The Secret Night

by Rebecca York

  A STAKEOUT was the most boring activity Trailblazer could imagine. But he was being compensated well for the long hours of sitting in his car, waiting and watching.

  The wait was suddenly over as Nicholas Vickers drove past on the country lane leading away from his house.

  Trailblazer waited for half a minute after the Mercedes sedan sped past. Then he pulled onto the blacktop without turning on his lights and followed Vickers.

  They drove past a shopping center with an all-night grocery, then crossed the line into the next county.

  Four miles down the road, Vickers’s Mercedes turned into the parking lot of an upscale watering hole.

  As Trailblazer pulled into a parking space at the opposite end of the lot, he watched Vickers get out of his car and stride toward the door.

  So was he here to meet someone? Who?

  Trailblazer swallowed. He’d been warned not to get too close to Vickers. But if he waited out here, he wouldn’t know who the guy was meeting.

  After waiting five minutes, he got out of his vehicle and headed for the door.

  NICK HAD LEFT the house thinking he was going to the grocery store to get more food for Emma. But here he was at a bar known for its swinging singles scene. He didn’t come to the place often, wanting to maintain his anonymity.

  Inside the doorway, he stood with his hands in his pockets, absorbing the feel of the pounding music and the thick atmosphere of sexuality.

  Some of the women and men were paired up, but he saw an attractive blonde sitting by herself at a table. Not as attractive as Emma, but she would do.

  Their eyes met, and he smiled. Crossing the room, he asked, “Are you looking for company?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Can I buy you a drink?”

  She studied him with interest. “I’d like that.”

  “What are you having?”

  “A margarita.”

  He ordered the drink for her and a bottle of Coors for himself. Once again, he faked drinking something besides blood.

  “My name’s Nick. What’s yours?”

  “Sandy.”

  “So what do you do?” he asked.

  “I’m a personal trainer.”

  He had learned how to make small talk with a woman and draw her into his web. “Mmm. I could probably use a few pointers on my workout.”

  She laughed. “You look like you’re already pretty buff.”

  “A guy can always pick up tips from a good instructor.”

  But he didn’t simply rely on charm. As they chatted, he silently used his powers of persuasion on her. She might have come here looking for a relationship. Still, in less than an hour, he had her agreeing to go to a motel with him.

  He felt the thrill of victory as they headed for her car. But once they were sitting in a darkened corner of the parking lot, he knew he couldn’t go through with the whole motel-room scene. He wanted only her body and her blood. Human blood. A woman’s blood. His need didn’t require a lot of trappings.

  After pulling her toward him, he kissed her. Not like he’d kissed Emma. She’d inspired his passion. This woman was a pale substitute. But she would have to do.

  To anyone watching, he knew they would look like a couple making out. But when he bent his head, he fogged her mind and sank his fangs into the tender place where her shoulder met her neck. He drank only enough blood to take the edge off the terrible hunger gnawing at him. Then he healed the wounds, kissed her gently again and wiped the memory of the encounter from her mind.

  ACROSS THE PARKING LOT, Trailblazer leaned forward, his gaze fastened on the couple in the car. Vickers certainly had some interesting powers of persuasion. He’d been in the bar less than an hour before he’d come out with this babe.

  They’d gone out to her car, but they hadn’t driven away. Were they going to have a quickie in the parking lot?

  No such luck, Trailblazer realized as Vickers climbed out of the car, went to his own vehicle and drove away.

  Had the babe told him to get lost? Or had he just changed his mind?

  And where was he going?

  Back to the shopping center he’d passed on the way, apparently.

  NICK PULLED INTO the parking lot of the local strip mall that had an all-night supermarket. On the way back from the biker bar, he’d grabbed a couple of cans of soup for Emma, but he realized he needed additional provisions.

  Since he didn’t eat conventional food, he hadn’t thought much about it in years. As he walked up and down the aisles, he remembered the dishes he’d loved as a boy. Plum pudding on Christmas, leg of lamb, the cinnamon buns Cook had baked for breakfast.

  He picked up a package of something the bakery department called cinnamon buns. They didn’t look much like the perfect little gems Cook had made, but maybe Emma would enjoy them.

  He bought some frozen dinners and microwaveable sandwiches called Hot Pockets that he’d seen advertised on television. Adding some fruit to his cart, he recalled the oranges his father had imported from Italy and the apples that had come from their orchard.

  Thinking of his long-ago home made him sad. He’d told Emma that his father had been a duke. He hadn’t told her that his entire family had been dead for more than fifty years. The influenza epidemic of 1917, World War I and World War II had taken care of them.

  After paying for the food, he strode to his Mercedes and pulled out of the lot. A black sedan was behind him, but when he sped up, the other vehicle dropped back.

  He relaxed, glad he didn’t have to field yet another problem today.

  ALEX SHANE checked his watch. He’d gone back to his stakeout, across the river from the Refuge, but nothing interesting had happened in the past few hours. It was almost midnight. Maybe he should pack it in.

  He was just about to head home when he saw something that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. A group of Caldwell’s followers had emerged from the mansion, clad in white, walking as if in a procession. Moving silently along the riverbank, they turned toward a grove of trees.

  Alex knew there was an amphitheater in the grove, where Caldwell carried out some sort of pagan ceremonies. He’d sneaked up on the place once but had barely gotten away without being caught by a suspicious guard carrying an Uzi. After that, he’d stayed on his side of the river, knowing Sara would never forgive him if he made her a widow.

  He scanned the line of men with his night-vision binoculars. They had a woman with them. Her hands appeared to be tied behind her back, and she was stumbling as though she’d been drugged.

  Soon the trees swallowed the weird procession. For long moments Alex strained to see anything more. He thought he heard chanting, like a chorus of many male voices. Then silence reigned again until, suddenly, it was pierced by a terrible scream. Then nothing.

  Alex waited, every muscle in his body taut. Should he row across the damn river, risk getting shot?

  The men came out of the woods soon thereafter. The woman was nowhere to be seen.

  Feeling sick and impotent, he went home to Sara, Beth and Jack.

  After a couple of hours of quality time with his wife, he left her with a satisfied smile on her face and went down to his office to call Light Street. He wanted to see if they could get a line on Nicholas Vickers.

  Chapter Six

  Before pulling into the garage, Nick took the time to search Emma’s car. He didn’t find anything incriminating, which proved nothing. But he did see that she’d purchased some clothing to replace what she’d presumably left at the Refuge. So he carried the bag into the house.

  Then he stood for a long time under the shower, washing off the scent of the woman named Sandy.

  Finally, when he couldn’t stay away from Emma any longer, he carried the bag of clothing upstairs and set it on her dresser. Then he sat in a chair in a corner of her room and watched her sleep, admiring the slope of her nose, the curve of her lips, the tendrils of blond hair around her face. From across the room, he listened to the sound of her breathing�
��in and out in a steady rhythm.

  When the rhythm changed, he tensed.

  She opened her eyes and blinked, obviously trying to orient herself. Then her gaze shot to him.

  “Nick? Have you been here the whole time?”

  “No. I went grocery shopping,” he answered, leaving out the part of the evening he didn’t want to talk about.

  She moved restlessly in the bed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Her cheeks took on a bit more color. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Let me help you get up.”

  The moment he touched her, he was aroused all over again. So much for being sated after his brief interlude with another woman.

  Trying not to give away his churning emotions, he raised Emma to a sitting position, then helped her stand, noting that she wasn’t entirely steady on her legs. But she was in fantastically better shape than she had any right to be—thanks to the treatment he’d given her.

  He waited outside the bathroom, then helped her back to bed, vividly aware of her hip brushing against his leg as they made their slow way down the hall.

  He’d left a glass of water on the bedside table, and he had to squelch the urge to gulp it down. It would only make him sick.

  With a hand that wasn’t quite steady, he handed Emma the glass and waited while she took several sips.

  “More soup?” he asked.

  “Yes. Thanks. That would be great.”

  Glad to escape the bedroom, he busied himself in the kitchen, fixing more soup as well as tea and toast.

  He returned to her room, set the tray of food on the bedside table, then retreated to the chair in the corner, putting a good eight feet between them.

  She ate about half the food, then set down her mug and gave him a direct look. “We need to talk about Caldwell—and the Refuge.”

  “What about them?”

  “I came here because I was hoping you’d help me get my sister out of there. Will you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Are you afraid of Caldwell?”

  He kept his gaze steady. “You’re damn right, I’m afraid of him. I know that blundering into his lair without preparation is a suicide mission. If you escaped from him, you were lucky.”

  She swallowed. “I know.”

  “If I’m going to consider going there, we need some ground rules.”

  “Such as?”

  “Neither of us is going to do anything foolhardy. Is that agreed?”

  She looked down at her hands, then back at him. “Yes.”

  He knew she’d mouthed the syllable because she didn’t have a choice. He wanted to continue the conversation, but he had run out of time.

  Outside, night was turning to the gray light that came before the sunrise, and he felt a tingle along his nerve endings.

  It was different for Caldwell. He was old—even for a vampire. He had learned the trick of being able to expose his skin to the sun. But Nick was far behind him in that skill. In an emergency, he could go out during the day—thanks to the modern miracle of heavy sunscreen—but even with protection, two hours was his limit.

  And right now he needed to get back to his protected rooms in the basement. He stood, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

  Emma peered at him. “What’s wrong?”

  “We’ll talk later.” He started to leave, then forced himself to stay a few more moments to explain a little. “I need to get some shut-eye. I was up most of the night. I sleep in the basement, so don’t worry if you don’t see me around the house. Make yourself at home. You’ll be quite safe.”

  “Why the basement?” she asked.

  “Because I can climate control it best to suit my needs,” he said evenly. “But it also has a very effective alarm system, so if you wake up again, don’t venture down there. Just be assured that you’re safe.”

  “But what if—”

  He cut off the question with the wave of one hand. His head was buzzing now. There were probably more instructions he should give her, but the clawing sensation on his skin had turned to real pain.

  As quickly as he could manage, he sent Emma back to sleep, then hurried down to the first floor. His hands were unsteady as he fumbled for his keys, intending to lock the door to his office. But he couldn’t fit the key into the slot. And his skin was burning with an unbearable intensity.

  Dizzy now, he staggered to the basement stairs, feeling as if he were Superman exposed to Kryptonite. Sunlight was his Kryptonite.

  Unsteady on his feet, he made it to the blessed darkness of the lower level. He almost forgot to set the alarm, but he remembered it at the last minute before stepping into his private quarters and locking the door behind him.

  He dragged off his clothes and fell onto the bed. And for a while he slept like the dead.

  EMMA FOUGHT to wake up. After the soup and tea, she needed to go to the bathroom again. But it was difficult to drag herself from sleep. Still, she knew where she was, and the thought of embarrassing herself in Nicholas Vickers’s guest bed finally brought her to consciousness. When she’d been seven, her mother had married a man who didn’t much like children. She’d been frightened of Charles Walters, and she’d started wetting her bed. He’d been furious that she was messing up his expensive bedding, and that had only made matters worse. Ever since then, she’d had a horror of mortifying herself that way.

  Climbing out of bed, she staggered down the hall to the bathroom. After using the toilet, she began heading back to bed.

  Nick had told her to sleep. She should do that. But she’d caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and decided she looked exactly as if she’d been on the run for days. A shower would be good. And some clean clothes. Hadn’t he put her purchases on the dresser in the bedroom?

  After retrieving the clothing, she undressed, then raised her arm and pulled off the gauze bandaging on her ribs, thinking she should replace the dressing after her shower.

  To her amazement, she could barely see where the bullet had gone in or come out. She’d never been shot before, but she was pretty sure that Nick had worked some kind of amazing cure.

  That made her think about Damien Caldwell again. He’d done something like that at the Refuge. One of the men had been fixing the roof and had fallen off. He’d been in terrible pain, and she was sure he’d broken some bones. But instead of calling an ambulance, Caldwell had him brought to the office, where he closed the door and did God knows what to the guy.

  Two days later, the man had been good as new.

  Nick had confessed to being one of Caldwell’s disciples. Had the Master taught him special healing techniques?

  She wanted to ask—as soon as she made herself presentable.

  No, wait. Nick had said he slept in the basement. And he’d told her not to go down there.

  Or was she remembering that wrong?

  Confused, she hoped the shower would help clear her head. So she turned on the water, then stepped under the spray. The shower was a luxurious state-of-the-art affair with multiple sprays. It felt wonderful on her body. Like the showers at the spa where she and Margaret had gone once for a sister’s weekend. Thinking of Margaret woke her up. She was at Nick’s because of her sister and the sooner she could get him to take her back to the Refuge, the better. By the time she’d washed her body and her hair and brushed her teeth, she was feeling better. And she was wide awake.

  The clock in her bedroom said it was almost six-thirty. Her stomach growled, and she decided to go downstairs and get something to eat.

  She found the tray Nick had left on the kitchen counter. She washed the dishes, then microwaved another serving of soup. As she sipped it, she looked around his kitchen. He had a can opener and a set of expensive knives but almost no cooking utensils and only a couple of copper pots that looked as if they’d come from a gourmet shop and had never been used.

  She peered into the cabinets. They were basically empty, except for a package of cinnam
on buns. He had orange juice, milk and ground coffee in the refrigera tor, and he’d stuffed the freezer with frozen entrees. Was that all he ever ate?

  Maybe he had a pantry somewhere. She wandered a little farther—and indeed found a pantry. However, it held not foodstuffs but firearms. How many weapons did one private investigator need? She shrugged and returned to the kitchen.

  She opened the cinnamon buns and munched on one as she leaned against the counter.

  The kitchen felt like…like a stage set. She couldn’t even find paper napkins. So she ate the pastry carefully as she explored the rest of the first floor.

  Like her bedroom, it was furnished with expensive antiques and Oriental rugs and some fascinating knickknacks he’d probably picked up on his travels. Scarabs from Egypt. Delicate china from France and England. Venetian glass bowls. Jade animals and a dragon that looked like it might have come from Thailand.

  Being here was so strange. She had dreamed of Nicholas Vickers. And walking through the rooms of his home was like taking a tour of a place she somehow already knew.

  It was as if she had stepped from reality back into her dreams. But, no, that wasn’t quite right.

  She picked up a small glass cat and squeezed her fingers around its curved shape before setting it back on the shelf. The dreams had felt so vivid. But this was the reality of Nick’s life.

  She had met him, talked to him. She was in his house. But she felt she knew him less, not more, than she had a few nights ago. How could that be?

  She made a frustrated sound. She’d built up an image of Nicholas Vickers in her imagination. And in appearance he was actually quite close to what she had expected. But now she was dealing with the flesh-and-blood man, not a fantasy figure—and finding him not quite as cooperative as he had been in her dreams.

  In her dreams, she had been so positive he would help her. But at this moment she was pretty sure he could go either way. The fear that he might refuse her made her stomach clench.

  She just had to bring him around.