When Passion Lies: A Shadow Keepers Novel (10 page)

She closed her eyes as he punched in the code. But there was no fire. No pain.

And when she opened her eyes, he was gone.

She stood cautiously. The door to the chamber was open.

She understood then that his words hadn’t been a condemnation, but a warning.
Learn control
, he’d been saying.
Or he’d kill her himself
.

“Caris? Miss Caris?”

The words pulled her from the unwelcome memories, and Caris peered down at the gray-haired vampire with bulbous eyes and a grandmotherly smile. She was standing beside a door, gesturing at Caris.

“Tiberius will see you now,” she said, as she pushed open the door.

Right. Of course.

Caris lifted her chin and reminded herself that she was in control now. She was strong. Powerful. And she was here because she wanted to be, not because she’d been summoned.

She was a warrior.

Hell, she was
Caris
.

Right
.

With a quick nod, Caris swept past the receptionist without another word, then stepped over the threshold into another world entirely. Unlike the antechamber’s antique warmth, this room was cold and crisp. Chrome and glass surfaces, gleaming electronics. And the scent of brutal sterility.

The only hint of the Tiberius she’d known lay on the walls—rich, vibrant Impressionist paintings that gave much-needed color to the austere surroundings.

He’d been facing the window when she entered, and he hadn’t yet turned around. Which, frankly, ticked her off.

She cleared her throat, but the sound came out weak rather than annoyed.

She saw the way his shoulders stiffened before he turned slowly to face her, and she forced herself to look at him. At the midnight-black hair that had once felt so soft beneath her fingers. At the patrician jaw she used to trace with her lips. And at those onyx eyes, his gaze so solid and stoic. Eyes that revealed nothing to anyone else, but had, once upon a time, told her everything she’d ever wanted to know.

She met those eyes now, cold and inscrutable, and she realized she was standing with her jaw clenched as tightly as her fists. Deliberately, she tried to relax.

“Thanks for finally opening up the inner sanctum,” she said, painting her words thick with sarcasm. “I was beginning to think you’d forgotten that you’d invited me.”

“Invited? Were you under the impression you could politely decline?”

She tensed, then bit back her instinctive response, which was a rather colorful curse word and an assault against his parentage. Now really wasn’t the time to get into it with him. “Politely?” she repeated innocently. “I thought you knew me better.”

His smile was quick and genuine and the ice between them melted just a little. “Thank you for coming.”

“Oh.” She shifted her weight, his conciliatory tone disarming her. “You’re welcome. I guess I should apologize for killing your snitch. It wasn’t about you.”

“Even so, it has caused me quite a bit of inconvenience.”

“Yeah, you said. I’m all broken up about that.”

Tiberius moved away from the window, circling his desk until he was standing in front of it. He leaned back against it and regarded her. He looked both casual and commanding, something she’d always admired about him, and something that she knew served him well in the world of shadow politics. One minute he could be chatting someone up like his best buddy, the next minute he could lop off his head.

She looked around the room and then moved to one of the low leather chairs. She sank into it, and then with her eyes on Tiberius, casually kicked her feet up onto the glass coffee table. “So, you got me here. Whatever shall we talk about?”

“I have a few suggestions. For example, you tell me you’re not working for Lihter, and yet the same day I’m scheduled to meet with a werewolf willing to reveal secrets of Lihter’s inner circle, that werewolf is killed. And at the hand of a woman highly placed in weren circles.”

“Dammit, Tiberius, I didn’t kill him for Lihter. I don’t give a rat’s ass about Lihter. I killed him because—”

No
. She closed her mouth. No, she wasn’t going there.

“Why?”

“You know what? Forget it. I’ve already told you it has nothing to do with you. And you gave up the right to ask me that when you banished me.” She cringed, wishing she hadn’t said quite so much. Because that was the crux of it, wasn’t it? He’d washed his hands of her when he’d walked away from the safe house, and his indifference had been like a knife in her heart.

“I never forgot,” he said.

“Didn’t you? Sure felt like it from my end.”

“You went to the weren.” His words were flat, harsh. “You joined them.”

Anger curled within her. “Dammit, Tiberius, I didn’t go to Claudius. I went to
Gunnolf
. I went to a
weren
. One who could teach me how to control the new and exciting tricks and tribulations of my body.” She leaned forward. “And what the hell was I supposed to do? You made it perfectly clear I was no longer one of your people. I guess that made me one of his.” She leaned closer, getting right in his face.
“Weren.”

A tic in his cheek was the only sign that his composure had been compromised. “Exactly,” he finally said. “You’ve sided with the weren. And therein lies the rub. Because Reinholt had offered himself up as a spy.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Do you really believe I’d step in as Lihter’s go-to girl? Do you really know me so little?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t believe it.”

“Oh.” The swiftness and certainty of his response surprised her. “Well, you’re right.” She stood and moved
toward the window that he’d abandoned earlier. Outside, she could see a faint purple glow at the horizon. Dawn was coming. She frowned. In the back of her mind, she’d known they wouldn’t have time to finish their talk before the morning, but it was only now, standing in his office, that the full ramifications of that reality hit her. Today she’d have to stay in the guest wing. The thought made her shiver with a mixture of nostalgia and, yes, anticipation. Despite everything, she’d missed it here.

He moved to her side, and she had to focus to concentrate on his words rather than on the awareness of his proximity and the air that hung thick between them. “I may not believe that you’re working with Lihter, but Reinholt is still dead, and my ability to obtain intelligence about the weren community has been severely compromised.”

“Life is full of inconveniences.”

He paused, and she had a feeling he was debating something. “I need your help, Caris.”

“I asked you for help once,” she said. “In this very room, in fact.”

“Caris …”

“You turned me down flat. Kicked me out. Chose your precious politics over me and left me to find my own damn help.” She saw him flinch. Saw regret color his eyes. “What?” she snapped, unable to keep the rising anger suppressed, the hurt that was flooding back now that he was standing right in front of her. “Are you going to tell me you made the wrong decision? That you regret it all and would do it differently if you could?”

“No.” The word was soft, but it stung like a slap. “I would do nothing differently. You returned to a city of
vampires with no ability to control the change.
My
vampires. My people. My responsibility. Do I regret the choice I made? No. Do I regret that my choice hurt you? I will regret that to the end of my days.”

The air between them grew thick. She wanted to rail at him, to scream that he damn well better regret it. That he hadn’t just hurt her, he’d destroyed her and everything she’d believed was true about the two of them. About the world.

But she couldn’t. Speak of it, and she feared she’d melt, and though she might be willing to tell him that he’d kicked the shit out of her heart, she wasn’t about to show him.

“It’s dawn,” she said.

“That means we have the entire day ahead of us to discuss this matter.”

“Give me a room and we’ll talk later.”

At first she wasn’t sure he was going to answer. Then he nodded, the movement strangely formal. “Of course,” he said. “And we will talk, Caris. There are things I need to find out, and you’re the one who will help me discover them.”

Gabriel Casavetes didn’t like the cold—he never had. Ask almost anyone why that was, and the answer was always the same: Hellhounds like to be warm. Their native habitat was pretty damn hot, after all.

Maybe so, but Gabriel had never been to hell. Not a mythological hell, nor any otherworldly dimension that passed for that particular ill-documented but well-pondered place.

Closest Gabriel had been was El Paso. Come to think of it, maybe he’d set foot in hell after all.

Now here he was, smoking and stamping his feet to stay warm while he waited for Everil to come out of the third tavern they’d been in since sundown.

They’d both spent last night on the mountain, talking with the percipient—who’d seen nothing—and hovering near the forensic guys, urging them to make conclusions based on footprints and trace evidence. But the snow had filled in the footprints, and they hadn’t found any decent trace.

Which left Gabriel in the irritating position of being an investigator without a lot to investigate.

“So what’s our next step?” Everil had asked, and Gabriel had to admit that they were going to have to rely on the long-standing tradition of legwork.

“Wonderful! Wonderful!” Everil had been so giddy he’d practically clapped, and the tiny wings he kept hidden
under a jacket fluttered unseen but made an odd scraping noise that Gabriel found incredibly distracting. “So what first?”

“Sleep,” Gabriel had said, and despite Everil’s disappointment, Gabriel had insisted. He wasn’t any use to anyone, much less the dead, if he couldn’t think, so he had caught a few hours of rest and then woke up with a plan.

He’d thought about heading out on his own, but he couldn’t get his partner’s excited, albeit prissy, face out of his head. So he’d called Everil and outlined their course of action.

Zermatt wasn’t a town with murders, not of the human or shadower variety. And yet last night a weren snitch had ended up dead and an Alliance big shot had come to town. That suggested that Big Stuff was afoot. And in Gabriel’s experience, Big Stuff tended to not be homegrown.

“So you think the killer came in from out of town.”

“I think it’s highly likely.”

“Zermatt gets a lot of tourists,” Everil said, and unfortunately, the little guy was right.

“Hopefully this tourist made himself known. We have two possibilities. Either our killer knew about the rendezvous point, or the killer simply knew Reinholt was going to be in town.”

Everil nodded seriously. So seriously, in fact, that Gabriel was a bit surprised he didn’t whip out a pad and start taking notes. “So which scenario are we hoping for?”

“The second,” Gabriel said. And then, because he was suddenly possessed by the spirit of his third-grade teacher, he added, “Do you know why?”

Everil’s forehead furrowed, his slightly pointed ears wriggling. “Because then the killer would have to look for him?”

“Got it in one.”

And since Zermatt was, for better or worse, a heavy tourist establishment, the taverns seemed like the best bet for starting their inquiries. They’d gone to the first two together, but with this third one, Everil had wanted to go in alone to test out his newly honed investigative mojo.