Crouching Vampire, Hidden Fang do-7

by Кейти Макалистер

  I collapsed on Kristoff, sobbing into his chest as I clutched his lifeless body, my mind swimming with endless agony that threatened to burst from me in a blinding, searing light.

  “Ah, nothing is sweeter than the sight of a Beloved reunited with her love,” Andreas said, his voice mocking the depth of despair that filled me.

  Rage unlike anything I’d felt before washed over me. I lifted my face from the empty shell that was Kristoff and focused my gaze on his brother. “You think it’s sweet, do you? Let’s see how sweet you think this Beloved is when she’s through roasting you alive, you bastard brother killer!”

  “Pia, stop,” a voice murmured in my ear.

  “Ooh, someone’s in trouble,” Rowan said archly, pushing over the reaper on the floor.

  “You’re second,” I told him, focusing my attention on him until light rained down from above. He yelped and leaped to the side, bouncing on the couch as he patted wildly at the sparkles of light remaining on his clothing.

  “Beloved, you’re pulling out my hair.”

  Alec crossed the room, giving the two men an irritated glance. “Mind the sofa. That’s Italian leather, and it didn’t come cheap.”

  “You’re third,” I growled, slamming down a wall of light between Alec and the doorway through which he was obviously about to go. “Don’t give me that look, Alec. I’m sure you think I’m the worst sort of idiot for falling for your innocence act, but I assure you-”

  “If you’re through with my ear, I wouldn’t mind if you released it. I’ve lost all feeling in it now.”

  “I assure you that I . . . I . . .” I looked down. I had been clutching Kristoff’s head to my bosom as I swore eternal vengeance for his death, but somehow he’d shifted so that the fingers of one hand were gripping his hair, my other hand grasping his ear.

  Eyes brighter than any gem regarded me.

  “Boo?” I asked, my heart doing a backflip or two.

  His face twisted into a momentary grimace as a muffled laugh, followed by, “Did she just call him ‘Boo’?” made its way from the vampires. “Would you mind releasing my ear?”

  I stared in stupefaction at my fingers closed around his ear. It was turning white. “But . . . you’re dead.”

  “Not quite. Nearly, but not quite,” Rowan said, vaulting the recumbent reapers as he strolled over to us. He hesitated a moment. “If I touch you, will you rain light on me again?”

  “Eh?” I said, my brain finally catching up with my heart.

  He gently took me by the arms and pulled me off of Kristoff. “When we found him, the reapers were in the act of hacking off his head. But he’s always been a fast healer.”

  Kristoff sat up, rubbing first his ear, then his throat. I was aghast to see a nasty, jagged-looking welt that wrapped around the front, disappearing into his collar. “It no doubt looked worse than it really was. You could have arrived a bit earlier, however.”

  “Traffic,” Andreas said with a shrug.

  “You’re not . . .” I looked from Kristoff to Rowan, who had released me, and beyond him to where Alec leaned against the wall, an odd expression on his face. Andreas got to his feet and picked his way across the bodies, stopping to peer at his brother’s neck.

  “You’ll do,” he said finally with a nod.

  “You guys didn’t . . .” I looked back at Kristoff. “What the hell?”

  He sighed and opened his arms, grunting when I threw myself into them, clutching him and kissing every part of him my mouth could reach, babbling the whole time about all my confusion and horror and love.

  It took a good ten minutes to work all of that out of my system. Kristoff just held me the whole time, stroking my back and suffering me to examine him to make sure he wasn’t still in some way harmed.

  “They almost cut your head off,” I said, pulling down the back of his collar to look at the vile scar that remained. It was still thick, red, and ugly, but was fading with each passing moment.

  “‘Almost’ being the key word,” he said.

  I spun around, glaring at the people who lay on the floor. The vampires had pulled the two women up onto the couch. “Those . . . scum! Those evil, detestable, repulsive scum!”

  The men twitched violently as I stalked toward them slowly, my hands fisted, pulling down light from the moon, which even now glowed gently above the treetops.

  “I had no idea your Beloved was so bloodthirsty,” Rowan said. “Are her eyes glowing?”

  “Beloved, this is not-” Kristoff started to say.

  “Which one did it?” I interrupted. “Which one held the knife?”

  “It was a sword, actually,” Rowan said, gesturing toward the man nearest me.

  I slammed down a ball of light smack-dab on the man’s groin. He screamed through the duct tape, his body curling into a fetal ball.

  “Ooh.” Rowan winced, neatly sidestepping the twitching body. “He won’t be having children now.”

  “There’s a lot more he’s not going to be having by the time I get through with him,” I said, stepping forward with dire intent.

  Kristoff caught me around the waist and pulled me back. “No, Beloved.”

  “Just let me smite them, Kristoff. They all deserve it! You can’t deny they deserve it,” I said, squirming in his grip.

  “I don’t, but not this way. You are too sensitive. You will hate yourself once you’ve recovered from your scare, and hate me for letting you do this.”

  “One little smiting, that’s all I ask,” I said, struggling. “Just that one, just Sword Boy there.”

  “I think ‘boy’ is going to be a moot term,” Andreas said, watching the reaper as he rolled around the floor.

  “No,” Kristoff said firmly, his frown deepening into a scowl as he suddenly pushed me to arm’s length, his gaze raking me up and down. “What the hell are you wearing, woman?”

  “Pia had a little contretemps with the tree while climbing into the attic,” Alec explained as I hastily tried to cover all my exposed parts.

  “Why did you enter that way?” Rowan asked.

  Alec gave a little shrug. “I had no idea you two had arrived. My first thought was to protect Pia.”

  “Are you going to just stand there letting them ogle you?” Kristoff demanded of me, his eyes dark as the sea in a storm.

  “Nobody’s ogling me,” I said, giving him a look.

  Kristoff glared over my shoulder. I turned to see his brother and cousin both considering me with their heads tipped identically to the side.

  “Nice legs,” Rowan said.

  “And ass,” Andreas added. “Is that something sticking out of the top of her panties?”

  Kristoff growled. I eep ed, clutched at both the tattered remains of my skirt and Alec’s reaper journal, and looked wildly around the room for a blanket.

  Alec sighed and detached himself from the wall. “Upstairs, second room on the right. There should be some women’s things-”

  I was off before he finished.

  The clothing I found in a guest room closet wasn’t in my size, and the only skirt I could fit into was too tight to be comfortable. I raided the room Kristoff had said was Alec’s, finally making my way downstairs in a pair of silk lounging pants that were a bit snug around the hips, and a worn T-shirt that was also a bit tight. Retrieving my purse from where it had fallen before I fell down the stairs, I put the journal in it and took a moment to comb the twigs out of my hair.

  “I have several questions, and I’d like them all answered,” I announced as I finally descended the stairs into the living room. “First of all, where are Magda and Raymond?”

  Kristoff eyed my unorthodox outfit. That was the best you could find?

  Don’t be impertinent.

  “A couple of the reapers were trying to scare them when we arrived. We scared them, instead,” Andreas said with a pointed smile at the woman sitting nearest him.

  Her eyes narrowed with spite.

  “Your friends left. We thought it would be be
st if they were not in the way,” Rowan explained.

  “OK. They must have gone to find the hotel we were going to head to after this. I’ll call later. Next question-what on earth are you two doing here, evidently rescuing Kristoff, when you were utter and complete bastards, betraying him in Vienna?”

  “She likes that word ‘bastard,’ doesn’t she?” Rowan asked Andreas.

  “I suppose it’s understandable, given her point of view,” he answered.

  “Boo?” I asked, pinning Kristoff with a gimlet eye.

  He sighed as the two men snickered, gesturing me to a chair. I sat, but crossed my arms.

  You just had to use that name in front of them, didn’t you? They’ll never let me hear the end of it.

  You’ll survive. Answer my question .

  “They didn’t betray me,” he said, jumping to the side when one of the reapers got his legs around a glass coffee table and sent it tumbling toward Kristoff.

  Andreas and Rowan hauled the reaper up onto the chair opposite me. I singed his toes.

  “Beloved . . .”

  “I’m stopping, I’m stopping. Go on.”

  Kristoff looked helplessly at his brother and the other two vampires. “I could use a little help.”

  “Oh, no,” Alec said, gesturing toward me. “She’s your Beloved. You can explain the pact to her.”

  “Pact? What pact would that be?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at the man who filled my every waking thought.

  Kristoff smiled smugly in my mind.

  And right now those thoughts lie heavily in the “what’s going to happen if you don’t stop stalling and start spilling” arena .

  Kristoff glanced at the reapers, then over to Alec. “Do you mind storing them elsewhere?”

  “Not at all,” Alec answered, making a fancy little bow. “Might I suggest the cellar?”

  It took them a few minutes to haul all the reapers downstairs. Judging by muffled thumps, I believe a couple of them were dropped on the way, but I didn’t feel too bad on their account. They had come close to killing Kristoff, and probably would have harmed Magda and Raymond if the vampires hadn’t stopped them.

  “Proceed,” I said when they had all trooped upstairs to where I sat.

  “It started about fourteen months ago.” Kristoff sat next to me, frowning at the tight T-shirt. “If you recall, I told you that it had become clear someone was passing information to the reapers.”

  “The mole,” I said, nodding, my hand on his leg. Just feeling him so warm and solid next to me made me relax.

  “The council tried for several months to pinpoint the leak, but was unable to. The mole knew they were looking for him, and the flow of information was temporarily halted. We eventually decided to take matters into our own hands. We decided that if one of us was marked as the traitor, it would allow the real one to relax his guard and go back to passing information.”

  “So you set it up to make it look like you were the traitor?” My fingers tightened on his leg. “Why you?”

  Kristoff shrugged, his fingers absently toying with the tendrils of hair that had escaped from my ponytail. “Luck of the draw. It took some time, but we eventually arranged it so that the council, presented with the evidence, had no choice but to imprison me.”

  “But one of the charges had to do with Anniki.” A horrible thought occurred to me.

  “No,” Kristoff said quickly. “We did not kill her. But we incorporated the mystery of her death into our plans, as we did the captive reapers. Alec went to ground, ostensibly a victim of my heinous plan, but actually to mislead the real traitor.”

  “So all that trying to find Alec was an act?” I asked, prepared to be annoyed by his pretense.

  Alec made a face as Kristoff answered. “Not all of it. Alec disappeared as planned, but then he went completely out of contact, which was not what we intended. We really were trying to trace him, just not from the time he left Iceland, which you believed.”

  “It was too dangerous for me to make contact,” Alec explained. “I was being watched, and suspicions were already high as to my true intentions. I knew that sooner or later our paths would cross again.”

  “It was very convincing,” I said, giving Kristoff a little frown.

  He shrugged. “It had to be. Rowan and Andreas had to appear to support the council, although Andreas couldn’t quite bring himself to condemn me as easily as did Rowan.”

  “He was never a good actor,” Rowan said, nodding toward Andreas. “I was much more convincing. I thought you were going to spit at me once or twice.”

  “You’re damned lucky I didn’t,” I told him before turning back to Kristoff. “OK, I got that. You guys set up this whole big thing to flush out the mole. I’m a bit pissed that you didn’t bother to tell me about it, though.”

  Kristoff’s fingers were warm on the back of my neck. “Our plans were set into motion long before I met you, Beloved. I had no idea if you could continue to carry out your role if you knew the truth.”

  Relief filled me. So that was your deep, dark secret.

  My what? He was startled, a wary feeling in his mind.

  The big secret I could feel you keeping from me. The dark place in your mind, the one you always keep me from seeing. I have to admit that I’m relieved that this is what you were keeping from me, and not something a lot more . . . well, scary. I was worried.

  He said nothing for a moment. No doubt he was embarrassed about the fact that I knew he was keeping something from me. It didn’t matter, I told myself. We hadn’t known each other long at all, and although I would have preferred Kristoff feeling as if he could trust me, I understood that he was reticent to share such involved plans until he was more comfortable with our relationship.

  Don’t worry, Boo. I’m not going to yell at you for not trusting me. I understand. I’m just glad that this is now out in the open. “I assume those couple of unnamed friends you kept calling were Andreas and Rowan?”

  Kristoff nodded. Pia-

  Don’t apologize. Or rather, don’t do it now. You can do so later, with some massage oil, perhaps. You like lemon? “I take it that you knew that Alec was pretending to be the Ilargi all along, then?”

  “No.” He glanced over to his friend. “That took me by surprise, as well. I had no idea that Alec had anything to do with the reapers.”

  “I told you I’d find a way to infiltrate them,” Alec told him.

  “I thought you meant to do so by the woman.”

  “What woman?” I asked.

  “A reaper, a woman I’d met a few years ago. She proved difficult,” Alec said, dismissing the subject. “I found another one, a secretary who had just joined and knew little about them. She was most informative.”

  “So you found a way into the reaper headquarters?” Rowan asked, suddenly interested.

  Alec nodded. “I myself couldn’t go inside-there were too many high-ranking reapers there who would have known me for what I am-but I did discover a way we can bypass the security.”

  I looked from him to Kristoff. “I hate to sound like a party pooper, but now that we found you, Alec, we don’t need to break in. It’s not likely your mole is going to be there, after all.”

  “There is still the matter of the director to be dealt with,” Kristoff said, taking my hand.

  I tried to pull it away. His fingers tightened.

  “I am not going to be party to wholesale murder for the sake of . . . well, I don’t even know what that would be, since there is no earthly reason you can have other than revenge for wanting to go after Frederic,” I told him.

  “There are a number of compelling reasons why we should do just that,” he argued.

  “Oh, yeah? Name one that doesn’t involve you guys wanting to get even.”

  Kristoff opened his mouth, looked askance for a moment, then cast a pleading glance at his brother and cousin.

  “Huh? Huh? ” I looked at them as well.

  “Well, there’s . . .” Andreas stopped, hi
s face screwing up as he thought. “There’s . . . er . . .”

  “I thought so.”

  “He poses a threat,” Rowan said suddenly.

  The other two vampires nodded eagerly.

  “A very big threat,” Andreas added.

  “To whom? Other than in general to you vampires, I mean.”

  “To Kristoff,” Rowan said, pointing.

  Kristoff looked as surprised as I felt.

  “He doesn’t even know Kristoff!” I protested. “Well, hardly knows him. He did imprison him, and tried to kill him after he couldn’t make me do the job for him, but that was two months ago, and I’m sure by now he’s forgotten all about Kristoff.”

  “Thank you,” the love of my life said dryly.

  You know what I mean, Boo. Besides, so long as I remember you, you have nothing to complain about, I said, blowing him a mental kiss.

  His fingers tightened around mine.

  “No other suggestions before I rest my case?” I asked the threesome.

  The gentle whoosh of air from the air conditioner was the only sound for a moment.

  “I hate to destroy any illusions you might possess regarding the director, Pia, but I’m afraid there is one very compelling reason for us to confront him and the other reapers.” Alec stood in the doorway, leaning against it with a mildly interested expression, as if he was somewhat bored.

  “What would that be?” I asked.

  He smiled. “You.”

  “Me? I don’t stand in the way of anything Frederic wants.”

  “You are a Zorya and a Beloved. Surely you’ve been in the Brotherhood long enough to know how vehement they are about anything to do with us. In their eyes, you are an abomination, tainted by your relationship to Kristoff, a contradiction to everything sacred. You must, at all costs, be destroyed before you can contaminate anyone else.”

  I stared at him, my jaw slack, for a moment or two. “But . . . the reapers offered me a deal. They’re going to execrate me once I get Ulfur.”

  The look he gave me was pitying. I leaned into Kristoff, needing comfort. “It says much about your purity of character that you believed what the reapers told you, but unfortunately, we know them of old. They will not honor their agreement with you.”