Weaken the Knees (The Immortal World Book 6)

by Shannon A. Hiner

“What about a shapeshifter?” Rene asked.

  “You want to solve one problem by inviting another?”

  Rene glared at Will. He referred to the fact that there was currently a rogue shapeshifter running around killing vampires. “We could ask a trustworthy one.”

  “Know any of those?” His chestnut eyes locked on hers.

  She resisted the urge to snarl, barely. He knew very well she had a pitifully short list of contacts in the immortal world. It wasn’t her fault. Okay, it was. She was incredibly antisocial. Still, it was a dick move to bring it up just then. “I thought perhaps one of our associates might.” She looked between the other vampires, all of whom shook their heads slowly.

  Shapeshifters were shifty . . . pun not intended. They kept to the shadows even more than her kind. It was a long shot to ask, but it stung more after Will’s input. Saints, she wished that Angela Estrada had sent her any other Risqueen.

  “Right, so we’ll have to do this the old fashioned way. We need to tail the top members. One of them must be in contact with the money, they’ll lead us to it.”

  “We’ll only be able to tail them at the night,” Megan said. “What if they’re in contact during daylight hours?”

  “I might be able to help with that.” Kendra shrugged. “I was pretty good with computers as a human. Shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for me to get some phone and bank records.”

  Rene knew how fast human technology was evolving. Only a decade before, her cell phone had been the size of her forearm. “All due respect, Kendra, but that might not be as helpful nowadays.”

  Kendra threw her a wicked smile. “Nowadays?”

  “When were you last human?”

  “I’m only six months dead. And yes, I know that even in that time technology has continued to evolve, but I still keep up.”

  Six months. She was worse than an infant; she was a zygote. What did Ignatius mean by sending someone so young for a task like this? Never mind that it was evidently going to work out in Rene’s favor. It still seemed like an insult.

  Faber was unfazed. He must have known already. Megan looked positively ill. Yes, she was definitely the eldest at their table. Will still regarded the Fraccas vampire with a steely eye.

  Oh. It clicked finally. The Risqueen and the Fraccas had a rivalry and bone deep hatred for each other at least three centuries in the making. That’s why he was acting so strangely. Kendra didn’t even seem to mark Will’s antagonism though. She was still staring at Rene with a self-assurance that might have been considered cockiness.

  “Okay. Well, good,” Rene said slowly. “That will be . . . useful. Anyone else have any suggestions or concerns at this time?”

  Everyone shook their heads or shrugged. Rene tried not to roll her eyes. What was it with meetings like this where no one wanted to take initiative?

  “All right then. In that case, you each have your assignments. There are three founding members of the Venor. Faber, Megan, and Will: you will all tail one of them.” She passed out pictures of their targets. “Kendra, you’re on desk duty for the moment. Follow the numbers on each of these three, and let one us know if you need more information. Do not, under any circumstances, engage with the enemy. Not only are they very dangerous, but we don’t want to alert them that we’re on their trail. This conference room is reserved for our use as long as this investigation is going on. We’ll meet back here an hour before dawn each day to discuss our findings. Take your packets with you. On page two you will find the contact information for each and every one of us. Questions?”

  Again the shrugs and shaken heads.

  “Excellent. Everyone is excused then. Your assignments begin immediately. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Megan wasted no time in gathering her papers and disappearing. Faber held the door open for Kendra, but the female stepped up to Rene before exiting. “It’s really a pleasure meeting you, Rene.” She smiled. “I’ve heard a lot about you at the castle.”

  That could either be bad or very bad. Rene winced. “I would say don’t believe everything you hear, but in my case it’s probably true.”

  Kendra laughed. “I’m looking forward to working with you. I hope you won’t hold my age against me.”

  “Prove me wrong a couple of times and I’ll learn my lesson.”

  “I’ll do my best.” Kendra grinned and preceded Faber out the door.

  William hadn’t yet risen from his seat. His narrowed eyes followed the Fraccas vampire out of the room and remained on the door for a few seconds longer.

  Tucking the other chairs firmly under the table, Rene grabbed her own packet and made her way to the door. Will was up, around the table, and holding it open for her before she even got there. Her fingers curled into fists as she struggled to keep her temper under control.

  “I hope you’re not planning on treating Kendra like that the whole time we’re working together.” Rene moved past him.

  Will followed her into the hall. “She’s Fraccas. They cannot be trusted.”

  Rene laughed. “I’m Fraccas.”

  “No, you’re Acrien.”

  “You know what I mean. My blood is Fraccas.”

  “Your blood is Tanner’s, and he had the sense to get out.”

  She sighed. Arguing with a Risqueen was like bashing your head against a wall until your brains splattered out. The wall didn’t budge and you were left senseless by the end.

  “Kendra can’t help who turned her any more than you or I. If you’re going to act like that, you won’t be invited to stay.” His hand reached for her shoulder, but Rene twisted out of the way. “I don’t have to have Risqueen input on my team, Will.” That wasn’t strictly true. “So why don’t you go home and think about if you really want to be here.” Maybe if she drove him to quit, Angela Estrada would be forced to send someone else.

  “I’ll play nice with the Fraccas vampire,” Will growled from behind her. “But I won’t stop watching her for a second.”

  “Fine. Good,” Rene spat back at him. “It’ll be nice not to be the only one in your scopes for once.”

  She turned back around and nearly ran straight into Serena. Side-stepping the blonde at the last second, Rene muttered, “Sorry.”

  “Hey Will,” Serena greeted.

  Rene heard him grumble something noncommittal before she turned a corner in the hall and was out the main doors of the headquarters.

  “Whoa! Slow down, speed demon,” Serena called, jogging to catch up. “What was that about?”

  “Estrada insisted on putting him on my team,” Rene growled.

  “Seems like the obvious choice to me.”

  Stomping over the narrow dirt path, Rene made for the apartment building across from the offices. “Serena, can you just leave me alone about Will? He takes up entirely too much of my time as it is.”

  “Why are you so hard on him?”

  Rene stopped, hands on her hips, and turned on Serena. “Will needs a damsel. Someone he can save.”

  Her best friend tilted her head with raised brows. “And he can’t save you?”

  “I don’t need saving,” she spat before swinging the apartment building door open and striding inside. She pretended not to hear Serena’s response, but it shot through the closing door and buried itself like an arrowhead right between her shoulder blades.

  “Don’t you?”

  Chapter 6

  The great stone castle gave off no light in moonless night. It rose up from the ground to swallow the darkness, creating a pit of darker black in the side of the mountain. By day it must have appeared quite normal, probably not forbidding in the slightest, but Kendra had never seen it by day. She doubted any of its occupants had.

  Kendra’s feet made no sound as she let herself in the side door. He must have been waiting for her.

  “Kendra.” Her sire’s voice stirred a deep wistfulness in her soul.

  The months of her new life had passed too quickly. Would the rest of it as well? Would she blink and find a
hundred years were gone? She could mark time only by the way her mind and body began to change. Older vampires were always telling her that the first fifty years were the hardest. She would struggle with the thirst, with homesickness, with not revealing herself to the humans. Maybe she was missing something, or maybe there was something wrong with her, but what she had begun to struggle with most was understanding her place in the immortal world.

  She was Fraccas. But what did that mean exactly? Her clan had many new bloods, but her sire had taken an interest in none of them. Except her. He looked in on her training, even going so far as to spar with her. He quizzed her on thoughts and impressions with regard to the immortal world. As Second in Command to the Fraccas clan, he probably didn’t have the time to do such things, yet he made it.

  “Kendra,” he said again from the shadows. She could hear the smile in his voice even though it was too dark to make out more than the outline of his broad shoulders. “You have a very busy mind this evening. I haven’t seen you so distracted since the change.”

  She sighed. “I’m sorry.”

  “Did the meeting go poorly?” An edge crept into his voice. The air stirred as he moved in closer to her.

  “No. It went well, I think. Though . . .”

  “Though?”

  Kendra shrugged one shoulder as she began to walk down the hall again. “There was a Risqueen there. He clearly doesn’t trust me.”

  The edge sharpened and he followed her. “Which one?”

  “William Rynquist.”

  Abruptly, he chuckled. “Ah, Mathew’s youngest whelp. Nothing to worry about there.”

  Remembering the way Will’s eyes followed her every movement, muscles tightened as if ready to spring at her, Kendra wasn’t sure she could agree. “Rene Kaplan didn’t seem to mind though.” Kendra actually liked the former Fraccas—now Acrien—vampire. She had an informal, unstudied air about her, as if she wasn’t a few hundred years old, but just as she looked: a teenager going on adulthood.

  Her sire made a noise deep in his throat. It could have been a growl or an affirmation, Kendra wasn’t sure. When he spoke, he sounded cautiously amused. “Kaplan is unpredictable at best. Don’t let your guard down.”

  “I won’t.” She’d try not to, anyway. “Should I report to Ignatius?”

  “Not just yet. Wait until you have something of interest.” He stopped with her next to her bedroom door. The glow of a lamp ten feet down the hall caught the green of his eyes and made them glow. Hair like spun gold dipped over his forehead. Inwardly, Kendra sighed, leaning back against her door. He smiled slowly. He knew. He always knew. Reaching out he cupped the side of her neck, caressing her jaw with his thumb. “Sleep well, little one.”

  She leaned into his touch, but he was already moving away. Disappearing back into the shadows as if he’d never existed. Kendra sighed deeply and let herself into her sparse bedroom. Being reborn was like starting life all over again. Everyone saw her as a baby, rather than a twenty-one-year-old woman. She’d have to prove her worth. Maybe if her first field assignment went well, he’d take her a little more seriously.

  Kendra would be cautious around that Risqueen vampire, and if she had to get rid of him, she would.

  ∞∞∞

  William didn’t think Rene had put much thought into assigning the three Venor members their tails. He wasn’t even sure she knew that she’d given him Stephen Smart. The arrangement suited him well, though. Since seeing her crumpled form appear in his apartment, a strong desire to find the person who’d caused her pain had enveloped him. Now Will not only possessed the person’s name and whereabouts, but the knowledge that he was working directly to bring the human down.

  True, it wasn’t easy to watch the mortal strutting about and not be able to end his miserable existence, but Will found comfort in imagining what would happen to the human when he was no longer needed alive.

  As Mr. Smart went about his business, he seemed none the wiser that he was being followed. The work put William in mind of his human life. Shortly before dying, he’d been an army scout. Remaining unseen was his specialty. He found Smart leaving the gym. It didn’t take following close to get a good pull at the human’s scent. Will would know him anywhere now. Tracking him would be even easier from a distance. After the gym, Smart stopped to drop a letter off at the post office then meandered his way home.

  Pulling his jacket collar higher, supposedly against the cold, but really just to hide his face, Will went through the human’s dossier again in his mind. Two more rights and about a mile to get to his home.

  Smart turned left.

  Will went back over the city map in his head, retracing the fastest routes and Smart’s known hangouts. Left made no sense. Falling a little farther back, Will listened for the human’s thoughts, but couldn’t pick up much from his distance. Smart was calm, that much was clear. Nothing seemed to have entered his mind about being followed. About half a mile later, the human made an abrupt right and slowed. A few hundred yards back, Will stopped.

  They were in a residential neighborhood, though not the one Stephen Smart lived in. The human stepped into a bus terminal and sat down on the bench. His head was tilted slightly up, as if he looked at the building across the street. Will ducked under an awning and casually flicked his eyes to the building Smart was scrutinizing. An apartment building. It was a nicer part of town; there was even a doorman. Nothing seemed to set that particular building out from the rest.

  A bus rolled down the street. Stopped at the small terminal. A few passengers disembarked, but Smart made no move to board. He nodded to the driver, who, Will could just make out in the darkness, nodded back. The doors closed, and the bus moved on.

  Smart remained still for another half hour. Watching. Waiting. Nothing more.

  Eventually he stood and made his way through the streets straight to his own home where he closed and locked the door, not stirring from it for the rest of the night.

  Along the way he removed a cell phone from his pocket and dialed. Will moved in closer to hear better. He couldn’t make out anything on the other end. Smart uttered only one sentence.

  “Still nothing. We’ll give her one more night.”

  ∞∞∞

  The human went to the same bus terminal and watched the apartment the next night as well.

  William had mentioned it at their pre-dawn meeting. Neither Megan nor Faber had reported similar actions by their humans. Only Smart watched this apartment. Though Kendra revealed that the phone number he’d called had been Marissa Noble’s, the human Megan was watching. According to Megan, the woman had been tucked up quiet in her home at the time of the phone call. But she had sent a text message to similar effect to Shawn Mizenhast, Faber’s human.

  What were the three up to? And who lived in that apartment? He noted the street address to share at their meeting in the morning. Something he should have done the night before. So he was a little rusty. Thankfully, Rene had never run surveillance ops before and hadn’t thought to ask him exactly where the human had stopped to while away forty minutes.

  Will shook his head. Hadrian just tossed her in the deep end and waited to see if she’d float. Thank goodness Will had been able to convince Angela to let him in on the taskforce. Megan, while a serious-minded and mature vampire, had never done anything like this. Faber seemed nice, but Will had heard rumors about the vampire’s hothead temper. And the Fraccas . . . a baby viper just waiting to strike.

  Truly, what was Hadrian thinking?

  It wasn’t that Will didn’t think Rene could do this; she simply needed a better support team than she was currently operating with. Will didn’t like the vibes he was getting off of these vampire hunters. They were too cool. Too calm and calculating. He knew, by extension, whoever was behind them had to be much more so. And that was a scary thought.

  Twenty minutes into the watching, Will felt a presence coming up behind him. He frowned at its familiarity and turned.

  “What the hell do
you think you’re doing?” came the whip-like crack of Rene’s Angry Voice. He knew it well, because it was almost exclusively the one she used on him.

  He hissed for silence, holding his finger to his mouth and glancing back at the human. Smart hadn’t moved yet.

  Rene, predictably, bristled. “Did you just shush me?”

  “Rene, quiet,” William said. “He’ll hear.”

  “Who? And what the hell are you doing here?” Evidently she refused to lower her voice.

  Will growled and grabbed her arm, hauling her around a corner and into an alley.

  “Oy! Hands off.” She wrenched out of his grip.

  “I’m surveilling. What do you think I’m doing?”

  “You’re supposed to be watching Stephen Smart,” she said loudly enough to echo in the alley.

  He swore and in a moment of panic, covered her mouth. “Shhh!”

  She bit him. Fangs and all.

  “Ouch! God dammit, Rene! What is wrong with you?” Thick blood welled up from the bite marks and he stuck his hand in his mouth.

  Before he could do more than blink, Rene had drawn her gun and leveled it at his heart. “Don’t you ever, ever do that again.”

  Will had never heard her voice hit that low pitch, that deep growl. Reverberating through him, it bounced along the inside of his skull before lodging in his throat to slowly churn its way down his esophagus.

  ∞∞∞

  Cutting off all her air, the hand was clammy and larger than her face itself. It smelled of peppermint and saddle leather. Pressing her back into his large chest, she could feel his breath whisper over the small hairs of her neck.

  “Shhh, Sarah.” Hot wet breath on her skin.

  Tears leaking out of her eyes. His other hand moved lower.

  Chapter 7

  Her eyes were blurred, distant. She couldn’t see where she was, only felt the comforting weight of her gun in her right hand. Her thumb caressed the safety, forefinger stroked the trigger. She was safe when it was in her hand. No one could harm her when she held it tight.