Darkness Unbound (14 page)

But one of those people had been Jack Parnell—Hunter’s brother and the man in charge of the guardian division. It was totally possible that he’d mentioned it in passing in his report.

And that could also explain why she hadn’t sent a lackey to talk to me. She’d wanted to examine me in person.

I finished my latte in one long gulp, then stood. “How do I contact you if I hear from my father?”

She drew a business card from her wallet and slid it across the table. “This conversation is not finished—”

“Yeah, it is,” I said. “I have to work today, and I really do
not
want to sit here listening to half-truths. When you feel like telling me what you’re actually planning, contact me. Until then, don’t bother.”

I expected the cold rush of anger, but instead she merely leaned back in her chair and gave me a small smile. “You really
are
your mother’s daughter.”

“No, I’m not,” I bit back, barely managing to control the anger that flared deep inside. “I won’t let you use me like you do her.”

Her smile grew, warm on the outside, calculating within. I had a bad, bad feeling that I’d managed to intrigue her further.

“Your mother helps us because we saved your life. Which means, technically, you owe us
your
existence.”

“The only person I owe existence to is my father. If he ever bothers to contact me, I’ll let you know. Until then, good-bye.”

I walked away. Her gaze burned into my spine, the sensation like a knife, cold and sharp.

“We’ll meet again soon, Risa,” she said, her voice soft and yet carrying through the noise as clearly as a shout. “That I promise you.”

Goose bumps ran across my skin. I slammed open the door and walked out into the night, taking several deep breaths to ease the hammering of my heart.

Damn, she was scary. And yet she’d been the epitome of politeness. I ran a hand through my hair, then called Uncle Quinn to let him know I was safe before heading home. Not surprisingly, Tao and Ilianna were waiting for me.

I flopped down onto the sofa and blew out a relieved breath. “Well, that was exciting.”

Tao handed me a large glass of Coke, then parked his butt on the coffee table in front of me. “Were you right about what she wanted?”

I nodded, then scooped up my abandoned cake and began munching my way through the thick, gooey mess, filling them in on events in between mouthfuls.

Ilianna grimaced when I’d finished. “It’s a damn shame no one seems to believe that he hasn’t contacted you yet.”

“Yeah.” I dumped the empty plate beside Tao. “I wish there was some way we could find him. I’d love to know what he’s really up to.”

Ilianna said, “You don’t believe either the reaper or the Director?”

I met her gaze. “Right now, I’m not sure what to believe. But I find it curious that everyone seems to know what he is up to, and yet no one seems to know where he is. I get the feeling there’s a whole lot of information we’re not being told.”

“You could always ask your Aedh if he’s heard anything,” Tao said.

“His name is Lucian, and he’s not my anything.” Not yet, anyway. “And all I really know about my father is his first name—Hieu. That’s probably not helpful.”

“But you can describe him,” Ilianna said. “And you have his necklace. Your mom gave you that much, at least.”

“True.” I drank my Coke in several long gulps, then placed the empty glass on the table and glanced at the clock. “I need to go to bed, or I’ll screw up the accounts tomorrow.”

Tao rose, then offered me a hand and hauled me up with ease. He dropped a kiss on my cheek and said, “Stane’s hunting up the nanowires. He said they’ll be expensive, but I told him cost was no object. We just need the best.”

“You really think Hunter would try to invade our thoughts?” Ilianna said, doubt in her voice and expression. “She’s Directorate. They have all sorts of checks and balances in place—”

“The trouble,” I cut in, “is not the fact that she’s Directorate, but that she’s also vampire high council. Those bastards are a law unto themselves, no matter what appearances suggest. And I got the distinct feeling she was here just as much as
their
representative as the Directorate’s.”

“Meaning the vampire council wants to get control of the gates?” Tao said, voice incredulous. “Why on earth would they want a power like that?”

“I don’t know,” I said grimly. “But Hunter said the Directorate was interested in using the gates—and hell—as an alternative to killing. Maybe the council is thinking along the same lines.”

After all, the council didn’t exactly sit on their hands and let the Directorate catch all the bad guys. They had the Cazadors—their very own, highly specialized squad of hit men. But the little of them I knew from Uncle Quinn suggested they were an extremely small unit. I guess hell provided an easier option—as long as you weren’t worried about the whole human-race-becoming-vegetables scenario.

Ilianna snorted. “Yeah, like them controlling the gates wouldn’t end up spewing trouble over the rest of us.”

I glanced at her. “I
did
point out that playing with hell wasn’t really a good idea, but I don’t think she believed me.”

“She’s a vampire,” Tao muttered. “They always think they know better than the rest of us.”

He had a point. Ilianna frowned and said, “But why come to you? They’d have to know your dad hasn’t contacted you.”

“I think my father was merely an excuse.” My voice was grim. “No one on the council or in the Directorate can walk the gray fields. If you can’t walk the fields, you can’t see the gates.”

“And that punches a mighty big hole in their plans.” Ilianna thrust a hand through her mane of hair. “Meaning, the bastards want to use you, just like they’re using your mom.”

“Yeah,” I said grimly. “Only this time, the situation they want to drag me into could very well result in the end of the world as we know it.”

And
that
was a pretty scary thought to go to bed with.

After managing only a couple of hours of sleep, I dragged my butt into the office and tried to make sense of the accounts. Thankfully, the system was all but automatic, and I only had to double-check that all the input data was correct—a hard enough task given the overtired state of my brain.

By twelve, I’d double-checked, then rechecked the figures, and had basically had enough for the day. I finished the dregs of my fourth glass of Coke and listened to the rattle of cooking pans and dishes rolling up from the kitchen below. My stomach rumbled a reminder that it hadn’t eaten anything since my rather rushed breakfast, and I half reached for the intercom to ask Tina—the chef currently running the afternoon shift—if she could fry me up something.

Then I remembered there was a better option and reached into my purse instead, drawing out the business card Lucian had given me last night.

Call anytime, he’d said. I needed food, and I also needed to ask him some questions. So why not combine the two needs?

And if a third, more basic need was also satisfied over lunch, then that would be a definite bonus.

Grinning in anticipation and suddenly feeling a whole lot more energetic than I had in hours, I touched the vid-phone’s screen and read out his number.

He answered on the second ring, his expression distant and somewhat formal. The Aedh, rather than the warm man I’d come to know. “Lucian speaking.”

His voice was a low rumble that seemed to vibrate pleasurably through my entire body. “Lucian, it’s Risa.”

“Risa.” The cold distance in his eyes fled, replaced by a lovely warmth. “It’s wonderful to hear from you again so soon.”

I smiled. I couldn’t help it—he had that sort of effect on me. “I was just wondering if you’re free for lunch.”

“As it happens,” he said, his green eyes sparkling with warmth and amusement, “a previous appointment just canceled, so I’m all yours. You can do with me what you will.”

“You might regret saying that,” I teased. “We half-weres have a very healthy list of wants.”

He chuckled softly, the sound whispering across my skin as sensually as a caress. “No healthier than mine, let me assure you.”

Oh yeah, this was going to be a
good
lunch. “Have you any particular preferences when it comes to food?”

“Not really.” He paused. “Not Italian. The garlic could prove problematic.”

“Not if we both have it,” I countered.

He laughed. “Italian, then. There’s a lovely little place called Alimento in Carlton. We could meet there at”—he paused, glancing down briefly—“one.”

My pulse rate increased. He lived in Carlton. What was the betting Alimento also happened to be very close to his house?

“That sounds perfect.”

“I’ll see you soon then, lovely Risa.”

He signed off. I sighed, and barely resisted the urge to fan myself.
Hot and bothered
really didn’t go far enough to explain just what I was feeling right now—and yet, he’d done little more than flirt with me. I’d never met anyone who could affect me like this—but I guess I’d never met a full Aedh before now, either.

I glanced at the time and realized I wasn’t going to make it home to Richmond to change and then get back to Carlton before one. I’d have to go dressed as I was. Thankfully, I’d had enough brain cells functioning this morning to pull on decent jeans and a cotton-mesh sweater that was see-through enough to tease the imagination of any hot-blooded male. But just in case his imagination needed a little more teasing, I reached underneath my sweater and unhooked my bra, pulling it off then dumping it into my desk drawer. If there was one good thing about being smaller in the breast department, it was the fact that they didn’t sag a whole lot when unsupported.

Which meant I was ready to go, but I still had a good twenty minutes to kill. I glanced briefly at the accounts, half thought about making a start on next week’s payroll, and decided to ring Mom instead. I pressed the vid-screen again, said her name, and watched the psychedelic colors swirl as the phones connected.

“Risa,” she said, a warm smile touching her lips. Her eyes—the same almost-almond shape as mine, but electric blue rather than violet—showed a touch of surprise. “I wasn’t expecting you to call so soon.”

I smiled, too. “Nice to know I can still surprise you.”

She chuckled softly. “Oh, trust me, you are more than capable of that, even now. What can I do for you?”

Straight down to business. Which meant she had clients waiting. “Have you heard from, or seen, my father since the night of my conception?”

Again surprise flickered across her almost ageless features. Werewolves tended to be a long-lived race, but Mom was also a clone—lab-created and enhanced—and, by rights, she should have been dead by now. Every clone who’d been created at the same time as her had died, most of them taken by a defective gene that either accelerated aging or caused their organs to fail inexplicably. In Mom, that gene had—for some reason—flipped. It rejuvenated rather than destroyed. No one was sure if I’d inherited that gene, and Mom had never allowed such tests—as much as the Directorate had pressed her for them.

“No,” she said slowly, “I’ve never seen him since that night. Why?”

“Because I’ve had a barrage of people insisting that he’s going to contact me. I was just wondering if maybe he’d contacted you instead.”

“No, and I wouldn’t expect him to. We both got what we wanted out of that night.”

And what they’d both wanted was me—the daughter she’d longed for, and a continuation of his genes.

“Is there anything at all about him that you haven’t mentioned?”

She frowned. “I think I’ve told you everything I could about that night, Ris.”

“So you never really talked about what he was or what he did for a living?”

“Not really. I knew he would give me you; that’s all that really mattered to me.”

“You knew he was Aedh, though.”

“Yes, but that was not something he mentioned. It was more an information leak from our merging.”

I blinked. “Merging? That’s an odd way of putting it.”

“Having sex with an Aedh is an interesting experience, Ris. The first meeting—the first kiss—is very explosive, and designed, I think, to ensnare completely. After that, it’s pure functionality. But”—she paused, as if searching for the right words—“while the actual sex is mundane, for those of us who are psychic there can also be a melding of minds. It’s not a very deep connection, but it’s a connection nevertheless—and I suspect it goes both ways.”

I frowned. “So when this connection happened—did you happen to catch whether he was a priest or not?”

“No.” Something flickered across her eyes. Uneasiness, perhaps. “But there was something about being a member of the Raziq. I have no idea what that was, but I got the distinct feeling he was troubled by something involving them.”

“Maybe the trouble he sensed was his approaching death.” Aedh only bred when their end was nigh, after all.

“Possibly.” Her gaze was still pensive. “Has this anything to do with what almost happened to Ilianna?”

“Yes.” There was no use lying to her—she’d sense it, even over the vid-phone. Mom might be blind, but she didn’t need her eyes to be able to see stuff like that. Of course, most of the time she wasn’t exactly blind, either. She was psychically linked to several spirit creatures known as the Fravardin, and they took turns being her eyes and her guards whenever she ventured outside the walls of her home. I added, “But Riley and Rhoan are hunting down those behind the attack, so I’m not expecting any more trouble.”

She didn’t look convinced. But then, neither was I.

“Just be careful, Ris. That’s all I ask.”

“I will.”

I glanced at my watch again. I really needed to get going because cabs were always damn hard to get along this section of Lygon Street, thanks to the proximity of two of the most popular wolf clubs and the fact that street parking was almost impossible to find these days.

And of course, Tao had insisted I take a cab this morning rather than risk the possibility of my bike being bugged again. I
could
walk, because Carlton wasn’t actually that far, but I’d be rushed for time now and the last thing I wanted was to arrive all hot and bothered. But there was still one question that needed answering. “Mom, what can you tell me about Mr. and Mrs. Kingston?”