Dead After Dark (Companion #6.5)(82)
Sasha was better off without him anyhow, if she’d stay out of trouble, dammit.
A wave of dark energy rippled through the room. Trey’s skin pricked with warning. He slowed, immediately on alert. He surveyed the crowd for Ekkbar, but the eight-hundred-year-old servant of a Kujoo warlord melded with the jumble of noise before Trey could detect him.
Ekkbar had almost exposed himself. He was a dimwit, but a lethal one to an unprotected human like Sasha.
As a strong empathic, Trey avoided crowds until learning how to filter telepathic noise to prevent sensory overload. He now closed the gateway to his mind within a blink, watching.
That flash of metaphysical energy had either been Ekkbar catching Sasha’s hunter scent or another otherworldly entity who could recognize Trey’s physical signature as a Belador warrior. There was no way the magician had picked up on his presence. Unlike the Hindu warlord’s elite Kujoo soldiers, Ekkbar didn’t possess combat powers necessary to detect a Belador. But he was a magician who could hurt a human woman.
Sasha paused across the room, swiveling her head left. Blue, green, and pink lights shimmered along the straight black hair pouring across her shoulders and back. She narrowed her eyes at something and then blinked. A thick ruffle of lashes kissed her cheek before she continued on.
Trey had kissed that same cheek when she wore tattered jeans and a ponytail that fit with her girl-next-door smile. Maybe if she’d kissed him like just any girl next door they might not have ended up in his bed having explosive sex, or on his back porch at midnight with her homemade whip cream, or . . . damn, he’d never forget the night at the lake with water cascading over her moon-kissed body when he lifted her high in the air.
He’d come close to reconsidering his future as a Belador right then. But he hadn’t and couldn’t change the past now.
Careful not to let her catch sight of him, Trey moved forward again, breathing the bitter smell of incense mixed with hot skin damp from dancing. He had to figure out what to do about Ekkbar without creating a disaster. Since accepting his destiny, Trey had been warned against ever engaging the warlord cursed to live beneath Mount Meru. A river of blood had been spilled once centuries ago when Beladors faced off against the Kujoo. Since then both had upheld an unwritten truce.
If he disturbed the fragile peace between the two, he’d open the gates to a war like none before.
Leave it to a woman to ruin a two-week sabbatical from his contract work with VIPER—Vigilant International Protectors Elite Regiment—where he defended this world against supernatural predators. Gathering intel on Sasha had been a major pain in the butt since he’d been forced to use conventional methods. Any other time, he’d just read a person’s thoughts, but he’d never been able to read Sasha’s mind and had no idea why not since he refused to ask other Beladors. No warrior ever admitted a deficiency to another one.
Tapping her phone line worked, but the only inkling Trey had gotten into this fiasco had been when Sasha left a message on her home phone for her sister that she was out working and hoped to locate Ekkbar at the Black Fairy tonight.
A tall blond female in an outfit that would bring the devil himself to heel stepped in front of Trey, blocking his path. She eyed him like a new soul to devour. His gaze danced over the very revealing red and black lace jumpsuit sending his mind to search her thoughts out of natural curiosity.
No words. Just erotic images of what she envisioned doing . . . to him . . . naked . . . tied to a bed.
He snapped his mind shut, smiled politely, and sidestepped her, then glanced ahead to make sure Sasha remained in sight.
When had she morphed her business from researching family ancestries to becoming a private eye? Who had hired her to find a creature that should still be living beneath a mountain?
A roar on the dance floor drew his attention. When he turned back to track Sasha the crowd had swallowed her. He stretched up, searching. No Sasha. His palms dampened, something he rarely experienced during an op, but those missions didn’t involve a defenseless woman facing a monster.
Heart pounding sharply with each thump of the music’s concussive base, Trey rushed forward, parting the sea of macabre costumes. He reached the far side of the wide room just as a pair of thigh-high boots with a dangly zipper pull headed through a hallway then out the rear door. He could move fast as light when necessary, but not in public without good cause. At the back exit, he caught the bouncer monitoring activity distracted and blitzed past in a rush of air.
Outside, Trey stepped onto an empty back street and took a breath of fresh air, enjoying the brisk late October chill. He caught a familiar tap of footsteps clipping along the sidewalk in the direction of the cemetery.
Next to woods where rapes had occurred in the past.
Where the hell was Sasha going?
Moving cautiously now, he tuned his senses to his surroundings. Survival in his unusual line of work depended on always being prepared. A half-block down, Trey stopped next to the cemetery, trying to pick up the sound of her steps again. He felt another body taut with animosity move into his zone, the area ten feet away. Trey spun around, hands flowing together into a bladelike move that would take off a man’s head.
He stopped barely a half-inch short of Sasha’s lithe neck.
“What are you doing here?” Her blue-black painted mouth pursed with irritation and all he could think about was testing her lipstick to determine if it would smear.
“How ya doin’, Sasha?” He pulled his hands away and straightened to his full height. From what he could see, she was doing exceptionally well in the black vest split open ten inches wide down the center of her front and laced with leather. A link of chain swung from the tip of one breast to the other.