The tiny hairs at the back of her neck stood up in screaming warning. “I’m here to do a job and I’ll do it well. If you want to play games, I’m not your girl.”
Janvier stepped forward before Nazarach could reply to what was surely a highly impertinent statement. “Ashblade,” he said, using the nickname he was responsible for coining, “is good at what she does. She’s not so good at playing by the rules.”
“So”—Nazarach turned his attention to Janvier—“you’re not dead yet, Cajun?”
“Despite Ash’s best attempts.”
The angel laughed, and the shattering power of it swept around the room, crawled over her skin. Age, death, ecstasy, and agony, it was all in that laugh, in Nazarach’s past. It crushed her, threatened to cut off her breath, leaving her trapped forever in the terror-choked hell that had sought to claim her since childhood.
Chapter Three
It was the fear that saved her. Fueled by the threat of being imprisoned inside her own mind, she wrenched herself out of the endless whirlpool and back into the present. As the rush of air receded from her ears, she heard Nazarach say, “Perhaps I’ll ask you to rejoin my court, Janvier.”
Janvier gave a perfect bow, and for an instant, she saw him in the clothes of a bygone era, a stranger who knew how to play politics with as much manipulative ease as he played cards. Her hand fisted in instinctive rejection, but the next moment he laughed that lazy, amused laugh, and he was the vampire she knew again. “I never was much good as a courtier if you recall.”
“But you provided the most intelligent conversation in the room.” Settling his wings close to his back, the angel walked to a gleaming mahogany table in one corner. “You aid the Guild Hunter?”
Ashwini let Janvier speak, using the time to study Nazarach, his power snapping a whip against her senses . . . a whip laced with broken glass.