So much stress over the last couple of weeks, winding her tighter and tighter. But with every subtle squeeze and rotating touch, Sahvage was taking it away from her, giving her a temporary peace that she knew was going to last only as long as he was massaging her.
But damn it, she was going to take the respite were she found it.
“Here, I’ll come around and do the clavicle,” he said.
She barely noticed Sahvage moving, but then he was in front of her and his thumb was pushing into the hollows above and below the bone that had been broken and healed wrong.
The second she winced, he stopped. “Too much?”
“No, it’s wonderful,” she murmured. “Please keep going.”
There were a pair of cracks from his knees as he knelt down, and he was so big that his face was in front of hers even though the rest of him was on the floor. And as he fell into a rhythm of pressure and release, her torso moved back and forth, becoming a wave, as opposed to an intractable I-beam of stress.
It was hard to say when relaxation turned to awareness.
When she started to focus on how close he was to her.
When her eyes, which she hadn’t been aware of closing, slowly reopened.
Sahvage was staring at her face instead of where he was rubbing, and his harsh features were a mask, showing nothing. His stare, though . . . it was full of heat.
I take lives against the will, but never females.
“I think you’re good,” he said as he dropped his magical hands.
In the silence, he didn’t rise to his full height. He didn’t move in to get closer. He just stayed where he was, showing her nothing and telling her everything with his obsidian eyes.
And that was when she realized . . .
“Not black, but blue,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Your eyes.” Her voice got huskier. “I’ve been thinking they were black. They’re a very dark blue.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“How can you not know what color eyes you have?”
“Because I don’t care.”
Their voices were low and soft in the silent cottage, but not because either of them was worried about waking up Tallah. At least that wasn’t on Mae’s mind. No, to her, they had created a separate space from the entire world, and there was no reason to speak any louder than it took to cross the infinitesimal distance between them.
“How can you not care?” she said.
“I don’t like to look at myself.” He reached up and brushed a strand of her hair back. “Mirrors are not my friend.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I can’t stand my reflection.”
Her hand lifted of its own volition to his face. The second she made contact with his cheek, his breath seemed to catch—which seemed strange given how powerful his body was.
With careful fingers, she traced his jaw . . . and lingered at his chin. “You have a five o’clock shadow.”
“Do I.”
“Do you shave without a mirror?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “How?”
“I do it in the shower.”
Sure as if he had implanted the image in her mind, she pictured him under a cascade of water, his head tilted back, his hair slick from the moisture . . . his naked body the peaks and valleys the spray traveled over. Glistening. Glossy.
As it rushed down his torso toward his—
“Do you ever cut yourself?” she breathed.
“No. I’ve been doing it that way for years.”
She stopped with her hand cupping the side of his face. And as she fell quiet again, he turned to her palm . . . and pressed his lips to her lifeline, to the place she had scored herself with the knife so she could bleed into the silver basin and call the Book that had yet to come.
“I’m sorry,” she said roughly.
“For what.”
“I don’t know.”
Sahvage took her hand down and ran his thumb over the already-closed cut. “I thought you hurt your finger, not here.”
“No, this was from before.”
“You’re not very good with knives, huh.”
“Guess not.”
Lowering his head, she closed her lids as he brushed his lips over the healed slice.
She stayed exactly where she was for what felt like an eternity.
When she opened her eyes, he was staring right at her—and she spoke one and only one word:
“Yes.”
Sometimes you had to go in for a second look.
Or twelve.
Deep in the Black Dagger Brotherhood’s sacred Tomb, Lassiter elbowed his way through big male bodies to get to the coffin’s edge. But it wasn’t like proximity changed what he was seeing.
Which was absolutely fucking nothing . . . except half a dozen old bags of—
“What is that?” someone said.
V outed one of his black daggers and stabbed at the discolored burlap sack. As a white powder was exposed, he speared some onto the blade.
“I’d think twice before throwing that in your nose,” somebody else remarked.
“Oat flour,” Vishous announced as he scented it. “Really fucking old oat flour.”
What the fuck, Lassiter thought.
No skeleton surrounded by spiderwebs. No mummy. No zombie with perpetually rotting flesh and a hankering for fresh meat. Not even a generic set of remains where there was a collapsed death shroud and some dust over a bunch of discombobulated bones.
But no, they had something Fritz could make a bread loaf out of.
And not the weapon Lassiter had brought them here for.
“Someone better tell me what the fuck is happening,” Wrath growled as he yanked the hood of his robe down.
“Nothing is happening.” Lassiter looked over at the King as the other brothers likewise lost the coverings over their heads. “There’s a couple bags of flour in there. Otherwise, the coffin is empty.”
The happy little announcement made the great Blind King register surprise behind his wraparounds. “Sahvage. Is gone.”
“If he was ever in there.” Lassiter backed away and ended up looking at the wall of names. “Maybe we have the wrong coffin.”
Tohr picked up the lid. “His name is carved into the damn thing. Along with all the warnings.”
“So they didn’t kill him,” Wrath said with a shrug. “Those guards must have not killed him, after all.”
“Warlocks aren’t immortal, if that’s what you mean,” Lassiter said absently. “Just because you practice magic doesn’t mean you live forever. It doesn’t work like that.”
“And just because you say you killed someone and nailed ’em into a coffin doesn’t meant that’s what you did,” Wrath shot back. “The glymera lying. Imagine that. That never fucking happens.”
“He must have used the supposed death to his advantage,” Tohr said. “He disappeared and stayed that way because he knew nothing good was going to come from what happened with that aristocrat, at that castle. He would have wanted to spare the Brotherhood the problems—”
Phury spoke up. “For those of us who don’t know the story, can anyone please explain?”
As Lassiter went over and checked out the names that had been inscribed into the marble wall, he listened to Wrath lay out the fact pattern: Sahvage with the hocus-pocus in the Old Country. Local glymera leader gets spooked. A hunt-down that supposedly ended in the slaughter of an aristocrat and his guards, and Sahvage’s own death. The brother put in this coffin along with the Gift of Light.
Except not so much, as it turned out.
“And what is the Gift of Light?” Phury said.
“It’s a source of energy,” Lassiter replied as he found Sahvage’s name in the lineup of inscriptions. “But more than that. It’s incredibly powerful, and if you want to fight evil, it’s really fucking handy.”
“So you weren’t going to try and resurrect Sahvage? I thought bringing him back was the point of all this.”
“No.” Lassiter shook his head. “Sahvage was never the thing. He was supposedly buried with the Gift of Light, and that’s what I want you to have.”
“What is that exactly? A sword? Another book—”
“Yeah, like we need a second hardcover in all this,” V muttered.
There’s something wrong here, Lassiter thought. This is not the way it’s supposed to be.
Turning away from Sahvage’s inscription, he cleared his throat. “The Gift of Light is a prism, a sacred relic of an ancient time that goes all the way back to when the Scribe Virgin was creating the vampire race. It reflects whatever goes into it. So if you leverage it against great evil—”
“Then that’s what you get back out of it,” V finished.
“So you could turn evil on itself?” Phury said.
“Only certain kinds of evil.” Lassiter pushed a hand through his hair. “It wouldn’t have worked against the Omega. He was the other half of the Scribe Virgin, so it was too close to him—I have to go now.”
“You’re kidding me, right.” V glared across the empty coffin. “If you’re leaving us because Golden Girls is on—”
“No, it’s not that.”
“Then what the hell’s wrong with you?”
Shaking his head again, Lassiter repeated some combination of the I’m-out-of-here album blaring through his skull—and dematerialized directly out from the Tomb.
Good job the Other Side was never far away for him. All he had to do was pierce the veil that separated the earthbound from all that was eternal and poof! he was in a glorious field of grass that did not require mowing, turning his face to a milky white sky that never stormed, taking a deep breath of temperate air that was perfumed with the delicate scent of tulips.
But there was no peace for him right now.
As he strode off toward his destination, he went past the bathing temple, with its beautiful, shimmering basin of water, and then continued on by the columned villas where the Chosen had stayed when they’d lived here. There was also the Treasury, with its baskets of loose gems and special artifacts, and even more important . . . the Scribing Temple.
He stopped outside of the sacred confines where, for millennia, the most cloistered of all the Chosen had spent the forever-hours of their existence staring into crystal seeing bowls and recording the lives and events unfolding down below on earth.
Opening one of the solid doors, he viewed the scribing stations set in rows, the desks still sporting the ink pots and feathers as well as the bowls and the folios of fresh, unused parchment. Everything was as it should be, the chairs aligned perfectly, the plumes of the quills all gracefully extending up at the same angle, no dust on anything, no cobwebs, the space as it had been at the moment it was established for its purpose.
Even though it had been abandoned.
Stepping inside, his boots echoed around the high ceiling, and he had a thought that with the Scribe Virgin retiring and him taking over, all these functions that had once been so vital were gone.
Talk about relics.
On that note, he went past the scribing stations and proceeded to the library—and even for an angel like him, who was pretty damned impervious to being impressed, it was daunting to take a gander at all the stacks and stacks of the recorded history of the vampire race.
Inside the countless volumes, which were arranged chronologically, every major and minor incident of every soul housed inside every body with vampire blood had been faithfully recorded. By hand. In ink.
It was all the knowledge that existed of all the lives that had gone before—and he was going to go through the pages and find every mention of the Gift of Light and Sahvage and that goddamn Book.
The brothers and the other fighters in the mansion often gave him a hard time for not taking his job seriously enough.