by C. L. Quinn
He couldn’t help himself, he squeaked, in shock, “You’re dead, I know you are.”
Her eyes opened and her head moved, then she looked at him. She looked confused, closing her eyes, her tongue sliding out to moisten her lips, then her eyes opened again, but she didn’t lift them.
With a painfully deep breath, she bent over, her hand to her belly, her eyes moved to Cheeto.
“You shot me,” came out on a wheeze.
“I killed you,” Cheeto followed up, barely audible.
“What?”
“I said I…”
“I heard you, you crazy fucking nut. God, I hurt. Why did you shoot me?”
“For the vampire. So we could keep him. He’ll want you back.”
Mal’s breath froze. He was looking for her? Could he know she was with child?
She tried to scoot off the bed and the pain wracked her body. Bending over, she felt the pain in her chest and lower abdomen.
“My daughter…” she whispered, fear cutting into her heart, but then she felt an intense warmth infuse her and she knew the baby was okay.
Her eyes blew upward to pin Cheeto’s. “Help me get out of here and I’ll forget all about this.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. The vampire, I need to be gone before he gets here.”
Cheeto began to nod his head. This was good, this would clean his slate, give him absolution.
“He’ll be here tonight. He’s coming from London.”
“Good. He can’t be out during the daylight, so that gives me time to move. Oh, fuck!”
She couldn’t get out of bed on her own, it hurt too much. Suddenly, she felt an arm around her waist and someone lifting her up. Cheeto was there, supporting her.
“You’re still a piece of shit, you know that.” Mal couldn’t help herself.
He smiled painfully and nodded. “I always have been. My daddy told me I’d never amount to anything and I’ve spent my life living down to his expectation of me.”
“Good job,” Mal said. She made it to the end of the bed and just sat there. “Can you get me my bag?”
Cheeto looked at her bag, half-emptied and strewn across the room, her wallet open and spilled out on top of the dresser. Mal’s eyes followed his.
“Crap. All right, just throw everything back into it, and find me my keys.”
“I have them. I was going for beer.”
Shaking her head, Mal tried to stand. “Nice to know you still felt like partying.”
Cheeto didn’t answer her at first, then he moved directly in front of her to capture her attention.
“I didn’t mean to kill you. Honestly. I just wanted to get you for Claude. Then you pulled your gun and I just fired.”
“Yeah, sure, I forgive you, you’re a real Samaritan. Just get me my keys.”
“You were dead,” Cheeto said, his tone serious, his volume higher.
“Sure. They always say you can’t kill an L.A. cop.”
“No, seriously. You weren’t breathing. You need to understand me, you were one hundred percent fucking dead, detective.”
Mal pushed herself and got onto her feet, kept her balance, shakily, but stayed upright. “I’m alive, Cheeto. I wouldn’t be if I had died. You’re mistaken, thank God.”
“No, I’m not. I don’t know how it happened, but you were dead, no breathing, no heartbeat, dead, all day. And now you’re breathing again.”
Mal stared at him. He was completely serious, she could see that. It was impossible, of course, people didn’t come back from the dead. But she knew better.
“Okay, whatever,” she said, anyway, putting an end to the discussion.
But he came to her and yanked at her shirt, the buttons popping, and it hung open.
“What the fuck?” Mal started to say, when Cheeto pointed to her chest.
“Look,” he said.
She glanced down and saw the bullet holes, no less than six ragged holes, one directly over her heart. Her hand went to each hole and gingerly slid across the damaged skin.
“It’s not possible,” she repeated.
“But it happened,” he insisted.
“I…” Mal tried to pose a comment, a thought, and nothing came. The evidence showed that she had serious, fatal, gunshot wounds. Not just her heart, but kidneys and gut.
“Are you a vampire, like him?” Cheeto suddenly asked.
“No!” Her response was loud. “No! I’m as human as you. I just…you must have missed the organs.”
Cheeto drew his chin back. “Yeah, sure.”
Mal didn’t believe it either, but she couldn’t process any more mysteries right now. “Look, I have to get out of here. You had better get lost, too.”
“Done. I don’t have a reason to stay in this city. Claude’s probably dead by now anyway.”
“All right. You have a credit card, Cheeto?”
He hesitated. “Um…”
“You killed me, you owe me.”
“Yeah.” He pulled the rattiest wallet she’d ever seen out of the back pocket of his jeans and handed her an equally nasty-looking credit card.
“Thanks. I’m going. Make sure I never see you again.”
“Done,” Cheeto repeated.
They walked out of the hotel room, Mal heading left to her car, Cheeto heading right to wherever the hell he was going. Mal paused while she watched him disappear around the corner of the building and then hit the road.
After she bought a cheap disposable phone at a big box department store, she dialed a number she’d committed to memory two days ago.
When the call connected, she sighed in relief. “Hi, it’s Mal. Erin, I need your help. I think he’s looking for me. I need to disappear.”
Darkness finally came, and Ahmose blew from the room, Eillia and Koen on his heels. David and Xavier had gone home, but with Ahmose’s pain and murderous rage, Eillia and Koen stayed with him as he returned to L.A. to retrieve the body of the woman he had deeper feelings for than he understood.
Eillia and Koen understood pain more than anyone. Both had lost people they’d loved deeply over all of these centuries, especially recently. They could not let Ahmose go through this alone.
The address burned into his memory, Ahmose crashed through the door of the low quality hotel room and knew immediately that she wasn’t there.
Moments behind him, Eillia and Koen walked into the mess.
“Less than clean,” Eillia murmured as the smell of the room assaulted her. And blood. The smell of blood was intense. But Ahmose’s woman wasn’t there.
Ahmose stood in the center of the empty room and stared at the bed, covered with blood that he knew belonged to Mal. He knew it was hers, he knew the smell of her blood, her scent, it was all over this room.
“He must have taken the body away.” Koen spoke the obvious.
“Why?” Eillia asked. “He was visibly affected by what he’d done. He agreed he would stay here with her, and, even through cyberspace, I can usually influence someone with that kind of intense emotion.”
“Something got to him,” Ahmose said through gritted teeth. “Someone.”
“Who? Who would want her body?”
“I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.” Ahmose closed his eyes. “I can’t feel her. I’ve taken her blood, I should be able to feel her, to find her body.”
“I suppose when they die, the bond is gone, too. Even if it’s this recently.” Eillia reached for his forearm.
“Ahmose, I’m sorry about this woman’s death, but there’s nothing you can do now. You need to go home. Ahmose, you can’t help her now, you know that. You have a loving family waiting for you.”
“Can you trace her?”
“No. Human blood is too weak, and once she’s passed, the scents begin to die quickly on the wind. It’s powerful here in this room where the blood is still present, but no.”
“I’m clutching at air. I know I ask too much, forgive me. I just cannot accept that she is gone.”
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“It’s harsh, but we know better. Ahmose, come back to France with us if you’re not ready to return home. We would love to have you.” Eillia caught his gaze. She could see and feel how lost he felt.
Could this girl have been the one? A potential mate? If she had been, he was right, the loss would be deep and it would take a long time to recover. It was best for him to get away from these constant reminders and begin to heal.
“So there is no way to find her…body?”
“Not unless I can find the man who was with her, but I don’t know who he was.”
“I’m staying. Just a few days, just to check around. Please, you and Koen go home. I’m fine.”
“You’re not,” Eillia countered. “But you will be.”
Ahmose nodded. His eyes landed on the blood and he suddenly needed to leave the room.
“Excuse me,” he said politely, and left quickly.
Eillia turned to Koen. “He needs to do this. We’ll go home and let him deal with this on his own. Even our presence won’t help him.”
“I know. I remember when I thought I’d lost Alisa. There was nothing in this world that could lessen my pain. My life halted. I hope he wasn’t that invested with this woman yet.”
“As do I. Come, let’s leave this morbid place. Humans are so fragile. I wonder how I would deal with such a limited lifespan.”
“Something as grand as you must live forever,” Koen said, his hand on the side of her face.
“Charmer. I can’t believe I never took you all those years ago.”
“We always knew we were family. It was never in our destiny.”
“True. I am glad you are back in my life. Let’s never lose each other again.”
“Pinky swear?”
Eillia smiled softly. Koen’s incessant sense of humor, and that he loved with amazing intensity, was what she loved most of all about the big vampire.
She lifted her finger and intertwined it with his.
“Pinky swear. Let’s go say goodbye to Ahmose.”
As daylight began, Ahmose, safe inside an interior room in a high-rise hotel in downtown L.A., lay on a cozy mattress with a huge room-service cart beside of it, trying to eat. He thought the food was probably very good, but tonight, he ate because he needed to. There was no enjoyment.
Closing his eyes, he pictured Mal’s acerbic response when he told her what he was, then her passionate orgasm the first time he’d entered her as he fed. God, he could never forget that connection. He wanted her biting humor and aggressive lovemaking, here, in this bed. He wanted to feel her beneath him, her sharp fingernails dug into his back. He needed her.
A large well-cooked steak lay untouched in a bed of sautéed onions, the scent heavenly. But Ahmose laid in the bed, naked, stretched out, his eyes open, staring into the dark. This was not unfamiliar, this pain. He’d felt it when he thought that Starla and his son were dead, murdered by a woman who had been with his community for a thousand years. His pain had almost destroyed him, but in the end, it turned out that Starla and the child had survived the fatal attack because she was Shoazan.
Here, now, again, the pain overwhelming, he felt his body shut down because he couldn’t process the loss. This woman, who he only now began to suspect had been a possible mate for him, was gone forever.
“I can’t fix this,” he whispered to the universe, to Mother Earth, to the sky, whoever might listen. “I can’t unmake this deed.”
If it weren’t for his children, for Starla and Jacob, he didn’t think he could make it through this. No, that wasn’t quite right…he didn’t think he wanted to make it through this.
But his role in the first blood children’s lives, in the future of his race, was important, so his only option was to deal with Mal’s death and go home to his family.
He rolled up onto his side, tears sliding down his cheeks across his nose and right cheek. He just kept mentally repeating what Eillia told him before they parted tonight.
I’m not all right, but I will be. I’m not all right, but I will be, I’m not all right, but I will be.
“I’m not all right,” he whispered into the darkness before he finally fell asleep.
Chapter 15
Frantic, Kai rushed into Kordalis’s office.
“Where is she?”
“She’s disappeared. I haven’t been able to find any trace of her. No credit card use, no identification anywhere. I put a couple of men on Canzone, but she hasn’t come anywhere near him.”
“I should have expected this. That girl never plays by the rules and she’s never done anything I’ve asked her to do, even when she was five.”
“I remember. Kai, we’ve done all that we can do. There comes a time you have to just let things happen the way they need to. She’s a good cop, Kai, and we’re just going to have to trust her.”
“But she’s off-mission. She has no back-up and no plan.”
“I bet that’s wrong. Mal usually knows exactly what she’s doing and exactly what she expects from her actions. I’m here for her if she needs me. You need to be, too.”
Kai paced, looked up at Kordalis, then paced more, glanced out of the glassed-in office, then walked closer to Kordalis. He looked him directly in the eye.
“She’s been with a vampire. Jeff, she’s pregnant.”
“What? That isn’t possible.”
“It seems it is. Erin says there are ancient vampires called first bloods that can do that.”
“Seriously? Fuck. Trust Mal to find one of them, then. Is she all right?”
“Yeah, she was great. Until she disappeared to come back here and get herself killed. I’m going out there.”
“Check in every hour, Kai. I’ll give you anything you need.”
“Thanks, Jeff. Let me know if you hear anything as well.”
Kordalis nodded and watched Kai disappear around the edge of the office wall.
Mal with a vampire? Damn, the train was off the tracks lately. His own experiences with the vampire community over the years had been both fascinating and unsettling. He had never been completely okay with the knowledge that supernatural beings existed. And now this with his best friend’s daughter…God, it was no wonder he had trouble sleeping at night.
Canzone’s office was silent. He sat in front of his computer screen, the sun rising over his shoulder, four men stationed outside of his door, armed with AK’s and a whole lot of attitude. He glanced at the ball of fire that brightened the sky around other skyscraping buildings, the milky yellow glow filling the room with a softer light than the LED’s that normally burned for illumination.
This morning, he’d turned on no artificial light, the glow from his monitor the only light in the room until the sun brought its billion watt smile. His head and eyes hurt from little sleep the past two days. God, he hated where things had gone lately. He knew it was going to get much uglier before it was finished.
Evidence to that effect occurred moments later when a scuffle outside of the door made him palm an automatic pistol that was never more than inches from his hand. He still kept his seat at his desk as the door opened.
“Sir?” Tyrone said, stepping through. “I hate to disturb you, but there’s a man here, says he’s family.”
Ah, fuck. Yeah, that shouldn’t surprise him.
Canzone laid the gun back on the computer keyboard.
“Send him in.”
With a curt nod, Tyrone closed the door. There was another scuffle, some harsh voices he didn’t understand, then the door opened and closed abruptly.
A man stood against it and didn’t advance into the room.
Neither man spoke for several long moments as the sun continued to bring more golden light into the dark, cavernous room.
“Come on in, brother,” Canzone finally said quietly.
Kai walked closer, slowly.
“Hardly. Never.”
“I considered you brother from the moment you married my sister. You never embraced the family you married into.�
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“We were on opposite sides of the law.”
“And now my niece brings us back together. This isn’t my fault.”
“You killed her partner. That’s unforgivable for a cop, you know that.”
“She was a dog with a bone. I had to interrupt her. Would you rather I had my man kill her?”
“I would rather you drop dead and solve the problem.”
“You’ll understand if I don’t comply with your request. Anyway, I did everything I could to discourage her. Now, her fate is out of my hands. I have to answer to people above me too, Kai.”
“Where is she?”
Canzone looked surprised. “I don’t have her. Not yet, anyway. Why, is she missing?”
“You better not be fucking with me. If you have her, for Brigitte, for family, let her go and I’ll get her out of here. You’ll never see her again.”
“I don’t have her, but if I did, I’d give her to you. I don’t have any family left, and even though she doesn’t know who I am, I still care about her.”
“Sure. Good. Then, you’ll release her?”
“You always had trouble with trust.”
“Just with the untrustworthy.” Kai took a deep breath. “You don’t have her. You’re telling me the truth? You really don’t have her?”
Canzone shook his head. “No, I don’t. If she comes, I’ll hold her for you. Here, give me a number to contact you, and I’ll text you. But Kai, if I can’t stop her from trying to take down my organization, I can’t protect her.”
“Don’t hurt her, Lawrence. I’m only going to ask once. If something happens to her, I can’t honor Brigitte’s wishes.”
“Then stop her before she gets here.” Canzone turned to face the vibrant sunlight filling the big glass wall. “It was nice to see you Kai. You can let yourself out.”
Kai turned and walked back to the door, opened it and closed the door behind him. As he walked to the elevator, his jaw tight, he knew that he’d better find his daughter before his ex-brother-in-law did.
He woke slowly, aware that the sun must have dropped, but he didn’t get out of bed. What was the point? Even if he found her body, which he still planned to search for, it didn’t change the fact that she was gone forever.
