they were both aware the security guard stood nearby, but the mortal with a pistol secured at his hip belt didn’t make a move. Smart guy.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Trystan Hawkes growled. He released his hold on Vail and tugged out the earbuds. The werewolf sneered, and spit, “Longtooth.”
“I love you, too, brother. Just come from talking to Daddy?”
“He’s not your father.” Tryst set back his shoulders and assumed a modicum of calm, but his adamant sneer told Vail what he wouldn’t say. He had already said it all, so why bother again? “You slumming with the normal folk?”
“Your daddy called me here.” Vail waggled a brow in a malicious tease. “Maybe he likes me better, eh?”
Tryst chuffed. “In your demented sparkly dreams.”
Vail did not sparkle, though the faery ichor he had imbibed had seeped through his pores and left a sheen on his skin. It had freaked out Tryst the first and only time they’d met right here in this building. Things had gone downhill from there.
“Glad to see there’s no love lost,” Vail countered. “Wouldn’t want my werewolf brother to go all mushy on me.”
He wanted to punch the bastard, but a frustrating sliver of need inhabiting his hardened black heart also wanted to pull the creep in for a brotherly hug. What a wib you are, Vail.
“You must be a force, brother,” Vail said. “But wait. You don’t run with a pack. Just a sad little omega wolf—”
The wolf wielded a sneak-attack high kick. Tryst’s hard rubber sole landed on Vail’s jaw and ratcheted back his skull on his spine. He saw stars for a few seconds.
Rubbing his jaw, Vail smirked. “Nice one.”
“You keep her insane,” Tryst said forcefully.
“She’s my mother, too. Like it or not,” Vail said, but he couldn’t get behind the retaliation. Did he keep her insane?
“You.” Tryst stabbed Vail in the chest. The wolf reeked of aggression. “Stay away from our family.”
“Seems your damned family keeps wanting to pull me in.”
“You have no right being here!”
“Yeah?” Vail slammed Tryst against the wall, pushing his anger through his brother’s shoulders. “I paid your father’s damn blood debt! A debt you should have paid.”
Trystan’s pale blue eyes went soft. He blinked and looked aside. Vail felt the tension in his brother’s muscles slacken under his grasp. He stepped away from the werewolf.
He’d spoken the truth. Neither could deny it. Tryst and Rhys Hawkes, and perhaps even his mother, Viviane, owed him more than they could ever give. But Vail knew the blood debt was one bargain for which he’d never know reciprocation.
“Gentlemen?”
The security guard knew they were brothers.
“It’s cool, Harley,” Tryst said to the guard. “All in jest. Brotherly love, and all that crap.”
The guard nodded, but his smile didn’t express amusement.
The lanky wolf nodded once, an odd acknowledgment, which either agreed that, indeed, he should have paid the debt himself, or that he didn’t care what Vail had suffered.
Vail didn’t have to guess at his brother’s meaning.
Tryst curtly waved him off and strode toward the entrance, calling, “Stay out of my life, vampire!”
Vail flipped off the werewolf and jumped inside the elevator as the doors closed. Releasing his breath, he then shook out his fists, working his tense muscles loose.
The surprise of learning, three months earlier, he’d a brother could never top the innate desire to connect with Tryst. Vail didn’t know where that feeling came from, but he’d fight it to the death, if he had to. Tryst hated him without knowing him. Vail had best accept that.
You are unwanted in Faery. You will be unwanted in the mortal realm.
Tough words to hear from his enemy. But not difficult to believe they were true.
Landing at the top floor, he assumed calm as he slicked back his hair and strode into the marble hallway. The place always smelled like leather polish, and that disturbed his respect for nature.
The receptionist, a petite, strawberry blonde with a sexy librarian’s penchant for tight, tailored clothing, adjusted her glasses at the sight of Vail and sat straighter behind her desk, offering a bright red cupid’s bow smile.
Vail winked at her, and she noticeably swooned.
Mortals. They were too easy.
Hawkes was on the phone, and gestured him inside the sparely furnished, large corner office.
Swinging by the bar, Vail nabbed a goblet of the expensive wine and sucked it down. It tasted like fruit warmed by the sun, but could never match any faery vintage.
He walked to the window that wrapped the two corner walls of the office. Spreading out his arms, he felt the sudden daring desire to jump through the glass, to discover the exaltation of flight. Despite growing up in Faery, the closest he’d come to flying was a raging orgasm. Not to be disregarded on the list of adventures one must constantly pursue.
Yet any attempt at flight would result in a vampire smashed on the tarmac—not dead, but aching and damaged for weeks, surely. He’d save it for desperation.
Rhys Hawkes showed his age with sublime protest. Pushing three centuries, Hawkes had told Vail his hair had once been black with a gray streak striping one side. Now it was gray with threads of black here and there. His harsh European bone structure battled for notice but the man’s whiskey eyes were always what garnered observation.
The man was the father of Trystan Hawkes, Vail’s brother. Vail and Tryst had the same mother, Viviane LaMourette. He and his brother had been born on the same day; Vail first, then Trystan not two minutes later.
They were not twins.
Vail’s father was a vampire who had once been Rhys Hawkes’s nemesis—and his brother.
Viviane LaMourette was all vampire—bloodborn in the sixteenth century—but also insane.
What a twisted web woven through this family’s history, Vail thought with a mirthless smirk. Made for interesting coffee table talk, if one owned a coffee table. Well, he did own the coffeemaker.
Mortals and their curious habits.
Vail had never met his father. He would, as soon as he could get Hawkes to cough up information on how to find him. If anyone knew where to find Constantine de Salignac, it had to be his own brother. Yet Rhys had been evasive the first time Vail had begged the information from him.
Vail needed to see the man who had driven his mother insane. To look into his eyes, and to know whether or not his own eyes were the same. And then? Well, then.
Hawkes hung up and gestured for Vail to sit on the other side of the sleek stainless-steel desk before him. The man wore a comfortable gray sweater and dark jeans, and a silver wedding band on his left hand. He looked more Aging Rock Star than Vicious Half-Breed.
“I’m pleased you’ve come. It’s been months, Vaillant. How are you getting on in the mortal realm?”
Vail slouched onto the chair and propped an ankle across his opposite knee. He shrugged fingers through his hair, liking the scrape of the iron rings he wore on most fingers against his scalp. He noted Hawkes zoomed in on the rings.
Cracking a lazy grin, he tilted his head. “I’m assimilating. But it’s got nothing on Faery. So what’s up, Uncle?”
“You feel ready to visit your mother yet?”
Hell,