BloodlustBundle

by Margaret Carter, Crystal Green, Erica Orloff, Patricia Rosemor

  After four rings, a recording began. “Professor Valpa here. If you are a student…”

  Max fumed through a menu of alternatives until the beep. “Pick up, Valpa.”

  “Yes, is that you, Maxwell?” said a richly resonant voice that had doubtless enthralled hundreds of female graduate assistants over the years. Max visualized the speaker, with his mane of white hair and deceptively benevolent features.

  “I need information.” Max flung himself onto the couch. “Nola Grant was living in Maryland, and she’s bolted. I need to find her.”

  “Why? Not from friendly motives, I suspect.”

  “The other day I got a call from Roger Darvell, who’d noticed a report of my brother’s death in the local newspaper,” said Max. He summarized the events surrounding the murders. Valpa listened without comment, except for occasional murmurs of dismay. Though the old man could behave as ruthlessly as any other predator when conditions demanded, Max regarded him as soft on ephemerals. Valpa seemed to regard Deanna’s death as no less appalling than Anthony’s.

  “What do you want of me, dear boy?”

  “Damn it, when are you going to stop calling me that?” Though Max knew that Valpa, older than most living members of their species, addressed almost everyone that way, the phrase remained annoying.

  “When your age equals mine. As for Nola, all I’m certain of is that she has a house in Pacific Grove. I don’t know the address.” Valpa’s tone cooled a degree or two. “What do you plan to do when you catch her?”

  “Execute her, of course. She destroyed one of our own kind.”

  “According to your story, an ephemeral did that.”

  “As her tool. Confound it, Valpa, you can’t deny her guilt.”

  “I’m inclined to believe your version—”

  “Profoundest thanks, venerable one.”

  With no acknowledgment of the interruption, Valpa continued. “Some of the other elders may not, especially those less than sympathetic to the notion that ephemerals have rights. After all, Anthony poached on Nola’s territory, and there’s no proof that the young man killed him on her command. If you retaliate in kind, a few of my peers might condemn you, instead, for murdering her.”

  “If I open my mind to them, they can read the truth in my emotions.”

  “What you believe to be the truth. If they consider you deluded, your belief wouldn’t justify murder.”

  “When did my word cease to be enough?”

  “When it concerns your closest kin.”

  “Well, what do you suggest I do? Haul her in front of the elders’ council for trial? How?”

  “To belabor the obvious, killing her wouldn’t resurrect your brother. Revenge is a game for the short-lifers. Would it be worth getting ostracized, possibly condemned to death yourself?”

  Max shot a glance toward the hallway and the closed door of the master bedroom, where the shower had stopped running. “Can’t you offer me any help?”

  “If she gives you any grounds for killing her in self-defense, I’ll back you up,” said Valpa. “That’s as far as I can go.”

  Max lowered his voice. “But that would rest on my unsupported word, too, wouldn’t it?”

  “With the difference that you’d have firsthand knowledge of her behavior, which the elders could read in your aura. Provided you’re fully open to the probe, of course.”

  “Of course.” He resisted the urge to lash out again, a futile exercise on the telephone.

  “You do have one possible ally there in the local area. Roger Darvell has worked with the police as an expert witness. He could probably arrange to interview Nola’s minion. If the others on the council distrust your version of events, he could support you.”

  “That half-breed? I owe him thanks for notifying me of Anthony’s death, but otherwise, I don’t want to associate with him. I certainly would not ask for his help.” Max forced his indignation under control. The existence of a human-vampire hybrid revolted him, and the idea of one of his kind, even a mixed-blood, practicing the witch-doctor vocation of psychiatry struck him as ridiculous.

  “Have it your way, then. As to Nola’s whereabouts—Pacific Grove, probably directly on the waterfront, which seems to be her usual preference. From what I know of her, she wouldn’t bother using different aliases in her various residences, so you may be able to find her easily enough.”

  After a mutter of grudging thanks, Max cut the connection.

  He had just turned off the phone when he heard Linnet step out of the bedroom. Her clean fragrance, embellished by soap and powder—but, he thankfully noticed, no perfume—drifted to him. Her scent stirred hunger pangs. Since arriving in Maryland, he’d had time for only a rabbit and a couple of squirrels. The true satisfaction possible only with a human donor would have to wait. Linnet, whom he couldn’t mesmerize, certainly didn’t offer any relief for the craving.

  But there are ways, even without hypnotism, his appetite whispered. With care, the target wouldn’t even notice a discreet nip in the midst of a passionate embrace, much less recognize the feeding for what it was. Shut up! he ordered the seductive voice. He would be a fool to risk his mission for a few minutes of self-indulgence.

  Yet he couldn’t deny he found her appealing, partly because of her fervent determination to avenge her niece. Her boldness alternately amused and exasperated him. A kitten that hisses at a German shepherd might be appealing, too, he reminded himself, but would I trust my life to it?

  Linnet slammed the bedroom door and locked it, her hands shaking. She could hardly believe she had let a stranger into her house, one who could turn people into suicidal zombies. Feeble protection that flimsy doorknob lock would provide if Max chose to break in. Not that he would have any reason to. A more realistic worry was that he might disappear while her back was turned. She hoped he believed her threat to accuse him to the police. She wasn’t sure herself whether she could go through with such lies, but Max didn’t know her well enough to guess her uncertainty.

  Stripping off her clothes, she plunged into the shower, first running cold water to quell the hot flush on her skin. When she’d cooled off and her breathing had steadied, she turned the dial to warm, then soaped and rinsed, her thoughts still revolving on Max Tremayne. Much as she hated admitting it, she didn’t mind the prospect of spending several days with him. Assuring herself that she only wanted to know more about the family of her niece’s lover only half convinced her.

  She scrambled into a fresh pair of shorts and a T-shirt, ignoring the impulse to choose a more flattering outfit. This is business, not pleasure, and I should be thinking of Deanna, not how I look to a man I’ve just met. She didn’t bother with her glasses, since she needed them mainly for reading. While running a brush through her hair, she wondered what she would do if Max had left.

  When she entered the living room, though, he was standing near the couch, examining the bookshelves. He instantly turned toward her, his eyes raking her up and down. She felt herself blush. To cover her confusion, she plunged ahead with, “Well, do we have to go for another round?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I mean, are we going to fight about you tracking Nola by yourself?”

  “No, we don’t have to fight. If you insist on accompanying me, I’m resigned to it. I just talked to a friend on the West Coast.” He held up a cell phone. “He gave me a general idea of where to look for her. I’ll need your telephone directory to arrange a flight, though.”

  Taken aback by his sudden change of heart, she floundered for a minute before she could conjure up an answer. “Oh, right, phone book. Kitchen.” She led the way, pulled the book out of a cabinet and handed it to him. “Or you could use my computer to order tickets on the Internet.”

  “No, thank you, I prefer to deal with live individuals, or a facsimile thereof.” He sat down at the table in the dining nook, while she watered the fern hanging over the sink and thought about food. Now that she had a second to catch her breath, her stomach r
eminded her that she hadn’t eaten since noon.

  “I’m going to throw together a meal,” she said. “Would you like something?”

  “Only a glass of milk. I’ve eaten already.”

  While he flipped through the yellow pages, Linnet whipped up a cheese omelette. Since receiving the news of Deanna’s death, she hadn’t bothered to shop. When she dished up the finished product and poured Max’s milk, she found him muttering curses into an unresponsive phone. “On hold?”

  He glanced up at her with a nod. Moving the phone away from his ear, he sipped from the glass and said, “Don’t you have any obligations to prevent you from flying to California on a moment’s notice?”

  “Nice try. No, I teach high school biology, so I’m free for the summer.”

  “Ah, that explains the books.” He resumed listening to the on-hold music.

  A moment later he started negotiating with an airline salesperson, while Linnet ate. Max recited his American Express number without consulting the card, she noticed. She decided the man must have either a phenomenal memory or more frequent-flyer miles than a space-shuttle pilot. Finally he switched off the phone and said, “The earliest flight to San Francisco with two seats open leaves tomorrow afternoon from Baltimore-Washington International.”

  “I’ll pay you back for the ticket, of course.”

  “Not necessary.”

  “Come on, I can’t let you…” Faced with his cool gaze, her protest wound down. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  “I’ll stay here until we leave for the airport, so neither of us needs to worry about the other one absconding.” He obviously guessed that she’d considered that possibility.

  Linnet’s mouth felt dry with renewed nervousness. She soothed it with a sip of orange juice. “Then you can sleep in the spare room. It used to be Deanna’s.”

  “If you’d rather I didn’t…”

  How about that? He has a grain or two of sensitivity after all. “No, that’s okay. Why let it go to waste?” She washed down the lump in her throat with another drink. “So what about you? You can run around chasing murder suspects, too? No job?”

  “I work at home, freelance. I write the text for folio-size volumes of photographs people like to display in their living rooms. Mostly architecture and fine arts.”

  “You must travel a lot.” Somehow one repair or replacement after another kept her savings pared down and prevented her from taking as many trips as she would like. Owning a house without a mate to share expenses meant a constant strain on the budget.

  “Not so often as you might suppose. I find it overrated. At my age, I prefer the comforts of home.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure you’re ready for the rocking chair.” She squelched the impulse to giggle, as if she were Dee’s age instead of a respectable thirty-four. “You can’t be much over forty. Where’s home?”

  “A small town in Colorado. It’s something of an artists’ colony, so the locals tolerate eccentrics like myself.”

  “Eccentric? You? I’d never have believed it.”

  As if oblivious to her sarcasm, he said, “Since I like solitude and follow a mainly nocturnal routine, the bohemian atmosphere suits me. I like the dry climate and cool nights, too. The view of the stars is…extraordinary. As for those blindingly bright Western days, being self-employed, I don’t have to go out.”

  “Oh, you estivate all day.”

  He did the Spock-eyebrow trick again, this time apparently signaling surprise that she knew the word. Good, she thought. That’ll teach him I’m more than a ditzy Miss Marple wannabe.

  “What about Anthony? He never mentioned whether he was working, in grad school, or what.”

  For a minute Max drank his milk in silence. She wondered whether he would refuse to talk about his brother. But at last he answered calmly enough, “Our family is financially comfortable. Anthony chose not to work. Instead he devoted his energy to various charitable projects—such as saving victims from predators like Nola.”

  She silently bristled at the scornful tone of the word “charitable.” To think she had almost started liking the guy. “Excuse me.” Linnet shoved her chair back from the table and carried her dishes to the sink, where she rinsed the plate and omelette pan, rattled silverware and banged the dishwasher door until her temper cooled. Suddenly Max popped up beside her, holding out his empty glass. She jumped, knocked her elbow on the counter and bit off a curse. “Say something before you sneak up on me!” She put the glass in the dishwasher and slammed it shut again. “Come on, I’ll get you settled in Deanna’s—in the guest room.”

  She escorted him, with his bag, to the spare bedroom. “I cleaned it out the day after—” She couldn’t make herself finish that sentence. “So the bed’s all remade and everything. I took Dee’s stuff to Robin, except for a few things I wanted to keep. A few of her drawings, mainly.”

  “She was an artist?”

  “Art major. I’m not sure what she planned to do with it. Hard to imagine her in commercial art, like advertising, except that she talked about wanting to do book and CD covers. She worked at a music store, where they didn’t mind the weird clothes and inch-long silver fingernails.”

  Max dropped his bag on the bed and walked over to the bookcase, where Linnet had arranged some of Deanna’s work. “She did this?” He picked up a framed black-and-white sketch of Anthony.

  “Oh, yeah, quite an imagination, huh?” The portrait showed Max’s brother bare chested, in snakeskin-tight pants, with pointed ears and a pair of pale wings that flared behind him like a pearl-gray cape.

  “Indeed.” He set down the picture and pointed to another. “And this is a self-portrait, I suppose.” Deanna had drawn herself standing on a cliff in a high wind in a Morticia Addams-style black dress, low necked to display the spiderweb tattooed on her shoulder. With her head thrown back and arms wide, she appeared to embrace the storm.

  “She didn’t look that way until the middle of high school.” Linnet showed him a photo on the dresser of Deanna, at fourteen, on a beach at Ocean City with Robin. Back then, Dee’s hair had been long and closer to platinum than Linnet’s own. “I didn’t think it was an improvement when she chopped off that beautiful hair and dyed the curls on top black. Made her head look like a vanilla ice-cream cone with licorice sprinkles. But I knew better than to freak over it the way her parents did.”

  Max turned to the other framed snapshot on the dresser. “And this must be you with your sister, yes?”

  “Oh, that.” Linnet couldn’t help blushing. Why hadn’t she thought to hide that picture of herself as a teenybopper in bellbottoms? She and Robin were posed together in front of the family Christmas tree, with her older sister looking cool and graceful, as usual. “That was a long time ago.” Robin’s tolerantly affectionate expression in the photo made a bleak contrast with her present coldness. Linnet turned toward the door. “I’ll set out towels for you in the bathroom. You probably want to get settled.”

  “Actually, I won’t go to sleep until near morning. I hope my staying up won’t disturb you?”

  “No, that’s fine.” Yielding to a reckless impulse, she said, “I’m pretty wired, too. How about a drink? I could open some wine.”

  While uncorking a bottle of Chablis, she wondered what had come over her. With this man around, the last thing she needed was alcohol in her bloodstream. Don’t be silly, I won’t get looped from a couple of glasses of wine. I just have to keep my guard up. Maybe a drink or two would loosen up Max enough to help her get straight answers out of him. She had to find out exactly what he planned to do about Nola Grant.

  Max lounged on the sofa, watching her as she walked in. Avoiding his eyes while handing him a half-filled goblet, she said, “What happens after we get to San Francisco? Your friend told you where Nola went?”

  “Approximately. If she isn’t listed in the local telephone book under her own name, I may be able to get more precise information from one of my other contacts. In San Francisco we’ll rent a ca
r and drive to Pacific Grove.”

  “Where’s that?” Linnet sat at the other end of the couch with her drink, glad for the excuse to focus on the glass instead of looking at him.

  “Near Monterey, not far from the famous Cannery Row. There’s a small airport, but driving will probably be more efficient.”

  “Okay, we get to Pacific Grove and find Nola. Then what? You claimed we can’t report her to the authorities.”

  “I’d rather not think in terms of ‘we.’ Do I have any hope of persuading you to let me handle her from that point?”

  “Not a chance.”

  He sighed. “Very well. The police would be useless. You know she hypnotized your local homicide detectives into believing she was uninvolved. She would only do the same thing over again.”

  “Fine, no police.” Linnet caught herself clenching the stem of the wineglass. She took a swallow and put the glass down. “So what’s your plan? I’m guessing you can’t zombify her the way you did Fred.” Would the murderer actually have gone through with suicide if Max hadn’t revised the command, or would self-preservation have kicked in at the last minute? Either way, Linnet’s stomach still churned at the memory of Fred’s vacant eyes.

  “No.” Max bared his teeth in a smile that showed no trace of humor. “I’ll have to deal with Nola more…directly.”

  “If you mean violence, I can’t go along with that.”

  “You keep jumping to that conclusion about me. Do I look so murderous?”

  Her eyes flickered over him. Tall, strikingly pale in contrast to the black hair, with the build of a greyhound, he didn’t resemble her idea of a desperado. But she’d already seen evidence of his casual attitude toward the law. “There must be some other way. For one thing, I don’t want to end up sentenced to life in prison as your accomplice.”

  “Blast it, what do you expect me to do? If we can’t have her arrested and you don’t want her killed, what’s the alternative?”