Beautiful Danger

Chapter 11

Rook arrived at Lark’s apartment ten minutes after she had showered. Flipping her loose wet hair over a shoulder, she directed him into the living room and asked if he’d like tea or coffee, neither of which she had, but it was polite, and she suspected he’d refuse.

“I’m not here for a chat,” the Frenchman said. “You’ve been taken off the job.”

Nothing new to her. She was surprised he’d even repeat himself like that.

“I got the text message. Gunnar replaced me, then?”

“He’s promised to make Domingos LaRoque dust before midnight.”

Doubtful, Lark thought to herself. And then she prayed Domingos kept a low profile, and knew he would not, for pack Levallois was not yet extinct.

“Since when has the Order set time limits on its marks?” Lark dared to ask. Rook deserved respect, but she’d always toed the line between his authority and her subservience.

“Since when does one of our best knights completely botch the job assigned her?”

He strolled before the window, eyeing her sharply. He had a certain look that crossed propriety and touched lecherousness. He’d never made a move toward her, but Lark suspected he moved all over her in his mind. The little she knew of him outside the office walls told that the man indulged dark, dangerous passions best exercised in the privacy of his own home.

“I’m disappointed in you, Lark. Your husband would be, too.”

He knew exactly how to plunge the stake deep into her heart. A heart that had been shattered the moment she’d had to jam the stake into Todd’s chest.

Yet recently, something had occurred to rearrange those pieces of her heart, just a bit.

“I always give the Order one hundred percent,” she tossed out, yet cringed inwardly. She wasn’t sure she had this time. Well, she knew she had not. “The mark was elusive.”

“But you said you had him in sight once.”

“And then was distracted by werewolves.” Poor excuse, Lark. Would she allow the exhaustion of emotion to drag her into lies? “Doesn’t matter now, does it?”

“Not at all. I have much faith in Gunnar.”

The rumor Lark had heard about that knight was that his wife had once had an affair with a vampire. Gunnar had slain the vampire, and then his wife.

“So, you know you must pay penance for letting down the Order?”

She nodded. This again? How many times had she done the same when in training? Too many times to count. Because of that, she was an old pro.

“Bring it on,” she said. “Just let me get my shoes.”

“I have a car waiting below to bring you to the chapel.”

The chapel. Which really was an old chapel in a cathedral the Order had retrofitted to serve as headquarters. An appropriate place for penance.

* * *

It wasn’t difficult to track Lark through the city. Domingos used the rooftops as a highway to follow the black limo, dashing from roof to roof, navigating the slippery tiles with ease. Yet the sun threatened to pop out from behind the thinning clouds.

It was midafternoon. He wore the goggles and gloves and had tied a scarf about his neck and pulled the jacket hood over his head. A smart vampire would have a special suit made up for traveling during the day to keep the UVs in check.

He knew Truvin Stone had designed DragonSkin armor years ago for vampires to wear as protection when witch’s blood had proven poisonous to them. Yet he hadn’t traversed the roofs during the day so often until he’d met Lark. If his rooftop excursions were to become a habit, he’d have to give Stone a call.

He suspected the place the man—who he guessed was the Order supervisor—took Lark to served as base for the Order of the Stake.

“Interesting,” he muttered, knowing such information would be valuable to other vampires. If he were a shady sort, and had a need for money, he could sell the information to the highest bidder.

He’d keep it under consideration.

Half an hour later, Domingos lay on the roof of an old cathedral, palms flat to the ceramic roof tiles. From his initial reconnaissance through a stained-glass window, he’d determined Lark had been brought into the chapel. She’d entered, had prostrated herself stomach-down on the cold slate floor and now lay still, arms out and cheek to the hard surface as if a monk.

Must be some kind of punishment. For not killing him?

He smirked. Such a wily creature he’d become, and not even in full grasp of his faculties. What a coup to give the infamous Order of the Stake the slip! And if they knew he’d fucked one of them? Ha!

Yet another juicy piece of information to keep tucked close to his vest.

The triumph was brief. Domingos kicked the damned phoenix coursing through his veins in the ass. It wasn’t like him to take joy in the suffering of others. And to know it was Lark, the one woman in this world he...

Breathing out, Domingos closed his eyes behind the goggles.

The one woman he what? Loved? He wasn’t sure what love was. The one woman he trusted? Part of him trusted her, but an even bigger part, a part that liked to rage and claw at his insides, would never again trust another living being, and especially not one who had been trained to slay his breed.

He pressed his palms flat to the tiles, which were cool thanks to the overcast sky. It wasn’t difficult to pick up her heartbeat many stories below. Though his body was damaged and broken, his senses were still sharp. He wanted to be in the room with her, lying alongside her, sharing her discomfort. Could his presence spare her some pain?

You’re not capable of such selflessness. You were only following the hunter, getting close to her, because you’ve put it into your brain a woman would never be able to kill you if she spent a small amount of time with you.

No one could kill someone he knew without regret. And she had emotions. Women were always compassionate.

Maybe. Though he found it hard to believe he’d be so callous. Again, was it the phoenix? It didn’t own a part of him as if it were another entity or some kind of demonic possession. Or was it becoming more whole, claiming yet another section of his brain with each tirade, each fight against the noise and the madness?

Domingos did not care. Just as he didn’t care when he plunged his fist through a werewolf’s chest to rip out the beating heart. They all deserved to die for the heinous crimes against him and his fellow breed.

So now you’re including the rest of the vampires? Since when did you become so magnanimous? Doesn’t that sound similar to Lark’s blind quest for revenge? Thought this was a personal crusade.

He could not have walked by the burning warehouse. It would have been unconscionable.

Only five years he’d been vampire. Changed against his will one night by a woman he’d not known, and had never seen after. Zara Destry had been her name. She’d come to him, frilled in pink with pouting red lips, praising his artistry after a local concert at the Opéra. He’d taken her home and slept with her, but had decided he’d not been interested in a second liaison. One-night stands were fine, but a relationship had always seemed like too much work when music had demanded his attention.

Zara had retaliated against his dismissal of her by biting him. And then she had stormed out of his life, laughing much like his maniacal phoenix. And he’d not known then what he knew now, that he could possibly have stopped the transformation to vampire if only he’d found his blood master and killed her, or had not taken mortal blood before the next full moon.

After being taken in by Truvin Stone and later, tribe Zmaj, Domingos had learned that when a mortal was bitten by a vampire, he could fight the transformation by not drinking blood before the full moon. If that was possible, the vampiric taint would pass through the mortal, and he would not change. Of course, fighting the full moon was literally impossible, and was rumored to drive the mortal insane.

One way or another, Domingos had gotten the wrong end of the crazy stick.

It was a powerful pull, the blood hunger. Admittedly, he liked the taste of blood. It was his comfort, or had been. Yet now, since he’d escaped from the pack and daren’t return to Zmaj—for he didn’t wish to inflict his crazy upon them—every time Domingos drank from a mortal the images filled his brain. Images of the heinous blood games. Of being shoved into the circular cage, pitted against another blood-starved vampire, and of struggling to survive. He’d been so animalistic as he sought the sustenance he’d been denied. When in captivity, he had drunk many times from a fellow vampire—to the death.

When a vampire drank a mortal to death, he experienced the danse macabre, a vicious replay of the mortal’s nightmares, over and over. Now, having drunk his own kind to death, he experienced the nightmare daily.

Swallowing, Domingos tucked his forehead against his elbow and beat a fist against the roof.

* * *

Lark stirred minutely at the sound overhead. Too loud for a bird. Had someone thrown a rock onto the roof?

Instinctually, she knew it was neither. Her body stiff and cold, and her muscles aching after countless hours of immobility, her sense of sound and smell had surged to the fore, and she had known the moment he had stepped onto the roof with his bare feet. The landing had been more graceful than a bird’s.

He must have a homing instinct toward her. She only prayed the clouds did not move away from the sun.

Hours later, her thoughts had not reverted from the one focus that made this punishment bearable. Domingos should be hunting werewolves. Yes, she now advocated his revenge, only because she was angry at herself and at the Order. Why must every vampire be marked for death?

Okay, she knew not every one was marked and in the Order’s crosshairs. They only went after those vamps who presented a threat to mortals, which could be construed as all of them. She suspected each knight possessed his own gauge of threat level when it came to vampires and very likely had varying scales of moral compass. Herself, she had never blinked an eye if the vamp had been female. If she’d encountered a woman vampire gnawing on the throat of an unfortunate victim, the stake had come out and she’d dusted the bitch.

Yet Lark had her limits. What of a child vampire? If inborn—meaning the child had been born of a mortal female and vampire male, or even bloodborn, which meant born of two vampire parents—the child only came into fangs and bloodlust at puberty. Lark reasoned that the child knew nothing else and had learned to reason in favor of its survival, and so was thankful she’d never come face-to-face with one so young.

Yet an even younger vampire could be created if a vampire bit a child and left it to transform. Any vampire capable of biting a child landed lowest of low on Lark’s scale of humanity. What a bittersweet cruelty to have to stake that child to save both it and innocent mortals from its blood thirst.

Again, Lark was thankful such an encounter had not occurred.

Rarely did the Order take on a job from outside sources, though Lark had only been with them for a year, and couldn’t know all their dealings. Rook kept details close to his vest. If a knight was dispatched to hunt a vampire, the intel provided was on a need-to-know basis.

Pack Levallois had hired the Order to dispose of a threat, yet it was the pack that had manufactured that threat through their vicious torture of vampires. As far as Lark was concerned, Levallois deserved what Domingos served them, and the Order should not have agreed to liaison as server of justice to one side when both were equally to blame.

Only now, alone with her thoughts, could she finally begin to reason that out. Why was she working for the werewolves? She should have questioned this assignment.

On the other hand, had she not received the job, she might never have met him.

“Domingos,” she mouthed, not putting the name out in sound, but feeling every syllable form a tune with her heartbeat. Gorgeous night music, that.

Sensitive Domingos LaRoque, with the scarred skin and blown-out pupil and a mad frenzy screaming in his brain. Skull clatter, as he called it. Their lovemaking had pushed all that torture aside for the moment. When they had been entwined, naked limbs seeking, holding and exploring, he’d seemed sane, whole. And if the noises had started to torment, he’d gotten them under control simply by focusing on her.

Lark imagined lying beside him in bed now, her body warm against his. The damaged skin on his back had been sensitive to her touch, so she’d carefully hugged up to him, her hand clasped to his chest, feeling his heartbeat thunder against her breasts. So strong. Always he smelled of sweet smoke, like a peat fire burning low in the countryside on a lazy summer evening. It brought back memories of her childhood, a good time when the only nighttime frights the world had offered were spooks under the bed and rattling branches against the windowpanes.

It didn’t matter to Domingos that she was mortal and hated his kind; he’d given of himself freely and without fear. She didn’t hate him. Couldn’t hate a man who had touched her soul as if with an inexplicable hush of his breath. The little he’d told her about his torture had drawn her up from the wondering and stalled fears regarding Todd, and now perhaps she could open her tightly grasped fist and let her husband’s memory move on, peacefully.

Maybe?

She believed Todd now resided with the tiny soul they’d lost early in their marriage. Together she would hold them both in her heart, but not so tightly they could not comfort each other where they were now. Heaven. She had to believe in that place, if only to know her family had made it there.

Release them. Give them the freedom you are just beginning to claim.

She wanted to. She needed to give them freedom so she could finally know her own freedom.

Opening her palm now, Lark did just that. She closed her eyes and pictured her husband’s loving smile in her thoughts. He’d had his own path, and while he’d loved her, at the time, she hadn’t been fully prepared for where that path had led the two of them—into a horrifying darkness. But she loved him for pursuing his passion, and for being kind to so many homeless strangers, and for making her laugh and yes, even for those few occasions his absence because of his job had made her cry.

Despite the need to form lies to protect his family and hers from learning about what he really did for a living, Todd Cooper had given her the best love he’d known how to give, even after the death of their child. And Lark had reciprocated.

“Goodbye, Todd,” she whispered. “I will always hold you in my heart. Keep our child safe in your arms. I send blessings to you both.”

Pressing her palm to the cold stone floor, she sent thanks three stories above to the man who risked his life merely by putting himself outside, above her, close and always there.

A new anchor in her life that she clung to fervently.

* * *

The midnight bells rang and Lark took long minutes to turn over and sit up, allowing the blood to move through the parts of her body that needed it and tingling as sensation returned. A few yoga stretches were necessary. She bent forward, gripping the soles of her feet and bowing her forehead to her knees. That felt freakin’ outstanding.

She’d been lying in the chapel all day. She needed a bathroom, stat. But more important, she prayed her vampire lover, who still lay above her, would not follow her escort home and risk being seen by the Order.

* * *

Lark unobtrusively lifted her head skyward as she got out of the escort limo before her building. The moon sat like a gorgeous disk in the starless night. She couldn’t see the rooftop from her position on the street, and so hoped that he was not above.

For his own safety.

Though she had no reason to believe Rook suspected her involvement with Domingos, she couldn’t take the chance he wouldn’t look into all reasons for her failure to complete the mission. Surely, a knight would be assigned to tail her for the next few days. See if she led him anywhere particular. Like a vampire’s lair?

She wouldn’t make anything easy for the Order. Strolling through the building lobby and taking the stairs two at a time because she needed exercise after her long day spent inert, she entered her apartment and closed the door. Leaning over, she placed her palms on the floor and stretched out her spine and back again. A long session of yoga felt appropriate to work out the kinks, but she wasn’t about to linger in an asana.

She couldn’t. A soul-deep compulsion moved her quickly through the apartment. She showered in less than five minutes, not washing her hair because she didn’t want it wet. Afterward, she combed her hair into a queue, then twisted it into a chignon and stuck a silver poniard through it. Stylish, yet functional as a weapon, if needed.

Shuffling through the shampoos and body creams in her closet, she found the birth control pills. Not expired. She took one and placed the rest in the medicine cabinet, close at hand.

Looking over her Order clothing, she shook her head. Didn’t need the protective Kevlar tonight. But the little black dress hanging from thin spaghetti straps on the velvet hanger had not been designed for the adventure she had in mind. Slender black leggings and a simple black T-shirt would serve. No underthings, because it was hot tonight and the humidity curled up tendrils of her hair against her neck.

Slipping her feet into flat sneakers with good treads, she then opened the back door and scanned below. The iron stairs still lay below in the courtyard. Building maintenance would probably call it a loss and leave it as it lay until someone coughed up the euros to have it removed to a junkyard. Across the street, the rooftops were clear.

The Order knights were like ninjas. You never saw them until the stake was aimed for your heart. But one ninja could always outsmart another if she was determined.

Closing the door and balancing on the narrow wood threshold, Lark muttered thanks this side of the building was shrouded in darkness. Gripping the lip of the roof easement, with some difficulty, and more thanks for the workouts that had given her impressive biceps, she levered herself up and onto the roof. Admittedly, it had been much simpler when she’d had a vampire to hoist her up.

Crouching low, she walked along the shingled surface, leaped to the next roof, which featured a border about two feet high at roof’s edge, and then looked out over and down to the main street below.

Paris never slept, though her neighborhood was quiet and just far enough away from the main touristy areas to offer a peaceful lifestyle. So spotting someone moving about would raise concern, if not alarm, since it was after midnight.

As suspected, she located the knight lurking in an alley across the street and two buildings down from hers. What caught her eye was the glowing embers at the end of a cigarette. That surprised her. Most knights took better care of their health. Wonder which one that was. Couldn’t be Gunnar; he was a physical specimen of health, spending most of his free time in the gym the Order maintained for training.

“One of Rook’s lackeys,” she decided.

With a smirk, she took off across the rooftops, knowing he’d never think to look for her above, rather than on his level.

She hadn’t gone farther than two buildings south when a hand reached out from behind a stairway entry door and grabbed her, clasping over her mouth to keep her from screaming. She had no intention of screaming because his smoky scent curled about her, softening her reactive muscles and melting her against his hard, lean frame.

“What are you doing?” Domingos whispered.

“I knew you’d follow me home, and I wanted to see you again.”

“You did?”

She nodded. He released his tight hold on her and she turned in his embrace, fitting her body against his seductive darkness. Lark kissed him in the shadows of the entryway, leaning into his body and finally, perhaps for the first time all day, releasing her tensions completely to the only one with whom she felt safe.

“I knew you were up on the chapel roof all day,” she said. Another kiss. A stroke of her finger down his fang stirred up a wanting moan from her lover. “Good thing it was a cloudy day.”

“I can’t stay away from you, Lark. I need you in ways even I don’t understand.”

“It’s because I keep your crazy away. But I don’t want to question this attraction. I just want to have it for as long as possible.”

“You don’t know how that makes me feel.”

“I do, because I feel the same way. We belong together. I don’t know how or why, but we do.”

“Mercy, Lark, you are too good for me.” He buried his face against her neck, his breath warm upon her skin. The press of his fangs to her skin didn’t make her cringe because it was not done with intention to bite; he just couldn’t help it. “Please, don’t ever change your mind. But I know if you do, and you have to stake me, I’d take the stake willingly, knowing it’s by your hand.”

“Don’t say that, lover.” She lifted his chin and stroked the hair from his eyes. “I won’t harm you. Ever. And I’ll do whatever I can to keep anyone else from going after you with a stake. It’s not right. You present no danger to mortals.”

He tilted his head. “I do need to drink their blood to survive. But I don’t kill. Never. I couldn’t do that to an innocent.”

“I know that. And the Order understands that is how vampires must survive, and we normally only go after the ones who present serious danger to mortals. That’s why I’m so angry they accepted this assignment from pack Levallois.”

“Let’s not talk about the dogs now. Come home with me? Let me make love to you until the sun comes up, and then we’ll close all the curtains and continue to make love until we fall asleep in each other’s arms.”

“I’m right behind you, lover. Lead the way. But be watchful. There’s a knight on the street below, keeping an eye on my movement.”

“I think you’ve given him the slip.”

“There could be others.”

“Then we’ll take my highway home, yes?”

She slipped her hand into his and let him lead. With this man, she had no fear of falling.