Miles capped the water and set it on the ground beside him. “I did this for you, Violet. For us.”
Inwardly she cringed at the adoration in his tone when he said her name. Obviously he was delusional about their past relationship. She was a psychiatrist, for God’s sake. How the hell had she missed that?
“What do you mean, Miles?” she asked in her coolest chatting-with-a-deranged-maniac voice. “What did you do for me?”
“I became a vampire, of course.”
With that startling revelation, he lifted his lips, showing off a brand-new set of razor-sharp, shiny white vampire fangs.
And as if that wasn’t terrifying enough, he added, “And now I can make you one, too. We can be together forever, my dear. You’ll finally be mine, just as you were meant to be.”
“Oh, Jesus,” she blurted as a wave of terror washed over her. “You really are nuts, aren’t you? I’m not meant to be yours! I’ll never be yours!”
His hand shot out with inhuman speed and slapped her across the face. Just a tap for a vampire, probably backed off to 10 percent strength or so. But to her poor human cheek, it felt like she’d done a face-plant onto a moving bullet train. She could feel her cheek swelling and taste blood on her tongue.
Then he was on his feet, grabbing a fistful of her hair and jerking her head back so that she was staring straight up into his face. “I’m nuts?” he snarled at her. “You’re the one carrying on with a half-breed murderer! You’re lucky I’m even still willing to have you!”
“All right now, Stats, that’s about enough of that,” a calm voice intoned from behind them. “Why don’t you take a break and let me have a little chat with the good doctor here?”
Miles continued to glare down at her, and she stubbornly maintained eye contact, as defiant as she could manage under the circumstances. It wasn’t normally a good idea to provoke crazy people, but Violet understood that emotional people made mistakes. Mistakes created opportunities to escape. If she was to escape on her own, she needed to keep Miles emotional and off balance.
With one last snarl, Miles released her. She flinched as he kicked the water bottle across the room, and stalked off, slamming the door behind him as he left.
The sound of a throat clearing drew her attention to the man who’d just pulled up a metal folding chair in front of her own and straddled it backwards.
“I apologize for Miles’s behavior. You know how new vamps are, don’t you, doc? So moody and temperamental. All their emotions heightened to crazy levels.” He shook his head. “But anyhow, we haven’t been properly introduced,” he said, his voice carrying a deceptively pleasant and non-threatening Southern accent. “I’m Marshall Briggs.”
Violet narrowed her eyes on him. “Well, Marshall Briggs, I’d shake your hand, but mine seem to be tied to this chair.”
He chuckled and shoved a hand through his dark blond hair. “You’re feisty. I like that.”
Well, why don’t you untie me and I’ll show you how feisty I can be when I introduce my knee to your nuts?
“I’ll assume you already know who I am since you kidnapped me,” she intoned dryly. “And I’ll also assume that I’m not here to impress you with my feistiness. So, what exactly is it that you want from me, Marshall Briggs?”
He leaned forward, offering her a pleasant smile that came nowhere close to reaching his glacial blue eyes. “Would you believe that I need you to help me make the world a better place?”
She shrugged a shoulder. “Sure. Why not? Why wouldn’t I believe that a guy who had me kidnapped, tied to a chair, and beaten by my ex-boyfriend wouldn’t want to make the world a better place? I mean, you’re clearly a humanitarian.”
“See, that’s just the thing,” he said, not bothering to acknowledge her sarcasm. “I’m kind of the opposite of a humanitarian. I’m a…vampiretarian? Is that a word? If it’s not it should be.”
The slap must have shaken her brain around a bit too much, because she was having a devil of a time keeping up with his train of thought. “You’re fighting for vampire rights? Don’t you guys already have those?”
His affable expression slipped. “We’re merely tolerated by the humans. Despised by the shifters and dhampyres. We’re ruled by a dictator and his little enforcer whore who won’t even let us be who we are. And do you know who we are, doc? Who we’re supposed to be?”
Oh, goodie, she thought. A zealot. The least reasonable people in the world were zealots. They never saw that anything they did was wrong. All sacrifices were deemed acceptable losses in the name of their beliefs. Of all the deranged psychopaths she’d seen in her career, none were as scary as zealots.
“I don’t know,” she answered carefully. “What do you think you’re supposed to be?”
He smirked at her. “Spoken like a true shrink. We’re predators, doc. A higher species. The top of the food chain. And yet our leader,” he said, speaking the word leader with enough venom to make Violet shrink back in her chair a bit, “has us practically bowing down to humans and letting shifters and halfers pretend they’re even worthy to breathe the same air as us vampires.”
Violet didn’t think it would do any good to point out that vampires didn’t even need to breathe the same air as, well, anyone else, since they didn’t breathe at all. So instead, she guessed, “You want to take over the council?”
He grinned at her like a proud papa whose little girl had just finished singing the ABC song for the first time. “Smart girl. Yes, we want to take over the council. And that’s where you come in.”
Oh, boy. “But I’m not on the council,” she argued. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not a vampire.”
“You’re not a vampire yet.”
A chill skated down her spine. “If you turn me against my will, you’ll go to jail.”
“And that will be the first law we’ll change when we take over the council. Under our rule, vampires will be able to change anyone they damn well please, just as it used to be back before humans knew we existed.”
A zealot who longed for the good old days, when humans were nothing more than walking, talking Happy Meals. Awesome. If she was able to head shrink her way out of this one, it’d be a miracle.
“The head of the council is over 500 hundred years old,” she told him as gently as she could manage. “He’s the strongest vampire in the state—maybe even the world. The only vampire anywhere close to his strength is his wife.” You know, the one you called a whore? She shook her head. “How can you possibly hope to overpower them to take control of the council?”
His answering smile was far too reasonable, considering how bat-shit crazy he was. “Well, of course we don’t expect to do it alone.”
And that’s when the puzzle pieces all clicked into place. The guerilla warfare garb. The abandoned military bunker. “You’re building an army,” she whispered, horrified.
And he wanted to recruit her patients. Because even though Briggs could make as many vamps as he wanted, older vampires were stronger, faster. Even with their various psychological issues, her patients would make better soldiers than any newly turned vampires.
He pointed his fingers like a gun at her and winked. “Again, smart girl. I knew there must be a reason why Miles was so crazy for you. You know, other than the obvious.”
Well, the crazy part was certainly right. “What does Miles have to do with this?” she asked.
“Honestly?” Briggs looked behind him to make sure no one was listening before saying, “Miles approached one of my guys about being turned. He was apparently sick of getting passed over for promotions and such at work by vampire candidates. He thought it was a form of affirmative action. We were going to turn the dude down. Frankly, he’s an annoying little fuck. But then he mentioned his girlfriend, the lovely Dr. Violet Marchand, therapist to—allegedly—every vampire, shifter, psychic, and halfer in town. Smart move not keeping your client list in your home or office, by the way. Although, it would’ve made things much easier for you if y
ou’d been just a smidge less concerned with your patients’ privacy.”
Violet would’ve rubbed her aching temples if her hands weren’t tied. They’d been in her home and office looking for her client list. They wanted her to help convince her patients and ex patients to turn on the council and join their army. She couldn’t even express how crazy that idea was, so instead, she asked, “If you need my help, why did you try to kill me outside the bar?”
He looked confused for a moment, then his expression cleared and he said, “Oh, that wasn’t us. It was Miles. I’d say he was a little irked to see his girlfriend making out with a dhampyre. Trust me when I say that if I’d wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”
She chose to ignore the last part of that statement. “I’m not his girlfriend.”
He smirked at her. “I’m getting that. I’m starting to see why the death threats didn’t send you running into his arms for love, support, and protection like we’d hoped, either.” He shrugged. “Oh, well. Snagging you from the police station worked just as well, I suppose. It just took us some time to build up the numbers we needed to get it done. Guess we should have just gone with the simplest plan to begin with, huh?”
She blinked at him. The death threats hadn’t been real at all. They’d just wanted her to run to Miles so that he could protect her and convince her to help them with…whatever their plan was. “So, what was Miles supposed to do if I had gone to him for protection?”
“Bring you to me. Let me convince you that the council had no interest in keeping you safe, but that I—that we—could.”
She eyed him skeptically, and he laughed, adding, “Well, there are some people who find me charming and convincing, doc. Believe it or not.”
“And what happens to my non-vampire patients?” she asked. “The shifters and halfers?” The dhampyres. Nikolai. “What do you intend to do with them?”
His answering smile was a blood-chilling mix of maniacal and friendly. “They’re abominations, doc. The world will be a better place without them.”
She knew by the fanatical gleam in his eye that her choices were simple: help with their plan, or die. But if he was right, and the shifters, halfers, and dhampyres were abominations and Briggs and Miles were the superior species…well, that wasn’t a world Violet wanted any part of.
Holding her head high and doing everything in her power to keep her voice from quivering, Violet looked Briggs in the eye and said, “I won’t help you. And you should know that my friends—the abominations you want to destroy—will come for me.”
“Oh, we’ll see,” he said. “I think you’ll change your mind.”
Briggs turned and pulled a syringe full of liquid from his tactical vest. Violet did her best to maintain composure, not wanting to give this bastard the satisfaction of knowing she was terrified, but she trembled regardless. What the hell was in that syringe? What was it going to do to her? Knock her out again?
He leaned over and causally injected it into her arm without bothering to wipe her skin down with disinfectant. Great. Even if she lived through this she’d most likely end up with a raging infection.
But that and every other thought in her head fled as heat seemed to course through her veins and the room around her started to spin. “What the hell did you give me?”
Was it her imagination, or was she slurring her words? Was her tongue thicker all of a sudden? And why was her head suddenly so damn heavy?
Briggs leaned down and shined a penlight into each of her eyes. “Oh, don’t worry about it, doc,” he said, his voice rife with mock compassion. “It’s just a little something to loosen your tongue and make you feel more agreeable to disclosing your full client list.”
“Never,” she slurred.
He stroked his hand over her hair gently. “We’ll see, doc. We’ll see.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Nikolai couldn’t sit still. Furious anxiety rippled through him, making his hands shake as he paced the length of Harper’s conference room.
Riddick watched him from the corner, and Benny and Harper had their heads bent together in a whispered conversation. On the other side of the room, shackled to the conference room table, sat the vampire who’d gotten a taste of Harper’s wrath.
Nikolai wanted to put a gun to the bastard’s head or beat the shit out of him to encourage him to divulge where Miles was holding Violet, but Harper had given Riddick strict instructions to shoot Nikolai in the leg if he tried. And the longer the bastard sat there, smirking, refusing to tell them anything, Nikolai was starting to think it’d be worth taking a bullet just to hear the smug bastard scream as he ripped him limb from limb.
“Tell me again why we’re not just torturing Violet’s location out of him,” Nikolai said.
Harper sighed. “Because it won’t work. I’m psychic, remember? The only vision I got off him told me he’s a vampire right’s zealous nut bag, and zealots are willing to be tortured. This one’s been trained to handle it and not spill. I have another plan.”
Nikolai scrubbed a hand over his face. “What plan? We’re just sitting here doing nothing while Violet’s out there…”
He trailed off, not even wanting to think the rest of that sentence. Anything could be happening to her. Could’ve already happened to her.
Nikolai slammed his fists down onto the table. “Goddammit!”
Their prisoner let out a raspy chuckle. “Someone’s a little high-strung, huh?”
Nikolai snarled at him, but Harper merely shook her head before saying, “Wow, you’ve got a death wish, huh, bro?”
The vampire sneered at her. “There’s nothing you can do to get me to talk, whore.”
Riddick’s chair squeaked as he leaned forward and cracked his knuckles. “Unless you want to find out what it’s like to have your own severed arm shoved up your ass, you’ll watch what you say to my wife.”
The vampire seemed to consider the threat and must have found it a credible one, because he sniffed and grumbled, “I won’t tell you anything. No matter what you do to me.”
Harper raised a brow at him. “What makes you think I’m going to do anything to you?” She snorted. “Please. You aren’t worth my effort.”
This seemed to confuse the vampire as much as it confused Nikolai. “Then why the fuck am I here?”
“You’re here for me.”
All eyes in the room immediately went to the doorway, and what—or rather, who—he saw there suddenly made Nikolai feel a whole lot better about their chances of getting the vampire to talk.
Hunter, head of the vampire council, strode into the room, looking slightly put out at having been summoned to Harper’s office at this time of night.
An uneasy chill skated down Nikolai’s spine, just as it always did when he was in Hunter’s presence.
In Nikolai’s time with Sentry, he’d killed all manner of paranormal creatures. Young, old, weak, strong, vampire, shifter…it didn’t matter. Nikolai had experience killing it. But Hunter? He was something altogether different than anything or anyone Nikolai had ever known.
Hunter predated all written records of vampires in North America, having been born sometime around 1492. Sure, there were stories of vampires older than that in Europe, but they were just that: stories. There was no evidence that any of them were still roaming the earth.
So, as far as anyone knew, Hunter was the oldest vampire in existence. And the power that came from being the oldest…well, it practically oozed out of his pores.
That kind of power made Nikolai edgy. Made him realize there were things in the world that were actually a danger to him, no matter how many kills he had under his belt. Made him feel almost human.
It was disconcerting. Kind of nice and terrifying all at the same time.
Hunter sat down next to Harper with a deep sigh and asked, “Why am I here instead of at home in bed with my wife?”
Harper jerked her thumb in the other vampire’s direction. “This asshat’s friends kidnapped Violet and he won’t
tell us where they are or why they did it.”
Hunter glanced over at the vampire, who shrank in his seat, eyes widened in terror. “So it’s your fault I’m not at home in bed with my wife?”
His tone was bland, but the look he was giving the vampire was sharp enough to separate flesh from bone, and if this asshole wasn’t somehow involved with whoever had taken Violet, he’d feel sorry for him. But as it stood, Nikolai found he couldn’t care less.
“He called me a whore, too,” Harper added helpfully.
Hunter’s eyes narrowed and Nikolai thought he heard the other vampire whimper a little bit. “That’s no way to speak to a lady. A hundred-year-old vampire should know better and have better manners than that,” he chided.
The vampire—who looked incredibly pale, even for an undead creature—shifted uncomfortably in his chair and said, “I-I c-can’t tell you a-anything. I s-swear.”
Harper turned to Nikolai. “OK, grab some pliers. We’ll go ahead and try this your way.”
“Don’t waste time on the fingernails. Go straight for the balls,” Riddick suggested. “Never fails.”
Nikolai shot the vampire what he was sure was a feral grin before Hunter held up a hand and said, “Not yet. I don’t think he’s refusing to tell us, I believe he’s been compelled not to tell us by an older vampire. Isn’t that right, child?”
The vampire was sweating blood at this point and couldn’t seem to choke out any words, but he did manage to nod.
Harper sighed. “Well, shit. Do you think you can break the compulsion to get the info we need, Hunter?”
Hunter raised a brow at her, looking decidedly insulted.
She threw her hands up in surrender. “Sorry, your worship. Didn’t mean to insult your…vampirehood.”
Hunter shook his head. “I’ve asked you repeatedly not to call me that.”
She cocked her head to one side and studied him before asking, “Do you prefer your eminence? Your highness? Khal Hunter?”
“Grand poobah?” Benny suggested.
Harper Hall Investigations Complete Series Page 95
