Intervamption

by Kristin Miller

CHAPTER FIVE

  “Blood riots at a dry bank on the Embarcadero caught the attention of mundane authorities near the first of the month. Elder Dixon was on scene to wipe the memories of the police and return order to an unacceptable situation. Another close call. . . .”

  —San Francisco Haven Newsletter: Note from the Primus for December 2010

  Ruan pushed through the library’s double doors and took a seat at an empty computer kiosk. The networking center was a flurry of whispers—not uncommon for such early evening hours.

  Most groups gathered in front of the stations to catch up on what happened while they were snoozing. Mundane News informed those interested in current worldly events. Stations like V! and the O+ Cooking Network simply entertained. Closed-circuit CrimsonTV played 24/7 from the overhead televisions, giving the khiss an overall heads-up on situations awaiting them when they hit the streets.

  There were also those who gathered for pleasure, using the early rising time to catch up on some reading or to find a quiet space to be alone and think. The library provided all of those things and more . . . including access to the Court’s database via Dylan’s log-in information.

  Something about this Eve Monroe situation wasn’t right, and it wasn’t only the way Ruan found Dylan on the floor of the front office earlier—that was an oddity all its own. What seemed off-kilter was that Eve lived in a mundane part of town . . .

  At least Dylan had finally agreed to have someone with her when she met Eve. She was stubbornly independent and had a mind of her own that wouldn’t bend for anyone, so it surprised him that she agreed to his company so easily. Perhaps she was warming up a little to the idea of him being around. Was it possible that after two years at her side she finally needed him for something? Or just felt more comfortable with him near her?

  He tapped his pen against the computer, waiting for the darn thing to boot up and log on.

  Why hadn’t Dylan taken to a male? Ruan wondered. Most women her age were chomping at the bit to settle down and have young ones running about. And she was such a drop-dead beauty. To deny the species from producing little ones from those stunning genes was just . . .

  Man, he was such a putz. He wished he had better things to do than drool over a girl he couldn’t help but want and couldn’t ever have.

  The computer linked to the network with an annoying ding!

  He flicked the mouse pad to jumpstart Windows. He used Dylan’s password, “Eternity,” to open the Court’s database. When an empty search field popped up, he typed in “Eve Monroe.”

  A blank screen stared him in the face. No information on subject.

  He tapped the counter again, half-listening to the mundane news-anchor report of a hostage situation taking place off of Fell Street. Those poor suckers were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  It was then that the thought occurred to him: maybe he was looking for Eve in the wrong place . . .

  He broadened his search to include all khisses in the country, instead of the immediate area. If Eve Monroe had sought shelter anywhere, or received help from any facility, surely it’d pop up. Thanks to Dylan’s persistence and hard work, ReVamp had a monumental leg up from other clinics in the country. Records were often scattered and uncategorized as power tended to change hands frequently in the race. And with new leaders came new ideals for record keeping and how these types of facilities should be run.

  Dylan had been ReVamp’s staple. The asset that kept the ship running tight.

  He had to believe there were other women in the country like Dylan; other hard-workers who ran facilities with the type of scrutiny she did. Ones who kept up records of donors and feeders and shared that information with other clinics through the species’ only database.

  He entered Eve Monroe’s name into the broad search field, and checked a box for possible aliases and known locations.

  The results were disappointing. No information on subject. No aliases found.

  Glowing on the bottom of the screen was the address he’d entered. Surrounding her house was a cracker-box mundane subdivision.

  What if . . .

  Even though he thought it was absurd, he logged off from the Court’s database and logged online.

  Google started up on cue. He typed in her name and address.

  Over two million hits for Eve Monroe flushed the screen, most mistakenly for Marilyn Monroe. He clicked on the second link leading to the personal information of Eve Monroe, current resident of Brookside Subdivision in Crimson Bay, California.

  He scanned over the information: Female. Twenty-five years old. Resident of Crimson Bay since birth. Parents Ronald and Gloria Monroe, deceased. No registered kin. Crimson Bay University transcript on file. Previous address and phone on file for minimal fee.

  Reality hit him like a freight train.

  She wasn’t a vampire at all. Eve Monroe was a goddamn mundane woman, too old to have a change in her future, too young to be a blood-doll.

  Either of those options would have been better than their current situation. If Eve had vampire family lines, she’d be destined to be a part of their race and would’ve undoubtedly changed by now. It usually happened during puberty. Late changes were extremely rare and those that went through the ordeal normally died from the intensity; changing late in life just wasn’t natural. If she were older, thirty to forty years old perhaps, it wouldn’t be surprising to hear she was a blood-doll, sacrificing her blood to the species for a few measly years of youth. But a woman in her twenties wouldn’t be taken as a doll—it would be in direct opposition to the Court’s rules of blood donors.

  Shit, Dylan almost walked right into the hands of a human woman and outed herself. There would’ve been no leniency from the Court if she’d volunteered information about the race. And they sure as shit wouldn’t show him any leniency for being on board with the plan. His job was to protect her, keep her out of harm’s way—not send her out to fend for herself among the wolves.

  His jugular pulsed the way it always did when trouble was on the horizon. He squashed it down with his thumb.

  No way in hell was he going to let Dylan head into suburbia to have a midnight chit-chat. Funny thing was, Ruan knew the instant he told Dylan the news that the woman she’d been searching for was human, there’d be no stopping her. She’d run headlong into the city to finish what she started.

  Seeing things to completion was a nasty flaw of hers. Once she got an idea in that pretty head . . .

  He’d be dammed if he was going to let that flaw be a fatal one.

  He’d stop her from finding Eve Monroe one way or another. He logged off the database, exited the library, and stormed to the chamber of someone who could make her listen to reason.

  “They’re morons, every single one of them,” Savage said once he entered the privacy of his royal chamber. If his team couldn’t find the missing scrolls in time, he’d be one crispy vamp sandwich. And he’d make sure each one of them drowned in the deep-fryer with him for their inadequacy. “They can’t see a single task to completion.”

  He refused to go down in history as a failure. He’d succeed in his task, come hell or . . . well . . . hell. Where else was there for him to go at this point?

  Finding the scrolls was not something he wanted for shits and giggles. It wasn’t even something he needed to be happy. Finding them was a matter of living and breathing. Or lying and dying, as it were.

  Scribbled in their elders’ blood thousands of years ago, the scrolls were pages of prophecy torn out of the Grimorium Verum, or Grimoire of Truth. The Grimorium contained rules for the species and the key to their survival in these tumultuous times. Hidden in its pages were also prophecies designating how the war between therians and vampires would end. Before anyone could study and decipher these prophecies, therians revolted, cracked down on vampire safe houses, and destroyed records right and left.

  To safeguard their way of life, vampires tore out pages from the tome—which became the scrolls, their most sacred t
eachings—and hid them apart from the Grimorium. If the tome was destroyed, some sacred teachings would remain, and vice versa.

  Savage had heard that certain pages of scroll were hidden deep in the secret catacombs of the compound, far below the posh existence the khiss enjoyed. Access was limited. Anyone seeking the catacombs had to have permission from their khiss’s Primus; their designated leader wouldn’t dish out backstage passes to just anyone, thus protecting the species.

  Luckily for him, his Primus was off on official khiss business and wouldn’t be back until Court on Winter Solstice, which meant he had roughly one week to get his shit together; a mere seven days to break into the catacombs, find the scrolls, decipher the prophecy, and somehow become Primus himself.

  So many people to kill, so little time.

  If rumors of prophecy-lore were true, and he had to believe they were, the days of hiding in tomato-canning warehouses down backstreet industrial drives would soon be over. Therians would cease to run the planet, leaving vampires free to live life in the open. As they should. As they deserved.

  He strode to the bookshelves lining the back wall and tilted a hardbound book down from the top. Brave New World. It had always been one of his favorites, and the reason he required those gracing his presence to call him Savage.

  He carried it to the mahogany desk poised in the center of the room and flipped open to the tagged page somewhere in the middle. Tonight he wasn’t interested in what Aldous Huxley had to say. He was more interested in the scraps of paper doubling as bookmarks.

  Flipping one over, then another, Savage scanned the small sheets, looking for something to grab his eye, for something to make sense. The key had to be in there somewhere.

  The Court would have his heart staked to his headboard if they knew he’d discovered these lost scraps of scroll and not reported them immediately. He’d found them pinned to the back of a portrait during one of the khiss’s remodeling sprees, and pocketed them. At the time he didn’t know what they were or who’d put them there. Through the years, of course, he’d figured out they were pieces ripped straight from the sacred scrolls themselves. He’d soon come to the conclusion that divine intervention led him to that portrait. If the pieces didn’t want to be found by him, at that moment, they wouldn’t have been.

  He was honored to be the Chosen One.

  The One to bring the end of an era.

  If anyone knew he wasn’t content to sit in hiding, that he wanted an uprising when everyone around him wanted peace, they’d sacrifice him to the light of day.

  Savage began to read the incomplete and smudged passages:

  “. . . spilled blood will bring the beginning of the end . . . an heir will be born . . . sacrifice to be made . . . will walk the earth . . . Primus to all . . . Eve of Winter Solstice . . . Blood of the heir . . .”

  A heavy banging at the door halted Savage’s progress. He put the papers back in place and slammed the book closed.

  “Yes?”

  Ruan peeked his head around the chamber door. “We have a problem.”

  Some things never changed. “What is it now?”

  Ruan’s blonde hair fell across his face. He made no move to push it back into place. He stepped into the room and shut the door, a vision in Valentino black. “It’s about Dylan.”

  “Tell her if she doesn’t have her speech ready it’s tough shit.”

  “No, it’s not about that. She needs to be put on watch. At least for tonight. She shouldn’t be allowed out after Induction without tighter security.”

  “I thought security was your job.” Savage shoved Brave New World aside and paced around his desk. “Unless you think she’s gotten to be too much for you to handle.”

  “It is . . . she’s not. I think she might put herself in danger. I think . . .”

  “You think what?”

  “I think she might try to out herself.”

  Savage chuckled, crossed his arms, and leaned back against the desk. “Why would she do that? ReVamp is proving to be rather profitable . . . in its own way. Numbers are up, blood donors are high. The tainting is weakening her spirit and stealing her daylight hours—true—but . . . wait . . . is that what this is about? You afraid she’s not paying you enough attention?”

  “That’s not it.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No.” Ruan pulled his shoulders back, stuck his chin up.

  “Then give me a damn good reason why you think she’d risk everything to expose herself to a human.”

  Ruan swallowed hard and shifted his eyes to the desk behind him. “Someone came into the clinic earlier and threw her for a loop. I don’t know who it was or what they wanted. She won’t tell me. But she’s hell bent on finding this mundane woman, Eve Monroe, and I can’t stop her . . .”

  Ruan blabbered away as Savage’s mind raced over the pieces of scrolls he’d just handled.

  Eve. Eve. Hadn’t there been a section referring to the Eve of Winter Solstice?

  Savage threw up his hand to stop the flow of useless information from Ruan’s mouth, and stalked back to the desk. He slipped the pieces of scroll out of Brave New World and scanned quickly, his eyes rolling over phrases that didn’t make sense without crucial filling information.

  Son of a bitch. It had been staring him in the face all along. Eve might not’ve been a day at all. It . . . she . . . might be a person. Savage’s eyes grabbed onto the corner of the smallest, most frayed piece. Scrawled in dried blood were the phrases that triggered his memory.

  Eve of Winter Solstice . . . Blood of the heir.

  He didn’t know why those smudged, unrelated phrases were grouped together, or exactly what they meant without knowing what words and letters were missing from between them. All he knew was that it was a breadcrumb to follow; one more than he had before and he damn well couldn’t ignore the twinging in his gut.

  Somehow this Eve Monroe could be linked to their next heir, the one who would rule them all. That made her paramount to the largest part of the prophecy.

  Drums pounded in his head, off his skull, and dropped into his stomach. He rubbed his temples and fought the sudden sensitivity to the overhead lights. Hadn’t Ruan just said Dylan was going to find Eve? No, that wasn’t happening. Dylan had to be stopped cold in her tracks. That damn woman would keep digging, wouldn’t she? Even if he was wrong and Eve Monroe turned out to be a dumb broad with nothing to offer the race, Dylan wouldn’t stop pulling the thread until she unraveled the whole bit.

  He’d never share the information, the scrolls, the power, with her or anybody.

  Eve Monroe was his, paramount to vampire prophecy or not. He couldn’t chance it.

  No one would be allowed in her presence until he had a chance to talk with her himself. And after he had his way with her, there’d not be much left for anyone else. He’d send scouts to her house immediately, follow her every waking moment. Even watch her sleeping from her bedroom window if that’s what it took.

  It occurred to Savage that Ruan was still standing in the middle of his chamber, staring at him like he’d had some sort of cataclysmic meltdown.

  Damn it, he had to remain calm. Wouldn’t want Ruan spreading word that their stand-in Primus was getting twitchy. He regained his balance by focusing on the algae-green depths of Ruan’s eyes. “Don’t you worry about Dylan from this point forward. I’m relieving you of your duties.”

  “That’s not what I was asking for, Savage,” he blurted.

  “I’ll give Dylan the best protection possible. She’ll never be alone a minute in her life. From now on she’ll have two shadows. Guaranteed.”

  Ruan’s eyebrows furrowed, a tangle of blonde. “Who will you assign her?”

  “Let’s just say the type of protection I’m going to offer her is lifelong.” Savage snatched the Newborn Induction itinerary from his desk and scribbled Dylan’s name in the Valcdana column.

  Right next to her future mate.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Therians cannot b
e trusted under any circumstances. Their morals shift as easily as their identities.”

  —What’s at Stake: A Vampire’s Guidebook by Alexa Draco

  “Okay, you’re on, Slade. Were you paying attention to everything I told you or do you need me to go through it again?” Dylan asked, hand to handle, ready to bolt.

  This whole damn thing was a mess. The last thing he expected was to get hot and bothered by a female vamp. Yet here he was, pissed at himself and his traitorous body surprisingly more than her. He should be pissed at her, shouldn’t he? She’d lied to him. Made him feel like she was a human as into him as he was into her.

  Okay, so she didn’t really flat-out lie to his face, but she crawled into his bed without coming outright and saying she was a vampire. She should’ve told him what she was. She shouldn’t have gotten so close to him, where he could breathe in her tantalizing fragrance. Yeah, piss-brain, like that was her fault, he thought.

  And she was pretty stunning . . . for being his enemy and all.

  “I remember the important things we discussed,” he said. “Don’t make eye contact. Speak when spoken to. Be courteous. You’re one striking female, you know that?” He regretted the last part the second it escaped his lips. But it was the truth.

  Dylan rolled her eyes. “That’s not one of the things we went over.”

  “If my memory serves me, I think we did.”

  Here came that growl again from deep inside his chest. Man, he had to learn how to tone that thunder down. He likened the impulse to a territorial dog biting down on a juicy bone, not wanting to share the treasure with its pack mates. Pushing the odd thoughts out of his mind, Slade stared at the milky-white skin on Dylan’s neck and . . . Sweet Jesus . . . started salivating.

  “All right, you’re as ready as you’re gonna get. Get going or they’ll refuse your Induction”

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “If I don’t pass their test I’m out? Just like that?”