White Nights: A Vampires of Manhattan Novel Page 2

  “OK – my respected co-worker and demon slayer. My angel.”

  “Too late.” Ara glugged down the last of her beer. She wasn’t looking angelic tonight, trying to scowl away her beauty. “Wow. I thought you were a wolf, but really you’re a caveman.”

  “Nice.” Edon raised his glass to hers, but Ara wasn’t in the mood for toasts. “OK. I guess I’ll be going. See you at mid–”

  “Hey!” Ara had swiveled in her seat. She was glaring out into the bar, and Edon followed her gaze. Two booths of Venators, off-duty but pretty low-key, chatting and drinking. Trading work gossip from Orpheus Tower, their soaring HQ downtown, probably, unwinding after the day shift. Too many vampires for his liking, but nothing to get worked up about.

  But Ara was definitely worked up.

  “If you want to stare at him so badly, why don’t you come over here?” It took Edon a second to grasp that Ara wasn’t talking to him. She was addressing another Venator, sitting in a nearby booth. Deming Chen, the sexiest demon chaser of them all. Damn. Nothing good happened with Ming and Ara got in the same room together.

  “What is your problem?” Deming asked, screwing up her beautiful face as though she’d just smelled something really bad. “I have no designs on your wolf, sister.”

  Ara was off the stool and striding towards Deming before Edon could grab her. There was way too much bad blood between these two.

  “I see the way you look at him.” Ara was looming over Deming now, hands on hips. “I know your game. Sister.”

  Deming spluttered with laughter. The bar was getting quiet now, everyone listening. Holiday was run by a witch, and at any given time the place felt like the Coven’s common room. A lot of the customers in here tonight knew Ming and Ara, and they knew all that Ara once slept with their disgraced boss Sam Lennox – twin brother of Ted Lennox, Ming’s lost bondmate. However bad a guy Sam turned out to be, Ming always saw him as the bondmate of her own twin sister, Dehua, another war casualty. Ara was the Venator who screwed Sam – and killed him.

  “Ara!” Edon was off his stool now as well. This was not a fight she needed to pick. Some wounds would never heal with time.

  “Hey,” Deming said, the picture of poise, gazing up at lanky Ara with narrowed almond eyes. “Let’s not fight over guys, OK? Even hot wolves.”

  “Who you slept with once.” Ara was fuming. The room was practically silent, everyone intent on the office melodrama unfolding before them.

  “Sure,” said Deming with the most nonchalant of shrugs. “We had a fling, during the War. When we were fighting the War – oh, but I guess you wouldn’t understand. You weren’t fighting.”

  Edon grabbed one of Ara’s lean, muscular arms and pulled her close.

  “Come on, angel,” he whispered in her ear. “Time to hustle.”

  Ara may have been too young to fight in the war, but he’d seen with his own eyes the way she could fight now. He’d been trying to handcuff Sam Lennox when Ara had leapt in, slicing Sam’s head off with her crescent blades.

  “Just keep your distance, bitch,” Ara told Deming, squirming in Edon’s grip. Deming smirked.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, her voice low and measured. “I have no designs on your wolf – anymore. Unlike you, I’d never sleep with one of the team – or my boss.”

  With her free arm Ara swung for Deming, smashing the entire booth’s beer steins to the floor. Edon had to brace himself on the bar’s sticky floor to keep hold of her; Ara was flailing and jolting like a wildcat. Ming was standing up on the table now, ready to kick her would-be assailant in the face with a very small pointy boot. Some of the Venators scattered, but others were trying to help, from what Edon could work out, pulling Ara away. He managed to get her outside onto the warm street at last – everything intact except her dignity.

  “Get off me,” she spat at him, shaking his hand free at last.

  “Ara,” he pleaded. “You have to get a grip. Since you …”

  “Since I what? Too scared to say it?”

  “OK. Since you killed Lennox, you’ve been – let’s say difficult. You did the right thing – everyone thinks so. So why act as though the world’s against you? You have to get your act together. Stop picking fights and trying to sabotage your career. Your life.”

  Our life, he wanted to say, but that kind of personal talk was too hard, especially with Ara glaring at him.

  “Lecture over?” she demanded, but he didn’t reply. His phone was buzzing. Kingsley.

  News traveled fast in the vampire world. They were both summoned to an urgent meeting with the chief, at midnight on the dot.

  Kingsley Martin – the Angel Araquiel, Duke of Hell – did not appear happy. Dressed in the Venator’s head-to-toe black, his thick hair the color of black ink, unsmiling, Kingsley looked like a dark storm waiting to crash on their heads.

  Ara and Edon sat in the hounds-tooth upholstered chairs Kingsley had introduced as part of the re-fit of the chief’s office when he took over the job. He’d said he wanted it to look more less like a call center in New Jersey and more like a gentleman’s club on Gramercy Park.

  Right now, as far as Edon could tell, all it looked like was bad news.

  “Araminta,” Kingsley said, his voice weary. “Picking a fight with another Venator in a public place. Really?”

  Ara said nothing. She hung her head, though Edon could see the look on her face was sullen, not repentant.

  “Chief, it won’t happen again,” Edon told him, and Kingsley managed a grim smile.

  “Exactly what you said last time.”

  “It’s just – we’re not busy enough, I guess. We’re like soldiers sitting around base camp, waiting for orders to go into battle.”

  “You have a job to do,” Kingsley said, dry and unsmiling again. “You’re working for the Coven, not the army. You’re supposed to be out there on the streets neutralizing demons and sniffing out Silverbloods. Not drinking and scrapping with each other about your … sex lives.”

  Kingsley raised an eyebrow and Edon felt as though he was a teenager dragged into the principal’s office. This was no life for a wolf. He nudged Ara and her head jerked up.

  “Sorry, Chief, it won’t happen again,” she said in one breathless rush. Kingsley sighed and picked up a red folder on the desk in front of him.

  “It certainly won’t,” he said. “You’re not wrong, Marrok – there’s not enough happening here right now to justify keeping you on our team. You’re needed elsewhere, urgently. I have details of your new commission here.”

  Edon felt a mixture of relief and excitement – and then the anxiety hit. What about Ara? They were a team in more ways than one. And on good days, they were a very good team indeed.

  “Who’s my new partner?” Ara sounded suspicious, just the way she had when her last partner, Rowena, got a promotion and she was saddled with Edon. She’d looked at him with utter disdain. Back then, to her he was just a battle-scarred wolf well past his prime. Maybe he was.

  Kingsley frowned at her and dropped the red folder on the desk.

  “Ara, I’m sorry, but until I can trust you to keep your temper in check and focus your mind on the job, you need to step aside.”

  “What do you mean, step aside?” Ara looked aghast. Edon’s stomach thudded.

  “You’re on forced leave,” Kingsley told her. “Take a vacation. Clean your place, clean your clothes, go to the movies. Go to the beach. It’s summer, or so I hear. Let’s talk again in a month and see how you’re feeling. How we’re feeling.”

  “But Chief …” Ara began, reeling out excuses and promises, desperate to keep her job. Edon knew none of it would persuade Kingsley. This was the lord of the underworld sitting on the other side of the desk: he’d heard it all. Whatever bleating Ara and Edon did would have no effect on his decision whatsoever.

  “I’m afraid I’ll need your gun,” Kingsley said, and Ara blanched. Edon felt the crude punch of the statement, and knew how hard Ara would take it. She said n
othing – just stood to unbuckle her holster, slapping it onto the Chief’s desk. Her gun and its silver bullets, known as demon killers for obvious reasons, lay there, but Kingsley had the courtesy and sense not to grab it away.

  “The blades?” she asked at last in a tight, tense voice. Edon frowned. Surely Kingsley wouldn’t take her crescent blades as well? The Nephilim didn’t know that Ara was on “vacation” and might attack or ambush her at any time.

  “You can keep them – for now.” Kingsley looked stern. “For self-defense only, OK? I don’t want to hear about you slashing your way through Holiday or cutting up some hipster who annoys you on the L train.”

  Ara nodded. She looked almost meek now. Defeated. Edon couldn’t stand to see her this way.

  Kingsley nodded to the door. The meeting was over. Ara was out, and Edon was being sent away somewhere else, whether they liked it or not.

  Whether they loved each other or not.

  3| Up in Flames

  When Schuyler saw the first tendrils of smoke rising from the vines, she knew – at once and instinctively – that this was not a safe place anymore. She called for Jack, who was in the kitchen, fixing up the scuffmarks on the skirting boards. If they were going to sell this place, it needed to look pristine.

  Jack dropped the paint brushes he was rinsing and walked out onto the patio, dusting his hands on his spattered overalls. The line of smoke was long now, a fuzzy gray string across their hillside, a flicker of red just visible.

  “Is Mike burning off some of the dead vines?” Schuyler asked him, her voice tentative: she knew before Jack shook his head that this was too simple and answer.

  Jack fumbled in his pocket for his iPhone.

  “Fire department,” he said in a firm, clear voice, and Schuyler’s heart sank. Mike, the latest in a string of indifferent caretakers, was away this week on annual leave. This might be a wildfire, but probably not: rain had fallen for the past three days, and the valley was too lush, the ground too muddy, to serve as tinder. And this wasn’t their first suspicious fire here. The storehouse had been burned to the ground a month ago.

  “Mama!” Lily bounded up, her blue eyes wide with fear. “There’s a circle of fire around us. Sy says it isn’t, but it is! I saw it from up in the tree.”

  “It’s just down there, Lil,” Schuyler told her daughter, ruffling the shiny black hair that was a mirror-image of her own. She was trying to sound more confident than she felt. “A brushfire. Nothing to worry about. Where’s Sy?”

  “In the tree,” Lily said, her voice suspiciously casual, and wriggled away. This meant, Schuyler suspected, that Lily had left Sy stuck in the tree. Halfway up the tree, no doubt, because he wasn’t as daring or physically strong as his sister. Sy and Lily, Simiel and Lelahel, were twins, but they were nothing like Jack and his twin, Mimi Force – the current incarnations of Abbadon and Azrael, the underworld’s greatest power couple. Sy had inherited some of Schuyler’s all-too-human weaknesses. Lily, on her typical high-speed setting, was always leaving him behind.

  “Pack up some things,” Jack murmured to Schuyler, and she gripped his arm, unable to speak. They should have left here months ago, she knew.

  For almost a decade she and Jack had found sanctuary here in Napa Valley, in the white stucco house with big windows that gazed out over their terraced vineyards and the twisting road that wound up their very own hillside. As a young woman Schuyler had led the Coven to Paradise, and this was her own version of it – and Jack’s as well. Building their own vineyard and wine business, building their own little family.

  Hiding their true natures from the world, in the hopes that the world would leave them alone.

  But everything had changed eight months ago, even before Oliver turned up on a cold, starless night, an emotional wreck, telling them how he needed to clear his name and regain control of the Coven. Schuyler was only a half-blood, but her subconscious remained one of her most potent supernatural tools. For more than a week she’d dreamed of the pentagrams appearing across New York City, and the dead girls left to taunt the Venators there. Something ugly was clouding her dreams, even on the clearest and sunniest of days.

  Back then, Edon Marrok had persuaded them to stay put in Napa and let the wolves sniff out the truth of the pentagram murders, and he’d been right: he and his Venator partner had done good work. But still, Schuyler and Jack had been uneasy, and even before Oliver knocked on the door with his terrible story they’d begun their preparations to return to New York – and to return to the fight. Lucifer’s forces weren’t defeated: they’d just been lying low.

  But nothing had gone to plan. They’d sent Sy and Lily away to what they thought was safety deep in the Oregon woods, but Sy had fallen ill, dangerously ill, with pneumonia, and Jack and Schuyler brought them both home to nurse Sy through his long recuperation. The manager of the vineyard left abruptly, and disease rippled through the vines, ruining the harvest and making the place impossible to sell. Another caretaker came and went, then another and another. Nobody wanted to work for them; nobody wanted to buy the vineyard. Their haven seemed like a cursed place. This fire – which took six hours to extinguish, by which time most of the orderly ranks of vines were reduced to ashy stubble, and everything in the house reeked of smoke – was the latest blow.

  That night, when the last fire trucks had pulled away, the children were asleep, and Jack and Schuyler were slumped on the sofa, surrounded by stacks of boxes and hastily packed suitcases, they agreed it was time to leave.

  “We’ll have to take the kids to New York,” Jack told her, filling her wine glass with some of last year’s vintage. Schuyler took a sip: even the wine tasted of smoke. “My sister’s place. I know it sounds crazy, but they’ll be safer there than anywhere in the world. Mimi’s on it.”

  “I wish you’d talked to me before you discussed this with Mimi.” Schuyler knew she sounded petulant, but sometimes it still got to her. She may be the love of Jack’s life – this life, anyway – but Mimi was his bond-mate for eternity. Mimi probably hadn’t mentioned a word of this new plan to Kingsley, her husband, either. The Force twins were used to running the world their way.

  “We didn’t need to talk,” Jack said. His handsome face looked tired, smudgy with ash. Schuyler felt like a fool. Of course he and Mimi didn’t need to talk on the phone like normal people: they shared a telepathic connection.

  “Things are just getting worse and worse,” she said, half to herself.

  “Oliver’s unleashed something … I don’t know. Something really terrible.” Jack swirled dark red wine in his glass and frowned into its garnet depths.

  “It’s not necessarily Ollie …” she began.

  “Oliver’s a wild card and you know it,” Jack snapped, with a flash of his old temper. Over the past couple of months they’d had this conversation too many times. According to Jack, and probably to Mimi, Oliver was unbalanced and that made him a danger to himself and a danger to the Coven. He needed to keep out the way of the Venators, not zoom around the world getting into fights and risking kidnap – or something worse.

  “You know what he’s trying to do – and why,” she said, trying to keep her voice even. Eight months ago, Jack had been with her, one hundred per cent, on this. He was the one who said they needed to start selling up, to start making plans.

  “It’s how he’s doing it that’s the problem.” Jack was still glowering into his glass. “Acting like the king of the Coven, refusing to follow advice. I’m tired of clearing up his mess. We have enough to deal with ourselves.”

  “So you think we should just abandon him?” Schuyler was incredulous. “Jack, we promised we would help.”

  “I know you’re sending him money,” he said, giving her a long, hard look.

  “Of course I am! I’m not making a secret of it.” Unlike Jack’s plans with Mimi, she wanted to mutter.

  “What I’m saying is, maybe if you stopped financing his Lonely Planet tour, he’d be forced to come home and stop put
ting himself, and us, and everyone else we know and love in danger.”

  There was no way Schuyler could abandon Oliver, and Jack had to know that. Oliver had been her one and only human familiar, her lover as well as her closest friend. Now there was no one closer to her than Jack, of course – the love of her life, the father of her children.

  But her deepest loyalties would always lie with Oliver. He’d given her up, despite his affection and loyalty to her, because he knew that she and Jack were true soul mates. Now she had to give something up for him – the peaceful, stable existence she and Jack had enjoyed for much of the past decade. Dark spirits were spreading through the world again, and putting the entire Coven and its hard-won victory at risk. Oliver was out there, trying to solve the problem he’d helped to create.

  Finn. Schuyler’s half-sister. The woman who chose immortality no matter how high the price.

  To Schuyler, Oliver was family. Finn was family. Any mess they were in was Schuyler’s mess as well. Unlike Jack, she had no past lives. She had to fix all her problems in this one.

  “So, when are we taking the kids to New York?” she asked, trying to sound blithe rather than bitter. Mimi had never liked her. Never. Nothing Schuyler did would ever change Mimi’s mind.

  “Tomorrow,” Jack said. He put down his glass on a lumpy cardboard box and reached for her hand. “We have to get out of here tomorrow, Schuyler. Before the Silver Bloods come for us in this house. You and I can fight, but the twins can’t. Not yet.”

  “I know,” she said, glad of Jack’s reassuring hand. “I know.”

  Jack was right, damn him. The twins needed protection. And who better to offer it than Mimi Force, Regent of the Coven, and twin Angel of the Apocalypse?

  4 | Jumping Someone Else’s Train

  The report of a gun awoke Oliver, jerking his body into life. He was on his feet, heart thumping, before he realized the sound wasn’t a gun shot after all. It was a rap on the window. A guard was striding along the platform, walking the length of the train, making sure passengers didn’t miss the stop.