by Sierra Dean
In his presence, that gift poured over me, and I relaxed against my better judgment.
Of course he won’t hurt you, the voice in my head told me.
I knew better, but I also believed if he meant to harm me tonight, I wouldn’t have gotten his initial warning sound. He would have just come to me in the darkness and ended it all. That I was certain he could kill me so easily should have been reason alone to not follow him.
Instead I jogged to catch up to where he’d gotten on the path.
“How is your task coming along?” he inquired, as though he was any normal boss and I was working on any old project.
I shrugged. “Working on it.”
“Do you think, perhaps, it might have been wise to do something about it when he was in your apartment last night?”
I stopped walking, and Sig took another step or two before he stopped as well. Flabbergasted, I couldn’t understand how he knew or how he could be so calm about it. He tilted his head to the side, an invitation to continue walking. I looked back up to the rock face and tried to see if there was a trap waiting for me.
“You’re quite safe. For tonight.” He extended an arm, inviting me to move closer.
I did, and he put his arm around me, pulling me tight against his side and holding me close enough I knew it wasn’t a purely friendly gesture. We walked in silence because all the noises of the woods had quieted in his presence. Everything hidden in the dark was withdrawing, and I wished I could do the same.
“He didn’t do it,” I insisted.
“Mmm.” His hand squeezed my shoulder and it hurt. “Did young Mr. Chancery tell you that?”
“He didn’t have to.”
“So you no longer want to know what he’s done, because you are so certain he is innocent?”
It wasn’t what I said, but I didn’t feel up to correcting him. “Something like that.”
“You’ve been to see the Oracle tonight.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” I confirmed anyway.
“And did she tell you anything about Holden?” For the briefest flicker his voice sounded hopeful, and it all became clear. I halted again, and this time he was forced to stop along with me or risk knocking me over.
Sig couldn’t ask Calliope about Holden’s guilt or innocence, because he was banned from Calliope’s realm. Some time during the Renaissance they had been an item, and he’d broken her heart. The thing they say about hell having no fury like a woman scorned? You can amplify it a thousandfold for an immortal. Calliope was still mad, and to my knowledge the only time he’d been permitted in her reality, she had forced him to stay outside and had only let him get that far because he’d come to see me.
My eyes searched his, hoping for some further evidence of the hope I’d heard in his voice. Something in his face had to tell me I wasn’t jumping to insane conclusions. He looked curious but little else.
It only then dawned on me. “You think he’s innocent too.”
“What did the Oracle tell you?” He wasn’t denying it, and that was close enough to an admission to satisfy me.
“Calliope couldn’t tell me anything.” I could tell he didn’t believe me because disappointment knit his brows together. I explained why Calliope hadn’t been able to read anything off me that night. “I was too far gone for her to see my path. She had to feed me.”
I wished I’d thought to visit Calliope as soon as I got home. Had I known how linked Holden’s path was to my own, I might have realized she could give me some of the answers I craved.
“Stupid girl,” he seethed.
Sig and I stared at each other, a breeze rustling the charged air between us. He grabbed my other arm so suddenly I didn’t see his hand move. I knew vampires were fast, but this was unlike anything I’d experienced before. There was no blur of motion, nothing to indicate he’d moved at all. It was as though his hand had always been on my arm.
My heart tripped a little as he bent his head and lowered it to my neck. I was trembling, but just as he’d warned, I did nothing to stop him. He was so tall he had to stoop down to reach me. His lips brushed the skin of my neck against the rattle of my trapped pulse, and goose bumps rose all over my body.
He was doing exactly what I’d done to Nolan, by demonstrating how unprepared I was. The shock of it was enough to shake me into action.
I closed my eyes and called up my vampire half. Between being freshly fed and engaging my werewolf with the run, the vampire part of me had been content to rest dormant, but now I was reaching deep inside myself to pull it out of its restful state. It wasn’t happy.
I hauled back and punched Sig. My new knuckledusters did an admirable job of making a solid crunch against his jaw, and at least this time the sound wasn’t made by my bones. He barely flinched, but he did straighten up and release my arms. My fangs were extended, this time for a fight, not the feed. I snarled at him, and in return, he smiled. Maybe I couldn’t hurt a master vampire in hand-to-hand combat, but at least I could still surprise him.
He started walking again, touching his jaw as he spoke. “Something about the accusation of Holden never sat right.”
I stood trembling in the middle of the path, a trickle of cold sweat sliding from the back of my neck all the way down my spine. It had been a test. One I gathered I had passed. What if I hadn’t resisted? Would he have actually bitten me?
Looking at him as his lithe, tall form disappeared down the trail, I wondered what I was to Sig. Ingrid referred to me as his pet. Calliope seemed to imagine something different, but she never voiced what that was to me. I had just seen the disapproval on her face when he’d come to see me. I’d never been able to understand why he showed so much interest in me.
This time I didn’t run to catch up with him. He was walking slow enough my regular pace was suitable, and I was soon in step behind him. I was thankful he didn’t try to make me walk next to him again. That much contact rendered me at his mercy apparently, and I didn’t want to be at the mercy of Sigvard, Finnish vampire and destroyer of immortal hearts.
Once I was close again, he continued. “Holden is a meticulous record keeper, I don’t know if you know that about him.” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “He has dozens of journals, and he has a keen mind for detail. They go back decades, these books he has, but they seem to have increased in number in the last five or six years.”
The emphasis on the time wasn’t lost on me. Holden had been assigned the unwelcome task of becoming my warden six years ago.
Sig continued. “See, Holden has records of everything. He wrote about meeting you for the first time. I believe his phrasing was ‘irritating teenager hell-bent on her own destruction, won’t live out the year’.” His muted Scandinavian accent dropped away in a perfect imitation of Holden. It was so spot on I was too stupefied to even reply to the insult. Besides, when Holden met me, I had been a stupid, foolhardy sixteen-year-old. His description was almost polite.
“So, Holden wrote a lot. What does that prove?”
Sig shot me a warning look over his shoulder. So this was going to be a monologue, not a discussion. I could handle that, couldn’t I?
“Funny thing about those journals is that he stopped sharing them with the council about two years ago. Funnier still, most of Holden’s current problems can be traced back about that far.” He paused and looked at me meaningfully.
I still didn’t understand. Nor did I think any of what he mentioned was very funny. So Holden had journals, and he kept them a secret. Big deal. If I had a diary, I wouldn’t want Sig to read it either.
Then something occurred to me. “Wait, I know you can’t tell me what he’s accused of, but if it’s something specific, there must be a date involved. Can you tell me when it happened?” My heart skipped a beat. If Sig believed Holden was innocent, then maybe there was a way to get his help without ignoring the rules of the Tribunal.
He smiled and put his hands back in his pockets.
“Dates.” He looked up at the da
rk night sky and rocked back on his heels. Then he turned to leave, speaking as he walked. “Dates can be so fleeting. I can say things like August 14, 2009. Or December 6, 2008.” I stopped breathing when he said the latter. My birthday? “I don’t know if dates will help you. I just know something didn’t sit right about the warrant.”
Sig vanished into the darkness, leaving me alone and cold against the heat of the summer night. He had told me something important; I just wished it wasn’t shrouded in so much mystery.
Why couldn’t vampires ever say what they meant?
Chapter Seventeen
When I awoke the next night, there was a voicemail from Lucas waiting on my cell phone. It was short and to the point. “I’ll be at Two Moon Grill at ten, and I hope you’ll meet me there.” After I’d listened to it for the twelfth time, I stopped arguing the multitude of reasons I couldn’t go—I had to find who was framing Holden, after all—and settled on one very good reason I should go. I had a werewolf king who was in love with me.
Problem was, I had been neglecting a major part of my warden assignment, and if I didn’t want Sig sending Brigit to live with me again, I was going to have to check in on my charge. The last thing I needed was more attention being drawn to me because I wasn’t doing my job for the council, and at least this job I was still somewhat willing to do.
That was how I found myself seated at the foot of a king-sized bed, in a cozy, furnished apartment in Chelsea. How the council had found an apartment in Chelsea that could hold a king-sized bed was beyond my comprehension, but Brigit seemed blissfully unaware of how lucky she was.
I’d arrived at the apartment about ten minutes earlier, and the entire time I hadn’t gotten a word in edgewise.
“…says there’s this amazing place off of Delancey that does these incredible Thai massages. And then, when I was at that other place? You know, the one where they have all the trees in the windows?” I had no clue what she was talking about. “Anyway, someone else told me there’s a busboy there who will let you…”
I stopped listening, because I was entirely certain I didn’t want to know what said busboy would let a buxom young vampire do to him. Brigit was speaking to me from the depths of her closet, and every so often her voice would muffle as she tried on whatever it was she was finding in there.
Climbing off the foot of the bed, I took time to survey the apartment, curious as to what kind of arrangements Sig had managed to make for her on such short notice.
The living room and kitchen were classic New York—cramped and hot. The kitchen was smaller than mine, with barely two feet of counter space between the two-element stove and the ancient fridge. There wasn’t room for a table, though I doubted Brigit would notice, considering all of her food was stacked in individual bags inside the fridge. The kitchen had no upper cupboards, but there were hooks on the wall where pots and pans had once hung. While the paint on the lower cupboards had probably once been white, years of smoke from a previous tenant had left them an unpleasant yellow-brown. The floor was the type of tile that had been popular in kitchens throughout the late seventies. That is to say hideous brown linoleum.
The living room had no personality, per se, with the singular exception of the beaded curtain covering the hall closet which was a take on the famous Japanese painting of a big blue wave. I ran my hand over the wooden beads and enjoyed the clicking rattle they made as they tapped against each other.
There was a single loveseat in the room, and it looked too large for the space. Against the wall leading to the kitchen was one empty bookshelf, and next to the front door was an old, antenna-operated television. I didn’t think analog worked in the city anymore, but trust a vampire decorator to be out of the loop on that. At least someone had gotten her a DVD player, and by the looks of it, the first few seasons of Gilmore Girls.
The afghan on the back of the loveseat was a nice touch too.
I stopped playing with the beaded curtain and gave the afghan another, harder look. It was a bit too nice of a touch, and certainly not something anyone rushing to find a home for a newborn vampire would have thought to add.
I walked over to the couch and snatched the blanket up, sniffing it more carefully. It smelled like old hand lotion, age and the faintest hint of the chemical people used for perms. I dropped the blanket in disgust.
This apartment had belonged to someone else. Recently.
I stalked back into the bedroom, which now seemed more incongruous with the rest of the apartment, with its bright white walls and giant bed. I made an angry mental note to ask Sig if they had at least waited for the old lady who once lived here to die before the council annexed her rent-controlled abode.
“…just gave me all these clothes, which is so cool! I mean, I’d rather have gotten them myself, because seriously who’s ever heard of Miss…Mees…Missoni?” She tossed a burgundy sweater out into the room, where it landed on a pile of other discarded clothes.
For someone who had lived the New York party-girl lifestyle when she was alive, Brigit Stewart was blithely unaware of a majority of the fashionable labels most girls her age would kill for. I was willing to bet she had only borrowed my twelve-hundred-dollar shoes because she thought they were pretty.
I pouted to recall those very same shoes would never be the same again after their adventure in Lucas’s pool.
What does it say about me that I can be distracted from wondering about the demise of a nice afghan-knitting little old lady by the thought of shoes? Probably that I’m a bad person.
“Aha.” The triumphant cry from within the bowels of her closet drew my attention back to the mission at hand.
I had called Brigit after getting Lucas’s message and insisted I needed her help preparing for my date tonight. I figured this way I could check on her, see how she was adjusting to being alone, and I could also find an outfit. I may have a lot of shoes, but I have very little to wear them with. And nothing in my closet screamed date with royalty. On my last date with Lucas I’d felt woefully underdressed.
Not that it mattered, because the whole outfit ended up getting covered in blood anyway.
What I needed for tonight was twofold. I wanted an outfit appropriate for a night out with Lucas, but I needed it to carry on with me for the latter part of the night, which would involve a little lying, troublemaking and general no-goodery.
Plus, my only date-worthy dress had been left at a dry cleaners over a year ago to get bloodstains out, and I hadn’t made it a priority to get it back. Wearing a dress you’d killed someone in was probably bad luck for any date anyway. Especially when the man you would be with might be able to smell the old blood on you.
I have a lot of problems with getting blood on me in my line of work.
“Found one!” the closet doors declared.
I needed to start learning to dress myself for fancy occasions. Getting help from vampires made me feel a little pitiful sometimes.
Brigit re-emerged from the closet, holding something I wouldn’t have imagined any vampire in their right mind choosing, but coming from Brigit it made perfect sense. It was a sweet-looking candy-pink strapless dress, which appeared to have pockets in the skirt. I hated myself for admitting it, but I found the dress charming in spite of how very pink it was.
She held it out to me like a proud cat showing off a dead sparrow.
“Like it?”
“Amazingly enough.” I took it out of her hands and held it against me so I could assess it in the full-length mirror hanging on her bedroom wall. She clapped delightedly, then collapsed backwards onto the giant pile of clothes behind her. “Thanks, Brigit.”
“Anytime. Put it on!”
I stripped down, almost embarrassed by my day-to-day uniform of jeans and a V-neck T-shirt, and slipped the dress over my head, thankful one of the many physical traits Brigit and I shared was our dress size. I was also glad whoever had put this dress in the closet for her had considerably underestimated her chest size.
The dress was ev
en better on me than it had been on the hanger. The rose undertones of the fabric provoked the illusion of color in my cheeks, and it somehow managed to make the blonde of my hair look less yellow and more gold. If I’d thought I could wear that dress to do all of my work from then on, I would have.
But there was always the blood to consider.
“Lucas is going to die,” Brigit said cheerfully.
“God, I hope not,” was my all-too-honest reply.
At ten to ten I was standing outside of the Two Moon Grill on Madison, feeling like a high-school girl waiting for her prom date. At least that’s what I imagined the feeling was equal to considering I’d never been to high school or a prom.
As much as I had wanted to go all-out glam for my date, I had learned a few lessons in my tenure as a vampire-slaying bounty hunter. My heels, pretty as they were, were easy to slip off, and inside the ridiculously huge purse I was carrying I had a pair of flats and a handgun.
I had places to be after my date with Lucas, and I didn’t think my plans for the night were going to wait for me to go home and get a gun.
I hiked the purse straps higher on my shoulder and stuffed my hands in the front pockets of the dress. From this point forward I was only ever going to own dresses with pockets. I was way too fidgety when I was nervous, and having pockets at least allowed me a place to steady my idle hands. A breeze drifted past me, and with it came the wolf king.
I tasted Lucas before I saw him. The sudden sweetness of cinnamon was almost overwhelming, and my whole mouth filled with the spicy and aromatic swell of it. After the taste came his arms, strong and a little warmer than the air. Werewolves are always hot, any time of year, and I found it comforting. My own skin maintained a happy medium between hot werewolf blood and cold vampire blood, so I just felt normal. It was one of the only parts of my life that was—at least on the surface—human.
