Shadowmaster
Brita opened her mouth to say something inadvisable when a woman came running out of the darkness. She halted suddenly when she saw the Fringe crews, looking about wildly as if to seek escape.
The first thing Drakon noticed about her was the cloud of dark hair flying around her panicked face. The second was that she was quite beautiful. And clearly not of the Fringe.
“Shit,” Brita said, pulling her illegal sidearm. “A raid?”
“I don’t know,” Drakon said, gesturing toward the rest of his crew, who had automatically begun to take up defensive positions. “Get everyone back to the Hold. If there are Enforcers on the way, I’ll—”
Before he could finish, Copperhead went straight for the young woman and grabbed her arm before she could dash off into the darkness. Acting purely on instinct, Drakon moved in, shoved the man out of the way and took the woman from him none too gently.
She gasped as he gripped her arm, and he eased up a little. Her hair obscured her face, but he could see her parted lips, hear her gasping for breath. She’d been running hard for some time.
“Are you—” She swept her hair out of her face with a trembling hand. “Are you The Preacher?”
“That would be me,” the other Boss said, stepping around the fire. “What do you need, my dear?”
Drakon stepped between him and the woman. “I don’t know who you are,” he said close to her ear, “why you’re running, or what you want with him. But you’re not from the Fringe, or you wouldn’t be asking for a Boss who’ll keep you on your back for the rest of your life.”
She stared from him to The Preacher, who smiled enticingly.
“Whatever you need,” The Preacher said, “I’ll gladly provide it, pretty thing.”
“Your choice,” Drakon said, his tone indifferent but the rest of him far from it. Touching her was like making contact with a live wire. His whole body seemed to catch fire, and he could not only feel the blood pumping through her body but smell it, as well. As he could smell the woman’s hair, the clean scent of it, though her clothes were torn and her face splotched with dirt. Her body held the faint musk of perspiration and that indescribable scent unique to women of both species. His cock stiffened, though the time for arousal couldn’t be worse.
Her eyes narrowed, as if she’d felt the physical change in him. For a moment he wasn’t sure if she’d bolt right into The Preacher’s willing arms. Drakon was inexplicably tempted to drag her away, willing or not.
“What’s your name?” she asked, astonishing him with the clarity of her voice and the sudden, fearless intensity in her eyes.
“We need to get out of here,” Brita said, cutting off his answer. “If she’s running from Enforcers....”
“I told you what to do,” Drakon snapped. “Get them home.”
With an openly hostile glance at the woman, Brita signaled to the others. As they melted into the darkness, The Preacher stamped the fire out with one heavy boot.
“I’ll give you five hundred A-dollars for her,” he said.
The woman reached down and gripped Drakon’s hand as if for dear life, and he understood the unspoken message in her eyes. He knew he was acting against sense, against reason, against the dictates of his mission, but he couldn’t let her go. He ran, pulling her with him, making his way easily in darkness that would confound his rivals. “Who’s after you?” he said, not even slightly winded.
“I...” The woman gasped, and it was clear she wasn’t in any state to explain.
“You’re leading Enforcers into the Fringe,” he said.
She didn’t answer, and he didn’t stop until they were far enough into the Fringe that the only illumination came from the scant light of false dawn in the west. He was running out of time.
But he still needed a few answers before he took her into the very heart of his hard-won turf.
As he came to a stop, she bent over, hands on knees, to catch her breath. He saw that her clothing was some kind of uniform, though a very generic one, the kind of standard issue that would be given a city or Enclave employee—known in the Fringe as a govrat, a citizen with a clearance rating high enough for government work.
As she straightened, he studied her face, making a rapid assessment: features somehow delicate and strong at the same time, stubborn jaw, smudges and scratches on her face that did nothing to lessen her beauty. Her body was slender and fit, that of a woman able to handle herself in a fight.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“My name is Lark,” she said, glancing over her shoulder.
“Who’s after you?”
She met his gaze, half-defiant and half-afraid. “The Enforcers.”
Exactly what he and Brita had suspected. “Why?” he asked.
“If we don’t move soon, it won’t matter.”
He almost laughed at her bravado. “Why did you come with me?”
“I don’t know. I was told to find The Preacher.”
“Why?”
“They said he could get me out of the city.”
“He wouldn’t,” Drakon said. “You were given very bad advice.”
“Can you help me?”
“If you’re running from Aegis or the Enforcers,” he said, “you’re not my enemy. If this is a trick, you won’t get out of this alive.”
“A trick?” she said with a burble of choked laughter. “What kind of trick?”
Drakon considered that he might have jumped to conclusions a little too quickly. Something about this woman almost convinced him that her fear was real.
“What can you pay for my help in getting out?” he asked.
“Information. But you won’t get it until I know I’m safe and none of your Fringer friends are going to hurt me.”
The sound of fast-moving vehicles thrummed from less than a quarter mile away. Whether she was leading them or running from them didn’t matter now. Drakon seized her wrist again, and they ran until Lark—if that was really her name—was panting hoarsely and beginning to stumble. Drakon turned a sharp corner into an alley. She leaned against him as if she might fall without his support. He wasn’t thinking at all when he put his arm around her.
He could still smell her blood. Almost feel it inside him.
He reached inside his jacket pocket with his free hand and pulled out one of the blindfolds he and the crew had used on the emigrants. “Turn around,” he said.
Her gaze fell to the cloth in his hand. “You’re kidding. If you think I’d ever—”
“I’m not letting you into my Hold without this. I give you my word that you’ll come to no harm.”
“The word of a—”
“Criminal, a fugitive from justice? Enclave justice?” Drakon turned her and tied the blindfold around her head before she could even think of struggling.
“I must be crazy,” she said, her voice rasping with exhaustion.
“No,” he said. “You’ve made the only possible choice.” Taking her arm again, he led her alongside the building, constantly listening, and took a very circuitous course toward the Hold, dodging the sounds of approaching troops. They didn’t seem to be gaining ground, perhaps more concerned about ambush than moving too recklessly.
He continued on by one of the many hidden pathways he and his crew had devised over the past year, frequently doubling back to make certain they weren’t being followed. Dawn was beginning to break when they finally negotiated the last obstacles and entered the Hold.
The building didn’t stand out from the other half-collapsed structures throughout the Fringe, but there were traps set at every possible entrance, and guards at every boarded window. The widely spaced lights were flickering and dim. The common rooms, mess and meeting room were protected by many external walls, like a castle keep. No one could reach Drakon and his crew without the use of explosives. Like so many other of the black-market items Drakon and the other Bosses dealt in, those were hard to come by.
Repo was crouched right outside the inner door. He sprang to his feet and stared at the woman in astonishment.
“You brought her?” he asked.
“No questions now.” Drakon pulled Lark through the maze of corridors, passing the occasional crew member without pausing for explanation, and took her straight to his private quarters.
“Sit,” he said, half-pushing her down on his narrow bed.
She probed the firm surface with her hands. “Where am I?”
“Where no one else will bother us.”
She tensed, and he knew immediately what she was thinking. “I am not The Preacher,” he said. “I have no intention of molesting you. But I can’t protect you until I get more information.”
“Protect me from whom?” she asked, turning her head slowly as if to take in any sounds that might help her get her bearings. “I thought you were the Boss here.”
“Most of my crew have the option of going elsewhere if I seem too soft.”
She turned her face toward him as if she would be staring if he could see her eyes, and he realized he’d just admitted something to her he wouldn’t say to anyone but Brita.
“Soft because you agreed to help me?” she asked.
“I haven’t agreed yet.”
“But they won’t be happy with what you’ve done. Would one of them challenge you?”
It was too late to retreat from the subject now, and he still had complete power over her in spite of her troubling insight. “You seem to know a great deal about the Fringe for a Cit,” he said.
Cocking her head, she smiled. It was a particularly lovely and enticing smile. “You’re unexpectedly honest and well-spoken for a condemned criminal,” she said.
Drakon pulled the room’s single chair close to the bed. “You work for the government,” he said, a statement of fact.
Her smile faded. “I did.”
“You’re on the run from your own kind, and yet you’ve somehow convinced yourself that only the ignorant and deceitful have been deported?”
When she didn’t answer, he pressed on. “Why are you running?”
“Do you think I could get some water?” she asked. “I haven’t had anything to drink in a while.”
Her sudden change of tone put Drakon even more on his guard. “I’ll have to tie you up.”
“I won’t resist.”
Far from trusting her, Drakon removed a heavy pair of shackles and short chain from a locked drawer. “Get up and turn around,” he said.
She obeyed without protest, and Drakon bound her hands together behind her. “Members of my crew are scattered everywhere throughout the Hold,” he said. “If you attempt to escape, they will almost certainly kill you.”
Chapter 3
“Your orders?” Lark said, resuming her seat on the bed after Drakon had her shackles in place.
“No one will take the risk of letting you escape.”
“I came here willingly, didn’t I?”
Drakon didn’t bother to answer. He went out into the corridor—where, as expected, Repo was keeping watch—and sent the man for water. When Repo returned, he was obviously near bursting with questions.
“Be patient,” Drakon said. “Find out what the others are saying, and report back to me.”
“Yes, Boss.” Repo hurried off, and Drakon went back into his room. He undid the shackles and handed Lark the slightly cracked glass, which she drained quickly.
“More?” he asked.
“Not now, thanks.” She ran the back of her hand across her lips...those full, enticing lips. Drakon swallowed. He wondered just how much she’d be willing to trade for her safety.
And felt no better than the other Bosses, whom he despised.
“Then let’s get back to the essentials,” he said. “Who are you?”
“I told you,” she said. “My name is Lark.”
“Lark what?”
“What difference does it make?”
“You do realize that you are completely in my power?”
“Ooh, scary,” she said, her mouth twisting into an ironic smile. “Have you ever read the pre-war literature known as ‘comic books?’”
Drakon froze, caught one of the thousands of memories he had managed to bury deep in his mind since his deportation. A little boy, laughing in delight because his father had managed to buy him a very rare bound edition of The Iron Corps for Christmas. It hadn’t been black market, but Drakon—the man he had been then—had saved up a portion of many months’ salary to buy it, even though Mark had still been a little too young to understand all the words.
“I know of them,” he said coldly.
“Then I don’t have to explain.” She shifted her weight, and even that slight movement brought his attention back to her body and the aching hardness that refused to be banished even by a firm act of will.
It’s the blood, he told himself. Like fine wine, human blood came in many vintages.
And he’d never smelled anything so rich and sweet. He wanted it, badly. But he knew his reaction now was fueled as much by hunger as inconvenient lust.
He would have to access his stores very soon. They had been going down more quickly than he’d expected and would need to be replenished, not a task he could entrust to any member of his crew. “Lark,” he said, pushing his hunger aside. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
She pulled a few strands of her dark hair out of the blindfold. “I’ve been branded a traitor by the government.”
“Why?” he asked.
She plucked at the blouse of her torn uniform. “I was an Admin. Very low clearance. I came across confidential information I wasn’t supposed to be able to access. Someone found out, and—”
“What kind of information?” he interrupted.
“Let’s just say that it would be more than a little embarrassing for the higher-ups, and possibly make trouble for certain parties involved in the election.”
Suddenly, Drakon was interested in Lark for more than her blood, her beauty and her spirit. “And what?” he prompted.
“They regard any breach very seriously. Rather than take a chance I might use it, they trumped up charges against me and were going to have me executed. I was able to—”
“Executed?” he interrupted. “Not deported?”
“They don’t deport traitors,” Lark said, a grim set to her mouth.
“And are you one?”
She suggested he do something anatomically impossible. Drakon let it pass. Whatever she’d discovered, it couldn’t just be “embarrassing for the higher-ups.” Drakon knew well enough that the Enclave government could be as ruthless as the Citadel’s Council, and would sooner kill than take the slightest chance of a security risk.
“So you think you’ll be safer out of the city,” he said.
Her blindfold shifted, suggesting eyes widening in astonishment. “Wouldn’t you, if you didn’t have such a good thing going here?”
He leaned over the bed. “What do you know of my business?”
Her body quivered as if it recognized the threat of a predator. “Only what I saw, back there. What you told me. And what everyone knows about the Fringe.”
“That there are ways of getting out in this part of the city? Why do you think such exits exist?”
“You are kidding, right?”
“I’m deadly serious.”
“Everyone remotely connected to the government knows that such passages exist. Most of them have been shut down by the Enforcers, but someone always manages to find another one. It’s common knowledge that convicts can be smuggled out of the city for the right price.”
“The price.” Drakon straightened and circled the room, his heart beating fast. “Why do you believe we have use for information on the foibles of a government official?”
“That’s not all I have,” she said. “Some of it might be very useful to your...operations.”
He came to a stop before her. “If you have something valuable to us, why do you believe you can withhold anything we choose to take from you?”
“You mean by torturing me? Or do whatever you thought this Preacher guy would do?” She shook her head. “That would be a mistake. You see, even the lowest-level govrats—to use your Fringe lingo—are given anti-torture conditioning. It’s not much, but usually it works by triggering a fatal chemical reaction in our bodies after a significant amount of pain is applied.”
“This is the first time I’ve heard of such conditioning,” Drakon said.
“It’s new. They want to keep it secret, of course. But I’m telling you now because I have nothing to lose, and you’d be better off taking what I’m willing to give you instead of losing all of it. I promise you that what you’ll get from me will be worth what I’m asking.”
Drakon took the chair again.
“Assuming you have such information,” he asked, “how are we to substantiate it without risk to ourselves?”
“I never said it was without risk,” she said, “just as I knew it could be a fatal risk coming out here.”
Perhaps even worse than merely fatal, if he acted as loyalty dictated. He had no reason to trust her. If he found a chance to pass her on to Erebusian agents who could get her to the Citadel, she could be extremely valuable as a source of intelligence.
But he couldn’t envision taking such a drastic step, and he certainly wouldn’t return her to her Enclave hunters. His mission had been clearly defined, and once completed would have virtually the same effect as if he were to tear the government down with his own two hands.
One highly popular mayor, in the midst of a highly contentious election, dead. The mayor who claimed to want to end the deportation of criminals to Erebus, cut off the tribute of blood serfs who were so essential to maintaining Opiri society in the Citadel of Night. Essential to maintaining the Armistice and preventing another devastating war.
Aaron Shepherd. One of the two men in all the world Drakon wanted dead more than he wanted to live.
* * *
Phoenix couldn’t see the man’s face, but she didn’t have to. She’d memorized it the first time she’d glimpsed him, when he’d snatched her away from the leering henchman of The Preacher, the Boss she’d been sent to find.
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?”