Blood Guilt

by Marie Treanor

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mihaela ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant almost directly below their bedroom. She sat at a window table, gazing out over the Grand Harbor, and thought about Robbie and Gavril and her long dead family. And the horrors of the earthquake it was her responsibility to prevent.

  Occasionally, in the past, hunters had made very temporary alliances with one vampire against a more dangerous one, sometimes to keep in power the devil they knew as preferable to the alternative of chaos and the violence of a leadership war. After the disaster of allying with Zoltán against Saloman, they’d decided never to do it again. And yet here she was allied with another vampire who had once been the most powerful in the world, because the vampire overlord wished it.

  And because Mihaela, innately practical, knew she needed him in this. Finishing up her coffee, she left the restaurant and made her way down to reception to arrange for a hired car. The kind with darkened windows. Then she went out and bought Maximilian a pair of sunglasses to support her story of his dangerously light-sensitive eyes.

  Returning to the room, she was annoyed to feel the quickening of her heart—which had nothing to do with the danger of the creature inside. She accepted that he wouldn’t hurt her. It was more to do with the way he’d looked when she’d passed through the outer room earlier.

  She’d gone for a shower when she first awoke. And although entering his room in only her night shirt had seemed ridiculously embarrassing considering what he’d already done to her naked body in Scotland, she’d refused to let such a tiny thing interfere with good sense. But of course, she couldn’t just keep her back to him and walk straight into the bathroom. She had to glance around the room.

  He’d lain on the bed in the semi-gloom, so perfectly still he could have been dead. As in fact he was. Only his pose was curiously human, his forearm flung up over his forehead, his eyes closed.

  She’d seen vampires asleep before. Usually fledglings—recently made vampires who had no self-control and were therefore much more dangerous than their older brethren. A lot of her time as a hunter had been spent clearing out fledgling communities, and the simplest time to do that was in daylight, while they slept. Older vampires slept less. She’d never expected to see Maximilian asleep, and for some reason, the sight had thrown her.

  He’d looked vulnerable. Which, at that moment, he was; she could probably have staked him then. But what had really got to her was the fact that in sleep his age seemed to have altered. The normally smooth, youthful face had lines of character, of life and suffering—hardly six hundred years’ worth, but still, he appeared to have aged.

  Not that he’d looked anything like an old man. If anything, he was sexier than ever, and she’d let her eyes trail from his face down his throat and unnaturally still, cotton-covered chest to his flat stomach and crotch and thighs. There was no spare flesh on him at all, and yet there was nothing remotely weak about his leanness. His shoulders were broad, and through his T-shirt, she could make out the powerful muscles as well as his ribs.

  It was only as she ate breakfast that it had come to her that he’d aged because he was hungry. He hadn’t fed last night, and she’d no idea when his last meal had been. She knew that Dmitriu, a vampire not so very much younger than Maximilian, had suffered terribly after only a few nights’ starvation. But how much could Maximilian have fed over the decades of his self-imposed exile on the island? She could almost imagine him forcing himself to suffer because of his crime, the great wrong he’d done Saloman.

  It was no longer enough to call him a treacherous vampire bastard. Somehow, over the last week, he’d become a being who’d made a mistake and paid the price in suffering. As if she had understanding, even compassion for him.

  I’m fooling myself because I slept with him, she thought as she inserted the key in the door. But she knew that wasn’t the whole truth. Like Elizabeth, she’d fallen into the mistake of seeing this vampire as an individual. Of assuming her values could therefore be his. They weren’t, and she should never forget that.

  He sat on the bed, legs apart, the stone compass in his hands, and didn’t look up at once.

  “Can you find him?” she asked.

  Lifting one casual hand, he pointed inland, away from the Grand Harbor.

  “Good. There should be a hired car here within the hour. Though I might have to wrap you in a blanket to get you into it.”

  He raised one dark eyebrow but said nothing, although his lips twitched when she tossed him the sunglasses. Opening the case, he put them on.

  Mihaela grinned. “You look like a famous movie actor. Or maybe a rock star. You’re wasted enough.”

  He actually looked startled by that comment, even turned his head to look in the wardrobe mirror.

  “When did you last feed?” she asked briskly. How the hell had it come to her asking a vampire such a question? Without staking him for the answer.

  “I forget. I don’t—” He broke off, a flash of a frown and then a grunt of laughter chasing over his features. “I didn’t feed much for a long time. I guess I’ve got too used to it again.” He took off the sunglasses and his gray eyes met hers in the mirror. “There’s a certain exquisite torture in sitting next to you for hours, smelling your addictive blood and yet not touching.”

  Heat flooded into her neck and face. “You never used to talk much either,” she retorted.

  ****

  Like the British, the Maltese drove on the left side of the road, so Mihaela had to concentrate to reaccustom herself to the oddity. In truth, she was glad of the distraction from the being who sat so still and observant beside her. For the first quarter of an hour after bolting into the car from the hotel, with an overcoat and an umbrella over his head, he said nothing at all. Eventually, she worked out he was in pain. She could even smell singeing. And something appallingly like cooking meat.

  She glanced at him as they drew out of Valetta. “That wasn’t comfortable for you, was it?”

  “I’m almost healed,” he said indifferently, and she had to swallow back her instinctive words of apology and comfort. As it was, she couldn’t prevent a tiny, helpless jerk of distress.

  Exactly when had she started feeling sorry for vampires’ aches and pains? She was growing too soft to do her job.

  Maximilian said, “Drive toward Skorba first.”

  Skorba was one of the several megalithic temples scattered across the island. Maximilian was convinced Robbie was living near one of them, because Gavril took him there most nights, sometimes with the other vampires, and they walked. Gavril didn’t ask Robbie to do anything, just let him run among the stones, touching them.

  But when Mihaela drove into the rough, empty tourist car park, Maximilian said, “He’s never been here. Try Ta’ Hagrat.”

  Wordlessly, she turned the car and drove back out. But Ta’ Hagrat elicited much the same reaction.

  “Even the stone compass isn’t moving,” Maximilian said, his dark brows drawn together with impatience. “I think Robbie’s asleep.”

  Suddenly, the most dreadful of all explanations drove the blood from her head, making her dizzy. She stared at Maximilian. “When did you ‘speak’ to him last? Didn’t you feel him last night?”

  “Yes, I felt him last night. I could have tracked him then, but I didn’t. It was too close to daylight. But he didn’t sleep last night; he’s bound to be tired. He’s not dead, Mihaela.”

  “You can’t know that. He isn’t a vampire.”

  “I can,” Maximilian said firmly, opening the map further out on his knees. “But these are the wrong sites.”

  “So why did the compass point toward them?”

  “Because…because it only gives you a direction. Not a distance.” He paused, sniffing. “That’s another thing. Would you say it smells here?”

  “No… Perhaps it does to a city kid.”

  “No.” Maximilian shook his head emphatically. “He isn’t on Malta. He’s on Gozo.”

  “Gozo…” The sec
ond largest of the three Maltese islands. “Does it smell?”

  “Oh yes. Or at least it does in the summer. It isn’t unpleasant, but as I recall, it’s much more definite than this.”

  Mihaela leaned forward excitedly to the map, poking her finger at Gozo. Beneath the paper, she struck hard, muscled leg, and hurried on. “There’s a temple there too—Ggantija.” At the same time, she was dragging her phone out of her pocket. “I wonder if we have to go back to Valetta to catch a ferry…”

  A quick online search proved that they didn’t. There was another ferry terminal closer by at Cirkewwa. Triumphantly, Mihaela restarted the car.

  It was still light by the time they reached Cirkewwa and parked close to the harbor. Only after Mihaela slid back into the driver’s seat with two cups of coffee in polystyrene cups did she realize that it had never entered her head to leave him there while she went alone on the ferry. She might conceivably have found Robbie before nightfall, by means of vampire detectors and a heap of luck. Although, without Maximilian, her chances of defeating half a dozen vampires and rescuing Robbie alive would not have been great.

  She muttered, “Apparently, Saloman drinks this stuff, so I brought you one.”

  He took one cup from her little tray with a polite word of thanks, and she watched with peculiar fascination as he raised it to his lips and sipped. Then, clocking her interest, he lowered the cup, his eyebrows twitching.

  “Where does it…?” she began impetuously, before breaking off with blood flooding into her cheeks.

  A spark of amusement lit in his eyes. “Where does it go?” he guessed. “The liquid? It’s absorbed by my whole system, much as fresh blood is. It doesn’t pass through my stomach, and I don’t go to the—er—toilet. How can you hunt vampires and not know these things?”

  “We don’t normally go out for coffee together,” she retorted.

  He raised the cup in a silent toast. She drank a little without speaking. A faint drizzle had started, darkening the sky, so she watched the trickle on the windscreen, trying to avoid the troublesome thoughts. But his words of yesterday echoed around her head constantly, like background music.

  “You called me ‘damaged,’” she blurted. “If I am, it’s down to vampires, not hunters.”

  He shrugged. “We’re all formed by the people and events surrounding us. What counts is how we deal with it. If you want the truth, I admire the way you’ve handled your lot.”

  “My damage?” she asked sweetly.

  “Yes,” he said seriously. “You always come up fighting.”

  “And you don’t?”

  His lip curled. “I have a slightly different issue. I caused my own problems.”

  Mihaela leaned her head back against the seat rest to look at him more closely. “Being a hunter didn’t cause mine. I like being a hunter.”

  He actually smiled, an open, oddly stunning smile that caught at her breath and her stomach. “Oh, you would always have been a hunter. What damages you is letting it define you, limit you.”

  Mihaela frowned direly, wondering quite seriously whether to throw her cup at him. “I am not limited,” she said at last. “Except by my belief in right and wrong. And there,” she added darkly, before he could say anything at all, “I am quite capable of thinking for myself.”

  “You’re talking about hunting again. Mihaela, everyone is more than what they are. Even I am more than the treacherous bastard the world thinks me. That’s why Saloman forgives me. And you—you are so much more than merely a hunter.”

  She’d never heard him speak with such passion before, even in the throes of sex. It took her by surprise, closing up her throat as the stricken, silent words rang around her head: But I’m not. A hunter is all I’ve ever been and all I can be.

  “That’s what you want to avoid for Robbie, isn’t it?” she said shakily. “That’s why you don’t want the hunters to have control of him. But no one pushed me into this, Maximilian. I chose it.”

  He crumpled the empty cup in his fist. “What other choice could you make?”

  “I went to university. Any career was open to me—.”

  “But you couldn’t take any other, could you? You didn’t want to, because they were always there, always talking to you about what had happened to you and your family, and how they stopped it happening to anyone else. You grew up with them as your heroes, your ideals of nobility. And I’ll bet they had you in martial arts training from childhood.”

  “They were kind to me!” she burst out. They were all that had made her life special, their visits to the orphanage where she grew up, the warmth of Katalin’s flat in Budapest where she’d been made so welcome as a student. The sports they did together, from badminton to judo…

  Unthinkable that the only affection she’d known in these years had been calculated, manipulative, all aimed at drawing her into the network. He was wrong; he had to be wrong.

  His profound gray eyes seemed to reflect her despair. With his free hand, he reached out and touched her cheek with one fingertip, as if the tears aching in her throat had actually spilled. “It’s easy to be kind to you, Mihaela, easy to love you. I’m sure it was their pleasure as well as their duty to look after you. They wanted for you the only life they had known, the life they believed in because it had been sold to them too. And so the cycle goes on.”

  As if for emphasis, he moved his hand, trailing the backs of his fingers from her cheekbone to the corner of her mouth. His voice became a husky whisper. “But you’re so much more than a hunter. You’re a passionate, caring, giving woman, so beautiful it hurts me to look at you.”

  Her lips parted in a silent gasp. His words bombarded her with a rush of confused feeling—including a glimmer of understanding, astonishment, and a peculiar, aching gladness, none of which she could deal with right now. Ever.

  She said shakily, “Can we go and fight vampires now?”

  His lips quirked; his hand fell away, and he glanced at the darkening sky. “Yes, we probably can.”

  ****

  She knew from Maximilian’s face, from the controlled tension of his stride beside her, that they were finally on Robbie’s trail. The fantastic, eerie site of Ggantija was the standing-stone temple to which Robbie was taken so frequently. In fact, there were two temples and other formations of stones scattered there, ancient and mysterious.

  They stood by the closed gates, peering up at, surely, one of the earliest results of human ingenuity. Older by a thousand years than the more famous Stonehenge in England, older even than the Egyptian pyramids…

  “He was here last night,” Maximilian said quietly. “With seven vampires, including Gavril.”

  “Can you sense them?” Mihaela asked. “Do you know where they are now?” Her detector was useless when Maximilian was with her. It only registered him.

  “They’re close by. Robbie’s thinking of me, as I asked him to whenever he went outside.” He opened his palm to reveal the stone compass. The needle was pointing down the hill.

  “Does Gavril know we’re here?”

  Maximilian shook his head. “I’m masking both of us.”

  “That wasn’t enough in Edinburgh,” she reminded him. “You said he still recognized you. And he found Robbie and me in St. Andrews.”

  “I was drunk in Edinburgh. And even in St. Andrews I was unaware that Gavril could use the strength of others.”

  “How does he do that?”

  “I’ve no idea. Saloman says it’s possible but was an art lost with the Ancients.” He dropped the stone compass back in his pocket and turned his glittering eyes on Mihaela. “What do you want to do?”

  She drew in a breath, tapping her fingers on the gate and gazing at Maximilian as if she could find the answer in his cool, inhumanly handsome face.

  “We have to rescue Robbie,” she said abruptly. “And we have to stop them causing the earthquake. But what really scares the shit out of me is it might not achieve anything, that we can’t stop them or someone else doing it agai
n somewhere else. If the knowledge is out there, it’s out there. And if they need Robbie, he’ll never be safe from them.”

  Maximilian met her gaze in silence. Eventually, he said, “Robbie’s excited that we’re here, and happy enough to be coming back to the stones.” And she realized he’d been talking telepathically to the child all evening. “Nothing will happen tonight. They’re waiting for one more vampire to join them, probably later on tonight or tomorrow.”

  “Then we have a little time to find out more…” If she was prepared to let Robbie stay with the vampires for one more night. Or even just a few more hours.

  Maximilian stirred. “We could use the opportunity of their absence to search the house.”

  “And find whatever instrument they’re using?” She swung away from gate. “Let’s do that. If necessary, we can free Robbie later.”

  ****

  Maximilian led her to the vampires’ traditional “farmhouse” villa in the village of Xaghra without obvious difficulty, although he did once drag her down a side street to avoid coming face-to-face with them. She imagined Robbie looking back over his shoulder, looking for a glimpse of them.

  “Is Robbie really okay with us doing things this way?” she asked again. “Does he want us to take him away now?”

  “He’s curious,” Maximilian said with a shrug. “If he gets too anxious, I’ll tell you.”

  The villa, like many on the island, was surrounded by a high wall and a tall, solid gate, locked. While Mihaela glanced surreptitiously up and down the road, Maximilian stared at the lock until it sprang open.

  “Neat trick,” she murmured.

  “Do you need me to perform it at the front door, or is lock-picking among the standard talents of a hunter?”

  “Standard,” Mihaela said, waving a set of picks in front of her. “Aren’t you coming?”

  “They’ll smell me. In the open, they probably won’t notice behind my masking; but in there, on their own territory, they’d know.” He stepped back. “There are no vampires in the house. Their all with Robbie at Ggantija.”

  It didn’t even seem bizarre, until she was inside the house, that she was placing so much trust in a vampire. And not just any vampire—Maximilian the great betrayer. Even now, creeping down the hall and aware of the oddity, she trusted him to watch her back, to warn her of trouble in plenty of time, and to get her out of it if she needed him to. Perhaps it was because he’d defended her outside the Angel when he didn’t need to. But in reality, there didn’t seem to be a reason. She just did.