Read Online Masters of the Night by Elizabeth Brockie - Free Book Online

eased out from between the trees and padded
toward her. Bending down, she stroked the silver and cream fur in curiosity.
“Well damn, don’t I feel like LadyHawke . ”
    He took up stride beside her.
    “ Tormentil . Such a strange
name,” she murmured to herself as she paused and plucked a few of the yellow
flowers growing on long, shiny, green stalks. “But they are rather pretty,
don’t you think, Henri?”
    She touched the petals. Her jewel-colored eyes moved from the flowers
to the path.
    A little pile of leaves that had been lying undisturbed swirled upward
as though tussled by a breeze, then settled back down again. Then
another and another.
    Her gaze followed the flurries of leaves. It was as though a tiny whirlwind
was traveling along the path.
    Or invisible footfalls.
    Henri felt an importune shiver, frosty with a sense of familiarity, and
he knew—
    A ghost disturbed those leaves.
    “What do you want?” Angie called out, trembling as the portentous
figure became visible.
    Slender, in a tailored gray suit and top hat, he acknowledged her by
touching the brim of his hat with the head of a silver-tipped cane.
    His hair, dark, carried a skein of gray at the temples, and his
thirty-something face was not extraordinary. Until one looked in his eyes.
    They were a dead gray.
    “Go away. Or I’ll have you exorcised!” Angie warned shakily. “I know a
priest, y’ know!”
    He popped open an umbrella as if to protect his expensive gray suit
from the mist floating through him, twirled his cane, and ambled away into the
fog, whistling.
    “I’ve stepped off the edge of the friggin ’
universe,” Angie groaned, and she raced to the safety of her mini, leaving the
wolf on the path.
    She seems a little distraught, Henri thought,
observing her. It was just a ghost.
    She looked as though she wanted to choke something, anything, with her
bare hands.
    Henri felt it best not to follow her, considering.
    The car’s engine revved and shortly became far away. Henri dissolved
the wolf shape in a vapor and became himself.
    Glancing into the woods where the spirit had dissipated, he puzzled
over the ghost’s appearance. Andre’s troupe of no-goods usually just unearthed vampyres , but it seemed they were unearthing a top hat with
a cane in their quest of Angie’s lineage.
    Interesting.
    Ice slushed down Henri’s spine, then warmed,
a warning his own kind was near—
    He swept quietly through the mist-swathed trees, searching, but the
woodsy paths did not give up their secrets.
    He sniffed the air. The perfumed scent of the mystic was still
lingering in the mists, and … vapors of another presence, one he couldn’t
identify.
    The Realm had dispatched a Lammergeier . A lamb hawk.
    To kill him. And carry away the
mortal infused with forbidden power.
    They did not yet know who and what Angie was.

 
 
 
    8.
    The rural road
panning the hilly English countryside had become a maze in the fog. Washes of
creeks, bits of trees, fence posts, floated into Angie’s vision then receded
back into obscurity.
    She was as lost as a rabbit in a snake hole.
    And all she had wanted was a glass of wine to calm the jolts of a day
that had ended with a ghost instead of good coffee. So she had turned onto this woodsy two-lane to find the French hideaway the librarian
had suggested, patterned after the famous Caravelle .
    She pulled off the road to get her bearings.
    Odd. Something, off to
the right moving through the marsh, parting the reeds and tall grass, cutting a
rapid path straight toward her, but she couln’t tell
whether it was animal or human or …
    It disappeared, sliding into the bog as another silhouette became
visible in the murky evening.
    Henri.
    He walked toward her across a low land bridge through feathers of fog.
His long trench coat was open, flowing out away from him, and his white cotton
shirt was unbuttoned to mid-chest.
    He was wickedly handsome.
    His casual Italian slacks were cut low and sensuously relaxed