by Tessa Blake
5
Gabriel slammed into the office, furious, and dropped into the visitor’s chair on the near side of the big metal desk. By all rights, he should have been on the other side, but—
“Vivienne, why are you in my chair?”
His mother swiveled away from the bank of security camera screens and gazed at him coolly. Her eyes were blue today, he noticed—fitting for someone as blond as she’d chosen to be.
“I’m keeping an eye on the club,” she said. “Which is more than I can say for some people in this room.”
“My eyes were in the club.”
“The only thing you had your eyes on was that chubby little redhead.” She crossed her long legs and leaned back in his chair. “I’m surprised at you, Gabriel. Such a non-starter.”
He bristled. “I don’t recall asking you to vet my selections.”
“You haven’t,” she said. “Nor would I want to. How … unseemly. Still, I don’t have to be holding auditions to have an opinion, do I?”
“As if anyone—or anything—could stop you,” he muttered.
“I’m just saying, she’s a nothing.” Vivienne lifted her chin and all but sniffed with disdain. “I stepped out into the club proper to get a sense of her, and I swear it was like looking at a black hole.”
Was she nuts? Lily had been electric with energy; he hadn’t been able to keep his eyes—or his hands—off her.
Not that she’d returned the sentiment, which was starting to make a horrible kind of sense now that he knew his mother had gotten herself involved.
“What did you do to her?” he demanded, too offended to even try to keep his tone civil.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You did something to her.”
“I did nothing.” She returned her attention to the screens, clearly bored. “Why would I?”
“She turned me down.”
Vivienne turned back to him slowly. “She did what?”
“I asked her to dance and she said no.” He let the fury roll through him, glad to have somewhere to direct his frustration. How dare she interfere? “What did you do to her?”
“What did you do to her?” she countered. “When I saw her, she was dancing with you.”
Stuck, he just looked at her.
A nasty smile crept across Vivienne’s face. “I thought you weren’t going to be enthralling anyone anymore. It felt like cheating, and all that?”
He scowled at her. “I just gave her a little pull. To get her to dance.”
“So, your moral fiber didn’t outlast even the first time you wanted something,” she observed archly. “It’s good to see there’s something of me in you, after all.”
He said nothing to that. What was there to say? He found her abhorrent, and didn’t want to be anything like her—but he had compelled Lily when she’d said no.
Still, it had been such a small thing. Just a little pull, through the place where their hands were touching. He hadn’t kept it going, and she’d still been almost purring against him.
And then … nothing. She’d walked away.
“Some people are more resistant than others.” Vivienne shrugged. “You know this.”
Yes, he knew that. And yes, he’d met people strong enough to resist his aura, his general presence. But he’d never met anyone who had responded to a pull … and then turned him down.
He thought of it as a pull because that was what it felt like. As a child, he’d gone fishing with his father—mostly upstate, but once all the way to the mountains of New Hampshire—and he’d learned early how to set a hook and reel a fish in slowly, carefully. One didn’t want to dislodge the hook and lose the fish—and, quite probably, the bait.
Enthralling someone was like setting a hook and reeling them in. Even before Vivienne, before he’d known what he was actually doing, that was how he’d envisioned it. He’d reeled in plenty of women in high school and college, and in the years since. He’d thought it was because he was fit and good-looking—there was no need for false modesty, as far as he was concerned—and those qualities paved his way until someone got to know him.
And while being handsome didn’t hurt, he’d liked knowing that once someone got to know him, she liked him even more.
Now, he couldn’t even stomach thinking about it. If it wasn’t real, if it wasn’t genuine, what was the point?
Except—he’d pulled Lily.
And she’d walked away regardless.
“It bears a little looking into, though,” Vivienne said, bringing his attention back to the present. “I wouldn’t have expected anybody so useless to have that kind of natural resistance, and it would have to be natural. She wasn’t shielded, or powerful, or … anything.” She shook her head, then reached down and pulled a long, thin, wickedly sharp knife out of her knee-high boot.
“Are you sure that’s below the legal limit?” he asked, allowing just a hint of derision in his voice.
“A woman that looks like I do, walking alone on the streets of New York?” She raised an eyebrow at him. “A little dagger in the boot is just an insurance policy.”
As if she would need a physical weapon for self-defense. It was ridiculous.
From the pocket of her little leather miniskirt, she pulled a small, round compact. Its surface was dull, scuffed bronze, and it was inlaid with glossy, polished bits of what Gabriel knew—to his disgust—to be human bone.
Vivienne opened it deftly, one-handed, and set it on the desk in front of her. Its scratched and warped twin mirrors cast dull circles of light onto the wall beside the desk.
“Wait—” he began, leaning forward, but it was too late.
With a swift indrawn hiss and an oddly delicate motion, she sliced the knife along the meatiest part of her thumb. Blood welled up and spilled over immediately; she moved her hand so the steady droplets of blood landed on one of the mirrors.
Gabriel watched her lips move as she counted drops, but he didn’t speak; talking while she was conjuring could have disastrous results. One did not divide one’s concentration when summoning an imp.
As the tenth fat droplet fell, light flashed from the mirror, bright enough that Gabriel squinted against it. The air filled with the stench of rotten eggs. There was a hollow pop—it felt like all the air was briefly sucked out of the room—and his mother’s favorite imp appeared on the desk.
Pusboil was basically human-shaped, though only about two feet tall, with leathery gray skin, huge bat-like ears, and irregular tufts of matted white hair under its arms and in the region of what would have been its genitals, had it any—which it did not. Its eyes glowed pink in the dim room as it slowly looked from Vivienne to Gabriel, then back again.
Finally, it spoke, its voice somehow soft and shrieky and gravelly and echoey all at once. “What do you want now, Vivienne?”
“You’re supposed to call me ‘Mistress,’” Vivienne said sternly.
“And you’re supposed to be seven feet tall and have bat wings,” it said, “but here you are, all tarted up trying to look good for a bunch of puny humans.”
Vivienne’s fingers closed around its throat and she picked it straight up off the desk, where it dangled, glaring at her with its watery pink eyes. “I look good for myself, Pusboil,” she snarled, and Gabriel almost laughed at the incongruity of a creature like Vivienne spouting quasi-feminist Cosmopolitan-Magazine-style bullshit.
As though it had read Gabriel’s mind—and honestly, Gabriel couldn’t swear it couldn’t read minds, what did he know?—Pusboil said, “Yes, you’ve come a long way, baby. Put me down, please.”
Vivienne set it on the desk and leaned back in her—in Gabriel’s—chair, folding her arms over her chest. “I have a job for you,” she said. “It’s very simple, but it’s also important. And you must not be seen, no matter what, because we are dealing with an unknown quantity here.”
The imp leaned back with its tail propping it up, and crossed its own arms. “An unknown quantity of what? I hope it�
��s something tasty, like kittens.”
“That’s quite enough,” Vivienne snapped. “Now, Gabriel was just downstairs leg-humping some nobody, and she left the club fewer than fifteen minutes ago. You go get a whiff of her, find her trail, and follow her home.”
The imp nodded.
“I want to know everything she does, and with whom she does it. Any sense you can get from her of whether there’s anything otherworldly about her, or any of her friends or acquaintances, I want to know about it.”
The imp nodded again.
“Oh, and anything you overhear her say about my darling son, of course.”
“Leave me out of it,” Gabriel said, knowing neither she nor the imp would listen but wanting to register his displeasure formally. Formality was important in this sort of thing—for all the casual language, she was forging a contract with the imp. He wanted his objections on the record. “It doesn’t matter what she says or does, about me or about anything else. I doubt she’ll be back.”
“Be that as it may,” Vivienne said, “your reservations are noted, but immaterial. Pusboil, do you understand your obligations?”
“You betcha,” the imp said, and hopped down from the desk and strode over to Gabriel. Without warning, and before Gabriel could even think to ask what it was planning, the imp had buried its face in Gabriel’s groin and begun sniffing around.
Gabriel backhanded the repulsive little thing across the room and into the opposite wall, but it just continued to grin as it dropped lightly to the floor, landing cat-like on its feet.
“That’s where I could smell her best,” it said, and its grin was … well, impish. “Don’t blame me that’s what you lot get up to.”
And with another pop, Pusboil was gone, and Gabriel was left to deal with the imp snot on his zipper.
6
In the light of day, Abaddon was less magical. Without the lights and the music and the fog, it was just a big echoing room. Lily despaired of finding anything to photograph.
“I was here last night,” she said to Scott, “and it was really hopping. But this….” She waved to indicate the exposed girders and the visible pegboard behind the bar supporting a sad string of bulbs that had, last night, been a dizzying display of colored lights chasing around the center area of the bar.
“You’ll figure something out,” Scott said. “You always do.”
She scowled, but didn’t respond. Stupid Scott.
Okay, not stupid. Scott was great. She liked Scott; he was one of her favorite coworkers and this was the third club article they’d worked on, so she knew they worked well together and he’d write good copy to showcase her photos. And honestly, no nightclub looked good in the light of day. That was why they were called nightclubs, right?
But she was in a foul mood and hated every damn thing at the moment. She especially hated being back here after … whatever that business was with that guy, the night before.
She’d gone home and straight to bed, but had woken up feeling as if she hadn’t slept at all. Bad dreams had plagued her all night, and she’d kept waking with a terrifying feeling that someone was in her room, watching her—going so far as to turn on the light the first couple of times she’d woken up.
Finally, at 4 o’clock, a couple of cats had gotten into a shrieking fight outside her window. She’d given up hoping for even a couple of hours of unbroken rest and had gotten out of bed and started a pot of coffee.
She’d managed four cups before leaving for work … and it hadn’t been enough. Plus, it was beastly hot outside; she was sweating even in her spaghetti-strap sundress, and her poor, wilted ponytail was setting loose a spiderweb of hairs to plaster to her neck.
“Maybe some shots of the mezzanine?” Scott suggested. “There’s a lot of glittery decoration up there. Maybe the owner would put on some spotlights for you.”
“Here’s hoping,” she said, trying to soften her grouchy tone. None of the things causing her mood were Scott’s fault. “I can’t do anything with this.”
“Maybe you can do something with that,” Scott said, raising his eyebrows almost to his hairline and using them to point behind her. She turned around and, shocked into silence, watched the guy from last night—Gabriel—striding across the floor toward them.
He faltered when he saw her, an almost imperceptible hesitation in his step, but he recovered quickly and approached with a hand out to shake Scott’s hand. Lily’s hands were full of equipment and she liked it just fine that way; she didn’t feel like shaking his hand after the weirdness of the night before.
She wasn’t sure if she should acknowledge that they’d met; he solved that dilemma by addressing it himself. “Lily, I had no idea you were affiliated with NYC Monthly.”
“Turns out I am,” she said, inanely, genuinely surprised he had remembered her name. “And you are…?”
His smile was just as devastating as the night before. “I own Abaddon—well, half of it,” he said.
She shook her head. “We have the owner listed as…” She turned to Scott. “I forget.”
“Vivienne Malignon,” he said.
“Partial owner,” Gabriel said. “She’ll be down shortly. I’m a silent partner and I really must insist I remain one, even in your story.”
“Okay,” she said. That was creepy, for the owner to be trolling for chicks in his own club. “I’m Lily Randall. This is Scott Deaver.”
“Gabriel Batiste,” Gabriel said.
Lily almost swallowed her tongue. She knew she’d seen that face; now, with the name to match it, she was mortified. Gabriel Batiste was stupidly, fabulously wealthy, and owned a piece of seemingly everything—in New York and outside of it. He was known for being reclusive, and had a reputation for being ruthless in business, even though no one ever seemed willing to give any specific examples of what that ruthlessness entailed.
Way to make an ass of yourself in front of one of the richest guys in the country.
Scott made a gesture which somehow took in the whole of the place. “This is … big.”
“It certainly is,” Gabriel agreed. “Let’s go have a seat at the bar. I’ll tell you the history.”
Lily and Scott sat on barstools as Gabriel headed into the interior square of the bar and ducked down out of sight, coming up with three bottles of water. The bottle he handed to Lily was ice-cold and she was glad of it; the interior of the club wasn’t as hot as the air outside, but it was stuffy and warm all the same. She drank nearly half her water in one go, then capped the bottle and set it back on the bar.
Scott and Gabriel were already deep in conversation about the transition from warehouse to nightclub, and the steps it had taken to get from one to the other, so she wandered away from the bar, shooting a few desultory pictures of the more interesting decorations.
But most of the allure the night before had come from the music and the lights, and she found herself thinking of Scott’s suggestion to put the lights on so she could capture something more interesting. She made her way back to the bar to ask about it. Gabriel and Scott were engrossed in a set of floor plans, so she waited for a break in the conversation, taking the opportunity to polish off the rest of her water.
When it came, she cleared her throat a little, and both men looked up at her.
“This might sound weird, but Scott mentioned maybe getting you to put some of the lights on, for the photos,” she said. “Is that something we could do? There were some spotlights on the mezzanine, and this string of lights behind the bar was flashing—if I get the right shutter speed, it would look really cool.”
Gabriel nodded. “One second.” He picked up a phone under the counter, hit a couple of buttons. After a moment, someone must have picked up the other end, because he said, “Vivienne, can you bring down the renovations spreadsheet? I’m in the bar with the magazine people.” He listened for another moment. “Thanks.”
He hung up, then came back around to the outside of the bar square.
“Bring your camera,”
he said to Lily, “and come with me. The light booth is pretty impressive on its own. You might find a shot you like there.”
He took her water bottle from her and two-pointed it off the pegboard and into a recycling bin. “Scott, do you mind waiting here? My partner will be coming through any second and she can give you some ballpark numbers on the renovation costs.”
Is he trying to ditch Scott so he can get me alone? she wondered, and felt a little shiver. He was standing entirely too close to her; it had been one thing when they were dancing, but it was entirely another thing when she was on assignment.
She took a couple of steps back, trying to be discreet about it and not look like she was fleeing his body odor—which he absolutely did not have. He smelled fantastic. Edible, even. What was it about this guy that literally made her mouth water?
“Sure,” Scott said, nodding. “No prob. That cool with you, Lily?”
She smiled at him. Scott was a good guy, and probably wondering at the weird vibe between her and Gabriel. “Yeah, I’m cool.”
But she found, as she stepped through the door marked Private with Gabriel close behind her, she wasn’t cool at all. Her temperature, as it turned out, was rising. Fast.
The way he brushed up against her as the door shut, trapping them in a short hallway, didn’t help at all, or the way he squeezed by her to get to the second doorway at the end. She watched as he unlocked it then stepped to the side and gestured that she should precede him.
Moving past him brought pretty much every square inch of her back in contact with him, which would have made for an awkward moment no matter what, but it was exacerbated by his quick indrawn hiss of breath and the involuntary shudder that wracked her from head to toe. What on earth?
She froze, every nerve ending suddenly on fire. Bad move, since her spine was still pressed firmly against his chest and abs—his exceptionally firm abs, she noted with another shudder.
He nudged her the rest of the way through the door, followed her through, and let it slam shut behind him. They were in a smallish room, made even smaller by a giant console set against the floor-to-ceiling glass that overlooked the dance floor and DJ tables.
