My Immortal Assassin (4 page)

“This is not over.”

Durian smiled, and it felt uncharacteristically good. “I imagine not. But in the meantime, she is under our protection.”

Even as the words left his mouth they felt oddly prophetic.

CHAPTER 5

G
ray’s awareness of the demon didn’t change even when she tried to block him out. It was like he was permanently lodged in the back of her head. She wasn’t sure if that was cause for panic yet. She surveyed the now empty street while she worked to regulate her breathing and her emotions. Life lesson number one: never give a fiend a way into your head. Especially when you were otherwise defenseless. You might never get him out once he was there. She was still alive, though, and that was something.

“Christophe’s not going to let you get away with this, you know,” she said to him.

The fiend strolled to his car and opened the passenger door again. He held it for her. His expression was impossible to dissect. “I am well acquainted with his dislike of losing. Particularly to someone like me.”

“Yeah.” She shoved her hands into her back pockets. “You animal.”

His gaze was steady. Opaque. No sense of humor. Gorgeous man, but honestly, she liked a guy who smiled more than once a century.

She held his gaze. “How long have you known Nikodemus?”

He tugged on the top of the car door.

“You’re good buddies, though. Right?”

“Buddies?” He put a hand to his chest and looked appalled.

“Don’t go having heart failure over it. Pals? Amigos? Chums, acquaintances only in passing?”

“Please get in the car.”

She sighed. “It’s not like I have anywhere else to go. I need a new plan for killing Christophe anyway.” She walked to the car. “Mind if I pick your brain on that one?”

“Gray.”

She shrugged and got in. Most cars had something of their owners about them. Papers. Gadget chargers. Gum, mints, spare change, or a travel mug. There wasn’t anything like that here. The interior was pristine.

“Where we going?” she asked when he was in the driver’s seat.

“Someplace we can talk without interruption,” he said in a voice as sterile as the inside of his car.

“Can’t wait to hear all about you and your BFF Nikodemus.”

After ten, maybe fifteen minutes of silence while the guy drove like an old lady on her way to church, he pulled into the garage of a house on Broadway up near the Presidio, a rarified neighborhood of mansions with views that hurt your heart to look at. It was still dark, so there wasn’t much to see right now. He walked her through the side door of a large house. A very large house.

She looked around and didn’t see anyone. The house wasn’t empty, and she couldn’t figure out why she thought that, given how quiet things were. There was an awareness in her head, a sense of someone else. Whoever it was, he outranked her, whatever that meant. The worst part, the creepy part, was that she didn’t know why she felt that way. The markings on her arm were going crazy again. Her skin ached as if she had a bad sunburn where the green markings had shown up. They were moving again, shifting into new patterns. She gritted her teeth while she tried to ignore the feeling that something was alive underneath her skin.

Most of the lights were off and she didn’t hear noises like you’d expect to hear when someone was home. No TV. No hey-I-live-here sounds. The kin, she knew, didn’t sleep. When they were passing as human, they faked it when they had to. As she and the demon walked through the silent house, she had no problem making out high ceilings, carved moldings, and museum-quality furniture. He knew his way around, that was clear.

They ended up in a twenty-by-twenty room on the first floor, an office of some sort with a glass desk and some crazily curved bookshelves. There were a few books on the shelves, a pair of jade Foo Dogs and several blown glass vases in neon colors and warped shapes. All the vases were empty. There was a sound system with an iPod dock. Against one wall was a smallish couch of crimson leather. A set of tall windows in the wall opposite the desk looked onto darkness. The wood floor was laid out in strips that formed a broad arrowhead pattern.

She looked down at her ragged pants and shoes, then at the fiend in his ensemble of meticulously tailored black and more black, then around the room again. She thought about her sense that someone else was here. Wherever she was, this wasn’t his house. Just why she thought that wasn’t clear to her, but she did think so. “Is this where Nikodemus lives?”

He stood by the door, hands loose at his sides. The guy was scary just standing there. “No. Nikodemus does not live here. The owner is attending to business outside the country.”

“Does he know you’re here?”

After a brief hesitation, he said, “Yes.” He closed the door and motioned to the couch. All business.

“Can I assume I’ve found the free kin Tigran told me about?” Maybe she hadn’t found Nikodemus himself, but this might just be close enough.

“Yes. Do please sit down, Gray.”

She sat at one end of the couch. The far end. The demon sat at the other. There might as well have been an ocean between them. He didn’t say anything. She settled her foot across her knee and wrapped her fingers around her ankle. Upstairs, someone walked a short distance, then settled down again.

“So. Whatever your name is. What are we going to talk about?”

He inclined his head. “Durian.”

“Durian.” She nodded.

“Some background is in order.” He plucked at the crease of his pants leg until it ran straight down to the top of his shoe.

“All ears.”

“As perhaps you have guessed already, I am sworn to the demon warlord Nikodemus.”

“What does that mean?” She leaned forward. “Is it anything like being mageheld?”

He had a way of looking at her that made her think about creatures that hid in shadows and that you never knew were there until it was too late. He was looking at her that way right now. “I have free will, Gray.”

“You’re not footloose and fancy free, either, though.”

“No.” His dark, dark eyes watched her. Scoured her, actually. “Are not all of us bound by constraints of some sort? We agree to conventions of behavior and, most of us, to the rule of law.”

She forced herself not to move, to keep her expression as blank as his. Inside, she was a mass of conflicting emotions. “Part of me wants to walk out.”

“You are free to do so.”

“I’d be safer on my own, far away from the kind of creatures that can take over my mind. Force me to do things I don’t want to.” She held up a hand to stop his interruption. “For as long as I could survive without anyone to show me how to manage Tigran’s magic.”

“You understand your situation, then.”

She nodded. “Can you help me?” Colors flickered in his eyes, mostly shades of purple, but other colors, too. That didn’t startle her. She’d seen that effect before, after all. His silence, however, freaked her out. “Can you at least tell me who might help me?” Filled with a nervous and desperate energy, she jumped to her feet. “I haven’t got any money, but I can get a job and pay my own way.” She paced a few steps. “All I need is to know how to deal with this. With having Tigran’s magic. It’s not—not what I thought it would be like.”

“I might be of assistance.”

“Might?” She shook her head in a tight negative as she paced. “I’m no good at subtext. Not when my life is at stake. How about you explain that
might
?”

“Tell me what happened, and I’ll be in a position to know if I can help you. Clear enough?”

She stopped pacing. She’d found the free kin, just like Tigran had wanted her to. She wasn’t going to throw away his sacrifice because she was afraid. “Okay. Here’s the thing. We figured Christophe was eventually going to find out what we were doing—I’ll explain that better in a bit—and that he might kill Tigran when that happened. We knew that was a risk. He taught me what to do in order to take his magic if it came to that, and when it did… I did. Only, somehow I think I ended up with some of Christophe’s magic, too.”

“Did you have magic before this?”

“My sister was the witch. Never me.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.” His gaze stayed steady.

“Me, too.” She sucked in a breath. It hurt to think of her sister. The loss was as sharp as ever. “Look. I don’t know what you’re like. Right now, you’re scaring the hell out of me.”

“I can see that.”

“It’s like I spent all this time with a tame panther and you’re a wild one. What I know might be completely wrong. Enough to get me killed.”

“What is it you know?”

“Magehelds like Tigran are cut off from the normal psychic links with the free kin. You can’t sense each other the way you should.”

“Go on.”

“The more powerful the demon, the better looking their human form tends to be.” She laughed, but she sounded nervous because she was. “Well. I mean look at you. Jeez.” That got her what she was starting to think of as the glare of doom. “Tigran said that’s because there’s more magic to create and hold the human manifestation. You have alternate forms, some more than one, and you reproduce with human women. You aren’t fertile unless you’re in your alternate form.”

“So far that’s not inaccurate.”

“A mageheld is a slave to his mage.” She swallowed. “There are ways for them to resist, but an order is an order. Nikodemus is a warlord and he’s organizing a resistance against the magekind. Tigran wanted me to join up, but I would have wanted to anyway.”

“Please sit down, Gray.”

“Right.” She sat on the couch again. “Sure.”

“I am interested in hearing about what happened between you and Tigran such that you ended up here. Asking to join a resistence movement.”

“Is it true?” All that got her was silence. She stared at the ceiling. Words flew around in her head but none of them seemed adequate to shape any kind of reply about what she and Tigran had done. Or, more specifically, what Christophe had ordered him to do to her, and what she and Tigran had done about that.

“It is remarkable you were able to thwart Christophe in any respect.”

She realized she was tapping her heel against the floor. Faster and faster. She stopped. The room with its crazily tilted bookcase and vases that looked like they’d been left in the oven too long was getting to her. Her entire life was getting to her. “Right. So, okay.” She rubbed her hands over her face. “I understand completely that Tigran was not acting from his own choice. There were probably things he couldn’t tell me that he should have. All right?”

“Understood.”

“It’s like this. Christophe had my sister killed and me brought back to his house. I thought Tigran was some psycho killer at first. But he sat me down and he explained what he was and what he had been ordered to do and what that meant for us both.” She shook her head. “That very first day he told me he was willing to die.” She had to wait a bit before she could continue. God, all that just seemed unreal now. “It took a while before I believed him and then we needed time to… get things to a point where there was a chance it would work.”

“Where what would work?”

She couldn’t answer right away. “Right.” She stared at a spot on the floor and gathered herself. “Tigran was supposed to reproduce with me.” She could feel her cheeks burning hot. She did her best to separate herself from her emotions. “Christophe wanted children he could take mageheld from pretty much the start. So he wouldn’t have to go out and find free kin.”

Durian drew in a long breath and let it out just as slowly.

“The wiggle room was in me staying pregnant. My idea, actually.” Gray stared out the window even though there wasn’t anything to see. “If I ever have kids,” she said, “if I still can, they won’t be born for any reason but me wanting them or knowingly taking the risk of having one. I’m not a fucking baby factory for Christophe or anyone else.” She glanced away from the window. He was watching her too carefully, she thought. She held his gaze. “I don’t care what you think about that.”

She rocked forward, realized she was giving away her turmoil, and stopped. She got up and went to the window, talking to the darkness. She could see his reflection in the window. “We knew he’d figure it out eventually, since, obviously, there would never be any children, and that Tigran would probably pay with his life. But what that bought us was time for him to make sure I could take his magic when the time came.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Because that way, you see, Tigran wouldn’t die for nothing. It was awful.” She turned around. “It worked. Just the way he said it would.”

On the surface, Durian didn’t react to anything she’d said. He stayed exactly where he was with exactly the same unreadable expression on his face. Except something did change. Her sense of him opened up. She dropped into his head, and there was a world there so foreign, so breathtakingly dark she went stock still.

He had killed. Many, many times. Swiftly. Without mercy. Without emotion. And he would do so again when it was required of him. Isolation. Anticipation of the hunt for his next target. Rage. Control so complete she might never find what lay beneath the surface he allowed her to see. She tried.

He blocked her. Her awareness of him went nova, and it freaking hurt. The markings on her arm and temple turned to fire underneath her skin. She didn’t know he’d gotten up or that she was going to fall on her ass until his arm shot out and stabilized her. He let her go when she was sitting on the couch again. She blinked a few times while her stomach threatened to turn inside out.

“None of the kin would fault you for surviving.”

She blinked at him, half expecting him to change forms. She fought her panic. Durian stayed human. Thank God. He leaned toward her, his eyes swirling with purple. He continued in the same smooth tones as before. “I am, at this moment, open to you. As you are to me. And that, Gray, is not something I often permit.”

“Are you going to help me?”

“Yes.”

She nodded. “Thank you.”

He extended one arm along the top of the couch. His eyes were brown again, that dark, dark brown that was almost black. “There are things you must understand before we proceed.”

“Such as?”

“Though I have a number of responsibilities to Nikodemus, there are two that need concern you now. The first is his safety. The second is my work as his assassin.” His upper back relaxed against the couch. “If you imagine those two things are closely related, you would be correct.”