Storm's Heart (17 page)

“I don’t understand you,” Carling said, as she tilted her head and regarded Niniane.

Niniane blinked. “
You
don’t understand
me
?”

“Is that so difficult to believe? You don’t maneuver for power around me, and yes, sometimes you are afraid, but underneath it all sometimes it seems that you . . . like me. Even though that isn’t wise or safe. And you are sad at the same time. I find that puzzling.”

Funny, how accurate Carling was at describing Niniane’s reaction to her. Niniane gave the Vampyre a lopsided smile then looked at her hands. She couldn’t possibly tell Carling that she thought the Vampyre was something precious and horrific, an enigmatic tragedy like the ruins of a historic battlefield.

She settled for a small truth. “I do like you, even if maybe I shouldn’t. And sometimes I get sad when I think about all the friends or associates that you must have outlived. I don’t just mean humans. Losing human companions is painful enough. I’m talking about people who have our kind of life expectancy, I guess.”

“You have already lost more than enough people in your own time,” Carling said, her voice gentle.

Was that gentleness an illusion? Did Carling mimic human behavior, to manipulate or to be social, or were there tattered remnants of humanity still left inside that exquisite exterior? Niniane sighed. Whatever the ultimate truth was about Carling, Niniane would not be the one to discover it. “I wanted to ask you something, if you don’t mind.”

Carling gestured with a few fingers.

“Why do you hate Tiago?” The words dropped like stones thrown in a pond, causing a ripple of reaction that moved outward to an unseen shore. Carling never moved, but Niniane’s chest grew tight. She forced herself to breathe evenly as the silence stretched taut between them. She said, “I just want to understand.”

The tension splintered as Carling exhaled an angry laugh. “The reason is so old it hardly holds any meaning, and he doesn’t even remember, which makes me even angrier. I met him once in Memphis.”

“Memphis,” Niniane said, taken aback.

Just as she was going to ask what Carling and Tiago were both doing in Tennessee of all places, Carling said, “Of course it wasn’t called Memphis then. That came much later. Then it was called Ineb Hedj. It was the capital of the entire world, and at dawn the sun would shimmer on the Nile like a sheet of hammered silver overlaid on jade and lapis lazuli.”

Niniane caught her breath. “You met him in Egypt.”

“Yes, a very, very long time ago. Tiago was a god, and I was a commodity. I was young and still human, taken out of poverty and the river mud because of my looks. I was given to a god to entice him to stay with our people. I was entirely desperate, but he did not even look at me. He left and I was punished for it.”

Niniane had gripped her hands together at the small, dry telling of the ancient story. She said, “That’s horrible.”

“It’s ludicrous,” said Carling. “I didn’t want him. I was just a child with a pretty mouth, and he terrified me. I was glad he left.”

Niniane forced her hands to relax. “What happened after that?”

Carling’s lush lips pulled into a smile, as if she were the Mona Lisa of demons and had just swallowed a soul. “I clawed my way to a better life,” the Vampyre said. “I learned poisons and warfare and sorcery, how to rule over others, how to destroy my enemies, and how to hold a grudge with all of my heart. Then I discovered the serpent’s kiss that turned me into a god as well, and no one ever took a lash to me again.”

Serpent’s kiss. Niniane stared at her. “You’re talking about the time when you became a Vampyre.” Carling inclined her head, and Niniane saw in the gracious, imperial gesture how much Rhoswen imitated her mistress. Niniane asked, “And Tiago never realized what happened or who you were?”

“No.” Carling’s expression turned wry. “But when I look at him, I want to strangle him all the same.”

“I’m so sorry,” Niniane said.

“Child,” Carling said. The Vampyre’s dark gaze was quizzical, somewhat bored.

“I don’t care if it did happen eons ago,” Niniane told her on a flash of ferocity. “I don’t care if there’s a more sophisticated way to respond or if it doesn’t matter to you anymore. I am sorry for what that girl went through. I’m sorry for what the girl
I
was went through. We may not be those girls anymore, but their ghosts live on somewhere inside us, if only in the memory of what happened, and someone ought to say it: those children deserved better.”

Carling’s gaze dropped. The graceful wings of her eyebrows pulled together. She said, “You are right, of course. They did.”

Niniane had slept too long, and none of it had been refreshing. Her eyes felt dry and scratchy. She dug the heels of her hands into them and rubbed. “It happened so long ago, and Tiago didn’t mean to do anything wrong. You do realize that, don’t you?”

Again Carling gestured with a few fingers. She made poetry of the movement through a couple inches of space.

“Do you think you could try to set aside your grudge?” Niniane asked. “I’m asking that you do this as a favor to me, in the interests of building an alliance between us.”

“You care about him.” Carling spoke as if she savored the words, even as she stared at Niniane with intense curiosity.

There wasn’t any point in denying it. She said, “Yes.”

“Even after he withheld the truth from you about the second attack?”

She sighed. “Yes.”

A shadow of a scowl crossed Carling’s face. The youthful, impetuous expression was a startling incongruity amid such disciplined, mature perfection. The Vampyre said grumpily, “Oh fine. I won’t do anything to him as long as he doesn’t try to do anything to me.”

Niniane sagged in her chair. “Thank you,” she said. “That means a lot to me.”

Carling gave her a hard look and said, “Perhaps it means too much to you. You should be careful where you step next, Niniane, and in whom you place your trust. You are in a fragile place right now.”

Niniane’s spine stiffened. “I am well aware of the place I am in.”

The Vampyre’s expression softened. “I know you don’t want to believe that Dragos had anything to do with the assassination attempt. I could feel the struggle in you earlier.”

She was startled by the context of the conversation. “You can . . . feel my emotions?”

“Yes, of course. As Vampyres grow older our senses become more acute. The eldest of us eventually lose our taste for blood and we feed on the emotions of those around us. I have not partaken of human blood for several centuries now.”

Good grief, Carling was a succubus. Niniane said, “You sense what other people are feeling.”

Carling shrugged. “I sense the feelings of those who are alive, at any rate. Other Vampyres are of no use to me when it comes to sustenance.”

What an intrusive ability. Niniane’s forehead wrinkled. Well, that explained how glossy the Vampyre had looked at various times today. Niniane wondered what the jagged landscape inside of her tasted like to a succubus. Could it taste as bitter to Carling as it did to her?

If she asked, would Carling tell her what Tiago felt about her? Would the Vampyre tell her if that sadness she thought she had seen in his eyes just before he left had been real or feigned? She clenched her fists and jaw so tight her teeth ached, in order to keep herself from asking the pathetic question.

It wasn’t as if knowing could change what had happened or bring Tiago back.

Carling said into the small silence that had fallen, “After two hundred years’ sanctuary with the Wyr, you may want to believe that you have forged an unbreakable bond with them. But remember, what was almost your entire lifetime is not so very long a time to those of us who have lived so much longer.”

Niniane’s mouth tightened. “I’m also well aware of my relative youth and inexperience, thank you.”

“It is not my intention to point out your inexperience or to make you feel inadequate,” said Carling. “And I don’t have answers for the challenges you face. I merely wish to caution you and give you food for thought. Stronger and longer alliances have certainly been broken, and the Great Beast is older than all of us. He is old and wily. His first priority will always be the Wyr, and you are not Wyr.”

Did Carling really mean to provide food for thought, or was she trying to sow distrust between Niniane and Dragos? Niniane shook her head. “Everything you said is technically correct. Old alliances can be broken, and of course Dragos’s first priority is the Wyr. But I don’t buy that as an argument for Dragos’s possible involvement in the attack against me. It doesn’t make any sense. Why would Wyr who were disguised as Dark Fae attack me, while another Wyr kills them to defend me?”

“I do not know.” Carling pursed her lips.

Niniane said, “If for some unfathomable reason Dragos wanted me dead, it would have been much more simple and efficient for Tiago to have killed me himself.”

“We do not have enough information,” Carling said. “Perhaps there is a schism within the Wyr of which we are only now becoming aware. Perhaps the Great Beast is playing a much deeper game than any of us can understand right now. I have always liked and respected Dragos, but I never completely trust him.”

Niniane took a careful breath. Could Dragos have played such a deep game that even Tiago did not know what it was? Dragos was certainly capable of it, but she would not believe that of him in this case, not unless she was faced with indisputable proof.

After a moment she forced herself to speak out loud again. “Thank you, Councillor. I’m glad we got this chance to chat, and I will think carefully on all that you have said.”

“Be sure that you do,” said Carling.

TEN

“
I
like your duck waddle across the parking lot,” Tiago told Clarence “JoBe” Watson. “It made its own statement. Maybe it wasn’t the one you wanted to make. But it was definitely its own statement.”

Tiago had found Clarence hanging with three of his homies on South Damon Avenue. They were wearing gangsta bling, displaying their colors and jamming to 50 Cent. The brothers had taken one look at Tiago striding toward them in his black fatigues, barbed wire tats and visible weaponry. The gods only knew what they saw in his face. Flares of white lightning kept flashing in his eyes. He had hidden them behind sunglasses. The brothers had bolted like so many rabbits flushed by a wolf.

Tiago had increased his pace to a quick walk. He had caught Clarence three quarters of a block later, grabbed him by the back of the neck and slammed him into the side of a brick building.

Tiago said, “You might be wondering if you could have gotten away if you’d had your pants pulled up instead of hanging down around your thighs.”

“What the fuck, man?” Clarence shouted.

Clarence was twenty-two years old, six-foot-one and one hundred and ninety pounds. Tiago took hold of his jeans by the waist. With a heave, he lifted Clarence two feet off the ground. In one quick jerk Tiago shook him the rest of the way into his pants.

“I don’t think so,” said Tiago. “But we can always try this again.” He stepped back. “Go ahead. Run.”

“I’m gonna take you out.” With a flick of his wrist, Clarence opened his switch as he whirled around. “You crazy mo-fucker!”

Tiago took the knife from the child, pressed the flat of the blade against the nearby brick wall, and snapped it at the hilt. He said, “That was just another one in a long series of unwise choices, son.”

“You whack-job sum-bitch from hell.” The whites of Clarence’s eyes showed.

Tiago spun the guy around. “Here’s the good news, Clarence,” he said. “It pains me to say this, it really does, but you get to live.”

“Whatever it is I didn’t do it!”

“Oh yes, you did. If you hadn’t posted your little impromptu film footage, those of us in New York might not have found out about the shit going down in Chi-town in time for us to stop some more shit from happening. Now here’s the bad news.”

Tiago grabbed him by the back of the neck and the seat of his pants, and threw him into the wall. Clarence accelerated from a baritone, took the freeway past soprano and hung a sharp exit to arrive at a teakettle shriek.

“Life for you is going to get really fucking painful for a little while,” Tiago told him. “You might get away with only a few broken bones. And you don’t get to keep any of your toys.” He dragged Clarence to his feet again and pinned him by the back of the neck to the wall as he fished through the pockets of the kid’s jeans and jacket. He confiscated a nine-millimeter and continued his search. There had to be one. “I’ve been to your crib. I’ve taken out your PlayStation, your Xbox, your Wii, your laptop and two PCs, the 52-inch, the TiVo, the Blu-ray, the Pioneer and the home theater system. Oh, and your Flip, of course. Speaking of which, that’s a mighty lot of toys for someone who has no job on record. You dealing or did you just steal the shit?”

Ah, there it was. He pulled out an iPhone, dropped it to the pavement and ground it under one booted heel, which prompted more teakettle whistling. He picked up Clarence and reacquainted him with the wall.

“Now I’d have to stop doing this if some witness chose to call 911,” Tiago said. “What do you think, Clarence? You see any dots that connect from, oh, say the attack you watched and filmed the other night without doing any goddamn thing about it to your current state of discomfort?”

The teakettle whistle dissolved into a soggy snivel. Tiago reached down to pick the guy up again.

A strong, lean tanned hand came down to grip one of his wrists.

Rune said in his ear, “You got the chance to discipline him, T-bird. That’s enough.”

Tiago turned toward the gryphon. Rune had lion’s eyes the color of sun shining through amber. Whatever Rune saw in Tiago’s expression made those golden eyes turn careful. “Hey, buddy, it’s time for a debriefing,” Rune said. “You need to catch me up on what’s happened since we last talked.”

“I fucked up,” Tiago said. “It was a stupid fucking mistake and it hurt her. Bad. I don’t know how bad.”

Rune gripped him by the shoulder hard, his keen gaze steady. “All right. Whatever it is, we’ll fix it.”

“I had to walk away,” Tiago said. His voice had turned guttural, harsh. “Give her a little space. I don’t know how much space to give her. Couple hours? The rest of the night? I was just”—he looked down at Clarence, who had crumbled in a heap at his feet—“I was killing something. Killing time I guess.”

Rune looked down at the guy too. Clarence had stuffed his bleeding nose into the sleeve of his jacket. Rune said to him, “You know what a lucky little pissant you are that I came along when I did?”

“Yeah, I thick so,” said the kid. He swiped at his streaming eyes.

“Wyr don’t forgive easily,” Rune said. “And we never forget. You need to become a model citizen now.”

“Cross by heart,” Clarence said into his sleeve. “I bean it. I thick I saw Jesus in the wall just now. I’b gonna start going to church with by bob again. Baybe I’ll join the arby.”

N
o matter how sumptuous and inviting her penthouse bedroom was, Niniane had no desire to go back to it after her conversation with Carling. She wandered with aimless restlessness throughout the penthouse’s common areas.

She paused by the grand piano and opened the lid to finger the cool, smooth keys. It was a Steinway, the black surface polished to a high shine, and she suspected it was in perfect tune. She loved music, loved to sing and adored dancing, but her piano playing skills were desultory at best. Besides, the time had to be well past ten o’clock by now. That wasn’t terribly late and the Vampyres would be wide awake, of course, but some of their human companions and the Dark Fae might be readying for bed. She eased the lid back down with a sigh.

She looked up at the Vampyre who had become her soundless shadow. It was the stairwell Vampyre again. He was beautiful as Vampyres tended to be, with cool dark looks and a slim frame that hid what she knew would be a tensile inhuman strength. Rhoswen had disappeared, perhaps to attend to her mistress.

She couldn’t keep thinking of him as the Stairwell Vampyre any more than she should keep thinking of Carling as the Stepford Vampyre. She asked, “What’s your name?”

“Duncan,” he said.

“It’s nice to meet you, Duncan.”

“Thank you, highness.” He watched her with an attentive dark gaze and a calm neutral expression. “It is a pleasure to meet you as well.”

“When you came back out of the stairwell this afternoon, I was glad that the first thing you did was look toward Carling and that you didn’t go after Tiago again,” she said. “But I’m curious. What made you do that?”

Duncan said, “We could all feel when she stopped us. At least the Vampyres could. I’m not sure about our humans. Their senses are so much less than ours. When she released us and I returned to the hall, it was important to find out what had changed, preferably as quickly as possible.”

Niniane’s eyebrows rose. No wonder Rhoswen had no sympathy for Cowan. He’d gotten two warnings to stop before he lost his head.

Duncan spoke with a slight pleasant accent. Normally she loved to talk to people and to find out about their lives—or spooky undead existence, as it were—and the impulse to ask him more questions drifted through the back of her mind. The impulse faded almost at once. She wasn’t able to muster up a social mood.

She asked, “So what’s a girl got to do to get a drink around here?”

“She has merely to state what she would like,” said Duncan. He smiled at her. “It would be my pleasure to get her whatever she desires.”

He had an attractive smile and a pleasing manner. Niniane knew better than to believe those were the only qualities that won him a place in Carling’s entourage. “I’d like a bottle of red wine, please,” she asked.

“Anything in particular? Merlot, Beaujolais, Syrah?”

She said, “Alcoholic will do just fine.”

She went onto the slate-tiled patio where potted trees and plants were arranged attractively around a couple of wrought iron tables and chairs. She sat and looked out at the city lights while a warm breeze played with her hair. A few minutes later Duncan brought a tray out. He placed a glass of wine in front of her. He murmured, “I thought perhaps a Malbec.”

“Thank you,” she said.

He placed the bottle on the table, along with an assortment of cheese, crackers and fruit. Wishing him gone, she thanked him again, and he gave her another smile before he stepped away to take a position by the doors.

Her life felt like too much of a burden to pick up and examine at the moment. She sipped her wine and tried to exist in the now, but she couldn’t turn off her thoughts.

You should be careful where you step, Niniane. You are in a fragile place right now.

Yeah, thanks for that reminder, Carling. Like I hadn’t noticed.

Niniane downed the contents of her glass and rubbed at her forehead. On the plus side: Her identity had been easily verified so that it was no longer in question. Nobody could contest her right to the throne.

Wow, that was on the plus side? That was the
only
thing on the plus side?

On the negative side: Aside from her releationship with the Wyr (which was
not
in jeopardy), she had no strong alliances upon which she could rely with any degree of confidence, she had no real Power to speak of and she had a long estrangement from Dark Fae politics and society. She had no idea which of the delegation members she could trust.

And her relationship with the Wyr was a long-distance relationship. Her father’s relationship with the Wyr had been in good standing as well. That hadn’t saved him or his family.

She really was up shit creek without a paddle. If she was in a betting pool, she would give herself less than a year.

Then a thought occurred to her. Perhaps dear dead cousin Geril wouldn’t have tried to kill her if she had been less obvious about how unwelcome his attentions had been. Perhaps that was why he had taken her out to dinner first then tried to kill her. Otherwise why bother to feed her? Had he really thought his distant connection to the throne would be enough to make a play for it on his own? That was hard to believe. Or had he been working with someone else and decided to play all angles of the game? If she had responded to his flirtation, he might have thought he had a shot at sharing the throne with her.

Anxiety gnawed at her. She wished she had a pack of cigarettes. She took the bottle, tilted a liberal amount of wine into her glass and tossed it back.

If she wanted to lose at that betting pool and live longer than a year, she had to make an alliance with someone who had power. Or Power. Working to build a good relationship with Carling was all well and good, but that would be a long-distance relationship too, and she had to do more than build a distant alliance with another demesne. She had to make an alliance with someone close at hand. What did she have to offer that she could hope would make someone’s loyalty stick?

She looked at her plus side. Well crap.

She said out loud, “I’m going to have to marry.”

The warm wind took her words and blew them away. Not that it changed anything. She was going to have to marry to solidify her position and survive. She was going to have to find someone who wanted the throne, who couldn’t get it on his own and who had enough political clout or Power, or both, to help her hold on to it. She needed someone who had as much of a vested interest in keeping her alive as she did.

This time when she reached for the wine bottle she didn’t bother with the glass.

A rush of immense wings sounded overhead, and for a wild, heart-leaping moment she was so full of
hope
. She jumped to her feet as she searched the sky. A pale film of clouds draped the dark blue night sky, and a gorgeous nightmare descended onto the patio.

The creature had the form of a tall female with a wingspan large and powerful enough to support her long, flowing muscular form. She was a study in pale and dark grays and black, her lower torso and strong legs covered with short, fine feathers. She had a wide rib cage and chest that supported long flight and fast speeds, high slight breasts and magnificent sooty wings that deepened to midnight toward the primary feathers. Her long hands and feet were tipped with razored lethal talons that could slice through metal or split open a person’s skull with a single swipe, and the lines of her angular face were severe, upswept. In her human form, the Wyr sentinel Aryal had a strange, gaunt beauty. In her harpy form both strangeness and beauty were accentuated, her stormy eyes magnified, and her long black hair moved in the wind as if it had a life of its own.

Duncan blurred past Niniane with his Vampyre’s lethal strength and speed. The harpy picked him up by the neck and slammed him onto the patio so hard the slate tiles underneath him cracked. She held the Vampyre pinned as she inspected him curiously with her piercing raptor’s gaze.

“
Hmm
, pretty,” said the harpy. She looked up at Niniane. “If you don’t want him, can I have him?”

A confused tangle of emotion roared up inside, gladness mingled with a bitter disappointment. She said, “Aryal, don’t hurt Duncan.”

“I wasn’t going to hurt him,” said Aryal. “Not unless he asked for it.” The Vampyre’s eyes had started to glow red, and his fangs had distended as he strained against Aryal’s powerful grip. The harpy tapped his temple with one curved talon. “That’s even prettier. Dude, you ever taste harpy’s blood? We’re rarer than shit so I’m betting not. Want to go out for a drink sometime? If you put out, I might let you have a sip.”

“Aryal!” Niniane exclaimed.

“What!” The gorgeous winged nightmare blinked at her. “You know how hard it is to get a date in New York.”