Lilliane emerged right behind him.
Her eyes glowed with that same unearthly fire she’d shown him when he first bared his fangs. For a moment the effect was so jarring, Lucan might have mistaken her for Breed.
But she was something else.
And this time she was truly pissed.
Lilliane pushed the human several feet in the air with a sweep of her hand. Screaming as he sailed high in the air, Ricky came down hard on a rickety old dock at the river’s edge. The rotting wood groaned from the crash, some of the boards cracking as they heaved and rocked over the dark water. Her hands fisted at her sides, she stalked forward onto the dock. Ricky’s wide eyes were locked on her in terror. Beneath him, the old dock swayed as he frantically crab-scrambled for the farthest edge. The wood started to break. The dock pitched violently to the side. Ricky lost his hold. The platform gave way, dumping him into the murky drink.
Only then did she pause.
No. More froze.
Watching, stock-still, as their quarry started swimming away.
Lucan plowed past her and dove in.
“YOU WANT TO TELL ME what that was about back there at the dock?” Lucan asked, shrugging out of his soaked black leather trench coat.
To avoid attracting any more attention, after fishing Ricky Dubois from the Mississippi they’d immediately brought the human to an abandoned house a few blocks away. Inside the neglected ruin that likely hadn’t seen inhabitants since Katrina, they’d conducted a tranced interrogation. He’d given them the name and address of the local private investigator who hired them tonight, but like his pal Danny, Ricky didn’t know how or why Lilliane had ended up on the PI’s radar.
Now, with Ricky mind-scrubbed and unconscious following his questioning, she watched as Lucan set his coat aside then pulled off his shirt and squeezed the foul water from his clothing. She couldn’t help noticing the complicated pattern of skin markings that danced and swirled over the Breed male’s torso and muscled arms. They weren’t tattoos, not the way their colors changed and moved.
There was a lot she didn’t know about his kind.
And vice versa.
Yet here they were, forced to work together to protect the secrets of both their people.
“I don’t swim,” she said, belatedly answering his question as to why she froze.
“All that power and badassery, but you don’t know how to swim?”
“I know how to swim. I said I don’t swim. Not anymore. Not since . . .”
Her words trailed off.
“Not since when?”
“Since I became what I am.”
“Which is?”
“I’m called a Radiant. Fifty-odd years ago I was just a woman. Mortal.”
“What happened?”
She shrugged nonchalantly, but the taste of regret hung bitter in her throat. “I made a terrible mistake. One I cannot correct.”
“Does your mistake have something to do with that strange candle shop back in the Quarter?”
She nodded, seeing no need to hide the facts from him. “One of those candles, the one meant for me. It found me. The shop. The man who runs it. The ghost who runs it. They all found me. Light this flame at the scene of your greatest passion and your heart’s desire will be yours.”
“Did you?”
“My heart’s desire was the white son of the family I cleaned house for. It was 1959. What do you think our chance of success would have been?”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I lit it. And something came out of it I had no words for. I thought they were ghosts at first. But they weren’t. They were more like a force, a force from the spirit world itself. I was supposed to give myself over to it. It filled me, literally. It filled me with a desire to go to him, to make my feelings known. Feelings I knew he shared. But I was one of the few people strong enough to resist. As a result, I was changed forever. Changed into this.”
With a flick of her wrist she caused the remains of the nearest rotting door to slam shut on its weak hinges. For added effect she flicked her index finger against the ball of her thumb and sent a little trail of gold dust shimmering through the humid air.
“It’s like the force that came out of the candle that night is trapped in me forever. But it’s more than that. I was offered a chance at true love, and I denied it. I was afraid. I wasn’t ready to risk everything. This,” she said, gesturing to herself, “is my punishment. Alive, but loveless. My powers, my gifts, if you can call them that, I use them to help others find their true desire. But as for me I can’t love anymore. Not like that anyway. Not like I loved him.”
“What was his name?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
His hard gray eyes softened as he listened to her pitiful history. “No wonder you’re mad at yourself and the world. If I didn’t have Gabrielle, if I had lost the chance to have her in my life as my mate.” He blew out a sharp curse and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Lilliane. For everything you’ve been through. It doesn’t seem fair. It doesn’t seem right. To have your entire existence shaped by one choice like that.”
She wasn’t accustomed to compassion. Lord, it was so rare she hardly knew what to do with it anymore. She spent most of her time caring for the other Radiants. Bossing them around. Cautioning them against leaping seven-story buildings in broad daylight or getting their aliases confused. To suddenly have her needs addressed by this inhuman predator whose reputation for cold justice and a general lack of mercy was legend, even among her kind, left her at a total loss for words.
She watched in awkward silence as he pulled something out of his trench coat, his dark brow furrowed, his broad mouth flattened in a dismayed line. From out of a sodden paper bag, he withdrew a waterlogged book.
His eyes were filled with disappointment.
“A souvenir for your lady?” she asked.
“A novel by one of her favorite authors. A signed first edition. Now it’s only fit for the trash.”
She caught the author’s name on the jacket and smiled. “I know some people who might be able to help. The business I run, we’ve made a lot of contacts in the city over the years. Maybe when this is over tonight, I can arrange to procure you another copy.”
He stared at her for a long moment, the hint of a smile playing at the corner of his lips. “You’re a good person, Lilliane Smith. Better than you seem to believe.”
Reluctantly, she allowed a rare smile to curve her mouth too. “I have a feeling the same could be said of you, Lucan Thorne.”
He chuckled as he donned his wrung-out shirt, then tossed his wet trench coat and the ruined book onto a pile of rubbish in the corner of the decrepit house.
“What do you say, partner? Ready to go conduct a breaking and entering on Ricky’s friend with the camera?”
She nodded. “Let’s get out of here. Oh, and Lucan?”
He stared at her.
“It’s Williams. Lilliane Williams.”