But still she couldn’t stop her terrible laughter.

Her heart was being compressed in a cruel god’s fist, giving out at last, giving up. Mockery such as this could exist only in a universe devoid of a merciful god. She’d put her last shred of faith in this story, believing that no matter the horror she’d endured, hope and love and life still existed. Now she knew those were just the fantasy of six billion humans, looking for a manufactured reason for existence beyond eating, fucking, shitting.

She wasn’t a crude person, but when one’s body was breaking down in a variety of embarrassing ways, it was pointless to be anything else. Blessed lassitude swept over her, weighing down her limbs, and the laughter evaporated with what had been left of her soul. She imagined that same cruel god shredding it like a maniacal baby tearing paper, throwing it in the air with mindless glee in its destruction.

Somehow she was flat on the floor now, her cheek pressed to cold stone and petals, the smell of the roses filling her. She gathered them in her arms and rocked, self-comfort. When a shadow fell on her, she peered up into that perfect, despicable face.

Hell. I’m in Hell. As his eyes flickered, she knew she’d said it out loud. She’d survived the claim of one vampire, only to fall right into the hands of another. The story had been a fairy tale. Her mind had twisted it, another one of the coping mechanisms she’d developed, which had come back to haunt her, punish her again. Illusion and imagination had fled, and now there was only harsh, stinking reality. Was she holding petals, or dust? The cleanliness of the chamber seemed tarnished, as if there were dusty cobwebs layering all his gifts. If she managed to get to her feet, would she see a skeleton in a tattered white gown?

Farida had been seduced by him, and her death had likely been his fault. Yes, that was it. Jess wondered if she should be glad she was in her right mind at the end, rather than in fantasy. Or would it be better to exit this world in delusion, so she could see the desolation of what lay afterward in the same rosy glow? Because she would be going into darkness, and she was so afraid of the dark.

“I’m sorry. They weren’t supposed to come with me.” She owed him nothing, but she owed Farida the words. “I just wanted to die with her.”

He studied her with those amber eyes. Rage was still close to the surface. Even if she didn’t now know what he was, she would have believed every story about the revenge he’d taken on Farida’s family. He had blood spattered on his white shirt. She also saw something in his face that wrenched her heart, because she didn’t want to see it, feel it.

“So did I,” he said. “But Allah decides when we die, habiba.”

“What a bastard,” she muttered. A glimmer of something passed through his gaze as her vision started to fade. Oddly, she thought it might have been bemused tenderness, a sad smile of agreement that eased the panicked stuttering of her heart. But that only meant her fantasies had kicked back in, for vampires didn’t have compassion. Not the kind she imagined in his expression before she let oblivion take her.

6

JESSICA Tyson. Holy hell. What in godforsaken, fucking hell was fucking Jessica Tyson doing here?

Every vampire knew about her, but she was hell and gone from Venice, where she’d supposedly participated in the slaying of her vampire Master and then made a run for it. The description circulated among all the vampire territories was that of a fresh-faced woman, twenty-nine years old, with curly, short brown hair and gray eyes, a sprinkle of freckles across her nose and a lean, athletic build. The face in the photograph had reminded him of a cheerleader, the body that of a gymnast.

Without his vampire senses, without the declaration she’d made in the tomb, she looked like a very unhealthy woman in her fifties.

No wonder no one had been able to find her.

He cleaned up Farida’s tomb first. In the bloody aftermath, he cared naught if the strange woman lived or died. She was as much a trespasser as the other two, though for now her words, her intent, had saved her life. She’d even taken a bullet to protect Farida’s body. Why had Jessica Tyson come to Farida’s tomb to die? Why was she dying?

After he finished the cleanup, he hesitated, squatting down next to her. She was unconscious, her breath shallow. The bullet had lodged in her lung, but since it was obvious she was hours away from dying, that hadn’t altered her condition much. She should already be dead; her heartbeat was so faint and irregular. But still, he wrapped her in his robe, for she was shaking. Lifting a body that weighed no more than eighty or ninety pounds, he stepped on a lever and entered a tunnel doorway that led back to his caverns, the place he called home when he was in the Sahara.

He wouldn’t have known about Jessica Tyson at all, but in the past couple years he’d had to be more involved in the vampire world than he wished. The abrupt abdication of Lady Lyssa due to the revelation of her Fey heritage and her forbidden attachment to her human servant Jacob had made her an outcast and left a power vacuum. Since she was one of his few friends, and she’d helped set up the Council, Mason had felt a cursed obligation to step in to balance things again, as he knew she wished him to do.

Therefore, he’d seen firsthand some of the investigative reports that had come to the Council.

The night it happened, Lord Raithe’s household servants claimed he’d been making preparations to turn Jessica to a full, third-marked servant. Then he’d been surprised by an attack of vampire hunters. He’d managed to kill most of them and escape. Two other house servants came to his aid, in time to see Jessica drop the bloody stake and flee the scene. They’d scoured the surrounding area, but assumed she must have been working with the network of hunters, who helped her escape.

Except since she was already second-marked, she couldn’t have hidden such long-term plans from Raithe. Her staking of him had to have been spontaneous, a dangerous opportunity she took when he was wounded.

Further questions revealed she’d been forced to serve him, a lamentable state of affairs that most seasoned vamps knew was a tragedy waiting to happen. It usually ended in having to put the servant down like a rabid dog who couldn’t serve the vampire’s needs reliably. The younger vamps got drunk on their own power sometimes and foolishly thought they could bend a human’s will to their own like a plastic straw. While a will could be broken, it could leave a sharp edge, like a stake. In Jessica’s case, the analogy had been literal. Such forced servitude was a betrayal of everything the vampire-servant bond was supposed to be.

Sitting back on his heels in his cave now, he considered her. From her condition, the unpleasant aroma of her skin and the dull glazing of her eyes, he wondered if perhaps she’d contracted a disease after the event, some form of cancer, though it was unusual for a second-mark. While they were not as invincible as a third-marked servant, they did have a greater resilience to human disease and healed faster from wounds, with minimal or no scarring.

Stripping off her bloody, soiled clothes, he rewrapped her in a clean blanket, a wasted, skeletal creature needing the mercy of death. But she’d been unexpectedly fierce when she’d defended Farida’s resting place.

Searching through the pack she’d been carrying, he withdrew a handbound journal of great age. Recognizing the cover, his hands trembled. It couldn’t be. Farida had had two of them. He still had one in his possession, much more carefully preserved. He’d assumed the other was lost to the desert, destroyed by her family.

While he stroked the spine, he remembered Farida’s hands holding it. The tilt of her head, her angel’s smile as she wrote in it.

She’d asked him not to read it. Teasing him, she’d claimed it was where she hid her thoughts about all his annoying habits, his rank and offensive odor, his great ugliness. In tender moments, she’d admitted it was where she spoke of her love in a woman’s foolish, romantic way. It would simply make you more unbearably arrogant than you already are, my lord, she’d said, her eyes laughing, her mouth soft, kissable.

Lifting his gaze from the book, he found Jessica Tyson’s eyes on him. On the way his hands held the memoir.

“Did you love her?” she whispered. “Or did I dream it all?”

Setting it aside, he pushed his own memories away. “I don’t see how that’s your business. Explain your presence here.” Her eyes drooped half closed, and the gurgle that came from her throat alarmed him, despite his desire to remain dispassionate.

“Typical . . . vampire . . . asshole.”

His brow lifted. “Jessica, I can ease your passage. But I will know why you’re here. Should I expect others, like those two?”

“Nobody else. No one knew where we were going. If all dead . . .” Her brow furrowed. “Dawud. His village . . . I wanted to help his village. Now his mother will never know what happened. Like my mother.” She raised her lids then, and Mason found himself confronting a pair of gray eyes that didn’t match the gaunt face. They were determined and pleading at once. “If any part of it was true, if you have any mercy or love for her, as she believed you did—” A cough bucked her up from the ground, and her face contorted with pain, blood spewing from her lips.

Automatically, he moved to the side, sliding his arm behind her back to steady her. Despite how weak she was, she struck at him, twisting, making the coughing worse. The blanket fell open down the front, but she seemed unconcerned with her lack of clothes, or perhaps she didn’t notice.

“Don’t touch me.” The panic and rage in her voice was startling, that of a trapped, wounded animal.

“Shhh,” he said firmly, though he couldn’t prevent another spear of compassion through his gut, damn the woman. “I intend you no harm. Steady. Try to relax. Easy.”

As he stroked her shorn hair, which felt as stiff as straw under his hands, some of it came away with his touch. He wasn’t repelled by it, only by what this young woman had become. What the hell had happened?

She’d gotten the coughing under control. Her body remained stiff under his hands, her revulsion at his touch obvious, but he sensed she needed the support as she gasped out the words. “Will you go to his village . . . tell his mother he died helping me? That he served God to . . . the end. In Cairo . . . there is an account. The contents should go to his village. I’ll . . . tell you how to get it.

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