Death's Dancer

by Jasmine Silvera

  “Vögelchen.” Isela flushed. “Yeah, that too. A little bird, flitting from branch to branch.”

  Azrael paused, seeming to retreat, and she bit her lower lip. What possessed her to think he even cared? He spoke a word in a language she had never heard before. It seemed distant, even for him. He repeated it with more certainty.

  “Terror,” he translated, with a touch of something she could only describe as rue. “That’s what they called me.”

  “Gods,” she said, horrified, before she could catch herself. She imagined tantrums with a child who could raise the dead. “Were you spinning your head around on your shoulders or something?”

  Unbelievably, Azrael grinned. The shock of white teeth and the sudden ease in his face left her staring in wonder. “I was the youngest of six. Unexpected. My siblings were older, bigger, stronger. I had to be wilder, more daring. My mother called me the littlest terror.”

  “You had brothers too?” Isela relaxed, picking at the fruit tray again.

  “Two,” he admitted. “And three sisters who liked to dress me up and braid my hair.”

  She laughed and quickly covered her mouth. But he grabbed her hand, pulled her fingers away.

  “That must not have made it any easier,” she said. “Were they all”—she hesitated—“necromancers?”

  It was his turn to laugh. Well, wonders never ceased. It was a beautiful sound, clear and ringing like a bell. “Gods forbid. No.”

  Azrael plucked the spent strawberry leaves from her fingers, sucking a final bit of red flesh from the root before discarding them in the fire. Isela chewed at her lower lip. “How did you become one?”

  Something in his face closed.

  “I was always different,” he murmured, cutting off her apology. “But I did not come into my power until much later. Now, enough. You need rest to recover your strength.”

  Isela twisted her body around on the rug. Her breasts pressed against his knee, and her fingertips slid along his inner thigh. He caught her hand.

  “There are many ways to recover,” she said.

  Isela took her lower lip between her teeth again, and he couldn’t look away. He traced her mouth with his finger, and his body betrayed him beneath the towel. She smiled, and a wicked gleam filled her eye as her fingers went to the knot at his waist. “I think it’s your turn to beg.”

  Azrael looked up sharply at a knock on the door, and Isela paused. The sound came again, louder, and he frowned with a little snarl of frustration.

  “Unfortunately, it will have to wait.” He lifted her hand to his mouth and sucked fruit juice from each of her fingertips. “Your neck must be attended to.”

  Azrael let her hand go as she pulled away to rise. When she had belted the robe around her waist, the door opened and his healer came in. He was, to Isela’s relief, human. Isela wondered if Azrael was able to communicate with everyone, like he’d done with her at the Academy.

  Azrael walked into the closet while the doctor finished examining her throat. When he emerged a few minutes later, he wore a pair of fitted, dark pants and a navy-blue T-shirt that hugged his chest and made his eyes particularly bright. She caught her breath, unable to look away. How could it be that sex only made her crave him more?

  Azrael watched her, arms crossed over his chest, but his attention was elsewhere. She thought of the story of the grimoire and the person they’d retrieved for information. In bed, he seemed to care only for assuring their mutual pleasure, but he’d been tasked with finding an extraordinary killer. Sex was a diversion from his responsibilities. She was a diversion from his responsibilities. And a tool to be used to achieve his ends. She would be wise not to forget it.

  Blowing off a little steam, Isela reminded herself, quieting the yammering voice in her chest that begged to be heard.

  His healer attended her, puzzled by how quickly she’d already recovered. He departed after leaving a salve to apply to the bruising.

  “What are you waiting for?” she asked quietly when the man was gone.

  Azrael’s shining eyes revealed his surprise.

  Isela didn’t expect him to massage her to sleep and hold her every night. The seduction had been achieved. She ignored the little stitch developing between her left ribs. It had been a difficult night, she told herself. She was overwrought and tired. That was the only reason she felt like begging him to stay.

  “The two who attacked you must be interrogated,” he said, striding to the bed. “The dead start to lose details and the ability to communicate if not handled quickly.”

  “But Tyler—”

  “Because he is under a contract, he kept his memories and his personality.”

  “And the others?” she whispered, trying to convince herself that he wasn’t what she wanted. “That’s how you punish us humans, right? Turning us into them.”

  “That is a punishment for those who break the laws,” he said. “They are stripped of anything but the knowledge that their service is atonement. It does not amuse me to turn humans into shambling idiots, but it does seem to serve as an effective warning.”

  “And the eyes,” she said softly.

  His eyebrows tilted in question.

  “The ones you nailed to the door of that building?”

  He frowned. “Some necromancers believe that power is gained through sacrifice and ritual. That one culled the old, and the infirm, and those who believed they had been called to the gods. He had made religion from their suffering. Enjoyed it, even.”

  He pulled down the comforter and the top sheet in invitation. She went.

  “A summoning. Could I help? To dance?”

  Azrael smiled, tucking her legs up under the comforter. “These are intact, fresh, and won’t be spelled. If I can’t summon them easily, I shouldn’t call myself a necromancer. I need you rested for the next murder—if there is one.”

  “And you think the other man, the one you found in Croatia, can tell what the Queen of Diamond intends to do with the grimoire?” Her words ended in a yawn.

  “Maybe,” he said. “A guard has been posted outside the door. You are safe here.”

  Isela blinked slowly. Safe. His hand settled on her cheek, tucking stray bits of hair behind her ear. His fingertip traced an intricate pattern on her cheekbone that could not have been random. Her eyelids felt weighted, impossible to keep open. She yawned again, drawing her knees close and her face into the pillow. As the realization struck her, she tried to sit up, but her limbs were too heavy. She glared at him, unable to hold it before another yawn broke her focus.

  “What did you do,” she said on the edge of consciousness, “to. . . me?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Dory waited outside the door to his quarters.

  “The geas should keep her down until I return,” Azrael said. “But with the witch blood—”

  “No worries,” Dory said, his broad face alight with amusement. “I’m not a foolish boy.”

  “Not for the last hundred years or so, at least.” Azrael’s brow rose.

  Dory slapped a palm against his ribs with a wounded expression. He bent over to inspect Azrael’s face with a wily grin.

  “What?” Azrael frowned.

  His chest heaved with contained laughter. “Just checking for the ring she’s got through your nose, Boss.”

  Azrael spared them both the illusion that Dory would stop speaking his mind anytime soon. “Speaking of foolish boys, what was Gregor’s punishment for our young geneticist turned attaché?”

  Dory grunted, acknowledging the subject change with a grin. “Waxing and buffing the car.”

  “Which one?”

  “All of them.”

  The bodies had been laid out in his aedis, the same place that Isela had tried to dance for the first summoning. Some necromancers, like Havel Zeman, preferred practicing the old way—in the dark little hovels full of books and potions—but the modern age of fluorescent lighting and stainless steel had been a boon to Azrael. Why not evolve? His aedis
was underground, as it should be. From there, it had little in common with those of his fellows; it resembled a modern morgue.

  The attack disturbed him. Isela should have been safe at the Academy. Few people knew she was important to him—other allegiance necromancers and his own Aegis. He trusted his shield implicitly. The other necromancers were never to be trusted, and this would prove his suspicion that someone wanted them to fail.

  Azrael began the ritual binding. It had been centuries since he’d required potions and lines on the floor that young necromancers used in their summonings. Even then, he knew it was more about focusing the mind than any power granted by symbols. The rituals created rhythm and sequencing.

  These days he only needed the words. Spoken in a language ancient even to him, he began the summoning. Because the bodies were intact, he had no need to venture into the In Between. He yanked the soul back into the body easily.

  The man came to with a gasp. His eyes rolled wildly. Azrael’s summoning had included a block that stilled him physically so he could not try to escape. Not that it would do him any good. Once separated by death, mortals quickly began to forget how to use their physical forms. Most of his undead were made immediately after death, before the soul could leave the body. If not, they were like shambling, drooling idiots for the first few hours, sometimes days, until they regained their control. But he didn’t want to waste time watching the man thrash and groan like a Hollywood zombie. He placed a geas on the man’s tongue, enabling him to speak with only a little slurring.

  The man knew little. He’d been brought on by his partner—easy money, he’d claimed—kill a dancer. He had no idea who hired them or why. Only that they were supposed to make it look like an accident—although that was going to be hard since “. . .the bitch struggled so much.”

  Azrael snapped the man’s mouth shut with a gesture. He began to wriggle on the table as he understood what he’d become and the first stirrings of fear overtook him. They panicked eventually.

  He focused his attention on the woman. Decapitated, her body twitched while her eyes rolled about wildly. He forced her to focus on his questions.

  The woman who hired them had been “classy, old-school money-like,” and spoke with an accent. The assassin assumed Isela had slept with the woman’s husband or something. Azrael scoured her memory, raking through her thoughts for every scrap about the woman who’d ordered the hit. But there was an obscuring force on the hired killer. He caught only glimpses of hair that might have been strawberry blond under a blue silk scarf, and the flashy red soles of her high heels.

  Azrael thought of both Vanka and the Queen of Diamonds. The former’s grudge over a thrown knife wouldn’t be enough to send her after Isela unless she truly was trying to undermine his effort.

  The latter meant that she had read Zeman’s mind when she took the book and knew Azrael and Isela were close. In either case, Isela would not be safe until this was over. And if they succeeded, would anyone on the allegiance forget her when they knew what her dancing had done for him?

  By now the man was beginning to gurgle and weep as panic hit him. The woman’s eyes switched rapidly, unable to turn her head but hearing her companion’s terror. Finally she, too, began to gibber and wail. She pleaded for mercy.

  Azrael thought of how forlorn Isela looked at the idea that Gregor might hate the humanity she brought out in him. She was so very human, full of compassion—and forgiveness. The fact that she’d come to his bed after everything she’d endured spoke to that.

  It made her weak. The first thing any necromancer learned, if they hoped to survive, was to stifle fear and release the humanity that made any number of horrors seem inconceivable. In his time, he’d seen things that would leave her suffering nightmares forever. In his early days, he’d committed more than his share of violence.

  Azrael now exercised force when necessary but no more than was required to accomplish his aim. And he’d let the rumors about him grow, knowing gossip and mystery would keep most in their place.

  He knew he should make examples out of them, but he hesitated. There were other ways to protect Isela.

  Wondering at his decision, Azrael released them instead, watching both bodies collapse on the table. He strode from the room, wanting to be as far from their true deaths as possible. Gregor was waiting. Azrael briefed him on what he’d learned.

  “Send the heads to the underground,” he said. “With the warning: Isela is mine. Anyone else who tries to take the job gets the same.”

  Gregor paused. “The heads, master?”

  “Was I unclear?” Azrael went still, and Gregor looked away first.

  Turning these two and delivering them as shambling undead was hardly necessary to send a message.

  “Often the best demonstration of power is restraint,” Azrael answered the unspoken question.

  Savagery, for its own sake, had never been his way. As soon as he was powerful enough to defend himself and his servants, without brutalizing his enemies, he did so. Humans were more productive without living in terror. Keeping their lives calm and ordinary meant they could go about doing the things they did—brilliant, greedy, selfish, generous, petty—that kept his territory one of the most productive in the world.

  “As you wish.” Gregor hinged at the waist. “The other—the Rabbit?”

  Azrael went still at the mention of the man they’d run down in the small coastal town in Croatia.

  Summoning these two was one thing. Again, he thought of Isela. Azrael could not afford the same compassion that he had shown the two assassins. What he might have to do to get information from the man would horrify most mortals.

  If the Queen of Diamonds was back, this was much bigger than the deaths of a few lower necromancers.

  Isela’s world had gotten more complicated, and now she was thoroughly entangled with him. That entanglement had already threatened her life. An idea had begun to form that any one of his contemporaries would say was a sign of his own weakness, or insanity. But it would be a way to protect her through this and—if anything happened to him—beyond.

  To accept his offer, Isela had to know him fully. Azrael could not live with her looking at him with the innocence of those ashen eyes, welcoming him with her body, without knowing what he must be willing to do to keep her safe. He would not be able to shield himself from her forever. She must know the other side of the man she brought to her bed: the monster.

  “Save him,” he said to Gregor.

  First he would go to her as the man she thought he was and allow himself to be that—for them both—just one more time. What happened after might change everything.

  Isela thrashed awake in the canopied bed, gasping for breath as she fought the cloth around her neck. Azrael stirred beside her.

  His hands closed over her wrists, preventing her hooked fingers from clawing at her own throat. Isela fought, but Azrael held firm. He chanted words until they became more than a jumble of sounds. “There is no rope. It’s over.”

  The tension went out of her arms in a violent spasm.

  As the specter of death closed over her, the night’s memories washed away the fragile dam she’d built against sudden awareness of her own mortality. A rising tide of suffocating coldness caught in her throat until her breath hitched and gasped.

  Azrael was there, in the dark, when fear and loneliness and the inevitability of death dragged her under. Strong arms closed around her, rocking, soothing. She wanted more, lifting her mouth to find his as though it held her next breath.

  When they met, he found her salty and hungry with a need so great his body responded instantly. Their union was frenetic: a raging hunger that could only be satisfied by a feverish race to completion. Isela took from him until she felt alive again. When she came, marking him with her voice and her nails, Azrael rode her body hard enough to bruise until his own release thundered through him and pushed them both into oblivion.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The scent of agarwood
and burned molasses tugged Isela from sleep. Azrael. Scraps of languid dreams faded with a tickle on her eyelids. She blinked her eyes open to take in sleep-spiked black hair on the pillow beside her own. Heat curled in her belly when he turned his head and the glowing silver pools of his eyes settled on her face. A sexy little smile licked at the corner of his mouth.

  She yawned, detangling her arm from his body to cover her mouth, and caught a glimpse of her forearm. It was marked with a line of soot. She inhaled, frowning at the distinctive ashy flavor in the air.

  “Who burned toast?” she asked.

  Azrael propped himself up on one elbow beside her, freeing her up to scoot back toward the headboard and take in the surroundings.

  “I. . . ah. . .,” he began, glancing around them. “Overheated. . . a little.”

  They were on an island of intact bedding. The rest of the bed—what was left of it—was in ashes. Only chunks of melted metal poking out of the rubble suggested a frame. She clutched the singed sheet to her breasts.

  “A little?” she echoed.

  Azrael actually looked embarrassed—the smile going bigger in a way that was surprisingly boyish. Her heart did a backflip against her ribs.

  No, she told it. You do not fall for a necromancer whose orgasm sets the bed on fire.

  Isela remembered waking up after the nightmare with arms around her and then his body inside her. Phantom tremors shook her. She had wanted release, and a distraction, and he had burned the bed down around them.

  Azrael searched for words. “You seem to have an unexpected effect on me.”

  “This doesn’t happen. . . all the time?”

  “All necromancers identify with one of the four elements,” he explained. “Our ability to generate or control it is the first sign of what we are to become.”

  Isela’s mind flicked back over the hot water, the room temperature, and now this—a bed turned to ash. “Yours is fire.”

  He nodded. “But loss of control is less common, as we age.”

  A lick of feminine pride rose in her. She wasn’t the only one who had enjoyed herself beyond expectation. And even then, he’d kept her safe. Not so much as a blister or a burned hair. The rest of the room was untouched except for that faint lingering scent of burned toast. Her stomach rumbled.