by Aja James
“Did you have a visitor?” the ex-Chosen inquired. “I did not want to intrude, but I wasn’t sure whether you were safe.”
Inanna and Gabriel had never guarded a human before. And not just that, but the human incarnation of the long-awaited Pure Queen. They weren’t yet familiar with how to best balance between being protector and friend. And as Sophia had no powers beyond recognizing Pure souls and minimal fighting skills, it was always a gamble to give her too much privacy.
Sophia shook her head. “He’s an acquaintance of mine, I’d like to think a friend as well. He was the teaching assistant for one of my classes my Freshman year.”
And then she added irrelevantly: “Dalair doesn’t like him.”
“But you do?”
Sophia looked down the corridor where Ere had gone.
“Yes,” she admitted. “I do like him. I wish we were truly friends.”
Perhaps then, she could help dispel the darkness she sensed within him, eating away at the edges, sometimes even engulfing the incandescent orange flames of his soul.
*** *** *** ***
It was midnight when Maximus and Simca, Devlin and Grace entered Zenn’s headquarters through a service tunnel a couple of levels beneath the tower.
On their seventy-five second ride to the top floor in the small, fiberglass capsule lift that shot through the center of the building, the two vampire warriors readied their weapons while Simca poised in a powerful crouch, her long rope of a tail lying still and tensed behind her, like a sword drawn.
Grace knew her role and position well within this deadly quartet: always stay in the middle so that she was well protected and concentrate only on cracking the security firewalls once they had access to the mainframes. She was to ignore everything she heard and anything she caught out of the corner of her eyes while she worked.
After all, Maximus had reasoned earlier, seeing and hearing her party get cut down or killed wouldn’t affect her own situation in any way. If they died, she wouldn’t be able to outrun their foes. If they lived, then everything was going to work out just fine. Distracting her attention away from breaking the codes would only slow them down.
It was all quite logical, Grace would be the first to admit. But Maximus could really work on his pep talks.
By the time she took a few deep breaths, they had arrived.
But when the clear glass door of the lift slid open, an empty corridor greeted them.
Maximus slid Devlin a meaningful look, one that said, “I don’t like this.”
Neither did Devlin. It had “trap” written all over it.
But they were here, and they had a job to do. So they set the explosives quickly and retreated back into the protective capsule as the charges went off in a thunderous blast and a blaze of flames that quickly died down around the fire-retardant concrete and steel.
With an ominous groan, the heavy four-feet-thick door creaked open just slightly.
Maximus led the way and secured the perimeter, ushering Devlin and Grace inside the vault while he and Simca remained on guard by the door.
At a nod from Devlin, Grace immediately got down to business. She found the central mainframe almost at once; she recognized it from the blueprints. Taking her tech equipment out of her hard-cased brief, she plugged in the necessary wires and routers.
Mainframes were quite archaic in this day and age, and certainly strange to find in the hottest new tech startup in town. Most companies nowadays used server farms and Cloud services, no physical location for their technology infrastructure needed.
But Zenn was in a sense ingenious to still use a mainframe. Hacking into it would require an understanding of old programming languages that were all but extinct today, like Latin or even more obscure—Sumerian cuneiform.
Fortunately, where technology was concerned, Grace was fluent in all languages, dead or alive. Within minutes, she found the files she was searching for and began the decryption process.
“We have company.”
It was the only warning Devlin gave.
As instructed, Grace merely gave a nod that she’d heard and didn’t even look to see what was happening, continuing to concentrate on her hacking.
Dimly, she was aware that he’d left the vault to fight alongside Maximus and Simca. Distantly, she heard the sounds of battle, the clash of metal against metal, low grunts and muffled moans, mixed in occasionally with a panther’s growl.
Grace single-mindedly focused on her task and successfully infiltrated the security gateways, breaking into the files and unlocking them.
The first file Devlin had flagged appeared to be some sort of list. It had hundreds of names, both anglicized and in their original language, many of which were symbols Grace didn’t recognize. There were numbers next to the names, like serial numbers, but with a distinct logic to them.
Dates? Grace thought. Dates indicating when people were born or when they lived or died?
And finally there were locations. Not addresses but coordinates. Longitudes and latitudes that sometimes varied as she scanned through the information, indicating that these were live traces, updating with each person’s movement.
After downloading the decrypted file, she moved on to the second of Devlin’s flagged files, the one about her parents.
A loud thud crashed against the door of the vault. The fighting grew closer, as if one or more of their enemies had entered the chamber.
Grace paid them no mind. Some part of her understood that her life was very much at risk, that if their enemies had entered the vault, then her protectors were losing ground, possibly heavily injured. Some deeply buried part of her recognized that Devlin might have suffered grave wounds; she instinctively knew that he’d die before he let the attackers near her.
But Grace’s cold logic and powerful processor of a brain quickly computed what Maximus had told her before. It was pointless to worry; there was nothing she could do to help the fight. She could only complete the task before her, a task none of the others had the skills to accomplish.
So she ignored the gruesome sounds and splatters of blood that flicked upon her person, one particularly long-traveling clot of gore hitting her directly on the side of the face.
Yes! She unlocked the second file and scanned the information as it downloaded into her disc.
Images and words flew past her eyes so fast she could barely absorb them, even with her almost inhuman speed in deciphering information.
Images like her parents going to work for Zenn’s parent company. Their busy lives as cutting-edge IT professionals.
Her birth and their over-the-moon happiness. The family routine they settled into to accommodate her demand on their time and attention, especially since the private and public schools didn’t work out.
Picnics at the park, rides on a carrousel, trips to the beach. Getting her a pair of goldfish and a chinchilla that they made a home for in their basement.
Grace involuntarily gasped. Someone had documented so many of her family’s private moments with photographs. Snaps of moments in time she herself didn’t recall.
Until now.
All the memories she’d submerged her whole adult life came rushing back. She was so overwhelmed by them she could barely continue scanning.
The battle drew ever closer. Something swooshed through the air inches above her head. A sword perhaps. She couldn’t tell and didn’t look.
A heel backed into her thigh as she knelt in front of the mainframe. A pained grunt overhead. And then the fighting was pushed back toward the entrance of the vault.
She continued absorbing the file’s information as it downloaded to her disc.
Her parents being assigned to a special project. The initial foundations of Zenn that they developed. Their accidental discovery of the fact that they were being watched, along with unspecified information about the company’s owner, A. Medusa.
The day her parents left for work and prepared her favorite breakfast on the kitchen table. Their return th
at evening at the usual time.
The shadow that descended upon them when they were upstairs changing out of their work suits. The shadow driving off in their car.
The police visit to the house the next day. Grace’s brief incarceration with a top secret branch of the federal government.
Her aunt Maria picking her up to go live with her. Her first session with Dr. Weisman. A call from Zenn’s HR to fill out an online application…
Just as the file finished downloading, Grace was gripped by the arm and jerked to her feet.
“Time to go.”
Chapter Seventeen
It was Devlin.
He was dragging her out of the vault at a limp. He all but threw her into the capsule lift before making a dive for it himself.
The fiberglass doors shut just as two vampires pounded upon it with their fists and daggers, hissing and baring their fangs as the foursome descended rapidly down the tower.
For seventy-five seconds, there was only gusts of rapid breathing in the lift. Grace quickly saw that both Devlin and Maximus were injured. Even Simca had a few bloody streaks marring her sleek black coat.
“There must be more of them waiting,” Maximus said grimly.
“Roger that,” Devlin rasped, his chest still heaving.
“Simca, guard Grace,” the Commander ordered his faithful feline.
A growl was all he got for reply. It didn’t sound happy.
“Get back,” Devlin bit out and pushed Grace behind them as they reached the lowest level and the capsule doors opened. He braced himself at the entrance.
But a battle was already taking place, Grace saw. A blur of black wielding a long, curved sword was at the center of the violent vortex. He moved so fast, Grace’s wide eyes could barely track him.
“Would that be Ramses or another new friend you haven’t told us about yet?” Devlin lobbed the question at Maximus, unsheathing two long daggers, readying to enter the fray.
“His timing is impeccable,” the Commander replied, pulling a pair of sharp-pronged tridents from out of nowhere.
And with that, the three warriors (for Grace had started to think of Simca as a full member of her band of protectors) leapt into action, picking off their enemies one by one, though the newcomer called Ramses looked to be holding his own just fine even before they joined in.
With the odds reduced from more than eight-to-one to now much healthier numbers, the bloody battle didn’t last long. Within minutes, piles of black ashes littered the tunnel while the victors remained standing, though in Devlin’s case, just barely.
Ramses wordlessly led them to a black SUV with tinted windows. Maximus got behind the wheel and floored the accelerator after they all climbed inside, Simca riding shotgun, Ramses, Devlin and Grace in the back, taking up two rows of seats facing each other.
“I have a private jet waiting,” were the first words out of Ramses’ mouth, “Follow the GPS.”
Grace noted his unique, lilting accent and smoky voice. Middle Eastern? Egyptian? She couldn’t quite place it.
“Impeccable timing and brilliantly resourceful,” Maximus complimented, driving out of the tunnel beneath Zenn’s HQ like a bullet.
“Does this mean you’ve decided to join us?”
Ramses shrugged eloquently. “Perhaps. We shall see.”
He slid his light-colored gaze toward Grace and tipped his chin at Devlin’s sprawled form across the backseat of the SUV, his head in Grace’s lap.
“Your lover needs blood, human,” he said softly, almost gently, as if he regretted pointing out that Devlin might in fact be dying in her arms at this very moment.
Grace began to panic. She hadn’t realized how severely hurt Devlin was with the dizzying pace of the last ten minutes. Surely they hadn’t been here for even that long. Everything was a blur it happened so fast.
“Break the skin of your wrist across his fangs and hold your vein to his mouth,” Ramses quietly instructed, pulling Grace out of her frozen terror.
She did just that and wetly breathed a sigh of relief when Devlin sealed his mouth to her wrist unconsciously and began to draw upon her vein, rhythmically swallowing, his eyes remaining closed.
His body had curved around her, his arms holding her tight.
But not in an embrace of affection. No. It was the embrace of a predator with his prey.
“I will tell you when to stop feeding him,” Ramses said conversationally. “He will not know in his current state.”
“Thank you,” Grace felt obliged to say.
The Dark warrior didn’t change his expression, but Grace thought he looked amused.
What he did was retrieve a thick, well-used cloth from the inside fold of his Asian-styled tunic and began to methodically wipe it across his curved sword, balanced across his knees.
“What is it called?” Grace asked, both because she was curious and to distract herself from Devlin’s feeding upon her wrist.
A part of her wanted to take her arm away, the part that valued her life and sensed the imminent risk she faced. Another part of her wanted him to take every last drop, because that’s what her purpose was. To provide this male the sustenance he needed to be well.
“Scimitar,” Ramses answered. “Do you know what it is?”
“I think I’ve seen it wielded by mummies in… well… The Mummy,” Grace said. “You know, the movie.”
Ramses didn’t respond, but she thought his amusement deepened.
“Why don’t you—the lot of you—fight with guns?” The thought just occurred to Grace.
She’d been witness to two life-and-death battles now and none of the vampires or shadow assassins had fought with guns. They only used sharp objects and their own bodies as weapons.
“Bullets don’t deter the older warriors,” Ramses explained. “We’re faster, stronger and more resistant to simple puncture wounds. The only way to kill a vampire is to sever his head or puncture his heart so deeply, cutting through the aorta, that it won’t have time to heal.”
“You’d have to shoot several rounds of bullets through the heart in the split second that a vampire will be still to receive them in the hopes of severing his aorta. Blades are far more precise, and you’re close enough to your target to make sure you’re doing the job right.”
“Besides,” he added, “gunshots are hard to disguise, especially with bullets powerful enough to explode the heart or head for quick kills. Whereas, blades are quiet. You could be decapitated and not ever hear it coming.”
“Fascinating,” Grace murmured and was thankful she wasn’t squeamish about blood and gore.
“Your lover held his own admirably despite being newly made,” Ramses commented.
“Why do you keep saying that?” Grace asked. “How do you know he’s my lover?”
A low chuckle rumbled through Ramses’ chest.
“I can scent it on your skin and his,” he said. “A vampire marks his Mate when he Bonds.”
“I’m not his ‘Mate,’” Grace argued. “I mean, we’re just together for the time being.”
As if he heard her, Devlin’s grip on her wrist tightened painfully and he deepened the penetration of his fangs.
Grace tried not to jerk at the burning sensation. Her arm was going to be black and blue when this was over.
“Are you sure about that?” Ramses countered. “Your lover seems to think differently.”
Grace abruptly switched topics. “How can you say a two hundred thirty year-old vampire is ‘newly made’?”
“My Kind has been around for tens of thousands of years. Perhaps even longer. There are some who have lived that long. By contrast, he is a veritable infant.”
Ramses nodded toward Devlin.
“Like I said, he held his own remarkably.”
“How old are you?” Grace inquired bluntly, never one for social diplomacy.
Ramses’ lips quirked. “Old enough.”
“You’re quite remarkable yourself, human,” this he said with a glint of r
espect in his eyes. “You don’t seem phased by any of this.”
“I’m not normal,” she stated factually.
“Thank the Dark Goddess for that.”
Then he said, “It’s time to stop.”
Grace tried to pull herself away gently, but Devlin only latched on stronger, curling his limbs around her, holding her tight despite his weakened state.
“He will take too much,” Ramses warned and leaned forward as if getting ready to forcibly pry Devlin from her.
“Wait,” Grace stayed him with a hand.
She dropped her head to Devlin’s and whispered in his ear, “Devlin, it’s time to let go. You can have more later. Right now, you’re hurting me. Let go.”
Ramses registered surprise as Devlin obeyed, gently disengaging his fangs from Grace’s vein and licking the puncture wounds closed. Still passed out, he pulled Grace’s torso close and nuzzled his face in her lap, exhaling deeply.
“He truly loves you,” Ramses murmured, his voice thick with an unnamed emotion.
“I know,” was all Grace said.
*** *** *** ***
They arrived back at the Cove by early morning the next day.
Devlin would probably wake up feeling chagrined again for having been carried by Maximus to and fro and finally settled in the healing chamber upon their return.
Her blood had been enough to pull him back from death’s door, but not enough to accelerate his healing.
Grace learned on the plane ride over that only Blooded Mates of vampires could provide enough sustenance to recharge a severely wounded Dark One fully in a short period of time. And one could only become a Blooded Mate if one was of the same race.
Well, that ruled Grace out. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
Something else she learned on the return trip was that only True Bloods, Dark Ones born, could turn a human into a vampire, and they’d lose a part of their soul in the process. Too many turnings would lead eventually to madness and death, for a splintered soul was never content, always striving to leave the body in search of wholeness once again.
