by Tina Folsom
Grayson took a step toward Blake. “Then why the fuck can’t you find her? You’re supposed to know where she is at all times. You’re supposed to protect her!”
Grayson was a hothead, just like Blake had been in his youth, but deep down he was like his father: fiercely protective of his family. If Katie had ever had any doubts about Grayson’s loyalty to his siblings despite their constant rivalry, his anger at Blake now expunged them entirely.
Blake peeled his lips back from his gums, flashing the nineteen-year-old just enough fang to demand respect. “Isabelle was playing a different part from the one she was supposed to.”
Katie expected Blake to point the finger at her, but to her surprise, he didn’t. Instead he took the blame on himself. “I didn’t adjust her security detail in time.” He narrowed his eyes at the hybrid. “But I can assure you, Grayson, I will find your sister. She’s my responsibility, and I don’t—”
“It’s my fault,” Katie cut in, putting her hand on Blake’s forearm. “I’m to blame. She begged me to change roles with her. And I agreed.” She turned her head to Samson. “I’m sorry. It was all last minute. I—”
Samson cut her off with an abrupt movement of his hand. Then he looked back at Blake. “Search every inch of this building and the grounds. She has to be here. She has to.”
“Samson!” Delilah’s strained voice came from behind him.
He spun around.
Katie noticed their wordless exchange. As a blood-bonded couple they were able to communicate telepathically. Seconds passed in silence. It made Katie even more aware of the goings-on around her: stagehands rummaged through the area where spare furniture was kept, turning over each item. Scanguards staff rushed through the corridors, opened every door, checked every closet. Different voices calling for Isabelle could be heard throughout the building. Katie knew that others would be outside the building, searching the surrounding parking lot, adjacent buildings, and streets. There was any number of hiding places, though Katie knew that Isabelle wasn’t hiding. She sensed it in her gut. Could feel it in her veins. Just like Samson and Delilah sensed it.
With every second that passed, reality encroached on the make-believe world of the stage behind her: Isabelle was gone.
Katie watched as Samson pulled his wife into his arms and pressed her to him, gently caressing her head.
“We’ll find her, sweetness,” he promised.
More people now crowded into the backstage area. Zane, the bald vampire who could scare the living daylights out of anybody, marched toward Samson, clearly agitated. He had a special connection to Isabelle: he was her godfather, the first person Isabelle had ever bitten. Besides her parents, he was the closest confidant she had.
A sob tore from Delilah, and Grayson exchanged a look with his father. Samson nodded and transferred his wife into his son’s arms.
“She has to be here, Mom,” Grayson comforted her.
“Nothing in the basement,” Zane reported to Samson, then turned to Blake. “How about the surveillance cameras?”
“I’ve already sent Eddie to check the video footage,” Blake replied, just as Amaury joined them.
The linebacker-sized vampire with the shoulder-long hair exchanged a quick glance with Samson. “The upper floors are clear, too.”
Blake touched his mic and listened for a moment. Then, “Bring him in! What are you waiting for? Now!”
Instantly, Katie could see all the vampires backstage go on alert. Their eyes started to glow, and she could see their mouths become fuller as their fangs extended.
“Who?” Samson asked Blake.
“My guys found an unknown vampire lurking in the parking lot. They’re bringing him in now.”
When the assembled vampires’ eyes narrowed a few moments later, Katie realized that they could already hear the intruder being dragged in, though it took another few seconds for Katie’s ears to perceive the sound of the struggling individual.
Everybody was rushing toward the door, anticipating the suspect’s arrival. Their broad backs obstructed Katie’s view. Anxious to find out what was going on, Katie stepped onto a footstool and looked over the vampires’ heads, just as three of Blake’s men brought in a defiant vampire.
Oh my God! He looked ferocious, and the black hair, black lashes, and dark complexion made him look like the devil. His eyes glared red, and his fangs were extended. He was big, broad-shouldered and muscular. He wore casual clothes, but there was nothing casual about his demeanor. Power and strength radiated from every pore of his body. She was inexplicably drawn to that power. Drawn to the vampire beneath the surface.
The sudden silence in the room pulled her out of her observation and made her snap her gaze upward, back to the captive’s face. The strange vampire had stopped struggling and was staring at Samson.
“Luther!” Samson hissed.
4
It had been a bad idea to show up in San Francisco wanting to make things right, Luther realized now. Apparently twenty years had done nothing to lessen Samson’s hatred for him. Nor Amaury’s. Both his former friends glared at him as if they were ready to rip his head off. Maybe they should. Maybe it would all be for the better.
“Oh my God, it’s him, it’s Luther,” the tearful voice of a woman broke the hate-filled silence.
He didn’t have to break eye contact with Samson to recognize the voice: Delilah, the woman he’d almost killed so many years earlier.
“It was him, it was him!” she now yelled with a fury he didn’t quite understand.
If he’d known that everybody at Scanguards held a grudge for such a long time, he would have never come.
“I paid the fucking price,” Luther ground out.
What else did they want from him? The council had sentenced him to twenty years, though they could have given him fifty, but Amaury’s mate, Nina, had pleaded for leniency. Maybe she shouldn’t have. Maybe he didn’t deserve leniency.
“Release him!” Samson commanded the guards who were restraining him. When they hesitated, he added, “That’s an order.”
When the men took their claws off him, Luther felt a sense of surprise wash over him. Had he misjudged Samson?
A balled fist punched him in the face so fast and so hard that Luther was catapulted back. He lost his balance and crashed against the wall. Before he could jump back up, Samson was already on him.
“Where’s my daughter?” he yelled and delivered a second blow to Luther’s jaw.
Luther’s head snapped to the side, and he tasted blood. His own blood. “How the fuck should I know?”
When the next blow came, Luther blocked it with his forearm and pushed back. But Samson didn’t give up so easily. Fury coursed through Luther, giving him wings. He reared up and barreled toward his former friend, delivering an uppercut to Samson’s chin, yet still holding back his true strength.
Samson’s eyes blazed with unbridled rage, while his friends stood back a few paces, allowing their boss to do as he pleased. Luther gritted his teeth. He hadn’t come to duke it out with Samson as if they were two thugs. That hadn’t been his plan. Far from it.
But apparently it was what Samson wanted.
Another punch veered toward Luther’s temple. In a lightning-fast move he raised his arm, preventing Samson’s claws from reaching their target, while kicking his foot against his opponent’s knee. But Samson didn’t go down as expected. Sure-footed, he barely swayed before drawing back his arm for another blow.
“Stop it!” Luther yelled.
“What did you do to my daughter?” Samson repeated, flashing his fangs.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about!”
But his words fell on deaf ears. Samson’s claws came toward him. Luther moved, but the wall at his back and another vampire who stood too close made it impossible to get out of the path of the lethal instrument fast enough. Sharp barbs, as deadly as knives, sliced across his shoulder, leaving deep cuts from which blood oozed instantly. The metallic scent permeated
the air in the corridor, inciting the need in the assembled vampires to show their vampire side.
Fangs flashed. Fingers turned into claws. Eyes glowed red. Men turned into bloodthirsty vampires. He’d seen it often enough—prison had been a perfect microcosm of what happened on the outside.
Samson slammed his full body weight against Luther, pinning him against the wall. Though Luther could have pushed him off, what would have been the point when at least seven other vampires were surrounding them, ready to interfere should their boss be in danger? Not even Luther could beat those odds. So he didn’t even try.
“Go ahead, slice me open!” he challenged his old friend. “But it won’t change my answer. I don’t fucking know where your daughter is.”
At least now he could guess that the slightly hostile treatment he was receiving had nothing to do with what had happened twenty years ago. Rather, he seemed to have stumbled into an incident that was only just unraveling. And he sure had no interest in sticking around to find out what this was about. If Samson couldn’t keep tabs on his daughter, it wasn’t Luther’s goddamn problem.
Through narrowed eyes Samson watched him intently, as if he could find out the truth by staring at him. Luther didn’t blink. He had nothing to hide.
From behind Samson, another vampire appeared. Luther had never seen him before, but he knew nevertheless who he was. After all, he was a younger edition of Samson himself—and a hybrid. He had to be his son.
“He’s lying. He has to be lying!” the young hybrid spat. “Dad, you can’t possibly believe Luther! Not after all he did!” It appeared Samson’s offspring knew who he was—and what he’d done in the past. Mistrust spewed from the boy’s eyes.
“Grayson!” Samson growled, tossing his son a warning look. “You take care of your mother and Patrick; I’ll handle this.”
Reluctantly, Grayson retreated a couple of steps. By doing so, he gave Luther a view of the people standing farther back. In the door frame of what appeared to be a backstage area, a woman stood dressed in a long blue period dress with an empire waist, which accentuated her full breasts. Outside he’d seen posters about a play when he’d arrived. Apparently she was one of the student actresses.
For a moment, the sight of such female perfection made him forget that he was in the middle of a confrontation. One thing was immediately evident: she wasn’t a vampire. However, she didn’t appear fazed by the show of aggression the vampires around her demonstrated.
Luther slowly lifted his eyes from her cleavage to her graceful neck and the beautiful oval face framed by dark brown hair, which was upswept with curls dangling from it. She looked like she didn’t belong in this century. As if she was a time traveler, a mirage from a different era. Not quite human, but something more. She was beautiful, and the sight of her filled him with an odd sense of yearning. A longing he didn’t understand.
“I’m asking again, where is my daughter?”
Intrigued and at the same time irritated, Luther tore his gaze from the dark-haired beauty and glared back at Samson.
“I don’t fucking know. So take your hands off me.”
“Luther?”
At the sound of Eddie’s voice, Luther spun his head to the side. His protégé, the young man he’d turned into a vampire over twenty years ago, came toward him.
“Hi Eddie, been a long time,” he said dryly.
Only once, Eddie had visited him in prison, and back then they’d gotten into a physical fight. He wasn’t expecting Eddie to take his side now either.
“What’re you doing here?” His protégé seemed genuinely surprised and interested.
“He abducted Isabelle,” Samson claimed.
“No, he didn’t,” Eddie contradicted his boss.
Luther raised an eyebrow, surprised that Eddie would give him the benefit of the doubt.
Eddie moved closer, addressing Samson directly. “Blake asked me to check any surveillance recordings from the cameras inside and outside the building. We have a visual. Isabelle was taken. But not by Luther. If he’s behind it, he didn’t do the dirty work himself.”
Well, so much for Eddie’s confidence in him.
“Who? Who took her? Did she get hurt?” Samson asked, easing off Luther and reaching for his wife’s hand.
Luther recognized true fear in his old friend’s face.
“All I could see on the tape is that some guy grabbed her outside the dressing room. She struggled, but she couldn’t shake him. Which suggests that he’s a vampire or a hybrid himself—we don’t know for sure, since a video can’t capture a vampire’s aura. But with Isabelle’s hybrid strength she would have been able to defeat any human.”
“Did you recognize him?”
Eddie shook his head. “I only got a partial of his face. And no voice. There’s no audio on the recording.”
“Run what you’ve got through our database at HQ; see whether we can get anything with facial recognition.”
Eddie nodded. “I already sent all the footage to the server at HQ.”
Samson turned back to Luther, narrowing his eyes. “Who took Isabelle?”
“Didn’t you hear Eddie? It wasn’t me!”
“One of your men?” Samson continued grilling him.
Luther sucked more air into his lungs. “I don’t have any men. I was in prison for twenty years. Remember?”
“Oh, I remember.” A dangerous undertone colored Samson’s voice. “And now you’re out. And back here. On the night my daughter disappears.”
“I’ve got nothing to do with that.”
“We’ll see.” He motioned to Zane and Amaury. “Cuff him and take him to HQ.”
“You’re making a big mistake,” Luther warned.
Samson went toe to toe with him. “No, you’re the one who’s making a mistake by showing up here.” He tossed a sideways glance at his subordinates. “Interrogate him downtown.” Then he swung around and looked back at Eddie. “Did the guy on the video touch anything? Doors? Walls? Anything at all?”
“There’s a chance we can get some fingerprints off the door, but it means we’ll need to get fingerprints from everybody else too in order to rule them out.”
“Do it!”
“I’ll get a team on that,” Blake interrupted him, then nodded to Eddie. “You and Thomas analyze the recording and run it through the system.”
Not too gently, Zane and Amaury grabbed Luther’s arms.
“Welcome back,” Amaury gritted.
“I hear we’re related now,” Luther replied. His protégé Eddie being Amaury’s brother-in-law made them practically family.
Amaury flashed his fangs at him, apparently not too pleased about that fact. “Trust me, that won’t have any bearing on how I treat you.”
A shove from Zane catapulted Luther closer to the door of the backstage area. The woman in the blue costume still stood there, her lips moving as she mumbled something to herself.
Tears rimmed her eyes. “It’s all my fault.”
The words registered but didn’t make sense. Luther hesitated for an instant, resisting Zane and Amaury’s grip, and inhaled.
The scent filling his nostrils made him jerk back in surprise.
The woman wasn’t human.
5
Katie’s breath shuddered and her heart skidded to an abrupt halt. Luther was staring at her, eyes widened, lips parted, still showing the tips of his fangs. His nostrils flared. Though she was used to being around vampires and had never been scared of them, this was different. Luther was different. He wasn’t civilized like the others. Anything but. Feral came to mind. It fit with his admission that he’d been in prison for twenty years.
His eyes were dark, almost black, but around the rim of his irises a golden hue began to shimmer. It was a sight from which she couldn’t tear herself away. Almost as if he was using some unseen power to draw her to him. To entice her to approach. To catch her in his net.
She felt paralyzed, unable to move, unable to breathe for fear he would tigh
ten the invisible chains he’d wrapped around her and suffocate her. In her mind’s eye she could see it happening. Her instinct told her to step back, to extricate herself from his spell. But something else inside her, something purely female—and purely wanton—overrode her sense of self-preservation.
This man was danger personified. Her entire life, she’d tried to avoid danger, tried to stay safe, but suddenly that very notion seemed cowardly. Danger suddenly called to her. Tempted her. Told her to throw caution to the wind. To live a little. To take a risk.
Luther’s eyes narrowed, and his lips moved. You, he mouthed.
But before she could figure out what he meant by that, a voice broke the spell she seemed to be under. “Katie!” It was her brother Wesley.
Luther’s head whirled in Wes’s direction, his look changing to one of battle-readiness.
The moment Wes reached them, he pressed a quick kiss to the top of her head. “Hey, love, you okay?”
Katie could only nod, before Samson interrupted, “We need you to find her, Wes.”
With a regretful look, Wes shook his head. “Sorry, Samson, but she’s a hybrid. Her vampire side prevents me from scrying for her. I have no way of locating her. Not with witchcraft anyway.”
When a low growl came from Luther, Katie’s gaze instantly shot to him, but already Zane and Amaury were dragging him away.
“Can’t you try, Wes?” Delilah insisted, giving Wesley a pleading look. “Please can’t you find my baby?”
Wes closed his eyes for a moment. “I wish I could help. But there are limits to my craft.”
“Oh no! As a baby she was telepathic, but it went away when she started to speak. I wish she could still communicate with me. Oh, Isabelle, where are you?” A sob tore from Delilah and she buried her head in her son’s chest.
Grayson exchanged a look with his father. “What now, Dad?”
Samson turned to Blake. “I want every one of our men out there looking for Isabelle. Call in anybody who’s on leave. I want every corner of this city searched. Tap into every surveillance camera, every traffic camera, every video feed. I want my daughter found.”
