepened, especially after she glanced over the names on her paper and found one in particular missing.

“Where's Kyros?”

Alexion didn't answer.

Danger grabbed his hand and waited until he looked at her. “What is going on with you?”

“I'm getting down to business. If Stryker was telling the truth, and in this I believe he was, I only have three days to get to the Dark-Hunters who are on the fence and convince them to side with Acheron.”

“And Kyros?”

His eerie green eyes were dull and as cold as his skin. “I'm writing him off.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “You can't do that. You were friends.”

“Yes, we
were
friends. Now we're enemies.”

She was aghast at his words. “How could you—”

“I don't have anyone in this world I can trust,” he said harshly, cutting her deeply that she was included on the list after everything she had done for him. Dear Lord, she had even given
him
her trust and that was something she did for no man.

“I should never have tried to save him,” Alexion said. “Artemis is right, compassion is for the weak.”

“So that's it?” she asked, disgusted by his sudden turnaround. “You're going to give up on your best friend?”

“I'm not giving up. I'm dying. I have a soul inside me that will have to be freed in—”

Danger narrowed her eyes two seconds before she pulled the dagger out of her boot and plunged it straight into Alexion's heart.

He burst apart.

Chapter 17

Two seconds later, Alexion was back in human form, standing before Danger, who waited with her hands on her hips.

He patted his chest as if he couldn't believe he'd returned. He reached out and placed a hand on her desk.

“Soul inside you all gone now?” she asked.

He nodded slowly.

“Good. Now you can stop being a total jerk.” She turned to leave.

Alexion grabbed her and pulled her to a stop. He couldn't believe that he had his body back. “How did you know to do that?”

“I didn't. I was only guessing. But it was something I thought of while I was downstairs talking to Rafe. The first rule of being a Dark-Hunter is to stab the soul's host to free it. Stryker said that you had to kill yourself, which would cause you to die permanently—he conveniently left out what would happen if anyone else ‘killed' you.”

Alexion was still aghast. It was true. Whenever a Dark-Hunter stabbed a Daimon and their body burst apart, the stolen souls always returned to their resting places.

She laughed bitterly. “I'm a staunch Catholic. My mother used to excel at sins of omission. Growing up with her, I learned early on to listen to what she said, not what I heard. And most of all, to pay attention to what she didn't say. Since Stryker put the soul into you during your mid-poofing, I was betting that another poof such as the one caused by an outside person stabbing you would release it. Why else would he have said you had to stab yourself?”

Alexion was completely stunned on so many levels that he didn't even know where to begin. Part of him wanted to choke her, but another was impressed by the fact that she had correctly deduced Stryker's logic.

“I wasn't being a jerk,” he said sullenly, returning to her earlier insult.

She stared at him dryly. “Yes you were.”

“No,” he said honestly, “I'm only being what I am. I'm here to—”

“What you are, Alexion,” she said, interrupting him, “is a caring man.”

He shook his head in denial. “I'm the Alexion. My only goal is to protect Acheron.”

She placed her hand to his cheek. “It wasn't a cold, unfeeling entity that slept with me last night and it wasn't an unfeeling ‘other' that looked hurt when Kyros betrayed him. You are still human.”

“No,” he insisted emphatically, “I'm not.”

She stood up on her tiptoes and pulled his head down so that she could kiss him. The coldness of his skin immediately vanished as he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her blind.

She could feel his heartbeat increase as his tongue swept against hers.

Danger pulled back. “You're not unfeeling or uncaring. I doubt if you ever have been.”

Alexion's head spun at her words and his reaction to her kiss. It was true. Around her he was completely different. He found himself feeling things that he hadn't felt in untold centuries. Until the moment she had entered his life, he'd begun to doubt he could ever really feel again.

With her, he did.

How could this be?

“There can never be anything between us, Danger.”

“I know.” He heard the pain in her voice. “I'm a big girl, Ias, and I can take care of myself. But you … you need to can the destroyer act around me. I don't like it.”

He frowned at her words. “Why did you call me Ias?”

“Because Ias is the man who considers a demon his daughter and it was Ias who woke me up tonight with a rose tickling my cheek.”

“But I'm also the Alexion.”

She offered him a smile that melted the iciness of his entire existence. “There's a tough side to all of us. Be grateful; it was my tough side that nailed you with the dagger a few minutes ago.”

He laughed at that, then sobered. “I don't know what to feel when I'm around you.”

“Yeah, I'm confused too. I can't believe that I'm about to help you hang my friends.”

“I'm not trying to hang anyone, Danger.”

“No? Then what's with the list of hopeless you have over there?”

He glanced to the paper where he'd been writing. “That's not a list of names. It's a list of rules for Keller so that the demon doesn't eat him.”

She laughed at him. Leave it to Alexion to think of that one. “I knew I should have studied Greek in school.”

Grateful that he was almost back to “normal,” she took his hand in hers. It was still warm. “Are we friends again?”

“Yeah, I think we are.”

*   *   *

“Akri!”

Ash rolled over in his bed as he heard Simi running down the hallway outside his room in Katoteros. She burst through the door, then launched herself at his bed.

He woofed as she landed on him then sat heavily on his chest. “I was sleeping, Sim.”

“I know, but I heard Alexion calling out again. The Simi wants to go see him,
akri.
Lemme go! Please.”

Ash felt the all too familiar knot in his gut as he fought himself not to allow her that wish. But he couldn't.

The last two times he'd let Simi out without him had been disastrous. In Alaska, she'd almost died, and in New Orleans …

That was something he still couldn't think about without his temper erupting.

“I can't, Simi.”

“Why not?”

He sighed heavily. “I can't tamper with his fate. You know that. This is his time and if I answer him I will probably do whatever it is he asks. So for all our sakes, I've turned his voice off in my head and I would advise you to do the same.”

She pouted as she pulled the sfora out of her pink coffin-shaped purse. “At least make this work so's I can see him.”

“No.”

She growled at him. “But what if he gets hurt? What if he dies?” Her face blanched. “You can't let him die,
akri.
You can't. The Simi loves her Alexion.”