LYRIC TUGGED THE towel from her wet hair and pulled a thick hank around to inspect because the hotel room mirror wasn’t going to help. Her pale tresses had been obliterated, to be replaced with dull, dumpy brown. She’d refused to let Vail help her put the color in, which had proved a challenge, keeping it off her skin. She was still angry with him over allowing her to die.
Had she been dead? Her neck had been broken. She’d lost a few minutes of perception. What if the worm wraith had staked her in that time?
She eased a hand around her neck for the dozenth time. Head still on, so that meant something. And Vail had beat off the bad guy. An attacker, she sensed, who had been much stronger than Vail, and determined to kill them both to get what he wanted—her. She should be thankful.
She was thankful. For the most part.
The sidhe had been after her because someone had put a price on her head? Apparently, she’d escaped her deadly fate only to step even closer to it.
She should tell Vail everything. He would know how to help her. Or it was possible the truth would piss him off and, tired of her danger, he’d hand her over to Zett himself.
She couldn’t risk that happening.
Vail waited out in the main room. The small one-bed, fifty-euro-a-night heap that he’d rented in the twentieth arrondissement was far from city center. And far from the circle of what she knew. Lyric was a city girl and moved and existed where she was comfortable, which was within the circle of the first six or seven quarters.
You really need to get out more.
“You can’t even fake a kidnapping right.” She pulled out the hem of the dowdy T-shirt she’d bought to wear for this procedure. It was covered with dark dribbles of hair color. “I can’t believe I didn’t plan that Charish would send someone after me so quickly.”
It was supposed to go smoothly. She had got out of the house, stashed the gown and contacted Leo about finding someone to remove the mark and, well, then…
But when she’d been ready to throw in the towel, so to speak—she tossed the color-stained towel into the cracked bathtub—Vail had stepped up, grabbed her hand and offered the support she’d needed.
In a manner.
Why? What did he see in her? It couldn’t be anything beyond the great sex. Though when he’d grabbed her hand to walk into the store earlier she’d felt special, as if she belonged to him and he was hers. And how weird was that? Just from hand-holding?
“You’re not a teenager anymore, Lyric. Men want women for more than holding hands.” She sighed. “But I’ll take it for what it was. Which felt pretty cool at the time.” And so what if her heart still acted like a teenage girl?
Vail had his own reasons for pursuing the answers in this case. He seemed to know Zett. Likely he did if he’d lived in Faery. Was Vail’s keeping her in hand some kind of vengeance against the faery lord?
She didn’t want to know, didn’t want the betrayal. Vail was the first male vampire Lyric had truly got along with, despite his obvious dislike for their breed. The fact he was an amazing lover was awesome, but that he’d developed the need to protect her meant even more. No one had ever stepped up the way he had for her, not even her brother, Leo.
“How’s it look?” he called.
Lyric considered pulling off the T-shirt and walking into the bedroom bare breasted so he’d be distracted from the awful hair, but decided it was time she acted as smart as he thought she was.
Vail lay stretched across the bed on his stomach. He whistled when Lyric sashayed in and fluffed at the miserable hair. “Not too shabby.”
“Shabby is the perfect word for this.” She sat beside him, her shoulders sagging. “This is awful. Do I have to have this color forever?”
“Just until we figure out the secret deal and why Zett wants you dead. I think it’s pretty.”
“It looks like mud.”
“Lyric, the color of your hair has little to do with my perception of you. Nor do your dazzling white teeth, or those bright blue eyes. Or your gorgeous full breasts and soft, sexy skin.” He rolled to his back and slid a palm over her heart. “This matters, though.”
“Since when did you become all mushy and romantic? Two days ago you wanted to bag my ass and haul me back to Mommy. The sex can’t be that good.”
“The sex is beyond good. And I am allowed to like you for more than just the physical, aren’t I? I like you, Lyric. I like what you’re about. Daring, fearless.”
She chuffed. If he only knew how desperately fearful she’d become.
“And the fact you trust me, a messed-up bloodsucker who thinks he’s a faery, is tremendous.”
“We’re all messed up. You just show it more. It isn’t every day a guy will let the big bad assassin kill his girl.”
“How long are you going to hold that against me?”
“Some time close to forever.”
“Good thing I have forever.”
She touched the corner of his eye where it sparkled. “How long do you think it would take you to get clean of dust?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care. Because it’s not going to happen.”
“Right.” Because he didn’t think he had a problem.
Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he did need the ichor to maintain. She hadn’t seen him acting high or out of sorts. Dust freaks could rage, act manic and paranoid if not given the high they craved. But seeing his blood all over his shirt now, glittering with ichor, was too much.
They were too different, yet, to be the hand-holding pair she hoped for.
“So what’s next?” she asked.
“I put a call in to a friend. He’s asking around about your mother’s deal with Zett. If the rumor mill is ablaze with me kidnapping you, it’s got to contain some spark about your mother’s deal. Said he’d call me back.”
Should she tell him what she knew? No, the time didn’t feel right. And she needed to make a call of her own. “So we’re going to sit in this dump until the phone rings?”
His thumb grazed her nipple beneath the thin T-shirt. “We can sit. Or lie down. Or you can sit and I can lie down. Or I can put you up against the wall, standing.”
“You have a one-track mind, vampire.”
“Don’t you want your new brunette self to get laid? Baptism by orgasm?”
She tugged her hair into a ponytail and twisted it. “Sounds like a holy ritual I can get—”
“Bloody Herne!” Vail flew off the bed as if by magical force.
Arms raised behind her head with her hair in hand, Lyric twisted around to see the vampire pointing at her, mouth gaping and eyes wide. “What?” Oh, hell. She dropped her hair.
“You’ve a faery mark!”
* * *
HER DEEPEST, DARKEST SECRET had just been ripped wide open. One stupid moment of basking in Vail’s charming flirtations, and she’d let it slip.
All her life Lyric had been careful to never allow anyone to see the thin luminous mark, which swept behind the curve of her right ear. Always she wore her hair long and over her ears. Though she liked the way it looked pulled up, that hadn’t been an option since she was a teenager.
How could she have let down her guard?
You’re starting to trust him. You knew he would prove dangerous, you just didn’t know the danger would be to your heart.
The jig was up. And honestly, Lyric felt relief loosen her muscles. Tilting her head and stroking her hair back and aside, she displayed the faery mark for him to inspect.
Vail approached cautiously, but she sensed it was such a remarkable discovery he couldn’t be sure how to take it. He didn’t get close enough to touch, yet craned his neck to examine what looked like a finger had smeared a trail of bioluminescence on her skin. It was marked at the bottom with a fingerprint, Leo had told her, after he’d inspected his sister’s mark. Leo was the only one she’d ever dared tell.
“Whose mark?” Vail whispered. “And…how? Why? Faeries don’t…”
“Like vampires,” she finished for him in a quiet breath.
“We hate vampires,” he said. “I mean—”
“I know what you mean.”
She couldn’t expect him to side with her. He had decades of ingrained belief to overcome. And why should she expect him to change to please her?
“How’d you get it?” he asked. “From who?”
“It’s Zett’s mark.”
“What?” His shout hurt her ears, and Lyric winced and tugged the hair back over her ear.
Vail stumbled backward, catching his heel on the wooden chair by the broken television, and sat, slapping his palms to the chair arms with a loud crack. The disgust on his face stretched through his entire tense musculature.
It shamed Lyric, and for good reason. She felt as small and helpless now as she had after her brother had initially berated her for allowing it to happen.
“I’ll explain,” she offered quietly. “It’s not what you think it is.”
“I have no earthly idea what it could possibly be. Zett would never—” Vail shoved a hand through his hair. “Hell, I don’t know anymore. Apparently there is something about you he desires enough to— I wish you would have revealed that little secret right away.”
“So you could have turned me over immediately? Not started to care about me?”
“I don’t—” He sighed and thumbed his chin. “I do. I just… Fuck, Lyric, do you know what that mark means?”
His voice had taken on an emotionless tone she guessed was not new to him. A means of putting up a wall. She knew that trick. She’d been doing it since she was a teenager.
“Of course I know what it means. It’s haunted me every day and night since I was a teenager.”
She sat on the bed, careful not to face Vail directly, because it felt like an intrusion into the shield his intense emotions cast before him.
“I met Zett when I was thirteen,” she explained. “It was summer, and my mother had packed me off to summer camp, as usual. I hadn’t hit puberty yet, so I was just another silly mortal girl to any who would wonder.”
She couldn’t erase a wistful smile over memories of camp. And the sun. The curse of the bloodborn vampire was they got to grow up as if a normal mortal, eating, drinking, and enjoying the warmth of the sun upon their skin, until the blood hunger took it all away.
“I met Zett one night after campfire, when most of the others were in their cabins readying for bed. I’d gone for a walk in the woods behind our cabin, gathering daisies for a chain—”
She wasn’t swayed by Vail’s mocking expression.
“He told me he was a faery prince. You can imagine I was enchanted.”
Vail grunted and caught his chin against his fist.
“I didn’t believe he was a real faery, but my thirteen-year-old, angsting teenage heart wanted it to be true. You probably don’t have a clue how a teenage girl’s heart works. Suffice to say, it was dramatic and pining and desperate for any facsimile of love.”
It still worked that way. Only now it was more cautious.
“Zett was my first kiss.”
She heard Vail’s quiet intake of breath, but continued, needing to get it all out while she still had the courage.
“He touched me behind my ear, though I wouldn’t know it was a claiming mark until my brother explained it to me, and swore me never to tell my mother.
“Zett apparently had no idea I was vampire. He didn’t come for me after that. The years passed and I thought I was in the clear. Leo was relieved. Until last month. I knew I was being followed by faeries and guessed they were Zett’s men. They must have witnessed me drinking blood from a mortal and reported back to the Unseelie lord. I received a polite request, by letter, to meet Zett in the forest.”
“You went to him?” Vail asked, incredulous.
“Of course not. I’m not stupid. I also wasn’t stupid enough to believe the attempt on my life two weeks ago from a speeding car wasn’t related. So when Charish told me she’d made a deal with a faery lord, I knew right away what Zett was up to. He’d found a more sinister way to get at me through my mother, who was completely unaware of the mark.”
Vail slammed a fist on the chair arm, breaking it from the body of the chair. He stood and paced. “I can’t believe this.”
“But it’s the truth. I had no idea when a faery marked someone it meant that faery intended to someday claim the person as their—”
“Bride,” Vail blurted. “Zett marked you as his fucking bride.”