Shadow Blade

by Seressia Glass

  “Khefar. You have their names. Remember, as long as you can speak their names, they live.”

  He stared at her for a long, unfathomable moment. Then he lifted his free hand, covered hers. A brief squeeze, then he let go, digging into his front pocket to hand her the keys. “I parked this way.”

  She followed him to the SUV without a word, but the silence was a good one.

  The Shadowchaser was an amazing piece of work.

  Khefar changed into shorts and a T-shirt in the men’s locker room, but his mind was focused more on Kira than on turning his shirt right side in. Kira had been so put off having him in her home even after they’d spent a night reconnoitering around the city, and yet she’d tried to comfort him. She’d touched him and offered reassurance and he was sure neither had been easy for her. It made the words, and the gesture, that much more precious. That simple act, those plain words, had beaten back the despair more than anything else could have.

  Somehow, he’d return the favor. It had only been a couple of days since Comstock’s brutal death. Kira held herself together by duty and determination; she hadn’t even fully shared her grief with her friends at the store as far as he could tell. She was like a bowstring: taut, stretched almost to breaking, ready to let loose at any moment. He was an expert archer; he knew the strength, skill, and patience it took to master a powerful bow. Kira had already shown that she didn’t appreciate his display of strength in attempting to help her. She was too mistrustful to yield to any skillful attempts to outmaneuver her. That left patience.

  He sighed. Handling Kira would be much more difficult for him than trying to string Odysseus’s bow had been for Penelope’s suitors.

  Kira was already waiting when he returned to the workout room. She’d exchanged her gloves for leather wrist guards and changed into formfitting navy yoga pants and a tank top that reminded him Kira was wholly, utterly female.

  “Are you ready?” she asked, reaching up to secure her braids into a ponytail.

  He smiled, pulling his T-shirt over his head and tossing it aside. “Definitely. What about you?”

  Silence. He turned to see Kira staring at him as if she’d never seen him before. “What is it?”

  “Nothing.” She pulled her Lightblade free of its sheath. “Let’s do this.”

  Khefar’s dagger was instantly in his hand.

  They circled each other. Khefar wondered if he would start out easy. He’d already seen her fight, toying with the hybrids on motorcycles and defending herself against the seeker demon. When she fought, she fought to win. He had no doubt that if he had truly been her enemy, she would have given her all to ensure he wouldn’t walk away from the encounter.

  Spotting an opening, Khefar struck first, to see if he could knock the blade from her hand. He didn’t put nearly as much force behind the thrust as he would in a real fight. Kira blocked the thrust easily and sent it back to him, with more weight.

  He parried. Khefar knew she’d give as good as she received, or even better. Too bad we don’t have shields to make the fight even more interesting, he thought.

  The parry caught her slightly off balance and she dropped to the padded floor and rolled. Kira gave the warrior a big toothy grin as she regained her stance. “You’re not holding back. Now.”

  “Should I?”

  “Only if you want to piss me off. Let’s make it fun!”

  More thuds, grunts, the metallic whine of metal against metal. She spewed curses after he dropped her the second time. “You’re taking advantage of me, you bastard!”

  “In what way?”

  “All that damn skin showing—it’s distracting!”

  He gave her a hand up. “Like a seeker demon dripping acidic spit while trying to kill you isn’t distracting?”

  “You know what I mean. And it’s not like I’m trying to kill you.”

  “All right then.” He slid his blade back into its sheath, then tossed it atop his shirt. “Let’s try hand-to-hand. That way, if you do decide you want to try to kill me, we can at least make it interesting.”

  “Just had to go issue a challenge, huh?” Kira sheathed her own dagger and set it aside, then swung her arms to further loosen her muscles, her grin almost childlike.

  “So, what’s your fighting style?” Khefar asked.

  Kira stretched languidly. “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether I’m bored or not.” She smiled at him. “I like Brazilian Capoeira and jujitsu among other things. I also learned a modified Krav Maga while training to be a Shadowchaser. So I hope you took your vitamins today, old-timer.”

  “Who’re you calling—oomph!”

  Kira smashed her shoulder deep into his solar plexus, tackling him. They rolled, wrestled, and grappled until he managed to toss her off him. She scrambled to her feet just as he regained his.

  A grin wreathed her face from ear to ear, her eyes were alight with joy. She moved in again, flowing easily from fighting style to fighting style, some he hadn’t witnessed in a century or more. Gilead knew how to train their Shadowchasers.

  After one particularly quick and brutal combination, they broke for a breather, the entire length of the room separating them. She laughed, a true laugh of unadorned delight that shook her entire frame. Khefar wasn’t prepared for it—the laugh, the bright mood, his reaction to it. It made him careless. In a blur of motion Kira swooped in, sweeping his legs out from under him. Somehow she wound up atop him, left hand holding his shoulder down, her right forearm pressed into his throat. “I win!”

  The warrior thought they both had won, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. Her chest rose and fell with each exerted breath, taunting him to drop his gaze away from her face. Before he could say anything, her expression changed. She looked down at her hands, his bare chest. An unguarded expression of pure, naked longing crossed her face, then disappeared so quickly he’d have missed it had he blinked.

  “You have so much skin showing,” she whispered. She raised her hands, fingertips hovering above his chest. “I can touch you. If I touched you, touched all that beautiful skin, nothing would happen.”

  That wasn’t true. Something very instinctive and very male would happen, and there was nothing he would be able to do about it.

  “Shall we see?” Keeping his gaze locked to hers, Khefar threaded his fingers through hers. Slowly he moved their joined hands from his shoulder across to his throat and down his chest. She sucked in a breath, her eyes widening in reaction. He tried to remember the last time he’d caused a woman to make a sound like that. Nothing came to mind.

  He pulled his hand away, stretching his arms out, allowing her to touch him as much as she wanted. It was such a simple thing, touching someone else. Something that people the world over took for granted. Even as he’d wandered the earth for millennia, he hadn’t denied himself the basic human needs to comfort and be comforted. Such comfort could be bittersweet: if it deepened beyond a casual relationship, there would inevitably be pain. Humans aged. They died and were not reborn in this world. Only Khefar remained.

  Yet Kira’s powers denied her any opportunity at all to feed this basic human need. Even the brief embrace of congratulation, the supporting shoulder of friendship, the bonding trust of a handshake were denied her. A weaker person would have been driven mad.

  Khefar knew Kira Solomon was not weak. But he wondered how—if—she remained truly sane.

  Chapter 19

  He felt . . . wonderful.

  Kira shuddered as her fingertips slid over Khefar’s exposed skin. Her hands burned, but not because of her power. No, a different sort of heat infused her, a heat she felt might consume her from within.

  His skin was amazing, the finest dark mahogany, stretched tight over his muscles. A scattering of wiry hair tickled her fingertips, contrasting the silk of his skin, the hardness of his physique. The body of a warrior, lethal artistry. Such power and grace contained by muscle and bone and skin. She could feel his heart pounding bene
ath her fingertips, strong and sure and constant, not stuttering and struggling as she drained his essence.

  Memories tangled with the present: the warm feel of a man’s body thrumming with life beneath her. Sliding her hands across skin with greedy abandon, reveling in the sensations, the pure, basic drive to touch another living person, to be wrapped completely in another.

  She wanted him to stop her. He’d have to be the one to stop this because she couldn’t. Not with all that beautiful skin beneath her just waiting to be touched, to be explored and discovered. The padded floor of a workout room was neither the time nor the place to be thinking such thoughts, though she had no idea if there ever could be a right time and place.

  Khefar swallowed thickly when she shifted backward to stroke lower across his chest. “Whatever you do, do not tell the spider how easily you pinned me. I’ll never live it down.”

  Kira laughed. She knew what he was doing and appreciated it. Khefar was, she realized, a gentleman as well as a warrior. She rolled off of him and stood. “You knocked me on my back twice. I think you’re still ahead.”

  She held out a hand to help him up. He locked his hand around her forearm as she pulled him to his feet. She dropped her gaze. She didn’t know why, but being upright with him so close seemed more intimate than pinning him to the floor. “Thank you, for letting me do that.”

  “You’re welcome.” He held on when she started to move away. “When was the last time you touched someone, Kira?”

  She felt her smile freeze. “Does pinning you to the floor or wrestling with a seeker demon count?”

  “You know I’m not talking about dusting hybrids or Shadow Avatars,” he said. “How long has it been since you touched another being—human or not—without the intent to subdue them?”

  She broke free, then crossed to her gym bag, her movements jerky as she pulled the band from her hair. “Why?”

  “How long?”

  “Six years,” she whispered, her voice flat with the effort to repress her emotion. “Six years, four months, and sixteen days.”

  The significance of the tally wasn’t lost on him. “A family member?”

  She shook her head in denial, braids swinging free. “Nico was more than family. He was my teacher, my first handler. And for one weekend in Venice, he was my lover.”

  “Was?”

  Pain, unmuted by time, welled within her. “He was killed by a Shadow Adept while all I could do was scream and try to hold his chest closed.”

  “Kira, I’m sorry—”

  “No, if you want to know the story, I’ll tell you.” Her eyes briefly met his, then she looked past him. If she didn’t look at him, she could tell the story. She needed to tell the story if only to remind herself why something like the time with Nico could never happen again. “I wasn’t supposed to be in Venice. We disobeyed a direct order from the Balm of Gilead, but I was nineteen, continually headstrong, and in love with my handler. Nico said he’d found a way for my powers to be temporarily blocked, and I jumped at the chance. I didn’t think about the costs, the ramifications, the consequences. All I cared about was that for once, for a little while, I could see what it was like to be normal.”

  She shoved her belongings into the bag, still not looking at him. “We had three days. Three amazing beautiful days in the most romantic city on the planet. And then one night we were attacked. I still don’t know why they didn’t kill me, why they chose to attack him instead. But they did, and I couldn’t do anything to stop them.”

  She zipped the bag shut. “The awful thing is, I still can’t, to this day, say that I would do anything differently. I wish Nico didn’t have to give his life to teach me that lesson, but that’s the only thing I know for sure I’d want different.”

  “What lesson do you think you were taught that day?”

  “That some people aren’t meant to have normal lives. Some people aren’t meant to have what everyone else has or could have. Some of us are meant to be in this world, but not really and truly be a part of it. So I gave up those wishes and concentrated on others.”

  “What do you wish for now?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “To be good at my job, at both jobs. To protect those who don’t even know they need protecting. To try to keep people who know me from being killed because of me.” She pulled on her gloves. “And sometimes I wish I could stop wishing for more than that.”

  He looked stricken, as if he’d regretted pushing her for answers. She didn’t want his pity. Yeah, maybe he understood what she was going through, but their paths weren’t the same. He’d been alive for four millennia so he could repay his crimes, but that didn’t compare to being unable to ever touch another human being, to know that your touch could hurt or kill. She was being punished, cruelly punished, and she hadn’t committed any crimes. No one in the world would look at Kira’s life and not think her cursed. What else could not being able to touch anyone, ever, be?

  But she could touch him. She could touch him and neither one of them would hurt.

  He stepped toward her. “Kira, why don’t—”

  She stepped back, something close to panic suddenly pounding in her chest. “I’m going to go take a shower. I’ll, um, I’ll meet you out front in about twenty minutes, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She ran. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was running away from.

  Instead of heading for the showers, Kira headed for the loaner SUV. She wasn’t running away. Shadowchasers didn’t run. No, she just needed a little space. Maybe, she thought as she stalked toward the parking lot, a drive would clear her head, ease the crazy pounding of her heart. Maybe it would keep her from wondering what the Nubian had been about to ask her.

  Goddess, he’d felt nice. All that beautiful mahogany skin, so smooth and silky over his muscles and veins. How wonderful to feel the steady rhythm of his heart beneath her palm. And he’d been willing to let her touch him as much as she wanted. Which was a lot.

  She still didn’t understand why she could touch him. Was it because he was more than four thousand years old? Was it because he was sort of immortal?

  Did it matter why? She could touch him. He would have let her keep touching him. Maybe even— She shook her head. She wasn’t sure if she was ready for anything like that, whatever that was. It was enough to have a physical connection to someone, skin to skin contact, that didn’t end with him slumping unconscious to the floor.

  It wouldn’t be so bad if she didn’t know exactly what she was missing. Six years ago she’d been young and stupid and eager, blithely confident in her ability to control her world. Nico had given her everything she could have wanted—except forever.

  Khefar had forever.

  She shook her head. No, she reminded herself, Khefar had a mission. Save a life for every life he’d taken, then move on. With two lives to go, he wouldn’t be around much longer. Then again, as a Shadowchaser, she had a short shelf life herself. Her line of work almost guaranteed she wouldn’t be around long either.

  Wynne’s words echoed through her mind. She was a healthy twenty-five-year-old, nearly twenty-six. She did have needs, needs that she’d suppressed for more than six years. No matter how normal she wanted to be, she didn’t want a traditional relationship even if she could have had it. Khefar seemed like the answer to prayers she didn’t even know she’d petitioned for, at least for right now.

  Her new Gilead-provided cell phone buzzed, a most welcome distraction. She stopped and dug it out from the side pocket of her gym bag. “Solomon here.”

  “Chaser Solomon, I have a message from Logistics.”

  Kira immediately tensed. The sweepers must have found something. Finally. “Tell me.”

  “We’re showing elevated levels of Chaos energy near the Fulton County Airport. It seems to be fluctuating but it’s not changing location.”

  “Good. Send me the details.” She had a passing acquaintance with that area of Atlanta, west of the city proper. It was mainly an industrial area t
hick with tractor trailers and large warehouses interspersed with budget motels that became a ghost town after dark. Perfect place for an Avatar to set up shop and not be noticed.

  “Transmitting.” The operator paused. “The sweepers tell me there is a special response team on site. How do you wish to proceed?”

  “What?” Kira kicked her pace up to a jog, her talk with Khefar all but forgotten. “Instruct the team to withdraw immediately. Under no circumstances are they to engage. I repeat: do not engage.”

  “Understood.” The operator paused, then broke protocol with a whispered curse. “We’ve lost contact with the team. Standard procedure requires us to dispatch backup.”

  “I am your backup.” What the hell was Sanchez thinking, sending a special response team to confront an Avatar? Even if the section chief had a Level Five Light Adept on call, they were no match for an Avatar fully charged with Shadow magic.

  “I’m on my way.” Kira broke into a run. “Do your best to re-establish contact and pull the team out. And do not under any circumstances think of sending anyone else.”

  She disconnected, then climbed into the SUV, and keyed it to life.

  As she pulled out of the parking lot, the Shadowchaser calculated how much time driving from the Carlos to the west side of Atlanta would take, time the SRT probably didn’t have.

  Evening slid into night as she schemed and planned her way toward the highway. She almost circled back for the Nubian, then decided against it. With all they’d left up in the air . . . she had to focus, to prepare for what lay ahead. She didn’t want emotions and confusion to distract her concentration. Kira had work to do. Work she’d always managed solo.

  Even if she didn’t work alone, she couldn’t take Khefar with her on this mission. He was a target. Or rather, his blade was. Kira knew he’d be angry at her when he figured out she’d taken off without him and it would definitely erode the rapport they’d developed over the past two days—well, up until her messy confession anyway. While she admitted they probably could work well enough together to take down the Avatar, it wasn’t worth the risk of losing the Dagger of Kheferatum to Shadow.