Shadow Rising (7 page)

chapter
FIVE

D
AMIEN STOOD OVER
the headless corpse of his only lead and cursed.

“Is he really dead?”

Damien whipped his head around at the sound of the voice, spoiling for a fight. It would help let off this head of steam that had been building for days with no outlet. His first look at the vampire who’d slunk into the waiting area, probably from a hiding place beneath his desk, left Damien completely unsurprised. Just another pretty, pampered highblood wannabe. A
pet
.

Damien gave a disgusted sniff and recognized the scent of fear he’d picked up on the moment he’d stepped into the office. Possibly a witness. Probably more trouble than he was worth. The latter impression was reinforced when the vamp gave a loud gulp.

“No,” Damien said flatly. “No, no, do not puke here, no.” He closed his eyes, threw his head back, and groaned at the first dry heave. “Have some self-respect, man!
You’ll sick up a bunch of blood and make everything worse!”

“Is Mr. Manon really d-dead?” The newcomer tried again, sucking in far more air than he should have, evidence of the unabated nausea. His eyes darted quickly from the corpse to Damien to a series of hideous landscapes some tasteless idiot had hung on the wall and around again. It was as though he was afraid to let his eyes linger too long in one place, for fear of what they might see.

The weakness made Damien want to put a fist through the man’s head, but that would have been counterproductive. For now, at least. What mattered was that his one possible link to Sammael the Grigori was now permanently incommunicado.

“Unless I’m missing something important, yes, the man is dead,” Damien finally replied. “I think his head is over there behind the desk, if you need further proof. Are you finished being overly dramatic yet?”

“His
head
?” The vampire gave a pitiful moan, his eyes rolling.

“Ah, apparently not. Lovely.” Damien turned away from the fledgling before he became responsible for ruining the rest of his evening and began to pace the waiting room, fists balled, claws already starting to extend. His appointment was shot. The only one who might have heard anything useful was a blithering, burping wreck, and now he was even further away from getting his hands on that diamond.

He might have had more patience if he’d been sleeping better. Who ever heard of a vampire having fucking sleeping problems?

There was the sound of stumbling, a whimper, and he saw a tottering figure out of the corner of his eye. Damien was on him in a flash, long years of assassin’s instinct kicking in. He needed to get it together, now, before everything else went to hell. He could waste time brooding later.

Even though he did
not
brood, as a general rule. He knew enough angsty cat-shifters.

“Don’t you dare pass out on me, you pathetic piece of shit. I’d do us all a favor and kill you now, but I need answers.” Damien grabbed the wavering vampire by the collar, lifted him off the ground a few inches, and hissed into his face. “You heard something. You must have. I suggest you tell me what before I lose what small amount of patience I still have.”

That stopped the moaning, but the vampire’s eyes, when they locked with Damien’s, were half wild with shock and fear.
Very
young, Damien decided. And whoever had made him ought to be ashamed for choosing one with such a weak constitution. He felt no pity.

“Please,” the man said, his voice choked and quavering as his feet dangled above the floor. “Please don’t hurt me. I didn’t kill him. I didn’t—”

Damien’s fists tightened. “No, you didn’t. You probably pass out from the sight of your own victims. Who met with Manon before me? What did you hear? I… want…
answers
.”

Absorbed in controlling his rapidly rising temper, Damien didn’t hear the door open. All he knew was that one moment he could smell nothing but blood and sweat and fear, and the next, his senses were flooded with the scent of a rose garden in full bloom. An outraged voice, light and musical despite the fury, filled the room.

“Put him down!”

He knew that voice. Damien shuddered, a wave of intense and utterly unexpected pleasure rippling through him. The physical reaction stunned him. Stunned… and then disgusted. Damien let go of the vampire in his fists, letting him crumple into a heap on the ground. He hit the floor with a pitiful grunt.

It helped. A little.

“There. As you wished,” Damien said smoothly.
Cold
, he reminded himself as he turned.
Get it together. She’s unimportant, just a tasty little bit of trouble sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong. If this is going to be a problem, just turn her in instead of screwing her; it hardly matters…

He was full of advice for himself in the seconds before he turned to glare at her, the Grigori who’d been slinking through his dreams, bad wig and all, and leaving him hard and restless when he awoke. The advice, and the glare, died as soon as he got a look at the woman standing in the doorway.

He finally understood the wig, the dark clothes. She’d been hiding herself, and he couldn’t help but think that was a good thing, at least for the sanity of the male population of Charlotte. More of Ariane walking around, and the men of the world would be reduced to groveling simpletons, besotted twits trotting along behind her and her ilk like dim-witted puppies.

He had the urge to do just that himself. Though if he had, he would have been in trouble. She was furious, if the violet fire in her eyes was any indication.

Ariane’s eyes moved quickly from Damien to the vampire whimpering on the floor to the headless corpse. He
could see the conclusion she jumped to almost immediately. It was hard to blame her, since this sort of job would normally have been very much in his wheelhouse, minus what he felt was incredible sloppiness. Still, he found himself launching a defense immediately.

“This isn’t what you think.”

“How do you know what I think, you… you miserable piece of shit?”

“I see you’ve learned some naughty words since we last met,” Damien said smoothly, all the while darting quick glances around to see where he might dive to avoid whatever a Grigori might be able to do to him. He was sure Drake would be interested to know what that turned out to be, but he had no desire to be a guinea pig.

“I know a few more, if you’d like to hear them while I kill you,” Ariane snapped. “How could you? I knew you were going to make trouble for me, but did you really have to kill the man after you got the information out of him? He was all I had to go on!”

There was a note of despair in her voice that tugged at him and brought on a wave of guilt, even though he hadn’t done a thing. It was disconcerting.

“No, look…,” he began, then hesitated. What was he going to do,
comfort
her? What did he care if a dead body hurt some Grigori busybody’s feelings? Damien curled his lip.

Ariane reached behind her and drew her blade.

And not just any blade. It was the sort of sword no vampire had any business carrying. The kind of sword that said, “I am ancient and terrible and I don’t have time to let those who annoy me live.”

Ariane looked decidedly more than annoyed.

“Bloody hell, woman! I didn’t do—”

Damien leaped out of the way just as the sharp and glowing edge of the ornate scimitar sliced mere centimeters from his head. He got an up-close look at the engraved blade and decided that was quite enough.

“
I
didn’t kill him! Aren’t you Grigori supposed to be analytical? Patient?” He gave another shout as the blade whizzed by his ear. Damien jumped and landed on one of the waiting room couches. “Hang
on
, will you?”

Ariane advanced on him, wielding her sword as though it were an extension of herself. Even in the way she held it, her skill was obvious.

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “You already threatened to turn me in. I’m being hunted. And now I have nothing left to lose. Do you have any idea what I risked coming here? What I gave up? What’s going to happen to me now? Or worse, to Sam?”

Another slice, far too close before he leaped to a chair. It looked like his initial impression of her as a guileless, untried innocent had been a bit off base. Ariane certainly
looked
like a goddess of vengeance. Her hair tumbled in platinum waves around her shoulders, the light reflecting off of it so that it seemed to glow. The cupid’s bow of her mouth was open, her lips pulled back over fangs that glittered in the light she gave off.

She swung the blade up and around her head, ready to bring it down in a final blow. Damien froze, his heart caught in his throat, arrested by the sight of her. In that moment, he wasn’t sure whether he was desperately attracted to her or terrified out of his wits.

Coherent thought returned just in time for him to leap onto the desk that dominated one corner of the room.
Behind it, Manon’s head gazed placidly up at him from dead, dull eyes. Damien glared at it before focusing again on Ariane, who sliced the scimitar through the air, once, twice, in graceful, dancing, deadly motions as she approached.

Damien put his hands up in front of him, knowing he had nowhere left to go. “Damn it, woman, calm down and hear me out before you decapitate me! Manon was dead when I got here! That’s why What’s-His-Face is sitting over there in a puddle of vampire vomit wetting himself!”

He heard a soft wail and just caught sight of the fledgling vampire crawling across the floor and trying to wedge himself into a corner, hands thrown over his head.

Ariane didn’t even glance in the fledgling’s direction. The force of her fury surprised him, but what surprised him even more was the pain and hopelessness in her eyes. Just that glimpse of her emotions resonated all the way through him, awakening feelings and memories long—and better—buried.

It made Damien wonder what had happened to her, that she was so different from her fellows.

Then the blade was at his throat, and he couldn’t move. Only one thought was left:
Oh, hell.

Damien swallowed hard, and the movement of his Adam’s apple caused the blade to nick his skin. He felt a thin rivulet of blood snake its way down his neck. She’d caught him, and he’d never been caught. Not like this. The woman was nearly as fast as a Ptolemy, and far more skilled than he’d given her credit for. Her beauty, so delicate, was deceptive. It looked as though he’d made his final mistake in the “don’t judge a book by its cover” department.

And yet… she hesitated.

The suspense didn’t settle well with Damien. Not when he was bleeding, slowly but steadily, all over one of his favorite shirts.

“If you’re going to kill me, just do it. I’m not going to beg. I’m hardly worth it.”

Damien didn’t realize what he’d said until he saw the surprise on Ariane’s face. He clenched his jaw, his anger now directed fully at himself. He’d sounded like a typical, self-loathing lowblood. And he wasn’t. He just didn’t care all that much about staying alive. In his mind, that was an entirely different issue.

Of course, he also didn’t much care for pain, so if the woman was going to do him in, Damien wished she’d just get it over with instead of staring at him with that odd look of… understanding.

“I don’t believe you,” she repeated, more softly now. The question Damien found himself asking, however, was which thing she didn’t believe. That he hadn’t killed Manon? Or more disturbingly, that he wasn’t worth her time?

“It’s a free country, last I checked,” Damien replied with a shrug, making an effort to keep his own tone low and even. Ariane made him feel off balance. Uncertain. He needed to find some solid ground on which to deal with her, and soon.

“If you didn’t kill Manon, who did?” she asked. The vicious, curved blade didn’t move from his throat, where the sting of it slicing into his skin was rapidly becoming torment.

“Are you saying you believe me, after all that?”

Ariane didn’t reply, and she didn’t have to. Damien could see that she would stand there forever, if necessary,
waiting for an answer. Of course, he’d be out of his mind by then from the slow-dripping blood, the insistent sting of the blade’s edge.

“This is interesting,” Damien said, wanting her to do something, anything to break the impasse. “I didn’t figure you at all for the sadistic type, and yet here you are, watching me bleed. Does my blood turn you on, love?”

Violet eyes narrowed. “Don’t call me that. It’s very obvious you’re only in love with yourself. Nothing about you interests me.”

It stung, which was ridiculous. Her petty verbal slaps at him were the least of his worries. And yet everything about Ariane smacked of a challenge. Her rejection of him most of all.

Not interested? We’ll see about that.

“Deadly
and
astute,” Damien said, his voice a bored drawl. “Look, are you going to separate my head from my body, or are you going to lecture me? I had a governess growing up, you know. I don’t need another. And you’re even duller than she was.”

He lashed out from habit, accustomed to being as cutting as he pleased without anyone thinking much of it. Ariane’s flinch was barely noticeable, but Damien caught it… and immediately felt like a cad, something he thought himself incapable of feeling even before he’d been turned.

“I may be dull to you,” Ariane said evenly, her chin tipping up just a little in defiance, “but I’m the one holding the sword. I’ll decide what to do with it after you tell me what happened here.”

“I discovered a headless corpse and a simpering moron moments before being attacked by a crazy vampiress with a ridiculously large sword.”

The slight curve of her lips was cool. “Funny.”

“I was being deadly serious,” Damien snapped. “Though it’s nice to know Grigori have a sense of humor.”

“We don’t.”

“Well… shit.” He bared his fangs at his own reflection in the gleaming blade. It wasn’t supposed to end like this for him, done in by a beautiful woman immune to his charms over something he hadn’t even done. For once.