“Agreed,” Hideo said, throwing down the sword strapped to his back. His companions quickly followed and then held up their empty hands in acquiescence.
Turning sideways, I looked over at Danaus, who released the Japanese nightwalker from the ugly grip of his powers. The nightwalker named Nomura stopped writhing about and curled up into a tight little ball on the ground, moaning.
“In case you were wondering, Danaus can more than take care of himself,” I said smugly. “Touch him again and he will not hesitate to kill you all. Touch anyone else in my domain and we will both hunt you down. I can sympathize with your desperation, and that is why I have spared your companion’s life.”
“How?” Hideo whispered.
“That’s my secret,” Danaus said in a low voice.
I took a step backward and put my sword in its sheath on my back. “Take your companion and return to your daylight resting place. My offer stands. You may stay in my domain for a few nights to give your companion some time to recover. Consider my plan. The elimination of Aurora may also succeed in helping your own people in Japan.”
“We do not welcome the Great Awakening, but working with the naturi to avoid such a fate is equally abhorrent to us.”
“I’m not thrilled with the idea either, but we have been backed into a corner.” I frowned. “It’s time to make some tough decisions.”
“Agreed,” Hideo said with a slight sigh, sounding tired for the first time. I couldn’t blame him. Dawn was drawing close and it had already been a very long night.
Cautiously, the three members of the Soga clan approached their fallen member and carried him from the clearing, keeping as much distance from Danaus and myself as possible. Kojima paused long enough to pick up their weapons at the edge of the clearing.
When my eyes finally fell on Danaus, I considered rescinding my offer and burning all four of them to a crisp, but I got hold of my temper at the last second. Hurrying to the hunter, I put my hand over his, resting on his throat. He had been cut deeply enough that blood was leaking between his fingers, while a second more shallow wound had sliced through his shirt and cut through the flesh over his heart.
“I’m fine,” he reassured me in a low voice that danced across my skin.
“You’re not. That bastard cut you. He could have seriously injured you. I thought their goal was to kidnap you. How could I possibly agree to help them if they killed you?” I ranted.
“I honestly think it was an accident.” Danaus weakly smiled at me, trying to ease my fears and cool the anger bubbling just below the surface. “When I started to boil his blood, he jerked away from me, pulling the knife across my throat as he rushed to get away from me.”
Danaus lifted his hand, wiping away the blood to reveal a long, angry red cut, but at least the bleeding had stopped. I pulled away my own hand, covered in his blood, my fingers trembling. A deep, unrelenting longing rose in my chest, nearly dragging a whimper from my throat. I wanted to lick my fingers clean of his blood. I want to suck the blood from his fingers and run my tongue along this throat to clean away the last of his blood. And if I was honest with myself, something dark inside of me longed to sink my fangs in his throat and finally drink deep.
With jerky movements I grabbed the edge of his cotton shirt, wiped my hands clean of the temptation, and took a step away from him. It was more than the fact that Danaus would not let me drink from him. It was that I refused to ever allow a nightwalker to feed from him, including myself. Danaus was above such things. He was my lover and constant companion. He was too precious to ever become a source of sustenance. I wouldn’t allow it.
But that didn’t mean my instincts didn’t scream for his blood. Danaus understood that longing and was smart enough to give me space when I needed it.
“It’s been a long night. You need to feed,” he murmured.
“Yes,” I reluctantly admitted, looking away from him.
He placed his hand under my chin and tipped my head so I couldn’t hide from his direct gaze. “Go feed. I will take the car back to the city. Do you want me at the house?” His thumb gently stroked across my cheekbone, and my eyes slipped shut for a moment, easing some of the hunger pains.
“No need. It’s late. I will go directly to bed when I return to the house. I have much to think about tonight.”
“As you wish.” He leaned in and slowly pressed a kiss to my forehead. His motions were slow and controlled, careful not to set off any of my more predatory instincts when the smell of his blood was still wafting through the air. I could feel the turmoil churning within him as he walked away and I remained a silent ghost in his thoughts. He still struggled with my need to ingest human blood, but he was fighting to accept it. This relationship was not an easy thing, but we were trying.
Seventeen
Danaus found me seated on the floor in the sunny yellow bedroom at my house the next night. A shaft of thick moonlight shone through the open curtains, cutting a square on the ground and glazing the furniture in an ethereal silver glow. After Lily’s death, Danaus and I had pulled the sheets and blankets off the bed and washed them. We opened the windows, welcoming in a chilly early spring breeze in hopes of the fresh air washing out her scent. But no matter what we did to cleanse the room, I swore I could still smell her presence in there, even after the past few months. I closed my eyes and drew in a slow deep breath so the air filled my useless lungs. I held it, picking apart the scents of dust, laundry detergent, lemon-scent cleaning product, and finally Lily.
She had been so briefly in our lives. A child of the street with an amazing gift to see the auras of the people around her, Lily had been special to me. She had spirit and courage. She was quick and resourceful. She should have survived. At that moment she should have been safely ensconced at the Themis compound, being taught by the paranormal researchers in a positive environment. Instead, she now lay in a cold grave in a distant cemetery because a bori had used her to get to Danaus and me. We had failed her.
But then Lily wasn’t the only one haunting me. Just down the hall, Tristan’s room remained completely untouched from when he was last in there. When I returned home from Venice in December, I locked the door to that room and allowed no one to touch his things. I didn’t even go inside, but I could imagine the unused bed, rumpled from where he would lay on it as he read. The computer on his desk would be sitting in sleep mode, waiting for its master to return home so he could resume his search for new music. Books and magazines were haphazardly scattered about the room, while a pile of laundry lay in one corner, waiting to hit the washing machine. I knew his unique scent would be thick in the air. If I entered his private domain, I would be lost to the horror of our past.
I replayed that night in Venice and doubts ate at me. I couldn’t convince myself that I had done the right thing. Macaire had shattered his mind, so that Tristan would look straight through me, never seeing my loving face or the tears streaming down my cheeks as my heart broke in bitter shards. I should have found a way to save him. If I had taken another minute and not been consumed by rage and despair, I might have come up with a way to save him. Vainly I reminded myself that his mind was broken: he was locked in a world of perpetual torment, and it had been my responsibility to set him free. Killing Tristan might have been the kindest thing I could have done for him, but it was slowly destroying me.
Heavy footsteps creaking on the wooden stairs helped to break my destructive train of thought, but it didn’t completely free me of the two ghosts that seemed to be clinging to me. I had come into Lily’s room to hide from the rest of the world as I tried to think about the chaos swirling around me. But my thoughts were stuck on my two dead companions.
I didn’t need to reach out with my powers—I could feel Danaus’s energy swirling up the stairs like the tentacles of a sea creature to search me out. Warm and comforting, they wrapped around me, beating back my demons before he leaned against the door frame to stare down at me with a frown marring his handsome face.
&n
bsp; “What are you doing?” he demanded as I looked up at him.
“Thinking.”
“I can’t imagine that any productive thinking can be done in here.”
“I never said it was productive thinking. I’m just thinking.”
“About what?”
“All the ways in which I went wrong.”
“Mira . . .”
“No, Danaus, think about it. I mishandled things, and now Michael, Thorne, Lily, and Tristan are all dead. My judgment is off. And now I’ve gone and made a pact with the naturi. I have agreed to be Rowe’s ally, of all people! The creature that has been torturing or trying to kill me most of my life!”
Danaus heaved a heavy sigh as he leaned his shoulder against the door frame. “Michael and Thorne were lapses in your judgment. You didn’t think ahead and bad things happened. But you’ve learned, Mira. You’ve grown more cautious and you’re thinking things through instead of rushing headlong into a situation. Valerio and Stefan could have easily been killed in Budapest, but your careful planning saved them on more than one occasion.”
His words stung a little as my own fears were validated, but I respected Danaus’s point of view and his honesty. He wasn’t going to lie to me to make me feel better. “What about Lily and Tristan? Maybe if I had—”
“There is no ‘maybe’ with Lily and Tristan,” he interrupted. “The situations were far beyond your control. Gaizka got the better of us when it came to Lily, and we didn’t anticipate the depths of Macaire’s depravity when it came to Tristan. We lost them to bad people. It happens no matter how hard we try to protect everyone we love.”
I took another deep breath and slowly released it as I stared straight ahead into the room, trying to force some of the tension out of my shoulders. My ass was getting sore from sitting on the floor for the past couple of hours and my back was stiff. However, I still wasn’t ready to move. I felt as if I had managed to find a hiding place from the world in this bright little bedroom, and I wasn’t ready to leave it.
“Why does it feel as if the world is falling into chaos?” I murmured, talking mostly to myself. “The Daylight Coalition has decided to strike now, endangering countless nightwalkers and lycanthropes in my own domain. I can’t shake the feeling they have been drawn to this city because of me. As a result, Daniel has been put into an extremely dangerous situation in hopes of garnering information. To make matters worse, Cynnia comes to me with a plan to get rid of her sister by teaming up with Rowe and the rest of the naturi. It’s the very thing I swore I would never do! Ally with the naturi!”
“You’re trying to do what is right for your people,” Danaus reminded me.
“Right for my people? Can I even be trusted to judge what is ‘right for my people’?” I snapped, twisting around to stare up at him. “I’m romantically involved with a nightwalker hunter that is part bori—the sworn enemy of the nightwalker nation! I’ve agreed to an alliance with the naturi in an effort to stop a war that would bring the Great Awakening. I feel as if I’ve killed more of my own kind during the past several months than I’ve saved.”
“Think of the faceless numbers you’ve saved by your actions,” Danaus calmly said, to which I only gave a derisive snort.
“And to add to my fun, members of the Soga clan are here trying to drag me back to Japan in hopes that I will solve their problems.”
“You can’t help everyone.”
“At this point I don’t feel I can even help myself,” I groused, falling deeper into self-pity. The situation truly was growing more and more out of control, and it was only going to get worse when Nyx and Rowe finally arrived in my city. I would have to find a way to work with Rowe without trying to kill him at the first opportunity. Not the easiest of tasks.
“Enough,” Danaus growled. Pushing away from the door frame, he stepped into the room and stood before me with his feet wide apart and his fists on his hips. “Stop the whining. Stop the complaining. Stop the self-pity.” Grabbing my left upper arm, he hauled me to my feet and then bent low enough to drop me over his shoulder while wrapping his free hand around my legs.
“Danaus!” I shouted, struggling to get into an upright position as he walked out of the room and headed for the stairs. He bounced me once, causing me to lose my balance. I flopped back down so I was lying over his shoulder. My hair felt forward, partially obscuring my view of his nice ass as we slowly and steadily descended the stairs.
“You need some distraction. Clear your mind.”
“If you want to distract me, we could have stayed upstairs and used one of the other bedrooms,” I suggested.
“This is better,” he firmly said as he hit the ground floor and made a sharp turn around the banister. He paused long enough to open the door under the stairs that led down the basement.
“Better than sex? I really doubt that,” I replied, pushing some hair out of my face as he started to descend yet another set of stairs.
Danaus said nothing in reply. He just silently continued down into the basement. Once in the center of the room, he none too gently dropped me on my ass on a thin mat. I gazed around the room in the bright overhead lighting. A couple months ago we had removed all the furniture, the wet bar, and the big screen TV. It had all been a facade in the first place to convince anyone who came into the house that there was nothing out of the ordinary.
In place of the items of leisure, Danaus and I had ripped up the carpet and replaced it with a covering of thin sparring mats. The walls were covered in a wide variety of weapons and sparring shields. The room was now a big open space for us to practice our fighting techniques. In here, blood was spilled and bones broken, but since we healed so quickly, the wounds were only a temporary distraction before we were back at it again.
As I sat in the middle of the mat, I watched Danaus walk over to the far wall containing the various staves and other blunt objects, all arranged according to discipline. I frowned as he paused, looking over the broad selection.
“What are you in the mood for?” he called out as his hand passed over a quarter staff and headed toward the Far Eastern fighting style weapons. As I watched him, I kicked off my shoes and pulled off my socks, preferring to be barefoot on the mat to give me better grip.
“For beating your skull in? Give me the jo¯ staff,” I replied. My aikido was far stronger than some of my other training, giving me what I hoped would be an edge. Danaus picked the jo¯ staff off the wall and threw it at me as I pushed to my feet. I caught it over my head and frowned as he pulled down a pair of eskrima sticks, as I expected. His kali training had proven to be much better than mine when we’d both fought with the medium-sized rattan sticks in the past, leaving me with more than a few welts and a broken forearm. I had learned that opposing him with the jo¯ staff tapped better into my aikido training, which was also complemented with more than a little Jeet Kune Do training. In this sparring session, it appeared we would be evenly matched. A small smile grew on my lips as he settled the two sticks in his hands and gave them a few lightning quick swipes through the air.
“What? No kalis or bankow?” I mocked, referring to the wavy blade and the spear that were commonly matched with one of the eskrima sticks in a traditional kali fight.
“Just blunt objects tonight. We’re playing a slightly different game,” he said with a smirk.
“Different scoring system? We going to twenty points instead of ten?”
“Better. If a hit is scored, the loser takes off an article of clothing.”
My eyebrows jumped and my mouth fell open as I stared at him for a second. “Strip sparring?”
“You needed a distraction and a way to burn off some steam.”
I gave a small chuckle and shook my head at him as I turned my jo¯ staff over in my hands, getting ready for his attack. “Grand Masters are rolling over in their graves right now.”
With my feet planted on the mats, I clenched my muscles and tightened my grip on the red oak staff as Danaus closed the distance between us. His f
ace was completely expressionless, and I could feel the calm sweeping through his mind and down through his body as he settled into total focus on knocking the absolute crap out of me. I, on the other hand, was a ball of energy waiting to explode. I could find no calm, no center of peace, as thoughts of the Daylight Coalition, Rowe, Cynnia, and the Soga clan all danced through my head.
The second he was within striking distance, Danaus pounded me with a flurry of hits I barely managed to block. The hunter was a blur of motion, aiming striking blows from the top of my head to the inside of my thighs as he searched methodically for an opening. The speed at which he came at me kept me on the defensive, but I didn’t back up an inch, refusing to give him the satisfaction of overpowering me with his speed and skill.
After more than five minutes of nearly nonstop blows, Danaus stepped back and wiped the sweat from his left temple. He wasn’t breathing heavily yet, but the flurry of strikes had taken its toll. I took the opening and launched my own attack with the jo¯ staff. He caught a strike aimed for his neck with his eskrima stick, but before I could sweep the staff down to knock his legs out from beneath him, he hit me with a punyo, slamming the end of one of the eskrima sticks in the dead center of my forehead.
Dazed, I stumbled backward a couple steps until I finally landed on my ass in the middle of my mat. With my left hand, I touched my forehead to find a steady trickle of blood starting to slide down to the bridge of my nose. I wiped away the blood as the wound quickly closed. I had a feeling I would have a bruise there for several more minutes. My thoughts were scattered and my head throbbed, making me wonder if he’d succeeded in cracking my skull.
“I want your shirt,” Danaus proclaimed.
Frowning, I put down my staff, pulled my black cotton T-shirt over my head and tossed it at him. The hunter caught the shirt with one of the sticks in his hand and tossed it to the side of the room as if putting aside his prizes. I was beginning to wish I hadn’t bothered to take off my shoes. My focus wasn’t on the fight as it should have been, and I was going to lose quickly if I didn’t get centered.
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