by Bec McMaster
Gemma fought, using her knees and her fists, but a tide of blackness began to grow at the edges of her vision, and her lungs were heaving like a chest pump, robbed of air and sucking desperately for oxygen.
The last thing she saw as the world crashed down upon her was something moving behind her attacker's shoulder....
* * *
OBSIDIAN STARED down at the woman on the floor, his chest heaving with fury as his hand curled around the stone fossil he'd used to beat the man to death. There was nothing left of the fellow's head. Merely a bloody pulp. He couldn't even remember doing it. The last thing he recalled was Hollis flailing backward as Henrik's hands locked around her throat. And now he was standing here, Henrik was dead, and Obsidian's knuckles were cut from where he'd obviously punched his way through one of the glass display cases to retrieve the fossil.
What the hell had he done?
The lost time unnerved him. The sight of her unnerved him. It brought back a lifetime of bitter memories and unanswered questions, and he'd buried those doubts years ago. Or thought he had.
He dropped the fossil and backed away.
He'd lost control. That was clear. And dangerous. If anyone found out—if the man who called himself Ghost found out.... He should finish the job. Right now. This was his chance to take revenge for the way she'd double-crossed him in Russia five years ago. As his body had slowly healed from the burns she'd caused him, he'd had more than enough time to plot his revenge. And Ghost had sat by his bedside and told him that it was for the best: Hollis was a weakness, and the dhampir could not afford weaknesses.
Except she'd disappeared, her body failing to turn up after she'd gone into the river. Obsidian had been forced to realize that the cold-blooded bitch who'd betrayed him was gone, and there would be no reckoning. He'd been cheated. Even if the woman had haunted his dreams every night since.
And now Ghost had tried to cheat him again. Hollis's death was his. Obsidian knelt by her side. It would be so easy. But his fist trembled, and stayed clenched.
Hollis groaned. No, he had to stop thinking of her like that. Gemma suited her better, for Hollis reminded him of the cold Russian nights they'd shared, and the way she'd kiss her way down his throat in bed... the way that, for a moment, he'd begun to think dangerous thoughts about turning his back on those who'd broken him free of his incarceration, and simply running away with her.
God, she'd played him so well.
Far better for him to think of her now as Gemma, for that Hollis—the one who haunted him—had never existed.
Calling her Gemma reminded him of that.
He stared down at her for a long time, watching as she began to shift and groan, and then withdrew his knife.
Damn her. She deserved to die.
* * *
"MY GOD! Scott, hurry and fetch the doctor, will you? Miss? Miss...."
Blinking in and out of consciousness, Gemma slowly found herself on the floor. Someone was patting her shoulder. She jerked and caught his wrist in an iron grip, then looked around. Blood. She could smell blood, and it called to the parasitic predator deep inside her.
"Get away from me," she snapped, scrambling backward on the floor.
The curator remained kneeling, his face white and his mustache quivering as he held his hands up in a sign of surrender. "Miss, I'm trying to help. You're bleeding."
Help. The poor man thought that she was frightened of him. If only he knew that Gemma was frightened of what she might do to him in this state.
"Just... give me some room to get some air," she told him. And stay right where you are, with all of that tempting blood on your hands. Her blood, she realized, and forced herself to take stock.
The man sucked in a sharp breath as he saw her eyes, and scrambled back.
"Don't move," she said, as the darkness inside her whispered, Look how it flees us. Look how it runs. Like prey....
Gemma squeezed her eyes shut and swallowed hard. She was in control of herself. Always. "Just don't move quickly," she repeated in a choked voice. "I need a moment to gather my... my wits."
The man swallowed. "As you wish."
Gemma let go of the breath she'd been holding. The world slowly receded in intensity as the shadows washed from her vision, and the staccato beat of his heartbeat grew quieter. A blue blood might pretend to be human, but what beat in their ragged hearts was anything but. And sometimes the chilling intensity of that darker part of herself bothered her. People were not prey. They were flesh and blood, with hopes and dreams of their own, but when the darkness washed over her, she couldn't see that anymore.
"It's all right," she told the curator, swallowing the saliva that had flooded her mouth. "I'm myself again. Just move slowly."
"Are you... unhurt?" His gaze dropped to the blood on her coat, but he kept his hands upright in the surrender position.
Gemma patted her side, where the knife had gone in. Her fingers came away wet, but she felt fine. The stab wound was tender, but not the sort of fiery pain that she'd expected. Her coat was tied neatly around her padded waist. How had...? The last thing she remembered was it being torn open... and the man with his hands around her throat.
And then the darkness.
Or no.... Had she seen someone else then? She winced. What had happened? There was no sign of her attacker, only a smear of dark blood on the floor, as if someone had hastily wiped it up. And it wasn't her blood. Hers was a richer color: a blue-red in tone, which was what had given the blue bloods their name. This was the blackest shade of red she'd ever seen.
What on earth...?
"Hold still, my dear. I'll..." The curator looked around helplessly, evidently unaccustomed to dealing with injured blue bloods. "I'll fetch a doctor."
Then he was gone, and Gemma carefully levered herself to her feet.
She had no intention of staying here. After all, someone had just tried to kill her, and although she'd blacked out before he could do so, clearly he hadn't just stopped out of the goodness of his heart.
She had to get to safety, before he tried again.
And then there was Ulbricht's comment to deal with.
SIXTEEN
INGRID’S NOSTRILS FLARED. "I smell blood."
She yanked open the front door just as Gemma staggered against the lintel.
“What happened?” Ingrid demanded, grabbing the other woman by the arm. There was blood on her coat, and her wig hung askew. “Ava!”
"Someone attacked me when I was following Ulbricht a couple of hours ago,” Gemma said, looking pale. “I’m fine, Ingrid, I promise. Everything has healed, but I'm still a little weak at the knees.”
Ava came out of the parlor, wiping her hands on her apron. “Oh, my goodness!” she said, hurrying to Gemma’s other side. “What happened?”
Together they helped Gemma inside as she told them about it.
"You're certain the attacker was a blue blood?" Ingrid demanded, once Gemma had finished.
"It happened so quickly," Gemma replied, "but his skin was as pale as snow, and his hair so white it was almost translucent. He was definitely a blue blood. One quite close to the Fade, I'd expect, as his blood was almost black."
"But blue bloods don't have to deal with the Fade anymore, do they?" A few years ago, the Fade had been a blue blood's greatest fear; when the craving virus began to overwhelm them and their color began to fade, until they were slowly starting to transform into a vampire. "Isn't there that Distillation device, where they can counteract the CV virus in their blood? The Duke of Moncrieff designed it before he died."
“This way,” Ava said, guiding Gemma into a chair. “Let me have a look at it.”
"I don't know why my attacker's CV levels were so far advanced, but he was clearly at the higher end of the scale." Gemma shuddered and touched her throat as if remembering, her voice dropping. "He was so much stronger than I am."
"SOG Agent, do you think?"
Ava peeled the coat back and sucked in a breath. “Hmm. This is heale
d, but there’s some unusual mottling here. Let me test your CV levels. Here, hold out your finger.” She pricked Gemma’s finger, and headed to the brass spectrometer to take her CV percentage rating.
"I don't know." Exasperation gained an edge in Gemma's voice as she glanced at what Ava was doing. "I'm usually more aware than that. I don't even know how they got the jump on me. They shouldn't have."
"The real question is: how did you escape?" Ava murmured, and the room fell silent as the brass spectrometer spat out a small curl of paper with her CV levels on it. "Or more to the point, what is wrong with you?" Ava frowned, examining the paper.
"Wrong with me?" Gemma sat up.
“They've gone through the roof," Ava said. “You told me you were in the low thirties.”
“I am.” Gemma held out a hand, and Ava deposited the reading there. “Oh, my goodness. They’re eighty-three.” She looked up, pale faced with fear. “What does that mean?”
“Let me test it again,” Ava muttered. “That can’t be right. The machine might need to be recalibrated.”
Gemma bit her lip. “The stab wound had healed over before I even woke. And I couldn’t have been out of action for too long. That's not normal. It should have taken two or three hours for the wound to seal over completely."
Ava held up a thermometer. "Open up. I want to check your temperature."
Ingrid paced. An attacker who was in the Fade.... She couldn't help but think of Ulbricht's mistress, with her silvery blonde hair and skin like bleached snow. "Describe the assault again," she said abruptly. "Every last detail. You thought you saw someone in the reflection, you said... do you think that someone saved you?"
"I don't know what to think," Gemma admitted around the thermometer, and it was clear that the assault upset her. But she went through the attack again, her voice clear and devoid of emotion, dealing out nothing but the facts. "But there's no other reason for him to stop trying to kill me. Something startled him, and he ran off."
"None of this makes sense,” Ingrid muttered.
"You're telling me."
The brass spectrometer spat out a scroll of paper with little figures on it. Ava frowned as she held it up. "That's odd."
"Odd?" Gemma looked at her. "What do you mean odd?"
Ava lowered the piece of paper. "You’re definitely at eighty-three." She poked the spectrometer. "Unless there is something seriously wrong with this device."
"Still?" Gemma swung off the table, and snatched the piece of paper off Ava. "Hell and bloody ashes. I don't feel any differently."
"Well, something healed that wound faster than it normally would," Ava said, fiddling with her microscope. "Sometimes a wound can exacerbate the amount of craving virus in the body. We call it the blooming, though I've only ever heard of rare cases. It's usually a grievous injury that sets it off, where the body can no longer fight against the craving virus and the injury, so it stops fighting the virus, we think, in order to save the person's life. The virus blooms out of control and the blue blood survives, but he's now prone to irrational hungers and dangerous side effects."
"I was stabbed in the side, Ava. It was hardly life-threatening. Or not like a knife to the heart, anyway. Would that cause this blooming?"
"I don’t think so. But how else do you explain how you're healing so swiftly, or why your CV levels went through the roof," Ava pointed out. "Aren't you the least bit curious?"
"What I am," Gemma replied, pressing her hand to her temples as if expecting to find herself sweating, "is filthy and freezing cold. I need a bath, and a glass of mulled blud-wein to make myself feel quite human again. I am positively covered in grime. And no doubt Malloryn shall want a report on this, and... oh, hell! I meant to track Sunderland to this meeting with the SOG." She screwed up her nose, then winced as a sharp movement forced her hand to her side.
"You're not tracking anybody," Ingrid said.
"We cannot simply allow this chance to slip through our fingers! What if the entire membership is in attendance?"
"It won't," she assured Gemma. "I'll go. You do have the tracking device, don't you?"
Gemma handed it over.
"Not alone." Ava tsked. "At least let Byrnes know what's going on. And maybe take Charlie with you. You don't know how many blue bloods will be there, or what you'll be walking into."
"I'll go find them right now," Ingrid replied. Ava might be out of her depth in company, but she was rapidly becoming the mother hen of the group.
"As for you," Ava speared Gemma with her gaze, "I'm not going to stop digging into this. I'm going to get a second spectrometer, to make sure it's not the device."
"Dig away, my dear." Gemma headed for the door, rubbing at her arms. "I shall be upstairs, soaking in my tub."
And then she was gone.
Ingrid waited until Gemma was clearly out of earshot. "You're worried about something."
"It's nothing." Ava tugged her apron off.
Ingrid crossed her arms over her chest. "You do realize that you're the worst liar I've ever encountered?"
Ava sighed. "Have a look at this. I didn't want to show Gemma, until I work out what it means."
She gestured to her microscope, and Ingrid peered through it. A bunch of black-red sickle-shaped objects appeared, circulating among redder, rounder globules. "What is it?"
"It's Gemma's blood," Ava replied, and reached past her to replace the slide with another. "And this is what a blue blood's blood should look like. This is my sample."
There was definitely a difference. Ava's example was a paler blue-red, and the globules were rounder, like the others in the first sample, only there were no sickle-shaped elements. Ingrid jerked back from the microscope.
"Something happened to Gemma in that museum. Something healed her wound at an exacerbated rate, upped her CV levels, and set her body into some sort of fever. Which is virtually impossible for a blue blood. We don't fall ill. We don't get fevers, but I quite think she's succumbing to one, as her temperature has increased by three degrees. None of this makes any sense to me."
"I'm certain you'll figure it out," Ingrid told her. She frowned again. "There was something different about Ulbricht's mistress too. When she was unleashing the vampires from the device they were using to tear Debney apart, she pulled a lever down as though it was barely a nuisance. I could barely lower it, even with all of my strength, and verwulfen are stronger than blue bloods, especially when we're in the midst of the berserkergang."
"I fail to see the connection."
"Ulbricht's mistress looks like a blue blood deep into the Fade," Ingrid replied, thinking out loud. "And now Gemma's been attacked by a man who looks like he's well into the Fade too, and her CV levels have changed following their altercation. Then there are vampires afoot, when that is the natural conclusion to the Fade. Too many coincidences make me begin to wonder. What if Gemma got some of her attacker’s blood into her wound? Would that make any difference? After all, sometimes blue bloods use their blood to heal wounds. What if this Fade blue blood had CV levels higher than Gemma's? Would that account for the discrepancy?"
Ava blinked. "Do you know, that is an entirely possible theory! His blood could have healed her." She paused in her mad rush for the spectrometer however. "Though the shape and color of the blood cells are unlike anything I've ever seen."
"Maybe there's some kind of change to the fellow's... craving virus? An abnormality?"
Ava looked up from the spectrometer. "Which means that we're not just dealing with one blue blood deep in the Fade. We're dealing with at least two, possibly more."
Hell.
* * *
"YOU CALLED?" Byrnes said, flourishing the small note Ingrid had left on his pillow two hours ago.
"Gemma's found us a lead," she said, striding past him down the hallway of Baker Street. "Ulbricht met with the Duke of Sunderland today, and they mentioned a meeting of the SOG tonight. She's too injured to follow, which means it's in our hands. Charlie and us."
B
yrnes fell into step beside her. He tucked the note back into his shirt pocket, along with her first one, feeling like an idiot for keeping them but unable to leave them elsewhere. If Garrett got wind of them, he'd never live this down, and the idea of burning them.... No. Just no. "Just how are you getting inside the Nighthawks headquarters?"
"Headquarters?" Ingrid paused in front of the main door. "Or your room?"
"Both. And what did you do in there? Your perfume was... everywhere."
On his sheets, on his pillow....
Stepping closer, she pressed her fingertips lightly against his chest and whispered in his ear, "Use your imagination."
Then she was through the door and striding in those ground-eating steps toward a steam carriage that idled at the curb. Charlie waved at him from the driver seat, wearing fingerless gloves and a bowler hat.
And then they were off, even as “Use your imagination” was still plaguing him.
Cursed woman.
* * *
THOUGH he often preferred to work alone, Byrnes swiftly began to realize that he didn't mind working with others when they knew what they were doing.
Ingrid loped ahead of him through the fog that adorned London's rooftops like the icing on a cake, with Charlie at her heels. Taking off, Byrnes leapt across an alley and landed beside them as Charlie fiddled with the levers on a small brass box. Chittering noises came from within, as the locator tracked the beacon that Gemma had planted on the Duke of Sunderland.
"That way," Charlie murmured, and then took off, skating down mist-slick tiles then leaping to another row of rooftops.
With a grin at Ingrid, Byrnes launched himself after Charlie until it became almost a breathless race for the three of them.
