Dayhunter

TWENTY

My skin crawled. I stepped onto the tarmac of the runway at the Nikos Kazantzakis Airport in Heraklion and my stomach lurched and churned within me. Clenching my teeth, I paused at the foot of the stairs leading down from my jet and wrapped my arms around my middle as if I could protect myself from the memories that seemed to rise up from the dead in the back of my brain.

I might never have lived in this town—my family had lived in a small house to the south of Chania, a port town west of Heraklion—but I was home. After standing on the runway for less than a minute, the familiar smells were already teasing at my mind. The wind swept up from the south, running over the island before finally reaching me. The warm breeze had skimmed through the valley and over the mountain ranges that bisected the island, carrying with it the rich scents of Jerusalem sage, Cretan bee orchid, and dark Cretan ebony from where it clung to the cliffs down at Siteia. Mixed in was the heady scent of olives and lamb roasting on a spit. Oh God, I was home.

Since leaving Crete as a young woman, I’d never looked back, never set foot on her sandy shore. My mother died when I was twelve and my departure to the mainland left my father alone in Chania. Laying under the stars in Greece, I cursed myself more than once for leaving my father, wishing I’d had the strength and courage to convince him to come with me. I should have demanded that he leave Crete behind and join me on the mainland. There had been nothing left for either of us on this island. But he returned. He went back to the same house I’d been born in, the house he’d been born in, because it was the only place he could ever call home.

“Mira?”

“I’m fine,” I snapped at Danaus before I even thought about what I was saying. Straightening my spine, I resettled my bag on my left shoulder and took a few steps away from the jet so he could finish descending the stairs. “Do we have company?”

“There’s a vampire headed this way, but other than that, I don’t sense anyone else in the area,” Danaus replied, coming to stand beside me. His bag of clothes and weapons was slung over his right shoulder. None of his usual weapons were visible, but I knew he had something lethal within quick reach.

During the short flight, we’d discussed possible scenarios that could occur at the airport when we landed. The naturi would expect us to show up at the Palace of Knossos, after I had stopped them at Stonehenge just a few nights ago. We would continue to thwart their every move until they finally gave up or we were all dead. I wasn’t in the mood to contemplate which would happen first.

The night air was surprisingly quiet. I had expected them to attack us as soon as we stepped off the plane. The flight would leave us stiff and somewhat disoriented as we struggled to acquaint ourselves with our new surrounding. It was one of their best opportunities. Of course, the prime time to attack was going to be sunrise, and I still needed to come up with a good plan for that eventuality. A part of me wished I could climb back on the plane and fly to Greece, where I could spend my daylight hours in peace. I didn’t want to sleep here. Were there stories of me in Crete? Old folklore of a demon child born with hair the color of Hell’s fires? Were the children taught to fear me like other nightmarish creatures? Damn, I wanted to be gone from this island and her memories!

Forcing myself to concentrate, I scanned the area and picked up two nightwalkers, but only one was approaching us. This was not what I had expected. There were only two in the entire region. The palace was not far from the city. The whole area should have been teeming with nightwalkers. Two vampires was all the Coven had thought to send? Bastards. Every last one of them.

The nightwalker slowly sauntered across the tarmac from the nearby hangar, her heels clacking loudly on the hard surface. A wealth of black hair spilled over her left shoulder and down her back while a secretive smile played across her mouth. As she approached, her eyes never left Danaus. I couldn’t decide what had caught her attention: his dark attractive looks or any of the rumors that had leaked from Venice.

“Who sent you?” I demanded before she could draw enough of a breath to speak. I was already on edge about being in Crete, and we still needed to come up with a plan to defeat the naturi. We were running out of time. Our flight out of Venice had been delayed, and it was now nearly 4:00 A.M. Dawn was drawing close.

“The Coven,” she said, her lips twisting in a frown as she looked me over. My clothes were rumpled and wrinkled, appearing as if I had wadded them up in a tight ball before bothering to put them on. I looked like a lost vagabond next to her neat cream-colored slacks and pale blue blouse.

“My name is Penelope. Macaire requested that I meet you and aid you against the naturi.”

“Where are the others?” I barely resisted the urge to run my hands over my dress in a senseless attempt to smooth out some of the wrinkles.

“Hugo waits at a distance, watching to make sure we are safe,” she replied.

“And that’s all?”

“Yes.”

I had a few choice words to say about Macaire and the rest of the Coven. This was ridiculous. There was no way Danaus, a pair of nightwalkers, and I could defeat all of the naturi lurking on this island. With odds like these, the naturi were going to have little trouble breaking the seal, and I was going to get staked in the process. However, before I could vent my growing irritation, Danaus spoke up.

“We need to get moving.” His deep voice pushed aside my anger. He was right. We were easy targets standing out in the middle of the landing strip.

Without any further discussion, Penelope led the way out of the airport and to a taxi she had waiting. At one time or another all three of us looked over our respective shoulders. It hung unspoken in the air. The naturi were out there and they were watching us. I wasn’t sure why they hadn’t attacked yet, and a part of me didn’t want to know the answer.

Penelope took us to a small square house she was renting. The exterior was painted white and the roof was flat. It looked like there might be some kind of awning covering part of the roof, offering tenants a place to rest at the end of the day and look out over the city. Even after all the centuries, Venetian influence was still visible in most of the buildings. For a time, Crete had been controlled by the Venetians, who left behind their form of art and architecture as a pervading influence. The cities such as Heraklion and Chania still glowed with the beauty of that dying city.

The interior of the house was the typical Cretan structure, with windows along only the front wall, while the other walls were covered in colorfully woven cloths and painted plates. A rounded archway led from the main living room into the kitchen and dining room, while the bedrooms were at the back of the house, off the kitchen. A window air-conditioning unit filled one of the few windows, growling softly as it put out a steady stream of cold air. The evening air had cooled to the low seventies, but the house retained most of the balmy afternoon heat.

It was a considerably larger house than the one I’d grown up in, and obviously more modern, but there were too many similarities in the design and the use of color. My hands trembled and a knot seemed to be permanently lodged in my throat.

Dropping my bag of clothes on the floor, I once again tried to push the little reminders that I was in Crete out of my mind and focus on why I had come to the island now. “How long have you been here?” I asked, trying to sound polite despite my raw nerves and growing frustration.

“I arrived on the island a few hours after sunset,” Penelope replied. She was watching me warily from the opposite side of the room. She stood underneath the tall archway, her arms folded over her chest. “I have been living in Athens for almost a century and I come to Crete during the summer season for the tourists.”

“Does this Hugo belong to you or did Macaire send him too?” I walked over to sofa that faced a corner fireplace made of small stones placed in an interesting mosaic. I leaned against the back of the sofa so I could face the nightwalker, crossing my left ankle over my right.

“Macaire sent him,” Penelope replied. “Is it true that you stopped the naturi at Stonehenge?” She made no attempt to hide her skepticism when she fired back at me before I could continue to interrogate her.

I smiled at her and rubbed the knuckles of my right hand on the front of my dress as if shining my nails. Holding my hand out in front of me, my fingers instantly became engulfed in blue fire. “I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve.” As I had expected, Penelope took one step backward, but she quickly stopped herself and returned to the spot she’d been standing, determined not to be bullied.

“You’re going to need it,” Danaus remarked.

“How many?” I asked him, instantly extinguishing the fire. My fun was over. We needed to get back down to business. We needed to figure out exactly what we were up against and how to defeat them.

Danaus’s power brushed past me as it moved out of the house and across the island. His eyes remained opened as he searched Crete, but his focus was not on anyone in the room. “A couple dozen. Less than England,” he said.

I was surprised. They had staged an enormous attack on the Themis Compound, throwing more naturi at us than I thought had lived on the entire earth. Had we seriously depleted their numbers to the point that they could no longer risk such a significant assault, no matter the importance of the event? One could only hope.

“Where are they?”

Danaus’s gaze focused as he leveled his blue eyes on me. “I don’t know this island.”

“Would a map help?” Penelope inquired in a voice so sweet it grated on my nerves.

“Yes,” I snapped before Danaus could answer. “Find one.”

After throwing a nasty look at me, Penelope stomped out of the room, disappearing into the kitchen as she headed toward the back of the house. A snort from Danaus caused me to look back over at him.

“What put you in such a mood?” he asked.

“I just want to get this done and get the hell out of here,” I snarled, no longer even trying to control my temper.

To my surprise, his expression softened. It annoyed me. I didn’t want to see sympathy or pity from the hunter. I wanted him angry or annoyed or any of the other moods I had grown accustomed to seeing on his face. A moment later I felt a faint touch in my brain, like a hand feeling blindly about in the darkness.

Maybe it’s time you faced your past. The sound of Danaus’s thoughts echoed in my mind. He was getting too good at speaking to me telepathically. Just over twenty-four hours had passed since he had last pushed his powers into me, but our connection grew stronger each time he did it.

To hell with my past. This isn’t the time to go all Freudian on me. We find the naturi and stop them. That’s it, I mentally flung back at him.

Danaus didn’t reply, but I could feel him laughing at me, some silent chuckle rumbling through his mind and slipping into mine.

But the feeling ceased at the sound of the front doorknob turning. A knife seemed to magically appear in Danaus’s hand as he twisted around to face whoever was entering the house. I stood, my knees slightly bent, ready for anything. We both scanned the house at the same time to find the other nightwalker. However, neither of us relaxed when he stepped into the room with hands up and palms out and open.

Hugo was built like a freaking refrigerator. The nightwalker could have caused a lunar eclipse if he happened to step in front of the moon. His shoulders were wide, tapering down to a narrow waist and hips before splitting into legs that resembled tree trunks. He could have easily palmed a basketball with one large hand. I would have taken a step backward if my left thigh wasn’t already pressed against the back of the pale yellow sofa. I’d never seen a vampire as big as Hugo. The only relief I felt was the fact that he wasn’t very old; less than a century.

“Hugo?” I asked in a hard voice.

“Ja,” he grunted, lowering his hands.

A curse rose up the back of my throat but I swallowed it down again. I spoke only a sprinkling of German and it had been a long time since I had last tried. “Sprechen Sie Englisch?”

“Ja,” he replied, to my immediate relief. “Mira?”

“Ja,” I said, trying to match his low growl and not quite pulling it off. I guess I needed a set.

“Hunter.” Hugo’s mouth twisted into a sneer as he looked over at Danaus.

“I’m glad we’ve got the introductions out of the way. Now, if we can get back to business, we—”

The sound of Penelope’s heels clicking across the floor as she returned to the kitchen halted me. She opened what appeared to be a travel guide for the island of Crete and unfolded a colorful map from the back.

“Have either of you seen or encountered the naturi since coming to the island?” I asked as I walked over to where she’d spread the map out on the table.

“No, but neither of us has been on the island that long,” Penelope said, shaking her head, her black hair flowing down around her face, nearly blocking her eyes. For the first time since meeting her, I saw a flicker of fear cross her face.

“Danaus,” I called, looking over my shoulder at the hunter so I didn’t have to look at Penelope any longer. I put my finger over Heraklion, which was on the northeastern part of the island. “This is where we are. Where are the naturi hiding? In the city or farther away?”

He moved behind me so he could see the map, but at the same time he didn’t have his back completely turned toward Hugo. I didn’t particularly want to turn my back to the enormous vampire either, but if Hugo knew that I was unnerved by his great hulking mass, he’d never follow my orders. And right now I needed him to follow me without question.

Once again Danaus’s powers flowed out of his body, passing through me like a warm wind, threatening to sweep my soul out of my body and drag it across the entire island. “Farther away,” he murmured. “None are in the city right now.”

“He—He can sense them?” Penelope asked, her voice wavering.

“Mmmm…he knows all kinds of nifty tricks.” A dark smile lifted the corners of my mouth. The nightwalker took a step back from the table, the fingers of her left hand curling into a fist. She glanced over her shoulder at Hugo, but I didn’t catch his expression. Danaus had lifted his right hand, moving it from Heraklion toward the west.

“They’re all gathered in one place,” he continued, his hand hovering over a relatively broad part of the island.

I leaned in close to read the tiny print on the map. “Can you get a sense of the region? Does it have a green feel? Mountainous?”

“Mira, my powers aren’t that exact,” he bit out as his hand moved back a little, toward the west. “I don’t sense the earth, just the naturi.”

“What about humans?” Penelope inquired, taking a tentative step closer again. “If they are in the Amari Valley, there are other villages there. People would be close to the naturi.”

“No, there are no humans. Not for a good distance.”

“Then they are on Mount Idi,” I said, straightening from where I was bent over the table. I looked up at Penelope as she straightened as well, a frown flattening her full lips into a thin line.

“That entire area is dotted with caves,” she stated, waving one hand over that part of the map. “The naturi could be hiding anywhere, and it would take us several nights to flush them all out.”

“We won’t need to flush them out,” I said. “They’ll be at the Palace of Knossos in two nights.”

“You want us to wait for two nights and then take on all the naturi at once?” Hugo asked from where he was still standing in the living room. “I was told that I was to kill a naturi called Rowe. How am I to get to him if he is surrounded by his brethren? There are only four of us.”

Hugo’s German accent was incredibly thick and it wasn’t helped by his growing anger. It had actually taken me a couple seconds to figure out what he was saying.

“Wait! You mean, this is it? No one else is coming?” Penelope shouted, slamming both her open palms on the table. “I never agreed to a suicide mission. The tales of the battle at Machu Picchu told of hundreds of nightwalkers. Why are we the only ones?”

“Don’t know. You piss off Macaire or the rest of the Coven recently?” I asked. I was about to say more but my cell phone started ringing, stunning everyone into silence. Stepping away from the rest of the group and walking into the living room, I hiked up my dress and got my phone from where it was strapped to my leg. No pockets.

The little LCD screen revealed that it was my home phone number back in Savannah. There were only a couple of people who could be calling me from that number. “Who is it?” I demanded.

“Gabriel said you wanted me to call,” replied a soft voice that instantly made my hands begin to tremble in relief. It was Tristan. He was awake and safe. For once, something had gone right.

I turned my back to the group and hunched my shoulders as if I could disappear from their view. I even went so far as to lower my voice, though I knew they could all clearly hear me. It didn’t matter. I needed this private moment with Tristan to settle my own nerves.

“Are you okay? Did Gabriel show you around?” I asked, cringing at my own questions. I sounded like a worried, overprotective mother. I sounded like Sadira.

“He said he would after I called you. Are you still in Venice? What about the naturi? I can still—”

“No, I’m in Crete,” I interrupted, and instantly wished I hadn’t used such a harsh tone. “We should have this all cleaned up in a few nights. I’ll be home in three or four nights, and then we can…find a more…permanent arrangement for you.”

A heavy silence filled the air. I couldn’t guess at what he was thinking. He either doubted that I would be back at all or was insulted by the idea that I was already looking to unload him like a pile of unwanted baggage. I had never wanted a family for this very reason. I didn’t want anyone underfoot and didn’t know what to do with someone once he was in my life.

“I should let you go,” Tristan murmured.

“Wait! I…If you don’t hear from me within the next week, I…I want to you seek out a nightwalker called Knox. He…sort of helps me out and…” I stumbled awkwardly. It was like telling my next of kin where to find my will. I had no provisions set aside, no preparations made for Tristan should something happen to me. He would be on his own in a foreign country. But at least for now he’d be away from Sadira and the Coven.

“I understand. I’ll be fine. Take care of Rowe,” he said, then hung up before I could say anything truly idiotic.

After returning the phone to its place on my leg, I turned back around to find everyone staring at me. Hugo looked a little stunned, while Penelope was outright smug. On the other hand, Danaus’s expression was blank. But then, he knew who had called. He knew why Tristan was half a world away.

“As I was saying,” I stated, trying to ignore the blush that I was sure stained my cheekbones, “we don’t need anyone else. The naturi numbers are fewer. We’re chipping away at their ranks and we’ll continue to do so until we finally get to Rowe.”

“But—”

“We’ll plan a series of incursions for tomorrow night based on their location,” I pressed on, cutting off Hugo before he could argue. “We can try to wipe them out before the new moon.”

“I can do some scouting during the day,” Danaus offered. I opened my mouth to argue when my phone rang again.

“By the gods, Mira,” sneered Penelope. “Hire a babysitter.”

I turned my back to her, refusing to comment as I grabbed my phone. However, the number was different this time, not one I remembered seeing before. Few had my number, and those who did knew to only call in an emergency.

“Who is this?” I demanded.

“Mira?” answered a startled voice. “This is James. James Parker. We met a few days…er…nights ago. I’m with Themis.”

“Yes, I remember you, James,” I said as I turned to look at the only other Themis member in the room. I didn’t have to ask how James had gotten my number. Danaus had used my phone to call him days ago. “I’m a little busy right now.”

“Actually, I’m looking for Danaus. You see, we’re here and we need to know where—”

“What?” I exclaimed, my thoughts coming to a screeching halt. “What do you mean ‘here’? Where’s ‘here’? And who’s this ‘we’?” That’s when I felt it. The first tear in the night. We had less than an hour before sunrise and I still needed a safe place against the daylight and the humans. “Never mind.” Stalking across the room, I slapped the phone into Danaus’s open hand.

Leaning against the wall with my arms crossed over my chest, I watched as he slowly paced away from us. The hunter quickly gave his assistant instructions to get settled in a hotel and told him he would go there after sunrise. We were all eavesdropping on the conversation. There was no such thing as privacy when a nightwalker was in the room.

I was shocked to hear that James had traveled to Heraklion with the intention of helping Danaus. We had contacted him before leaving Venice, wanting Themis to confirm that Crete would be the next location of the sacrifice, since I didn’t trust the Coven to tell the truth. It was part of the reason we had delayed our flight, waiting for the little research society to hear from all its field operatives at the twelve locations.

But I was speechless when James revealed that Ryan had come to Crete as well. The gold-eyed warlock was trouble. I might have temporarily escaped the scheming and torture of the Coven, but I was now faced with an extremely powerful human with an agenda I had yet to understand.

“What’s this Themis?” Penelope asked softly, taking a couple steps closer to me.

“The help you were looking for.” My gaze returned to Danaus as he ended the call. I’d been with the hunter every moment since we had spoken with Macaire, heard both of his conversations with James. He had not yet spoken of the Coven’s pact with the naturi. But he was now planning to meet with Ryan without me.

Will you tell him? I asked when his fingers brushed against my hand as he returned my phone.

I have to.

Don’t. Not yet. Telling him will only start a war.

And if I don’t, we could all be in danger, he argued, frowning at me. However, the look in his eyes told me a different story. He was worried and unsure. I could see it, and feel the emotions beating between us.

Just give me one more night.

Why?

I need more time to think. There has to be a better way. Please.

Postponing won’t help us.

It buys us one more night without war among all the races. Isn’t it enough that we’re fighting the naturi?

After a moment, Danaus softly grunted and walked away from me. I had bought one more night. I trusted him to keep his word, even though he had not actually spoken at all. Chaos was swirling around us and we needed to tread carefully if we had any hope of protecting what we had all come to value in this world. And I had a dark suspicion that I would get only one shot at this.