But the house looked eerily like this one, Sabine thought. The Valbonne manse had a distinct look, with arched windows, periwinkle shutters, and vines running up the stone walls. The weathervane atop the pergola was adorned with a copper gargoyle. And the driveway curved down to a tall, scrolled iron gate.
Sabine rubbed her eyes. How did these violent images mesh with the peace in this household? She needed to look for patterns, to think with a physician’s cool detachment.
Marie-Therese was curled up at the foot of the bed, so Sabine eased off the mattress and opened the balcony door. The night air smelled of lavender, cypress, and overripe plums. She stiffened as a car drove slowly past the house. The vehicle backed up, red taillights blinking, then pulled into the driveway. The head-beams shone against the iron security gate. Sabine’s pulse slammed in her ears, and she gripped the terrace railing.
GO AWAY. She held her breath, then slowly released it.
The headlights retreated. The car backed into the road and drove in the opposite direction. The taillights glided down the road and dipped behind a hill.
The smell of plums vanished, too.
Think, Sabine. She tapped her index finger against her lips. Should she wake Lena? Vivi was a seasoned traveler and would not ask questions. In an hour, the three of them could pack the car, drive to the Nice airport, and wait for the first available flight to Paris. No, the shattered door had felt like Paris, and the bloody restroom had felt like London. Where could they go? Some place she hadn’t dreamed about.
Vivi’s training had gone well, but the self-defense aspects couldn’t be completed in good conscience. Not with living beings. It was one thing to Induce portly tourists to eat a salad rather than palmiers or an apricot tart—Sabine had been right there with Vivi, monitoring her pulse and respiration, making sure the tourists were safe. It was another to make an innocent person have a nosebleed, or worse.
Teaching the theory of advanced hemakinesis was akin to reading about brain surgery in a textbook and then trying to drill through the skull of a breathing patient. Last night, she’d given Vivi a crash course, but she’d only frightened the child. And scared students seldom retained information.
The headlights returned, moving crookedly down the road. Was it the same car or a different one? A drunk driver, perhaps? She began to breathe slowly. Then she cast an imaginary net over the car and tried to pull in the thoughts of its occupants.
A black tangle spun up, raw and sexual. Sabine’s head jerked back. She counted four men and one woman. The woman was pleasuring the driver. The other men were aroused and impatient.
Sabine jerked the net away. She had no way of knowing if the people in the car were college students, tourists, or murderers. Most likely, they’d drunk too much wine and weren’t dangerous.
The car lights swerved to the right, straightened for a moment, then swung left. A screech of tires echoed, and the car stopped. The headlight beams glowed like a predator’s eyes. Finally the car did a U-turn and drove north, moving faster and faster, the taillights skimming over a hill. Then the road went dark and still as a painting.
Sabine crept back to bed, but she couldn’t sleep. She chewed her thumbnail, trying to remember where she’d put the melatonin. She lay in bed until the sky was the color of an oyster shell. She got out of bed and checked the road again.
Empty.
She looked past the hills, toward Valbonne. Above the town, the early morning sky resembled melted pewter. Her slippers brushed over the wooden floor as she paced in front of the fireplace before sitting on the bed. The bedroom was suffused with a gray pallor, lending a graveyard aura to the white walls and beamed ceiling. Her bedroom was the only white room in the house—the paleness had always soothed her, but now it felt menacing.
I need color, she thought. She rolled off the bed, opened the maple armoire, and pulled out a purple caftan. She lifted the cat, then tiptoed down the hall, past Vivi’s closed door and past Lena’s open one, with its piles of cookbooks, rag rugs, and green Murano vases. When Sabine got downstairs, she paused in the living room. Last year, she’d painted this room a muted shade of apricot, and the walls seemed warm and womblike. Lena had been so pleased. “Your hurt places are starting to heal,” she’d said.
Sabine knew different. Her décor was a textbook example of Freud’s iceberg metaphor. Her apartment in Paris represented the ego and superego; but the Valbonne house was pure id, the childish part of Sabine. Just beyond this room, she saw the green-and-apricot kitchen, with its tiled backsplash and copper pots. Paisley curtains hung over the cupboards, and messy heaps of dishes poked out. The disorder stilled her mind.
She turned back to the apricot living room, and her gaze stopped on the bookcase. She set down the cat, pulled Elemental Kinesis from the shelf, and carried it to the sofa. She opened the book, flipped past the hemakinesis chapter, and stopped on the electromagnetic section. Vivi could manipulate the thoughts of others with skill, but new talents were developing.
The other day in the garden, the girl had demonstrated an aptitude for phyllokinesis, a capacity for influencing plant life, though influencing was a mild description: Vivi had made grapes burst open.
Sabine tapped her fingernail against the book. Vivi’s powers were inconsistent with case studies of other hybrids, which were admittedly few, but still. The girl sometimes had precognitive dreams, but she lacked telepathy. When a young hybrid demonstrated three psi skills, it indicated the presence of other, latent talents, such as pyrokinesis, hydrokinesis, or biokinesis. The ability to control fire and water was uncommon, and she’d never read about a case of biokinesis, which was the ability to rearrange DNA. Vivi was an uncommon girl, and it was impossible to know when, or if, these skills might emerge.
She set the book aside and went to the kitchen. Marie-Therese trotted behind her, letting out indignant meows. Sabine poured kibble into a bowl. The sun was coming up, staining the room with pink light. She shuffled to the window. The road was still empty, but it resembled a coiled black snake.
By the time Vivi and Lena came downstairs, Sabine had prepared breakfast. No cream puffs or brioche, no mascarpone or marmellata. She served caffe latte, a mixture of espresso and warm milk, along with fruit.
Vivi stared down at the food, her lips forming a rumpled line. “Can’t we have a frittata?”
“The brain is sharper with caffeine and complex carbohydrates,” Sabine told her.
They went to Grasse, as promised, and Sabine started to calm down. They bought fruit in the market, then came home. She and Vivi spent the rest of the day working—the girl had succeeded in bursting dozens of tomatoes and eggplants.
Despite the success, tiny seeds of dread took hold in Sabine’s mind. The hairs on her arms prickled, and she felt slightly nauseated. It was the same apprehension she’d experienced in medical school, when she’d run up the stairs to ICU for a code blue.
After the sun went down, Vivi and Lena went to the kitchen to make chocolate-dipped strawberries. Sabine and Marie-Therese stayed in the apricot-colored room, resting on the sofa, watching television. Sky News was full of gloom. A man had been tortured and murdered in a Heathrow restroom. Authorities in Paris were still puzzled over a recent home invasion that had resulted in a fire and six deaths.
The reporter moved on to another story, but Sabine kept staring blankly at the screen. The seeds inside her chest grew into hard, green knobs. It hurt to breathe.
From the kitchen, the phone trilled in three short bursts, indicating that a car was at the gate. If Sabine pressed 2, the gate would open.
“Don’t open the gate,” she called.
Lena appeared in the doorway, clutching a red dishtowel. “I didn’t. But they got it open somehow.”
Sabine lifted the cat and got off the sofa. “Take Vivi and Marie-Therese upstairs and hide.”
Lena took the cat and ran back to the kitchen. Sabine got up and opened the front door. Behind her, she heard footsteps creaking on the stairs. Vivi was
asking if she’d done anything wrong, and Lena made soft shushing noises.
Sabine walked down the curved path. A full moon lit up the upper part of the driveway. Car lights swept around the curve, and a dusty white Audi stopped at the edge of the walkway. A woman got out, the wind stirring her short blond hair. She wore a tan linen jacket and dark slacks. Her pretty face held no emotion. Her thoughts were black and twisty.
“How may I help you?” Sabine called, folding her arms. Her eyes narrowed as she remembered the car she’d seen last night. Was this the same woman who’d pleasured those men? No, surely not, Sabine told herself. She had no logical reason to connect the two women.
The blonde flashed a badge and tucked it inside her jacket, giving a teasing glimpse of a holster.
“I’m from the Grasse Police,” she said. Her accent was definitely not French. Nor did she have the demeanor of an officer.
“Yes?” Sabine looked past her. The four men stayed in the car: a driver with bushy black hair; three men with buzz cuts in the backseat, their shoulders pressed together. The blonde smiled. “Caroline Barrett asked me to find her daughter. There’s been an accident.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. What kind of accident?” Sabine’s gaze sharpened. Should she take out the blonde now? No, first she should disable the men.
“We’ve been instructed to take Vivienne to her mother,” the blonde said. She put her hand on her hips, and her sleeve pulled up, showing the top curve of a black infinity tattoo, a green snake twisted in the loops.
Sabine smiled, but her brain was rapidly assembling facts. The blonde had no telepathic skills, and she was struggling to hide her thoughts. The name Tatiana Kaskov floated up.
Breathing in and out, Sabine pushed out an Inductive thought.
Relax, Tatiana.
The blonde smiled. Her hand slid off her hip, and then she looked back at the Audi and waved to the men. When she turned back to Sabine, she frowned, as if she were disappointed.
“We’re in a hurry,” she said.
Sabine punched another thought at the woman. You’re at the wrong house, Tatiana.
The blonde’s forehead tightened.
Sabine punched harder. Wrong house. Go away.
The blonde sucked in a breath. Her eyelids fluttered. “I’m at the wrong house?”
“Yes.” Sabine tensed her stomach muscles, and she felt a whoosh push away from inside her head. YES.
The blonde took another hitching breath, then spun around, as if unseen hands had wrenched her shoulders.
Sabine drew in her breath, held it, and sent out another burst. The air around her seemed to warp and ripple, like the oily film that rises from a charcoal grill. Then the blonde’s head jerked forward. Her hand went to her face. She looked back at Sabine, blood running through her fingers.
Turn around. Get in your car. Lock the door.
Sabine shifted her gaze to the driver and aimed a thought in his direction. Unzip your trousers.
The driver looked down at his lap. The Audi’s rear doors opened, and the other men got out. They were lean, bronzed, and dark-haired. White T-shirts. Loose-fitting sweat pants. Tennis shoes. Slung around their hips were black nylon gun holsters.
“Tatiana?” called a man with clipped brown hair.
The woman, Tatiana, leaned over and propped her hand on her knee. Blood streamed out of her nose and pattered onto the gravel. She clamped her other hand over her nostrils and took a mincing step toward the car.
“What is wrong with me?” she cried, blood forking down her wrist, skating between her knuckles.
The driver didn’t look up; he kept staring down at his lap. A man with a ponytail hurried away from the Audi and squatted beside Tatiana.
“Are you all right?” he said in heavily accented English.
“Obviously not,” she snapped.
He peeled off his T-shirt and held it to her nose. A dark dampness spread over the fabric.
Tatiana was sobbing, blubbering to herself.
Blubbering in Russian, Sabine noticed. She drew in a breath. The night air reeked of blood and ketones; but she wasn’t afraid. Long ago, she’d learned how to control her response to fear, and her mind was alert and dispassionate. She tightened her stomach muscles, trying to decide if she should Induce all of the intruders at once, imploring them to leave, or if she should use hemakinesis. Induction sped up the metabolic rate and eventually caused fatigue. Vampires weren’t always affected by projection. Hemakinesis had few side-effects. She could do all three, but it would be imperative to keep the energy flowing, the way a one-woman orchestra keeps the music playing, and that was damned hard. She needed to stop wasting time and make a decision.
Definitely hemakinesis. Sabine focused on the ponytailed man beside Tatiana.
His head jerked. As he got to his feet, blood oozed out of his eyes and nose. He screamed and put his hands on his face. Behind him, a bow-legged man stepped away from the Audi. Sabine blasted him. He halted, then rubbed his ear on his shoulder, leaving a stain on his shirt sleeve. She zapped him again. His lips parted, as if he were trying to speak, then he dropped straight to the ground.
The man with clipped brown hair walked in front of the car, his forehead puckered, and shouted something in Turkish.
Sabine saw into his mind. He liked little girls.
That bastard. Sabine opened her mouth wide, then sucked in a harsh breath and held it; she tightened every muscle in her body, then sent out a burst of energy.
The man’s feet left the ground, and he fell back onto the Audi’s hood. His left tennis shoe kicked out the headlight, and glass tinkled to the gravel. Blood jetted from his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. He slid down, leaving a red streak on the white hood, then fell to the driveway and didn’t move.
Sabine shut her eyes, breathing in and out. She pushed a gentle thought at Lena. Put Marie-Therese in a closet. Bring Vivi downstairs. Run out the back door. Hide in the vineyard. Go!
When she opened her eyes, she saw two silver Peugeot vans pull into the driveway and glide through the open gate and up the hill, gravel pinging against the fenders like bullets hitting a steel door. It was too dark too see inside each vehicle, so Sabine cast an imaginary net over both. She counted ten men, five in the first van, five in the second. All human.
Too many, she thought, the back of her neck prickling. At least they were mortal, which meant they would be easier to disable. She could project an illusion—the humans brain was so receptive—but she could project only wasps, and not for long. It required sustained focus, and she had the others to worry about. But she had to try.
Her gaze swerved back to the ponytailed man who’d helped Tatiana. He had stopped howling, but his eyes were still bleeding. He was stumbling around the Audi, both hands extended, a stain spreading down the front of his T-shirt.
Tatiana was digging her shoes into the gravel, trying to get to her feet.
“What is happening?” she screamed, the cords on her neck taut and reedy. Her lips and chin were dark red and glistening, as if she’d dipped them into a freshly gutted deer. She stood, legs wobbling.
The silver Peugeot vans were halfway up the driveway, so Sabine knew she had to work fast.
Tatiana, get in the front seat. See to the driver. He is waiting for you. He wants you. As Sabine let out a breath, the air roiled and shimmered.
Tatiana was wrenched backward, hard. Gravel spun away from her shoes, but she quickly regained her footing.
Meurs, pute, Sabine thought. She wanted this whore to die painfully. She sent another burst at the woman’s belly.
“It hurts,” Tatiana said, wincing. A blush spread in the V of her crotch. She crept back to the Audi, ignoring the dead man, who lay sprawled beside the front tire. She got into the passenger seat.
Sabine watched the silver vans roll to a stop behind the Audi. The doors opened and men in Hawaiian shirts got out. Each top was a different color, but the pattern was the same: parrots, oversized flowers, and palm fronds. The m
en were big-boned and muscular, with pale eyes, buzz cuts, and sunburned faces.
Project the illusion. A droning sound hummed in Sabine’s head, as if freshly hatched wasps were trapped inside her eardrums. She visualized thousands of stinging insects, then projected this image at the men in the floral shirts.
“What the fuck,” one of the men said. The others scattered away from the vans, cursing and stamping the ground, their hands swatting the empty air.
Americans. Sabine looked past their conscious thoughts, into their memories. It was like spinning a dial on a radio, a mishmash of static and music, but the same words rose up. Paramilitary. Blackwater. Iraq. Afghanistan. Post-Katrina New Orleans.
The driver in the second van got out, his hand sliding inside the waistband of his shorts, as if he were reaching for a gun. He resembled the others: a navy, parrot-strewn Hawaiian shirt, nondescript eyes, buzz haircut, athletic physique. The breeze lifted the edge of his shirt, and Sabine saw a belt holster. He grabbed a man in a red floral shirt. “What the hell are you doing?” he yelled. He didn’t get an answer and flung the man away. Muttering to himself, he strode past the Audi and glanced through the passenger window. His eyebrows slanted together and he stumbled back, his sunburn turning a deep purple-red. A pulse beat in his neck as he walked around the Audi’s blood-streaked hood, then his gaze passed over the bodies in the driveway. His eyes hardened as he looked at Sabine.
“What happened to these people?” he called. He reached into his belt holster and pulled out a gun.
Sabine hit him with an aggressive wallop. He dropped to his knees, and his mouth opened wide. His expression resembled the screaming man in Edvard Munch’s painting. He coughed. Blood dribbled over his lips, then he coughed again, and a bright red gash spurted into the air. Another burst came out of his mouth. He hit the ground, and a dark puddle spread out him.
Sabine caught her breath. She’d aimed for his lungs, but she’d struck the aorta. And she’d failed to keep projecting imaginary wasps. The other men in Hawaiian shirts were starting to calm down, muttering to each other. Their broad As and dropped Rs reminded Sabine of her old Harvard professor.
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