Page 94 of The Rogue's Curse

Misha laughed. “No offense, but you wouldn’t know what the hell you were looking at,” he said. Paris let one hand slide over his back, sending a shiver down his spine. Then he placed a surprisingly plain, but well-polished sword on Misha’s workbench. Its handle was wrapped with rough hide, stained in dark, overlapping patches. “This is the one?” Misha asked.

Paris nodded. “This is it.” He ran a finger along the gleaming metal. “I ended the careers of quite a few vampire hunters with this blade.”

Misha reached for his hand, turning over his arm to stroke the fine lines of the tattoo on his right arm. “And these?”

The other man chuckled. “I wish that I could tell you there was some deep, esoteric meaning. I lived by the blade for many years, and I got rather drunk while spying in London and had them done, quite poorly, I might add. Several decades into being a vampire, we met a tattoo artist who had learned to tattoo vampires. Our skin heals too quickly for normal artists,” he said.

“Wood in the ink,” Misha said.

Paris nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “It’s unpleasant, but it lasts for decades. I had them redone so they didn’t look like a drunkard’s scribbles.” He examined his arm and said, “I’m due to get the bloody things touched up in another year or so unless I want to look like a faded newspaper.” He shook his head. “The indiscretions of youth.”

He peered closer, reading the fine script. “And the writing?”

“May honor be my blade and loyalty my shield,” Paris said. “In French, of course, and it’s not a precise translation.”

“You are full of surprises,” Misha said.

“I am at that,” Paris said. He glanced at the blade. “There are much more interesting things we could do rather than work on this sword.”

Misha smirked at him. “We have priorities.”

Paris put on a mock pout that made him laugh.

“All right. Let me get this started, and then we’ll revisit.”

Paris grinned. “Will you work faster or slower if I do this?” he asked, gently rubbing Misha’s shoulders before planting a kiss on the back of his neck.

“Slower,” Misha said. “It’s wonderfully distracting.” He almost said fuck Carrigan Shea and broke away, but he resigned himself to work. After reluctantly turning away from Paris, he fetched a vial, then attempted to be professional while he collected a small blood sample.

Paris was quiet, watching him intently as he measured and poured ingredients, then added the sample of Paris’s blood. As he worked, dusk gave way to sunrise. Though the room was an interior classroom with no windows, Misha felt the heavy ache of daylight approaching.

While the blood was distilling, he examined the blade. What would encapsulate Paris’s strength? There were required runes, but some would be decorative, and some would be unique. Misha’s roughly translated to power from order.

He was still thinking it over when he heard a familiar voice whisper in his ear. He doesn’t love you.

With his heart sinking, he whipped his head around to see Beckett Frasier standing in the doorway. His eyes were eerie and silvery-blue, his shadow far too large for his frame. Suddenly, he blurred closer, and a stabbing pain arced through Misha’s chest. He stared down in horror at the silver needle, spraying his blood across the room.

Closing his eyes, he fumbled to find that warm red thread that bound him and Paris. Suddenly, he heard Paris’s voice clear as a bell. “Get down,” he barked.

With Misha’s blood dripping to the floor, the hallucination was taking on solidity. Its eyes cast an eerie glow across the room. As he stared at Frasier, the room shimmered around him, and he found himself in a dark place, a place that rang with shouts and stank of blood and sweat.

He had never left.

His vision faltered again, and he saw Paris barreling through the door. The sword slashed across the shadowy form, and he saw his workshop again. He staggered after Paris, watching as he corralled the creature into a room across the hall and flung open the curtains. Sunlight poured in a wide beam, and the shadow-Frasier let out a horrific screech before exploding in a cloud of ash-like particles.

Paris recoiled, one exposed arm turning pink from the sun, and hurled the curtains closed again. He gently guided Misha back into the workshop. “If we’re apart when it happens again, sunlight will take care of them, unless they’ve gotten too much of a foothold,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“You saw how it got stronger from your blood,” Paris said. “Once they’ve manifested, they can draw energy from you and become more and more real. After a certain point, the sunlight will ward them off, but it won’t kill them.”

“What will?”

“Same thing that kills anything else. Can’t go wrong with decapitation,” Paris said, brandishing the sword before placing it back on Misha’s workbench.

Misha sighed. “I don’t know how you’ve dealt with this for so long.”

“You forget that I only have this problem when I’m sleeping,” Paris said. “So I just don’t.”

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