Younger, Bree - Burn [All American Vampires 1] (Siren Publishing Classic)

by Bree Younger

  RJ just laughed and exchanged a knowing look with Quinn.

  Hawk’s mouth creased up for a moment in what she supposed was a smile at the others’ antics as he stepped closer. “Ignore those two. They’ve never known how to act in civilized company.” He took her hand. “I want to offer my thanks, as well.”

  “Please, you’re all going to make me blush. Really, not another word about it.”

  “We just want you to know how grateful we are for everything you did, but I wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable,” Quinn commented.

  “And of course you remember my brother, Quinn.” Ty led her over to where the intimidating vampire stood. She was a little embarrassed to meet his eyes after what she and Ty had done on his desk, but when she finally got her courage up, she was met with a warm twinkle of understanding. Unable to help herself, she blushed, and his smile widened.

  “Why don’t we all sit down?” Quinn suggested, and everyone moved to do just that, the men resuming their positions on the various chairs and couches.

  Ty led her to the sofa where he’d been sitting and pulled her down snugly beside him. She tried to put a little space between them, embarrassed at his possessive attitude, but he just pulled her against him again. She gave up, not wanting to treat the other men to the sight of her and Ty engaged in a tug of war, which she knew she had no hope of winning. As she settled against him, he relaxed his hold a bit. She thought Quinn bit off a laugh, but when she darted a suspicious glance in his direction, he just looked back at her with a bland expression on his face. She must have been mistaken.

  “Please, don’t let me interrupt whatever it was you guys were discussing.” Libby was very curious to know if they’d discovered anything about the men who had been chasing her and Ty.

  “Well, the fact is, we’re here to see you, Libby. We were just passing the time until you got up. We’d like to talk to you, if you feel up to it.”

  She was surprised. “What about?”

  “About when you found Ty. We need to know if you saw anything unusual, or if you might remember anything that Ty doesn’t. Would you mind answering some questions?”

  She shrugged. “Sure, you can ask me whatever you’d like, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to help you too much.”

  “I know you’re probably curious about what’s going on. The truth is, we’re struggling to figure it out ourselves. It’s been kind of like putting together a puzzle, but we’re missing some of the pieces. We have a theory, but no real proof.” He briefly filled her in on some of the things they’d learned. She was stunned when he told her about bloodslaves. It was a horrid practice, and she could tell the others were just as repelled by the thought as she was. It made Libby sick to think about it.

  Quinn explained about sending Ty to check on the bodies that had been found in Waveland, and he told her they thought there might be some connection between the bodies and whoever had kidnapped Ty. “So we were hoping that with what we’ve learned, what Ty has told us, and what you remember, we might be able to make sense of everything.”

  She could sense he wasn’t telling her everything, but it was still more than she had expected to find out. “You know you didn’t have to tell me all of that. I understand that you need to keep things confidential. I’m just an outsider. You’re not going to offend me by keeping me out of the loop or anything. Although I was dreadfully curious about what was going on. Ty told me he didn’t know who was chasing us.”

  Quinn smiled. “Normally, I probably wouldn’t tell you so much. You’re right when you figured that we don’t often like to share our secrets with outsiders, but the fact that you’re so deeply involved makes this situation a little different. We feel like it’s in your best interest to know at least most of what we know. That way, you might be able to remember something that otherwise might not strike you as important.”

  She shrugged, still not convinced that she knew anything that could help them. But she was willing to give it a try. “Okay. What do you want to know?”

  “I want you to tell us anything you can remember about the morning you found Ty. Even the least little detail might be important.”

  She did as he asked, recounting everything from her driving to the cabin to the time she actually discovered the body staked to the ground.

  “And you didn’t pass any cars that seemed suspicious or see anything unusual?”

  She thought about it but shook her head. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “Go on. What did you do next?”

  It went on like that, with Libby recounting what she remembered and one or the other of the men interrupting occasionally to ask for clarification or to prod her memory with questions.

  She could tell they were surprised when she told them how she had shot through the chains to get Ty free. And they looked absolutely amazed when she explained how she got him in the back of the SUV. When she snuck a glance at Ty, all six-foot-three inches of muscular male, she was pretty amazed herself.

  Reaching the part in the tale where Ty had bitten her, she stuttered to a halt, glancing at him uncertainly.

  “She was unconscious after that,” Ty informed them, his voice hard, and she knew he still felt guilty about having taken so much blood.

  She reached down and took his hand in hers, squeezing gently. He looked down and met her gaze, and she thought his eyes softened a bit at whatever he saw in her expression.

  “That’s fine, Libby. You’re doing great,” RJ assured her. “What about when you stopped at the store for gas? Do you think you’d recognize the two vamps that came in?”

  She thought for a moment. “I know I’d recognize one of them. He was big with mean eyes. The other one…I’m not sure. I didn’t get a very good look at him. I know he was big, too, but not like the other one. Tall but not bulky, you know?”

  Hawk opened up a folder he’d been holding. “Could any of these be the vampires you saw?”

  Libby took the photos he passed to her and began looking through them. The first two pictures were strangers to her, but the third one stopped her cold. “This one. This is the big one I was talking about.”

  Ty took it from her and looked at it, his jaw tightening. Then he nodded and passed the picture to Hawk, who looked at Quinn. “It’s Cumbest. Just like we thought.” His gaze turned back to her. “Any of the others look familiar?”

  Libby continued to look through the photos. She thought one of the others looked vaguely familiar and handed it over. “This one. I’m not sure, but he might have been the other man.”

  Ty stared at the photo for a minute but shook his head at the questioning look the others were sending him. “I’ve never seen him before.”

  Hawk took the pictures and put them back in the folder. “He’s a known associate of McElroy’s. More muscle than anything else. It would make sense for him to be there.”

  “And that’s another link connecting McElroy to this whole thing.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful, but that’s really all I know,” Libby said when they’d finished questioning her.

  Quinn shook his head. “You’ve been more helpful than you realize. Both you and Ty positively identified one of the men, and you gave a tentative ID on a second. That’s enough to take to the Council.”

  “But not enough to nail McElroy,” Ty interjected then looked like he wished he could call back the words.

  “Who’s McElroy?” Libby wanted to know.

  “He’s the guy we think might be behind this whole thing.”

  “Oh.”

  They sat there a few more minutes, tossing around ideas, and Libby started to tune everything out. She was starting to get hungry. She stood up and immediately got everyone’s attention. “I’m sorry to interrupt you, but if you don’t need me for anything else, I think I’ll go get something to eat while you guys finish your discussion.”

  The others stopped talking and Ty rose beside her. For a moment, she got a little lightheaded from standing up
so fast and swayed unsteadily on her feet. Ty reached out a hand to grasp her arm. She glanced down and gasped.

  “What is it, Lib?” His voice was a low rumble somewhere above her head.

  “It’s just that I remembered something. Your arm—”

  She halted and tried to recall exactly what she’d seen.

  “Yeah, Libby. What about my arm?”

  “That guy—” She pointed toward the folder with the pictures. “Cumbest?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He had a tattoo on his lower left arm.”

  “What kind of tattoo?”

  She looked up at him. “It was a black rose with a snake coiled around it.”

  “What?” Ty’s eyes widened and then he turned to look at his brother. Both men looked like they’d been hit with a sledgehammer.

  Quinn rose to join them. “Are you sure, Libby? Absolutely sure?”

  She nodded her head. “I’m pretty sure. Is it important?”

  Ty answered. “Yes. It’s very important. The tattoo you just described is symbol worn by a specific group of vampires.”

  Quinn ran a hand through his hair. “They are a bloodthirsty group, Libby, and definitely wouldn’t think twice about killing a bloodslave or staking out a vampire to meet the sun.”

  “You think this group might be connected to those bodies? To what happened to Ty?” Libby wanted to know.

  He turned his head and met Quinn’s gaze again. “Is it possible?”

  His brother nodded grimly. “Yes. It makes a strange sort of sense, if you think about it. The way you were taken. The plan to kill you. That’s personal. That’s a vendetta. Not a warning. Revenge.”

  “I can’t fucking believe she’s involved in this shit.”

  “Why not?” Quinn asked.

  Ty didn’t answer.

  Libby couldn’t contain her curiosity. “Who?”

  The men just stared at her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Lib. Weren’t you saying earlier that you were getting hungry? Why don’t you go to the kitchen and fix yourself something to eat while we finish up in here?”

  Ty didn’t want her to hear what they were about to discuss. He could tell she didn’t want to leave, just when things were starting to get interesting, but she did as he asked. He followed her out and closed the door behind her. When he turned around to face the others, he knew he looked as stunned as Quinn did.

  “Son of a bitch. I can’t believe it. Simone. Who’d have thought after all this time, she’d turn up again?”

  Hawk looked at the two brothers, a question in his eyes. “You want to fill me in on this woman? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you mention her before, or this group of vampires.”

  Quinn stood up and crossed to the cabinet in the far corner. He opened it up, got out some glasses and a fifth of bourbon. He gave each man a glass and poured the liquor. After he sat again and took a swallow of his drink, he began to speak. “Simone d’Amboise is the vampiress who turned me and Ty.”

  RJ let out a grunt of surprise.

  “We’d just finished our maiden voyage in a ship we’d recently purchased, and she was a passenger. She was mesmerizing. Beautiful. You know what I mean.”

  Hawk and RJ nodded their heads.

  “Everyone had left the ship, except for Simone and her attendants. The three of us celebrated our arrival in port by having a…private party. We thought we were going to have the night of our lives. We did, I guess. Just not the way we expected.” He grimaced uncomfortably at the confession, but the men just sat and listened.

  Ty rolled his eyes. “We thought we were a couple of lucky bastards. Instead, we played right into her hands. In the middle of the action, she bit me. I looked up and her servants were in the room with us, taking Quinn down. They bled us, injected us, and we turned the next day.” He shook his head at the memory. “You’ve all been through the change. You know how painful it feels, what a shock it is. How lost and confused you feel.”

  The others nodded. The first few weeks and months after a turning were often very difficult, depending on your maker or makers. “She guided us. Tended to us. Cared for us,” Quinn told them. “We were totally dependent on her. Like fucking newborn babies. We believed her when she said it was necessary to kill each donor. That humans were lesser beings, meant to give us nourishment and entertainment. Nothing more.”

  Ty swallowed down his bourbon with one gulp and held out his glass for Quinn to refill. “She kept us close to her. We were her right and left hands, she said. We would do anything for her. And often did. Things that I look back on now and I can’t believe that was even me.”

  Quinn’s hand came down on his shoulder in a comforting gesture. No one said anything. “We were completely in her thrall, just as her other followers were. She used sex and blood and pride and fear to bond us to her. But after a while…” He took a sip of his drink before continuing, “After a while we both began to realize that not everything she had told us was quite true. That humans were not lesser beings. That we didn’t have to kill to live.”

  “Yeah. We took our discoveries to Simone. We thought that she would be receptive. Instead, she laughed at us. Told us not to be foolish. Demanded that we not spread our subversive ideas among the others.” Ty frowned. “I think that was the first time that I started to suspect that Simone was not completely sane.”

  “We decided we had to leave. It took a while, a lot of planning. We knew she wouldn’t accept our desertion easily. She could be quite vindictive when she felt betrayed.”

  He stopped talking, listening as Quinn continued the tale, and let his mind drift back. Deep into his past. A past he’d hoped had been wiped from his memory completely. He should have known better. Some things you could never forget.

  Ty could still remember it as if it had been only yesterday. Simone had been beautiful. Beautiful in her ferocity. In her brutality. That last night they’d been in the ballroom of the mansion she had purchased on the outskirts of Albany, New York. It was another “feast,” as she liked to call it. Her cadre of vampires danced and laughed with the unsuspecting fools who had accepted her invitation to a weekend house party of decadence and depravity.

  And Simone had shined. Gowned in a beautiful silver confection, she had drawn all eyes as she’d danced and laughed her way around the ballroom.

  The party had soon disintegrated into another orgy. After that it wasn’t long before the vampires began feeding. It was a bloodbath. Ravaged bodies lay everywhere, some dead, others dying. He could remember thinking that they would have to move—again. They never stayed in one place too long. Simone and her followers did not do discretion well. They would play nice for a while, drawing to them the defenseless and pathetically eager-to-please humans who lived in this or that town, enslaving the weakest, the most disposable, for their personal bloodslaves. Then all hell would break loose. Simone would tire of pretending to be civilized, and she and her voracious horde would attack and feed until it was impossible to hide the bodies or disguise the deaths as random acts of violence.

  Simone had already been talking of immigrating to Canada. She’d heard Montreal was growing by leaps and bounds, and she missed being around fellow Frenchmen and hearing her native tongue. So tonight…another slaughter.

  Sickened, he’d turned away, and his eyes had met Quinn’s over the heads of the other vampires as they’d feasted, and he had known. It was time. They’d talked of leaving many times before in the six decades they’d been with Simone. Had planned it meticulously, down to the last detail.

  The planning had started the night Simone had laughed at them when they’d made the suggestion that they spare the lives of the men and women from whom they drank. “Oh, You are très amusant, mes coeurs. These humans…they are like bétail. Cows and pigs. They are here for our plaisir et amusement. Do not worry yourself over their petty little lives.”

  They should have left then. But instead they had let her beauty and her sensuality persuade them. Pe
rhaps she was right. They were better than the lowly humans, weren’t they? Stronger, faster, more beautiful. Surely she knew. After all, she’d been alive a lot longer than they. She was from the old countries, where vampires even older than she had lived, and she was a thousand years old. She had to be right.

  But the stirring discontent the brothers felt had grown with each blood orgy, with each needless butchering. They had given her lip service, and they had begun to prepare. They knew the price if she caught wind of their plan. She did not tolerate betrayal, and she would definitely see their leaving as exactly that. But Ty had known that somehow, in some way, he and Quinn would find a way to get away from the woman they had once worshipped. And that night, after the feast, they would leave.

  She and her faithful would be sated, exhausted from their gorging. They would sleep the rest of the night through and the following day as well. It would give them enough of a head start. It had to. They would disappear. Travel south. Into the war-torn Confederacy. Amid the confusion and the chaos on the fields of battle, the two brothers would be able to lose themselves, to disappear. Simone, with her love for all things expensive and beautiful, would be horrified at the thought of having to endure the hardship and struggle. No, she was much too fastidious—except for when she fed—to venture into the ravaged Southern countryside. She might send a few henchmen after them, but Ty was confident that he and Quinn would have no problem in avoiding them, or eliminating them if necessary.

  There was a reason the two brothers were her favorites, and it wasn’t just their expertise in the boudoir. They could always be counted on to take out any enemy. The years spent with Simone as their mistress had honed them both into battle-ready warriors. Yes, tonight was definitely going to be the night. He looked back over at Quinn and nodded. A few more hours, just a few more hours of tolerating Simone’s insanity. And then freedom.

  Ty shook off the memory and forced himself back to the present. Quinn was speaking. “So we need to find out if she’s got any connections to the area. Properties she owns, friends, acquaintances in the surrounding states. Anything. She’s been living in Canada. Owns a string of hotels up there, last I heard.” Ty could hear the determination in his brother’s voice. “If she is connected to this shit, we need to know what her role is. I’ll be honest. She’s dangerous. Very dangerous. There’s nothing she won’t do to further her own ends. Nothing.”