Sword and Shadow (7 page)

The man curled into a fetal position inside the tiny cup of the ’nest, sobbing aloud. He winced.
I hate it when they do that.

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He wanted more, of course, but knew he couldn’t take another draught without the risk of infecting him. He could always simply snap his neck when he was finished, but Raven wasn’t a fan of cold-blooded murder, no matter how much some might think men like this pirate deserved such a fate. Once they were incapacitated, he simply couldn’t justify killing them any more than he could justify making them what
he
was.

Some sixty feet below he could see more pirates scurrying about, firing their strange weapons, and screaming to one another as their intended victims began to fight back. The air filled with arrows and a couple of the pirates were smashed down where they stood.

He spotted Val leaping between the ships, a prodigious jump for a mortal, and trading blows with a pirate for a brief second before she cut him down. She was damn good with that sword, he noted, but that only made sense. There was no such thing as an unskilled TAU operative. Psi powers were all well and good, but sometimes their job came down to sheer brute force, blade against blade. As far as he knew no TAU agent had ever been bested by a single native warrior on
any
of the client worlds.

Then he saw her beset by two pirates at once and nearly jumped to her defense, only to discover in short order that she didn’t really need his help at all. She circled to the left of the one in the lead, forcing him to step into his comrade’s way, and handily skewered him the moment his attention wavered.

The second pirate offered even less of a challenge than the first. In less than an eye-blink she was stepping over their bodies to engage another. She skipped to the side, evading the man’s initial lunge, then whipped her trailing foot up into his face. His head bounced from the deck as she strode forward and, with a casual sweep of an invisible hand, used telekinesis to toss another pirate over the side from fifteen feet away.

He hesitated longer, admiring, but could hesitate no longer as he saw a pair of men stealthily moving up on her. He vaulted the side of the 58

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crow’s nest and willed himself toward them. This short flight was not beyond him, and he alighted without a sound on the deck behind them.

He surged into the space between them, arms shooting out and fingers like steel spikes embedding themselves in their clothing and flesh.

He gave a sudden yank and smashed them into one another with bone-crushing force. They bounced away from him and each other, shattered and bleeding, as he made it to Val’s side in a single, ground-eating leap.

The men would live, but not comfortably.
That
notion didn’t trouble his conscience in the least.

She turned and thrust reflexively, but he leaned away from the point and slapped the rapier down. “Watch where you’re sticking that thing,”

he said with a grin, then swept the deck with his gaze. “Looks like that pretty much took care of them.”

“Maybe,” she murmured, frowning at the carnage around them. “I sure the hell hope so.”

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Chapter Nine

Despite the fact that a concerted sweep revealed no living pirates, Val couldn’t shake the feeling that they were missing something. All they could find were bodies. At least all the pirates were either dead or disabled, yet, thankfully, most of their own crew was alive and mostly uninjured. By all reports, their friend Goban had given a good accounting of himself aboard their ship—and even Bryon had turned out to be more effective a fighter than anyone had expected. The pirates asked no quarter and gave none. Val was just glad the butcher’s bill wasn’t higher on their end.

The purpose behind their attack, and how they were able to creep up so close without being detected, remained a mystery. Raven murmured something about a theory, but refused to elaborate when she pressed him for details. “I’d just as soon have some sort of verification before I say anything more.”

He ignored her icy glare and continued poking around the corsair vessel. “I smell a warlock,” he muttered, glancing around what they’d assumed to be the Captain’s cabin. Expensive rugs littered the floor, and inside they found the only real bed aboard the ship.

Goban stood in the cabin doorway, shaking his head. “I didn’t see one.”

“You weren’t supposed to. I do ask—where’s the Captain? I’d be willing to guarantee that the Captain and the warlock I’m sensing are one and the same.”

“A warlock pirate? There’s a scary thought.” The watchman fingered the hilt of his sword. “Makes too much sense though,” he added, scratching his three-day-old beard growth. “So where is he?”

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“Not
he
. Recognize that scent?” Raven asked Val, who sniffed experimentally.

She nodded. “Very familiar. Spicy, but not too heavy. What is it?”

“The perfume of choice of the woman who greeted you on your way into town.”

Val took another deep sniff. “I didn’t smell it then.”

“You didn’t smell it now until I pointed it out. You don’t have my senses. To me it’s as though she bathed in the stuff.”

“That would be an interesting coincidence, wouldn’t it?” she asked him and received only a shrug in response. He was being rather closed-mouthed, to the point it was starting to piss her off. “Do you think she was after us in particular?”

He nodded curtly. “Quite likely.” He began to cast about the room with his gaze, then reached up and plucked something she couldn’t see from the air. He repeated this a few more times, and then appeared to weave something invisible between his outstretched hands.

Magic. She shivered. There was something deadly enticing about the magical arts—though her own gifts were unique and powerful in their own right. But magic—she’d always been curious, but never had the opportunity to learn anything about it. TAU recruited her straight out of college on Earth, just a backwoods bayou gal from Louisiana with a strain of the meta-bug that turned on the switches in her brain.

She wasn’t even particularly powerful as a metapsi. Her strongest talent was her telekinesis—known commonly as TK or ‘Teek’—but she had a smattering of telepathic, empathic, and precognitive talents as well. They were occasionally useful, but involved a lot more ethical considerations than simply smashing someone in the face with a telekinetic fist.

She was a powerful Teek, but it was an exhausting discipline.

Physically lifting and throwing an average-sized man had left her pulse pounding and tiny lights going off in the corner of her eyes. She’d damn near overdid it on that one.
One or the other, Val—maintaining a inertial
shield or throwing pirates around. You can’t do both at the same time.

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She came back to the present to realize Raven was staring at her, and he’d said something. “Sorry. What was that?”

“This is no time to be woolgathering,” Raven told Val with narrow eyes. “Be ready and observe.”

“Huh?”

He tossed the spell out, watching through magesight as the first arm of the spell reached out and swept the room. Another strand reached out of thin air and tried to brush it aside. Then his spell reached out with its second arm, spearing directly for the point from which the opposing thread had originated.

A column of white light shot from the floor to the ceiling—a blinding flash he alone out of his whole party could see—and, swathed in a swirl of what looked like white smoke, a human figure appeared in their midst.

That,
everyone could see. Before the figure—the woman—could move, Val had her rapier resting comfortably on her shoulder, the point just barely pricking the side of her neck. “Wouldn’t try anything, witch.”

“Warlock,” Raven growled. “They call them warlocks.”

“Males and females?”

“The word our translators turn into ‘warlock’ is a word that simply means ‘traitor’ in Church Low Tongue.”

She shrugged. “Not that I care.”

He nearly sighed. He found languages pretty fascinating—he no longer relied on the translator implant to communicate with the natives here…he’d learned another important thing about being a vampire.

Vampires learned fast. After over a hundred years roaming his own Earth, and nearly another hundred leaping from universe to universe, he now knew seventy Earth languages and sixteen the natives of his Earth would never recognize at all. “Being an agent is more than just roughing up the bad guys,” he said, leaning close and whispering in her ear.

Her eyes shot sparks at him. “I know that,” she whispered back. “And I resent—“

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“I see you two are still getting along famously,” the mysterious out-world woman remarked with remarkable aplomb for someone literally millimeters away from death.

“Do you
want
to die?” Val asked her incredulously, more fascinated by the woman’s attitude than angry at her for it.

That provoked a grin. “Not particularly. But you’re not going to kill me.”

“And why not?” Val asked her, twisting the blade slightly, feeling the blade bite barely into the woman’s neck.

“Because I know things you don’t.” Her smile bordered on mocking, but fell just short of it. Not that it bothered Val. She’d developed thick skin working with her training agent, one of the most abrasive human beings she’d ever had the pleasure to meet.

Raven laughed aloud. “You’re a bold creature, aren’t you?” Then, moving so fast he was barely a blur, he bypassed Val and stopped mere centimeters away from the woman. “I usually find that intriguing in a woman, but, in your case, it’s tedious. What’s your name?”

The woman stiffened. Val’s gaze flicked between them, unable to shake the feeling that there was another conversation entirely going on beneath the surface of their exchange. And she found she didn’t like it. It wasn’t overtly sexual, but there was a certain quality that lent itself that sort of mystique. The woman’s breasts heaved and her eyes fell upon Raven like two neutron stars—gravity wells that drew his gaze inexorably into her own.

They were both magi, so they shared something Val herself could never understand.

And, at that moment, she hated the woman with pure white passion.

She was jealous, she realized, and that realization nearly made her laugh. Why should she be jealous? She and Raven had shared nothing but a kiss, and even that he’d taken as an excuse to berate her—or question her motives, at least. This woman had tried to kill him, but maybe he was one of those who found that sort of thing…enticing. She knew that many men did, for some inexplicable reason. The few days www.samhainpublishing.com 63

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they’d spent together had really told her nothing about the man who lived within that ageless teenage exterior.

His spirit was often as cold as the vampire flesh that housed it, yet she had felt some sort of heat and passion rising from him as well. He remained an enigma, for all intents and purposes, and yet, without even seeming to make the attempt, he had somehow seduced her into an attraction she hadn’t even recognized before it had come upon her.

She needed this aggravation like she needed a sledgehammer upside her head.

“Your name, woman,” Raven hissed through clenched teeth. He’d nearly run out of patience with this one—she found the act of defying him entirely too amusing for his comfort. She was right, in one respect—

he had no real intention of killing her. But he wanted to know what she did, and she wasn’t about to give up that information freely.

Not for the first time he wished he had some of the mental powers of his progenitor, or even a fraction thereof. But the psychic gifts granted to Renee Fontaine were not his. Val had a measure of them, of course, but a glance in her direction spoke volumes—if he allowed her a few moments alone with their prisoner, he’d be lucky if she wasn’t returned in this world’s equivalent of a body bag. The blonde TAU agent’s eyes were focused on the other woman’s face like twin laser cannons armed and ready to fire. The hand holding the sword at the woman’s throat whitened with the strength of her grip.

The cabin fairly stank of animosity and sheer unadulterated jealousy.

What the hell?

He despaired of ever understanding the ‘gentler’ sex. Had he been an ordinary man, the look Val was giving their prisoner might have frozen the blood in his veins. If she didn’t want her dead, he knew nothing of women at all.

“I’ll have your name, and the name of whom you work for,” he insisted, reaching out and wrapping ice-cold fingers around the woman’s pale throat. Nails that glittered like mother-of-pearl dug into her smooth skin as he dragged her away from the edge of Val’s blade.

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This earned him a dark look from Val, which he ignored. Just as he ignored the painstakingly crafted look of boredom on their captive’s beautiful face. He could read the tint of fear hiding behind the jade lenses of her eyes.

She attempted a smile and he squeezed his fingers together just slightly, cutting off most of the air flowing to her lungs. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe I don’t want to kill you. But there’s nothing stopping me from making you
wish
I was going to.”

Despite all the legends surrounding Raven, it wasn’t until this exact moment that Val saw even a glimmer of the deadly predator hidden beneath the innocuous exterior.
This
was the creature that had so cowed the early vampires of Earth—the one who struck terror into anyone even considering an existence as a rogue outside the rules he himself had designed.

The cold-blooded killer. The monster who hunted monsters. He turned his suddenly burning gaze on her and she flinched back. “What the fuck use is a psi,” he asked, “if you can’t ream what we want out of her mind?”

“I’m not that powerful a telepath,” she replied in much the same tone.

“And she’s adept at shielding—more than any non-psi has any business being.”

“Excuses,” he snarled, lifting the woman from the deck and suspending her at arm’s length. “I’m getting really sick of this woman.

I’m sick of her interference, I’m sick of her attitude, and, frankly, I’m sick of her face.”

“So just kill her,” Goban murmured from the doorway, his weathered face a mask of studied disinterest. “If she’s out of our hair, what does it matter if we don’t know where she came from?”

“You’ve got a point,” the vampire said slowly, uttering the words ever so slowly around his vicious and feral grin. “I’m beginning to see it that way myself. If she won’t talk, she’s useless to us.”

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few degrees. He radiated cold like an angry mortal might radiate heat, the product of an icy fury so deep that it might’ve been drawn from the northern ice-flows themselves.

“All right, damn you!” the woman gasped finally, after a few seconds of tearing at his wrist with both her hands to no avail. His grasp was far too strong to be broken by the likes of her.

He tossed her aside like a rag doll to lay panting and wheezing against the nearby bulkhead. “So talk,” he said coolly. “Before I decide you’re better off as fodder than as a living prisoner.”

Val found herself wondering how long it had been since the vampire had fed. Long enough, obviously, that whatever reticence he’d felt about revealing his nature to the others had began to fade. Some of his apparent anger might well have been the by-product of vampiric hunger and, all things being equal, she much preferred the notion of him dining on the dark-haired bitch than anyone else in their party.

“I’d do what he says,” she said warningly. Her mouth twisted into an evil smile. “He’s looking a little thirsty.”

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