Blood Law

by Jeannie Holmes

  “That was Damian,” he said, sinking onto the bed, turning his cell phone over and over in his hands.

  Damian had left Jefferson the day after she’d killed Darryl Black, summoned back to Louisville and FBPI headquarters. “What did he want?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Varik?”

  He seemed to struggle with a decision, uncertain, and then sighed. “Damian says they’re going to launch a full investigation into every case you’ve worked since coming to Jefferson.”

  Alex’s breath left her in a rush. Investigations of that scope happened only if they believed an Enforcer to be corrupt, compromised in some way. Compromised Enforcers weren’t tolerated any more today than they had been before the formation of the FBPI, back when the Hunters were still the only means of law enforcement among vampires. Charges of corruption carried only one penalty—death. She sat on the bed next to him, stunned.

  “I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “No, I’m glad you told me. It’s just …” She loved being an Enforcer, but she’d allowed the pressures to crack her, and far too many had paid the price for it. How was she supposed to get through a corruption investigation?

  Varik pulled her in tight next to him. “We’ll get through this. You’ll see.”

  “I thought you were going back to Louisville.”

  “Jefferson still needs an Enforcer, and since you’re suspended while the investigation is pending, Damian’s reassigned me.”

  “You’re staying?”

  “Only if you really want me here.”

  She slipped her arms around his waist and laid her head on his uninjured shoulder. “Stay.”

  “See? I told you you’d realize you couldn’t live without me.”

  Alex smiled but didn’t respond. Outside, a cloud drifted across the moon, blotting out its light and plunging them into a shadowy darkness from which she wondered if they’d ever return.

  Look for more of Alexandra Sabian’s dangerously

  sexy adventures in the hotly anticipated sequel

  BLOOD

  SECRETS

  by Jeannie Holmes

  Coming soon from Dell Books

  Turn the page to take a look inside. …

  prologue

  NO MOON SHONE IN THE SKY WHEN HE DUMPED THE body. He hardly recognized the mangled mess before him as the vibrant young woman he’d known. Hair the color of new pennies turned black with dried blood. A dull silver film encroached the sparkling jade of her eyes.

  Her jaw was marred by a dark smear as he traced its gentle curve. He pulled back and stuck the digit in his mouth, coating his tongue with her blood. An electric charge jolted his spine. Memories that were not his own flickered through his consciousness, playing scenes from her life on the movie screen of his mind, until the film stopped in a crimson moment of violence.

  The rags he’d used to wipe down the trunk and hide his fingerprints fell from his hand and greedily absorbed the blood pooling beneath the remains. Using his elbow, he slammed the trunk closed, blotting the macabre view from sight.

  A falling star streaked across the glittering sky. He closed his eyes and made a wish he’d made a thousand times before. The vision of his wish coming true filled his mind.

  “Soon.” His whisper, a blade, sliced through the silent night. Without a second glance at the trunk-turned-tomb, he walked away.

  one

  November 17

  ALEXANDRA SABIAN SEARCHED THE HALL OF RECORDS for clues that would lead her to a killer. The only problem with her search was that she had no suspects, no witnesses, and the body had been buried for forty years.

  Her father, Bernard Sabian, had been murdered in the spring of 1968, when she was only five. Someone had left his staked and beheaded body in a cemetery near her childhood home.

  Simply because he was a vampire, like her.

  At least that was her theory.

  The large screen before her was projected by crystals housed in a black granite access terminal. Names scrolled by in one column while the adjacent column held a series of numbers showing the location of a door that led to that person’s memory.

  In the two weeks since she’d discovered she could access the Hall of Records—a metaphysical storehouse for the memories and experiences of every man, woman, and child who’d walked the face of Earth—she’d been searching through the records, trying to locate her father’s. She hoped once she did that she would uncover the clues she needed to find his killer.

  The screen flashed from white to red and bold black letters appeared: ACCESS DENIED.

  “Damn it,” Alex muttered and dropped her head into her hands. Every time she searched for her father’s name she met the same result.

  Sighing, she looked up and around the Hall. It had transformed since the first time she’d entered. What had been a single endless hallway had become a huge ornate multilevel rotunda. Countless doors lay hidden in shadows on each level of the massive round building. Large golden Corinthian-style columns supported each level, and she craned her neck to count ten floors before the top-most levels became lost in darkness. The only light came from the screen in front of her and the softly glowing crystals beside each door. Although moonlight streamed through a circular opening in the apex of the rotunda’s unseen dome, none of it reached the lower levels.

  “All I need are some crickets chirping in the background,” she said to no one. She turned her attention back to the screen, ready to try a different approach to her search.

  Somewhere in the distant shadows overhead, a door opened and closed.

  Alex jerked. While she’d known others could access the Hall, she’d never been present when it happened. She waited to see if someone appeared or if she heard footsteps.

  No noise broke the silence. No one showed themselves.

  “Hello,” she called. “Is someone there?”

  Only her echoed voice answered.

  Frowning, Alex peered into the gloom overhead. Had she imagined it?

  A persistent, steady beeping sounded from her wrist. She checked her watch and sighed. It was time to leave the Hall behind.

  She rose from her seat and headed for the simple wooden door behind her. The Hall wasn’t a place located on the physical plane but rather was located in the Shadowlands, a sort of neutral zone between the physical world and the realm of the spirit. Light flooded the rotunda as she opened it and stepped through.

  The light surrounded her, warm and welcoming. The moon had reigned over the Hall, but once outside, Alex found herself in a flowering meadow kissed by sunlight. Looking over her shoulder, no building was visible—only the door through which she’d exited the Hall.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” she muttered and then smirked at the reference to Alice in Wonderland. Sometimes she definitely felt like Alice tumbling through the looking-glass.

  Parting the Veil that separated the physical from the spiritual required concentration. She sighed and closed her eyes, pushing aside the random thoughts that crowded her mind.

  Her physical body lay in a hotel room in a meditative trance. Once awake, she would be groggy and disoriented, like someone coming out from under anesthesia. In order to shift her consciousness from the Shadowlands back to the real world, she had to remember details of the room.

  Gradually she recalled the feel of the bed beneath her, the coolness of the air, and the hum of machinery from the nearby elevators. The sensation of a yawning pit opening beneath her made her stomach roll. She’d learned to keep her eyes shut tightly against a kaleidoscopic whirlwind of colors and shadows as she passed through the void and returned to the physical plane.

  Alex slowly awoke from the dreamlike trance in which she’d fallen and alarms immediately sounded in her mind. Her skin prickled under the gaze of an unseen observer.

  Darkness cloaked her surroundings. Disoriented, she searched with her senses, probing the night for signs of life. She steadied and measured her breathing as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. T
he greenish glow of a security light bathed the window beside the bed on which she lay and cast strange shadows on the wall.

  Without turning her head, she looked around the small hotel room trying to make sense of what she saw. One of the shadows in a far comer shifted and her focus zeroed in on it. She eased her hand beneath her pillow, reaching for her loaded Glock G31 .357-caliber pistol.

  The shadow detached from the wall and moved toward her.

  Alex sat up quickly and aimed her pistol at the shadow as it launched itself onto the bed. Her finger found the trigger.

  The shadow landed beside her with an inquisitive warble.

  “Damn it, Dweezil,” Alex whispered, jerking her finger from the trigger as the large Maine Coon cat swished its tail over her bare legs. She secured the gun’s safety and laid it on the nightstand.

  Dweezil head butted her empty hand and purred.

  She chuckled and scratched behind his large tufted ears. “Don’t scare me like that. I almost shot you.”

  His eyes flashed iridescent green in the light filtering through the window. He winked at her as if to say “Gotcha,” before moving to the spare pillow and curling into a tight ball.

  “Crazy cat.” Alex yawned and glanced at the time displayed on the digital clock on the nightstand.

  It was almost four o’clock in the morning. She could still manage a few hours of real sleep before her meeting. Straightening the oversized University of Louisville T-shirt she wore, she walked into the bathroom and blinked against the harsh light before closing the door to insure Dweezil didn’t join her. Answering the call of nature didn’t require a fuzzy audience, though he begged to differ at times. His objections usually manifested as fuzzy paws waving at her from beneath the door.

  As an Enforcer with the Federal Bureau of Preternatural Investigation, it was her job to police the vampire population of Jefferson, a small town in the southwestern corner of Mississippi. At least it had been until two weeks ago when she turned rogue, abandoned her oath to uphold the law, and incurred the wrath of Chief Enforcer Damian Alberez. She’d been placed on administrative suspension and ordered to remain within the city limits until the Bureau summoned her to their headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, to face an official inquiry before the Tribunal, the vampire equivalent of an internal affairs committee. She was being charged with numerous violations of the Enforcer code of conduct, the most serious being corruption, which, if found guilty, carried a mandatory death sentence.

  She was scheduled to meet with Damian and a special investigator assigned by the Tribunal to examine not only her recent actions but also every case she’d worked since moving to Jefferson six years ago. It wasn’t a process she looked forward to enduring.

  As she washed up, Alex checked her reflection in the age-spotted mirror above the sink. The bruising that had covered her ribs, stomach, and the right side of her face had finally disappeared but the fractured cheekbone hadn’t fully healed. She could still feel the soreness when she smiled, not that she had much reason to smile lately. A bright pink scar ran diagonally over her right bicep, the result of a sniper’s bullet grazing her arm.

  Another scar marred the left side of her neck, a jagged slash starting behind her ear and extending to her collarbone. She fingered the scar, a permanent reminder of a chapter in her life she thought was behind her. Fate, however, had other plans for her.

  “Snap out of it, Alex,” she told her reflection as she pulled loose the band securing her hair in a low ponytail. She gathered the shoulder-length-tangled auburn mass at the nape of her neck and looped the band around it once more. “What’s done is done.”

  She opened the door and was greeted by the first crashing notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

  Dweezil chirped his displeasure as she dived across the bed to reach her cell phone.

  “Sabian,” she answered breathlessly on the second ring.

  “Dreaming of me again?” a man’s voice purred in her ear.

  Alex rolled her eyes. “You wish.”

  Varik Baudelaire laughed. “Well, you can’t blame me for asking when you answer the phone like that.”

  “I know you didn’t call at this hour to flirt.” She could hear distant voices over the line and the sound of dried leaves rustling in a breeze. “Where are you?”

  “Nassau County Community College campus, outside the women’s dorm,” he answered.

  “Crime scene?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. You’ve been keeping track of the Mindy Johnson disappearance?”

  “The girl that went missing three days ago. Yeah, I’m familiar.”

  “Her car just turned up. We’re processing it now.”

  “Why call me?”

  “I need you here.”

  “I’m suspended, remember?”

  “Not anymore. I already cleared it with Damian.”

  Alex’s eyebrows rose and she checked the clock again. “How long have you been there?”

  “Since a little after one.”

  Three hours on scene was a long time to process a car. “You said you were trying to figure out if you had a crime scene. What do you mean?”

  Varik sighed and the weight of the past few hours seemed to be carried in the sound. “Open the bond and I’ll show you.”

  Six years ago, they’d been lovers, engaged to be married, until he attacked her, savaging her neck and giving her the scar she now unconsciously traced with her finger. He’d taken her blood and forged a psychic bond between them. Time and distance had weakened the blood-bond but two weeks ago, she’d turned the tables and attacked him, restrengthening the bond.

  Alex drew a steadying breath and lowered the mental barriers she’d erected to protect her mind from Varik’s. The low-level hum she always heard in the back of her mind grew louder, accompanied by a pressure comparable to a mounting headache. Her awareness expanded until it met a warm tide of thoughts and memories, and her consciousness merged with Varik’s.

  Images, sounds, and smells assaulted her: a three-story brick building, snippets of conversations, the clean scent of rain, a Honda Accord with its driver’s-side door open and engine left idling. The final vision focused on a small figure, a doll clothed in a white dress lying in a sea of darkness. Along with the doll came a wave of emotions ranging from disgust to anxiety to recognition.

  Alex latched on to the sense of recognition, pulling on it like a loose thread, following it back to its source. Alarm and anger pulsed through the bond and left her reeling when Varik threw up his mental barriers, severing the connection. She fought against the vertigo that threatened to overwhelm her and raised her own psychic shields once more.

  “How soon can you be here?” Varik asked.

  She evaded his question. “What’s the significance of the doll?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Like hell you don’t. You recognized it. What’s going on?”

  “I said I don’t know, Alex.”

  “Yes, you do. I sensed it in you.”

  Silence filled the line.

  “Damn it, Varik. If you want me to help, then you have to talk to me.”

  “We’ll talk when you get here.”

  “Varik—”

  “When you get here,” he snapped and ended the call.

  Alex stared at her cell phone for a moment before closing it in frustration. “You’re damn right we’ll talk,” she grumbled, rolling over the bed to gain her feet.

  As she dressed, the image of the doll remained fixed in her mind’s eye. She felt none of the emotions she’d sensed from Varik upon seeing it. Why wouldn’t he tell her anything over the phone, or more important, through the blood-bond? What was it about this doll that had him so spooked?

  “Only one way to find out.” She shrugged into a dark brown leather jacket and secured her Glock in a holster at her hip. Grabbing her keys beside the television, she ran a hand over Dweezil’s back. “Guard the place and behave yourself.”

  The cat
yawned and rolled onto his back, exposing his fuzzy belly, which she quickly scratched and was rewarded with a low, rumbling purr.

  Alex stepped into the brightly lit hotel hallway and made certain the door locked behind her. She stalked past the other rooms containing sleeping patrons and waited for the elevator.

  Her apartment had been damaged in a fire a few weeks prior and wasn’t ready for her return. She’d been staying with her brother, Stephen, in a studio apartment he rented out over Crimson Swan, Jefferson’s only legal blood bar for vampires. However, arsonists led by the now former sheriff of Nassau County, Harvey Manser, had destroyed the bar, leaving her homeless once again.

  The hotel room in which she was staying had originally been reserved by Varik. Her suspension from the Bureau left the town without an Enforcer so the Bureau had assigned Varik as her temporary replacement and had provided him with a short-term apartment. He, in turn, had given his hotel room to Alex. She’d offered to reserve her own room but he’d insisted, claiming that the room was already paid for in advance.

  She didn’t believe his story, just as she didn’t believe that he didn’t know more about the doll than he was claiming.

  The elevator arrived and the doors slid open. She pushed the button that would take her to the lobby.

  As the doors shut, another door opened and closed somewhere in the distance, bringing to mind her encounter—or lack of an encounter—in the Hall of Records.

  Machinery whirred overhead and, while the elevator descended, she was on edge. Dread settled over her like a shroud and she couldn’t shake it.

  The elevator reached the first floor and the doors opened to reveal a well-lit, empty lobby.

  Alex silently chided herself as she passed the vacant front desk. She was allowing the events of recent weeks to get to her. Now she had an opportunity to make up for some of her mistakes.

  And yet when she stepped into the rainy predawn gloom, the sense that some unseen menace lay in wait, watching, quickened her steps until she was running when she reached her dark green Jeep Grand Cherokee.