by Tracy Tappan
A beat of shocked, almost disbelieving silence passed. Then Dev’s head slumped forward on his shoulders. “Ah, Jesus,” he breathed, covering his eyes with one hand. “Why do they do shit like that?”
Thomal’s face was a mask of tight rage, and Gábor was glaring at the roof of the van as if imagining a hundred different pain-filled ways to make the bad guys pay.
Dev looked up at Kendra. “Do you think you could describe the guy for me?”
Hadley answered. “He was… God, he’s the meanest one.”
“You broke his neck,” Marissa said softly.
Dev swung his stare over to her.
“I think he’s called Videön.”
“Fucking figures.” Dev’s face hardened. “Sedge, pull over.”
Sedge braked to the side of the road. “Tell me this is something good,” he said grimly.
“Yeah, I’m going after the scuzzbag. Thomal, give me your M16, my weapon’s shot to shit.” Dev hopped to the ground and caught the tossed weapon one-handed. “Gábor, you’re with me.”
“Hoo-rah.” Gábor jumped off the rear end of the van.
Sedge turned around, one arm hooked over the back of his seat. “Hell, let me go. I can already taste that guy in my teeth.”
“I need someone who can see in the dark for this, Sedge, and, um”—Dev’s eyes darted toward Marissa—“and your NVGs are busted. You and Thomal just make sure the women get back to Ţărână safely.”
“No sweat.”
“You only have a little over an hour till sunrise,” Thomal said, strangely enough.
“I got it.”
Marissa watched Dev turn to go, and her chest clenched. She grasped his forearm. “Don’t leave,” she whispered around quivering lips, her stomach filling with a sudden, weird desperation. It might be just the slightest exaggeration to say that Dev Nichita was the only person in the world she’d ever felt wholly safe around. “Please, I-I don’t want you to.”
“Hey,” he said in a gentle voice. “Don’t you worry about a thing, all right? My men are taking you someplace safe, and I’ll be there real soon.”
“Y-you’re coming back? For sure?”
His goatee parted in a gleaming smile. “I always do, sweetheart.” And then he was gone, he and Gábor disappearing into the darkness as easily as if they were made of the night.
Thomal carefully stepped off the back bumper. “There still a first aid kit in the glove, Stănescu?”
“Yeah, come on up. Not that there’s anywhere to sit.” Sedge was still craned around, looking at them. “Sorry, ladies, but we have to go no-vis now. The entrance into our compound is classified.” He flipped a switch and a thick screen descended from the roof just behind the front seat.
Thomal closed the rear doors and locked them.
Screen met floor, entombing them in the Dodge’s dark metal belly, then the screen’s motor shut off in an abrupt, unearthly quiet.
Marissa crammed herself into a corner of the van and hugged her knees to her chest. Compound…? An extra special security unit…? Bad men called Mürk, Tëer, Videön, Tøllar, Krølan…? More questions than answers never felt good.
The Dodge moved back onto the road, the steady drub-drub of rubber tires over asphalt the only noise. Taking them someplace safe…called Ţărână…
Chapter Six
Community of Ţărână, 6:11 p.m.
Luvera Nichita shifted from foot to foot in the doorway, running her work apron through her fingers as the orchestral beauty of Bach floated softly around her from a hidden sound system. A grandfather clock lorded over the living room, keeping time with perfect Swiss accuracy, and the furniture and objets d’art on their étagère were all poised on the glossy parquet hardwood floor with Architectural Digest precision. Nothing but the best in the Nichita household. Nothing that ever felt like home, even though she’d lived here forever.
“Are you going to speak, child?” Her mother was seated at a custom-made maple roll top desk, her posture as erect and precise as the surrounding furnishings.
Pettrila Nichita had become an elder seven years ago, her appearance changing abruptly, as was the way of aging in their race—one day, young, the next day, old, like a snap of the fingers. Lines now creased Pettrila’s eyes, her body sagged a bit, although Pettrila would never allow herself to be anything but flawlessly slender, and gray hair fanned out from the temples of her short, styled black hair like skunky streaks.
“Yes, um…” The strings of Luvera’s apron tangled in her fingers. “Jennilĩth has asked me to move in with her again.”
Pettrila elegantly dipped the tip of her quill into a small antique ink-pot. A leather-bound cookbook was open in front of her. She must be hostessing the next bridge club, a small, elite group of women handpicked by Pettrila herself of only the noblest Pure-bred matrons. Basically, a bunch of old prows who somehow managed to make Luvera feel as useless and disappointing to them as she was to her mother.
She’d make doubly sure to waitress at Garwald’s that night.
“You’re not married,” her mother pronounced. “You should live at home.”
Luvera sighed under her breath. At one hundred fifty-seven, a modern woman Pettrila was not. “Mother, I’m forty-nine.”
“A baby.” Pettrila turned a page in the cookbook and peered down her nose at a recipe for aspic.
Gack, who liked jellied meat? “In Vârcolac years, yes, I’m young, but that’s an awfully long time to live at home.”
In her willowy script, Pettrila wrote down several ingredients across a sheet of vellum paper. “That Jennilĩth isn’t a good influence.”
Luvera secretly rolled her eyes. Who was, in her mother’s opinion?
Pettrila re-dipped her quill. “At any rate, Jennilĩth will surely be moving into a house in Ţărână’s residential neighborhood soon, and then where will that leave you?”
Luvera scrunched her fingers around her apron.
Pettrila sniffed. “Roth has practically tied a ribbon around the girl and put her in that human’s bed.”
Luvera bit her lip, her throat overflowing with a sudden, sharp longing. That human was Alexander Parthen, who, like his sister Tonĩ, was a Dragon of the extremely rare Royal Fey kind. So, yes, considering his bloodlines, it was perfectly reasonable that Roth would want Alex and Jennilĩth to get together. Jennilĩth was the last female of Royal Fey Vârcolac bloodlines. Luvera should be supportive. The match was perfect—heck, their offspring would probably be genetic demigods—and Jennilĩth was one of her best friends. Problem was, Luvera herself was insanely in love with the smart, off-beat, adorably nerdy Alex. Which was sad and pathetic.
Pettrila set down her quill. “All this talk is fiddle-faddle, anyway. You have obligations to this family, child.”
Luvera winced. Oh, oops. Her mother saw that.
Pettrila shut the cookbook firmly, her amber eyes flashing. “Geology is a noble profession, Luvera. If not for the work your father and I did to unearth the precious minerals of this cave, Ţărână wouldn’t have the vast wealth it now owns. Without doubt, the entire community would have faltered long ago.”
“I know, Mother.” It was just that the thought of studying rocks and gems all day made her want to gouge her eyes out…an attitude that must’ve resonated in her voice.
Scorn flared Pettrila’s nostrils. “Do you think that I want this honorable responsibility laid on your shoulders?”
Heat flushed into Luvera’s face. She glanced down at the floor. She could hardly quibble with her mother on that score; there wasn’t much to commend Luvera these days. For God’s sake, she couldn’t even get herself out of this house.
“I can’t call upon Devid—your father made certain of that—and I don’t have any other choices beyond you. Do I?” A slight tightening of Pettrila’s chin was the only show of sorrow she demonstrated over the death of her other choices, four daughters who’d perished in a 1942 cave collapse.
For some reason Pettrila and Grigore, Luv
era’s father, had waited eighteen years after that catastrophe to replace their losses. In 1960, Dev was born. Another four years after that, Luvera came into the world, born to a mother who by that time was the ripe age of one hundred and eight: two very different women born in two different ages. In all of Luvera’s existence, never once had her mother offered her even a scintilla of understanding or sympathy, and Luvera sometimes wished, quite horribly, that Pettrila and Grigore had just left well enough alone with their family.
On the other hand, the moon had proven to rise and set on the Nichitas’ only son. Dev could do no wrong, at least in Grigore’s eyes, and when Dev had done the unthinkable and decided to go into the Warrior Class—a career choice which would elude his duty to the family—Grigore had indulged his son’s dream with hardly a blink. And then immediately thrust the entire burden for taking over the family business onto Luvera’s unwilling shoulders. Without even asking her.
Her mother’s stern eyes were still on her. “Would you have this community perish?”
Guilt lodged like a dead weight in Luvera’s stomach and left a bitter taste in her mouth. It was her mother’s favorite ploy, setting up Luvera’s career path to be a life-or-death calling, when, in reality, Luvera suspected that Pettrila mostly didn’t want the noblest profession in the community to fall to the Vasilichi family. Always involved in only the gritty work of mining, the Vasilichis had positioned themselves to leap into the gemology side of the profession soon after Grigore’s death. Such a coup would’ve been an insufferable prick to Pettrila’s pride, and for Luvera to be responsible for either the financial ruin of the community or for her mother’s step down, however miniscule, from her social strata was not… No, Luvera couldn’t manage the fallout from either.
Attention back on her cookbook, Pettrila lifted the vellum sheet off her desk and held it out to Luvera, her wrist bent at a graceful angle. “Go get these items at the store for me, if you would.”
Their conversation was apparently over. Had Luvera gained anything besides a headache and a stick poked into that soft, insecure part of her? Of course not.
“Um, sure.” She took the paper. “I have to go on an errand, anyway.”
Pettrila’s attention snapped over to her. “Where?”
“Oh, nowhere. The post office just gave a package of mine to someone else by mistake.” Luvera turned and trudged for the door. Something she wouldn’t have to explain if she had her own apartment.
“Stand up straight, Luvera.”
“Yes, Mother.”
* * *
“Avoided becoming a Toaster Strudel today.” Gábor slouched into the seat of the Lincoln Town Car, his M16 propped between his legs, and added on a mumble, “Hoo-rah.”
Dev grunted, wearily dropping back against the headrest. Their Town Car transport had just pulled into the large cargo elevator that would take them on the twenty-minute trip home—they both recognized the soft grind of the cables—and heading the one half mile down into the safety of Ţărână was always a bit of a sphincter un-clencher, especially so close to sunrise.
They’d barely made it off the streets of San Diego before dawn hit, and one sunny ray on their Vitamin D-allergic bodies would’ve immediately led to anaphylactic shock, and from there, death. Cutting it that close hadn’t even been worth the risk, either. The Om Rău they’d chased had gotten away.
Dev scrubbed a hand over his face and winced. He felt beat to shit. Tired and sore, his left cheek throbbing like a sonofabitch where Videön had socked him. He’d caught a glance of himself in the rearview, and his face was swollen like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man’s, his cheek sporting a nasty bruise. All in a night’s work. He sank deeper into his seat…
He jerked out of a doze when the elevator lurched to a halt.
He felt the Town Car drive slowly forward off the elevator platform, then stop. The door locks shot up. He and Gábor climbed out, stepping into the vast garage that was home to Ţărână’s half dozen or so vehicles. Some were delivery trucks for the Travelers to bring food and supplies from the surface down into the community, the others were kept on hand for the warriors’ various shenanigans.
Llawell, Ţărână’s body shop guy, was even now busy replacing the Dodge’s blown out window. The man was going to have a field day with the rest of it. The van looked like a damned colander.
A woman dressed in olive drab coveralls was leaning against the driver-side door of the Dodge and chatting with Llawell. Candace was the man’s wife, and a Traveler, one of the regular human females who’d been brought into the community twenty years ago to reproduce with Vârcolac males, before it was discovered that only Dragons could produce viable offspring. Candace had to be in her fifties by now, but barely looked thirty-five. Ah, the many perks of Fiinţă.
Dev and Gábor nodded to the couple as they tramped past, both warriors aiming for the long corridor that led into the main part of Ţărână’s mansion. Serving as home to Roth and his wife in the penthouse suite on the fourth floor, the new Dragon females on the third floor, and the single warriors on the second, the mansion provided every conceivable amenity. The basement housed a huge gym—for both the warriors’ training and fitness-minded others—an armory, Roth’s office, a medical clinic, accommodations for the mansion’s staff, and two luxurious “lockdown” suites for the married women to hole up in during their fertile period when they wanted to avoid pregnancy.
One flight up on the main floor was a grand entrance hall, several parlors of various sizes, a library, a vast computer center for Ţărână’s two techno doinks—a dopey young Vârcolac named Cleeve and Alex Parthen—a rec room, a kitchen with an attached formal dining room, and now there was a large conference room, newly remodeled for the Council with a sliding wall partition that could be opened and closed according to space requirements.
He and Gábor strode by the community’s electrical generator, which purred contentedly behind its floor-to-ceiling metal grate. Overhead an interwoven gray pipeline channeled California’s precious water from topside into the community—stole it, really—turning this part of the corridor into the bowels of a battleship.
Gábor slung his M16 over his shoulder. “So what do you think of those new girls?”
“Hard to say.” Dev shrugged. “They were out of their natural element, you know.”
“Well, I thought they were cute.” Gábor bobbed his eyebrows. “And that brings the total up to eleven.”
“If the three new ones stay.”
“Shit, bro, can you imagine eleven Dragons in one room, how good they’d smell? Hoo-rah.”
Dev smiled. “You’d swoon like a lady in a corset, guaranteed.”
Gábor laughed in a burst. “So would you, Nichita. Last I checked you were just as horny.”
He couldn’t argue the point. The instinct to jump-and-hump always jacked high near an unmated female, especially a Dragon, who smelled like a rockin’ sex Popsicle to an unmated Vârcolac male. His near-paralytic inability to hoist himself out from between the legs of that mega-biscuit in the van was a case in point. And with eleven? He probably would come embarrassingly close to fainting.
He and Gábor strode along in silence for a few minutes.
“I’m getting one of those Dragons this time,” Gábor said with quiet intensity. “There’s none of that mate-choices bullshit this time, so it’s anybody’s game. No offense to my homies in the Warrior Class, but it’s been way too many decades of a sausage fest.”
“I’ve done the math myself, Pavenic.” Hell, he’d lived the math. “We’re going to have to ugly down Thomal, though, if we want half a chance of getting close to one. You know, put some teeth black in his toothpaste or zit powder in his shaving cream.”
“If a pussy Mixed-blood needed to shave, you mean?”
They both laughed. Black-haired, Pure-bred Vârcolac like themselves were the only males who could grow facial hair. It was a masculine advantage they never failed to shove into the face of a blondie: known as a Mi
xed-blood because they were a combination of both Dragon and Vârcolac.
“Besides, speak for yourself,” Gábor went on. “I know I’m good-looking, bro, even standing next to Golden Boy.”
Dev cocked a brow. “But do the girls know?”
They came to the end of the corridor and stopped in front of another elevator. Dev slipped in his key card, opening the doors, then they went one flight up to the basement floor of the mansion. The elevator doors swished open, and—
Jaċken Brun was standing directly in front, his burly arms crossed over his broad chest and his stance wide. A married man now, Jaċken had exchanged his usual black leathers for black jeans and a dark blue T-shirt. Still not exactly cruise wear, but at least he didn’t always look like the headliner for an Ultimate Fighting bout anymore.
“Hi, Mom,” Gábor chirped. “We’re home.”
Jaċken’s black Om Rău eyes zeroed in on Dev’s bruised face, then shifted over to Gábor. “Any injuries on you I need to know about?”
Gábor swept a hand across his chest. “You mean besides my achy-breaky heart?” He grinned, the pointed tip of a fang peeking out. “When do we get to meet the chicks?”
Jaċken’s eyelids narrowed. “Well, Pavenic, there’s an introductory cocktail party scheduled for tomorrow night, but if you can’t get that smile of yours throttled back, you’ll be scrubbing toilets with a toothbrush instead.”
“Roger that.” Gábor chuckled. “Throttling back now, sir.”
Yeah, the whole town was under strict guidelines about keeping their fangs hidden until the Big Reveal. A total pain, but a necessary evil. “How’s Thomal?” Dev asked.
“Fine. You and I need to debrief.” Jaċken made a curt gesture of dismissal to Gábor. “Let’s go to my office.”
Shit, really? He was hungry, needed to take a piss, and his armpits were emitting some kind of nuclear waste smell. He caught back a sigh. “Yes, sir.”
