Master of Darkness

by Susan Sizemore

He stared into the other vampire’s eyes while the earth rolled inexorably toward sunrise. It seemed to take hours before the other vampire acknowledged Laurent’s dominance by looking away.

  How you doing, Wally? Laurent asked, entering the other’s mind.

  The Hydra offered no resistance. Been better. What are you doing with the monkey bitch?

  Working a scam.

  Ah. I see. This really hurts.

  You taking this Dawn drug? Or is the sun going to wreck your complexion in a few minutes?

  The jolt of fear that went through Roswald told Laurent that the other vampire wasn’t a user.

  Are you a dealer, then? A smart dealer doesn’t use his own product.

  It doesn’t work that way, Wally answered. You know the drill with our kind.

  “Sounds like somebody hasn’t given him permission to use Dawn,” Laurent told Eden.

  It was hard to communicate verbally while he was touching another mind, but Eden was anxiously waiting for information.

  “How does he get permission?” she asked.

  “By killing the hunter that’s after his boss,” Laurent answered. Right? he asked Roswald.

  “Right,” Roswald answered aloud.

  “Who is your boss?” Eden asked the prisoner. “Where do we find him?”

  Can I lie to her? Roswald asked Laurent.

  Fine with me.

  Even as Laurent answered the verbal thought, he slipped deeper into the other vampire’s mind. He found out the truth about who was in charge of the drug dealing, and other pertinent details. Maybe he did it for the challenge, maybe he did it because the information might prove valuable to him.

  He suspected he did it because Eden wanted him to.

  Which was not a good reason at all. Playing into the hands of the good guys was not profitable. Or safe. Or sane.

  The safe and sane thing would be to keep the knowledge to himself as a card to play, when and if he needed it for his own sake.

  Remember that, he told himself, and stepped away from Roswald.

  “You can let him go now,” he told Eden.

  “But—”

  “I said you would if he talked. You did hurt him.”

  “He was trying to kill me!”

  “He promised not to try again. Sure, he’s a Dawn dealer, and he’s a Tribe boy, but he deserves some reparations for pain and torture.” Laurent hoped he sounded enough like a stern and compassionate member of the Wolf Clan to get through to her.

  He glanced toward the east, where the sky was turning the faintest shade of pink. Damn. The night was gone, and he was no closer to acquiring vast amounts of wealth than he had been twenty-four hours before.

  Which meant he was going to have to spend another day as Sid Wolf, the brave and noble….

  He shuddered at the thought.

  “Okay, okay, we’ll let him go.”

  He smiled as his partner knelt on the sidewalk and carefully eased the hawthorn and silver arrows out of Roswald. She didn’t look so tough now. She was all wincing tenderness as she eased the pain she’d caused.

  “You’re a bundle of contradictions, Faveau,” Laurent told her. “First you hurt ’em, then you heal ’em.”

  She gave him a quick glance. “I’m just trying to figure out how to do this job. There,” she said as she finished taking the second arrow out.

  She sat back on her heels, and Laurent made sure to get between her and the Hydra as Roswald staggered to his feet.

  The other vampire gave him a venomous look, but he was weak, and it was too near sunrise for him to cause any trouble. Roswald limped hurriedly away, his form caught briefly in the headlights of a van as it turned into the street.

  “Your people are here,” Laurent said.

  He felt his skin begin to warm, even though the sun hadn’t topped the horizon yet. The uncomfortable sensation emphasized the appeal of daylight drugs, whether they were sanctioned or the street variety.

  He urged Eden toward her Volkswagen. “Report later,” he told her. “I have to get out of here.”

  Chapter Ten

  “You have a sunburn. How can you have a sunburn from a few seconds exposure?”

  Eden heard the whining complaint in her voice, but the truth was, she was feeling guilty for being the cause of exposing Wolf to the sunlight. The street had been completely empty, so she shouldn’t have stopped at the red light on the corner in front of the apartment building. By the time she turned into the underground garage, Wolf was blistered.

  “I’m sorry,” she said as she pulled into a parking space.

  He’d been silent the whole drive, but she’d been aware of the tension building in him with the growing daylight. Now that they were inside the garage, he heaved a sigh and touched her arm.

  “Don’t worry about it. I heal fast.” He got out of the car, then opened her door for her in a very polite, old-fashioned way.

  Eden smiled at this chivalrous gesture. He smiled back. It sent a hot shiver through her, even though the smile didn’t completely reach his eyes. And the sexy edge of danger he exuded made her knees weak.

  His blood sang in her. Sang, and sent hot desire curling all through her.

  “You’re still mad at me about something, aren’t you?” she managed as they walked toward the elevator. Even though she was going up in flames, she told herself the desire would wear off, and that they still had to work together.

  “Not angry. Frustrated.” He took her hand as they stepped into the elevator. “And not really at you.” He yawned. “And not really sleepy, either. Just—” He shrugged. “I want to get on with my life.”

  “Yeah, me too,” she agreed. “But we have to stop the Dawn dealers first.”

  He shrugged again, and silence stretched between them as the elevator crept upward. Eden was all too aware of the warmth of his skin, and the latent strength of the hand holding hers. Wolf leaned against the rear wall of the car, staring straight ahead. He looked very pale in the harsh overhead light, and the dark circles under his eyes emphasized the sharp outline of his cheekbones. At least his sunburn had already healed.

  “You don’t look good,” she ventured. The truth was, despite the evidence of exhaustion, he was still the handsomest male she’d ever seen.

  “Montserrat” was his answer.

  “What?”

  “What about Stromboli?”

  “Huh?”

  “Or there’s Mount Etna. Iceland has an active geological life you could check out.”

  Eden finally realized that everywhere he’d mentioned was the site of lava flows. “I doubt they allow tourists on Monserrat,” she told him. “The island is still one big erupting volcano.”

  “You said the last time you saw lava, you were running from it. What’s that about?”

  “When I was a kid, my family went on vacation in the Andes. The village where we stayed was at the base of a dormant volcano.”

  He nodded. “It wasn’t dormant when you left.”

  “When we ran for our lives,” she said. “We were on the last truck out during the evacuation. I remember looking back as the lava burned down the mountain. I saw it torch the first house on the outskirts of the village, and the fire leaping from building to building. It was inexorable. Terrifying.” She sighed. “Beautiful.”

  “So you want to see it again.”

  “Yes. I figure looking at lava in Hawaii is safer than my initial experience.”

  “You’re a vampire hunter.” He grinned at her. “What do you know about being safe?”

  “I’m not suicidal.”

  “Having adventures isn’t about being safe. Life isn’t about being safe.”

  “I know that.”

  “Do you?” His voice was a soft, sultry purr.

  Suddenly she didn’t think he was talking about volcanoes anymore. The dangerous fire was in his eyes, and Eden couldn’t look away. She’d always been drawn to fire.

  She wasn’t sure what would have happened next, but the elevator sto
pped, and they stepped away from each other as a man got on.

  The rest of the ride up to the fifth floor was uneventful. Desire wasn’t racing through her anymore as they reached the apartment, but it was a slow, persistent ache.

  She ached in other ways as well. His blood had healed the deep cuts on her arms, and she’d regained her energy, but she wasn’t yet used to living by night.

  “I hope this case doesn’t go on too much longer,” she said as she stepped into the living room. “Because the hours are killing me.”

  “It might not just be the hours, if this goes on much longer.”

  A chill went down her spine at the coldness in his voice, but she faced the danger. “Having a personal vendetta against me is—a challenge.”

  He went into the galley kitchen and took a container of blood from the refrigerator. Her immediate temptation was to offer herself instead, but she knew that was the way bonds were formed. He’d only been trying to help her when he’d given her his blood. The fact that he didn’t now assume she was there for his sustenance was a good sign of his honorable intentions. Her resentment of those honorable intentions was only a by-product of what had happened.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” she said, and left him to his meal.

  By the time she was done, Wolf had retreated to his bedroom. She needed to sleep, too, but there were a few things to take care of before she could rest.

  The phone rang before she could even sit down at the desk to check her e-mail.

  “Yes? What? Where? No, he can’t come out in the daylight. But I’ll be right there.”

  Eden put down the phone and ran her hands through her damp hair. No rest for the wicked, she supposed, glaring at Wolf’s closed door before hurrying to dress.

  There was a hint of vampire on the morning breeze. Joe took note of it, but didn’t think much about it. He’d spent a long night on a stakeout where absolutely nothing had happened. And on his night off, too, all alone, which increased the sense of aggravation he’d been nursing lately.

  It really made him want to bite something.

  Right now, all he wanted was to watch waves rolling onto the beach and sip his tall paper cup of black coffee out here on the café patio. He liked the smell of the sea. He liked watching the girls go by.

  He liked—

  He took a deep breath. Something wasn’t right. The nose knew.

  The nose knew the scent of fear, and the reek of aggression. It was on the breeze, coming from the same direction as the scent of vampires.

  He didn’t immediately equate the vampires with the other scents. The one vampire he knew was Clan, who would consider it rude to go around scaring mortals in public.

  Joe didn’t really want to get involved, but curiosity was strong in him. So was the need to help. It seemed almost instinctual, which made him feel kind of domesticated, which he hated.

  Still, if there were a couple of vampires inadvertently outing themselves with bad behavior, it behooved a member of another supernatural species to look into the situation. After all, if people found out about vampires, how long would it be before suspicions of the existence of werefolk were voiced in anything but the tabloids?

  Joe took his coffee with him as he headed up the street toward the source of trouble. People strolling in the Sunday-morning crowd didn’t consciously notice the speed and suppleness with which he moved around them, but they did get out of his way.

  It didn’t take him long to reach the entrance of a café courtyard where little tables were set around a blue-and-yellow-tiled fountain. It was very like the patio of the coffee shop he’d left.

  Only here, some of the tables were turned over, and there was a dead dove in the fountain, its blood staining the water. A vampire stood at the top of the fountain. Though no fangs were showing, he was plucking startled birds from the air at lightning speed, draining them and tossing them aside.

  The other vampire was quietly and methodically building a sculpture out of all the metal furniture in the courtyard. He was constructing a tower, and making no secret of his preternatural strength as he bent and twisted chairs and tables into the shapes he wanted.

  Both vampires frequently paused to look into the bright blue sky.

  Are they waiting to be struck by lightning? Joe wondered. Or sunstroke?

  “They’ve been acting odd for a while,” he heard someone say. “But the cops I called are just standing there and watching them. One of them made a phone call, but no one’s done anything.”

  “Maybe it’s not against the law to kill pigeons?” someone else said.

  “But it’s scaring away customers and drawing a crowd at the same time.”

  “Do something,” a woman urged the officers, who stood motionless by one of the tall flowering bushes at the courtyard entrance.

  Joe got the distinct impression that the two cops were waiting for someone else to come and fix the problem for them. Maybe they’d called for backup.

  Maybe they knew what they were facing, and were waiting for supernatural backup. Joe knew very well that this was a crazy thought, but he didn’t think it was wrong. The thing was—he wasn’t sure if there was anything he could or should do.

  Then the vampire in the fountain focused his attention on a young woman in the crowd. He snarled and jumped to the ground, and Joe had no choice but to act.

  The woman turned and ran, headed toward the beach. Joe sped into the men’s room of the coffee shop to get naked and change into a one-hundred-and-sixty-pound black wolf. He propped the door open with a shoe before he took animal form, then nosed it the rest of the way open.

  In this form it was even easier for him to follow the scent of sick vampires.

  “Report!” Eden shouted to the cops as she finally made it through the crowd heading in the opposite direction. She joined the officers in running toward the water. Besides being on the police force, the pair were also her cousins Charlie and Andre, and vampire hunters.

  “Both subjects took off. One of them away from the scene. The other—”

  “You’re not tracking him?”

  “The other one is chasing a woman.”

  “Okay.”

  Saving a civilian was definitely more important than tracking a lone vampire right now.

  “Pick up his trail after this is over,” she directed.

  They were within sight of the water now. The brine scent filled her lungs. People on the crowded walkway saw the cops and got out of the way. What she didn’t expect was to have someone come up behind her and push her aside.

  What was even more surprising was that it wasn’t a person that passed her, but an enormous black dog. She and her partners ended up following the animal out onto the sand. It led the way toward the vampire.

  It said a lot about the vampire’s weakened physical state that he hadn’t caught up to the fleeing woman yet. The dog made a great leap, and landed square and hard on the vampire’s back. Normally this wouldn’t have done any good, despite the animal’s great size and the force of the hit. A normal Prime would have simply shaken the dog off.

  This Prime went down face-first on the beach, and didn’t move as the animal’s powerful jaws wrapped around the back of his neck.

  This had to be a trained police dog, Eden decided. It lifted its head as they reached the prone vampire and gave her a look out of blue eyes that said, Well, what are you waiting for? It moved back without any direction when one of the uniformed hunters knelt to slip silver handcuffs on the Prime’s wrists.

  The dog looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite place where she’d seen it before. Something about the glinting gold nametag around the dog’s neck was also familiar. Its name was Joe.

  “Hi, Joe.”

  He cocked his head at the sound of her voice, but backed away when she would have touched him. Then Joe turned and flashed away, and she left the mystery of the dog to deal with the Prime.

  “I think we have proof now that Dawn does send these creatures into psychosis
after prolonged use,” one of the cops said.

  “Yeah,” she answered. And wondered what Sid Wolf, who wasn’t yet sure Dawn was harmless, would make of this.

  She looked around the beach, where a crowd was gathering. “Let’s get this one out of here.”

  Chapter Eleven

  By the time Eden returned to the safe house, she was almost at the point of collapse. She’d had a rough night, and a tense morning that had now turned into afternoon. Her butt was dragging, her brain was fried, and she guessed she wasn’t cut out for working by night and sleeping by day.

  It didn’t help that she’d had a fight with the other hunters, which ended with her having to pull rank and point out that she had been put in charge of this operation. That had been after her cousin Charlie pulled out his cell phone to call her father for advice.

  That had been after she’d refused to let them kill the captured Tribe Prime when they were done taking samples for testing.

  “Are you beginning to believe they’re people, after running with one for a couple of nights?” Charlie had taunted.

  “It would have killed that woman,” Andre had pointed out.

  “Think of it as an injured animal that has to be put down,” Charlie said. “If you have to have any sympathy for it at all.”

  “I want the Prime kept locked up and under constant observation,” she’d ordered. “He’s a drug addict. It might be useful if we study the effects of the drug and withdrawal. Think of the Prime as a lab rat,” she sneered at Charlie. “If you have to have any reasons to follow my orders.”

  They’d left it at that, with the boys grudgingly obeying. Eden came back to the apartment weary in soul and body and with a blazing headache.

  She looked at the tiny tape recorder she’d left sitting on the computer desk, and considered adding to her observations. Not now, she decided. She was in no mood for doing any sort of documentation right now.

  But that was a bad and wrong attitude, since she’d made a commitment to this blogging project. So she dutifully picked up the voice-activated recorder. “I’m going to blame Wolf for my grumpiness—because if I have to work twenty-four/seven, I think he should, too.” She sighed. “That said, last night had its ups and downs. While we didn’t acquire the laptop Wolf thinks the tribe vampires want, we now know that …”