The Vampire Affair

by Livia Reasoner

  She had put that together quickly and under stress, a good sign. But she hadn’t taken the next step in her reasoning.

  “That’s right, they don’t want to be here when the police arrive, but neither do I.”

  “Because then you’d have to answer a lot of potentially awkward questions.”

  “Very awkward,” Michael agreed. “As it is, they’ll wonder about some things, but they won’t be able to trace the owners of this building. They won’t connect it to me or my family.”

  He still held his hand out to her. She nodded and took it, allowing him to draw her into the cramped space. “All right, let’s go.”

  Michael pushed the hidden door shut, and absolute darkness closed in around them.

  Under other circumstances, being stuck in the dark with Michael Brandt might not have been such a bad thing, Jessie reflected. But not when a bunch of goons were trying to kill them.

  Michael seemed confident that they couldn’t get through the locker room door, though, and Jessie had no choice but to believe him. Obviously, he tried to be well prepared for an attack wherever he was, otherwise he wouldn’t have armored doors and secret passages in this gym.

  She’d seen him throw that metal hamper lid at those guys as if it were Captain America’s shield or something, just before he slammed the door. That reminded her once again just how deadly he really was.

  But that hadn’t helped Charlotte Whittier, had it?

  Her heart had gone out to Michael as he told her the story. Sure, he’d been a little careless, maybe. Who wasn’t, from time to time? Lord knows, she had made plenty of mistakes in her life.

  Of course, none of them had ever resulted in someone she loved being turned into a vampire.

  Michael found her shoulders in the dark, slid his hands down her arms in a move that sent involuntary but not unpleasant shivers through her and took hold of her hands. He placed them on one of the metal rungs and said, “Climb.”

  “I can’t see where I’m going.”

  “You won’t have to. The rungs are evenly spaced, so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding them by feel. I’ll be right below you, so you can’t fall.”

  “Yes, I can. I can fall on you and knock us both back down this shaft.”

  “That won’t happen,” he said. “I have confidence in you.”

  Jessie swallowed. As much as she liked hearing him express his faith in her, she wished she had as much confidence as he seemed to. Maybe she wasn’t cut out for fighting vampires after all, if an attack by a few of their human mercenaries shook her up this much. And her hand hurt where that splinter had cut it, too.

  She knew Michael counted on her, though, and she didn’t want to let him down. She found one of the lower rungs with her right foot, stepped up and reached for the next one above her with her right hand.

  Actually, the climb didn’t present much of a challenge. She went up the built-in ladder easily, and she heard Michael climbing below her. “How will I know when I get to the top?” she asked him.

  “I’ll tell you when to stop,” he said, and she realized that he must be counting the rungs.

  Sure enough, after a short period of time, he told her to stop climbing and then said, “Reach above you, not very far, and see if you can find a handle.”

  Jessie reached above her head and felt around for a couple of seconds before she found a curved metal handle. “Got it!”

  “Twist it down and to the left.”

  She did so. The handle turned easily at first, but then she encountered some resistance. She strained against it but couldn’t turn it any farther.

  “I can’t get it!” she told Michael. “It’s stuck. We may have to climb down and let you come up first.”

  “No, you can do it,” he said. “I know you can. Just be careful. Don’t put so much effort into it that you slip off the ladder.”

  Jessie took a deep breath. “All right. I’ll try.”

  Nana Rose would have told her that the grunt she let out as she struggled with the handle was unladylike, but Jessie didn’t care. She just wanted to get away from those killers.

  With a solid clank!, the handle suddenly turned the rest of the way. Michael said, “Now push.”

  Jessie pushed, and a door swung outward, letting light flood into the shaft. She had been in the dark long enough so that she had to blink her eyes and squint against the glare. Then she began to clamber out of the secret passage onto the flat, gravel-tarred building roof.

  The sudden scrape of shoe leather behind her made her whirl around. She saw that the door opened from what appeared to be some sort of ventilation tower. A man in black, with a black ski mask pulled over his face and a gun in his hands, rushed around that tower toward her.

  Jessie didn’t stop to think. Michael had come at her like that during their training sessions, so she just did what she had done then. She sprang into the air and lashed out with a kick before the mercenary could bring his weapon to bear on her.

  He must not have been expecting such a move from her, because he didn’t even try to get out of the way. The kick landed cleanly, the heel of her sneaker smashing into his chest. He went backward as his arms and legs flew out. The gun slipped from his fingers and sailed through the air. His head bounced off the roof with a hard thunk and he didn’t move again.

  He wasn’t the only bad guy up here. A second one came around the other side of the tower. Jessie caught a glimpse of him as she landed and rolled. The roof gravel bit into her palms as she took some of her weight on them and powered back up.

  The second mercenary didn’t get a shot off, either. Michael was ready for him. He knocked the gun aside with his left forearm and slammed a right cross into the ski-masked face. A sweeping kick knocked the man’s legs out from under him. As he fell, Michael caught him in the head with a knee. The would-be killer landed in a limp sprawl, just like the first one.

  Michael didn’t waste any time checking on them. He grabbed Jessie’s hand again and led her toward the edge of the roof. “Not scared of heights, are you?” he asked her with a quick grin.

  “Not too much,” she told him, although in truth she didn’t like heights very much. She hadn’t ever since she had gotten stuck in the top of a tree on the reservation as a kid. One of her friends had had to climb up and help her down.

  Well, Michael was with her now, she told herself. She still had some issues with him, but over the past few days she had come to consider him a friend. More than a friend, considering that it had only been half an hour or so since he’d been inside her, bringing her more pleasure and satisfaction than she had ever known before.

  But everything that had happened since then made it doubtful she would ever experience such bliss again. Even if the two of them lived through this attack, they still had to deal with the fact that his lie to her was now out in the open.

  The building wasn’t all that tall, the equivalent of two stories probably, but it seemed like an awfully long way to the ground when Jessie peered over the edge of the roof. Another built-in ladder, similar to the one in the escape shaft, led downward.

  “I’ll go first this time,” Michael said as he swung a leg over the low coping at the roof’s edge. “Follow me.”

  “Sure,” Jessie said, swallowing her nervousness.

  Michael started climbing down. Jessie glanced at the two mercenaries, who still lay motionless as if they were out cold. Or dead. She hadn’t kicked the first guy hard enough to kill him, but she didn’t know about the second one. Either of Michael’s blows might have broken the man’s neck.

  She told herself not to waste too much sympathy on the black-clad men. They might not know their employers were vampires, but considering that they ran around in ninja outfits and shot up places with machine guns and tear gas grenades, they had to be aware that they weren’t working for the good guys.

  “Come on, Jessie,” Michael urged from a few feet down the ladder. She nodded, climbed carefully over the edge and started the descent. />
  They were about halfway down when two more of the mercenaries ran around the corner of the building. Jessie bit back a dismayed groan. She and Michael would be sitting ducks up here on the ladder as soon as the two killers glanced up.

  Michael didn’t give them that chance. He pushed away from the building and seemed to…well, fly was the only word to describe it, Jessie thought as her still-stinging eyes widened in shock once again. Michael aimed his plunge right at the two mercenaries. They yelled in alarm and tried to bring their guns up, but Michael swooped down on them too fast. One foot drove into the side of a man’s head, and Jessie heard the clearly audible snap as the neck broke. Michael’s other foot shattered the shoulder of the second man, who went down in a moaning heap. Michael landed on his feet, like the big cat he sometimes appeared to be, and crouched as he looked for more of the enemy.

  Jessie got moving again, scrambling down the rest of the way to the alley behind the building.

  Michael was at her side as soon as her feet hit the ground. He took hold of her arm and said, “This way.” Jessie heard a rush of footsteps from around the corner. She and Michael went the other direction, not looking back as they ran.

  “They gave up on getting into the locker room sooner than I thought they would,” he said. He didn’t seem winded by his exertions. “We’re cut off from the BMW.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Steal a car.” He flashed a grin at her. “Don’t worry, I’ll see that it gets back to its rightful owner. And if anything happens to it, I’ll make sure the owner gets something better to replace it.”

  Jessie didn’t doubt that for a second, given Michael’s wealth. And if money wouldn’t fix a problem, he always seemed to be able to come up with some other solution.

  He could handle just about anything, Jessie thought, except his guilt over what had happened to Charlotte Whittier.

  Two minutes later they were in a van they’d found parked behind an electronics warehouse down the street. Michael had taken off his sweatshirt, wrapped it around his right fist and broken out the window in the driver’s door. Once he’d brushed the glass off the seat he had Jessie climb over to the passenger side, then reached under the dash and hot-wired the ignition. Jessie had known some car thieves back in high school, and Michael was as fast and smooth at it as anybody she had ever seen.

  He put the truck in gear and drove off, not taking the corners in tire-screeching turns because that would call attention to them, but not wasting any time, either. As they started to put some distance between themselves and the gym, Jessie leaned back on the somewhat raggedly upholstered seat and closed her eyes as she drew a deep breath of relief.

  Then she opened her eyes, looked at Michael and asked, “Did you just fly back there?”

  The question seemed to take him by surprise, but after a moment he laughed and said, “You mean when I jumped off the building and landed on those two?”

  “I know you said you’ve got some vampirelike abilities that you inherited from your great-great-grandfather or whatever he was. I thought maybe…”

  Michael shook his head. “No, I’m afraid it looked more impressive than it really was. I just happened to get a really good push off the building when I jumped. And I wasn’t all that high in the air, twelve feet, maybe.”

  “Uh-huh.” Jessie wasn’t sure whether she believed him or not. Michael could do things normal men couldn’t. She had seen plenty of evidence of that so far, and the question of just what abilities he possessed hadn’t been settled yet as far as she was concerned.

  One thing was certain, though: none of it mattered in the long run unless they could work out the problems between them.

  That was first up on the agenda, as soon as they got back to the Chateaus.

  “Compromised?” Max repeated with a surprised scowl on his broad face. “How the hell could the training facility have gotten compromised?”

  “I don’t know,” Michael said, “unless they trailed us there, which seems unlikely. I took precautions to make sure we weren’t followed.”

  No matter how good you were at something, though, he reminded himself, somewhere there was somebody better. Carl Williams had been one of the top hired killers in the world, but Michael had disposed of him. Maybe the vampires had found someone better at tracking than Michael was at throwing off a tail.

  Clifford said, “They know we’re here, and they know about the training facility. Maybe it’s time to go underground, Michael.”

  He nodded. “I’d say you’re right. We’ll split up and rendezvous at the safe house. Take every precaution you possibly can. We’ll try to stay off their radar until we’re ready to move against the summit. Speaking of that…”

  “Rendell’s pilot has filed a flight plan for Love Field tonight,” Clifford said. “Escobar was spotted in Laredo last night, and Takahashi has dropped out of sight in Japan.”

  Max said, “The bastards are on their way, Michael. They might even get to the resort tonight.”

  “Then we can’t afford to waste any time. Get word to all our agents and tell them to be ready to move—”

  “Hey. Did you forget about me?”

  Jessie had stood by quietly while he talked to Max and Clifford. A bandage covered the cut on her hand that Clifford had cleaned and disinfected. Really, she had been more patient than Michael expected. But she didn’t want to be ignored any longer, and he couldn’t blame her for that.

  “I didn’t forget about you at all,” Michael said as he turned to her. “I could never forget about you.”

  That was the truth. She haunted his thoughts more than he wanted to admit.

  “Then tell me what my part in this is. Tell me what I can do to help.”

  “You’ll be staying at our safe house.”

  Anger sparked in her eyes. “Just the way you intended all along when you were lying to me.”

  Michael felt some anger himself. He hadn’t asked her to get involved in his war; that had been all her idea. But now that she was involved, she had no right to get mad just because he wanted to protect her.

  “I didn’t lie to you,” he insisted.

  “You told me I could come along when you raided that vampire summit!”

  He shook his head. “I never said that. I just explained the situation to you and offered to give you some training, so that maybe someday you could be part of one of our missions.”

  “But the summit is the biggest part of the story!” she protested. “You knew I wanted in on it!”

  “I know you’re not ready for it.” He deliberately made his voice cold, hoping that he could discourage her. Everything he had seen of Jessie Morgan so far, though, told him not to get his hopes up.

  “I did pretty good when I kicked the hell out of that guy on the roof,” she countered. “The guy who might have shot you if I hadn’t taken care of him, I might add.”

  Max frowned. “She took out one of the mercenaries?”

  “That’s right,” Michael said. With as pretty a flying kick as you’ll ever see, he wanted to add proudly, but he kept the praise to himself. No point in giving Jessie even more ammunition for her argument.

  Her beautiful dark eyes flashed and she gave a defiant toss of her head that made the raven hair swirl around her shoulders. “I can take care of myself,” she insisted. “You saw it for yourself, Michael. I didn’t panic when those guys attacked us.”

  “No,” he admitted. “You didn’t.”

  “And I know you fought more of them than I did, but I came through when I got the chance.”

  “One man, even a tough, well-armed mercenary, isn’t the same as a bunch of vampires and thirty or forty human guards,” Michael said. “This is going to be like a military operation, Jessie. A commando raid, if you will. If you trained for six months or a year, I might consider taking you along. Maybe.”

  “I could always blow the whistle on you.”

  He smiled thinly. “Blackmail again? If we can take out the overlord
s, I don’t care what you reveal afterward. You’ll have a hard time getting anybody to believe you, anyway, especially given your track record with Supernova.”

  He saw the wounded look in her eyes and knew his shot had gone home. Immediately he felt a twinge of regret that he had hurt her. Hurting Jessie was just about the last thing in the world he wanted to do.

  “You’re right,” she said with a grudging acceptance in her voice. “I stumble into maybe the biggest story of the century, and nobody’s going to believe me because I wrote all that stuff for some crummy tabloid. But this is real. I didn’t want to believe it at first, but now I know the truth.”

  “As real as it can be,” Michael agreed with a nod, “and as important as it can be that humanity doesn’t find out about it just yet. Not until we’ve managed to get the upper hand on the vampires.”

  “You may never do that.”

  “Then we’ll keep on fighting in the dark, in secret, doing what we can to hold back the tide of evil.” Michael gave a curt laugh. “That sounds like some noble speech, but I don’t mean it that way. It’s just the way things are. The way they’ve been for hundreds of years, ever since my family took on this crusade. You’re a part of it now, Jessie, I won’t deny that, but it’s up to me to determine the extent of your involvement. I won’t let you risk your life.”

  “Because of what happened to Charlotte.”

  Just hearing her name was like a stab in the heart, even after all these years. He wanted to wince, but he kept his face carefully expressionless as he said, “Not completely, but that’s part of it. I won’t risk the life of someone I—”

  The word wouldn’t come out of his mouth. It had been so long since he’d allowed himself to feel it. The last time, the person who aroused those feelings in him had wound up a soulless, undead monster. He couldn’t give in to his emotional desires, couldn’t ever put his heart in anyone else’s hands again. That part of him had to be shut off, walled up and hidden away with bricks of guilt and the mortar of grief.

  Then Jessie had come along, taking him completely by surprise. She’d been nothing but an annoyance at first, but he had quickly come to admire her intelligence and her persistence. Then the more time he spent with her, the less he was able to fight the instinct that said to push her away, keep her at a distance. He wanted her closer, wanted to know more about her. Hell, he wanted to know everything about her. He wanted to possess her, just as he wanted her to possess him. He wanted to laugh with her, cry with her, make love with her…make babies with her…