Shadowmaster

Either someone at Aegis had given her very bad information, as this man had told her, or her instincts had been dangerously off. But she didn’t think hearing a man offer to buy her for “five hundred A-dollars” would inspire much confidence in even the most desperate fugitive.

She could honestly say she’d been incredibly lucky. This Boss’s treatment of her had been no worse than she might have expected from any one of his kind, likely better than most. He was handsome, most definitely, with his defined features, gray eyes and auburn hair. Strong and fast, his movements swift and graceful. He had struck her right away as being someone extraordinary.

Even so, she hadn’t been sure until she’d seen the faint red reflection behind his otherwise very normal-looking eyes. His incisors were covered in some way she couldn’t quite define. She’d been luckier—or unluckier—than she or Aegis could possibly have imagined.

The man who had “saved” her from The Preacher wasn’t human. After the first shock had passed, Phoenix had quickly realized that neither his fellow Boss nor either of their crews knew what he was. His coloring told her he must be a Daysider—one of those very human-looking “mutant” Opiri who could walk in daylight without suffering fatal burns—and Daysiders looked very human to most non-Opiri. The headlamp he wore wasn’t just protective camouflage, since his breed couldn’t see nearly as well in the dark as dhampires or other Nightsiders. But he seemed to have forgotten that no ordinary man or woman could keep up with him, and that he was supposedly leading a human female to safety.

What he believed to be a human female.

He didn’t seem even remotely concerned about what he might have revealed, but if he believed her story, he wouldn’t expect a govrat to be looking for Opiri in the city.

And this Opir had done very well for himself by becoming a turf Boss. He couldn’t be the assassin Drakon, since no one less than a Freeblood—the lowest rank among full-blooded Opiri—could be trusted with such a task, and only a true Nightsider could operate in the dark with complete freedom.

But any Opir in the Enclave had to know who and where the assassin was hiding. This was too big an operation for one agent to handle alone. Others would be helping him make preparations. All resources would be thrown behind the killer, regardless of the danger to the other spies in San Francisco.

“I knew it could be a fatal risk coming out here,” she’d told him. She had been warned that the Fringe could be dangerous, but now that she’d seen it—seen how people were forced to live, families scraping by on whatever discarded material they could find, raiding garbage bins in the Mids, forced into theft and worse by the very need to survive and protect those under their care—she understood why the Fringers might attack an outsider.

It had made her feel sick, this suffering...a feeling she’d had to force aside as a distraction she couldn’t afford. And any trouble from the people here was by far outweighed by the incredibly delicate and deadly task of prying information out of her “captor” without getting herself summarily killed or, almost as likely, smuggled out of the city and shipped right off to Erebus for interrogation.

Phoenix wondered if he’d accepted her implausible story about the new anti-torture conditioning. What she did have was an implant in one of her molars, the old reliable standby of covert agents since well before the War.

But she wasn’t nearly ready to die. She’d completed Phase One of the operation: making a connection with someone influential in the Fringe, one who could help her locate an Opir operative. The Preacher, or another like him, was to have provided the necessary access, but she’d bypassed that step entirely. Phase Two, finding an Opir spy, was also complete.

That was all she was supposed to do. Phase Three, pinning down the location of the assassin Drakon’s hiding place, was to be the work of a more experienced agent. She should have been making plans to escape and return to Aegis.

But not yet. Not quite yet. She was in too good a position to give it up now. Even though Aegis wouldn’t know how far she’d already come, they’d follow through with their part of the plan by continuing the search for the “fugitive.” And when she finally did return, she’d have plenty to give them.

Now the Daysider’s silence was heavy, as if his mind was focused on weighty matters...as well it should be. But she knew he was thinking of other, more personal subjects, as well, not the least of which was her body.

She’d been well aware of his arousal; it had been impossible not to be, given the impressive size of his package. She could still smell his desire for her like a heady perfume, even though she could no longer see the way his pale gray eyes followed every slight move of her body.

She’d planned to keep him from realizing that she knew what he was as long as possible, and prevent him from finding out what she was, until she had no other choice but to consciously make use of her true nature. But if part of his nearly instantaneous and obviously powerful attraction to her was due to the scent of her part-dhampir blood, she had no idea how long her secret could last.

“Lark,” he said.

She almost—almost—forgot to respond to her alias.

“Was the information you plan to sell to me the reason your government believed you’d betray them?” he asked, resuming their conversation as if there had never been a break. “Or was it something else?”

Phoenix thought through her cover story. There was still something about her claims he wasn’t buying.

“Okay,” she said with a shrug. “I found some...stuff that I thought might bring in a little extra income. They don’t pay us govrats that much, you know. Not at my clearance level.”

“What stuff?” he asked, his husky baritone sending unwelcome shivers down her spine.

“Just a little persuasion,” she said. “A politician who’d rather not have anyone know he keeps a little something on the side.”

He snorted. “And they caught you?”

“They only found out at the last minute who did it.”

“And you were stupid enough to risk so much without taking sufficient precautions.”

“Maybe I needed the money fast.”

“Why?”

“Do I have to tell you my life story to get you to help me?”

“You’ll have to provide a lot more than that if you want our help.”

“Isn’t that what this conversation is all about?”

The chair he was sitting on creaked, and she turned her head to follow the sound of his progress around the small room.

“It isn’t only the Enforcers who are chasing you,” he said. “Not if you’ve been declared a traitor. Traitors are the ones who might reveal things to the bloodsuckers that could bring the Enclave down.”

“And you think I—” She gulped in a breath. “I don’t have that kind of information. And everyone knows the Nightsiders are evil monsters. Why would any Cit pass Enclave secrets on to those who would only enslave her?”

“Aegis must think you have those kinds of secrets,” he said. “They could be sweeping the Fringe in an hour.”

“I didn’t access Aegis files! I can’t even get near them!”

His weight—his heat, his warmth, his maleness—settled beside her on the bed. “Are you telling me the truth?” he asked, very softly.

“I—” For a moment she forgot what she was about to say, enveloped in the blatant desire emanating from him.

“It would be safer for me to turn you in,” he said. “Anonymously, of course.”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

His breath sighed very close to her lips. “You don’t know what I’m capable of,” he said.

“You warned me about The Preacher, even before he—”

“Maybe my motives weren’t very different from his.”

“Didn’t you say you wouldn’t molest me?”

“I wouldn’t take any woman against her will.”

But the rough purr in his voice told her exactly what he meant by will. She’d been prepared for this. She’d been ready to offer her body in payment for what she had to have, regarding it as no more than part of her mission.

The problem was that her body was responding to his nearness, his potent masculinity, as powerfully as he was reacting to her. And her mind was refusing to think of using that body as just a tool in a war for the Enclave’s survival. Her nerves hummed in response to the aura of sheer sexual need that surrounded him, and she realized that she had somehow developed a very personal, visceral interest in her “savior.”

Her enemy.

“Before we go any further,” she said, “would you mind telling me your name?”