Wait for Dusk (2 page)

At this, Nick frowned at me as he leapt back to his feet with an easy grace that bespoke of supernatural powers rather than any human finesse. Placing his hands on his hips, he paced away from me while shaking his head. “I knew I should have kept a closer watch on you, but after your initial display of powers, I thought you would be safe on your own for a while. Besides, I had other children to check on.”

“There are others?”

“There were.” He paused, giving a soft sigh. “Anything that failed to be as talented as you was quickly pruned like dead growth.”

“Bastard.” I grunted as I pushed into a sitting position. I was light-headed from the pain and my vision swam before my eyes focused on him again.

“What’s a father to do? Can’t have useless bits of my genes running aimlessly around,” he replied as he slipped his hands in the pockets of his black slacks. “But I turn my back on you for a few short years, and when I look back you’re a damned nightwalker! You soiled yourself, diluting all your wonderful powers and potential with that bori filth!”

I couldn’t understand what he was talking about. “I’m stronger now than I ever was as a human.”

“Stronger?” he snapped. “Unable to go out in daylight, dependent on the blood of humans. How is that stronger?”

“I’m faster and stronger than any human. I have the ability to read their minds and control their thoughts.”

“And who’s to say that you wouldn’t have all of those abilities if you hadn’t allowed yourself to be changed? You didn’t give yourself enough time to develop. Now you’re saddled with all these silly limitations.”

“What the hell should it matter to you what I chose to do with my life?” I pulled my legs underneath me as I prepared to push to my feet. My legs were mostly healed and I felt that I would soon be able to stand. I didn’t like the distinct disadvantage of being trapped on the floor while this creature paced the room like a chain-smoking speed addict looking to score his next fix out of my hide.

“Because I’ve got plans for you, my daughter,” he admitted with an evil grin. “I’ve had to modify them a bit, but my plans for you still stand.”

“I don’t give a damn about your plans,” I replied through clenched teeth. “I just want you to leave.”

“Not yet. And trust me, you will care about my plans before I am through, for you sit at the center of it all.”

I tried to pull to myself up by using a couple intact bookshelves behind me. “What plans?”

“Ahhh . . . no reason to give away my best secrets just yet.” He laughed, wagging one finger at me. “Besides, there’s something that you need to take care of first.”

“I don’t have to do shit for you!” Struggling to stand on my own as pain shot through the bones of my legs like a bolt of lightning looking for a grounding rod, I swallowed a scream.

“This is for the both of us.” Extending one hand toward me, I felt a surge of energy fill my frame. In an instant I jerked to my feet, my arms snapping out to my sides, leaving me hanging in the air as if I were a marionette on a string. Jabari had exhibited the same ability to physically control me against my will. Danaus could force me to use my powers against my will. The bori could control me completely as well. And with no great surprise, so could Nick.

“I have had enough of this nonsense,” he said with a harsh hiss. “No daughter of mine will be controlled by other creatures! Well, you will be controlled by no one but me.”

“I can’t help it!”

“Lies! You’ve never properly fought them!” With a wave of his hand, he slammed my back against a broken bookcase before pulling me toward him again. “There will be no more of this. You will not only fight them and keep them from controlling you, but you will learn to harness their own powers for your benefit.”

An ugly bitter laugh escaped me as he stepped away and my head fell back. “That’s nonsense if I ever heard it.” I chuckled, letting my head fall forward again. My hair dropped down to crowd around my face, partially obscuring my vision of Nick. “Fight Jabari? He’s centuries old. He could crush me with a thought if I so much as tried to defy him. He has some kind of power over me that I don’t understand and can’t fight.”

The creature rushed toward me in a flash and wrapped his large hand around my throat. I felt his powers release me half a second before he flung me across the room and into the side of my toppled desk. A loud groan echoed through the room as both my body and the desk skid across the hardwood floor before finally hitting the opposite wall.

I slowly lifted myself into a kneeling position so I could glare up at him. “Don’t you think I want to be free of Jabari?” I demanded. “I would love nothing more than to shove his damned powers down his throat and let him choke on them, but I can’t. I can’t fight him. Hell, I can’t even sense his powers until it’s too late.”

“Then let me give you the gift you would have had already if you hadn’t messed your life up with these bloody nightwalkers.” He waved his hand at me and I found myself cringing, all the muscles tensing in my body as I waited for another wave of pain to come crashing through my frame. But it never happened. There was only Nick’s laughter as he mocked my surprise and fear.

And then it came to me, as if a heavy veil were being lifted from the world. I could sense . . . energy. Different kinds of energy as it flowed in and around me. I could feel the earth and her steadily beating pulse. I could feel the hum of energy buzzing in my own body. I could sense the energy rolling off Nick in fat, swamping waves so it seemed to fill the air, suffocating me as I struggled to pull above its weight. It was unlike anything I had ever seen or felt before. Once, many months ago, I had sensed the powers of the earth, and being a nightwalker, I was always in touch with blood magic. However, the energy that tumbled away from Nick seemed to fit neither of these categories. He was a massive ball of power and something else . . .

“How about a test drive, father mine?” I mocked, pushing to my feet. Narrowing my eyes on his smug face, I tapped into all the energy swirling around me, not caring whether it came from blood, earth, or whatever Nick was, and let it fill me in a rush. I summoned up my powers and flung a round of fireballs at him with enough speed that I was sure he wouldn’t be able to dodge them. And he didn’t. The fire struck him in the center of his chest and washed over his body, covering him as if it were a second skin. His laughter bounced around the room as he took a step toward me, still covered in flames.

I stumbled a step backward, hitting the desk behind me, and steeled myself for the next round of blows as my mind frantically searched for another way of attacking. I had no weapons on me, only the power I had been born with. Running wasn’t an option. Nick had already proven that he was faster than me. So I waited for my punishment for striking out.

But it never came. He laughed at me and extinguished the flames. “That’s my girl,” he said, and patted me on my bruised cheek. “Now you just need to use that energy you can sense against those who are trying to control you. Prove to me that you can harness their own powers for your means. Control Jabari. Control Danaus.”

Something in my chest twisted at the sound of the hunter’s name falling from Nick’s thin lips. I wanted to keep Danaus as far from this creature as I possibly could, but I knew looking into his twinkling black eyes that it wasn’t even a remote possibility.

“And if I refuse?” I lifted my chin as I clenched my teeth.

“Then you are useless to me as you are, and we’ll have to start from scratch,” he said with a grin. He pressed his hand into my stomach and leaned in close. “I can still undo what was done.”

“What?” I demanded, my stomach twisting into a tight knot.

“Make you human again.” My mind halted at the very thought.
Human. Again.
I couldn’t ever be human again. I didn’t
want
to be human ever again. I was a nightwalker. I had been a nightwalker for more than six hundred years. It was all I knew.

Nick sent a pulse of energy through my system and I felt a jerk in the middle of my chest as if something had tightened its fist around my soul. At the same time, my heart thudded in my chest and I took a ragged gasping breath, feeling like I had been holding it for the past six centuries. I could feel blood rushing through my veins and warmth pulsing through my body again.
Oh, no!
I was alive again.

“No!” I screamed, grabbing his hand with both of mine. “No! You can’t do this! Don’t take this away from me!”

“Then heed me, daughter of mine,” he bit out. “Prove to me that you can wield the powers of the hunter and the Ancient, and I will leave you as you are. Otherwise, I will turn you human again and you will bear me a child to replace you.”

“A child?” I stopped struggling as the horrible thought screamed through my brain. “But you said you were my father. It would be a monster.”

“It wouldn’t be the first monster I’ve graced this world with.” Nick released me, and I slid down the side of the desk as my legs gave out. Sitting on the ground, I stared straight ahead, blind to the world around me.

“Listen to me, Mira,” he said slowly, drawing my gaze back to his smiling face. With a wave of his hand, one of the silver-plated hourglasses that had been smashed to pieces reassembled itself in midair, leaving the black sand to collect perfectly in the upper glass chamber. Nick set the hourglass between my legs, tipping it so the sand ran into the empty chamber. “You’ve always felt like time was running out for you, and now you know why. I’m here and I’m waiting for you. Do as I ask and you shall be rewarded. Fail me and I shall make you human so that you can breed me a child to take your place. I will be watching, but remember, your time is running out.”

Chapter Two

V
alerio found me sitting in the middle of my destroyed library, my eyes locked on the hourglass as I tried to will the sand to stop falling. My thoughts were a shattered wreck and I was left bobbing in the middle of the black sea, clinging to the one thing that I had been sure was impossible: Nick could turn me human again.

After centuries of being a nightwalker, of endless nights of blood and violence, it was the one place where I felt I belonged. I was hated and feared by most of my kind, I had allies that would rather see me staked, but being a nightwalker was all I knew. It was home, and I couldn’t go back now.

But my heart beat and blood rushed through my veins, if only for a moment. My lungs had burned until I took that first gasp of air, refilling them completely for the first time in far too many years. Worse still, my soul had been fully anchored within my frame as if it had settled back down in the hole that was now the home to the monster that craved the blood I fed on so frequently. For a flicker in time I’d been human again, and all I had felt was terror.

“Mira?” Valerio whispered, glass crunching under the hard soles of his dress shoes as he stepped into the room. He had magically appeared, streaking across the vast distance from Venice to Savannah. And for the first time in my existence, I had sensed the swell of power before he appeared and knew exactly who it was. Nick had truly awakened something within me.

Kneeling beside me, he slowly placed one hand on my shoulder, causing me to flinch. “Mira, are you all right?” I was wounded mentally and physically, and I needed time to heal and think, but I would get neither. Yet time was slipping away from me, and Valerio’s unexpected presence in my domain indicated there was a new problem that needed my unique attention.

“Bring me Danaus,” I commanded in a low voice.

“Is he the one that did this to you?” Valerio’s hand tightened on me even though there was no change in tone in his voice.

“No. Bring him to me.”

“Where is he?”

My eyes fell shut and I reached out with my senses, letting my powers wash over the entire city of Savannah and the surrounding suburbs in a great wave. To my surprise, I found Danaus exactly where I had left him—at Factors Walk. Had only a couple minutes passed when it felt like years?

Mira!
came Danaus’s instant reply when he sensed my touch.

Valerio is coming for you,
I simply stated and then pulled quickly away, setting up mental barriers as I went. I didn’t want the hunter in my head, didn’t want him to know about the monster that seemed to be linked to my earliest beginnings, my weak pathetic human roots.

“He’s at Factors Walk,” I said, shoving a mental image of the location into Valerio’s mind. The nightwalker jerked away at the unexpected invasion, releasing his hold on my shoulder, but I didn’t care. “Bring Danaus to me now.”

Wordlessly, my longtime friend and companion stood and disappeared from sight. I had enough time to reach out and pick up the silver hourglass that rested between my bent legs before Danaus and Valerio reappeared. With a grunt, I flung the timepiece across the room, where it to shattered into hundreds of pieces, sending out a spray of black sand like a plume of deadly smoke.

The hunter took one look at the room before grabbing a handful of Valerio’s white shirt and slamming him against the nearest wall. “What the hell have you done?” he snarled. Danaus’s powers bubbled up with his anger, filling the small, broken room with a warm haze of anger. This time, I felt as if I could reach out and touch those powers. And if I really wanted to, I could give them only the slightest shove and Danaus would boil Valerio’s blood. This new power carried with it a haunting temptation, like low-hanging fruit just waiting to be plucked.

“He didn’t do anything,” I muttered, shaking my head as if to clear it from too many dark thoughts. Energies swirled around me like ghosts, each with its own demands and desires. “He found me like this.”

Danaus released Valerio with a small shove and stepped over to me. Kneeling down, he placed one hand beneath my chin and forced me to lift my head. I knew what he saw. I was cut, battered, swollen, and bruised to the point of being barely recognizable. My clothes were shredded and I was covered in my own dried blood. From the moment that Nick had gotten me alone in my home, he had taken the time to beat me completely senseless so I didn’t have a chance at fighting back. Didn’t have a hope.