The guys had settled around the tiny table, Vayl and Aaron on one side opposite Raoul and Cole. They all looked pretty wasted. But I could tell Vayl had more to lay on them. He motioned for me to join them, so I pulled the desk chair over and sat at the end of the table. Then he said, “I have a bad feeling. It is near to making me ill. Hanzi—or rather the man he is today—is in terrible trouble. The longer I think on it, the more certain I am that Roldan will have cornered him just as he did Aaron here. We cannot wait for him to make his move. We must find him first.”
Cole, Raoul, and I traded helpless looks. They left it for me to say, “But, Vayl. You’ve been searching for him for… ever. What makes you think we’ll have any better luck now?”
Vayl leaned his head toward Aaron. “My younger boy is with me now. I believe it is inevitable that I will be rejoined with the elder. But fate seems determined to reunite us in violence. If there is any way we can stop that from happening, we must try.”
“What do you suggest?” asked Raoul. “And don’t look at me. This is one area where I absolutely can’t step in for you.”
“Cassandra,” said Cole.
“She has read me before, and failed,” Vayl said.
“Yeah. But you said yourself times have changed. You have to bring her here. The sooner the better, I think. Let her touch you and Aaron. I’m betting she’ll have a mega-vision that’ll head you straight to Hanzi.”
Vayl turned to me, his eyebrows raised a notch. “She’s coming this way anyhow. Family visit before Dave’s leave ends,” I explained.
“Call her,” he said. “Tell her I will charter her and David a plane if they will agree to come tomorrow.”
And just like that I knew my crew was going to be whole again by the time the sun set on the following day.
Raoul had agreed to take the first watch over Aaron, who protested that it was ridiculous to imprison him until we reminded him that he was, according to his own law, an attempted murderer. At which point he quietly followed my Spirit Guide to the guest bedroom, his head clearly so full of new thoughts to ponder that he didn’t even protest the company of Jack, who still felt like being social after his last trip to the backyard. Cole, who was just as exhausted as Vayl’s attempted assassin, took the green room, which also contained a guest bed and bath in addition to an indoor sauna that made our newest Trust member fall to his knees and pretend to kiss Vayl dramatically on his nonexistent ring.
“I will be your vassal forevermore, me lord,” he said in a horrible Cockney accent, bucking his front teeth so far over his bottom lip as he talked that it completely disappeared. He rolled onto his back. “Do you want to rub my tummy to make it official?”
“Would you get up?”
“Okay, but I’m warning you, I may have slightly obscene thoughts about you while I’m sitting in your sauna. I’ll try not to, but it’s probably inevitable, I’m just that grateful.”
I grabbed him by the cheeks, reminding myself forcefully not to pinch as I pulled him forward and kissed his scar-free forehead. “Just get some sleep, you doof. We’re going to need you fresh tomorrow.”
He brought his hands up to wrap around my wrists so he could pull my hands down and kiss the back of each one. His eyes held depths I never would’ve imagined the day we first met in a ladies’ bathroom in the house of a terrorist sympathizer. “Thank you,” he said. “For everything.” A light seemed to go on from his heart, and I had no doubt whom he was talking about when he said, “You’ll take good care of her for me?”
“Of course.”
He nodded and dropped my hands. “Then I’ll be in your debt forever. Anything you want, anytime, you just have to ask. Except for right now, when I suggest you run, don’t walk, out the door, because I’m stripping down for my first of many sweats in that sauna in five, four, three, two—”
Vayl slammed the door on Cole’s laughter and together we closed ourselves into the room we’d shared since we’d gotten back from Marrakech.
It reminded me of its owner. Large, masculine, with a preference for life’s luxuries. The walls, papered in ivory with a hunter green stripe, each held a single memento from his past that, I hoped, someday he’d feel comfortable explaining. On one hung a glass case that displayed a British heavy cavalry saber that I dated to around 1800. On another hung a framed program and two tickets to Don Giovanni. The third wall held a black-and-white photograph of two men, one of whom was Vayl, standing arm in arm in front of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow. The fourth I had demanded an explanation for, because preserved behind a long glass frame was a beautifully tailored wedding dress that had gone yellow with age. The moment I’d seen it, the fact that I carried my dead fiancé’s engagement ring around in my pocket didn’t matter a damn. Vayl was gonna fork over a reasonable explanation or I was out the door.
He’d touched a finger to the frame with a tenderness that nearly broke my heart. Then he’d said, “Helena wore it when she married John Litton.” And I’d wrapped my arms around his waist. I didn’t care how pretty that dress was, if I’d had a long-dead adopted daughter, anything that reminded me of her would’ve had to be buried in a trunk and stored in the attic. But Vayl had preserved this piece of her happiness so he could always remember those few years when they were a family.
I felt her now, like an old friend at my shoulder, as I walked to the dresser and looked down at the items I’d arranged there. In a strange way she was responsible for their presence. If Vayl hadn’t discovered her back in 1770—an eleven-year-old orphan cowering in a deserted mansion about to be attacked by Roldan—that same Were would never have tried to give him permanent amnesia. Because Roldan had become obsessed with her, and the fact that Vayl had saved her from him made them bitter enemies. And if they hadn’t been enemies, we might never have discovered that Roldan’s pack was guarding the Rocenz, which sat on the dresser, a silver hammer magically glued to a chisel, looking like nothing more than an extrafancy paperweight.
Next to it lay the map we’d stolen, which had led us to its hiding spot in Marrakech. We’d kept the dusty old leather because on it was written a clue related to separating the hammer from the chisel. Naturally it wasn’t in English, but the translation read, “Who holds the hammer still must find the keys to the triple-locked door.”
I picked up the map and curled up on the couch while I watched Vayl prepare his room for the coming day. He pressed a button beside the balcony doors that activated light blockers within the window glass, turning them pitch-black. But Bergman, whose middle name was probably Redundancy Plan, had also installed a massive canopy above Vayl’s bed that was made out of the same black material as the traveling tent that he slept in when we went out of town. It could descend from the ceiling and spread over the intricately turned wooden frame that towered feet above the gold silk bedspread. During the night Vayl kept the canopy raised almost to the top of the frame so it looked like a regular bed. Now he flipped a switch on the wall and the curtain lowered to the floor.
I hadn’t been able to bring myself to crawl under that enclosure with him yet. For a kinda-claustrophobic like me it all seemed a little too cave-like. So when I finally decided to hit the sack I’d scooch the curtain toward him until I literally tucked him in, flip the covers back, and settle in. Kinda weird, I know, but so far it had worked okay. And I loved waking up beside an emerald-eyed vampire who couldn’t wait to see what I’d decided to wear to bed that morning.
Vayl sat down beside me to shuck off his shoes. “Have your researchers had any luck deciphering the clues?” he asked as he nodded to the map in my hand.
“Nothing new,” I told him. “You know, when Cassandra called and said she’d found a reference to the triple-locked door I thought my hair was actually standing on end. But it’s been a whole week and I still can’t figure out what it means.”
“Well, at least you know that the triple-locked door is, literally, the Rocenz. That is progress,” Vayl said comfortingly. He balled up his socks and threw
them in the corner right next to a rattan hamper. Sometimes he was such a guy.
I hid a smile and said, “Yeah, Bergman should probably get a medal for discovering that little nugget in the archives. But it’s what Cassandra dug up, you know? What am I supposed to make of the phrase ‘Cryrise cries bane’? Okay, I know Cryrise was a dragon. And the hammer was forged from his leg bone. But I’ve been running that info around in my head every waking moment and the only conclusion I come to is that Cryrise is a pussy.”
Vayl laughed.
“I’m not kidding!” I insisted. “What kind of respectable dragon goes and gets himself killed by a demon in the first place?”
“Perhaps it was not that simple,” Vayl suggested as he undid his shirt, slow, the way he knew I liked it.
“Jasmine?” he murmured as he leaned forward to slip his shirt off, his shoulder muscles and biceps bunching and releasing with fascinating results.
“Uh?”
“Are you panting?”
I licked my lips. Realized my breath had started coming a lot quicker. I put my hand to his chest, sliding my fingers into the thick curls that covered it as I threw my leg over his hips and sat facing him. “I like this couch,” I told him.
“You do?” His fingers, free of the responsibility of his own buttons, had begun toying with mine.
“Yeah.” I brushed my cheek against his as I leaned forward to nibble on his earlobe and say, “It’s got great handgrips.” I reached past his arms and buried my fingers in the soft leather cushions of the back.
And then neither of us talked anymore for a long, long time.
CHAPTER NINE
Wednesday, June 13, 8:00 p.m.
I woke up beside Vayl in his huge, comfy bed the night after Aaron’s attempted assassination, amazed I’d slept the day through as I picked up the curtain to wish him a good evening.
“What’s up?” I asked. “You look like somebody just called off your birthday.”
“The Rogue has left our territory,” he said. “Now we have no evidence to plant on Aaron.” He held up a hand. “And before you try to comfort me, just imagine if we sent him in with faked remains. His description last night was not far off. Roldan could injure or even kill him before we were able to intervene. We must save him. You know he cannot do it himself.”
“He’s a dead man and you know it,” I said bluntly. “That Were never had any intention of leaving either boy alive once he figured out they were connected to you. Not after they’d served his purpose anyway. Now quit being so emotional—” I stopped. What a weird thing to have to say to the man whose expressions had to be read with a magnifying glass. But by now I knew that under that tightly wired exterior boiled passions that could leap out and destroy whole cities. I said, “Okay, that’s not fair. Just, you know, try to back off and think. That’s what’s going to help the most here, and you know it.”
He took a deep breath. “All right. We can eliminate a Rogue vampire after we make the flight. It would have been difficult to explain a bag full of remains to airport security at any rate.”
I nodded. Not impossible, because we still carried our department IDs, but since our status was officially inactive it could’ve still been problematic. So we spent the rest of the night trying to get more information from Aaron about his contacts, shuttling Cassandra, Dave, and later on Bergman from the airport to Vayl’s house and preparing for our psychic’s reading. Which failed on nearly every front.
All she got from Junior was more of his dad’s tortured pleas. And when she touched Vayl she couldn’t see the other son. Not his face. Not his location. All she sensed was audio. A revving engine and the horrifying sound of crumpling metal. Afterward she sat back in her chair, swept her long black braids from her regal face, her big brown eyes so full of sympathy I nearly cried myself as she embraced Vayl with her gaze. “I’m so sorry,” she told him. “Definitely Hanzi is here, I can feel that. But the sense of violence and impending death is so strong it interferes with every other image.” She smoothed the skirt of her bright orange sundress, her elegant black hands hesitating at her stomach a moment longer than was necessary, making me wonder if the reading had left her nauseous.
Then Dave stepped up with his amazing admission.
“I think I can find him.”
We were sitting in the coziest room in the house. Tucked at the back behind the billiard room within easy reach of the kitchen, it seemed to reflect more of the Vayl-who-was than the ass-kicking Vampere he’d become. I’d seen his den before we’d become a couple, but then I hadn’t been in the mood to take in much more than the country-gentleman squares of gleaming brown paneling that gave the area a warmth that was backed up by the chocolaty leather couch, matching love seat, and two burgundy wing chairs with matching footstools. They huddled around a sturdy square coffee table that looked like it had been crafted from railroad ties and ceramic tile painted with the most colorful horse-drawn wagon I’d ever seen. Usually books covered the design, but since I’d come Vayl had gotten better about putting them back onto one of the three black floor-to-ceiling shelves against the walls.
Most of Vayl’s rugs had been imported from the Middle East. Beautiful Persian designs that seemed to reveal a new picture every time your eye fell on a different section. Underneath the rugs the floors were well-maintained, deeply stained pine. But in the den he’d chosen a hand-woven rag rug in all the colors of the rainbow that stretched nearly the length and width of the room. The colors were muted just enough that they lifted the spirit when you walked in, rather than making you want to bang your head against the wall.
The rug stopped at the black marble fireplace. Covering the opening was an iron grate in the shape of a dancing woman, her skirt twirling and her hair flying as she spun in front of the flames. One night he’d confessed that she reminded him of his mother. Not that he’d ever seen her. Just the picture he’d built in his mind, gathered from watching his grandma and his aunts working through the day. But at night they always seemed to have the energy for at least one dance. That was when I’d asked him about the wagon on his table.
“I painted it,” he’d told me. “It was my first home.” And that was all he’d say. But I spent every moment I could spare staring at it, memorizing the red mini-caboose shape of it that was highlighted by gold-painted slats, a four-square window, and a green roof, all of which rode on ridiculously spindly tires with red spokes. Every time I saw it I thought I understood a little better the motherless boy who’d traveled so far inside that tiny, beautiful rig.
I’d been gazing at that wagon when my twin had said, “I think I can find him,” had risen from the love seat, and left his fiancé’s side to stand beside the mantel. He’d really caught my attention when he grabbed the mantel with both hands, like he needed the help to keep from falling.
“Dave?” I asked.
He stared at the single white earthenware pitcher Vayl had set above his fireplace, like if he eyeballed the wedding party marching across it long enough he might be able to make the flower girls dance right off the container. When he turned around everyone in the room went still.
My brother is a commander. That alone causes people to sit straight and shut up. But as I looked around the room, at Vayl and Cole on the couch beside me, at Bergman and Raoul in the wing chairs and Cassandra on the love seat, at Aaron uneasy in a chair brought in from the dining room, even at the animals curled up beside the cold fireplace, I knew they shared my dread. It wasn’t just the fading scar on Dave’s throat, an unwelcome reminder of the fact that he’d spent time in the service of a necromancer. It wasn’t only the no-bullshit gleam in his piercing green eyes, or the fact that his time in the desert had hardened him into a lean, muscular warrior worthy of the utmost respect. It was also the haunted look in his eyes, and the way his lips pulled against his teeth, like he could barely stand the taste of his thoughts.
Cassandra stretched her arm over the back of the love seat, her gold bracelets clinking musically as she rea
ched for him. He nodded to her. I’m okay. Then he said, “If I have to talk about this I only want to say it once. So listen up.” I watched his broad chest rise with the breath he scooped into his lungs. “Ever since I was a zombie—”
Cassandra jerked toward him, every one of her ten pairs of earrings shivering in alarm, but he held up his hand. “No. I’m not gonna put pretty words on it. My soul might not’ve been allowed to move on, and that’s why Jaz and Raoul could ultimately save me”—he stopped and bored his eyes into each of us, like he could bury his gratitude so deep we’d feel it every time we woke up—“but basically I was just a slave with skills. Anyway, ever since then, some weird things have been happening.”
Suddenly he couldn’t look at any of us. His eyes skirted the room and finally landed on the window, where Vayl had used a couple of bright red shawls in place of curtains. He went on. “I talked to Raoul about it, and he told me it’s a function of my Sensitivity. How, when people agree to serve the Eldhayr, the circumstances of their deaths burn themselves into their psyches. And that they often develop special talents related to that.”
I thought about some of my own abilities—to sense violent emotion, to cause sudden and deadly fires—and immediately understood his point.
He went on. “During my last mission we were tracking an imam who’d reemerged from hiding after fifteen years and was, yet again, recruiting suicide bombers. We had a pretty good source in the area, but when we went to him he told us the guy was dead. We said that was impossible. Our psychics insisted that he’d been active as recently as the previous month. So he showed us a picture of the body. He even said he could take us to where it was buried, because it had become a local shrine. So we went.”
Dave realized his hands had started to shake, so he clasped them behind his back. At that moment I realized how much he resembled our father, Colonel Albert Parks, the ultimate marine. Strong. Determined. And wounded. Why is it you never recognize the pain in your parents until it’s too late?
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