SEVEN
The window of my sitting room looks out over the front of the house, so when a candy-apple-red sports car wended its way down the long and twisty driveway, it caught my eye. I’m not enough of a car nut to guess what it was, except that it was probably something Italian and obscenely expensive. No one in this house drove anything so ostentatious, and I made an educated guess that Emma was behind the wheel, dropping by for the visit Cyrus had warned about.
I told myself it was none of my business, and that I should stay up in my suite, as far away from the impending fireworks as possible. But after Cyrus’s advance warning, my stomach was tied up in knots wondering what terrible thing Emma had done. Whatever it was, whatever Anderson’s faults, I was sure he didn’t deserve it, not from her. He’d done everything he could to take care of her after we’d rescued her, had made excuses for her and forgiven her outbursts well past the point of being reasonable. She was the one who’d walked out.
My feet carried me to the door before I’d consciously made the decision to go downstairs. I was probably being stupid. My presence was likely to throw gasoline on the fire, and though I considered Anderson a friend, of sorts, we weren’t close enough to justify me sticking my nose into his marital difficulties. But of course I kept heading downstairs anyway.
Anderson was waiting in the foyer when I reached the landing above the first floor. He was standing straight and tall, his arms crossed over his chest and his gaze focused on the front door. Emma had to have called him to let him know she was 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 stand by Anderson.
“I don’t remember giving you permission to bring a guest,” Anderson said coldly.
The calculating gleam in Emma’s eyes sharpened. “Oh, but I just knew you’d want to meet Christina.”
Christina just stood there smiling, a prop rather than a person.
“Whatever it is you have to say, just say it and get the hell out,” Anderson said.
Emma pouted. “You never did have a sense of drama, did you?”
“I’m in no mood for banter. I let you come here because you said it was important, but I’d be happy to throw you and your lovely companion out on your asses. So talk.”
The look on Emma’s face said she was genuinely disappointed Anderson didn’t want to play word games with her. She was purposely drawing out the encounter as much as she could, letting the suspense build. I wondered if Anderson knew she was here to unveil her revenge, or whether he thought something more mundane was going on.
“Fine,” Emma said with a resigned sigh. “I’ll get to the point.” She turned to me. “You remember when Kerner’s jackal bit you and you came down with rabies?”
I tried not to shudder at the memory. The supernaturally enhanced rabies would have killed me permanently if it had been allowed to run its course. Instead, Anderson had killed me himself and burned my body, and the seed of immortality had generated a brand-new, virus-free body for me. It was something I’d have loved to forget.
“It rings a bell,” I said, hoping I sounded dry and casual despite the chill the reminder had given me. “What does that have to do with anything?” I glanced over at Christina, and the lump of dread in my stomach grew tighter and colder as my mind began rapidly connecting the dots.
“Anderson was so very concerned about you that he called a Liberi who had refused to join his merry band and was living in quiet anonymity out in the countryside. He needed a descendant of Apollo to examine you and figure out what was wrong with you, and she was the only one he knew who might actually help.”
I started to shake my head, as if I could somehow stop her from finishing her thought.
“What have you done?” Anderson asked in a horrified whisper, but we were both looking at Christina now, and I think we both knew what was coming.
“I never liked Erin,” Emma said to him. “And not just because she was your lover before me. She was so bitter about you dumping her it made her quite unpleasant to be around. I’m sure it was the bitterness that made her choose not to live under your roof, where she would be off-limits to Olympians.”
Anderson stood frozen in shock and horror beside me. Frankly, I wasn’t doing much better myself, and I shared Emma’s opinion about Erin’s likability.
Emma drank in Anderson’s pain, then turned to me with another of her vicious smiles. “I have you to thank for making this so easy for me. I don’t know if I could possibly have hunted her down if she hadn’t come out of hiding to treat you. When she left, I followed her home so I knew where I could get to her if I ever had a need.”
I guess I was supposed to feel guilty about that, but there was no way I was going to accept it as my fault. Although perhaps I should have thought of it when Emma left us to join the Olympians. Maybe I should have anticipated the animosity between Anderson’s ex-girlfriend and his ex-wife and constructed a new cover identity for Erin.
“I told Cyrus where she was hiding,” Emma continued, “and he sent a squad to harvest her seed. Of all the mortal Descendants in our service, Cyrus thought Christina the most deserving of elevation, so he had her do the honors.”
By which Emma meant Christina had killed Erin, thereby stealing Erin’s seed for herself. She was no longer a Descendant, but had joined the ranks of the Liberi. With an act of deliberate murder.
I swallowed hard, horrified by what Emma had done—and by the reminder that Cyrus wasn’t really a nice guy, no matter what he liked to pretend. And then I sneaked a peek at Anderson and practically stopped breathing.
He was still firmly in his mortal disguise. There was no white light leaking from his eyes, nor was any glow coming from his hands, and yet he was still incandescent with fury. Enough so that Christina had taken a step backward, and even Emma looked just a touch less sure of herself. She glanced quickly down at his hand, and I knew she was wondering if she’d pushed him too far, if he was actually pissed off enough to use his Hand of Doom against her. Not that she knew what that hand could do if Anderson set his mind to it. Anderson took a step closer to Emma, his hand rising from his side. Her breathing quickened, but she held her ground.
“Do you want to go to war against all of the Olympians?” she asked. “Because if you hurt me, it will break your treaty with Cyrus, and he will destroy you and all of your people. Except for Nikki, of course.” She smiled her malicious smile again. “We’d have other uses for your new girlfriend.”
Even in the midst of the crisis, I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. Emma was descended from Nyx, the goddess of night, but if there was a goddess of jealousy—and I was sure there was, even if I couldn’t name her off the top of my head—I would swear Emma was at least her kissing cousin.
Anderson looked like he was about to choke on his rage. He was a god of vengeance, and it had to be killing him to restrain his need to strike out. I think everyone in the house was damn lucky he was rational enough to care about the consequences of unleashing his inner Fury. “I will not start a war,” he said in a low and dangerous voice. “You and your companion may leave this house unscathed. I was a fool not to see this coming and move Erin to a new location.”
It took everything I had not to burst out with something scathingly unwise. Even after all the crap Emma had pulled, Anderson was still willing to take some of the blame and put it on his own shoulders.
“But I warn you, Emma,” Anderson continued, letting more of his anger creep into his voice, “you had better not try me again. I am better at vengeance than you are, and you would not be the first ex-wife to learn that the hard way.”
Being the son of a Fury, Anderson most definitely was an expert in the vengeance business. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to mess with him. Emma was crazy, but only if she was stupid and crazy would she take another shot at Anderson after this warning. There was a sense of . . . portentousness in the air, like Anderson’s words might be more than just words. But maybe that was just my imagination running away with me because of what I knew about him.
Emma had lost her gloating smile, and I think that under her calm facade, she was actually afraid of Anderson for the first time. I know Christina was afraid, because her face was ghostly pale and her eyes too wide. I bet she’d have run screaming out the door if Anderson had said boo.
“I’ve done nothing wrong,” Emma said, and I think she actually believed it. “I haven’t broken the treaty, and it was your own fault Erin was vulnerable.”
“Get out. Now.”
I think Emma would have liked to have hung around and looked for more chances to gloat. This was probably the end of her revenge—Cyrus was right, and I couldn’t see her settling for burning down empty houses when she had this rabbit already in her hat—and she wanted to savor it. But she also knew when Anderson had been pushed as far as it was safe to push him, and that was the case now.
“Well, it was lovely seeing you both again,” Emma said, then turned her back on Anderson and walked with affected nonchalance toward the door. Christina, who truly had been there as nothing but a prop for Emma’s revenge, was in such a hurry to get out she practically bowled Emma over on the way.
The door closed behind them, and seconds later the car revved its engine and pulled away. Leaving me alone in the foyer with an enraged god of death and vengeance who might be on the verge of exploding.