assault, he hadn’t even had eyes for the days it had taken his flesh to regenerate. “It’s not yours, either, though it looks to me as if you prefer to give the appearance of it.” He’d seen the way the old man’s gaze had turned dull when Asirani neared.
“Smart, too.” Fen waved him to a chair across from his own. Taking it, Noel braced his forearm on the gleaming cherrywood of the desk and looked out at the vast main area. Christian was deep in conversation with another woman, a curvaceous beauty with long, straight hair to the base of her spine and the most guileless face Noel had ever seen. “Who’s that?” he asked, having guessed what role Fen played in Nimra’s court.
The old man’s expression softened to utter tenderness. “My daughter, Amariyah.” Smiling at her when she turned to wave at him, he sighed. “She was Made at twenty- seven. It does my heart good to know that she’ll live on long after I’m gone.”
Vampirism did turn humans into almost- immortals, but the life was hardly an easy one, especially the first hundred years after the Making, when the vampire was in service to an angel. The century- long Contract was the price the angels demanded for the gift of being able to live long past the span of a mortal life. “How much of her Contract remains?”
“None,” Fen said, to Noel’s surprise.
“Unless you had her before you were born,” Noel said, continuing to watch Amariyah and Christian, “that’s impossible.”
“Even I’m not that efficient.” A phlegmy laugh. “I’ve been in service to Nimra since I was a lad of but twenty. Mariyah was born a year later. Been some sixty- five years that I’ve served my lady— the Contract was written to take that into account.”
Noel had never heard of such a concession. That the angel who ruled New Orleans and its surrounds had done this said a great deal about both Fen’s worth to her, and her own capacity for loyalty. It wasn’t a trait he’d expected to find in an angel known far and wide for the harshness of her punishments. “Your daughter is beautiful,” he said, but his mind was on another woman, one with wings that had lain so warm and heavy against him for a fleeting moment earlier.
Fen sighed. “Yes, too beautiful. And too sweet a soul. I wouldn’t have permitted her to be Made if Nimra hadn’t vowed to care for her.”
Amariyah broke off her conversation at that instant to walk over. “Papa,” she said and, unlike the echoes of another continent that flavored her father’s speech, the bayou ran dark and languid in her voice, “you did not eat your breakfast today. Do you think you can fool your Amariyah?”
“Ach, girl. You’re embarrassing me in front of my new friend.”
Amariyah held out her hand. “Good morning, Noel. You are quite the topic of conversation in this court.”
Shaking that hand, with its skin several shades lighter than her father’s, Noel gave what he hoped was an easy smile. “All good, I’m sure.”
Fen’s daughter shook her head, the dimples that dented her cheeks making her appear even more innocent. “I’m afraid not. Christian is, as my grandmother would’ve said, ‘very put out.’ Excuse me a moment.” Bustling over to the sideboard, she filled a plate before returning. “You will eat, Papa, or I will tell Lady Nimra.”
Fen grumbled but Noel could see he was pleased at the attention. Rising, Noel waved a hand at his seat. “I think your father would prefer your company to mine.”
Amariyah dimpled again. “Thank you, Noel. If you need anything in the court, let me know.” Walking with him a few steps, she smiled again, and this time there was nothing guileless about it. “My father likes to see me as an innocent,” she murmured in a low voice, “and so I am one for him. But I am a woman grown.” With that unsubtle message, she was gone.
Frowning, Noel went to leave the audience chamber, skirting a young maid walking in with a fresh carafe of coffee. Then again… Turning, he walked back to snag a cup off a small side table. “May I beg a cup?” he asked, making sure to keep his voice gentle.
Her cheeks colored a pretty red, but she poured for him with steady hands.
“Thank you.”
Nodding, she dropped her head and headed to the main table, placing the carafe on the surface. No one paid her any mind, and— their potential complicity in the attempted assassination aside— it made Noel wonder just how much the servants heard, how much they remembered.
Nimra stared at Augustus across the length of the small formal library where she handled her day–to–day affairs. “You know I won’t change my mind,” she said, “and still you insist.”
The big man, his skin a gleaming dark mahogany, snapped out wings of a deep russet streaked with white, his arms folded across his massive chest. “You are a woman, Nimra,” he boomed. “It’s unnatural that you should be this alone.”
Other female angels would’ve done something nasty to Augustus by now. Theirs was not a society where men alone held power. The most powerful of the archangels was Lijuan, and she was very much a woman. Or had been. No one knew what she’d become since her “evolution.”
It was Nimra’s cross to bear that Augustus was a childhood friend, less than two decades older than her. Nothing in the scheme of things, given the length of angelic lives. “Friendship,” she said to Augustus, “will only get you so far.”
The idiot male smiled that huge smile that always made her feel as if the sun had come out. “I would treat you as a queen.” Dropping his arms and folding back his wings, he moved across the room. “You know I am no Eitriel.”
Her heart pulsed into a hard knot of pain at the sound of that name. So many years now, and yet the bruise remained. She no longer missed Eitriel, but she missed what he’d stolen from her, hated the scars he’d left behind. “Be that as it may,” she said, stepping nimbly to the side when Augustus would have taken her into his arms, “my mind is made up. I have no wish to tie my life to a man’s again.”
“Then what am I?” came a rough male voice from the doorway. “A meaningless diversion?”
4
Startled, Nimra looked up to meet the frigid blue gaze of a vampire who shouldn’t have been there.
“Who,” Augustus roared at the same time, “is he?!”
“The man Nimra has chosen,” Noel said with what she knew was deliberate disrespect in his tone.
Augustus’s massive hands fisted. “I’m going to break your scrawny neck, bloodsucker.”
“Make sure you rip it off or I’ll regenerate,” Noel drawled back, settling his body into a combative stance.
“Enough.” Nimra had no idea what Noel thought he was doing, but they’d deal with that after she sorted out the problem of Augustus. “Noel is my guest,” she said to the other angel, “and so are you. If you can’t behave like a civilized being, the door is right there.”
Augustus actually growled at her, betraying the years he’d spent as a warrior in Titus’s court, conquering and pillaging. “I waited for you, and you throw me over for a pretty- boy vampire?”
Nimra knew she should have been angered but all she felt was an exasperated affection. “Do you really think I don’t know about the harem of dancing girls you keep in that castle of yours?”
He had the grace to bow his head a fraction. “None of them are you.”
“The past is past,” she whispered, placing a hand on his chest and rising up on tiptoe to press a kiss to his jaw. “Eitriel was a friend to us both, and he betrayed us both. You do not have to pay the penance.”
His arms came around her, solid and strong. “You are not penance, Nimra.”
“But I am not your lodestar, either.” She brushed a hand down the primaries of his right wing. It was a familiar caress, but not an intimate one. “Go home, Augustus. Your women will be pining for you.”
Grumbling, he glared at Noel. “Put a bruise on her heart and I’ll turn your entire body into a bruise.” With that, he was gone.
