Masters of the Night (7 page)

Angie’s eyes became intense. “He’s wearing a ring, but I can’t tell if
it’s a wedding band. It seems a little too thick. Anyway, look at this—”

Angie opened the second newspaper, dated 1988. Smoothing the paper, she
placed a second page with a photo, side by side with the 1850 photo of the
striking young man showing off his gold, the handsome young man who had washed
his hair for the picture.

“One is a prospector in the 1800s, the other a passenger from a
derailed train—in 1988.” She paused. “Both photographs of this man were taken
at
night,
and over a century apart.” She looked up at
Henri. “He hasn’t aged a day.”

“Well, maybe a day,” Henri said weakly.

A knot formed in Angie’s throat, and she became silent. She could feel
the Bowler hat within Henri’s transfused essence. Henri had known him.

She swallowed the knot and pressed her fingertip to the article below
the 1988 photo headlined,
One Found Dead On Train.

“Apparently, he’s a hero. He was credited with helping the passengers
after the derailment. The obit Andre had me looking for, Allison Weston, my
mother apparent, died during this train wreck. She was killed when an ensuing
explosion threw a railroad tie spike, right through her heart. She was in a
rear coach car, but the blast sent it all the way past the engine where it
happened?” She paused, and looking up, cut her eyes sharply to Henri’s. And the
violet depths welled with tears. “Is that how it happened, Henri?”

“I do not
know,
chéri
.
I did not know your mother.” That, at least, was the truth.

“And the
vampyre
?”

“We were associated for a time. But it was long ago. I have not seen
him in several decades.”

Decades.
Acutely, Angie was
reminded that the being sitting next to her, exotic, exciting, and an Excalibur
of strength, was not human.

She folded the newspapers, stuffed them under the raincoat he had given
her and buttoned it up.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to take—” Henri began.

Vampyres
.
Okay to suck
you dry, but stealing newspapers from a library apparently is ardently frowned
on.

“Andre needs to see these,” she said. “I’ll bring them back.”

Sneaking the papers past the librarian was a piece of cake. First, the
old lady was sorting through bunches of returned books, then she was looking
for her glasses,
then
she was looking for her date
stamp. She was absent-minded, and seemed more concerned with her tea and
chocolates than the two visitors leaving the library with an obvious weight
gain.

“Well, I’d invite you home for coffee,” Henri said as he opened Angie’s
car door for her and smiled, “but I live in a barn.”

“I know,” she said, with a half-smile.

He drew his hand down the sleeve of her raincoat. She tensed, her trust
fragile, and Henri knew if he took her away by force, even though it was to
protect her, she would hate him. The act would override the reason, no matter
how he tried to explain it.

He kept his eyes cool, and let her go. But compelled to safeguard her,
he trailed her.

Vapors of her fragrance on the rainy breeze followed a road out of town
and into the woods.

The rain diminished to a misty fog, draping him as he shape-shifted
into a wolf and ran into the trees.

He tracked her rented mini to a wooded area wonderfully messy with wild
flowers—pink dog roses, tubular foxglove in pink purple, patches of wood
anemone and yellow
Tormentil
.

As she parked and walked through the flowers along a small foot path,
the mystic’s flaxen hair became as beautifully misted as the wild garden around
her. Her fair skin glistened, and she appeared as exquisitely fragile as a
serene, gliding forest spirit.

But Henri knew Angie Carter was on her way to becoming lethal.
Underneath that deceiving, delicate demeanor, she was carrying a brimming ladle
of his power. Laced with the undiscovered country of
her own
mysticism.

Was she also on her way to becoming a mystic slayer?

Absorbed in the kaleidoscope of color and fragrance around her, she did
not see the wolf who watched her through nebulous whiffs of fog. She turned and
gazed at him in fascination as he eased out from between the trees and padded
toward her. Bending down, she stroked the silver and cream fur in curiosity.
“Well damn, don’t I feel like
LadyHawke
.
”

He took up stride beside her.

“
Tormentil
.
Such a strange
name,” she murmured to herself as she paused and plucked a few of the yellow
flowers growing on long, shiny, green stalks. “But they are rather pretty,
don’t you think, Henri?”

She touched the petals. Her jewel-colored eyes moved from the flowers
to the path.

A little pile of leaves that had been lying undisturbed swirled upward
as though tussled by a breeze, then settled back down again.
Then
another and another.

Her gaze followed the flurries of leaves. It was as though a tiny whirlwind
was traveling along the path.

Or invisible footfalls.

Henri felt an importune shiver, frosty with a sense of familiarity, and
he knew—

A ghost disturbed those leaves.

“What do you want?” Angie called out, trembling as the portentous
figure became visible.

Slender, in a tailored gray suit and top hat, he acknowledged her by
touching the brim of his hat with the head of a silver-tipped cane.

His hair, dark, carried a skein of gray at the temples, and his
thirty-something face was not extraordinary. Until one looked in his eyes.

They were a dead gray.

“Go away. Or I’ll have you exorcised!” Angie warned shakily. “I know a
priest, y’ know!”

He popped open an umbrella as if to protect his expensive gray suit
from the mist floating through him, twirled his cane, and ambled away into the
fog, whistling.

“I’ve stepped off the edge of the
friggin
’
universe,” Angie groaned, and she raced to the safety of her mini, leaving the
wolf on the path.

She seems a little distraught,
Henri thought,
observing her.
It was just a ghost.

She looked as though she wanted to choke something, anything, with her
bare hands.

Henri felt it best not to follow her, considering.

The car’s engine revved and shortly became far away. Henri dissolved
the wolf shape in a vapor and became himself.

Glancing into the woods where the spirit had dissipated, he puzzled
over the ghost’s appearance. Andre’s troupe of no-goods usually just unearthed
vampyres
, but it seemed they were unearthing a top hat with
a cane in their quest of Angie’s lineage.

Interesting.

Ice
slushed
down Henri’s spine, then warmed,
a warning his own kind was near—

He swept quietly through the mist-swathed trees, searching, but the
woodsy paths did not give up their secrets.

He sniffed the air. The perfumed scent of the mystic was still
lingering in the mists, and … vapors of another presence, one he couldn’t
identify.

The Realm had dispatched a
Lammergeier
.
A lamb hawk.

To kill him.
And carry away the
mortal infused with forbidden power.

They did not yet know who and what Angie was.

8.

The rural road
panning the hilly English countryside had become a maze in the fog. Washes of
creeks, bits of trees, fence posts, floated into Angie’s vision then receded
back into obscurity.

She was as lost as a rabbit in a snake hole.

And all she had wanted was a glass of wine to calm the jolts of a day
that had ended with a ghost instead of good coffee. So she had turned
onto this woodsy two-lane to find the French hideaway the librarian
had suggested, patterned after the famous
Caravelle
.

She pulled off the road to get her bearings.

Odd.
Something, off to
the right moving through the marsh, parting the reeds and tall grass, cutting a
rapid path straight toward her, but she
couln’t
tell
whether it was animal or human or …

It disappeared, sliding into the bog as another silhouette became
visible in the murky evening.

Henri.

He walked toward her across a low land bridge through feathers of fog.
His long trench coat was open, flowing out away from him, and his white cotton
shirt was unbuttoned to mid-chest.

He was wickedly handsome.

His casual Italian slacks were cut low and sensuously relaxed around
his hips.

A Molotov cocktail exploded within Angie as she gazed at him.

He was well endowed.

Framed into the mist, Henri was a heart-stealer.
A
cavalier.

Angie climbed from the mini, her heart beating like a rabbit’s. He
excited her, but her heart was roiling. She was remembering his fiery red drops
against her lips. He was the master of stolen souls.

Nervous, watching him, wary of him, she stepped cautiously onto the
bridge.

He slowed his steps, his blue gaze falling full across her, penetrating
splinters of ice blue.

She slipped her hand into her belt pack. Warm wood met her touch.

Not much security in that. The stake felt like a toothpick in the face
of such power.

Slowly, Angie withdrew the stake, uncertain, wanting to trust, unable
to trust—

Where did he go?

He was in front of her, her stake in his hand.

She stared down at her empty fist, aghast, then at him.

“How do you think I have survived for eight hundred years,
Anjanette
?” he said quietly, his Parisian voice
sotto voce
.

“Obviously very well,” she answered.

The stake became cinders in his hand. “Were you not headed home to ‘Dinner
with
DuPre
,’ Angie?”

“And you’re concerned because …?”

His voice was gentle. “I—do not trust the evening or the night with
you. Where were you going, lovely mystic? You seem lost in the fog.”

Angie could not isolate the mystical perceptions bombarding her as his
eyes drank her in as though tasting mystic wine. This baffling, mesmerizing
creature had brought her as close to death as a human could be, yet now seemed
to have no malice toward her whatsoever.

“I was trying to find a restaurant called The French Reconnection,” she
managed.

“Ah, excellent cuisine I’ve heard,” he said, his perfect mouth forming
its usual brilliant smile. “You’re not too far actually. I could take you
there.” He held out his hand for her car keys.

She did not even try to protest. She couldn’t stake the broad side of a
barn. The world was more akin to hell and it was obvious he wasn’t going back
into the fog.

Settling comfortably into the driver’s seat, he ran a hand through his
inky hair and tossed a sly glance toward the backseat. The purloined newspapers
lay in plain view. “You’re quite the little mystic thief. Couldn’t you just
have told
DuPre
what you’d found?”

Angie cast a sly glance of her own toward the muscular chest rippling
with comfortable power under his barely-buttoned shirt. “I want him to read the
articles. My grandmother said my mother, Allison
Wessin
,
died in a car wreck. If she lied and also really changed our names, maybe the
reason had to do with Jane Weston.”

A trace of rigidity passed through the
vampyre’s
muscles at her words, a taut ripple. But it left very quickly.

Henri pulled easily out onto the road, and a small restaurant soon appeared
in the fog wrapped hills. Henri parked, and pulling the raincoat he had bought
her close around her shoulders. He led her inside. She trembled under his
touch, under his closeness. Walking next to him was like walking next to
lightning.

The French Reconnection, a relaxed restaurant and club with white
tablecloths and sexy little table lamps, was patterned after its famous larger
twin.

Murals of Paris parks and streets rimmed the walls evoking the illusion
of Paris street scenes.

“Il
est
adorable,” Angie murmured as they
entered.

Henri slipped the hostess a fifty-dollar bill for a secluded table in a
far corner—out of earshot and eyeshot of the rest of the patrons.

Angie slid into the chair he held out for her, and concentrated on the
menu, avoiding the eyes of moist fire under the cavalier eyelashes.

He lowered her menu with his fingertips. “I promise I will not offer
you anything this evening that you do not want, Angie.”

She leaned her cheek on her hand and studied him. If he wanted to kill
her, he could have done so on the land bridge and just dumped her body in the
soupy little marsh. “Scallops sound good.”

The waiter grinned broadly and greeted them in French.
“Bonsoir,
vous
êtes
prêts
à commander?”

“Ah
oui
.
Je
voudrais
les coquilles St. Jacques,” Angie responded,
ordering the scallops.

“And for a wine?”
Henri asked.

“Bordeaux?” she suggested.

“Nous
voudrions
une
demi-bouteille
de Bordeaux pour mademoiselle,”
Henri’s resonant voice requested from the waiter.

Angie watched Henri
DeLaCroix
with intense
interest—the rich voice no one could turn away from, the muscles with sinewy
strength unfettered by mortal limitations, the slight trace of warmth under the
loosely buttoned cotton shirt.

Warmth …

How could a
vampyre
have any traces of
warmth?

The wine came. He poured them both a goblet to sip until her food
arrived.

As Henri lifted his wine glass to his lips and relished the bouquet,
the color and the taste before he drank deeply, Angie caught a change in his
eyes, just a flash,
a
flicker others might not have
even noticed. The pleasure in his eyes was rare, from another century.

Then the gaze centered on her, deeply focused. “Angie, that night,
offering you damnation with me to save you— Yes, it was probably not the best
decision I’ve ever made, especially considering you are a mystic, but you were
dying. Your lover tried to kill you. Do you not remember?”

She was barely able to answer, the shock smacked so hard.
“No, I … My lover?”

Was he telling her the truth?!

“The human mind often blocks what it cannot accept, trauma too deep to
relive,” he said carefully. “Can you believe me though you cannot yet touch
that night?”

The scallops came, but mostly she just pushed them around on her plate,
her appetite lost, sloshing around in a nervous sea with her bile.

“I sense good in you, Henri. But I don’t remember much of that night,”
she finally said. “For me, for now, you’re a
vampyre
,
and a few good notes don’t necessarily salvage a bad melody.”

“Perhaps I can at least work on the lyrics?” He pulled the little
velvet pouch from his coat pocket. “Open your hand.”

She gazed at him uncertainly.

He took her hand in his and turned it palm side out.

She felt her breath catch as he held her hand. He didn’t just walk in
lightning. Electricity once again traveled along her arm in a bolt of pleasure.

A notched
silver cross with
a sunburst fell into her palm from the pouch.

“My cross!”
Angie cried
elatedly.

“You lost it when you were struggling with your attacker,” he said,
releasing her hand. “I had it repaired.”

The sunburst caught the soft light from the table lamp in its rods and
shone like translucent gold.

The master
vampyre
seemed to find it
difficult to take his eyes from the golden sheen. Was it a longing, a wish,
just to see a sunrise? Angie wondered.

As his eyes moved to his wine glass, she wondered if perhaps like her,
he had decided long ago that wishes and dreams were for fools, lovers and old
men on park benches.
Though she kept trying to believe
otherwise.

She slipped the cross back in the pouch.

“You are not going to wear it?” Henri asked curiously.

“Do I need to?” she countered softly.

Lightning streaked across his eyes. Then it was gone. Taking the pouch
by the satin strings, he dropped it into her blouse breast pocket. “It would be
better if you didn’t.”

Although he did not touch her, Angie felt the essence of him, brushing
her like the quick edge of a sea wind.

She took a quick sip of her wine to steady her nerves. “You said you’re
eight-hundred years-old?”

“Eight hundred and thirty-two.”
A tease curled
into his smile.

“That’s a lot of lovers.”

“No, that’s a lot of sex. I have only been in love once. And it was a
disaster. My lover was not what I expected.”

“Apparently mine almost killed me.”

“Mine tried.”

He poured them a second swirl of wine and raised his glass in a mock
toast. “Here’s to disastrous love affairs,” he
said,
his laughter rich and solicitous.

She touched her goblet to his, then lifted it to her lips and emptied
it.

“
Liora
Anjanette
!”
he laughed. “Should I dare give you a third?”

Drinking the rich wine like it was water warmed her far too swiftly and
left her light-headed. She ate some of the scallops to put some food on her
stomach.

After downing his own second glass of wine, Henri poured her a third
then eased his chair around the table close to her. She lowered her eyes,
fearful to look into his. Fearful she might see her heart reflected in his blue
wells.

“Angie, lift your luxurious lashes and let your violet eyes
enter
mine,” he coaxed whisperingly.

She looked up into his blue storms.

“I should go,” she said, her throat dry.

“I know,” he said, softly stroking her cheek with the back of his hand.

A flash of pleasure warmed her, desire for foreplay.

“I really should go,” she said again, taking his hand from her cheek.

“I know,” he said, wrapping the hand in his.

He pressed her palm to his chest.

The hint of warmth as her hand came in contact with the soft cotton
shirt, with him, capsized her defenses like a paper boat on a wanton sea.

He rubbed her hand caressingly across his shirt.

“Explore me, Angie,” he whispered, pressing her hand harder against his
chest. “Touch me. What do you feel from me mystically? Trust your senses.”