Enthrall Me (Underbelly Chronicles Book 4)

by Tamara Hogan

  It was a common reaction. Their home, with its hodge-podge decor spanning centuries, frequently left visitors speechless. Georgian tables supported Art Deco lamps, Beaux Arts cozied up to Eames, and Moroccan tassels brushed against Windsor chairs and Federation hutches. Several pieces of current-era furniture, like the oversized shabby chic chair where Lukas sat, were recent additions. Not long ago, he’d finally convinced Valerian that the furniture pre-dating the Reformation, along with many of the rare books and manuscripts stacked haphazardly on the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, should be moved to the Archives for preservation and protection. On the night he and Val had selected which tchotchkes and objets d’art would remain on display, memories and stories had poured out of his mentor like an uncorked cask of wine, especially when they’d sorted through Valerian’s precious collection of tintypes, cameos, daguerreotypes, and photographs. People he’d known, people he’d loved and lost.

  So many people loved and lost.

  Tia’s eyes widened. “Is that a Fabergé egg?”

  “Yes.” The Tsar had given him the priceless, bejeweled object as thanks for his counsel—not that Nicholas had followed his advice.

  She looked, wide-eyed, around the room. “There’s so much history here.”

  To one so young, it was history, but to him and Valerian? It was simply their life. He and Val had first sat side-by-side on this very settee almost three hundred years ago, at Valerian’s London residence. Wyland had spent years—decades—studying medicine, law, business, and history by candlelight, reading until his eyes stung with fatigue. He’d become Valerian’s apprentice. When the American Civil War broke out, Val named him the Vampire Second, and then moved to America, trusting him to serve as the Council’s European liaison. Wyland glanced at a particular photograph on the bookshelf, then quickly looked away.

  Look how well that had worked out.

  When Lukas murmured something that made Val laugh out loud, something pinched in his chest. Time had a way of passing, regardless of one’s wishes. He no longer had centuries, or even decades, before he’d have to take Val’s place.

  “Wyland?”

  There was such care in Tia’s voice, even after he’d been rude to her. He cleared his throat. No more reverie; it was time to start this impromptu meeting. Time to get Tia Quinn out of his thoughts, out of his house, and out of his life.

  Lukas beat him to it. “What’s up?” he asked Bailey.

  “Tia asked me to look into a comment someone posted at In Like Quinn earlier today.” Reaching into the side pocket of her computer bag, Bailey pulled out several pieces of paper and passed them around.

  In Like Quinn had a financial news section? The last time he’d glanced at Tia’s website, the front page had featured a picture of a young pop star’s latest unfortunate tattoo.

  As the last piece of paper reached them, Tia passed it to him without comment. He glanced at the story’s headline—something about Wall Street corruption—and then at the comment Bailey had printed. “‘Sebastiani Labs’ so-called board of directors must be called to account for their illegal acts, and for abandoning the old ways,” he read aloud. “‘If you don’t expose them, I will.’” He looked at Bailey. “Do you know this person’s identity?”

  “Not yet. Looks like whoever it is used a burner account.” Bailey’s eyes snapped with annoyance. “I’ll do more digging once I get back to the office, but someone’s working harder than the average bear to disguise their identity.”

  While Bailey and Lukas launched into a detailed technology discussion, he picked apart the message. ‘Sebastiani Labs’ was self-explanatory. ‘So-called board of directors’ could indicate either generic disgust with the board’s decisions, or very specific knowledge about the board’s true nature. ‘Called to account for their illegal acts?’ Which illegal acts? According to whose laws? Called to account how? By whom? What did the commenter expect Tia to investigate? And did the commenter mean ‘old ways’ in a general way, or The Old Ways? In their culture, the second phrase had a specific, shameful, meaning.

  Tia took a sip of wine. “I feel stupid bothering you about this, but the comment felt…off.”

  “Yeah,” Lukas said. “We need to look into this.”

  Bailey shot Tia a look. “I told you so.”

  “Okay, but I don’t get it.” Tia’s husky alto voice vibrated into him where their arms and thighs touched. “My regular readers know that financial reporting isn’t my beat. The financial stuff, the celebrity news, the political stories, are aggregated from other sources. I have content-sharing arrangements in place with dozens of other writers and journalists.”

  If he remembered correctly, music used to be her beat. She’d gotten her start writing reviews for music magazines like Rolling Stone before shifting her focus to investigative journalism.

  “There’s no way the person who commented could be sure I’d even see what he or she wrote,” Tia continued.

  “What are you working on right now?” Bailey asked.

  “I just finished a series on data privacy—thanks for the sources, by the way,” she said to Bailey. “Now, I’m researching human trafficking, with a regional slant. I’m interviewing a young woman who recently escaped a sex trafficker who forced her to work in the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota. After so many arrests at hotels and motels here in the Twin Cities, a lot of procurers are now doing business from private homes.”

  He and Lukas exchanged a glance. Stephen, the incubus who’d nearly killed Lukas and Scarlett several years ago, had murdered a man at just such a location as his need for death energy had escalated. Stephen had somehow escaped their most secure psychiatric facility and was still at large. Somewhere along the line, Tia would probably contact their police commander for information, but when she did, she’d hit a brick wall. Gideon Lupinsky couldn’t—wouldn’t—comment on an open case.

  He’d call Gideon himself to ensure it.

  “Are you taking safety precautions?” Lukas asked Tia.

  “I know how to take care of myself.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  No, it didn’t. Despite its squeaky-clean reputation, the Twin Cities had the same problems as any large metropolitan area. In addition to the residential sex clubs, gangs had staked out turf in north Minneapolis. There were areas of the city where no law-abiding person wandered after dark.

  Tia Quinn probably considered those areas her workplace.

  “What do you carry?” Lukas asked.

  Not ‘do you carry,’ but ‘what do you carry’—an interesting assumption on Lukas’s part. Wyland skimmed Tia’s body. Where in the world would she carry a weapon where no one could see it? Her Vlad Drac T-shirt clung to bountiful breasts, and faded black denims hugged her dangerous curves. She wore a pair of those hideous rubber flip flops—black, with her toenails painted to match—so she couldn’t hide a weapon in her footwear.

  She gestured to the battered leather purse sitting on the floor next to the settee. “Stun gun.”

  He reluctantly approved. The defensive weapon would temporarily incapacitate only the assailant, and not cause irreparable or fatal harm, but…why did she have to put herself in danger in the first place?

  “I’ll have Jack give you a call,” Lukas said. “He teaches self-defense.”

  She raised a brow. “I’m well-trained.”

  “It never hurts to practice. When Scarlett and her band were still touring, she worked out with Jack all the time.”

  His eyes narrowed. Too many women found Jack Kirkland, Sebastiani Security’s big, blond managing partner, appealing—and damn it, now Lukas was staring at him. There was no hiding one’s emotional state from any incubus or succubus, much less one of Lukas’s skill. Lukas plucked emotional energy out of the air, absorbed it for sustenance like humans digested food or vampires drank blood.

  Why did the prospect of Tia physically grappling with Jack annoy him so much?

  Her big toe brushed his pant leg. Nerve end
ings, dormant for years, sat up and blinked. When blood rushed to his penis, he choked back a groan at the barely-remembered sensation. Setting the piece of paper on his lap to disguise his condition, Wyland tried to ignore Tia’s wine-wet lips as Lukas asked her questions about her website. His jaw throbbed, but he kept his fangs from shooting down through sheer force of will.

  “Speaking of The Old Ways…” Lukas reached into the battered messenger bag sitting near his feet, extracting a piece of paper stored flat in a clear plastic bag. “This…screed arrived with the latest batch of Scarlett’s fan mail.”

  Though Scarlett hadn’t performed in public since the night Stephen killed her sister Annika, she still had a rabid fan base—and unfortunately, with it, all the security problems that accompanied fame in this era. When Lukas handed him the bag, he saw an adhesive tag affixed to the corner. The item had been logged as evidence.

  When he read, he understood why. The word-processed document, two paragraphs long, invoked The Old Ways against Scarlett and Lukas’s “unborn half-breed abomination.”

  Glancing at Tia, he passed the packet to Valerian. “We shouldn’t discuss this matter with a reporter present.”

  Valerian waved a regal hand. “Tia knows what ‘off the record’ means.”

  One, no one had actually said it yet, and two, he wasn’t so sure. A threat made against the unborn child of two Underworld Council members was a pretty big scoop. “Ms. Quinn, this conversation is off the record.”

  Her gaze gored him like a bull at Pamplona. “Ya think?”

  “Wyland, take a chill pill,” Bailey said.

  Lukas speared a weary hand through his hair. “He’s just doing his job.”

  Yes, he was—and no matter how alluring he might find Tia Quinn, the protocol was clear. The safety of their people depended on him remembering his responsibilities. “Ms. Quinn, this conversation is off the record. Do you understand?”

  Her fingers skimmed her inner forearm, where a phrase he couldn’t quite read was tattooed onto her pale skin. “All topics having to do with our culture have been, and ever shall be, off the record,” she said. Each word was precisely spoken, sliced with a razor-sharp knife. “Do you require a signed affidavit?”

  “Your words have been witnessed by three sitting Underworld Council members. That won’t be necessary.”

  She angled her body away from him, the tilt of her chin reminding him of royalty displeased. He was certain she hadn’t meant to expose her neck to him quite so alluringly, but she had, and it was. The sexual charge that zinged through his system was completely and utterly inappropriate.

  Tia seemed startled when Valerian handed her evidence bag. After reading the message, she flipped the packet and looked at the envelope, also stored in the bag—something he hadn’t done. “U.S. Postal Service, downtown Minneapolis zip code and postmark.”

  Lukas nodded. “Adhesive stamp, so no saliva, but we’re testing it for prints. There are no fingerprints on the paper itself. The paper and ink are disgustingly generic. That leaves us analyzing content, which is why I came here.”

  “I’m sorry for barging in,” Tia said.

  “No worries.”

  Speak for yourself, Lukas.

  “The fact that you and Scarlett are having a baby has been well-publicized, even in the human press, but this mention of The Old Ways? The mention at ILQ?” When Tia tapped her pursed lips with her index finger, her ring caught the light. “That’s us. That’s Underworld.”

  Wyland’s brows rose. “I wouldn’t have thought someone your age would be aware of the phrase.”

  “I am an investigative journalist, and reasonably well-informed.”

  If looks could kill, he’d be dead on the floor.

  “Hey.” Bailey waved her arms in the air. “Human here. What are The Old Ways?”

  How could he explain their ancestors’ practice of euthanizing newborns who exhibited severe physical abnormalities? Marooned on an inhospitable planet with no hope of rescue, with little medicine and even fewer options, their ancient ancestors had made unspeakably painful decisions for the good of the tribe. He knew better than to judge an ancient culture by contemporary standards.

  But he did.

  “So much waste. So many lives forever changed,” Valerian murmured. He looked at Bailey. “You’re familiar with our culture’s origin story?”

  She nodded. “Your ancestors’ spaceship crashed in northern Minnesota several millennia ago, marooning the passengers, forcing the surviving incubi, succubi, vampires, Valkyrie, were-shifters, sirens, and faeries to fight for survival in the dead of winter.”

  Wyland half-listened as Valerian told Bailey of their history, the story passed from generation to generation unchanged—until last summer, when Lorin Schlessinger had made the archaeological discovery that had thrown their oral histories’ timeline into complete disarray. The otherworldly lockbox Lorin had found at the Isabella site had yielded a big a surprise: extra-planetary technology lying next to three-thousand-year-old native wild rice. It boggled the mind.

  “When I was young and I’d misbehaved,” Tia said, “my parents joked that if only The Old Ways were still in vogue, they could wring my neck with impunity.”

  “Wrung necks and smothering were the preferred methods of dispatch,” Valerian said matter-of-factly, “but rarely did one’s own family perform the grisly task. My predecessor, Sigurd…”

  Wyland stilled. There was exactly one reference to Sigurd in their entire Archives: his death announcement. Valerian never spoke of him. He’d assumed this was because Val had few, if any, memories of the man.

  Clearly this was not the case.

  As Tia took Valerian’s gnarled hand, offering comfort, he observed Val from a great mental distance, and through the long lens of time. Why hadn’t Val ever spoken of Sigurd? Why were there no artifacts, no written records, and no mention of Sigurd’s life and accomplishments, in their Archives?

  Damn it, he’d been so focused on the documents present in the Archives that he’d never questioned why some materials might be absent. Val had some explaining to do.

  Tia gestured to the letter. “But the baby is healthy, right?” Worry was etched on her face. “It’s been too long since I talked to Scarlett.”

  “She’s fine. They’re both fine.” After a pause, Lukas added, “I’m sure she’d love to see you.”

  The invitation sounded reluctant, rusty. She quirked Lukas a crooked smile Wyland couldn’t interpret.

  A red stain crept up Lukas’s neck.

  Well. Wasn’t that interesting.

  “So, back to the letter,” Bailey said, looking at it. “The writer is suggesting that Lukas and Scarlett kill their ‘unborn half-breed abomination’ because Scarlett is a siren and Lukas is an incubus? That’s really fucked up.”

  Lukas took another swig from his beer bottle. “As if most of us don’t have mixed ancestry to begin with. At this point, species designations are almost beside the point.”

  “Don’t let Krispin Woolf hear you say that,” Bailey muttered. “He’d demand your resignation.”

  Lukas snorted. “Let him try.”

  Underworld Council representation was species-based and tended to run along powerful family lines, but little Coco Fontaine, the daughter of two sitting Council members representing different species, was a game-changer. Never before had two family dynasties merged in such an overt manner. He’d spent countless hours poring over Council records, bylaws, and succession planning documents to assess her precise status.

  The child wasn’t even born yet, and she’d already given him his first silver hair.

  “It sounds like whoever sent this letter might share the Alpha’s opinion,” Tia mused. “Have you been able to connect Krispin Woolf to the Genetic Purity League yet?”

  Shock rocketed through his system. “What do you know about the Genetic Purity League?” Or about Krispin Woolf’s suspected leadership of the organization?

  “I know that a couple of ye
ars ago the GPL petitioned the Council to demand that the law be changed to require bondmates to register their relationships. Krispin Woolf’s preference for wolf/wolf pairings is well known.” She looked at Valerian, and then, reluctantly, at him. “Thank you for voting that one down.”

  “Who is your source?” Lukas snapped.

  Individual members’ votes were supposed to be confidential.

  “I’m not about to reveal who my source is, dude.”

  Lukas might be wearing jeans and drinking a beer, but one of his subjects had just called a sitting Underworld Council member ‘dude.’ It was completely unacceptable, regardless of how well Tia and Lukas knew each other.

  Just how well did they know each other?

  Lukas set his beer bottle down. “Tia, if we have a security breach within the Council—”

  “You don’t. This information didn’t come from the Council.”

  “So it came from the League itself?” Lukas pressed.

  Tia paused, considering her words. “My source read a draft of the proposal several months before you received it—and before you ask, no. I will not reveal the person’s identity.”

  There weren’t too many civilians Lukas couldn’t bully into submission through sheer size and attitude. Apparently Tia Quinn was one of them. She didn’t seem the least bit intimidated by Lukas’s pissed-off glare.

  “I don’t remember seeing any reference to The Old Ways in the Archive material I’ve worked with,” Bailey said, diffusing the tension.

  “It was so very long ago,” Valerian said softly.

  And as he’d heard Valerian say many times before, winners wrote history. Valerian, the world’s oldest living vampire, defined the word ‘winner.’ For centuries, he’d been the sole arbiter of which information was stored in their Archives, and which information was omitted.

  Anger rose like the tide. What information had Val omitted, and why? Damn it, could he trust any of it?

  “Wyland, how much Archive work did you get done while Rafe and I were in Alaska?” Bailey asked. “God, I have so much work to catch up on.”