Twenty-Sided Sorceress 3 - Pack of Lies (19 page)

I didn’t know how Alek had managed that one, but I guessed it gave the family closure while still protecting the shifters. Balance again. I sighed and tossed the paper into the recycling.

I heard the creak of someone coming up my back stairs and paused by the kitchen door. A light tap followed, and I opened the door.

Alek stood there with a bag of Chinese in his hand and a gentle smile on his face.

“You are getting sloppy,” I said. “I heard you coming up the stairs.”

He shrugged. “I made noise on purpose.”

“Sure you did. That lo mein?”

We settled down on my couch with chopsticks and passed the boxes back and forth, just eating and sharing company for a while. After my belly was full of noodles and spicy chicken, I told him about my day.

“It will be more difficult for you here now,” he said with a sigh. “But you will stay?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’m sort of in for the penny and the pound at this point. I am done running away from my problems. From now on I run at my problems, preferably armed to the teeth.”

“Good,” he said.

“What about you?”

“Me?”

“Yes,” I said. I set down my chopsticks and curled up on the couch beside him, tucking my feet under his thigh. “The Council didn’t send you back here. You told Eva that.”

“No. I came back because I missed you. Missed this.” He waved a hand around, gesturing at the apartment, at the food, at me. “I ran into Henry at a gas station outside town. He was searching for his mate and recognized me. He thought I was here to help him, and I let him believe that.”

“You totally lied,” I said, smiling to take some of the bite out of my words.

Alek ducked his head and took a deep breath. “Yes. I maintain that you are a bad influence.” That thought seemed to sober him further and he looked at me, searching my face. “Before, when I left? It was because the Council sent me away.”

“To help somewhere else, to work a case, right?” I reached out and tucked a stray lock of hair behind his ear.

He pressed his cheek into my palm. “Yes, and no. They warned me to stay away from you. They do not want me here.”

I looked into his ice-blue eyes and saw shadows lurking there. “What else?” I asked, because I knew there was more he wasn’t saying.

“They showed me my death,” he said, his voice dropping almost to a whisper, a growl. “They showed me that if I stayed here, I would die.”

“I don’t fucking accept that,” I said, curling my fingers into a fist and pulling my hand back. “They didn’t warn you about Eva. They didn’t send anyone to stop what happened here. I’m sorry, Alek, but I am beginning to seriously doubt this Council of yours.”

I had watched him dying beside me, had felt the poison burning away his heart. No way was I ever going to let anything happen to him. Never. Fuck the Council and their stupid visions. I was a sorceress. I would change the future, make it mine.

“I am, as well,” he said so quietly I thought I’d imagined the words. He wrapped his hands around mine, warming me. “I still sense them. I still have my gifts, my talisman. I do not know what their plan is. But I will stay here. That is not negotiable anymore.”

“Good,” I said. “Because we have some serious talking to do.”

“We do?” He raised an eyebrow at me. “Should I be nervous?”

“No, but I want to know you, Alek. I mean, I don’t even know if you have a family, siblings. Where you grew up. Anything. You’ve at least met my family.”

“You never asked,” he said. “And I only met your family because someone tried to kill them and they came asking for help. You didn’t exactly share their existence or that you’d been born to shifters before that.”

Touché. Another point for Alek.

“All right, so both of us need to be better about this whole actually sharing thing.” I made a face at him.

He dragged me into his lap and tucked my head under his chin. I curled against his impossible warmth, relaxing into him.

“I was born in Siberia,” he said, his voice rumbling and making his chest vibrate against my cheek. “In the Irkutsk Oblast.”

“Gesundheit,” I said.

“Hush, kitten. If you want others to talk, you first must be silent.”

I leaned up and nipped his chin. “Go on. Siblings?”

“I have two siblings. A brother and a sister.”

“Let me guess, you are the oldest?” He seemed like an oldest, with his overdeveloped sense of responsibility.

“Technically, I suppose. By a minute or so.”

“Wait,” I said, sitting up and twisting in his lap so I could look at him. “You are a triplet? That’s like crazy rare, right?”

“Yes, well, Mother was an overachiever.” His eyes were unfocused, looking at memories far away and long ago. I remembered then that he was over sixty years old.

“Was? She’s dead?”

“She died giving birth to us. Hemorrhaged, but she refused to shift with us inside her—she was convinced it would kill us. By the time they cut us out, it was too late.”

Oh. I laid my head back down on his chest. “Are you close to your siblings? Did your father raise you?”

“We are tigers. I do not even know who my father was.” I felt him shrug. “We were raised by my grandmother. She lives still, in Russia. It has been a long time since I spoke with her, or my siblings.”

“When did you become a Justice?”

“I was sixteen when I was called, chosen. Carlos, who you met at Three Feathers, came to me not long after and took me away to the States for training.”

“And you’ve never been back?”

“I have. But it was not the same.”

I understood that, too. “Thank you for telling me,” I said.

“Anything,” he murmured into my hair.

Anything? I decided to test that. I sat back up.

“When Eva triggered the bomb, did you see anything?” I recalled his face as he looked down at me, the awe there. I had caught hints of that awe in him, speculative glances in the days after.

He looked away from me, staring into the middle distance again. Then shook his head. “I do not know. There was much chaos, people trying to leave, getting the doors open. Your magic shoved me away from you. Then there was a bubble of light, and inside…” He shook his head again. “I think I know what I thought I saw. But it is impossible. And the memory is unclear; it won’t stay for me to look at it.”

“As though it’s something you knew but have forgotten and now can only remember that you have forgotten, but not what you forgot,” I said.

“That almost made sense,” he said, smiling. “But yes, it is slippery like that.”

“What do you think you saw?” I asked.

“A dragon,” he said softly.

“Oh.” I searched my own memory. The heat, the light, that lingering sense of wonder and power. No dragons.

Alek pulled me tight against him and kissed my forehead. “I told you it was crazy.”

“Crazy is my new middle name.” I nuzzled his neck, glad to be held. Glad he was whole and safe.

“While we are on the subject of crazy things,” he said.

“Go on.” I licked his throat. He even tasted like vanilla. I probably tasted like soy sauce.

“I love you, Jade Crow,” he said.

I froze, my mind going blank for a moment. I struggled to form the perfect response, to find the words to tell him how much hearing that meant to me, how my life was better with him in it, how I wanted to give us a real chance, to make this relationship work and let our past be damned. I hesitated too long, unable to find the right words to begin, and the moment stretched out and became awkward.

So I settled for a Star Wars reference instead.

“I know,” I said, burying my head in his shoulder.

And somehow, with those two words, he heard all the things I had meant to say.

Tess watched Samir from the corner of her eye as he spoke quietly into his cell phone. Tension built in his broad shoulders and his golden eyes flared with power as he snapped the phone shut and turned away from the huge picture window that overlooked the valley below his mansion.

“The assassin has failed,” he said.

“I told Tess it wouldn’t work,” Clyde said in his nasal, whining voice.

Tess vowed, again, to rip out his vocal cords before she killed the little bastard. But Clyde was still Samir’s apprentice, sharing her station in life like a sibling. Samir expected them to get along. So she could go on pretending.

She was faking the rest of her life—why not this little thing, too?

“It was diverting,” Samir said. “But now it is Clyde’s choice.”

Tess knew what Clyde would choose. She looked over to where he sat, resting like a fat and pampered lap dog on the white leather sofa. His blonde hair was artfully messy, his silk shirt unbuttoned just enough to show off the smooth muscles of his chest. He was slight but kept himself in excellent shape. Samir preferred his lovers to be in shape. He required beauty in all things around him.

“I want to go,” Clyde said. “Enough fooling around. Let me bring you her heart myself.”

Jade Crow. Samir’s obsession. It grated on Clyde. He hated that Samir cared more for a woman who had left him years ago than for the man who lived with him now, fawning after his every whim.

Clyde did not understand Samir. He was young, and he did not see the danger in a life lived too long yet. Boredom was a terrible burden, and Samir was easily bored.

Soon, Tess knew, Samir would grow tired of Clyde. Then the young sorcerer would become another heart for the reaping.

Tess did her best to never be boring. A delayed execution was better than nothing.

She looked at Samir, drinking in his aquiline, dark features, and his masculine beauty. She focused on her attraction to him, pushing down her revulsion, her fear, shoving it aside.

“I wish to go as well,” she said. She lifted a thin shoulder as though to say “why not?” To convey to him that she merely wanted in on the fun, that this wasn’t an important request either way. If she showed it was important, he might refuse her out of spite. Or start asking her questions that wouldn’t be safe to answer.

“I don’t need her,” Clyde said, staring daggers at Tess.

She smiled blandly at him. “Of course not, dear.”

“Enough, both of you.” Samir chuckled and shook his head, his expression benevolent and amused, but his golden eyes sharp. “You will both go. Bring me Jade’s heart. I will make a new container tonight. I will be watching closely. Do not fail me.”

“What about her friends?” Clyde asked. “That big blond guy?”

“Do with them whatever you like,” Samir said.

Clyde’s smile made Tess’s skin try to crawl off her bones. She bit the inside of her lip and kept her feelings off her face. Clyde’s expertise was in raising demons, in perverting spirits of nature. He reveled in cruelty in ways that surprised even Samir on occasion.

Which was probably why Samir let him live. For now.

Tess’s talents were subtler. She would find a way to make Clyde’s rapid bull-in-a-china-shop methods mesh with her own. She smiled at Samir and inclined her head. “We will not fail you,” she said.

Turning away before her face could betray her thoughts, she left the study. Only when she was safely behind her own wards, in her own room, did she relax.

Jade Crow had escaped Samir, not once, but twice. She had thwarted his attempts to find her for many years. And now she was visible again, surrounded by magic and inhuman friends. She had killed the assassin Tess had suggested they send after her. Tess had known that Samir wouldn’t mind fattening Jade up a little more. Just as she knew he half expected his errant former protégé to kill both his apprentices.

Their lives meant nothing to Samir.

But Jade’s life. Her life might mean something to Tess. Win or die, Tess was certain that the beautiful Native American sorceress held the key to Samir’s death.

And that was something Tess was very interested in indeed.

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