My Immortal Assassin (21 page)

“This is as good a time as any for you to learn.” He opened his eyes. They weren’t purple. They were the color of new pennies. She caught her breath because she knew that color meant he was close to changing.

“Change if you need to, Durian.”

His eyes flickered, and she had never thought he looked less human than he did right now. “That is not necessary.”

He repeated what he’d done before, and she tracked his magic as best she could. This time she was prepared for the eerie sensation of the air tight with tension. After a few minutes of that, he rose from his kneeling position to move through the house. Every so often, he’d stand immobile, breathing deeply, and the air around him sizzled with expectation. Once or twice she caught an echo of something, a glimpse of energy that had lain dormant until Durian’s magic raised it. So, he was right. What he was doing was similar to tracking. The way jogging was similar to running.

Because she was in his head, she worked out some of what he was getting from his examination of the apartment. Psychic residue clung everywhere. It drifted from the ceiling and swirled around their feet. She fell deeper into her link with Durian.

She shivered when she felt Tigran, an echo of him, far away and yet, it was him. Undeniably Tigran. Things got stranger still. She swore she heard the faint whisper of conversation.
Anna, you look great.
A beating heart. The distant scent of blood. Fear rippled down her back, but it was distant, a memory of fear, of being certain she would die. Emotions that didn’t belong to her.
You, too, Emily.
A scream that didn’t end and wasn’t her or Emily.

Hey, Val.

She knew Durian was blunting her emotions. There was more here, but he knew she couldn’t relive the final day of her old life without the scream that was building in her head getting free and endangering them both. He was hiding other details from her, too, and frankly, she was grateful. After a second painstaking circuit of the apartment, Durian put a hand on her shoulder, sliding his palm to the nape of her neck. “A few moments more and we’re done.”

They began again, following an odd pattern from the back door through the room, to a niche by the front door where Emily had stashed an umbrella and a pair of sneakers. When they reached the place where Val had been taken down, Durian cut their connection to a trickle. His eyes burned copper-red. Her skin felt slick with the residue of the magic he’d been pulling and shaping and letting fall onto everything in the house.

“This, I will do on my own, Gray.”

She could barely move her mouth. “Please.”

Durian crouched at the spot where Tigran had brought her down to the floor, kicking and screaming. He’d muffled the sounds while he did something to her that had burned like fire through her head and chest. By then Val and Emily had already been dead. Durian stayed where he was for what seemed like forever but wasn’t any more than five or ten minutes.

He rose and resumed his pattern through the house. The unit was small but he made it seem microscopic. Kitchen, bathroom, laundry area, bedroom. The wall of pictures from a life that wasn’t hers anymore.

“Well?” she said when he released the magic he held and stood motionless. Her entire body tensed, but the memories, the sounds, scents, and emotions faded with his magic.

He opened his eyes. “Understand, Gray, that I cannot yet be sure.”

“Of what?”

“Three deaths happened here. I did not know Valentis or Emily before this happened so I cannot say that it was them who died. Given what we know, probably it was Valentis who died. Christophe had no reason to keep him alive if he was human and even less if he was magekind.”

“The other two?” Gray covered her mouth with both hands, afraid to ask the questions that roared through her yet desperate to know the answers. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat.

Here, exactly where she stood, was where Val had kissed her cheek that day and told her how rehearsals had gone and that he was sorry to be late. He was having trouble with his principal dancer for his newest work and not only that, the understudy was better. She’d been standing there with flour all over her hands, helping with dinner. Emily, still in the kitchen, had called out
Hey, Val
.

Through the window, she could see the stepping stone path to the house. The day Christophe had come for them, she’d stood there waving at Val through the window before she’d let him in to be killed by a monster.

As she stared past the reflection in the glass, Gray was half-convinced she would see Val just as she had that last day, him smiling and pantomiming a big air-kiss for her, his white hair mussed as if he’d been running his hands through it. A permanent condition, he liked to say, so he could frighten the corps de ballet.

A bone-white face appeared in her line of sight.

She screamed because for a moment she actually thought it was Val, but with pewter hair instead of white and ashen skin too loose on his skull. Durian whirled and the moment he saw what she did, he touched her shoulder, and then she didn’t feel anything at all.

A key slid into the exterior door. The mechanism turned and clicked, and whoever it was came inside. “Who’s there?”

She didn’t move. Neither did Durian. They didn’t make a sound.

Gray’s mother stared into the house, standing there in her low-heeled pumps, her cheeks pink now instead of the ashen white she’d seen through the window. Her breath was loud. She walked across the living room. Her head turned this way and that, eyes darting toward the shadows.

The framed cover of
Dance Magazine
hung lopsided on the wall.

Her mother’s hair was gray now, instead of the platinum she remembered. More lines creased her face, and she was thinner than ever. Her heels clicked on the wooden floor, echoing as she walked, and the curious thing was, she followed a pattern similar to the one Durian had taken. She went into the bedroom and stayed there a little longer than it would take to be sure no one was there.

On her way out, her mother stopped in front of the cluster of photos that had so drawn Durian. She reached out and touched the framed cover of
Dance Magazine
and then straightened it.

The silence suffocated her, plugged up her ears, stole all the air in the room. Thank God she could not feel.

Her mother turned around and whispered, “Anna Grayson?”

There wasn’t any answer.

Gray thought her heart would break. She took a step forward only to have Durian check her. He was right. She knew that, but she wanted to have her mother’s arms around her. To breathe in her scent and believe that everything would be all right. If she gave in to the impulse, she might endanger her entire family. She knew for dead certain that Christophe would retaliate with lethal force if she made any contact with them.

Her mother waited before she sighed and walked out. The door clicked closed after her, leaving a breath of air to ripple through the room and die. After a bit, the key turned in the lock again with a hollow echo.

She steeled herself. “Now what?”

“We plan.”

CHAPTER 26

9:59
P.M
.
Piedmont, California

D
urian let himself into the granny unit where Gray’s sister had once lived. He’d come prepared and didn’t need to turn on any lights. His clothes were across the street in his car. In his altered form, his vision was more than acute enough to see even if the room were pitch dark. But it wasn’t. In a city, there were too many lights for any place with windows to be dark.

Floodlights from the main house shone into the apartment windows, casting a sickly light on the floors. Despite no one living here, gadgets and appliances glowed with red or green lights.

Gray’s fragile state had meant he hadn’t done everything he wanted or needed to do. He made a slow pass around the rooms he’d been through earlier. The small area was an advantage to balance against the difficulty of the age of the evidence trail. He’d analyzed much older scenes before, locations where the residue was more contaminated and attenuated than was the case here. Here, the challenge was in overcoming his preconceptions. He believed he knew what had happened and those convictions might warp his interpretation of what he found tonight.

There was the additional problem of him recognizing and then separating the physical and psychic residue from Gray’s presence here in both the distant and recent past. Even before Tigran, she’d left traces of an insistent presence. Despite the passage of time and the changes Tigran had forced on her, Durian recognized Gray’s psychic patterns.

Familiar to him. Intimate. Disturbing. All the more disturbing because of what had happened to her here. What Tigran had done. The magic required for one of the kin to bind a human to him was dark enough by itself, but the terror and horror experienced by the victim left behind a multiplying effect. Then later, what Christophe had done to cover the truth.

He went still. He needed to be in a state that cut off sensory input of all but what was necessary to analyze Christophe and Tigran’s attack here. If someone came in, human or anything else, he might not know until it was too late. He closed his eyes and breathed deep, opening himself to what had been destroyed here. Her sister’s magic carried a distinct enough quality that he could easily filter that out. That left two humans without magic and Gray.

Gray’s aura clung to things she’d been emotionally attached to or had frequently touched. He filtered out the more recent signals, what Gray was now, her mother, and other signifiers too old or too new to interest him until at last he was down to the remnants that were relevant.

A great many humans had been here, as was usually the case when a human death was involved: police, emergency medical personnel, detectives, the personnel required to remove the physical traces of death. Dozens of signals were present to examine for signs of magic and to exclude from further consideration if there were none or if the magic was from a human who didn’t know he or she wasn’t completely normal.

Eventually, he filtered out the extraneous lives and touches and was left with a base set from the day that interested him. Gray, her sister Emily, and three vanilla humans. One of the dead humans he believed was Val Antoniu. The other was the woman he believed Christophe had transformed to look like Gray. Last was the woman whose body had taken the place of Emily Spencer’s. All Christophe would have needed was some hair and a drop or two of blood. And, of course, an alternate body.

In his state of heightened senses he could smell the blood. The deaths, unnatural as they were, formed an unsettling void in the normal psychic detritus of any space where humans, the kin, or magekind had been. Here, in the living room, quite near the door, was where Tigran had killed the human male. Val Antoniu. Emily had been the next to fall. Then Gray herself, with all the nerve-slivering horror of Tigran’s binding of her. Christophe had known exactly what he wanted to achieve here.

Tigran, as a mageheld kin, was a complete nullity to him. That void could be a trail to follow, but one had to take care that an absence of resonance wasn’t mistaken for evidence of a mageheld. On occasion, though, Tigran’s presence could be extrapolated where the nullity of his magic intersected with the other traces in the room. And, naturally, the effect of Tigran’s magic on Gray had left behind its own terrible pattern.

He pushed himself off the floor where he’d been seated and worked his way through the rest of the house. He could extrapolate now. Antoniu dead first. Emily incapacitated. Gray taken down and bound over to Tigran. Then Christophe with, no doubt, the assistance of his magehelds, killed the two women whose bodies he required.

He thought it likely Christophe had begun his magicking of Emily’s memories long before the mage met Gray. He wondered now if it would ever be possible to return Emily Spencer’s memories. There was no telling how badly she might be damaged from what Christophe had done to her.

Durian ended up by the wall of pictures—an accident that he should stop here? He studied the
Dance Magazine
. Her hair was black as ink, her smile brilliant and joyful. Durian wanted to kill Christophe for robbing the world of her talent. Almost more than he hated the mage for destroying her life. In the picture of her and Val Antoniu, they were both smiling. A happy couple. Would she have married Antoniu? He couldn’t imagine any man not wanting to.

There was another, smaller snapshot of Gray in a studio. She wore tights and a sloppy, short-waisted gray sweater over her leotard. She was
en pointe
in a breathtaking attitude, making a funny face for the camera. The flash had gone off and the glare in the mirror behind her had obliterated the reflection of whoever took the picture.

If not for Tigran, she would be dancing still. Perhaps coming to the end of her career, but married to Antoniu. He might even have gone to see her perform, never knowing more about her but her talent and the beauty of her dance. Chances were he would have sat in his orchestra section seats at the War Memorial Opera House and known only that this dancer was human. Nothing more. He would never have known the breathtaking sensation of sliding inside her body or heard the sound she made when he kissed her breasts or when she came or when her mouth was on him and he was thinking of things better not explored. He would never even have spoken to her.

The door to the granny unit opened.

Whoever came in meant to be stealthy. If Durian hadn’t come out of his trance-like state, it was doubtful he would have heard. He stilled himself and his magic. And waited.

“I don’t mean harm.” That was not a young man’s voice wavering in the silent air around Durian. Outside cars passed by on the street. “Please. Show yourself.”

The interloper turned on the light. Magekind, with that odd reverberation of aborted power that came when a mage had burned himself out. But this wasn’t Rasmus Kessler. This man who came in had never been anywhere near Kessler’s level of magic.

Durian watched him walk in, from all appearances an older human man with a full head of salt and pepper hair. He wore steel-rimmed glasses, but behind the lenses his eyes were the same pale blue as Gray’s.

The mage walked to a sidetable and switched on the lamp. “Forgive me. My vision isn’t what it once was.” He returned to the center of the room where he stayed, looking around him. He slid his hands from the pockets of his cardigan sweater. A wedding ring glinted on his finger. He looked harmless. A human man nearing the last years of his life, yet Durian knew he was looking at a trained mage. “I know you are here,” he said softly. “Fiend.”

Durian didn’t move.

Gray’s father held out his hands, palms up. They trembled in the air. “I burned out my magic,” he said. “Years before Anna was born. I will not attack you. There’s almost nothing left of what I used to be. As I am sure you have ascertained by now.” The tremor of his hands increased. He laughed. “At this point, I doubt I could do you harm even if I wanted to.”

Durian kept a firm hold on his magic, but he let himself be seen; in his non-human form lest there be any mistake about what the mage faced if he were lying. “Tonight,” he said, “is a good night to kill a mage.”

“No doubt you are correct.” He cocked his head and the light flickered off his glasses so that Durian could no longer see his eyes. “These days, I’m known as Richard Spencer.” Slowly, he lowered his hands. The tremor didn’t stop. “I’m Anna’s father, in case there is any question.”

“I know who you are.”

Spencer frowned. “That was you here before, I presume. My wife said she felt our daughter.”

Durian didn’t reply.

“Curious,” Spencer said. He tipped his head to one side. “Unless I am mistaken, you are not mageheld. Am I wrong about that?”

“No.”

“Who are you?”

He reacted to the man’s magic, trivial though it was now, and he had to be cautious lest the thrill of that magic seduce him into a mistake. Durian gave him not a name, but the title that would mean the most to a mage. “I am Nikodemus’s assassin.”

Oh, yes, Richard Spencer knew that name, though he tried to hide his reaction.

“Nikodemus?” He smoothed the sides of his sweater. His hair was a bit wild. He must have gotten out of bed and come here without doing anything but throwing on a change of clothes. “Did he send you to kill me? After all this time?”

“No.”

“If he has, it’s too late.” He seemed old and frail. Experience and the natural process of aging unslowed by ritual murder had etched deep lines in his face. “Is Anna alive?”

Durian bared his teeth. Like hell was he going to tell a mage anything about Gray.

“She’s my daughter.” The mage took a step toward Durian. “Is she with you? Is she all right?”

He didn’t answer.

“Losing the girls almost killed my wife. The violence of it. What those animals did to them—It’s beyond comprehension even for me. And my wife? She’s human, you see. No magic in her. She doesn’t know what I am.” He checked himself. “What I used to be. Nor did Anna. Emily knew, of course. She had to be told once she came into her power. Things would have been easier if they’d both been talented.” He slid two fingers under his glasses and pressed them against his eyes for a while. “I teach Medieval History. A bit eccentric. Absorbed in my studies. Publish or perish. Nothing more. In declining health now.” He lifted a trembling hand into the air. “My physician suspects Parkinsons’ but as I’m sure you’ve guessed it’s the copa that’s done this to me.”

“Yes.”

“I was once a young and foolish mage.” He pushed his glasses higher up on the bridge of his nose. “Well. No more.” He gave a dry, mirthless laugh. “Anna had no magic, but then she was always crazy about dancing. It’s all she ever wanted. Emily was different. I thought she had escaped notice. I trained her myself, as far as I could. I didn’t want—well. I’m sure you can imagine. Though she would have done quite well, I think. I thought that would keep us all safe. Whoever did this—” He swept a trembling hand around the room. “Whoever it was used magehelds, so please. I know it was not you.” He took another step closer to Durian. He squeezed the bottom of his sweater. “Please. Tell me. Is she well? Safe?”

“You are aware Emily is alive?”

Spencer paled. “I know Christophe dit Menart has her.”

Durian regarded the man. He was working a minor spell to make himself seem less threatening.

“If I contact her he’ll kill them. Emily and my wife. He told me that quite specifically.” The man rubbed his face with a hand, briefly dislodging his glasses. “I was the one who found the bodies.” He expression hardened. “The place stank of magic. When I confronted Christophe, that’s when he threatened me. My wife and Emily. He made it quite clear he had the power to carry out his threats. To whom could I turn for help in such a case? The police?” He drew a slow breath. “All this time, I’ve assumed Christophe had no interest in Anna. That she was dead.”

“Gray is alive,” he said at last. “Anna.”

The old man bowed his head. “Thank God.” When he lifted his head, tears glistened in his eyes. “Where is she now? Is she all right? Can I see her? Will you take me to her?”

“It would not be safe. Not for either of you.” He stretched out his fingers, making no effort to hide the talons.

Spencer took off his glasses to wipe at his eyes with the sleeve of his sweater. “How is it that you, a free fiend, are here? In this house? How do you know anything at all about my daughters?”

“That is a long story, mage.”

“Has Emily bound you somehow?” His lips moved in a silent series of words, but the result was a trivial spurt of magic. “Have you been compelled to come here?” Whatever magic Spencer had been trying to work ended with—nothing.

“No.” Durian didn’t bother moving. “Tell me about your daughters.”

“And in return, you’ll tell me what?”

Durian wondered how old Spencer was if he knew the traditional way of dealing with the free kin. Always an exchange. Tit for tat. “In return,” Durian said, “I will tell you what I can about the daughter you thought was dead.”

“I warned Emily against Christophe. She was quite strong in her magic but so young. Compared to Christophe, she was almost completely untrained. I didn’t care for dit Menart showing up, I’ll tell you that.”

“But not Anna.”

Spencer ran his fingers through his hair. “What possible interest could a mage have in her? Naturally, I assumed he was here sniffing around Emily. I was right, too. All that beauty, and the magic. Of course Christophe wanted her.”

“Did you ask anyone for help? Another mage?”

“You’ve no idea how difficult it is for someone like me to gain access to the practicing magekind. The kind who would have had the power to help.” He gripped the bottom of his sweater and pulled. “They don’t care to be reminded of what might happen to them. We magekind do not help our rivals or those less fortunate.”

“My heart bleeds,” Durian said.

He focused on Durian, and he bared his teeth. “I’ve told you all I’m going to. Tell me about Anna.” His voice softened. “Please.”