Masters of the Night (6 page)

Her cheeks reddened, and her body tightened. “What—are you doing here?”
she managed, her hand shaking as she fingered a page of the book.

He leaned toward her, and his watery blue gaze swept through her opaque
violet one. “What are you doing with The Breakfast Slayer Club? I left you with
my descendent cousin, with Stephen. I didn’t let you live so you could become a
slayer. I wanted you to—have a real life. Some fun, some adventure.” He paused
and arched an eyebrow slyly, invitingly.
“With me perhaps?”

“I’d rather eat a handful of live wasps!”

He studied her, puzzled. He had expected a measure of aggravation with
him perhaps, but not this, this open animosity. He had saved her life, after
all. “You sound—a little irritated.”

She pursed her lips. “I would kill you right here, right now, if I had the
power!”

Holding his arms out to his sides in a mock gesture of surrender, he
flashed a sly smile. “Ah, but you do.”

Her next words were a bitch-slap. “When I learn to use it, I will.”

The glacial coldness in her tone seared him to the core, an odd pain
reaching into his heart.
An ache that stole his control.
The emotion of feeling hurt, wounded, was new to him.

Or perhaps so old he had forgotten.

At any rate, he quickly pushed it aside. He could deal with human
frailty later. There were more pressing matters at hand. “Why are you with
DuPre
and that scurvy band of stake throwers?’” he
demanded.

“I’m not your minion,” she spat. “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“You clean up nice,” he said, tossing her a brilliant, white smile.
“Spunky, perky, impertinent, and maybe even a little sexy.”

She half-rose from the nook to run, but in a flash, he was putting his
hand of power over her soft, human one. “Don’t, Angie. I’m sorry. Please. Sit
back down. I only came to talk. I’m a vain, arrogant bastard. I know that. I
guess it happened when I was bitten.”

“I think you’ve probably always been one,” she said, but eased back
into her seat.
Slowly.
Watchfully.

Henri could feel the pulse in her wrist racing. She was scared. With no
memory, apparently, that he did what he did to save her.

She does not yet remember she was being beaten to death by her mortal
lover, and bleeding out
, he realized unhappily.

But he knew as her eyes became brackish, that she was sensing acutely
the irrevocable union with him.

He also knew she was acutely aware that experiencing her in return was
pleasuring him all the way to his groin.

“I am a
vampyre
, and you are pleasantly
gorgeous, but I’m not going to hurt you, Angie,” he said softly, his voice
coffee-rich as he stroked the back of her hand lightly with his fingertips.

“Then why are you here?” Angie was barely able to ask, wondering at the
sensation of pleasant warmth his moving fingers caused as they pressed lightly
against her skin.

“You need a guardian, Cinderella. You couldn’t throw a stake and hit
the broad side of a barn.”

“Maybe not today,” she retorted with a Cimmerian tone, closing the book
of poetry and withdrawing her hand before the fire in her brain drew her into
flames of surrender.

“Andre should have left you with Stephen, where you would be safe and
protected by that crazy nun of his.”

“Why do I need protection?”

“Because the world is not heaven.
It is more akin to
hell.”

For a long moment, her violet gaze cut into his.

“You are thinking you should stake me,” he said, as her fingertips
eased to her belt, where a drawstring pouch bulged slightly against her hip.

She curled her hand into her lap. “Eventually, Henri, the Shadows will
come for you. You must know that.”

“But that day is not today, yes,
chéri
?” he
answered, unconcerned, his voice a cool waterfall.

The blouse was dry now.
A pity.
He had wanted
to gaze at the hard little, wet nubs pushing against the rain-kissed blouse.

Ah, well.

Emitting a semblance of a sigh, Henri admitted to himself he was
obsessed with this beautiful mystic he had salvaged from death.
Possessed by her.
The myth of insanity was true. But it was
not the insanity of a lost mind. It was the insanity of a mind lost.
Lost to desire.
A fire burned at his very core, a violet
fire striking him every time he envisioned her eyes.

And to make matters worse, his one moment of human weakness had cost
him. His heart had throbbed with a great burst when he saved her, an explosion
of life, hurling him into a remembrance of being human.

And into atonement.

He had not been able to drink from even a useless drunk since.

Mystics.
He should have
known to leave well enough alone.

“Hate me if you must, Angie,” he said, “But I feel—responsible for
you.” He paused, and grinned.
“Since you seem to be carrying
a bit of a
vampyre
in you,
chéri
.”

“Damn you!”

For want of anything else to do with her hands, she clutched the little
book, so tightly her knuckles turned almost white.

His eyes moved to the little volume of poetry.

“I have somewhat of an affinity with poetry myself,” he said,
comfortably leaning back and clasping his hands behind his neck.

Henri kept his indulgence in human poetry secret from the Realm, away
from their glowing, prying eyes. The powerful, perfect, faster than a speeding
bullet able to leap tall buildings and able-to-kill-with-a-single-prick Royal
was expected to move through the night with his soul masked.

Weaknesses, especially those associated with humans, could earn you a
night, or a century, in chains.

“We are as clouds, traveling ‘crossed a wanderer’s midnight moon,” Henri
murmured, creating poetry, as he had centuries ago.

Radiant, we slide and glide, and ride the moonlight!

To pale the very stars we seek,

As moonbeams through our ebon profiles streak

Then the day, and we were but darkness laced in night

Sleep poisons the dreams we would keep …

A
vampyre’s
poem.
But it was all he
had. A violinist who could no longer play the haunting melody, only haunt the
melody.

“What do you know of your past, Angie?” he asked, leaning forward to
place his chin on his hand and study her.

“My mother died when I was very young. What is that to you?” she
answered warily.

“Is that all you know?”

“My grandmother didn’t tell me much about her. And I don’t know who my
father was. My grandmother is in a home. She has dementia or something. All I
have of my childhood with my mother are some little books of poems, a few legal
documents, some other books and I had a cross—”
A sadness
paled the violet in her eyes. “I guess I lost it.”

“The cross.
Was it from—your
mother?” he asked carefully, keeping his voice gentle. She was tossing him a
few crumbs of trust, and he did not want to lose them.

“I think so.” She shrugged. “My grandmother gave it to me for my
twelfth birthday.”

“What is your grandmother’s name?” he ventured.

“Jennie Mae
Wessin
.”

Wessin
.

So.
Mae Weston had
changed her last name.

Mae Weston.
The daughter of an English duke whose
legacy traced directly back to a royal court.
The duke was murdered the
day Mae’s daughter, Allison, gave birth—to a girl.

The last Henri had heard in the
vampyre
courts, Mae had fled with her daughter and granddaughter to America to save
them from the family horror, a violet-eyed
vampyre
named Jane who had made a secret pact with the Realm to deliver up the royal
babe for a purpose that had made even Henri shiver.

“And your mother’s name?” Henri probed carefully.

“Allison.”

Ah,
Liora
Anjanette
,
Henri thought, sighing inwardly.
Your
little
keepsake
necklace has marked you, revealed you.

And Jane is roaming the earth.

7.

Angie’s eyes
rested, but not demurely, on the library ceiling beam. The violet gaze burned
into the wood.

“When I saw that mouse—with odd little eyes, unusually
bright.”
Her gaze whipped to Henri’s. “You’re a shape-shifter!
Andre told me only the most powerful …”

“Andre’s a fool.”

He crammed his hand deep into his trench coat pocket.
To keep from making a fist and breaking the table.

The velvet pouch met his fingertips, and a bit of burnished gold. He
pulled the oval locket from his pocket.

A tiny painted portrait had once occupied one half of the inside. The
Lady Jane Weston had been twenty-six, so to speak. Was still twenty-six, so to
speak.

He was thirty-two.
So to speak.

He pressed the locket’s tiny latch with his thumb.

As the locket popped open, Angie glanced at it in surprise. “It’s
empty.”

“I, umm, tore the lady’s picture out.”

“Pissed you off, did
she?”
she
smirked.

But the snow in her eyes was melting.

“No. She was—a little
pissy
to begin with.”

She was beautiful, Angie’s ancestral aunt, the
vampira
who had taken him from the mortal world and become the owner of his soul.
Provocative, twilight violet eyes, skin as smooth as tea with cream, though
cool, and raven-black hair that could dew into a mass of unruly, little-girl
curls.

Like Angie’s blond ones.

Perhaps the resemblance had unconsciously struck him, been the reason
he had been drawn to the mystic.

Adding to nature’s gift of sweet deception, Jane had appeared fragile.
But unbeknownst to him, unholy strength had laced every sinew in her body when
she walked the earth at dusk, and walked with the mortal who lived in the royal
courts, distant cousin to the queen.

He had walked willingly with her in the royal gardens with little fear
of her winsome smiles.

To his demise.

Henri rose from the desk and flashed away to run from the mystic, run
from the fear he might hurt her, run from the disappointment of never being
human.

He glanced back only once.

Angie was staring, perplexed and bewildered, into the empty space where
he had been only seconds before, and at the locket left open on the pages of
the book.

The golden token of his destruction.
He smacked the
library doors open and stomped outside. He had kept it.
All
those years.
Why?

Beads of rain were forming on the library’s ribbed support columns, and
puddles were beginning to dot the stone steps.

Umbrellas began to bob.

Henri pulled his trench coat collar up around his neck to ward off the
rain, and brushed the water from his eyelashes. He didn’t like the rain so much
anymore today.

Henri walked two blocks, then the hellish sting of atonement ripped at
him. The mystic was unskilled, alone and vulnerable, with no one to protect her
if she went dragon slaying with Andre’s wild bunch.
Or to
protect her from the dragon lady, Jane Weston.

He whipped into a shop and bought Angie a cape-style, hooded raincoat,
then hurried back to the library. He would give her the
cross,
help her remember what had happened in the park.

The study nook was empty.

Duty to
DuPre
had called.

The little book of poetry was still on the desk.
And
the locket.
Henri left the golden oval where it lay. It was time to move
on.

His eyes traveled to the basement steps. Being entombed in a windowless
cellar with a bunch of dusty, faded newspapers did not appeal to his sense of
adventure or spirit any more than it had Angie’s, any more than shape-shifting
into vermin—he was French, after all—but he wanted to know what Angie would
find.

A thin, little elderly woman in a gray skirt and prim white blouse was
manning the information booth and looked up pleasantly over the rims of her
reading glasses as Henri approached her and asked for access to the historical
reference section.

Smoothing back her salt and pepper hair, she inquired conversationally,
“Are you all right, sir? You look a little pale.”

“I’m fine,” Henri said. I’ve been pale for a few hundred years.

“Are you of local ancestry?” the woman smiled amiably.

No. I am French. And I am the ancestry.

“Most visitors who want to take a peek into the history of the city are
usually tracing their family tree. If that’s the case, the church might also
have birth records you’d be interested in,” she said invitingly. “And then of
course, there is the churchyard—if you want to search through the headstones.”

Not likely.

“I’m a genealogist, a historian of sorts” he said, mimicking Andre’s
misnomer for his slayers as they tramped across the graveyards of the world.

Henri was amused at the woman’s instant interest as she breathed in
admiration, “How fascinating!”

“I’m actually trying to trace the existence of an ancestor for a
client,” he continued.

“You are the second person today!” the librarian exclaimed brightly,
directing Henri toward the basement. “Just ask if you can’t find what you’re
looking for.
And good hunting,
dearie
.
You know, we may not be among the most well known cities of the world, but we
do have a few intriguing skeletons of our own.
The House of a
Hundred Rooms, for instance—if you’re interested.
It’s said a
vampyre
once owned the place!”

She still does.

“When you’re finished, you might want to end the day in the lovely
little French restaurant just past the bridge at Ridgeway Turn,” the librarian
offered,
her dentures in a full smile now.

Henri assumed she had made the suggestion because he was French. He
thanked her and descended into the unappealing basement disheveled with old
magazines, newspapers and periodicals—and air layered with dust.

The room was permeated with dust, and the smell of musty shelves and
old paper—and Angie’s perfume.

Taking a deep, delicious whiff of the lingering fragrance, a scent of
forest
florals
, that, magnified by his heightened
sense of smell, pleasured him to distraction, Henri followed the
florals
and found her secluded between two back shelves at
a table strewn with stray newspapers.

He glanced over her shoulder at the newspaper she was intensely
reading, enjoying her scent. Another paper lay to the side.

She lifted her eyes under their beautiful veils of lashes to his. “Why
did you come back?”

“Would you rather I left?”

“Whatever.” She shrugged unconcernedly and returned to the paper.

“I brought you a raincoat,” he tempted, sitting down beside her. “You
should not be running around in a downpour in summer clothes. You could catch a
cold.”

She looked up at him in surprise. “You bought me a coat?”

“Do you not need one?
DuPre
should not have
brought you halfway around the world without a proper trousseau,
Anjanette
.”

“I …” Words failed her.

“You’re welcome,” he said, draping it around her shoulders.

Sunday edition, June 12, 1850, Henri thought with distress as he
glanced at the date on the paper. He swallowed hard, forced himself to seem
only semi-interested. “Is there a
Wessin
?”

“Andre has me looking for anyone and everyone named Weston. He talked
to my crazy grandmother, and she not only said she changed our names to
Wessin
, but that she once lived in England, had relatives
in the Gold Rush, and so on and so on. I couldn’t believe he even listened. But
I did find a couple of references to Weston in the archives here.”

“So
DuPre
has you looking
for your past in old newspapers.
Why? What
difference does it make now?” He stifled an impulse to yank her forcibly from
the table and run with her, hide her.

“Andre said he would explain more
later
, but
he thinks I may be descended from royalty or something,” Angie said.

Or something,
Henri thought.

Apparently, Andre had chosen not to tell her yet the significance of
her necklace.

“He said he needs to verify that I’m really Allison’s kid,” Angie
continued, “since my grandmother said my parents died in a car collision,
then
switched gears, to ‘Allison died in a train wreck.’”
She paused and became thoughtful. “Maybe I was adopted.”

Not with those eyes.

Henri watched Angie’s soft hand tremble slightly as she turned the
pages that sensationalized an exciting era in the history of a young America,
and he wanted to touch the satiny hand again, stroke her arms, became
sensationalized himself, and take away her uncertainties, take her to bed …

Or brush the clutter from this tabletop and coax her soft thighs to his
right here, right now.

But her mother may have been murdered and now was not the time. He
forced his attention to return reluctantly to the excerpts from the past she
was buried in.
Intriguing ads boldly soliciting adventurer
and settler alike to America.

She continued reading, but he found his eyes drifting to the fly on her
jeans.
So much easier in days of old to have a woman.
Just lift a skirt, drop a petticoat or two, or fourteen and “Voila!” Petticoats
and pantaloons dropped so easily. Jeans were problematic.
Especially
if they were tight.

Angie’s were tight, hugging her thighs like a second skin.

“As long as you’re here, I may as well show you this,” Angie said,
pointing with a reference card at a photograph taken in late evening, under a
caption proclaiming a man could become rich in day.

Three prospectors in scruffy pants and boots were leaning happily on
their picks and shovels and showing off a six pound nugget of gleaming gold,
two Americans, and one supposed Englishman.

A woman wearing a richly adorned riding dress was standing near them,
partially concealed in the shadows of a shed, her features unclear.

“The paper says the woman was the financial backing for the venture,”
Angie said. “Jane Weston, the Lady Jane Weston.”

Henri’s eyes darkened.

“But that’s not the eye-catcher. A hot California sun should have
weathered and prematurely aged the youngest gold seeker in spite of his youth,”
Angie continued, becoming exhilarated. “He should be sun-wrinkled and heat
shriveled, but he’s clean-shaven, and his short, sandy colored curls are
freshly washed while the other two look like the Sasquatch brothers.”

“He does seem none the less for wear,” Henri added, trying to keep his
voice even.

Angie drew in a long breath. “The grueling work of digging out a square
of dirt next to hundreds of squares of dirt being shoveled out by sweaty
adventurers could tire a man quickly, draining his vitality and youth before he
ever found a single golden flake. But this man does not seem fazed at all by
the hard work.”

The sandy-haired prospector was holding a bowler hat against his
midriff and maintaining a gentleman’s stance in spite of a wild and woolly
culture where men sported such nicknames as Snake-Eye, and towns bore names
like
Hangtown
.

A short article gave the names of the two Americans, and the local
Englishman, who had struck it rich in Sacramento, California.

“The young one with the bowler hat must be the Englishman, Nicholas
Browning,” Angie said.

He was proudly holding the reins of a white horse.