The vampire spun to me. “Do you even realize the enormity of what you’ve done?”
“Yes, I do. That’s why the man I love and I came here to have quiet time before the storm hits. And you’re interrupting it.”
“You challenged him. He can’t let it go unanswered.”
“I know.”
“He’ll come here and scorch this place.”
“I know, Ghastek. I’m his daughter. I know him better than you do.”
The vampire opened his mouth.
“Stop,” I told him.
The vampire stopped, silhouetted against a window. “Do you have it?”
“Have what?” Curran said.
He was asking if I had the Gift. The promise of immortality that kept people like him anchored to my father. I looked at the vampire. “You’re alive, are you not?”
The vampire froze, his mouth slack.
The door fell off its hinges and four shapeshifters tore into the room, Myles the wolf render in the lead.
Curran spun on his foot and roared, “Stop!”
They froze.
Curran in sweatpants, me in a sheet, obviously naked under it, a vampire in the middle of the floor and four combat-rated shapeshifters. I put my hand over my face.
Curran’s face was terrible. “Explain.”
“We were instructed to provide necessary assistance,” Myles said.
“By whom?”
“Jim.”
Great. Jim had us followed.
“We saw an undead enter the room,” Myles said.
Curran’s eyes blazed with gold. His expression turned flat. His anger had imploded. He’d taken his towering rage and distilled it to cold precision. The shapeshifters didn’t move a muscle.
“Did the vampire break down the door?” I asked. “Or did it knock and was let in?”
The shapeshifters stayed perfectly still.
Curran spoke slowly, pronouncing each word exactly. “What made you think that the two of us together couldn’t handle a single vampire?”
Myles swallowed. “It was my call. I take full responsibility.”
“Go back to the Keep,” Curran said, his voice eerily calm.
The shapeshifters turned around and fled.
Ghastek’s vampire slipped out the window. Curran and I looked at each other.
They’d broken the door to the apartment he’d made for me. For some reason that hit me harder than knowing the Pack Council didn’t want him to come and rescue me.
“I’ll have it repaired,” he said.
They would break it down again the next time. “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s just a door. We might as well go back to the Keep.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I smiled at him. “I knew what I signed up for.”
He was worth it.
• • •
WE TOOK OUR time. By the time we rolled into the Keep’s courtyard, the night was in full swing. We trudged up the stairs, while Derek trailed after us and spit out facts: triple patrols, Keep on high alert, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah . . . I stopped listening. The last drops of my patience had evaporated long ago.
We went straight to our rooms. Curran shut the door. I landed on our couch. Outside the large living room window the night reigned, Atlanta a distant smudge of deeper darkness studded with pale blue feylantern lights.
Home . . .
The door swung open. Barabas stepped inside, his face serious, his eyes slightly distant, as if he were looking at something far away. Something was wrong. He always knocked.
“The visitor you were waiting for is here,” Barabas said.
He stepped aside and held the door open. A person wrapped in a plain brown cloak with a deep hood walked in. Barabas bowed a little, walked out, and shut the door behind him. The figure pulled back the hood, revealing my father’s face.
Why me?
Curran started toward Roland. His eyes were on fire.
I shot between them and blocked him with my body. “Stop.”
“Move, Kate,” Curran said, his voice calm.
Roland smiled. “I mean no harm. I just came to see my daughter. No audience, no need for any grand gestures. I simply wish to talk.”
I turned my back to him so I could see Curran’s face. “Please, stop.”
He finally looked at me.
“Stop,” I asked him.
He took a step back, leaned against the couch’s side, and crossed his arms. “Touch her, and I’ll end you.”
“May I sit down?” Roland asked me.
His magic wrapped around him like a mantle, muted. I still felt it, but he seemed much more human now. This must’ve been his version of traveling incognito. Nobody would ever know. Yeah, right.
I sat on the couch. “Sure.”
“Thank you.” He sat in the soft chair across from me.
Roland had walked past our tripled patrols like they were nothing and then compelled Barabas to let him in. All of the defenses we’d built, all the walls and gates and safeguards, meant diddly-squat. He could just walk into the Keep at any time. He could walk in and sit by Julie’s bed and I would never know it.
Curran’s face turned expressionless. He pulled his Beast Lord’s face on like a mask. He must’ve come to the same conclusion. Whatever little illusions of safety we’d had just turned to ashes.
Roland sat. “It’s a well-made fortress. Considerably more comfortable on the inside than it appears from the outside.”
Lovely paintings you have here on the walls. Don’t mind me, I’m just making small talk. “Did you hurt anybody on the way up?” I asked.
“No. I came to talk, and if I had hurt one of your people, you wouldn’t speak to me.” Roland glanced at the sword hilt protruding over my shoulder. “You visited your grandmother.”
I pulled Sarrat out and showed it to him. He passed his hand over the blade, his face mournful.
“I wish you hadn’t gone to see her. She’s dangerous.”
Yes, she is. Legend said she’d murdered my grandfather. All things considered, he probably deserved it. “It wasn’t by choice.”
“That was an unfortunate turn of events,” he said.
“You shouldn’t have taken her bones out of Persia. She misses it.”
Roland sighed. “Persia is a challenging place right now. Old powers are awakening. Those who had slept, those who were dead or perhaps not quite dead. Mishmar is the safest place for her right now.”
“Close enough so you can crush her if she tries to rise?”
“Exactly.”