“As you wish.” He leaned in and slowly pressed a kiss to my forehead. His motions were slow and controlled, careful not to set off any of my more predatory instincts when the smell of his blood was still wafting through the air. I could feel the turmoil churning within him as he walked away and I remained a silent ghost in his thoughts. He still struggled with my need to ingest human blood, but he was fighting to accept it. This relationship was not an easy thing, but we were trying.
Seventeen
Danaus found me seated on the floor in the sunny yellow bedroom at my house the next night. A shaft of thick moonlight shone through the open curtains, cutting a square on the ground and glazing the furniture in an ethereal silver glow. After Lily’s death, Danaus and I had pulled the sheets and blankets off the bed and washed them. We opened the windows, welcoming in a chilly early spring breeze in hopes of the fresh air washing out her scent. But no matter what we did to cleanse the room, I swore I could still smell her presence in there, even after the past few months. I closed my eyes and drew in a slow deep breath so the air filled my useless lungs. I held it, picking apart the scents of dust, laundry detergent, lemon-scent cleaning product, and finally Lily.
She had been so briefly in our lives. A child of the street with an amazing gift to see the auras of the people around her, Lily had been special to me. She had spirit and courage. She was quick and resourceful. She should have survived. At that moment she should have been safely ensconced at the Themis compound, being taught by the paranormal researchers in a positive environment. Instead, she now lay in a cold grave in a distant cemetery because a bori had used her to get to Danaus and me. We had failed her.
But then Lily wasn’t the only one haunting me. Just down the hall, Tristan’s room remained completely untouched from when he was last in there. When I returned home from Venice in December, I locked the door to that room and allowed no one to touch his things. I didn’t even go inside, but I could imagine the unused bed, rumpled from where he would lay on it as he read. The computer on his desk would be sitting in sleep mode, waiting for its master to return home so he could resume his search for new music. Books and magazines were haphazardly scattered about the room, while a pile of laundry lay in one corner, waiting to hit the washing machine. I knew his unique scent would be thick in the air. If I entered his private domain, I would be lost to the horror of our past.
I replayed that night in Venice and doubts ate at me. I couldn’t convince myself that I had done the right thing. Macaire had shattered his mind, so that Tristan would look straight through me, never seeing my loving face or the tears streaming down my cheeks as my heart broke in bitter shards. I should have found a way to save him. If I had taken another minute and not been consumed by rage and despair, I might have come up with a way to save him. Vainly I reminded myself that his mind was broken: he was locked in a world of perpetual torment, and it had been my responsibility to set him free. Killing Tristan might have been the kindest thing I could have done for him, but it was slowly destroying me.
Heavy footsteps creaking on the wooden stairs helped to break my destructive train of thought, but it didn’t completely free me of the two ghosts that seemed to be clinging to me. I had come into Lily’s room to hide from the rest of the world as I tried to think about the chaos swirling around me. But my thoughts were stuck on my two dead companions.
I didn’t need to reach out with my powers—I could feel Danaus’s energy swirling up the stairs like the tentacles of a sea creature to search me out. Warm and comforting, they wrapped around me, beating back my demons before he leaned against the door frame to stare down at me with a frown marring his handsome face.
“What are you doing?” he demanded as I looked up at him.
“Thinking.”
“I can’t imagine that any productive thinking can be done in here.”
“I never said it was productive thinking. I’m just thinking.”
“About what?”
“All the ways in which I went wrong.”
“Mira . . .”
“No, Danaus, think about it. I mishandled things, and now Michael, Thorne, Lily, and Tristan are all dead. My judgment is off. And now I’ve gone and made a pact with the naturi. I have agreed to be Rowe’s ally, of all people! The creature that has been torturing or trying to kill me most of my life!”
Danaus heaved a heavy sigh as he leaned his shoulder against the door frame. “Michael and Thorne were lapses in your judgment. You didn’t think ahead and bad things happened. But you’ve learned, Mira. You’ve grown more cautious and you’re thinking things through instead of rushing headlong into a situation. Valerio and Stefan could have easily been killed in Budapest, but your careful planning saved them on more than one occasion.”
His words stung a little as my own fears were validated, but I respected Danaus’s point of view and his honesty. He wasn’t going to lie to me to make me feel better. “What about Lily and Tristan? Maybe if I had—”
“There is no ‘maybe’ with Lily and Tristan,” he interrupted. “The situations were far beyond your control. Gaizka got the better of us when it came to Lily, and we didn’t anticipate the depths of Macaire’s depravity when it came to Tristan. We lost them to bad people. It happens no matter how hard we try to protect everyone we love.”
I took another deep breath and slowly released it as I stared straight ahead into the room, trying to force some of the tension out of my shoulders. My ass was getting sore from sitting on the floor for the past couple of hours and my back was stiff. However, I still wasn’t ready to move. I felt as if I had managed to find a hiding place from the world in this bright little bedroom, and I wasn’t ready to leave it.
“Why does it feel as if the world is falling into chaos?” I murmured, talking mostly to myself. “The Daylight Coalition has decided to strike now, endangering countless nightwalkers and lycanthropes in my own domain. I can’t shake the feeling they have been drawn to this city because of me. As a result, Daniel has been put into an extremely dangerous situation in hopes of garnering information. To make matters worse, Cynnia comes to me with a plan to get rid of her sister by teaming up with Rowe and the rest of the naturi. It’s the very thing I swore I would never do! Ally with the naturi!”
“You’re trying to do what is right for your people,” Danaus reminded me.
“Right for my people? Can I even be trusted to judge what is ‘right for my people’?” I snapped, twisting around to stare up at him. “I’m romantically involved with a nightwalker hunter that is part bori—the sworn enemy of the nightwalker nation! I’ve agreed to an alliance with the naturi in an effort to stop a war that would bring the Great Awakening. I feel as if I’ve killed more of my own kind during the past several months than I’ve saved.”
“Think of the faceless numbers you’ve saved by your actions,” Danaus calmly said, to which I only gave a derisive snort.
“And to add to my fun, members of the Soga clan are here trying to drag me back to Japan in hopes that I will solve their problems.”
“You can’t help everyone.”
“At this point I don’t feel I can even help myself,” I groused, falling deeper into self-pity. The situation truly was growing more and more out of control, and it was only going to get worse when Nyx and Rowe finally arrived in my city. I would have to find a way to work with Rowe without trying to kill him at the first opportunity. Not the easiest of tasks.
“Enough,” Danaus growled. Pushing away from the door frame, he stepped into the room and stood before me with his feet wide apart and his fists on his hips. “Stop the whining. Stop the complaining. Stop the self-pity.” Grabbing my left upper arm, he hauled me to my feet and then bent low enough to drop me over his shoulder while wrapping his free hand around my legs.
“Danaus!” I shouted, struggling to get into an upright position as he walked out of the room and headed for the stairs. He bounced me once, causing me to lose my balance. I flopped back down so I was lying over his shoulder. My hair felt forward, partially obscuring my view of his nice ass as we slowly and steadily descended the stairs.
“You need some distraction. Clear your mind.”
