But none came.
The rumbling quieted quickly as the terrible, inhuman sound faded. Ariane opened her eyes to see that the world had turned a soft shade of gray from falling dust and rock, and the room was full of dim, dingy light.
Gingerly, she sat up, peering around, looking for any sign of life. Several enormous chunks of the ceiling had crashed to the floor, one not far from her. Then she saw Damien, sprawled on the floor where he’d been knocked off his feet.
That got her to her feet, stumbling over to him and kneeling down.
“Damien,” she pleaded, her voice sounding harsh and strange. She shook him. “Damien, please…”
He groaned softly, but the smile he gave her when he rolled over and saw her was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. He sat up slowly, and Ariane threw her arms around him, holding him as tightly as she could.
“We’re alive,” he said, sounding amazed. “Did I kill him, then?”
“You did not. But you fought well, cat.”
Ariane looked to see Sam slowly making his way toward them. He was bloodied and battered, but very much alive… as was Lucan, not far behind him. Damien stood, helping Ariane to her feet, and the four of them came together to look at what had once been Chaos’s prison. The piles of ash that had once been fallen angels still smoldered, and the room smelled faintly of incense.
“Come,” Lucan said, looking wearier than Ariane had ever seen an ancient look. The four of them picked their way out of the rubble, saying nothing. Though the suffocating feeling of the place had lifted, Ariane couldn’t shake the sense that they were walking through a tomb.
At the threshold, they found the withered husk of what might once have been a man, but for the luxuriant black wings. It looked mummified, and the mouth was open in a silent scream.
“Sariel,” Ariane said. She had never felt so numb.
Not far away lay the remains of Armaros. He had run, Ariane guessed, seeing too late all that his brother had truly become. He hadn’t made it far.
Chaos was nowhere to be seen.
Damien pulled her back against him, wrapping his arms around her and holding her close. Though his skin was cool, he was the only thing that prevented her from feeling like ice.
“We lost,” she said softly. “Chaos has risen.”
Sam turned his head to look at Ariane, both pride and sorrow reflected in his eyes.
“No, d’akara. Living to fight another day is no loss. It’s as I feared. Chaos will not be so easily destroyed.” Then Sam looked at Damien, and what she saw there surprised her. “You have my gratitude, Damien Tremaine.”
“And mine,” Lucan said. “When the next battle comes, I will gladly fight at your side.”
She felt him incline his head, accepting without a word the enormous compliment that had just been paid him… which, Ariane later thought, was probably best.
Together, the four of them started down the corridor to where they could hear the trapped and weakened vampires beginning to shout for them. Sam looked at Ariane, and in his eyes she saw every one of his thousands of years.
“This is only the beginning.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
FOR WEEKS AFTER Chaos had risen, Ariane had nightmares.
They were terrible things, images of burning eyes mixed with the sounds of screams, some of which sounded eerily like the family she had lost so long ago. When she woke at dusk every evening, though, it was with Damien’s arms around her, dulling the pain of the monsters that stalked her mind and memory until slowly, they began to recede.
Finally, when the air had begun its subtle change from the warmth of summer to the earthy nip of fall, Ariane awoke one evening to find that she had slept the day through in complete peace.
They had been staying with Vlad, at his insistence, and Ariane didn’t mind, though she was beginning to feel like she needed some space. The Dracul might be a bookworm, but he was a powerful man, and there was a constant flow of visitors. At first, they’d all been waiting for Chaos to show himself quickly, girding themselves for a fight. Instead, there had been nothing but silence. Mormo had been revived, though for how long was anyone’s guess. Sammael had assumed leadership of the Grigori with the unanimous support of the dynasty, with Lucan preferring to remain only as advisor, and the secrets beneath the dust and sand were exposed to every member. They would not be taken unaware.
Still, whatever Chaos planned, an immediate frontal attack on the dynasties did not seem to be it.And Ariane wanted to start to move on with her life.
She opened her eyes and stretched, smiling when she heard the sound of Damien’s voice. He was on the phone already—not an uncommon occurrence lately. She lifted her head to look at him, sitting in a chair by the dresser and looking adorably disheveled in his pajama pants. His eyes connected with hers, and he grinned.
That smile, lovely and just a little wicked, melted her every time.
“Yeah. Mmm-hmm. Well, I’m not going to fight about it. No, you keep your bloody paperwork. I know. All right, look, Drake, I’ve got something to do. Yes, I’ll tell her. I’m hanging up now.”
He held the phone way from his face for a moment, looking at it as though it were a foreign object. Ariane could hear Drake’s deep voice still chattering away on the other end. Damien hung it up and put the phone on the dresser.
“Honestly, I think I liked him better when he was throwing files at me and telling me to get the hell out of his office.”
She sat up, and he came to sit beside her on the bed, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. Ariane leaned into his touch. There had been a huge change in him since that night in the desert. He was still very much the irreverent, irritating assassin she’d fallen in love with, but he seemed… content. Happy. And not at all reserved about his love for her.
Ariane was fairly sure their friends found it obnoxious, but when one was in love with a man like Damien Tremaine, that was a way of life. She wouldn’t trade a second of it.
“What did he want this time?” Ariane asked, bemused by Damien’s disgruntled expression.
“You, I think, on a hot buttered roll and slathered in cream. He’s asked me to thank you for agreeing to all this. Again.”
She laughed. Alistair Drake’s obvious fascination with her had become a running joke among their friends. It was flattering, she supposed. And Drake was an interesting man. But she suspected his interest had more to do with finally getting to have a Grigori, mixed blood though she now was, under the auspices of the House of Shadows.
“What else did he want?” she asked.
Damien blinked. “Hmm? Sorry, was thinking about the slathered in cream thing. Anyway, he would like… if we wouldn’t be too terribly put out about it… for us to come home.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Seattle, you mean?”
Damien hadn’t breathed a word about returning to Washington, though she knew that eventually he was going to want to do something about the apartment of stuff she still hadn’t seen. It was time, though… time to start living again. Drake had been wonderful about giving both of them the time to recuperate after all that had happened, but his calls to Damien had been more frequent lately, his interest in how he could adjust his operation to accommodate all that had happened obvious.
Especially since Damien had informed him that he and Ariane were now a package deal. The possibilities immediately had Drake salivating.
Damien slid the rest of the way onto the bed and relaxed against the headboard.
“Yes, well, we’ll be traveling plenty, considering he wants us gathering information about whatever it is that demon’s gone off to stir up. This is what happens when you make too many friends in high places. Less skulking and stabbing, more wandering around creepy little bookshops run by… well, I don’t know, but I swear he was part troll. Oh, and we’ll have to schmooze. Nothing like being PR for the Shades.”
Ariane rubbed her hand against his. All of it sounded fascinating to her, but she wanted to be sure it wouldn’t put Damien to sleep. He’d been slinking around in shadows for a long time.
“Will you miss it? The skulking and stabbing?”
His smile was slow and sweet. “No. I think it stopped being entertaining a long time ago, honestly. I was just too busy not giving a damn about anything to notice. This will be interesting, I think. The House of Shadows does all sorts of things, not just the basic nefarious services. It was high time I branched out. We’ll travel the world. I can show you everything you’ve missed without worrying quite so much about having my head cut off.”
She loved imagining it. She desperately wanted to see the world, and Damien was the perfect man to show it to her. Even if she didn’t remotely believe he wouldn’t ever find trouble for them to get into.
“Anyway,” Damien said, “travel aside, we’ve got to have a home somewhere, and Drake would like us as close to his towering stack of paperwork as possible.”
“Ah.” She laughed. “I’d like to see Seattle. And the actual House of Shadows. And that apartment you never talk about.”
“I don’t want you to see that,” Damien said.
Ariane lifted her eyebrows, surprised at the sting of the words. She’d thought he was finished holding back from her. Since that awful night in the desert, he’d given her everything she could have hoped for, finally letting go, letting her in. That he would want to hide his little dragon horde from her was an unhappy surprise—it seemed like such a small thing now.
But when he continued, she understood.
“I mean, I suppose you can see it, but I don’t want to live in it. That was just a place to keep things. It was never really mine. Nowhere was.” He stroked a finger down her arm, making her shiver. “I want our own magpie nest, as you called it once,” Damien said, his eyes lighting. “I want a house, and I want us both to fill it with ridiculously expensive and shiny things we bring back from our travels. I want to make a home, Ariane. With you.”
He couldn’t have said anything that would have pleased her more.