The scarlet trinity. Three tears of blood. It was so obvious. How had she missed it?
“I do not value your love any less if it is shared between Gideon and me. Not if it makes it richer and deeper, stronger and more enduring.” He paused, and she sensed his struggle to say something that might be hard for him. Because she knew him better than he realized, she said the words for him.
“Not if it"s a reflection of how you yourself feel.”
His lips curved in a feral smile, pure desire and emotion combined in a way that curled in her chest like liquid fire. “You think so, cher?”
“Yes.” She whispered it, her chest still tight with a wealth of backed-up emotions. “Your feelings for him are no less strong than mine. You"re right. Somehow it"s him that ties us together. The missing part of our heart. Daegan, what are we going to do?”
“We go on with our lives, knowing that truth. He will come back, cher. It may take far longer than we wish, but it"s inevitable. I know it.”
She would have risen on her toes, put her mouth on his, but his hand settled on her throat.
His fingers clasped her there, with enough firmness to stir her blood, make it pump a little faster through her heart.
“You have not directly answered my question, cher. I am selfish, and want to hear it. Have I lost your love and trust? Are we back to the beginning?”
Anwyn parted her lips, her breath caressing his mouth where he wouldn"t allow her to touch.
For the first time in quite a while, she let a seductive smile curve her lips, even as her eyes softened, filling with love and letting him see her heart.
“Daegan Rei, I was yours the first time you walked into this club. I belong to you. Gideon and I both do. Until he decides to come back and prove it to you as well, I"ll offer for us both.”
“Hmm. For that, I"ll take it out on his ass in my own way. For now, you answer only for your own self.”
The part threat, part promise did a great deal to reassure her, in a way that she knew most the world wouldn"t understand. As a Mistress, maybe she herself didn"t understand her surrender to Daegan any more than Gideon did. Unlike Gideon, though, she knew the freeing power of surrender.
Daegan brought her to his mouth, taking over the kiss, taking the reins away from her, telling her with the strength of his arms, the demand of his lips, that there was no need for her to be anything but sensation in his embrace. She could trust him with everything else.
She prayed that was true, and chose to believe it.
21
PERFECT. There he was. Allan Walker, a vampire in a nice suit, strolling into the coffeehouse. He wasn"t there for a cappuccino, though. He was stalking his annual kill.
There was no way around learning who a man was when you were setting up his surprise execution, though Gideon had spent less time on Allan than he had on previous targets. There hadn"t seemed to be much point. He knew that Allan had no servant. He was a financial analyst, a job easy enough to coordinate at odd hours and via technology, rather than out in the light of day. He was a quiet member of his territory, not interested in vampire intrigues. He continued to embrace his human life as much as possible. That might be because he"d had no sire to integrate him into the vampire one. He"d been made nine years ago by a vampire Gideon had killed last year, Clarence Wilson, a seventy-five-year-old vamp. Clarence had turned Allan but then, for whatever reason, had abandoned him shortly after the transition to let Allan find his own way. Usually, such an early abandonment made a fledgling easy prey for other vamps.
Not Allan. He"d figured it out, though Gideon hadn"t been around to witness how. All the better. He had no room for admiration for the man"s character. He doubted Allan"s prey, a young man named John Whitcomb, currently checking his e-mail in the cafe, would have any, either. Whitcomb was working on his bachelor"s degree in environmental studies while contemplating a career with Greenpeace, or the Peace Corps, or some other idealistic shit, but Gideon had found even the peace-and-love types didn"t find room for “love thy brother” when that brother was sucking the life out of your body.
He had noticed Allan was far more alert to his surroundings than most made vampires like him, suggesting a military background. This one wouldn"t be oblivious enough to chase a young junkie into an alley. Fortunately, John liked to seek out quiet places to take pictures, because he was an amateur photographer. So Gideon planned to lure John Whitcomb into this abandoned warehouse, several blocks down the street from the café. Allan would think he"d gotten an easy killing ground, John simply scoping out his next shooting location, but Gideon would be waiting. There wasn"t much cover in here, but he didn"t need it. He"d set snares to trip the vampire up, cause him confusion. It was more risky, but doable.
He was doing what he should be doing. He had his focus again. His time with Daegan and Anwyn had been one of those odd forks off to the side, a detour that tried to make him believe something different, when he knew there was nothing different for him. There were other vampires, within fifty miles of this area, who deserved death far worse than Allan Walker.
Those who preferred to live in the shadows, preying on the weak, doing things that skirted or overstepped Council law when they assumed eyes like Daegan Rei"s weren"t watching. But Daegan would handle those. The John Whitcombs and Morena Wilsons of the world needed Gideon to handle Allan.
Gideon squeezed his eyes shut. Before the night he"d walked into Atlantis, his gut had always been in knots except during the kill, when he"d trained himself to go into a no-feel zone. Sometimes the actual killing had been the closest he"d felt to peace, because he hadn"t needed to think. A temporarily release that could easily turn into a psychopath"s addiction.
Knowing how fucked-up that was, he was never surprised when, after it was over, he had an overwhelming urge to stab himself in the arm or some other less vital place, cuts that blended in with the battle scars. It was a form of score keeping, tics on the side of the container that held his diminishing soul.
Jesus, enough. This was the right thing to do. It couldn"t be right to stand by and watch someone kill an innocent, just because they needed their blood to live. If he accepted that, then he accepted that Laura"s death was nothing more than a cycle of nature, a cheetah calmly walking into a gazelle herd and plucking a fawn out of a depression in the ground, none of the others stopping her, because of course no gazelle could hold its own against a cheetah. How could anyone accept that? What kind of fucking God came up with that as the natural order for a gazelle and a cheetah, let alone a nurse and a vampire?
His stomach was cramping, damn it. He fumbled for his wallet, opened it up. Saw Laura"s picture gazing at him, but it was like he was looking at the picture of a stranger, the attractive model someone had hired to sell a frame. She was gazing at nothing but a camera lens, not seeing him. Not even knowing him, because the Gideon she knew had died with her.
Son of a bitch. He couldn"t afford this right now. He ducked back into the warehouse, took up his vantage point. As soon as John left the café, headed past here to return to his loft apartment, he"d make his move. He wanted to remain alert, but he had to squat down low, breathing hard, squeeze his eyes shut. He was not having a goddamn panic attack, like some kind of rookie.
Instinct. It was always instinct that saved him, his precognition, but now it failed him utterly, because his enemy had walked right up on him. A familiar hand stroked through his hair, the fabric of a duster brushing his back. He had two seconds to think, thank God, his earlier denials forgotten, and then he"d sprung to his feet, his knife in hand, a snarl on his lips.
Daegan countered the lunge, drawing the katana in one smooth moment that Gideon couldn"t follow. He knocked the shorter blade completely from his hand, followed it up with a reverse thrust that knocked him in the chin with the hilt, hard enough it sat him back down on his ass. He would have jumped back to his feet, ready to go another round, but Daegan was ten feet away, his shoulder braced against a beam scrawled with graffiti.
He wore his hunting gear of solid black, and his dark hair had grown out a little so it was feathering over his brow. It made Gideon remember how Anwyn had said she"d love to see it longer. Women.
Except his eyes were on it as well, following the hard lines of Daegan"s warrior face, those dark, fathomless eyes, the firm line of his mouth as it spoke his name. “Gideon.” He would have answered the brief greeting, but he couldn"t. It was caught in his throat, too hard to say it aloud. Far too many times, he"d woken with both their names on his lips, for embarrassingly the same reasons. The most humiliating dreams weren"t those where his dick was hard, needing the relief of his hand, though of course his wayward imagination had concocted way too many unlikely scenarios of that. It was that half-dream state where he was in a bed with them. Anwyn curled between the two males, all of them twined together, arms, legs, the intimacy of feet touching and overlapping as they slept. At peace with one another"s proximity, with the easy caresses of sleep and half wakefulness, the simple affection of belonging.
Something altered on Daegan"s face, watching Gideon"s. When he took a step forward, Gideon pulled out the nine-millimeter. It wouldn"t stop a vampire, but it hurt enough to give him pause. He fired before he gave himself time to think.
Daegan was gone. Just long enough for Gideon to feel a moment of panic; then he felt him right behind him. No more than an inch between their two bodies. His long-fingered hand came forward, sliding down Gideon"s forearm, teasing the wrist gauntlet under his coat sleeve, closing over his knuckles, white and hard, holding on to the gun. The motion put them even closer together, because they were of similar heights, though Daegan had slightly longer arms, something Gideon noticed for the first time.
What other things would he notice if he had time, all the time in the world?
“I ought to beat the shit out of you,” Daegan murmured. “Drop it now.”
“Make me.”
“No. Too easy. You drop it, because I told you to do it. Do it, Gideon.” His hand began to tremble, and that cramping in his belly turned into something else, no more controllable. Daegan waited, a still, deadly presence at his back, dangerous for so many reasons, at so many levels.