SIXTEEN
Standing beneath the flickering light at the entrance to The Crystal Haven Museum of Fine Arts, Phoenyx took a moment to finally breath. The cigarette she’d been sucking back like oxygen was burnt out between her fingertips, so she flicked it casually away from her body, and dug her hands into her pockets.
This was it. She was about to come face to face with Lazarus Morelock––her father. It almost seemed like a dream––or was it a nightmare waiting to happen? She swallowed with difficulty, remembering the look on Hutton’s face as she walked out the door. The man that trusted her more than anything in the world, had looked like she was driving full speed into a brick wall, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
Maybe, he was right.
Gazing upward, her eyes found the source of the flickering light. The lightbulb was on the verge of dying. You’d think a place like this would keep its premises impeccably fine-tuned, but that didn’t seem to be the case. If anything, it looked as if the entire building had been abandoned and was falling apart. The tricks the dark played. Everything appears abandoned in the dark.
A scuffle in the bushes had her peering into the darkness, and the skin on the back of her neck stood on end. There was something there. Something inhuman. It chittered its teeth and the bushes rustled slowly, an odd kind of quiet on the wind as it blew past her cheek to move her hair. The air was hot. Her guard went up and every instinct told her to be ready for an attack.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Phoenyx whirled around, silver stake in her fist, and aimed straight at the throat that uttered the words. Ash stared down at her with those strange, golden eyes and his mouth tilted up in a heart-lurching smirk. His Adam’s apple bobbed slowly against the tip of her stake, the contact sending a small tendril of smoke up into the air between them. He didn’t even flinch.
“What are you doing here?” She demanded, silently berating herself for the way her thighs melted immediately in his presence.
Ash’s eyes stared penetratingly out into the darkness before they found their target. Whatever had been stalking her made a noise of terror and flitted away into the night. He turned those incredible eyes on her and smiled deeply, an enticing dimple finding its way into his stubbled cheek. “Keeping you alive it would seem.”
Phoenyx scoffed. “Give me a break. One little dark entity is child’s play for me.”
“Ah,” Ash whispered, his breath tickling her cheek. He was too close. “But that wasn’t any ordinary entity, Jane. That was Eligor. He’s not your run of the mill minion, darling. He’s a discoverer of hidden things. He knows the future of wars and he feeds on it.”
She was painfully aware of how near Ash was standing to her. Their breath bated one another’s faces and she was close enough to want to touch him, but knew better. Lifting her eyes to his, she fought the urge to dissolve into them. With her heart hammering in her chest, she took a careful step back and tucked her stake carefully back into her belt.
Lifting her chin, she eyed him wearily. “Where’s Lazarus?”
The laughter that parted Ash’s lips was like a mini sonic boom, startling her into clarity. He arched a perfectly shaped brow at her. “So, you figured out who’s been hot on your tail. I’m impressed.”
Before she could open her mouth to say something, Ash closed the distance, their chests touching, and gripped her shoulders in his strong hands. She could have sworn she felt warmth there as he pulled her closer to him, until their noses almost touched. The intoxicating scent was back, wafting up to her nose. Vampires let out pheromones when they were hunting, to lure their prey to them, but this was nothing like that pungent musky scent. This was delicious. Embarrassingly, her mouth began to salivate. His eyes were golden lava as they melted into her, serious and strained.
“Go home, Jane. You don’t want anything to do with him.”
“You’re right,” she whispered, her breath labored as whatever was passing between them settled slowly, comfortably low into her belly. “I don’t want anything to do with him. I’m here to kill him.”
Ash grimaced, squeezing her arms a little tighter, before finally letting her go. His lips pressed into a thin line. Standing back, he eyed her as if she were a demon herself. He shook his head disbelieving her words. “You’re not strong enough for that yet.”
“Look, who’s side are you on anyway?” She snapped, hands immediately finding her hips in frustration. “You’re the bad guy, remember?”
A look she couldn’t quite place softened his features as he watched her standing her ground. He gave a soft chuckled, his hair falling carelessly over his forehead. Pursing his full lips, he nodded slowly and began to back away. “I’d go back home if I were you. It won’t be safe here soon, and I won’t be able to do anything to help you.”
Her brows furrowed. “Why would you want to help me?”
Ash shrugged playfully. “It would be a shame to see something bad happen to a soul as pure as yours.”
And just like that…he was gone.
Like a ghost, he had disappeared from her view and she was left standing in the flickering light of the entranceway, heart pounding and mouth as dry as cotton. She swallowed with difficulty and bit her lip. She wouldn’t let some vampire, no matter how devastatingly sexy he was, frighten her out of doing what she came here to do. This was her chance to take the problem out of the equation. This was her chance to destroy the evil before it had a chance to attack the good.
Phoenyx took a quick step forward and the light above her head exploded, sending sharp shards of glass in every direction. She stumbled backward and quickly had a vision of Hutton. His eyes drawn and worried as she exchanged words with the father who had sent vampires to hunt her down like a dog.
A shiver crawled up her spine and she whirled around to find herself face to face with a vision of her mother––silver and otherworldly in the darkness. She frowned, concern lashing her features as she urged her forward, silently begging her to follow. Phoenyx stepped quickly onto the grass and the vision dissolved into a hazy mist. She appeared again a few feet away, once more, beckoning her forward. Phoenyx knew she was leading her away from Lazarus. Pausing, she could hear Ash’s voice in her head. ‘I’d go back home if I were you.’ Everything in her gut was telling her do exactly that. Even the ghost of her dead mother was warning her against it. Maybe she wasn’t ready. Hutton could do more research before she jumped so recklessly into this. Judas wasn’t going anywhere. Right?
She hated herself for doubting her strength and ability, but what if Ash was right? What if H had been right? What if her mother knew something she didn’t? Was she really ready to die without getting any of the answers she sought? Without knowing who she truly was? Was she ready for the unknown?
***
“She was here,” Lazarus growled, sniffing the air like a caged animal, his eyes glowing with unchecked rage.
Ash watched him wearily, standing back among the men Spider had instructed to go with Lazarus for the evening, and wanted nothing more than to jump forward and rip out his throat. A soft tinkling of laughter cut the air as Lilith, Lazarus’ demon offspring strutted forward, her obscene red heels clicking against the pavement like talons trying to go through rock. Her crimson lips curved upward into an evil smile as her eyes flashed. At her side––Ian Rutherford.
Ash fought the urge to spit in distaste.
“Father,” Lilith cooed, pulling the gloves from her hands one finger at a time, revealing long, red nails beneath. She gathered the gloves into one hand and sighed, eyebrows shooting upward with pity. “Did you really think she would have the courage to face you?”
“Yes,” Lazarus hissed, sliding his eyes to his daughter slowly, a dangerous look settling into their vivid green depths. “Yes, I did. She’s a warrior, Lilith. Warriors don’t just agree to meet their supposed foes and then run away. They face them with their lives at their feet. Something changed her mind.”
There was plenty of fact in this. Ash had been lucky that she listened to his warning, otherwise she would have still been there, and then who knows what would have become of her.
Ash watched as Lilith ran a sharp nail down Ian’s pale, drawn cheek and purred against the collar of his shirt. He looked used, drained and dull. She’d obviously fed. Smiling, she winked at Ash and licked her glossy lips before turning to her father and shrugging. “Maybe she’s more afraid of you than you thought.”
Lazarus’ roar split the atoms in the air, causing the night to go silent and every dead thing in it to quiver, but Lilith simply laughed. She was putting on a show for Spider’s men––and for him.
“Come, Daddy. She was raised by Grimshaw. What did you think would happen? There’s no way she had the balls to actually come here and face you. She’s a coward, just like her benefactor.”
Oh, Jane had the balls, Ash thought with inner satisfaction. This crazy Succubus bitch is talking out of her arse. I’ve never seen more courage in one female before, and I’ve been around for a very long time. Jane Grimshaw is anything but a coward. What worried him most was that, although he’d managed to persuade her to get as far away from her father as she could, he’d sent her straight home to contend with the greater issue at hand. Her true nature. One he wasn’t sure she was ready to face.
“At least we still have Judas,” Lazarus murmured, eyes darting around the constellations in the sky, as though seeking something profound in them. The moon lay nestled secretly behind a thick passing cloud.
There was a glimmer of fury in Lilith’s hard eyes as she watched her father, still as stone. “Judas?” She spat. “Judas is about as good to us as a neutered steer. What could he possibly do to help any of us now?”
Laughter trickled from Lazarus’ lips as his eyes roved that ever-expanding sky with the keenness of a hawk. The temperature outside dropped as he squared off with his daughter, fangs retracted and eyes aglow. Around them, shadows moved behind the black of night, tittering and sneering, just out of their reach.
“You underestimate him, daughter. You underestimate me. There was once a time when you hung on my every word with the eagerness of a child. Where did that blind trust go? How have you come to doubt me thusly?”
Lilith’s eyes faltered, glancing sideways at Ian who for the moment didn’t know if he was here nor there. Ash was certain that the discord between father and daughter would bring an end to their ridiculous plan to taint Jane with their evil. She could very well take their side anyway, with or without her father nudging her.
Ash watched as Lilith swallowed delicately and smiled at her father, a wrathful light pooling in her stark, blue eyes. “I don’t doubt you, Father. I would follow you into an all-out war with only a stone and gall if you said that’s how it should be. What I doubt––is her. She’s not one of us. She will never be one of us. You are hanging on to this notion that she will somehow cross over to the dark side like a character from a movie, and be this prodigy you long for, but you’ve forgotten me. What about me, Father?”
“If you truly trusted me,” Lazarus whispered, the sound of his voice hissing over the air like a serpents warning, “you would not question me, insolent child!”
Adequately silenced by her father’s outrage, Ash watched as Lilith hung her head and sulked back into the shadows, a look of chagrin touching her features, as her lips quivered in fury. The darkness swallowed her, with Ian at her side, until she had all but disappeared.
Once she was gone, Lazarus turned to Ash, closing his eyes thoughtfully as he crossed his arms and touched an index finger to his lips. When his eyes opened, he was considerably calmer. A smile played across his lips.
“Gather your men,” he whispered. “I want them all present for a meeting at my penthouse. Please make sure your boss is present. The last thing I want him to do is get overzealous and kill my second born, just because he got an itch he couldn’t help but scratch.”
Nodding, Ash made a quick motion with his hand to round up the other vampires and pointed toward their bikes, parked at the far end of the museum. With a quick jerk of his head, they all moved in that direction like a good herd.
He turned to Lazarus. “When?” He asked, not wanting to pique this madman’s curiosity.
“Thursday night.” That was all Lazarus said before turning slowly on his heel, and strolling quietly away. The entities that throbbed in the shadows shook with fear as he walked past, softly groaning in his presence, until he was safely at a distance. That was when they turned their eyes toward Ash.
Ash narrowed his eyes into the darkness and hissed. There was an audible flurry of movement as the creatures scattered into the night.
Breathing deeply, he hung his head and sighed. Reaching into his vest pocket for a cigarette, he lit it quietly, his mouth set in a grim line. As he expelled the smoke in a rush from his lungs, he felt a tug at his heart. A brief flicker of humanity sparked the faintest glow within him as he thought of the bewitching assassin who had strolled so casually into Spider’s compound the previous night, with all the fierceness of every female warrior that had ever roamed the Earth before her.
He gazed upward at the sky and his eyes faltered. The cloud had passed, revealing that there was blood on the moon, and evil was crawling out of the darkest pits of the dank underground to roam the streets. He could feel a faint shiver on the surface of his skin as his thoughts raced to what he may have done tonight. There was so much that could go wrong, but steering Jane away from Lazarus, and toward Judas, was exactly what had to be done. It was written.
Reaching into his coat pocket, he pulled out his cell phone and he dialed out. As the phone rang impatiently on the other end, a black cat paused in his path, cocking its head curiously at him. The cat’s golden eyes gazed into his, holding him momentarily captive. Ash took a long pull on his cigarette, not wanting to be the first one to break eye contact. The cat yawned, blinking slowly at him.
“Hello?”
“It’s done,” Ash said gruffly into the receiver. He waited, the cat and he sharing a bittersweet moment of pure nothing, until something rattled in the bushes and sent it skittering off into the night. There was a deep, withered sigh on the other end of the line.
“Good.” Came the reply. “I’ll take care of the rest. Be ready. It won’t be long now.”
He closed the phone and slipped it back into his pocket. Guilt seeped into him. Ash hadn’t felt such a feeling in a very long time, longer than he cared to remember, but he had a job to do and this was it.
Taking a deep breath, he flicked the cigarette away from his body and strolled slowly to the vampires as they loitered around their bikes, talking amongst themselves. As he approached, a vampire named Breaker, and one of the only few he could stand from the crew, slapped a firm, thick hand on Ash’s shoulder.
“What an asshat,” Breaker chortled, his voice coming out like a sputtering muffler.
Ash smiled at that, a deep dimple forming in his cheek as he threw one long leg over his black IRON 833 Guerilla. These men followed him blindly, all because he’d saved their leaders life once long ago. Providence? Sure, some would call it that. Fate? Now that was a word Ash didn’t like to toy with. However, truth be told, it could have very well been fate that brought him into Spider’s employment.
Breaker threw a leg over his ride and glanced over at him. “Where to?”
His eyebrows drew together at the question and he squinted upward as if that dodgy moon were blinding him and shrugged one shoulder. “The Pink Pussy?”
The crew roared in approval at the suggestion and they all revved their engines to life. A heaviness settled into Ash’s chest as he kicked the stand on his bike and started it up. The sound of the engine roaring sent a jolt through his thighs, but it wasn’t enough to bring him out of the funk he found himself in.
Glancing back up at that foretelling moon, he blinked hard. The future was now, and he’d set a course for either destruction or revolution, though, which one was still a mystery. All he knew was that Jane would be the bringer of either of them.
“Let’s ride,” he called over the roaring of the bikes as they eased out of the parking lot in one fluid motion.
The moon cast an eerie glow on the pavement as the wheels cut through a sheen of wetness from a brief rainfall. Ash sped up until his bike was at the front, and switched his thoughts to something he could focus on, something that would keep his mind off the mess of brainwaves lurching about in his head. His thoughts turned to Monroe.
He felt a tightening in his crotch and folded forward onto his bike, pushing it faster into the night. He didn’t need to think about Jane and her fiery eyes, or the way her hips moved as she walked with enough purpose to kill a man with just her stride. No, he couldn’t think of the way her breasts swelled in a luscious curve from her body, or how her lips were begging to be bruised by a kiss. He couldn’t think of any of it. Wouldn’t think of it. Not because it wasn’t something that had taken up his existence ever since she strolled right up to him, threatening to kill him. No, he couldn’t think of it because those lips weren’t his for bruising. Not tonight anyway. What he needed to concentrate on was Monroe and her magic pussy. That was all he needed right now. All he wanted. He just needed to forget.
Ash frowned. How many lies will I keep telling myself?