Chase the Dark (Steel & Stone Book 1)

by Annette Marie

  The young man with wandering hands casually put himself out of easy reach, propping an elbow on the counter. If sex appeal were an artist, he was its masterpiece. Golden brown skin sheathed lean muscle and flowed over the sharp planes of his cheekbones. His hair was an impossible platinum blond much lighter than his skin, his eyebrows dark, and his eyelashes thicker than any man should have. They framed eyes of an exotic amber shade like a dark patina brushed over ancient gold.

  Piper gave him her most disgusted glare. “Lyre, can’t you ever keep your hands to yourself?”

  “No,” he replied in his deliciously deep voice. There was no apology in his face, only grinning amusement at her discomfort. “You’re just so easy.” His eyelids lowered. “So am I.”

  She straightened from her aggressive stance and gave him an insulting once-over, taking in his impossible style of metrosexual crossed with a hint of Goth—he pulled it off, and did it well. The wide leather cuffs with metal studs shouldn’t have looked good next to his sleek gray shirt with its sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The chain running from hip to pocket really didn’t match his designer jeans, but it did. Damn, the guy knew what he was doing. Clean, safe, and charming but with that oh-so-sexy hint of bad boy—exactly the kind of guy who would appeal to almost any girl. And that body packaged with that face? Very few women said no to Lyre.

  Surprisingly, he didn’t seem offended she was one of those few. Then again, he never missed a chance to flaunt his availability.

  “Would you mind finding someone else to harass?” she growled. “I’m not in the mood right now.”

  His mouth quirked up. “I’m always in the mood.”

  Before she could come up with a retort, the second half of the dream team drifted out of the pantry, a box of crackers in his hand. Piper’s back stiffened.

  Ash barely spared her a glance as he crossed the kitchen to the fridge. Since he wasn’t aiming to terrify two bloodthirsty daemons, the aura of intimidation he carried was muted but still undeniable. Unlike Lyre, he didn’t have that cultivated appeal of “I’m a little bad but you can trust me.” Ash was all bad. Dressed in black from head to toe, some of it leather. His hair was even more impossible than Lyre’s—a wine-red so dark it was almost black. It was long enough to hang in his eyes and the left side was braided alongside his head with a blood-red strip of silk woven in. The loose end hung to his shoulder, the only color in his whole ensemble. Even his eyes were a cool, storm cloud gray.

  She exhaled with a little too much force. “Ash,” she greeted him. She’d been aiming for polite but it came out flat and angry.

  His slow, sharp gaze turned. She froze, hardly daring to breathe, as he seemed to look right into her, taking her apart piece by piece as though he knew her every secret. She shivered, feeling more violated by his look than Lyre’s touch.

  Then he popped a cracker in his mouth and the dangerous moment shattered. She sucked in a breath as he nodded an oh-so-casual return greeting as if he hadn’t butted into her business and made her look like an incompetent idiot less than an hour before.

  Lyre’s arm slid around her waist as he took advantage of her distraction. His fingers trailed suggestively up her side.

  “Would you get off?” She twisted away, glaring as he laughed and leaned against the counter again. “I just got in serious trouble and I’d like an excuse to punch something soft and bruisable.”

  His eyebrows rose. “The frog thing didn’t go down well with the Head, did it?”

  Her shoulders slumped. “You know?”

  “Everyone knows.” He shrugged. “It’s not that big a deal. Ether is an emotional dipshit. Powerful, but a dipshit.”

  “My father thinks it’s a big deal.” She scrunched her face and tried not to whine. “Why did Ether even have a pet frog?”

  “He’s pretty amphibious himself, you know. He’ll get over it. That frog was damn annoying.” He slid a little closer. “But if you need comforting, let me know.”

  She slapped his hand away before it could reach her. “Quit screwing around, Lyre. I’m in serious trouble, don’t you get it?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to screw around yet,” he complained. “What’s the big deal about a frog?”

  She shot a cold look at Ash in answer. Still munching crackers, he opened the fridge to ponder its contents. She scowled at his back, then ducked past Lyre into the pantry. Grabbing a chocolate bar from the massive stack on the top shelf, she returned to the island.

  “So?” Lyre pressed. “What’s the big deal?”

  “It’s just such a bad time,” she mumbled as she tore open the wrapper. “It would be seriously bad for the Consuls to look powerless today.” She took a huge bite, almost moaning as the chocolate melted on her tongue.

  Lyre watched her eat the chocolate bar with a little more intensity than was normal. “And what’s special about today?”

  Ash reappeared from the fridge with a can of cream soda in hand. It wasn’t fair. Even with a pink soda can and crackers, he was still frightening.

  “So it’s tonight then?” he asked. “They’re moving it out of the Consulate before morning?”

  Her head jerked up in surprise. He met her stare, expressionless.

  “Move what?” Lyre asked blankly.

  She fought not to shrink under Ash’s gaze. How did he know? Sure, the guy had a reputation for being in on just about every secret out there, but only a bare handful of people knew the classified object, the very one being discussed in the confidential meeting that night, was hidden in the Consulate itself. The ambassadors who would be arriving in a couple hours didn’t even know the object of contention was in the country, let alone in the manor.

  She almost said she wasn’t at liberty to discuss it. “I don’t know,” she answered instead, following a vague instinct that he would force it out of her if he knew she knew.

  His eyes narrowed for an instant. He suspected she was lying but didn’t say anything. Just ate another cracker.

  “I . . . have a lesson to go to.” As she walked out of the room, she glanced back. Ash stood at the counter, staring at nothing. Swallowing hard, she wondered what other secrets he had somehow unearthed.

  Because she had a few she didn’t want anyone to know.

  CHAPTER 2

  PIPER slowly leaned back into the stretch. Tired muscles complained as her thighs went taut. She lay on her back on the mats, legs bent at the knee and feet under her butt.

  “And then,” she huffed, “he threatened to expel me from my apprenticeship.”

  Uncle Calder leaned back into the same stretch beside her. His eyebrows climbed halfway up his shaved head. It glistened with moisture from their sparring session. “Do you think that was an unfair threat?”

  “Yes.”

  He lifted his eyebrows impossibly higher. She scowled. Her father and uncle might be identical twins, but they were easy to tell apart: Quinn always looked cross while Calder looked perpetually amused.

  At the moment, he looked uncharacteristically somber. “You’re working with a serious disadvantage that other Consuls don’t have. That’s all the more reason you need to be more careful about getting into physical altercations with daemons. Today, you crossed the line to physical.”

  Piper sat up with a growl. “Ether was charging Ozar! It was going to get physical anyway. I was trying to keep Ozar from getting killed.”

  “And who do you think stood more of a chance against Ether? A mature daemon with seasoned defensive skills or an Apprentice Consul without a stitch of magic?”

  She snapped her mouth shut, seething at the painful truth.

  “Of course your father and I are concerned. I don’t think it’s unfair to remove you from your Apprenticeship if your life is in danger.” His look was sympathetic. “We know how much it means to you, Piper. We won’t make that decision lightly.”

  Flexing her jaw, she began another stretch. Because it took magic to counter magic, all Consuls had to be haemons. The word was slang-t
urned-official-term, short for half-human, half-daemon: haemon. Although they looked entirely human, haemons inherited magic from their daemon parent, giving them a powerful edge. But though she was a haemon, she had no magic.

  She leaned into her stretch, glaring at the mats. “I barely got a scratch,” she mumbled. “I could have handled it even if Ash hadn’t shown up.”

  Calder gave her a long look. She pretended not to notice.

  “Are you sure you can’t talk Father into letting me attend the meeting?” she asked. The ambassadors would be arriving in an hour. It was her last chance to get in on the biggest political event of the decade.

  “I don’t plan to try.” Calder angled his legs into a split. “It’s no place for an Apprentice. You’re lucky you even know about it.”

  She scowled and almost told him that Ash—impossibly—knew as well but she didn’t want to divert the topic. “You don’t think I can keep a secret? I haven’t let slip a single detail. You two could at least—”

  “Drop it, Piper. Not happening.”

  Exhaling forcefully, she started stretching her arms. It wasn’t fair. The biggest deal of the year, happening right in her Consulate, and she didn’t get to attend. Everyone right up to the damn President wanted in on the meeting, which is why only a select handful of special ambassadors knew when and where it was taking place. A fake location had been leaked two days ago to send everyone else running in the wrong direction.

  If her father hadn’t decided to be paranoid, she might have gotten to see it when they moved it out of the Consulate.

  They finished their stretches in silence. Piper stared gloomily at the wall of weapons across from her, everything from Japanese swords to throwing knives to guns. She was proficient with them all. She didn’t need a weapon to put a full-grown man on the ground. If combat ability were the most important part of being a Consul, she’d have her Apprenticeship in the bag. If knowledge and experience were key, she’d be in clear. All that diplomacy and negotiation and de-escalation might trip her up now and then, but she was getting the hang of that too—sort of.

  However, there was a skill she was missing, one she could never learn, that made her future as a Consul unstable at best. Without magic, her ability to defend herself was severely limited—not that she planned to give up. A full day of regular school plus four hours of lessons every evening was a small price to pay for a career that would never, ever get boring.

  After a quick shower, she headed for her father’s office for a second time. Maybe if she casually positioned herself nearby, Quinn would spontaneously change his mind and invite her to the meeting.

  The office door opened as she was coming up the hall. Quinn stepped out, a briefcase under one arm and a file folder between his teeth. He locked the office door and waved her over. Her nerves twanged with anticipation.

  He took the folder out of his mouth and tucked it under his arm. “I was about to look for you.”

  Her heart leaped with excitement. She tried to look mildly intrigued. “Oh?”

  “Nearly all our guests have departed for the night. Danica was scheduled as the on-duty Consul tonight but she’s ill. That leaves you and two daemons. I don’t want them wandering around while the meeting is ongoing so I sent them upstairs for the night.”

  She tensed. “Upstairs? As in the Consul floor? But they—”

  “Just for one night, Piperel. It’s only the two of them. I want you to keep them upstairs and out of the way—no exceptions, you included. No one goes downstairs under any circumstances. They are your responsibility to supervise. Understood?”

  Her hopes shriveled to nothing. Fantastic. Babysitting duty.

  “While I’m in the meeting, I’ll leave command of the Consulate to you.”

  Under normal circumstances, being put in temporary command would have been the perfect opportunity to prove her skills. Today, she’d rather be in on the top secret, dangerously controversial meeting.

  Quinn started to step away and paused. Dipping a hand into his pocket, he pulled out a small black cube. “Would you mind holding onto this for me? I forgot to put it in my room earlier.”

  He dropped the cube into her palm; it was a tiny velvet ring box. She stared at it curiously. Since he was still watching, she tried to force it into the pocket of her jeans but they were too tight. With a shrug and a smile, she stuck it down the front of her shirt and wedged it between her breasts. Quinn looked vaguely appalled.

  “I’ll see you in a few hours. Remember—keep your wards upstairs until I say otherwise.”

  She nodded and he walked away, leaving her alone in the hallway. With no witnesses, she let a scowl take over her face. Top-secret meeting? Nope, she got to babysit instead.

  . . .

  Piper turned the gemstone over in her hands, watching the dim light from her bedside lamp gather inside its bluish silver depths. It was the size of the end of her thumb and heavier than it looked. Other than that, it wasn’t anything special—merely a pretty stone.

  Curiosity nagged at her. Her dad wasn’t a trinkets person. Why would he care about a gemstone? She bit her bottom lip. Had it belonged to her mother? She stoked her fingers across the smooth surface. Her parents had split up when she was eight. Piper remembered her mother departing in a storm of tears and screamed insults. Her father had slammed the door behind his wife, turned to Piper, who was hiding around the corner, and said, “That was goodbye.” Piper had never seen her mother again. One year later, her father had brought home the news that her mother had died in a car accident. He told her this the day after the funeral and cremation. Piper had never gotten to say a final goodbye.

  Black resentment spread through her but she stuffed it down. Unclenching her hand with effort, she stuck the gem back into the ring box and dropped it on her dresser beside her alarm clock. Ugh, one in the morning. Good thing she didn’t have school tomorrow. Stepping backward until her legs bumped her bed, she let herself fall over the covers and yawned until her jaw popped.

  The evening had passed without incident. The meeting had gone on for hours and finished twenty minutes ago when the ambassadors left. She hadn’t seen them but she’d heard assorted voices as the group left the building. She might have indulged in self-pity over missing all the fun but she was too worried about her nearby roommates. Of all the guests to stay behind . . . She would’ve preferred Ether and Gigantor-what’s-his-name, but both of them had taken off after the confrontation downstairs. Instead she got stuck with the dream team: Lyre and Ash.

  They’d behaved perfectly so far. She probably didn’t need to lose sleep over them. Lyre was annoying as always but she could handle him. Mostly.

  Then again, she didn’t really know him. He spent a night or two at the Consulate every month or so, but she’d hardly spent enough time with him to judge his integrity and trustworthiness. He only stopped in for their free room and board while travelling from whatever point A to point B he fancied that month. Unlike a lot of their other visitors, he never needed the Consulate’s secondary services as a safe house—a place protected against any outside threat. Whatever he did with his time, at least he stayed out of trouble—probably. Their guests didn’t always admit their real reasons for “visiting.”

  Ash, on the other hand, was the kind of trouble others came to the Consulate to escape. She knew even less about him than Lyre. She’d only met him a few times and only once when he was travelling without Lyre. Every time he did stop in, she made sure to avoid him. Unlike Lyre, Ash had a reputation—the kind that stopped a raging fight mid-strike by walking into the room. He was real trouble, not like the silly flirting Lyre indulged in. Lyre couldn’t help himself. After all, that’s just what incubi were like.

  The Consulate served a lot of purposes, but everything they did revolved around daemons. Not demons. Daemons. Big difference.

  There were three “worlds” for lack of a better term: Earth, where humans lived, the Underworld, and the Overworld. Daemons came from the latter two and Ea
rth was stuck inter-dimensionally between them.

  The Underworld wasn’t Hell any more than the Overworld was Heaven. They were simply opposites. Lyre and Ash were Underworld daemons, but they weren’t evil demons come to steal human souls—even if Ash’s morality was dubious at best. They were merely nocturnal, liked black, and could be nasty if you got on their bad side. Overworld daemons liked white and gold, harps, and sunlight and could be equally nasty if you got on their bad side. There were Overworlders as scary as Ash—or even scarier.

  In fact, Piper was of the opinion that Overworlders only liked white and harps because generations of angel mythology had gone to their heads.

  Underworlders had the bad reputations, a lot of it unearned. Incubi were pretty harmless most of the time; they got a high and an energy boost off sex. They did siphon energy off their partners, but they didn’t hurt the humans they slept with. In fact, incubi were so damn good in bed they were practically addictive.

  Of course, no daemon was safe. They were all dangerous in their own way, even the incubi. Some variations, castes as they called them, were worse than others—like Ash. He was a draconian: the daemon equivalent of a VP in a billion-dollar company. He had the power to do anything he wanted and almost everyone was too afraid to argue—hence his bad reputation. That he and Lyre were buddies was kind of strange. Most daemons were only too happy to get out of Ash’s way, as Ether and Gigantor had demonstrated. Piper was smart enough to follow suit.

  She frowned at the ceiling. The quiet noise of the TV was gone. Had they finally gone to bed? As acting Consul for the night, she couldn’t sleep until she was certain they’d settled in. Shoving herself up and swallowing another yawn, she turned toward the dresser and froze.

  For a second, she thought there was a cat crouched on her dresser, the ring box between its front paws. Then small wings unfurled and a long neck stretched out. The creature cocked its head, large golden eyes blinking slowly.