Connor’s face was stark with misery. “I didn’t want you to get hurt, Erin. I would’ve done anything to stop it.”
The look on his face made her chest hurt and her throat swell shut. The bus groaned to a halt, a suffocating cloud of diesel fumes rising around them. The door sighed and opened its maw for her.
She laid her hand against his broad chest, and yanked it right back, shocked by her own boldness. His body was so hard and warm.
“I know it wasn’t your fault,” she said. “What happened to Dad. He did it to himself. I knew he was in trouble, but he wouldn’t let anyone help him. And none of us knew how bad it was.”
“Miss!” the driver bellowed. “You on or off?”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she repeated. She scrambled into the bus, and clutched the pole as it pulled away, watching Connor’s tall form recede into the dusk. Wind whipped his shaggy hair around his stern, sculpted face. The canvas coat flapped. His penetrating eyes held hers, tugging at her, until the bus turned the corner and he was lost to sight.
She collapsed into a seat. Her eyes darted from passenger to passenger, as if Georg would suddenly pop out of nowhere and flash her that seductive smile that had so perplexed her at Crystal Mountain six months ago. She’d been surprised and gratified to be pursued by a guy like that. Almost tempted to give him a whirl just to break the spell of her self-imposed celibacy—but something had held her back.
Her friends had been so impatient with her. What the hell do you want in a guy, Erin? He’s smart, he’s built, he’s charming, he’s got a sexy accent, he looks like a GQ cover model, and he’s warm for your form! Stop acting like a friggin’ nun! Go get you some, girlfriend!
She’d tried to explain that the easy warmth that Georg exuded didn’t warm her. It was sort of like the way her taste buds could not be fooled by saccharine or Nutrasweet. The sweetness didn’t follow through, it didn’t satisfy. Her girlfriends had shrugged that off as unconvincing. They told her she was too fussy. Or just plain chicken.
The fact that she hadn’t gone to bed with that awful man had been her one small, private satisfaction and comfort afterwards, when her world lay around her in ruins.
Nobody in the bus was the right size or build to be Georg. Every time the bus lumbered to a stop, she held her breath until she saw who boarded. A teenage Goth girl with black lips and a pierced face. A portly Latina lady. A young urban professional woman in a suit, coming home from working Saturday at some high-powered job, like she herself so often had, back in the dear old days of steady employment. No Georg. Not that she would necessarily recognize his face, after what Connor had done to it. The memory of that bloody duel made her queasy again.
She was being stupid, really. If Novak really was bothering to think of her, it wouldn’t be Georg that he would send.
It could be anybody.
Novak read the e-mail on the screen of the laptop and typed a response. His hands were deft on the keyboard even with the use of only his right hand plus the thumb and middle finger of his left. He stared at the text as he rubbed the stumps of his maimed hand.
A constant, throbbing reminder of the debt he was owed.
The wind on the terrace made his eyes tear up. They burned and stung, unused to the colored lenses, and he pulled the case out of his pocket and removed them. The glues and the custom-made prosthetics that changed the shape of his features were uncomfortable, but temporary. Just until he could organize a final bout of cosmetic surgery.
He gazed out over the city. Such a pleasure, after months of staring at the walls of a prison cell, to cast his gaze out toward ranges of ragged mountains that hemmed in the jewel-toned greens and blues and silver grays of Seattle. He hit SEND, and took a sip of cabernet out of a splendid reproduction of a second-century B.C.E. Celtic drinking cup. It was fashioned from a real human skull, decorated with hammered gold. A fanciful indulgence, but after his prison experience, he was entitled.
He had Erin to thank for this expensive new caprice. Odd, that he had not developed a taste for blood-drenched Celtic artifacts until now. Their penchant for ritual murder resonated in his own soul.
The sacrifice that he had planned was blessed by the gods. He knew this was so because Celia had come to him in a vision. He was always moved when one of his angels visited him. They had come to him in the hospital where he lay near death, and they had comforted him in prison. Souls he had liberated, forever young and beautiful. Their shades had fluttered around him, distressed to see him suffering. Belinda had come, and Paola, and Brigitte, and all the rest, but when Celia came, it was special. Celia had been the first.
He savored his wine, his pulse leaping at the memory of the night that had marked his life. He had taken Celia’s lovely body, and as he spent himself inside her, the impulse rose up like a genie from a bottle, huge and powerful. The urge to place his thumbs against the throbbing pulse in her throat, and press.
She had thrashed beneath him, her face turning color, protruding eyes full of growing awareness. Celia could not speak, she could only gasp, but he had sensed her passionate assent. They had been linked, a single mind. She was an angel, offering herself to him.
The fanged gods had claimed him as their own that night. And he had understood what tribute the gods demanded to confer power and divinity. They had marked him, and he would prove himself worthy.
Celia had been a virgin, too. He had found that out afterwards, when he washed himself. How poignant. It was a curse to be so sensitive. Doomed to grasp for the spontaneous perfection of Celia’s sacrifice, over and over. Never quite reaching it.
The door to the terrace opened. He felt the red, throbbing glow of Georg’s energy without turning. “Have a glass of wine, Georg. Enjoy the pleasures of freedom. You refuse to relax. This puts us at risk.”
“I don’t want wine.”
Novak looked at him. The thick, shiny pink scar that marred Georg’s cheek was flushed scarlet over his prison pallor. His beautiful yellow hair had been shorn to stubble on his scalp, and his eyes were like glowing coals. “Are you sulking, Georg? I hate sulking.”
“Why won’t you let me just kill them?” Georg hissed. “I will be a fugitive for the rest of my life anyway. I don’t care if—”
“I want better than that for you, my friend. You cannot risk being taken again.”
“I have already made arrangements,” Georg said. “I will die before I go back to prison.”
“Of course you have. I thank you for your dedication,” Novak replied. “But you will see, when you are calmer, that my plan is better.”
Georg’s face was a mask of agony. “I cannot bear it. I am dying.” The words burst out in the obscure Hungarian dialect they shared.
Novak rose from his chaise and put down his wine. He placed the scarred stumps of his maimed hand against Georg’s ruined face. His cosmetic surgeons would improve matters, but the young man’s youthful perfection was gone forever. Another score to settle.
“Do you know why the butterfly must struggle to escape its chrysalis?” he asked, sliding into dialect himself.
Georg jerked his face away. “I am not in the mood for your fables.”
“Silence.” The nails of his left thumb and middle finger dug into Georg’s face. “It is the act of struggling that forces out the fluid from the butterfly’s