Guild Hunter 02 - Angels' Flight

guest.”
     
    Not even the Atlanta heat could fight the chill that invaded her veins, a cold blade of warning.
     
    S leepless, Ashwini sat on the balcony off the guest suite Nazarach had provided. She’d have preferred a tent in the park, a bed in a shelter, anything to the opulence of the angel’s home—all of it stained with a screaming terror that refused to let her sleep. “How many men and women do you think Nazarach’s killed over his lifetime?” Usually, she sensed things only through touch, but like its master, this place was so old, so bloody with memory, that it echoed endlessly in her mind.
    “Thousands,” came the soft answer from the vampire leaning against the wall beside the antique lounger where she sat. “Angels who rule can’t afford to be merciful.”
     
    She turned her face into the night breeze. “And yet some people see them as messengers of the gods.”
     
    “They are who they are. As am I.” Turning, he walked over to brace his hands on the gleaming wooden arms of her lounger. “I must feed,
cher
.”
     
    Something twisted in her chest, a sharp, unexpected ache,but she held it, held control. “I’m guessing you don’t have much trouble finding food.”
     
    “I can give pleasure with my bite. There are those who seek such pleasures.” Lifting a finger, he traced the scar just above the pulse in her neck. “Who marked you?” A quiet question formed of pure ice.
     
    “My first hunt. I was young, inexperienced. The vamp got close enough to almost rip out my throat.” What she didn’t say was that she’d let the target get that close, let herself feel the kiss of death. Until that moment—when her blood scented the air in an iron-rich perfume—she’d thought she wanted to die, to silence the voices forever. “He taught me to value life.”
     
    “I will ask Nazarach’s indulgence,” Janvier said after an endless moment, “to use the store of blood kept here for his vampires.”
     
    Her senses honed in on something she’d barely seen, words unsaid. “What aren’t you telling me?”
     
    “The angel wants me to leave you alone.” Janvier’s breath brushed over her in an intimate caress. “Otherwise that blood would’ve already been provided. He wants me to go out and hunt.”
     
    Shivers threatened at the idea of what Nazarach wanted from her. “So you’ll anger him.”
     
    “He likes me too much to kill me for such a small transgression.” Still, he didn’t move. “Why are there so many shadows in your eyes, Ashwini?”
     
    It startled her each time he used her given name—as if every utterance bound them tighter on a level she couldn’t see. “Why are there so many secrets in yours?”
     
    “I’ve lived over two hundred years,” he said, his voice as sensual as the magnolia-scented night. “I’ve done many things, not all of which I’m proud of.”
     
    “Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.”
     
    He didn’t smile, didn’t even breathe, still, so still. “Talk to me, my Blade.”
     
    “No.” Not yet.
     
    “I’m very patient.”
     
    “We’ll see.” Even as she spoke, she knew she was laying down a challenge, one Janvier wouldn’t be able to resist.
     
    He leaned in close enough that their lips could’ve touched, his breath a hot burn, his almost-immortality a living beacon in his eyes. “Yes. We will.”
     
    S tepping into the shower, Ashwini turned it to freezing. “Yikes!” Her libido sufficiently dampened by the ice-cold shock, she switched it to superhot.
    As her skin sizzled under the delicious heat, she supposed she should’ve been giving serious thought to the lunacy of what she was doing playing with a vampire, who was, for all his charm, as lethal as a stiletto across the throat. But then again, most of her friends already thought she was half a nut short of a fruitcake. Why disappoint?
     
    She gned against the pounding spray.
     
    Rules and regs, the intricacies of living an “ordinary” life—she’d tried it for the first nineteen years of her existence, and had almost paid with not only her sanity, but her life itself.
     
    A flash of memory and she was in that white-on-white room again, the straps biting into her arms, cutting into her flesh. The smell of disinfectant, the soft hush of rubber-soled shoes… and always,
always
, the screams—screams only she could hear. Later,
them
sitting there, judging her, as if they were gods.
     
    “
The drugs keep her lucid.”
     
    “
Are you sure