Forever The World of Nightwalkers - By Jacquelyn Frank Page 0,16

by three shades and his fingers almost instantly began to tremble. Kamen watched him with genuine curiosity. Would the acolyte brave Kamen’s wrath by refusing the request, or would he brave the unpredictability of the psychopathic killer? It was an intriguing contest.

The repeat of a deep bow gave him his answer, and just like that the moment of fascination was gone. Like all the moments before it, fleeting and ephemeral and nothing. Always such vast nothingness.

He glanced at Odjit.

Nothingness. But there was going to be a price to pay for this nothingness. And like anything else, he knew no one source could be trusted to complete the task, so it was best to sic all his best dogs on the problem at hand. Kamen walked over to his mistress, his fingers reaching down to brush over her forehead and over the fading scars at her throat. He knew that if he set a dog like Chatha on the trail of Odjit’s would-be killer that he would go after the quarry with rabid delight, but only for as long as it amused him to do so. Kamen’s job would have to be to make the process as entertaining for him as possible.

Someone had taken the last vestiges of light from his world …

… and that someone was going to pay.

Leo Alvarez opened his eyes to utter darkness and the smell of musty perfume.

“Shit,” he grumbled under his breath as he fumbled for his watch, trying to do it as gingerly as possible. The owner of the perfume, not to mention the bed, was asleep against him, snoring a little on every breath.

Six p.m. Or eight a.m. Tasmania time, which is where he’d just spent two weeks routing out the remains of a drug cartel that had been in hiding on the otherwise harmless Australian island. Depending how you looked at it, he had either overslept or was waking just in time to start his day. He groaned softly when pain shot through both the back of his skull and his eyes. No doubt a recollection of the tequila he’d been pounding back, trying to drink some fricken lumberjack under the table last … yester … ah fuck it. He just took pleasure in the idea that the lumberjack was probably still throwing his guts up. Luckily the lady of the stale perfume hadn’t cared whether or not Leo was drunk, she’d brought him home anyway. Which was good last night, but not so good this morning … evening …

“I fucking hate time zones,” he grumbled under his breath.

Now the trick was to find a way to extricate himself from woman and bed without waking her up. In his favor were vague memories of her drinking pretty heavily herself the night before. Odds were she was down for the count. He also seemed to recall some heavy-duty drunken sex in there somewhere. Actually, he was pretty damn proud of himself for it. Performance under the influence of alcohol could be a hit-or-miss situation. Especially that much alcohol.

He had danced through more than one bottle of Jose Cuervo Especial during this particular contest. And if he remembered correctly, he’d won a fuckton of money when Mr. Lumberjack went down like a felled tree, the wooden floor of the bar shuddering with the impact. People could be so predictable, he thought. They figured the man with the height and girth was going to handle his liquor better than a man half an inch over 5′10″ with lean, whipcord strength and no fat to help absorb the tequila.

They had figured wrong.

Unfortunately, there was a price to be paid for being right. Actually, it was more like a steep cover charge. Number one, a hangover. Not a bad one because he’d remembered to drink a lot of water along with his shots and he’d taken aspirin before finally falling asleep. Number two, slipping out of bed without waking his hostess. Luckily this was something he’d had a lot of practice in. Infiltrating and extracting, without his targets being any the Styles ===================== */ vg. wiser. Honestly, they had both known this was going to be a straight-out tumble and nothing more, but he wasn’t interested in any pillow talk. She had already run through a lifetime’s worth of beauty-shop drama from where she worked, with the occasional segue to toss some serious venom her ex-boyfriend’s way. It was a good thing he’d been so hammered or he might have developed momentary discretion, looking for someone who