by Nalini Singh
Noel found himself fighting the desire to stroke their petals, feel the velvet softness against his skin. It was an unexpected urge, and it made him pull back, tug his shields even tighter around himself. He couldn’t afford to be vulnerable here, in this court where he’d been sent to rot— it wasn’t a stretch to believe that everyone was waiting for him to give up on life and complete what his attackers had begun.
His jaw set in a brutal line just as Nimra spoke again. While her tone was rough silk— the kind that spoke of secrets in the bedroom and pleasure that could turn to pain— her words were pragmatic. “We will talk in my chambers.”
Those chambers lay beyond another set of wooden doors, these painted with images of exotic birds flitting through blossom- heavy trees. Feminine and pretty, there was nothing in the images that spoke of the hardness that was part of Nimra’s reputation, but if Noel knew one thing after his more than two centuries of existence, it was that any being who had lived more than half a millennium had long learned to hide what she didn’t wish to show.
His guard up, he walked in behind her, closing the painted doors quietly at his back. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t the graceful white furniture scattered with jewel- toned cushions, the liquid sunlight pouring in through the open French doors, the well- read books set on an end table. The plants, however, were no longer a surprise, and they gave him a sense of freedom even as he stood stifled and imprisoned by his broken self, his pledge of service to Raphael, and thus to Nimra.
Walking to the French doors, Nimra closed them, shutting out the world before she turned to face him once more. “We will speak in privacy.”
Noel gave a stiff nod, another thought cutting through his mind with punishing suddenness. Some of the angelic race, old and jaded, found pleasure in taking lovers they could control, treating those lovers like… fresh meat, to be used and then discarded. He would never be that, and if Nimra expected it of him…
He was a vampire, an almost- immortal who’d had more than two hundred years to grow into his power. She might kill him, but he’d draw blood before it was over. “What would you have of me?”
Nimra heard the menace beneath the outwardly polite question and wondered who exactly Raphael had sent her. She’d made some quiet inquiries of a scholar she knew in the Refuge, had learned of the horrific assault Noel had survived, but the man himself remained a mystery. When she’d asked Raphael to tell her more than the bare facts about the vampire he was assigning to her court, he’d said only, “He is loyal and highly capable. He is what you need.”
What the archangel had not said was that Noel had eyes of a piercing ice blue filled with so many shadows she could almost touch them, and a face that was hewn out of roughest stone. Not a beautiful man— no, he was too harshly put together for that—but one who would never want for female attention; he was so very, very male. From the hard set of his jaw to the deep brown of his hair, to the muscular strength of his body, he drew the eye… much as a mountain lion did.
Dressed in blue jeans and a white T–shirt, utterly unlike the formal clothing favored by the other men in her court, he’d nonetheless overshadowed them with the silent intensity of his presence. Now he threatened to take over her rooms, his masculine energy a stark counterpoint to the femininity of the furnishings.
It annoyed her that this vampire of not much more than two hundred could inspire such feelings in her, an angel who demanded respect from those twice her age and who had the trust of an archangel. Which was why she said, “Would you give me anything I asked?” in a tone laced with power.
White lines bracketed his lips. “I’ll be no one’s slave.”
Nimra blinked, realization swift and dark. It did her vanity no good to see that he believed she had to force her lovers, but she knew enough of her own kind to understand the thought wasn’t unwarranted. However, the fact that it had been the first one in his mind… No, she thought, surely Raphael would have warned her if Noel had been misused in that way. Then again, the archangel who held enough power in his body to level cities and burn empires was a law unto himself. She could assume nothing.
“Slavery,” she said, turning to another set of doors, “offers no challenges. I have never understood the allure.”
As he followed at her back, she had the sense of having a great beast on a leash— and that beast wasn’t at all happy with the situation. Intriguing, even if it did prick at her temper that there was so much power in him, this vampire Raphael had sent in response to her request. That, of course, was the crux of it— Noel was Raphael’s man, and Raphael did not suffer the weak.
Once inside the chamber, she nodded at him to close the door behind himself. She wouldn’t have thought to take such measures even a month ago, she’d had such trust in her people. Now… The pain was one she’d had to live with for the past fourteen days, and it had become no easier to bear in that time.
Walking past the smooth and well- loved wooden desk situated beside the large window, a place where she often sat to write her personal correspondence, she lifted her hands to unlock the upper doors of the armoire against the wall. The curling tendrils of a fine fern brushed the backs of her hands, a whispered caress as she revealed— set into the back wall of the armoire— the door to what appeared to be a simple safe, but one no burglar would ever be able to crack.
Retrieving a tiny vial half- filled with a luminescent fluid from within, she turned and said, “Do you know what this is?” to the man who stood immobile as stone several feet from her.
A shuttered expression but there was no discounting the intelligence in that penetrating gaze. “I haven’t seen anything like it before.”
So beautiful, she thought, watching the colors tumble and foam within the vial when she tilted it to the light, the crystal itself etched only with a simple sigil, signifying her name, and thin, decorative lines in fine gold. “That is because this fluid is beyond rare,” she murmured, “created from the extract of a plant found in the deepest, most impenetrable part of Borneo’s rain forests.” Closing the distance between them, she held it out toward him.
The vial looked ridiculously small in his big hand, a toy stolen from a crying child. Lifting it to his eyes, he tilted it with care. The fluid spread on the crystal, making the surface glow. “What is it?”
“Midnight.” Taking the vial when he returned it, she placed it on her writing desk. “A hint of it will kill a human, a fraction more will place a vampire into a coma, and a quarter of an ounce is enough to ensure most angels of less than eight hundred will not wake for ten long hours.”
Noel’s gaze crashed into hers. “So your intended victim doesn’t stand the smallest chance.”
She was unsurprised by his conclusion— it was nothing less than could be expected, given her reputation. “I have had this for three hundred years. It was gifted to me by a friend who thought I might one day have need of it.” Her lips lifted at the corners at the thought of the angel who had given her this most lethal of weapons— as a human older brother might give his sister a knife or a gun. “He has ever seen me as fragile.”
Noel thought this friend couldn’t know her well. Nimra might look as if she’d break under the slightest pressure, but she didn’t hold Louisiana against all the other powers in the wider region, including the brutal Nazarach, by being a wilting lily. Not being as blind, he never took his eyes off her, even when she picked up the vial and returned it to the safe, her wings so exquisite and inviting in front of him.
Their tactile beauty was a trap, a lure to the unwary to drop their guard. Noel had never been that innocent— and after the events in the Refuge… If there had been any innocence left in him, it was long dead.
“Two weeks ago,” Nimra murmured, closing the armoire doors and turning to face him once more, “someone attempted to use Midnight on me.”
2
Noel sucked in a breath. “Did they succeed?”
The relief that rushed through him when she shook her hea
d was a ravaging storm. He’d been helpless in the Refuge, bound and trapped as pieces of glass and metal were shoved into his very flesh until that flesh grew over it, trapping the excruciating shards of pain— and though he had no loyalty to Nimra except through his ties to Raphael, he didn’t want to think of her with her spirit broken and her wings crumpled. “How did you escape?”
“The poison was placed into a glass of iced tea,” she said, shifting to touch her finger to the glossy leaf of a plant by the writing desk. “It is tasteless and colorless once blended with any other liquid, so I wouldn’t have noticed it, had no reason to consider that anything in my home might be unsafe for me. But I had a cat, Queen.” Her breath caught for a fragment of a second, sharp and brittle. “She jumped up onto the table when I wasn’t watching and sipped at the drink. She was dead before I even had a chance to scold her for her misbehavior.”
Noel knew the sorrow that marked Nimra’s face was, in all probability, an attempt to manipulate his emotions, but still he found himself liking her better for being saddened by the death of her pet. “I’m sorry.”
A slight incline of her head, a regal acknowledgment. “I had the tea tested without alerting anyone in this court, discovered it held Midnight.” Smooth honey brown skin stretched tight over the line of her jaw. “If the assassin had succeeded, I would have been insensible for hours— and those who knew of my incapacitated state could have come in and ensured full death.”
Angels were as close to immortal as was possible in this world. The only beings more powerful were the Cadre of Ten, the archangels who ruled the world. Unless they pissed off one of the Cadre, death wasn’t something angels had to worry about except in very limited circumstances— depending on the years they’d lived and their inherent power.
Noel didn’t know Nimra’s level of power but he knew that if someone were to decapitate a strong angel, remove his or her organs, including the brain, then burn everything, it was unlikely the angel would survive. Unlikely but not impossible. Noel had no way of knowing the truth of it, but it was said angels of a certain age and strength could regenerate from the ashes of a normal fire.
“Or worse,” he added softly, because while death might be the ultimate goal, many of the oldest immortals lived only for the pain and suffering of others, as if their capacity for gentler emotions had been corroded away long ago. He could well imagine what someone like Nazarach would do to Nimra if he had her alone and vulnerable.
“Yes.” She turned to the windows beyond that little writing desk— formed with a daintiness that would crumble under one of Noel’s fists— her gaze on the wild beauty of the gardens below. “Only those who are trusted enough to be in my inner court, and carefully vetted servants, are ever anywhere near my food.
“Because of this act of treachery, I can no longer trust men and women who have been with me for decades, if not centuries.” Calm, tempered words sliced with anger. “Midnight is near impossible to acquire, even for angels— which means the one who betrayed me is working in the service of someone who holds considerable power.”
Noel felt a spark within him, one he’d thought had been extinguished in that blood- soaked room where his abductors had brutalized him for no reason except that it gave them a twisted kind of pleasure. They might have justified the act by calling it a political ploy, but he’d heard their laughter, felt the black that stained their souls. “Why are you telling me this?”
An arch look over her shoulder. “I do not need a slave, Noel”—his name carried a slight French emphasis that turned it into something exotic—“but I do need someone whose loyalty is beyond question. Raphael says you are that man.”
He had not been cast aside after all.
It was a shock to the system, a jolt that brought him to life when he’d been the walking dead for so long. “You’re certain it’s one of your people?” he asked, his blood pumping in hard pulses through his veins.
Her answer was oblique and it held a quiet, thrumming anger. “There were no strangers in my home the day the Midnight was used.” Her wings flared out, blocking the light as she continued to focus beyond the windows. “They are mine, but one has been tainted.”
“You’re six hundred years old,” Noel said, knowing she saw nothing of the gardens at that instant. “You can force them to speak the truth.”
“I cannot bend wills,” she said, surprising him with the straight answer. “That has never been one of my gifts— and torturing my entire court to unearth one traitor seems a trifle extreme.”
He thought he heard a dark amusement beneath the anger, but with her face turned to the window, her profile shadowed by the tumble of those blue- black curls, he couldn’t tell for sure. “Do they know why I’m here?”
Shaking her head, Nimra turned to him once more, her expression betraying nothing, the flawless mask of an immortal. “It is probable they believe the very thing you did— that Raphael has sent you to me because you are broken and I need a toy.” A lifted eyebrow.
He felt as if he’d been called to the carpet. “My apologies, Lady Nimra.”
“Do attempt to sound a fraction more sincere”—a cool order—“or this deception will fail miserably.”
“I’m afraid I’ll never be able to pull off being a poodle.”
To his shock, she laughed, the sound a husky feminine stroke across his senses. “Very well,” she said, eyes glittering with gemstone brightness in the sunlight. “You may be a wolf on a long leash.”
Noel was startled to feel a different kind of heat within him, a slow- burning ember, dark and potent. Since waking in the Medica, his body destroyed, he’d felt no desire, had thought that part of him dead. But Nimra’s laugh made his body stir enough that he noticed. It was tempting to follow that flicker of heat, to hold the ember up to the light of day, but he didn’t allow her laugh or the exquisite caress of her femininity to wipe the truth from his mind— that the angel with the jewel- dusted wings was deadly. And that while she might be in the right in this particular game, she was no innocent.
He heard screams that night. The nightmare always surprised him, though he’d been having it since he opened his eyes in the Medica after the assault. Because the fact was, he’d lost the ability to scream several hours into the torture, remaining conscious only because his attackers had made it a point to never cross that fine line. Broken bones, torn flesh, excruciating burns— vampires could take a lot of damage without the escape of the cold dark of unconsciousness.
He didn’t remember screaming even at the start, determined not to give in, but he must have— for the echo of it haunted his dreams. Or perhaps the screams rang inside his mind because that was the sole place he’d had that had been his own, his strength, his dignity stripped from him with malicious force.
Throwing off the sweat- soaked sheets as he shoved away the memories, he got out of bed and walked to the window he’d left open to the honeysuckle- scented air. The heavy warmth of it stroked over his cheeks, fingered its way through his hair, but did nothing to cool his overheated flesh. Still, he lingered, staring out into the inky dark of the night and the slumbering silhouettes of the gardens and trees that sprawled out in every direction.
It was perhaps twenty minutes later, right when he was about to turn away, that he glimpsed wings. They weren’t Nimra’s. Frowning, he angled himself so as to be invisible from the ground and watched. The angel appeared out of the shadows a minute later and stopped, his face lifted up toward Nimra’s window— a long, motionless moment— before he carried on.
Interesting.
Pushing away from the window when there was no further movement, Noel walked into the shower, realizing he’d glimpsed the tall male in the audience chamber earlier. The angel had stood on Nimra’s right as she dealt with a number of important petitions, so there was no doubting the fact that he was one of her inner circle. Noel intended to find out everything else about him later today.
It was still dark when he walked out of the shower, but he kne
w there was no point in attempting to sleep now— and as a vampire, he could go without sleep for long periods. Part of him didn’t know why he even tried to find such rest. Even on the nights when he didn’t hear the screams, he heard the laughter.
Nimra walked out into the gardens the next morning to find that Noel had beaten her to the dawn. He sat on a wrought- iron bench beneath the branches of an old cypress, his eyes on the clear waters of the stream that snaked through her lands before joining a wider tributary that led into the bayou. He was so motionless, he appeared carved from the same stone as the silken moss- covered rocks that guarded the waterway.
She stepped quietly, intending to take the path that would skirt away from him, for she understood the value of silence, but he lifted his head at that instant. Even with the distance between them, she was caught by the wintry blue of those eyes—eyes she knew had been destroyed in the attack at the Refuge, his face beaten in with such viciousness he’d been recognized only because of a ring worn on a shattered finger.
Anger, cold and dangerous, slid through her veins, but she kept her tone easy. “Bonjour, Noel.” Her wings brushed the curling white and pink flowers of the wild azalea bushes on either side of her, and the dew showered a welcome caress on her feathers.
He rose to his feet, a big man who moved with predatory grace. “You wake early, Lady Nimra.”
And you, Nimra thought, do not sleep. “Walk with me.”
“A command?”
Definitely a wolf. “A request.”
He fell into step beside her, and they walked in silence through the rows of flowers nodding sleepily in the hazy early-morning light, their petals seeking the red- orange rays of the rising sun. It was her habit to spread her wings when she was outdoors thus, but she kept them folded today, maintaining a small distance between her and this vampire who was so very contained, she couldn’t help but wonder what lay beneath the surface.
