Dance of the Gods Read Free Page A

had it all over her apartment inChicago where she’d based herself over the last year and a half. The bed boasted a tall headboard with carved dragons on either side. A woman could feel like a spellbound princess in that bed—if she was of a fanciful state of mind.
    Despite the fact the place was owned by a vampire, there was a wide mirror, framed in thick mahogany. The wardrobe would have held three times the amount of clothes she’d brought with her, so she used it for secondary weapons, and tucked her traveling wardrobe in the chest of drawers.
    The walls were painted a dusky plum, and the art on them woodland scenes of twilight or predawn, so that the room seemed to be in perpetual shadow if the curtains were drawn. But that was all right. She had lived a great deal of her life in the shadows.
    But she opened the curtains now so morning spilled in and then sat at the gorgeous little desk to check her e-mail on her laptop.
    She couldn’t prevent the little flicker of hope, or stop it from dying out as she saw there was still no return message from her father.
    Nothing new, she reminded herself and tipped back in the chair. He was traveling, somewhere in South America to the best of her knowledge. And she only knew that much because her brother had told her.
    It had been six months since she’d had any contact with him, and there was nothing new about that, either. His duty to her had been, in his opinion, fulfilled years ago. And maybe he was right. He’d taught her, he’d trained her, though she’d never been good enough to merit his approval.
    She simply didn’t have the right equipment. She wasn’t his son. The disappointment he’d felt when it had been his daughter instead of his son who’d inherited the gift was something he’d never bothered to hide.
    Softening blows of any sort just wasn’t Sean Murphy’s style. He’d pretty much dusted her off his hands on her eighteenth birthday.
    Now she’d embarrassed herself by sending him a secondmessage when he’d never answered the first. She’d sent that first e-mail before she’d left for Ireland, to tell him something was up, something was twitching, and she wanted his advice.
    So much for that, she thought now, and so much for trying again, after her arrival, to tell him what was twitching was major.
    He had his own life, his own course, and had never pretended otherwise. It was her own problem, her own lack, that she still coveted his approval. She’d given up on earning his love a long time ago.
    She turned off the computer, pulled on a sweatshirt and shoes. She decided to go up to the training room and work off frustration, work up an appetite lifting weights.
    The house, she’d been told, had been the one Hoyt and his brother, Cian, had been born in. In the dawn of the twelfth century. It had been modernized, of course, and some additions had been made, but she could see from the original structure the Mac Cionaoiths had been a family of considerable means.
    Of course Cian had had nearly a millennium to make his own fortune, to acquire the house again. Though from the bits and pieces she’d picked up, he didn’t live in it.
    She didn’t make a habit out of conversing with vampires—just killing them. But she was making an exception with Cian. For reasons that weren’t entirely clear to her, he was fighting with them, even bankrolling their little war party to some extent.
    Added to that, she’d seen the way he’d fought the night before, with a ruthless ferocity. His allegiance could be the element that tipped the scales in their favor.
    She wound her way up the stone stairs toward what had once been the great hall, then a ballroom in later years. And was now their training room.
    She stopped short when she saw Larkin’s cousin Moira doing chest extensions with five-pound free weights.
    The Geallian wore her brown hair back in a thick braidthat