Masters of the Night by Elizabeth Brockie Read Free Book Online Page B

had
changed her last name.
    Mae Weston. The daughter of an English duke whose
legacy traced directly back to a royal court. The duke was murdered the
day Mae’s daughter, Allison, gave birth—to a girl.
    The last Henri had heard in the vampyre courts, Mae had fled with her daughter and granddaughter to America to save
them from the family horror, a violet-eyed vampyre named Jane who had made a secret pact with the Realm to deliver up the royal
babe for a purpose that had made even Henri shiver.
    “And your mother’s name?” Henri probed carefully.
    “Allison.”
    Ah, Liora Anjanette , Henri thought, sighing inwardly. Your little keepsake
necklace has marked you, revealed you.
    And Jane is roaming the earth.

 
 
 
    7.
    Angie’s eyes
rested, but not demurely, on the library ceiling beam. The violet gaze burned
into the wood.
    “When I saw that mouse—with odd little eyes, unusually
bright.” Her gaze whipped to Henri’s. “You’re a shape-shifter!
Andre told me only the most powerful …”
    “Andre’s a fool.”
    He crammed his hand deep into his trench coat pocket. To keep from making a fist and breaking the table.
    The velvet pouch met his fingertips, and a bit of burnished gold. He
pulled the oval locket from his pocket.
    A tiny painted portrait had once occupied one half of the inside. The
Lady Jane Weston had been twenty-six, so to speak. Was still twenty-six, so to speak.
    He was thirty-two. So to speak.
    He pressed the locket’s tiny latch with his thumb.
    As the locket popped open, Angie glanced at it in surprise. “It’s
empty.”
    “I, umm, tore the lady’s picture out.”
    “Pissed you off, did she?” she smirked.
    But the snow in her eyes was melting.
    “No. She was—a little pissy to begin with.”
    She was beautiful, Angie’s ancestral aunt, the vampira who had taken him from the mortal world and become the owner of his soul.
Provocative, twilight violet eyes, skin as smooth as tea with cream, though
cool, and raven-black hair that could dew into a mass of unruly, little-girl
curls.
    Like Angie’s blond ones.
    Perhaps the resemblance had unconsciously struck him, been the reason
he had been drawn to the mystic.
    Adding to nature’s gift of sweet deception, Jane had appeared fragile.
But unbeknownst to him, unholy strength had laced every sinew in her body when
she walked the earth at dusk, and walked with the mortal who lived in the royal
courts, distant cousin to the queen.
    He had walked willingly with her in the royal gardens with little fear
of her winsome smiles.
    To his demise.
    Henri rose from the desk and flashed away to run from the mystic, run
from the fear he might hurt her, run from the disappointment of never being
human.
    He glanced back only once.
    Angie was staring, perplexed and bewildered, into the empty space where
he had been only seconds before, and at the locket left open on the pages of
the book.
    The golden token of his destruction. He smacked the
library doors open and stomped outside. He had kept it. All
those years. Why?
    Beads of rain were forming on the library’s ribbed support columns, and
puddles were beginning to dot the stone steps.
    Umbrellas began to bob.
    Henri pulled his trench coat collar up around his neck to ward off the
rain, and brushed the water from his eyelashes. He didn’t like the rain so much
anymore today.
    Henri walked two blocks, then the hellish sting of atonement ripped at
him. The mystic was unskilled, alone and vulnerable, with no one to protect her
if she went dragon slaying with Andre’s wild bunch. Or to
protect her from the dragon lady, Jane Weston.
    He whipped into a shop and bought Angie a cape-style, hooded raincoat,
then hurried back to the library. He would give her the cross, help her remember what had happened in the park.
    The study nook was empty.
    Duty to DuPre had called.
    The little book of poetry was still on the desk. And
the locket. Henri left the golden oval where it lay. It was time to move
on.
    His