Wait for Dusk

Chapter Four

We boarded my jet earlier than I had wanted. But the plane was completely fueled and the pilots were ready. My only reason for wanting to stall was that it was still three hours until sunrise and I would be trapped on a plane with Danaus. He was going to start demanding answers to a long list of questions I was hoping to evade for just a little while longer. But it simply wasn’t to be.

After the door to the jet had been shut and properly secured, Danaus took my hand and led me back to the small bedroom at the back of the jet. He left me sitting on the edge of the bed while he walked into the tiny bathroom. Closing my eyes, I listened to the water running and the dull roar of the engines as they powered up. My thoughts drifted aimlessly along, first to the bori Gaizka and our narrow escape, and then on to Nick and his own dark demands. No matter where I went or where I turned, there was always someone dark waiting for me to mess up. At first it was Danaus, then Rowe, and Jabari, and Aurora, and Gaizka. Of course, there was always Macaire. He had wanted me dead even before I was reborn into a nightwalker. The problem was that I wasn’t doing a very good job of cleaning off my list of people who wanted me dead. If I was going to live much longer, I needed to do something about my enemies list.

My eyes popped open and I jerked upright when I felt the bed shift beside me. I hadn’t heard Danaus’s approach over the jet engines. He reached out with one hand to touch my cheek, but I lurched away from him. I was edgy and wary of the hunter when I knew he was going to come drilling for the truth.

Patiently, Danaus held up a wet washcloth in his left hand. “You’re a mess.”

“Oh.” Taking a deep breath, I allowed him to turn my face toward him so he could begin to wipe away the caked on layers of dirt and dried blood. In my weariness, fresh tears welled up, but I held them back. How long had it been since someone had cared for me in such a gentle fashion? No easy answer came to mind. The years just stretched out in my mind like a black endless abyss.

“It’s lucky it was dark when we arrived. The pilots might have called an ambulance rather than allow you on the plane,” Danaus said as he tilted my head slightly to one side so he could clean along my right jaw.

One corner of my mouth quirked in a half smile. “I’m sure I’ve looked worse.”

Danaus dropped his hand into his lap and heaved a heavy sigh that was barely heard over the engine of the jet as we taxied down the runway. “Not by much if at all. Between the bori, the naturi, and the coven, I don’t think I know of anyone who has taken a beating like you and survived.”

“You mean besides yourself?”

Danaus shook his head. “You have always taken the brunt of what they’ve all dished out. And through it all, you’ve survived.”

“But . . .” I prompted when the word seemed to hang ominously in the air.

“But when you disappeared from Factors Walk, I thought you were dead. Never have I seen such terror in your eyes.” Danaus slid his fingers into my hair and grasped the back of my head. He pulled me close so that his lips grazed my ear. “Tell me what happened. Tell me the truth so I can protect you. I never want to see that look again.”

“Maybe you can’t protect me,” I said, pulling away from him.

Danaus gave a low growl as he stood and tossed the filthy washcloth into the entrance of the bathroom. He then turned and lifted me into the bed. He paused long enough to remove my leather boots before pulling the blanket up over me. While at the town house, I changed into some clean clothes and packed a small bag while Danaus grabbed his bag. We were at least prepared for a few days of travel.

“I will protect you,” he proclaimed, sitting on the edge of the bed again. “But my job becomes much easier if I know what I am faced with.”

I stared down at the blanket, propped up by a small mound of pillows. I was exhausted and hungry, but I knew we would get no rest until I spoke of what had occurred at my house. I briefly debated a string of lies that would be immensely easier to swallow than the truth that rested on the tip of my tongue.

But even as I settled on a lie, I found myself recalling a lonely church in Venice where Danaus divulged to me his darkest secret: his mother had sold his soul to a bori before he was born. He had risked horror and censure with that admission. He trusted me when he still had little reason to trust me. It was well past time that I did the same.

“My real father paid me a visit,” I said, desperately searching for some logical place to start this ugly conversation.

“Jabari?”

I shook my head, refusing to lift my eyes from the blanket. Jabari might have been one of the nightwalkers that made me into a nightwalker, but he was not my father. “No. I’m talking about the creature that gave me this set of particular genes when I was born as a human.” Human . Even that word seemed to be a stretch, but I didn’t like my other choices.

“I don’t understand. What happened to LaVina?”

“There was no witch named LaVina. That had always been my father in disguise watching over me. He apparently was waiting for his chance to get closer to me, to finally make his presence known. Gaizka gave him the opportunity.”

Danaus reached up and gently brushed my hair away from my face, bringing my gaze up to meet his. “Mira, you’re more than six hundred years old. This . . . thing . . . can’t possibly be your father. I don’t know of anything that could live that long and actually reproduce with a human. Unless, of course, your mother wasn’t—”

“No, my mother was a normal human woman.” I paused and shook my head. “You won’t believe me. I hardly believe it myself. If he hadn’t . . . I would never have believed it myself.” A lump formed in my throat around the words that still needed to be spoken.

“Ryan’s a warlock, and I doubt that he’s more than three hundred years old. There couldn’t possibly be an older warlock hanging out there,” Danaus said, more to himself than me. “Not naturi or bori. Nightwalkers don’t reproduce, right?”

“Danaus, you’ve never met a creature like this.” I reached across the bed and took one of his hands in both of mine. I closed my eyes and pushed the words forward. “He calls himself Nick. But he said that in other cultures he went by names such as Raven, and Anansi, and Keku, and Loki.”

Danaus lurched off the bed, pulling out of my reach when I finally reached names that he instantly recognized. The names were all different, but they all were names for the gods of chaos in the various different religions. The trickster gods of old. I was a child of chaos.

“Mira, this thing has got you fooled. That’s impossible. A god? A dead god from another religion?”

“And what if I’m not? This creature beat me within an inch of my life and did it without breaking a sweat. It appeared before me looking like the man that raised me as a child. It threatened to make me human.”

Danaus halted his pacing sharply and turned back to face me. “Make you human?”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” I snapped. “But yes. Nick said that if I didn’t do as he demanded then he would make me human again so I could bear him a child to take my place in his master plans.”

“Human?” Danaus slowly sat back down on the edge of the bed. “Such a thing isn’t possible.”

“With a touch, he caused my heart to beat and blood to flow through my veins. For just a second I could feel my soul settle back down into my chest. It only lasted a couple seconds but he did make me human again.”

“Okay, just supposing that for a crazy minute your father is a god, what does he want?”

“He wants me to learn to control you the same way that you can control me. He wants me to learn to control Jabari as well,” I admitted, cringing as I waited for him to explode at the suggestion.

“This Nick has to realize that Jabari is going to kill you the second he even gets the slightest indication that you can control him,” Danaus calmly said. “Jabari wouldn’t risk it.”

“Let alone you.”

A half smile tweaked his beautiful mouth. “What’s the saying? Turnabout is fair play. I can’t say that I won’t fight you every step of the way, but it would only be fair considering how many times I’ve utilized your powers.”

“Thanks. It’s just until we find an edge over Nick, though I can’t begin to guess as to how we’re going to do that.” Relief rippled through me as Danaus seemed to be taking all this information a lot better than I had initially expected. Of course, I knew that he didn’t truly believe any of this. I had no doubt that he believed some other creature was playing a trick on me, trying to bend me to its will. For the time being it didn’t matter what Danaus believed. I’d told him the truth, and I had a feeling he would come face-to-face with it soon enough.

“Why Nick?” Danaus inquired.

“What do you mean?”

“Why would he call himself such a common name as Nick?”

A knot twisted in my stomach. “Don’t worry about it, Danaus. It’s not important.”

I knew the moment the name clicked in his brain. It was an old colloquialism that Nick was playing off of from Christian mythology, but Danaus was smart enough to know it. The hunter surged off the bed and crossed to the other side of the plane, putting as much space between us as possible.

“Old Nick! That’s it, isn’t it? He calls himself Old Nick!” Danaus barked at me.

“Yes, that’s it,” I said calmly.

“Your father is the devil. He’s Satan. Old Nick.”

“Another god of chaos, yes. This time he’s just playing off Christian mythology. Look, it doesn’t matter what he calls himself, the point is—”

“If he’s the devil, that makes you the Antichrist!”

“Damn it, Danaus! Listen to me. I’m not some fucking Antichrist! You know me! I’m not evil, regardless of who claims to be my parents.” I wanted to scream. I had just gotten around to convincing him that all nightwalkers weren’t evil, and now it turned out that I was the love child of the god of chaos. It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for me and the rest of my kind. “Please, I need you. Don’t abandon me now.”

Danaus slowly walked back over to me and sat on the edge of the bed. He reached out and cupped the back of my head, pulling me forward so my forehead was pressed against his. “I trust you,” he whispered in a shaking voice.

I understood what such a thing cost him. This was a man who had devoted his entire existence to fighting evil in an attempt to reclaim his soul. Now he was potentially siding with a creature that had been spawned by the greatest evil of all. He was siding with me based on the decisions I had made, the lives I had saved while we were together. I had earned his trust, and there was no greater honor in this world.

Placing a trembling hand against his cheek, I let my thumb run along his hard cheekbone. “Thank you.” A spark of undiluted desire surged through me as my gaze settled on his parted lips. I wanted to lean in and taste him, drink him in for the first time after so many all-too-brief encounters. I could sense the same longing ignite in the hunter as the sound of his heartbeat increased in its pace. The tip of my tongue darted out of my mouth, wetting my lips. His scent swirled around me, dragging up memories of a distant sea bathed in sunlight. Danaus was so close. Another couple inches and I could feel him, taste him.

With a shuddering breath, Danaus pulled away from me first. He stood and paced the tiny room a couple times, shoving one hand through his thick mane of black hair while I settled back against the pillows. The hunter’s willpower and self-control remained intact simply due to the fact that he feared the true nature of the creature that called itself my father. He returned to his spot on the edge of the bed when his breathing and heart rate evened out again, while I settled back against the pillows and closed my eyes, feeling more than a little frustrated.

“We still have a problem,” Danaus announced. My eyes popped back open and my body stiffened. I thought we finally had everything worked out. “The coven. What are you planning with the coven?”

Curling up tighter in the covers, my gaze drifted away from him to dance around the small plane, anything so I didn’t have to face his piercing gaze. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Danaus put his hand under my chin and forced me to tilt my head back so I had to look up at him. “Consort?”

Sliding my chin out from his touch, I released my hold on the blanket and pushed myself into a sitting position. I winced as pain stabbed through my body from too many bruised organs and fractured bones. I was almost completely healed from my encounter with Nick, but there hadn’t been time to feed. My focus had been entirely on saving Tristan’s life.

“When I took the vacant coven seat while we were on Crete, I kind of skipped some of the more important formalities. It’s time to take care of those things.” I ran my fingers over the blanket, smoothing it out, anything so I didn’t have to look up at him.

“What formalities?”

“Any nightwalker has a right to challenge my claim to the open seat.”

“Does that include members of the coven?”

“Yes.”

“And your liege lord?”

“Yes,” I murmured, my head dipping a little lower.

“Will Jabari help you?”

My hands stilled on the blanket and the world slipped away from me as I thought of the coven and its members. Jabari had been one of my three creators and my mentor. He could also control me that same way Danaus could. It expanded his power on the coven from a single seat to two, giving him an edge over his rival Macaire.

“If Macaire were stupid enough to challenge me directly, yes, I think he would. If Our Liege took issue with my presence, I don’t think so. Jabari knows how to pick his fights, and I’m not worth getting killed over.”

“And what about this consort business?” His voice hardened and I found myself inwardly cringing. I didn’t expect him to honestly go along with this, but I had been backed into a corner. I didn’t want to go into Venice alone. Sure, I was a member of the coven. I was also the illustrious Fire Starter. But I wanted someone at my back. I wanted someone among this horde that I knew I could trust. Valerio would only help me so long as it was in his best interest. Same with Jabari. I had no others that would be in Venice that I could call comrade.

“I need you with me,” I said, trying to sound strong and confident. “I need you there with me, someone I can trust to watch my back. I won’t lie and say there’s no risk to you. If I’m killed by Our Liege, then you’ll be next, and it won’t be a quick death. But if I survive the challenges, then I want you there with me when the business of the naturi comes up.”

“As your consort?” Danaus’s voice had become surprisingly soft, like a gentle caress.

I let out a groan and buried my hands in my face. I wish he hadn’t been there for that part. “It’s not like it sounds,” I muttered. “I need you there, in the Main Hall, at my side. But to do that, you need a title, a standing within my world, and there are only three grades when it comes to associating with the Elders. You’re a pet—”

“Which is nothing more than a plaything.”

“Yes. Or you’re a companion, which is just a glorified servant.”

“Or you’re a consort,” Danaus finished.

I paused, licking my lips as I dropped my hands back into my lap. “It’s the closest I can come to putting you on equal footing with me. It means you are my . . . my . . .”

“Lover?” he supplied, and I cringed.

“Typically, but obviously not in this case,” I admitted. “It means you’re under my protection, you are held in very high regard to me, and anyone risks my wrath if you are harmed in any way. However, you have no power on the coven or within my world. It’s just what little extra protection that I can offer you. No mortal has even held that position, and I honestly don’t expect it to go over too well, but it’s the best I can do.”

“Do I get a say in this matter?” he asked.

I closed my eyes and shook my head, disgusted with myself. I was making all these plans, but I had not bothered with the most important thing: asked him if he was willing to go. The hunter had done his part. He had faced not only the naturi with me, but the bori as well. I needed him to stay close if I was to escape Nick’s grasp for the time being, but he didn’t need me any longer. He had sworn that he wasn’t going to return to Themis. His life was his own now. He could go wherever and do whatever he wanted.

“Will you please go before the coven with me? It will be dangerous, and I will do everything within my power to protect you. I . . . I just want you there with me.” I felt as if I was dangling out on a thin limb, waiting for it to break under the weight of all my hopes and fears. After everything that had happened, I wasn’t ready to let him go.

Raising his hand, Danaus ran the back of curled fingers gently across my cheekbone in a caress so soft it nearly brought tears to my eyes again. “If I don’t, I miss out on the latest news regarding the naturi. Maybe even a chance to hunt the bastards. Besides, going would mean that I get the chance to thumb my nose at Jabari and the rest of the coven by being at your side. I’m willing to take a risk for that kind of opportunity.”

A surprised laugh escaped me before I turned my head and pressed a quick kiss to his knuckles before he could draw them away. “I think you’re spending too much time around me. You’re developing a seriously twisted sense of humor.”

Danaus leaned forward and pressed a light, lingering kiss to my forehead, causing my eyelids to slip shut. “I’m willing to take that risk, too.”