Dawnbreaker (22 page)

“And then I’ll kill you.”

“There are worse reasons to die,” she said.

Eighteen

A
fter Shelly and Cynnia were settled with food, Danaus followed me back to the other hotel room we were occupying. I was reluctant to say that we were actually sharing it. He had the bed and I, obviously, was stuck in a trunk in the closet. Hardly a fair setup, but unfortunately a necessary one.

“I need some weapons,” I announced after he closed and locked the door behind me.

With a nod, he pulled out his handy black duffel bag from under the bed and dropped it on the mattress with a small bounce. He unzipped it and began sorting through the items, coming up with an assortment of knives with matching sheaths that I could attach to my waist and ankle under my pants.

“Where are we headed?” he asked as I pulled my pant leg back down over the last knife.

“I’m headed out for a bite to eat,” I said, looking up at him. Danaus frowned, his fingers nervously fiddling with a small silver throwing knife as he stared down at the bed.

“Mira, I don’t know if I…” he started, but his voice quickly faded. I knew what he was about to say. He wasn’t sure that he could accompany me on a hunting expedition since he was still struggling with the idea of what I was. And yet, he felt that he had to stay by my side in an effort to keep me alive.

I smiled as I walked over to him. I carefully took the throwing knife out of his nimble fingers and laid it on the bed, more out of an effort to keep it from accidentally injuring one of us. Danaus stared down at me, his dark blue eyes narrowed with mistrust.

“I wasn’t inviting you along,” I murmured. “I don’t want to worry about you trying to keep up with me.”

“I’ve had no problem keeping up with you, vampire,” he bit out, but there was no real fire behind his anger.

“So far, but then you’ve never been around when I’ve been hunting,” I teased. Reaching up, I brushed aside some black hair that had fallen forward on his forehead and was threatening to block his vision. Danaus caught my wrist and squeezed tightly so I wouldn’t be able to easily free myself.

“This isn’t about you hunting,” he said, his voice softening.

“I know.”

“It’s about Rowe hunting you.”

“I’m counting on it. I want him outside waiting for me. He and I need to talk again,” I said, twisting my wrist slightly, but he refused to release me, though he did lighten his grip.

“And I don’t want you meeting with him alone. He could kill you before you get a single word out.”

I shook my head at his assessment, though I appreciated his concern. “That’s not Rowe’s style. I’d be willing to bet that he wants me to stay alive to see his triumph on the mountain at the Machu Picchu ruins. My only problem is making sure that I’m not present as a prisoner, and Cynnia will be my guarantee that I’m not. Rowe will be willing to talk with me.”

Danaus slowly released me, his thumb rubbing along the tender flesh on the inside of my wrist, caressing the veins that would have held my pulse had I still been alive. The hunter wasn’t happy with my plan, but he was going to let me go alone. At least, he would say that, but I didn’t trust him not to be lingering at a distance, protecting my back. I had to keep him otherwise occupied.

“After I feed and meet with Rowe, I will need to meet with all the nightwalkers in the city,” I announced.

“Locals?”

A soft chuckle escaped me and I shook my head as I took a couple steps away from the hunter. When I looked up at him, a ghost of a smile flitted across my pale face. “There’s no such thing in South America. No nightwalker that I know of calls this continent home. This is naturi territory. Always has been.”

Around us I could feel nightwalkers awakening and beginning to move about the city. They had all been sent by the Coven for one purpose, which explained the overwhelming feeling of anxiety. Unfortunately, fear easily shifted to anger and violence. I needed to get this group reined in before people started dying.

“We need to get moving,” Danaus said, shoving his hands in his pockets. After his more casual attire in Savannah, he was back in his durable black pants, but his black T-shirt looked new.

“Do you know of a place I can call the nightwalkers together? Somewhere very large and public?”

“There’s a bar a couple blocks away called Norton Rat’s. It’s just off the main plaza and should be big enough. It’s where Eduardo works.”

“Good.” I nodded, pacing over to the edge of the bed and then back. “Head over there and see if Eduardo can help you get some vans or a bus. We can at least drive part of the way to Machu Picchu tonight.”

“And you?”

“I’ll hunt, take care of my business with Rowe, and meet you at the bar in less than an hour,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“We both know you wouldn’t allow me to feed, and I must hunt tonight. I go alone. I can handle Rowe and whatever the naturi decides to throw at me,” I firmly said.

Whatever he planned to say died in his throat. I knew what he was concerned about. The naturi were in the city. I couldn’t sense them, but I believed Cynnia when she said there were more than a hundred. The whole area was crawling with them.

“I’ll be fine. Trust me, if I’m in trouble, you’ll know it.” I flashed the hunter an evil grin full of fangs and menace. If I had to, I’d set half this town on fire to rid the earth of a handful of naturi.

“The bar is off the Plaza de Armas. You have to go through the Hostal Loreto to reach it,” Danaus explained, finally accepting my decision. He then wordlessly left the hotel room. I didn’t ask how many naturi were in the city and he didn’t offer. Obviously, he thought it was better that I didn’t know exactly how many were close by.

Once the door was closed, I jerked open my bag of clothes and dumped its contents onto the bed to see what I had grabbed in a rush before running out of the house to catch my painfully late flight. Jerking off my T-shirt, I pulled on a V-neck, long sleeve shirt that clung to me like a second skin before pulling on a second button-up black shirt. While fall was just beginning to give birth back in the States, Peru was still in the last days of winter, waiting for the official arrival of spring. The cold wouldn’t bother me, but it would tighten up my muscles, and I needed to be as nimble as possible if I was going to take on Rowe.

I quickly ran a brush through my hair and piled it on my head to keep it out of my eyes. Just before leaving the room, I paused in front of the pile of clothes I had created when I rummaged through my backpack. Why bother even to pack again? The fight on Machu Picchu was coming soon. There would no longer be any need for clothes or worrying what I would wear to return home. Oh, I planned to fight back against the naturi, Jabari, and, if I had to, Danaus as well. But the odds were stacked against me.

With a growl, I turned back at the last second and shoved all the clothes back into the bag. Stranger things had happened. Hell, the naturi were waltzing around the Coven’s main hall. Maybe I could survive this mess.

It wasn’t yet eight o’clock when I hit the streets. The night was young and I was starving. Every instinct within my body begged that I fall back into my typical hunting style of slowly stalking my prey. Ordinarily, I would wander through the crowds of people that still lingered on the streets and listen to their thoughts until something finally caught my attention, but I didn’t have that luxury tonight. Rowe would be lurking somewhere within this crowd, waiting for a glimpse of me, I had no doubt. I needed to feed quickly and carefully tonight. My only concern was not grabbing a naturi in my haste and drinking their poisoned blood.

Out of pure necessity, my “hunting” was condensed down to settling as comfortably as possibly in a dark shadowy niche between a pair of tall stone building and mentally calling to one human after another. My only requirements were large men in their mid-twenties to early thirties. I needed to be sure they wouldn’t pass out from a little blood loss. I fed from four different men and they all walked away without a mark or a memory of the event. On the other hand, I felt more than a little dirty from the whole affair, but pushed my qualms aside.

Flushed with fuel again, I leaned against the wall, running my tongue over my fangs as I sent my last victim on his merry way without a memory of the encounter in his head. The wind had picked up and was whipping through the city, causing flags to snap and flap in an angry frenzy. Trees swayed and the clouds overhead churned and swirled through the sky, completely blotting out the stars. The earth seemed angry.

Upon leaving the hotel and setting foot on the street, I instantly felt the power that Cynnia had warned of. It wasn’t as strong as at the Palace of Knossos on Crete, but it was there, beating against my flesh, trying to find an entrance into my body. We were still many miles from the ruins of Machu Picchu. I didn’t think I should be feeling this energy here, but there was no denying that the mother earth was fueling the power nearly crackling in the air around me. If anything, I had a feeling that it made the naturi more dangerous than normal. They had a new power to feed off of.

While drinking from my victims, I’d picked out a quick map of the city, discovering that I was only a couple blocks from the plaza that Danaus mentioned before I left the hotel. With that in mind, I now wandered in the opposite direction, toward a second, smaller square. I headed away from the crowds and from where I sensed most of my own people were congregated. If I was going to finally draw out Rowe, I needed to be as alone as possible.

And I knew the moment that it worked. I had entered the distant square from the south, my hands shoved in the pockets of my leather pants, trying to keep my fingers warm and nimble against the bitter wind. I skirted the cobblestone sidewalk that led toward the center of the park with its stone monument to some forgotten hero or a forgotten people. The dead grass and sticks crunched lightly under the rubber soles of my boots, but I stuck close to the shadows created by the trees, offering up an obscured view of me as I passed through the darkness.

I sensed no one in the area—nightwalker or human. And naturally, I couldn’t sense any naturi in the region. I was half tempted to reach out to Danaus across the vast distance and see if he could scan the area for me, but quickly pushed aside the urge. No need to make the hunter worry more than he already was.

A feeling twisted in the pit of my stomach suddenly as I stood halfway between the entrance of the square and the monument in the center. Freezing where I stood, I slowly turned my head left and then right while my hand slid down to grasp the handle of the knife at my side. There was a whisper of cloth rubbing, and I was in motion in the blink of an eye. Rolling to my left, I jerked my knife free with my right hand and was grabbing for a second knife with my left by the time I was back on my feet, facing whatever creature had managed to sneak up behind me.

Rowe, the one-eyed naturi, smiled at me, pulling his dark black wings close to his body while wielding a long knife in his right hand. The silver blade reflected a sliver of lamplight as he twisted it in his hand, waiting for me to make the next move.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” I said, inwardly wishing I had brought something a bit longer than the trio of short daggers. His long knife was going to make it difficult for me to get in close to do any kind of substantial damage without completely impaling myself.

“I figured as much,” he snorted, lowering the blade slightly. “Wandering alone at night in a city dominated by the naturi. You have to suspect that you’re completely surrounded right now. You have no way of walking out of here alive.”

To his obvious surprise, I placed the dagger in my left hand back in its sheath on my left thigh and turned my back on the naturi, a smile toying with my lips. I walked toward the monument in the center of the square. It was little more than a plaque on a marble slab. I didn’t attempt to read it, because all of my senses were focused on the approach of the curious naturi.

“You fell while we were at Knossos and didn’t get back up,” I commented as if making idle chitchat. I could barely make out his footsteps on the stone walkway as he approached me, but my smile never wavered. “They said that you had to be carried away. What happened?”

“I fell and hit my head on the edge of some broken stone,” he said in a strange voice. He stopped when he was a few feet away, standing almost directly across from me at the monument. His brow was furrowed in confusion and his full lips were twisted in a frown that seemed to deepen the scars that stretched across what I could remember being a handsome face.

To add to his confusion, I very carefully placed the knife in my right hand back into its sheath on my waist and snapped the guard over it so I wouldn’t be able to quickly draw it. While it would be a lie to say I was completely unarmed, I could honestly say that I was not holding a single weapon at that moment. In response, Rowe tightened his grip on his knife and took an unsteady step backward.

“You’re surrounded, you know that,” he said in a loud, hard voice. As he spoke, his wings disintegrated into fine black sand that spread across the paving stones.

I cocked my head to the side, seeming to listen to the wind. But deep down I knew that he was bluffing. Every time Rowe had faced me, he’d been alone. Regardless of whether we were trying to kill each other or just wanting to talk, it always came down to just him and me. I was beginning to think that he had it in his head to succeed where Nerian had failed; he wanted to break me personally.

“Maybe from a distance,” I conceded with a shrug of my slender shoulders as I shoved my hands into my pockets. “But in this square, right now, there’s just you and me.”

“What game are you playing, Mira?” he snapped, shaking his blade at me. “Do you seriously think I won’t kill you right now?”

“Killing me would solve so many of your problems, wouldn’t it?” I taunted, starting to walk around the monument to my left. Rowe matched my movements, maintaining the same distance between us. “I wouldn’t be around to stop you from opening the door between worlds. I wouldn’t be around to form yet another seal, keeping Aurora safely locked away. I wouldn’t be around to ruin any more of your brilliant schemes. Why, I bet you’d be able to locate your missing princess if I weren’t around!”