“That’s what you think of me, isn’t it?” She wished her voice didn’t shake, but she couldn’t stop the words tumbling out. “Warped and damaged. By my constraints. Do you imagine I have no free will? No brain to think for myself? I’m not the one who’s dead.”
Gasping to stop the flow of words, she spun on her heel and strode away from him, not even sure where her anger came from or why it should bloody hurt so much. She just knew she had to be away from him.
Worse, she couldn’t even tell if it was relief or anger that battered at her when he let her go without a word.
Chapter Thirteen
Mihaela paced past the doorway of the hunters’ headquarters building for the second time. But sooner or later, she knew she’d have to go in and face Konrad. He wouldn’t work willingly with Maximilian. She knew that. And right now she couldn’t blame him. But she needed backup. She needed information. And she owed Konrad years of loyalty.
Maximilian had been right about that much. The loyalty was ingrained from childhood when she’d first understood that there were good, brave people like Joseph and Katalin who protected ordinary people from the monsters. They’d given her her first lessons in self-defense, had introduced her to other hunters, who’d all inspired her to be like them, to be one of the protectors. It had been the least she could do.
And she’d taken to it like a duck to water. She’d worked bloody hard, and she’d passed through her training with distinction. And then they’d taken her on her first hunt, in the Carpathian Mountains. There had been no fighting, just the slaughter of sleeping, bestial vampires in a cave. But it had taught her where to place the stake and how to push it home. It had got her beyond the instinctive, sick revulsion at tearing through flesh and bone and introduced her to vampire-killing.
However, it had been the later years, the years with Konrad and István, that had really honed her skills. With them, she’d grown into the true, capable hunter she was now. She hadn’t always agreed with Konrad; she’d quarreled and disputed with him often. But she’d always known their respect was mutual. As her leader, her teacher, her friend, she owed Konrad so much.
Get on with it, Mihaela. The plane leaves in four hours.
Decisively, she turned and strode right up to the front door. Before she reached it, a familiar figure swung out. A tall, pretty African American in casual jeans and leather.
“Cyn?” Mihaela said in surprise.
The younger woman’s face lit up in a genuine smile. “Mihaela! I heard you were on vacation.”
“I am. Sort of. I thought you’d gone back to the States.”
“I had,” Cyn said vaguely. “I came back again. Left Rudy holding the fort. How are things?”
“Exciting,” Mihaela said, and Cyn laughed.
“Aren’t they always? Catch up with you later? I’m here until Monday.”
“I’ll call you,” Mihaela said, although when she thought about it, she didn’t actually have Cyn’s number. She watched the younger woman run down the steps and disappear around the corner. Cyn did everything at a run. She and Rudy Meyer in New York had begun a group of unofficial, roving vampire hunters. They’d pretty much turned up as the seventh cavalry in the battle for the hunters’ library three months ago. But what the devil was she doing here now?
Thoughtfully, Mihaela entered the building and went in search of Konrad. She found him in the open office shared by the three field-hunter teams. At the moment, probably because his team was understrength, leaving more work for the others, he was the only occupant.
Frowning and serious, one hand threaded through his short, blond hair, he was hunched over a computer on the far side of the office. But his intense blue eyes lit up as she walked in, and he pushed himself back from the computer with something like relief.
“I just met Cyn,” Mihaela greeted him. “Did she come to see you?”
“Yes, I asked her to.”
“Recruiting?” Mihaela asked lightly.
“Trying.” Konrad was giving nothing away. The instinctive welcome in his eyes had vanished. Now they looked veiled and secretive, and he drew himself up as if repelling further questions by mere force of his considerable personality.
Was he trying to recruit Cyn to his official team, since István was long-term sick? Or had he earmarked Cyn for his breakaway group? Authority and officialdom didn’t sit well with Cyn. She went her own way. She hated vampires and believed the world should know about them in order to fight them. In this she differed from Konrad, who believed continued secrecy was the best possible protection. Mihaela wished them luck convincing each other.
Konrad said, “I couldn’t find you much on Gavril, which is why I haven’t been in touch. He wasn’t even recognized or named as the vampire who killed your family. He’s turned up in a few fights in Romania, always managing to escape. And he’s been responsible for several fledgling communes in the last forty years. Otherwise, low-profile vamp.”
Mihaela nodded. She hadn’t really expected anything else. Although it was interesting that he liked to make other vampires. His current allies were largely young, just somehow stronger than they should have been.
“Thanks. Did you find any mention of my parents?” she asked, perching on the corner of his desk.
Konrad sat back in his seat. “Ah. Well, there’s no mention of your father that I can see. Your mother didn’t work for the network either, but her name does crop up. A couple of hunters—in fact, Joseph and Katalin, who rescued you—noted concern about her work.”
“Really?” Mihaela frowned. “They never said…” And now she couldn’t ask them. Joseph had died in the field when Mihaela was sixteen. Katalin had died of cancer four years later, while Mihaela was at university. They’d been the last people she’d wept for.
“What kind of concerns?” she asked. “What was she researching?”
“Some kind of psychic research was the fear. Like others during the Cold War she’d been involved in experiments with mind control, only she seemed to have more success than most. Then she left her job—resigned or pushed, I don’t know which—and so far as I can tell began working on her own. But what concerned the hunters was, they were afraid she was using vampires as her test subjects.”
“What?“
Mihaela’s accepted world was reeling again. The hunters she’d loved had told her nothing. Her parents knew about vampires? Her mother researched their minds?
“Shit… Could Gavril have been one of her subjects?” Was it payback? Had they imprisoned him, like Dante had once captured the vampire Dmitriu, and done some kind of experiments on him? It was no excuse for killing her innocent sister, for trying to kill her…
“There are no names,” Konrad said apologetically. “But the hunters were watching your house. That’s why they came so quickly when the attack happened.”
Not quickly enough… But there was no point in bitterness.
“So whose research did he steal?” she wondered aloud. “My father’s on seismology, or my mother’s on mind control?”
“Does it matter?” Konrad asked dubiously.
“I don’t know…”
“And why would he wait so long to use it?”
“I suspect he hasn’t been strong enough before. Now he’s ‘coming of age.’” Angyalka’s words, but she wouldn’t tell him that. In any case, such issues could wait for later debate. Pulling her thoughts back to the present, she said, “We’ve located Gavril and Robbie. They’re in Malta, and other vampires are drifting in to them. We think they’re going to cause a major tremor under the sea that’ll trigger tsunamis all around the Mediterranean coast.”
Konrad’s eyes were steady. “We?” he repeated. “You and who? Saloman?”
She met his gaze. “And Elizabeth. And Maximilian. It was Maximilian who located them. I’m going out there tonight, with him. Come with me.”
He closed his eyes, as if shutting out the sight of her. “Mihaela. Mihaela… Cut off your connection to the vampires, and I’ll c
ome. I’ll even bring the second team as backup.”
“We need Maximilian more than extra hunters. It isn’t just fight power. It’s psychic power. We need his feel for stone.”
“No, Mihaela, we don’t.” Konrad stood, pushing back his chair with a sharp scrape. “You can’t trust vampires,” he said deliberately. “And if you could, Maximilian would not be one of them.”
“Maximilian, together with Saloman and Dmitriu, saved our necks three months ago.”
“They were there,” Konrad snapped. “Against express orders too. But we saved our own necks. With a bit of help from Cyn’s hunters.”
Mihaela stared. “Are you really pretending Saloman made no difference? Without him, we wouldn’t even have survived the first wave! This place would be matchwood and vampires would be running out of control. We’d probably all be dead. I certainly would be, because it was only Maximilian who saved my life. Did you even notice that?”
Konrad seized her shoulder. “Is that what this is about, Mihaela? Gratitude? Because he saved your life by some accident or calculated design? How long are you going to pay for that before you wake up?”
“Konrad, I need your help,” she pleaded, covering his hand on her shoulder. “More than ever, with Maximilian there, I need your help.”
A moment longer, he stared into her eyes, then slowly slid his hand free. “He scares you,” he observed. “And yet you’re still prepared to work with him? Fear is there for a reason.”
“To be overcome,” Mihaela said with an attempt at lightness. “Please, Konrad, come with me. Or if you can’t bring yourself to do that, tell me I can rely on you for backup here?”
Konrad sat down again heavily. “I can’t do that. Unless you break the connection with the vampires. I won’t work with them ever again.”
“Not even to save thousands of lives?”
“That’s up to you, Mihaela. Ditch them, and I’ll come with you.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying that. Can you live with this if the earthquake happens? If thousands die because you wouldn’t help?”
“I will help. But not with them. That’s my condition.”
Mihaela kicked his chair leg. “Christ, you’re a stubborn bastard! Konrad, there’s a child involved, and thousands of others could lose their lives. The destruction will be horrific.”
He whitened, and yet the blind, determined hardness of his eyes never softened for a moment. “And if they do, maybe you and the rest of this once-great organization will wake up to the truth. That this alliance is just plain wrong.”
Mihaela stepped back as though he’d struck her. “Are you saying you have more in common with Gavril than with me?”
His eyes fell. “No,” he said tiredly. “But right now, I understand him more.”
She reached for his shoulder. “Konrad—”
He jerked away from her. “I’ve set my conditions, Mihaela,” he snapped.
A moment longer, she stared at him. Then, without a word, she turned and walked out.
****
There was no sign of Maximilian at the airport, not even at the departure gate. Mihaela wondered if he was traveling in the hold. In a suitcase. Or a coffin. Somehow, she couldn’t quite imagine it, although the thought gave her a sour kind of amusement.
She sat down on one of the uncomfortable seats near the desk and dug her Malta guidebook out of her handbag. She flicked through until she found the sections on the island’s megalithic sites and began to read.
She didn’t feel or see him sit beside her. She just knew, suddenly, that he was there. Her body knew, heating as it always did around him. Every tiny hair seemed to stand up in awareness, and it wasn’t even unpleasant. It wasn’t unpleasant at all.
After a moment, allowing herself to get used to the shock of his nearness, she said, “There are several of these sites.”
“Robbie says they always go to the same one. It won’t take us long to discover which. I’ll feel their presence.”
Slowly, she turned her head and regarded him. He looked as he always did: young, physical, casually dangerous, with the face of a fallen angel. He wore his woolen workman’s jacket over jeans and a T-shirt and lounged quite at ease in his uncomfortable seat. It was hard to imagine she’d rolled naked on a cavern floor with him, had spent hours lost in the sensual wonders of sex with him. Some of it had been surprisingly gentle. The rest had been wild, rough…
A vision of him flashed through her mind, his glowing silver eyes devouring her as he lay on her, twisting and writhing inside her, pounding her with impossible speed into yet another orgasm. His fangs gleamed white as he plunged for her throat and pushed hard into her. She’d screamed, wrapping her legs around his hips, straining to him as if she’d melt into his body if she could.
She looked quickly away, unable to bear even the memory of that intensity. She couldn’t regret it, and yet she couldn’t live with it. Maybe she was destined to die on Malta. She just hoped they’d save Robbie and stop Gavril first.
His thigh was a bare inch from hers. It gave off no heat, and yet she was so aware of it, it took considerable willpower simply not to close the distance. She stared at her book and wished they’d call for boarding.
****
They had to change planes in Zurich, so it was four o’clock in the morning before they arrived at Malta’s Luqa airport. Mihaela watched in fascination as the immigration officer scrutinized Maximilian’s passport and let him through.
“Do you have a team of forgers or something?” she asked curiously as they went to reclaim their luggage.
“Don’t need one,” Maximilian said. He flashed his “passport” at her. It was a totally blank booklet. “Enchanted. I can be whoever I want.”
He leaned forward and picked her suitcase off the carousel.
“How did you know…?” she began.
“It smells of you,” he said and grabbed a brown leather holdall with his free hand before swinging away.
“Is that yours?” Mihaela demanded as they walked toward customs. “Or did you just fancy the look of it?”
“Both,” he said serenely. “I can’t just pick any bag at random, can I? I wouldn’t have my self-assembly coffin.”
Mihaela choked on a laugh. Whatever he had in the bag that he shouldn’t, he could no doubt disguise. Which would be a useful ability in her own line of work. She herself never traveled without at least two stakes, but she had to disguise them as drumsticks, with blunt knobbles on the sharp ends to get them through the X-ray machines.
As they walked into the arrivals hall, Maximilian said calmly, “There’s a vampire here.”
“Watching us?” Mihaela demanded, looking casually around as if for helpful signs or friends.
“I’m masking us. But I’d say, on the lookout for us.”
“Gavril is very careful,” she said ruefully. “Is that him by the newspaper stand?”
A man who looked half-asleep was propping up the side of the stand.
“No. She’s in the café, with a cappuccino.”
Mihaela made another casual pass. Plumpish and middle-aged, the woman looked perfectly ordinary, and she sat idly stirring her teaspoon around the cup and watching the flow of people. Her gaze passed harmlessly over them.
“I’d know her again,” Mihaela murmured.
They took one of the airport taxis to the hotel in Valetta. Mihaela, beguiled by familiarity over the hours of flying and waiting, felt comfortable enough to consider sleeping in the car. Only she didn’t feel comfortable enough to risk her head dropping onto his inviting shoulder. She’d probably drool on him. Which, while it might serve him right, would do her dignity no good.
So she contented herself with watching the dark scenery fly past. Beside her, in silence, Maximilian appeared to be doing the same. After the countryside came some dull, mundane streets, then a high wall with the sea beyond. Mihaela couldn’t take much in for tiredness.
“The British Hotel?” she managed to mock as they pull
ed up outside it. “How very colonial.”
Maximilian only shrugged. The British had been the last in a long line of foreign possessors of the island. Mihaela vaguely recalled that the British king had presented the islanders with the St. George’s Cross for their bravery in holding out against the terrible battering they’d endured in the Second World War. Perhaps some residual affection remained after independence.
It was an unassuming hotel, where, after Maximilian registered for them both, they managed their own luggage into a tiny lift that made personal space an issue. When the lift doors opened, Mihaela got out first, murmuring, “Where’s my key?”
“We both have the same key. It’s a suite.”
“According to whom?” Mihaela asked as she stepped into the room.
“Angyalka.”
Tiled, patterned floor, double bed. Two doors leading off. One to a tiny shower room. The other led into another bedroom with three single beds.
Mihaela’s lip twitched. “It’s a family room. This is where the kids would sleep.”
“You can have it, since you’re younger.” Maximilian walked across to the curtains and drew them back. There was a narrow balcony outside, and beyond, a breathtaking view of the sea, the illuminated Grand Harbor, and the island fortresses.
Wordlessly, Maximilian opened the balcony door and stepped outside. As if she couldn’t help herself, Mihaela followed him and leaned against the balcony rail.
As sometimes happened without any real reason, a sense of pure happiness began to build slowly from her toes. It had something to with the peace of the night, with the beauty of the view, for which she had no words. She wouldn’t think beyond that, just let the happiness come and engulf her, for she knew from experience it wouldn’t last.
The strange, undead being beside her stood perfectly still, not touching, not speaking, and yet she knew, in the same buried, barely understood part of her that rejoiced inwardly at beauty, that for this moment, he was part of the happiness.
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