“And I am.” He took a deep breath and released it slowly. “We are both in a precarious situation. The fates have given no certainty of life for either of us, but that has been our situation since this quest first began.”
“But the fates have said something since this quest began, haven’t they? I can feel it, Azriel. It hangs like a weight in your eyes and your soul.”
“They have done nothing more than emphasize the precariousness of the situation, but that is something we have long been aware of.” He shrugged. “Now, please, rest.”
He was lying. I knew it; he knew it. The fates had said something else, something he feared to tell me. I swore softly but knew my reaper well enough by now to know he was never going to tell me what it was.
I tugged off my clothes and climbed into bed. As I pulled the blankets over my shoulders, I met his gaze, a smile teasing my lips. “Seeing you’re forcing me into bed, the least you could do is give me a kiss good night.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Is this a required custom here on Earth?”
“Totally,” I said. “And if you don’t kiss me good night, I’ll only get moodier.”
“Heaven forbid that happen,” he murmured, then bent down, his lips brushing mine briefly, before the kiss deepened, becoming a long, slow exploration that had desire curling through me again and heat sparking the air between us.
“That,” he murmured eventually, “is a very dangerous custom. And if you did not need sleep so badly, I might be tempted to join you under those sheets.”
“You still can.” I traced a line down his chest with a fingertip and lightly played with the button of his jeans. “Twenty or so minutes isn’t going to matter one way or another to my strength.”
“Twenty minutes hardly does justice to the fire that plays between us,” he said, and pulled away from my teasing touch. “Sleep, Risa. It is for the best, trust me.”
“You, reaper, obviously have a core of steel somewhere inside that rather enticing exterior of yours.”
“Believe me, I have not.” He caught my hand and kissed it. “I merely wish us both to survive the next couple of days.”
With that, he released my hand and disappeared. I sighed, then snuggled deeper into the blankets. And, despite the desire that still spun through my body, fell to sleep almost instantly.
* * *
A few hours later—feeling refreshed but still somewhat unsatisfied sexually—I leaned back in the office chair and rubbed my forehead. We were now back in the office above the café I owned with Tao and Ilianna, and the sounds of a world going about its business as usual drifted upward—sounds like the murmur of conversation, the clink of cutlery being polished, or the happy whistle of our sous chef as he prepared for the next influx of customers. Normal, everyday sounds in a life that had become far from normal.
At least for me.
But they were also sounds that would no longer exist if we didn’t find the remaining key damn soon. Unfortunately, the search was going nowhere fast. My father might have said that the key could be found in a palace whose coat of arms lay the wrong way around, but there were no actual palaces in the state of Victoria, and Google had thrown up hundreds—if not thousands—of places that used “palace” in their names. It was going to take forever to check and eliminate every one, even with Azriel’s ability to zip from one place to another in seconds flat.
“Perhaps it is time to call on Stane’s skills again,” Azriel commented. He was sitting on the sofa at the other end of the room, outwardly relaxed but not so inwardly. His frustration swirled through me, as sharp as anything I was feeling. “Cannot a computer work far faster than either of us?”
Stane was Tao’s cousin, and a black marketeer who just happened to be able to hack into any computer system ever created. It was an ability I’d made full use of when it came to Hunter’s cases as well as the search for the keys.
“Yes, but while a computer can check location, it can’t visually visit every place and check whether it bears a coat of arms that lies the wrong way around.”
“But could he not write a program that would at least list those buildings that bear a coat of arms? Surely not every building would do so. It would, at least, shorten the list.”
I frowned. “I guess—”
The phone rang, cutting off the rest of my words. I glanced at the caller ID and groaned. It was Hunter. I guess I should have known the bitch would catch up with me sooner rather than later.
“You do not have to answer it,” Azriel commented. “Although doing so might cause the very problem we are trying to avoid with her.”
“I know. Trust me, I know.” I reached for my Coke, taking a sip to ease the sudden dryness in my throat, then reluctantly hit the vid-phone’s Answer button.
A brief, psychedelic pattern ran across the screen; then Hunter’s countenance—which seemed oddly sharper—glared back at me. Her shadowed green eyes were filled with the promise of death, and a tremor that was part fear, part foreboding, ran through me.
“Good morning, Risa Jones.” Her voice was soft—pleasant, even. But there was something in the way she said my name that increased my fear. Or maybe it was the fact that she’d used my full name, something she hadn’t done in a very long time. “I appear to be missing a Cazador. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
“And why would I know anything about the disappearance of a Cazador?” I replied, feigning a calm I certainly didn’t feel and damn thankful she was at the other end of the vid-phone rather than standing in front of me. Hunter always seemed to catch my thoughts at the worst possible moment, despite the fact that I had superstrong nano-microcells inserted into my body. With them in place, no one should have been able to get inside my head—but she had a habit of doing things she shouldn’t be able to.
“Because this particular Cazador was one of the three who was astrally following you.”