Wrath: The Niteclif Evolutions, Book 2 (21 page)

“Brilliant!” Hellion exclaimed. “We’ll go to London, retrieve the hair, and I’ll perform a spell of revelation. It should be able to give us at least a cursory idea what flavor of individual we’re dealing with.” He scrambled from the bed, grabbed the covers and yanked me toward him. Scooping me up, he spun in a circle and I flinched, not prepared to dematerialize, but he was just being slightly exuberant. Recognizing my hesitation, he set me down gently. “Does it bother you, what I am?”

“What you are… Oh. No. I’m just, um, a little unnerved by the casualness with which you pop in and out of places. Can all witches and wizards do that?”

“No.” His brows drew together as he contemplated a reasonable explanation. In the end, he went with basic truth. “It’s a highly specialized skill, and to be able to carry a passenger with you is even more difficult. There are four, maybe five of us in the world who can do it. Two of us, Amaly and I, are in my coven.”

“Amaly?”

“She was at the henge last night, but she went back to London so you’ve not had a proper introduction. She’s the most powerful witch in Europe and my second.”

“Oh.” I felt uneasy, and it took me a minute of digging around in my own psyche to understand that the emotion I was having a hard time identifying was jealousy. I sighed, slightly disgusted with myself.

Understanding the variety of emotions dancing across my face, Hellion leaned in and kissed me gently. “You’ve nothing to fear, Maddy.” He sat on the edge of the bed and lay back, pulling me down with him so I straddled his hips. Shifting beneath me, Hellion smiled up at me so harmlessly that I had to laugh.

“That’s far from innocence I’m feeling from you despite the look on your face,” I said, leaning forward to brush my lips over his.

He snaked his tongue out and traced my lower lip, and I shivered. “What would it take to talk you out of your clothes?” he murmured against my lips before laying kisses across my temple, down my neck and stopping just over my heart. He bit me through the T-shirt and I gasped, involuntarily responding to his physical suggestions if not his words.

“Less talk,” I responded.

Hellion flipped me over on my stomach, and I shrieked with laughter. “Less talk it is,” he promised. He delivered.

Chapter Fourteen

We gathered our things and left Ireland. I had to get busy with the investigation, and too many interruptions—imagined death, near death, death—had diverted my attention. Hellion and I materialized in his London home. More specifically, we ended up in his bedroom. I recognized some of my personal belongings sitting on his dresser. I stepped over to the chest and pulled out a drawer; there were my underwear.

“It seems you expect me to stay…to, ah, live here with you at this point.” My voice was unsteady as my mind ran through a gamut of emotions—fear, frustration and anger.

“And why shouldn’t I,
mo shíorghrá
? We’re together now, not to be separated. In my mind that means we live together. Am I wrong, then?”

“I’m not sure. That isn’t the point, though. Not really.” I stumbled around, searching for the right words, but blurted out, “I’d like to be asked, Hellion. Don’t presume to know me well enough to know what I want.”

“You’re right, my love. I should have asked if you wanted the same thing, not just assumed. I apologize. Do you want to stay here?” He wandered up behind me and his hands snaked around my waist, his chin resting on my shoulder.

“For now. I’ll stay for now.” He moved to cup my breasts. “Don’t assume I’m here because I’ve nowhere to go at the moment. I could get another hotel…” He laid small kisses along the side of my neck. “Or an apartment.”

“I’ll buy you your own house if you’ll stay here. Then every time you get angry with me, you’ll have somewhere you can go.”

I sighed, distracted from my displeasure by pleasure. He was stroking my nipples through the thin material of the T-shirt and they, along with other things, were tightening in response to him. How could I want him so much? I wondered. It hadn’t been this fierce with Bahlin… I was distracted momentarily until Hellion nipped at my neck and, settling himself in the crevice of my ass, gently rocked back and forth.

There was a knock at the door and we both paused.

“Bloody fucking hell,” he muttered, reaching to adjust his impressive erection. “Come in!”

Mark, the butler, entered the room. I squeaked and turned my back to him, hiding my erect nipples against Hellion’s chest.

He stroked my back and said, “Mark, what is it?”

“I’m sorry, sir, ma’am. I didn’t realize you’d come home together. Is everything to your liking?”

“Sure,” I said, uncomfortable with the fact that this strange man was catering to my every need. I just wasn’t cut from the stock that expected the custom service, or butlers, that wealth could buy. My family had been the servers, not the served.

“There’s nothing to be uncomfortable with, Maddy,” Hellion whispered. He turned my chin to face him, and I jerked away from him, stepping out of his arms.

“Give us a minute, Mark.”

The butler left the room quietly.

“What is it, love?” he asked.

Good question.
“I feel like I’m failing everywhere and fitting in nowhere. A few weeks ago I was engaged to another man, and this morning I find myself post-coital cuddling with another whose expressed intent had been to see me dead. What is it with me, Hellion? I’m floundering like a drowning woman, and people are dying because of it.” I slapped a hand against the wall and thumped my forehead against the cool plaster. I felt his arms come around me and I sagged into him, needing just for a moment to be supported. He caught me, just as I’d counted on him to do.

“Maddy, you’re new at this—” he began.

“And that doesn’t mean jack shit to each and every dead woman’s family,” I countered.

“Families who have no idea you exist.”

I jerked and realized that that was probably the biggest rub. I was fulfilling the prophecy without even trying, walking between the worlds of the mundane and mythological, a foot in each reality and a place of belonging in neither. I rubbed my forehead, the worry lines feeling like little mini-ridges under my fingertips.

“Do you want to talk to Tyr?” he asked.

“It might help,” I answered. “But I’ll save it for tonight when I hit the sack. For now I need a shower and my own clothes.”

“Of course. I’ll just run downstairs and see what we’ve missed in the last night. I need to take care of some business anyway.” He turned me around and I went slowly, slipping my arms around his waist and laying my head against his chest. His voice rumbled under my ear when he spoke. “Don’t hold yourself accountable for the murderer’s actions, Maddy. We’ll catch him, or her, and we’ll see justice meted out.”

I nodded, feeling inexplicable tears building in the back of my throat. I pushed away from him gently and turned for the bathroom.

“Maddy?” he called.

I shook my head and kept going. Any more empathy and I was going to begin to unravel, and right now I needed to keep it together. I had a murderer to stop in a world that, as Hellion had said, didn’t even know I existed.

I wandered downstairs after my shower and found Hellion in the study poring over the letter that had been delivered to him before we’d left for the Council meeting.

“Anything new?” I propped a hip on the edge of his desk.

“Nothing.” He sighed, leaning back and pushing his hands through his thick, blond hair. His black eyes were flat with frustration, and he stared at me carefully. “Have you had any new thoughts on it?”

“I’m wondering about the blue thread.” I reached over and picked it up, rolling it between my fingers. It was silky but heavy, almost like embroidery floss. “Do you think it could mean it’s from the blue dragons?”

Hellion shrugged. “I wondered the same thing, but it seems too obvious.”

“Maybe.” I sniffed the thread and smelled nothing in particular. “Think back to the note. They refer to me as the traitorous Mary Stuart. Could be that they’re English, or of English persuasion. That would rule out the leaders of the weyr.” My chest constricted.
Bahlin
. “Who does that open up, in particular?”

“You’re thinking in modern terms, Maddy. What if the killer actually
knew
Mary Stuart?”

I blanched.

“He knows her, thinks she turned traitor to her family, and ended up getting what she deserved. That would be right in line with what the blue weyr has been to you: potential family, then you turned traitor—”

I made a noise of protest and Hellion held up his hand.

“—you turned traitor and sided with someone outside the family, someone from foreign soil. It could very well be the blue weyr, Maddy.”

“Aiden could have killed me last night when he had the gun to my jaw,” I argued.

“For all his tough talk, he’s just a boy. And he had his orders to return you to Bahlin.”

I thought about it, rubbing my temples at the developing headache. Could it have been Aiden? Was it that simple? Somehow I doubted it. Aiden was angry, and he’d lost his father and his sister, but he wasn’t a killer. The opportunity to take me out last night and then change the story of the surrounding circumstances convinced me he wasn’t my focus. Shaking my head, I stood and walked to the sideboard to pour up a neat whiskey. I raised my glass and offered Hellion a drink. He nodded but came to retrieve his own. I took a generous sip and it burned going down, the artificial warmth spreading immediately into my torso and arms and making me relax slightly.

“He’s just not the right focus, Hellion. I’m sure of it.”

“What about Bahlin’s mother? She’s arguably lost the most in this, and she stands to have her family scrutinized closely due to the murders. Could she want to take you out?”

“Undoubtedly,” I said. “But not for that reason. I could be considered indirectly responsible for the deaths of her husband and daughter.
That
would make her want to kill me. But I don’t know that she’s the type to act on it personally. She’s been in power, or related to those in power, too long. She’d find someone to do it for her.” The thought sent chills up and down my spine despite the effects of the alcohol. If someone had been hired to take me out, I was working against someone I wouldn’t recognize. I sighed and walked over to the sofa, sinking down into it and setting my drink on the side table.

“And Imeena?” Hellion asked, rolling a pen back and forth in his fingers as he watched me.

“Imeena is a possibility. The attacks are at night, no trouble with the brutality, she’s got the strength and she’s definitely got the motivation. I just don’t know that she’d waste the blood. And her sense of smell—wouldn’t she be able to determine if it was me before killing?”

“I’m not sure every vampire has a distinguishing sense of smell. Yes, they can smell blood and hear heartbeats and such, but we’ll have to ask Darius about the general improvements they undergo after the rebirth.” Hellion walked over and sat beside me, setting his drink with mine. He opened his arms to me, and I was struck by the kindness of the gesture. He was offering me the choice to seek comfort, not assuming I needed to.

I pushed off the back of the sofa and crawled into his lap.

Hellion held me close, breathing in and out with slow, deep breaths that ruffled my hair. “
Tá grá agam duit,
my Madeleine,” he whispered.
I love you
.

I nodded, unable to answer him. My heart seemed to have lodged itself in my throat, bound equally by joy and fear at Hellion’s profession of feelings.

His arms tightened around me then released me, and I crawled out of his lap to stand in front of him. “When will Darius be here?”

Hellion stared at me, his eyes pulsing, before answering in a soft voice. “He should get here later this evening. As fast as he is, it will take him a bit. Two hours after dark, I’d assume.”

“Let’s—”

“I don’t expect you to answer me right now, Maddy.”

I looked up sharply.

“But I do expect you to answer me someday.”

I nodded, mute with fear. I couldn’t speak.

Hellion smiled gently. “There’s nothing I can imagine that’s more important than hearing the words from you, but I won’t push you. You’ll come to me willingly or I’ll not have you at all. You understand this, right?”

I shrugged so stiffly it must have appeared I was cast of stone. “What do you mean ‘not at all’?”

Shaking his head, he rose to stand in front of me. I instinctively reached up and smoothed his hair back from his forehead. He dropped his forehead to mine and laid a light kiss on my upturned face. “I won’t coerce you and I won’t push you, but I also won’t hide my own feelings. You’ll come to me or you won’t. If you don’t, then we’ll have nothing between us but the physical, and that’s not enough for me. So consider that, Maddy. I love you, but I’ll not tolerate heartbreak just for the sake of suffering some emotion.”

“Sounds sort of like you’re pushing,” I stammered.

“No. Don’t misunderstand this. There’s a difference between pushing and honesty. I’ll give you honesty. Don’t ever doubt that.”

My recent history with Bahlin led me to believe that every oath could be broken, but I didn’t want to fight with Hellion so I just nodded. “Okay.” I stepped back and turned toward the clock. “So we’ve got about three hours before Darius shows up?”