Invincible (A Centennial City Novel) - By Fionn Jameson Page 0,73
an enemy, a creature who was, the lack of a better word, dead.
He wasn’t human.
He was dead.
Why was I having trouble trying to remember this? “What do you want?”
He was quiet for a moment, just watching me from those crisp blue eyes. “Wow. You really are everything they say you are, aren’t you? You have absolutely no remorse.”
For whatever reason, he made me sound worse than a child molester. “She threw herself at Jason. I merely did my duty. I protected him.”
He leaned on the car, and let out a low breath, eyes still on me. “You sure did that thing. Now the Committee knows you two aren’t lovers.”
“Shouldn’t have lied for us, then.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” he said. “Although, I guess it’s not your fault. Shannon...wow, she really lost her cool back there. I thought she and Paul were way over. I didn’t expect her to react like that.”
“I don’t think anyone expected her to react in such a way,” I said dryly and shivered in the wake of a brisk breeze that felt like it could shoot ice straight through my body.
The moonlight turned Ryder’s hair almost white and when he turned his gaze upward, I was relieved.
“Vincent is making excuses. Said something about how you two were lovers. Made it sound like a jealous lovers spat and how you were just looking for an excuse to do away with her.”
Jealous.
The very word froze me.
Jealous.
I pressed a fist to my mouth, still seeing Jason’s accusing eyes in my mind. “Is that what you think? Do you think I was jealous of her?”
“I don’t know.” I hated the look in his eyes, as though he could see everything in my mind, in my heart. “Are you?”
I shook my head. “Why should I be jealous for her? She’s dead.”
“He loved her,” he said simply.
I stared at the full moon, hanging low in the sky, impossibly large and for a moment, just one moment I thought I could reach out and pluck it out of the sky. Fanciful thought, although it was a pretty one. “It had to be done. She wanted to hurt him. I only did my duty. They won’t kill him, will they?”
A glimmer of a smile played around the curve of his lips. “Not yet. Noir’s shown interest in your Master. That’s always good. If anyone had Jason on their kill list, they’ll think twice about trying to finish him off now. If he was killed while under Noir’s protection, there’s going to be hell to pay. Noir might look meek and mild, but Vincent respects him. I think Vincent’s even a bit scared of him.”
An interesting bit of information, and one I stored away for future use. “So, he’s safe.”
“For now.”
As Jason’s Ailward, it was my duty to stand by his side and protect him from all harm. But what if he no longer wanted me, no longer needed my sword?
Still, through strange circumstances, somehow we had gotten close to Noir. We had infiltrated his House.
Surely, surely, that was something to be proud of, something to be lauded.
The Fellowship would be pleased.
The plan would go forward as planned.
Ryder scuffed the hard, frozen ground with a booted foot. “So…what should we do?”
What should we do, indeed. “The most prudent thing would be to wait for Jason to come out. For what it’s worth, I must protect him.”
He winced. “Yikes. Maybe right now, you should really just leave him alone. No offense, but you just offed his ex-fiance. Something like that…you’ve got to give a guy some time to recover. Look, Vincent’s helping him right now, believe it or not. And besides, he’s under Noir’s wing. Now that we’ve got him, they’re not going to let him go so easily.”
The last sentence brought me up short. “What…what do you mean?”
“Are you worried?”
I saw no point in lying. “You make it sound like we should be trying to run away.”
The blond vampire shrugged. “The Council hasn’t seen a Sanguinate in such a long time, nor one who was actually coherent and not some raging beast. They’ll take this time to study him…find out what factors goes into the formation of such a thing.”
“Are they going to experiment on him?” I asked, startled. “There was no word of such things.”
Ryder’s eyes widened and he put his hands up as if to assuage me. “Hey, hey, don’t get me wrong. It’s not like they’re going to hook him up to a bunch of machines and perform a lobotomy. They’re just going to