Archangel’s Enigma (Guild Hunter #8)(18)
Author: Nalini Singh

The blade will give you a way to earn your place in the world.

As it was, she hadn’t had to sell her sword to find precious freedom. But when she’d broken away from her parents while still technically a child, it had given her the confidence to believe she could protect herself on the skyroads. Her sword and a small pack of belongings was all she’d had when she arrived in the Refuge and petitioned Jessamy for the learning so long denied her.

Charisemnon used scholars but didn’t respect them. He respected only strength—and in his court, that meant cruelly hardened men and women who could mete out pain and torture and humiliation without blinking, who could make a living being beg and crawl and bleed. Lailah had learned that lesson at her father’s knee, and she’d raised Andromeda in a home as filled with brutal violence . . . and as redolent with the smell of sex.

The more deviant the better.

Andromeda’s parents were beyond jaded at this point.

I promise I will learn and I will treat the Library and the Archives with respect, she’d said to Jessamy that long-ago day. I will not harm any of the volumes. The last she’d had to add because it wasn’t every would-be scholar who came from parents who’d been banned from the Archives. I want to learn. To have a chance to be more than a puppet driven by pain and obsessive sexual need. Please, teach me. Please.

Stepping far too close to her, his bare upper body a sensual temptation she had to gird herself to resist, Naasir said, “What does Dahariel ask in return?”

Andromeda’s heart squeezed, the ache deep and old. “Nothing,” she whispered, remembering what Dahariel had said to the girl she’d been.

Maybe you are my one good deed. But there is only so much good in me and I’ve spent it all on this—expect nothing more.

“We should get some rest,” she said, to stop Naasir from following up on her answer. “We start the hunt tomorrow.”

Naasir didn’t get out of her way. Reaching out, he curled an escapee tendril of her hair around his fingers. “Tell me of the Grimoire.”

Andromeda didn’t back away. That would give the wrong signal to this vampire who wasn’t a vampire. He was a predator and she did not want to become prey. “It is legend that the Grimoire was a record of secret things, beings, and treasures, all of which have been long lost in time.”

Naasir tugged on the tendril he’d captured. “You like secrets?”

“I like hunting them.”

A wicked, dangerous smile. “So do I.”

Somehow, Andromeda didn’t think he was talking about the kind of slow, methodical research that was her preferred method of the hunt.

*   *   *

Dawn came in soft washes of color on the horizon. After speaking to the guards on duty at Raphael’s stronghold, where she was currently staying, Andromeda took a walk along the top of the cliffs that overlooked the gorge. Since she had no intention of being kidnapped by Lijuan’s people, she stayed within sight of the stronghold and the guards.

Yes, she could defend herself with the knives she wore strapped to her thighs under her airy mint green gown, but she wouldn’t win against a squadron of trained warriors. Better not to take the risk—and it was no hardship to keep her morning walk to this part of the Refuge. It was peaceful, few angels having yet left their homes or aeries, while none of the vampires in the Refuge seemed to be up and about.

In the calm, she found her center again.

Discipline. Serenity. Learning.

The three foundations on which she’d built her chosen life.

Wild silver eyes and a sword dance that still made her breath catch.

Andromeda shook her head, fisted her hands, and closing her eyes, drew deep of the crisp air of a mountain dawn. There was no room in her life for Naasir’s brand of wildness; she only had two precious weeks to build emotional shields tough enough to survive five hundred years in hell. Those shields had to be created of absolute discipline and steel will.

Feeling the slap of wind against her cheek that signaled a nearby angelic landing, she opened her eyes. She was determined to be polite in spite of the rudeness of such a close landing, but her polite smile disappeared the instant she saw the razor-sharp cheekbones and red-streaked dark gray wings of the black-haired angel bare inches in front of her.

Xi. One of Lijuan’s generals.

Andromeda didn’t hesitate; she stepped backward off the cliff and snapped out her wings . . . but Xi hadn’t come alone. Panic buffeted her as her wings were caught in the fine threads of the net that had been waiting for her. There was no chance to recover or to go for her blades. They had her tightly wrapped within heartbeats.