Most Wanted - A Fantasy Romance Novel (The Shadow Blade Series)

by E. L Friel

  Jax looked up at the house, trying to see it through Ariel’s eyes. It was a big house. A beautiful house for sure. His sanctuary. His and Neve’s house. The place they had planned to raise children in. As they walked up the steps to the front door Jax realized that maybe he should have hidden traces of Neve in case Ariel asked questions. But it was too late for that.

  Ariel paused on the step and turned to look at the view over LA. A blanket of lights twinkled below them, cut off only by the dark void of the Pacific. As Jax watched her, something softened in Ariel’s expression. It was as if she’d never seen LA from this viewpoint and was stunned by its impossible beauty. The haughty indifference fell away and she took a deep breath in, exhaling softly. Jax felt another stirring, an urge to wrap his arms around her from behind and bury his lips in her hair, to just hold her like that and try to keep her in that moment. She seemed almost content, the mask had slipped and he’d just caught his first sight of the real Ariel beneath.

  Ariel turned around to find Jax staring at her, almost wonderingly, a curious expression on his face. Her heart skipped a beat. He was even more beautiful than the damn view. And the house. Holy shit. It was like something out of movie; all glass and steel and concrete. She was sure it had probably featured on the front of Architectural Digest and was no doubt worth tens of millions of dollars. How much money did the guy have exactly? More than her, came the answer.

  As he led her to the front door Ariel thought of her disgusting hovel of a home, with the dirty dishes, screaming banshee neighbors upstairs, and the croaking air-con which rattled all night but which drowned out the sound of addicts shooting up in the stairwell. She thought of the tattoo parlor downstairs, and the drug dealers outside her door and the syringes that littered the stairwell. It was OK for some she thought to herself, as Jax put his key in the lock and pushed opened the door.

  Ariel gathered herself and walked inside, starting to have second thoughts about what she was doing. Not that she really knew what she was doing. She’d not said a word on the back of the bike, some silent assent passing between her and Jax that this night was going to end with them in bed. After the fight her bloodlust had been at an all time high, adrenaline scoring through her body like an acid trip.

  If Jax had shoved her against a wall and kissed her she probably would have given into it right there and then, ignoring even the frenzied, braying Suckers storming up the beach after them. Which was why, when he had kept driving, she had stayed silent, feeling the rigid lines of his stomach beneath her palms, his taut shoulders and muscular back sheltering her from the wind, and enjoying every minute of it.

  She admitted it to herself. She wanted him more than she’d ever wanted any man. But now she was no longer near him, no longer pressing against his back, and her bloodlust had abated somewhat, she wasn’t so sure she wanted to just give herself to him. She didn’t just give herself to men, not until they’d earned it. And then there was the fact she’d already decided that she was going to hand him over to the Brothers one day. Sleeping with him might make that harder. Might make it easier too though she mused, hardening herself to the inevitable.

  Jax stood aside to let her into the hallway. Ariel strolled past him trying to look nonchalant but her eyes quickly scanned the interior, taking it in in total amazement. The ceilings were double height, huge expanses of windows facing the view and the twinkling blanket of lights below. Ariel caught sight of a swimming pool through the window, illuminated and glinting turquoise. It was opulent without being lavish and the thing that struck her most was the feeling of peace and total solitude that surrounded them. It was bizarrely quiet. That was what she finally put her finger on. There were no yelling neighbors screaming in Vietnamese, or crack addicts fighting in the stairwell. There was just pure, blissful silence and clean air. They were above the smog. Despite the cold steel and concrete exterior the inside of the house was warm and inviting. She glanced at Jax, maybe it was a little like the owner in that respect. Ariel took a few steps into the living room, aware that Jax was standing back, observing her.

  There was an enormous L-shaped sofa in the center of the room, scattered with cushions. It was the kind of sofa you found in an actual store, and not sitting on a street corner decorated with cigarette burns and a ‘free to a good home’ sign. A vase of white roses sat on what looked like an antique side table, and a more modern looking coffee table sat in the middle of the space and was stacked with a pile of books. Ariel resisted the urge to walk over and explore further. Instead she turned back to the hallway, taking in the sweep of the staircase leading up to the second floor. She wondered what his bedroom looked like.

  It was only then that Ariel realized something about the house that made her heart sink. It had a woman’s touch about it. Either a gay man or a woman had decorated this home, she was sure of it. Her gut was telling her so. It wasn’t just the flowers or the paintings, it was the whole vibe. He lived there with a woman. She would bet on it.

  Ariel whipped around to face him. ‘So, you live here alone?’ she asked, hoping the question sounded innocuous. Her heart drummed in her ears though and she realized she was holding her breath.

  Obviously Jax heard the note of worry in her voice though because when she glanced at him she saw he was biting back a smile. ‘Yeah,’ he answered, tossing his jacket over a chair.

  Ariel pretended to study a painting on the wall, so he wouldn’t see the fact she was biting back a smile of her own. The painting was kind of abstract, sweeps of color swirling together into a sea of green and pink. It seemed to evoke less a person or a place than a feeling. She couldn’t exactly explain what the feeling was, but she knew she felt calm looking at it and that she didn’t want to tear her eyes off it.

  ‘You like it?’ Jax asked, coming up behind her. He was so silent when he walked that Ariel jumped. She didn’t like it that he could sneak up on her. She also didn’t like the magnetic draw of his chest, or her own body’s automatic reaction to his proximity, which was to try to lean backwards and close the distance.

  ‘Yeah, it’s nice, ’ Ariel mumbled, wishing she knew something about art. ‘Who painted it?’ she asked.

  ‘I did,’ Jax answered after a beat.

  Ariel shot him a look over her shoulder. Was he joking? It appeared not. He had walked back into the hallway. She followed after him, casting a lingering glance back at the canvas. He had painted that? Wow. Jax Sayer really was full of surprises; a millionaire demon-slayer with a sensitive, artistic side. Who’d have thought it?

  Ariel had little in the way of formal education herself, and definitely no time to set up an easel and get in touch with her inner creative. Her father had taught her how to kill a man before he had even bothered to teach her the alphabet. She had been practicing martial arts since the age of four. While other kids were learning to throw a baseball she’d been learning to throw knives. While other kids were taking SATs she was already on the streets, having to hustle for a living. Her father had died when she was fifteen, leaving her alone, having to fend for herself.

  So no, she’d never had much time to study, or go to museums, or read books, or sketch bowls of fruit. Her one guilty pleasure was movies. That was her one escapism, had been since she was a kid and her father had left her in front of the TV every time he’d gone out hunting. She was a horror film aficionado, though any movie except for romantic comedies would do. She’d met Saul at a midnight showing of The Omen. They’d shared an obsession for horror movies and for Mexican food and had spent all their free time hanging out in the back row of movie theatres. Thinking of Saul made her mood instantly sour.

  ‘What do you think those things were?’ Jax asked once he’d led her into the kitchen. ‘Have you ever seen anything like them before?’

  Ariel barely heard him. She was staring at all the appliances lined up on the mortuary clean surfaces. The dining table was big enough to seat twenty Suckers, and the refrigerator was so huge it could have housed a dozen bodies in it.


  ‘You tell me,’ she muttered wondering why a guy who lived alone needed a place so huge, and trying to picture him hosting dinner parties or cooking. He didn’t look like the kind of guy to entertain. He had a melancholy sadness about him that she recognized. He was a loner like her. She sensed he preferred his own company to that of others. But maybe that was wrong. What did she know? He didn’t look like the kind of guy who painted abstract paintings either.

  Jax was over at the sink now. He turned on the faucet and with one swift movement pulled his T-shirt off over his head.

  Words dissolved on Ariel’s tongue as she took in the sweeping lines of his body, the muscles of his six-pack and the crisscross of scars, some faded and some more recent. She ached all of a sudden to run her hands over the contours of his chest, and felt a pang of something disturbingly like pain combined with a rush of anger when she considered the fights he must have been in, the hurt evident on his body. It was only then she saw the fresh wound on his chest, and the blood seeping down his stomach. She took a step towards him. When had that happened?

  ‘Is it clean?’ she asked, examining the wound.

  He glanced at her and nodded but she watched as he doused a cloth and swiped it with alcohol anyway. Better safe than sorry. The Sucker virus was like the Aids virus. It could only be spread by bodily fluids; semen, spit, blood. And only through sex, or if saliva or blood got into an open wound. Suckers technically weren’t demons. They were humans infected with a demon virus. Sure, once upon a time, long ago there had been demon Suckers called Originals who had come to the human realm and started infecting humans, but now the Originals were all gone.

  Jax tossed his bloodied T-shirt on the side and leaned back against the counter his eyes resting on her face. He was lucky it was just a scratch and he seemed to be healing already, making Ariel wonder about the truth of the myth she’d heard that Blades healed faster than your average human. She wished she had studied the myths and history of the realms more, but unfortunately her training had been of the practical rather than the book-reading variety. Her father had been an advocate of throwing children to the wolves and seeing how they fared.

  Ariel turned away from Jax, feeling heat spreading up her neck, suffusing her cheeks. If she stared any longer at Jax’s naked torso she wasn’t going to be able to form a coherent sentence. She turned to the window, but managed to catch sight of his reflection, his broad chest and shoulders and the rippling line of his abs. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ she murmured under her breath. ‘I mean them,’ she added hastily, cursing herself. She turned towards the wall where there was no danger whatsoever of catching a reflection of him.

  It was true. She had no idea what those things were. Suckers for sure, but some kind of new breed. But frankly she was finding it hard to focus or give a damn right this moment in time.

  Jax had grabbed a towel from the side and was patting himself dry. He walked over to the refrigerator and took out two beers. Handing one to Ariel he led the way through into the living room. Ariel followed him, feeling the atmosphere turn markedly heavy, charged with electricity, like the air before a storm. She stood there, at a slight loss, feeling an unfamiliar prickling of nerves, as Jax drew the curtains and turned on a single lamp in the corner.

  When he finally turned to face her, Ariel’s stomach flipped over as though she’d just plummeted off a cliff edge. His eyes were mesmerizing, warm brown and filled with challenge.

  ‘That’s quite a scar,’ she said, her throat constricting, as he crossed towards her. She was still working out how to play this, struggling to stay focused and not lose the upper hand. She stared at the white jagged line that ran across his shoulder blade.

  Jax glanced down. ‘That’s nothing,’ he said, setting his beer on a side table and then flexing his bicep.

  Ariel raised her eyebrows lazily because it was obvious as a Sucker’s fang dripping in blood that Jax was just trying to show off how fit he was and how big his biceps were. Still, if they were on display… and actually it was a pretty impressive scar he had running up all the way to his shoulder blade.

  She leaned in closer. ‘What was that from? A Saw demon?’

  He nodded.’

  Ariel glanced at him, then back at the scar. ‘Doesn’t look like a tail mark.’

  ‘It wasn’t. She had sharp nails.’

  Ariel tilted her neck to the side, ‘Now this is a wound,’ she said, lifting her hair and pointing at the mark on her neck, a long, white scar that travelled all the way to her shoulder blade. Jax’s fingers traced the scar and she jolted, surprised as much by the gentleness of his touch as by the surge of heat and current that was now coursing through her body. She felt like she’d just touched an electricity pylon. She straightened up, tossing her hair back over her shoulder, unnerved at how much this guy, a stranger almost, was able to elicit feelings and responses she hadn’t felt in such a long time. ‘A Sucker came at me with a knife.’

  ‘You kill it?’ Jax asked, his voice so low she felt it vibrating through her.

  She gave him a look over her shoulder. ‘Of course I killed it. I don’t dig Suckers. Who do you think I am? Sookie Stackhouse?’ She tossed her coat onto the sofa and pulled the arm of her T-shirt down so he could see her collarbone. Scooping her hair out the way she angled her body into the light. ‘That was a Scarab demon. There were three of them.’

  Jax couldn’t resist running his fingers the length of the translucent white scar that ran along the sweeping curve of her collarbone. He felt her inhale, saw the shiver race across her skin and felt an answering pull in his gut.

  ‘Must have hurt. Those are killer,’ he murmured, his fingers stroking up her neck. He was aching to drop a kiss onto her skin. Damn, she smelled so good. But he still wasn’t one hundred percent sure she was his for the taking. Since they’d stepped foot in the house she’d been acting funny, the distance was back, that aloofness that seemed to be her trademark. And the mask of indifference was firmly in place, though the goose bumps prickling her skin seemed to tell a different story altogether.

  ‘I got a Scarab demon scar too. Right here,’ he said, pointing at his stomach.

  Ariel blinked a few times before her gaze focused on the scar he was pointing at, a thin white line running at a diagonal across his stomach. Her cheeks were flushed pink, her breathing had started to speed up. Jax’s gaze dropped to her breasts, the full swell of them beneath her T-shirt. He couldn’t help himself. She noticed immediately of course, and he saw the smile tug at the corner of her mouth - that mouth that was just begging to be kissed.

  With a glint in her eye she lifted her top and showed him the smooth flat of her stomach. His gaze lingered on her face for a few seconds before dropping to her waist, to the pale dots that traveled across her slender hipbone.

  ‘Burn?’ he asked, nodding in appreciation more at the curve of her hips than the scar. They were like two injured army vets, comparing war wounds.

  Ariel nodded, and he caught the flare of challenge in her eyes, the defiant lift of her chin. The heat rose inside of him like a fire flaming from an ember, startling him with its intensity. She pulled her top up higher so it brushed the bottom of her black lace bra and he had to dig his heels in to stop himself from picking her up in his arms and throwing her down on the sofa.

  She was showing him another scar. It ran along the bottom of her ribcage, this time a knife wound. It looked a mess, had been badly stitched, and yet somehow it only seemed to accentuate the beauty of her body, to exaggerate the smoothness of the rest of her, the perfection. He liked that she didn’t seem to care about it being an ugly raised area of skin, that she was proud of it. Most of the girls Cy tried to hook him up with were obsessed with how they looked. That kind of girl had never been his type. He liked a girl who was comfortable in her own skin, who wore sweats and didn’t need to wear make up to put out the trash. Ariel reminded him of Neve in that respect.

  The scar was puckered, looked old. ‘Home stitched?’ he ask
ed, stepping closer to examine it.

  ‘My boyfriend did it.’ She winced as she said it and Jax’s gut clenched. His hand hovered above the scar, not touching. Boyfriend? She had a boyfriend?

  ‘Ex,’ she clarified quickly. ‘My ex.’ He caught the sigh in her voice. A bad break up then? Something she regretted? There was a story there for sure, but he didn’t want to hear it right now.

  ‘I can beat that,’ he said, stepping away and letting his hand drop to his side. He pointed at the scar left by a bullet, just beneath his clavicle. Ariel glanced at it and nodded. Then she licked her lips and stepped towards him.

  In the next moment Ariel ripped off her T-shirt and tossed it to the floor. Jax stared at her stunned into speechlessness, and tried to appear nonchalant. She was standing in front of him in just her bra and jeans though, and nonchalance was a challenge. He had to force himself to stay rooted to the spot, stop himself from taking the two steps necessary to close the distance between them and pulling her into his arms.

  She pointed at the scar above her left breast. He barely noticed. His eyes were tracing the full curve of her breast, the dark pink of her nipple that was clear through the black lace. He watched it harden beneath his gaze. Taking a long, unsteady inhalation, Jax took a step closer.

  ‘Near miss,’ he murmured. There was barely a millimeter between them now. His thumb hovered just over her breast, aching to brush the nipple. ‘That could have hit your heart.’

  ‘Who says I have one?’ Ariel answered, her voice low and seductive.

  Jax smiled at her. She kept acting like she was heartless and tough but he knew there was a softer, more gentle side to her. He had seen a glint of it when she stared at his painting. Suddenly all he wanted to do was uncover it, tame her, reveal the tender side he knew existed beneath her veneer of bravado.