"No problem."
*
The instant he was alone with Brooke, Janvier focused on the butterfly bandage high on her right cheek. "You've been hurt."
"I did it myself," Brooke answered without hesitation, heat under the pale cream of her skin. "It was foolish and done in a moment of pique. I'm so very sorry to have brought you out here for nothing." Twisting her hands in front of her, she hunched her shoulders inward. "Giorgio is a wonderful master and I am ashamed of my actions."
Stepping closer to her, Janvier lowered his tone to the same gentleness he'd used on Marie. "No one will do you harm." As far as Janvier was concerned, the abuse of women was an unforgivable crime. "You have my protection. Speak the truth."
Brooke's eyes shone wet, her lower lip trembling. Raising her hands, she placed them against Janvier's chest. "I am," she rasped. "From the bottom of my heart, I am. If there is to be punishment for wasting the Tower's time, I will take it." She inhaled a shaky breath, her smile piercing. "My Giorgio is innocent of all but loving me even when I am foolish." A single tear hit Janvier's hand where he cupped Brooke's cheek, her other cheek holding a trail of wet.
She couldn't have appeared more romantically tragic if she'd tried.
Janvier spoke to Brooke for another ten minutes, but the most senior of Giorgio's cattle stood firm in her assertions. Releasing her, he talked to Marie, Leisel, Laura, and Penelope one at a time. All backed up Brooke's statement that she'd done the injury to herself and that Giorgio didn't mistreat his women.
The five held hands when united again, unanimous in their declaration that Giorgio was a good and fair "master."
"We aren't prisoners, Janni," Marie said, eyes bright and naive and fervent to Ashwini's gaze. "Any one of us is free to do as she wishes. Laura's leaving in a few days, aren't you?"
The brunette nodded, her smile poignant. "I'll miss Giorgio and the rest of my blood family desperately, but I'm homesick. The master bought me a first-class ticket home to Nebraska, and he says he'll pay for me to return if I ever change my mind."
"I'm thinking of joining her." Penelope squeezed her friend's hand, her fingernails decorated in gold polish with a tiny constellation of diamantes in the top left corners. "At least for a visit." A sweet, affectionate kiss to Laura's cheek. "Giorgio knows how close we are. He's offered to pay for me to go to visit her."
"He treasures us." The words were Brooke's but the sentiment was clearly shared by all five women.
The fatuous devotion on their faces made Ashwini's skin crawl.
"Brooke and the others," she said to Janvier when they left the town house five minutes later, "are as much junkies as those mainlining coke." Not every vampire could give pleasure with his bite, but the thrill of having fangs at the jugular or the carotid was rush enough for many. "Add in Giorgio's kind of beauty, and they mistake dependency for love. It's like he has his own miniature cult."
Janvier straddled the bike, passed her a helmet. "Let's ride. I need to get the sickly devotion of it all out of my head."
Initiating the throaty roar of the engine once she was on, he took them through Greenwich Village to Chelsea Piers, then hugged the edge of Manhattan until they reached the George Washington Bridge. Powering over it in the winter dark that had fallen while they'd been inside the town house, he drove to the cliffs of the Angel Enclave, his bike obviously well known enough that none of the angelic guards stopped him.
When he brought the bike to a halt, it was mere feet from a snowy cliff that overlooked the river they'd just crossed. Ashwini couldn't see any houses, only towering trees on either side of this narrow clearing, so either this land was unclaimed or--more probably--on the far edge of an angel's property line. Taking off her helmet as Janvier removed his, she swung off the bike, placed the helmet on the ground, and walked to the edge of the cliff. The lights of Manhattan sparkled on the other side of the water that moved slumberous and sullen tonight.
Drawing in deep drafts of the bitingly cold air, she tried to shake off the crawling sensation she'd felt inside Giorgio's elegant town house. New as the house was, she'd picked up nothing from the walls, no embedded whispers of horror. Her response derived solely from, as Janvier had put it, "the sickly devotion of it all."
Having remained on the bike, Janvier said, "Giorgio's household has little to recommend it."
Ashwini frowned, shifted on her heel so she could see his face. "You say that like the cattle-master relationship isn't a bad idea full stop."
"It's not always about exploitation." He leaned forward on the handlebars, leather jacket unzipped and hair a sexy mess. "I know vampires who have had the same cattle for decades. They truly treat the men and women as family, are more loyal to them than to other vampires, mourn each who passes. Some of the most haunting memorials I've seen in the graveyards of New Orleans are to blood family members."
"Could be it's just about keeping the food happy."
"Food is not so difficult to find, cher." A liquid shrug. "Vampirism gives the old ones astonishing physical beauty and many are also wealthy and powerful. Mortals are drawn to them like flies, yet it is the oldest of my kind who most often have cattle.
"Unlike Giorgio, the majority don't view it as a sexual relationship or treat those in their blood family as trophies, the physical appearance of their cattle an unimportant consideration. Friendship, affection, respect, these are the keys. I once asked a six-hundred-year-old friend why he kept cattle, and he said he was tired of the constant round of meaningless seduction, wanted only the intimacy and comfort of family around him."
Sitting back up, he played with a blade he must've slipped out from his boot. "You must remember that many of my kind were born in a time when to be a family was to live in a single home, several generations one on top of the other, newborns sharing rooms with grandparents, and warriors seated side by side with younger siblings, cousins, and fosters. That is what they seek to recreate, for the old ones often find loneliness the worst pain of all."
His words stopped Ashwini; she'd never considered things from that angle and it made a heartrending kind of sense. "I grew up like that," she found herself saying when most of the time, she did her best not to think of the past. "My paternal grandparents lived with us, as did an aunt before she got married, and another who'd been through a divorce." It had never been quiet in the Taj household.
Janvier's expression was intent. "So you understand."
"The need to create a family? Yes." Wasn't that what she'd done with the Guild when her own broke into too many pieces to put back together? "But that's not what we saw today."
"No." He stared out toward the water. "Giorgio treats his women as pretty dolls. His to own, to dress, to bejewel. Marie May had such a fire in her when I first met her--that fire is now all focused on Giorgio. Soon she will forget her dreams."
"And when she gets too old for him, he'll nudge her out like he's doing with Laura and Penelope."
"Oui. What they see as kindness is simply Giorgio's way of creating space for new playthings."
Red in her vision at the memory of the smug bastard who, it was clear, would soon push poor, lovesick Brooke to the curb, she folded her arms. "Can you get the young ones out?"
"No." Jaw tight, he said, "They are of age and the Tower cannot interfere in domestic arrangements without cause." That fact clearly not sitting well with him, he swung his leg off the bike and came to stand beside her. "I'll call Marie tomorrow and reiterate that she and the others can come to me at any time, but I can do nothing about their mental and emotional enslavement when they go into it with eyes wide open."
"Five minutes alone with Brooke," Ashwini said, "and I'd know for certain if she was telling the truth." Memory echoes were the strongest in old ones like the angel Nazarach, but with a little more effort, Ashwini could pick them up from those under four hundred. The latter limitation was why she could continue to work as a hunter--it was extremely rare for the Guild to be contracted to hunt an older vamp. The angels
usually took care of any problems at that level themselves.
Unfortunately, the limitation wasn't set in stone. Janvier was opaque to her--had always been that way--but usually, the better she knew someone, the more chance she'd connect with them regardless of age. And every so often, even a young stranger would set off her senses, drag her under. It was why she was so careful about physical contact.
Janvier ran his knuckles down the line of her spine. "If you find darkness in Giorgio's blood slave, it'll live in you forever. No, I won't permit this."
"Since when do you have the right to 'permit' me anything?" she said, turning away.
He grabbed hold of one of her wrists, his grip gentle but unbreakable. "Who was he?"
Her response was instinctive, her mind shying away from the agony of it all. "None of your business."
Hauling her to him, Janvier held her wrist against his chest, his heart pumping steady and strong under the thin barrier of the T-shirt, his body so warm she wanted to stretch out into it like a cat before a fire. "We are beyond that, and you know it. That's why you've been running so hard from me."
"I seem to recall hunting you," she said, her traitorous fingers curling into the heat of him.
He tugged her closer, and his voice, it held so many layers when he spoke. "I see such pain in your eyes, such loss." Breath shallow and shoulders rigid, he whispered, "Did you love him so much?"
At that instant, she knew she could strike a blow that would be a sledgehammer to the strange, nameless, precious thing between them, the connection that had formed the first day they came eye to eye. He'd grinned at her as she notched a crossbow bolt in place, then blown her a kiss and moved with the rapid grace she'd come to associate always and only with him. She'd almost smiled in return before remembering she was there to bring him in to face a very irate angel.
That angel had pulled the hunt order seventy-two hours later, after Janvier made nice. She'd walked into the angel's residence to find him laughing with Janvier, while the damn Cajun who'd led her into a swamp, before escaping with a slickness she'd reluctantly admired, lay sprawled in a heavy green armchair, long legs kicked out. It was the first time he'd called her cher, asking her when they'd play again.
Et quand en va rejouer, cher?
"I have photos of all my family on my phone," she whispered, unable to destroy their relationship with a lie that would forever alter the honesty at its core. "You just saw Arvi's that day . . . my brother."
Janvier released a harsh breath, a shudder rippling through his body. "He's at least twenty years older than you."
"Nineteen," she said. "I was a late-in-life oops baby." A mistake, a regret. "In many ways he was my father. That's why he talks to me like that, assumes I'll do what he says."
"Your parents?"
"You didn't already hack into a database and look it all up?" It was stupid to avoid the question, but she'd been doing it so long it was habit.
Thumb moving over her skin, Janvier waited until she met his eyes to say, "That would've been against the rules."
Ashwini couldn't pretend she didn't know the rules. "My mother and father died when I was nine."
"An accident?"
"Yes. That's when we lost our sister, Tanu, too." The words were a lie wrapped in a devastating truth but this one secret she couldn't share. Not today. Not until she no longer had a choice. "After they were gone, Arvi stepped up, took charge of everything." She'd thought he hung the moon, her smart, handsome brother.
"Love does not cause such shadows as I see in you, my fierce Ashblade."
9
Unable to bear the naked emotion in his eyes, because it was a mirror of her own, she used her Guild training to break his hold. The fact that she'd waited until now was another danger sign, another warning. "I didn't fit," she said, and it was all she could say right then without breaking completely.
Moving to the very edge of the cliff, the snow crunching beneath her boots, she turned the conversation back to what she could handle. "My brother is a neurosurgeon." One of the most revered in the profession. "Dr. Arvan Taj does not do house calls, not for anyone. And he definitely doesn't treat cattle."
"Giorgio was once a renowned physician." Janvier's boots broke through the ice crust over the snow as he came to join her. "He was responsible for a number of significant breakthroughs in his time and remains respected in medical circles. Perhaps because it is only in the past four decades that he has chosen to abandon his vocation for the pursuit of a selfish pleasure that does not care who it hurts."
Catching something unexpected in his tone, she frowned. "He called you mon ami. You were friends?"
"No, but there was a time when that address would've made me proud." Pushing a hand through his hair, he said, "I spent a month in his chateau in the Alps a long time ago. He was having a salon featuring a select number of the world's best minds and I stumbled into it when I was tasked with delivering an important letter." Eyes distant, he shook his head. "For some reason, he invited me to remain, though I was an ignorant courier with barely half a century of vampirism behind him."
"You've always been smart." It was a flame in him, the desire to grasp at life with both hands, absorbing knowledge in a thousand different fragments.
"I am happy to know you think so, cher, for your mind seduced me long ago." The faint hint of a smile lay on his lips, Janvier a man who was never dark for long. "But I was out of my league there, the others around the fire scientists and artists, philosophers and explorers." A sigh, his throat arched as he looked up at a night sky become hazy with clouds. "It could be those great men and women decided they needed an audience. It doesn't matter--I drank in the knowledge they shared as if it were rain and my soul a thirsty plain."
It was an image that tugged at her soul, made her want to lock herself in a room with him for days, weeks, months, just so she could hear of the roads he'd traveled, the places he'd been, the people he'd met. Time was running out from between her clenched fists, and she had so many things she didn't yet know about him.
"Did Giorgio have cattle then?" she asked through the ache of need.
"Yes, and he has always had an eye for nubile beauty, but such is true of many men, mortal or immortal, non?"
Ashwini nodded, thinking of the septuagenarian who lived in her building, his companion a foxy redhead in her thirties.
"But back then," Janvier continued, "Giorgio treated the older of his cattle with love and respect even after their youth faded--during my time in the chateau, I met one who was in her sixth decade. To her, Giorgio was family, and the feeling was reciprocated."
Ashwini couldn't get her head around the idea that the vampire they'd just left had once been such a different man, a sudden fear choking off her breath. "Don't let immortality do that to you," she whispered. "Don't let it steal your soul."
Moss green eyes held her own. "It is, others tell me, far easier to stay human if you split your heart in two and give one part to another to keep."
Give it to me, she wanted to say. I'll protect it with my life . . . and I'll give you my heart in return. Folding her arms against the urge that would ultimately cause him pain so terrible it permanently scarred, she broke the searing intimacy of the eye contact to stare out toward the dazzle of Manhattan. "I guess Arvi might do a favor for a friend. He and Giorgio probably met at a charity gala or some other black-tie affair, became acquainted."
Her brother was at home at such events, the perfect, urbane date. Because though Arvi was a man born to be the head of a family, the mantle sitting on his shoulders as if he'd been made to wear it, he had never married. A decade back, Ashwini had thought that was about to change, but the gifted female surgeon whom she was dead certain Arvi loved passionately had gone on to become another man's bride. Since then, Arvi had played the field. It didn't suit him, but she understood why he did it.
"You've never mentioned your brother before." Janvier stroked strands of her hair between his fingertips.
The tiny
tugs on her scalp reaching deep inside her, Ashwini looked up at a wash of wind to see a squadron of angels passing overhead on a low flight path. They dipped their wings as a unit as they passed, and she knew Janvier had been spotted. He raised his free hand in acknowledgment right as a fresh gust of wind blew his hair back from his face.
That face could never be called beautiful. It had too many rough edges. But sexy? Yes, Janvier was sexy in every way a man could be sexy. The curve of his lips, the dark shadow of scruff on his jaw that said he didn't fuss about being pretty, the glint of sinful knowledge in his eyes, the lazy way he moved, it added up to a package a woman would have to exercise incredible willpower to repudiate.
Ashwini's willpower was at an all-time low.
As if he sensed that, Janvier slid his hand down her back to hook one thumb into her back right pocket. It was pushing at her boundaries and it was what he always did. If he ever stopped flirting with her, a part of her would die. "Do you have to report in to Illium in person?" she asked, ignoring his implied question about her brother, unable to go there, to talk about the agony that both divided and united her and Arvi; she couldn't forget his betrayal, and Arvi couldn't forgive what he saw as hers.
"I can call in the information." Janvier's gaze was acute, but his words easy. "You?"
"I'll do the same."
Separating to opposite ends of the cliff, she rang Sara while he contacted Illium.
Ashwini updated the Guild Director on the details, then said, "My instincts are screaming that the dog is a harbinger of worse to come." The feeling had nothing to do with her more unusual abilities; it was pure hunter instinct. "I'm going to keep an eye on the area, work my contacts to see if I can shake anything loose."
"I'm not putting you on an active hunt for another two weeks at least," Sara replied, "so take the time and keep me in the loop. No heroics." It was a command. "I damn well don't intend to watch the undertakers put another one of my people in the ground."
There had been far too many funerals after the battle that had thundered in the air, on the rooftops, and along the streets of Manhattan. Hunters, vampires, angels . . . the wave of death had been indiscriminate, the grief left in its wake a heavy shadow that colored Sara's order tonight. "Noted," Ashwini said to the other woman before hanging up.