Playing with Fire by Michele Hauf

Author:Michele Hauf [Hauf, Michele]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2011-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

The blonde spitfire blazed into the study and hissed in a whisper, "You don't have permission to enter this home!"

I set down the marble globe I'd been studying with care and turned to lean against the ancient mahogany desk that might have been around for centuries. "I'm not a vampire, vixen. I can enter any dwelling I choose."

"Generally a person waits to be invited in if he means to be in the least nice."

"Never confessed to being a nice guy, either."

"You're an ass."

"And you should be nicer, seeing you've got some big favor you want to ask of me. Yes?"

Fists chugging at her sides, she blew out a breath of frustration instead of another argument. I had guessed correctly. And I immediately felt awful about it. Someone had taken the wind out of her sails, and that someone had been me.

I shouldn't feel bad. She was a thief. But standing here in her father's home, with him upstairs--dying--would never put me in the running for sainthood.

Defeated and quiet now, Parish pulled the Retriever from her pocket and held it before her on a shaky palm. "Please, help me. I need the code to make it work."

"Tell me how your mortal father lost his soul?"

"I don't have time for this, demon."

I winced because I preferred her to use my name and not the label that suddenly made me feel dirty and lesser around her brightness.

"Do you even care?" she continued. "He's dying. He's so close..." She tilted her head down and I looked away before I could see the teardrop. Too late. I smelled the salty sadness. My chest squeezed oddly. "Fine. Papa sold his soul for me."

"For you? But what...?"

"I didn't want to tell you this, but apparently you've not a clue."

"A clue about what?"

"About what I really am, or rather, what I once was, and how I believe we were destined to meet."

Now she'd lost me. She was vampire, who I assumed had once been mortal due to the mortal father. Destined to meet? I bought into that crap about as much as I believed in fate and soul mates. Life was what you made it; it was not foretold before you set foot on this earth. Unless...

"Cinder, I was born with a sigil on my forearm." She displayed her forearm, but where she stroked it the skin appeared paler, thinner.

A sigil? That was an angel thing. And as she spoke, I started to shake my head, not in disbelief, but in utter awe.

"I was born a muse," she said. "A female who would attract a fallen one to mate with me and give birth to a monstrous nephilim. My father learned what the sigil meant when I was eight. And believing if it wasn't there, it wouldn't lure an angel, to have it removed...Papa sold his soul to the dark prince."

Not one to ever be taken by surprise, that detail stunned me. I dropped my jaw open.

"Himself flayed it off right then and there. Without anesthesia. I've never felt so much pain.

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