shaede assassin 05 - shadows at midnight (16 page)

I wasn’t about to take any chances.

I headed for a little dive bar a few blocks from my new studio. It wasn’t much to look at, but with a name like The Pit, it’s not like they were doing any false advertising, either. I melted into shadow—I wasn’t interested in being seen—and made my way to the darkest corner of the bar. I found a tiny table tucked in a corner and out of view, and regained my corporeal form only when I knew no one cared enough about my adopted space to pay any attention.

This was my favorite perch to people watch from. It made me feel a little more normal to soak in the normalcy around me, even if it did qualify me as sort of a voyeur. It had been so long since I’d had a relationship of any kind, I forgot what it was like to have someone in my life that I could count on. Someone I could confide in. Hell, have a simple conversation with. Almost a century had passed and I still missed Azriel with a bone-deep ache that hollowed out my heart and left me cold and empty.

Death would have been a reprieve from the torture of eternal solitude.

“Someone wants to meet you.”

I turned my head slowly to face the kid staring down at me. I recognized him as the bartender. Leroy—or something like that. I leveled my gaze and cocked a curious brow. “Do I seem like I’m looking for a date tonight?”

He flashed me a wide, brilliant smile that more than likely incinerated panties on a daily basis. Charming. Easy-going. And unafraid.

Interesting.

“Nah. I wouldn’t call you particularly approachable.” He set a bright orange and ruby red drink down on the table. “Sex on the beach. On the house.”

Another wide smile. I didn’t think he was coming on to me, but damn, given the proper motivation I could definitely take a model like him for a spin. Too bad I’d sworn off personal interactions. I lifted the glass and gave him a silent salute. A little sweeter than what I usually drank, but it had a nice fruity tang. And I supposed a sugar rush couldn’t hurt.

“Thanks for the drink. Still doesn’t mean I’m interested.”

He crossed his arms in front of his wide chest. “How do you know? And for the record, this isn’t about a date.”

I had to give it to him, the boy was persistent. And now, my curiosity was piqued. “Okay, fine.” I pushed out the chair across from me with my foot. The bartender flashed me another confident grin. “Talk to me.”

#

“Talk to me.”

I stirred from sleep to find Tyler hovering over me. He braced one arm beside me and leaned down, so close that the corner of his mouth brushed mine.

“What?” My voice was thick with sleep and it took a minute for me to remember exactly where I was. I’d meant to take a short nap, but had fallen into a deep, dream-filled sleep. A wormhole of my past that was still fresh in my mind.

“You were talking in your sleep,” Ty murmured with amusement.

“Trying to flush out my secrets, huh?” I stretched my stiff muscles. Tyler made no move to put any distance between us. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t have any. Not anymore.”

He put his mouth to mine. A gentle quest of a kiss, feather-light. My arms went around his neck and I threaded my fingers through his hair as his lips moved over mine. There was nothing harsh or demanding about it. Nothing greedy or punishing. Not an ounce of selfishness. I loved him for his tenderness. He always seemed to know when I needed it most.

“Wait.” I pulled away. I did in fact have a secret. Well, not so much a secret as something that I wanted to tell him before it became a secret. “Xander kissed me today.”

Ty let out a long suffering sigh. He kept his lips against mine and said, “You sure know how to kill a mood.”

“Sorry.” He sat upright and I pushed myself up on the pillows. I hadn’t reciprocated the kiss, but keeping it from Ty would make it seem as though I felt guilty for what had happened and that’s how secrets were born. “I just wanted you to know. He was obviously out of his mind at the time. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

“You sure about that?”

Ty’s sour tone prickled the hairs at the back of my neck. “Yes. And you know it, too. I talked to Raif today. He said that if you can help Xander like you helped me, you’ll be pardoned.”

He answered with a derisive snort. “As if I need their
pardon
.”

I pursed my lips. “You have enough problems; wouldn’t you like to have one less thing on your plate?”

“What other problems do you think I have?”

I might have vowed not to keep secrets, but Ty was still having a hard time with that particular promise. “The Synod, for starters.” I held up my left hand and shoved my ring toward his face. “This. Don’t think I’ve forgotten the letter you gave me when Adare arrested you, Tyler. We have a lot to talk about.”

He brushed a palm over his head. “We do.”

“There was a man. At The Pit. I saw him the night Lorik took me. I saw him again two nights ago. Sort of had an English professor look. Tall, well put together in a three-piece suit. His eyes were like yours, hazel but more green than gold.”

“Merrick,” Ty said.

“Merrick,” I deadpanned. “As in,
He’s my friend, Darian, but he’s loyal to the Synod and I don’t know if I can trust him.
” I repeated the words Ty had written to me in his letter as though his memory needed jogged about who exactly he was talking about.

“Yes.”

Those single-word answers weren’t doing anything for my temper. “
Who is he
, Tyler?”

“Levi’s adoptive father,” Ty responded. “And the Ordar of the Synod.”

“Ordar?” I repeated.

“It means he’s the chairman of the Synod, more or less,” Ty responded wryly. “The Jinn in charge.”

Knock me over with a fucking feather.
Levi
. That little shit. I knew that his connection to the supernatural world was big, but never in a million years would I have thought that his own dad—adopted or not—was the Jinn in charge of the mother-fucking Synod. Jesus.

“He’s the one who told you we couldn’t have any sort of relationship aside from protector and charge?”

“Yes.”

If he didn’t start answering in full sentences, I was going to go ballistic. “Was he the reason you ran off this afternoon when we got back to Xander’s house?”

“He summoned me. I’m required to respond.”

Summoned him how, I wondered. The message obviously hadn’t been hand delivered. Magic? Telepathy? I could speculate the possibilities for hours.

“My problems are your problems.” It was a truth that had spanned the entirety of our relationship. “And that means your problems are
mine
. There’s no use trying to protect me by keeping things from me because you know as well as I do that I’ll butt my way in anyway.”

“Not yet, Darian.” Tyler reached out and stroked the tips of his fingers over mine. His brow puckered as he brushed over my ring and a shock of cold raced up my arm. “Please. I need a little time. Can you trust me and know that I’m doing what’s best for both of us right now?”

“We both know that secrets don’t work with us, Ty. We’ll self-destruct.”

“I know. And that’s not what I want. Let me protect you. For a little while at least. Because it won’t be long before I might not be able to.”

Ominous words. But I didn’t scare easily.

“If we can’t tackle your problems yet, let’s start with mine. Xander—can you help him?”

“Depends. Can I help him off a cliff?”

Ty’s smirk wasn’t half as charming as he thought it was. “You’re not funny.”

“I can’t help him,” Tyler said after a moment. “Believe me, Darian, if I thought it would get both him and Raif off my back, I’d return Xander’s clarity in an instant. But a fractured mind isn’t as easy to heal as you think.”

I cocked a brow and fixed Ty with a stern gaze. “You fixed mine,” I replied. “It was almost immediate.”

His eyes flitted to my ring and just as quickly refocused on my face. “Because of our bond.”

Our bond, and the silver circling my thumb, no doubt. “There has to be something we can do to help him.” Ty’s brow arched. “Okay, there has to be something
I
can do to help him.”

“You already did, Darian,” Ty replied. “You got him out of there.”

It wasn’t enough. If Xander’s mind wouldn’t heal, the results could be disastrous not only for him. So much weighed on his ability to rule. An entire kingdom rested on his shoulders. And I wasn’t sure how long Raif would be able to bear the burden while his brother healed.

“I can’t just sit around and do nothing, Ty.”

He let out a slow breath. “Have you ever considered that maybe that’s exactly what you should do?”

My eyes felt like they were about to pop out of the sockets. “What? How can you seriously suggest that?”

“You’re so damned enmeshed with Xander, Raif, and the rest of them that you can’t see that it might be time to take a step back. From the moment Xander stepped foot in Seattle, shit has hit the fan. Your codependence isn’t doing you any favors.”

“Codependence?” I knew that Ty would never be Xander’s—or Raif’s—number one fan, but his words stung.

Ty raised his hands in surrender as my tone escalated. “Relax. Maybe codependence wasn’t the right choice of word. But even you have to admit that your life was pretty gods-damned uneventful before Xander forced himself into your life.”

The only reason my life had been
uneventful
was because Ty had done his damnedest to perpetuate the myth that I was a lone supernatural creature in a sea full of the mundane. “Xander showing up here might have opened up a world I hadn’t known about, but even if he’d chosen not to come here, Azriel would have found me eventually and shit would be going down exactly the same.”

“Maybe.” Ty averted his gaze. “Maybe not. I just don’t understand why you can’t let Raif handle this? The reason Xander thinks he has a claim on you is because you’re ever present in his life.”

Ty and I weren’t exactly on steady ground. We’d reconciled but that didn’t mean our relationship was solid. We had our own issues to work through and it was obvious that my relationship with Xander was one of them. “First of all, no one has a claim on me.” I belonged to myself first and foremost. I made my own decisions. “Secondly, my wanting to help Xander has nothing to do with any feelings I might have for him. I love
you
. Period. I thought you knew that, Ty. I thought you understood that.”

“I do know it.” His expression fell and he let out a long sigh. “But Xander doesn’t and that’s the problem.”

I’d made it clear to Xander more than once there would never be anything between us. True, he was stubborn but what did that matter? I didn’t want him the way he wanted me, that’s all there was to it. But his feelings for me shouldn’t justify turning my back on him.

“Tyler—”

“You forget that Xander and I spent some quality time together recently,” Tyler interrupted. “And believe me, Darian, he didn’t pull any punches. He let me know exactly how he felt about you. He’s not above manipulating you to keep you close. You have this…weakness when it comes to him. To Raif and Asher, too. They’ll continue to use you because they all know that you’ll come running if they so much as let out a whimper.”

His anger mounted with his words but I refused to lose my cool. A fight wasn’t going to do either of us any good. “I owe him, Tyler. He gave himself to her to buy my freedom.”

“You wouldn’t have been in that situation in the first place if it hadn’t been for his multiple fuckups!” Tyler shouted. “He owed
you
. Not the other way around. He’s put you in harm’s way time and again and rather than hate him for it, you keep running back there, more than ready to stretch your neck out on the chopping block once again.”

Xander’s infatuation might have been a little misguided but he cared about me. I’d seen proof of it in Padma’s dungeon. And Raif’s loyalty to me couldn’t ever be questioned. Or Asher’s. Neither one of them would ever willingly put me in the path of danger.

“So you think I’m stupid, is that it? That I would blindly let them use me and run back for more abuse?”

“I don’t think you’re stupid, Darian,” Tyler said quietly. “Sometimes I think you’re too damned smart for your own good. It’s not your head that’s the problem. It’s your heart. It’s too damned big.”

“Wow. Somehow, I didn’t think that would be a quality you’d find unsavory in me, Tyler.”

“It’s the thing I love most about you,” he responded. “But it’s also the reason why you can’t cut ties with Xander when you know it’s what’s best for both of you.”

Maybe Ty was right. Dysfunctional as it might have been, my connection to Raif and Xander and even Ash was more than just a simple friendship. They were my family. I’d existed most of my life feeling adrift and unconnected to another soul. They’d become my lifeline. Did that mean that I enabled Xander’s behavior? Encouraged him to press his case with me over and again because I was simply too weak to let him go?

“Are you trying to tell me that we can’t have a relationship unless I walk away from them, Ty?”

He pursed his lips and gave me a stern look. “I’d never tell you what to do, Darian. I think we both know you do what you want anyway.”

Low freaking blow. Henry had isolated me through abuse and belittlement. He’d intimidated me to the point that I made very few friendships outside of the façade he wanted people to see. Azriel had separated me from my humanity and closed me off from the world under the guise of caution until I cleaved to him and him alone. No matter the havoc it had wreaked in my life, Xander’s appearance had connected me to the supernatural world as well as other creatures like me. Well, sort of like me… Didn’t Tyler realize how much that meant to me?

I stared at him, unable to speak through the hurt that sliced through my chest. Tyler let out another gust of breath and raked his hands through the tangles of his hair. A crease cut into his brow as his gaze drank me in.

“I’m an asshole. A jealous, selfish asshole, and I’m sorry.”