For these reasons, Dexter had very little humor regarding Raven’s twenty-first birthday, though Raven felt reasonably certain that most days, regardless of what day or year it was, presented its fair amount of danger. However, the mystics in the High Council remained convinced that year twenty-one was a death warrant to the Few, therefore Dexter had on his worried hat. He likely wouldn’t let up until this time next year when she crossed the threshold to age twenty-two.
It didn’t help that so many of the Few died during their twenty-first year. Raven called it bad luck. Dexter called it something else.
“Do I have to remind you again of the dangers of—”
“Dex, if you remind me again I’m gonna do something you don’t like.”
“Like what?”
“Like tape over your Baywatch reruns.”
“You wouldn’t!”
She shrugged. “One way or another, I’m going out tonight.”
He scowled but continued anyway. “You know the dangers—”
“Better than you do,” Raven returned dryly. “Let’s take a poll. Who in this room hasn’t been attacked on their birthday every year?” A pause. “Dex, why isn’t your hand in the air?”
“I can’t believe how cavalier you’re being.”
“After all this time, I gotta say that sounds like a you problem,” she reasoned, shrugging again. “Look, I know the song and dance by now, all right? Turning a year older means gaining more strength, ergo I have a big stamp on my forehead that reads, ‘Hey, you, attack me.’” Raven watched the Guardian a minute longer, then sighed one of those defeated sighs sure to win him over. In the end, Dexter was a pushover. He hated denying her anything normal because she had so little of it. “Sorry,” she added for good measure.
“You know what happened last year,” he warned, voice low.
“Yeah. I was kinda there.”
“They would have killed you.”
“It’s their job, and really, I can’t begrudge them that. It’s my job to kick their asses night after night, isn’t it? It’s not personal, it’s business.” Raven’s shoulders relaxed. “Come on, Dex. A girl only turns twenty-one once, and you promised.”
Dexter made a face. “When did I ever—”
“When I turned eighteen.”
“I was just trying to negotiate.”
“Yeah, well, you need to learn more about women. We never forget things like that.” She tossed him a wicked grin. “Please?”
Dexter stared at her a beat too long, and she knew she had him.
There stood one constant in her life and one alone: Raven was One of the Few. Beyond that, she knew little else. She walked among the darkness, one of many, perhaps, but the only one she knew. She could not know the others, could not share their battle or feel their pain. Knowing one would invoke devastation the likes of which she’d never encountered. The Few were solitary figures, all save their Guardian.
Only tonight, Raven was determined to forget things like duty and calling. She didn’t want to be anything except on the cusp of her twenty-first birthday. Tonight she would not stalk gravesites, pore over ancient texts, or spar with her Guardian. God knew Dexter needed a break. Tonight, Raven would go to a club, drink a margarita, and forget everything about the Few.
At the very least, that was the plan.
“You promise you’ll be careful?” Dexter asked, fight abandoning his voice. “We’ve been having trouble since that new demon, the vampire—”
“Nicholas,” she supplied.
“Right. He’s a tricky one. There’s no telling if he knows it’s your birthday.”
“Well, trust me. I’m not going to go out with my guard down. I just want to drink, dance, and make with the merry for once. And if Nicholas shows up, I think a stake in the heart ought to do the trick.” Raven smiled gratefully. The space between them closed, her arms looping around Dexter’s neck in a thankful hug. “I’m just a phone call away.”
“I don’t like this,” Dexter warned, tightening his grip.
“I know. But it’ll be okay.”
“That’s what you said last time.”
“And I managed just fine after the cat stopped barfing up snakes.”
Dexter sighed. “You know what you’re not doing?”
“Inspiring confidence?”
“That’s right.”
“I’ll be careful, Dex. Cross my heart.”
“Yeah,” he replied, pulling back with a sad half-smile. “Heard that before.”
Chapter 2
He was a simple guy really. A girl to fuck, warm blood to drink, something entertaining to watch, and he felt set. The past few weeks hadn’t cooperated with him. Rather, they had spanned into all-out torture, and not in the way he preferred. It was as though he’d snapped into a part of himself he’d never known, and he ran too slow to be in on the joke.
Perhaps things would seem different if Octavia’s attitude hadn’t also changed. She couldn’t claim herself a huge fan of hunting down the Few to begin with, but something about this particular girl—about Raven—had her knickers twisted tighter than ever. Nicolai supposed he could understand. He hadn’t been the same since meeting her.
Perhaps that had something to do with the fact that the dreams were growing stronger.
No point in denying it. Denial did not make the truth any less significant. Denial didn’t make the dreams vanish. Denial didn’t do anything but exacerbate an unmovable fact. The dreams grew stronger, more frequent, and he felt lucky now to escape a single night without a visit from his nocturnal angel. Perhaps he wouldn’t be so concerned about the dreams had the faceless woman remained faceless. The dreams had lived with him since childhood—always the same thing, always the same woman. Always the same everything.
Only now they had a face.
A face that looked frighteningly similar to another that had made his acquaintance. A face belonging to a girl who was One of the Few. Raven.
Nicholas honestly didn’t know what to make of it. Not once had the phantom woman in his psyche assumed the persona of a woman in his life. Not when he lived as an awkward teenager in middle class London, not when Octavia’s fangs had rescued him from the human condition, and certainly never in the instances wherein he’d hunted down and bathed his hands in warrior blood.
The fact that something consistent in his life had suddenly turned inconsistent didn’t really bother him. It seemed unusual, yes, but not unheard of.
No. What bothered him remained the same. The dreams stood as the only remnants of his human days that had carried over into the twenty-first century. The dreams brought a woman, a woman composed of poetry and shining with light, a woman whom, in his youth, he’d assumed was his guardian angel. Adulthood had transformed the romantic notion into a proverbial pipe-dream, his subconscious telling him what sort of woman he truly wanted. Vampirism had molded the interpretation into the pinnacle of desires, what he needed in Octavia but never received. What he wanted more than anything was a perfect, nonexistent being who would complete every hollow crevice of his worn body.
Suddenly, the angel of night had transformed into something else entirely.
Suddenly she looked like Raven.
It was bizarre the way it happened. Nicholas had always seen a young woman with emerald eyes. Her hair was dark brown, her smile infectious and her laughter addictive. Her lips felt soft and warm, her tongue a golden caress against his own. Her flesh felt like cashmere beneath his touch, and her body molded against his as though they had been fashioned together.
There was power in her hands and loyalty in her heart. The love she gave him in a single glance bent time and reshaped realities.
None of that had changed. The only difference was that her face carried over now. It hadn’t before. He’d always awaken from the dreams with a vague recollection of what had occurred, of what he’d seen and experienced. He’d feel her skin beneath his hands and taste her kiss for the day’s duration, but her face always eluded him. He recog
nized her instantly at night, of course, but never during the day.
Not until now.
At night. Every night. Ever since he met her at Club Intensity, he’d known she was One of the Few, and somehow, in some twisted, sick way, she was also his.
It was outrageous, insane, and it had to stop.
Nicholas knew his obsession with the Few had exploded beyond his reckoning. He wanted more than anything to snap Raven’s neck and finish the whole sordid affair. The fact that the idea alone made him feel nauseous was more than enough reason to proceed with her regularly scheduled death. The sooner Raven Rayne was out of his life, the better. Perhaps her face would fade and the nightly angel would return to him, enigmatic and distant, a proverbial woman who did not exist.
He hadn’t gotten very far in convincing himself.
“Going out tonight, Octavia,” Nicholas announced. “Grab me something tasty. Anything you fancy?”
She did not answer him. She rarely did nowadays.
He tried hard not to compare her cold, fragile touch to the warm, strong touch of his night angel. It wasn’t right. Never before had the dreams disrupted his life. The life he led between sleeps. The life with Octavia.
“Did you hear me?”
She glanced up from the sofa. A sofa. She probably resented that. She resented everything that played against the role Hollywood wanted them in. He could tell her until his lungs were dust that there were no rules in their world—some vampires slept in crypts, others in coffins, others in the earth of their homeland. He chose cushy residential streets with unsuspecting owners of houses too good for them. As it happened, the Hendersons had made quite the tasty meal. He merely grew sick of leftovers.
“Going out,” she echoed. “To see the girl, I suspect.”
A rush of guilt raced up his spine. Sometimes even he found Octavia downright spooky. “Not unless she runs into me.”
“It’s her birthday, you know.”
“How do you—”
“I just do.”
Nicholas’s brows perked. Interesting. “Well then…”
“You want to play with her, don’t you?”
“Don’t know what you mean.” He cleared his throat and glanced down, guilt becoming more prominent. Looking into his love’s eyes and wishing she were someone else had a way of doing that.
Nothing at all stood right with this picture.
As though reading his mind, which he nearly figured she had, Octavia cooed, “You think I don’t see it, but I do.”
Nicholas swallowed hard. “Don’t know what you mean,” he said again, fighting off a wince. He sounded pathetic. “Look, if I run into her, I’ll knock her off good and proper. It’ll make it right, won’t it?”
Once he killed her, she’d no longer haunt him, only he didn’t say that part.
“Until the next one. You’re obsessed.”
“They’re the ones hunting us down.”
“And you’re the one seeking them out.”
His hands came up. “Just trying to be a bit proactive. Don’t see the harm in that.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” Octavia sighed heavily and looked away. “Go out, Nicholas. Find whatever you’re looking for.”
He wouldn’t get anything else out of her—that much he could see.
He just wished he knew the words to say to make things right. To make the dreams vanish and turn his world right-side up again.
He didn’t. All he had were the dreams.
Those he had to follow.
* * * *
There were parts of town that absolutely thrived after midnight, and thanks to her hours, Raven knew exactly where to find them. The sort of places where people lost themselves to music and sweat, where shadows played and inhibitions melted away until nothing existed but the hard roll of bodies colliding. While not a frequent patron, she found her otherworldly activities brought her to the doorstep of where pheromones were highest, and often Club Intensity served as a beacon of depravity. Since she didn’t have normality in many forms, she often took up people-watching in her free-time, and nowhere else provided what Club Intensity provided. That made it the favorite hangout of vamps, demons, and lonely, desperate people.
Still, this didn’t strike her as the sort of place she would typically consider attending with Dexter at her side.
“I can’t believe you talked me into this,” she grumbled, fishing out her ID for the club’s bouncer, which proved unnecessary. Bones knew her well enough.
“It’s your birthday,” Dexter called.
“Believe me, I got that memo.”
“You shouldn’t be alone on your birthday.”
Raven twisted around and plastered on a saccharine smile. “I’m never alone,” she said. “I have you.”
“Can’t we just be friends tonight?”
Her shoulders slumped as she sighed. Friends. She’d like that, in a perfect world. Friends would make her something other than what she was. This job didn’t allow for friends. Her life expectancy didn’t exactly shine through the roof. Sure, she had the whole supernatural strength thing going for her, but the Few couldn’t be everywhere, couldn’t even know each other, and the loss of one wasn’t anything to cry over. Why snivel over one when the replacement was on its way?
No one did. Not unless the Guardian was emotionally involved, which Dexter was whether he wanted to admit it or not. Big Brother Dexter would jump in front of a bullet to save her for reasons not at all pertaining to what she represented to the world, rather for what she meant to him.
“Sure, Dex,” Raven replied, forcing a smile and nodding to Bones, who immediately dropped the somewhat hostile look, which she didn’t think Dexter had even noticed.
However, before she could even whirl around to face what would assuredly have gone down as a brilliant evening, she crashed with a wave of dizzy and promptly collapsed.
* * * *
Voices.
“Raven!” a strange man yelled. “God, I knew we shouldn’t have gone out tonight. Raven! Answer me!”
The voices belonged to no one she knew, no one in particular. Then again, as Kenneth Mal’s ward, she knew very few people. Such was the life of the Few.
She recalled the face of a demon lord and nothing after that. The demon…. One she’d summoned. She’d been on her back, drowning in her own blood, and he hadn’t allowed her wound to heal. Her inherent super-strength should have guaranteed her survival beyond the blood offering, but Paimon had denied her. Just as well. The sooner her life ended, the sooner she could be reborn.
The sooner she and Nicolai could be reunited.
Reunited.
Ravenna blinked blearily and tried to sit up, catching only a glimmer of light and a semi-circle of concerned strangers surrounding around her. The one who had called her name, a name he couldn’t possibly know, was at her side. Handsome, young-looking with sandy blond hair, his warm eyes quieted the panic stirring in her chest and nearly distracted her from his very odd state of dress. He struck her as far too worried to be a stranger.
Something cold stabbed her insides.
“Raven?”
Ravenna’s heart skipped a beat. “What?” she demanded, blinking and sitting up. She thought perhaps she’d misheard, but she had not. No one knew that name except Nicolai. He had given it to her.
How had the stranger known?
“My gorgeous girl.” A lick of his tongue moved across her quivering skin. Her insides pooled into desire, and she reached for him with trembling hands. He grinned in kind and kissed her lips, his hands framing her face. “My sweet Raven.”
“Raven?” she replied, indignant. “What sort of name is Raven?”
“Your name.”
“I prefer Ravenna, thank you very much.”
“Ravenna is One of the Few,” Nicolai countered, his calloused fingers tugging expertly at her hard nipples, his mouth exploring the creamy flesh of her throat. “The Few are not welcome here.”
“I am always One of the Few,�
�� she replied, her words little more than a dreamy gasp. She thrust her hips hard against his and melted when he growled and thrust back. She’d grown addicted to the hard feel of him between her thighs, rubbing her with reckless disregard to anyone who might find them.
“Not here, you’re not,” Nicolai replied simply, wheedling a hand between them. “With me… you’re…mmm…”
“Uh…”
“You’re…” His fingers pried her vaginal lips apart and slipped across her swollen, tender clitoris. He favored her with a cocky wink. “Raven.”
She fought the urge to laugh. “I am not.”
“You’re Raven. You’re my Raven.”
“I am not!”
Nicolai’s dancing eyes glanced over her face, wandering southward until he was staring at her breasts. “You most certainly are,” he told her.
“Nicolai—”
“You’re mine, and I’ll call you whatever I like.” He grinned and tickled her lips with his tongue, the fingers at her pussy massaging her throbbing pearl into a new form of madness.
“You’re mad.”
“Love tends to turn a man a little nutty, yeah? Especially a man who falls for the enemy.” He nuzzled her throat tenderly and pressed a kiss against the sacred mark blushing her flesh. “You’re my Raven, darling. Accept it.”
Ravenna’s vision blurred, another gasp clawing for freedom. Around him, air seemed in short supply. “I might need some… convincing,” she conceded, feeling very wanton and rather unapologetic about it.
Nicolai met her eyes, the demon in him all but purring with pleasure. “Oh kitten,” he growled, his hand abandoning her center to free his cock. “You know how I feel about challenges.”
“Remind me.”
The man standing over her knew her name, but he remained a stranger. The room burst with light, occupied with far too many people for this to be anywhere near home.
She’d landed far from home.
Paimon had inserted her into a society far from her own. Her body felt the same. When she looked down, she saw her hands. When she spoke, she heard her voice. She fisted handfuls of her own hair and recognized the familiar contours of her face as her fingers explored what she could not see.
Ripples Through Time Page 3
