Night Unbound

by Dianne Duvall

  Lisette held out a hand. “No. Leave it off, Seth. There’s no need to don it on my account. I’m guessing you don’t let many people see you like this, and I want you to be comfortable.” She knew, from her mortal past, how hard it could be to maintain a facade among friends and family. “In fact, I want you to consider this a second home. A place where you can be yourself.”

  He hesitated. “You would offer me that after I accused you of betraying me?”

  She waved a hand. “Pfft. Water under the bridge. You were tired. I was behaving oddly. And, technically, I did betray you because I ignored your warning to stay away from Zach.”

  Still, Seth hesitated.

  Zach released a heavy sigh. “You may as well. She’s already seen your wings.”

  “Do you want this to be a second home for me?” Seth taunted with a faint smile.

  “Hell no. But I love her and will tolerate your ass as often as I have to if it will make her happy.”

  “It will,” Lisette said.

  Zach dipped his chin in an abrupt nod. “Then park said ass at the table and finish your tea.”

  Seth grinned. “Actually, I was just about to cook some pasta. I can make enough for all of us, if you’d like.”

  “I could eat,” Lisette said. Her stomach rumbled in anticipation.

  Smiling, Zach rolled his eyes. “Didn’t I tell you? The woman is always hungry.”

  “Hey,” she admonished playfully, “unless you object to how I worked up my appetite, don’t complain about it.”

  Zach held both hands up in surrender.

  Shaking his head, Seth took a couple of boxes of multicolored fusilli down from an upper cabinet.

  Lisette let Zach tug her coat off her shoulders and draw it down her arms.

  As he left to hang it up on the coat hooks near the front door and remove his own, she studied Seth.

  No stubble adorned his cheeks. Nor did circles hover beneath his eyes or lines of strain bracket his mouth. His shoulders and stance seemed relaxed. His lips still curled in a faint smile.

  “You look better,” she ventured gently.

  He glanced at her as he stirred the pasta, his expression somewhat chagrined. “I feel better.” When Zach rejoined them, Seth held out his hand. “My phone, please.”

  Zach handed it over with unmistakable relief.

  Seth tucked it in a back pocket. “I have to admit, I expected you to crush it mere hours after I gave it to you.”

  “I was sorely tempted,” Zach retorted without remorse.

  Seth motioned for them to sit at the table.

  Each took a turn at the sink first, washing and drying their hands.

  “Ami and the babe are all right?” Seth queried.

  “Yes,” Lisette assured him. “Dr. Kimiko and Melanie both seem pleased with how well Ami is doing and by how the baby’s lungs are coming along.”

  “Excellent.” He looked to Zach. “Marcus hasn’t tried to kick your ass?”

  Zach smirked. “He isn’t that stupid.”

  “Marcus has been keeping his distance,” Lisette said, warning Zach with a glance not to stir up trouble.

  He winked, the rascal.

  Zach held the chair at the head of the table for Lisette, then seated himself on one of the new bench seats she’d had Tracy purchase.

  Seth served them each a plate piled high with the colorful fusilli and topped with homemade sauce Lisette had prepared earlier, then took his own plate and settled himself on the second bench across from Zach.

  “So,” Seth said as they tucked into their meal.

  Lisette didn’t know if it was the vampire hunting or the lovemaking or a combination of the two, but hunger gnawed at her and drove her to wolf down the delicious meal faster than she normally would have.

  “So?” Zach repeated before he slipped a forkful of pasta into his oh-so-talented mouth. Perhaps it was the lovemaking. He seemed as hungry as she.

  Seth caught Lisette’s eye. “How did he do?”

  Her mind still on lovemaking, she paused. Then she realized Seth was asking how Zach had done filling in for him. “Very well. I’m proud of him.”

  Zach sent Seth a See, I told you I could do it look.

  “He didn’t kill anyone?” Seth asked, voice full of doubt.

  “Only vampires. No immortals, gifted ones, or humans.”

  Seth nodded, satisfied, and addressed Zach directly. “How did the search go? Have you read the minds of all the immortals on the list?”

  “Yes.”

  “Without giving anyone nosebleeds? I’m impressed.”

  Lisette and Zach looked at each other.

  And, of course, Seth saw it. Seth saw everything. “Without giving anyone nosebleeds?” he repeated, his deep voice acquiring a hard edge.

  “Actually . . .” Zach said slowly.

  “Damn it, Zach! I told you not to hurt any of them!”

  “I—”

  “I told you not to tip any of them off either!”

  “I didn’t,” Zach protested. “They all slept through it. And I healed the damage done once I was finished.”

  Lisette rested a hand on Seth’s strong forearm. “He did it for you, Seth. They’re elders. Their minds are very difficult to penetrate. Zach knew it would tear you up to hurt them like that yourself. So he . . . hurt them for you.” This wasn’t sounding as good as it had in her head. “I mean, he knew you needed the information and the only way to get it was to force it. . . .” She looked at Zach. “I’m not helping, am I?”

  “You don’t need to defend me, love. Seth knows it had to be done and is secretly relieved he won’t have to do it himself.”

  Lisette eyed Seth doubtfully.

  Seth stared at Zach, his fingers clenched around the fork he held. “What did you find?”

  “Not a damned thing,” Zach told him.

  Seth’s brow furrowed. “I’m torn between feeling relieved that I didn’t miss anything and utterly confounded. How is that possible?”

  “That would be the billion-dollar question.”

  Seth poked at the pasta on his plate. “You found no evidence of guilt in any of their minds?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You read the shifters, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “And found nothing?”

  “Nothing. Although . . .”

  Seth looked up.

  “There was one telepath,” Zach murmured, face troubled, “whose barriers were stronger than any of the others’.” Setting his fork down, he leaned forward and drew a folded sheet of paper out of his back pocket. He spread it on the table in front of Lisette.

  A quick glimpse revealed it to be the list of immortals he had been given, both names and where to find them.

  “This one,” he said, pointing to a name on the list. “The Celt.”

  “Aidan,” Seth murmured.

  Curious, Lisette leaned forward to view the name. “Aidan?” The only Aidan she knew spelled it with an e.

  “Aiden O’Kearney?”

  Seth shook his head as he studied the paper. “Different Aidan. This one’s been stationed in Denmark for some time. Keeps to himself.”

  “He’s an elder?”

  Seth nodded. “Born around seven or eight hundred B.C.” His eyes met Zach’s. “And he can read minds and teleport.”

  Zach picked up his fork and resumed eating. “Among other things.”

  “You say his barriers were stronger than the others’?”

  Zach nodded.

  “How much stronger?”

  “Too much. Enough to tell me he’s been working on strengthening them. I couldn’t penetrate the strongest of them without giving him more than a nosebleed. With your permission,” he drawled, voice dripping with sarcasm, “I’ll return and find out what the hell he’s hiding.”

  Seth immediately vetoed that one. “No, I’ll do it.”

  “Bad call,” Zach said with a shake of his head.

  “Not wanting you to kill him is a b
ad call?”

  “I wouldn’t kill him. I’d just hurt him. And an Immortal Guardian as old as he is will recover quickly.”

  “No.”

  “Stop being such a hard-ass,” Zach said. “When you fucked up before, you could blame it on not having slept for two months.”

  Lisette looked at Seth. “You told me weeks, not months!”

  Seth glared at Zach.

  Zach continued. “Fuck up now that you’re rested, and it’ll just be poor judgment.”

  “I’m not going to let you—”

  “There’s a reason surgeons aren’t supposed to operate on their own relatives,” Zach interrupted, voice mild. “Their emotions are too invested and may lead them to make mistakes, to not do something they should for fear they’ll cause their spouse or father or daughter pain.” He pointed his fork at Seth. “Try to do this yourself, and you’ll pull back the instant Aidan manifests discomfort.”

  Lisette nibbled her lower lip and watched Seth. “He has a point.”

  Something flickered in Seth’s eyes, there and gone in an instant. “You question my ability to carry out my duties?”

  “Absolutely not,” she assured him, squeezing his arm before she withdrew her touch. “Unlike Zach, I think you’ll do whatever it takes to find out what Aidan is hiding because the lives of the rest of us depend upon it. But I also know that you aren’t as cold and ruthless as Zach can be.”

  Zach frowned. “Ummm . . .”

  Seth’s lips twitched.

  “Being the instrument of pain that will extract the information you need from Aidan will torment you endlessly. Zach won’t give it a second thought.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Zach protested.

  Lisette rolled her eyes. “Don’t even try to deny it. If I hadn’t stopped you, you would have erased Bastien’s and Ethan’s memories of you and given them brain damage.”

  Seth scowled. “What?”

  “To protect you,” Zach ground out. “I was going to do it to protect you.”

  “And you’re willing to hurt Aidan why?”

  A moment passed. Zach sighed in defeat. “To protect you. Fine. I’m ruthless.”

  She smiled. “It’s one of the many things I love about you.”

  His face lightened. “Good.” He looked to Seth. “So, am I doing this, or what?”

  Lisette could almost hear Seth’s stomach churning at the prospect.

  “Fine,” Seth said at last. “You can do it. But we go together.”

  “If you go, you’ll just—”

  Seth held up a hand. “We go together,” he repeated, words clipped. “And not just so I can be assured you won’t kill Aidan. Have you forgotten the Others are hunting you?”

  “Hell no. They’re like fucking bloodhounds. Every time I expend more energy than usual, they come running and I have to disappear.”

  Lisette stared at him. “Every time? You didn’t tell me that. I thought it was just tonight.”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t want to worry you.”

  “Zach . . .” How long would they hunt him?

  And how long could he continue to elude them? Lisette feared she would never see Zach again if the Others succeeded in recapturing him.

  “As long as I’m gone when they get there and have left nothing behind that carries my scent,” he said, “they have no way of knowing for sure whether it was me or Seth. And, since I can still conceal my presence from them, even if they figure out it was me, they can’t follow me once I teleport.”

  Seth grunted. “Expending the amount of energy you’ll need in order to topple Aidan’s mental barriers is sure to draw their notice. If I sense the Others coming before you’re finished, I’ll take over, and you can disappear so they’ll think it was me the whole time. In fact, even if you finish before they arrive, I’ll linger after you leave, just to throw them off a little.”

  Zach nodded. “Sounds good.”

  Lisette continued to fret.

  “We’ll go as soon as we finish our meal. It’s daytime in Denmark, and Aidan will be sleeping.”

  They returned to their pasta, silent, somber.

  “Someone want to tell me why my phone isn’t ringing?” Seth asked out of the blue.

  Lisette forced a smile. “David volunteered to take your calls for a bit. I think he saw how on edge Zach was and decided he could use a break.”

  “Ah.”

  Zach grunted. “That reminds me. I learned a couple of things from one of the new breed of vampires tonight.”

  Seth frowned. “I thought I told you not to engage them.”

  “You told your Immortal Guardians not to engage them. And they didn’t. We came across one of the new vampires traveling with seven of the usual vamps. I ordered Lisette, Richart, and Jenna to remain on the roof nearby while I dispatched the psychotic vamps and confronted the new one myself.”

  Seth raised his eyebrows and met Lisette’s guilty gaze. “Did you remain on the roof?”

  “No,” she confessed, “but the danger had passed. Zach had already taken out the insane vampires and incapacitated the newbie when we joined him.”

  Seth shook his head. “There could have been—”

  “More lurking downwind. I know. Zach and David already read me the riot act, so stop looking at me like that. I won’t make the same mistake twice.”

  “David read you the riot act?” Seth asked, lips quirking.

  “In his quiet, gentle, don’t-make-me-lose-it-like-the-Hulk way,” she said.

  Seth smiled and returned his attention to Zach. “What did you learn?”

  “First, that even with the dosage upped, the drug won’t affect you or me, although it is strong enough to make David groggy.”

  “Will it knock him out?”

  “One dose won’t, no.”

  “Good to know. What else?”

  “The immortal you’re looking for is definitely an elder and very powerful. Yet another reason to delve more deeply into Aidan’s mind. Because your immortal enemy doesn’t just erase the memories of the vampires in his army. He plants commands in their subconscious to get them to do what he wants.”

  Lisette had never heard of such a thing. “You mean like hypnosis?”

  “More like hypnosis times a hundred,” Zach confirmed. “These are impulses so deeply implanted that the puppet couldn’t ignore them no matter how strong his will to do otherwise.”

  Seth took a bite. Chewed. Considered Zach’s words. “That explains how the vampires can carry out duties without revealing anything about the one commanding them. But such behavioral modification would take great power.”

  Zach nodded. “If I didn’t know how loyal he was to you, I would suspect David.”

  “David would never betray me.”

  “I know. The big question is who would?”

  Seth sighed. “A question for which I still have no answer.”

  “But we’ve narrowed it down.”

  “To one of the elder telepathic immortals. Aidan is the most powerful.”

  “And is harboring secrets. If he’s strong enough to bend someone’s will, he may be strong enough to keep you or me from finding what we seek in his mind. That barrier I encountered may be too strong even for us to topple. At least not without destroying him.”

  Lisette looked from one to the other. “Even while he’s sleeping?”

  Both males nodded.

  “Then how can you find out who it is?”

  “Did you plant a tracking device on the vampire?” Seth asked Zach.

  “No. His brain was Swiss cheese by the time I finished with him. Have you pissed off Aidan or any of the other elder telepaths recently?” Zach asked.

  “Actually, yes,” Seth said. “But I didn’t think their anger had lingered.”

  “You have?” Lisette asked, surprised.

  He shrugged. “Rumors of the recent marriages that have taken place here have circulated the globe. Like other immortals, the elder telepaths have become suspicious rega
rding the unusually high number of gifted ones that seem to populate North Carolina.”

  Lisette looked from Zach to Seth. “I admit I’ve been a bit curious about that myself.”

  Seth sighed. “David and I always steer gifted ones toward areas that bear network headquarters. It makes it easier for us to keep them safe in the event their advanced DNA is discovered.”

  “Ahhhhhh. No wonder.”

  “Aidan requested a transfer a few months ago.”

  Because he had hoped to find love and happily ever after himself?

  Zach grunted. “A transfer you denied.”

  “Yes.”

  “So we have motive.”

  Lisette knew well how lonely this existence could be, but . . . “Do you really think your denying Aidan a chance to meet and fall in love with a gifted one—something that would still be a long shot, even if he were here—would drive him to retaliate by trying to destroy us all?”

  Seth shook his head. “You’ve only been immortal for two centuries, Lisette. You don’t know how wretched it can be to live thousands of years without love.”

  Zach nodded. “It is.”

  “Yes, but . . .” She looked at Seth. “You make it sound like you’re a marriage broker or something and have intentionally denied Aidan and the other elders spouses.”

  “I decide which immortals are stationed here. And I’m responsible for guiding gifted ones to the area. Even David suspects there are immortals out there who think I’m playing favorites. I’ll have Darnell look into comments made online, see if he can differentiate between the disgruntled and the furious. Aidan’s wasn’t the only transfer I denied recently.”

  A sobering thought. Lisette had heard of men killing for love. She supposed killing for being denied love wasn’t so far out of the realm of possibility.

  “Down With The Sickness” interrupted them.

  Zach growled. “I hate that fucking song!”

  Laughing, Seth retrieved his phone. “I guess this means David is off the clock.” He took the call. “Yes?”

  “Is this Zach or Seth?” Bastien asked on the other end, voice taut.

  “Seth. What’s up?”

  “Cliff tagged one of the new vampires.”

  Seth vanished.

  Zach touched Lisette’s shoulder and teleported, following Seth to the field that used to support Bastien’s lair.