by Nalini Singh
Janvier had once come into a town that was meant to be a rest stop for couriers only to find every part of the small settlement sticky with rust red, and the two resident vampires feeding like gluttons on the warm, nude corpse of the woman who'd been the lover to one. He'd executed both on the spot. It was the only way to contain the slaughter.
Dmitri's response lit up his phone. I've had the same report from two other senior people in the area--we have Tower vampires scattered through the clubs keeping an eye on the temperature until I can talk to the leaders.
Satisfied that the issue was being handled, Janvier said, "We can leave now, sugar."
"Thank God." Ash slid away her phone with a groan. "There are only so many glow-in-the-dark dildos I can look at with wide-eyed interest."
Chuckling, he ran her braid through his fingers. "I don't think we should go to more clubs tonight--we have Felicity's name, and any further questions may arouse suspicion and concern." They had to balance the needs of the investigation with making sure it stayed under the radar.
"Agreed."
"Don't bite my head off, cher, but are you hurting?" He touched his hand to his chest to indicate her scar, unable to forget how much she'd bled in his arms, how close he'd come to losing her. It was a nightmare that had woken him, soaked in sweat and gasping for breath, more than once.
"I'm good. Today was all about asking questions, no real physical strain."
Janvier had watched her carefully tonight, seen no indications of pain from her injury, so he accepted her words, and they moved off into the delicate flakes falling from the sky.
"I love snow," Ash said with a sigh. "Bad for tracking when it falls, but it's so forgiving on the world, so peaceful."
He watched small flecks collect on her eyelashes, knew she'd grow ever more beautiful to him as the years passed. Reaching for the gloves he'd slipped into his coat pockets before leaving to pick her up for dinner, he said, "Put these on." They were her size, ones he'd bought because she was so often without gloves.
Tilting her head, she pinned him with the dark eyes that saw too much. "I've realized something about you, Janvier."
He waited to hear what she'd say.
"You like to take care of people."
"Is that a bad thing?" He couldn't change his elemental nature, couldn't unmake that part of him.
"No." A spreading warmth deep within, Ashwini accepted the gloves, tugged them on over chilled fingers. It was odd to be taken care of, to be valued in such a way, but now that she'd conquered her initial confusion and fear at his tenderness, it felt like a gift. "Most hunters can take care of themselves."
"So can most vampires of my strength," he said with the confidence that made him so attractive. "That doesn't mean I would not be delighted if you showed a care for this Cajun's hide."
Ashwini thought of the way he'd looked at her after the kiss in the bar, took in the faint half smile that didn't match the shadows in his eyes, and knew it was all going wrong. In trying to protect him, she'd rejected him. "Janvier?"
"Yes?"
"I'm keeping a secret from you, a huge, terrible, bad thing." There, it was out.
He stopped in the shadow of a private club, his expression grim. "You won't tell me this secret?"
"I can't." It made her too angry, too afraid of how it would change everything between them, the cowardice closing up her throat. "But you have a right to know, and once you find out, you'll hate me for allowing this relationship to go so far."
"Ashwini, I'm yours." Utter disbelief intermingled with temper. "Hating you is an impossibility."
Her already brittle heart threatened to shatter. "You don't know what I'm keeping from you."
"I don't need to know--and neither one of us has ever been in control of the thing between us. It has its own stubborn, relentless will." He thrust one hand into his hair, began walking again, his next words so angry the heat of them seemed to melt the snow. "The only way it would die would be if you repudiated me."
Stopping again, the two of them now on the fringe of the Quarter, he faced her. "Is that what you want to do?" His tone was raw, his hands fisted. "To tell me that you don't want me?"
"You're an idiot." Hauling him to her by gripping the open sides of his jacket, she kissed him in frustrated fury. "I'm trying to protect you." She released him, strode off ahead.
He caught up to her, his eyes bright with temper and passion both. "Well, don't. I'm a big vampire. I can handle any secret you have as long as you're mine."
"Damn you." She slipped her left hand into his right. "You'll regret this."
He wrapped his fingers around hers, the hold blatantly proprietary. "I will never regret you!"
Ashwini would never regret him, either.
And she knew. No more secrets, no more stealing time.
She had to tell him, show him, everything.
Forcing her mind off the heavy weight of what was to come, she said, "I shot Ransom a note with Felicity's name in case his street contacts know anything. I also fed her name to the computer tech on duty so he can troll the databases."
Vivek had been a lone ranger for a long time in the position, available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. He'd known everything, or so it seemed, but he was one of a kind. "How's Vivek?" she asked Janvier. "Have you seen him?" The guild hunter had chosen vampirism not for eternal life but because it would--eventually--give him back the use of his paralyzed body.
"No." Expression dark yet, Janvier said, "He asked for privacy during his transformation, and Elena has made sure of it. I don't think she's seen him, either."
She could understand why Vivek didn't want his friends to see him while he was weak and defenseless; paralyzed or not, he'd always been a force to be reckoned with. "I guess I just want to know someone has a careful eye on him. I don't know any human who's been Made after suffering such devastating long-term injuries."
"Keir himself is monitoring his progress."
Ashwini had met Keir in the aftermath of the battle. She'd been stitched up by human doctors, but the angelic healer had unexpectedly dropped by her apartment two days after she'd made Janvier leave. With uptilted eyes of warm brown set in a delicately beautiful face, his black hair sleek and his body slender as a boy's, Keir had appeared unutterably young and yet there'd been a wisdom in his gaze that told her his was a soul old and noble in its peace.
"It is past time I came to see you," he'd said with a small incline of his head.
Bemused, she'd invited him in, offered him a cup of herbal tea rather than coffee.
His response had been a smile and the words, "Yes, of course that is what I would like."
The most unfathomable thing was that she hadn't touched Keir even once, and yet she'd known he'd enjoy the tea, just as she knew he was exhausted from the work he'd been doing with the wounded at the Tower. So she'd offered him a place to rest and, to her surprise, he'd accepted, closing his eyes and dozing quietly in her favorite old armchair.
It had been strange to see angelic wings of golden brown draped over her furniture, to have someone of such age and power in her living space. "Keir," she said to Janvier, the two of them having almost reached the car, "he's so old." The kind of age she'd always feared. "But he doesn't make me uncomfortable. If anything, he makes everything seem peaceful, he's so gentle and centered."
She knew Keir had incredible depths to him, intricate layers of pain and living that made up any life, but there was no cruelty, none of the horror she associated with immortality.
Janvier blinked away a tiny snowflake that sought to cling stubbornly to his eyelashes. "The scholar who taught me to read," he said after they'd entered the parking lot and were inside the car, "said she'd done the same for Keir when he was a boy. She told me he was the wisest child she'd ever known, an old, old soul reborn into a new body."
"Yes. Lijuan boasted that she'd evolved to the next plane of existence, but I think Keir's the one who's done that." The healer was something better than
this world, with a luminous light at his core.
Janvier's return gaze was hard. "I won't argue with you--on that point."
Gloves off and jacket unzipped in the warmth of the car, Ashwini looked out at the lightly snowy landscape as they left the Quarter. The city sparkled through the white and it felt as if they traveled inside a snow globe, like the one Arvi had given her when she was seven. She'd accidentally broken the treasured present the morning of the day he drove her to the place where they tried to "fix" her; and Arvi, he'd stared at the shards with the strangest expression on his face.
At the time, she'd thought he was angry. Now, she wondered if, just for an instant, he'd realized that what he was doing might as irretrievably shatter the sister who adored him.
"Ashwini?"
"Would you like to go for a drive?" she asked the vampire with the moss green eyes who'd branded her soul long ago and whose heart she was about to break as she'd once broken that snow globe. "I have to show you something."
*
Following Ash's instructions, Janvier left the city and the falling snow behind. The tires currently on his car were designed for winter conditions, so the journey was smooth despite the occasional patch of ice. He'd driven for approximately an hour on mostly empty night roads when she directed him down a side road, having not spoken much for the entirety of the drive.
The road was well maintained, though not particularly brightly lit. Janvier didn't yet have the preternatural eyesight that came with centuries-long vampirism, so he lowered their speed around the corners, in case the person on the other side was an idiot who thought he or she could see in the dark.
As it was, they passed only two other vehicles over the next twenty minutes.
"Turn where you can see that small signboard on the left."
The car's headlights reflecting off the discreet black-on-cream of the board, he found himself going down what appeared to be an endless private drive, winter-bare oaks lining it on either side. "Cher," he said, hating the pain in her silence. "I can see large gates."
"I have the access code." She told him the code when they reached the gates, and he punched it in on the driver's side.
Lights appeared in the distance over five minutes later, a sprawling brick house that reminded him of a Georgian mansion taking shape against a backdrop of trees that were black silhouettes in the night. The drive appeared to end in a circular sweep, with what might have been a fountain in the center, though it was difficult to tell from this distance.
"Pull over here."
Not arguing with Ash's request, he brought the car to a stop some distance from the house and turned off both the headlights and the engine. "What is that place?"
Ash got out. Following, he met her at the front of the car . . . where she reached for his hand and held on tight. "It's called Banli House," she whispered. "They don't have a website or any other online presence. It's one of those places that's so exclusive, you have to know someone to get in."
Janvier's tendons went taut, jawbones grinding against one another.
"My brother was a younger doctor then," she said, "but our family was wealthy, established. One of my parents' friends must've recommended this place when . . . when things went wrong." Her breath fogged the air, her inhales shallow. "The rich usually send their drug-addicted sons and daughters here to sober them up, but Banli House is a fully accredited medical and psychiatric facility capable of handling far worse embarrassments."
Her hand was squeezing his so hard that had he been human, she would've left bruises. Janvier wanted to put a hundred bloody bruises on the man responsible for the echo of horror in her voice. "Arvi sent you to this place."
"When I was fifteen. He drove me here himself, told me the doctors would help me." A streak of wet on her cheek that broke Janvier's heart. "I wanted so much to be normal for him." Her eyes met his, huge and dark. "He was my big brother and, no matter what, he'd always looked after me." Voice cracking, she blinked rapidly. "The worst thing is, he truly believed he was doing that this time, too."
"Cher." He turned to wrap his other arm around her, hold her against him, his indomitable Ash who'd fought off vampires and angels hundreds of years older than her and never crumbled.
"They drugged me," she said, the words a rasp. "To make me better, that's what they said. There was more, other kinds of 'therapy.' They tied me down when I resisted, and then they pumped me full of drugs again."
Taking a deep, shaky breath, she pulled away but didn't break the handclasp, her eyes on Banli House. Her nightmare, he thought, to be vanquished. And she'd do it with shoulders squared and head held high.
He was fucking amazed by her.
"So many people touched me and I couldn't do anything to stop it. Orderlies, doctors, nurses. Enough that I began to tune in to them." She dashed away the tears that had escaped her, stared unflinching at the facility in the distance. "Sometimes they were being nice, trying to calm me during a panic attack after I'd been strapped down, but it just made it worse--at least three of my care staff had worked with the criminally mentally ill, had horrible things inside their heads."
Her fingers flexed, squeezed his hand again.
"I was drowning in their lives and it was driving me mad, but I had to pretend the therapy was working, that I was getting better. Even when I slept, I couldn't let myself go too deep--I had to be awake enough to fight the nightmares. I was in there for five months."
24
Janvier thought of how strained she'd been in Nazarach's home, her energy contained tightly inside her skin, and couldn't imagine how she'd survived the hell of having her mind violated over and over again. "Were the walls--"
"No," she said, anticipating his question. "Banli House is too young to have become a living entity to my senses. It's safe for the time being--and if I'd been able to choose my caregivers, choose the ones who had quiet, ordinary minds, I might have been okay."
Janvier saw she didn't believe her own words; his Ash wasn't meant to be trapped and caged. Like a bird with its wings clipped, she would sicken and die. "How did you get out?" he asked through the rage that was a flood shoving against his senses.
"I convinced them I'd stabilized enough that they started to let me out on the grounds." Tiny lines flared out from the corners of her eyes, her expression wondering. "To this day, I don't know how I did it. It was as if I put on a different skin like Naasir talks about doing--beneath that skin, I was one step away from total fragmentation."
"You were tough even then."
A fast, unexpected smile. "Yes, I was." The smile faded too soon, her eyes drawn toward Banli House again. "I wanted to run the first day I glimpsed freedom, but I fought it. I knew they were watching me." Pausing, she lifted their clasped hands, rubbed her cheek against the back of his.
It was a punch right to his heart.
"So I did what they expected me to do," she said after lowering their hands again. "I sunbathed and read books like the addicts who'd gone through detox. After a while, the staff stopped paying as close attention to me. Then late one evening after final bed check, I squeezed out a window I'd wedged open, and I ran."
Janvier clenched his jaw, his entire body trembling with the storm inside him. "Where was your brother during the time you were in this place?" he asked, not sure he could ever be civil to the man again.
"Don't blame him, Janvier," she said, to his surprise. "I can't forgive him, but I know why he did it."
"No reason can excuse such abandonment." He would've died for his sisters, would've slayed dragons for them. "A brother is meant to protect."
"That's the thing." A pained whisper. "In his mind, that was exactly what he was doing." She leaned her head against his shoulder. "It wasn't until I was in here that I understood why he couldn't stand to be around me once I began to know things I shouldn't, once I ran to him as an eleven-year-old scared of the ugly things I'd glimpsed in the mind of a teacher who turned out to be a child molester."
The hurt
in her voice as she spoke of her brother's rejection was old, long accepted. "In that last, Arvi didn't let me down. He had the teacher investigated, and the man ended up behind bars." A squeeze of Janvier's hand. "He's not a bad person, my brother. He's just . . . I think I'd better show you why Arvi is as he is . . . Why I am as I am." Her eyes went to the facility in the distance. "We have to go inside."
*
Banli House grew bigger in front of Ashwini as they approached it, a bloated beast with glowing eyes.
No, she thought, forcing her jaw muscles to relax, aware she was seeing the facility through the gaze of the scared, confused girl she'd once been. Banli House was no beast; rather, it was a hiding place created by the wealthy to dump their problems where the world couldn't see them.
Janvier brought the car to a smooth stop in the circular drive, near the steps that led to the entrance. There were planters on either side of it, a small manicured evergreen in each, and the fan-shaped lead glass above the door glowed from the light beyond. "It looks so warm and inviting, doesn't it?" she said through the choke hold of fear and old panic.
It was never easy, walking through those doors. But if she didn't do it every single time, the fear would win, it would own her.
Janvier braced his arm along the back of her seat. "This place wounds you. We don't need to be here."
"No. It's important."
"Then I am with you."
Ashwini skimmed her eyes over him; he wasn't wearing any visible blades or guns, but she knew he was armed. "Keep a careful eye on your weapons."
Not questioning her instruction, Janvier gave a small nod.
The front door of Banli House opened as they exited the car and she saw Carl was on duty again tonight. Neatly cut hair, straight white teeth, and creamy skin, his features symmetrical, the nurse was as attractive as every other member of staff. Ashwini had always found that strange. What did the owners think? That rich people didn't want to dump their embarrassments in a place where those embarrassments might come in contact with the less than attractive?
"Ash," the nurse said when they reached him. "It's good to see you again so soon."
"Is she awake?" Ashwini knew the answer even as she asked the question; the woman she'd come to see had always been a night owl . . . and "clock" time had little meaning to her now. She woke and slept to her own internal rhythms.
