Storm's Heart (Elder Races #2)(13)

He paused to check for her breathing, expecting the same deep, even rhythm of sleep.

Except there was no breathing, no sense of another living presence.

He flipped on the light.

The room was empty. She was gone. So were her shopping bags. So were the keys to the SUV.

So was his Glock.

Fury erupted. “Goddamn you, Tricks!”

Tiago couldn’t have tortured her with any greater efficacy if he had tried.

Coming after her all the way to Chicago to make sure she was okay. Being all mean and barbaric and sexy.

She could handle that. She had lived with and been vastly entertained by it for two hundred years. All of Dragos’s sentinels were mean and barbaric and sexy. Even that weird harpybitch Aryal, who she might have a teensy girl crush on. You know, in a totally hetero kind of way.

But then Tiago had turned nice. She hadn’t known he had a nice speed. She had thought he had only two speeds, the killing speed and full stop.

The warlord sentinel, being nice to her. It burned her skin as if he had poured acid all over her.

He had come up behind her in the dark. He curled that powerful muscled body of his around her, enclosing her, and made her feel safe and warm and cared for. He caressed her hand like he cared. It made her wild to get away from him.

What was he thinking? Returning to New York was out of question. She couldn’t go running back to the Wyr demesne just because things had gotten a little rough. That would be political suicide. She would look weak and unfit to rule, not just to the Dark Fae but to all the other demesnes as well.

He told her everything was going to be okay. Damn it.

How was everything going to be okay? For how long? For a few days or a few weeks, or for however long he might decide to help her out? Then what?

He would get on with his life, that’s what, and leave her a solitary monarch on the Dark Fae throne. Meanwhile she had a hundred second cousins. No doubt some of them were lawabiding citizens, but she would bet a good number of them were every bit as ambitious as Geril or her uncle Urien had been.

Stupid Wyr. Nothing was okay.

She couldn’t run away to New York. Now that she was no longer drunk or in shock, she knew she couldn’t run anywhere else either. All the news networks had been telling the same basic story by the end of the evening. Human police and Dark Fae authorities were collaborating on getting a major manhunt underway to find her.

She’d had her time-out and a chance to react, and now she had to go back to the Regent and meet up with the Dark Fae delegation. There wasn’t any other realistic option. When she had chosen to go public with her real identity, she had started down a path of no return.

The delegation was a traditional triad that was comprised of three of the most powerful officials of the Dark Fae government. The first was Chancellor Aubrey Riordan, who belonged somewhere on a distant branch of the Lorelle labyrinthine family tree. Aubrey had been old when Niniane had been born and had retired from public office about fifteen years before her family had been massacred. In the late 1950s Urien had brought Aubrey back into government.

Aubrey’s wife, Naida, had been absent from the group that had met Niniane when she arrived in Chicago. Niniane had heard that Naida was quite a bit younger than her husband. Niniane was interested in meeting the other woman. She looked forward to having conversations with someone that weren’t quite so weighted with political considerations.

The second member of the delegation was Commander Arethusa Shiron, who was the current head of Dark Fae military forces. Arethusa was a cold-eyed, silent woman who intimated Niniane just by the force of her presence. The third was Justice Kellen Trevenan. Kellen was a rarity among the elder Dark Fae, for he was so old his hair had turned white.

All three members of the delegation, Aubrey, Arethusa and Kellen, were hardy survivors if nothing else. They had all lived through her father Rhian’s reign. Her father had been a progressive ruler who had embraced change and developing Dark Fae relationships with not only the long-standing American Indian population but the fast-growing number of European settlers that spread across the continent after the American Revolution in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

Then the members of the delegation had weathered the coup that Urien had led against her father. Urien had been the leader of a conservative faction of Dark Fae that opposed Rhian’s open door policies toward the onslaught of new European arrivals.

To the best of Niniane’s knowledge, none of the three in the delegation had actually participated in the coup itself. They had witnessed Urien’s rise to power and the throne. They had not only lived through his segregationist rule, which had isolated Dark Fae society from the rest of the world, but they came to hold positions where they wielded considerable power. Now they were witness to yet another shift in the monarchy.

While she didn’t want to believe they could be involved in what had happened, the fact was, any of them could have been responsible for the attempt on her life, either by acting on their own or in collusion with another. Or they might have had nothing to do with it, and her cousin Geril and his accomplices had acted independently. Or the attack could have been instigated by someone else entirely.

It had been hard enough to face the delegation the first time when she had arrived in Chicago. The thought of facing them now made her gut clench and her palms sweat. The Dark Fae were known for subterfuge and silent political allegiances, and she had been gone for so long, she was a virtual stranger to it all. What she knew of her heritage read like a short encyclopedia entry colored with adolescent emotions and memories. It was an antiquated snapshot, two hundred years out of date, of a culture and a government that was thousands of years old and Byzantine in its convolutions.