by Alyssa Day
Nicholas’s mansion, the basement computer rooms and interrogation chamber
Nicholas watched Ivy as she struggled to gather enough courage to touch the amethyst again. The jewel sat on a velvet cushion, inanimate yet somehow serene, as if daring the sorceress to touch it. She wasn’t quite up to taking the dare yet.
He smelled the banker’s slightly sour stench even before Smithson entered the room. The smell wasn’t body odor; the man was clean enough. Nicholas assumed the stink was the smell of soulless evil.
Pot, skillet.
“Do I even want to know why you have a room in your basement with a two-way glass window installed?” Smithson’s voice was too cheerful for someone whose plans were falling apart.
Nicholas decided to remind the banker of that. “Do not presume to question me about my actions, human,” he hissed, baring his fangs. He was rewarded with the banker’s barely visible shudder. Smithson was tough enough for a mortal, but Nicholas had lived for centuries and crushed the spirits of far tougher wannabe predators than this one.
“I’m not questioning you,” Smithson said quickly. “I just—”
“The attack at the rebel campground was a complete and utter failure,” Nicholas said. “Your intelligence was flawed. Not only were the numbers greater than your men reported, but they had two shape-shifters on their side, both tigers. Not to mention a vampire of their own.”
Nicholas’s source, one of his blood pride, had actually reported seeing that one of the shifters had been a saber-toothed tiger, but he assumed the vampire had been struck senseless with fear or stupidity. Either way, Nicholas didn’t care. He’d sent the sniveling idiot to the true death for his idiocy.
Nicholas didn’t like visual reminders of failure, as his subordinates had long since learned. He was a big fan of killing the messenger if the news happened to be bad. Not necessarily a great communication strategy, but eminently satisfying.
“A vampire? I thought you were in charge of all of them in this region,” Smithson said. “How could one stand against us? Do you have a traitor in your group?”
In a movement so fast it blurred, Nicholas pinned Smithson to the wall, pressing his arm into the banker’s neck. “Do not dare to question me, or I will enjoy draining you of every drop of your blood. There are many humans ready and willing to take your place.”
Smithson’s face turned the color of an overripe tomato as he struggled to draw a breath. Nicholas finally tired of the game and let him go with a final warning. “Remember that.”
Nicholas saw the look of utter hatred that crossed the banker’s face, but he laughed. He had far more to worry about than a human’s anger.
“She won’t try,” he said, pointing to Ivy, who still sat huddled on the floor, as far from the gemstone as was possible in the small room. “I think her fear of the gem is outweighing her fear of me, as impossible as that sounds.”
“Oh, not for long,” Smithson said, retaining a measure of his composure as he rubbed the red marks on his neck. “If we can’t torture them into doing what we want, we can always make life miserable for their families.”
The banker walked to the doorway and said something to one of his thugs waiting outside and then returned to Nicholas.
“Watch this.”
The door to the room opened, and Ivy flinched and looked up, then cried out and ran across the room. A boy stumbled into the room as if pushed.
“Ian! What—where did you—why are you here?” She pulled him into a fierce hug and burst into tears.
The boy awkwardly patted her back. “Sheesh, Mom, calm down. It’s okay. I’m here now, and I’ll take care of you.”
Nicholas eyed the boy’s bruised face and blackened eye, and a slow wave of rage churned through his gut. “What did you do to him?”
“I didn’t do anything. Some of my men may have gotten a little carried away.” The nasty little banker had the nerve to smile. “I wish I could always do business like this. Threatening their families makes them so much more agreeable.”
Almost casually, Nicholson backhanded the banker so hard that the man flew backward and struck the wall before sliding down to the floor.
“We don’t make war on children. Remember it,” he said.
“Don’t ever put your hands on me again, or I’ll be sure you never get one word of information about the investors,” Smithson shouted. The effect of his belligerence was muted somewhat by the fact he still sat on the floor and cringed when Nicholas turned around.
“If that boy is hurt again, even so much as a minor bruise or cut, I’ll end you,” Nicholas said. “I’ve survived for centuries without your pathetic excuse for help. You might remember that when you’re considering how very fragile humans are.”
Smithson struggled to stand up. The man was a worthless pile of excrement, but he was no coward, Nicholas had to give him that.
“You promised to turn me. I want to be a vampire,” Smithson said. “Whatever it takes.”
“Indeed. Whatever it takes, I promise to drain all the blood from your body.” Nicholas let all the feeling and movement vanish slowly from his expression until he stood utterly motionless, like a particularly deadly block of ice.
Smithson shuddered again, but persevered. “And then give me some of yours. Three times. Once is only a blood bond, I know that much.”
Ivy pounded on the window, saving Nicholas from the annoyance of a reply.
“You let him go,” she screamed. “I’ll do anything you want. Just let him go.”
Nicholas pressed a button on the panel set into the wall next to the window and leaned forward. “You’ll do anything I want, anyway, my beautiful little witch. Now try again with the jewel, and we’ll send in food and drink for you and the boy.”
Tears gathered in her eyes, but she blinked them back, squaring her shoulders to appear strong for her boy. Nicholas admired that in a mother. His own son’s mother had been a sniveling coward, too terrified to even let Nicholas approach his boy. No matter that Nicholas had been forced into this life; he’d not chosen to become vampire.
Ancient history had no place here, however. He banished the unwelcome memories and focused on Ivy. Beautiful and deadly, the witch had dabbled in the black side of her magic often enough to gain the title sorceress and dark powers she had no business wielding. Time enough to put shackles on her later, though. For now he needed every bit of her strength and didn’t care overly much where she found it.
“No, Mom, your nose has been bleeding again,” Ian said, trying to stop his mother from approaching the amethyst. “You know what the doctor said. Too much magic, and you could get a brain aneurysm, remember? You can’t push like this again.”
Ivy shook her head. “Ian, you don’t understand. I have to help these . . . men . . . or they’ll hurt us.” She put a gentle hand on his face and tilted it to the light to better see the bruising, and when she turned back toward the window, her eyes were glowing with a deep purple fire.
“Know this. Whoever hurt my son will pay for it,” she said, each word a deadly chip of ice. “If you touch him again, I’ll kill you.”
Nicholas inclined his head, though she couldn’t see it, and touched the panel again. “You have my word your son will be unharmed. The one who bruised him will be punished. We will not release either of you, however, until you achieve our goal. Do you understand?”
It was her turn to nod. She drew in a deep breath and then turned to the amethyst, and three quick steps later she held it in her hands. It did something to her—something he couldn’t see but which clearly hurt her, judging by the sound she made and how her face drained of all color. She only tightened her fingers around the gem and closed her eyes, and began murmuring something under her breath, a kind of chant that even Nicholas, with his vampire hearing, couldn’t quite make out.
Seconds later, though, a pulse of magic rocked the building, and a weak, pale beam of violet light shot out of the gem, spilling between her fingers and across the room. Its
end terminated on the third drawer of the second in a line of filing cabinets.
Precisely spotlighting the single location in the room where he had previously hidden a small cache of gold and jewels.
“Houston, we have liftoff,” Nicholas murmured.
Smithson hesitantly moved up next to him at the mirror as the light vanished. Ivy fell to the ground, and her son ran to gather her up. Nicholas stared at the thin stream of blood that trickled from the witch’s nose. A brain aneurysm would be most unfortunate at this point in the process.
“We need to find a way to strengthen or reinforce her magic so it doesn’t harm her to use the gem,” he told Smithson.
The banker blinked rapidly, which had the unpleasant effect of making him look even more like a rodent than he usually did. “You care about what happens to her? I thought she was just a tool.”
“I take good care of my tools, as any competent mechanic would. If she dies, she is of no use to us, and we need her for this.”
“Are you finally ready to tell me what exactly the plan is?”
Nicholas glanced at the human, considering. So long as he kept Smithson at hand, there was little to no chance of betrayal. Why not, after all? There was no danger here.
“The gem acts as a dowsing rod for other gems and for gold. Any valuable mined from the earth. It might even find oil, for all we know.”
Smithson whistled, long and loud. “That’s—that’s—”
“Exactly.”
“How did you find out about this?”
“It was one of your human archaeologists, actually, who recently discovered cave writing that translated into a heretofore unknown legend from the days of the Sinagua Indians. According to these pictographs, the Sinagua hid a great treasure when the vampires first came to the area. Their medicine men warned them that they might not survive as a people, and apparently they wanted to record this story for posterity.”
Smithson held up a hand. “Hold up. Your kind is why the Sinagua died out all those years ago? Have you told anybody? All the historians and archaeologists around here would go crazy for that information, and now that vampires are part of society, you can tell them this stuff freely, right? It’s not like you can get in trouble for what some unrelated vampires did hundreds of years ago.”
Nicholas bared just the slightest hint of fang. “Are you so sure they were unrelated?”
Smithson recoiled a little, but said nothing.
“The vampire goddess Anubisa—Chaos praise her, wherever she may be—long ago laid down a prohibition against sharing our history with mortals. But none of that is your business. All you need to know is that the legend from the pictograph told of a magical gem from the city beneath the waters, and that it could find treasure such as gems and gold and silver, because like called to like.”
“The city beneath the waters? Venice?”
Nicholas wished for a moment that he could afford simply to drain the fool now and give his dead body to the members of his blood pride to dispose of. Sadly, necessity made strange crime-committing fellows.
“Atlantis, you idiot.”
Smithson started laughing. “So it’s a fairy tale. Great. You’re basing our hope of funding for the consortium’s initial investment on Atlantis? Why not just ask Santa Claus for the money?”
“Atlantis most definitely existed and still does. From what I hear, it’s nearly ready to take its place in the world again, if you and your kind don’t bomb it back to the deep when it rises. But those are problems for another day. For now, we feed our witch and her son and let them rest, because this evening we’re going out to the canyons and caves to see what we can find when fewer prying eyes will be around.”
Smithson’s expression still said he didn’t really believe any of it, but just then Ian, having settled his mother on the bench inside the interrogation room, walked over to the file cabinet and pulled open the drawer which the gem had pointed out just minutes before.
“Holy crap, Mom! There’s a freaking fortune in here!”
“Don’t say holy crap, Ian,” Ivy said tiredly, not even bothering to open her eyes. She’d wiped the blood off her upper lip, Nicholas saw, but she looked pale enough to faint at any moment. Nearly unconscious and clearly in pain, but still mother enough to chastise her son for bad language. As Nicholas watched the lovely witch, he felt something in his chest warm in a way he hadn’t felt for more than three hundred years, and he flinched away from the window.
He’d been wrong. There was danger here, after all. He watched her a moment longer and then turned to the banker.
“Bring me the man who hurt that boy. I want to have a word or two with him over breakfast.”
He laughed, fangs fully descended, as the banker scurried from the room. Nicholas was in a wonderful mood, and why not? The witch would find the gem, the consortium was on track, and to top it all off, the blood of a man who had hurt a child would taste so much better than scrambled eggs. He glanced through the one-way glass again, his gaze returning to the lovely witch and her son.
Yes. So much better than eggs.
Chapter 15
Oak Creek Canyon, just after nightfall
“Are you sure this is right?” Daniel looked around, his night vision excellent, and wondered if Serai’s exhaustion was playing tricks upon her connection with the Emperor. She’d fallen back into a deep sleep at the hotel after their conversation about plans, not even waking when Melody’s friends brought the gear. Apparently the events of the day and night before and the strain from the Emperor’s fluctuations had weakened her far beyond what she’d wanted to admit. He’d spent a restless day trying to sleep, listen for danger, and keep from touching her. Or biting her. Or fucking her.
Or all three at once.
He’d also had three cold showers and a brief period around noon where he feared he was descending into lunacy. Oh, yeah, it had been a hell of a day. And now his fragile, darling, innocent sex kitten of a princess was telling him to shut up.
“Yes, as I said the other five times, Daniel. Please be quiet now, so I can try to sense the Emperor again.” She leaned against a tree and looked up into the sky. “Look. It’s Draco, curled around the Little Dipper. Was that one of your names?”
“Honey, there’s nothing little about my dipper.”
She rolled her eyes, but at least he’d made her smile. It lightened the shadows in her eyes, if only for a moment. “No, Draco. Or Drakos.”
“How could you know that?”
“Oh the attendants in the temple loved to gossip, and the exploits of Conlan and his warriors were constant fodder. I heard much of their vampire ally Drakos. A vampire who was a friend to the high prince’s brother was very gossip-worthy. It never occurred to me that Drakos could be . . .” she finished in a strained voice.
“I’ve had many names over the years,” he said, shrugging the backpack to a more comfortable position. “Something to pass the time. Daniel was not always a name that fit in where I happened to be.”
“What are some of the others?”
He breathed deep of the pine-drenched desert night air and caught the slightest scent of sea salt and woman.
His woman.
He shook his head. She was his only in his dreams. The beauty never ended up with the beast, despite brief moments of pleasure and the beast’s futile wishes.
“Names? Or are you ignoring me on purpose?” she asked teasingly.
“They almost always began with the same letter, for ease of remembering. Drakos, Demetrios. Lately, Devon. Once, for a memorable period, D’Artagnan. Generally back to Daniel whenever possible.”
“Because it’s your real name.”
“Yes, but that’s not the reason. I kept coming back to Daniel because it was the name you’d called me,” he said softly, but he knew by her indrawn breath that she’d heard him.
“I . . . Wait. Daniel, I can feel it. The Emperor. It’s closer than ever before, and it’s moving.” She started running forward and he cau
ght her arm.
“No. Let’s not charge headlong into danger, okay? It’s safe to bet that whoever has the gem is not going to want to give it up and is almost certainly not after it for innocent reasons. It has a lot of power, which tends to draw the attention of those who want to accumulate a lot of power. These are rarely the nicest people you might want to meet.”
She turned toward him, and he tried not to think about touching the curve of her neck, or the delightful curve where her hip met her waist. Tried not to think about unbraiding her hair and wrapping his hands in fistfuls of those lush curls.
Tried not to think about it. Failed miserably, but at least he’d tried.
“Daniel. You’re looking at me the way I looked at that chocolate cake,” she murmured. “I confess I like it, but now isn’t the best time.”
He leaned down and stole a single kiss. It would have to tide him over. “You’re right, of course. Now tell me about what you feel, and how close you think the Emperor is to where we are now.”
“It’s north—no, west of here. Where is that?”
“It’s the Red Rock Secret Mountain Wilderness area,” Daniel said grimly. “Of course they couldn’t be at a coffee shop. Well, enough of this. We can’t do much with the car Melody’s friends brought us, since the direction you’re sensing is pure hiking country, but we’re certainly not hiking, in spite of these fancy clothes and boots. You’re wasting energy you don’t need to expend, especially when you’re traveling with someone who can fly.”
“No!” She backed away from him, violently shaking her head back and forth. “I can’t.”
“I’ll keep you safe. It’s just a matter of closing your eyes if you feel dizzy.” He knew it was easier to show her, so he swept her into his arms and launched into the air. He made it about ten feet above the ground before she started to scream.
In his ear.
He was so startled he nearly lost his grip on her waist, and she slipped a little and then started screaming even louder. Then her entire body started shaking and spasming in his arms, and he headed back for the ground, fast. When he landed and her feet were firmly on the ground, though, the screaming didn’t stop. If anything, it intensified in volume, and she kept shaking so hard he was afraid she was having a seizure.
