by Amy Corwin
“Well, it’s too late now, isn’t it?” She asked. “They think I killed this Juliana and they aren’t going to be happy until they’ve tasted human blood.”
“Did you have anything to do with her death?” Joe’s soft question startled them both.
She looked from one man to the other. A tremor of disappointment shook her mouth, and she chewed her lower lip as she struggled to regain control. “I didn’t lie, I swear! I had nothing to do with it.” Her voice held a sour, ill-used, no-one-believes-me tone. “Not that it matters. You might as well face it; your negotiations have gone south for the winter. I tried to warn you, but you refuse to listen. You can’t negotiate with vampires.”
Joe stepped around her. “All the more reason to show we trust Martyn Sutton. I believe they want peace between us, too. He deserves a second chance, if he’ll accept it.”
“Are you crazy?” She stared at him. “He’s a vampire! What kind of second chance could he have?”
“Never mind,” Kethan said, muscles tightening. Faith in his plan warred with his awareness of the danger that lurked outside his door. The priest was right—they needed to show trust—but now might not be the best time to do so. “At least wait a few hours, Joe.”
“Waiting won’t change anything. We either show our faith, or we allow Quicksilver to handle the clan. I don’t see a great deal of room between the two.”
“Let me go with you,” she offered. “Give me my weapons. I’ll make sure you’re safe.”
Joe opened the door and studied the storm with a frown. “Perhaps that’s not such a bad idea. I could use your help—”
“Yes!” She stepped forward, her face flushed with eagerness. “Anything—”
“—to hand me my umbrella. It’s a dreadful night.” His eyes twinkled as the skin around his eyes crinkled with amusement.
It was hard not to feel a flush of warmth and grin at his gentle humor. As Quicksilver snorted to hide a girlish giggle and reached over to snag the umbrella, Kethan glanced past her, through the open door.
“Be careful, Joe.”
“Always.” He took the umbrella and leaned forward to give Quicksilver a light kiss on her cheek before he moved outside.
She was still smiling as they stood together in the hallway and watched the slender priest fight the elements. He bowed forward with the umbrella held in front of him, the gale pushing him around and twisting the insubstantial metal spokes of the umbrella as he wobbled toward his car.
Kethan waited until Joe clambered inside his rusty, once-white vehicle before waving and gently closing the door.
Joe had made it that far and if he exercised caution, he might make it home without any difficulties.
For now, there was nothing else Kethan could do except pray for peace until dawn.
Chapter Sixteen
Kethan turned and studied Quicksilver, suddenly aware of her. The soft scents of soap and clean hair filled the warm air around her. It was late and he wanted nothing more than to climb into bed, although his desire had nothing to do with sleep.
She watched him with an anxious look on her face. “I don’t like this.” When he stepped around her, she trailed him into the sitting room. “Something’s wrong.” Curling up at one end of the loveseat, she patted the conspicuous space next to her.
He looked at it and sat down in the hard, wooden chair across from her. Discretion is the better part of valor. “I agree.”
“Don’t you think this whole setup is wrong? I didn’t kill that vampire, Juliana, which means it had to be someone else—probably one of Martyn’s own people. Although I find it hard to believe he’s so into this negotiation that he’s willing to kill one of his clan just to frame me. You don’t think he did it to prove his sincerity, do you?” She straightened and gazed over his shoulder, her face tight with concentration. “Maybe he killed her because she disobeyed and he thought that would prove his good faith to you. But Cage and Taylor didn’t know and when they saw me on my motorcycle, they came here thinking I’d killed her.”
“I don’t know,” he murmured. “It’s all guesswork.”
“Think about it! Maybe he’s trying to manipulate us and doesn’t care if he has to kill one of his own clan to do it.”
“He’s worried enough about how few there are in his clan. I don’t think he’d do that.”
“Possibly. Or maybe he’s just desperate to save his own skin and is willing to get rid of those in his way. Then he can just blame me. I’m telling you, this is all about power. It always is.” Her left hand pressed against her neck where scars puckered the translucent skin.
There were no answers, only guesses, and her gesture reminded him of another tragedy that he knew too little about. He sensed a hesitancy in her, an openness he had not noticed when they first met, and he was desperate enough to use it to gain an understanding and bridge the gap between them. The mystery of Juliana’s death could wait for now.
“What happened to you?” he asked, changing the subject.
“What do you mean?” She lowered her left hand and intertwined her fingers in her lap. The knuckles whitened as her grip tightened.
“Your neck. What happened?”
“Nothing. The usual stupidity.” She shrugged, glancing toward the hallway.
“A vampire?”
“A vampire.” She laughed a low, brittle laugh redolent with bitterness. “Yes. A long time ago. I handled it.”
He sat back, humming low in his throat as he decided how to phrase the next question. Somehow, her trust had become important to him, and he didn’t want to lose it through clumsiness. “How did you end up at Theresa’s home?”
“The usual way.”
“Your parents died? In a vampire attack?”
He could sense her struggle.
Trust me. Just a little. Anything.
Her glance flashed around the room as if searching for a comfortable place to rest, however her gaze kept returning to him. Pain narrowed her eyes, and her lips opened but instead of sharing her torment with him, she pressed them shut and she looked away. The side of her clasped hands rubbed her thighs, pressing into the rough fabric of her jeans.
Finally, she slumped back in her seat. Staring at the floor, she said in a dull voice, “My parents are archeologists. They’re…well, I don’t really know where the hell they are, now. Somewhere in Mexico, I think. I kind of lost track of them a few years after they left me with Gran—my grandmother.” She flipped her hair over her shoulder but she couldn’t seem to meet his gaze. She looked anywhere—everywhere—except at him. “Anyway, you know a kid hanging around a dig is really inconvenient. They took me along when I was younger, but when I got old enough for school, well, there aren’t exactly a lot of prep schools in the jungles of Mexico if you know what I mean. So they left me with my grandmother.”
He nodded.
Her knotted hands rubbed faster. “It made sense at the time. Unfortunately Gran died from a heart attack.” Her voice broke. She shook her head and forced a smile as she cleared her throat. “I was almost nineteen and getting ready for college. I’d already been accepted, but I thought, well, I had the summer free. You know. And I wanted to let my parents know about Gran. My mom, well, I needed to let her know. Gran was her mother—I—she needed to know. So I drove to Mexico. I mean, I thought it would be easy enough to track them down even if they were in a jungle somewhere, and I wanted to see them—” Her voice grew brittle and she swallowed convulsively, her clasped hands rubbing faster over her jeans. “I hadn’t seen them for a while. Years. Their work completely absorbed them, you know, and I’m sure they just forgot about me. That is, they wrote and all the first two years, but a kid would’ve only been in the way and they thought I was safe with Gran. How could they know?”
How could they not know? How could they leave their only child behind, abandoned, even if she was in the care of her grandmother. It was inconceivable.
Anger left him incapable of responding. No wonder she was so confu
sed and torn. Furious. Abandoned by her parents and then attacked by a vampire. Disgust seethed through Kethan, even though he was only hearing about the events years later.
Suddenly, he wanted to punish someone, only it wasn’t a vampire—it was her selfish parents. Tears hung on Quicksilver’s lashes, seconds from falling. She wiped her nose with the back of one fisted hand.
When the red mist cleared from his vision, he managed to ask, “Did you find them?”
“No, not even close. I got to Mexico City, though.” She gulped back a hysterical giggle. Her damp lashes fluttered and a few tears trickled over her cheek as a laugh like shards of glass broke in her throat. She wiped them away a second time with her fist, leaving her face red and bruised-looking. “I met the wrong people. That old, sad story. You know the one. You fall in with the wrong crowd, things go bad, and then you end up killing them.” The faux bouncy tone made her words all the more horrifying. She waved airily though her eyes looked like burnt coals, powdery and dead. “So, anyway, I sort of lost interest in the old parental units. Too old for that clingy-emotional family junk, anyway. I came back to the States. Drifted around for a while.”
He felt numb, unable to respond. Finally, he asked the first inane question that occurred to him, “How did you meet Theresa Blackstone?”
“Rode around.” She looked at him with wide, uncomprehending eyes. “Eventually, I ended up here.” As she focused on him, a smile of relief curved her lips. At last he had asked something she could comfortably answer. “I was eating dinner at a Hot Stop.” In other words, a gas station convenience store. “She said she didn’t think my choices of teriyaki beef jerky and donuts were the best culinary choices and invited me to eat at the home. I declined. But I didn’t have any place else to go and I was tired, so I followed her and checked out the home. It used to be a convent, you know, and she was a nun.”
“I’m aware of that—”
“Was. She’s not anymore. Anyway, it seemed…safe. There were other kids there. They were, uh, all right.”
“Unharmed.”
She nodded, a wistful longing filled her face. “Anyway, I hung around.”
“Do you ever hear from them? Your parents?” He cursed when he realized he’d dragged her back to the pain.
“No.” Tears pooled in the bruised hollow beneath her eyes. She squeezed her eyelids with her thumb and forefinger. After a sniff, she cleared her throat. “No. They don’t know where I am. How could they? Gran is dead. For all I know, letters are piling up in her mailbox. Besides, I told you—they’re busy. Having a kid just wasn’t a good idea for them. Some people really shouldn’t reproduce.”
“Perhaps not,” Kethan agreed, doing his best not to drag her into his arms by force. She needed gentleness, not brute force, and he was too aware of that streak of wild, frenzied energy still snapping around her and the electricity of her touch. His control was eroding, and her courage in revealing the vulnerable, piercing source of her pain made it even more difficult to maintain his distance.
She squeezed her fingers harder, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Do you ever wonder if you’re going insane? Cracking into pieces?”
“After what you’ve been through—”
“Yeah, right. I have an excuse for being completely psychotic. Lucky me.”
“I was going to say that anyone might have some emotions to work through after that. No one makes it through life without scars, visible or invisible. It’s how you handle those wounds that reveals what kind of a person you are.” He smiled at her. “And worrying about your sanity proves you’re sane. Only the insane believe they’re completely normal.”
“Then I guess my behavior proves I’m a nut job. A killer. Because that’s how I handled ‘my wounds.’ By killing vampires.”
“You’ve done the best you could. You thought you were doing the right thing, saving others. Give yourself a break.”
She stared at him. Darkness hung in her eyes, hinting at another secret she was unable, or unwilling, to share. “Enough about me. What about you?”
So many secrets, so few he could share.
He grinned and tried to assume a relaxed position in his chair, but the hard, straight back made it impossible. “I was the usual idiot when I was a kid. Thought I knew everything. Turns out, I didn’t, and worse, it took a few deaths for me to figure it out and appreciate life.”
“Whatever that means. I guess your family died, and you became a priest to make up for it as a sort of penance.”
“Something like that.” He nodded, hesitating. She’d shared the source of her anguish, perhaps not all of it, but the root. Unfortunately, he wasn’t sure how she’d react to the truth about his past and who he really was.
And then there was the law, the single rule that governed all those like him: never reveal the possibility of redemption, the way back for those who manage to cling to enough humanity to make the ultimate sacrifice for another.
If a vampire ever discovered it was possible to become human again by sacrificing his life for another’s, the act would lose its purity of purpose. Self-interest, even if it was just the desire for redemption, would taint the act. Once that happened, even that small loophole, the thin, nearly invisible road back, would vanish.
So he’d accepted the burden of silence, knowing that he could maintain his hope and survive if he could help other vampires and grant them the time necessary to find the narrow road back to humanity and salvation. It made the negotiations critical for him.
If they killed all vampires, none would find the narrow path and none would be saved. And although Quicksilver was not a vampire and unlikely to reveal any secret to the undead, he had to remain silent. He’d accepted the responsibility when he’d discovered the road. He couldn’t back away, now.
“Sure.” A little of the hope in her eyes flickered and died. “Keep your secrets. Whatever.”
Pain clenched his heart. He couldn’t ignore her plea to make a connection with her, no matter how tenuous. “I became a priest because I had a lot of sins to atone for, and the church was a safe haven when I needed it. Like Ms. Blackstone’s orphanage was for you.”
“It’s not an orphanage!” Defensive anger hardened her face. “I was an adult, not an orphan. It’s a—a home. Anyway, we were talking about you. So you became a Jesuit, one of those priests who like to argue. And fight.”
“That I did.” He offered her a conciliatory grin. “Still like to argue although I’ve lost the desire to fight.”
“Then you lost your faith, or what? Why did you quit?”
“I never lost my faith. I just realized I never had the calling.” His jaw clenched, but he worked to keep a pleasant expression on his face. He wasn’t a quitter.
Or was he?
She nodded. “You didn’t belong.”
Her interpretation spoke volumes about her view of her own place in the world, or lack of a place. Her words resonated with chords of abandonment, chords that he knew so well from his first life before it had all gone to hell. At one point in his first life, he’d been willing to trade his soul for companionship.
“I had a different path to follow,” he said. “One that led away from the priesthood.”
“Well, at least you can still argue.”
“Discuss, we discuss,” he corrected, his lips twisting with wry humor. “And the church was generous enough to let me lead the negotiations despite the official stance that vampires don’t exist.”
“And I butted in. Ruined everything.” She’d never be a good poker player, her face was too expressive and revealed her thoughts all too clearly to anyone who cared to look. Once more, her volatile emotions seemed to shift through anger, uncertainty, and the ever-present, underlying fear that she’d stepped into a situation where she was not wanted.
What a mess. He ran a hand through his hair, aware of his own exhaustion and inability to fix all that was broken with her, with him, and with whatever simmered between them. Despite the aching tiredness, he felt
wired with worry about both Joe and Quicksilver.
What had really happened to Juliana? Was Martyn behind it? Had something frightened the master vampire whose control, by rights, should encompass the entire Eastern seaboard from Canada to Florida?
Kethan studied Quicksilver, trying to evaluate what he knew dispassionately. Was he a fool to trust her?
There were so many possibilities, but just one, deadly question: what was really going on?
Chapter Seventeen
“It’s late,” Kethan said, rotating his shoulders and listening to them crack in protest.
The skin stretched sharply over Quicksilver’s cheekbones, sculpting her face with lines of fatigue. She stared at her hands with blank eyes that appeared almost dazed. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed three, and in a few more hours, it would be dawn.
Even the storm outside seemed tired. The wild lashing of branches scrapping the windows and doors had stopped, and only the occasional shriek of wind circled the corner of the house hungrily, disturbing the pre-dawn silence.
“Call Father Donatello.” She held his gaze, the corners of her mouth creased tightly in worry. “Please. I just want to know he got home safely.”
“I’m sure he did. They like him. Everyone likes him.” As he spoke he realized he was trying to convince himself just as much as Quicksilver. He didn’t want to believe anyone would try to hurt Joe—it would be like someone trying to kill the Easter Bunny—evil beyond comprehension.
“They like you, too.” A sad edge to her words made him think of the Dickensian story of the lonely, hungry little girl standing in the snow, watching a family through the window as they ate Christmas dinner while she starved. Quicksilver seemed so isolated and convinced she’d never be allowed inside where it was warm and safe.
“I’m sure they like everyone, given the opportunity.” He stood and resisted another, stronger urge to take her in his arms. She looked half frozen sitting there on the loveseat, hugging her knees to her chest. “Should I light the fire?”
