Lore felt the horizon snuff out the last of the sun’s glow. Talia’s eyes flickered open. They reflected the dim light of the room like a cat, a sudden flash of yellow.
Lore knew enough to wait before approaching the bed. There was a moment when a vampire woke when the body was active, but the mind still asleep. For those first few seconds, the newly made were unpredictable.
Sure enough, she launched herself across the bed toward him. A trapped animal. Nothing but rage, fear, and hunger.
Lore grabbed her shoulders. “Talia!”
She froze, and the silence was potent. He could almost hear her mind booting up like a balky computer. Then he saw personality flooding back, filling up her face.
“You.” The word was filled with meaning—disgust, relief, regret, and a touch of desire. Then he saw pain. “Last night . . . it all really happened.”
“Yes.”
“Of course it did.” She sank back on the bed, jamming her hands through her hair. “Oh, God.”
Lore picked up a glass from the dresser top. “I brought you blood.”
“Get serious.” Hunger and revulsion collided in her face. “Whose is that?”
“I keep refreshments in the fridge. Beer, cola . . . and this. For friends. The hospital supplies it, if you know the right people.”
“Bagged blood is—it doesn’t work. We can’t live on it. And it’s disgusting.”
She was right. Vampires needed the life essence of their victims as much as the protein from their blood, but the O Neg alone could keep them going for a few days. “I’m told it’s best cut liberally with vodka. I can make it into a cocktail, if you prefer.”
“I’d be hosed by six o’clock.”
“You’d stop complaining.”
“I’ll stay sober, thanks.” She eyed the glass, hunger obviously getting the upper hand. “Any chance of going out for a bite?”
“You’re safer here, where I can protect you.”
“Who elected you my bodyguard?”
“I’m a hellhound.” He handed her the glass, careful not to let their skin touch. He would not visit that slippery slope again. “Guarding is what we do.”
“Don’t I get a say in the matter?” She glanced up at him. “Don’t watch me.”
New vampires were squeamish about drinking blood, but he couldn’t afford to make a mistake. “I’m not turning my back on you. You’d figure out a way to hit me over the head.”
“Mangy beast.” She took a sip of the blood and made a face. “Omigod is that awful!”
“It’s a bit old.”
“Ugh!”
He moved to take it away, but she waved him off. Closing her eyes, she chugged the blood, draining it to the last drop. Then she held out the glass, eyes still screwed shut. When he took it, she clamped her hand over her mouth, her throat working. For a moment, Lore wondered if she was going to throw up. A thread of guilt wormed through him. “I’ll try and find a volunteer next time.”
She drew a long, shuddering breath. “Next time I’ll just bite you.”
The rest must have done her good, if she was up to slinging insults. “I’ve been told demon blood is low in nutrients.”
The look she gave him would have made a lesser hound grovel. Lore grinned. “You have to keep up your strength.”
“You’re a monster!”
“So are you.”
She hiccupped. He wondered again if she was going to be sick but, to his complete astonishment, she started to weep, little mewing sobs.
This was too much. He abandoned the dirty glass on the nightstand and sat down on the bed next to her. He laid a hand on her head, feeling the smooth silk of her dark hair. Stiffening, she folded her free arm across her stomach, clutching herself.
“I didn’t ask for this!” she muttered under her breath.
“I’m sorry.” Lore stroked her hair, rattled by her silent, angry sobbing. These were tears of rage as much as sorrow, her teeth clenched against her grief. “I’m working as fast as I can to find out who killed your cousin.”
When she didn’t pull away, he wrapped his arm around her shoulders. Talia was small by hellhound standards, but that made her fit neatly into the circle of his arm. She was so slender, he could feel her bones move as she wept. The utter, aching sadness of it stirred memories of his own. Species didn’t matter when it came to the kinship of sorrow.
Slowly, very slowly, Talia quieted. “You’re warm,” she murmured.
He pulled her closer. Vampires were always cold, and he had heat to spare. The perfumes she had been wearing had faded, and now he could smell her clearly, her unique musk imprinting on his memory. It smelled familiar, like a sweet tune he’d forgotten only to hear it in the most unexpected setting. He closed his eyes, memorizing the feel of her body against his. It felt so right.
This was wrong. He was the Alpha of his pack, and he shouldn’t be holding a strange female. He could feel his motivations turning murkier by the second, the desire to see justice done mixing with desire of another kind. So this is forbidden fruit.
“What happened to you?” Lore asked. “How did you end up in this mess?”
She closed her eyes. He studied her finely veined eyelids, delicate as a moth’s wing. “The answer depends on where you want to start.”
“The beginning.”
“When my brother turned thirteen, my father hung a picture over Max’s bed so that it was the last thing he saw at night. It was of a succubus devouring the flesh of her lover. It gave him nightmares. As long as I knew him, Max never bedded a woman more than once.”
Lore’s stomach rolled over. “Disturbing, but how did that get you here?”
“It says everything you need to know about where I came from. The rest was all me trying to make sense of everything my father did to us. I try to tell myself I’m not a victim, but it’s hard to believe sometimes. Home was like a prison, only stranger.”
She fell silent, as if talking had exhausted her. Lore kept his arm around her, feeling the tension in her muscles. She might be slumped against him, but she was wound to the breaking point. In the quiet, Lore could hear some optimist trying to start his frozen car.
“I know what it’s like to grow up in a prison,” he said.
“How did you get out?”
“One day, by pure chance, a doorway opened and a few of us escaped. It took a while before we could figure out the place we’d come to. Your world is so different. I’d never seen the sky or growing things.”
Talia put her hand on his forearm. It was a commonplace gesture, but it was the first time she’d made the first move to touch him. It made him feel humble and yet twice his size.
“As soon as I could, I went back for the rest. Many were held as slaves by the Castle warlords. We are stronger than many species, so the others kept children and wives as a guarantee that we would not turn on them. Many hounds would not leave their captive families behind. So I smuggled in goods that were scarce in there but plentiful here and bargained for every hound I could. Cloth. Books. Tools. Three pairs of shoes would buy a houndish child out of slavery. One by one, I got them out. Finally, I convinced the other species to help me rescue the rest of the pack who were still hiding in the dungeon corridors. It was a fierce battle, with many casualties. But no one was left behind as a prisoner.”
Talia blinked. “No one?”
“No.”
“You had nothing, and you got your people to safety. So why did this happen to me?” she whispered.
“No one asks to be the target of a killer.”
She seemed to choke for a moment. He saw tears leak from beneath her long, dark eyelashes. They trailed down her cheeks, glistening with a faint pink sheen. “That’s not it. I didn’t ask to be Turned.”
Lore stiffened, and she looked up. The stricken look in her eyes made her meaning clear. Few vampires were made, especially in these times when human law held sway. None were Turned without begging for it.
Unless Talia had already b
een murdered once before.
A cold, cold horror began to fill his chest. Beneath that, rage.
Chapter 16
Wednesday, December 29, 8:00 p.m.
101.5 FM
“Good evening, this is the CSUP news on 101.5 FM in Fairview. At the top of our headlines tonight is the fire that destroyed the South Fairview Medical Clinic and the campaign office of Michael de Winter, the first nonhuman to stand for election to city council. Although preliminary investigations do not reveal traces of an accelerant, according to Fairview Police Detective Derek Baines arson is indeed suspected. The news has rocked all of Fairview. Already, accusations of a hate crime are finding their way into the national media. Queen Omara, sponsor of de Winter’s candidacy, is rearranging her plans and will arrive in Fairview as soon as the weather permits.”
Wednesday, December 29, 8:00 p.m.
Lore’s condo
Talia heard the front door click shut. She was alone, lying on her side, her face to the wall. She’d cried herself into exhaustion and Lore had finally left, believing her asleep.
The anger and tears had been for Michelle, but also for herself. She’d pushed her own wounds aside for years, but they’d reopened, needing to be cried out, too.
Lore had simply held her. He hadn’t tried to tell her everything would be fine, and that made her enormously grateful. She didn’t need his lies—but then he’d said hellhounds couldn’t lie. That allowed a slim margin of trust to grow between them.
But what was she supposed to make of him? Mandog. Dog-man. Demon guy. She’d never met anyone like him. Hunters hunted monsters, they didn’t get to know them.
So what if she was one of the monsters now? It was something she’d been careful not to examine too closely. Existence was a day-by-day bargain between self-disgust and her instinct to survive. She’d never looked at her fellow Undead as anything but walking corpses. Maybe that had been shortsighted, but a person’s world view didn’t change just because they’d been bitten. Waking up dead wasn’t a great advertisement for interspecies relations.
But Lore was something else. As jailers went, he could have been much worse. There was no mistaking the power that clung to him like a second skin, but he hadn’t hurt her. That counted for a lot.
He did seem bent on finding the truth. That gave them something in common.
On top of that, he was easy on the eyes. She was a sucker for the hard, strong kind of guy who worked with his hands. The kind you knew could fix the sink or the car or the horrible day you’d had with his oh-so-capable touch. She bet Lore was just that type. A haircut and some wardrobe advice, and he’d be a definite hottie. Oh yeah, and he could use some advice on the whole handcuffing thing. Definite turnoff if it wasn’t handled just right.
But what did you expect from a monster? A wry smile twisted her lips. What does the word “monster” mean, anyway? Did it really describe a guy who walked into the hell he’d escaped and bargained for the lives of his people? That was the stuff of legends.
No one was left behind. The words had power over her, because she had been abandoned when it counted most. Over and over again.
What had Lore asked? How did she end up in this mess?
The kickoff really had been the incident with Max and the succubus painting. Talia was just old enough to see the incident as a wake-up call. Killing monsters was the hub of Hunter culture, but so was despising anything that made a man weak. That included women. Lust happened, but it was something to be sniggered at or hidden in dark corners. Her father was already shaping the way Max saw his future loves.
Most of the Hunter women accepted that they were second-class warriors and not much else, but Talia’s mom had been from outside the tribe. The male grip on Max was hard to break, but she’d given her daughter ideas. It was her mom that had given Talia the courage to strike out on her own.
Against her father’s wishes, Talia left for university. She’d done brilliantly, found a job she loved, built the start of a sane life—but such a lonely one. There’d been no one to fill the place of the tribe and all the close-knit family bonds she’d had from the cradle. She still loved and hated them at the same time, and with such passion. Too bad there was no Toxic Homes Anonymous.
Hi, my name is Talia and I can’t stay away from my homicidally screwed-up roots.
Her mistake had been letting family bonds drag her home again. Going back had cost her life. I tried to be a good daughter. I should have tried harder to become a good wife.
No, that last one would have been a disaster.
She sat up, pushing her hair out of her eyes. She’d survived her family, sort of. Even death hadn’t stopped her. She’d soldiered through that like she had everything else—but each battle took a little more out of her. Michelle’s loss had hit her hard. Grief had made it easy for Lore to capture her.
I can’t afford that. If I’m going to make it past this, I have to keep it together.
Talia closed her eyes, realizing the whole murdersuspect thing meant abandoning her teaching position. She felt a sudden, nostalgic wave for the hush of the university library, the scent of fresh paper, and that eager nervousness of September beginnings. I don’t want to lose that, too. Her students were her only real contact with the human world. The world of books was the one place where being a vampire didn’t matter.
The price for survival just kept getting higher. The only way to stop paying was to clear her name and go somewhere her past couldn’t reach her.
If she was going to find the killer, she had to be at the top of her game.
The bedsheets felt cool under her fingertips. She sat for a moment, watching the snow fall outside the window. Lore had left the drapes open, giving her a view of the winter scene. The drifting flakes invoked a sense of inevitability that was almost like peace.
Talia was definitely feeling—not exactly better, but calmer.
Okay, then, think.
She had defined goals: to find and punish Michelle’s killer, and to escape someplace where the rogue registry couldn’t find her. To accomplish either one, she needed her money, ID, clothes, and weapons.
She’d run out of Lore’s condo once already—straight into the cops. She was going to plan properly this time. I am calm and rational. I am in control. I spit in the eye of fate.
First, she wanted out of the bedroom. The memory of being chained to the bed was making her claustrophobic. Talia rose, walked to the door, and tried the handle.
It was locked. She rattled the handle a second time, just to be sure. A tingling spread over her hands, creeping up to her elbows like a glove of electricity. A spell.
Damn him! Lore had been so sympathetic, so kind, she thought he’d given her a refuge, not made her a prisoner again! Stupid, stupid, stupid! She’d granted him a glimmer of trust, and this is what happened. Fool!
A sense of betrayal flared through her. She clenched her teeth so hard the back of her skull ached. She’d been had. Now what am I going to do?
She could pick a lock. There wasn’t a thing she could do about magic.
Damn! She slammed the heel of her hand against the door in frustration.
Talia slid down the door until her rump hit the carpet. She was so going to tear the dog a new one once she got free. No one chained her up, locked her up, and fed her stale blood and got away with it! Fleas were too good for him.
Calm and rational, remember? She ground the heels of her hands into her eyes.
You haven’t tried the window yet. With a surge of hope, she got to her feet, crossed the room, and tried to push it open. A zap of electricity numbed her arm. She yanked it away.
Her whole body felt the low burn of frustration. Just let me go, you mangy bastard!
The sound of the door to the main hallway opening sent her skittering back from the window. Stupidly, she felt like a teenager caught ransacking the liquor cabinet.
There were voices. Several, and ones that she didn’t know. That threw a new wrench in the works. Who are t
hey? Police? Or the killer? The mysterious vampire?
She glared at the door. I’m caged here. A sitting duck. And Lore was out, nowhere around to protect her—and he’d locked her in so that she couldn’t protect herself. Idiot.
She needed a weapon, and she needed her freedom. A quick look around the room revealed only standard bedroom stuff. She opened the closet. A weapon could be anything, if it could stab or club.
Like a baseball bat. There it was, hiding in the corner behind a pile of junk. Talia picked it up almost lovingly. It was an old wooden one that bore the marks of many, many games. Perfect for smacking anything short of a full-blooded demon. If it broke, heck, it would make a great stake. Talia steps up to bat, and the crowd goes wild.
Finding a weapon had taken only seconds. Check.
Now for the door. Would Lore’s magic work on it if it wasn’t attached to the wall?
The construction in the building was better than most condos, but interior doors were for privacy, not security. They crumpled like paper if you knew what to do. Hunter 101.
The thought brought a spark of satisfaction.
Talia stripped off her dainty, high-heeled boots. The bedroom was crowded, but there was enough room for a good kick. A couple of steps and a twist, and she would lead with her heel and the full force of her anger. She tested the carpet—just enough nap to give great traction.
It was a perfect strike from the right hip. The door crashed open, pounding against the wall in an explosion of splinters and drywall. Talia landed on the balls of her feet, her fists raised to cover her face. In the next second, she swooped to pick up the bat, ready to swing.
A faint whiff of ozone filled the air.
On the other side of where the door had just been, Lore was turning around, eyes wide with surprise. Astonishment turned into a frown as he planted his feet and crossed his arms, looking like an irate Egyptian statue. “Getting impatient, I see.”
Astonished, she fell back a step. The doorway crackled, thin blue veins of electricity making jagged spider webs across the empty space. The spell guarding the door was still going strong. Crap!
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