Masters of the Night (5 page)

“You know him?” she cried in surprise. “You know him?”

“Oh, yes, we know him,” the priest said.

“Maybe he was—afraid—to let me die,” she answered hesitantly. “I—can’t
remember—”

The Frenchman’s eyes narrowed. “There is little that would cause a
vampyre
fear.” He appraised her slight frame. “And I don’t
think it’s your size.”

“I’m a mystic,” she finally admitted.

“That would not deter Henri De
LaCroix
.”

“Then I don’t know,” she said, her shoulders slumping unhappily.

The Frenchman’s eyes studied her intently. “At any rate, you can’t go
home.”

He sat on the bed and began to question her, about her life, her
childhood, the crazy grandmother she inadvertently mentioned, and her “gift.”

“Do you know what you have been given?” the priest asked her.

“A curse.
Apparently, it
almost cost me my life.” She touched the side of her neck where the
vampyre
had struck, then gazed at the small bottle of holy
water and a tiny branding iron in the form of a cross on the night stand. There
was no longer any visible evidence she had been bitten, but the knowledge was
there as deep and raw as any wound that would not heal.

The priest approached the side of the bed. “Perhaps it’s time for
introductions,” he said. “This dire little Frenchman is known as Andre
DuPre
, a master slayer. And I am Father Stephen—De
LaCroix
.”

6.

A fireball of fury
rose up in Henri, white-hot. He had not given Stephen the mystic so that horse
butt, Andre
DuPre
, could proselytize her!

Angry and disappointed in his cousin, Henri stomped through the rain
and mud and churchyard gravestones to the rectory. Sequestered by a crepe
myrtle, he peered in past the front window drapes.

Irons of fire erupted in his eyes behind the veils of rain beading from
his thick, black eyelashes. Sitting around in the parlor light, congenially
drinking brandy and beer, and laughing, and getting to know the mystic, were
DuPre’s
slayers, his “Shadows” as he called them.

Oldest of the troupe at twenty-six, James Lauren sat across from her in
a thumb back chair. His crossbow rested beside him, and his lanky legs
stretched out comfortably in front of him. He swilled a brandy and took off
every stitch of her navy leggings and beige satin tunic with long, easy glances
from his beer-bottle-brown eyes.

Henri felt his blood burn.

A
vampira
in alliance with
DuPre
stood behind the crossbow slayer, her hand relaxed on
his shoulder.

Her azure eyes moved to the window. The
Vampyre
of Light had sensed the Royal’s presence.

Not that Henri cared. He knew Kathryn
Beucherie
would not betray his presence unless he posed an open threat.

A skinny little Nebraskan with a pouch full of stakes strapped to her
waist leaned against Stephen’s credenza and sipped a sweet, white wine. She was
a black belt; she could leap high and come down tight. Beside her,
DuPre’s
stocky, cocky, street-wise nephew from Northern
Ireland cleaned his nails with a stake point.

Brandi Davidson and Mack
MacKenzie
.

Henri curled his tongue across his lips. If he had not been in
atonement, he would have liked to have made the little Midwestern wine-sipper
his minion.
Then had a taste of Northern Ireland.

The crossbow slayer, he would simply have killed.

An Ethiopian, beautiful with skin like smooth caramel, entered the room
from a side door, and Henri instinctively backed away, deeper into the shadows.

Taniesha
Telahun
was an African night fighter.

Deadly.

And she normally did not travel with the Shadows.

There had to be more to this parlor party than met the eye…

Andre
DuPre
pulled a hardwood dining chair
close to Angie, and began explaining they were going to do a genealogy search
on her.

Something to do with a cross her grandmother had given her.

What is that damned
DuPre
up to with her?
Henri thought
hotly, his fangs dropping as his emotions roiled and instincts ruled.

Fear and hatred for slayers flared from his lips in a heavy hiss.

Angie was sipping a nice Merlot. Henri smiled, the fangs receded. She
was enjoyably experiencing the taste of life he had given her.

He let his eyes travel along the leggings, desiring a thrilling moment
or two with her himself.

A fang-laden frown erupted again.
DuPre
was
discussing taking her away.
Tonight.

To England.

Why?

The master slayer informed the group they would be traveling by train
from London, their destination a small village to the north.

A small village to the north …

A cross her grandmother had given her …

Henri flashed away from the window, a silhouette parting the beads of
rain as he raced to the park where Angie had been attacked.

Stripping a slender, short branch from a sycamore sapling, he entered
the mausoleum.

The body of Angie’s assailant was still on the floor. No one had
discovered it yet.

They might never discover it.

Stepping over the bloating corpse, Henri began poking around in the
dust and debris.

A bit of sheen in the dirt next to a wall.
He scooped the
chain and
cross
from its tiny grave on to the stick
and held it up to a moonbeam streaming in through the window.

If it was possible for a
vampyre
to be
shocked, Henri was.

Well, this is definitely an OMG
, he thought.

He gazed, immobile, for several moments, at the gold sunburst soldered
to two, tiny, intersecting silver beams centered with four baguette diamonds.

There was only one cross like this in the world.

Careful not to touch it, he slid the bit of jewelry into his trench
coat pocket.
And grabbed the red eye to England.

Liora
Anjanette
Carter was quite possibly far more than just your
everyday, radial-reading mystic.
A lot more.

•

As soon as he reached the English burrow,
DuPre
had targeted to hunt down Angie’s ancestors, Henri took the cross to a jewelry
store to have it repaired and cleaned for her—while he planned a way to get her
the hell out of England and away from a past, that if proven to be hers, could
shellshock her.

“You have perhaps seen a short Frenchman roaming the streets,
Monsieur?” he asked the jeweler casually as he held out the cross, dangling
from its stick.

“Ah, the historian,” the man returned, as he tossed a questioning
glance at the sycamore branch, then at Henri.

“Silver causes an allergic reaction,” Henri said in response to his
look.

“Unusual piece,” the jeweler commented as he fixed the clasp. He shined
the sunburst,
then
dropped the jewelry into a velvet
pouch. “No charge for the bag. Oh, and your Frenchman has leased a Tudor home
in the country.”

Henri took up residence in the barn.

Pacing the hay-strewn floor restlessly, he waited until the rain-rich,
low-hanging clouds darkened an oncoming dusk to semi-night, then glided as a
raven through the faux darkness to follow Angie as she left the house. Andre
was sending her to the town library.

A brief stop at a small dress shop, then happily on to
the library rising into the cistern skies of an English evening—totally
oblivious to the horror about to rise on her horizon like a bad sun.

Henri lighted on the tiled roof. The library was impressive for a small
township. Stately pines flanked either side of the stone
steps,
ribbed pillars supported an arched portico.

Inside—the wonderful smell of cedar and books. Books crawled up the
walls everywhere. Shape-shifting into the tiniest of mice, he scurried through
the door and across the library floor.

Angie stood in jeans and cap-sleeved blouse, gazing upward in awe at
the wealth of thought rising around her. And Henri gazed upward in awe at her.
Her golden hair curled from the moist English air, her blouse was dew-damped
around her breasts. Henri could not take his eyes from her.

She pulled a note from her shoulder bag, briefly studied it, then,
wadding it into a ball, tossed it toward a nearby trash can, unaware as she
turned away that the crumpled note had hit the can rim and popped to the floor.

Henri padded swiftly across the waxed, hardwood floor, grabbed the wad
in his teeth, and whipped behind a book case. Smoothing back the edges with his
claws, he studied Andre’s scrawls. The prince of penmanship Andre was not.
Meticulousness was not one of his most notable attributes.
Except
when he was cooking.
He was a chef to rival the best, Henri had heard.

The note was listing editions of several old newspapers in the
library’s basement archives.

DuPre
was hot on the
trail of the bloodline best left in the grave.

Henri hurried out from behind the case to find Angie.

She was standing at the top step of a dimly lit basement stairwell.
Wistfully, she glanced behind her at the staircase that spiraled upward into
the poets’ brightly lit realm.

She turned around, walked to the center of the library, placed her palm
over the baluster finial knob, and ascended the spiral staircase.

Apparently,
DuPre
and her family tree could
wait.

Scampering up mahogany stairs so highly polished he would have been
able to see his reflection, if he had a reflection, Henri followed the mystic.

Chaucer and
The
Canterbury Tales
moved past them on
the right. Homer’s
Iliad
, Greek mythology,
and Europe’s art arced around the lustrous wood balustrade to the left. The
history of kings shone out from a shelf of their own at the landing, the dark
brooding romances of the English moors lay hidden further back.

A column of art and music, then, the poets.
Angie’s gold locks
fell away from her face revealing an open fascination with the magnanimity of
it all.

Taking a small, blue, hardbound from a crowded shelf, she let her shop
purchases slide from her arms, and scooted into a secluded study nook.

The window gave her an intriguing view through rain buttons of the dark
blue clouds and the park below.

Henri shimmied along a ceiling beam to where he also had an intriguing
view—down into the book—and down into the front of her blouse.

The philosophy of the poet masters the mystic liked best, it seemed,
struck a common chord with her own. They believed that inherent human goodness
will, sooner or later, eliminate evil from the world and usher in an eternal
reign of transcendent love.
Ethereal idealism.

Why did she cling so veraciously to such an ideal when her own life had
been one of flat tires and futility? Henri wondered, intensely curious as he
leaned his chin on his paw and drank in the cleavage of the human mystic he was
beginning to desire beyond reason.

A gnarled and weathered branch from an ancient tree rubbed against the
window, its leafy fans smearing the pane with wet. Henri blinked toward the
mist spattered glass and down to the park.

Everywhere the world was a canvas of watery green—green grass deepened
to dewy splendor, and lush, leafy satiated trees.

Il
commence à
pleuvoir
! I love the rain!
Henri thought.
I love to walk
in it, talk in it, and I want to kiss Angie in the dark in it. Kiss her in
doorways drenched in watery curtains, behind rainy veils under
porchway
eaves,
kiss her into
beads of pleasure that will melt her will into my own until she is one with me.

I’m such a fool
, he thought suddenly.
Here I sit in
vermin’s clothes, stinking, carrying God only knows what filth on my claws, and
for what? Just to glimpse her.

Angie’s violet gaze suddenly left the book and
centered on the beam, or more specifically, the mouse.
“Enjoying the
view?”

She had sensed his presence, who knew for how long?

He scurried across the beam, dropped to the floor, became himself, and
was sitting across from her at her little reading table before she could
exhale.

A universe of emotions passed through her eyes. None of them the
desirous
stars he had hoped for. She stared at him as though
a nightmare had just materialized before her, a horror of discovery. The
vampyre
who shared her being was indeed real and right in
front of her.

“Slaying for
DuPre
must pay well,” Henri said
sardonically, eyeing the lavishly wrapped parcels. Then he kicked himself in
the butt mentally. That was not what he wanted to say. He had wanted to
say—hell, he didn’t know what he wanted to say.
But not that.