“Do you have claws?” All vampires could extend their nails, some more than others. It was part of what allowed them to climb so well. But during the battle, when she’d bandaged up Naasir’s wounds, she’d thought she glimpsed a more dangerous ability out of the corner of her eye. “I don’t mean normal vampire claws. Actual claws.”
Putting down his glass, Naasir spread his hand between them. His fingers were long and strong, his skin that lush, rich brown with an undertone of gold . . . and where his nails had been, she suddenly saw wickedly curved claws as might appear on the paws of a tiger. They disappeared a heartbeat later, and she could almost imagine it had been an illusion.
“Truth,” she whispered, taking his hand to examine his nail beds when he didn’t seem to mind. She almost asked where his claws had gone, since there was no trace of them, but didn’t want to waste a question.
“Do this, Ellie,” Ash said from his other side, reaching out to playfully scratch the back of Naasir’s neck, his hair brushing over her skin.
He made a rumbling sound in the back of his throat, eyes closing.
Elena copied Ash’s action on his hand, got another rumble before he lifted the gorgeous, true silver of his lashes to say, “Last question.”
“Do you change shape?” Her words made Illium erupt in gales of laughter, but Elena wasn’t put off. Legends had to start somewhere. Why not with Naasir?
“Of course,” he answered, then turned his body to the right and curled his arm into his chest. “See, I have just changed shape.”
Making a strangling motion with her hands that had him throwing back his head and laughing in unhidden glee, Elena felt the clean kiss of the sea, of the rain in her mind. I see you and Naasir are becoming friends.
What did I tell you about this new sense of humor of yours? She took a bite of her dinner, which she’d ignored while questioning Naasir.
I was speaking only the truth. Naasir is currently playing with your hair.
He probably wants to scalp me and use my hair as a trophy.
True.
Elena looked up, eyes narrowed at the far too amused archangel across the table. I am so going to get even with you for this. Tugs on her scalp at the same instant, as if Naasir were curling the strands around his finger, then letting go.
She turned, intending to tell him to knock it off, but then she saw his face. He looked . . . absorbed. Like a cat with a ball of yarn. She didn’t care if he’d said no to the tiger question—there was something distinctly feline about him. Especially since he’d apparently talked Ash into scratching his nape again while he played his game with Elena’s hair, his eyes heavy lidded in ecstasy.
She was going to unearth the truth of him, even if it took her the rest of eternity.
Janvier saw Ash run her nails affectionately over Naasir’s neck and remembered the first time she’d done that. It had been about thirty minutes after meeting Naasir. Where he was standoffish and distant with most new people, Naasir had already decided he liked “Janvier’s hunter,” having kept track of their interactions over the years.
As a result, he’d been his normal self.
Instead of being startled by Naasir’s behavior, Ash had taken to him from the start, making no effort to avoid the physical contact the other male liked to make. “He’s different,” she’d said with a mystified shrug when Janvier asked her about it. “It’s hard to explain, but what I sense from him isn’t anything that disturbs me. I’m not sure I understand most of it.”
A few minutes after that, while the three of them had been crouched in a hidden access tunnel they’d been scoping out in the run-up to the battle, she’d reached out and absently scratched the back of Naasir’s neck.
Janvier, having previously seen how ferociously Naasir could react to unwanted contact, had been ready to fight for her life, but the other man had bent his head for more. Ash’s startled expression as she realized what she was doing had faded into affectionate puzzlement—and Janvier realized she’d reacted to an unvoiced need in the other male.
Her friendship with Naasir was as open and free of shadows as Janvier’s relationship with her was not. So much lay unsaid between them, but saying it would fix nothing. Ash knew he loved her, would always love her. Anything she wanted, he’d give her . . . except for her mortality.
He’d waited more than two hundred years for her. How could she ask him to just let her go?
Feed
Her eyes were drenched in terror.
Raising a hand, the one-who-waited stroked her cheek as her throat worked, the scream swallowed up by the pungent miasma of her fear.
“Not tonight.” A rasp, its throat a ruin. “I have fed.” The hunger came often, but the one-who-waited had learned to discipline that voracious need, because without discipline it would become a slave to those urges rather than a master of them.
So it pressed its mouth to hers in a kiss that made her whimper, its lips cracked and papery against hers. Hers had been soft once, were no longer. A pity.
Releasing her jaw, the one-who-waited smiled and drew one last draft of fear-laced air before removing the temptation from view. “Soon,” it promised as the wood obscured her face. “Soon.”
19
Janvier was leaning against the wall by the window finishing off the last of the blood in his wineglass when Ash found him around ten thirty that night. Dressed in those sleek black jeans paired with red ankle boots that had a spiked heel, her long-sleeved black shirt tucked into her jeans and opened at the throat just enough to hint at skin, she looked sexy and dangerous and his.
The dangles at her ears were a cascade of hoops created with tiny beads of orange and yellow and red, the belt around her hips having a simple square buckle of gleaming silver. And her hair, that glorious hair, it was a waterfall down her back. He wanted to wrap his hand in it, arch her throat, sink his fangs into her.
Mark her.
“We should head out,” she said, eating a forkful of the chocolate fudge cake on her plate.
Janvier put his possessive hunger in a stranglehold and stole a fingerlick of frosting. “Any more news from the computer teams?”
“No. They’ve struck out in terms of identifying her either through the tat or through missing persons reports.” She stabbed her fork into the cake with unnecessary force. “Not surprising. With what we know from the signs of feeding on her body, she probably lived with her killer.”
“We will find her, cher.”
“Yes, we will.” An absolute statement as she finished off the cake.
He couldn’t help it. Leaning in, he caught a crumb clinging to her lower lip and brought it to his mouth. Sucking his thumb inside, he said, “Mmm, sweet.”
Her body had gone stiff at the contact, and now she moved with an unusual jerkiness to place the fork and saucer on a side table. “Let’s go.”
It wasn’t the response he’d been hoping for, but neither was it the light, flirtatious one he’d begun to find increasingly dissatisfying. He loved playing with Ash, but not when she was using that play to keep him at a distance. This at least was a sign he’d breached the armor she used to hold him at bay.
“Any particular club you want to hit first?” he asked, after getting into the car and starting up the engine.
“I say we start at the low end and work our way up. We have no way of knowing if she was beautiful enough to be invited into the exclusive clubs.” Beauty talked in the clubs, especially if sexual feeding was involved. “But if she had been a regular at one of those places, or over at Erotique”—the most elite club in the city and located outside the Quarter—“her disappearance would’ve created more waves.”