One More Bite (28 page)

He nodded, biting his lip as his toe accidentally hit the path. “They exist in every plane. Remember I told you there was one in Castle Hoppringhill?”

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“Yeah.”

“That’s the one I’m looking for.”

“But it’s miles from Tearlach!”

“It’s miles from your body. But your mind always keeps one close. Ah, yes, there it is.” He pointed across the meadow to a flaming rectangle framing a black portal whose center could lead us any number of places depending on the words we chanted before we walked through it.

“Explain that,” I demanded. “Why’s the door always close in my mind?”

“I don’t know. It’s something unique to you. I’ve never known anyone else who’s been able to do it.”

Oh great. One more weird spot on the mustard-and-blood-stained T-shirt that was my life.

Raoul murmured the appropriate wordage and the door cleared, automatically widening to admit the three of us at the same time. When we emerged, what hit me was the thought of how starkly my two bosses’ workplaces contrasted. Raoul worked out of his home, a penthouse currently overlooking the sparkling skyline of Caracas. Pete’s office looked like it had come straight out of a library basement.

Colonel John waited for us by a bank of large windows, his hands clasped behind his back as he observed the city below him. He took one look at Raoul and his mustache seemed to drop an extra inch. “Over there,” he ordered.

We lowered Raoul onto the soft white couch Colonel John had directed us to.

Clearing a place on a glass coffee table that Raoul had added to his decor since the last time I’d visited, Colonel John sat opposite him with his knee between Raoul’s booted legs. We watched him pull a long, well-maintained knife out of the sheath at his left side and split Raoul’s pants from thigh to hem. My Spirit Guide’s knee had swollen to three times its regular size. And the noise he made when Colonel John laid his hands on it made me turn away.

I strode to the sleek black bar, Óeekel where I poured myself something that smelled a lot like whiskey from a glass decanter and stubbornly ignored my reflection in the mirrored wall. “Do you want something?” I asked Vayl as he came up to the other side and sank onto one of the black cushioned bar stools.

When he didn’t answer I met his eyes. Same color as before, and not the one I was hoping to see. “Vayl—”

“Why could you not wait?”

“What?”

“Now his blood is in you when mine should have been first.”

I clutched my glass so hard I was surprised it didn’t shatter in my hands. I wanted to yell at him that I’d had no choice. I considered throwing my booze in his face and screaming that drinking blood was grosser than sucking toes, neither of which could he expect me to do at any time during our relationship. Then I got this image of my big toe, painted bright red, suddenly developing a face and a hot Southern temper to match, screaming, “What the hell is wrong with mah bad self?” And I started to giggle.

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His brows lowered so fast they would’ve crossed if it had been anatomically possible. “Oh, stop,”

I said. “I’m not laughing at you. I never do. You should consider that. It’s not necessarily a good thing.” As his jaw began to tighten I went on. “If you’ll recall, you were first. In Miami. Your fangs?

My neck? You seemed to think it was a big yummy moment.”

“That is . . . different.”

“Bullshit. And I haven’t forgotten the night you explained that you make it a point to sample your targets’ A-positive whenever possible, just to make sure they taste as guilty as the CIA led you to believe they were to start with. So, using your method of judgment, I should also be pissed that you’re the equivalent of a blood whore.”

“A what?” His voice went so deep it practically tolled. I wasn’t sure when he’d slid off the stool and come around to my side. Usually I noticed things like that. But his eyes had captivated me so completely I’d lost all awareness of my surroundings.

“It’s all in how you look at things, isn’t it?”

“You are mad.”

Once I’d have kicked him right in the teeth. Or done a quick hunt for the looney van. Now I laughed. “You’re jealous.”

“I am not.”

“Now you sound like Cole.”

“Are you actively trying to snap my control now, or is this just part of your overall charm?”

I sidled up to him. Whispered, “When I bite you, it’ll be because I want to make your toes curl and your hair stand on end. And you won’t need stitches afterward. You’ll need crutches.”

Finally. The black bled out of his eyes, replaced by that emerald green I’d grown to adore. I heard a sharp crack, looked down and realized the edge of the bar had buckled under the pressure of his grip.

“Aw, Vayl, just when Raoul was getting used to you.”

“It is your fault. Pushing me to within a hairsbreadth of explosion and then spinning me so quickly into desire it is all I can do to keep myself from taking you right here.”

I almost said, Taking me where? Like a ditz. Because the second I kicked in my eighteenthcentury translator my mind went, Oh. Ahhhh! Blush. Giggle. Cool!

Vayl said, “I have never seen that expression on your face before. What does it mean, I wonder?”

“Um, probably something along the lines of, I can’t wait to get you alone.”

Crack. An entire triangle of the bar’s edge came loose in Vayl’s hand. He looked down at it like it had just deeply disappointed him. He shook his head and murmured, “Damn.” I snorted. He glared at me. “You are not helping.”

“I’m sorry, it’s just—”

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“Aaaah!” Raoul’s cry of pain made my shoulder blades ache. And how did Vayl choose to distract him?

“Raoul, I just broke your bar.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

It turned out that Raoul was so relieved for Colonel John to have put his knee back right that he didn’t mind much about the bar. “It came with the room,” he told us as we sat on the couch that met his at a forty-five-degree angle, staring at the bit Vayl had torn off as it balanced in the middle of the coffee table. “I’ve been thinking of replacing it.”

“With what?” I asked.

He laid his head back. “I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll lose all respect for me, and then how will I ever get you to believe anything I have to say?”

Before I could even begin to think of begging, Colonel John said, “Come now, Raoul. This hedging is paramount to torture. You must let us in on your secret now.”

Raoul raised his head. “I want a train set.” He waited. When we didn’t laugh he allowed a hint of excitement to enter his eyes as he said, “I could build one all along that wall. Two levels. With a working yard. And at least five engines running at once. I had one when I was”—he glanced at me—“well, you know.” Boy, did I. I wondered, had Colonel John brought him back from the dead long ago, to fight as an earthly Eldhayr like I was now? And then, how had he finally ended up here? A blast from some suicide bomber he just couldn’t come back from?

“Do it,” said Colonel John so decisively it sounded like an order.

“Really?” Raoul eyed the bar like it might attack him if he tried to dismantle it. “I don’t know. It seems kind of—”

“You do understand that is what makes us different from them.” As Colonel John waited for Raoul’s full attention he fished a pipe out of his pocket and began to fill it from a roll of tobacco he pulled from his boot.

“What do you mean?” Raoul finally asked.

“The ability to play. Nothing we fight, be it demon, kloricht, slyein, or faorzig ever indulges in lighthearted amusement. Every single creature that calls itself our enemy has lost its power to laugh. To joke. To have fun. Which is why we must hold to it as if it were the most treasured part of our souls.” He looked at each of us, one by one. “Perhaps it is.” He lit the tobacco he’d packed with a match struck on the side of a battered red box.

Raoul jumped up, standing on one leg like a flamingo who thinks the water’s a tad too cold for both feet today. As he hopped toward the hall he said, “I have to get some paper. Where’s that pencil? It was just here! If I design it in a U-shape I should be able to—no, that won’t work. Or will it?”

“Raoul.”

He stopped, teetered so precariously I half rose from my seat before he finally caught hold of

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one of the white chairs that surrounded his dining room table. He turned around. “Yes, Colonel?”

“Are you forgetting something?” Colonel John squinted over the cloud of smoke he’d puffed up, which smelled sharp and yet sweet, an aching reminder of Gramps Lew.

“Oh.” Raoul pogoed back to us, only a shade of guilt marring the anticipation on his face. He plopped down on the couch between me and Vayl. “Colonel John couldn’t locate Samos’s contract, but he has found your father’s attacker.”

I sat forward on the couch, watching the colonel enjoy his smoke. One bit of me found it amusing to note that even here, so far removed from his time, the man had found it impossible to lose his old habits. But the rest felt like a tabby clawing her way up a curtain, yowling because the dude holding the catnip wouldn’t freaking share!

Finally the ancient veteran squinted at me through the haze he’d created and said, “I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, young Jasmine, but I’m afraid your mother has escaped from hell. She seems to be the one who hit your father with the van. And, ah, the incident with the pineapple cans?”

When I gave him a blank look, he nodded wisely. “I supposed your father had kept you in the dark on that one. No sense in worrying the children unnecessarily. Well, it seems she was trying to gain his attention, and in her frustration at being unable to do so, she knocked over a large wooden pineapple that had been erected by Albert’s favorite grocer. If Shelby had not quickly pulled him out of the way, a sea of Del Monte chunks in their own syrup might have crushed the life out of him.”

When the colonel first gave me Mom’s news I’d shoved my hands in my hair, prepared to yank out handfuls as she’d pushed me to do so many times in my adolescence. I froze, fully aware I was giving myself mini bunny ears, and began to laugh.

Colonel John traded puzzled looks with Raoul. “I fail to see the humor here. The Gatekeeper has unleashed the dogs. And if they catch her before she returns voluntarily, I can foresee no end to her tortures.”

I felt the laughter burn to cinders in my throat. Nearly choking on the ashes I said, “According to my count, she’s done exactly four nice things for me in the past twenty-five years. You Ûiveerswant to tell me why I should give a shit?”

When all three men winced at my four-letter-word choice I jerked myself off the couch and stomped to the window. What the hell? Is this your idea of a joke? You put me in the most stressful situations you can imagine, where you know I’m going to need to swear, and then you surround me with old-world prudes? Matt never cared what I said. Matt liked me just the way I was. I was talking to the Big Kahuna, but I addressed the broad expanse of skyscrapers and twinkling lights hiding masses of pissed-off poor people who thought the only way to make life better was to give all the power they didn’t realize they had to the biggest dickhead they could find.

Vayl’s hands, warm on my shoulders, let me know he cared despite my potty mouth. I looked up, caught my breath as his amber eyes met mine. Maybe even a little bit because of it? The heartcrushing longing I’d felt for my dead guy eased as I stared up at my undead one.

“Do you suppose we should do something about your mother before she kills your father?” he asked.

“Fine. Let’s call Dave. He likes them both better than I do. He can be the mediator.” Colonel John cleared his throat. The apologetic look in his eyes led me to ask, “There’s more?”

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“I am afraid so,” he said. “I was able to intercept a third message from her loeden. She wants to meet both your father and you at Clava Cairns. It seems to be a repeat of a message your father already received and did not acknowledge. It is here, awaiting your reply.” He nodded toward the hallway that led to the biggest part of Raoul’s penthouse. A series of locked doors hiding treasures I’d only begun to uncover the last time I’d visited.

I turned around so I could search Vayl’s expressions better as we talked. “What do you think she’s after?”

He shrugged. “You know her better than I.” He lifted the curl that rimmed the right side of my face. The one that had turned white after she’d touched me when we’d met in hell. “Has she changed?”

I wanted to think so. And the fury that rose at that little-girl yearning filled my lungs like glue. I slammed my hand against my chest, reminding myself how to breathe. “Nobody who’s done what she did changes,” I said.

“What did she do to you, my Jasmine?” His whisper was so soft it could almost have been the doors of my own memory creaking shut, trying to block access.

I glanced past the comforting barrier of his shoulder to the men sitting beyond us. They hadn’t heard. In fact, realizing we needed privacy, Colonel John had restarted Raoul’s toy train conversation and my Spirit Guide was yapping deliriously about track layouts and the proper turn radius for HO scale.

I moved to the side, so their view of me would be completely blocked by Vayl’s broad back. For the second time tonight I shed my jacket and revealed scars I’d kept hidden up to this point. Boy, was I getting all therapied up lately, or what? After one look at my sverhamin’s face I decided “or what” should probably apply next time. Because if my dad had been furious, Vayl had snapped.

Blood filled his eyes until the only relief from the frightening redness was the hard core of blaÛardheick at their centers. His lips pulled back, revealing his fangs, like a lion’s will when he’s warning another male off his territory. And his powers spiked, an Arctic gale to my Sensitivity, making me ram into the window so hard I could feel the wood of its frame biting through my shirt.