"No, I just don’t always say everything I know. There is a difference."
I snorted softly. "Only by a matter of degrees, Azriel, and you know it."
"In my world, degrees can mean the difference between life and death."
That was true in mine, too, but I resisted the comment and instead pressed my palm against the reader, then let it scan my retinas. When the scans had registered and the first lock released, I spun numbers on the old-fashioned dial and unlocked the safe. Inside was a stack of papers—nothing vital, I guessed, because Mike already had all the necessary legal stuff for Mom’s companies, insurance, and whatnot.
I left the door open and turned off the alarm. The new owners could reset it when the place finally sold. After gathering everything together, I turned around and faced Azriel, only he was no longer paying any attention to me. His head was cocked to one side, as if he was listening to something. And Valdis—the sword strapped to his back, which held a life force of her own—was beginning to flicker with blue fire.
Tension slammed into me and my pulse ratcheted up. Valdis only ever reacted to two things—evil and danger.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t my father; I would have felt his return. I licked suddenly dry lips and breathed deep, trying to keep the fear at bay as I listened. I couldn’t hear anything—couldn’t smell anything—and as a half-wolf, I would have. But there were things in both this world and the others that had neither scent nor smell nor form, and it wasn’t out of the question for one of those things to be hunting me. The Aedh could traverse the gray fields—the unseen lands that pide this world from the next—as easily as the reapers, and those who’d trained as priests could also control the magic of the gates. The Raziq were rogue priests. It wouldn’t be beyond them to free something from the dark path and fling it after me.
Although I couldn’t actually imagine them doing that when they still needed me to find the keys.
Valdis grew brighter, sending flashes of electric blue light across the pale walls. Azriel silently drew her from the sheath at his back and held her at the ready. The blade hummed with every movement. "Someone comes."
"I gathered that." I dropped the papers and the items I’d gathered from the two safes onto the desk, then looked around for some sort of weapon. But with the house cleaned for sale, there really wasn’t anything left. Not that Mom had ever had weapons in the house, anyway.
Which meant I’d have to rely on my own fighting skills, damn it. Because while I could fight, I preferred not to.
It wasn’t cowardice, merely practicality. I’d learned the hard way that I was never going to be as good as a guardian, despite the fact that I’d been trained by two of the best.
I flexed my fingers, then said, "What is it?"
"Vampire."
I blinked in surprise. "A vampire? Really?"