My father gave a small start at the noise, actually going so far as to turn his head in my direction as I slid down to sit on the flagstone floor. I barely noticed, because my brain was too caught up in replaying a scene from several weeks ago, like a movie inside my head.
Rans had brought me to Nigellus’ home in Atlantic City to escape the Fae. I was resting in one of the guest bedrooms when the sound of the door opening woke me. The light slanting through the window was at a lower angle than it had been, but it wasn’t evening yet. It hadn’t occurred to me to lock the bedroom door—I’d felt safe enough there.
I blinked rapidly and rolled into a sitting position, just in time to see Rans catch himself against the doorframe with one hand. Blue eyes fell on me, but there was a dazed look behind them that I hadn’t seen before. He froze, as though he hadn’t expected me to be there.
“What are you doing in my room?” he asked in confusion.
“Rans?” I asked, groggy. “This is my room. Yours is across the hall.”
He stared at me with an oddly blank expression on his face. That expression woke me up fast, and I slid off the bed to cross to him. That was when I noticed his extreme paleness. True, Rans was never going to be winning any awards for ‘Best Tan Lines.’ But this was the same sort of paleness he’d exhibited when I first found him with a shotgun blast through the chest in my back yard.
It was the sort of paleness that belonged to a corpse, not a man.
“You don’t look so good,” I whispered in the understatement of the week. “What happened, what’s wrong?”
Without even thinking about it, I took him by the arm and pulled him inside, closing the door behind us for privacy. He shook his head as if trying to dislodge something rattling around in his brain.
“I...” he said. “I don’t...”
His voice trailed off and he lifted a hand to his forehead.
“Okay, you’re scaring me now,” I told him.
Herding him backwards toward the bed, I pushed at his shoulders until he sat on the edge of it, his thighs bracketing mine as I stood in front of him. He glanced up at me through dark eyelashes from the slight disadvantage of height.
“Rans,” I begged. “Talk to me, please. Did something happen with Nigellus?”
A deep furrow formed between his brows. “No, I...” he trailed off. “That wasn’t...” He shook his head sharply again. “Sorry. I seem to have... a bit of a hole in my memory. A new one, I mean.”
Misgivings flooded me, but I tried to focus on the practical. He was pale and disoriented. He was a vampire. Those two facts could be related, right?
“Do you need blood?” I asked slowly.
His absent blue gaze turned inward, like he was taking stock.
There was a long pause. “Maybe so,” he said. “I don’t... feel right.”
Looking back, it was all so painfully obvious. Rans had gone off alone with Nigellus, and come back an hour later... drained of blood, and with a fresh hole in his memory.
Fuck.
TWENTY-TWO
I WAS PRACTICALLY trembling with rage as I sat on the floor, hugging my knees to my chest. I couldn’t even bring myself to care that Dad was looking at me, frowning as though he understood that I wasn’t okay. I wanted to throw things just so I could watch them shatter, and the worst part was, most of my anger was self-directed.
I’d marched down to the dining room that evening once Rans was resting quietly, all ready to get my inner bitch on and confront Nigellus about whatever had happened when the two were alone. It had taken five minutes flat for the demon bastard to talk me around until I was once more convinced that he was nothing more than a concerned friend, not a blood-stealing, memory-altering, back-stabbing pile of shit. My skull thunked rhythmically against the door of the hut as I castigated myself for being a gullible idiot.
This was huge. If I was right—and at the moment I couldn’t see any other conceivable explanation that fit all the facts—then the person I was relying on for Dad’s safety and my freedom was a turncoat. God help me, I’d been days from binding my soul to Nigellus. And even now, he was on Earth with Rans, who had no idea that his beloved mentor was using him... and probably had been for centuries, now.
Jesus Christ—Rans.
I had to get to him. And I had to do it without binding myself to a demon. Any demon. My fingers tangled in my hair, tugging at the wayward spirals as I tried to get my brain to slow down. It was as though, after so long spent being a Grade A moron, all the puzzle pieces were falling into place at once.
Remove the assumption that the demons were on Rans’ side—not to mention, my side—and suddenly the entire landscape changed. Why had the goons at the fetish club been firing silver bullets? Even the wild-eyed nutjob who’d killed my mother had known to use salt for demons. Silver was only uniquely lethal to one kind of creature—a vampire.
What if our attackers hadn’t been in the Fae’s employ, but Myrial’s? Sure, she’d been in the line of fire, but she was in no danger. She was immortal. Knives and silver bullets meant nothing to her. And if she’d heard about the life-bond I shared with Rans, she would know that killing either of us would be the same as killing both.
But why would she want to kill Rans, when his life was protected as part of the treaty? I scoffed at myself. The treaty clearly didn’t mean much to her, since she’d already broken it by getting my grandmother pregnant all those years ago. What if she wanted the treaty to
