“And you feel he should not have taken her to mate, that he should have made the sacrifice so that Vampires would never learn of the power they could achieve.”
“Exactly.” She shrugged. “But I’m not going to play shoulda woulda coulda with you. Things are what they are, there’s nothing to be done about it.”
“Who can say?” Adam gave her a sly little smile as he leaned in close to her. “Perhaps you would like the past to change more than you are willing to admit.”
Jasmine frowned. The last thing she needed was temptation from a Demon who barely had a clue about the modern world and all the many things a ripple in time could affect. She would readily admit to doing everything in her power to voice her displeasure in Damien’s choice of a bride—everything short of killing her, that is—but she wasn’t so selfish that she couldn’t see the bigger picture. She liked her life just the way it was, and she wasn’t going to risk changing it when she knew things could just as easily be so much worse.
But she had to give him credit for trying ... and for knowing just the right way to tempt a girl. It made for a very worthy opponent, and she found it beyond hot. Then again, he had been made to turn heads. Wearing the delicious and decadent designs of the modern world, he was enough to make even an elitist like her consider playing outside her species. But she wasn’t about to let him know any of that. It was safer to simply team up with him just long enough to kick Ruth’s ass and then they could each go along their merry way.
Of course, that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to have a little fun at his expense in the meantime.
“I think I like things just the way they are,” she said with a dip of one shoulder and a flirtatious swing of her body. “You and I going out to play together. We’ll track the big bad bitch and hand her her ass for dinner. Then I can go back to hunting rogue Vampires, and you ... you can do whatever you put your little mind to.”
“Rogue Vampires,” he echoed, his eyes dropping down over her body in increments ... breasts, waist, hips, thighs, and eventually her calves.
It was well into winter, and as a result she was clothed almost conservatively, if you could call tight low-rise jeans and a navel-baring sweater conservative. But she wished for her favorite shorts just then. Anything to torment the poor bastard. Still, she wouldn’t be worth much if she were only as good as the clothes she wore.
“Funny how that sounds. In my world you were all rogues.”
“Well, it’s a good thing we’re in my world now, isn’t it? Otherwise you’d want to cause me bodily harm, and I like my body just the way it is. Don’t you?” She ran a hand up her hip to her waist, watching his eyes follow the movement as if he were a compass and she were the North Pole.
She watched his generous mouth turn down into a full frown and his eyes shoot up to narrow on hers. “I see women have not changed much at all,” he noted coldly. “You still try to play with men for your own amusement and ends.”
Jasmine snorted out a laugh. “That’s rich, coming from a stereotypical Alpha male. If you can’t beat something up or screw around with it, it barely gets your interest.”
“Why are we having this conversation?” he demanded crossly, turning away from her and marching for the door.
“Because it’s fun?” she posited archly.
“For whom?” he muttered as he took to the hallway in huge, ground-eating strides, forcing Jasmine to double-time her pace if she wanted to continue to snap at his heels like an annoying, yappy little dog.
“You don’t agree that men are essentially base creatures driven by violence and sex?” she asked him.
“Not to the exclusion of all else, no. I most certainly do not agree with that.”
“All right then. Let’s test this theory out a little. Right now we are on our way to do violence, and from what I can see you look like you’re raring to go.”
“So are you,” he pointed out as they hit the stairs. “I have never met such a bloodthirsty woman. You are just as eager to have a piece of this Ruth.”
“True, but that’s because she tried to kill my Prince and held me captive while she prattled on endlessly about what a demented psychopath she is. Not a fun night, I assure you.”
“Held you captive?” Adam enjoyed the idea. “Poor you. How did she manage that? You do not strike me as an easy victim.”
“Screw you!” Jasmine bit out. “Ruth’s a powerful Mind Demon, more powerful mentally than I was at the time. She seized control of my mind, held me paralyzed in my own bedroom, spent the time until dawn raping my brain of information that ...” Jasmine gritted her teeth. “Once the sun rose and she knew I couldn’t give chase, she left me in order to wreak havoc, using that information.”
“How unfortunate for you.” He didn’t sound at all sympathetic. Clearly, he didn’t appreciate the magnitude of what had happened next. “I, however, have been doing some thinking. Seeing that girl, my niece, the way she looked at Jacob like she had never seen him before ... something tells me Nicodemous and Ruth killed him in that cavern. How the girl survived I cannot say, but Ruth was out to murder my family and would have succeeded if not for the child.”
“Leah. Your niece has a name. It’s Leah.”
That brought him up short in the middle of the stairs and he turned to look at her.
“Leah,” he echoed. “He named her after our grandmother on our father’s side.”
“Someone you admired?” she asked.
“Greatly so. She was a fine lady. A warrior. An artisan. Jacob has high aspirations for his daughter if he named her thus.”
“Well, she is a child of prophecy, after all. And she has accomplished much even for one so young. The girl who brought you here—she waited all those years until she was a teen before acting. It means she gave it a lot of thought. It also means she was willing to throw away life as she knew it in order to change what had to have been a life-altering event. Not just for her, but for everyone here. Jacob means a lot to a great many people. As does Bella. I don’t see any of them coping easily with their deaths if it went down that way.”
Adam thought for a long moment, the expression on his face troubled.
“You are right,” he said at last. “I must reconcile myself to things as they are. I have told myself this already, but I continue to resist.”
“That is really quite normal,” she assured him. “Even though going to ground is a Vampire’s way of moving through time, and our whole purpose in doing so is to wake in a different era, it is perhaps instinct to resist and rebel against all the changes we find upon awaking at first. Even though there is nothing to be done about it. And especially when we realize those we hold attachments to did not survive.”
He made a scoffing sound. “Vampires have attachments?”
Jasmine could have gotten angry at the thoughtless prejudice in his remark, but she couldn’t fault him for it. The truth was, Vampires had few attachments of any significant or emotional depth.
“There are those we grow close to over time. Familiar with. Companions who mean more to us than others. So yes, I would call that attachments. Maybe it is not the grand friendship and love you other races sputter on about, but it is our way and it is how we form affections. Just because it is different doesn’t make it any less valid.”
She was not speaking with offense or even with any great passion, but instead with intelligent logic—and yet her words had the power to touch Adam. For the first time as he looked at her he saw her to be an incredibly thoughtful and intellectual person, rather than just a flat stereotype of a race he had learned to hate or a creature of remarkable beauty and sensuality. The understanding made her even more irresistible to him; it somehow made her tightly clothed curves and pretty pale skin all the more magnetic.
“And who means more to you than others?” he found himself asking. There was a little bite of insecurity in the back of his brain and he bristled against it. What did it matter to him who was special in her life? She had even just told him t
hat the Vampire definition of special was nothing compared to what a Demon might consider it to be. How much depth could she really feel?
How much depth could there ever be?
Somehow Adam was not comforted by his thoughts.
“Damien,” she said without hesitation. “We have walked this world together for quite some time. He is my closest friend.” She frowned a little. “Or he was. Until he bonded with a little Lycanthrope twit. He’s in love.” The word “love” couldn’t have been any more snide.
“I thought Vampires did not feel love. Or any great passion.”
“Apparently there is some great cosmic exception. We can fall in love ... with other Nightwalkers. Non-Vampires. Then there’s this whole ceremony ...” She waved it all off with the flip of an agitated hand. “Never mind. It is all a waste of time and energy, if you ask me.”
“Is it?” he asked her. “I had somehow thought a creature as passionate at heart as you seem to be would crave the deeper passions of love. Or even of infatuation.”
“I know Vampires who have been infatuated before. Some of us are at least capable of that. I watch how ridiculously they chase the object of their infatuation. But it always burns out, and always so quickly.”
“Are you telling me,” Adam asked her softly as he stepped up and closed the distance between them, “that you have never even been infatuated? Never been roused enough by another to find yourself smitten?”
She had come close once.
Only once.
“Never,” she lied to him, lifting her chin and meeting his eyes directly. “Thankfully. Nothing turns a person into an idiot faster than some mindless fascination with another. No one should ever put so much energy into someone else. Others cannot be trusted to do anything but disappoint you.”
“As Damien has disappointed you?”
She took a breath to answer him quickly, but then held it as she thought about her answer more carefully. He noticed she did that when she was emotionally engaged. She breathed. Even though she didn’t need to. He suspected she felt far more than she owned up to. Despite all her callous exterior, Jasmine the Vampire was sensitive at heart. All of these barbs, he saw, were in defense of that heart.
“I am not half as disappointed by him as I was by you,” she said quietly. Then she seemed just as surprised she had said it as he was, and looked around quickly to see if anyone had heard her.
She pushed past Adam and hurried into the Great Hall, grateful it was empty, only the ever-present fire bearing witness to her ridiculous confession.
Stupid, stupid thing to say! she thought heatedly.
“What does that mean?” he asked a little numbly, more to himself than her because she wasn’t likely to have heard him. But he quickly hurried after her, grabbed her by the arm, and forced her to turn and face him. He got a savage little hiss in his face and a flash of fangs for his trouble. He let go of her, holding up his hand in a conciliatory gesture. He had no right to manhandle her, and she didn’t like it.
At least not when it came to conversation.
“What does that mean?” he asked her more strongly. “What have I done to disappoint you?”
“Never mind. It wasn’t what I meant to say. And regardless, we have other things to do at the moment.”
But Adam had never been known for his ability to let things go.
“I will not accept this. You should tell me how I have let you down. I do not see how. I hardly know you!”
“You see, this is why I said to forget about it! I should have known you would say something like that! Hardly know me? You think because I’m a Vampire I let just anyone grope at me and—and stick their tongue in my mouth? Hardly know me? I’d say we’re pretty damn intimate acquaintances, Adam! But clearly you don’t see me as anything more than some Vampire piece of trash you can poke your stick at a few times, then crumple up and throw away. You sit there with your holier-than-thou bullshit attitude about what lowlifes my kind are, but I’m not the one using a random naked girl for my jollies and then turning my back with no thought to the consequences!”
“Consequences? Like what? Are you trying to say I hurt your shallow little Vampire feelings?” he railed back at her, not liking the discomfort her words made him feel.
“I’m saying, you selfish little prick, that you did something to me! I don’t know what it was, but you did something! Then you left me struggling for four hundred years trying to figure out why two brief encounters with an enemy sucked the color out of my world! I may have succumbed to melancholy all on my own the first time, but the second time, when only six months had gone by and all I could do was search the empty earth for the things you made me feel ...”
Jasmine turned her back on him, her eyes burning with shocking tears. She needed to shut up! Why was she telling him all of this? It wasn’t even true! And even if it was true ...
It was true. It had been so very true. She had gone to ground again after a mere six months, hoping that sleep buried under the earth would make her cravings for ridiculous nothings go away.
“But we could never—”
“I know that! And so did you, but it didn’t stop you from touching me, Enforcer!”
She growled and swung away from him, confused by her own behavior and the tumult of strange feelings inside herself. This didn’t make any sense! Things were coming out of her mouth that she didn’t understand. She was feeling things she didn’t understand.
Adam did back off after that. She was right. It had never occurred to him how his actions might affect her. He had behaved rather selfishly in all of their encounters, writing off any impact on her because she was a Vampire, an unfeeling, coldhearted thing that didn’t deserve his respectful consideration. He’d only considered the ramifications of his actions as far as it concerned himself and his laws and the way others of his kind would look on him because of them.
It was beneath him. She had never once acted the enemy toward him, never once given him cause to be so dismissive. He had neglected to give her even the smallest common courtesy, not to mention being considerate of her feelings, however shallow or deep they might run. And he couldn’t even excuse himself by saying that after all he had been through, he couldn’t be expected to be on his best behavior. That excuse would do nothing to explain the fact he had been behaving rather selfishly since the moment he had laid eyes on her, taking any manner of liberties with her as it struck his fancy. Even an enemy deserved a certain level of respect. Human men of his time had often behaved like savages, taking from noncombatant women dignities that should never be a part of the battlefield. It had disgusted him.
He should be equally disgusted with himself.
“Wait.”
He didn’t touch her, didn’t force her to his will. He wanted to do so, and on some level he understood that she liked his dominance and naturally aggressive nature, but physicality was one thing and personality something else ... and respect something else entirely. He had shown her none of the latter and wished to correct that.
“Please, wait,” he edited himself.
Perhaps the “please” took her by surprise. She certainly looked surprised when she turned around to look at him. Her reaction only served to make him feel even lower.
“I feel I must ... apologize.” It came hard to say it. He wasn’t used to second-guessing his actions. Even less used to admitting his faults to others. “It was never my intention to cause you pain. Whether you feel strongly or very little, that does not excuse thoughtless behavior.”
Jasmine hardly understood her own feelings, never mind how they pertained to him. She barely comprehended her own anger with him. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t appreciate what it took for him to take a hard look at himself and then admit any flaws he found to her. She might be something of a coldhearted, jaded bitch, but she could still appreciate a generous gesture when she saw one. Especially when she wasn’t expecting it. Especially when she usually behaved in ways that made her less than deserving of
it.
She sighed.
“I don’t deserve much of an apology,” she admitted in return. “I have taunted you quite a bit.” She shrugged, brushing the entire matter off with the turn of her body. “Let’s focus on Ruth. I think we both will feel very much better when we get her in our sights.”
And so the matter was dropped ... for the moment. They were both quite happy and eager to turn their focus toward an enemy that well deserved their enmity. Both of their lives had been bent and twisted in some way because of the Demon traitor. It was well past time she paid for her crimes.
Chapter 8
Windsong was content to spend her long lifetime going no farther than her own little village. She was even happier confining herself to the edges of her property, the borders of her herb garden, the walls of her simple but comfortable cabin home. She had, unlike the majority of her people, done her share of traveling in her life. She had spent time, however short, in almost every other Nightwalker court, lending them wisdom and guidance where she could, or her significant healing abilities. She counted the current leaders of the other Nightwalkers as some of her closest friends. Damien. Siena. In these past years, Noah. She even looked forward to making friends with the Shadowdweller Chancellors. She had met Tristan and Malaya more than once as the Nightwalkers strived to maintain their current peace with regular meetings and communications.
The Mistrals, Windsong’s people, did not have a central body of government. There had never really been a need for it. There were one or two village Elders who spoke for an individual village, and sometimes those Elders collaborated on matters of import to all the Mistrals. But that was a rare occurrence. A rare necessity. So when offers to exchange ambassadors between Nightwalker courts had begun, it only made sense that the most experienced and most centrally important village Elders take the foreign ambassadors into their homes.
This was how Windsong had ended up with not only her usual student, Lyric, under her care and roof, but a peculiar little Vampire named Izri. Of all the Nightwalkers, the Vampires were most resistant to the spell of Mistral voices and singing, provided they were old enough and mentally strong enough. Izri was about three centuries old, not very old by Vampire standards and certainly not very old compared to Windsong and the power of her voice. But Windsong had weeded the spell out of her voice, an act that required constant concentration and had slowed her speech down considerably over the past eighteen months, and Izri had focused her impressive mental strength, so they had managed to find a way of living together in an almost musical fashion.
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