With Barrett reassured, somewhat, it was then on to my human assistant Charlotte, who would make the arrangements for the private flight from Venice to Savannah. She had received enough bizarre phone calls like this one to know not to ask too many questions. After talking to her, I contacted my bodyguard Gabriel, still recuperating in England following our last battle with the naturi. A lump grew in my throat at the sweet sound of his familiar voice. Closing my eyes, I could see his crooked smirk. Gabriel had protected me for years, knew my secrets. He would also grab a flight tonight and be waiting in Savannah when Tristan and Nicolai arrived. My angel would see to it that Tristan was properly taken care of when he arrived in my domain.
I wanted to call Knox. While relatively young, he had proven capable and intelligent enough to manage the region when I was out of town. I wanted to hear his voice, the touch of dry humor that laced his every comment. I needed to know from him that all the nightwalkers I had left behind in my domain were still safe. But Tristan and Danaus returned as I ended my call with Gabriel and sank into the soft cushions of the sofa, forcing me to put aside my phone.
The nightwalker had been considerate enough to go hunting while I occupied myself with Nicolai. Neither said anything about how I had spent my evening because Tristan got it into his head to argue with me for the next hour over whether he would travel with me to the site of the next sacrifice and battle the naturi.
In the end I won and he agreed to travel to my domain. He had suffered enough, and I wasn’t willing to lose him to the naturi. I prayed it was the start of a series of smart choices on my part.
NINETEEN
If I had been human, I would have tossed and turned, twisting the smooth cotton sheets. I would have stared up at the ceiling as the minutes crawled by, imagining the hundreds of threats and dangers Tristan could potentially face while he lay helpless during the daylight hours. I would have laid there hating Danaus and Nicolai, fearing they would betray my desperate trust. Hell, if I was human, I would have accompanied Tristan’s lifeless form down to the airport and personally secured him on the private jet.
But I wasn’t human, and at times I wondered if I had ever been human, considering my horrid past. I was a nightwalker. When the sun finally tore at the horizon and the night gave its last shuddering breath, consciousness left me no matter how badly I wished to remain awake. There were no thoughts of Tristan, no bits of safeguard I could offer him. There was only the desolate blackness and an emptiness from which I could not pull away. In those last seconds, I hated the dawn and my weakness, not for the first time since being reborn.
Yet, my daylight hours weren’t completely filled with undisturbed nothingness. In my final hour before waking, images of Tristan filled my brain, flashing in my mind like a demonic slide show. This was not like the nightmares I suffered in Egypt and England. Those grim plays had been a mix of my own memories and growing fears.
These garish images were from Macaire’s memories of the night when Tristan was tortured by the court. But there was no order to the images, no linear progression. The Elder’s memories flickered in my brain like a reel of film that had been badly spliced together. One moment Tristan was hunched over covered in blood, his back raw and his limbs trembling in pain. Yet, in the next moment, he was standing unharmed, surrounded by his kind as he anticipated his fate.
The only thing about the nightmare that was linear was Tristan’s thoughts. They whispered through my head like a ghostly soundtrack, going from disbelief that his beloved maker would abandon him to his fate, to broken pleading for her to save him. Save him from the pain. Save him from the blackness that was swallowing up his hope. In the end his fragile, fractured mind clung to a single, unwavering word: Mira. He knew I would come and end the pain.
When I was finally released from the hellish nightmare and awoke, my body began trembling and I choked back a sob. Rolling onto my side in the bed, I curled into the fetal position as I waited for the shaking to pass. My thoughts were sluggish, as if a thick, tarlike film covered them, a disgusting residue left behind by Macaire’s mental touch.
When I could finally unclench my fingers, which were twisted in the sheets, I mentally reached out for Tristan, but came up with only dead air. Instantly lurching into a sitting position on the bed, legs bent before me and eyes tightly closed, I concentrated again. All of my energy poured into the single act of touching his thoughts, being able to feel his presence. I needed to know he was safe.
When the sun had risen that morning, Tristan was laying beside me. Danaus and Nicolai had agreed to get him safely aboard the chartered jet. Either one of them had ample opportunity to stake him while he slept.
No. Shaking my head at the thought, I knew Danaus wouldn’t kill a nightwalker when he or she slept. The hunter might hate my kind, but his sense of honor ran deeper than that. If he wanted Tristan dead, he’d take care of the matter while the nightwalker was awake and able to defend himself.
Nicolai, I didn’t trust. He could have been lying. Maybe he was a naturi sympathizer and I’d left Tristan at his mercy. Damn it! I was an idiot.
Twisting on the bed, I snatched up my cell phone from the nightstand and pulled up Gabriel’s number. My bodyguard answered after the second ring, and some of the tension in my stomach slowly unknotted at the sound of his voice.
“Do you have Tristan?” I quickly demanded, inwardly wincing at the harshness of my voice.
“Yes. Are you in trouble?” he asked.
I ignored his question. I was in all kinds of trouble, but there was nothing he or Tristan could do about it. “Let me speak to him.”
“Mira,” Gabriel started hesitantly, “he’s still asleep. It’s about two-thirty in the afternoon.”
Falling back against my pillows, I gave a breathless chuckle, laughing at my own stupidity. All the chaos flying about me had scattered my thoughts. I was so worried about Tristan’s safety that I forgot about the six-hour time difference.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“He’s safe,” Gabriel reassured me, his voice growing soft. “Both he and Nicolai landed around one.”
“Is Nicolai with you?”
“No. You didn’t say anything about him staying with you, so I left him at your town house. He wasn’t happy about it.”
The thought brought a faint smile to my lips. Nicolai possibly didn’t trust Gabriel with a vulnerable Tristan, but I had told the lycan that Gabriel was my bodyguard.
“I had to agree to have Tristan call Nicolai the second he was awake,” he continued.
“Have you actually seen Tristan?”
“I opened the trunk after I pulled into the garage at your place. He’s curled up with head and heart in their right places,” he teased, and I couldn’t blame him. My paranoia was worse than usual. “I won’t leave him until he’s in the house and knows how to set the alarms.”
“Thank you, my angel,” I sighed, letting my eyes drift shut. The security system for my house wasn’t quite Fort Knox, but it would deter most humans and give Tristan enough warning if another creature was near at night. There was also a vault in the basement with a separate security system, which would keep him safe during the daylight hours. Not even Gabriel knew how to disarm the locks on the vault. I had given Tristan those codes before he fell asleep that morning.
“How bad is it?” Gabriel inquired when a comfortable silence had grown between us.
“Bad enough.” I didn’t want to say more. It would take too long and serve no good purpose. “Have you healed?” I asked, changing the subject. The last time I saw him, he had sustained a wound to his side and thigh, and was still nursing an injured arm from a fight in Egypt.