Mina’s expression grew serious. “Was a ploy to bring you to a place where you could discover your real talent, at least on my part.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Don’t tell Heath. He had ambitions.” She grinned, patted Thalia on the shoulder and, with a stately whisper of nylon hose and linen pleats, moved to intercept the nearest clump of people.
Thalia went to Gideon.
“That was quite a show.” The harsh lines of his face made it difficult to guess his thoughts. “Is that how it’s supposed to work?”
“Typically the observer feels a small push.”
Gideon nodded and took her arm. “I think we should get going.”
Deflated by Gideon’s lack of reaction, Thalia followed him up the narrow stairs, the weight of everything that had happened pressing down on her.
This night was far from over.
The summer solstice. Akos hated the shortness of the night, but it signaled the turning point of the year. Now the hours of sunlight would diminish and the hours of darkness would flourish, a fitting night for Inanna’s prophecy to come true.
Inanna. She’d been the perfect pawn. She’d thought she was the one in control, the immortal vampiress, and she’d certainly been exciting, but his agenda had had nothing to do with love or even sex.
He’d sought her out because of what she was, and when he had arranged for her and Gideon to meet, his two goals had collided.
At first, she’d refused to turn him, said the dark gift was more a curse, a punishment, than a boon. But when he’d lain near death, she’d chosen to turn him rather than live without him.
It was too bad she’d turned the Butcher, as well. If she hadn’t done that... Ah well, it was no use speculating.
Tonight. It had to be tonight. He didn’t want to wait any longer. He was tired of waiting.
He’d spotted Gideon near the Tomb earlier, but his enemy hadn’t had the Champion with him. He’d managed to slip away before the Butcher could detect him. He needed both of them to fulfill the prophecy.
Akos burned with displeasure. Where were they?
“Gideon. About what happened earlier at Mina’s—” Unable to hold her tongue any longer, Thalia broke the heavy silence that hung between them in the car.
He believed something evil lived inside him, waiting for the chance to strike. But she hadn’t spent the past week with a monster, just a man, and, regardless of his feelings about her, a good man at that.
How could she convince him of that?
“There’s nothing left to talk about.” Ice coated his words.
“But—”
“I agreed to help you find the rogue. That’s all.” His words had the ring of iron.
Stabbed, the crushing pain in Thalia’s heart seemed to radiate through her chest. She fought back tears, raised her chin, and turned to look out the window at the passing scenery.
She studied the familiar streets and houses for several minutes. Everything looked so different in the dark, as if a strange transformation occurred when the sun went down. She sorted through her disjointed thoughts. Words leaped to her lips. She bit them back, but reconsidered. She might have promised herself she wouldn’t beg, but she couldn’t let it rest. He had to be forced to confront the truth. This wasn’t for her. It was for him.
“What I wanted to say isn’t about us.” Thalia’s voice was so soft only his vampire-aided senses allowed him to hear her over the road noise.
“Oh.” Chagrin colored the single exclamation. Gideon steadied himself with a short laugh. “What did you want to say?”
“I wonder,” she took a deep breath. “How long has it been since you’ve killed someone?”
“What?” Gideon threw a surprised glance at Thalia. How could she ask him that?
She looked straight ahead out the dark windshield, as if fascinated by the taillights and license plate of the car in front of them, her face reflected in the glass. Her gaze darted in his direction before skimming away. “You say you’re a monster,” she continued. “I’m curious. How many victims has the monster claimed, say in the past one-hundred years?”
Gideon didn’t have to think. “None.” Everett had been the last and the hardest. Since then, he’d left administering the penalty for breaking vampire law to others.
“Hmm. How many in the past millennium?” She looked at him out of the corner of her eye.
“Ten.” And he remembered every one.
“Cold blooded murder?
Gideon hesitated, considered a lie, then remembered her talent for detecting an untruth. “No.”
“You were enforcing the Code each time, weren’t you?” With that, she pinned him with her eyes, daring him to answer truthfully.
“Yes.” He could see their faces before him, men and women who had surrendered to the awesome power of the Claiming. They’d each had their own story. They hadn’t been strangers. He’d known them all well. Thankfully, except for Everett, he hadn’t turned any of them.
There was Angelina, an aristocratic French woman who had been run through on the cruel tines of a pitchfork by an angry mob during the French Revolution. She’d been a talented singer and had delighted in using her voice to draw men to her. Despite his need for isolation, he’d liked her. She’d had a witty charm that could make one forget inconvenient memories.
He’d been forced to behead her before she brought the entire constabulary of Bordeaux down upon them.
John, a simple yeoman farmer, who had craved the excitement and supremacy of the vampire gifts. How he’d gloried in learning, something forbidden him in his mortal life.
Before becoming addicted to the Claiming, John had made it a practice to turn every pretty girl he saw. After, he used his blood ties with his eyasses to form his own personal army.
Edward, a young fop of the Regency era who’d dallied with the wife of the wrong man and eaten grass for breakfast, as he’d like to say. Edward had been a sad case. He’d been a man of his times who’d outlived them. No doubt if he’d still been mortal, he would have become an alcoholic or an opium eater.
And there’d been so many others. They’d died and lived again, but learned nothing from the experience.
“And before that? How many murders have you committed?”
“When I was a boy, I arranged to have enemies killed.” He didn’t remember their faces. They seemed as distant now as the craggy surface of the moon. Sometimes the moon seemed closer.
“And these enemies. They were innocents?”
“I wouldn’t call them innocents,” he hedged. He could see where she was going, but she was wrong. “They were ambitious men. Men who saw a young prince as an obstacle to their own advancement.”
“Men who were willing to kill to remove that obstacle?” Thalia accentuated her point with the rise of her delicate eyebrows, her gaze riveted on his face.
“That doesn’t change the fact it was my order that led to their deaths.”
“Doesn’t it? You told me you were a sickly boy. If you had met these grown soldiers on the field of battle, what chance would you have had? They would have killed you—little more than a child—without a moment’s remorse. Wouldn’t they?”
Gideon didn’t, couldn’t speak.
“Wouldn’t they?”
“And later, when Inanna betrayed you, would you have killed her, if she hadn’t attacked you? What would you have done if it had been someone else who had spied against you? What would have been the penalty?
“How many of your soldiers died because of her? Because of information she’d passed to Akos? She handed you and your men to him time and time again. It’s a miracle you weren’t killed.”
He shook his head. He’d told himself the same thing, but it excused nothing.
“I can’t condemn you because you fought to live. And I don’t think you should condemn yourself.”
She didn’t blame him? A part of him rejoiced in her forgiveness, but the rational part of him struggled to forgive himself. Could it be true? Had his actions been self-defense?
You’d like to believe that, wouldn’t you?
Breathed that voice inside him.
Flashes of memory seared across his mind’s eye.
He was a child, trembling in his narrow cot, each night consumed by fear. Would they come for him in his sleep? Or would the next day bring the slip of a bronze sword, the ill-timed backswing of a mace, a spear gone astray?
He was a young man, triumphant, waiting for an audience with the king, expecting praise from a remote father he should finally have pleased, only to overhear the king ordering his death.
Years later, still young, but leaning on a cane, debilitated from the effects of poison as he watched his half-sister led to her death.
She held her head high as they took her to the square. Her mouth pinched, her eyes, so like his, so like his father’s, had been flat and dead. Then she’d tuned on him. “Usurper! I’m the older!” she’d said, struggling against the two men restraining her. “This all should have been mine. You should have died. Why couldn’t you die?” Her venom still rang in his ears, though millennia had passed.
And then, Inanna’s betrayal just when he thought he’d found true happiness. The coppery gleam of her dagger in the lamplight as she rushed toward him. The fury in her eyes, then the horror as his curved sword pierced her flesh.
Catching up with Akos later at his campsite. The visions that had disturbed his sleep for thousands of years, faces set in masks of rage and fear, lips drawn back in desperate grimaces, eyes wide, pupils dark. Blood the color of mud and pitch in the uncertain light of the torches. And at last, standing among the twitching corpses. His hands stained, his sword broken.
Inanna’s curse. And later, the hardened mercenary.
The mortals didn’t stand a chance,
the monster reminded him.
You were faster, stronger, able to manipulate their will. What’s your excuse for that?
“I worked as a mercenary,” he said into the silence that had followed her pronouncement of faith. Let her defend him against that charge.
Thalia looked at him, her mouth opened and closed. It seemed she didn’t know what to say, then she asked in a tone that said she already knew the answer. “You fought for the strong? You massacred old men, women, and children? You worked for the highest bidder?”
It was Gideon’s turn to be at a loss for words. He wanted to say yes. But it wasn’t the truth. “No.” He grinned ruefully. “I’ve always been a sucker for a lost cause, but don’t think nobility played a part. Don’t think I was some sort of hero. I did it for the challenge.”
“Hmm.” Thalia turned away, but in the passenger-side window he could see the reflection of the smile she struggled to hide.
Despite the intensity of the conversation and the pain that lingered in her chest, Thalia couldn’t quite quell the victorious smile that bubbled up as Gideon tried to spin the truth to fit the lie he’d believed for so long.
He stopped the car. They’d arrived.
“What’s the plan?”
“We’re just a couple out for a drink.” As he spoke, Gideon seemed to shorten and grow broader, and a small paunch formed at his waist. His features shifted and flattened, his hairline retreated. Soon he was wearing baggy khaki shorts and a white golf shirt.
He looked like a former high school football player who had started to go to seed. Thalia summoned a glamour. The spell came over her with an ease she’d never known.
Why had she been unable to tap into these powers before? She sighed and put her questions away. Time to get to work.
She checked her reflection in the car window. A tall, bleached blonde with skinny jeans pasted on her legs and a cropped, white T-shirt with a sparkly multi-colored butterfly decal molded to her chest gazed back at her.
“We won’t fool Akos, but we don’t need to. He wants to find us as much as we want to find him.” Gideon put a hand under her elbow and escorted her toward the Tomb. She could see him noting the position of the various police officers, male and female, watching the bar.