My eyes popped open and I jerked upright when I felt the bed shift beside me. I hadn’t heard Danaus’s approach over the jet engines. He reached out with one hand to touch my cheek, but I lurched away from him. I was edgy and wary of the hunter when I knew he was going to come drilling for the truth.
Patiently, Danaus held up a wet washcloth in his left hand. “You’re a mess.”
“Oh.” Taking a deep breath, I allowed him to turn my face toward him so he could begin to wipe away the caked on layers of dirt and dried blood. In my weariness, fresh tears welled up, but I held them back. How long had it been since someone had cared for me in such a gentle fashion? No easy answer came to mind. The years just stretched out in my mind like a black endless abyss.
“It’s lucky it was dark when we arrived. The pilots might have called an ambulance rather than allow you on the plane,” Danaus said as he tilted my head slightly to one side so he could clean along my right jaw.
One corner of my mouth quirked in a half smile. “I’m sure I’ve looked worse.”
Danaus dropped his hand into his lap and heaved a heavy sigh that was barely heard over the engine of the jet as we taxied down the runway. “Not by much if at all. Between the bori, the naturi, and the coven, I don’t think I know of anyone who has taken a beating like you and survived.”
“You mean besides yourself?”
Danaus shook his head. “You have always taken the brunt of what they’ve all dished out. And through it all, you’ve survived.”
“But . . .” I prompted when the word seemed to hang ominously in the air.
“But when you disappeared from Factors Walk, I thought you were dead. Never have I seen such terror in your eyes.” Danaus slid his fingers into my hair and grasped the back of my head. He pulled me close so that his lips grazed my ear. “Tell me what happened. Tell me the truth so I can protect you. I never want to see that look again.”
“Maybe you can’t protect me,” I said, pulling away from him.
Danaus gave a low growl as he stood and tossed the filthy washcloth into the entrance of the bathroom. He then turned and lifted me into the bed. He paused long enough to remove my leather boots before pulling the blanket up over me. While at the town house, I changed into some clean clothes and packed a small bag while Danaus grabbed his bag. We were at least prepared for a few days of travel.
“I will protect you,” he proclaimed, sitting on the edge of the bed again. “But my job becomes much easier if I know what I am faced with.”
I stared down at the blanket, propped up by a small mound of pillows. I was exhausted and hungry, but I knew we would get no rest until I spoke of what had occurred at my house. I briefly debated a string of lies that would be immensely easier to swallow than the truth that rested on the tip of my tongue.
But even as I settled on a lie, I found myself recalling a lonely church in Venice where Danaus divulged to me his darkest secret: his mother had sold his soul to a bori before he was born. He had risked horror and censure with that admission. He trusted me when he still had little reason to trust me. It was well past time that I did the same.
“My real father paid me a visit,” I said, desperately searching for some logical place to start this ugly conversation.
“Jabari?”
I shook my head, refusing to lift my eyes from the blanket. Jabari might have been one of the nightwalkers that made me into a nightwalker, but he was not my father. “No. I’m talking about the creature that gave me this set of particular genes when I was born as a human.” Human . Even that word seemed to be a stretch, but I didn’t like my other choices.
“I don’t understand. What happened to LaVina?”
“There was no witch named LaVina. That had always been my father in disguise watching over me. He apparently was waiting for his chance to get closer to me, to finally make his presence known. Gaizka gave him the opportunity.”
Danaus reached up and gently brushed my hair away from my face, bringing my gaze up to meet his. “Mira, you’re more than six hundred years old. This . . . thing . . . can’t possibly be your father. I don’t know of anything that could live that long and actually reproduce with a human. Unless, of course, your mother wasn’t—”
“No, my mother was a normal human woman.” I paused and shook my head. “You won’t believe me. I hardly believe it myself. If he hadn’t . . . I would never have believed it myself.” A lump formed in my throat around the words that still needed to be spoken.
“Ryan’s a warlock, and I doubt that he’s more than three hundred years old. There couldn’t possibly be an older warlock hanging out there,” Danaus said, more to himself than me. “Not naturi or bori. Nightwalkers don’t reproduce, right?”
“Danaus, you’ve never met a creature like this.” I reached across the bed and took one of his hands in both of mine. I closed my eyes and pushed the words forward. “He calls himself Nick. But he said that in other cultures he went by names such as Raven, and Anansi, and Keku, and Loki.”
Danaus lurched off the bed, pulling out of my reach when I finally reached names that he instantly recognized. The names were all different, but they all were names for the gods of chaos in the various different religions. The trickster gods of old. I was a child of chaos.
“Mira, this thing has got you fooled. That’s impossible. A god? A dead god from another religion?”
“And what if I’m not? This creature beat me within an inch of my life and did it without breaking a sweat. It appeared before me looking like the man that raised me as a child. It threatened to make me human.”
Danaus halted his pacing sharply and turned back to face me. “Make you human?”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” I snapped. “But yes. Nick said that if I didn’t do as he demanded then he would make me human again so I could bear him a child to take my place in his master plans.”
“Human?” Danaus slowly sat back down on the edge of the bed. “Such a thing isn’t possible.”
“With a touch, he caused my heart to beat and blood to flow through my veins. For just a second I could feel my soul settle back down into my chest. It only lasted a couple seconds but he did make me human again.”
“Okay, just supposing that for a crazy minute your father is a god, what does he want?”
“He wants me to learn to control you the same way that you can control me. He wants me to learn to control Jabari as well,” I admitted, cringing as I waited for him to explode at the suggestion.
“This Nick has to realize that Jabari is going to kill you the second he even gets the slightest indication that you can control him,” Danaus calmly said. “Jabari wouldn’t risk it.”
“Let alone you.”
A half smile tweaked his beautiful mouth. “What’s the saying? Turnabout is fair play. I can’t say that I won’t fight you every step of the way, but it would only be fair considering how many times I’ve utilized your powers.”
“Thanks. It’s just until we find an edge over Nick, though I can’t begin to guess as to how we’re going to do that.” Relief rippled through me as Danaus seemed to be taking all this information a lot better than I had initially expected. Of course, I knew that he didn’t truly believe any of this. I had no doubt that he believed some other creature was playing a trick on me, trying to bend me to its will. For the time being it didn’t matter what Danaus believed. I’d told him the truth, and I had a feeling he would come face-to-face with it soon enough.
“Why Nick?” Danaus inquired.
“What do you mean?”
“Why would he call himself such a common name as Nick?”
A knot twisted in my stomach. “Don’t worry about it, Danaus. It’s not important.”