Dancer's Flame (Grace Bloods Book 2) Read online

  He emerged beside Lysippe where the trees circled an enormous fountain. The shadow of the old winter palace, long ago closed up, loomed in the background. Without a word, he followed her gaze.

  Isela danced in the moonlight, clothed only in the spill of her sleep-tousled hair. She’d been in the fountain; water curled the ends of her hair into tighter spirals and dappled over the velvet expanse of her brown skin. The pale moonlight caught in droplets and glittered like jewels. Her muscles bunched and lengthened as she swept through wild, uncoordinated movements.

  Arousal jetted through him even as the hair on his arms stood on end.

  Rory was on patrol, Lysippe said. She said nothing on her way out, refused to respond to him at all. He called me when she started—

  Her brow rose. Isela cartwheeled, missed the landing, and tumbled into the snow, laughing. Snow clumped in her hair, mud on her elbows and knees. He’d seen her perform more acrobatic maneuvers—she was as sure on her hands as her feet. She didn’t fall. Something was not right.

  Thank you, he said.

  Lysippe dropped back into the shadow of the trees. Azrael turned his attention to his consort.

  “Little wolf,” he called softly.

  She didn’t respond. He stepped forward. She was on her feet again, dancing. The movements were uncontrolled and uncoordinated, like a child’s.

  “Isela.”

  She froze, deerlike, and turned to him. He shivered. He’d followed the contours of her face a hundred times with his fingertips. Fast asleep or in the throes of passion, he knew it. Whatever was looking out at him wore her features like a mask.

  He switched to the oldest tongue, the one he used to summon the dead and command the pure strength of his powers. It was said gods had no language before humans danced for them, but that wasn’t entirely true. Most humans had just forgotten it by then.

  “Goddess,” he said.

  Eyes the color of molten gold fixed on him. “Begone, death dealer. This night is mine.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Her heart was heavy; I offered to lighten it.” The goddess curled around herself as if cradling a baby to her breasts. “She sleeps. Safe as a babe.”

  “This was not the agreement you made.”

  The goddess flung out her arms as she stalked toward him. Her mouth curved, teasing. “How do you know what bargain was made between her and me, O lord of death?”

  She slid against him. Her nipples, pebbled with cold, brushed his chest as her frozen arms wrapped around his neck. His body responded and she smiled knowingly.

  “I know Isela,” he said into the brilliant gilded pools of her eyes. “She would not want this.”

  “She wanted you so badly she would have agreed to anything.” Her mouth brushed his, tongue darting out to lick his lips. “Now I know why.” She ground her hips into his.

  His arousal throbbed, painful. She danced her fingertips down his chest, nails leaving tracks as they went.

  “Come, death dealer,” she whispered. “Let this night be ours. Do you think you can bring a goddess to her knees?”

  He trapped her wrist before she reached his waistband. “Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong, goddess. It was she who brought me to mine.”

  Her eyes flicked up at him again, startled. He twisted her wrist behind her back, drawing her against his chest.

  “She chose you.” He sent his breath directly into her mouth, imbuing the words with power enough that Isela, wherever she was inside, would hear him. “I chose her. And I will always choose her.”

  She shuddered in his arms, eyes narrowed. “You would rather have…”

  “A hundred thousand times,” he affirmed. “Make your choice. But know you are nothing to me without her.”

  She pursed her lips, and he felt the power building in her. Even weakened by being bound to mortal flesh, she was still a god. While necromancers commanded individual elements, the gods could overrule the laws of nature. He had no way of knowing exactly what Isela could do. With the goddess in control, he was afraid to find out.

  He sent a warning to the Aegis, the elite warriors that served him. He felt Lysippe respond in the affirmative, but she refused to stand down. Gregor, too, kept coming. The best chance he had of keeping them all safe was getting through to Isela. He wrapped his arms around her, locking her to him.

  “She is my consort.” He hissed the words into Isela’s ear. “You are a guest. Now honor your vow, and wake her up.”

  Isela’s body stiffened in his arms, and for a moment he prepared to battle with the divine. Abruptly, she sagged in his arms and he softened his knees to catch her.

  “Azrael?” Isela’s teeth chattered.

  He slipped the robe over her shoulders and swept her off her feet, sending a wave of heat into her body. She clutched at him, fingers scrabbling.

  The clouds covered the moon, and it began to snow. She shivered.

  “I wasn’t dreaming?” She glanced around them.

  “No, love,” he murmured, nodding to Lysippe as he passed.

  “Oh gods.” Isela flushed as the Amazon retreated. “I’m so cold.”

  “In the oldest days,” he murmured, “women danced under the moon to pray for fertility or to thank the goddess in abundant years or because they’d had a bit too much to drink and it was a good time.”

  She rested her head against his shoulder, her cheek warmer now. Even her breath came in a rhythm as familiar as his own heartbeat.

  “Naked?”

  “It was more effective that way,” he said with a grin.

  “I’ll bet.”

  “The gods, attracted by the beauty of their dancing, came into the bodies of men and danced with them,” he said. “And that is how necromancers and witches came into the world.”

  Her eyes sought his in the dark. No longer pools of gold but stormy gray, and he sighed in relief.

  “Truly?”

  They’d reached the building. Rory and Gregor stood guard at the door. When Azrael appeared, both men slid into the darkness. Isela flushed at Rory’s disapproving glare.

  “They must think I’m a lunatic,” she muttered as Azrael closed the door behind them.

  “If one believes the moon causes intermittent insanity,” Azrael whispered against the shell of her ear. “Perhaps.”

  Isela smiled.

  “They’ve seen—we’ve all seen—much stranger things,” he said. “You only suffer from a mild case of possession—a voluntary case, I might add.”

  She was laughing by the time he mounted the stairs. He set her on her feet by the hearth, then stoked the fire. She dusted bits of decayed leaves and dirt from her palms, and he brushed a smear of mud from her hip. She shivered. When he looked up, she was watching him. He knew the contours of her face again and the emotion her eyes contained—the question in her brows, the doubt turning her mouth down.

  “I should take a shower.”

  He heard the need for distance in her voice and let her go.

  When she emerged, robed with velvety fawn skin pinked about the edges from the hot water, he waited with an old T-shirt and a plate piled high from their recently stocked refrigerator.

  The smile that creased her mouth didn’t lift the shadows from her eyes. “What is this?”

  He beckoned to the ottoman by the fire and the place he’d made for her between his thighs. She settled, lightly bracing on her right hip. It was old habit from her human life, where a degenerative hip joint had threatened her career as a dancer. The goddess had taken care of that, and she was growing stronger and faster, closer to immortality every day. But old habits died hard. Gradually she relaxed with a little sigh.

  “Close your eyes,” he instructed, handing off the T-shirt.

  This time the smile quirked her mouth with more strength.

  “Bossy.” She sighed, squeezing the moisture out of her hair and dramatically closing her eyes.

  He chose an olive, the shiny, deep purple skin plump against his fingers. Lift
ed it. He didn’t even need to get it close to her nose.

  “Kalamata.”

  Her lips parted in anticipation. He followed the olive with the tip of his finger, the pad of her lip pushing against him as she chewed.

  “Salty,” she said, opening one eye.

  “Eyes closed,” he rumbled.

  Obediently she closed her eyes, but this time her lips remained parted.

  He swiped pita in hummus.

  She nibbled. “Red peppers, cilantro, and garlic. Are you sure about that?”

  He wiped a fleck of hummus from the corner of her mouth. Arousal flared again, held at bay. He tamped it down and ate the rest of the slice himself. “We’re even.”

  He didn’t touch her other than to steer food into her mouth or clean it up. She leaned into him, the tight lines of her face softening, the smile infusing her cheeks and the corners of her eyes. Once he had been able to read her mind. Now he relied on her body to tell him what he needed to know.

  “What is this?” she asked after chewing roasted cashews, pistachios, and a few salty almonds.

  “A reminder,” he said, plucking the last of his selections. It was room temperature now, softening and growing shiny in the heat of his fingertips. “This body is yours. Its desire and tastes are yours.”

  Her inhale was deep and slow, and the smile that curled her mouth would have reached her eyes if they’d been open. “How did you know?”

  She bit into the date, chewing.

  “I have my ways,” he said.

  She opened one eye. “Did you read someone’s mind?”

  “I spoke with your mother. She mentioned that dates were your favorite.”

  Both eyes popped open. “You what?”

  “Eyes closed,” he ordered. “Taste is richer without sight. You never wondered why you lost weight after you started dancing with your ‘golden shadow’?”

  She finished the date, swallowed. “I thought it was the stress. Running from demons takes a lot out of a girl.”

  He huffed laughter, and when her fingers crooked in invitation, he pressed another date between her lips. “It takes an extraordinary amount of physical energy to communicate with the gods. Most possessions that go on too long simply burn out the human body. Something different is happening with you. You’re able to contain her without extraordinary cost, and you’re getting stronger and faster. You will need to consume more—at least until whatever you are becoming stabilizes. And you haven’t been.”

  Grief was a strange companion. It showed up without warning and lingered long past its expected departure. If it wasn’t given its due, it took in other ways. Already thinner from the burden of the god, he’d watched her open and close the refrigerator without making a selection and pick at the meals sent up from the kitchen.

  “But these dates…” Her voice drifted, hesitating. Her breath caught, and she struggled with the words. The tip of her nose flushed bright pink. “My dad.”

  “Used to take you on Sunday afternoons to a little shop in Žižkov owned by a Tunisian family,” he finished, brushing the tear from her cheek before it could reach her chin. His fingers left a sticky trail. “A well-kept secret—they import the finest Deglet Noor dates in the city. You would play with their children, and your father would practice his Darja. He had a passion for languages.”

  She covered her mouth with her hand to contain the sob. He trapped her fingers.

  “You try to run from your sadness,” he said. “It is part of you. Any part you reject is an opening for her. Own your grief, Isela.”

  She crumpled and he collected her, mouth moving over the sticky marks on her cheeks.

  “What did he smell like?” Azrael asked. Isela’s legendary sense of smell was one of the few traits granted by her father’s were genes. Isela had inherited a complex sense of smell that was both specific and associative. He waited for her to collect the memories within.

  “Hazelnuts,” she said, and her voice broke. “He kept them in his desk as a snack when he was working.” She paused. “And sand. When we lived in California, he would take us to the beach every chance he got. I was too young to remember much. But he always smelled like warm beach sand.”

  His lips moved over the damp waves of her hair, scenting only her conditioner and the faintest hint of soap beneath. “Memories are anchors. I’ve been thinking this is what necromancers lost. We made it easy to behave inhumanly because we try to forget we once were, that once we may have loved someone. It’s not always easy. To remember. Memories can mean loss; loss means pain.”

  At last she tilted her head up, her eyes ringed with red but dry again. She dabbed at her nose. “Who do you remember?”

  The tongue of his birth came easily to him now. He translated. “Copper. My first horse.”

  She laughed, drawing back to dab at her nose. But this time the laughter went all the way to the stormy gray of her eyes, and he slid his fingertips along her jawline, watching the heat build in them in answer to his own.

  “My sisters,” he said. “They were my constant. My mother was… absent often, my grandmother too old and well known to be more than a legend. My brothers were much older, one had a left to follow a woman from another band. My sisters— were always there.”

  “Your father?”

  “I did not know my father.” Age had given him distance from the emotion. “It was not uncommon. In my bala, lineage was determined by the mother.”

  “But that wasn’t it for you, was it,” she said. “Your mother danced with a god one night, under the moon.”

  “Perhaps.”

  He’d asked once. Most of the others his age had some indication of their father from looks or habits. A few of their mothers even maintained their partnerships. The presence of his siblings confirmed his mother’s occasional dalliances, but she had named no man as the equal in her tent. She spent little time among the bala. One sunny afternoon he found her crouched beside the front hooves of her favorite mount, a blade of long grass in her teeth as she watched the herds move along the river. Her horse lifted its head and blew out a greeting to his as he swung down, humbled and embarrassed as she took him in without turning her head. But she did not move. So he crouched beside her, glancing out over the backs of grazing horses.

  Side by side, he noted their differences. The way the skin on her arms had burned and freckled with sun while his grew dark gold like the tall grasses in fall. The fine rippled strands of her hair bleached sun bright at the end of the long tangled plaits trailing down her back, his heavy in thick waves over his collar. He was scrawny for his age and dirty from an afternoon of playing with the other boys. She was long limbed and strong.

  They spoke of many things. His chores. His education. His role in the family. He answered, and she seemed pleased. Emboldened at last, he asked. After a long moment, his mother rose, her joints creaking as she moved to her horse’s saddle.

  The sleek animal, the color of hammered steel, pinned her ears at his little chestnut gelding and showed teeth. By the time Azrael had calmed his gelding, his mother was mounted.

  “I had much regard for your father though he was not of our world,” she said. “We will not speak of it again.”

  Azrael spoke to Isela. “It was a story I was never told.”

  “Does it bother you?” Isela asked.

  Azrael shook his head. “I left my home when I was twelve. Losing my sisters, even my mother, caused more pain than the absence of a man I had never known. But that is a story for another night.”

  He pressed his lips to her brow as she tried to bite down on a yawn. “Sleep now.” Her frown creased the skin beneath his lips. “No geas. I promise. I will call you back. I will always call you back.”

  He sat up for a long time by the fire after she had succumbed to exhaustion. The memories had come haltingly at first, buried by time. But as he forced himself to recall them, they became clearer and more complete.

  We protect always the vulnerable, she’d said that day among the
scent of horses and fresh grass on the windswept rise. What good is your strength if not for that service? What other purpose for your anger than righteous cause?

  Two thousand years later, far from the steppes of his home, the words were clear as springwater in winter.

  I will be your shield. Isn’t that what he’d promised Isela?

  Azrael, the immortal necromancer who controlled all of Europe, poured his own coffee.

  Isela watched, amused at the sight of him stirring in enough sugar to make the caffeine negligible. Her lover. If she stopped to think about it, it was a terrifying prospect. She’d seen him rip a man’s spine from his body, and still she’d taken him to her bed. She’d become his consort in part for her own protection against the rest of the Allegiance of Necromancers that ruled the world. Chasing down a supernatural killer bent on revenge had brought them together. But she could not deny her attraction to him or the way he responded in kind. Somewhere along the way, they’d chosen one another. As he’d said once, she was his and she was home.

  For a moment, standing in the kitchen of his expansive quarters on the grounds of the Prague castle, overlooking gardens and the summer palace, life seemed refreshingly mundane. She imagined one of the many ordinary mornings they might have together. Sugar with coffee for Azrael, tea for her. A discussion about their day.

  “You told Divya, I presume.”

  The director of the Praha Dance Academy was on a first-name basis with few of her students. She counted Isela among her own children. She had seen Isela’s potential as a child. Potential Isela had fulfilled in ways no one, not even Divya, had expected. Isela no longer danced for gods. But if she could teach… “Divya’s been holding the position for me since New Year’s. Classes have already started.”

  “Channeling a god was not an accident. You are special, Isela, different from the others.”

  No matter how nice he made it sound, dread built in her.

  “I believe you would have connected with a god on your own,” he said. “The Allegiance warned me when we began searching for the killer—”