“How do you know Danny Novak?”
“I don’t, but I am trying to trace him. He’s missing from a—youth home—in Oregon. The director asked me to look into it.”
“Why you?”
“Why not? How do you know Daniel?” she asked in turn. “Why are you hunting him? You’re a long way from home and your usual pursuits, Haven.”
Haven leaned back in the booth and studied the girl through the rising steam as she took delicate sips of coffee. She somehow managed to look fragile, ladylike, and tough as steel at the same time. She’d taken off her raincoat, and he thought it a pity that her long legs were tucked out of view under the tabletop. Under the coffee shop lights her tousled hair looked like wet autumn leaves. She had big gray eyes, flat cheekbones, a pointed chin and wide mouth, porcelain skin, and a general glow of curious enthusiasm. Perky, he thought, pretty rather than beautiful. She had nice tits, though, round and full and nicely outlined by the lightweight blue sweater she was wearing.
She also knew his name and that he was looking for the Novak kid. “What do you mean, ‘usual pursuits’?” He took a sip of coffee and tried to ignore the scalding heat that spread from his mouth and all the way down his throat when he swallowed. It took him a second to get his breath back, and she watched him with big gray eyes the whole time. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”
Char considered her answer. The longer a strigoi was around, the more likely it was for him or her to go by a single name or attribute. She’d certainly been working on developing her persona, the vampire identity of Char the Hunter. Well, she hadn’t done anything yet to earn the persona, but she’d been thinking about it a lot. Sitting across the table from a man as bone-deep dangerous as Jebel Haven, she felt rather silly proclaiming her Charness. She knew very well that in theory she could kill him in a blink, but she owed this character who had done a good many bad and brave things a bit of respect.
“Charlotte McCairn,” she answered his question. “My friends call me Char. I mention this in passing,” she added, “not as an offer of friendship.” Then, because she was far too curious and couldn’t help but ask since she had the man in front of her, “Is your name really Jebel Haven?” She assumed the name to be an alias but hadn’t tried to trace the man’s identity beyond the incident that had changed him from a criminal to a hero.
“Yes.” Haven didn’t know why he answered. Maybe it was because the intense, focused interest she turned on him was almost impossible to resist. Kind of cute, too. “My dad worked for an oil company in the Middle East. He heard that Jebel means mountain, or something like that, in Arabic. Thought it was cool. And I don’t like being called Jeb,” he added. Sometimes Baker or Santini called him Jeb, but they were friends, so he let them live. He put the cup to one side of the table and leaned closer. “And how do you know who I am?”
Char stirred another packet of raw sugar into her coffee and considered how to answer him. She flicked a few of the brown sugar crystals into her hand and licked them off her fingers. She was surprised at the intense way Jebel Haven focused on this simple action. It occurred to her that some of her clumsy effort at seducing him had carried over into this meeting. When she glanced at him, he looked as coolly self-possessed as ever. She assumed an equally poker-faced countenance for a few seconds.
Finally she smiled and answered quietly, “That’s easy, Mr. Haven. I know who you are, because I, too, am a vampire hunter.”
His surprise registered against several of her senses, but his expression didn’t change one bit. “Really?” was his sarcastic response.
He glanced around. He had amazingly dark brown eyes and quite long lashes. No one was close enough to where they sat to overhear. She wondered if he wondered about the absence of anyone at nearby booths and tables on a busy Friday night.
Once he was sure they weren’t overheard, Haven said equally quietly, “You kill vampires.”
She was surprised that it wasn’t a question. She gazed at him steadily. “I notice you have not yet denied the existence of such creatures.”
“I’ve met a few fiends from hell,” he answered.
“So you have.” She drank more coffee, enjoying the combination of caffeine, sugar, and delicious irony without disrespecting the man’s skills.
In a manner of speaking, he had faced fiends from one religion’s version of hell. Faced them and fought them quite bravely, but until a few minutes ago, he’d never met any vampires. Strictly speaking, Char supposed that he still hadn’t met any regulation strigoi, as she was something of an ubervampire these days.
“How many vampires have you killed?”
“One,” she answered honestly.
“What was it like?”
Delicious. Char barely caught herself from saying this. She gave him a slightly confused look. “What do you mean?”
Dark brows came down over dark eyes. “What kind of vampire did you kill?”
She wondered if she should innocently ask what he meant. “You don’t believe me,” she said instead. He didn’t deny it. Char held her hands above the table. They were long-fingered and slender, delicate-looking to this big man, she supposed, though the shape at the base of the cuticle might appear a bit thicker than normal to someone who looked closely. She kept her nails short and wore no rings. Her hands didn’t grow any larger when she changed, but the claws of a Nighthawk were quite impressive. “You don’t have to appear dangerous all the time to kill vampires,” she said.
Haven looked her over in a way that would have been deeply insulting if it hadn’t also been so warming. Char blushed from the inside out in a way that left her very nearly light-headed. Meanwhile, Haven laughed softly and said, “I believe that you killed a vampire, sweetheart.” He shrugged. “I’ve seen a fifteen-year-old girl kill vampires.” His face lost all expression again, except for a flash of pain deep in his dark eyes. When he went on, his voice was flat and hard. “I asked you what kind of vampire you killed.”
Char supposed this was where she ought to deviate from telling the truth for the good of the secret world Jebel Haven was on the edge of discovering. It was not lost on her that she had approached him to learn what he was doing in Seattle but that he was the one acquiring all the information for the price of a cup of coffee. “One of the smarter ones,” she told him. “An urban one. I know the blood-drinking creatures you’ve dealt with hide in the countryside and—How shall I put this?—that they’ve spent too many generations marrying their cousins.”
He laughed. “If that was how the bastards reproduced, I’d agree with that. They’ve got some cunning, but mostly they’re stupid little shits. With big teeth,” he added.
“The creatures you kill spread an infection. Death really is the best thing for them.”
The infection was the result of a spell gone wrong and had nothing to do with the Strigoi way of becoming a vampire. Haven’s creatures had been created when a priest prayed over some Native American slaves he was trying to convert so he could better exploit them. The prayer was from an ancient book the Church had banned and ordered burned (along with the alchemist sorcerer who’d written it) hundreds of years before this seventeenth-century colonial joker decided to set up the spell to help his search through the Southwest for gold. Who knew how the priest had gotten his hands on the forbidden grimoire? What was known was that he thought a spirit of meekness would enter the people he was trying to control. What he got was a total mess. Yes, the people the spell transformed ate flesh, feared the light, thirsted for blood, and were afraid of crosses in the manner of movie vampires. That was because of the priest’s melding Catholic dogma with an ancient magical spell.
“You sound like you feel sorry for the bastards.”
“Sorry for all the centuries’ worth of victims, yes. But let’s talk about urban monsters, shall we? And Daniel?” She put her arm on the table and leaned forward. “Why are you interested in Daniel?”
“Why are you?” was Haven’s grudging, suspicious answer.
> She wanted to hit him. No, she wanted to spit a piece of shotgun ammunition in his face, and then hit him, with her claws extended. But Char was very good at controlling herself. She said, “You are a pain in the posterior, Mr. Haven.”
He ducked his head and smiled up at her through long lashes. “Posterior. That’s a dainty word.” He straightened up. “What does an amateur vampire hunter—”
“Amateur!”
“—have to do with the Novak kid’s being missing from a shelter in Oregon? And how’d he end up at a shelter in Oregon?”
“He was kidnapped and sexually assaulted.” She answered his second question first and tried to be more amused than annoyed at his granting her amateur status.
“This was when he first disappeared? From college?”
“He was in college?” She held up a hand. “I know very little about Daniel’s past. I only know that he washed up at the home of a woman who takes in damaged adolescents, then disappeared again. She suspected Daniel of being involved in a . . . human-sacrificing satanic cult for want of a better term. She knows I look into that sort of thing. I looked into it. I think he’s involved with something a great deal more serious.”
He stroked his jaw thoughtfully. “Most people would think that kind of cult was pretty serious.”
“We’re not most people, Mr. Haven.”
He gave a slight shrug.
“You still haven’t told me how you came to be looking for Daniel.”
“His mom hired me to find him.”
She tilted an eyebrow at him. “You aren’t a private investigator.”
“His mom’s with the Bureau. A profiler. She thinks he’s involved with a human-sacrificing satanic cult, too.”
Char sat up straight. “The Bureau? FBI?” He nodded. She bit off a swear word as she fought down a flash of panic and an urge to look around suspiciously. “The last thing we need is any involvement with the feds.”
“Especially if there’s been permanent changes in Danny boy’s overbite.”
Char couldn’t think of any response to this. She was too taken aback by the news of FBI involvement with the strigoi to do much more than stare at the mortal slouched in the seat opposite her. What had Daniel gotten the strigoi into?
She was almost frazzled enough to look the mortal in the eye and ask this question out loud. As if the man she’d been ordered to kill because he was likely to stumble onto the truth about real vampires was suddenly some sort of ally. Fortunately, she was able to keep her tongue in her head, though she gripped the table so hard she left finger marks in the laminated wood.
Also fortunately, Jebel Haven didn’t have time to notice her wrecking the furniture, because his partner shoved through the crowd to reach them. Santini’s face split into a wide grin as she and Haven turned their heads to look at him.
Santini pointed at Char. “One of us, right?”
“Yes,” Char answered, giving Santini an intense, convincing look. Strong-minded as he was, he also had a touch of psychic gifting. She could influence him. She smiled at him and thought good thoughts.
“She made claims,” Haven told his partner.
“Night’s not getting any younger,” Santini said, rocking back and forth on his heels. He jerked a thumb toward the exit. “Let’s take a walk, Jebel, miss.”
“Char.”
“Welcome to the club, Char.”
Haven slipped out of the booth without another look her way. The two men walked away, Haven elaborately ignoring her. Santini was excited. He obviously had news, information. Char didn’t hesitate a moment before grabbing her raincoat and following them.
Chapter 14
OF COURSE CHARLOTTE McCairn followed them into the night. Haven gave her a warning look as she came up behind him and was answered by a quizzically tilted eyebrow.
“We’re both looking for the same thing,” she reminded him. “What have you got, Santini?” she called to the biker leading the way across the square.
“A guy with an address,” Santini called back to her. “His sister’s been living with the Angel’s Children.” He laughed. “That’s what they call themselves. He’s pissed cause she’s turning tricks for them instead of him.”
“Charming,” Charlotte said. Haven almost smiled at her sarcasm.
Santini looked back, his glance going to the girl instead of Haven. “You’re packing, right, Char?”
“Definitely.” She moved up to walk beside Haven. “We’re just going to check this group out, right? Not get into a firefight?”
“We?” Haven asked.
Santini gave his manic grin. “Well, if the kid’s there, maybe we can shake, bake, and stake.”
Haven silently cursed Santini’s in-your-face, what-the-fuck attitude. Discretion was too large a word for the biker’s limited vocabulary. Hell, usually it was too much for his. What Haven was good at was killing. Only lately he’d gotten a stupid idea that there were things going on beneath the surface of even the underground world that needed more than good reflexes, stubbornness, and cunning to deal with.
The way the woman called out as she died, and the werewolf encounter were proof that there was more evil than he’d realized in the world. All he’d had to do was leave his usual territory to hunt for Danny Novak, and he’d landed smack in the middle of a situation that was deeper and darker than he was prepared for. Prepared or not, he’d handle it. He’d been handling it, even before the appearance of a new girl in town.
He’d planned on finding out what the girl knew, then dumping her and getting on with his business. It was not his problem if the kid wanted to call herself a vampire hunter and get herself torn to shreds or worse for her trouble. She wasn’t going to be dying because of him. But he didn’t want her dying in front of him, either.
Sara had said that it wasn’t his fault, had forgiven him, had tried to smile at him just as he put the wooden bullets into her brain and her heart. Sara had been eighteen and a veteran of the vampire wars. A partner. A friend. A victim. She was dead because of him.
“Screw it,” he muttered and firmly shut off thoughts about the past. “Where’s this new friend of yours?” he asked Santini as they reached a spot under a streetlight a few blocks closer to Elliot Bay.
“Guy said he’d wait here,” Santini answered. “Looks like he didn’t.” He gave a casual shrug. “Doesn’t matter. He gave me an address. Native guide would have been nice.”
“You’ve got one.” Char told the men from Tucson. “Seattle’s my hometown.” She pulled her car keys out of her raincoat pocket. “My car’s near here.” She looked at Haven. “Just how close is your car? Time’s fleeing, Mr. Haven.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he growled. “Fine. You win. You drive. Let’s go.”
“Not much farther,” Char said, though no one had actually asked her about an ETA. Friday night traffic in the downtown area had been bad. Then, once they were in quieter streets, she’d made a few false turns and had to backtrack a few times. The magic was making navigating hard but not impossible. What did bother her was that the digital clock in the dashboard read 2:05.
When she hadn’t been psychically suggesting that Jebel Haven meet her this evening, Char had spent her dream time really looking at the city. Now that she was aware of the obscuring spells, she was much less confused by them. She did not have to use her complete concentration to drive, which was good, because she had a lot to think about regarding the man sitting so closely beside her. He was large, her car was small, he couldn’t help but fill the front while Santini sat in the backseat.
Jebel Haven had a guilty conscience. He radiated anguish while he stared expressionlessly through the windshield. Char knew all about Sara Breslow, the young woman who’d died while working with Haven, Baker, and Santini. Haven was probably comparing her to Sara. She was sure he blamed himself for the girl’s death. Then there was the guilt over all the things he must have done before an attack by a band of blood-drinking parasites on a desert hideout converted the survivors into
a band of God-fearing crusaders. Jebel Haven had done a good deal to make up for his past, but he still didn’t have a lot of reasons to like himself very much. He’d probably be grateful to be put out of his misery when she finally got around to killing him.
Much to her annoyance, she had to change her plan to whack him tonight. Killing Haven before dawn was no longer an option. She had a lot more to find out from him than she’d originally thought. Char recognized this fact and was furious for having been so honest with him. It was all very well and good to tell him the truth when she thought he only had a few minutes to live, but then he’d dropped the bombshell that he was working for the FBI or someone in the FBI. Her plans had had to change.
She wondered if that was why Istvan had ordered the hit on Haven. Not only was the mortal looking to turn his formidable destructive talents on different types of supernatural beings, but the Council was aware that he was now working with the feds. No government anywhere in the world could be allowed to know of the existence of the strigoi. It was a Law. But how could the Strigoi Council know that and not tell her? After all, she was the one whose research had uncovered Haven’s existence in the first place. If he could feel guilty about Breslow’s death, she could feel guilty about his. On many levels. When it happened.
In the meantime, there was Daniel, the sorcerer, and the demon connection to untangle. Soon, she hoped, as she pulled into a parking space half a block away from a building she couldn’t see but knew was there. She couldn’t see it because of the deep concentration of protective spells. Something had to be hidden in the heart of all that magic.
“We’re here,” she announced to her passengers.
“Where?” Haven got out of the car and slammed the door behind him. Char and Santini followed him onto the sidewalk. He gestured. “There’s a hole . . . in . . .”
“Let’s go,” Santini said, and started forward.
Laws of the Blood 2: Partners Page 11
