Archangel's Shadows

by Nalini Singh

  "Yes."

  She wasn't about to fall for that. "Will you answer truthfully?"

  Naasir flashed his fangs at her. "I'll give you at least two truthful answers."

  Elena decided that was better than nothing. "Are you the only one of your kind?" she asked, conscious of not only Ash but others around them listening in.

  "Yes."

  She examined his extraordinary eyes, his sly half smile, his body posture--and had absolutely no idea if he was lying or not. Damn it. "Were you born or Made?"

  "Both."

  Angling her shoulders to face him as Illium's shook with laughter across the table, she said, "Are you part of the tiger family?" His scent, it was so wild she could almost taste the jungle, almost see the long grasses where a striped predator might hide.

  Naasir leaned in so close his nose brushed hers. "No," he said with a playful snap of his teeth.

  Elena wanted to strangle him. It was impossible to gauge his expression, separate truth from lie, but she wasn't about to give up. "Are you a vampire?"

  He drank deeply of the blood in his glass, the dark ruby of it swirling with secrets. "No."

  "I think I could be driven to bite you," she muttered. "Hard."

  Naasir growled, but his eyes were laughing. "Enough?"

  "No. I have three questions left." Shooting a death glare at Dmitri when he asked her if she needed assistance, all false solicitousness, she turned her attention back to Naasir. "Do you truly eat people?"

  "Only if I dislike them, or if I'm very hungry." A solemn statement.

  Remembering what he'd once told her about the angel who'd Made him--though she was certain he hadn't been Made in any ordinary way--as well as what he'd said about Lijuan smelling like bad meat, she figured that was a truth.

  "Do you have claws?" All vampires could extend their nails, some more than others. It was part of what allowed them to climb so well. But during the battle, when she'd bandaged up Naasir's wounds, she'd thought she glimpsed a more dangerous ability out of the corner of her eye. "I don't mean normal vampire claws. Actual claws."

  Putting down his glass, Naasir spread his hand between them. His fingers were long and strong, his skin that lush, rich brown with an undertone of gold . . . and where his nails had been, she suddenly saw wickedly curved claws as might appear on the paws of a tiger. They disappeared a heartbeat later, and she could almost imagine it had been an illusion.

  "Truth," she whispered, taking his hand to examine his nail beds when he didn't seem to mind. She almost asked where his claws had gone, since there was no trace of them, but didn't want to waste a question.

  "Do this, Ellie," Ash said from his other side, reaching out to playfully scratch the back of Naasir's neck, his hair brushing over her skin.

  He made a rumbling sound in the back of his throat, eyes closing.

  Elena copied Ash's action on his hand, got another rumble before he lifted the gorgeous, true silver of his lashes to say, "Last question."

  "Do you change shape?" Her words made Illium erupt in gales of laughter, but Elena wasn't put off. Legends had to start somewhere. Why not with Naasir?

  "Of course," he answered, then turned his body to the right and curled his arm into his chest. "See, I have just changed shape."

  Making a strangling motion with her hands that had him throwing back his head and laughing in unhidden glee, Elena felt the clean kiss of the sea, of the rain in her mind. I see you and Naasir are becoming friends.

  What did I tell you about this new sense of humor of yours? She took a bite of her dinner, which she'd ignored while questioning Naasir.

  I was speaking only the truth. Naasir is currently playing with your hair.

  He probably wants to scalp me and use my hair as a trophy.

  True.

  Elena looked up, eyes narrowed at the far too amused archangel across the table. I am so going to get even with you for this. Tugs on her scalp at the same instant, as if Naasir were curling the strands around his finger, then letting go.

  She turned, intending to tell him to knock it off, but then she saw his face. He looked . . . absorbed. Like a cat with a ball of yarn. She didn't care if he'd said no to the tiger question--there was something distinctly feline about him. Especially since he'd apparently talked Ash into scratching his nape again while he played his game with Elena's hair, his eyes heavy lidded in ecstasy.

  She was going to unearth the truth of him, even if it took her the rest of eternity.

  *

  Janvier saw Ash run her nails affectionately over Naasir's neck and remembered the first time she'd done that. It had been about thirty minutes after meeting Naasir. Where he was standoffish and distant with most new people, Naasir had already decided he liked "Janvier's hunter," having kept track of their interactions over the years.

  As a result, he'd been his normal self.

  Instead of being startled by Naasir's behavior, Ash had taken to him from the start, making no effort to avoid the physical contact the other male liked to make. "He's different," she'd said with a mystified shrug when Janvier asked her about it. "It's hard to explain, but what I sense from him isn't anything that disturbs me. I'm not sure I understand most of it."

  A few minutes after that, while the three of them had been crouched in a hidden access tunnel they'd been scoping out in the run-up to the battle, she'd reached out and absently scratched the back of Naasir's neck.

  Janvier, having previously seen how ferociously Naasir could react to unwanted contact, had been ready to fight for her life, but the other man had bent his head for more. Ash's startled expression as she realized what she was doing had faded into affectionate puzzlement--and Janvier realized she'd reacted to an unvoiced need in the other male.

  Her friendship with Naasir was as open and free of shadows as Janvier's relationship with her was not. So much lay unsaid between them, but saying it would fix nothing. Ash knew he loved her, would always love her. Anything she wanted, he'd give her . . . except for her mortality.

  He'd waited more than two hundred years for her. How could she ask him to just let her go?

  Feed

  Her eyes were drenched in terror.

  Raising a hand, the one-who-waited stroked her cheek as her throat worked, the scream swallowed up by the pungent miasma of her fear.

  "Not tonight." A rasp, its throat a ruin. "I have fed." The hunger came often, but the one-who-waited had learned to discipline that voracious need, because without discipline it would become a slave to those urges rather than a master of them.

  So it pressed its mouth to hers in a kiss that made her whimper, its lips cracked and papery against hers. Hers had been soft once, were no longer. A pity.

  Releasing her jaw, the one-who-waited smiled and drew one last draft of fear-laced air before removing the temptation from view. "Soon," it promised as the wood obscured her face. "Soon."

  19

  Janvier was leaning against the wall by the window finishing off the last of the blood in his wineglass when Ash found him around ten thirty that night. Dressed in those sleek black jeans paired with red ankle boots that had a spiked heel, her long-sleeved black shirt tucked into her jeans and opened at the throat just enough to hint at skin, she looked sexy and dangerous and his.

  The dangles at her ears were a cascade of hoops created with tiny beads of orange and yellow and red, the belt around her hips having a simple square buckle of gleaming silver. And her hair, that glorious hair, it was a waterfall down her back. He wanted to wrap his hand in it, arch her throat, sink his fangs into her.

  Mark her.

  "We should head out," she said, eating a forkful of the chocolate fudge cake on her plate.

  Janvier put his possessive hunger in a stranglehold and stole a fingerlick of frosting. "Any more news from the computer teams?"

  "No. They've struck out in terms of identifying her either through the tat or through missing persons reports." She stabbed her fork into the cake with unnecessary force. "Not surpr
ising. With what we know from the signs of feeding on her body, she probably lived with her killer."

  "We will find her, cher."

  "Yes, we will." An absolute statement as she finished off the cake.

  He couldn't help it. Leaning in, he caught a crumb clinging to her lower lip and brought it to his mouth. Sucking his thumb inside, he said, "Mmm, sweet."

  Her body had gone stiff at the contact, and now she moved with an unusual jerkiness to place the fork and saucer on a side table. "Let's go."

  It wasn't the response he'd been hoping for, but neither was it the light, flirtatious one he'd begun to find increasingly dissatisfying. He loved playing with Ash, but not when she was using that play to keep him at a distance. This at least was a sign he'd breached the armor she used to hold him at bay.

  "Any particular club you want to hit first?" he asked, after getting into the car and starting up the engine.

  "I say we start at the low end and work our way up. We have no way of knowing if she was beautiful enough to be invited into the exclusive clubs." Beauty talked in the clubs, especially if sexual feeding was involved. "But if she had been a regular at one of those places, or over at Erotique"--the most elite club in the city and located outside the Quarter--"her disappearance would've created more waves."

  "I haven't heard any rumors of such a disappearance," Janvier confirmed.

  "Did your contact have any success in reconstructing her face?"

  "Yes, I received the image during dinner. It has no life to it so we'll have to be judicious in how we utilize it." Janvier tapped a finger on the steering wheel, the streets shadowed and dark around them. "She had to be in a one-on-one relationship."

  "Why?"

  "You saw at Giorgio's how the cattle cling to one another. If the victim was part of a group, her housemates would have reported her missing even if her vampire didn't."

  "Unless she told them she was leaving him, and he kidnapped her after allowing her--and them--to believe he'd let her go. You know how many times that happens in abusive mortal relationships. Any reason it should be different for immortals?"

  Face grim, Janvier said, "No."

  Blowing out a breath at the bleak ugliness of it, she ran a hand through her hair, having left it down for tonight. However, since she didn't want anyone running their fingers through it in the clubs--it was creepy how many people thought that was okay--she reached back and began to braid it tight to her skull. "The situation with Giorgio is bugging me. You don't think our victim could've been part of his harem, do you?"

  Janvier shook his head. "I made it a point to check him out--all his cattle are accounted for, even the ones nudged out of the nest after becoming too old." Distaste colored his tone. "Giorgio's use of women apparently stops short of murder."

  "Damn, he made such a good, smarmy suspect." She tied off her braid and considered whether to swap her heeled red boots for the hunter boots she'd left in the car. She decided to stick with the heels since this was about blending into the clubs.

  "And you, cher--did you sense any disturbing memory echoes in his house?"

  "No, but it's new. The only time I've had an overwhelming reaction to a place rather than a person was at Nazarach's home." A shiver rippled through her. "I do get a hint of it now and then with older homes, but nothing like the screams in his walls."

  Janvier ran his knuckles over her cheek, the caress chasing away the shiver and wrapping another set of chains around her heart. "Even with the Tower," she said past the knot in her throat, "I don't get anything. Could be because it's continuously modernized."

  "Or perhaps," Janvier said, "the reason is that it's filled with so many different souls, rather than one who dominates everyone to cowering obeisance."

  Ashwini could see that; Raphael was ruthless, but he gathered strong men and women around him. Ellie, for one, had never backed down from anyone in her life, and Dmitri wasn't exactly a cream puff. Then there was Janvier. He had the ability to bend, his temperament slow to anger, but he was also very much his own man. She knew that should it ever come down to it, Janvier would walk away from the Tower rather than go against his principles.

  "As for Giorgio," Janvier said, "I'm not convinced he isn't hurting his cattle." His hands tightened on the steering wheel before he seemed to consciously make himself loosen his grip. "I have people keeping an eye on the situation--there was just something too sickly sweet about it all."

  "Like an abused spouse who's been charmed into forgiving and forgetting." Ashwini's stomach twisted. She knew too well what it was to want to believe in the promises of someone she loved. "The honeymoon phase, I call it. Before the next hit."

  Janvier shot her a hard, dangerous glance before returning his gaze to the road. "No one hurts you."

  She heard the protective rage and, below it, a kind of stunned shock. "No one has ever hit me," she clarified. "Except, of course, during my work as a hunter." Then, all was fair.

  Janvier's rigid shoulders didn't relax. "You think I don't know you well enough to see through that?"

  Suddenly, the space between them didn't exist, the intimacy as blinding as when he'd brushed the crumb off her lip. "I don't talk about this." Tried to not even think about it, though seeing Arvi the previous day had stirred the pain of it back up.

  No, Ashwini, she told herself, be brutally honest. The reason you can't find a way to tell Janvier everything is that it'll break you if he looks at you with pity in his eyes.

  The car ate up the road, a sleek piece of the night.

  "When I was a boy," Janvier said into the silence that had grown too heavy, too dark, "I used to work for a man who caught crawfish and supplied them to others. It was a way to earn a little money for my family, help my mother provide for my baby sisters."

  Ashwini turned in her seat, compelled by the intimate vein of memory, affection, and sadness in his tone. "How many sisters did you have?" It startled her to realize she didn't know this about him when they'd spoken so many times, trusted one another so deeply.

  "Two." A smile that creased his cheeks. "Amelie arrived in time with a thunderclap one rainy day, Joelle a year or so later in the midnight hours, both squalling and red-faced and tiny." Having reached the fringe of the Vampire Quarter, he drove around to the small lot behind a blood cafe, after first unlocking the gate by pressing in a code on the keypad at the entrance.

  He parked, switched off the engine, then turned toward her, one arm braced on the steering wheel. "My father died in a logging accident when Amelie and Joelle were only two and three, so it was just the four of us until my mother married again seven years later."

  Meaning he'd effectively become the head of his household for those seven years. "How old were you when you began working?"

  "The dates weren't so well kept then--you understand, sugar? But I was old enough. Seven or eight."

  "So young?"

  "It was nothing unusual, not then." A shrug. "The man I worked for, he used to hit me if I didn't move fast enough; he'd kick me at least once a day. I have never forgotten the feeling of helplessness I experienced as a small boy trapped in a position of no power against a bigger, stronger opponent."

  Blood hot and hands fisted, Ashwini had to remind herself that he hadn't been that small, helpless boy for a long time.

  "You'd think I learned my lesson," he continued, "but we both know I later made the decision to enter into another situation where I did not hold power, out of what I then thought was love." He smiled, as if at the foolishness of it. "I was so green, so inexperienced in the ways of the world, and Shamiya was sensual, beautiful--and she told me incredible tales of lands far beyond the bayou."

  A shake of his head. "It was a deadly combination when it came to the restless young man I was then, the hunger for adventure a craving in my soul, especially when she said such sweet words to me. I did not understand that I was in the throes of infatuation, and that she was merely playing."

  Ashwini could see it, see the young male he'd bee
n, hungry to experience life and to prove himself. "Did she help you become a Candidate?" A person couldn't simply ask to be a vampire; he or she had to be chosen.

  "Yes. She took me to Neha's court, where she was a favorite." He laughed. "I have never been so sick as I was on that voyage. The waters of the bayou never crashed and rolled as that ocean did, as if attempting to throw an insect off its back."

  The idea of the long journey, the things he must've seen, made a thousand questions form on her tongue, but she was even more fascinated by this deeper glimpse into his path to vampirism. "Shamiya must've felt something for you to go to all that trouble," she said, unable to imagine how any woman could be so careless as to throw away the loyalty of a man like Janvier. "Even as a favorite, she still had to petition Neha." And the Queen of Poisons was an archangel, as ruthless and as deadly as Raphael.

  "She felt what a child does with a new toy." He spoke the words without rancor. "I was different enough in my lack of sophistication that I was new and shiny and amusing for a period. I, on the other hand, believed myself in the grip of a grand passion"--laughing at himself, eyes dancing--"and so like a fool, I gave up gumbo for blood." There was no recrimination in his gaze, nothing but an affectionate humor directed at the young man he'd once been.

  Ashwini had asked him once if he loved Shamiya still. His answer had resonated deeply with her.

  A silly question, cher. You know love cannot survive where there is no light.

  Tonight, she saw that he'd not only moved on lifetimes ago, he bore no grudge. "Have you ever seen her again?" she asked, curious. "Shamiya, I mean."

  "Oui, many times. She is as feckless and as fickle as she always was, while I am no longer green and impressionable. I outgrew her at the infancy of my Contract." His eyes locking with hers. "But before I grew into this man I am today, I was that boy at the mercy of a brute, and that unsophisticated young man abandoned in the court of the Queen of Poisons. I am no stranger to being under the control of others."

  Ashwini knew that like the small boy, that idealistic young man was long gone. Janvier had survived both his childhood and the betrayal of the woman who had lured him into vampirism, come out of it a strong, intelligent male who would never again allow himself to be powerless.