Masters of the Night (9 page)

“I doubt I would have had an escort. I would probably have had a
shriveled up old aunt chaperoning me, like the English librarian,” she laughed
lightly, but still on guard.

“You would never have been without an escort,
Liora
Anjanette
. “
Que
tu
es
élégant
ce
soir
!” he said softly.
“Burgundy becomes you. It deepens those dark Amethyst jewels glittering in your
eyes.
Que
vous
êtes
belle,
Anjanette
!”

Angie felt her thoughts becoming cloudy in the presence of the sensual,
dangerous creature standing so close to her.
The dashing
scarf at his throat, the debonair hat, the whimsy in his smile.

He removed his hat and bowed low. “Your coach awaits,
m’lady
—if you choose to be with me.”

The streams in his eyes were becoming tributaries to wash away her
thoughts.

“I live with slayers who want to kill you, Henri,” she said, shaking
away the cloudy streams and sweeping the skirt of burgundy to the side to step
past him.

He caught her and swung her toward him.
Into him.
“But not tonight, yes,
chéri
?”

She gasped as she felt the muscles seething with power and terrible
strength.

But he was sweeping her into visions of his past with him so fast and
furiously Angie was left breathless.

The room dissolved. Velvet curtained coaches with romantic lanterns clattered
on a cobblestone drive toward a pillared house.

Coachmen were holding carriage doors for party goers, and the scent of
roses tinged the air.

A coachman held a carriage door open for her. She climbed out, one
dainty
slippered
foot peeping out discreetly from
under the hem of the burgundy dress and rich purple folds of the velvet cape.

Henri was pulling her with him into the fantasy of a romantic era when
gentlemen courted ladies dressed in satin gowns, and silver candelabras adorned
dinner tables laden with food and laughter. An era she had seen only in
books, and in her mind’s
eye from Henri …

She entered a house filled with gaiety and lively conversation and
chandeliers spilling crystal light across an elegant ballroom.

“Dance with me, Angie.”

She eased carefully into his arms. He was in atonement, right? And
would not hurt her …

She gasped as strands of weakness flowed through every sinew in her
body when his hand moved against her waist—the price of willingly yielding to a
master.

“It’s all right,” he whispered. “You’ll get used to it.” He swept her
onto the dance floor.

Her thoughts burned away like paper in a fireplace.

Then he was turning with her, twirling, whirling, flirting with her,
leaving her dizzy, laughing.

As he laughed with her, Henri’s enjoyment seemed genuine, as though he
was remembering or reliving his own version of
Dance in
Bougival
.

The crystals in the chandelier high above her swayed,
filling her vision.
Shimmering glass careening past
her, around her, within her, taking her from herself.

“Are you real?” Angie asked, looking into his eyes, her heart a Roman
candle.
“Or just part of a dream?”

His eyes cut sharply into her pools of shining violet. “I’m real.”

In moments, Angie was becoming part of his being, his strength—his desire,
wonderfully lost in him.

“What are you really doing here?” she asked.

“Guarding you,” he said softly. “The slayers left you alone. Are you
all right,
chéri
?”

The voice was so tender her knees went weak, and she felt as though she
would collapse she was driven so crazy with wanting him.

The orchestral music crested, the violin bow waltzed hauntingly across
the strings. Chandeliers and candlelight began to glow like liquid gold.

She swayed with him to the
music,
his
seductive whispers filled the room. He was whispering to her to enjoy him,
touch him,
excite
him.

His seduction was so subtle … the laces of airy whispers caused
sensuous ribbons around her thighs, teasing her, heating her.

“To hell with the past,” he said suddenly, halting the dance. Loosening
the satin ties at her throat, he pushed the cloak from her shoulders and to the
floor.

The chandeliers became circles of recessed
lighting,
undulating music throbbed sensually with heavy percussion.

She became encapsulated in the rhythm, dancing against him, her hips
moving, guided by his hands. She was entwined in a new dream, of heat, of
passion.

Gasping for breath, she fought to control her heart—and other places.

The dance ended. The crowd dissolved.

With his arm around her waist, Henri pulled her close and led her to a
private table laden with fragrant bouquets of roses, where he spoke of love and
her beauty, and they talked softly—and she never touched the food on her plate.

He filled a silver wine goblet for her, then, for a moment gazed into
the rich depths.

When he looked up, fire had entered his eyes.

The fire of his desire.
Specter
cold, yet oh-so-hot.

He stood and pulled the tablecloth away. She reached out her arms to
him, sliding them along his, aware of nothing except that she wanted him,
wanted him with every pulsing ache within her. Pulling her up from her chair,
he leaned her back against the edge of the table, grasped the bodice of her
dress to unlock her breasts from their satin prison, and spilled a tender
draught of wine onto her lips. Wine splashed enjoyably from the cup’s full
brim, traveling in luscious rivulets across her bare breasts. Henri caught each
with a slow draw of his tongue, groaning in pleasure with each slide, melting her
into seeking, wanting, searching for deeper pleasures with him. She unbuttoned
his shirt, pushed it from his shoulders and moved her hands across his chest,
wanting the cold heat of him again, wanting his body against hers.

His free hand played the satiny folds of her skirt until the hem was at
her waist, and there was nothing between them but a tiny swathe of blue lace
and nylon. He tossed the emptied cup to the floor. His hand moved to the lace.
The goblet’s silvery bowl echoed as it rolled, a silvery, light ringing as it
spooled away from the table. Ringing …

A phone was ringing.

The music, the roses, the illusion, fell away—broken bits of color.

The kitchen phone was ringing, and Angie didn’t have to answer to know
it was Andre.

Unwillingly, she flew to the kitchen, picked up the receiver and
sighed. The magical evening was over.

After no more than a handful of moments, she hung up.

“Ex-boyfriend?”
Henri asked
casually, buttoning up his shirt as he came out of the bedroom.

“Don’t pretend you didn’t hear that.
Vampyres
have the hearing of a
noctuid
moth.”

“Or a bat?” he smiled.

“You know Andre and the Shadows are on their way back, and as soon as
he senses you’re here, he’ll be coming up those stairs, guns blazing,” Angie
said anxiously. “Why have you not gone?”

He drew the back of his hand down her cheek and smiled devilishly.
“Tell him Nicholas was the one lurking around your bed.”

She pushed him to the window. “Go!”

He lifted the latch, but paused as he raised the casing. “Nicholas is
dangerous, Angie.”

Kissing his cheek quickly, ardently, she whispered, “Then stay close to
my dreams.”

A small smile played around his mouth—but it was edged with fear for
her life. “I’ll be close,” he said.

He swung his legs over the side of the window ledge and was gone.

Angie grabbed her lounging pajamas and hurriedly slid out of her dress,
to hang it in the closet before the Shadows were opening the front door.

Her thumb slid across a button on the bodice.

A broken button.

Several of the buttons on the bodice of her evening gown were broken,
in fact.

And he had been buttoning his shirt …

Not
all of his
dream with her had been an
illusion.

10.

From her room,
Angie could hear the Shadows on the porch singing raucously in French. Their
voices, not exactly on pitch, were burly and punctuated with laughter, Andre’s
deep notes and guttural laugh clear above the rest. Deciding the newspaper
stories could wait until morning, she went downstairs, asked how dinner was,
babbled for a few moments about nothing in particular, then returned to her
room and happily fell into bed, relieved. It did not seem they had felt any
disturbance within the house. Henri had made good his escape.

At what should have been sunrise, Angie awakened to rain and the smell
of freshly brewed coffee. She grabbed a quick shower, splashed on perfume,
pulled on a pair of jeans and one of her new sweaters, a soft forest green and
clutching the newspapers, hurried down to breakfast.

The dining room in the Tudor style home was more than generous—it was
humungous.
A huge stone fireplace, oak ceiling beams
criss
-crossing the ceiling, a pine table and benches that
could have seated a horde of Vikings.
“Who’s cooking breakfast today?”
she asked James lightly, avoiding the probing gaze still intent on reading her
soul. Could he tell she was beaming a little?

“Andre’s our cook for the day,” James said, then laughed. “He watches
every show on The Food Network. He’s in the kitchen as we speak, throwing
garlic all over everything to kick it up a notch and ‘
bamming
’
everything in sight with his own blend of essence while he explains how the
yolk remains in the center of the egg.”

“He’s not throwing in that homeopathic crap I see him drinking every
night and day, is he?” Angie laughed in return, deciding he could put his nosy
eyes where the
sun don’t
shine.
“To
kick us up a notch?
The juice you invented for him in your mad scientist
lab?”

“His health recipe?”
James grinned. “I’m
the only one brave enough to swill it with him.”

Tantalizing aromas floated from the kitchen—roasting ham and savory
eggs. And garlic. The pungent fragrance of Andre’s first line of culinary
defense delineated the room as Andre pushed through the kitchen door with a
bowl of homemade salsa, a large serving platter of warm flour tortillas and
fresh cilantro for breakfast burritos. Plates were soon filled with the
extravagances of his palate, and coffee filled generous mugs.

To a visitor, it would have appeared seven normal people were about to
have a normal breakfast at a normal, if somewhat large, picnic table.

Except the morning conversation was going to be a little terrifying.
James had brought his crossbow and bolts to the table, belt packs bulged with stakes
underneath lap napkins, a strange little starling with bright eyes watched them
from the window sill, and the ghost was, well, about to visit.

Angie could sense the presence of the ghost. He was somewhere in the
house. As she plopped the newspapers in the center of table, she asked the
group if they had seen the ghost from the woods. “Gray suit, gray felt top hat,
silver cane?” she broached cautiously.

Not a look, not a flicker in their eyes betrayed any knowledge of him.

“Sounds like a jolly fellow,” James teased. “Anybody I knew in real
life?”

“Lame, James.” Kathryn’s laugh was light, jeweled.

They didn’t seem to believe her. Fine, then.

Angie put the subject of the ghost on a back burner and opened the
newspapers. “If Allison Weston is my mother, it looks like she died in a train
wreck,” she said. “And it looks like she was on the ill-fated train with a
vampyre
.”

Andre’s eyes flamed like coal oil wicks as he looked at the photos and
read the columns.

And a twitch started in his square
jawline
—not
a good sign. That little twitch in his jaw meant business.

“Who am I, Andre?” Angie asked. “Am I related to a duchess or
something? The paper calls her, ‘The Lady Jane Weston.’”

“All we have at the moment is that a
vampyre
seems to be intimate with your family,” he said. “He and Allison Weston both
appeared to be from here in England, but were also in the States at the same
time. We might find more about you and these events related to your family,
Angie, in Sacramento’s past where they may have had more in common than a
train. Maybe a passenger’s diary or journal is stashed in an attic, someone who
observed them before the wreck and witnessed Allison’s tragedy. We could place
an ad in a local paper offering to pay for information and search for Nicholas.”

When her guardians suggested that the Bowler Hat, as he was now
officially being dubbed, not only might shed light on her identity, but also be
in “atonement.” The word caused a brief, but strange sensation within Angie.
Like the sting of a stray raindrop on her skin.

“Atonement?”

“We have to be careful we do not go after those who are atoning for
their crimes,” James explained, then paused. “But this one … lot of pride in
that stance,” he said as he gazed at the 1850 photo.

The strange stirring again.
“How can you know
if one is really—in atonement?”

Answers sailed around the table, everything from a measure of warmth
that would increase as they neared their return to humanity, to an occasional
heartbeat, to shedding a tear or two (though not often), to entering
professions where they could offer assistance to humans in need.

Helping those in need
, Angie thought.

Protecting them …

A trace of warmth …

Angie’s breath became shallow, achy as she fought the yearning rising
within her. Her eyes moved to the window to the
vampyre
of interest sitting on the rainy sill, the master
vampyre
who had said he was in atonement. She felt a pang of longing ribbon through
her. Henri De
LaCroix
was becoming her heart’s
desire.

Suddenly, she could have cared less about prospecting
vampyres
, a mother she didn’t really remember or anything
else. She was lost in a wish, a misty stroll in the woods with the French
vampyre
in atonement. His arm was protectively around her
waist holding her close, and he was laughing tenderly, teasing her, touching
her … returning to humanity.
Then the first deep kiss, his
lips moving against hers, coaxing them to part as they melt to the forest
floor, their bodies liquid.

Angie pulled the velvet pouch Henri had given her from the pocket of her
jeans and shook the little sunburst cross into her palm.

“I didn’t have this at the rectory,” she said in a small voice, holding
it up by the chain. “I think it must have broken. It fell … before that. But a
few days ago, it was—in the pocket of one of my blouses. Perhaps Henri … Would
it be odd for a
vampyre
to—return a cross?”

She exhaled, hesitant to say more than that.

“If it’s Henri De
LaCroix
, that
would be damned odd. Outré,” Andre said, eyeing her
keenly.

“Maybe Stephen found it on the porch that night and gave it back while
you were out of it,” James said with a shrug as he poured a second cup of
coffee and stretched back in his chair. “And maybe you put it there later? You
were kind of mentally wandering for a few days there. And you didn’t remember
much for awhile.”

“I guess that could be.” Angie voiced her next suggestion carefully.
“Or maybe Nicholas is not the only one—in atonement?”

The response was instant laughter.
By the entire
troupe.

And the consensus was that if Henri was in atonement, hell must have
frozen over.

Angie sighed inwardly. She could not defend the French
vampyre
. She had no actual proof Henri was in atonement.
She didn’t even know herself.

She slipped the cross back into the pouch and put it away.

From the corner of her eye, Angie could see James studying her, trying
to read through her silence.

The crossbow slayer was too damned sharp, too observant.

“Was my mother murdered, Andre?” she asked, turning to the master
slayer.

“Je
m’en
occuperai
plus
tard
.
We’ll discuss her
further when I return,” he said, placing his napkin on his plate and rising
from the table.

Then he was out the door and gone, driving in a speedway run toward
town.

The starling left the sill.

“Napoleon seemed a little on the flaming side of fiery,” Angie remarked
as she reached for a last bite of ham.

“You’ll get used to him,” James said.

“Where did he go?” she asked.

“He’s a master slayer. We don’t ask him.”

A master slayer, apparently, was a man of many secrets. They told her
it was once rumored Andre was possibly in the employ of the Illuminati, that
infamous secret organization of power moguls hell-bent on maintaining balance
in the world economy to keep their money intact. If people knew
vampyres
were running amok all over the countryside, they
would lock their doors and windows, hang out the garlic, and no one would be
dining out after dark, late night shopping, or going to clubs, pubs, movies or
Vegas. The rumor in the underworld, though, was that Andre
DuPre
may have been a
vampyre
himself at one time, and
returned to mortality through atonement—or a secret chemical.

Or was he just a rich man with money to burn and needed a cause? Who
could know?

At any rate, Andre could wield a stake like a third hand and took good
care of his troupe. He said he had been born in the Pyrenees Mountains. They
left it at that.

Angie rose from the table, to help clear the leftovers—and steal
glances out the window, to search the trees for Henri.

A coldness
, like a breath of
ice, suddenly swept straight through her. She whirled, gasping—her hair
disheveled as though from a wild wind.

Cutting a path across the floor, the iciness traveled across the room
then swirled into the ashes of the fireplace smack dab in the middle of the
brickwork hearth.

Angie stared into the ashes. A transparent shape took form against the
ash-blackened depths of the large fireplace.

The apparition was brief, no more than the wink of an eye, then gone.

Had anyone else caught it?

Angie picked up the newspapers, and busied herself with folding them.
No one saw it,
no one else knows …

James eased the newspapers from her hand. “Gray felt top hat?
Gray suit?
Silver-tipped cane?
You
want to tell us what we think we just saw, Angie?”

Angie looked up. Five pairs of eyes were on her.

“The ghost?
I think?” she
gulped.

“Duh.
Y’
think
?” James tossed at her while Brandi muttered in
disbelief, “A ghost. I don’t think I’m in Nebraska anymore, Toto.”

“And we’re not in an Irish castle either,” Mack added, his voice rising
nervously in pitch. “So where’d the bloody thing come from? Is this house haunted?
Have we run into a real live haunted house?”

“I don’t know where he came from,” Angie said. “He was in the woods. I
guess he just followed me home …”

“
Och
!
Just
followed you home.
Like a wee warm pup.”

“He seems harmless,” Kathryn commented with a shrug. “He just seemed to
wander in and out, twirling his cane.”

“He just wandered in and out—of me!” Angie retorted indignantly.

“Well, I don’t think I’ll be for getting much sleep tonight,” Mack
said, rising. He began to clatter and clang in the kitchen, madly scrubbing at
the dishes while he muttered to himself, “We’ve maybe got a bloody murder on a
train, a man who might be a
vampyre
but appears to
have staked her,
then
saved passengers on the train,
and now we’ve got a ghost. The brickbats on the streets of Northern Ireland
didn’t chill me like m’ bones feel in this instant. A brickbat, I can handle. A
railroad spike, I can handle—but a ghost?”