Broad Daylight (The Veiled World Chronicles Book 1)

by LJ Rivers

  I threw a quick glance at my phone, expecting a text or missed call from Edwin. Finding none, I looked back at the park and nearly fell off my chair.

  “Are you all right?” Stefan folded a hand over mine.

  “Uh, yeah, sorry. I must be sleep-deprived or something.” I blinked hard a few times, but he was still there. The man with the bright light device from last night. His syrupy eyes fastened on mine as he leaned leisurely against the trunk of a tree, his arms crossed over his impressive chest. Standing in the shadows as he was, I could still make out his features, and part of me was undeniably drawn to him. I felt a stab of guilt for breaking his nose, though. His skin was too dark to see any potential bruising, but he seemed fine. Suspiciously fine.

  “At any rate—“ Stefan droned on, and I realized he must have kept talking while I was busy eyeing the tall and dark stranger. Cliché, sure, but true. “See you tomorrow, then?”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah, maybe. I’m not sure what my week will look like yet, so call me?”

  This was routine. I couldn’t call him when he was on duty at the ER, and since I was useless at keeping track of his schedule, it was always easier if I waited for him to call me. “Will do.” He put a few notes and some extra coins on the table. “Gotta take care of some stuff before my shift starts. It was a pleasure, as always.” He leaned in for a kiss, but I didn’t turn to meet his lips, so it landed just on the side of my mouth.

  I didn’t watch him leave, as my attention was fixed on the man across the street. Instead, I waited until Stefan rounded the corner, made sure I paid my half for lunch, and crossed the street to where the man stood.

  “Why are you following me?” I demanded as soon as he was within earshot.

  “I need to talk to you.” It was faint, and I hadn’t noticed it last time, but there was a hint of French in his accent.

  “Well, talk.”

  “Let’s take a walk, shall we? It’s such a gorgeous Saturday.” He started through the park, and I followed. There were a bunch of people on the pathways, biking, jogging, drinking and whatnot, so we ventured onto the grass and found a quiet spot near a cluster of trees.

  “Is your nose OK?” I asked.

  He showed me his teeth, his lips curving up. “All good. It’s my fault for startling you. Water under the bridge.”

  Someone must have helped reset it, though. I was pretty sure I had properly crushed bones, but there was only a minor bend on his nose now. “Who are you? What was that device you carried? Who was that other man?” The questions tumbled out before I could stop myself.

  “Whoa, hold on. One question at a time, please. First, my name is Leon Nasri. My parents moved from Algeria when I was just a kid, and I grew up near Maubeuge in France, just on the border to Germany.”

  I hadn’t expected an entire history lesson but kept my mouth shut as he continued.

  “My employer lives in the western part of Berlin, and I’ve been here for the past ten years or so.” He paused, gesturing for me to sit on the grass opposite him.

  I shook my head. Although he didn’t appear threatening, I would like the option to run.

  He gave me a brief nod, as though he understood. “I know this is a strange request, though I have to ask. May I touch your hand? I promise I won’t bite.” He grinned, and I unwittingly cupped my palm over the wound on my neck.

  What was up with him wanting to touch me? He had asked me the same question last night. There were plenty of people nearby, so I might as well see what the fuss was about. I put my arm forward. “One finger. The back of my hand.”

  “That’s plenty.” Carefully, he moved closer and put his index finger gently against my skin, keeping his other hand where I could see it. Smart man. I couldn’t help but draw in his scent of citrus and leather. His touch was warm, and an unfamiliar tingle started at the pit of my stomach.

  “Peculiar.” He stepped back, rubbing his hands together. “Very peculiar.”

  “What?” I planted my feet firmly, glaring at him.

  “What are you?”

  What? Not who. “My name is Cam—.” I bit down on my words. What was I thinking? One touch from this guy, and I almost threw all protocol out the window by telling him my name.

  “I didn’t ask your name.”

  I knew that, but answering the ‘what’ in his question was impossible. Unless, did he mean where I was from? Considering my reply for a second, I concluded to tell him something. “I’m not sure what you want me to say. My mother was from Scotland, and I don’t remember my father.” There, that was good enough.

  “Your accent isn’t distinctly Scottish, and you don’t exactly have the complexion of a highlander,” he remarked truthfully.

  All my traveling had given me a somewhat confusing accent that was hard to pinpoint, and I sometimes mixed words from different places with each other. And while I wasn’t as dark-skinned as my father—judging by the one photo I had seen of him—he was from Egypt, which was about all I knew about the man who had straight-up abandoned me when my mother died.

  “In any case, there is something about you.” Leon eyed me curiously, as though I were on display as the recent discovery of the world’s eighth wonder. “I would very much like to introduce you to my employer. If you’re willing.”

  “I’m sorry, but this is weird. I’m not a what, I’m a person.”

  “So am I.” He looked around in much the same way I would when guarding someone, before lowering his voice. “But I’m also a witch.”

  If my jaw could have unhinged and dropped to the ground, it would have. He was insane. “I think I’ll find my attacker on my own, unless you have any real information on him you’d like to share.” I started to turn when Leon spoke again.

  “I don’t know who he is, but I do know what he is.”

  I glanced back at him.

  He cupped a hand behind his neck, shifting his weight as if uncomfortable. “His kind goes by many names. Rakshasas, lamia, strigoi, Nosferatu, Nachzehrer—whatever you want to call them. I suppose the word vampire works as well as any.”

  Chapter Four

  Picking up my imaginary unhinged jaw from the ground, I turned away, for real this time, and stalked away from Leon. I wanted to put as much distance as I could between myself and that lunatic. Sure, an attractive one at that, but a lunatic nonetheless.

  He didn’t follow me, which was just as well. As I stormed through the streets, his words rotating in my brain.

  Vampire?

  An image of my attacker flashed by in my mind: his dark eyes, his sharp teeth, the way he climbed that wall. To be fair, that was all undeniably weird, but there had to be a logical explanation. Vampires didn’t belong in the real world.

  And what more had Leon said? He claimed to be a witch. It wasn’t like he was the only con artist out there. Lots of people claimed to be a kind of witch in one form or another, but they were all in it for the money. None of it was real. Illusions and a way with words, along with the ability to read people, could get you a long way in performing a believable fortunetelling, for instance. Reading people was a practised skill, nothing more.

  I snorted as I fell into a jog, eventually finding myself on the pathways in Tiergarten where I usually ran with Stefan, falling into a steady rhythm. Thinking over what I had learned, I tried to work out how this might affect me. I wasn’t buying what Leon was selling, but he had managed to find me only hours after I first saw him. If he was capable of that, he could certainly find my home address, too. Luckily, I had cut myself off before blurting out my full name. That stopped me short. A man running behind me cursed under his breath as he was forced to slow down and detour across the grass to get around me.

  “Sorry,” I muttered and went to sit on a nearby park bench, retrieving my phone from my pocket . I called Edwin again. It kept ringing until his familiar husky voice replied in the form of his voicemail.

  “Don’t leave a message unless it’s urgent. I’ll probably call you back.”

 
I looked skeptically at the phone for a moment. I didn’t want to bother him again so soon, but circumstances dictated this was too important. So I put the phone to my ear again.

  “It’s me, where are you? I really have to talk to you. Weird shit is going on, and I need you.” I sounded a little too desperate, even to my own ears, but what the hell? These were desperate times. I hung up. It bothered me that he didn’t answer. I was so used to him being there whenever I needed him, and maybe that was all it was. It had been six years since I last lived with him, though, and I was an adult now. Of course, he was an adult too and allowed to have a life of his own. He’d spent fifteen years living only for me. If anything, I should be grateful, not annoyed.

  Raising my chin, I jumped back on my feet. As I resumed my jog, my phone began to vibrate. That brought a smile to my face. I glanced at the screen and my lips tightened into a line at the same time as I sped up. It wasn’t Edwin.

  Someone was breaking into my apartment.

  The alert pointed to someone failing to punch in the right code. According to the notification, the keypad was damaged, which could mean any number of things. Whoever was at my place must have either tried the code too many times and failed or tried disconnecting the system. Or—I realized—had damaged the wiring when they broke through the door. With a few swipes of my finger, I pulled up the camera view from my living room. The screen was dark. I tried the others, also dark. And the only way that could happen was if someone disabled them from within the apartment. In addition to notifying me, the security system would also notify my agency about a potential break-in, and an operator would call me on the tablet mounted on the coffee table in my living room. In case that didn’t work, they would simultaneously call my phone, which they did just as my mind remembered the protocol.

  “Did you leave the oven on?” the operator asked. The familiar firm yet sing-song voice belonged to my usual contact, Lotte.

  “I’m not baking cookies,” I replied, knowing she understood that meant I wasn’t the one who triggered the alarm.

  “Status?”

  “Six minutes out,” I said.

  “You’ll be there before we will. There’s a team headed your way. ETA eleven minutes.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Oh, and, honey?” Lotte softened her voice. “Be careful.”

  “Thanks.” I slipped the phone back in my pocket and sprinted home.

  I made it in four, halting at the top of the stairs outside my apartment to take a much-needed breath and frown at the door. Someone had torn it straight off the hinges in the steel frame and tossed it aside. An impressive feat, seeing as it took four men to install it last year. It wouldn’t break easily, and lifting it required muscles and the right set of tools to free it from the frame. There were no signs of tools, explosives, or any other damage outside, which I would have expected considering the removal of the door. I reached for the gun at my back, then slapped myself on the forehead. My gun was in the safe in my bedroom. And so was my switchblade. The German gun laws were pretty strict and there was no reason for me to carry it at all hours, though I often wore it on the job. Having carried only hours earlier, my muscle memory hadn’t quite caught up.

  Under normal circumstances, I was confident in my hand-to-hand combat abilities. These were not normal circumstances, though. Last night had shaken my resolve, and I couldn’t be sure if whoever was in my apartment was carrying a weapon—or had strangely sharp teeth, or perhaps claimed to be a witch. Maybe I should wait for the team to get here? They were still at least five minutes away, and chances were that if someone was still inside, they would be heading out at any second. When they did, they would see me standing there like the numpty I was.

  While I supposed I could have simply gone outside and waited for them to leave, that might mean whoever broke in would get away. I knew everyone who lived in the building—well, I had done my research on them—but I couldn’t know if they were entertaining guests, so I had no way of identifying the perpetrator. And if I were somehow able to identify the right person—or persons—I couldn’t attack anyone on a busy street in broad daylight. Before I could think it over any further, I was already at the empty doorway, carefully inching my body around the frame to peek inside.

  Nothing looked amiss. No overturned furniture or broken glass. I fell into a crouch and slid around the door frame and into the tiny hallway, which was really only a section of the living room. Scanning the space, I kept my back to the wall while carefully edging toward the kitchen area. As quietly as I could, I opened the bottom drawer and found a pocketknife, tucking it into my waistband.

  Murmurs issued from the far end of the apartment.

  I stopped dead. Someone was in my bedroom. With quick, shallow breaths, I moved through the room, shielding myself behind the furniture strategically placed for just this kind of situation.

  You trained me well, Edwin.

  “Put that back, Ulrich,” a gruff voice said sternly.

  Something screeched against the floorboards. It sounded like my bed being pushed into the wall. “Just being thorough,” Ulrich replied. He sounded a bit younger than the first man.

  “Not our orders.”

  The men kept bickering while I climbed atop a small dresser by the hallway leading to my bedroom. As quietly as I could, I unfastened the pull-up bar in the ceiling, gripping it with both hands. It calmed me immediately. The bar was padded, and the inside was aluminum. Not my weapon of choice, but it would do plenty of damage with enough force behind it. I briefly considered the knife, but decided the bar was my safest bet. Squatting on the dresser, I waited. They had to come out at some point.

  It didn’t take long before two pairs of footsteps closed in on me. Inhaling sharply, I readied myself, and the moment the first man came into view, I swung the bar as hard as I could at his head.

  He made a startled sound and staggered back. I hopped off the dresser and landed another blow across the second man’s stomach. Groaning, he went down on one knee. I hit him again. The first of the two, an elderly man with a potbelly, held his hands up as if surrendering. Instead, he blew some kind of dust in my face. I sneezed and the man backed up further. Spinning on my toes, I went for another blow.

  And was knocked out from behind.

  My eyes fluttered open, and a throbbing headache made me groan. I tried raising my hand to my head, but couldn’t lift either of my arms. When I tugged them to me, another kind of pain had me gritting my teeth. My wrists were bound. Standing was out of the question, too. My feet felt like jelly.

  Why was the ceiling so low? Wide-eyed now, I took in my surroundings. Leather seats faced each other, and a dim skylight tortured my eyes. The soft purr of an engine hummed beneath the low crackle of the radio coming from the nearby speakers. I was in a car, possibly a limo, or at least something more fancy than what the average Joe rode. Or Max Mustermann, as Stefan had taught me. Thinking of him made my stomach knot. What if our earlier conversation was the last one we would get to have?

  “She’s awake,” someone said, tapping on the screen separating us from the driver.

  My eyes fixed on Mr. Potbelly across from me. He held an ice pack to his temple, which made me happy despite my current predicament.

  “Where am I?” I asked.

  “Nearly there,” Potbelly replied.

  “Where are your friends? What happened?”

  He folded his hands over his generous belly, drumming his fingers. “Your Nikita moves forced me to send Ulrich to the convalers.”

  Convalers? Was that even a word? They must have knocked me hard enough to crush a few marbles.

  “Lucky I was there to save your ass,” someone chimed in from the front while sliding the screen to the side, revealing a head of short, silver hair on the woman sitting in the driver’s seat.

  “Yes, Nova, lucky.” Potbelly rolled his eyes at me like we were old friends. “I forget myself. My name is Sigmund and our driver is Nova.”

  I resorted to g
laring at him, daring him to explain.

  “I didn’t mean for this to happen. You forced my hand, I’m afraid. Not to worry, though, you’re perfectly safe, but it’s not my place to fill you in on all the details, Miss MacKay.”

  My heart made a double-take, and I gulped down air. Why was he using my mother’s name? It was the first time in years I had heard that name in association with my own. A lump formed in my throat as I felt the sorrow of her death all over again. Pushing that away for the time being, I focused on Sigmund. “What can you tell me?”

  He looked at me for a long minute. Despite his appearance, it was the look of a soldier weighing his options. I recognized that look because I used to train with soldiers during my education with the agency, and it was one they all wore when considering their orders. Sigmund might not look like a soldier, but he was taking orders from someone. Finally, he sighed and leaned forward.

  “I have no intention of harming you.”

  That was a diplomatic way of saying that if it were up to him, I wouldn’t be harmed. What he didn’t say was that since he didn’t call the shots, his opinions were moot and void.

  “Nova is taking us to see the person in charge. You’ll learn more then. Meanwhile, you should be aware that there is no escaping this car until Nova lets us out. If you behave—“ He stopped himself, obviously unsure if what he was about to say was true, and never finished the sentence.

  We didn’t speak more after that, and I didn’t push. This guy wasn’t going to give me any straight answers anyhow, so I might as well play along until I found a way to escape. He went back to nursing the bruise on his face, ignoring me, which I didn’t mind. Meanwhile, my fingers searched for the pocketknife I had hid in my waistband earlier. To my dismay, it was gone. Sigmund, or maybe Nova, must have searched me when I was unconscious.