Bay of Sighs (10 page)

“A reunion.” She thought it would be a new favorite word. “You'd come?”

“Sure. I bet Bran could fix it up, somewhere private, by the sea. We'll have gelato and Bellinis.”

“And pizza.”

“Pizza goes without saying.” He couldn't help himself, and stroked his hand down her hair. “We'll end Nerezza, but that won't end us.”

A
t midnight, far too intrigued to resist, Malmon studied the house matching the address on the card Nerezza had given him. He'd already had one of his men take photos of it earlier in the day, and had assigned another to find out everything there was to find on the woman.

It both angered and intrigued him when everything to be found was nothing at all.

But the house suited her, to his mind. Even as he studied it now, from the smoked glass of the limo, he could imagine her inside. It held an eerie grace with its old stone, shielding trees, the gargoyles perched on the eaves.

As his did, it stood back from the road, behind a gate. He appreciated the desire for privacy, the power it took to command it.

What would she offer him? He had to know.

When he ordered the driver to pull up to the gate, he found himself unsurprised it opened immediately. Once the driver opened his door, he stepped out, a confident man in a bespoke suit, who believed he'd already seen and done all there was to see and do.

The wide, arched door opened as he approached. A man, pale of face, dark of eye, stood silently.

Malmon stepped into a foyer lit with dozens of candles. In the shifting, shimmering light, the pale man closed the heavy door. And Malmon's heart beat quickly.

“My mistress waits.”

The man's voice scraped rough, like a lizard's tongue over flesh. Malmon followed him up the stairs—more candles, and urns full of lilies so red they looked nearly black in the candlelight. Lilies so strongly scented they swam in his head.

He entered a large drawing room where Nerezza sat in an ornate chair, almost a throne, that glimmered gold. Its back rose up behind her with a carving of intertwined snakes at its peak.

She wore the same red as the flowers, so deep it showed black, with rubies like fat drops of blood dripping around her throat, from her ears.

An odd bird—not a crow, not an owl, but some odd combination—perched, like the gargoyles, on the wide arm of the chair.

Her beauty struck him like a bolt—both fierce and terrible. And so, in that moment, was his desire for her.

She smiled, as if she knew.

“I'm pleased you came. Leave us,” she told the servant while her dark eyes stayed on Malmon's face. She rose, her gown rustling like papery wings, and glided to a decanter. Poured deep red into glasses. “A drink, to new friendships.”

How dry his throat; how fast his pulse. He struggled to keep his voice even, casual.

“Will we be friends?”

“We have so much in common already, and more to come.” She watched him over the rim as she sipped. “You came because you wonder, and your life has few wonders now. You'll stay because you'll know, and you'll want.”

Her scent seemed to twine around him, made him think of everything dark and forbidden.

“What will I know? What will I want?”

“You'll know what I tell you. You'll then tell me what you want. Your choice to make.” But her eyes told him she knew that choice already. “Shall we sit?”

She didn't sit on the throne chair, but moved to a curved settee, waited for him. And said, “The Stars of Fortune.”

“You believe they exist.”

“I know they exist. The first, the Fire Star, was found only days ago, in an underwater cave in Corfu.”

His interest piqued, and some irritation with it. His network should have picked up that information. If true.

“You have it?”

Something dark, and far more terrible than beauty, slid in and out of her eyes. “If I did, I'd have no need for you. I told you there are six who stand in the way. They found the star, they have it, and—for now—it's beyond my reach. Now they hunt for the next, and I hunt for them. I . . . underestimated their inventiveness. I won't do so a second time.”

Now he smiled, believing he held the advantage. “You want my help.”

“Your skills, your thirst, combined with mine. Force alone proved inadequate. I require guile, and human ambitions.”

“Human?”

She said nothing to that, only sipped again of the wine that swam in his head like the heady scent of lilies.

“You know two of the six.”

“Do I?”

“Riley Gwin.”

“Ah, yes.” Even the sound of her name made his mouth thin. “I know Dr. Gwin. A bright, resourceful woman.”

“She's more than that. Sawyer King. And I see you have no love for this one.”

“He has something I want, and haven't yet managed to take.”

“The compass. It can be yours. I have no use for it.”

Fascinated, Malmon leaned toward her. “You know of it, what it's reputed to do?”

“He is the traveler, for now, able to shift through time, through space as long as he possesses the compass. You want that power.”

“I'll have it. It's simply a matter of time. One way or the other, I take what I want.”

“As do I. With these two are four others. None of the six are only what they seem. If you choose to do what I ask of you, I'll show you what they are, what they have. And what they are, what they have can be yours. I only want the stars.”

The compass. He coveted the compass, and only more since he'd failed to . . . acquire it.

But she clearly coveted the stars, so a bargain must be struck. “If, as you say, the stars exist, nothing six people are or have can compare to their worth.”

“The guardians—these six—are not all I'd give you. The offer of money is too usual for you and me, Andre, though I can give you more than any man can hold. You can choose more wealth, but I think you'll make another choice.”

“What else is there?”

She lifted a hand, and in it rested a clear ball of glass.

“Parlor tricks?”

“Look and see.” Her voice whispered over his skin like ice. “Look into the Globe of All, and see.”

“Something in the wine,” he murmured as clouds and water stirred and stirred inside the glass.

“Of course. Only to help you forget all of this should you choose to refuse me.” And, she thought, to make him—like his servant—susceptible to suggestion.

Hers, should he disappoint her, would be for him to return home,
take the weapon he now had at the small of his back, put it into his mouth, and pull the trigger.

If he refused, he was of no use to her.

“Look and see,” she said again. “See the six. Guardians of the stars. Enemies of Nerezza. See them, and what they are.”

He saw Riley standing under the light of a full moon, saw her transform into a wolf that threw back its head to howl before running into shadows.

He watched Sawyer, holding the compass, vanish in a golden light and reappear in another.

He saw a man hold lightning in his hands, a woman who spoke of visions and things yet to come. Another man run through with a sword who rose again, healed and whole.

And the woman, the beauty who dived into a night sea and rose up with a jeweled tail.

“You see the truth.” Nerezza spoke quietly, watching the dazed and dazzled look in his eyes. “What they have, all and each, you can possess. Do with what you will. Think of hunting the she-wolf, the thrill of it. She has a pack, more hunting. Think of possessing the mermaid. Of owning the compass. Of harnessing the magician, the seer for your own purposes.

“Or destroying them. How it would thrill to destroy such creatures. Your choice. Enslave or destroy. And the immortal?”

She smiled when he looked at her again, when she saw what she'd known she would on his face. The greed for life.

“This could be yours.”

“Immortality.”

“A payment, if you choose. I can give this to you.”

“How? How can you give me immortality?”

“I am Nerezza.”

“Named for the goddess who cursed the three stars.”

She rose, lifted her arms. The candlelight swirled into walls of fire. Her voice was a thunder that dropped him to his knees.

“I am Nerezza. Goddess of the dark.”

The strange bird gave a cry, almost human, then swooped. Malmon felt a quick sting at his throat, but made no sound. He trembled with awe, with lust.

“Refuse me and leave, never to see again the wonders. Accept my task, and choose your payment. Wealth, power? Life eternal?”

“Life! Give me immortality.”

“Give me the stars, and it's yours.”

The fire died to candlelight; she sat. She held out a paper, and a silver quill. “A contract, between us.”

His hands shook—fear, excitement—he'd forgotten what it was to
feel
so much. To calm himself, he drained the wine in the glass, then accepted the quill.

“It's written in Latin.”

“Yes. A dead language for immortality.”

He read Latin, as well as Greek, Arabic, Aramaic. But his heart thudded as he translated. He wanted more time. A night to think, to settle his nerves.

She rose, skimmed her hands down, and the gown spilled away, leaving her naked, magnificent.

Nerves smothered under lust.

“Once signed, we'll seal. It's been too long since I've had a man in my bed. A man worthy of it.”

He could take a goddess, have immortality, possess all the powers he'd seen inside the ball of glass.

He signed his name, and she hers. He watched those names bleed and burn into the parchment.

Then she took his hand. “Come with me, and we will do all there is to do to each other, until the light comes.”

She took her fill of him, took with a voracious hunger he nearly matched. Because he pleased her, well enough, in bed, she knew she would use him there again.

When he slept, she smiled into the dark.

Men, of all worlds, of all natures, all species, were to her mind the simplest of creatures. They might spring to act, to violence more fiercely, more quickly than the female, but the female remained cannier and more clever.

And the male? Sex would always rule them. The offer of it, the act, the need.

She'd had only to offer this when he hesitated, and he had signed the contract, in his own blood. That blood now burned and bound him.

He belonged to her now. And when he helped her take the stars, when she granted him his choice of immortality, he would belong to her—as ever she wished—for eternity.

W
hen Annika couldn't sleep, she crept downstairs. She saw the light under the door of the room where Sawyer slept, and yearned to go in. Just to sit and talk to him, or better, to lie with him in the bed, quiet and warm.

But she understood when doors were closed, those inside usually wanted alone.

She slipped outside to stand and look out over the flowers, the steep road where the singing woman had pushed her baby in the stroller, and out to the sea.

Here and there on the slope down, and along the land below, lights twinkled against the dark. Faintly, very faintly, she heard music and wondered if someone danced.

Overhead, over the indigo sea, the moon turned toward its dark time. When she'd been a child, her mother had told her how the sky
faeries nibbled away at the light of the moon until they were full, then breathed the light back. And so the moon turned.

A pretty story, she thought now, for a young one, to ease fears. She thought of her family—did they sleep? She knew she'd brought them pride when she'd been chosen for the quest. They believed in her, trusted her to succeed.

So she could not, would not fail.

Her mother would understand the dreaming part, the longing part, the loving, and would offer comfort when Annika returned home. But she wouldn't weep long, Annika promised herself. She would have done what she was meant to do, preserve the stars, return them to the Island of Glass. And she would have had this time with her friends who were her family in this world.

She would have her memories of them, of Sawyer, who was and would be her only love.

But she could wish—wishes that caused no harm were never wrong. So she picked out the brightest star, and made one.