by Teal Ceagh
“You’re not in Kansas anymore.” He looked at Sera. “Séreméla, I want you to do something that’s going to sound weird but trust me. I want you to shout in your mind. Shout for Seaveth. You’ve met her, yes?”
“Yes. And it doesn’t sound weird. I know what you want me to do.” She closed her eyes and thought of Seaveth and reached out for her.
Seaveth, we need you!
There was a rattle of sheet iron behind them and Diego turned, alerted.
“What is going on?” Blake demanded.
“More of the vampeen,” Diego said coolly, turning on his heels. “Put Séreméla between us. Her call for help will bring the others in a few seconds. We just have to hold them off until then.”
“I think I’ve lost my mind,” Blake muttered.
“It really is happening,” Sera whispered. “Just hold on a few more seconds.” She stepped away from him and between the two men, so that he would have a clear line of fire. Then she saw what Diego had sensed. More vampeen. Approaching over rooftops, through cracks in basement walls and impossibly tight spaces in between buildings. Dozens of them.
“They’re taking too long,” Diego muttered.
“The keep is shielded,” Sera reminded him.
He spun to face her again. “You can jump, like Lindál, can’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Jump away,” he told her. “Take the cop with you.”
Fright tore through her. “And leave you here alone? No!”
He smiled and it was a predator’s smile. “I can handle this.”
“I need somewhere to jump to, Diego. I’ve been on Earth for about two hours and it was all at Lindál’s bedside, in the keep!”
“That’s it?” Diego seemed stunned. He glanced over his shoulder at the approaching vampeen, then back at her. “Nowhere else?”
“Well, Seaveth’s apartment but that would be—”
“You’re going to worry about protocol? Go!” he yelled.
She turned to Blake Harvey and wrapped her arms around him. “This will seem a little odd,” she told him as his expression changed to one of surprise and jumped.
The apartment was quite empty and silent.
Blake Harvey gripped the kitchen counter to steady himself and looked around. Sera held him until she knew he was oriented. He looked at her and she realized it was the first time she had properly looked at him. He was taller than her by a few inches and surprisingly young for a human with such responsibilities. About thirty-five years old in human years, with brown hair that had gold highlights and hazel eyes that also had gold highlights.
“I know you have questions but I have to go back and get Diego,” she said.
He sank onto a stool and shrugged. “Why not?” he said, sounding shell-shocked.
She jumped again and had to adjust her landing, because the area was full of elves fighting vampeen. In the midst of them was Diego. She made a small hop, landing right behind him. He whirled, alerted and the movement brought him hard against her. She had anticipated his reaction and brought her arms around him. “Surprise,” she said and jumped.
Sera found towels in the bathroom and brought them back to the kitchen for all of them. Diego ignored the pile. Instead, he stood at the big plate glass floor-to-ceiling windows with his arms crossed, brooding, a still figure in black.
Blake picked up a towel and dried his face and rubbed it through his hair.
Sera patted her own face and arms dry. “We are the final trinity, aren’t we, Diego?”
He curled his hand into a fist and pummeled it gently against the glass. “Yes.”
“Someone want to clue me in?” Blake asked. “I’m getting really tired of playing catch-up here.”
Sera looked at Diego. “Can you?” she asked. “Don’t you face execution if you do?”
“I think we’ve moved beyond that now,” Diego said dryly.
“If the bonding is certain.”
“Hey, I’m sitting here!” Blake said, banging the counter.
Sera sat on the stool next to him and covered his hand. She looked into his eyes. “We know you are there. But these matters we are speaking of are…well, I am certain you’re about to learn for yourself. Bear with us a moment more.” She looked at Diego. “You were called. I know the distress I felt at the idea of leaving you when I jumped here with Blake. And I was able to call to Seaveth. What further proof is needed?”
“He’s a police lieutenant,” Diego hissed. “Seaveth will want incontrovertible proof.” He dug in his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. “So do I.” He dialed.
“What’s he doing?” Blake asked Sera as Diego turned away, speaking into the phone.
“Calling Seaveth.”
“Why doesn’t he just…yell, like you did?” He pushed the towel around his neck, inside the shirt.
She smiled. “You’re being very patient.”
Blake shook his head. “I’m being very curious. Something has been tearing up my city for about a year now and I think I’m about to get answers in the next little while. You’d have to use C4 to move me from this apartment now. Those creatures. You called them vampeen.”
Sera winced. They had slipped and not realized it.
“Are they…vampires?” He stood and unbuttoned the sodden shirt and pulled it from his trousers.
“No,” she said quickly. Firmly.
The sharp answer made him look up. “So certain. Is that because there are vampires somewhere else? I really am stepping into fantasyland after all?” He stripped off his shirt and Sera felt her heart squeeze and her stomach flip.
She had never seen a human male naked before and wondered if they were all this beautiful. Blake Harvey did not have the perfect flesh that elves did but his skin was satiny smooth with good health and a light tan from the long hot summer. He was muscled in a way elves never could be, with rounded caps at his shoulders. When he lifted his arms, the muscles elongated, tendons stretched and she saw the tufts of human hair under his arm. She suddenly wanted to run her fingers along that long line of muscle and tendon. She wanted his arms around her.
She wanted his body against her.
Over her.
Her channel gushed fluid and her tongue seemed glued to the roof of her mouth.
Sera brought a hand to her throat. She could feel her whole body flushing with heat.
“Well, fuck,” Diego said.
She dragged her gaze away from Blake to glance at him. He was looking at her and Blake, folding up the cell phone, a resigned expression on his face and the front of his jeans swollen with a huge erection. “I guess we have our proof,” he said softly.
Blake straightened up, turning around to look at them both, completely unaware of what had happened. He lowered the towel, reading their body language, confusion filtering across his face. “Okay, someone really is going to have to clue me in,” he confessed but Sera could see that his own body was reacting, tightening. The flat disks of his nipples were hardening. She hardly dared drop her gaze to his crotch to check.
The front door of the apartment suddenly shuddered under a massive impact, groaning.
They looked at the quivering door.
“Vampeen,” Diego said. “They tracked us? Impossible.”
“Could they have access to your personal data?” Blake suggested.
“Oh, there’s a joyful thought.”
The door shuddered again.
Sera opened up her arms. “Quickly, come to me.”
“Both of us?” Diego asked.
“We must,” she said. “If you both hold each other too and we form a single unit…”
“Where to?” Diego asked. “You don’t know anywhere else.”
“There’s only the keep left,” she said. “It’s shielded, so that leaves the basement parking garage. Right next to the elevator. Into the elevator and down to the keep. I cannot think what else to do.”
He nodded.
The door shuddered and splintered. Blake and Diego wrapp
ed their arms around her waist and about each other and she slid her arms as far about their shoulders as she could reach. It would have to be enough. She took a breath. They were gazing at her. Trusting her.
“Let’s go,” she said and jumped.
* * * * *
The basement parking garage was shockingly empty and silent. Sera thought of Seaveth and gathered her thoughts. We’re coming, she warned her and prodded the elevator door open.
There were only buttons for floors above the basement. Diego pulled an electronic security card out of his wallet and slid it into a slot on the panel and out again. The doors slid shut on the three of them and began to descend.
“What the hell?” Blake murmured.
The elevator came to a smooth halt and slid open again and Sera took his arm, knowing how disorienting the first glimpse of the keep could be. “Come,” she murmured.
Blake Harvey stepped into the foyer of the keep, shirtless and bewildered, to be greeted by the assembled senior representatives of the vampire and elven races and human hunters from across North America. Seaveth stood a little in front of them, glowing in the green velvet she favored when she was in her formal role.
Seaveth stepped forward. “Welcome to the home and hearth of the Earthwing Clan, Lieutenant Blake Harvey and headquarters for the war effort to defeat the Grimoré.”
Sera held out her hand, palm up, as she had seen humans do. “Lieutenant Blake Harvey, this is Seaveth, queen of the trinities and commander of the vampire and elven armies.”
Diego stepped to his other side and leaned in a little. “Relax. She’s human. I’m the vampire.” And he winked.
Blake licked his lips. “War, huh?” he said to Seaveth.
Seaveth nodded.
He looked at Sera and slowly lifted his hand up to her hair and lifted it to look at her ear, just as Diego had done. “Then…you’re an elf?” His chest was lifting as his breath came faster.
“Yes.”
He turned back to Seaveth. “There’s probably something polite I’m supposed to say but I really need a drink. Is there a single malt scotch around here I could have?”
Chapter Four
“There has been a human in each of the trinities so far and each human has found orientation difficult,” Seaveth admitted, as she walked beside him.
Blake glanced at her. “You were one of them,” he said.
“I was the first and none of us knew what was happening, then.” She smiled. “At least you have a roadmap to follow.”
“And the foreknowledge that I have no choice in the matter,” he added dryly.
“Oh, you have a choice,” Seaveth assured him. “But the other way leads to madness and we believe to eventual death.”
“And to choose it means to let these Grimoré things win the war and wipe out New York.”
“The human race, Blake. They’re not just after your city. They’re after the full pot.”
He stopped walking and faced her and she turned too, infinitely patient. “This is…blackmail.”
“It is what it is, Blake. We’re not the ones who set it up. And there are compensations.”
“What, sex on a stick?” He grimaced. “I don’t sell out that cheap.”
“It’s a bit more profound than that.” She didn’t seem upset by his crude dig and he felt embarrassed.
She began walking again and he strode to catch up with her. She had long legs, for a woman. Almost as long as Sera’s. She slowed as she approached a closed door and when they reached the door she opened it very quietly and motioned that he look inside.
He saw a man lying on a bed, another on a chair beside it. Then he quickly assembled facts with his new knowledge. The man on the bed was an elf but he was injured…possibly near death, for he didn’t have the glow about him that Sera did.
Diego had said something about recovery…this, then, was Sera’s brother. The man bent over in the chair beside him must be a vampire. He looked drawn with care and worry. Blake would have described him as tired, except that he’d already learned that vampires simply couldn’t get tired.
Blake looked at Seaveth and was startled to see tears welling in her eyes. “I can’t go in there,” she said. “They both feel my emotions and it would upset them too much.”
He put it together with a small gasp. “They…are bonded to you. You three are the first trinity.”
She nodded. “Séreméla came to earth to treat Lindál because we do not have the knowledge here to treat elven wounds. And that was why the third trinity did not form until now—it waited for her to arrive here. But Sera is a healer, Blake. Not a hunter. She has sacrificed her place on her own world in order to treat Lindál and is now an outcast. I did not understand that until it was too late but I have researched it and now I believe I do.”
She shut the door again and drew him over to a couch pushed up against the passage wall and sat on it as if she were very tired. He had a feeling she had been sleeping on the couch a lot lately.
He lowered himself down next to her.
“Do you know your family origins, Blake?”
“Um…English, I think. Somewhere there. My grandparents came out after the war. Why?”
‘“Harvey’ is Breton. It means ‘battleworthy’.” She stretched her legs. “I am the hunter in my trinity and Mia is the hunter in hers. I had assumed the female would be the hunter in the third. But I was wrong. I think you are supposed to be the hunter, Blake. It makes sense. It balances. Two female, one male. The triangle again.”
He jumped. “Ma’am, I’m a New York City police lieutenant. I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that vampires and elves actually exist and have been trying to halt an invasion of Grimoré for the last two years from wiping out humanity as we know it. You can’t start telling me I’m supposed to lead the charge on top of it.”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you, Blake.” Her voice was cool. Even.
He stood up, wishing mightily that he’d had the foresight to grab his shirt before they’d jumped to the keep. It stole his authority to stand there arguing in just his trousers. But it didn’t seem to bother Seaveth. “You know I should have reported into my desk about three hours ago? They’re going to start wondering where I am any moment.”
“We called you in,” Seaveth said. “You’re pulling a rare sick day, Lieutenant.”
His jaw descended.
“We have a policy of assimilation here, Blake,” she said softly. “I wouldn’t jeopardize your career. I made sure your job was covered as soon as I realize what was happening. Mia is superb at administrative detail. I got her to take care of it. I hope you don’t mind?”
He found his back pressing against the opposite wall. He let himself slide down it. “Sure,” he said stupidly. “So I’m supposed to go back to being a lieutenant and hunt down Grimoré in my spare time?”
“We’ll figure out the details later but something like that, yes.” She gripped her thighs. “I have to admit, Blake, that you may be my life preserver. We couldn’t have gone on much longer without the police department cracking our façade somewhere along the line. With you on the inside, it’s going to be a little easier to work it now.”
“You’re speaking like you’ve already got my agreement,” he growled. “I don’t remember signing on the dotted line yet.”
She smiled. “You forget. I’ve been through the bonding. I know its power.”
* * * * *
Sera watched Diego prowl the length of the guest suite with growing nervousness. Anger seemed to be building inside him toward an explosion she wasn’t sure she wanted to witness.
The door to the suite opened and Blake stepped in. She glimpsed the armed guards outside before the door closed.
“So, the cozy love nest is complete,” Diego growled.
Blake threw himself into a chair. “It’s not like I’m thrilled about it, either, Diego.”
Sera gripped her hands together. “I thought the bonding…eased things along.”
“I believe it helps if you’re willing to give it half a chance,” Blake said coolly. He glanced at Diego. “He’s not.”
Diego snorted and resumed his pacing.
“And you, Blake?”
“If we’re not all in this, there’s no point, is there?”
Sera got to her feet. “I’ll be a few minutes. Oh…” She moved to the tiny kitchenette area. “I have something for you.” She opened the cupboard and withdrew a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label and a heavy crystal glass and an ice bucket. “Enjoy,” she said.
Diego could feel the tension in his gut like a primed grenade. He didn’t know what to do with it. His one abortive conversation with Alexander had gone exactly nowhere because Alex had been distracted by Wyatt’s injuries and Mia had been running around organizing stuff for Sera. He’d found no relief there.
He watched Blake pour a belt of scotch into the glass and knock it back and his throat contracted. He moved over to the counter and pulled out another glass from the cupboard.
“Give me some of that.”
Blake, in the act of pouring more into his own glass, hesitated. “You can do that? Drink alcohol?”
“Eat, drink, in small amounts, to fool humans. You have to purge afterward, you understand?” He grimaced and shoved the glass forward. “Give me some.”
“Are you sure?”
He knew he would pay for it. “No,” he growled. “But I want some, damn it.”
Blake shrugged and poured two fingers into the glass.
Diego picked up the glass and took a large mouthful. It tasted wonderful. It was ambrosial. He closed his eyes, remembering the subtle, peaty delight of it, letting it coat his tongue and teeth and the back of his throat. Then, finally, he swallowed and enjoyed the burn of it and the aftertaste.
He put the glass down.
“How long since you had scotch?” Blake asked softly.
“About three hundred years. On the one hundredth anniversary of my turning. God, what a night.” He laughed. “This stuff nearly killed me. They called it something else back then but it was as fine a drop as it is now.” He thumped his chest and looked at Blake and grinned. “You’re going to have to stop looking like a deer in the headlights every time someone speaks about something that happened to them a few centuries ago. You’ll go into adrenaline overload inside two days.”
