“You touch my friends and I will kill you once you’ve led me to Anastasia,” I warned him. I pulled my hand away and let him watch me retract my nails.
Instead of being intimidated, he laughed again. “It’s very uncanny.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing. Shall we?” He reached a hand out. “I would say ladies first, but I am the only one who knows the way. Try and keep up.”
It was dark outside by the time we made it to the surface. Galen was showing signs of weariness, but he still limply held up his flashlight.
“Lucas,” I called when he didn’t stop walking down the street. “We need to rest.”
“Why?” He looked innocently confused until he saw Galen panting against a wall. “Oh. The human. Hmm. Why did you bring him exactly? Were you baiting me? It would’ve worked had you not already bitten him.”
“I would never use a human as bait. Things have changed in the last century, the rules are different now.”
He bounced on his heels. “Don’t know, don’t care. The rules don’t really apply when one has a kill order on one’s head. Gods above, it’s nice to be outdoors again. The air is so…” He took a nice long whiff. “Fresh.”
“I’ve got Galen. You handle Phantom of the Opera,” Knight quipped. He lifted Galen’s arm and picked him up like a beautiful damsel.
We went back to our hotel, Galen carried in Knight’s arms, and Lucas skipping down the pavement. We had the penthouse suite, and Lucas disappeared into one of the bathrooms as soon as he got through the door. Knight let Galen down, who then limped to the bar and poured himself a very large drink.
“I wonder when was the last time that man had a bath?” Galen said with a laugh.
Eww.
Lucas emerged an hour later smelling like sandalwood and peaches, wearing only a towel around his waist. Galen was asleep in one of the bedrooms, while Knight and I sat on opposite ends of the couch.
“Hey, crazy,” Knight threw in Lucas’s direction. “Feel like telling us where this Anastasia is?”
“In a hurry?” Lucas poured a drink for himself and chugged it in one breath.
“I just spent five hours underground. I’d rather get the rest of this over with.” I toed him with my foot so he’d calm down. He grabbed it and started massaging it without prompting.
Lucas stared at Knight’s efforts with amusement. “I have put out a message, so I know where she is now.”
I found it hard to focus on anything with Knight’s fingers doing very sinful things to my feet. I pulled them away and stood up. “We’ll head out tomorrow morning.” I walked over to Lucas and stared into his deep green eyes. “Promise me you will not leave. Promise me I will wake up and you will still be here. Please.”
He reached out to touch my face and smiled gently. “I swear it on my life’s blood.”
CHAPTER 10
True to his word, Lucas was sitting on the floor eating cereal when I came out of my room the next morning. He’d forgotten the milk, and was eating the dry cereal with chopsticks. Knight was lounging on the couch playing a game on his phone, and Galen was in the kitchen sipping coffee while reading a French paper.
Knight saw me first and looked up with a smile. He turned his phone to me to show me the game he was playing. “Look, I infected the entire world with vampires.” I raised an eyebrow and walked over to Galen to get a cup of coffee.
“Are you okay?” I asked him quietly.
“I’m fine, cheri.” I noticed his bags packed and next to the door. I knew he’d have to leave, but I didn’t want him to.
“You going?” Nodding, he finished his cup of coffee and we moved over to the front door. I opened it, took his bags, and shut it after we’d gone into the hallway. “I didn’t umm…” I had to blink before tears came.
He kissed me on the forehead and wrapped me in his arms. “I hope we meet again soon. When Renard comes home, tell him I miss him. I expect an invitation when he and Olivier become bonded.” He kissed my hair again and we stood there for a few minutes, not wanting to let go.
“I wanted more time,” I said with a sniff.
“You are welcome at my home, always. Knight too, but…not the other one.” I laughed and felt a tear escape. “Until we meet again. And Lisbeth.” I pulled away to look up at him. “You deserve to be happy, too.”
One last kiss, and he was gone down the hallway. My heart sank, and I couldn’t help but fear that I would never see him again. I shuffled back into the hotel room and finished my coffee.
“Bonded?” Knight asked after a few minutes. “What’s that?” Of course they’d listened in.
“It is a ceremony,” Lucas explained. “Two vampires pledging their lives to one another.”
“So it’s a marriage?”
I rinsed the coffee mugs in the sink. “No, it’s not a marriage. It’s deeper than that. It’s forever. Once bonded, you can never be bonded with another, not even if your mate dies. The ceremony is a very rare occasion, for that reason alone.”
Lucas got up and put his bowl on the counter. “We need to go now. They are expecting us.”
“They?” I asked him in confusion. There was someone with Anastasia? Lucas didn’t elaborate, instead he came over and started munching on a package of coffee beans.
Knight raised an eyebrow and got up from the couch. “I’ll just be a minute. You watch Crazy, make sure he doesn’t lick the electrical sockets.” He disappeared into one of the rooms.
“Your friend thinks I am insane,” Lucas said, mid-crunch of another coffee bean.
“Well… you’re eating coffee beans.”
He frowned and looked down at the bag. “Is this not how they’re consumed?” I leaned over and took one, popped it in my mouth, and chewed it.
“Not bad,” I told him with a smile. My phone rang during our moment, scaring Lucas enough that he threw the coffee bag and beans flew everywhere.
“WHAT IS THAT? IS IT A DEMON FROM HELL? Just playing. Who’s calling you?”
I pulled my phone from my pocket and shook a finger at him. “Clean up the mess, Lucas.” He grumbled and bent to pick up the scattered beans. Olivier was calling me in a video chat, so I answered and saw her holding Kitty in her arms.
My heart squeezed, and nothing else mattered at all except my little girl. Kitty looked healthy, and happy. She held her little teething toy to her mouth and munched on it with gusto, stopping every now and then to giggle at Olivier’s fingers tickling her.
“Say, hi mommy,” Olivier prompted in her baby voice. Kitty squealed and looked over at the phone someone was holding for Olivier. When she saw my face and realized it was me on the other end, she looked happier than she had with the teether, or the tickles.
She grabbed for the phone and I heard Arthur say, “No phones, young lady.” Kitty looked sad for a few moments, until she saw me again. She shook her teether to show it to me and cooed. “Hand her to me,” Arthur said. The phone changed hands, then Olivier set it down and sat on the couch next to Arthur and Kitty so I could see all three of them.
“How’s the negotiations going?” Olivier asked me. Oh. That.
“We haven’t started yet. Knight reached out, we’re waiting for an answer.” It wasn’t wholly untrue, we had sent them a letter that they should’ve gotten already. The follow-up would have to wait, though.
“Let me see the child,” Lucas insisted, and he grabbed the phone before I could stop him. “Aye, she is perfection. I am so proud of you.” I took the phone back and slapped at him when he tried to stop me.
Olivier had a suspicious look when I got back on the camera. “Who was that…” Lucas had his hands together, tapping his fingertips in excitement.
“Rogue vampire. We’re trying to convince him to come back with us. He’s a little…” I glanced up at Lucas’s smiling face. “Odd.” His smile deflated in a pout.
“Okay then,” Olivier responded, her eyebrow still raised at me. “Call us back when you hear from the Lycans.” She
moved the camera to show Kitty again, and with a wave of her teether, the screen went dark, and my heart squeezed in pain.
Remember the mission. I could do this. I could do this.
Lucas was still pouting as he munched coffee beans from the floor.
“Have you fed?” I asked him.
“Room service,” he said with his mouth full of beans. “You call, and a human comes. It’s very convenient.”
When had that happened? Oh god. Was there a body in here? I was not in the mood to dispose of a body. I glanced around and gave a few deep sniffs to see if I’d missed the stench of death.
Lucas stood up, offended at my lack of trust. “I didn’t kill him. I fed, altered his memories, and let him leave. I’m not a monster. I may have stolen people in the catacombs, but I always let them live.”
My cheeks flamed in shame. I’d naturally assumed he was a human killer, but that wasn’t fair of me. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I’ll be right back.”
I left Lucas to the coffee beans and walked over to the door Knight had entered. The door was slightly open, so I pushed on it and knocked on the side.
“Knight?” The room was empty and the shower was still running. Knight’s small bag sat at the edge of the bed with a shirt on top of it. I walked closer to run my hand across the shirt fabric. It was soft, and had, ‘Translation: This house is bitchin’ written on it.
“Yo,” Knight said behind me.
“Hey,” I said as I turned, only to see he was shirtless. Right. The shirt on the bed. Of course he wasn’t fully dressed. “Heyy,” I repeated louder as I turned my focus to the crown molding of the ceiling, and not on the glorious display in front of me. “I just umm, well, it’s morning, so I kind of…need…” I twirled my hand around to get my point across.
“Blood?” he asked with a smirk. He came up close to me and held out his wrist.
“Umm, shirt first?” I suggested in a higher pitch than I intended. He wiggled his wrist at me with a sigh. “Fine.” I grabbed his hand and sank my teeth into the muscle on his forearm. Mid-sip, he pulled me until my back was against his chest, and he folded me up in his arms. I drank until my stomach was full, and licked the skin clean. “That was a dirty trick,” I complained half-heartedly. Was he trying to tease me and show me what I could never have? Maybe he was trying to punish me. Either way, this was nice. Wrong, but nice. Could I stand here forever?
He breathed a sigh of relief and pulled his arms tighter around me. “I missed you so much, Lis.” His lips floated through my hair, planting a million kisses against my scalp.
Against my will, I felt myself relaxing against him. “I missed you so much I wanted to die. I even tried to kill myself.”
“In the bathtub,” he whispered, his lips getting closer and closer to my face.
In the bathtub? How had he known that? I pulled away from his warm embrace, which was the last thing I’d wanted to do.
“How did you know that? How did you know I tried to kill myself in the bathtub? I never told anyone that.”
His hands opened and closed, trying to invite me back inside his arms. “Because I was there? I was outside in the prison they’d made me. It was muddy and cold, and then suddenly I was in your bathroom and you were holding your head underwater. ‘I was being a dolphin,’ that was what you said. You were trying to kill yourself? Why would you do that?”
“That was a delusion. You weren’t really there,” I insisted, mostly because I couldn’t wrap my head around this.
“I was,” he said back.
Lucas popped his head in. “Can I turn on the telly, or are we leaving soon?”
I looked away from Knight’s searching eyes. “We’re leaving. Pack up.”
CHAPTER 11
My delusions had been real? That couldn’t be. No way. I’d never heard of such a thing. Being crazy and conjuring up a mirage of someone, sure, that’s normal. Being crazy and actually conjuring someone? That’s just ludicrous. Knight was mistaken, or… something. But how could he be? He knew that I’d been in a bathtub trying to be a dolphin, not to mention when I first saw him back he was wearing the clothes he’d had on in one of my delusions, clothes I’d never seen him wear before.
Maybe it had something to do with the blood binge, or that I almost killed him, or when I pushed into his mind as I was being dragged away from him? Who would I ask about this? James would know, maybe. Or Olivier. Those that had blood binged in the past weren’t exactly sharing that fact with the public, so I had no idea who would know anything.
To make matters worse… that… had happened. Knight holding me against him, being in his warm arms and feeling his heartbeat against my ear, it was too much. I’d wanted nothing other than to turn and capture his lips in mine and surrender to whatever happened between us. What if I had. What would he have done? Pushed me away? Kissed me? Both?
“Deep in thought?” Lucas asked, unearthing me from very deep musings. He was sitting next to a sleeping Knight on the airplane, across the aisle from where I sat alone. There was something about his smile that was gradually bringing my guard down, so I leaned over my arm rest to be closer to him.
“You’ve made mistakes before, right?”
He looked surprised. “That’s what you’re pondering about? I never think about my mistakes.”
I sighed and realized I’d asked the wrong person. If only Balthazar was here. First I’d ring his neck for being a neglectful baby daddy, and then we could have a heart to heart about how stupid feelings are. “Surely, there are some that you regret?”
The drink cart went past us and when I looked back, Lucas had a lollipop and a face that was too serious for someone holding a lolly. “Yes. I regret things.” He was staring at the treat like it was someone’s face. And he missed that face very much.
“What if those mistakes hurt people. What if they were too big to forgive?”
He looked thoughtful at the lollipop. “I suppose it depends on the love. I wonder if she loves me. Maybe she can forgive if she loves.” He licked at the lolly without taking the wrapper off and continued looking woefully pensive. I left him licking plastic and tried to sleep with his words in my head.
Maybe she can forgive if she loves.
Vague, and specifically about a female, it still had some wisdom. From a guy who licks lollipops, eats coffee beans, and may or may not be the Phantom of the Opera.
“Hey,” I asked him. He looked over at me. “Have you ever like… conjured someone? An apparition, but they could see you too?” He pointed to Knight and I nodded.
“You’ve drunk his blood, right? He is immortal. That comes from drinking from an immortal. You can summon his mind when you need him, no matter how far away.”
That felt like a load of hooey, but it seemed like the only answer to what had happened with myself and Knight. After that, I fell asleep. I woke hours later when the plane was descending to land. Lucas was still licking the lollipop pondering life, only someone had removed the wrapper so there was a deep indent where Lucas’s tongue was. Knight was on his phone playing his game again, but he looked up when he noticed I was awake.
“Hey,” he said with a smile that was all teeth and charm. Curse you. “I think this game is one-sided. I can infect the world with vampires, but not werewolves. Where’s the wolf love? I’m part dog. Everyone loves dogs.”
Surprisingly, I wasn’t in the mood to make jokes with him, and I was always in the mood to make jokes. I looked away and ignored him. Before he could break my silence, we had to get up to leave the plane.
Lucas grabbed his rucksack and held it to his chest like it had money in it and he’d just spotted a pick pocket. I rolled my suitcase off the ramp and into the airport with Knight and Lucas behind me. They followed me to the food court when we all got giant pretzels, and then we went to the car rental place. Our bags in the trunk, I got into the front seat, Knight in shotgun, and Lucas in the back.
“Okay, Lucas. Where are we going?” He didn’t answer, as he hadn’t th
e last five times we’d asked him where our destination was. He’d said, we can get there from Vienna, but left out the rest of the journey. “Lucas,” I said patiently. “I need to know where I’m driving to.”
He pointed to the right. “That way.”
Knight chewed on his lip and sighed. “Look, man. You’re trying to protect this Anastasia, fine. We get it. You don’t have to tell us where they live, just what city it is. Right? We can’t find them even if we know what city they’re in. We don’t even know what they look like. They’ll be safe, okay?”
Lucas thought it over with a series of expressions that made me struggle not to laugh. “Cachtice,” he finally said. Then his lips were buttoned, and he leaned back in his seat with his arms crossed tightly over his chest.
“Teamwork,” Knight gloated with a smile. He reached his fist up to me for a fist bump. I ignored it and started the car, seeing his fist lower slowly out of the corner of my eye. He started pouting too.
Cachtice castle, the home of Anastasia’s mother, the Countess of Bathory. After four hundred years, that was where Anastasia had chosen to hide? A little on the nose. This was truly the last place vampires would look for her, though I couldn’t say if it was genius or just sheer lunacy. If she was as crazy as James’s journal said, it was the latter.
We pulled up to the town of Cachtice, Slovakia, and Lucas started to look like he’d swallowed poison. He rocked back and forth on his seat, whining quietly, with sweat starting to pool on his forehead.
“You okay there, buddy?” Knight asked, his eyes watching Lucas through the rearview mirror.
“Mmm, no. No. Not okay. Not.” Lucas shook his head like a crazy person, muttering things to himself in a language I didn’t understand.
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