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Something woke me.
My skin felt tight, itchy. I should have felt relaxed, languid. I'd been fucked and fanged until I'd passed out with a smile on my face. The vampire had been next to me on the bed when I fell asleep. No idea if he still was. Didn't much care.
My nose twitched. I sneezed. Smoke tickled my nose, and the scent of burned flesh hit me.
I jerked up in bed just in time to see the vampire laying next to me go up in flames. His screams made my hung-over head pang with pain, but I didn't have time to nurse it, not when the figure standing over my bed made a disgusted sound.
I grabbed for the sheet to cover up my naked body from the stranger's gaze, but it burned up in my hands. Scowling, I batted away the flames until they dissipated. My eyes were blurry with sleep and smoke as I glared at the figure.
“Who the fuck are you?”
The blonde-haired man with not a hair of stubble on his chin pushed his glasses up his nose and frowned. “I'm surprised you don't recognize me, Adara.”
I did a double take.
Long legs, slender build that was covered up by a pair of navy-blue pants and jacket, his shirt crisp and white. I knew he had them pressed every night and always wore a pair of black loafers with them.
Letting out a disbelieving breath, I rubbed a hand over my face. “Alec.”
I stood and grabbed my robe off the side chair, fully aware of his eyes on my body. If it had been any other man than Alec, I’d have shown off a little. Maybe bent over or something... however...this was Alec. Maybe I would have a long time ago but not now. Not after everything that happened.
“My father let you out of his ass long enough to come to visit little old me?”
Alec’s jaw ticked, but he didn't comment. Instead, he nodded toward what was left of my bed. “I see you are still fucking the enemy. Your father would be disappointed to see you so relaxed around them. Sleeping like the dead. I’m surprised you're still alive.”
I smoothed my hands over my silk robe and hummed. My eyes moved to the ash of my recent lover. “Yes. Well, at least they tell me up front when they want to kill me.”
“Nobody tried to kill you.” The exasperation in his tone was old. We'd argued this point to death, but it would never change.
“Only everything I held dear.”
“He was a vampire, Addie.”
My eyes snapped up to lock with Alec's gaze at the use of my old nickname. “Don’t call me that. We're not friends. Not anymore.”
I shoved past him and moved across my small studio apartment. I pulled a mug from the cabinet and went about making coffee. I never forgot the deadly man standing in my living room.
It was a fight we would both never give in on, one that I’d had many times with my father, Jamal, head of the Phoenix Hunter Guild, the only demon hunter guild to last over a thousand years.
I was once part of that guild, once ready to be the leader of them all. Just like my father and his father before him and so on, until the beginning of our world.
Things change. I changed. The Phoenix Hunter Guild didn't change... or so my father told me.
So, I left.
They'd been trying to get me back ever since, but they must really be desperate if they sent Alec. His presence moved closer, but he didn't crowd me. He knew better.
“I didn't come here to fight.”
Pouring cream into my coffee, I snorted. “Just to kill my fun.”
“He was a vamp,” he scoffed.
As if that made a difference. Like I said, they never changed.
“That's always been your problem, Alec, yours and the guild’s.” I turned and leaned against the counter, gesturing my cup at him. “To you, everything is black and white. We good, they bad.” I took a sip of my coffee, letting it warm me inside. “You never took the time to ask them why.”
Alec laughed, a bitter sound as he rubbed his lower lip. “I don’t need to ask why a demon does what it does. It's evil. There's nothing good there, only blood and pain. If you see anything else, they are playing with you, or you are further gone than we all thought.”
I stared him down, my dark eyes never blinking over the lip of my cup. “What do you want Alec? Why are you here?”
Something flashed behind those pretty blue eyes of his, and his mouth opened like he wanted to say something but then thought better of it. Instead, he cleared his throat and straightened himself as his hands laced in front of him. It was a mask he wore, one that said this was guild business.
The blank stare. The prim press of his lips. The mask was meant to separate us from our work. It was just business.
I had one of those too, or at least I used to.
Of all the things I expected Alec to say, nothing prepared me for the words that came out of his mouth. “Your father is missing.”