Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) - By Jenna Black Page 0,28

coming, or she’d never have gotten past the front gate. Anderson had changed its code the day after she’d left.

“Go back upstairs, Nikki,” Anderson said without looking up.

I stopped on the landing and blinked in surprise. “How did you know it was me?” I wasn’t surprised he’d known someone was coming, considering we had a few creaky steps, but unless he had eyes in the back of his head . . .

He glanced up over his shoulder at me, and his expression was inscrutable. “Because you’re the only private investigator in this house, and the only one nosy enough to try to eavesdrop.”

“I wasn’t eavesdropping!” I said in outrage, but the doorbell rang, and I no longer had his attention.

I stood hesitating on the landing as Anderson opened the door. It was hard to interpret his words as anything but a direct order, and yet I was reluctant to leave him alone to face Emma. Which was ridiculous, of course. He wasn’t a man, he was a god. He could probably handle whatever Emma was about to dish out.

I was still debating what to do when Emma swept into the room, followed by another woman I didn’t know. Both women wore full-length fur coats, and diamonds sparkled from their earlobes and fingers. Clearly, Emma had embraced the Olympian way of life, where ostentation was considered a good thing.

I decided too late that I had made a foolish decision in coming downstairs. I turned to leave, but Emma had already spotted me.

“Nikki!” she cried in feigned delight, and I had to suppress the instinct to cringe. “How lovely to see you.”

Anderson shot me a steely look. “Upstairs. Now.”

“Yup, I’m going,” I assured him, holding up my hands in surrender.

“Oh, please, do stay,” Emma said, smiling up at me as malice glittered in her eyes. “What I have to say concerns you, too.”

I looked at Anderson for a verdict, and if he had told me to leave, I’d have been out of there.

“Very well,” he said. “Come on down.”

“Aren’t you going to invite us in to somewhere more comfortable?” Emma asked as I descended the last flight of stairs.

“If it weren’t so cold out, we’d be having this meeting on the front porch.” Surely Anderson was battling a severe case of mixed emotions, but he sure as hell wasn’t letting it show in his face or voice. He spoke to Emma as he would speak to any other Olympian, with no pretense of courtesy.

Emma’s eyes narrowed at Anderson’s response, whether from pain or from anger, I wasn’t sure. Maybe both. I didn’t understand what gave her the idea that Anderson’s interest had strayed to me, but I was sure she actually believed it, and that his imaginary betrayal hurt her. If she weren’t such a crazy bitch, I might even have felt a tad sorry for her.

I descended the last few steps, getting a closer look at Emma as she opened her coat. She was as beautiful as ever, but I could tell she’d lost weight. Her cheekbones looked sharper, her eyes almost sunken, and her hair seemed to have lost a little of its luster. She stroked the fur of her coat absently, and I saw that her fingernails were chewed down to nubs, a fact her glossy red nail lacquer accentuated more than it hid.

The smile on her face was cruel, and the glint in her eyes held both confidence and spite, but her body told a different story. She was not flourishing as an Olympian, no matter what she wanted Anderson to think. But leaving him to join them had been her choice, and she now had to live with it.

Emma’s companion looked far more comfortable in her own skin. She wore a skintight black miniskirt displaying legs about a mile long. Personally, I thought she was too skinny to pull off the look, and her legs looked like matchsticks tucked into expensive designer pumps. A crescent moon glyph glowed on her cheek, and her gray-blue eyes glittered with what looked to me like anticipation.

Shrugging as if Anderson’s rebuff meant nothing to her, Emma turned to me. Her gleeful self-assurance might be an act, but her hatred of me was definitely not. “Come meet Christina,” she said, beckoning. “You two have a lot in common. She’s a descendant of Selene, who’s also a moon goddess.”

I was sure that was about the only thing we had in common. “Charmed,” I said with a curl of my lip and went to