“Valentine.”
“Don’t you remember what you really are?”
“I try to forget as much as possible, actually.” She waved a contemptuous hand toward the night, the world beyond her window. “Who needs all that crap? Especially at my age?”
He stared at her, those big, dark, beautiful eyes full of worry, full of the conviction that she was mad, full of dread and concern for the child. She wasn’t going to argue about her sanity, maybe she would even admit that her definitions of reality were slightly askew. It went with the job. Goddess knew, it went with the business. Who was truly sane in Hollywood?
She took Selim’s hands in hers. She felt how different they were from human hands only because it had been so long since she’d touched one of her own kind. Body temperature was a little higher, skin that was soft, yet subtly tougher than human, a faint ridge at the base of fingernails that masked the sheathed claws. The differences from human were no more pronounced in Nighthawks; it was mind-set and magic that set them that further step apart from human. Or maybe it was a step closer. Valentine liked to think so. In fact, she liked to think that there was really very little that separated them from the people they used to be. The proof that drinking the Goddess’s blood didn’t really take them away from humanity was in the occasional birth of vampire children.
“Sebastian’s a miracle child,” she told Selim. “So was Istvan. Istvan would never want to harm another dhamphir. I just made that up.” She didn’t tell him that the spells referred to in the script were real. Why admit to even more crimes against the dictatorship he served? “I’ve been mucking around in your subconscious for weeks, my dear.” And that was crime enough, against a person, not antiquated Laws, and for that she was sorry. “You just picked up the idea that Istvan was involved from me.” She squeezed his hands. “You’re really good for such a kid. You almost caught me a couple of times. I’m quite proud of you.”
Selim didn’t seem to absorb her praise, but he did listen to her explanation. He twined his fingers with hers, drawing her closer to him. He radiated danger, but Valentine was unafraid as he looked down at her, his expression gone still and blank. “Maybe he isn’t coming for Sebastian,” he agreed with her. “But what about the rest of us when he finds out what you’ve done?”
“You aren’t going to kill me,” Valentine answered him. “You aren’t going to stop me. We both know that.”
“If I don’t take care of it, they will send him.”
“He’s a good boy. I can reason with him.”
Geoff Sterling’s wild laughter interrupted whatever they would have said next. Valentine pulled her hands from Selim’s and went to the grieving strig. Geoff’s laughter shifted to shuddering sobs as she crossed the room, then turned to a thundering howl of pain. Selim was but a step behind her. It was Selim who took the boy by the shoulders and shook him hard.
“He’s seen Istvan work. I think that’s what set him off,” Selim explained to her. “But not what this is about.”
“I know. I saw you with Kamaraju.”
“I’m not sure who I’m going to kill first,” Selim said. “You or Kama.”
Selim looked for her reaction as he put his arms around the young vampire and drew him into a tight embrace. Sterling quieted and held onto Selim for all he was worth, whispering over and over the name of the girl he’d lost.
Valentine stood back with her arms crossed. She glanced from Selim and Sterling to the balcony and back. “You’ll have to decide on that tomorrow,” she told him. She got between the two men and took Sterling’s arm. She wiped tears off his face, put her hand over his heart, and waited until his ragged breathing had calmed a bit. She urged him toward the couch. “Sleep there,” she told him. “We’ll talk when we wake up. No dreams,” she added softly, looking deeply into his eyes and his mind. “No dreams at all today. Just rest.”
Dawn was just a few moments away when Geoff headed toward the couch. Valentine took Selim’s hand. He was looking at the lightening sky, watching for the sun that was about to trap them together with their unfinished business until night fell once more. “Come on, princeling,” she said. “You can sleep with me.”
He didn’t protest. You couldn’t argue against daylight. He went with her, the enemy of the Law, into the bedroom and settled down beside her to sleep.
“Tell me about the child.”
Siri looked at the man driving her car, and couldn’t recall how he came to be in the Mercedes or behind the wheel. She didn’t like to let anyone else drive. She smiled dreamily at Yevgeny. “What do you want to know?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Everything. What happened to his mother?”
The air-conditioning was on too high, chilling her down to a shivering mass. Siri looked at her watch. It told her that the time was 10:25; the sunlight glinting off concrete, chrome, and shiny metal skins of the cars all around them on the freeway told her that it was morning. She welcomed the heat of the sun, but couldn’t get to it, not even to roll down a window. She tried hard to remember where the night had gotten to, how she had come to be where she was, and with who, but the compulsion to respond to whatever Yevgeny wanted overrode every concern and question.
“Oh, she’s a vampire now,” she told Yevgeny.
“Really? How interesting.” He changed lanes and speeded up. “Shouldn’t giving birth to the little monster have killed her? Shouldn’t he have killed her when he tore out of her womb?”
“That’s a myth,” Siri responded tartly. “Legend. Modern medicine intervened, actually. Cassie had the best ob/gyn in town. Sebastian was delivered C-section, a few weeks early. That was Selim’s idea, just in case the myth proved to have some basis in fact. He wasn’t born with fangs and claws, so it probably wasn’t. Cassie did almost die, though, from complications to do with a blood transfusion she wasn’t supposed to have. Someone at the hospital screwed up.”
Siri still got angry at the memory. She was convinced it had been an attempt by someone, possibly Kamaraju, to kill off the dhamphir. Except the murderer was already too late when the attempt was made. There was no proof, though. Neither Selim nor Tom had ever found the technician to question him. To Siri’s suspicious mind, this was proof that it hadn’t been a screwup or accident. She had enough control over her own thoughts not to offer this information, though she couldn’t help but continue giving Yevgeny what he asked for.
“You know a companion can’t take anyone but their vampire’s blood?” she went on. Yevgeny nodded. “After some technician pumped about a pint of the wrong type of blood into a woman too drugged to stop him, she went into convulsions. To keep her alive, Tom had to take her Hunting, do the makeover thing. She was so pissed off.”
Yevgeny took his eyes off the road long enough to give her a very curious glance. “She didn’t rejoice in her rebirth?”
“Hell no.”
“Why not?”
“She’d just had a baby! She didn’t want to leave her husband and house. She especially didn’t want to leave her child, and there was no way Tom was going to send his son to someone else’s household. In the end, she didn’t leave, which has caused all sorts of friction in the community, but she’d rather stay at home with Sebastian than do the vampire thing, anyway.”
“The child is more important to her than becoming immortal?”
“Of course!”
“Why ‘of course’?”
“You’ve obviously never been a parent.”
Yevgeny went very still, his thoughts going far from the car he was driving. “I have, actually,” he said after she’d watched him for a long while. He gave a soft laugh. “I’d forgotten. Two sons and a daughter. I loved them very much before I was taken from them.” He shuddered, and the determined look came back to his face. “It doesn’t matter. Tell me more about Sebastian. No,” he stopped her before she could go on. He held up a hand. “Maybe it’s better not to know.”
Silence settled in the cold car as he turned onto Mulholland and dr
ove up the steep, curving road. Siri stared out the windshield. Every now and then, a thought tried to break through the darkness that blanketed her. She caught glimpses of memory, of Yevgeny rousing her out of a fitful morning’s sleep. She was certain awful things had happened in the night, but she could only grasp at shadows. Yevgeny kept whispering in her mind that all that mattered was her taking him to Sebastian. Music tried to hum inside her head, but she caught no chords she could put together. Yevgeny’s determination kept getting in their way.
By the time they reached the gated drive of the Avella estate, she had a terrible headache.
“It will be over soon,” Yevgeny said gently and put a hand on her shoulder. He switched off the car engine. “I’ll wait here. Go to the door,” he instructed Siri carefully. “The slave’s waiting there for you with little Sebastian.”
This was not good. This was not right. Panic lanced through her. “I—”
Yevgeny’s grip on her shoulder turned harsh. He caught her gaze with his, bored the necessity to obey into her as he said the words. “Go to the door, Siri. Bring back the child. Bring him to me right now.” He repeated his commands over and over, until Siri nodded at last.
She got out of the car and went to the door. Two members of Don Tomas’s household were waiting with Sebastian by the door. The adults, a man and a woman, didn’t look happy. Sebastian, dark curls combed neatly, bright amber eyes shining with excitement, had never been happier. He threw his arms around Siri when she reached him. His enthusiastic embrace, reaching somewhere above her knees, threw her off balance. She had to grab hold of the adobe arch over the doorway to keep her feet. Siri gave Sebastian’s nanny a grateful look as the woman pried the little boy off of her.
“Behave,” the woman admonished and was ignored.
“I’m having a birthday party!” Sebastian crowed as he looked up at Siri’s face. He punched the air with a small fist. “Yes!”
She took Sebastian’s hand. “Yes, indeed,” she agreed. “We’re going to Andy’s place. He’s closed it for the day, and decorated it with dinosaurs and balloons. It’s going to be great.”
“I know,” Sebastian said. He tugged hard on her hand. “Let’s go.”
She started toward the car with Sebastian, the two slaves following close at her heels. Yevgeny stepped in front of them before they could get in the backseat, though. He caught and held their attention while Siri continued on to the Mercedes. Sebastian paid the man with her no mind. As she settled the little boy in the backseat and adjusted the seat belt for him, she heard Yevgeny talking to Don Tomas’s people. “That’s all right,” he told them, in his soft, persuasive way. “You won’t be coming with us. In fact,” he went on, friendly, confident, magnanimous. “I’m giving you the day off.”
Siri opened the passenger door. By the time Siri had her own seat belt fastened, the servants had started back toward the house. Yevgeny slid into the driver’s seat. The car started.
“Won’t this be fun?” he said and guided the car smoothly back down the driveway.
Chapter 23
SEBASTIAN TUGGED ON Siri’s hand as they walked away from the car. “Why do we have to go here?” he asked her. “Why can’t my party be near where I live? How will my friends find me?”
Siri had been waiting for these questions. “Your mama told you why, didn’t she, owlet?” She waited until Sebastian nodded twice, to acknowledge that Siri had spoken the secret word that told him they couldn’t talk about the subject right now. He chafed against it, but, young as he was, most of the time he was good about keeping their secrets. “We’ll talk about it when we get where we’re going.”
Sebastian fidgeted and looked worried but kept quiet. He held her hand and was careful to look both ways as they crossed the street. Siri sighed at the burden this life put on a child and was glad that she could do little things, like arrange birthday parties, even under tight security conditions, that helped ease the stress of growing up strigoi for Sebastian.
She glanced back once, worriedly, at Yevgeny. He walked behind them as they started up the hill. The sight of him disturbed her, but only for a moment. He put out his hand to caress the back of her neck, and she was soothed, calmed. She walked on without any worries.
The noontime traffic was light, but there were plenty of pedestrians on the sidewalks, with college students and shoppers heading for cafés and coffeehouses in the central area of the town known as the Village. The street was lined with trees and flower beds, with an old-fashioned pharmacy on one corner and benches under the trees. The benches were full of young people eating quick take-out meals. Siri noticed the aroma of fresh, warm chocolate from a handmade candy store mingled with the hot, spicy smell of the curry being eaten by someone on the bench outside the candy store as they walked past.
They’d left the Mercedes in the train station parking lot, the closest parking space they found to their destination on the far edge of Claremont’s old-fashioned downtown. It was a two-block walk to Andy’s, a small, hole-in-the-wall place wedged between a dress shop and a store full of Tibetan art and jewelry. The coffeehouse was always very busy during the evenings but normally open for the lunch crowd, as well, offering sandwiches and desserts along with lattes and espressos. Now it was closed, the day help replaced by Gary and Joseph. At least, that was the arrangement Siri had made with them. The idea had been Cassie’s, to give Sebastian a party out in the real world, but in a spot that was quiet and safe, among people who could be trusted. It wouldn’t be as much fun as taking the kids to Disneyland or even the party room of a McDonald’s, but Sebastian had been convinced that it would be fun, and it was his only shot at normal at the moment. Sebastian wanted a normal life desperately enough to go along with anything—after the requisite hours of tantrums.
“Where are my dinosaurs?” Sebastian asked as the door closed behind them.
Yevgeny’s wide shoulders effectively blocked out the light from the half-moon window in the thick wooden door. Blocking any exit, Siri thought with a shiver. He smiled reassuringly, and she returned her attention to Sebastian, who tugged his hand out of hers, and Gary, who came rushing toward her from around the counter.
“What is this all about?” he asked, sparing an anxious look at Yevgeny. “Who’s he?”
“Where are the decorations?” she asked the slave. “We’ve got six kids and their parents showing up for the party in less than an hour.”
The tables squeezed into the long, narrow room were bare. The overhead lights hardly shed any light on the room. There was a shadowy, claustrophobic feel to the surroundings that Siri had never noticed at night. It sent a cold chill through her. No balloons were in evidence, no presents. Definitely no dinosaurs.
“What party?” Gary asked as she turned an angry look on him. “You called this morning and told me the party’d been called off but to meet you here at noon. You had me call all the children’s parents.”
“I did no such thing! Where’s Joe?”
“At home with Miriam, of course. Do you think he’d leave her side when the whole community’s in danger?”
“What danger? We’re having a birthday party.”
“You canceled it. I assumed it had something to do with . . .” He glanced furtively at the man by the door, before whispering, “What Joe told us about.”
“Don’t I get a party?” Sebastian spoke up loudly. “Why not? It’s my birthday,” he added as Siri turned to him. “It’s an owlet thing, isn’t it? Why does everything have to be owlet stuff? Why now?”
Siri looked at Gary. “I never called you.”
“You did.” He was adamant, and he cast a nervous glance at Yevgeny. “He doesn’t belong here, does he? You don’t belong to Don Tomas, do you?”
“No,” Yevgeny answered. He didn’t move from the doorway but surveyed them all, one by one, with a cold blue stare. Ice stabbed through Siri’s heart as his gaze passed over her. She looked at him as though she’d never seen him before, as though she’d never noticed how
large he was, how dangerous. What was he doing here?
“You’re the guy from the Viper Room.”
“You’re crazy,” Gary breathed. “Crazy sick. You better leave, I’m calling—”
“Shut up, slave,” Yevgeny replied. He smiled, chilling the room down even more.
Gary grabbed Siri’s arm. “Why did you bring a madman here?”
She blinked, tried to summon some sense to the morning’s actions, tried to even remember the morning’s actions. So much was darkness. For a moment, all she got was music running through her head. “What is that song?” she said. “I can almost make it out.”
“Can you?” Yevgeny asked, soft and menacing.
He took a step forward. Siri wanted to turn and run, but his cold gaze held her in place. What she’d almost remembered slipped back into darkness. Beside her, Gary made a strangled noise, as though a protest was being pushed down his throat. Yevgeny snatched Sebastian off his feet. His hold on her and Gary broke somewhat as he held Sebastian up at eye level. Gary ran for the back of the building.
“It’s almost noon,” Yevgeny told the little boy. “We haven’t got much time.”
Siri hurried forward to see Sebastian gazing calmly back at the big, menacing man. She stopped, shivered, and did no more. Yevgeny brushed a hand through Sebastian’s hair. The soft curls clung to his fingers, and he drew his hand away as though he’d been burned.
“You’re going to kill me,” the young dhamphir announced calmly.
Yevgeny looked surprised. It was several seconds before he could answer. “Yes, little one.” He didn’t sound gleeful about it. He didn’t look evil but tired and desperate.
“My daddy won’t let you,” Sebastian told him, not showing the least fear. “Or Uncle Selim.”
“They’re sleeping. You have to die at high noon. That it’s your birthday is a fortunate coincidence, but it will add strength to the spell.”
“Are you going to drink my blood?” Sebastian showed all the curious interest in this mayhem that any five-year-old male would when discussing cartoon and action figure violence. “So you can become a vampire like Daddy?”
Laws of the Blood 1: The Hunt Page 22
