by Nalini Singh
“Don’t be taken in,” Christian said, his eyes as hard as diamonds though his facade of arctic politeness never slipped. “There is a reason the others fear her teeth.”
Noel rocked back lazily on his heels. “Been bitten?”
The angel’s wings spread a fraction, then snapped tight. “Insolence will only be tolerated so long as you warm her bed.”
“Then I better warm it for a long time.” Noel shot him a cocky grin, figuring he might as well play the part to the hilt.
“Is Christian giving you a hard time?” The question came from a long- legged female dressed in a tight black knee- length skirt and white shirt that flattered a slender figure with graceful curves. Paired with those legs and uptilted eyes of a deep, impossible turquoise against sun- golden skin, it made her a stunner. Not an angel, but a vampire old enough that immortality had worked its magic on what had surely been a spectacular canvas to begin with.
Noel deepened his smile in response to her flirtatious wink. “I think I can handle Christian,” he said, holding out his hand once again. “I’m Noel.”
“Asirani.” Her fingers closed over his own. He allowed it but he felt nothing. He’d felt nothing ever since he’d been taken… except for that odd, unexpected ember of sensation stirred awake by Nimra’s laugh.
Releasing Asirani’s hand, he looked from the vampire to the angel. “So, tell me about this court.”
Christian ignored him, while Asirani twined an arm through his own and led him across the huge central room that appeared to function as the audience chamber when necessary, but was otherwise the center of the court. “Have you eaten?” Thick black lashes lifted, turquoise eyes looking meaningfully into his.
“I’m afraid Lady Nimra doesn’t like to share,” he murmured, thinking of the sealed bags of blood that had been left in the small fridge in his room. “I thank you for the offer.” Whatever her motive, it had been a considerate question.
Fact was, taking blood from a human or vampiric donor wasn’t something he’d had any inclination to do since waking from the assault. The head healer at the Medica, Keir, had been very good about providing him with stored blood without question. Maybe Nimra’s courtesy, too, was as a result of Keir’s influence. The healer seemed to command a great deal of respect from angelkind— even the archangels themselves.
“Hmm.” Asirani squeezed his arm, her fingers brushing his biceps. “You are a surprising choice.”
“Am I?”
A throaty laugh. “Ah, cleverer than you look, aren’t you?” Eyes dancing, she stopped beside a window, her face to the room. “Nimra,” she said in a low tone, “has not taken a lover for many years. Christian always believed that when she chose to break her fast, it would be with him.”
Noel glanced over at the angel, who was now talking to an older human male, and found himself wondering why Nimra hadn’t invited Christian to her bed. In spite of the appearance he gave of being a stuffy aristocrat, the man was clearly sharply intelligent, and he moved in a way that said he’d had training in how to fight. No useless fop, but an asset.
As Asirani was no vacant hanger–on.
“Do you all live here?” he asked her, intrigued that this court appeared to be made up of the strong.
“Some of us have rooms here, but Nimra maintains a wing that is hers alone.” Leading him to the long table set with food to the side of the room, she released his arm to pluck a plump grape from an assortment of fruit and pop it into her mouth. Though vampires couldn’t gain the nourishment they needed from food, they could digest and appreciate the taste— Asirani’s hum of pleasure made it plain she enjoyed utilizing every one of her senses.
Noel had no interest in such sensuality, but he was moving to pick up a couple of blueberries so as not to stand out, when the hairs rose on the back of his neck. Not fear, but an instinctive, primal awareness. He wasn’t the least surprised to turn around to discover that Nimra had entered the room. The others receded from his consciousness, his eyes locking with the power and intensity of her own.
“Excuse me,” he murmured to Asirani, crossing the gleaming wood of the floor to come to a halt in front of the angel who was proving to be an irresistible enigma. “My lady.”
Her gaze was impenetrable. “I see you have met Asirani.”
“And Christian.”
A slight tightening of her mouth. “I do not think you have met Fen. Come.”
She led him toward the elderly human man Noel had seen with Christian. He sat surrounded by papers at a desk in a sun- drenched corner of the room. As they neared him, it became clear the man was even older than Noel had first guessed, his nut- brown skin lined with countless wrinkles. Yet his eyes were dark little pebbles, shiny with life, his lips mobile. They lifted in a smile as Nimra got closer, and Noel realized the man’s eyesight was deteriorating in spite of the flashing brightness of his gaze.
Nimra stopped him with a hand on his shoulder when he began to struggle to his feet. “How many times must I tell you, Fen? You’ve earned the right to sit in my presence.” A smile so vibrant, it cut at Noel’s heart. “In fact, you’ve earned the right to dance naked in my presence should you so wish.”
The old man laughed, his voice cracked with age. “That would be a sight, eh, my lady?” Squeezing her hand, he looked up at Noel. “Have you let a man make an honest woman of you at last?”
Leaning forward, Nimra kissed Fen on both cheeks, her wings brushing inadvertently against Noel. “You are my only love, you know that.”
Fen’s laughter segued into a deep smile, his fingers lighting on Nimra’s cheek before dropping to the desk once more. “I am a blessed man indeed.”
Noel could almost feel the history that ran between the two of them, but no matter their words, there was nothing loverlike in that richness of memory. There was instead an almost father- daughter element to it, in spite of the fact that Nimra remained immortally young, while the march of time had caught up with Fen.
Rising to her full height, Nimra said, “This is Noel,” before returning her attention to Fen. “He is my guest.”
“Is that what they’re calling it these days?” Twinkling eyes shifted to give Noel a closer inspection. “He isn’t as pretty as Christian.”
“Somehow,” Noel muttered, “I think I’ll survive.”
The riposte caused Fen to laugh in that hacking old- man way. “I like this one, Nimra. You should keep him.”
“We shall see,” Nimra said, a tart bite to her words. “As we both know, people are not always who they appear to be.”
Something unseen passed between the angel and the aged human at that instant, with Fen raising Nimra’s hand to his lips and pressing a kiss to the back. “Sometimes, they are more.” Fen’s eyes lifted for a bare instant to snap across Noel’s and he had the feeling the words were meant for him rather than the angel whose hand Fen still held.
Then Asirani click- clacked into his vision on sky- high heels and the moment broke. “My lady,” the vampire said to Nimra, “Augustus is here and insisting he speak with you.”
Nimra’s expression turned dark. “He’s beginning to try my patience.” Folding back her wings tight to her spine, she nodded good- bye to Fen and strode off without a word to Noel, Asirani by her side.
Fen nudged at Noel with a cane he hadn’t seen until that moment. “Perhaps not quite what you expected, eh?”
Noel raised an eyebrow. “If you mean the arrogance, I’m well versed in it. I worked with Raphael’s Seven.” The vampires and angels in service to the archangel were powerful immortals in their own right. Dmitri, the leader of the Seven, was stronger than a large number of angels; he could take and hold a territory if he so chose.
“But,” Fen insisted, lips curved in a shrewd smile, “have you experienced it in a woman? In a lover?”
“Blindness has never been one of my faults.” The bitter irony of his words made him laugh within. After the assault, he hadn’t even had eyes for the days it had taken his fles
h to regenerate. “It’s not yours, either, though it looks to me as if you prefer to give the appearance of it.” He’d seen the way the old man’s gaze had turned dull when Asirani neared.
“Smart, too.” Fen waved him to a chair across from his own. Taking it, Noel braced his forearm on the gleaming cherrywood of the desk and looked out at the vast main area. Christian was deep in conversation with another woman, a curvaceous beauty with long, straight hair to the base of her spine and the most guileless face Noel had ever seen. “Who’s that?” he asked, having guessed what role Fen played in Nimra’s court.
The old man’s expression softened to utter tenderness. “My daughter, Amariyah.” Smiling at her when she turned to wave at him, he sighed. “She was Made at twenty- seven. It does my heart good to know that she’ll live on long after I’m gone.”
Vampirism did turn humans into almost- immortals, but the life was hardly an easy one, especially the first hundred years after the Making, when the vampire was in service to an angel. The century- long Contract was the price the angels demanded for the gift of being able to live long past the span of a mortal life. “How much of her Contract remains?”
“None,” Fen said, to Noel’s surprise.
“Unless you had her before you were born,” Noel said, continuing to watch Amariyah and Christian, “that’s impossible.”
“Even I’m not that efficient.” A phlegmy laugh. “I’ve been in service to Nimra since I was a lad of but twenty. Mariyah was born a year later. Been some sixty- five years that I’ve served my lady— the Contract was written to take that into account.”
Noel had never heard of such a concession. That the angel who ruled New Orleans and its surrounds had done this said a great deal about both Fen’s worth to her, and her own capacity for loyalty. It wasn’t a trait he’d expected to find in an angel known far and wide for the harshness of her punishments. “Your daughter is beautiful,” he said, but his mind was on another woman, one with wings that had lain so warm and heavy against him for a fleeting moment earlier.
Fen sighed. “Yes, too beautiful. And too sweet a soul. I wouldn’t have permitted her to be Made if Nimra hadn’t vowed to care for her.”
Amariyah broke off her conversation at that instant to walk over. “Papa,” she said and, unlike the echoes of another continent that flavored her father’s speech, the bayou ran dark and languid in her voice, “you did not eat your breakfast today. Do you think you can fool your Amariyah?”
“Ach, girl. You’re embarrassing me in front of my new friend.”
Amariyah held out her hand. “Good morning, Noel. You are quite the topic of conversation in this court.”
Shaking that hand, with its skin several shades lighter than her father’s, Noel gave what he hoped was an easy smile. “All good, I’m sure.”
Fen’s daughter shook her head, the dimples that dented her cheeks making her appear even more innocent. “I’m afraid not. Christian is, as my grandmother would’ve said, ‘very put out.’ Excuse me a moment.” Bustling over to the sideboard, she filled a plate before returning. “You will eat, Papa, or I will tell Lady Nimra.”
Fen grumbled but Noel could see he was pleased at the attention. Rising, Noel waved a hand at his seat. “I think your father would prefer your company to mine.”
Amariyah dimpled again. “Thank you, Noel. If you need anything in the court, let me know.” Walking with him a few steps, she smiled again, and this time there was nothing guileless about it. “My father likes to see me as an innocent,” she murmured in a low voice, “and so I am one for him. But I am a woman grown.” With that unsubtle message, she was gone.
Frowning, Noel went to leave the audience chamber, skirting a young maid walking in with a fresh carafe of coffee. Then again… Turning, he walked back to snag a cup off a small side table. “May I beg a cup?” he asked, making sure to keep his voice gentle.
Her cheeks colored a pretty red, but she poured for him with steady hands.
“Thank you.”
Nodding, she dropped her head and headed to the main table, placing the carafe on the surface. No one paid her any mind, and— their potential complicity in the attempted assassination aside— it made Noel wonder just how much the servants heard, how much they remembered.
Nimra stared at Augustus across the length of the small formal library where she handled her day–to–day affairs. “You know I won’t change my mind,” she said, “and still you insist.”
The big man, his skin a gleaming dark mahogany, snapped out wings of a deep russet streaked with white, his arms folded across his massive chest. “You are a woman, Nimra,” he boomed. “It’s unnatural that you should be this alone.”
Other female angels would’ve done something nasty to Augustus by now. Theirs was not a society where men alone held power. The most powerful of the archangels was Lijuan, and she was very much a woman. Or had been. No one knew what she’d become since her “evolution.”
It was Nimra’s cross to bear that Augustus was a childhood friend, less than two decades older than her. Nothing in the scheme of things, given the length of angelic lives. “Friendship,” she said to Augustus, “will only get you so far.”
The idiot male smiled that huge smile that always made her feel as if the sun had come out. “I would treat you as a queen.” Dropping his arms and folding back his wings, he moved across the room. “You know I am no Eitriel.”
Her heart pulsed into a hard knot of pain at the sound of that name. So many years now, and yet the bruise remained. She no longer missed Eitriel, but she missed what he’d stolen from her, hated the scars he’d left behind. “Be that as it may,” she said, stepping nimbly to the side when Augustus would have taken her into his arms, “my mind is made up. I have no wish to tie my life to a man’s again.”
“Then what am I?” came a rough male voice from the doorway. “A meaningless diversion?”
4
Startled, Nimra looked up to meet the frigid blue gaze of a vampire who shouldn’t have been there.
“Who,” Augustus roared at the same time, “is he?!”
“The man Nimra has chosen,” Noel said with what she knew was deliberate disrespect in his tone.
Augustus’s massive hands fisted. “I’m going to break your scrawny neck, bloodsucker.”
“Make sure you rip it off or I’ll regenerate,” Noel drawled back, settling his body into a combative stance.
“Enough.” Nimra had no idea what Noel thought he was doing, but they’d deal with that after she sorted out the problem of Augustus. “Noel is my guest,” she said to the other angel, “and so are you. If you can’t behave like a civilized being, the door is right there.”
Augustus actually growled at her, betraying the years he’d spent as a warrior in Titus’s court, conquering and pillaging. “I waited for you, and you throw me over for a pretty- boy vampire?”
Nimra knew she should have been angered but all she felt was an exasperated affection. “Do you really think I don’t know about the harem of dancing girls you keep in that castle of yours?”
He had the grace to bow his head a fraction. “None of them are you.”
“The past is past,” she whispered, placing a hand on his chest and rising up on tiptoe to press a kiss to his jaw. “Eitriel was a friend to us both, and he betrayed us both. You do not have to pay the penance.”
His arms came around her, solid and strong. “You are not penance, Nimra.”
“But I am not your lodestar, either.” She brushed a hand down the primaries of his right wing. It was a familiar caress, but not an intimate one. “Go home, Augustus. Your women will be pining for you.”
Grumbling, he glared at Noel. “Put a bruise on her heart and I’ll turn your entire body into a bruise.” With that, he was gone.
Noel stared after the angel until he disappeared from sight. “Who is Eitriel?”
Nimra’s gaze glittered with anger when it slammed into his. “That is none of your concern.” The door to the libra
ry banged shut in a display of cold temper. “You are here for one purpose only.”
Very carefully worded, Noel thought, watching as she walked to the sliding doors that led out into the gardens and pushed them open. Anyone listening would come to the obvious conclusion.
“As I said, Noel,” Nimra continued, “take care you do not go too far. I am not a maiden for you to protect.”
Stepping out into the gardens with her, he said nothing until they came to the edge of the stream that ran through her land, the water cool and clear. “No,” he agreed, knowing he’d crossed a line. Yet he couldn’t form an apology— because he wasn’t sorry he’d intervened. “You have an interesting court,” he said instead when he was certain they were alone, the scent of honeysuckle heavy in the air, though he couldn’t see any evidence of the vine.
