Heavy footsteps creaking on the wooden stairs helped to break my destructive train of thought, but it didn’t completely free me of the two ghosts that seemed to be clinging to me. I had come into Lily’s room to hide from the rest of the world as I tried to think about the chaos swirling around me. But my thoughts were stuck on my two dead companions.
I didn’t need to reach out with my powers—I could feel Danaus’s energy swirling up the stairs like the tentacles of a sea creature to search me out. Warm and comforting, they wrapped around me, beating back my demons before he leaned against the door frame to stare down at me with a frown marring his handsome face.
“What are you doing?” he demanded as I looked up at him.
“Thinking.”
“I can’t imagine that any productive thinking can be done in here.”
“I never said it was productive thinking. I’m just thinking.”
“About what?”
“All the ways in which I went wrong.”
“Mira . . .”
“No, Danaus, think about it. I mishandled things, and now Michael, Thorne, Lily, and Tristan are all dead. My judgment is off. And now I’ve gone and made a pact with the naturi. I have agreed to be Rowe’s ally, of all people! The creature that has been torturing or trying to kill me most of my life!”
Danaus heaved a heavy sigh as he leaned his shoulder against the door frame. “Michael and Thorne were lapses in your judgment. You didn’t think ahead and bad things happened. But you’ve learned, Mira. You’ve grown more cautious and you’re thinking things through instead of rushing headlong into a situation. Valerio and Stefan could have easily been killed in Budapest, but your careful planning saved them on more than one occasion.”
His words stung a little as my own fears were validated, but I respected Danaus’s point of view and his honesty. He wasn’t going to lie to me to make me feel better. “What about Lily and Tristan? Maybe if I had—”
“There is no ‘maybe’ with Lily and Tristan,” he interrupted. “The situations were far beyond your control. Gaizka got the better of us when it came to Lily, and we didn’t anticipate the depths of Macaire’s depravity when it came to Tristan. We lost them to bad people. It happens no matter how hard we try to protect everyone we love.”
I took another deep breath and slowly released it as I stared straight ahead into the room, trying to force some of the tension out of my shoulders. My ass was getting sore from sitting on the floor for the past couple of hours and my back was stiff. However, I still wasn’t ready to move. I felt as if I had managed to find a hiding place from the world in this bright little bedroom, and I wasn’t ready to leave it.
“Why does it feel as if the world is falling into chaos?” I murmured, talking mostly to myself. “The Daylight Coalition has decided to strike now, endangering countless nightwalkers and lycanthropes in my own domain. I can’t shake the feeling they have been drawn to this city because of me. As a result, Daniel has been put into an extremely dangerous situation in hopes of garnering information. To make matters worse, Cynnia comes to me with a plan to get rid of her sister by teaming up with Rowe and the rest of the naturi. It’s the very thing I swore I would never do! Ally with the naturi!”
“You’re trying to do what is right for your people,” Danaus reminded me.
“Right for my people? Can I even be trusted to judge what is ‘right for my people’?” I snapped, twisting around to stare up at him. “I’m romantically involved with a nightwalker hunter that is part bori—the sworn enemy of the nightwalker nation! I’ve agreed to an alliance with the naturi in an effort to stop a war that would bring the Great Awakening. I feel as if I’ve killed more of my own kind during the past several months than I’ve saved.”
“Think of the faceless numbers you’ve saved by your actions,” Danaus calmly said, to which I only gave a derisive snort.
“And to add to my fun, members of the Soga clan are here trying to drag me back to Japan in hopes that I will solve their problems.”
“You can’t help everyone.”
“At this point I don’t feel I can even help myself,” I groused, falling deeper into self-pity. The situation truly was growing more and more out of control, and it was only going to get worse when Nyx and Rowe finally arrived in my city. I would have to find a way to work with Rowe without trying to kill him at the first opportunity. Not the easiest of tasks.
“Enough,” Danaus growled. Pushing away from the door frame, he stepped into the room and stood before me with his feet wide apart and his fists on his hips. “Stop the whining. Stop the complaining. Stop the self-pity.” Grabbing my left upper arm, he hauled me to my feet and then bent low enough to drop me over his shoulder while wrapping his free hand around my legs.
“Danaus!” I shouted, struggling to get into an upright position as he walked out of the room and headed for the stairs. He bounced me once, causing me to lose my balance. I flopped back down so I was lying over his shoulder. My hair felt forward, partially obscuring my view of his nice ass as we slowly and steadily descended the stairs.
“You need some distraction. Clear your mind.”
“If you want to distract me, we could have stayed upstairs and used one of the other bedrooms,” I suggested.
“This is better,” he firmly said as he hit the ground floor and made a sharp turn around the banister. He paused long enough to open the door under the stairs that led down the basement.
“Better than sex? I really doubt that,” I replied, pushing some hair out of my face as he started to descend yet another set of stairs.
Danaus said nothing in reply. He just silently continued down into the basement. Once in the center of the room, he none too gently dropped me on my ass on a thin mat. I gazed around the room in the bright overhead lighting. A couple months ago we had removed all the furniture, the wet bar, and the big screen TV. It had all been a facade in the first place to convince anyone who came into the house that there was nothing out of the ordinary.
In place of the items of leisure, Danaus and I had ripped up the carpet and replaced it with a covering of thin sparring mats. The walls were covered in a wide variety of weapons and sparring shields. The room was now a big open space for us to practice our fighting techniques. In here, blood was spilled and bones broken, but since we healed so quickly, the wounds were only a temporary distraction before we were back at it again.
As I sat in the middle of the mat, I watched Danaus walk over to the far wall containing the various staves and other blunt objects, all arranged according to discipline. I frowned as he paused, looking over the broad selection.
“What are you in the mood for?” he called out as his hand passed over a quarter staff and headed toward the Far Eastern fighting style weapons. As I watched him, I kicked off my shoes and pulled off my socks, preferring to be barefoot on the mat to give me better grip.
“For beating your skull in? Give me the jo¯ staff,” I replied. My aikido was far stronger than some of my other training, giving me what I hoped would be an edge. Danaus picked the jo¯ staff off the wall and threw it at me as I pushed to my feet. I caught it over my head and frowned as he pulled down a pair of eskrima sticks, as I expected. His kali training had proven to be much better than mine when we’d both fought with the medium-sized rattan sticks in the past, leaving me with more than a few welts and a broken forearm. I had learned that opposing him with the jo¯ staff tapped better into my aikido training, which was also complemented with more than a little Jeet Kune Do training. In this sparring session, it appeared we would be evenly matched. A small smile grew on my lips as he settled the two sticks in his hands and gave them a few lightning quick swipes through the air.