luscious.”
Callan held her back with a hand fisted in golden hair that screamed Monique’s immortality. “Try leading me around by the cock, Monique, and you’ll find your hand hacked off.”
Monique’s lips seem to grow even fuller at the threat, her nipples beading against the satin. “Take me.” She rubbed herself sensually against him. “It’ll be the best choice you ever make.”
“I’m fully capable of having sex with you,” Callan whispered against her throat, “then burning you to true death.”
“I’d be more useful to you alive.” Trembling visibly, Monique ran her hands up to cup Callan’s face. “I hate Simone. She takes Grandfather’s attention away from me.”
“Are you saying you’ll betray Antoine to get at Simone?”
“I’m saying we could work out a mutual agreement.” Her nails were perfect ovals against Callan’s skin. “You get rid of Simone for me, become my consort and my grandfather’s right-hand man. The old transitioning to the new.”
Callan’s jaw hardened. “Sorry, sweetheart. I’m not playing second fiddle to anyone—least of all a vicious brat who’d sell out her own family.”
Ashwini saw the flash of surprise in Monique’s eyes the instant before Callan kissed her. Hearing the other woman moan in the back of her throat, Ashwini decided she’d seen more than enough to form a conclusion, though what that conclusion might be, she had no idea. Two wrong turns later, she found herself back in her bathroom. Jumping out of the vent, she replaced the cover, then got into the shower and scrubbed herself until her skin stung.
When she walked out into the bedroom, dressed in jeans and a tee, she wasn’t surprised to see Perida waiting for her. “We got worried when you didn’t answer the door,” the vampire said.
Ashwini held out a hand, palm up. “Earplugs. Hate getting water in my ears.” Rubbing at her hair with a towel, she looked at the woman questioningly. “Where’s Janvier?”
“Walking in the gardens.”
Ashwini threw the towel over a chair. “I think I might join him.” She felt Perida’s eyes on her all the way to the roses where she’d spied Janvier. “You won’t believe what I saw,” she said, wondering if Monique and Callan were even now locked in that embrace powered by equal amounts of lust, ambition, and loathing.
“Try me.”
She did, had the satisfaction of seeing his eyes widen. “Think Callan still intends to go through with his plan of wiping out Antoine, then getting rid of Monique?” she asked.
“If he wants to seize power in Atlanta,” Janvier said with the icy pragmatism of an almost-immortal, “he’ll have to eliminate Jean, Frédéric, and the others, too.”
Ashwini thought of the ruthlessness she’d seen in Callan’s expression as he spoke to the Beaumont vampire. “He’s capable of it. But, no matter what he says, he’s also susceptible to Monique.”
“There’s a chance Monique won’t want to be rescued,” Janvier pointed out, “not if she thinks she can get Callan ’round to her way of thinking.”
“Doesn’t matter. Nazarach wants her.” And not even the most ambitious young vampire would dare gainsay their sire. Angels had torture down to a fine art—and those screams locked in the walls of his home told her Nazarach was better at it than most. “You’d think,” she murmured, “that Monique would’ve had better sense than to ask to be Made after seeing the life Antoine and Jean lead.”
“There are advantages to being a vampire.” Janvier stopped to pick up and bring the trailing edge of a climbing rose to her nose.
The scent was decadent, luxurious. “Maybe,” she said, taking another perfume-laced breath, “but once Nazarach has Monique back, he’ll use her as he might use a chess piece. And she has to let him. For a hundred years, she’ll have no freedom, no self-will. She’ll be less than a pet.”
Dropping the rose, Janvier thrust his hands into his pockets. “You’ve never asked how I was Made.” His voice was missing its usual music, something brittle and hard in every syllable.
“You fell in love with a vampire.”
He froze. “Been researching me?” His anger was hidden but as apparent to her as the sickle-shaped moon in the soft summer sky.
“Didn’t have to.” She shrugged. “Man like you, your personality, doesn’t easily accept submission. But if you decided to give yourself to someone, you’d do anything for that person—even if the choice half killed you.”
“I’m so obvious?”
“No.” She met his eyes, stripped away a single fragile layer of her own shields. “You’re like me.”
“Ah.” That beautiful hair of his glittered under the moonlight as he began to walk again. “Have you ever trusted that deeply,
Yes, and she bore the scars still. The marks on her back she could almost forget… but the ones on her soul? Those, she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to forgive. “We’re not talking about me. What happened to your lover?”
“Shamiya became tired of me after a few years. I was left to the most tender mercies of Neha.”
“The Queen of Poisons?”
A slow nod. “Being in her court was… part nightmare, part ecstasy. I’ve never experienced such pain as I did at Neha’s hands, but she also showed me pleasure I didn’t know could exist.”
Ashwini thought of the archangel, with her skin of dusky brown, her sloe-eyed gaze, her exotic sexuality. “Is that why you’re drawn to me?” She was no beauty, but her skin was the same Eastern shade, her eyes as dark. “Because she imprinted on you somehow?”
Janvier laughed and it was a truly delighted sound, one she’d heard from him only once or twice—usually when he bested her on a hunt. “Neha,” he said, “is as cold as the snakes she keeps as pets. You, my fierce hunter, are wildfire. Two more different women could not exist.”
The cold feeling in her stomach dissipated under the heat of his laughter. “So, what did you learn before Callan went to play tonsil hockey with Ms. Beaumont?”
“He asked me to stay on, join the Fox kiss.” His body brushed hers as they walked.
She wanted to get even closer, touch, be touched. Feel human. “I thought he’d know you aren’t the joining type.”
“I will fight for what’s important,” he said, his voice missing its usual amusement. “But this—petty politics —
“Is that what you told Callan?”
“Of course. Anything else would’ve made him suspicious.” He nodded left and, seeing the lily pond in the distance, she acquiesced. “But now he accepts that I will not take sides.”
“Too bad he forgot the biggest player.”
“Only a fool forgets an angel.” Going down on his haunches by the pond, he put one hand on the back of her calf when she came to stand beside him.
Aching for contact that demanded nothing from her except the most human of sensations, she didn’t shift away, didn’t remind him of her rule against dating vampires. She simply stood there and let the warmth of him soak into her bones. He was an enigma, Janvier. She’d seen him ice-cold, a predator, and she’d seen him bathed in sunshine. Some might’ve asked which was the real man—she knew he was both.
“Do you love her still?” she found herself asking.
“Who?”
“The vampire. Shamiya.”
His hand squeezed her calf in gentle reproof. “A silly question,
Yes, she thought, he was right. “What was she like?”
“Why so curious?”
“I just wonder what kind of a woman would’ve captured a man like you.”
“But I wasn’t this man when she knew me.” He leaned his body against hers. “I was a callow youth. I’ve learned since then.”
Accepting the answer, she turned her eyes to the pond, where the sickle moon made the lilies shimmer with midnight shadows. For the first time in years, her mind was completely quiet, completely her own. The peace of it
