At Blade's Edge Read online

  Rowan had learned to be a Vampire from the first of their kind. Had taken her lessons that had come with liberal applications of pain to underline the point. She’d been broken down and rebuilt until her scar tissue rendered her nearly impervious to sleights like these.

  By the time she’d been ten years old she’d held her own against Vampires like the one across the table from her. Rowan would have preferred a first meeting without this maneuvering. She’d tried to keep things even but Antonia pushed her hard enough that there was nothing else to do but slap her down.

  Sometimes people really did beg to be throat punched.

  “I can’t imagine what I might have said to cause this dissonance between us. But pray forgive me for it.” Antonia’s eyelash flutter was so practiced, so perfectly annoying that it’d taken most of Rowan’s willpower not to roll her eyes.

  Rowan didn’t say anything else. She’d won. It wasn’t necessary to rub it in, but Goddess knew she really wanted to.

  They parted at long last, with Rowan all but running inside once she’d said her goodbyes.

  * * *

  David was waiting for her, along with Elisabeth, in the kitchen.

  “Would you like something to eat and a cup of tea?” Elisabeth handed the packages off to Betchamp, who disappeared to put her things away.

  The nice thing about British people is they knew the value of tea as a restorative.

  “Yes to both.” Rowan sat at the island and nodded her thanks when David pushed a file her way.

  He’d know she wouldn’t want to be asked to share much about the evening. She knew he’d be around should she want to vent about it in a no-holds-barred way, though.

  “I should warn you I think the elder Mrs. Stewart will return again at sundown,” Elisabeth said as she put chips and mushy peas in front of Rowan. “Fish is in the oil just a moment or two longer but you can get started. You’ll be wanting vinegar.”

  Duh.

  Rowan thanked Elisabeth as she drenched her fries—chips—in malt vinegar before eating several. “How did you know? About the food and the mother-in-law?”

  Elisabeth laughed, clearly not expecting such frank talk.

  Rowan had to give herself a stern talking to about the heat of the freshly fried fish that had just been put on her plate. It smelled so good her mouth nearly watered.

  “Don’t tell me Clive didn’t have some sort of talk with you all to warn you about my issues with authority and general cranky nature.”

  “He would never do such a thing.” Elisabeth laughed some more. “In his own way he made sure we knew who you were. Henry is so meticulous and very good at his job that he had a dossier on you—all to serve you better, mind—when the renovations were happening.”

  Henry? Oh! Betchamp’s given first name.

  “The food was because you’d mentioned a chip shop down the road and how you wanted to try it. You said it again today before your nap. Easy enough to puzzle out. The other is based on my personal experience.”

  The way she pursed her lips made Rowan sigh. “You’re in the middle. You serve Clive and the Nation. You’ve told me enough. Clive will be here before dawn tomorrow.”

  “I serve you now too. As well as the Scion. You’re his wife.”

  “I am.” And they had no problem not announcing it to all and sundry unlike Antonia. “But I’m not a Vampire. I swear no fealty to the Nation as you have. I have my own loyalties to mind, so it’s all right. I appreciate what you have said and for the fish and chips.”

  After Rowan finished eating, she and David headed to the mews house to talk work.

  “Dare I ask?” he murmured as they settled in. Elisabeth and Betchamp—Henry—had gone off to sleep for several hours. The sun wasn’t up yet but it was quiet. The air all around was absent the threat riding Rowan’s ass for longer than she wanted to really think on just then.

  “She’s everything in the world that’s wrong, David.” Rowan shuddered.

  “Perhaps the two of you will become friendlier as you get to know one another.”

  “We agreed it was cool for you to lie when it came to how awesome I look in something, but not out of pity.” Rowan sent him a raised eyebrow.

  “What will you do, then?” he asked.

  “Ride it out. It’s a cliché for a reason. Lots of people don’t like their in-laws, right? And who am I to talk? Look what I come from! Anyway, it’s not like I’m living with them. Or even on the same continent most of the time. I’m sure I’ll learn to tolerate her.” For Clive, she’d do it.

  “Would you like me to accompany you when she returns after sundown?”

  It would be so lovely to throw David at that horrible woman and run the other way. She had work to do, after all and she was far happier when she did the fieldwork herself.

  “Though I’d love to do that, Clive will be here soon enough. I have to work this morning though. I have to meet someone. Alone, so don’t try it.”

  “I don’t expect to go out with you every time, but as I’m learning, it does help when you let me tag along.”

  “Don’t give me those fucking eyes, David. Some things are above your pay grade. Some things would eat you alive.” Rowan raised one of her hands to stay his argument. “I’ve been doing this a lot longer. You’ll be with me in the field on and off, just like other valets are. You’ll most certainly be part of every case I handle. I value your intelligence and your skills. I’m the Hunter, David. So there are things I will see to alone. Either in Her service, or in Hunter Corp.’s but either way, sometimes you’ll stay back and you won’t like it and I get that. This job isn’t going to be listed in any major magazines listing best places to work. Your boss is an unmitigated bitch and people try to kill her all the time. Suck it up.”

  He sighed, but didn’t argue.

  Where she had to venture in a few hours, she’d need all her wits and attention.

  Chapter Five

  Genevieve Aubert sat on the bottom step of someone’s mansion, the midmorning sunshine lighting her like a painting. All her dark brown hair had been caught up into a topknot that managed to appear messy and chic in the way French women had.

  But her gaze, though it appeared lazy, missed nothing. A predator just like Rowan, with her own unique power. Back in Rowan’s very early days with Hunter Corp., she’d been sent to a Conclave senate—basically a convention of all the magical powers represented in the Treaty with the Vampires and humanity.

  On day one, Genevieve and Rowan ended up stuck in an elevator with a freaked out, claustrophobic human on the verge of passing out. Between Genevieve’s magic and Rowan’s mechanical know-how, they managed to help the human, take out the camera long enough to get the elevator to the next floor using magic and safely exit.

  Then Genevieve had dragged Rowan to her hotel room where they’d bonded over their annoyance at how much time was being wasted between the members of the Conclave having one silly power display after another.

  Another being far older than the early twenties she appeared, Genevieve smiled, delivered the two-cheek kiss and waved a graceful, bracelet heavy wrist indicating Rowan follow her inside the house they stood in front of.

  “It smells like Cheech and Chong’s dorm room in here,” Rowan said as they moved through the house and into a huge, modern kitchen where a dumpling shaped woman worked, creating the non-weed smells that sent Rowan’s stomach growling.

  Genevieve laughed, shrugging. “I’d offer it to you, but if I remember right, Brigid doesn’t like you using any sort of mind altering substances.”

  The magic spoke through Genevieve in ways Rowan had a little experience with. Enough to understand it was rare and more than enough to not blink an eye that this witch needed help to calm the voices and not go insane.

  That she smoked weed and looked like
a pretty magazine ad for soy candles or two-hundred-dollar dresses made from hipster silkworms was a front. A mask.

  Rowan had a mask of her own so she respected it. Understood it to her bones.

  It was true that the Goddess wasn’t a fan of Her vessel getting drunk or high. She didn’t ever want Rowan to be caught unawares and unable to defend herself. And, as it happened from time to time—the being caught unawares—Rowan tended to agree.

  “Luckily She’s cool with it if I need surgery, and I still have coffee and carbohydrates.”

  Genevieve cocked her head and took Rowan in for a moment before she turned to the woman who’d already begun pouring coffee into two cups. She pointed and spoke rapid-fire French, telling them to get out of her kitchen and wait to be served breakfast that they’d better eat.

  With quick, murmured appreciation, Genevieve led Rowan through to a sunny breakfast room where a table waited. “Two Full English on the way. She says you need the protein and not to argue or pick around anything or she’ll know.”

  “I’ll never complain about being served breakfast. At least not to her face.” Rowan had better manners, and a finely honed sense of preservation.

  “This is a good idea. She’s very quick with a wooden spoon if you displease her,” Genevieve said.

  They settled at the table and soon enough the coffee arrived.

  “You’re far more than you were the last I saw you three years past.” Genevieve’s gaze fastened on the ring Clive had given Rowan, the one worn on her blade hand rather than her left. “We have much to discuss, I see.”

  “Business first or last?” Rowan asked as the food showed up.

  “Let us deal with our business and then we can move freely to other topics.”

  Business then, took over. Rowan sipped her coffee and tucked into the breakfast that seemed more French than English but she had no complaints either way.

  “I come to you, seeking Parley.” Rowan kept her tone and her words formal. Genevieve might look like a voluptuous hippie model, but she was a deeper power and what Rowan needed access to had to be approached with respect and no small amount of fear.

  Genevieve’s mellow mask faded away, and the edges and ferocity of her terrible beauty rose. Power coated static made the hair on Rowan’s arms rise, leaving gooseflesh in its wake.

  Curious, drawn by the magic in the air, Brigid didn’t rush to the surface of Rowan’s consciousness. Instead she seemed to unwind herself from the toes up.

  “Are you seeking as a Hunter? Or?” One of Genevieve’s eyebrows rose slightly. Her voice had gone dreamy, yet steel lined her tone.

  There was always a price to be paid when one dealt with a magical being like Genevieve. “The debt I incur will be my own. But it is in service of the Treaty,” Rowan replied.

  Genevieve was going to require an offering. The power she used came at a price, as most things did. The more powerful, the higher the price.

  Some of the beings Rowan had to bargain with were repugnant. Or truly, bone chillingly frightening. Nutty usually heaped on top just to make things extra spicy.

  But Genevieve didn’t set off any of Rowan’s alarms other than the super-powerful-being-who-needed-to-be-feared-and-respected one.

  Genevieve held her hands out and Rowan placed hers in them.

  The Goddess rushed up, swallowing Rowan for what felt like a few blinks of an eye but when Rowan rose to consciousness once more, her mouth was dry and she was ravenously hungry. Breakfast had obviously gone cold so it had been at least fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.

  “Parley accepted.” Genevieve’s eyes flashed just a moment before she eased back. “Eat, it’s still hot.” Genevieve waved a hand and the food steamed once more.

  At some point, another basket of bread showed up and it wasn’t much longer before Rowan felt much recovered. She hadn’t planned to let Brigid bear the weight of this negotiation but there was no denying it was a relief to have it over and no memory of it.

  The food would help recharge the magic she’d given up. Sleep would as well.

  Now that the way had been paid, Rowan plowed ahead. “It’s my belief several employees at Hunter Corp., along with some Vampires, have been working with a group of sorcerers. And, that the sorcerers may have been working both humans and Vampires against the other. Certainly they’re working at cross purposes so it makes one wonder just exactly how you could serve those particular masters.”

  “Explain.”

  Rowan understood why Genevieve would be so brusque. Such a claim had the potential to start a war.

  She also knew she needed to skirt around the edges of this happening under Theo’s watch. Rowan didn’t want to weaken him unnecessarily, or upset the already precarious balance she was charged with protecting.

  Ever so carefully then, she began with the situation at the Joint Tribunal in May. At the time Rowan had been unsettled, but she’d had so many reasons to be unsettled—namely returning to her home after a fifteen-year absence—that had nothing to do with the business between humans and Vampires. She might have missed smaller details at the time, but in the months since she’d gone over the events again and again, culling out things she’d overlooked before.

  Every once in a while, Genevieve would ask clarifying questions before going quiet once more as Rowan brought her up to speed on everything that had happened from the Tribunal until right that moment.

  By the end, breakfast had been totally demolished, the dishes cleared away, the coffee replaced with tea.

  Just the scent of the Russian black tea beginning to unfurl as it steeped was enough to center Rowan once more.

  Some places in the world had the right of it, to take tea breaks during the day. Of the simple, good magic of the tea ritual, even the most basic. It forced one to slow and reflect. To exist and be present.

  The tea set, like the breakfast, was more French than English. Thin, beautifully shaped porcelain in shades of deepest blue. But like its owner, the frailty it promised was a ruse. A beautiful work of art, yes, but it was at least a hundred years old. The history of it seemed to hum all around the handle as Rowan turned it to pour out.

  An automatic behavior that nearly had her snatching her hand back at the intimacy of the memories it invoked. From the age of two, Rowan had attended as Theo had his tea upon waking for the evening. By the time she was four, Theo declared everyone else unfit for the job but her. By five she’d understood the tea kept him calmer and his punishments far less severe. Understood why no one was jealous of her position as vassal to The First.

  As always when it came to her memories of the man who was her father in all the ways that counted, the bitter came with the sweet. The weight of his care, it seemed, had re-settled on her shoulders and with it, the realization that this balance too, was her role.

  All roads had led her to be sitting across from Genevieve discussing all this stuff on a summer day far better suited to lazing about and daydreaming.

  Genevieve’s dreamy, far-off blur sharpened as she leaned forward, across the table in Rowan’s direction. “I brought you pain?”

  Though it was disconcerting to be read that well, Genevieve’s words eased something in Rowan’s gut. Something she held as a shield so often she hadn’t even noticed it until it fell away.

  “Not you. A memory,” was all Rowan could say.

  Genevieve seemed to see right through to Rowan’s heart. It was oddly relaxing even as it laid her vulnerabilities open to someone else.

  “I know what it means to grow up in a world full of blood and bruises. I would like you to know the exchange for Parley was power, not pain. I don’t need pain. Not yours, in any case.” She paused for several breaths, staring off into the distance.

  Rowan wasn’t sure if she was more embarrassed or relieved that the source of her unpleasant memories was appare
ntly so obvious to Genevieve. Though she was honored that Genevieve had shared part of her own terrible memories.

  Understood too why it had been important for Genevieve to let Rowan know she hadn’t caused pain. Understood that her friend had wanted to draw a line between the way others might have used the opportunity to harm, but she was not such a being.

  “You and I are alike,” Genevieve finally said.

  At first—even second or third—glance it appeared the two women couldn’t be more different. She didn’t know much about Genevieve’s upbringing, but the way she’d just spoken led Rowan to believe it was as gritty as her own.

  They were powerful. They were unique. Which meant they were in demand or people wanted to kill them. Maybe that last part was just Rowan, but she liked to think it was more than just her.

  Under siege. Weight on their shoulders from before birth. Lonely.

  Also fierce. Resilient.

  Rowan lifted her teacup. “Survival.”

  Genevieve’s pleased laughter broke the emotional tension and enabled them to get back to business.

  “In Germany, during the Joint Tribunal, how did the magic feel? Tell me how it made you react. Don’t worry about perfect words. Just let your mind go,” Genevieve said.

  Rowan had spent a lot of time thinking on these details, taking notes, doing some research of her own. It had given her some control when in truth she had very little.

  “It left me nettled. Jangled. The magic was clingy, cloying, like spider webs. Sentient.”

  The snick of the lighter, the sound of the water burbling and the scent of marijuana filled the room in a nearly musical way. “When you experienced this in Venice, directly from the sorcerers themselves, did it feel different?” Genevieve asked after releasing a cloud of smoke.

  “It was the same sticky feeling. Dirty. Oily. Like it was looking for a way in. Like it was alive. I rarely feel dread when I work. But dread and this magic seem to be connected. Do you think it could be the whole creating shades thing?”