loyalty to unbiased scholarship over more than three hundred years of hard work and unrelenting discipline. Most people had forgotten she was of Charisemnon’s bloodline, seeing her as belonging only to the Archives.
Naasir bared his teeth at her. “Do you report to him?”
“No. I report to no one.”
“For this task? To find Alexander?”
“In accepting the task, I have agreed to keep Raphael’s confidence for the duration.” No one could compel her to betray any of the secrets she learned during her remaining days of freedom. And instinct told her that by the day of her four-hundredth birthday, this task would be over, one way or another. Events were moving too fast for it to be otherwise.
Naasir handed back her sword. “Dahariel is not a good man.” The words were harsh. “He hurts people. Sometimes he hurts people who aren’t full-grown.”
Andromeda flinched. “He may,” she admitted, “but he saved me.” She’d been a child who was a possession held jealously close yet rarely given any attention or nurturing. Dahariel alone had seen her as a person; the hawk-faced angel had put a blade in her hand and taught her what he knew best.
The blade will give you a way to earn your place in the world.
As it was, she hadn’t had to sell her sword to find precious freedom. But when she’d broken away from her parents while still technically a child, it had given her the confidence to believe she could protect herself on the skyroads. Her sword and a small pack of belongings was all she’d had when she arrived in the Refuge and petitioned Jessamy for the learning so long denied her.
Charisemnon used scholars but didn’t respect them. He respected only strength—and in his court, that meant cruelly hardened men and women who could mete out pain and torture and humiliation without blinking, who could make a living being beg and crawl and bleed. Lailah had learned that lesson at her father’s knee, and she’d raised Andromeda in a home as filled with brutal violence . . . and as redolent with the smell of sex.
The more deviant the better.
Andromeda’s parents were beyond jaded at this point.
I promise I will learn and I will treat the Library and the Archives with respect, she’d said to Jessamy that long-ago day. I will not harm any of the volumes. The last she’d had to add because it wasn’t every would-be scholar who came from parents who’d been banned from the Archives. I want to learn. To have a chance to be more than a puppet driven by pain and obsessive sexual need. Please, teach me. Please.
Stepping far too close to her, his bare upper body a sensual temptation she had to gird herself to resist, Naasir said, “What does Dahariel ask in return?”
Andromeda’s heart squeezed, the ache deep and old. “Nothing,” she whispered, remembering what Dahariel had said to the girl she’d been.
Maybe you are my one good deed. But there is only so much good in me and I’ve spent it all on this—expect nothing more.
“We should get some rest,” she said, to stop Naasir from following up on her answer. “We start the hunt tomorrow.”
Naasir didn’t get out of her way. Reaching out, he curled an escapee tendril of her hair around his fingers. “Tell me of the Grimoire.”
Andromeda didn’t back away. That would give the wrong signal to this vampire who wasn’t a vampire. He was a predator and she did not want to become prey. “It is legend that the Grimoire was a record of secret things, beings, and treasures, all of which have been long lost in time.”
Naasir tugged on the tendril he’d captured. “You like secrets?”
“I like hunting them.”
A wicked, dangerous smile. “So do I.”
Somehow, Andromeda didn’t think he was talking about the kind of slow, methodical research that was her preferred method of the hunt.
* * *
Dawn came in soft washes of color on the horizon. After speaking to the guards on duty at Raphael’s stronghold, where she was currently staying, Andromeda took a walk along the top of the cliffs that overlooked the gorge. Since she had no intention of being kidnapped by Lijuan’s people, she stayed within sight of the stronghold and the guards.
Yes, she could defend herself with the knives she wore strapped to her thighs under her airy mint green gown, but she wouldn’t win against a squadron of trained warriors. Better not to take the risk—and it was no hardship to keep her morning walk to this part