With a growl, I turned back at the last second and shoved all the clothes back into the bag. Stranger things had happened. Hell, the naturi were waltzing around the Coven’s main hall. Maybe I could survive this mess.

It wasn’t yet eight o’clock when I hit the streets. The night was young and I was starving. Every instinct within my body begged that I fall back into my typical hunting style of slowly stalking my prey. Ordinarily, I would wander through the crowds of people that still lingered on the streets and listen to their thoughts until something finally caught my attention, but I didn’t have that luxury tonight. Rowe would be lurking somewhere within this crowd, waiting for a glimpse of me, I had no doubt. I needed to feed quickly and carefully tonight. My only concern was not grabbing a naturi in my haste and drinking their poisoned blood.

Out of pure necessity, my “hunting” was condensed down to settling as comfortably as possibly in a dark shadowy niche between a pair of tall stone building and mentally calling to one human after another. My only requirements were large men in their mid-twenties to early thirties. I needed to be sure they wouldn’t pass out from a little blood loss. I fed from four different men and they all walked away without a mark or a memory of the event. On the other hand, I felt more than a little dirty from the whole affair, but pushed my qualms aside.

Flushed with fuel again, I leaned against the wall, running my tongue over my fangs as I sent my last victim on his merry way without a memory of the encounter in his head. The wind had picked up and was whipping through the city, causing flags to snap and flap in an angry frenzy. Trees swayed and the clouds overhead churned and swirled through the sky, completely blotting out the stars. The earth seemed angry.

Upon leaving the hotel and setting foot on the street, I instantly felt the power that Cynnia had warned of. It wasn’t as strong as at the Palace of Knossos on Crete, but it was there, beating against my flesh, trying to find an entrance into my body. We were still many miles from the ruins of Machu Picchu. I didn’t think I should be feeling this energy here, but there was no denying that the mother earth was fueling the power nearly crackling in the air around me. If anything, I had a feeling that it made the naturi more dangerous than normal. They had a new power to feed off of.

While drinking from my victims, I’d picked out a quick map of the city, discovering that I was only a couple blocks from the plaza that Danaus mentioned before I left the hotel. With that in mind, I now wandered in the opposite direction, toward a second, smaller square. I headed away from the crowds and from where I sensed most of my own people were congregated. If I was going to finally draw out Rowe, I needed to be as alone as possible.

And I knew the moment that it worked. I had entered the distant square from the south, my hands shoved in the pockets of my leather pants, trying to keep my fingers warm and nimble against the bitter wind. I skirted the cobblestone sidewalk that led toward the center of the park with its stone monument to some forgotten hero or a forgotten people. The dead grass and sticks crunched lightly under the rubber soles of my boots, but I stuck close to the shadows created by the trees, offering up an obscured view of me as I passed through the darkness.

I sensed no one in the area—nightwalker or human. And naturally, I couldn’t sense any naturi in the region. I was half tempted to reach out to Danaus across the vast distance and see if he could scan the area for me, but quickly pushed aside the urge. No need to make the hunter worry more than he already was.

A feeling twisted in the pit of my stomach suddenly as I stood halfway between the entrance of the square and the monument in the center. Freezing where I stood, I slowly turned my head left and then right while my hand slid down to grasp the handle of the knife at my side. There was a whisper of cloth rubbing, and I was in motion in the blink of an eye. Rolling to my left, I jerked my knife free with my right hand and was grabbing for a second knife with my left by the time I was back on my feet, facing whatever creature had managed to sneak up behind me.

Rowe, the one-eyed naturi, smiled at me, pulling his dark black wings close to his body while wielding a long knife in his right hand. The silver blade reflected a sliver of lamplight as he twisted it in his hand, waiting for me to make the next move.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” I said, inwardly wishing I had brought something a bit longer than the trio of short daggers. His long knife was going to make it difficult for me to get in close to do any kind of substantial damage without completely impaling myself.

“I figured as much,” he snorted, lowering the blade slightly. “Wandering alone at night in a city dominated by the naturi. You have to suspect that you’re completely surrounded right now. You have no way of walking out of here alive.”

To his obvious surprise, I placed the dagger in my left hand back in its sheath on my left thigh and turned my back on the naturi, a smile toying with my lips. I walked toward the monument in the center of the square. It was little more than a plaque on a marble slab. I didn’t attempt to read it, because all of my senses were focused on the approach of the curious naturi.

“You fell while we were at Knossos and didn’t get back up,” I commented as if making idle chitchat. I could barely make out his footsteps on the stone walkway as he approached me, but my smile never wavered. “They said that you had to be carried away. What happened?”

“I fell and hit my head on the edge of some broken stone,” he said in a strange voice. He stopped when he was a few feet away, standing almost directly across from me at the monument. His brow was furrowed in confusion and his full lips were twisted in a frown that seemed to deepen the scars that stretched across what I could remember being a handsome face.

To add to his confusion, I very carefully placed the knife in my right hand back into its sheath on my waist and snapped the guard over it so I wouldn’t be able to quickly draw it. While it would be a lie to say I was completely unarmed, I could honestly say that I was not holding a single weapon at that moment. In response, Rowe tightened his grip on his knife and took an unsteady step backward.

“You’re surrounded, you know that,” he said in a loud, hard voice. As he spoke, his wings disintegrated into fine black sand that spread across the paving stones.

I cocked my head to the side, seeming to listen to the wind. But deep down I knew that he was bluffing. Every time Rowe had faced me, he’d been alone. Regardless of whether we were trying to kill each other or just wanting to talk, it always came down to just him and me. I was beginning to think that he had it in his head to succeed where Nerian had failed; he wanted to break me personally.

“Maybe from a distance,” I conceded with a shrug of my slender shoulders as I shoved my hands into my pockets. “But in this square, right now, there’s just you and me.”

“What game are you playing, Mira?” he snapped, shaking his blade at me. “Do you seriously think I won’t kill you right now?”

“Killing me would solve so many of your problems, wouldn’t it?” I taunted, starting to walk around the monument to my left. Rowe matched my movements, maintaining the same distance between us. “I wouldn’t be around to stop you from opening the door between worlds. I wouldn’t be around to form yet another seal, keeping Aurora safely locked away. I wouldn’t be around to ruin any more of your brilliant schemes. Why, I bet you’d be able to locate your missing princess if I weren’t around!”

A snarl erupted from Rowe and he quickly tried to close the distance between us that he had been so eager to maintain. I chuckled as I stepped back and created a circle of fire around me about five feet tall and only a couple feet wide in diameter. I wanted to make sure there was only enough room for one within that circle.