Christian frowned. Family could be a problem, especially if they were religious. “What do they think about this?”
“He says they’re fine with it. They’re socialist for the most part, and not particularly religious.”
“He talked to them about it specifically?”
Marc nodded. “Apparently, he’s been considering this ever since he met Natalie. He knew about vampires before that, but she was the first person he’d come across with any personal knowledge. Frankly, I’m surprised meeting her would make him more interested rather than less. I don’t think your woman was all that fond of vampires before meeting you.”
Christian shrugged. “I’m a charming guy.”
Marc scoffed loudly.
“Show some respect, asshole. I’m your Sire.”
“Right,” Marc said, his expression shifting to one of mocking attention. “Don’t want to give the newbie the wrong impression.”
“Where did I go wrong?” Christian muttered. “Okay, I’ll ask Alon to come by the house later. We’ll talk, and I’ll make a final decision. In the meantime—”
“I’m back! And look! All in one piece, too!” Natalie bounced out of the locker room, with a huge smile.
Marc nearly choked to death trying not to laugh, while Christian could only scowl. Obviously, it wasn’t only with Marc that he’d gone wrong.
“Let’s go,” he growled, indicating the door to the back parking lot.
“My car’s there, too,” Natalie said, jiggling the keys in her hand.
“Leave it, we’ll—”
“I’m not leaving my car again,” she said stubbornly, planting her feet.
Christ, was he a powerful vampire or not? Shouldn’t somebody be cowed by him? “Fine,” he snapped, and turned to Marc with a jerk of his head. “You drive her car. Natalie and I will take the SUV. Natalie, give him your keys.”
“I don’t like the idea of—” Marc started to protest, but, wonder of wonders, he caught the impatient look Christian was sending him and changed his mind. “Go north down the alley,” he said, pointing. “You lead, I’ll follow.”
Alon came up to say good-bye. He shook Marc’s hand, then reached out to hug Natalie, pulling her away from Christian and into his arms. It took every ounce of control Christian possessed not to tear the man’s arms off, but he told himself that Alon didn’t know what he was doing, that the human and Natalie were friends, nothing more. That didn’t stop the low growl of warning that rumbled up from his chest.
Natalie shivered a little at the sound, but she quickly kissed Alon’s cheek and broke away from his embrace. “I probably won’t see you tomorrow,” she told him, “but—”
“I think Alon should come home with us,” Christian interrupted, shifting his attention to the Israeli. “If you’re available, that is. We have things to discuss.”
“Sure thing,” he said firmly. “I’m finished for the night, and my assistant can close up.”
Christian hadn’t told Natalie, but he’d already decided to turn Alon, if that’s what the man truly wanted. He was going to need soldiers, loyal soldiers, when he became Lord of the South, and the best way to ensure that was to make an army of his own. He couldn’t do it all in a day, or even a year, but Alon was a good beginning, and he’d make a great security chief. Natalie had said he was former Israeli military, but Christian knew there was much more to it than that. He’d known, even before talking to Alon, that he’d been Special Forces, and almost certainly one of the covert branches. There was a coiled readiness to such men, a constant awareness of everything around them, even when they were pretending not to pay attention.
But first, Christian had to be certain that the human knew what he was asking for, that he understood deep in his gut that there could be no return from this decision, other than death.
When Alon rejoined them, Christian took Natalie’s hand, and walked out to the parking lot, with Alon leading the way. Unlocking the SUV with the remote, he opened the front passenger door and nudged Natalie in that direction, while Alon reached for the back door. Either Marc would bring Alon back to the dojo later tonight, or, if it got to be too late, he could always borrow Natalie’s car and drive himself. The thought struck him that at least that way, Natalie might remain safely at home during the day tomorrow.
She turned as she climbed up and settled on the passenger seat. “I never told you what I discovered today in Anthony’s files.” She started to say more, but he’d already stopped listening, one hand held up in warning.
Instinct had him turning toward the mouth of the alley a moment before the surrounding walls pulsed to the sound of a powerful engine ramping up. Christian shoved Natalie flat onto the front seat as gunfire erupted from behind them, shattering the SUV’s rear windows, and punching through metal. Marc had already started Natalie’s small car, and he now zoomed forward, slamming it into position next to the SUV, before shoving the door open and racing to Christian’s side. The smaller vehicle provided some additional cover from the hail of bullets, but it was too late for Alon. The warrior had followed his instincts, turning to face their attackers, protecting his friends with the only weapon he had—himself. He’d been hit badly, his body dancing wildly under the hail of gunfire.
Natalie screamed Alon’s name, and tried to crawl out of the vehicle, but Christian slammed the door, keeping her inside. He started forward, intent on catching the assailants before they could escape, but Natalie didn’t stay where he’d put her. She jumped out of the vehicle and went to her knees next to Alon, leaving them both completely unprotected.
“Marc!” Christian roared, and caught the weapon his lieutenant threw at him from the back seat of the SUV. He preferred to fight as a vampire, but as a wise man once said, you don’t bring a vampire mind trick to a gunfight. At least, not until you’ve gotten rid of all the fucking guns.
He and Marc took up position in the angle between the two vehicles, hoping to draw fire away from Natalie and the injured Alon where he lay on the other side next to the building. One of their attackers fell, and the others were suddenly more intent on maintaining cover than on shooting anyone. Christian lowered his gun, letting Marc keep their enemies busy, while he took stock of the situation. Their assailants were both human and vampire, and their white SUV—an irony he would appreciate later—appeared to be heavily reinforced. The man on the ground—injured but not yet dead—was vampire, while the remaining two gunmen were one of each. They were braced behind what were obviously bullet-resistant doors, and seemed mostly concerned with keeping their heads down. At the same time, Christian could detect a fourth, definitely vampire, presence sitting in the back seat of the vehicle.
He fired off a quick telepathic warning to Marc, then dropped out of the present, and into the expanded consciousness where powerful vampires could go. Using all of his considerable power, he probed past the hidden vampire’s shields and tried to identify him. The lurker was powerful enough to resist the intrusion, but not powerful enough to stop it. Christian had just slipped into the other vampire’s awareness, which told him all he needed to know, when he was jolted back to the alley by the sound of Natalie’s angry scream.
He nearly jumped to his feet to go to her, but Marc held him down, pulling open the SUV’s driver-side door instead. Christian slid across the seats to the other side of the vehicle, where Natalie was fighting off her attacker. The remaining human assailant had used Christian’s distraction with their master to slip past their defenses, probably crawling on his belly along the wall to get to her. But even as Christian was rushing to save her, he saw that he’d underestimated her ability to save herself. So had her attacker, who was handicapped by an obvious desire not to hurt her, and to take her alive. This was a kidnapping, not a murder—at least, not for Natalie. But she wasn’t going easily. She was a whirlwind of defense, her feet and hands flying as she beat
back her very human attacker, until he was forced to drop his useless gun in a desperate bid to fight her off without shooting her.
It was a turnabout that Christian would have appreciated under other circumstances, but not with Alon’s life on the line, and not when their enemy could change his mind at any moment, and decide he didn’t need Natalie alive after all.
“Natalie, down!” Christian yelled, and she dropped like a rock, stunning her attacker into immobility for no more than a second or two. But that was all Christian needed. With a thought, he sent a focused blast of power burrowing into the human’s brain. The man’s mouth opened in a scream he never got to voice, before he collapsed to the ground like a bag of bones.
Christian popped the door open above where Natalie was still working on Alon’s motionless body, using her shirt in a fruitless attempt to stop the bleeding. “Stay down,” he ordered her, then gathered a second, focused blast of power. This one was for Alon, to keep his heart beating until he could get back to him.
He slid back to Marc’s side again. Only one gunman remained, a vampire whose resistance suffered from his desire to keep living in the face of Marc’s superior skills. That made two dead enemies, and one badly injured but still alive, lying on the ground next to the white SUV. And the leader of them all, who was still hiding in the back seat.
“Marcel Weiss,” Christian muttered, telling Marc the name of the master vampire lurking in the shadows while his people died.
Marc nodded, and sent a withering volley of fire at the lone defender’s position.
Marcel wasn’t making an appearance, but Christian knew they had to wrap this up. It had been no more than three minutes since he’d first heard the screech of the white SUV’s tires, but there were screams coming from the dojo, and he could sense more than one human huddling near the back door. He reminded himself that many of the people inside were trained professionals, either police or military, and while they were too smart to walk into the middle of a gunfight, he had no doubt that more than one call to 911 had already been made. In fact, he could hear distant sirens that might well be the human police responding to their calls.
He thought about Alon, lying in a pool of his own blood, and about Natalie, and how close she’d come to being kidnapped. Fuck that. Natalie was his, and Alon was, too. Forgetting reason, dismissing concerns for his own safety, he slammed into the remaining vampire gunman’s brain—bulletproof was no guard against his kind of assault—and turned it to mush, then snapped a shield of power around himself and stepped out into the open.
“Marcel Weiss,” he called, augmenting his voice so that it dug right into his enemy’s ear. “If you would be Lord of the South, come out and face me.”
The back door of the white SUV opened silently, and Marcel Weiss—the Midwestern vampire who’d decided he couldn’t live under Aden’s rule—stepped out of the vehicle and into the open. He was carrying an HK MP5 submachine gun hanging down at his side.
“Let me have the woman, and we’ll call it a draw,” Weiss called.
Christian laughed. “There will be no draw tonight, Weiss. You challenged me, remember?”
Weiss lifted one shoulder. “All I really wanted was the girl,” he said casually, but in a flash of movement only a vampire could follow, he raised the gun and aimed at Christian, his finger tightening on the trigger.
As fast as Weiss was, however, Christian was faster. Weiss screamed as the gun exploded in his hand. He belatedly attempted to gather his shields, but Christian wouldn’t let him. He didn’t know what Weiss had been thinking to stage a challenge in such a public place—and with guns of all things—but the sirens were getting closer, definitely heading their way, and it was time to end this.
He advanced upon Weiss, lobbing grenade-like bits of power at the other vampire, disrupting his every attempt to structure some shields. Weiss’s right hand was shattered, bone gleaming whitely beneath the gushing blood. His inability to stop the bleeding spoke to how weak he was, or at least how rattled by Christian’s unceasing attacks.
“Stop,” Weiss ground out, holding out his one good hand, palm forward, as if to build a wall to hide behind. Except, there was no power to back it up. “I yield,” he rasped, staggering.
“There is no yield in this contest, Weiss,” Christian informed him, still maintaining his own shields lest Weiss be pretending more weakness than was real. “You should have checked the rules before you started.”
“It wasn’t supposed to come to this. Anthony wanted the girl, that’s all.”
Christian laughed in disbelief. “And you thought I’d just let that happen?”
Weiss shook his head in confusion, his concentration clearly fraying. “Fine. You win. I’ll be gone by—”
Christian gathered himself for a final strike. “You still don’t get it, Weiss. I don’t win until you’re dead.” He shaped his power into a burning spear and sent it flying through the air. Weiss screamed, and tried to bat it away, but the weapon wasn’t a physical thing to be knocked from the air. And Weiss no longer had the power, or the control, to deflect it any other way.
The weapon stabbed through his nonexistent shields and pierced his heart, where it flamed hotter than the hottest forge, turning that vital organ into dust. He died as silently as his human minion, his mouth open in an empty scream for a fraction of a second before his body joined his heart in turning to dust.
There was no sound for an instant, and then Natalie’s sobs broke through Christian’s awareness. “Alon,” he whispered, and raced around the SUV to where Natalie still knelt over her friend’s motionless form, her blood-soaked shirt still pressed to his chest, struggling to stanch too many wounds. It was pointless. She might stop one hole from bleeding, but there were too many others. The only thing keeping Alon alive right now was Christian, and even he couldn’t stave off death forever.
“Let me have him, chére,” he said gently, trying to pull her away.
She fought him, her hands and arms covered with so much blood that Christian worried he was wrong, and she’d been shot after all. “I have to help him,” she cried over and over, while Christian ran his hands roughly over every inch of her, ignoring her attempts to push him away.
“Natalie, stop,” he snarled finally. “I can’t help him if you won’t let me!” He shook her slightly, trying to get her attention, until at last her vision seemed to clear, and she raised her eyes to his.
“Is he dead?” Her voice was shaking, terror lurking on the edges.
“No,” Christian said, the word hard and determined. “And he won’t be, either.” He turned to his lieutenant. “Marc, get our gear, but leave the Suburban. We’ll take Natalie’s car. Natalie?”
She was still shaking, but her voice was strong. “Yes?”
“Get in the car with Marc. Alon and I will be in the back.”
Marc jumped to obey him, understanding, without being told, that they needed to be gone before the police arrived. They’d want to take everyone in for endless questioning, and that never went well for vampires. And then there was Alon. If they stayed here, an ambulance would be called and he’d die before they reached the hospital. If he was to survive the night, it would not be as a human. And Christian didn’t want any witnesses to what some would see as a miraculous resurrection.
Natalie, too, seemed to recognize the necessity of a clean getaway. She leaned into her Prius and speedily flattened the back seats, then opened the rear hatch, so that Christian could climb inside. It wouldn’t be comfortable, but comfort wasn’t among his priorities right now. Marc helped him get Alon into the car, holding the bleeding human while Christian climbed into the tiny space, then easing him into Christian’s arms.
Closing the hatch, Marc quickly settled behind the wheel, next to Natalie, then drove away at top speed. Bystanders would assume they were rushing someone to a hospital. And in
a way, they were. By the time the police discovered Alon was missing, he’d either be dead, or he’d be a vampire and beyond human authority.
NATALIE WATCHED numbly as Christian carried Alon into the house and disappeared down to the basement. Marc started to follow, but paused at the head of the stairs, his dark eyes full of compassion. “You should go ahead and clean up, then try to sleep,” he said kindly. “You won’t see either of them again tonight.”
“Is there anything I can do?” she asked, desperately needing to be useful.
“Not tonight, sweetheart. It’s all up to Christian now. But you know . . . he’s damn powerful. If anyone can save your friend, it’s him.”
She nodded, believing him, not only because he said it with such conviction, but because she knew Christian. Vampire or not, he was an honorable man. He’d do everything he could to save Alon. “Okay,” she said faintly. Marc turned and was gone.
Natalie stared at the empty space where he’d been and frowned unhappily. She had to accept that there was nothing for her to do. Not with Alon, at least. She had the files she’d copied from Anthony’s server, and she was way too wired from the night’s excitement to sleep. But it wasn’t the kind of wired that would lend itself to analytical thinking.
She made her way to the bedroom that she thought of as hers, wondering again how long it would be before Christian trusted her enough to admit her to the inner sanctum in the basement. What would it be like to sleep next to a vampire all day long? And what if she wasn’t tired? Would she be trapped down there anyway?
Thoughts chased each other around in her head until she turned on the light in the bathroom and got a look at herself for the first time since the attack. She closed her eyes, and fought the urge to gag. She was covered in blood, and none of it was hers. That fact nearly drove her to her knees. She began tearing at her clothes, wanting them off. There wasn’t enough cleaning product in the city of Houston to get all of that blood out. And even if she could, she’d never be able to wear any of them again.
Christian (Vampires in America: The Vampire Wars Book 10) Page 24
