Masters of the Night (10 page)

“Look, I think the ghost is probably harmless,” James said, then added
with a small laugh, “I mean, he wasn’t throwing plates and crockery around like
Mack is right now, right?”

Angie spent the rest of the day in her room reading up on
vampyre
atonement on her laptop until she heard the front
door open and close. Andre was back.

It was early night.

“I’ve made arrangements for the train ride back to London and airfare
home,” he informed them.

Which, translated, meant, “Everybody pack up, grab a nap, and be ready
to rise and shine at midnight. We’re going to Sacramento.”

The group became a whirlwind of wiping, swiping and cleaning the house,
Lysoling
away any traces of their existence.

Angie felt a slow panic unfurling within her.

She had to let Henri know they were leaving. He had said the two of
them were in danger. What had he meant? She took a stray glass to the kitchen
sink, and the voices bubbling behind her fell away as she gazed out the window
past a small meadow to the graying, weathered barn with crumbling doors and
rusty hinges—

While the troupe finished cleaning, Angie eased away. Hurrying to her
room, she pulled the traveling cloak from the closet. She had purchased the
velvet coat on a whim, but now found it had a purpose. Throwing it around her
shoulders, she tied the satin laces of the hood under her chin and slipped down
the back stairs. The dark cloak concealed her, wrapping her into the night as
she ran with determination through the rainy trees and across the small meadow
to the barn. Shoving the weather-warped doors open, she called into the dim
interior fragrant with hay and cured wood. “Henri?”

He was beside her before she could call his name a second time.

His blue eyes flashed fire from deep within, a quick
pentip
of light normal humans would have thought was just a
sunray hitting the pupil. But Angie knew the hot light rose from the abyss
within, not from the world without.

Ropes of desire unmercifully coiled around her
heart,
desire to have Henri’s body of lightning moving against hers.

“Why did you come through the meadow alone?” he admonished her, taking
her by the shoulders, his voice anguished. “I told you not to go anywhere
alone.”

She pushed the hood of the cloak away from her face and let her eyes
fall into his blue depths. “I—wanted to see you.”

He could acutely hear her breathing, a little fast. “Why did you want
to see me,
Liora
Anjanette
?”
he asked, an eyebrow arched knowingly.

She answered his question by standing on her tiptoes and placing her
soft lips against his.

Angie … Do you know what you do to me?
The barn was quiet,
with only the beading of the rain on the roof planks disturbing the silence as
Henri took Angie’s waist in his hands and caressed her mouth with his,
returning the kiss he had been wanting since—

Since forever.

“Welcome to the comforts of my home,” he said, his voice husky as he
drew away.
“Hay dust, wood rot, a leaky roof.
Just your usual, conveniently priced rundown barn.”

“Warm, sweet hay and you,” she smiled.

Her words startled his heart, aroused him to a fever pitch.

He wanted to love her …

But if he became lost in her, immersed in physical union, he knew the
Lammergeier
could descend and take him easily.

And thoughts of the horrors that might befall her if he died and the
Realm found out who she was ate away at him like crows’ beaks.

Angie was a Black Rose, the last female in a royal mortal bloodline.

Black Roses were highly prized, to be impregnated by human male
descendents of
vampyres
of royal birth, to ensure the
continuance of the
vampyre
royal lineage, a lineage
of power. After mating, the males subjected themselves to the Realm to become
vampyres
, and the babes were inducted into the Realm when
they turned eighteen.

Angie carried an English crest in her past. And she was a mystic, the
missing mystic that had been chosen to begin a lineage reign of royal,
powerful, mystical
vampyres
—who could rule the world.

The Count had two living descendents. Both males …

“Angie, where is your amulet?” Henri asked urgently.

“You mean my cross?
In my pocket.”

He tore a small piece of wood plank from a stall wall. “Let me have
it.”

“I don’t understand …”

“I’ll explain later. Right now we need to hide it. You must trust me.”

She reached into her cloak and pulled out her grandmother’s gift to
her. Then, reluctantly, she hung it from the end of the piece of wood.

He stuffed it down the throat of a rabbit he had killed earlier when he
was out scrounging for food in the woods,
then
he
pulled up a floor plank, hid the rabbit in the cavity and replaced the board.

“I’m going to take you back to the house,” he said, taking her almost
roughly by the arm to usher her to the barn door.

“When will I see you again?” she said, bewildered and confused by the
unexplained change in him.

He loosened his grip quickly and smiled to reassure her.
“Tomorrow if it’s cloudy with a chance of rain.”

“I won’t be here,” she said sadly, her shoulders slumping. “I also came
to tell you we’re leaving.
At midnight.”

“Leaving?
To where?”
He stopped abruptly, his
eyes becoming dark sapphires.

“Sacramento. To look for passenger accounts of the train wreck—or
details from the atoning
vampyre
from Nicholas if we
can find him.”

“Atoning?” The darkening in Henri’s eyes deepened. How could he tell
her that finding Nicholas might lead to Jane discovering her? Nicholas was Jane
Weston’s paramour.

“Do you know where he is, Henri?” she asked innocently.

“No. But perhaps I can find out.” He took her arm again. “Right now,
you need to get back to the house before you’re missed.”

He ushered her quickly out of the barn and through the rain splashed
meadow.

But through the night’s rain, Angie could sense something, or someone,
keeping pace with them in the trees lining the fenced meadow.

Henri’s eyes joined hers in searching the span of woods and he hurried
her faster and faster until she was breathless by the time they reached the
house.

“What’s out there?” she whispered in terror, trying to catch her breath
as she shook with fear, her eyes wide and terrified for him. He still had to go
back to the barn.

“Don’t invite anything in, and stay close to
DuPre
and that jackass slayer who sleeps with his crossbow instead of a woman,” Henri
insisted firmly as he sent her up the back porch steps.

“But where will you be safe?” she cried, turning, her heart hurting for
him.

“In my hovel, the barn,” he laughed.
“After I search
the woods for misfits.
This bit of countryside is a known vamp hang.
I’ll let them know what will happen if they come knocking at your window
tonight.”

She sensed he wasn’t quite telling her the whole truth, but as she
opened her mouth to speak, he slipped in his tongue and pleasure warmed through
her like hot spice.

When he drew away, she swayed, still lost in him, her eyes still
closed.

They were sharing essences in a union that suspended them between space
and time, streams flowing across a universe of light and night.

“Angie,” he said hoarsely, releasing her from his mental and physical
grasp only with difficulty. “I will see you in America.”

Pulling the cloak close, she swept up the back stairs, still bathed in
his spell, still spicy hot. His fiery blue eyes filled her dreams as she slept,
and not until close to midnight did she sleep deeply. She did not awaken, in
fact, until an incessant, loud knocking on her bedroom door told her she had overslept.

And she hadn’t packed.

She slammed her sweaters, jeans, lingerie and the cloak into her
suitcase, rolling the luggage out into the hallway by the handle just as James
alerted the house they were ready to roll.

•

Soaring from bedroom window to window with long, boned, featherless
wings, giving it the appearance of a pterodactyl, the
Lammergeier
peered into the rooms of the Tudor house. All of them were as empty as a robbed
grave, all stone-cold silent. Not even a footstep in the hallway.

At the back porch door, he sniffed the air. The Royal had been here.

If the slayers had taken off with him, were hiding him, they would die
one by one, and not gently.

The door was locked. Curling his gray-blue fingers into a fist, he
smacked the middle of the door—it broke from the hinges and crashed to the
floor of the mudroom.

Leaping into the middle of the fallen door with raptor quickness, the
assassin crouched and his eye slits widened. Red points of pupils darted from
wall to wall in the emptiness of a house suddenly hushed.

The house was as quiet as the hour before a storm.

The only evidence any humans had even been in the house were two
newspapers
laying
open end to end on a long pine
dining table.

His eyes plunged to the photos, and his thin blue lips drew into a
tight line. The Russian
vampyre
in that photo was
well-known, a
vampyre
trickster.

A chill traveled through his long, hairless arm as he touched the
paper, a chill that was not from the dampness in the air or England’s rainy
coolness but from connecting with something beyond the portals of the present.

The core of constricting cold enveloped his consciousness, pulling him
into another place, another time.
A time when the Realm had
found the power shared by the Lady Jane Weston and Henri De
LaCroix
disturbing.

The Tudor kitchen blurred.

A woman’s hand filled his vision, dipping a quill in ink.

“Tonight, Henri.
In the arbor of roses.
Bring
only your love. And I will wear only my love.”

His senses returned to the present. He drew his finger along the newspapers
and the essence of another hand, younger with a feather of perfume, filled his
nostrils.
The woman from the woods.
The reason Henri
De
LaCroix
was to be killed.

Slashing the photos with his long fingernails to make them
unrecognizable to human eyes, the lamb hawk sniffed the air again and glided
toward the barn.

Throwing open the door, he slashed at the hay, scattering the stalks,
looking for evidence of where Henri might have gone if he did not leave with
the slayers—or where he might be hiding or in
daysleep
.

Uncovering a dead rabbit, he slung it to the side, looked further
through the hay, anywhere the
vampyre’s
essence still
lingered. He sniffed again. The Royal’s essence went deeper than the
smatterings of hay. Was he under the flooring? Droplets of rabbit blood
spattered the hay and a board in the flooring. He pushed the hay aside, and
began ripping up planks. Reaching in under the boards, he did not find the
vampyre
. He found another rabbit. For several moments, he
stared at it, cocking his head from one side to the other as he studied it,
then he threw it behind him, against a pitchfork.

The sound when it landed against the prongs was not a simple thud.

To his keen sense of hearing, something had chinked.
Inside
the rabbit.

Striding with long thin legs that carried him more like a raptor than
bird or man, he crossed to the rabbit, picked it up, shredded it open and
reached inside.

The scream that pulsed past his sharp teeth pierced the sunless day and
shattered the meadow, scattering the birds from the trees.