The Bloodline War (The Community)

by Tracy Tappan

  He shifted closer, his nostrils quivering. “You smell so damned good, Toni.” He caressed his thumb along the length of her artery.

  Her eyes sagged in their sockets. Hmm, really, you don’t say? Maybe we can….

  Forcing her teeth together, she blinked past her dizziness and shook the spellbinding fog from her brain. “Stop it, Devid. Whatever you’re doing.” She grabbed Dev’s wrist, jerking his hand from her throat. Then she made use of the YMCA Self Defense Training Course she’d taken a few years back. She gripped the sensitive area between his thumb and forefinger and pressed her own thumb in, hard.

  His eyebrows soared in surprise. “Ow.”

  She hauled his arm down, throwing him off balance, then gave him a shove. As he stumbled backward, she spun around and shot out the door. Not putting it past a man like Dev to chase after her without benefit of clothing, she didn’t even try to make it back to her own bedroom. She dashed directly into Berlin next door.

  Shutting the door hurriedly behind her, she gulped in deep breaths as she listened for—

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  She whirled around. Oh, damn. Deflating back against the door, she cursed the universe. Couldn’t she ever catch a break?

  Jaċken.

  Chapter Twelve

  Big, Dark and Murderous was standing over by a black entertainment center, his hands planted on his hips and a scowl knitting his eyebrows into a fierce vee. The proverbial tower of manhood and menace. He was dressed in that super sexy all-black workout gear the warriors wore for training, and although he was still his usual scary self, he also looked surprisingly…well…super sexy.

  Toni’s stomach gave a start and then a funny flutter at the sight of him. Powerful muscles stood out in rigid relief against the tight fabric of his gear, his body so clearly articulated with grooves and crevices he could’ve been held up in anatomy class as an example of the perfect male specimen. These are the quadriceps, class, this, the tibialis anterior, and this part right here between his legs is the…oh, my. Let’s just all make a ‘yum’ noise, shall we.

  Toni briefly closed her eyes. She really needed to get some help.

  “Well?” he pressed in a peeved tone. “I asked you a question.”

  “Yes, I’m…uh….” I’m here to steal a key card so that I can instigate an escape plan. She covertly scanned the room for inspiration on another excuse, figuring the truth wouldn’t go over well with a man of Jaċken’s temperament. It was then she noticed just how black his bedroom was: black wooden dresser and entertainment center, sleek black lacquered wet bar, black bedspread with a dark gray geometric design on it. Sheesh. If her bedroom was Louis XVI, Dev’s like a cozy room out of a château, then this bedroom—in keeping with the whole French theme—was Marquis de Sade all the way. Well, at least the bedroom fit the man this time.

  “I just came to see if, um….” Her gaze zeroed in on a stack of DVD’s in his entertainment center. “If you wouldn’t mind if I borrowed a movie.”

  “You ever hear of knocking first? I was about to get into the shower. I could’ve been standing here naked, lady.”

  That gave her pause. Despite all logic, the thought of Jaċken naked wasn’t a wholly unpleasant prospect. Not at all, in fact. Clearing her throat, she started forward. “I’m a doctor, Mr. Brun,” she said in the kind of overly patient tone she knew would annoy him. “You surely don’t have anything I haven’t seen before.” Mmm, that was about as big a joke as it had been with Dev.

  She drew up right in front of him, and startled as a tingle of sensual awareness lit off a short burst of heat in her belly. She was close enough to smell him now, clean male sweat and a hint of Old Spice deodorant and Irish Springs soap; everything that was completely masculine and just about curled all the fine hairs on her body. An immense power radiated off of him, like the force of a tornado barely held in check, along with determination and confidence and ruthless intelligence, and something…strangely raw.

  Her lips parted on a small breath, all that was feminine in her helplessly reacting to him. What was it about this man? How was it that she was even more aware of all the glorious differences between men and women while standing here with Jaċken than she had been with Dev, when he’d been naked as a jaybird?

  “Would you mind backing the fuck up?” Jaċken ground out, his nostrils flaring white at the rims. “Being this close to your smell is about as much fun as a fork in the eye.”

  Cured, instantly, of all wayward thoughts. Bristling, she plunked her hands on her hips. “Up yours, Jaċken. You’re such a misogynist, I swear to God.”

  His eyes slitted.

  He had the darkest eyes she’d ever seen, so deep a brown they looked almost black…Jesus, they were black.

  “A what?” he snapped.

  “A woman-hater.” She pished a breath. “What’s your problem, anyway? Your mommy neglect to breastfeed you?”

  His face tinged red. “You don’t know jack shit about me, lady.”

  “No?” She slanted an insolent brow at him. “I’ve been watching you from my bedroom balcony this past week, you know.”

  He stiffened, the color in his face deepening.

  “Yes, spying on you,” she needled, “and I’ve seen how you are with women. Every morning you stand in front of Aunt Ælsi’s and hand out muffins or pastries to the warriors going on duty, but when Beth strolls by to go to work, you don’t give her a single thing.”

  “She’s someone else’s wife!”

  “You barely even say hello to her!” she lashed back. “And what about the school teacher? When she came by with her students, you didn’t say one word to her, you just gave her a curt nod. But you sure as hell had the decency to squat down and talk to the kids, didn’t you, even going so far as to ruffle their hair, and—miracle of miracles!—crack the tiniest smile.” She flung out her hands. “So what’s it about women, Jaċken, you scared of us or something? You one of those types who’s threatened by the multiple female orgasm because you think it makes you—”

  “Get out!” he growled, grabbing her elbow. “Nothing about me is any of your damned—”

  “Keep your paws off me, you meathead!” She wrenched her arm out of his grasp, pulling so violently against his hold she knocked into his entertainment center, sending his stack of DVDs tumbling off the shelf. “I’m not one of your warrior peeps who you can just boss…”

  She froze as her peripheral vision caught sight of the DVDs at her feet: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, It Happened One Night, Singing in the Rain. Her jaw loosened, shock chasing the anger out of her. She couldn’t believe it. Hard-faced, foul-mouthed Jaċken liked old movies? Humphrey Bogart flicks appeared to be his favorite. The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the incomparable Casablanca. She bent to pick one up.

  She straightened, holding one of her favorites. “The African Queen,” she whispered. She looked up at Jaċken, a nostalgic smile pulling at her lips. “I love Katherine Hepburn, she’s always so—”

  He snatched the movie out of her hand.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake!” She exhaled sharply. “You’re really the most foul-tempered person I’ve ever met.”

  “I’m going to take a shower now.” He flung The African Queen back on its shelf. “I recommend you get the hell out.” He turned around, yanking his lycra shirt off over his head as he stalked toward the bathroom. “Unless you have some demented need to see my pecker.” He stopped and reached for the laces at the front of his black boxer briefs, his eyes narrowed in challenge.

  She didn’t budge. She just stood there and stared, utterly dumbfounded by the sight of his bare chest. It was covered with more of those black, interlocking saber-toothed tattoos, the design starting just above his nipples and climbing up the brutal slabs of his pecs to his collarbone. A strange uneasiness curled through her belly. Something didn’t seem right about them. The skin underneath the marks was dented in places, pockmarked in others. Damaged.

&nbs
p; “Shit.” He bowed his head, losing his bravado in the face of her gawping refusal to leave.

  She walked toward him, and his head instantly snapped back up, his expression guarded.

  “Those tattoos aren’t normal,” she said quietly, stopping in front of him. Her stomach cramped with another wave of disquiet. She stared at him for a long moment, the uneasy tension building inside her until it was painful. “Somebody hurt you, didn’t they?”

  Jaċken’s lip quivered on the verge of a sneer as his black gaze met hers in ruthless defiance, silence his only answer. The room suddenly felt stifling. The pounding rock music switching to more pounding Nickelback down the hall was the only noise to invade their mute battle of wills. They stood there for a full minute, just staring at each other. She could’ve stood for many more minutes. The most stubborn girl alive, her brother had called her many times, and although Alex hadn’t meant it as a compliment, the trait served her well this time. Jaċken finally caved.

  “My father did this to me.” A muscle in his jaw spasmed viciously. “The bastard hammered ink-soaked tacks into my skin to mark me as his son and turn me into a man. Tack after tack after tack,” he gritted between his teeth, “and I wasn’t allowed to make a single sound. You fucking happy now?”

  Bile lurched into her throat and horror invaded her chest. He was trying to shock and hurt her by telling her his story so brutally, to make her wish she’d never pressed him about it. It did all those things and more, planting a picture in her mind of Jaċken as a boy—scared, lost, vulnerable, just trying to survive—and she wasn’t sure how to reconcile that image with the stony-faced man before her.

  She turned her head to the side, staring across the room with distant eyes. Was this the something raw she’d sensed in him earlier? Was there a hurt child inside him who mirrored her own, simply a boy who didn’t want to feel so alone? God, did she really share a connection with this man? It felt oddly…right.

  Nickelback switched to something else. The entertainment center shimmied before her gaze as memories unfolded across her mind.

  “My own father,” she said softly, “packed only a single small duffle bag on the day he left. I remember that very clearly because even though I was only about six at the time, it still struck me as very weird he’d take so little. I think it also gave me the vague hope he wouldn’t really leave. But no….” She pressed her lids closed as the memories sleeted over her. “He stopped in the doorway, leaned down to kiss me on the forehead, and said, ‘Goodbye, Antoinetta.’ That’s it. No, ‘Hey, see you this weekend for an ice cream, kid’ or even ‘I love you.’ Just, ‘Goodbye, Antoinetta.’” She paused as she came to the part of the story that always hollowed her out. “I never saw him again.”

  She turned to look at Jaċken. His eerily dark eyes had gone strangely intense, pinned on her in a way that made her think an earthquake could rock the room and he would’ve stayed just as he was. “What father never sees his kids again just because he divorces their mother?” she asked earnestly, almost expecting him to answer. “Other divorced fathers saw their children, right? Weekends and every other Christmas, half of summer vacation. So it must’ve been me, don’t you see. I’d done something to drive him away.”

  Some kind of emotion flickered across Jaċken’s face. She couldn’t tell what it was, and then it was gone.

  “So I, uh….” She swallowed thickly, and pulled her eyes away, unable to bear the intensity of his dark gaze anymore. “I went out into my back yard one day and gathered a bag of small rocks and pebbles, then spread them under the sheets in my bed.” She half shrugged. “I guess I figured that maybe if I punished myself severely enough, my father would somehow know how sorry I was and come back.

  “God, I must’ve slept on those rocks for a good week before my mother discovered them and went bonkers. Well, she stayed calm on the outside, but she sent me to a child psychologist all the same. I don’t remember much about those sessions, except there were a lot of puppets involved.” She laughed humorlessly. “But I suppose in the end I came to realize my father’s departure wasn’t my fault.”

  She turned to him again, her throat working convulsively as she looked at Jaċken’s tattoos. “What you experienced was so much worse than what I went through. I know that. I don’t mean to invalidate your dreadful experiences. I just…I know what it’s like to live a childhood feeling pretty lost.”

  His face remained absolutely still, not a single muscle moving, bones set in place. Only the rhythmic flexing of his hands at his sides revealed that he wasn’t made of stone. Except for his heart, that is.

  She took a single step backward on unsteady legs, feeling exposed down to the depths of her soul. Why in the world had she let some weird, disturbing—and, please God, temporary—connection with this man inspire her to regurgitate the most agonizing experience of her childhood? He had about as much ability to respond to her pain as a 2x4.

  “I’ll leave you to your shower now.” She practically sprinted for the door.

  “Start dating your mate-choices.”

  She froze with her hand on the knob, astonished that he’d spoken to her.

  His voice was as gritty as a rusted out 10-speed. “They’ll…I think one of them could make you very happy, a kind of happy you’ll never find topside, Toni, and…you deserve it.”

  A choking lump of emotion lodged in her throat. Unable to speak, she pulled open the door and hurried out. Once inside her own room, she crossed to her bed and crumpled down onto the mattress. Tears gathered in her eyes as emptiness swept over her like a cold wind, spreading numbness through her extremities. She wanted to run; run down the hall; run out of this building; run back home and throw herself into her brother’s arms and never let go.

  She hugged her middle and looked around the room with bleary eyes. This wasn’t her room. She didn’t belong here. She’d spent a week straight in this rotten bedroom and had never felt as alone and out of place as she did now.

  A kind of happy you’ll never find topside, Toni.

  Damn that man. Gulping a breath, she scooted over to the French Contessa phone on her nightstand and picked up the receiver.

  There was the usual soft hum. “Operator.”

  “Yes, this is Dr. Toni Parthen. I’d like to speak to Mr. Roth Mihnea, if I may.”

  A single tear traced a path to her jaw. She’d start dating, all right. Her mate-choices were warriors, and somehow, damn it, she was going to finagle a key card off one, and then get the hell out of this place.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Alex absently strummed his guitar, the instrument feeling like an old friend in his hands. He hadn’t played in a while, not since his band’s bass player had gone into treatment for colon cancer, if four computer geeks could even be called a band. Toni had given him this guitar for Christmas years ago: a handmade mahogany/spruce Sorbera acoustic. He’d just about killed her for going so over budget that year, but she’d wanted to encourage his music, seeing real talent in what to him had just been another rebellion: his electric guitar rocker phase.

  He picked out the first few chords of Hotel California as he gazed at his computer with enough force to bore a hole through the screen. He was seated stiffly on the edge of the couch in his office, the light of a dying sun filtering in through the west facing window, coloring the room a mellow gold. The ice in an untouched gin and tonic chinked softly on the table next to him. On the computer monitor, the mouse cursor blinked where he’d left it stalled out on Toni’s latest email, or actually the email from whoever was pretending to be her.

  He was absolutely sure now that whoever was sending those emails wasn’t his sister. The emails sounded almost like her to anyone who didn’t know Toni as well as he did, but it all came down to the fact that over a week had gone by and Toni still hadn’t called or given him any contact information. No way would Toni keep him out of the loop this long. He and his sister were just too close these days. They’d always been tight, even as kids, but in the last few
months—hell, years—with neither of them dating much or going out with friends, they’d really come to rely on each other for big time sanity checks. For companionship. A couple of days without calling was pushing it. A week was…impossible.

  Alex and Detective Waterson had been working the fake Toni theory together, but the detective wasn’t having any luck running down information. Neither was Alex, for that matter; just as he’d predicted, that forged IP address was proving impossible to trace.

  He’d been attacking the problem with his best stuff, too. The moment Waterson and his partner had driven off seven days ago, Alex had brought his no-no hacker programs out of mothballs and reinstalled them: sniffer, crack, malicious logic, cryptographic checksum, DNS and IP spoofing, daemons. He’d been sending emails to Fake Toni ever since, with various Trojans attached to try and probe out system information, but whoever was working on Toni’s end had access control encrypted tighter than a virgin’s honey pot. Just when Alex would manage to follow a signal a few steps, the footprints would cross a stream, so to speak, then just vanish. He knew they were there, but hell if he could see them.

  Damn, but he was so friggin’ sick of feeling helpless. Bowing his head, he switched from the Eagles on his guitar to Eric Clapton, gently plucking out Tears in Heaven, a song he only played when he was mega depressed. A sudden rush of tears startled him, and he stopped playing to press his eyelids. “C’mon, sister mine,” he whispered, “where are you?” God, this sucked. He had to do something, man.

  He glanced at his closet door. What was hidden inside there could…

  No, don’t even go there, Alex. Using the “piggy-backer” was a bad idea.

  The program, called a piggy-backer for its ability to ride any signal undetected, was too unpredictable. On a good day, it was a brilliant device, allowing him to hack into a system he had no business messing with. Fabulous on the surface, yes, except that when he’d invented the software back in his Berkeley days, he hadn’t had the time or the talent to rid the thing of all its bugs. So on a bad day, his piggy-backer had a nasty habit of spazzing out and obliterating everything within the very system it’d breached. A real downer. In fact, it was such a serious negative that if he used the program to hunt down Fake Toni, he could just as easily end up slamming shut the only open door he had into information about her. He’d spent this entire last week avoiding the damned thing, even though time was rapidly ticking by while his sister remained missing. Possibly in serious danger. Or dead.