we went out of town. It could descend from the ceiling and spread over the intricately turned wooden frame that towered feet above the gold silk bedspread. During the night Vayl kept the canopy raised almost to the top of the frame so it looked like a regular bed. Now he flipped a switch on the wal and the curtain lowered to the floor.
I hadn’t been able to bring myself to crawl under that enclosure with him yet. For a kinda- claustrophobic like me it al seemed a little too cave-like. So when I final y decided to hit the sack I’d scooch the curtain toward him until I literal y tucked him in, flip the covers back, and settle in. Kinda weird, I know, but so far it had worked okay. And I loved waking up beside an emerald-eyed vampire who couldn’t wait to see what I’d decided to wear to bed that morning.
Vayl sat down beside me to shuck off his shoes. “Have your researchers had any luck deciphering the clues?” he asked as he nodded to the map in my hand.
“Nothing new,” I told him. “You know, when Cassandra cal ed and said she’d found a reference to the triple- locked door I thought my hair was actual y standing on end. But it’s been a whole week and I stil can’t figure out what it means.”
“Wel , at least you know that the triple-locked door is, literal y, the Rocenz. That is progress,” Vayl said comfortingly. He bal ed up his socks and threw them in the corner right next to a rattan hamper.
Sometimes he was such a guy.
I hid a smile and said, “Yeah, Bergman should probably get a medal for discovering that little nugget in the archives. But it’s what Cassandra dug up, you know? What am I supposed to make of the phrase ‘Cryrise cries bane’? Okay, I know Cryrise was a dragon. And the hammer was forged from his leg bone. But I’ve been running that info around in my head every waking moment and the only conclusion I come to is that Cryrise is a pussy.”
Vayl laughed.
“I’m not kidding!” I insisted. “What kind of respectable dragon goes and gets himself kil ed by a demon in the first place?”
“Perhaps it was not that simple,” Vayl suggested as he undid his shirt, slow, the way he knew I liked it.
“Jasmine?” he murmured as he leaned forward to slip his shirt off, his shoulder muscles and biceps bunching and releasing with fascinating results.
“Uh?”
“Are you panting?”
I licked my lips. Realized my breath had started coming a lot quicker. I put my hand to his chest, sliding my fingers into the thick curls that covered it as I threw my leg over his hips and sat facing him. “I like this couch,” I told him.
“You do?” His fingers, free of the responsibility of his own buttons, had begun toying with mine.
“Yeah.” I brushed my cheek against his as I leaned forward to nibble on his earlobe and say, “It’s got great handgrips.” I reached past his arms and buried my fingers in the soft leather cushions of the back.
And then neither of us talked anymore for a long, long time.
CHAPTER NINE
I woke up beside Vayl in his huge, comfy bed the night after Aaron’s attempted assassination, amazed I’d slept the day through as I picked up the curtain to wish him a good evening.
“What’s up?” I asked. “You look like somebody just cal ed off your birthday.”
“The Rogue has left our territory,” he said. “Now we have no evidence to plant on Aaron.” He held up a hand. “And before you try to comfort me, just imagine if we sent him in with faked remains. His description last night was not far off. Roldan could injure or even kil him before we were able to intervene. We must save him. You know he cannot do it himself.”
“He’s a dead man and you know it,” I said bluntly. “That Were never had any intention of leaving either boy alive once he figured out they were connected to you. Not after they’d served his purpose anyway. Now quit being so emotional—” I stopped. What a weird thing to have to say to the man whose expressions had to be read with a magnifying glass. But by now I knew that under that tightly wired exterior boiled passions that could leap out and destroy whole cities. I said, “Okay, that’s not fair. Just, you know, try to back off and think. That’s what’s going to help the most here, and you know it.”
He took a deep breath. “Al right. We can eliminate a Rogue vampire after we make the flight. It would have been difficult to explain a bag ful of remains to airport security at any rate.” I nodded. Not impossible, because we stil carried our department IDs, but since our status was official y inactive it could’ve stil been problematic. So we spent the rest of the night trying to get more information from Aaron about his contacts, shuttling Cassandra, Dave, and later on Bergman from the airport to Vayl’s house and preparing for our psychic’s reading. Which failed on nearly every front.
Al she got from Junior was more of his dad’s tortured pleas. And when she touched Vayl she couldn’t see the other son. Not his face. Not his location. Al she sensed was audio. A revving engine and the horrifying sound of crumpling metal. Afterward she sat back in her chair, swept her long black braids from her regal face, her big brown eyes so ful of sympathy I nearly cried myself as she embraced Vayl with her gaze. “I’m so sorry,” she told him. “Definitely Hanzi is here, I can feel that. But the sense of violence and impending death is so strong it interferes with every other image.” She smoothed the skirt of her bright orange sundress, her elegant black hands hesitating at her stomach a moment longer than was necessary, making me wonder if the reading had left her nauseous.
Then Dave stepped up with his amazing admission.
“I think I can find him.”
We were sitting in the coziest room in the house. Tucked at the back behind the bil iard room within easy reach of the kitchen, it seemed to reflect more of the Vayl-who-was than the ass-kicking Vampere he’d become. I’d seen his den before we’d become a couple, but then I hadn’t been in the mood to take in much more than the country- gentleman squares of gleaming brown paneling that gave the area a warmth that was backed up by the chocolaty leather couch, matching love seat, and two burgundy wing chairs with matching footstools. They huddled around a sturdy square coffee table that looked like it had been crafted from railroad ties and ceramic tile painted
