Free The Deadliest Bite by Jennifer Rardin Page A

song had changed. Become ful of interesting harmonies interspersed with drumbeats so intense I half expected an army to take the field. Instead the cord began to vibrate against my non-hand so painful y that I backed away.
    “Raoul?”
    “Behold,” Raoul said to Cole.
    He turned away from the nightmare spread out before him just as the cord seemed to separate and rebraid itself into a new shape, that of a woman whose dark brown hair swept in ringlets down her back. When she looked up, as if in amazement that a sky so blue could exist anywhere in the universe, the sun glinted off her red highlights.
    “I’ve never seen eyes so green,” Cole whispered. His hands had dropped, palms up, into his lap, as if he were a beggar pleading for her mercy. “What’s her name?” Raoul looked at me. “Her name is Ezri…”
    I finished it for him. “Ezri Jasmine. E.J. for short. She’s my niece in, what, twenty years?”
    “Twenty-three,” Raoul told me.
    Cole didn’t seem to have heard. His jaw had dropped slightly, as if he’d been hit by an armored truck. He whispered, “She’s an angel.”
    “You could say that,” Raoul agreed.
    I riveted my eyes to his. But he avoided my gaze. Suddenly random events in my life clicked together in new ways. I understood why the Magistrate had gone after E.J. during that battle back in Tehran. Why the part of her that connected to the cosmos was able to resist his attack so wel for so long. And maybe even why her father did his best to avoid me during those rare times that Evie blackmailed me into attending a family event.
    Cole stretched out his hand as if he wanted to touch her but knew the museum guards would kick his ass if they saw him defiling the fine art. He said, “Ezri? She’s—”
    “Your destiny, if you choose to embrace it,” said Raoul. “You won’t seem old to her when you final y meet, because having most of your name chiseled to the demon’s heartstone has slowed your aging process by decades. But be warned. Even if you decide to wait for her, you’l have to endure tortures in the space between. As I said, the Rocenz has changed you. But its marks aren’t clean and precise, like a carpenter’s tool. They leave the scars of a brand. For some the dark fire becomes so al uring that they choose it despite the fact that it burns away everything that made them human.”
    Cole touched the horns that had almost completely receded back into his skul . “She’s just a baby now? How do I fight it for twenty years?”
    “Twenty-three,” Raoul corrected.
    Cole’s eyes drank her in. He knew he wouldn’t see her again for decades, and I could see him trying to memorize every feature, right down to the beauty mark high on her right cheekbone. Final y he said, “You saw how wel I made it through the first couple of weeks. How am I going to pul off years?”
    Raoul reached into his pocket as he said, “Soon Vayl wil decide that you need to travel to Romania, which has just recently embraced its roots as the country that birthed vampirism. Perhaps you wil find a use for these?”
    I couldn’t see what he held at first. He did a little turning motion with one hand, set the object down with the other, then stepped back and watched with us. A pair of ruby-red lips smiled up at us as its blinding white wind-up vampire teeth chopped up and down so fast they looked to be stuck in the middle of the Antarctic without a hat or scarf to keep them toasty warm. The vamp mouth walked around in circles with the help of a pair of pointy-toed black dress shoes.
    Cole’s chuckle started somewhere near his belt buckle and by the time it emerged from his throat he was doubled over and slapping his thigh. Which isn’t easy when you’re mostly spirit.
    “Excel ent! I can just see Vayl looking down his nose at those, going, ‘Those are not in the least bit amusing. Also, you cannot get a good anchor into your victim when you are gnawing at him like some kind of jackal.’ I’l take