Masters of the Night (12 page)

A wing of breeze shivered past her shoulder, and Henri was beside her,
kissing her as he flashed past. She felt she would melt into the cracks in the
sidewalk from the wild warmth suddenly on her lips, then gone. A shadowy
profile was caught briefly in the yellow glow of a street lamp,
then
it, too, was gone almost before she could blink.

Trembling, ecstasy delivering throb after soft throb, she turned
blankly and went back inside.

The trees in the painting were becoming liquid, moving lines behind a
transparent outline.

The ghost materialized in the painting, twirled his cane and sauntered
down the trail.

Damned ghost.
He was
interrupting her luscious, mental afterglow.

She shut the front door and scooted the mat next to the stop.

The ghost melted away into the oils.

“What the hell was that?” Andre directed toward no one in particular as
he sat down at the break table and opened a large manila envelope.

Kathryn shrugged quickly. “I do not know him, Andre. I swear. He is no
one I knew. He is not here for vindication.”

“That he is here at all doesn’t exactly leave me with a warm and fuzzy
feeling,” James grimaced, looking back at the trees and path.

“So long as he does not pilfer,” Andre said simply, nonplussed as he
began sifting through the contents of the envelope.

“Pilfer?” Angie stared at him in astonishment. “A ghost is running
around in the art on the walls, and your only concern is whether he might
pilfer?”

Andre looked up and said simply, “Better the painting than sitting here
with us at the desk or the dinner table, don’t you think?” He turned his
attention back to the envelope. “After I saw the newspapers, I decided to do a
little more intensive investigation. I found these objects in the library
museum in our favorite little English city and managed to talk the librarian
into parting with them.
For a price, of course.”

Andre spilled the contents of the envelope onto the table: an etching
about nine by twelve inches, a frayed and well-used prayer book, and a cross
about two inches in length hanging from a thick, silver chain about thirty
inches long.

The irresistible brown eyes that gazed out at her from the etching,
eyes that joined Henri’s in her mind, left Angie momentarily without thought.

“Are you in atonement, Nicholas?” she finally murmured. The etching on
the parchment had been done by hand in brown ink, a portrait of Nicholas and
another man both sketched from the shoulders up. Was it fifteenth century? They
were wearing simple dark tunics with high round necks and a single row of
small, white buttons down the front of each.

Chains extended from their necks, but the artist had stopped his work
above whatever pendants or medallions were attached.

Angie placed the chain with the large, ancient cross next to the chain
in the etching.

Perfect match.

“He was a holy man?” the Shadows breathed in unison.

Andre’s tone became pensive. “I’ve rarely seen a holy man return from
the living grave.”

Angie rubbed the silver edge of the cross between her finger and her
thumb, then slipped the chain over her head to see if she had precognitive
powers like
Taniesha
and Andre, and could read the
chain to “see” the past, his past, from the object.

Nothing.
She felt
sensations, but nothing definitive.

“Make sure you have the goods if you decide to wear that, or you could
be a
vampyre’s
milkshake,” James said,
then
with a light stroke to her cheek, he smiled a curvy,
friendly smile. “Welcome to the Shadows, California girl.”

“The other holy man was murdered, reportedly by robbers he surprised as
he entered a church he was visiting,” Andre said. “But there was no proof of
how he actually died. Nothing was taken from the church.”

“So there is a possibility someone else killed him?” Angie questioned
as she gazed into the silvery grains of the cross.

“A rather substantial possibility.”
He paused. “At any
rate, it would appear Nicholas may hold a few keys to the mystery called Angie
Carter, having known both Jane and Allison Weston.”

A maelstrom in the secret places of her heart ravaged Angie. Warnings
were pumping through her like gasoline spewing from a broken tank. And a lit
match was too damned near. That, she could feel.

She glanced at the prayer book. The cover of the little book was
excessively faded, the pages dog-eared.

“He must have been very faithful in his private devotions,” Angie said,
then paused.
“Or guilt-ridden.
It’s often easier to
methodically repeat words than face your own heart.”

She took the prayer book into her hands and opened it. Something was
striking close to home, to family.

A small portrait fell from between the pages of the book, onto the
floor face down.

Angie picked it up and turned it over, then breathed in awe as she
gazed at the flawless oval face framed in raven-black, drop curls. “She’s …
Jane.” As her tone blackened with recognition, her awe furled into a frown.
“The same woman who was in the 1850 photo, Jane Weston—but here she’s wearing a
seventeenth-century French farthingale.”

Her eyes flew to Andre. “How can that be?”

Andre’s narrowing eyes also considered the picture that was out of
place and out of time, and the beads in them glittered sharply.

“How is not as important as why. Perhaps our Gold Rush
vampyre
can give us the answers.”

Angie studied the sensuous, come-hither eyes the same unusual color as
her own … This was definitely her aunt, her ancestral aunt.
Caught
in pictures hundreds of years apart.

Another
friggin
’
vampyre
.

“Answers would be good. Answers as to why I’ve got a vamp in my
history,” Angie said.

And is she also—in Henri’s history?

Angie sat up straight as she felt the silent words hurling through her
like musket balls.

Kathryn …

Kathryn had shot her a single thought, a mental murmur, through the
deepest breadths of her being to see if she would pick up on the threads.

It was too late to bury the startled flicker in her eyes.

Now she knows Henri is still in the
psionic
fields with me!
Angie thought frantically.
She knows I can
sense the thoughts that slip past mortality! Any suspicions she had that he is
in union with me have just been resolved. And now she has probably also
realized I can send them …

“Keep this cross close if you choose to wear it,” Kathryn said, her
gaze without expression as she pulled the chain out from under Angie’s collar.
“James is right. There are too many unknowns.”

As Kathryn’s fingertips brushed her skin, Angie felt oddly warm.

Because Kathryn
Beucherie
was a
vampyre
.

Angie was beginning to understand and read her mystical perceptions,
perceptions that were at the moment manifested through touch. She sat
stone-still.

She can feel and hear my blood vessels pulsating so keenly she can
almost see them,
Angie thought.
Can she control
her dark instincts, the instinct to take what she needs, what she wants?

“Did you know you have an aura?” Angie asked her flatly. She may not
have been a
precog
, but she could read radials quite
clearly.

Kathryn looked up in surprise, but only for a moment before a smile
broke across her lips. “Ah. Yes, I’ve heard mystics can see color arcs around
those they are with that reveal much to them.”

“Yours just turned black.”

Kathryn exhaled slightly.

Angie, you are deliciously vibrant,
Kathryn threaded.
Your blood would
sparkle wonderfully in my veins, and Henri’s drops left within you would warm
me. But I will not hurt you. I am sworn to Andre.

The
vampyre
moved away and folded her hands
together pristinely.

“We—umm, haven’t had dinner yet,” Angie said, addressing the group and
the air with a bright tone of terror. “I’m starving.
Pizza
and beer all around?”

And maybe some of that stuff James and Andre drink every night to ward
off
vampyres
?

They ordered pizza with everyone putting in bids for their
favorites—except Kathryn. While they dipped into fragrant boxes of “hand tossed
extra large,” she sipped her wine contentedly.

Andre’s cell phone buzzed.

“An associate has discovered an ancient earthen jar of water, and a
cross, much like the one Angie now chooses to wear, that I want to acquire and
which I think we are going to need on this quest,” he said as he read the text.
Rising from the table, he snatched a last piece of pizza to munch on his way
out the door.

He hadn’t been gone more than thirty minutes when Angie stopped cold in
the middle of her last slice of cheese pizza.

A sound of shirring like wings outside the shop beyond
the front door.

A bat?
An
owl?

The front door’s opaque glass darkened briefly behind the blinds.
Something was blocking the street light.
A jagged, undefined
shape.

It zipped away. Then it was back.

“Is something beginning to bubble in my family cauldron?” Angie asked,
her voice becoming ashes.

“Something’s bubbling,” Andre said, coming back in through the door on
the alley side. “Unless I’m mistaken, there’s a phantom outside this shop.”

Phantoms.
Formless,
wingless things that haunted the night when
vampyres
are about.
The dark companions.

Rigid, the group moved from their chairs like silent arrows. Beyond the
door’s window blind, something was silhouetted against the street light,
something clinging to the branch of a small ornamental tree—a torn black
plastic bag?

They looked closer.

It flipped or flew—they weren’t certain which—a couple of times back
and forth. More like a blink of movement.
Razor sharp.

Angie drew a spike from her knapsack.

“Put it away, Angie,” Andre said. “You would be throwing it into empty
air.”

“Then how do we fight them?” she asked, wide-eyed.

“We don’t. You hold on to your will, keep your fear in check, and tell
them to move out of your way.” He paused. “They won’t come in here right now.
There is force in numbers. Anyway, they seem to be only—watching us.”

The black, formless things cast a chilly shadow over the little
storefront door.

“Phantoms,” she murmured.

“Someone knows we’re here. Someone knows who we are,” James said,
tensing.

The phantoms left abruptly.

12.

The placid currents
of the Sacramento River were spackled with setting sun.

Angie walked near the shallow golden-tinted water sloshing at a bit of
pebbly bank and waited anxiously for the cell phone in her front jeans pocket
to vibrate. She had left a text message for Virgil Danby, but he had not
replied.

Where was Henri? Did he know about the phantoms?

From a nearby walking bridge, Kathryn was watching her protectively,
but no one was at the river’s edge besides a group of barefoot children panning
for gold under a park guide’s instruction. Andre had assigned the
vampyre
of light to accompany the “undisciplined” mystic
and check out the first Nicholas they located, a cop who worked at night and
lived in the nearby woods.

Diligently, with excited, serious little faces, intent on finding a bit
of gold before they had to retrieve shoes and socks and leave, the school
children sloshed
goldpans
to spill the water and sand
over the sides and see what was left behind. A whoop erupted near Angie, and
the bevy of classmates ran to check the lucky pan. Most of the glitter carried
in the currents was mica, of course, but bits of gold still haunted the river
and catching a fleck or two was not an empty hope.

A shelf of water had pooled near the edge of the shore. Pausing, Angie
picked up several smooth river rocks, spun one toward the center of the pool,
and watched the ripples make circles outward toward the river.

Another rock pelted the circle of water.

The two circles of ripples overlapped, then widened, moving toward the
center of the river currents together.

She looked up to see who had skipped the second rock.

Henri stood sideways to her on the river bank, his face obscured by the
hood of a black wind breaker.

“You came!” she cried. She turned to leap into the arms of the French
vampyre
whose blood rushed through her veins in a fire she
could not quench—

He stopped her.

“She chooses not to approach in the presence of children. But she is
ready to strike, Angie.”

Angie’s eyes darted to Kathryn. She was watching them intensely, her
hands braced on the bridge rail, positioned to catapult her over the rail to
the river bank.

Henri turned slightly and his eyes revealed to Angie how much he wanted
to hold her, touch her.

She felt the wild embers in her heart spiral.

How Danby could have even known where she was, she didn’t know, but no
matter. Henri was here!

Henri pulled the hood away from his face, and in his countenance Angie
could see the deep longing.

But she knew Kathryn was wary, battle-ready. If he took Angie in his
arms, she would leap the bridge rail and fly at him with her fangs bared and
every kid on the river would forever after have therapy.

She took a small step back, put space between them.

“You returned to the shop last night. You were there,” she said.

“I was.”

“You sent the phantoms packing.”

He smiled. “They didn’t like me much.”

“Do you know why there were phantoms watching us?”

For a moment, Angie saw the strange sadness trouble his eyes again—and
something else, something unspoken that almost surfaced.

“Something’s gnawing at you.
Big time.
What is
it?” she probed tenderly.

“There’s something you need to know,” he said, his tone reluctant. “But
just not yet. All right,
chéri
?”

His words left her cold as bleached bones.
There’s
something you need to know.

“Where is the rest of your troupe?” he asked, looking around.

“They’re going to meet us at some cabin in the woods to see if the
occupant is the Bowler Hat.”

“Nicholas doesn’t inhabit cabins. He prefers castles,” Henri said
drily. He glanced at Kathryn again and his tone became fervent. “What do you
know of Kathryn?”

Angie shrugged. “Not much. She once ran in rich circles with a
notorious
vampyre
in Europe known as a rogue, a
Marquis—until he waited in the alley of a concert hall for a violin player that
he wanted to play for him, and only him, and denied the world her music.
Kathryn was shattered with remorse. Then she woke up one night to find Andre
holding a stake over her heart making her an offer she couldn’t refuse—devote
her talents to his little troupe of hunters or face damnation. In exchange, she
would earn her soul’s freedom and regain the life that had pulsated briefly
within her when she felt remorse. She’s allowed to walk in the light, but not
partake of it. If she didn’t follow truth, justice and the Andre way, she
would—implode.”

“Angie, if her freedom is being purchased, she is not in atonement,”
Henri said.

That’s an understatement,
Angie thought.

He cast a fleeting look at the bridge. “I need to know she is not a
threat to you. I need you to stay here while I approach her. Do not interfere.
I will not hurt her.”

She looked at him quizzically. “You don’t trust her?” Kathryn was
becoming her friend.
Somewhat.

“I must know.”

Henri approached Kathryn cautiously. She had bristled.

“You have a lot of nerve,” Kathryn said, turning to him,
then
added with an acerbic taunt, “But then you are a
master.
And a Royal.
Who goes where he pleases, takes
what he pleases,
does
as he pleases. Even the phantoms
must obey you.”

“How long has it been, Kathryn?” he said, his voice rolling toward her
like soft, heavy fire. “How long since you have tasted?”

The rich, solicitous voice enveloped her with clouds of remembrance and
tempted her. Henri moved closer to awaken her thirst with heavier thrusts,
remembrances of nights when she and the Marquis ravaged the cities they chose
to inhabit.

Kathryn slipped a glimpse toward the mystic’s pulse, listening,
wanting.

“May I remind you,” he said in a lowered voice, “this temptation would
in all likelihood kill you. Pain would surge through your veins if you took too
much, pain that would leave you screaming longer than the final burn of sunset
when the soul enters hell.” He paused and shrugged nonchalantly. “Or Andre
DuPre
would pull your headless body out into the sun.
Same difference.”

With effort, she was able to tear her eyes away,
then
exhaled deeply, passing his test, resisting the mystic. She was thirsty but in
control.

“What do you want, Henri?” she said,
then
smiled precociously.
“Besides the mystic?’

“You once ran with the Marquis. Now you run with Andre
DuPre
, with slayers,” he scolded her harshly.

“Go, Henri,” she said coldly.

“You cannot hide what you are from me, Kathryn,” he said. “I’m a Royal
of the Realm. You can fight me to protect, but you cannot deny my will.”

His eyes became blue webs and he forced her gaze to his, pressing his
mind toward the core of her being. He felt a chill shiver her spine as though
someone had just thrown a fistful of dirt on her grave.

The grave left open in the south of France when Andre
DuPre
came calling.

Henri deepened the meld.
Why are you with
DuPre
?

Agreeing seemed like a good idea at the time, considering.

How did Andre find you when the Marquis was hiding you so well
throughout a whole continent?
Henri probed.

Master slayers do not reveal their knowledge of the night. One day he
was just there, chasing me down like a dog. With those beady little eyes of
his.

Though she spoke offhandedly, Henri could see within her the admiration
and respect Kathryn now held for the master slayer. The wiry little man was a
seasoned guardian who kept a close watch over his band of warriors. There was
no guarantee ever that he might not lose one or more of them to death or worse.

Kathryn he was especially watchful of. She could perish. Her mortal
life was being restored in exchange for her allegiance, not through atonement.

Releasing her, Henri drew away satisfied she would not harm, or betray
the mystic. She was no longer with the Realm.

Kathryn’s brow furrowed and her eyes misted with hurt that he had used
his power as a Royal to call her into obedience to him.

“You could have just asked me,” she said.

“If you were in atonement, I would not have been able to do that,” he
reminded her.

“Go!” she hissed, wounded.

Henri left, becoming no more than a blur of breeze on the river paths
as he rejoined Angie. “I will not be far from the road you will be taking
tonight, Angie. To be sure you are safe.” He took her in his arms in spite of
Kathryn’s warning stance.

The shock of her warmth, the fragrance of her as he buried his face in
her hair to whisper to her, for a moment left Henri without words. The subtle
power in a mortal woman’s body was pleasurable, but Angie left his pleasure
heightened, different.

Because he loved her.

He held her until the first star of evening appeared in the sky.

“There are things we need to discuss,” he finally said in a lowered
voice into her ear.
“If this night survives into the next.”

He flashed away, becoming part of the darkness in the trees.