Any weapon? That seemed extreme. I’d never touched a gun in my life, and before thirty seconds ago, I had never wanted to. But as I continued to stare at it, I felt myself becoming more and more curious. The damn thing attracted me on some level. Unlike a Were, I was inherently defenseless—unless I was hyped up on blood. Sure, I could sink my teeth in if a person got close enough, but it wouldn’t be hard for them to wrestle me off. By now, thanks to Alexa, I was probably slightly stronger than the average woman, but that certainly didn’t mean anything against someone like the rogue vampire who had attacked me. I had the potential to be one hell of a sprinter, though that was meaningless if I were injured the way I had been in that alley. But a gun—a gun would even the odds. It was a no-frills weapon—
sleek, mean, deadly. I wondered if it was heavy. My fingers twitched, but fortunately, I managed to rein in the impulse before my hand moved. Most of me didn’t want to accept this gift. Damn it, I deserved better from my father than a visit from his lackey.
Or did I? If I were being honest, I had pushed him away just as much as he’d pushed me. I looked at the Colt logo embossed on the gun, then over at Penn. “Ooh,” I said, trying to be flippant. “A picture of a horsie. That’s my favorite part.” But he didn’t roll his eyes. He smiled, as though he knew what I was actually thinking.
“Try it once,” he said as he rose from the couch. I shrugged, not wanting to commit. But I knew I would.
“I’ll tell him that you’re doing okay,” he said, his hand on the doorknob. I knew he would do exactly that: Valentine’s doing fine, sir, he would say. But in this moment, it didn’t feel right.
“Tell him thanks.”
Penn, halfway out the door, nodded once. When he was gone, I turned back to the pistol. I really did want to hold it, so I crossed over to the table and lifted it into my left palm. It was heavy—heavier than I’d
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expected, anyway. The checkered texture of the grip was rough against my palm. I just stood there, cradling it in my hand, afraid to do anything else. While I doubted that it was loaded, I didn’t want to find out the hard way.
And that’s when Alexa walked into the room in nothing but my Bon Jovi T-shirt, rubbing her eyes. God, she had nice legs. Just looking at her made me want to—
She suddenly came to a halt, and her mouth rounded into an “O.”
“Valentine,” she said in that quiet voice that meant she was on either the edge of panic or a blow-out. “Why are you holding a gun?”
I lowered it back into the briefcase and snapped the lid shut. “You just missed Penn,” I said, taking a seat on the couch and holding out my arms.
She still looked suspicious, but perched next to me nonetheless.
“Your father’s security guy?”
“Yeah. He was passing along a present from Dad.” I pointed to the briefcase.
“How thoughtful,” she muttered, calming down enough to shift her weight so that she could recline against one armrest and rest her legs in my lap. I immediately began to massage her calf muscles. She closed her eyes and let out a tiny moan, and I sighed happily.
“Good morning,” I whispered.
“Mmm.” She opened one eye, and the opposite corner of her mouth curved slightly. “You’re hot.”
I laughed. “You just noticed?”
“What are you going to do with it?”
I frowned at the non sequitur before realizing that her brain had ping-ponged back to the damn gun. She was tough to keep up with, sometimes. “Do you know how to shoot one?” I countered.
“Harder,” she said, and I dug my fingertips more firmly into her muscle. The moan reemerged, but louder this time. “And yes. Wisconsin farm girl, remember? Good with shotgun. Older brothers.”
“Not so good with complete sentences, though,” I teased. When she stuck out her tongue, I started throbbing.
“Answer my question, vampire.”
“He paid for fifteen lessons at some firing range here in Manhattan,” I said. “I guess I’ll take them.”
“Mmm.” Alexa bent one knee so that her heel was pressing firmly
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against the crotch of my sweats. I tried not to make a noise, but failed.
“You need to take me. Now.”
“O-okay.” It was hard to maintain any kind of coherent idea when she was swiveling her foot against me, but… “But I was going to make you an omelet. You need to, oh God, to eat more, and—”
She shifted her legs off me, and I groaned in disappointment. And then she was straddling me, anchoring my head to the back of the couch with the strong grip of her fingers in my hair. Slowly, she licked her lips. “Fucking now,” she whispered, bending toward me. When I skimmed my hands up her sides, she shivered beneath my touch. That was the only signal I needed; in another second, she was lying on her back and I was looming over her, my thigh pressed hard between her legs. Flipping her was such a rush.
I leaned in close to trail my tongue from her clavicle up her neck to swirl around her earlobe. “Omelets later,” I agreed. We didn’t leave the apartment that day. Or the next. Mostly, we slept, made love, and half watched movies. Neither of us turned on our computers the whole weekend. The outside world was irrelevant. But all too soon, Monday intruded.
I was in a cab, heading to the Consortium’s facility to pick up a few changes of clothes that I’d been keeping in “my” room—which, thankfully, I didn’t need anymore, when my phone rang. Alexa.
“Hey, baby,” I said, saturating my voice with all the warmth that I could manage, remembering how incredible it had felt to wake up that morning to the sensation of her arm curled around my waist. I hadn’t taken her for granted before, but I really wasn’t going to now.
“Val.” Her voice was tight and urgent. “It’s…it’s Olivia. She’s been attacked—I just saw it on the news.”
“What?” Instantly, my brain made the link to my own mugging. A dozen questions flew through my head, from how badly she was injured, to how in the hell I was going to be able to put up with her drooling over Alexa for all eternity. That last one wasn’t charitable at all, but my neurons were indiscriminate.
“She was mugged,” Alexa continued, corroborating what I had already guessed. “And she lost a lot of blood.”
“Fuck. Where is she?”
“Tisch.”
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“Okay. Thanks. I’ll go see her right now, before class.”
“Val…” Alexa’s voice quavered on the single syllable, and my heart contracted furiously. She was scared. “Do you—do you think it’s all connected somehow? You and Olivia being in the same social circle…”
“My God. Like a terrorist attack?” It was certainly possible, given her father’s status as the Senate majority leader and my father’s role as the head of the Treasury. But when Alexa’s breathing sped up, I abandoned my speculation. “Hey. It’s going to be okay. I’m going to talk to Detective Foster as soon as I can, all right? In case she hasn’t made the connection between me and Olivia. And who knows, maybe this is a coincidence.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Okay.” She paused for a moment. “I didn’t want to let you out of my sight this morning, but it’s much worse now.”
“For me, too,” I said fervently. “Be careful. I love you. I love you.” “I love you, too. So much.”
When she ended the call, I felt bereft. I stared at my phone for a moment before thumbing through its menu to launch the Web browser. While it connected to the Net, I gave the cab driver new instructions: NYU’s Tisch Medical Center. I would get my stuff from the Consortium facility later, after my classes—which, conveniently for me, were located in the building adjacent to where Olivia was at this moment presumably battling for her life. Damn it.
The article was prominent on the front page of the Times online. Olivia had been the victim of a “brutal muggi
ng” on Friday night; having been “savagely beaten,” she was in stable but critical condition. Friday night. That meant I’d seen her a scant few hours before she had been attacked. God.
I leaned my head back against the faux leather of the back seat and tried to figure out why a terrorist organization might arrange for someone to turn the children of prominent politicians into vampires, but was no closer to coming up with a viable explanation by the time the cab pulled into the circle in front of the hospital. I was probably barking up the wrong tree, anyway. I paid the driver and dug my ID from my coat pocket as the automatic doors parted for me. Wearing this, I could probably get access to Olivia even if she wasn’t taking visitors. A nurse told me that she was on the ninth floor, so I rode the
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elevator up. When I neared her room, I slowed down to scope out who was inside. Sure enough, both her mother and father were sleeping in two chairs near the head of the hospital bed. Olivia was covered in a mountain of blankets, and had needles in both of her arms. She looked pale and fragile. I shivered, seeing an echo of my past self. And then I got angry. Whoever was doing this was a monster, and I wanted to see him thwarted at every turn. Why the hell hadn’t the Consortium stopped him, yet? How hard could it be? Did they just not care? Wasn’t he, every time he tried to turn someone, threatening to expose them…us? I hadn’t been able to feel this kind of rage when it had been me lying in that bed; coping, surviving, had taken every last ounce of energy at my disposal. But watching Olivia take shallow, raspy breaths made me grind my teeth. Was the parasite systematically devouring her red blood cells, even now?
“Valentine?”
I turned, unsurprised to hear that familiar accent. “Dr. Clavier. I should have known you’d be here.” Without waiting for him to comment, I gestured toward Olivia. “Did he turn her?”
Clavier shook his head once. “He appears to have failed. The police reports indicate that he was interrupted in the act. She didn’t lose as much blood as you did.”
Relief eased my jaw muscles. No one deserved this curse. With Clavier at my heels, I stepped into the room and quietly approached the foot of the bed. Olivia opened her eyes, one of which was badly swollen and bruised. Even so, she managed to look surprised.
“That’s a nice shiner you’ve got there,” I told her, deciding to take the liberty of inspecting her chart.
She blinked and winced. “Val?” she croaked. “You’re…but I thought I was your…arch-nemesis or something.”
Maybe it was because Olivia was badly injured and I felt a kind of empathy with her now. Or maybe it was because I had spent the weekend in Alexa’s arms. Regardless of the cause, I felt pretty awful for the way I’d treated her on Friday.
“Not unless you want to be,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry for being such a jackass on Friday—I was having a monumentally bad day.” I looked down and continued scanning her chart. “You know, I would have given you a tour of the med school if you’d asked—you didn’t have to go to such lengths.”
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“You’re…a laugh riot.”
I could tell that speaking took a significant amount of effort; unsurprising in someone who had sustained head trauma similar to mine, and was also having trouble taking a deep breath on account of three badly bruised ribs. That fucking bastard.
“You need anything? Ice chips?” Clavier could run all the tests he wanted; this was my version.
“Pain meds?” she whispered hopefully. In that moment, I was completely convinced that she was not a vampire. The pain all over my body had never ranked over the thirst in my throat. Clavier stepped out from behind me. “I’ll ring for the nurse,” he said. Olivia immediately looked relieved. In the chair nearest me, her mother stirred.
“I’m going to go,” I said. “Class, you know. But uh…feel better, okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks, Val.”
I checked my watch as I walked back down the hallway toward the bank of elevators—twenty minutes until class, an hour in class, and then I’d finally have the rest of the day to myself. That was good, because I needed to do some major research over at the Consortium. I didn’t care how good an investigator Devon Foster was—she couldn’t help but fumble in the dark over this case. I rounded the corner, preoccupied by my planning, and literally slammed into the detective herself. She winced and took a quick step back, then frowned in suspicion as she recognized me.
“Valentine? What are you doing here?”
“I know Olivia,” I said bluntly, dispensing with a hello. I still wasn’t over the way she’d looked at Alexa. Drinking from her hadn’t quelled the increased possessiveness I’d been feeling ever since my attack. Maybe intense jealousy was another vampiric attribute. I’d have to ask Helen. “She and I have run in the same social circles since we were young. I was going to call you, to tell—”
“We’re well aware,” Foster snapped.
I arched my eyebrows. “All right then.” I turned back toward the elevators, but she stopped me with a hand on my forearm.
“Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s been a rough weekend. As you can imagine, there’s even more pressure now to get this case squared away.”
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I turned back to her and nodded. My temper worked the same way, after all, flaring up over nothing when I was under stress. “What can I do to help?” As if I didn’t know better than she did. Foster spread her hands out in front of her, palms up. They were callused, probably from weights at a gym. “If you remember anything else…”
“You’re always the first to know.”
“Thank you. Really.” She smiled halfheartedly and then turned toward Olivia’s room. I found myself eyeing her gun, cradled in a hip holster today, as she walked away. I wondered if there was some part of her that hoped she got to kill this guy herself—to take him out, instead of bringing him in.
And then I wondered if deep down, that’s what I wanted as well. v
The Consortium had a lounge on the facility’s top floor, sporting a 360-degree view of midtown. Comfortable chairs were arranged in clusters near the windows, and a bar took up the center of the room. The bartender had been serving drinks since 1881. During my selfimposed separation from Alexa, I had often come up here at night to drink a scotch and brood over the city lights. It was a good place to think.
As soon as my Neuroanatomy class finished, I called Kyle to ask him to meet me there. When I arrived, I found him catnapping in one of the chairs. His face was ashen, and an ugly bruise peeked out from under the collar of his button-down shirt.
“Hey,” I said, crouching next to him and placing a gentle hand on his arm. “Are you all right?”
He opened bleary eyes and blinked several times before he was able to focus enough to recognize me. “Hey, Val. Yeah. I’m okay.” He gripped the edge of his chair and pulled himself out of his slumped position. “Helen was thirsty last night.”
“Jesus,” I breathed, feeling the skin on the back of my neck start to crawl. Right then and there, I made a vow never to do that to Alexa—to take so much that she could barely sit up. Never. “I’m sorry, Kyle. I didn’t realize. You should sleep, and—”
“No,” he insisted. “I’m good. Really. What’s going on?”
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I was worried that the only reason Kyle had agreed to meet me in his current state was that he hoped to get in my good graces so that I’d deign to suck on his neck someday. Something else that was never going to happen.
“I need to know everything I can possibly know about this rogue vampire,” I said, taking the chair next to his.
Kyle looked dubious. “That’s all anybody’s been talking about since Saturday morning. Helen deployed a team to hunt him down almost two months ago, but they haven’t come up with anything. I don’t think there’s much to know—he seems really good a
t giving everyone the slip.” He looked at me sideways. “You still don’t…remember?”
I sighed in frustration. “Just flashes. Not nearly enough to be helpful.” I stretched my feet out in front of me and watched the afternoon sunlight glint off the Chrysler Building. “I know the woman he attacked this weekend, and seeing her lying there like that, like I was…I just want to do something.”
Kyle was staring off into space. I wondered if he had fallen asleep with his eyes open. “You could always try the Red Circuit,” he said suddenly.
“The what?”
On top of looking like death warmed over, Kyle now seemed ill at ease. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but that party at Luna was very upscale. Classy and relatively tame. The Red Circuit is completely different. I’ve never been myself, but everyone says that those parties are savage. Brutal.” He turned to look me in the eye. “Someone like this rogue vamp, though—that might be his thing.”
I nodded, afraid that he was right on the money. While the idea of this Red Circuit might be morbidly fascinating, it also frightened me. I didn’t want to acknowledge my own inner monster, not to mention someone else’s. “Surely Helen would send people there to investigate.”
He shrugged again. “I don’t think that would do much good, unless he’s bragging about the people he’s killed—or turned.”
“And if they haven’t caught him by now, then he’s not that stupid,” I finished for him. I didn’t say the other thing that had suddenly popped into my head: the notion that if I could be in the same room with the rogue vampire—if I could see him—then maybe I’d be able to recognize him.
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Kyle rested one hand lightly on mine. I blinked at him, surprised; he rarely touched anyone unless they touched him first. “I’m pretty sure Helen knows where they are each week, but she won’t tell me. I met someone the other night at Luna who might be able to get me in, though.”
“Is there enough room for me to tag along?”
Kyle leaned back in his chair. “I’ll work on it.”
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