In the Beginning... (62 page)

How could he blame the males of his House for taking
their females and leaving, forging out to find their own ways, or
melding themselves into their females’ family Houses?

It was what he would do in their same positions,
with a leader like him. Now. Once he would have challenged the
Equan
for the right to guide his people.

“Death comes when you are not ready, no matter how
you may think you are prepared to meet it; in a war such as this no
one is ready. Swords will do us little good. Think you the demons
will use swords? No, they’ll use magics and weapons the kinds we do
not know. They and the others—the whatever Kinds are coming—will
look at these pitiful toothpicks, these traditions, you cling to as
toys. Jokes. Decorations to be hung on their walls the way the
Jareth
Equan
hangs Lupoiux coats upon his own hall walls.
Because that will be all that is left of you when it is over.”

“What are you suggesting then, Black? That we do
nothing?” the leader of the youth demanded. Nalik stared at him,
trying to remember just who had sired the little whelp.

He wore black tied around his waist.

Nalik should know him. He was ultimately responsible
for the whelp, after all. He should at least care enough to know
the youth’s name.

But he didn’t. What did that say about him?

“I’m suggesting no such thing, because doing nothing
yields nothing, but doing something will also yield nothing. All
you can do, boy, is pray to the goddess—damned cold bitch that she
is—that you and yours survive what is to come.” Nalik spit on the
earth, then pulled his sword free. He wiped the mud from the blade
and slipped it back into the scabbard. Kept his back to the
boy.

What did such youth matter?

If this war was to come, like the seers predicted,
then the boy would probably be dead within the next two years.

A blink for him.

“Protect your family, protect your House, protect
your people, and hope to hell you don’t die in the process. That is
all you can do.”

“And pray we don’t screw it up like you have?”
Disgust was in the boy’s words now, and had Nalik been any other
kind of man, the boy would be down in the dirt, with a few less
teeth.

As it was Nalik just walked away.

A passivist carrying the sword of a killer. Tasked
with training the very ones he was supposed to protect to enter
battles they had no hope of winning.

If he had still possessed a soul that knowledge
would have eaten away at it. As it was, it both saddened and
disgusted him.

Almost seven hundred years now he’d walked this
world, seeking to protect his people. And that had brought him
nothing but loss.

Her grotto called to him, as it always did when he
was hurting.

It had since his first night back in Dardanos, He’d
spotted her humming as she did something as humble as digging in
the blood-scarred earth.

Why did he torture himself thusly?

He knew she waited before he even parted the large
hibiscus leaves that separated the grotto from the rest of the
resort’s gardens. Large rocks, native to the area, had been hewn
into crude benches, and through the decades weathered into smooth
private nooks perfect for lovers.

Or for young women more at home with their own
thoughts than in large crowds, even when those crowds were her
family. A quiet, unassuming woman who was kind to everyone whose
path she crossed. Who was always carrying some sort of flowers. Who
sang to those plants every single day. Good, kind, sweet—the
opposite of everything he was.

Cassandra.

She waited there, like he knew she would. He always
knew where the girl was. A blessing and a curse from the goddess he
despised.

What type of deity would curse a person of her own
Kind to live the hell he had?

Did.
Did
live
was a better way to put
it.

The goddess had given him to mate one of the very
people he was sworn to hate and despise. How was that what was best
for him?

It for damned sure wasn’t good for the woman barely
out of her girlhood.

It was a sadistic torture—the kind only mirrored in
the records of the most forgotten Greek or Roman myths. His goddess
was supposed to be better than that.

He watched the woman-girl for several moments,
feeling like the nightmare of the night she had to know
existed.

He had spoken less than a handful of words to
Cassandra in more than a year.

He’d touched her not a single time.

And he almost prayed that he never would.

If he did, all resolve he now possessed would be
gone. Leaving nothing but the monster he knew her grandfather had
made him behind.

***

Cass knew he was there. She always knew when she
wasn’t alone; that was a gift she had long taken for granted. She’d
been maybe twelve or thirteen before she realized that others
didn’t have the same talent. Her cousin and best friend Jade maybe,
but that was all. Jade was just as different as Cass knew she was.
Becca probably could, but Cass had never asked.

This man watched her a lot. More than any others,
though she knew that many of the Dardaptoans found her worth
watching.

She was one of them, after all. A Taniss, one of the
most reviled creatures on Earth to these people. It didn’t matter
that she had never hurt any of them. Or that she had nothing to do
with the company that had been built on their blood and pain. It
didn’t matter that the whole idea of it horrified every bit of her
soul.

She was a Taniss, and that was enough for them.

Someone had thrown mud at her the day before. Mud
and rocks. And called her filth.

How was she supposed to deal with that? She hurt for
the people her grandfather had harmed, how could she expect them to
treat her with respect when she lived in their world now?

She wanted to go home, to her own room—the one she
had grown up in. The one with her father and Claudette and the rest
of their family nearby. Her sister was in this place and several of
her cousins, but her greenhouses, her gardens, called to her.

She’d spent years developing the plants and seeds in
those buildings. And it had been months since she’d been allowed to
spend more than an hour every few months or so in the gardens she’d
been building since she was thirteen years old.

Her father and family thought she’d be safer in this
strange place with her sister and her brother-in-law than in her
own home.

She understood that. Theoretically. It was why she
hadn’t insisted on going home.

Someone had placed a price tag on her head; on hers,
her sisters, her cousins, even the children. And she could never
understand or forget that.

She could live without her plants—though it almost
hurt her to think about it—but she couldn’t live with the idea of
losing anyone else she loved.

Especially her sister or her cousins. Her best
friends.

And until her brother-in-law Rydere figured out who
threatened them all, Cass would just content herself as much as she
could with the hotel gardens. They had been well tended before she
came to Dardanos, and the gardens housed several strains of plants
she had never seen before. Plants that she had spent the last year
studying under the tutelage of the Dardanos head gardener Uruses.
He was wise in the ways of Dardaptoan plants, and he’d freely
shared. She’d spent her time tending and loving, every spare moment
that she could.

When she especially needed soothing the way only
plants could, she came here.

It was actually a horrible piece of ground—or it had
been a year ago. The tiny patch of land right next to the water was
where her cousin Josey had nearly died. No one had told her exactly
what had happened, but from the moment Cass had been brought to
this place she had known that her cousin’s blood had seeped into
the dirt. And the dirt cried from the pain Josey had known.

Cass would never seek to explain how she knew that.
It was just something she knew and something she accepted.

She was doing her best to remove the scar upon the
land. To erase the poison of violence from this little place.

She tapped some soil around the roots of a tiny
plant she’d been nurturing for weeks, then dipped her dirty hands
into the cool waters of the small pool. She swooshed her fingers
around, idly drawing shapes in the water.

A quick look around told her that no one else was
about; except the leader of the Black House. He was usually in the
gardens this time of night.

Unwinding from the brutal military maneuvers he was
training the Dardaptoan and Lupoiux wolves in. She shivered.

She’d never understood those who made their ways in
war.

Still, whenever he was in the gardens, there was an
odd peace about the place that she had found she needed sometimes.
And no one bothered her when he was out there. And he had seen her
swim before.

She couldn’t see or hear anyone else out there now.
She would slip into the pool and wash the dirt off of her skin.

She wore her swimsuit, a modest blue one, under her
short and tank top. She’d left the pool where Josey and Jade had
been relaxing a few hours earlier and skipped going to her room,
choosing her plants instead.

They’d upset her with the talk of war that was
coming. She’d felt so helpless, and she’d been able to hear the
sounds of Equan Black’s army in the courtyard outside the private
swimming pool.

It had made it all so real.

People would probably die, people she knew. And
possibly some she loved. How was she supposed to ever understand
that?

She slipped into the water, hoping to somehow erase
the very idea of war from her soul.

Chapter Two

He watched her, like he had so many times before.
Why was she so drawn to the dirt? He’d never seen a human with such
a need for plants as his little Rajni. Was it just because of that
bastard Leo Taniss’s experiments? Had he done something to this
girl when she was just a babe, like he had the Lycurgus
Equa
? What?

If he had that man in his hands, he wouldn’t
hesitate to kill him. That the man had not faced the Dardaptoan
justice he had deserved would always gall him. The old bastard had
killed himself two days after his punishment was decreed, robbing
the Dardaptoan people of what they had deserved.

“You can go back inside, Mr. Black. I have nothing
more to say to you.”

Mr. Black. Like he was some common human. Was that
how she saw him? A stranger or a passing acquaintance? Someone
insignificant to her life?

Did she even realize who—and what—she was to
him?

He hadn’t claimed her, and never would. But didn’t
this girl realize that she was now everything to him?

No. Of course she didn’t. How could she? He had
never told anyone, least of all her. And he never would. What could
he offer her, truly? A scarred male, inside and out. And she was
so, so young. How could he ask her to tie herself to him for the
rest of their days? Yes, her cousins of the same age were quite
happy with their mates—Barlaam and Matthuin made sure of that—but
those males were different than he.

He would hurt her. The darkness in him ensured that
was an inevitability. And he would die before he let that
happen.

But he would also not sit back and watch her do
something so stupid again. He might not agree with her
brother-in-law in all things, but on one thing he did. Her
safety.

“Did you once again forget the Dhar’s warning? No
one, especially females, is to be in the gardens this late at
night.”

She did not look at him. Ignored him as she swam
through the waters.

“Girl...Cassandra.” Her name was beautiful, and
suited her well. She was definitely the most beautiful of the
Taniss females, though all were extremely comely for humans and
once-humans. But this girl...was it just because of who she was to
him? Was he just fated to find her beautiful? Alluring?

As it was he wanted nothing more than to pull her
into his arms or lay her out on the soft grass there next to the
grotto and show her the ways that a real male had of pleasing a
woman. Or to jump in the water with her and pull that modest suit
from her body and show her how much he burned for her.

So damned hot he could almost smell the ash.

And despite his insults, she was full grown, with
all the shape of a female designed to tempt a male.

He’d found her cousin Mallory and Aodhan rolling
around near this very spot months ago. How he’d looked at his
friend with derision for his weaknesses.

And then he’d turned and saw her. Digging in the
dirt, of all things. Looking soft, young, vulnerable.
Delectable.

Prey.

When had he stopped viewing humans as what they
were? Was it because of her?

He’d spent the last thirty years despising her Kind,
yet in the months since she’d come into the Dardanos fold, he had
felt himself softening towards her. Thinking about her. Dreaming of
her.

It took every bit of strength he possessed not to
just take her and say the hell with it.

To hell with all of them.

Only the knowledge that she was his
Rajni
kept him from her.

Because the one human he would die before hurting
was her.

Finally, she raised her head from where she floated
and looked at him with the green eyes the same color as her
grandfather’s. Cruel trick of the Four Fates, that. Give his female
the same eyes as the nightmare in his night. Had he pissed off
those bitches somehow? That had to be the answer.

“Do you smell that?” Fear was in her words, and for
a moment he thought it was him she feared.

And then he scented it, too.

“Inside. Go to your brother-in-law, now. Forest
fire, from the east. Go!”