My Immortal Assassin (20 page)
The next day. Piedmont, California
T
hey don’t know I’m alive.” Gray folded her arms around her waist when she and Durian stood outside her parents’ house. Their target wasn’t the main house but the granny unit in back where Emily had lived and where her own life had come to an end. She shivered even though she wasn’t cold. Her old life stared back at her, dredging up memories she’d rather not face.
“They must continue to think so,” he said. “For a while longer. Until we know what happened.”
He was right. Until then they wouldn’t be safe. “I came over to meet Emily’s new boyfriend.”
“Christophe, I presume.”
She nodded, shoved her hands into her front pockets and hunched her shoulders against the bite of the wind she didn’t feel. “There were bodies,” she said. “Afterward. Including one that was supposed to be me. Christophe showed me the articles about it. It had our pictures in it. Emily’s and mine.”
“A mage as powerful as Christophe could easily have done the magic that would transform a human’s physical appearance.” Durian, too, gazed across the street. She didn’t get much from their link except a sense that he was thinking things over. “We know the woman you saw killed was not your sister.”
“Good enough to get through an autopsy?”
He looked at her. “The kin have been living among humans for a very long time. We have learned a great deal about how to pass without revealing ourselves. The magekind have been no less resourceful.”
Gray shook her head. She hardly knew what to think anymore. She didn’t want to go inside the house where everything had ended, just like she didn’t want to be standing here, confronting the past. “Everything looks the same. Like a movie I’ve seen. Not anything that really happened. Familiar. And not familiar.”
The elms shading the street grew large, with thick, gnarled branches. A few oaks grew here, but not young ones. These oaks had been growing before the area was ever settled and now had trunks too large to get arms around. In a few places, the roads had been diverted around the massive trees.
“I don’t belong here. Not anymore.”
“Perhaps not,” he said in a low voice.
“You could.” She pointed behind them to where his Volvo was parked. “That car belongs here. Look at you. If you had a briefcase, anyone who saw you would think you’re some white collar worker pulling down six figures.”
He reached to realign the crease along the front of his trousers. “You grew up here. Not I.”
Had she really once walked this sidewalk, barely old enough to be out without supervision? “No one could look at me and think I belong anywhere near a million-dollar home.” She scrubbed her hands through her hair. “The neighbors are probably looking out the window thinking you’re some hottie from three blocks over. Parking out of sight so no one knows you’re bringing home the skanky girlfriend to do nasty things to you during your lunch hour.”
His expression was inscrutable. “Very nasty.”
He stepped off the sidewalk and Gray followed him. Did the Witmarks still live next door? Did they even talk to her parents anymore after what had happened? A neighbor’s misfortunes brought a community together or tore it apart. Which one had happened here?
He paused on the sidewalk in front of her old house. With a look at her, he said, “Consider this another lesson.”
She squinted because a ray of sun through the trees was in her face. His mouth quirked, but he wasn’t smiling. “What?”
“It’s crucial that we make no mistakes once we are inside. Maintain your calm no matter what memories may come to you. Observing me will help keep you focused.” He touched just behind her ear. Such light contact, but the gentleness of it rocked her. “I will understand if that is not possible.”
Gray nodded. Her stomach clenched with tension, though. Everyone thought she’d died here. In a way, she had.
“If there is trouble of any kind, please expect me to take over. By which I mean, take control.” He tapped her forehead and their link deepened. “Not an indwell, unless it’s for some reason necessary.”
In her head, she made sure her memories were too far away for her to get to.
He put a hand on her waist. “I may have no choice.”
She wheeled to face him, and this time emotion did flare sharper than expected. Not the kind of control Durian wanted to see from her. “Whatever you need to do to find out what happened, you do it. Don’t ask permission. Don’t worry if I’m going to get all upset.” She met his gaze. “Just do what needs to be done.”
He nodded. “I’ll mask our presence when we go in. Do the same if you can. Unless we are unlucky, there is little chance we will be disturbed. Inside, I’ll need to concentrate on my magic. We will not have the same protections, is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“Very well, then.” He touched her forehead. All business. She thought he was sexy as hell like this. His fingertip was warm against her skin. The connection between them came alive in her head. There was a sensation of bringing the energy toward him to be shaped according to his need. She felt the burn of him drawing his magic, the specific twisting of the air around them that prevented others—human or otherwise—from taking notice of them.
Her mother, a Superior Court Judge in nearby Oakland, was unlikely to be home, but her father might be. Depending on his class schedule. When they crossed the street her sense of detachment increased. That came from Durian and it was useful to take up some of his calm. She remembered even though she didn’t want to. Bringing in the mail after school, her mom or dad driving her to ballet classes and piano lessons or years later, visiting for the holidays, and later still coming here to see Emily. She remembered her sister opening the door to her knock.
They approached the house. From the silence, she guessed they were lucky. No one was home. Durian did something to the alarm system that she didn’t catch—his use of magic was over practically before he started. Then Gray led the way around the back. Her old self on that last day walked beside her like a ghost made of the memories she’d kept locked for so long. Why hadn’t she known something was wrong?
The latch on the gate shone with new metal on old wood. This door was alarmed, too. Durian let her take care of this one. It turned out to be easier than she thought. The granny unit was attached to the house, but you had to be outside to get to it. There wasn’t any interior connecting door between the two buildings. Almost nothing had changed in the backyard. There was a birdbath she didn’t recognize. The Witmarks’ cat was sunning itself underneath it. The same gravel path was lined with miniature roses.
Durian did his thing with the separate alarm on the unit. He didn’t need a key to open the door because with a quick pull of his magic, the tumblers in the locking mechanism aligned and clicked into place.
All the breath in Gray’s lungs vanished when they stood inside the apartment where her sister had lived. The place was spotless. But for the eerie neatness, she could imagine Emily still lived there. All her things were still here. The television, the stereo. Her furniture. The wall she kept between old and new disintegrated.
The past rushed at her in a maelstrom of memories and emotions that were breaking her apart. In this room, Emily—or someone she thought was Emily—had put her arms around her and told her how much she loved her baby sister. As kids they used to fight all the time, but as adults, that changed. They got to be friends. Gray had kept Emily’s secret when her sister admitted she was practicing magic, and Emily had never, ever belittled Gray for being the less talented of the two. No matter how much she remembered, or how vivid the recollections, she couldn’t reach back into the past and bring her sister safely to her.
Durian touched her elbow and the storm eased. Some of his darkness seeped into her. She welcomed the separation he gave her, the numbness. She followed his circuit around the apartment. He wasn’t using any magic yet that she could tell. Getting the layout, she guessed, since all he did was look into the rooms. Bedroom, kitchen. Living room. He stopped at the wall of pictures between the kitchen and living room and after a bit, she joined him because she was safely without emotion.
“That’s Emily,” she said, pointing to one of the pictures. “The two of us at the beach when we were kids. She was gorgeous then, too. My mom and dad there. Her graduating from college. She did her undergrad at Mills. Grad school at Berkeley.”
“And this one?”
“Emily backstage at the Met.” She touched the frame, remembering that night and how proud Emily had been of her. She didn’t dare look at Durian. She didn’t want to know what he thought, but she kept explaining anyway. “That’s me at the Opera House not long after I came home from New York. I was in Lausanne the year before. With Béjart.”
Her two lives pushed against each other, crushing her.
“And the gentleman with his arm around you is?”
The man in the picture was a stranger to Gray Spencer. And not. “Val.”
He wrinkled his forehead. “Val.”
“Emily took that picture of the two of us.”
“And this?” he said at last. “This is you, Gray?” And of course he meant the framed cover of
Dance Magazine
.
She nodded. “The year I made soloist at New York City Ballet. I was twenty years old. It’s how Val and I met. We did
Billy The Kid
the next year, but he also staged something of his that season. Marakova was his principal dancer, but I had a solo.”
“I should have known,” Durian whispered. He stared at the picture as if the dancer on the cover was the President of the United States in pink tights and toe shoes. “This,” he said. “I did not expect this.”
She couldn’t have said anything if she’d wanted to. Her throat closed off.
“Not just good, but gifted.”
“That was then.” She couldn’t deal with the admiration. He made it too real. “Who cares what I used to be?” She stared at the picture of the smiling ballerina and it didn’t even look like her anymore. She remembered the day of the shoot. She’d hit that arabesque dead on and could have held it all day.
“Gray.” His finger brushed along the line of her jaw. “It explains a great deal about you.” He kept touching her, and she kept wondering what would happen if she smashed the picture. “I did not understand how much you lost. Not truly.”
“Would it have been all right if I was just some regular person with a regular job?” She grabbed the framed cover and yanked hard enough to rip the fastener halfway out of the wall. “Why does it matter what she used to be?” Rage and agony boiled in her, white hot with the futility of wishing she could have it all back. She raised the picture over her head and hurled it downward.
Somehow Durian caught the picture in the millisecond after it left her hands. He returned the frame to the wall and slowly turned to her. His presence in her head got bigger and darker. Panic welled up because she knew what came next. Tigran would push her into a corner of her mind, and she couldn’t even pretend her life was her own. Air whooshed out of her lungs and refused to come back in. Her vision completely cut out.
“Gray.”
Someone touched her, and it was warm and not angry. Not looking to hurt.
Her mind was still her own.
Durian. Not Tigran. Durian’s arms were around her. Gentle. Holding her, and she wasn’t being made so small or insignificant that she didn’t matter. Durian pressed his lips to the top of her head. “Hush, love. Hush.”
She got herself under control, and by the time she stepped away from his embrace, she was almost normal. Durian didn’t look angry. He almost never did, but his magic wasn’t telling her any different. He waited, as if he had unlimited time and patience.
“Better?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He continued watching her and she had the strange feeling that he was seeing her for the first time. Whatever he was seeing, it wasn’t really her. “Val.” He said the name with puzzled emphasis. He closed his eyes for a moment and cut off her psychic link with him. She was alone. So alone. When he opened them again, his irises swirled with streaks of purple. “That man in the picture with you is Valantis Antoniu.”
“You’ve heard of him.” Of course he had. He liked opera and ballet and fine art. And women like Emily, with beauty and brains.
“I saw Antoniu dance when he was a young man. Before he retired and turned to choreography.”
She willed her tears gone. “That was a long time ago.”
He nodded. “He was a great deal older than you.”
“So?” Her eyes burned hot. She didn’t dare blink again because she didn’t want to look like any more of a fool. He needed her to be calm. She would be calm.
He was quiet for so long, she gave up trying to understand what was going on with him. He wasn’t letting her see much now anyway. “We will discuss this another time.”
Her pulse got going hard. “Understood.”
“Nikodemus is right. You and your sister do look alike.” He turned from the photographs.
She didn’t move right away. No dust clung to the corners or muted the color of any of the frames. She touched the picture of Emily and wanted her sister to be safe and happy. What if that meant being married to Christophe dit Menart? What if it meant Emily hated what Gray was now?
“We do not have much time, Gray.”
She did a slow turn and looked around. “Someone’s been in to clean, obviously, but that’s all. This is pretty much how it looked when Emily lived here.”
He inhaled, long and slow, and she felt the quiver of his magic flow over her from that dark pool inside him. “Yes, that’s so.”
Durian knelt in the center of the living room and closed his eyes. She stayed to one side. “This is not unlike tracking.”
“Great. I’ll suck at this, too.”
He opened one purple eye. “Pay attention, please.”
She saluted and then, slowly, the air around him became charged until the hair on her arms prickled and her hair crackled with static electricity.
He let out his breath. “Did you see how I did that?”
“Not really.” Not enough to try by herself.