Key to Conflict

by Talia Gryphon

  He felt a swelling of admiration and desire for this woman he barely knew. She hadn’t run screaming from the pub and onto the next flight out of the Country. Not that it would have done her any good. It would prolong the inevitable attack by a Dracula-allied Vampire in her home or office or out on the job some dark night. She would be dead. Here or in the United States, she would be just as dead simply because of her open association with him.

  “I admire your fortitude, Gillian. I hope that you understand that I would not bring any of this up if your life were not directly in danger.” Gillian glanced at him as she drove. His lovely face was full of concern but also admiration.

  Gillian laughed harshly. “I have a bad feeling that I am not nearly as frightened as I should be Aleksei, but I really hate bullies. Dracula sounds like a first-class bully.”

  “Bully? No Gillian, he is not a bully. He is your worst nightmare come to life.”

  His words held a dark finality that Gillian didn’t want to contemplate right then as she turned into the estate. The tires crunched on the gravel as they left the paved road and entered between the open iron gate. Iron wolves stood guard on top of the stone gateposts on either side as the car rolled through. The cabin itself looked almost picturesque, framed by the mountains and the thick forest.

  “I’d put that out if I were you, and let me do the talking.” Aleksei indicated the cigarette as he exited the car.

  “Because…?” Gillian’s eyes were cold. The alcohol was making her edgier and more reactionary than usual.

  “Tanis does not have a liking for inordinately liberated women, Gillian, nor ones who are deceitful. He’s not a bad man, just an opinionated, backward one on occasion.” Aleksei was grinning from ear to ear.

  “Well, I tell you,” Gillian took a long drag on her cigarette, “if I gave a shit what Tanis thought, that might concern me just a tad, but seeing how I don’t, I won’t worry about it.”

  Kicking the car door shut, she turned to see Aleksei staring at the porch, part of which was cast in shadow, despite the outside light still being on. She took a shot at the possibility. “He’s standing on the porch and he just heard everything I said, right?”

  Aleksei nodded, then started for the house, keeping his smile turned away from the little blonde courting danger.

  “Fuck.” Gillian swore under her breath. She didn’t want to start out fighting with Tanis again. It was late, she was tired and she was a little muddled from at least two bottles of wine. Alcohol had a tendency to subdue the therapist in her and bring out the Marine. Unfortunately, the Marine had an attitude with bossy men as did the actual woman. Screw it, she thought, Tanis wasn’t her client and she didn’t owe him shit.

  This was not going to go well, she could tell already, and it was about to get a lot worse when she heard his deep velvet voice,

  “Apparently someone needs to put a stop to the damage you are doing to your body from your smoking and drinking and to your inclination for deception, Dr. Key.” He could smell the alcohol and nicotine from where he was, even if he hadn’t seen the smoke streaming from her mouth and nose.

  His statement was accompanied by the light crunch of his boots on the gravel. Tanis stepped off the porch and was moving up to her. For a big man, he moved with the grace of a panther, softly and ominously, broad shoulders and lean hips all in alignment, his step buoyant on the crushed pebbles of cement.

  Gillian shifted her backpack to her left hand, walked directly up to him, effectively stopping him in his path. Her temper started to skyrocket. She was torqued up from everything that had happened, the alcohol fueling her attitude, squashing all cautionary warnings from her senses, which were screaming at her to shut up.

  Deliberately, she took another drag on the cigarette while staring straight up into those shimmering golden eyes, and blew the smoke into Tanis’s surprised face. Snarling audibly, she crossed the professional etiquette line without another thought. Hell with it.

  “You pretentious prick, who do you think you’re talking to?”

  CHAPTER

  4

  E VERYONE froze. Aleksei had just opened the door to the house, thinking Gillian would be following even if Tanis tried to intervene. Obviously she wasn’t right behind him. And what she just said…oh hell. That was a mistake.

  “Tanis!” Aleksei’s telepathic shout to his brother was both a warning and a plea.

  The last thing he needed was Tanis losing his temper with the lovely doctor. They were supposed to sort this out together, the three of them. He hadn’t taken Gillian’s blood so he couldn’t issue the same mental warning to her, but he turned, trying to catch her eyes in his icy gray glare. Trouble was, she wasn’t looking at him. Her attention was focused on his tall, dark and deadly brother. The porch light illuminated the disaster in progress.

  Tanis’s eyes narrowed and his voice was low but full of black fury. “What did you say to me?” He stared at Gillian, golden eyes literally shooting sparks, menace radiating from him. He stepped forward, aggressive, male and very dominant.

  That did it. Gillian did not take to being bullied by anyone. Not even exceptionally handsome Romanian men, whose beautiful voices and eyes would normally intrigue her. She threw caution completely to the wind, uncaring at the moment about what disciplinary actions the IPPA and the Marine Corps might take for her blowing her stack with a patient’s brother.

  “Pretentious prick!” she bellowed at him, less than two feet away. “I called you a pretentious prick! Are you deaf as well as undead?”

  She used the insult undead deliberately, and because he was blocking her path, she strong-armed him in the shoulder to push past. A fully sober Gillian would have gone around him and avoided purposely insulting someone who was twice her size and about twelve times stronger physically. Then again, an entirely sober Gillian would not have started this line of rudeness to begin with, but she was unconsciously spoiling for a fight as a tension release. At least that would be the rationale she used when she thought this through tomorrow. If she survived.

  There was a sharp intake of breath from Aleksei. Whatever happened, no matter that he had preternatural speed, he was not going to get to Gillian in time for Tanis not to rip her head off. He moved as quickly as he could while the veins in Tanis’s neck became instantly visible, and a black cloud of rage seemed to extend out, with him in the center. Aleksei felt his brother’s anger swell, but curiously, not that the woman was in any real danger.

  Two steps. Gillian made it exactly two steps when her right arm was grabbed by a steel band—correction, Tanis’s hand. She dropped the backpack instantly, cocked a fist back and whirled, throwing her strength and weight into the punch. He was faster, much faster. Unnatural speed. Preternatural speed. Vampire speed.

  His arm blurred and caught her small fist before she connected with his jaw. Shit and double shit. Now he had both of her arms and he pulled them together to capture them with one hand. First thing she noticed was that he wasn’t really hurting her, just holding her. Second thing was that she still had the cigarette in her mouth and that the ash hadn’t fallen off. She pulled on it, squinting in the smoke that billowed around her face and puffed it out. “Well, fuckadoodle doo,” she muttered as he hauled her arms up over her head and reached a hand out to cup her chin.

  “You are definitely in need of a lesson in manners, my dear lady.” Tanis spoke every word softly and through his teeth, staring down into surprised green eyes through the smoke from her cigarette.

  He plucked the cigarette from her lips, dropped it and ground it out, without looking, with his foot. In response, she jackknifed her hips upward and two-footed him in the stomach. He doubled over momentarily in astonished reflex, but that was all. Vampires do not require air in their lungs to function so the blow to his diaphragm did little except surprise him and make him angrier.

  Lowering his arm when she kicked him, Tanis inadvertently set her feet on the ground. Gillian twisted her wrists and jerked backward, but her le
gs were quivery from the alcohol and from kicking Tanis’s rock hard, amazing abs. The jolt to her legs was like kicking a concrete pylon. She was free of his grasp but more off balance than she had anticipated. Her knee buckled and she stumbled away from him, toward the tall stone gatepost directly behind her.

  When she staggered and nearly fell, Tanis moved with blurring speed. If he had been Human, she would have fractured her skull or broken her neck on the stone obstruction. Unnatural speed, unnatural strength, preternatural reflexes were what saved her from serious injury or death. Not that she would be grateful.

  He grabbed her leg in midair and flipped her all the way over, catching her in his arms bridal-style. Gillian wound up cradled in his arms, balanced on his thigh. Tanis had gone down on one knee as he caught her to cushion her fall and not jolt her fragile-looking body. Aleksei had stopped where he was, seeing that his brother had everything under control. Sort of.

  Gillian was horrified as she stared up from her vantage point in Tanis’s lap into a pair of golden eyes that held amusement and quite a bit of residual fire. Good Goddess, this was just getting better and better. She knew she was blushing under that amber gaze.

  “Are you all right, sweetheart?” Tanis said in a patronizing tone, a smirk curling his lip. He shifted her a little on his leg and patted her bottom lightly. “Nothing damaged, I hope?”

  Aleksei nearly moaned aloud. It was like a train wreck about to happen. He could see it coming and was helpless to prevent it. To Tanis, he fired off, “No! Do not provoke her further!”

  Gillian went from horrified to pissed in a heartbeat. Intellectually, she knew that going head to head with a Vampire was not bright, but she wasn’t at her level-headed best at the moment.

  She spit out a string of expletives that would have made her drill instructor proud, finishing with, “You cocksucking corpse, let go of me right now!”

  To her abject horror, she did the utmost girly thing she could have. She was very inebriated and a whole lot scared, and when he didn’t immediately release her, she reached up and slapped Tanis across the face. It shocked him more than inflicted damage, but it served as a goad to push him over an edge he didn’t know he had.

  Later, Tanis would not be able to recall what had come over him, but he had never encountered a female of any species with so much audaciousness and so little common sense. Before the slap and her last scathing comment, he had been prepared to let her up and lecture her as soon as she calmed down, but not now. He rolled her over in his arms, draping her face down across his bent knee, pinning her pelvis against his leg.

  “Not just yet, piccola guerriera.” The words were ground out between clenched teeth, beautiful in tone but filled with dark menace.

  The crack of his palm connecting to her butt was sharp and loud. Aleksei started forward but the look in his brother’s gleaming golden eyes stopped him. In four hundred years Tanis had never raised his hand to any female. He wouldn’t injure her, not really, but the tanning he was giving her backside was surely going to leave a mark.

  Gillian was beyond mortified. She was a twenty-eight-year-old adult. In the past two minutes, she’d lost her temper, nearly started a fight and was now bent over the knee of a very angry Vampire, being spanked like a kid. She nearly bit her lip through not to shriek. It was obvious he was tempering his hand or he would have broken her pelvis, but it still stung like hell. Too bad she’d left her gun in the car. She could have shot herself and spared everyone embarrassment.

  Determined that this young female learn some manners, Tanis was swift and resolute. It was obvious no one had ever cared about her enough to take her to task for her insufferable insolence and inclination toward physical aggression. Rectifying that situation was his pleasure this evening. When he stopped and lifted her to her feet, he was prepared to finish this incident off with a firm lecture on her behavior. To his surprise, she straightened up and, with furious tears sparkling in her eyes, she belted him in the mouth, rocking him back.

  Aleksei leapt forward, inserting his body between Gillian and Tanis, who was now rising to his feet, pressing a hand to his bleeding lip. Gillian looked up at Aleksei to survey if he were a new threat. She saw amusement and admiration in the nearly metallic gray eyes. Blushing furiously, she whirled and stomped off into the nearby dark forest to collect her thoughts.

  “Assault and battery. That’s what I’ll charge him with.” She was fuming. Her alcohol-sodden thoughts were scattered and disordered.

  More mad at herself than Tanis, Gillian took herself to task more than he had. She was a professional. She dealt with Paramortal people and their problems for a living, yet she’d just let a Vampire piss her off to the point of losing her temper, something she couldn’t remember doing since her early days in the Marine Corps.

  Chauvinistic bastard spanked me. Shit and double shit, she couldn’t even go home. Finding her way into a clearing about halfway up the mountain, Gillian sat on a fallen log, wincing a little, and cursed the day that she decided to come to Romania. In the quiet among the immense pine trees she tried to collect her thoughts and her dignity.

  Hathor’s hells, Daedelus was going to laugh his ass off when she relayed this little tidbit of trivia to him. Helmut would be mortified and probably sanction her ass for losing her mind…temper like she did. Daed would say she had provoked it and give Tanis a medal. Bastards. All of them.

  When was she going to learn? Psychology was an even playing field for men and women, but the military was something else. It had been her temper that had gotten her into the Special Forces in the first place. Well, her temper and her empathy, to be fair. It had been during her assignment at the Pentagon. She was head of the security detail for the Vampire delegation during the Human-Vampire Peace Talks. Her mind flicked unwittingly to that unpleasant incident.

  One of the Vampire delegation, Baron Von Essen, had propositioned her more than once, not realizing she was an inherently powerful empath and knew immediately that all he wanted was bragging rights about bagging a Human female. Gill had refused because he was an insincere prick. The insincere prick was insulted by her refusal and had given her a gift, publicly, which was designed to humiliate her.

  Gill had opened the box and found a heavy gold cross on a very long chain. The Vampire had suggested that she wear it as her chastity belt to avoid any sort of Vampiric penetration. It was a bad enough idea to give a Jewish-Pagan girl a Christian cross with intent to insult, but it was a worse idea to piss off a United States Marine for any reason, at least in public.

  She’d taken the object out of the box and surreptitiously admired the shining gold ornament, then flicked it into the Baron’s surprised face with a smile and a hearty, “Go fuck yourself, sir.”

  Crosses and other religious artifacts only work if they’re wielded by a true believer against a Vampire who is also a believer. Gillian, being non-Christian, knew she didn’t believe, but being pissed off, didn’t stop to think that Baron von Essen was most likely Catholic during his Daywalker life.

  The cross had spun through the air like a shuriken and embedded itself like a hot knife in the butter of His Excellency’s jaw before Gillian’s horrified eyes and his great dismay.

  Probably the only reason Gill was still in one piece was that the other members of the Vampire delegation hated the Baron’s creaky ass and intervened before he could tear into her. One in particular, Cassiopeia Delphi, PhD, was rather impressed by the little blonde’s chutzpah and utter lack of fear. She was busy surreptitiously working with Daedelus to recruit Gillian for a project she was working on at the Miller and Jackson Clinic for Paramortal Understanding and Intimacy, where she was clinical director.

  Once Daed heard Gillian’s side of the story, he was impressed that she hadn’t killed the Baron outright. The fact that she hadn’t even shot him was amazing of itself. Hell, he had new recruits and diplomatic liaisons who would have killed the Austrian Vampire just for making a pass in the first place.

  If it were only
up to him he’d have let the incident go with no report on her record. Regrettably, although Gillian was currently the flavor of the month for the brass, these Summit meetings were too important to ignore her actions. The Baron had been replaced, sent home from the delegation by one of the Vampire Lords, Daed wasn’t sure which one or how anyone could tell who had allegiance with whom. Gillian would have to be punished in some manner.

  Gill watched the wheels turning behind Daedelus’s icy black eyes. She saw the myriad of emotions flicker across his face. Her highly functional empathy told her that he believed her even if he didn’t condone how she’d handled it. He wouldn’t allow any severe action to be taken against her, of that she was certain given his current feelings. But there was a pensive look to Captain Aristophenes and a warning niggle in his psyche that she wasn’t sure she liked.

  Daed was frantically thinking of a solution that would please the brass, get them off his ass and hers, yet send a message to the Vampires and anyone else that a marine is not to be trifled with, ever.

  Aha! He had just the thing.

  “Tell you what,” he said wryly, his eyes narrowing a little as he looked down at her. “Our unit got orders this morning to collect a team for a recon mission. It’s in Austria, near a little village called Badgastein. Interested?”

  Shit. Gillian knew what he had in mind. Send her on a dangerous combat search-and-seizure mission and all would be forgiven. No mark on her record, no one the wiser. Gill knew that Daed was trying to help her out of her predicament. It wasn’t a palatable way out but it was a way. She also reasoned it would send a clear message to all the delegates that she was being entrusted with further responsibility rather than being officially reprimanded.

  “I’ll do it.” She’d said without hesitation and never looked backward.

  Yup. That had been the start of her field operative career. That mission had been the first of many successful endeavors with her handpicked team. It had given her a promotion to Captain and a place of unshakable faith within the USMC. Now she was on a mountainside in Romania, nursing her wounded pride and tingling butt. Oh how the mighty will fall.