“I won’t let this go, you know,” Rhys warned. “You’re far too intriguing.”
“You’ll have to,” she said. “I’m already here and gone.”
“And if I were to ask you to stay?”
The waist-length, silver-white tendrils of her hair had taken on a luminous sheen under the streetlight. Hell, Rhys thought, she looked more like an elf than anything else. Another impulse came to touch her, just to make sure she was real and not a mirage. She hadn’t addressed any of his questions, but didn’t really have to. What had she said? She owed him nothing.
“Ghosts can’t fight. Noncorporeal bodies and all that,” he said, thinking hard about which gene pool she might have sprung from and again coming up short. “But you are very good with a blade.”
“Hate ghosts.” She took another backward step.
“What about Blood Knights? Do you hate them, too?”
“Would you deserve it?”
“You know about us, about who we are. Was that by rumor?”
“Plenty of rumors,” she said.
“If you travel in the kind of company that would spread those rumors, why haven’t I heard about you?”
“Maybe I’m not rumor-worthy.”
“I’m fairly sure no one could forget you after a glimpse. If your soul had been around for a while, someone would have seen you.”
“You’re right,” she agreed. “They wouldn’t have forgotten someone like me, which is why I don’t allow them that glimpse.”
As fun as this was, it was now clear to Rhys that this immortal wasn’t going to volunteer any real information about herself at all, even after sharing in his fight with the vampires. He was going to have to get those details some other way.
Smile widening, he said, “I do love a challenge.”
“Good for you. Now, you must let me go.”
“Or?”
“It will be a regrettable mistake in judgment.”
“Really? When we seem to be on the same side?”
“I value privacy above all other things.”
Rhys nodded. “If you stay in London, I will be able to find you.”
“I didn’t realize Blood Knight was synonymous for bloodhound.”
“Scent has strong power,” Rhys said. “Smells create memories. I can smell the power in you. Though as yet nameless, what you are rolls in my mind like a misplaced vision, sparking images I can’t see clearly. It has to be obvious to you that I need to sort that out.”
“Quite obvious,” she said. “Which is why you followed me in the first place. You’re not sure what I am or who I am. For a Guardian, that kind of void in information would be regrettable.”
“You would be curious in my place, I think.”
The whittled animal-bone handle of the blade that she clenched in her fist was a further sign of her Otherness. Most supernatural species could not touch any kind of metal.
Rhys wondered if she might use that blade on him if he pursued this line of inquiry.
“I watch here, for now,” he said. “I discern friend from foe and try to keep the peace when that task gets harder with each passing year.”
She waved her blade at the dusting of fine gray ash covering the pavement. “Yet, aren’t you and these creatures you call monsters distant cousins? In which case, one might reason that you and your knightly brothers have an obligation to cull their numbers in order to protect the humans these vampires prey upon.”
“More rumors?” Rhys said.
“Aren’t rumors often sparked by truth?”
Before he had time to reply, she closed the distance between them. From only inches away, her scent was much stronger. Her next move was unexpected. She touched him.
No, it was her blade that had touched him. Its sharp tip pierced a coin-sized hole in his coat. Rhys looked down at the knife, then at her. He quirked an eyebrow.
She lowered the blade and placed her cool, bare fingertips on his mouth. Rhys swayed and swallowed a rising groan of surprise. He held his breath as she traced the outline of his lips before gently pressing them back. He knew what she searched for and what she saw hidden there. Fangs.
“It would seem some rumors actually are true,” he said.
Wickedly placed inside the mouths of each of the seven men who had accepted the vows issued by their Makers at Castle Broceliande, those fangs were, like this female’s inked tattoos, not really good for anything. They were merely reminders that blood sipped from a holy relic is what had resurrected the seven men and sent them on a quest.
“This is what the Grail Quest did to you,” she said.
“In return for preventing that Grail from falling into the hands of others who might use its power to bestow immortality for another purpose,” Rhys said. “Imagine a world where the bad guys couldn’t be harmed.”
“No rumor, then.” She drew her hand back.
Rhys watched this female closely. The effects of her company were incredibly rich for an immortal who had never beheld a female of similar kind. She was enough like him to threaten his moratorium on seeking the companionship of others. Her touch, like her earlier light show, left an imprint, not only on Rhys’s mouth, but on his soul, as if she had branded him with the same fire that flickered in her eyes.
Rhys took a firm hold on her shoulders and pulled her closer, so that she had to look up to see his face. She did not use the knife or try to escape from what she had to know would come next.
All that fire...
All that heat...
He was so damn hungry for those things.
Daringly, Rhys rested his mouth on hers lightly, testing his resolve and hers. He waited, expecting a slam of protective power from her in honor of his transgression. But nothing like that came.
Her lips were as cool as her fingertips, and soft. She didn’t encourage him. Nor did she pull away when he deepened the pressure, breathing her in, tasting the sweetness of what lay behind the lushness he was invading. She was so very appealing.
She leaned into him and made a sound that was part groan and part whisper. In that sound lay a silent command...not for release, but for more.
He gave her that. And when her lips parted, the uncanny sense of familiarity returned so strongly that Rhys echoed the sound she had made. He knew her, didn’t he?
As his mouth captured hers, his hunger raged. Her spirit seemed to capture his spirit. She bent him to her will, commanding him to forget that familiarity he sought and bury it deep.
But she kissed him back, and the intimacy of the physical connection spiraled Rhys into a world where nothing other than the two of them existed, and the past, present and future became one.
Hell, if she was a demon, someone on the other side knew too much about the longings of a Blood Knight.
A draft of cool air drifted over him when her lips left his. Rhys opened his eyes to find himself alone. In a totally unacceptable move that had to have involved some kind of mind trick, the woman whose lips had so moved him had, like liquid moonlight, just melted away.
He stood beneath the streetlight, looking around, surprised to have been bested by the pale stranger. That was a first.
“All right,” he said, retrieving the dagger from his boot. “This game point goes to you, but the game isn’t over.”
Then