SEDUCTIVE SUPERNATURALS: 12 Tales of Shapeshifters, Vampires & Sexy Spirits (67 page)

“Luca’s gone?” Custo couldn’t believe it. No address on the card. Probably wasn’t in the phone book either. “And the rest of them?”

Adam shrugged. “They took off as soon as the last wraith was put down. Wouldn’t answer my questions. Wouldn’t acknowledge me beyond giving me the card.”

Just hours ago Custo had begged Luca for one more night, and Luca was giving it to him. Should he have begged for a week? A year? A hundred years? Would it have mattered? What an excruciating, horrible thought.

And an irrelevant one.

Custo had a single night, but no way to track the wolf. Annabella was well beyond her strength, emotionally and physically. And he couldn’t even lend his immortality to the wraith war, because he needed to be by her side in case the wolf returned.

He looked at the pristine, yet tainted card again. The White Tower. What kind of pompous name for a congregation of angels was that? This was exactly the reason he wanted nothing to do with them. Absolutely nothing.

Well, screw ’em. He wasn’t going. He had a number of strikes against him already, what was one more? He’d lied a million times before; they should be prepared for it. He’d been a thief in his past life, too, always looking for an advantage. Well, he was going to steal every single moment he could. If he had to leave Annabella, she would know that he fought the sky to stay with her.

“He’s like you, isn’t he?” Adam asked, his intensity growing. “He and the others with him?”

“Yeah,” Custo answered. But he didn’t know what privilege permitted them to exist on
E
arth.
To exist on
E
arth.
He didn’t know how to apply, or if his escape from Heaven (or the circumstances thereof) made him ineligible. As always, his decisions were tainted with regret.

“I’d like to go with you tomorrow,” Adam said.

Of course he did. Big brother Adam always had to see things through.

“If nothing else,” Adam continued, “I’d like to see if they’d be willing to cooperate with Segue to fight the wraiths. I’d give anything for Talia to be relieved of that duty.”

Custo went cold. Talia. How could he have forgotten her? Talia had been saddled with an unimaginable horror. A life of rending the boundary between the worlds to force the crossing of the reeking dead.

He’d been too self-absorbed to track the direction of Adam’s thoughts, but it wasn’t so hard to guess their path. Adam had witnessed firsthand the ability of the angels to destroy wraiths without any threat to themselves.

Custo put a hand to his aching belly. An angel might risk pain and lingering discomfort fighting the wraiths, but little else. With Shadowman so clearly unwilling to help, what other recourse did Adam have? None. Adam needed the angels, and he needed Custo to help him find them.

The White Tower would be impossible for a mortal to locate on his own, even Adam with his untarnished heart and networks of information. For one time in Custo’s life, he was in a position to help Adam, to give him the connections he so desperately needed in his war against the wraiths.

Movement from Annabella caught Custo’s eye. She was using some kind of cream to wipe the makeup from her face. The skin under the white foundation was almost as pale. Her thoughts were a scatter of Peter, Jasper, and Wolf. The name Wolf was new, and Custo didn’t like it, as if Annabella and the animal had become something to each other.

Maybe the angels could save Annabella from
the wolf,
too. Why hadn’t they already? He’d like to have their response.

Custo cleared his voice, but his answer still came out tight. “I’ll let you know when I’ve located the tower. Might take some…doing.”

Adam nodded. “I need to go. I can almost smell the wraiths from here.”

“I’ll call you when I know anything,” Custo said. He’d probably be combing the city with his mind all night, searching for the bell-clear thoughts that marked a host of angels.

Not the way he wanted to spend his last night.

Adam left just as the hallway thickened with people. Custo closed and locked the door—no gushing visitors for Annabella—then turned to size up her condition.

She’d managed to get most of the white off her face, and the spider lashes were gone. Though wrapped in a robe, a tuft of white at her knees told him she was still in her costume. All those hooks and eyes were too much for her, and she wouldn’t have wanted to ask anyone else for help.

“Let’s get you back to Segue and tucked in for the night,” he said.

She nodded, passing a hand over her face, but he caught a hint of her face contracting with tears. She stood and removed her robe so Custo could help her out of her costume.

Applying his big hands to the little hooks, he considered what to say. It was pointless to tell her that she wasn’t responsible for Peter’s death. She’d only point out that it was because the wolf wanted
her
that he was dead. She might have been able to forgive herself if they’d managed to push the wolf back into Shadow at the end of the performance, but that effort had failed.

He’d have to try another approach.

“About five years ago—no, wait, it would be seven years now—” Custo kept his tone as flat as he could. He didn’t want pity. “It was after the first rumblings of the wraith war. Some international arms-dealing scumbag put a hit out on Adam.” He swallowed the stone in his throat and finished, “I hit him first.”

Annabella’s eyes widened in the mirror so that Custo could see the whites all around.

“His name was Heinrich Graf. I seduced his daughter into telling me his traveling itinerary, and then I made my move. But the first shot didn’t get him. No, my first shot got an innocent bystander. A doctor, murdered in the street. The second shot got Graf. Adam doesn’t know about any of this. I’ve been too much of a…
coward
to tell him.”

“Why are you telling me?” Annabella croaked.

The last clasp came undone and the back of her costume gaped open. “The difference between you and me is that I killed those people myself, with my own hands, by my own actions. You haven’t hurt anyone.”

Her eyes filled again. “I could have stopped him tonight.”
My fault.

“We’ll find another way. You know yourself better now.” Custo turned Annabella to face him.

She put a hand to her breast. “It hurts to breathe.”

“Try to remember that you were magnificent tonight. No, don’t shake your head. Don’t diminish what you have accomplished.”

“It was Shadow…it was the magic.”

“Annabella, that was
you.
That was all you.” Custo grabbed her hand. If he could give her nothing else before he was dragged away in the morning, he wanted her to be aware of her power. “The wolf didn’t learn
choreography.
The wolf took his cues from your imagination.”

“He was supposed to go back,” Annabella said.
But now he wants me, too.

“I don’t blame him for trying to take you with him.” Custo fisted his hands to remember the burn of the wolf in his grasp. “Your talent, your gift, is amazing.”

“You were so right to tell me not to trust myself, because I don’t.” She lifted her chin to meet his gaze, her eyes blazing, her thoughts begging,
Please don’t hate me.
“I want the magic he offers so badly that in another weak moment I might take him up on it. Even now I want to feel the magic of Shadow again.”
To go there with him.
“You have to promise me you won’t let that happen.”

“Annabella—”

The look in her eyes hardened to resolution. The fear clouding her expression cleared at last. No one had ever looked at him like that. Needed him like that. “Please. I don’t want to lose myself. I won’t if you’re with me.”

He’d been telling her to trust him from the moment he met her. Been telling her that he would be with her every step of the way. That together they’d push the wolf back into Shadow.

Now, Custo didn’t have the heart to correct her.

Shadow Fall: Chapter Eleven

Custo tightened his arm around a sleeping Annabella and cursed the rising sun. Not that he could see it from Adam’s underground apartment, but since the digital clock read 6:40
A.M.
, he figured the damn thing was lifting itself off the horizon. Truth was, he didn’t want to move. His gut was still aching, wouldn’t fully heal, and he didn’t have time to have a doctor check it out—what could one do anyway?—before they left for the tower.

Instead, he’d spent his time the best way he knew how—keeping Annabella close while he could.

Her body was soft, fitted against his like a perfectly matched puzzle piece, her ass connecting with heat to his groin. She was supple and curved where she should be, though every bit of her was firmed with muscle. Almost every bit; his thumb had been stroking her rib cage under her breasts for the last twenty minutes. He didn’t dare reach higher, or he wouldn’t be able to trust himself. Only her hair, tickling his nose half the night and smelling of Talia’s fruity shampoo, had been irritating enough to keep his mind from picturing the creamy, raspberry-tipped mounds.

Oh, hell. The tower. Think of the tower.
No, that just made him want to have her more. The tower was a reminder that he was going away, probably forever.

Okay, then, cars. He pictured his first car, a stolen 1981 BMW 635CSI. Nice ride. Needed it for a date. Screwed the blonde from his university survey class in the passenger seat.

Annabella stirred. His dick tightened. The wound in his gut burned.

Who would have thought that mortality was Heaven and Hell combined?

He should be sainted for not having sex with Annabella last night. A monument should be erected in his memory for not accepting her invitation, exhausted though she was. Any other woman and he would have sated himself, and her as well, over and over again. He’d have screwed them both blind. Why not Annabella?

The trust in her eyes. Her belief that they would be seeing this nightmare through to the end together. How could he accept her confidence when he knew the very next morning he would betray it?

Somebody up there had better be taking notes.

Last night, he’d contented himself with stroking the long lines of her aching body, her front lounging on the many pillows littering the bed. His thumbs had worked the arches of her feet and had her sighing in relief. He had slowly ground the rocks of tense muscle from her calves. She’d shouted “ow, ow, ow” when he’d massaged the length of her thighs, then finally subsided into a grateful groan, wiggling her butt into his palms. The woman was not shy about her body, and with good reason.

As she drifted off, he’d watched her profile, her eyelids flickering in vivid sleep, and took sharp, smug satisfaction in knowing that the disjointed snatches of dream-thoughts were all about him. Not the wolf.

When the night deepened to utter quiet, he’d opened his mind to search for The White Tower. Its location had come easily, within moments. It was a beacon of calm order, a lighthouse in the confusing ocean of humanity. The only way he could have missed it before was because he was deliberately avoiding anything…angelic.

6:45
A.M.
Time to be up. He was pushing it as it was. They’d need to leave in a little more than an hour and there was a lot to do. Too soon he’d be turning himself over to Luca. He didn’t want to screw up Adam’s chances of getting help with the wraiths, and he had to make certain that Luca would take care of the wolf. How long the wolf required to regenerate, Custo had no idea. A lot was riding on this appointment.

Custo brushed away Annabella’s hair and kissed the spot behind her ear. He’d been planning to do that for hours. He turned his head, buried his face in her hair, and inhaled deeply. He’d found her too late, amid too much danger to know her—every slide of her skin, tone of her voice, draw of her breath.

“Custo?” she murmured.
…so warm…touch me more…

“I’m here,” he said to cut off her thought, and therefore, the temptation. But he couldn’t help grazing his fingertips down to her smooth, tight stomach, memorizing her contours for later, when he faced the consequences of his actions. He barely managed to say, “We have to go soon.”

“Five more minutes.” She groaned, turning in his arms to face him, her eyes half lidded, and cuddled deeper into him.
…want more…

More time to sleep or more…?

She answered by twining a leg around his, knotting him close, pelvis to pelvis. She had to feel him rock-hard against her. The sensation was painful in its bliss, perfect in its fit. His blood filled with hungry greed, pounding out lofty intentions. He tilted his head back for clean, sane air. Didn’t help.

…wants me bad, too…why doesn’t he…?

A better man wouldn’t have his hand up her shirt. A better man would’ve never gotten into bed with her in the first place. A better man would have slept on the hard floor like a damn priest.

But he wasn’t a better man. He was a bastard.

Annabella nuzzled closer, grazing her mouth against his neck. He clenched his jaw—there was a reason he couldn’t sleep with her, but he had to think real hard to find it. All he could feel was warm, willing woman, the
boom boom boom
of his blood.

…touch me…why won’t he touch me…?

Oh, right. Because of the wraiths and the wolf, and a woman who trusted him to keep her safe when he was about to leave her. He tried to push her away, but ended up grasping her hips to bring her closer.

…oh, please, yes…

When she nipped him with her teeth, his control cracked. He skimmed his hand up again to cup her breast, stroking his thumb over the peaking nipple. Mouth dry, he barely managed to be lucid. “We leave in an hour, and I have to meet with Adam.”

That was probably the most heroic statement he’d ever made. If it wasn’t worthy of some wings, nothing was.

“Too soon,” she pleaded. “Let’s shut the world out for a while.”

“I…oh hell, don’t do that…Bella, please…” But her hand was already down his sweatpants. No blood was left in his brain at all. His last coherent thought:
Screw it.
He was going to
H
ell for sure this time anyway.