From the looks of him, he wasn’t expecting company. Wearing nothing more than loose cotton pajama bottoms, he stretched for an inappropriately long time. Give me a break. I’m sure the show supplied more than a few suburban housewives with enough fantasy fodder to get them through a tedious night or two.
Damn it. Discretion might be a bit of a problem if telescopes all over the neighborhood were dialed in to that window. I’d been paid a pretty chunk of change for this job, and I wanted it neat and tidy.
Standing from my perch, I fluffed out the duster. Raindrops scattered from its black surface, sounding like wind chimes and steel drums. I wrung the water from my hair as well. Didn’t want to add insult to injury by dripping all over the poor guy’s floor.
I reached to my right thigh. The sheathed dagger waited to be put to good use. Stretching my neck from one side to the other, I looked up at the balcony to the side of Xander Peck’s picture window, and with as much concentration as it took to bat an eyelash, my body became one with the dark night air.
In the next second, I stood on the balcony. I didn’t need to break in; I simply glided through the glass. Shadows don’t worry about things like doors, windows, bars, gravity. I appeared in the next room—the bathroom, to be exact. I could hear Blondie moving around his bedroom, probably flexing and posing for his audience.
A faint smell lingered in the air, and at first I thought I’d imagined it. The aroma of warm spring flowers, stream water, grass, and pitch. That fragrance hadn’t touched my nostrils in at least a century. It threw me off my game a little, but I brushed it away like a buzzing mosquito and focused on the job.
His presence was harder to pinpoint than a human’s should be. Usually I can feel where they’re standing, as if I have a built-in thermal imager. But my senses felt askew and I couldn’t quite get a bead on him.
Oh, well, I told myself. You’ll just have to be quick.
I passed through the wall, feeling no hindrance from the solid structure, to where I thought he’d be standing. He’d moved beyond the large window, just as I’d predicted. Dagger poised and ready to strike, I took a steadying breath and prepared myself for the kill. Muscles rippled beneath flawless, creamy skin. His spine straightened. I couldn’t get my arm around him; he was too broad for my shorter reach. So I decided to sever his spine at the nape of his neck. It wasn’t my usual MO, but beggars can’t be choosers.
The smell that I’d tried to ignore hit me hard, choking me with its sweetness. I stabbed and then cut with the sharp steel blade, but all I managed to slice was thin air.
My target, vulnerable only a moment before, vanished just as effectively as I had. I spun around to guard my own back when a large, strong hand seized me by the throat.
“Who sent you?” Xander Peck asked, a little too calm for someone who’d almost lost his head.
I should have been more shaken, but his voice distracted me, draped over me like a red velvet blanket. I wanted to wrap myself up naked in that voice. The next thing—and it should have been the first thing—I noticed was the way his form quavered in the artificial light. He was almost . . . transparent.
I hadn’t encountered anyone like me in close to a century. In fact, I’d been sure I was the only one left. But there he stood: tall, blond, and angry, and a natural-born Shaede.
“Who sent you?” he asked again, his grip tightening on my throat.
“I’m hired,” I rasped in a flat, icy tone.
“Then who hired you?”
He almost sounded amused, but he wasn’t going to be when he got his answer.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I never meet the clients.”
“Well, then, you’re not much use, are you? Maybe I should kill you.”
“You could try.” I didn’t have to pretend to sound defiant or confident. Even a born Shaede would need a special blade to kill me.
He laughed, and the sound of it caused a spasm of pleasure to ripple from the top of my head right down to my toes. His grip on my throat disappeared with his body, and in a waft of dark air, he reappeared on a small sofa, very much at home.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Darian,” I said, throwing it out there like I had nothing to lose.
“Darian,” he repeated. “So, Darian . . . who do you think would want me dead?”
“How the hell should I know?” I asked, maybe a little more indignant than I ought to have been considering the circumstances. “I guess you must’ve really pissed someone off.”
“You think?” I couldn’t blame him for mocking me. Hell, I was there to kill him. “Now, why would anyone send you to kill someone that you couldn’t kill?”
I hadn’t thought about that. Didn’t care. Thinking wasn’t part of my job. The client had to have recognized something inhuman about Xander Peck. Born Shaedes did have the ability to dazzle, glamour—whatever—a lot better than I could. They could convince humans that they’re made of something more solid. Still, the “otherness” that exists in us has a tendency to set a person on edge.
“My guess,” he said, resting an arm over the back of the couch, “is that you were set up.”
That thought knocked the breath right out of me. Adrenaline pulsed in my veins. My heart hammered against my rib cage. Who would set me up? And why? Who, besides Tyler, knew—truly knew—about me? And, more importantly, who knew I wasn’t the only one of my kind? I choked up on the dagger, the guard digging uncomfortably into my hand for a brief moment before I slid it into the sheath at my thigh. I’d been alone. The only one. Only. One. God, it didn’t sound convincing even as I thought the words. Had Azriel known? He couldn’t have. He never would have kept it from me. Or would he? His words, spoken long ago, haunted me. We are alone in this world, and you have nothing to fear. My head swam, feeling as though all the blood had rushed from my brain to my pounding heart. Not alone. I am not alone. The situation demanded a little more thought and a lot more caution. If anything, I needed answers from someone, and there happened to be only one someone on my list.
For the first time in my long existence, I left a job unfinished.
I sought the shroud of my shadow self for a stealthy escape and fled the town house. But when I gazed up at the window, Xander Peck stood at its center. He bowed his head deeply and vanished.
Chapter 3
“Meet me at The Pit in thirty minutes,” I growled into my cell, “and if you’re even fifteen seconds late, I’m going to slice you open like a Thanksgiving turkey.”
Tyler was five minutes early.
The Pit isn’t a prize to behold, but it’s my favorite haunt. The stale smell of beer never went away and mingled with hundreds of different perfume and cologne samples into an olfactory nightmare. But the dim lighting and the warm air made me feel safe, no matter how bad it smelled or how many times I had to send an overeager guy on his way.
Lucky for me, I like the heat. And the club happened to be seven different kinds of hot that night. But I couldn’t take the duster off; it hid my saber and covered the dagger. I’m sure I looked like a Goth kid’s wet dream, sitting in my black sex-kitten outfit, sipping a rum and Coke, exuding little to no emotion on the outside while my insides writhed like angry vipers.
Despite the fact that I’d all but shut him down the night before, Tyler gave me one of his lusty once-overs, and if I hadn’t been so jacked up I would have smiled or even welcomed the attention. Ty was easygoing and had a tendency to bounce back even when things didn’t exactly go his way. Apparently, he wasn’t willing to give up on me quite yet. But my encounter with Xander Peck had been more than a message, and more like a slap in the face—just what I needed to keep my mind focused on the business at hand. And I wanted answers.