Key to Conspiracy

by Talia Gryphon

Unfortunately for Gillian and everyone else on the landing, the rickety structure was ill equipped to handle the weight of all the beings slamming onto it, backed by the force from the power of the combined minds in the room. Ancient wood and mortar crumbled, planking snapped and everything fell twenty feet to the main floor. Fortunately, everyone on the landing was unconscious by the time they hit the ground. Boneless inertia was what saved all of them from being crushed to death by the fall.

  Dust motes fluttered and settled around the fallen. At the Gate’s mouth, a quivering formless mass slid into the pit from which it originated. Within its shattered collection of lumps, shining streaks of light rose as the souls that had been inadvertently freed took flight to whatever final destiny they had incurred with joyous pipings of noise, which were lost in the quiet of the wounded house. All became eerily silent.

  In Romania, Aleksei’s heart nearly stopped as Gillian broke their fragile connection. His mind rang with Gillian’s cry of rage and the unexpected, immediate silence that followed. Frantically he cast his thoughts for her. The tiny amount of her blood taken during their kiss had afforded him some peace of mind with that tremulous bond, but Gillian had destroyed it in her fury. He couldn’t hear her anymore. Worse, he couldn’t feel her. Aleksei’s own furious bellow brought Tanis immediately to his brother’s side.

  “She . . . I cannot feel her, Tanis. I cannot determine if she lives.” Aleksei slumped against the thick stone wall of the Great Hall for support. The shining silvery eyes lifted to Tanis’s face, turning flat as pewter with fear for Gillian’s safety.

  Tanis could do nothing except extend a comforting arm around his brother’s shoulders. “We will find her, do not worry,” he said gently, offering assurance when he had none himself. “Day is upon us. At the moment, Aleksei, we can do nothing until dusk. Rest, gather your strength. She is alive, you must believe that.”

  Nodding numbly, Aleksei allowed his brother to steer him down to the crypt below the castle. “You are correct, of course. Gillian would be very difficult to kill.”

  “She has Pavel and her other friends with her,” Tanis said. “I am certain that between the Wolf, the professor and the lovely firebug, your little Captain is well looked after.”

  Aleksei noticed Tanis’s designation of the word “your,” in relation to Gillian and the notation of “lovely” in reference to Jenna. It was a small gesture but important. Tanis wanted him to know that his interests had shifted.

  “I do not care much for certain aspects of her profession,” Aleksei admitted.

  “I understand,” Tanis agreed, “but it appears that we must make a few concessions if we intend to date . . . Is that the correct term? What I mean is, these women are far stronger, more capable . . .”

  “I know what you mean,” Aleksei said wryly. “They are capable, strong, exceptional, but I cannot ignore my basic instinct to protect and cherish them.”

  “Somehow I do not think they will mind the ‘cherish’ part, it is being overprotected that will raise their ire more than a little.”

  Aleksei sighed, a very un-Vampire-like sound. “I know, I will try not to be a domineering ass.”

  “You will have to do more than try, as I have done.” Tanis chuckled as he opened the secret chamber behind the marble sarcophagi containing the bodies of their parents, and the empty ones for himself and Aleksei.

  The brothers ducked to enter the chamber. It was essentially a duplicate tomb dug deeply into the rich Romanian soil, which had been walled and carved with limestone imported from Italy by Aleksei’s father. Crypts, the real crypts for himself and Tanis, were hidden here, away from any potential disturbance by the curious, stupid or incalculably brave. Tanis waved a hand and opened the sepulchers for them both.

  “Rest well, brother, we will need our strength,” Tanis said softly as he settled for the day.

  “Thank you, Tanis,” came Aleksei’s voice, almost as an afterthought.

  “Think nothing of it.”

  Tanis’s last thought before he let the torpor take him was a silently muttered curse for Gillian. Wherever she was, she’d better damn well have a valid reason for being unable to contact Aleksei or he’d never forgive her for causing his elegant noble brother this level of emotional pain.

  “Mother fucking son of a bitch,” Gillian groaned, realizing that everything except her left pinky toe hurt like hell.

  Where was she anyway? Tentatively, she opened her eyes a slit. Stark, sterile, white room with low-level lighting . . . Okay, it looked like a hospital. Her nose wrinkled. It smelled like a hospital: antiseptic, overly cleansed. There was a faint scent of blood in the air. Was she injured? She turned her head a little and immediately wished she hadn’t. The room spun briefly before her vision righted itself again. Yup, the bed had slats up on either side so she wouldn’t roll out.

  Ha! she thought, wincing at even the smallest movement. Like that’s going to happen. Hell, she couldn’t even move without about a zillion nerve endings firing and telling her that was a bad idea.

  “I see you are awake,” a masculine voice said from her left side. “Tell me what you remember, if you can.”

  Gillian tried to turn her head toward the voice but a bolt of pain shot up through her neck. “The stairs, the whole landing gave way . . . We fell.”

  “Good. Very good,” said the voice, “You are extremely lucky to be alive, young lady.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Gillian grumbled, thinking the voice was vaguely familiar. “Do you have any morphine on you, Doctor?”

  “I will send a nurse with some additional medication for you, but we want to go easy with too many strong narcotics for the time being. You are muddled from the anesthesia at the moment and, of course, have been given pain medication. The morphine will have to wait, for now.” The voice hadn’t moved position but Gillian felt him lift her arm gently, feeling her pulse.

  “So I have a head injury?” she asked, closing her eyes against even the soft lighting in the room and swearing silently. If she had a concussion, they’d withhold narcotics from her until they were sure she wouldn’t succumb to a coma.

  “It looks that way,” the doctor said. “Of course, we also do not want to pollute your blood.”

  Gillian’s eyes flew open suddenly. The way he worded that gave her a very uneasy, creepy feeling between her shoulder blades. “Where’s Helmut, Jenna and Pavel? And those two Inspectors . . . Brandt and Claire . . . ?”

  She managed to turn her head and saw the doctor, in full surgical scrubs, gloves, plus the mask, holding her wrist delicately, checking his watch as he counted her heartbeats. His eyes flicked up to meet her own and she frowned. Odd-colored eyes: not quite brown, not quite . . . rust. Rusty brown . . . cinnamon colored . . . Where had she seen eyes like that?

  That voice too . . . familiar, but . . . Something was wrong. The voice was beautiful but there was something else there, something thick, heavy, palpable in the tones and inflection. A sense of dread began to form at the edges of her mind as her empathy clicked on like a switch.

  Dammit, she didn’t want to think just now. Her head hurt but she felt incredibly muddled. It was almost like the aftereffects of the Pixie venom she’d experienced the last time she was in London. Why would she feel so disconnected after a fall? Pain, yes, but not the vaguely disorienting feeling.

  “Your friends are recovering as well,” he assured her, lowering her arm back to the bed. “I am certain they will be along shortly to check you out and take you home.”

  “What exactly happened to me?” Gillian asked, still trying to piece together what was bothering her about this doctor.

  “You wound up with a segment of the staircase impaled horizontally through the front of your abdomen. Fortunately, it was largely a superficial wound and I was able to save your female organs.” The doctor’s eyes seemed to glow for a moment.

  “Female organs?” Gillian shook off her languor. Who used euphemisms like that anymore?

  “I had surgery?
”

  Tentatively she felt her stomach, then lower. There were two tender places, one on her right hip and one about four inches above her left hip. The shard must have cut through mostly the top layers of skin and muscle, not penetrating anything very deeply. In between the two areas, it was tender but not as much as at the entry and exit points.

  “Yes, your wound was not very deep. At first we feared that it had gone through your ovary, but once we took an X-ray, we were able to determine that everything was as it should be. You are quite intact, with the exception of your virginity, of course.” Now the eyes above the mask hardened, reddened. The voice was taking on a distasteful quality. He chuckled maliciously, which annoyed the hell out of her and felt like broken glass inside her skull. Vampire. Goddammit. Now what?

  “What the fuck business is that of yours?” Gill snapped, her mind suddenly unpleasantly clearing. “What kind of doctor are you anyway and what the hell was that remark about ‘polluting my blood’?”

  “I am a gynecologist, Dr. Key”—he raised his hand to the back of his head and the ties on the surgical mask— “and you should know by now that Vampires do not like tainted blood.”

  The mask slipped down and Gillian went rigid with terror. It was a face she’d seen only once before, and then only briefly, through the fog of Pixie venom aftereffects. Exact recollection of his features was impossible owing to his ability to shift and blur his appearance like a chameleon. But those eyes . . . she remembered those rusty cinnamon-colored eyes now as they were blended with the face. It all clicked into harsh, horrible reality.

  Jack the Ripper, in all his twisted glory, was at her bedside. He had performed surgery on her, only hours before. Jack the Ripper. Scalpel. Operation. And herself under anesthesia. Gillian suddenly felt nauseous.

  “I see you remember me, Dr. Key.” Jack’s face melted into the dark beauty of a Vampire as he smiled at her. Too bad it was absolutely chilling; it spoiled the beguiling effect.

  “Get the hell away from me!” Gill hissed. She was scared to death, drugged, weaponless, and less than two feet away from one of the most demented serial killers ever known.

  The Vampire grinned down at her, letting her see the fangs slowly elongating, enjoying her reaction as she shrank back as far as possible against the opposite side of the bed. A flick of his left wrist brought a gleaming scalpel to his hand.

  Jack killed by exsanguination, but not through a bite. He killed and then did bad things to the body afterward. Showing her the knife was just part of his style. Intimidation. Fear. Jack fed off it as surely as he fed off blood, only this time he wasn’t stalking his prey; his prey was lying helplessly in front of him in a hospital bed.

  When the thought of being helpless crossed her mind, Gill grabbed it like a tiger on a horsemeat roast. Her reflexes were way off owing to the drugs in her system, but she managed to clamp her fingers on Jack’s wrist before he could pull away. As she fought to hold his hand away from her, their eyes met. Jack was smiling, the otherworldly lure characteristic of the Reborn gracing his face. Only his eyes remained chillingly cold, detached. There was no seduction in them, no sensual need to be close for feeding or sex. There was only death. Specifically hers.

  She had no hope to match him in strength, no intention of screaming or crying out. Giving the bastard the satisfaction of her terror wasn’t something she was willing to compromise. Jack would know by her scent, elevated heartbeat and blood pressure that she was scared to death. Vocalizing that fear for his jollies wasn’t on the agenda.

  Almost lazily he twisted his wrist free of her grip. “Not bad for a Human, Dr. Key, not bad at all.”

  Gill wanted to knock the smirk off his face along with his fangs. “Gee, thanks. Nice to know I can impress a creature like you.”

  He flinched almost imperceptibly at the word “creature.” “You have no idea what variety of ‘creature’ I am, Dr. Key.”

  “Au contraire,” Gillian rasped, her voice husky as her throat was still dry from the anesthesia tubing, “I know exactly what kind you are.”

  “I can sense your fear, Dr. Key . . . smell it . . . why not scream?” His smile was sepulchral. “I am almost certain someone will hear you. Whether they will hear you in time is quite another matter.”

  Her blood seemed to freeze in her veins. “Because I won’t give you the satisfaction, you sick bastard. You have gotten enough from me already.”

  Jack’s eyes went from cinnamon to blood colored. “Not nearly enough, my little soldier. But that will change soon enough when we dance our final dance.”

  “Doctor?” A male nurse poked his head in, just as Gillian was about to opt for falling out of the bed and somehow scrambling away from her tormentor.

  “It’s time to change her dressing, unless, of course, you would rather do it yourself,” the nurse continued, completely oblivious to the drama in the room.

  “No, you go right ahead. Dr. Key and I have completed our discussion for now.” Jack smiled and patted her shoulder, squeezing it with just enough pressure that Gill knew she’d have a bruise later. He jerked his head in a brief nod, flashed his fangs again then turned and left, giving the nurse a light pat on the back as he passed.

  “You were lucky, miss,” the nurse informed her. “If that shard had penetrated even a bit more, it might have severed your abdominal artery or one of your ovaries.”

  As he drew back the covers and opened her standard hospital gown, Gillian squeezed her eyes shut tightly. “Yeah, lucky,” she whispered, more to herself than to the nurse, who was gently changing her bandages.

  Lucky, hell. Right now she wanted to dive straight into a mound of paperwork at the IPPA headquarters and never come out again. That alone pissed her off. She hated desk jobs, paperwork, politics and all the highfalutin bullshit that went with them. She was a field operative, a trained commander and psychologist. Why this one Vampire rattled her cage like no other being ever had bothered her immensely.

  Thinking back on the romance novels her college roommate had mooned over, Gillian had a brief, disturbing thought that if she weren’t quite so much the badass, and a bit more of a femme fatale, she could run and tattletale to Aleksei and Tanis about Jack. Then it would be their problem and not hers. Regrettably, it would also probably get the two of them killed.

  Newfound powers or not, noble, ethical, trusting Aleksei was, in her opinion, nowhere near Jack’s caliber in clout, deception or abilities, and the serial killer won hands down in the sick twist category. Tanis was just like his brother: honest and straightforward. They’d be dead before they ever uncovered what Jack was really up to. No, she couldn’t draw the two of them into this immediate nightmare.

  Shit. Aleksei. She had to call him, or at least get word to him that she was all right since she’d demolished the connection they’d shared. No doubt he was frantic with worry about her and she definitely didn’t need him showing up here, in London, and accidentally running into Saucy Jack. That was a disaster waiting to happen. If Jack had an inkling that she was becoming involved with the Romanian Count, most assuredly he would make both of their lives hell. As Dracula’s First Lieutenant, The Ripper would have a host of Vampires and various Paramortals at his command. They’d use her as the bargaining chip to bring Aleksei to heel. That sucked.

  She had to get out of there, and fast. Gill waited until the nurse finished, refusing the morphine patch he offered to let her head clear. After a brief argument, she agreed to a Demerol injection, just to take the edge off the discomfort. As the door closed behind the nurse, she tried sitting up. Her head spun, whether from the Demerol or from her injured state, she couldn’t tell, so she lay flat and used the electronic control for the bed to raise her torso into a sitting position. Any movement she made seemed to involve her abdominal muscles, which screamed and protested her attempts at premature activity.

  She was nearly crying in frustration when the door cracked open and a cultured voice with a light Austrian accent inquired, “Gillian? Schatzi,
are you awake?”

  “Helmut!” Gill had never been so glad to see anyone.

  As her former teacher and mentor crossed the room to her, she took a quick inventory of his injuries. He had a bandage on his forehead and the skin around the edges of the dressing were bluish purple; left arm in a sling and pulled tightly against his chest. He still managed to give her a clumsy hug.

  “God, I thought I had lost you,” Helmut said unsteadily, then gave her a gentle shake from his arm around her shoulders.

  “If you weren’t so ill, liebling, I would take a stick to your bum for frightening us all to death.”

  Gillian blushed under her mentor’s gentle reprimand. “I’m really sorry, Helmut, I lost my temper. I haven’t done that in years, but that thing just pissed me off. It was like a giant bully cloud and I got mad.”

  “Yeah, well, next time, try not blowing the shit out of the structure the rest of us are standing on,” Jenna said dryly from the doorway.

  She leaned against the door frame, favoring a splinted foot and crutches, frowning. Then her face split into its familiar generous grin and her mahogany eyes sparkled. Pavel stepped around her, looking slightly shamefaced.

  “Cujo here thinks he did a bad thing by not catching you and me as we fell. I told him even superawesome magical Werewolf foo is no match for Gravity. It’s the Law.”

  Everyone moaned at her quip. At least they were all right too, and Gill allowed herself a moment’s respite from her guilt then she had to ask.

  “What about the others? Did everyone get out all right?” There was trepidation in her voice. She wanted to know but yet she didn’t.

  Helmut predictably glanced away for a second then met her eyes squarely. “We lost two, Nutmeg and Richard. It was . . . Well, it wasn’t pretty. The entity essentially sucked them dry like an amorphous spider.”

  “Ugh,” Gillian grimaced. “I’m sorry, Helmut. I know you relied on me to keep everyone safe and I fucked up.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Helmut said sharply. “We went in there with too little information. I should have researched everything much more thoroughly. I was hoping to impress my class and the observers with my former protégée. This is my fault. I should have handled it differently. It will plague me for the rest of my life.”