She drew a deep breath. If she walked away from this house, from her job, her life would never be the same. At a minimum, Mr. Sotiris would fire her. And that was assuming he didn’t send the police after her for . . . well, she wasn’t sure for what. Theft? You couldn’t steal an adult person, even if they’d been a statue that morning.
Oh, yeah. She could just hear herself explaining that to the police. She’d be the one locked up, not Dragan. They’d put her in one of those institutions. Someplace peaceful. Maybe close to her family. They could probably swing that. Her family was from Tennessee, but they didn’t exactly sit on a porch and play the banjo. Her parents were both physicians in Nashville, her grandfather a corporate attorney, now retired. Her family knew people.
On the other hand, if they didn’t get caught, or if Sotiris didn’t bother to chase them, there was the intriguing idea that at least some magic was real. Dragan believed it was. And she had to admit that, on the face of it, the facts were on his side. What if it was real? Even if no one had true power any more, if the ability had died off long ago, the possibility that it had ever existed would be amazing. And if Dragan’s existence was a leftover piece of that magic? This road trip might be her only chance at the kind of adventure she’d been reading about all her life. The kind she’d dreamt about.
Damn. She couldn’t believe she was going to do this. “I just have one question.”
Chapter Two
Manhattan, New York, NY
SOTIRIS CURSED SILENTLY as he rode the elevator down thirty- two floors to the lobby of his very elegant and expensive Manhattan high-rise apartment. At the time, the height had seemed to make sense, offering a splendid view from his penthouse condominium. He could stand at any of his windows and gaze down at the tiny ant-like forms of the common people scurrying along the crowded sidewalks far below. Far below him, where they belonged.
The damn elevator doors opened again, this time to admit a large group of people whose appearance was similar enough that he dismissed them as a family, as they shuffled into the elevator, moving a few inches this way or that before finally settling in one place. He wanted to shove them all out and send the damn box straight to the lobby. He could do it. The smallest touch of magic, a whispered spell, and he’d be out of the building and speeding away from this infernal city with its crowds and its traffic.
He hadn’t considered the possibility that the hideaway he’d built upstate in the most remote area of the Finger Lakes, where there was no estate smaller than ten acres, would be a refuge from the constant noise of Manhattan. He usually thrived on that noise and its energy, but the people, the throngs of humans sweating and crowding every inch of the city, including the damn elevator—he needed to take a break from that on occasion.
But that wasn’t why he was hurrying there now. Something was wrong. It stroked his nerves, echoed in his very bones like the voice of doom. He thought of the many magical artifacts stored at that house. Not only the statuary with Dragan’s stone prison, but the artifacts in his office and too many of the other rooms to count. His mind raced, trying to pin down the sensation. What had gone wrong? The girl had been ordered not to enter the statuary, but unlike his office, the room was never locked. Had she finally gotten too nosey? After all, he’d hired her in large part because of her specific knowledge of antiques in general, and oddities specifically. It made sense that the kind of curious mind which would lead one to pursue such a unique specialty would also drive one to explore once in a while. But she’d been so meticulous all this time, so diligent in following his orders, and doing the work she’d been hired for. If she had entered the statuary chamber, then why now? And why would it matter? What the fuck had gone wrong?
Two minutes later, though it felt like an eternity, the elevator’s golden doors opened on the ground floor. He shoved his way out, ignoring the scandalized glances, the muttered imprecations. He didn’t care about people or their opinions. Striding across the veined marble floor, he acknowledged the doorman’s silent signal that his car was waiting. And then finally, finally, he was behind the wheel of his Mercedes-Maybach sedan. A sleek dragon of a car that shut out the noise of the world and flew on silent wings at his command, his beast was as black as a moonless night on the moor.
His breath froze in his chest at that thought from the old world, leaving him with a single name that flashed to the forefront of his mind—Dragan. Was it possible? Was that the whisper of disaster that had him racing northward?
“Call the girl,” he ordered the vehicle, then waited as the call went through. He never called her by name. Sometimes it required focused thought to remember what it was. She was simply “the girl,” or nothing at all. She did her job and stayed out of the way. He listened as his call began to ring at the Finger Lake house. And ring. And ring.
But even then, he denied the possibility. Dragan couldn’t have gained his freedom, not after all this time. Sotiris had searched the world over to get hold of that damn statue. He hadn’t been searching for Dragan specifically, but for all of the warriors he’d cursed thousands of years and an entire universe in the past. The four of them had served his mortal enemy, Nicodemus Katsaros, and had been treasured by him above all others. It had been the greatest spell casting of Sotiris’s life when he’d stolen the four of them away on the very precipice of battle, trapping them in stone and hurling them into the winds of time where Katsaros would never find them. The fact that Katsaros had never stopped looking for them had been the sweetest part of Sotiris’s victory—the knowledge that his enemy would spend every moment of his life in a fruitless pursuit.
As added insurance, Sotiris had searched, too, wanting to be certain Katsaros would never succeed in recovering his warriors. He’d never found Damian, but that hadn’t surprised him, since the big blond warrior had been and still was inextricably tied to Katsaros’s magic. He had found the other two warriors, but not in time. He’d had Kato within his grasp, but lost him by a hair’s breadth when his curse had been broken. He’d located Gabriel long ago, but the damn Japanese mobster who’d owned him had refused to sell. The man had possessed just enough power, boosted by ties to the ancestral lands where he lived, to enforce his refusal. Sotiris had been willing to wait after that, knowing the human mobster would eventually die and Gabriel would be his.
But Gabriel had been freed before that could happen, and being a vampire, he’d chosen to serve Raphael, the powerful vampire lord who dominated all of North America. Which, in a way, denied him to Nicodemus Katsaros. It wasn’t fully satisfactory, but it was no fairytale ending for his enemy, either.
That had left Dragan, the winged warrior who’d been in Sotiris’s possession for more than a century, safely hidden away in his remote lake house. He was the one warrior whom Katsaros would never recover.