by Nalini Singh
Then she turned, looked at the man who walked toward her, his hair wind-tumbled and his smile an invitation, and knew she was about ten seconds away from making what might be the worst mistake of both their lives.
*
Janvier wanted Ashwini. He'd wanted her since their first meeting in the luxuriant green humidity of a cypress swamp, her skin beaded with sweat and dragonflies buzzing in the air. It had taken everything he had not to attempt to seduce her then and there, the desire to lick up the salt-laced tang of her as he drove his cock into her body a sudden, violent craving.
The fact that she had a crossbow aimed at his gut hadn't dampened his lust, just heightened it, but the lust had only been the start. Each time they tangled, he'd learned a little more about his Ashblade, until having her body would no longer be enough. Janvier wanted all of the gifted, complicated, skilled woman in front of him.
Including her trust.
Today, the rich brown eyes he'd seen laughing, infuriated, amused, were sad and brittle. A small push and he knew she'd permit the seduction, allow him to use his body to make her forget the pain that lived in her, that huge thing too terrible for a mortal to possess. He could kiss her, taste her in an effort to assuage the need inside him, even thrust his cock so deep into her that she cried out. And when it was over, he'd have destroyed the most beautiful thing he'd encountered, that he'd felt, in all eternity.
"It's a great night for a long ride," he said before she could speak. "No real wind, and I can handle any snow that falls. You game?"
A pregnant pause, those mysterious eyes locked on his face.
His nerves stretched taut; Janvier didn't know if he had the strength to refuse her if she made him a different offer, even knowing it would be a devastating mistake. She was his Achilles' heel, his personal, luminous madness.
"Yes," she said at last. "Let's go."
Grabbing the helmet he'd bought especially for her and that he never lent to anyone else, he put it on her with his own hands, flipping down the fog-resistant visor to protect her face. Then, zipping up his jacket after a glance at Ash to make sure hers was secure, he put on his helmet and straddled the bike. She hesitated for a second before swinging up behind him, long and sleek and the most complex, fascinating creature he'd ever met.
Not interrupting the silence that had fallen between them, he drove down the narrow cliff access road with care; he might have a daredevil streak, but despite her grit and determination, Ash was mortal. If he totaled the bike, she could die. His gut tightened, his spine locking.
Only a few more decades. Then it'll be time for a new hunter to chase you.
She'd said that to him the first time she ever asked him for help. They'd gone into Nazarach's territory, survived the sadistic angel, shared a decadent promise of a kiss on a train platform before she left him, his wild windstorm of a lover. Because she was very much his lover, even if they'd never been skin to skin. The idea of being with any other woman after he met her had simply been out of the question.
He would not--could not--let her die. Not the tempestuous storm that was her.
The light would go out of the world if she was gone.
The only impediment to her becoming near-immortal was Ash's own resistance to the idea. Raphael had been aware of Ash since long before Janvier's fateful meeting with her in that swamp; the archangel would be more than happy to have a woman with her abilities in his Tower. Somehow, Janvier had to make Ash see that living hundreds, perhaps thousands of years wouldn't be the nightmare she imagined.
Once out of the Enclave, he turned the bike in the direction of the Adirondacks. The night wind whistled past them and other vehicles overtook on the left because he kept the speed undemanding, the snow on the sides of the road glittering in the beam of his headlight when they passed out of the more populated areas, the trees clean silhouettes against the night.
Flicking on the microphone and speaker system embedded in his helmet with a tilt of his head, he said, "There's something about going for a ride with a beautiful woman wrapped around me."
It took her a couple of seconds to figure out the system on her end. "Since when is a hand on your shoulder 'wrapped around you'?"
The old sadness and older hurt he'd sensed in her since the instant she came face-to-face with her brother was still there, but he could hear his Ash rising through it. "Ah, perhaps I am simply indulging in a fantasy. Foolish male that I am."
A snort sounded from behind him . . . but then she slid her arms around his body, pressing her chest flush to his back, the strength of her grip making him feel possessed, owned. The contact eased the aged, potent need inside him enough that his chest no longer hurt, air filling his lungs again.
"So, I ask and I receive. You're in a generous mood."
"Don't get too cocky, cuddlebunny."
His grin was bright. "What's a cuddlebunny?" he asked, genuinely curious.
"You, at the moment. Sexy, non?"
He loved it when she teased him. "Oui, if it makes you cuddle so close."
Her laughter was husky, and it was all he needed to hear.
*
They rode for hours, taking a break now and then to stretch their legs or admire a view--or for Ashwini to get some hot coffee into her.
"I'm going to hit caffeine overload at this rate," she pointed out the second time Janvier made a quick pit stop at a diner, the snow that had begun to fall soft and pretty and no challenge to Janvier's skill at handling the bike.
"Humor me, cher. I don't want you frozen." A wicked smile. "I like your blood running hot."
"Stop thinking about my blood."
"Now you ask for the impossible from your cuddlebunny."
With each mile that passed, each playful word from him, Ashwini felt more and more of the strain caused by the unexpected encounter with Arvi leaching away . . . and more and more of her heart falling into the hands of the man who'd seen the fractures in her and given her laughter to heal it.
What was she going to do about this, about them? It no longer seemed as simple as keeping a secret, keeping her distance. Because, as proven by her current position, the latter had proved a spectacular failure, and the former seemed a betrayal of everything they'd become to each other. "Naasir is right," she said when Janvier brought the bike to a halt at a gas station on their way back to Manhattan, the air clear of snow once more.
Taking off his helmet, Janvier looked over his shoulder at her. "About what?"
"About people making things too complicated for--" A loud buzzing interrupted her words. "Hold on," she said, her heart slamming into her ribs because the decision about what to tell Janvier might just have been made for her.
However, the late night call wasn't from Banli House.
"It's Sara." Ashwini felt her blood go cold; the Guild Director wouldn't be calling her at a quarter after eleven unless there was a serious problem. "Sara, what's happened?"
"Cops just contacted me. They have a body they've tagged as Guild business. From the description, it's in the same condition as the dog."
Ashwini had steeled herself for bad news, but Sara's words knocked the air out of her nonetheless. "Damn it." Fisting her hand against Janvier's shoulder, she closed her eyes for a second before flicking them open. "I'll handle this."
"You're not in hunting condition, Ash. You know that."
Janvier tapped her thigh and made a motion for her to cover the phone so they could speak.
"One second, Sara."
"I couldn't hear her clearly," Janvier said as soon as she blocked the receiver, "but did she say a body connected to the dog?" At her nod, his face grew grim. "The city doesn't need this right now, so soon after the battle. It's barely begun to heal."
"Are you offering Tower assistance?"
"No way around Tower involvement," he pointed out. "Guild would have to report this to Dmitri sooner or later. Might as well work together from the start."
Ashwini couldn't argue with him--this was no normal Guild case
. "I've got Tower assistance," she said to Sara. Annoyed as she was about having to fight to do her job, she also knew the Guild Director was right; she wasn't in the physical condition to handle this on her own. It'd be stupid not to have backup in case things turned to shit.
"Janvier?" Sara asked.
"Yes." She passed on what he'd said about the city's psychological state.
"He has a point." A faint tapping sound came through the connection, Sara likely drumming her pen against her desk. "I assume Janvier will pass on the details to Dmitri?"
"Yes."
"All right. I'll contact Dmitri in the morning, sort out our game plan, but for now, work under the assumption that the investigation needs to fly under the radar."
"So the case is mine?"
"I'll tell the cops to hold the scene for you."
10
Ashwini and Janvier arrived back in Manhattan in half the time it should've taken. It was the most exhilarating ride of her life, the bike moving as smooth as a ribbon of water along a well-worn channel. Pure silk and steel and speed.
That exhilaration was replaced by bright, hard anger the instant they reached the scene.
The victim had been found in a Dumpster behind a restaurant officially located in Little Italy. In actuality, it hugged up against the far edge of the Vampire Quarter. One street over from this quiet one, and the clubs were questionable at best, deadly at worst.
Last time she'd been in the area--chasing a vamp who'd skipped out on his Contract and decided to hide in the dark underbelly of the city--she'd walked into one of those clubs and come across a blissed-out junkie passed out in the lap of a well-groomed and elegant vampire with a tinge of red in his eyes. He had the junkie's sequined mini shoved off her shoulder, his hand molding her bare breast as he drank from her neck.
Another male vamp had his fangs buried in her inner thigh.
Ashwini had known she was wasting her time, but she'd made them stop, then waited until the woman was conscious. At which point the junkie had called Ash a bitch who needed to get fucked. Then she'd spread her legs lewdly to reveal she wore no panties, and shoved one of the vampires down between her thighs, telling him to feed. Her eyes had rolled back in her head an instant later, orgasmic cries torn out of her throat.
A week later, Ashwini had seen the same woman's face in a Guild bulletin. She'd been found drained of blood, fanged all to hell. Saddened but unsurprised, Ashwini had told the hunter on the case about the vamps she'd seen with the victim. Turned out the two had been in San Francisco at the time, the junkie killed by another of her customers.
That was only the tip of the iceberg.
Certain parts of the Vampire Quarter were a meat market--for blood, for sex, for pain. Not all of it in the dives. Two of the most dangerous Quarter clubs were also the most sophisticated and exclusive, catering to a highly select clientele. Old, old vampires who no longer liked anything vanilla.
The Guild did its best to keep an eye on things, but the hunters weren't anyone's big brother, and if the meat walked in and wanted to be eaten, it wasn't anyone's business but that of the adults involved.
Minors were a whole other story.
Ashwini's skin pebbled at the memory of the report that had been part of the file she'd been given when she entered the Academy at sixteen--the Guild had a policy of making sure all its students were fully aware of the world in which they'd be moving should they complete their training.
The younger students received redacted data, what their minds could handle at the time, with more to follow as they grew. Older entrants, in contrast, were given the hard facts with both barrels from the word go. In that never-forgotten case, the vampire in question had been sent to a special prison for near-immortals and sentenced to have his skin flayed off once every fourteen days, no anesthetic, the tool to be a whip or a scalpel.
Apparently, he had to choose which tool was used each and every time. If that wasn't terrifying enough, once every month, the jailors cut off his tongue and genitals in specific punishment for the fact he'd preyed on children. The timing was calculated to be precisely long enough for everything to grow back, given his age, and for him to have two days of perfect health.
Forty-eight hours in which to dread what is to come, Janvier had said to her once while they'd been discussing punishment in the realm of immortals and almost-immortals. It's a stupid man indeed who seeks to break a law when the penalty is in Dmitri's hands.
Parole wasn't even a possibility until the vampire had served a hundred years.
As far as Ashwini was concerned, it was the perfect goddamn punishment. The vamp had been fucking and sucking from a thirteen-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl, both of whom had been raised in his household, the children of servants. Instead of protecting the innocents who'd looked up to him, he'd used their trust and that of their parents to systemically abuse.
He'd even groomed his victims to the point that they believed the abuse to be a normal part of life.
The two children had been damaged on such a deep level, Ashwini knew the prognosis for their future psychological health had been bleak at best. She'd heard rumors that it was one of the rare times Raphael had personally involved himself in the lives of mortals--this was long before Elena became his consort.
According to the rumor mill, he'd done something to the children's minds that allowed them to heal. Ashwini had always hoped the rumor was true, that the kids had made it, were living safe and happy lives as the adults they'd now be . . . and that no other monster had invaded their existence.
Like the one who had preyed on this victim.
The female--who wasn't any longer in the Dumpster, but had been put on a tarp on the fresh-fallen snow beside it, a white tablecloth protecting her from exposure--wasn't a child. That much was clear when Ashwini and Janvier lifted one edge of the tablecloth to look underneath with the help of the high-powered flashlight she'd borrowed from one of the two cops who'd responded to the report of a body.
"I knew it was a Guild case soon as I saw it," the senior member of the duo had said, her gray hair worn in a neat bun at the back of her head and her breath frosting the air. "Things I've seen on this job, you'd think I'd be immune to surprise. Never come across anything like this before, though."
The victim, her hair like straw stripped of color, wasn't a total mummy, had some shape to her. Enough that Ashwini could tell her face had the bone structure of an adult and her breasts had developed beyond adolescence. Her height appeared to be near the five-four mark and, with the skin around her mouth having receded, her dentition was clear and testified to her humanity. No fangs, not even baby ones. The marks on her body were myriad. The light reflected off the shiny white of long-term scarring, sank into the fresh purple-green of new bruising, was torn up by the mess that had been her throat.
Someone had hurt this woman over a long period of time.
Anger throbbing in her gut, Ashwini knew any further examination would have to wait for the cold clarity of the Guild morgue. "Why did you move her?" she asked the senior patrol cop.
Her partner, young and buff and a touch green around the gills, was on guard at the entrance to the alley/drive that serviced the back of the businesses along this stretch.
"Wasn't me, ma'am." A subtle jerk of her head. "Restaurant owner, he had her out before we got here. Name's Tony Rocco."
Glancing behind the uniformed cop, Ashwini took in the short and solid-appearing man who stood red-eyed in the open back doorway of the restaurant. She rose, giving the waiting crime scene techs the go-ahead to process the scene. The two weren't Guild, but had worked cases for and with them before and could be trusted not to leak anything to the media.
"Thanks for coming out so late, guys," she said before walking over to Tony Rocco.
Janvier held back, talking quietly with the techs.
"Sir," she said on reaching the restaurant owner. "My name is Ash. I'm with the Guild."
He didn't ask to see her ID, just shoo
k his head, his thick hair the same deep black as his neatly groomed mustache, his skin pasty with shock. "I couldn't leave her in there, like garbage. I know I'm not supposed to touch if I find something like that, but I just couldn't." His lower lip shook, his voice hoarse. "She's someone's little girl."
At least, Ashwini thought, the victim had had this, a moment of care, of humanity after the horror. "I understand, Mr. Rocco," she said, keeping her voice gentle. "But can you tell me how you found her? Was there rubbish on top of her?"
Instead of answering, he turned in the doorway to call out, "Coby!"
A lanky teenage boy with the same facial structure as Tony, but a foot more in height and skin several shades darker, appeared behind the older male. "Yes, Pa?"
"Show the lady the photos."
The teenager took out his phone, touched the screen to bring up his photo files, then handed it to Ashwini. "I watch the crime shows . . . but I never expected to see anything for real." His Adam's apple bobbed. "I made Pa wait a minute to take her out. I helped him then, even though I knew we shouldn't."
Gripping his father's hand as he must've done as a younger child, Coby blinked rapidly, added, "She was just thrown away. I didn't know people did that for real. I thought they made that stuff up for TV." His voice shook.
Ashwini met a lot of bad people in her line of work, mortal and immortal. A few were plain stupid and violent, others evil and cruel, a percentage selfish and narcissistic. Then she met people like Coby and his father and it renewed her faith in the world. "Thank you." Forwarding herself the photos from the boy's phone and deleting his copies so Coby wouldn't have to do it himself, she said, "Do you usually put out the garbage around the time she was found?"
Tony Rocco nodded after putting his arm around his son and hugging the teenager to his side. "Yes. We clean up for the next morning and--"
"It would've been around eleven," Coby said when his father broke off, the older man's voice swallowed up by grief.
"Anyone else use this Dumpster?"
"Street people Dumpster dive now and then," Coby said, "but we try to give them leftovers so they don't have to." Another jagged swallow, but the boy kept going. "It's so cold now that they don't come around at night anymore. Mostly it's us and the place next door, only they were closed today."
