Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) (3 page)

He gave me a long, thoughtful stare. Trying to read me, I guessed. I’d told him the truth, even if I hadn’t exactly told him everything, and he seemed to read that in my face. He nodded and let out a little sigh.

“Thank you. That does.”

He looked honestly relieved, like he’d been worried about Konstantin’s safety. I knew there were all sorts of people out there, but I still had trouble understanding how someone could actually
care
about Konstantin. Fearful respect I could understand, but not affection. And yet I didn’t think it was fear or respect driving Cyrus right now.

“Anderson told me Konstantin killed all his children before you,” I said. “Why would you care so much about his safety? And what makes you think he won’t kill you, too, someday?”

Cyrus shrugged. “He’s my father, Nikki. I know he’s not a nice person, and I know he doesn’t have a good history with his children. But he’s still the man who raised me, and I think we both learned a lot from what happened with the others. I’ve made it clear that I have no desire to take his place, and while he doesn’t trust me completely, I think he at least for the most part believes me.”

“Um, correct me if I’m wrong, but you
have
taken his place. Haven’t you?”

He smiled blandly at me, and I understood.

“You’ve taken his place in name only,” I said. I should have known someone like Konstantin would never voluntarily step down. “He’s still pulling the strings.” I frowned. “And he’s okay with your decree that the Olympians not kill Descendant children anymore?”

It had always been the Olympian policy under Konstantin that when they discovered a family of Descendants, they would kill them all, except for children under the age of five, who would be raised to believe in the Olympian ideal—and would later be used as lethal weapons against other
Liberi.
That policy had been the first thing Cyrus had changed when he’d taken over.

Cyrus grinned wryly. “He doesn’t love it,” he admitted. “But since I don’t actually
want
to lead the
Olympians, he had to make some concessions to get me to do it.”

I didn’t for a moment believe Konstantin had abandoned his quest to rid the world of all Descendants and
Liberi
who weren’t under his thumb, and in his mind, that meant killing children too old to be controlled. If he was letting Cyrus put a stop to the practice, that meant he thought of his son’s rule as nothing but a temporary inconvenience. I didn’t like Cyrus’s chances of surviving the regime change when Konstantin took back the reins.

“You keep playing with fire and you’re going to get burned,” I said, and Cyrus laughed like I’d made a particularly funny joke. I thought back on my words, but they were nothing more than a perfectly ordinary cliché, not funny at all. Whatever the joke was, I didn’t get it.

Cyrus realized I didn’t get it and raised his eyebrows at me. “Playing with fire?” he prompted. “Getting burned?”

Nope, that didn’t clear things up a bit.

“You are aware that my father and I are descendants of Helios, the sun god, aren’t you?”

Actually, I’d never bothered to ask. For some reason, I’d kind of assumed they were descendants of Zeus because he was king of the gods. I wouldn’t have thought Konstantin, who puffed himself up with so much pomp and circumstance, would be the descendant of a god many people had never even heard of.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Cyrus said. He turned in
his chair and tugged down the collar of his shirt so I could see the glyph that marked his skin, right where his neck joined his shoulders. It was an iridescent sun with long, spidery rays. If he wore a shirt with no collar, some of those rays would be visible, though only to other
Liberi
. I myself had a glyph in the middle of my forehead, and no mortal had ever shown any sign that they could see it.

“I’m still kind of new at this game,” I reminded Cyrus. “I tend not to think about who a person’s descended from unless I can see their glyph. Out of sight, out of mind.”

“Understandable,” he said, turning back toward me. “I’ve known what my father was, what
I
was, for all my life. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have all this thrust upon you all of a sudden.”

There was real sympathy in his words, and I had to give myself another mental slap in the face to remind myself he was one of the bad guys. He was just more subtle and deceptive about it than the rest of the Olympians.

The waitress returned to our table, bringing our food. I tried not to stare at his
croque monsieur
with naked envy, but it was hard when the bread was a perfect toasty brown and glistened with butter. My soup and salad would make a perfectly nice lunch, but Cyrus’s looked positively decadent.

To my surprise, Cyrus didn’t even bother to glance at his food. Instead, he opened his wallet and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill.

“Lunch is my treat, since I barged in on you so
rudely,” he said, laying the money on the table and pushing back his chair.

“You’re not going to eat?”

He shook his head. “I’ve said what I needed to say. There’s no reason for me to disturb you any further.”

Then why did you order food?
I wondered, but declined to ask.

“I’m sure they’d be willing to give you a to-go bag. Throwing away a
croque monsieur
is a crime against nature.”

Cyrus grinned at me as he stood up. “I saw the way you looked at my food when the waitress brought it. I have a strong suspicion it won’t go to waste. It’s been a pleasure.”

I watched him leave with what I was sure was a puzzled frown on my face. I’d been properly warned off, but I had the nagging suspicion that there’d been more going on during our conversation than met the eye. However, I couldn’t figure out what it was. And the
croque monsieur
was getting cold.

Cyrus was right; his food didn’t go to waste. It wasn’t until I was almost halfway through the sandwich that I realized Cyrus had specifically come to talk to me here, nowhere near where I lived or worked. No one knew where I was. So how had he found me?

The only explanation I could come up with was that he had tracked me by my cell phone somehow. Not something a private citizen would ordinarily be able to do, but the Olympians had so much money to
throw around they could buy just about any service known to mankind.

I resisted the urge to dig my phone out of my purse and remove the battery. Cyrus already knew where I was right this moment, so there was no point. But I added a new task to my to-do list: buy a disposable cell phone.

There are some people who can chow down on
butter-soaked ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch every day without gaining an ounce. I am not one of them.

Considering the radical changes my life had undergone recently, I’d decided to step up my workout regimen so I’d be in the best possible shape to fight off bad guys, and one of my favorite workouts was running in the woods. My overindulgence at lunch and the relatively mild weather meant this was a good day for a run.

I returned to the mansion and changed into my running clothes—nothing fancy, just a T-shirt and shorts. Sometimes my friend and fellow
Liberi
-in-residence Maggie went running with me, but after my meetings with Anderson and Cyrus, I needed some time to myself, so I didn’t go looking for her.

Being a city girl, I have very little concept of how big an acre is, but I knew there were a lot of them on Anderson’s property. Even just running up and back along the driveway was not an inconsiderable amount of exercise, but there were also tons of woods. Those weren’t conveniently furnished with running
trails, though Maggie had told me that during the warmer months, Anderson brought in a tree service on a regular basis to keep the weeds and underbrush tamed. The result was that we had all the beauty of nature, without any of the inconvenience.

I went up and down the driveway once as a warm-up, then plunged into the woods, just deep enough that I couldn’t see the cleared land on which the house and its environs stood. Pine needles and leaves crunched pleasantly under my feet, and the air smelled of earth and evergreens. A brilliant red cardinal peeped from its perch on a branch above me, and I was far enough away from the road that I couldn’t hear any car sounds. The knot of tension in my gut released as I drank in the peace and solitude.

I was in the zone, my breathing steady, my legs carrying me at a comfortable pace without any conscious control, and I felt like I could run ten miles without being overly winded. I couldn’t, of course. Marathon running wasn’t one of my supernatural powers. When I came out of the almost trancelike state I was in, I’d be breathing like a racehorse and the muscles in my legs would burn something fierce, but for a few perfect minutes, I was transported.

My footsteps faltered when I heard a sound that most definitely didn’t belong out here in the woods of Maryland—a roar that sounded like it came from the throat of a big cat. The sound of that roar brought me back to myself, and I felt the brisk January air burning my throat and lungs as I panted heavily. My legs felt like a pair of tree trunks, rooted to the
ground, and I bent over and put my hands on my knees, watching my breath steam as I slowly came to myself.

There was another roar, and I forced myself to stand up straight and look around. I have a very good, possibly supernatural, sense of direction, and even though there were no obvious landmarks around me, just trees, trees, and more trees, I knew exactly where I was.

In the woods behind the house, there was a large, grassy clearing. I wasn’t sure what its original purpose had been, but some of Anderson’s
Liberi
used it as a sort of practice field, where they could hone their powers without anyone seeing them. I had used the clearing for target practice, trying to learn the limits of my supernatural aim, which seemed to apply equally well to throwing and shooting.

I was currently about fifty yards from the clearing, and with the leafless trees and the lack of underbrush, I wouldn’t have to go very far before I’d be able to see whatever was going on there. The feline roar ripped through the air again, and I knew any sensible person would turn tail and run as far away from that sound as possible. But I’ve rarely been accused of being sensible, so I started forward again, this time at a brisk walk.

I knew who and what was in the clearing, of course. It had to be Jamaal.

A descendant of the Hindu death goddess Kali, Jamaal possessed a terrifying kind of death magic that almost had a will of its own and
wanted
to be used.
The death magic had driven him half mad, though I suspected his temper had always been an issue, even before he’d become
Liberi
. Thanks to some info I’d gathered from serial killer Justin Kerner, Jamaal had learned to channel some of that magic into the form of a tiger. Summoning the great cat seemed to vent the death magic for him, so that he was no longer as volatile as he had once been. However, his control of the tiger was shaky, to say the least, which meant that when I heard the roar, I should have known better than to approach.

Curiosity was more likely to kill
me
than the cat under the circumstances, but I’d had the reluctant hots for Jamaal almost since we first met, and I couldn’t resist my urge to investigate.

I eased my way through the trees toward the clearing. I hadn’t heard any more roaring, so it was possible Jamaal had put the tiger to rest. I’d only seen the creature once before, during our final battle with Justin Kerner, and I’d been too distracted by my attempts to catch a killer to take a good look.

I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. I stopped in my tracks and turned slowly, noticing for the first time that the wind was at my back—carrying my scent straight to the clearing. Perhaps the tiger had been aware of me all along and its roars had been warnings I’d foolishly failed to heed.

It was peering at me through the trees, way too close for comfort. It was a beautiful creature, no doubt about it, with pumpkin-orange stripes and a magnificently muscled body. Paws the size of skillets
sported claws that could rip a person open with one swipe, and the amber eyes practically glowed with intensity.

I stood still and swallowed hard. I had no doubt the tiger could outrun me in about two strides if it felt so inclined. I stared into those amber eyes, trying to guess what it was going to do. The tiger snarled, showing off an impressive set of teeth, and I quickly dropped my gaze. I knew dogs and primates took eye contact as a form of challenge, but I wasn’t sure about tigers. Of course, if this one was the embodiment of Jamaal’s rage and death magic, it probably didn’t take much to provoke it.

“Jamaal?” I called softly, afraid yelling would spur the tiger into motion. “A little help here?”

I didn’t know exactly where he was, but he had to be nearby. I just hoped he hadn’t completely lost control of the animal.

The tiger stalked forward, moving with sensuous grace. I scanned the ground in search of a rock I could use as a weapon, while keeping the tiger in my peripheral vision. Even with my powers, I didn’t think throwing a rock at it would even slow the tiger down, but anything was better than just standing there and being mauled. As far as I knew, the tiger couldn’t do me any lasting harm, but it could hurt me, even kill me, in the short term. The magic of the
Liberi
would bring me back no matter what happened to my body, but I’d died once before and hadn’t enjoyed the experience. I wasn’t eager for a repeat performance.

“Jamaal?” I called again, louder this time.

The tiger was close enough now that I could probably have reached out and scratched behind its ears. If I had a death wish, that is. I was shaking with the effort of restraining my primal urge to run, but I was sure that was the one thing I could do to make the situation even worse.

“I don’t think Sita likes you,” Jamaal said from behind me.

I hadn’t heard him approach, but then I’d been keeping my attention firmly fixed on the tiger, where it belonged.