She had the grace to look away, her cheeks slightly rosy as she hurried off to the next room. "I will get the key to the pub."
"Nell," Adrian said. I watched in amazement as his eyes changed from deep sapphire to a light steel-blue. "I know what you're thinking."
I raised my eyebrows in faux horror. "You know I am planning on jumping your bones the second I get you alone?"
"I know you are planning to slip out once I'm asleep. I know you intend to free Damian without me."
My eyebrows dropped back to their normal position as I slipped into the most innocent look I could muster. "I never once thought that."
"No?"
I couldn't meet those knowing eyes. I glanced down, picking at a piece of invisible lint on my sleeve. "No. Not seriously. The idea might have flitted through my brain, but I didn't consider it. Not for long."
"Good. It is an idea that goes beyond foolish. To attempt to best Asmodeus without me to help you would be suicide, and that"—his fingers caressed my chin as they tilted my face upward—"I could never allow. You are too important to me."
"Face it," I said, rubbing the tip of my nose on his. "You're madly in love with me. You'd be lost without me. I'm your earth and sun and everything in between."
I held my breath as I waited for his response to my half-joking statement. I knew he desired me, knew he needed my blood, knew we were bound together in ways I couldn't begin to understand, but I had no idea whether or not his feelings for me were more than physiological.
His lips parted to speak.
"I found the key for you. It would probably be best if you two entered the pub via the back way, so no one will see you."
Adrian turned away as Belinda entered the room. I swore to myself, cursing her bad timing. What had he been about to say to me? His eyes were shuttered, giving me no clue, and now I wouldn't know.
I would just have to find out once we were alone. Adrian gave Belinda instructions to wake us a few hours before sunset, so we would have time to prepare for the ritual I'd be conducting—or trying to—that evening. I accepted the package of food she'd made up for me, and waited by the door attempting to hide my impatience, praying Adrian would finish talking so we could make our escape to the office below. Tired as I was, I had plans for him… plans which included not only a little therapeutic lovemaking, but the consumption of breakfast as well.
"You know, I have a very good feeling about this," I said over my shoulder to Adrian as I marched down the stairs from Belinda's apartment to the outside door. He was a shadow on the dark stairs, being clad in his coat and hat, with a black scarf that Belinda had dug out of a closet wrapped around the lower part of his face. "We've been dealt a few blows, but we're still on top. It's all going to be downhill from here, just you wait and see!"
I reached for the doorknob, jumping away as it suddenly swung open toward me.
A man in a black overcoat and hat loomed in the doorway. Behind him, a woman in sunglasses limped toward the door.
Christian stared at me in surprise—probably the same amount of surprise that was visible on my face.
Only I was quicker. I lunged forward, shoving him backward through the door, slamming it shut and twisting the deadbolt closed as I quickly traced the binding ward on the door.
"They found us!" I hissed over my shoulder to Adrian. He didn't need any further explanation. He grabbed my wrist and started dragging me back up the stairs to Belinda's apartment.
I grabbed the newel post to stop my ascent, my gaze riveted on the door. I watched with amazement as the ward I had drawn began to unravel, the green ward dissolving bit by bit. Right before my eyes!
"What the hell?" I pulled myself free from Adrian and ran the few steps to the door, touching the unraveled end of the ward, quickly redrawing it into the pattern of binding.
The ward glowed green for a second, started to fade, then glowed again as it once more began to unravel.
"Nell, leave it! There is a back way out of Belinda's flat!"
I touched the ward with the tip of my finger, gritting my teeth as it fought my touch. "You go," I said, focused on the recalcitrant ward. "I'll stay here and hold the door."
"I am not going to leave you," he snarled, jumping down the stairs to grab me.
"It's that Allie woman," I said, fighting with the ward to keep it from undrawing any more. "She's trying to unmake it on the other side of the door."
"Nell, leave it. We must escape now."
I twisted the unraveled edge of the ward back onto itself, tying it in a knot, watching it for a second to make sure Allie wasn't going to be able to undo it quickly. The ward quivered and strained, but held.
"I don't think so," I said, facing Adrian. "No, listen to me, I think we should split up. They don't want me, they want you. You go up to Belinda's and slip out the back. I'll keep Little Miss Wardypants busy here so they can't get in until you've gotten safely away."
"I will not leave you," he growled as he grabbed me. I allowed myself to droop against him for a moment, brushing my mouth against his.
I appreciate the macho he-man protective instincts, Adrian, but this time you're going to have to conquer them. You know as well as I do that Christian and Allie won't harm me. I'm in no danger, so you can stop bristling with indignation over the thought of us splitting up.
I will not leave you. I will not throw you to their mercies.
My lips drifted over to his jaw. It wasn't Christian who wanted to kill me, it was Sebastian. I swear to you, I will be safe. Now that I went to all the trouble of believing six impossible things before breakfast, White Rabbit, I don't intend on losing you.
Hasi—
Go. I will meet you later, at the British Museum.
Where will you go? He was weakening. His need to protect me warred with the realization that what I said was true, but it was touch and go there as to whether or not his heart or his head would win out.
The one place a vampire can't go—a church.
His sigh brushed my mind as he pulled away from me. "Dark Ones can enter churches, Hasi. We are damned, but not demons."
"Oh." I glanced at the ward. It was beginning to fray at the opposite end as Allie worked to unmake it. I had a few seconds, nothing more. "I'll go to the US Embassy, OK? That's got to be the most secure place in London. I'll meet you at the British Museum just after sunset."
"Nell, if we separate, we won't be able to merge."
That stopped me for a few seconds. I have never thought of myself as an overly clingy person, but since meeting Adrian, I felt any separation greatly. It was almost as if a part of my consciousness were missing. If I felt that way just by being in a different room from him, what would it be like with the entire city between us?
The door behind me shook with a blow. I had no choice.
"Go!" I shoved him up the first couple of stairs, leaping back to the door to wrestle with the ward. The knot I had tied slipped free. Reluctantly Adrian stared up the stairs. "Adrian?"
He paused at the top, swathed in so much black he almost faded into the shadows.
"I love you."
His head jerked, but whether in acknowledgement or disagreement I'll never know. The ward slipped through my hands and almost completely unraveled. I grabbed the end of it, holding tight as Adrian pounded on Belinda's door. It opened, and he disappeared at the same moment the door in front of me bucked with the force of a hard blow. The ward twisted and squirmed in my hand, the sound of a large, angry vampire attacking the other side clearly audible. I held on to the ward as long as I could, trying to knot it again, but Allie had much more experience with wards than I. The entire ward melted in my hands as wood splintered. I leaped back out of the way as Christian threw himself at the door again, the wood giving way completely without the ward to hold it shut. I leaned against the wall, my arms crossed, with what I hoped was an insouciant look on my face. "Fancy meeting you here."
Christian snarled something in a vaguely familiar language as he rushed p
ast me.
"Get a little too much sun?" I called after him, waggling a finger toward one side of his face where the skin of his neck and cheek were red. "You'd better watch that. Skin cancer, you know."
He ignored me. I looked past Allie as she marched in. "What, no Sebastian?"
She paused at the bottom of the stairs, pulling off her dark glasses to glare at me. "He can't tolerate the light at all. And if you had made my husband stay out in that sun one second longer, I would have decked you!"
I lifted my chin, refusing to allow her to intimidate me. "You could try."
She snorted before limping up the stairs after Christian. "Don't tempt me."
I waited until Belinda answered the pounding knocks Christian was delivering to her door before turning and slowly walking out the now destroyed front door into the cheerful light of a rare sunny day.
Chapter Sixteen
With the morning came the usual London hustle and bustle—cars, buses, and people all hurried up and down the streets, everyone moving with purpose and a sense of belonging. The scent of diesel mingled with more enticing odors drifting from a nearby bakery. My stomach rumbled as I clutched tighter the paper bag of food Belinda had pressed on me. There would be time to eat it once I found a safe place to hole up in. I wandered around to the back of the block-long building in which the pub was located just in case Adrian had hung around waiting for me, but he wasn't there.
"Whoa!" I jumped back in surprise as Christian landed suddenly on the ground in front of me, having leaped, I assumed, from the second-story balcony outside Belinda's apartment.
He jerked his coat up around his neck, pulling low over his head an Indiana Jones-ish hat as he glanced upward. "You stay here, Allegra. I will follow the trail of the Betrayer."
I looked up as well. Allie leaned over the balcony and yelled down, "He's not worth it, Christian! I know your tolerance of the sunlight is growing, but it's not strong enough for you to go haring around London!"
"Perhaps I won't need to chase him. Perhaps this one will tell me where he is hiding." His head turned to look at me. Before I could do so much as blink, he had my neck in a painful grip, his face near mine, his black eyes narrowed. Suddenly he stopped, sniffing the air a couple of times.
"You have Joined with the Betrayer?" he asked, releasing my neck.
I stepped back, rubbing my bruised skin. "Not that it's any of your business, but, yes, I have. And I'd appreciate it if you'd stop trying to kill him. He's mine, and I don't intend to let you or Sebastian or anyone else who thinks he has a grudge do anything to him. So why don't you and Ward Girl there leave us alone!"
"I'm a Summoner, not a Ward Girl," Allie corrected me. "Christian, come out of the sun. Your chin is turning pink."
Christian's eyes narrowed on me as if he were seeking proof I was lying. A strange pressure invaded my head, a touch that wasn't Adrian's.
"Stop that!" I yelled at Christian, backing up. "No one is allowed in my head but Adrian!"
"What do you hide?" he asked, stalking forward.
I stopped retreating and raised a hand. "I know a curse that will strip you stark naked where you stand. If you don't stop trying to get into my brain, you'll be barbecue."
That stopped him.
"Oh!" Allie cried, firing a glare at me that all but spat fury. "You wouldn't dare! Don't you move, either of you! I'm coming right down!"
Christian gave me a considering look from under the shadow of his hat brim.
I raised my eyebrows. "Don't think I won't do it! I'm leaving now. I don't know how you found us here, but it won't do you any good to follow me, because I'm not going to where Adrian is. As a matter of fact, I don't even know where he is. So good-bye, so long, hasta la vista."
My hands fisted as I walked past him, half expecting him to grab me, but he didn't reach for me. Instead he waited until I was halfway down the alley before calling after me, "We didn't follow you here. We were seeking Saer. What confuses me is why the Betrayer would seek him as well."
"Maybe if you asked yourself who is the real villain of this piece, it might make more sense," I said over my shoulder. "You'll have to do it on your own, because I don't have time to straighten you out. Thanks to you, I don't get to spend the day with Adrian on a nice comfy cot."
When I glanced back as I turned the corner at the end of the alley, Christian was being tugged into a yawning black doorway by Allie. I gave a mental shrug, figuring that I might have given Christian enough to chew on so he'd leave us alone.
There was always the possibility that he didn't believe me, though. And it was for that reason that I made my way to the nearest tube station, and dug through the coins I had filched from Adrian earlier in search of something I could use in a phone. I managed to round up enough for a three-minute overseas call to my friend and next-door neighbor Sabrina.
"Hulluh?"
I peered through the morning throng to a distant clock and did some quick mental arithmetic. "Ooops, sorry, Sabrina. I didn't realize it was one a.m. there."
"Nell?" Her voice was thick and fuzzy with sleep.
"Yeah, it's me, and don't ask questions. I only have two and a half minutes left. I need you to call a hotel in London… uh… sec…" I flipped open the phone book and turned to the hotel pages, picking out the first name I saw. "I want you to call the Dorchester Hotel."
"Hotel? Nell? London?"
"Yes, it's me, and I'm in London. I want you to book me a room in the Dorchester Hotel for a couple of days. Use your credit card to pay for the room. I'll pay you back later, OK?"
"London? I thought you were in Prague?"
"I was, but now I'm in London. Here's the number. Make the reservation under the name Diane Hall." I read the number off to Sabrina, repeating it a couple of times until she seemed to have it.
"Who is Diane Hall?"
I signed, watching the seconds count down on the phone screen. "Me. It's way too long a story to tell now. I'll fill you in when I get home. Just call the hotel now and pretend you're my secretary or something, and pay for a room for a couple of days."
She yawned. "You're going to owe me more than just money for this, Nelly."
"Bottle of wine and a box of Godivas, I promise. Gotta go, time's gone. Thanks a million!"
The phone clicked off in the middle of her response. I hung up the receiver, consulted with the big station clock, and went to find out just how long a walk I had to the Dorchester Hotel.
I'd like to think that being bound spiritually to a vampire meant I had all sorts of superpowers, but I didn't seem any different than before when I flopped down on the hotel bed. My body was sore and tired from the long hike, my mind was exhausted, and the toe blister born on the walk from Christian's castle had blossomed into adulthood.
"The least Adrian could have done was give me some sort of extra resilience or wonderful pain-blocking techniques," I grumbled as I hauled myself into the bathroom, dredging up enough strength to run a bath. "There's not a lot I'm getting out of this deal. Eternity with a weak left side, crooked smile, and blisters. Oy."
I fell asleep in the tub, but managed not to drown myself. By the time I dried myself off, crawled into bed, ate one of the two sandwiches and an orange Belinda packed for me, I was at the end of my strength. I roused myself enough to make sure that no dark-eyed vamps were lurking at the end of the hotel hallway, staggering back to bed to collapse into the soft pillows. Worry about Adrian was uppermost in my mind, worry that made me feel ill and restless despite the exhaustion, but I comforted myself that he had taken care of himself for several centuries—surely he would be all right on his own for a few hours.
I missed him. I missed the touch of his mind on mine, the warm security of his body. I missed the way his eyebrows arched when I said something outrageous. I missed the way his eyes darkened when he was aroused, the heat he fired within me with just a flick of his eyelashes, the joy we shared when we merged bodies and minds. But most of all I missed the piece of me that he had taken
with him.
It's hard to sleep when your heart is off somewhere else.
Six hours later I limped (the blister still hurt, despite the three band-aids I had begged from hotel housekeeping), up the front steps to the British Museum. The sun hadn't set yet, but I had gotten little sleep despite my body's fatigue. I figured I might as well start looking around the British Museum. It certainly couldn't hurt to scope out the area, just in case Christian or Sebastian were out looking for us.
I stopped in the Great Court at one of the information desks and inquired about the location of an ivory griffin-headed figure. "It's from Toprakkale," I added as the information woman entered keywords to search the BM's collection.
She looked up. "How do you spell that?"
I told her.
"I'm afraid that item is being held in a conservational storeroom in the basement. It is not open to the public."
I heaved an inner sigh of relief. My memories of the cursed cloth that had resulted in Beth's death were enough to convince me that any article that had come in contact with a demon lord posed a hazard to unwary observers. "That's all right, I don't mind going off the beaten path, so to speak. If you'll just tell me where it is—"
"I'm sorry, but it is museum policy to limit access to such items to approved students and visiting scholars."
"Perfect! I'm an assistant professor at the University of Washington. That makes me a visiting scholar."
"Oh," she said, brightening. "Do you have your credentials?"
My hopeful look dimmed. "Um. As a matter of fact, no. I… er… left them behind. In my hotel. And I don't have much time, so I'd really like to see the figure this afternoon."
"We must see credentials," the woman said firmly. "Do you have anything with your university affiliation on it?"
"No," I said, biting my lip. I was familiar enough with museum security to know it would be no easy task to break my way into a storeroom. I much preferred just walking in. "Oh! I know. The UW website. My page has my picture on it. Would that suffice?"
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