Chapter 5
Christophe’s mental
warning system for critical danger had stood him in good stead for
many long years and saved his ass, not to mention his life, on too
many occasions to count. Right now warnings were flashing through
his brain on high alert. This woman was clearly dangerous. She was
definitely trouble. He should be wary and on his
guard.
Instead, he was
elated.
She was a little bit
of a thing, maybe five and a half feet tall, but she seemed bigger
because pure attitude added a few inches. And those ice blue
eyes—well, even without the husky, sexy purr of her voice, he would
ignore more than a little warning flare for the chance to see her
face. The silk of her loose garments couldn’t hide her ripe, curvy
body, and a wicked corner of his mind kept picturing what she might
look like in his bed, wearing nothing but that scarlet
mask.
His cock hardened at
the thought of it, and it was almost enough to distract him from
what she’d said. Almost. Vanquish was
hers? He thought not, lovely ass or no.
“What’s yours?” He schooled his voice to calm,
silken menace and allowed power to glow in his eyes and resonate
through his words. Grown men—humans, shifters, and vamps alike—had
all trembled at the sound of that voice.
She
laughed.
“Ooh, scary glowy
eyes. Do you try that trick on everyone, or just the odd ninja you
meet when you’re planning a heist?” She glanced at her watch and,
in spite of the casual amusement in her voice, he could tell her
anxiety level was ratcheting up. Whatever she was up to, it looked
like she was running out of time.
“You didn’t answer my
question.” He stepped closer, taking two quick strides, until he
was so close to her that the barrel of her gun pressed into his
chest and the scent of her tantalized him.
She didn’t have it in
her to shoot him.
He was almost
sure.
“Back away, big boy,”
she told him, pressing her body weight, such that it was, into the
warning until the gun dug into his skin beneath his shirt. “Don’t
make me shoot you. It would be messy, and who needs
that?”
“What are you trying
to steal?” he repeated, ignoring the gun and the banter, because it
was pretty obvious exactly what she’d meant.
She sighed and
stepped back, then lowered her gun and flicked something small and
silvery at the base of the glass case. “More than twenty-three
thousand gems in this collection, and we’re both after the Siren.
Too bad, you really are extremely luscious, but that gem is
mine.”
Before he could think
of a response, she tucked her gun into a holster on her leather
belt and stepped closer to him. Her scent teased him again,
swamping his senses with the light fragrance of jasmine underneath
a spring rain.
“Perhaps just a
taste? As a sort of good-bye?” she murmured, maybe to herself, and
then she rose up on her tiptoes and pulled his head down to hers
with one hand. With the other, she lifted her mask a little and
pressed a soft, gentle caress of a kiss against his lips. Utter
shock kept him motionless just long enough for her to drop her
mask, step back, and press something hard into his
abdomen.
“Lovely. I really do
regret this,” she said.
And then she shot
him.
“You shot me—” he blurted out, but looking down, it
wasn’t the expected bright red of his blood flowing out of his body
that he saw, but bright red . . . feathers? A dart. It was a
dart.
And feathers. Dancing
feathers, and the room spun around them. Magical feathers? Oh. Oh,
no. Not magic . . .
Drugs . .
.
As he hit the floor,
his Atlantean metabolism instantly began to push the drugs out of
his system. But instantly wasn’t quick enough, if the way the floor
was trying to suck him into it was any clue.
She bent down, and
his senses reeled at the sight of her features all gone
topsy-turvy, until his drug-hazed mind realized that he was looking
at her upside down. Her mask had dropped down a little to show the
wry curve of luscious lips. Even after she’d shot him, he still
wanted to taste that mouth again.
“I really am sorry,
you know. Hopefully since you haven’t actually stolen anything yet,
they won’t imprison you for too very long,” she said, with what
sounded like sincere regret. “Best of luck to you.”
She said something
else, but by then the drug had temporarily—at least, he
hoped it was only
temporarily—overwhelmed his body’s efforts to push it out, and the
gray pushing at the edges of his vision swarmed in to take over his
conscious mind. The last thing he saw before the blackness claimed
him was the small rectangle of paper, with its tiny scarlet image,
that she’d dropped on the ground.
“Ninja,” he
managed.
Her unexpected peal
of laughter echoed in the swirling dark.
Fiona clapped a hand
over her mouth, stifling the laughter. Fool. She was out of time
and had nearly been out of luck. What was she thinking to kiss that man? He could have grabbed
her and ripped her mask off or, worse, held her for the
authorities. He was certainly big enough to have overwhelmed her
and done hideous things to her with his hard-muscled
body.
Lovely, dirty things.
Or at least naked things.
She stifled another
laugh. Clearly panic and adrenaline had combined to drive her mad.
The man was a thief, she reminded
herself, acknowledging and then proceeding to ignore the obvious
irony.
She could almost hear
Hopkins’s voice in her head. Lady Fiona Campbell did not kiss
common criminals.
She allowed her gaze
to travel the length of his hard, muscled, and quite decidedly
male body. Well. She shouldn’t kiss
uncommon criminals,
either.
Declan’s tinny voice
squawked from her wrist, and she tapped the button to silence it.
Time was up. She gathered the shadows around herself and stepped
into the corner behind the door. The guards would be joining them
any moment. Unfortunate, that. She rather hoped the man didn’t face
too much trouble, but the stakes were too high to let him interfere
with her plans.
This job was too
dear. The Siren was on the auction block; that absolutely flawless
and enormous square-cut aquamarine centered on Vanquish’s hilt was
meant to be hers. The anonymous buyer who’d put the word out had
also said those magic words: Money is not an
object.
There was no possible
way to even cost it out. The sword itself was priceless and the
Siren was as well known as Vanquish. According to history, William
had always claimed it came from his own
many-times-great-grandmother, and she was an actual siren. The kind
who sang sailors to their deaths. Apparently old Grandma the
Conqueror had kept at least one sailor alive long enough to get a
little frisky with him.
Fiona figured she’d
start high and negotiate her way down. She wasn’t planning to steal
the sword, after all. She wasn’t irretrievably destroying a
national treasure. Just defacing it a little. They could put a
different jewel in the hilt. A paste one. Fakes were brilliant
these days; nobody would even be able to tell without a jeweler’s
eye.
Guilt whimpered and
tried to raise its ugly little head in her conscience, but she
firmly pushed it back down. Vampires didn’t feel guilty, so why
should she?
The man on the
floor—the man she’d just shot, for
Saint George’s sake—stirred and groaned. Guilt didn’t just whimper,
this time. It jumped up and down and sang an aria. She’d never shot
anyone before. She didn’t want to ever shoot anyone again. She was
not her grandfather’s
child.
The warning gong
clanged as the security door began to rise, and she swung her
attention to the glimmer of light that slowly widened between the
floor and the bottom of the steel door. Right on schedule. Time to
make her way home and decide what to do next. She focused with all
of her concentration on shadowing her presence—sight, sound, and
scent—from even the shifters and their ultrasensitive noses and
ears, then cast one last regretful glance over her shoulder at the
ever-so-gallant thief.
It was quite
fortunate that her shadows dispersed the sound of her gasp even as
it left her mouth, because the floor was empty.
The man was
gone.
Christophe made it as
far as the roof of the White Tower before he collapsed out of mist
form and fell heavily to the stone. The drug had left him weak,
barely able to reach for and channel the magic that had helped him
escape before the Tower Guard found him lying helpless as a mewling
babe on the floor.
Wicked little wench.
She was going to be very, very sorry she’d ever shot an Atlantean
warrior. He might have to tie her up and take a considerable amount
of time teaching her a lesson.
With his
lips.
And his
cock.
The thought of her
warm, willing body underneath his flashed a sizzle of heat through
him that got him up and moving. Now was not the time to be caught
on the grounds. He’d come back for the Siren; he’d seen enough to
know she hadn’t taken it. Not yet.
Now he wanted to find
her. Needed to find her. The Scarlet Ninja was suddenly the only
mission he cared about. He’d wanted a challenge, hadn’t he? She was
definitely that. How had a woman he hadn’t really even seen aroused
him more with a brief brush of her lips than any tumble in the
sheets had done in decades?
He pulled himself up
and, from a crouching position so as not to shout his presence to
the world, scanned the grounds for the uniquely bending shadows
that had signaled her presence inside the Tower. It took several
long seconds, but he found her. She was running, and she was still
shadowed. There was nothing magical or preternatural about her
running speed, however, and he would easily catch up.
Wouldn’t she be
surprised at what she found when she finally stepped outside her
magical shadows? He laughed and, channeling the power of Poseidon
once again, threw himself off the roof and into the rain. This
would have to be his last effort to travel as mist until he’d had
rest and food. Exhaustion was pulling at him, amplified by the
remnants of the drug still working itself out of his system. The
transformation itself should help remove the drug, though,
balancing out the drain on his magic as he changed forms yet
again.
He focused on the way
the curving shadows moved through the grounds and toward the gate,
barely perceptible in the drizzling rain. She moved so gracefully,
almost dancing between one raindrop and the next. It couldn’t be
just the light she was bending with her magic. Shifters had
extremely powerful noses, and she’d been within scenting range. But
clearly they hadn’t caught so much as a whiff—or the sound of her
heartbeat, either. If he hadn’t known better, he might have thought
she was a vampire.
He did know better,
though. More than two centuries spent fighting vamps had taught him
how to recognize a vampire when he confronted one. She had a magic
he hadn’t seen before, that was all. Maybe Fae, but even as he
thought it denial rose to counter it. Not Fae, please not
Fae.
He hated the
Fae.
There. She’d veered away from the loose grouping of
guards near the gate and circled around, slipping through behind
them even as Christophe watched. That easily, and she was
gone.
He wondered if it was
always that simple for her. Decided it must be. After all, she was
the Scarlet Ninja, celebrated throughout the United Kingdom. People
in every pub he’d entered during the past few days had happily and
drunkenly embellished rumors about this phantom who’d stolen
millions of euros’ worth of jewelry and art, but never been caught
or so much as seen. People were speculating that he—and wouldn’t they be surprised to see just how
much the Scarlet Ninja was not a
man—was a descendant of the legendary Robin Hood. He gave an amount
worth exactly half of every take to various charities and causes,
accompanied only by his calling card: a shiny silver card embossed
with the scarlet silhouette of a ninja.
Distraction. If he kept thinking about her, he
might forget to realize how much he was hurting. Exhaustion took on
the form of physical pain, even for an Atlantean warrior, when he’d
been living on pints and very little else, not even sleep, for
days, and then overused his magic in pursuit of a phantom. Alaric
would be furious. The thought cheered him up enough to keep him
going for a little farther, just a bit . . . there.
He’d caught her. The
long, dark car pulled smoothly away from London’s hideous traffic
and up to the curb just long enough for the back door to be opened
ever so briefly, seemingly by whoever sat inside behind those
dark-tinted windows. And if Christophe hadn’t been watching very,
very closely, he never would have seen the flash of scarlet silk
materialize before the door slammed shut and the car pulled back
out into traffic. Not a chance the traffic cameras had caught a bit
of her, either. Just another anonymous dark car in a city filled
with them. Even the license plates were mud-splashed and
unreadable.
As he soared down
toward the car and its mysterious passenger, Christophe spared a
flash of grim amusement at the thought of how very surprised his
Scottish ninja was going to be when she reached her
destination.