Masters of the Night (17 page)

“
You giving
me roses, Angie?” Nicholas asked
with an amused smile.

“You didn’t give me this?” she said slowly, weakly.

His eyes penetrated hers. “If I wanted to give you flowers, Angie, I’d
have them sent—and I wouldn’t send just one.”

He took the crushed black rose from her hand, gazed at it oddly, and
his eyes darkened.
Into strange, brown-black fire.
“Where did you get this?”

“It was—on my pillow.”

His face became rueful.

Then a smile crossed his face that she could only describe as warlock
wicked. “You should show this to Henri,” he smirked.

He skirted to the kitchen, grabbed up his clothes and was gone.
Dissipating in a new shadow of fog.

Dumbfounded by the transformation of man and wing into mist, Angie
could only stare in wonderment at the empty space where he had been seconds
before. What had frightened him away?

The door to the apartment burst open.

The Shadows swept in, stakes drawn, their eyes searching for the
intruder.

She dropped the rose behind her, kicked it under the bed.

“Who was it?” Andre asked urgently.

“Nicholas. But I don’t think he’ll be back,” she answered.

It was 2:20 in the morning. The sun would not be up for several more
hours. When the Shadows left, she climbed wearily under the bed covers,
mentally exhausted from trying to keep her will intact with a master of the
night.

A question surfaced from deep within her, floating into her fading
thoughts. Something she had forgotten, but that her dreams brought forth.

What had Nicholas meant when he said Henri was a renegade Royal?

She made a mental note as she drifted into sleep that the next time
Henri made one of his dramatic entrances, she was going to ask him what the
hell he was exactly.

If he made a dramatic entrance.
He didn’t know
where she was.

She cursed her pride and fell asleep.

Angie woke only once, briefly. An eerie feeling roused her, but she was
too deeply entrenched between wakefulness and sleep to probe the sensation.
Then it was gone.

She slept softly.

The slumber was short lived. She became filled with restless dreams,
brought forth by a presence, a presence she could feel violently even through
her sleep, standing over her bed, leaning over her as she slept, studying her.

When morning hit, bright and blinding, she crawled out of bed and went
into the kitchen to get an aspirin for a merciless headache.

Andre was pouring himself a cup of coffee. He gazed at her intensely.
“We have been with you most of the night. He shadowed and fled at our presence,
so we do not know what or who he was. Do you? Was it Nicholas again?”

“This apartment is becoming a
freakin
’ bus
stop,” she muttered irritably as she poured herself of cup of coffee. “It was
Nicholas. It had to be.”

Stakes, daggers and a crossbow, weapons of supernatural war, rested on
the kitchen table. And the slayers’ eyes betrayed their hearts’ concern for
her.

“What do you think Nicholas wanted?” James asked, his tongue rolling
over the
vampyre’s
name as though it left a bad taste
in his mouth.

“I couldn’t read him,” Angie shrugged. “His aura is indistinguishable.
Nicholas is murky.”

“He’s brazen,” James said. “He comes waltzing in here like he owns the
joint? He’s obviously unpredictable. And that makes him dangerous.”

That makes him deadly,
Angie thought.

“He said he’s in atonement,” Angie informed them.

“Do you believe that?”

She shrugged and rose from the table. “I’d like to go see Stephen this
evening,” she said, then added the careful lie she’d been planning. “I’m still
trying to put together the pieces of what happened to me. I want to know if he
actually found my cross on the porch.”

In truth, she wanted to find out more about Henri’s past from his
descendent cousin.
That Royal thing, for instance.
And
hopefully Stephen would have some idea of how to find him since Danby hadn’t
called back.

“I would suggest you take one of us with you,” Andre said.

It was not a suggestion.

17.

Henri had
deciphered the ghost’s riddle, but Amtrak’s departure schedule and the sun had
delayed him in reaching Seattle. Reminding himself not to get too close to the
apartments where Andre had sequestered the mystic with his crew, or the
Vampyre
of Light would catch his scent, Henri sat on his
haunches on a rooftop a few blocks away to watch over her.

The evening star rose bright and beautiful. Lights came on in the
apartment windows. Henri caught sight of her putting on her jacket as she told
her cronies she would take Brandi with her to St. Michael’s rectory, but that
she wanted to make a confession in private to Stephen.

What is she up to?
Henri thought.
She’s Methodist.

Henri left the rooftop to follow the mystic slayer and her
corntown
companion.

The street directly in front of the rectory was crowded with cars
belonging to condos across the street from the church. Angie had to park a
couple of blocks away.

Henri was suddenly filled with trepidation at the gently swaying
branches of the elms along the walk. As the two young warriors of the dark made
a fast clip toward the rectory, the air became brushed with a chinking,
metallic sound.
The sound of a choker chinking on a dog’s
neck.

The soles of their tennis shoes met cement and stone with anxious, uncertain
steps.

The sound again, closer, behind them on the sidewalk.

“Hurry!”
Angie
said,
her voice in her throat. She picked up her pace.

Henri could see the drops of perspiration on her forehead.

The mystic was afraid of dogs.

Andre’s little Nebraskan Shadow began glancing around watchfully.

Shreddy
little pillows of
clouds that seemed to move across the sky too quickly covered the stars. Then,
it was as though things were in the outlines of the carefully pruned trees in
front of the church; creatures with scraggly arms, open mouths, and empty eyes.
Even the strings of clouds took on the appearance of wispy, floating phantasms
with jointed legs like crabs and open, gaping jaws.

A master of night games was at play.

Nicholas
, Henri thought darkly.

Nicholas was a master of the games the undead play at night with mortal
hearts—before they kill them.

Henri could tell by her eyes and her hard breathing the younger slayer
knew they were in trouble. He flew to the church roof, in case the “Gold Rush”
vampyre
decided to play too rough. He could have the
Nebraskan. But if his fangs went for the mystic, Henri knew he would attack.

His lips parted and he made the semblance of a sigh. Angie had pricked
his heart deeply. And he couldn’t take it back. He was tormented, tortured,
terribly in love.
And would defend her to the death.
Even against the vanguard who had been his friend.

The chinking again.
Joined
by a harmony of chinking.
And the unmistakable sound
of untrimmed claws clipping against the cement sidewalk.

Angie and Brandi slowed their steps and turned.

The phantoms were in the visages of men, but with mongrel faces and
paws where feet should have been. Claws, long and sharp, curled against the
cement, and their tails swished with a snapping motion.

Brandi stepped quickly to block their attempts to reach the mystic, but
one of them drew a hidden length of chain from behind him and slung the heavy
metal end toward her. As the links swung through the air, she spun and leaped
over them, but landed with her back against the support wall of the church
steps.

A pair of hands reached over the top of the wall, grabbed her shoulders
and yanked them back hard, butting her head against the stone.

She dropped, out cold.

Henri descended from his perch like lightning. An unknown force had
made an appearance.

“Brandi!” Angie cried, spotting the unconscious form on the church
steps behind her.

But she could not reach her. The phantoms circled around, blocking her,
moving with deliberation, growling. They had no interest in the unconscious
Shadow. Their eyes were on the mystic.

Angie took off her jacket and wrapped it around her arm. The phantoms
attacked, shredding the jacket from her arms and leaving her hand torn and
bleeding. But her power responded. Unafraid, she ripped them as they flew at
her all at once.

The marks on her hand dissolved.

Henri watched as he landed, fascinated, pleased with her power, knowing
she could handle them while he searched behind the wall for the
Lammergeier
and whoever owned those hands.

Not a blade of grass was broken.

Nicholas’ voice suddenly echoed through the bevy of ravenous barks. He
was in the bell tower parapet. “Angie! Angie, listen to me!”

The command was sharp. “They’re not real. They’re phantoms. I can’t
fight them, honey. You have to. Think. Why would they use this apparition? It
had to be something in your past. Tell them to stand off. Tell them, Angie, or
they will tear you to pieces!”

She heard the last words well. “They’re not going to tear anyone to
pieces,” she said. Then she shouted, “Back off!” and with tenacity, whipped her
arms through the air as though to clear away a web of spiders.

They retreated a few feet down the stairs.

Nicholas spread his wings, leaped from the parapet ledge and lighted
next to her on the steps. “I can’t command them, Angie. They’re not mine. You
have to,” he said urgently. “What would cause them to take on this form? Hurry,
search your past. They will attack again.”

The wings folded into obscurity behind a royal blue cape.

“I don’t have to. I already know,” Angie said. “I knew when I heard
them on the sidewalk. I was eight years old. My brother was five. I was walking
him home. We were suddenly faced with a rabid dog. It attacked my little
brother.”

The sudden surge of guilt in her voice gave them license to attack
again. Nicholas flew at them, but they rose into a horror that threw him as
easily against the church wall as a plastic bottle tossed from a car.

Snarling, they turned back to their victim and gnashed at her with
increasing fury. Her arms and legs and body became lost beneath bristling fur,
claws and fangs and ripping teeth. Then an arm shot through the mass, upward.
Angie was on her feet, and they were retreating.

Henri debated whether to leap into the skirmish and risk revealing
himself, an open target that could jeopardize her if the
Lammergeier
saw him. Nicholas’ only intent at the moment seemed to be to torment her. The
abduction would not be in play until Jane herself set the stage.

He flew to a stone sill below a stained glass window that overlooked
the steps where cloistered he had a clear view of the grounds. His eyes
searched the parameter, constant like a wolf’s, on the alert for the Realm’s
hawk.

A phantom flipped, flew, sat down beside him.

“Get the hell away from me,” he commanded.

It became a black smear on the colored glass,
then
slimed its way to the steeple.

God, he hated phantoms! They were nasty little black things whose
presence reminded
vampyres
they would one day die,
and not gently. And they tore and lashed at the hearts and minds of the mortals
they conquered without mercy.

These were especially tenacious. They belonged to Nicholas.

What is he up to?
Henri wondered.
Letting his own
phantoms throw him around and lying to her like that?

Conquering her terror and her guilt, Angie began battling the phantoms
like a hellion.

The horrid things began to fade back into black strips.

Their illusion lost, the phantoms rose like black razor blades and
towered over her, their eyes burning like craters of lava, but they did not
advance.

“If you have holy water, use it.
Now!”
Nicholas
said urgently, again by her side.

With hands and fingers still aching from gripping and shredding, she
grappled with the bottle from her pouch. “I—can’t get it uncapped.”

The phantoms floated forward again, toward her. He yanked a bottle out
from under his cape.

The drops sprayed into the air in a fountain across the inky sheets.

A black rainbow sparkled in the halo of drops.

The screams that followed were like the wail of a lost wind, the loss
of heaven. The church door blew open. Nicholas backed quickly away into the
dark recesses of the church porch, shielding himself with his cloak as
sanctuary light spilled across the steps. The sidewalk was splashed briefly
with light.
Then nothing.
The door closed. The
phantoms were gone. The clouds moved on. The night returned to calm.

Angie’s eyes shone with amazement.

She thinks he destroyed them,
Henri thought,
frowning.
He threw open the church door, Angie. God doesn’t need
theatrics. Only the devil, the devil called Nicholas.

Quite a chance for Nicholas to take, opening that door considering how
much holy light suddenly flooded the place and could have caught him in its
rays.
And killed him.

But Nicholas was afraid of nothing.

The mystic began sinking weakly against the steps, unused to mental
battle of such magnitude.

She was going into shock, Henri realized unhappily. He had misjudged
her mental strength, overrated her ability.

The Realm and the assassin be hanged, he flew to her.

The porch light came on at the nearby rectory and Stephen appeared in
the doorway.

Nicholas leaped from the steps and ran away into the adjoining church
yard and through the tombstones.

Henri’s cape swept across the mystic and over her as he pulled her
lovingly into his arms. “I am sorry,
chéri
. I was
detained by my own foolishness. It will not happen again.”

“Henri,” she whispered, rising up and planting a long, full kiss on his
lips that cold cocked him. Then she sank back. “How did I do?”

“Like powerful, warm wine,” he smiled. “I think I’m drunk on you.” He
paused. “Oh. You also did all right with the phantoms.”

“Stop!
I say, stop.
You!”
Stephen shouted and ran toward them. Squinting into
the darkness, he was trying to identify the dark form bending over a woman.

“I need to get you to the protection of the slayers, Angie. A horror
who wants to hurt us is too near,” Henri said. “So I will not ask you to
relinquish your protection. But it will burn when I carry you to your friends
because I must use dark power to run. Do not be alarmed for me when you feel my
pain. Just hang on.”

Angie threw her arms around his neck.

Henri scooped her from the steps. And cried out as wrenching pain
traveled from the cross at her throat into his arms in a burst that made him
want to drop her and flee.

But he fled with her. Something was running through the leaves by the
side of the church.
Toward them.

Glancing back, the only form Henri could see was Stephen, turning
toward the sound of moaning coming from the church steps. Brandi was coming to.
The priest peered briefly down the street after them,
then
tended the injured slayer. Henri was too far away to follow.

Lifting Angie into the air with him, Henri swept past an owl, and into
the night.

“I don’t think we’re on the ground anymore, Toto,” Angie murmured in
astonishment as she watched the church steeple sweep by. She leaned back a little
and looked behind his shoulders. “You—don’t have wings.”