He’d enjoyed looking at her so much that he’d stopped poking at her to find another wig. Stupid, he told himself. Careless. Things being quiet didn’t mean they were safe, and now they were in this godforsaken basement with whatever Perkins was.
“I’ve never even heard of this book, or the things in it,” Ariane was saying to Perkins. “There’s no author. Who wrote it?”
“One of your kind, of course,” Perkins replied with a lopsided yellow grin. His teeth were jagged, and Damien once again found himself wondering what the man ate.
“My kind?”
“Grigori. Watchers,” Perkins grunted. “You can see this is handwritten, hand bound. It’s the only copy, and word is the one who wrote it got in plenty of trouble when they found out what he was up to.”
Damien lifted an eyebrow, skeptical. “Ah. A Grigori got in trouble for writing an academic book on demon myths. Right. And then he, what, gave you the book to make a little extra money?”
Perkins narrowed beady eyes that glinted strangely in the dim light. “The story is he handed it off to a friend before he disappeared. Or got disappeared. You have a smart mouth, cat. Careful. I’m sure the lady here can tell you that the Grigori are greedy with their secrets. That drawing you were looking at resembles a Grigori, yeah?” He chuckled, an unpleasant sound that had the hair on the back of Damien’s neck standing up. “If Grigori had wings, that is. Just a rumor, though.”
He slid a glance at Ariane that was full of unpleasant speculation.
“Bull,” Damien snapped. “All of it. I’ve never seen a demon, and I’ve seen damn near everything.”
Perkins looked amused. “Well, I guess you’ve got nothing to worry about, then. Good thing too. Demon’s way more powerful than a vamp. Theoretically speaking, of course.” He tapped the book. “All kinds of interesting theories in here.”
“You still didn’t tell us how you got this,” Ariane said, looking as though she wanted to rip the book out of Perkins’s stubby hands.
Perkins shrugged. “I have my channels. You buying, or what?”
Damien knew it was going to cost a fortune. He also knew he had to have it, even if the theory was a little strange. It was more to go on than they’d had. And it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. After all, he’d seen a hungry, flesh-eating gypsy curse tear a path through a bunch of Ptolemy when his bloodline had been freed. All sorts of things were possible.
Even if he didn’t want them to be.
“How much?” he asked, and watched Perkins smile.
Fifteen minutes later, they were out in the night, back among reasonably normal mortals and drinking in fresh air. In one hand, Ariane had the book, wrapped in tissue and stuffed in a handled paper bag. Her eyes had a far-off look as she walked, the loose tendrils of her hair blowing gently in the warm night breeze.
Out here, it was easier to think of some winged monster as nothing more than a fairy tale. Easier to focus on the present instead of on dark things buried out in the desert.
Damien smiled as he watched several mortals, male and female, nearly fall on their faces when Ariane passed. She was utterly oblivious to her effect on people, which he had decided was part of her charm.
He seemed to spend a lot of time lately dwelling on that charm, and all the myriad parts of it. He’d never imagined he’d like working with someone. But then, Damien reminded himself, technically this wasn’t work any longer. He wasn’t getting paid, and Drake was allowing him to continue sniffing around for a short time only on the off chance the Grigori decided to come back to the table.
Damien’s smile faded.
That grace period would no doubt soon be over. Plenty of other jobs awaited, one of which would be thrown in Damien’s lap. He knew Drake. As soon as something lucrative enough came up, he’d set Damien on it. And Damien would go, because that’s what he had signed on for when the crescent moon had been inked beneath his mark so long ago.
He’d traded a good bit of freedom for profit and adventure. And it had never bothered him a whit… until now.
“I’ll find some way to pay you back,” Ariane said, pulling him out of his thoughts. He looked at her, surprised.
“Perish the thought, kitten. It was nothing.”
Her eyes rounded, the violet glowing faintly. “It cost a fortune!”
He chuckled ruefully. “Well. Yes. One of a kind, as that charming shopkeeper kept repeating. But you’ll have to believe me when I tell you that in my case, money is not an issue.”
Ariane looked dubious. “You’re that rich?”
“I’m that rich.” He thought, briefly, of the beautiful apartment he had in Seattle. It was full of ridiculously expensive odds and ends, with a horde of treasure a dragon would envy. He set foot in the place a handful of times a year. It was, in essence, a stylish storage facility.
The London town house redux, he thought with a touch of pure misery. Had he really changed so little in all this time?
“Still, you didn’t get hired to deal with this part of things,” Ariane said, shaking her head. “Winged demons that eat souls… I’m not even sure I want to know if it’s true, except now I’m worried it may have had something to do with why Sam disappeared. Or went into hiding.”
Of course it did, Damien thought. Both of them knew it.
Part of him, a lot of him, actually, had begun to hope the trail stayed cold. There would be no winning against a thing like what was drawn in that book. He knew his limits… though he feared Ariane wasn’t nearly as certain of hers.
“Let’s hope not,” Damien said, dismissing the subject for now. “Look, consider the book an extremely disturbing present, if it helps. Not exactly light reading, but that’s the sort of thing that’s probably better out of circulation anyway. We’ve done the world a favor snapping it up. I only wish it got us closer to actually finding Sammael. Your Elena hasn’t had a hint of anything, has she?”
Ariane shook her head. “No. She’s busy, but nothing unusual. And she’s definitely been keeping an ear to the ground.”
The two spoke often, Damien knew. Somehow, it no longer surprised him that Ariane would choose for a best friend a Cait Sith who appeared to make a living doing odd jobs as a bodyguard/smuggler/mercenary.
“Well. We’ll have a look at that thing when we get h—er, back to Vlad’s,” Damien said. Good Lord, had he almost called Vlad’s place home? Had he called anywhere home in the last three hundred years?
He sensed Ariane’s eyes on him, but he didn’t dare meet them. Gods knew what she would see.
Her question, which he’d been expecting for days now, was tentative. “Damien… where do you live anyway? You never talk about it, but you have to live somewhere, right?”
It was, perhaps, the only subject he wanted to discuss less than a soul-eating demon.
“Not exactly. I mean, I have a place. Seattle, where the House of Shadows is based. I’m just hardly ever there.” He glanced at her, saw her intense interest.
“My things are there, but it’s not like a home, kitten. I’m usually traveling.”
“Hmm,” Ariane said, a soft noise of surprise he didn’t quite understand.
“Hmm what?”
“Oh, I knew you probably traveled a lot. I just pictured you with a little oasis tucked away somewhere for your downtime.” She smiled, and it made her eyes sparkle. “Somewhere stuffed with things you’ve picked up on your travels. A cross between a magpie’s nest and an armory.”
He laughed, genuinely amused that she’d thought this out. “A cozy assassin’s den. I like the idea of it. I may have to set one up just because you said so.”
“It’s really just a boring apartment you never see?” she asked. “That doesn’t sound like you at all.”
“Ah, well,” he began, surprised to find himself at a loss for words. How did he explain the way he lived? Nothing in that apartment held his interest; nothing he dumped in it mattered any longer than the time it took him to walk away from it. Even the Star of Atlantis, the diamond he’d taken this job for, would have sat on a pillow on a shelf not long after he’d brought home his new toy.
He pressed his lips together in disgust. This was why he despised self-reflection. Shallowness was far less depressing than the truth.
“Maybe you’ll come see the magpie nest sometime. You may find it more interesting than I do,” Damien finally said when they reached the car. He opened the passenger door for Ariane, and she slid in.
It was only when he saw the surprised pleasure on her beautiful face that he realized he actually meant the invitation.
With a sinking feeling, Damien realized he knew exactly what his sterile apartment lacked. But the treasure he wanted to add would never consent to sitting on a shelf and waiting for his infrequent visits.
And he couldn’t drag her into the sordid work of his life, risking her more than she was already risking herself. He understood enough about Ariane to know that she was happy to fight for a purpose, but that violent intrigue for the sake of coin wouldn’t be her thing. Hell, maybe it wasn’t his thing either, anymore. He’d gone too numb to really examine it or care. He had obligations, and that was enough.
Or it had been.
Damien stalked around to his side of the car and got in, trying to convince himself to do what he had always done. Enjoy the moment, and hell with the rest. But the truth kept smacking him in the face. For the first time in three hundred years, he’d found something he wanted to keep…
… and it was something he would never be able to have.
Chapter Seventeen
TWO NIGHTS LATER, Sammael surfaced.
Vlad was just finishing up on the phone when Ariane rushed into his office. The summons his assistant had given her was brief, but it had been enough to bring her running. Damien was already there waiting for her, standing beside one of the empty chairs facing the massive mahogany wood desk.