Darkness Hunts (Dark Angels 4)

I might as well have been looking into the eyes of death. A shiver that was part fear, part foreboding, rolled through me. “What do you mean? Didn’t you see that?”

“See what? What the hell are you talking about?”

I frowned, my gaze searching his. “The Dušan. It reacted to the ward.”

He glanced at my wrist sharply. Now that I’d stepped away, the Dušan had resumed her normal position on my arm. Amaya, however, was still eager to bite into whatever darkness Lauren had employed to make the ward, and she was letting me know it. Banshees had nothing on the noise she was currently making inside my head.

“Impossible,” he said.

“Not in this case.” I crossed my arms. “I can’t use the ward, Lucian. I won’t.”

He contemplated me, his expression still remote, then turned and faced Lauren. “It would appear you have wasted your time and energy. I’m sorry.”

Lauren rose and moved toward us, her long dress flowing around her legs like the gray tendrils of a web. Definitely a dangerous, dark spider, I thought with another shiver.

But one who wasn’t entirely surprised or annoyed by my actions, if her expression was anything to go by. My gaze returned to Lucian. Maybe she wasn’t worried because she would still extract the price of the ward from him.

“A foolish choice, but one that she nevertheless has the right to make.” Her gaze came to mine. “You may yet regret this decision, however. There are worse things in this world—and the next—than this stone and the magic within it.”

“I’m more than aware of that, believe me.”

She wrapped her fingers around the ward, then raised it to eye level and contemplated the oily black surface. “It is a thing of beauty, is it not?”

I didn’t reply, but then, she didn’t seem to be expecting me to. She dropped the stone into her bag and then, with a glance at Lucian, turned and left.

I heaved a silent sigh of relief. One problem down, one silently seething Aedh to go. I hesitated, watching him, wondering if it was better to keep my distance, then shook the thought away. He might be angry, but he surely wouldn’t hurt me. After all, he needed me alive just as much as everyone else did. I walked around the counter. “Well, I can’t say I’m sorry to see the back—”

The rest of the sentence was cut off as Lucian’s hand shot out and his fingers closed around my neck in a vise-like grip.

Chapter 12

Shock held me immobile for too many seconds. By the time my brain did start working, my lungs were burning and my head was pounding—a result of not only lack of air but Amaya’s scream of fury.

But there was also fear. Not because of the sheer and utter fury in his eyes, but because, for one instant, it felt like his fingers were going through my flesh. That he would, at any minute, rip my throat apart from the inside out.

“Do you know what you’ve just done?” He shook me with each word, as if to emphasize the point. “You just let what might be our one chance to win this race walk out the door!”

I made a gargling sound and kicked him. The blow was weak, ill aimed, and went unnoticed. Amaya, I thought, and flayed my hands back, trying to reach her. I couldn’t. I didn’t have the strength.

It didn’t matter. She burned through my flesh, answering my unspoken need.

Hurry, I thought, as spots began to dance in front of my eyes. Only they were spots that burned like fire. Furious, red-tinted blue fire.

Valdis, I realized dimly.

“I have been looking for an excuse to kill you for some time now, Aedh,” Azriel said softly. “If you do not immediately release her, I will have one.”

For a moment Lucian didn’t respond. Then the fury melted from his eyes and he blinked. A second later, I was a heap on the floor, coughing and spluttering and sucking in great gulps of air.

But I wasn’t on that floor alone for long—Amaya had finished her journey through my flesh and had appeared in my right hand, her shadowed steel spitting dark purple fire as she hissed her displeasure and need to kill. I gripped her, then surged to my feet and aimed her point at the middle of Lucian’s brow. My whole arm shook as I fought the urge to press farther, to let steel taste flesh and blood.

Amaya did not appreciate my restraint.

“And here I was thinking you’d do as I ask and not bring your sword into the company of a dark sorceress.” His voice was calm, and there was little fear in his expression. The bastard knew I wouldn’t kill him. That I couldn’t—not in such a cold-blooded manner, anyway.

“Then you don’t know me as well as you thought.” I pressed Amaya’s point to the bridge of his nose. A thin stream of blood trickled from the wound. “I may be many things, Lucian, but I’m not stupid. That’s what meeting Lauren without some form of personal protection would have been.”

“I would have protected you.”