Shadow Keepers: Midnight Page 8

  She was behind him now, moving, assessing. He didn’t turn.

  “As old as you are. As cold. It’s all about the politics, isn’t it? But then again, aren’t you the one who always told me how important politics were? That without a system to bring order, even the strongest civilization would fall?”

  “You admired my commitment once. You even shared my ambition.”

  “I’m a different woman now,” she countered. “I thought you knew.”

  “This isn’t over,” he said.

  “Actually, it is.” She took a step toward the door. “I’m leaving. Good luck stopping Lihter. I’ll be rooting for you.”

  “Stay.”

  She stopped. “With an invitation like that, how could I say no? Oh, I remember. Like this. No.”

  “Stay,” he repeated, and this time she looked at him. Really looked at him. And then she groaned.

  “Dammit, Tiberius, is that what this is about? You don’t trust me so you’re fact-checking my story? What is this, The New York Times?”

  “Luke’s making a few inquiries. Did you really expect that I’d sidestep my own protocol? Did you think that because the tip came from you I’d consider it dusted in a sparkling layer of truth?”

  “No. But I thought you’d be smart. You could all be dead by the time you have confirmation. This isn’t a political cakewalk. There’s no time to bat it about in committee.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “You know what? I’ve done my part. I’ll leave my cell number with Mrs. Todd.”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve got things to do. Plans to formulate. All that organizing that you know I’m so very good at. And just in case you’re telling the truth, I want you here so that I can talk to you. I’m sure your intimate understanding of the inner workings of the weren community will be invaluable.”

  He could see the effort she put into not smirking, and he had to hold back a smile of his own. This might be a horrific facsimile, but he’d missed their casual banter.

  “And if I’m lying?”

  This time he let the smile show. “In that case, I’ll definitely want to talk with you, won’t I?”

  As soon as the door closed behind him, Caris realized that she could breathe again. Before, her body had seemed frozen. Tight. Like she was in someone else’s skin, unable to move the way she wanted to.

  Now that tightness had vanished, but instead of the Caris she knew, the woman left standing in the room was broken somehow.

  She knew she shouldn’t have come back. Damn Gunnolf, and damn herself for listening to him. For doing the goddamned fucking right thing.

  She thought of Tiberius and wanted to hate him—she did hate him. But she thought after coming here she’d hate him even more.

  She didn’t. She’d seen regret in his eyes. Just a hint, just a flicker, but it had ripped through her like a shard of glass. And that single look had said more to her than all the words they’d bandied about.

  The Tiberius she’d once known would never have shown weakness to an enemy. Yet even after everything that had passed between them, he’d shown it to her.

  She closed her eyes, willing her thoughts to calm. She was here, she was working with him. There was no changing that.

  He was no longer her lover. There was no changing that either.

  But she’d been wrong about one thing. All these years she’d assumed he was no longer protecting her. That the promise he’d made to her ancestor Horatius all those centuries ago meant nothing to him anymore. She’d believed that because she’d had to. Because that was the worst thing she could believe, that the one thing Tiberius had clung to throughout all the years was a simple promise to protect a family. Her family.

  He’d kicked her out of his house, and that had been a betrayal. She’d assumed it had been the end. That he’d washed his hands of her and all the De Soranzos.

  But that wasn’t true at all.

  She reached out to steady herself, not liking the way reality was shifting beneath her feet. She’d shaped and polished her hate over the years, but now she was finding it cracked, its layers beginning to peel away.

  That wasn’t a reality she wanted to examine. Because hating Tiberius was easy. If that hate chipped away, she wasn’t sure she could stand the pain.

  She curled her fingers around her phone, craving Gunnolf’s voice. Hard to believe she’d come to rely so much on his friendship. When he’d first pulled her into his life, she’d been broken, defeated, riddled with guilt. She’d been wary, afraid he wanted to destroy her for what she was. For what she could do. For what she had done, although that was a secret she held close, not even sharing it with Gunnolf, not even after all this time.

  She’d been edgy and wary and pretty much an all-out bitch. But he’d hung fast, swearing that he understood, that he didn’t fear her. That she was, in fact, an asset.

  And that he would take her secret to the grave.

  They’d danced around each other for years, their relationship at first purely political. She’d been able to offer him a unique perspective on the vampire world. He’d been able to help her understand what she was now and how to control it. Best of all, the control he’d taught her had reduced her fears. Anger could pull out the wolf—and when the wolf was out, she was toxic.

  He’d helped her, taking her off into secluded caves and teaching her control even while risking his own life. She was a walking plague upon the earth, and he’d willingly danced with the devil to help her.

  Most of all, he’d helped heal her heartache.

  She wanted to call him now. She wanted his low voice to remind her that Tiberius had kicked her to the curb. That any softness she saw in him now wasn’t meant for her.

  She wanted Gunnolf to remind her that the Tiberius she’d once loved had died in her heart the day he’d cut her loose.

  She wanted him to say all those things, yet she didn’t dial the phone. Because secretly she was afraid he’d only be silent. That he’d make her come to her own decisions. And that she wouldn’t like what she saw when she peered deep into what was really going on in her heart and her head.

  “Screw it,” she whispered, then tossed her phone onto the desk. She neither had nor wanted a degree in psychology. She wasn’t the type to analyze or ponder or pick apart motives. She was the type who did, and that—that—was what had her all screwed up in her head. Because right now, she wasn’t doing. Right now she was waiting. And it pissed her off that there was nothing she could do to change the status quo.

  And to make it worse, she was waiting in the blue room. Was it intentional, she wondered? Had Tiberius asked Mrs. Todd to put her here, in her old office? Of course he had—he never did anything without a purpose. This was his way of reminding her that she wasn’t welcome.

  She moved around the room, memories burned deep rising to the surface. The hours they’d spent planning together. The mornings when he’d join her, agitated about some political miasma, and she’d pull him down onto her couch, abandoning the comfort of their bedroom for the quick necessity of right then, right there.

  She remembered it all, and it had been right here.

  But that was almost twenty years ago, and her things were gone, the furnishings changed. Even the walls were a different color, and the bright Mondrian canvases to which she’d been so partial had been replaced by more somber Wyeths, giving the room an almost sleepy atmosphere where once it had been so vibrant it practically hummed.

  She wondered how quickly he’d changed things after he’d kicked her out, because that had certainly happened with head-spinning speed. For four months she’d been okay. She’d sneak off when the full moon taunted, sliding out of the mansion and heading to a warehouse she’d rented, well stocked with chains and locks. She’d ride the change out, her body ripped apart, the need for the kill eating her up inside as hours seemed to stretch into centuries.

  And then it would be over, and she’d sneak back and park herself behind her desk in this very room and pretend that everything w
as business as usual.

  Four months.

  For four entire months that had been the way she’d operated, trying to work up the courage to tell Tiberius the truth, at the same time knowing she never could.

  And then she’d gotten sloppy. Or maybe she’d just underestimated him.

  A shrink would probably say she wanted to get caught, but that wasn’t true.

  Not that it mattered; the end result was the same—he’d become suspicious. He’d followed. And he’d seen firsthand what she became.

  Not that she’d realized it at the time. Back then, she didn’t know how to remain herself during the change. But she’d chained herself up good and strong, and he’d been smart enough not to come close.

  He’d heard the stories about hybrids, after all.

  She’d headed back home in blissful ignorance, certain she’d gotten away with it one more month.

  How wrong she’d been.

  She’d understood why he was angry. He’d told her about his past, and she understood why he hated werens to a degree that surpassed even the usual animosity between vamps and werens in the Shadow world.

  She’d known that; she’d understood it. She’d known there would be a huge blowup.

  She’d known that it would be hard and horrible.

  Yet in the back of her heart she hadn’t expected him to kick her out. How could he, after everything they’d been through together? He was her life, and he had been for centuries.

  But he had, and her last lingering bit of naïveté had died in that moment.

  She pressed her fingers to her temples and silently cursed. She seriously needed to get out of this room. She didn’t want to think, she wanted to hit. To pound out her frustrations. She punched the air once, twice, and decided it was time to burn off some of the shit that was stirring inside her. She headed toward the door. Hopefully Tiberius’s stint at redecorating hadn’t run to eliminating or moving the gym.

  More important, she thought as she eased up next to the door, she hoped he hadn’t put a guard outside her room.

  She paused, her fingertips grazing the wood as she listened for movement outside. She heard it, and bit back a curse. He really had assigned a guard. Wasn’t that just the most fucked-up—

  The scent.

  Slowly, quietly, she stepped closer, her chin tilted up, her nostrils flaring as she breathed in.

  She knew it—knew him.

  Tiberius was there, beyond the door.

  Carefully she moved closer, her blood pounding in her veins, some emotion she didn’t want to name sweeping over her. Desire? Surely not. Anger? Maybe.

  Curiosity?

  Slowly she pressed her hand to the wood. That was when she heard it. More accurately, she felt it. The slightest intake of breath as if in reflex. And then a hint of warmth permeating the wood. Nothing a human would notice. But she wasn’t a human.

  And neither was Tiberius.

  Quickly she yanked her hand away, hating that she’d revealed even the slightest weakness to him, not caring in the slightest that her weakness had been his as well.

  He’d find a way to turn it around on her. He always did, after all.

  Frustrated, she headed back toward the desk. No way she was leaving the room now, not with him right outside the door.

  She was just about to give in to temptation and call Gunnolf when her phone rang. She snatched it up, saw that it was Orion, and answered.

  “I just heard,” he said. “Where are you?”

  “Heard?”

  “About—” He hesitated, and that was all she needed to know. He’d heard about Reinholt’s murder.

  “Don’t say it.”

  “Am I an idiot?” he retorted.

  She had to smile. Richard Erasmus Orion III was her nephew, cousin, something like that. Whatever he was, it was a billion times removed. Point was, he was family. The only family she had left, for that matter.

  More important, he knew what she was. And he alone knew what she’d done.

  “I can’t talk right now,” she said.

  “Where are you? And are you all right?”

  “I’m with Tiberius.”

  The silence hung long and heavy. Finally Orion cleared his throat. “So I ask again: Are you all right?”

  She wanted to come up with a profound response. Something that illustrated just how not all right she was. But the words wouldn’t come. “Sure,” she said simply, and knew that she hadn’t fooled him when he swore softly under his breath.

  “Like hell. What can I do?”

  “Same as always—nothing you can do.”

  “Caris—”

  “No. I’m sorry, but you know it’s true. I appreciate the thought, I’m glad you’ve got my back, and all the rest of that warm, fuzzy bullshit. But ultimately it’s just me out here with my ass swinging in the air.”

  “Least it’s a hot ass,” he said with a growl.

  She couldn’t help her laugh. “I’m your cousin, you perv.”

  “Aunt, I think, and I’m pretty sure we’ve passed the levels of consanguinity that make that sort of thing illegal.”

  “Dammit, Orion, I’m trying to hang on to this pisser of a mood.”

  “Go work it off,” he said. “Beat up some unsuspecting flunky or something.”

  “You really do know me too well.”

  She realized as she tossed the phone onto the bed that she meant it, and that the smile on her lips was genuine. Orion and Gunnolf—a human and a werewolf. The last time she stood in this room she never would have believed that the two people she depended on most in the world were so very unlike herself.

  At least things were never dull.

  And, yeah, she needed a workout.

  She headed back to the door, expecting that Tiberius would be gone by now, surprised to find that he was still there. That scent. That heat.

  Had he heard her conversation, heard her laughing?

  She hoped so. She pressed her hand against the wood and hoped to hell he believed she was happy. Because she damn sure didn’t intend to let him see her pain.

  But it wasn’t only her pain that filled the room like a sour stench. She sensed his as well, her senses no longer merely vampyric but something more. She could feel it—raw emotion. Pain and anger, but also longing. And, yes, that hint of regret. For a moment her throat tightened, and she realized she was watching the door handle, waiting for it to turn, cursing herself because she wanted it to.

  And then cursing him when it didn’t.

  Outside, Tiberius closed his eyes and drew back his hand. His fingers had almost closed around the brass knob. He’d almost gone in. He’d let the pull of what they’d once had overshadow the reality that lay between them.

  He couldn’t do that.

  He couldn’t do it back then. He couldn’t do it now.

  And so he turned and walked away.