Broad Daylight (The Veiled World Chronicles Book 1)

by LJ Rivers

  Leon clasped my arm and guided me forward without another word.

  The last thing I saw before the curtain swept closed behind me, was Christian unwrapping a lollipop and slipping it between his lips.

  It sounded like a band was playing up ahead, doing justice to a rock ballad. The room was dark, lit only by floor lamps, shining with a dim red glow. There was nothing else to see until we rounded the corner. My stomach revolted, and my feet turned to go back, but Leon pulled me to him.

  “They are willing donors. I know how it looks, but you need to calm yourself. We have a job to do.”

  I took a shallow breath and nodded. I could do this. It wasn’t my first rodeo, although I had never seen anything quite like this. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t exactly frequent S&M establishments, but I was expecting, well, I don’t know what exactly. It sure as gravy wasn’t a nest of vampires drinking leisurely from people, as though they were at an open bar. Was nest even the right collective noun for a group of vampires? I made a mental note to ask Leon at a more appropriate time.

  It seemed vampires came in all shapes and sizes. Some part of me had expected them to look like Count Dracula at worst, or at best like Alexander Skarsgard as Eric Northman. Instead, they looked like your everyday neighbors, albeit with fangs. None of the fangers looked a day over forty, however.

  A bar stretched along the wall at the far end. Three vamps in matching outfits, like the one Christian wore—if those qualified as outfits—tended to the customers. The band, all in similar scant clothing, stood on a stage in the center of the area.

  In a booth to my right, a female vampire fixed her gaze on me, her eyes scrutinizing me from head to toe. Another woman—my guess was human—straddled her in nothing but lacy underwear. The human woman bent her head back to expose the vein on her neck. When the vampire’s fangs punched out, I looked away.

  “This is so not cool,” I muttered.

  “Watch what you say, Cam. There might be music playing, but they can all hear you.”

  I clamped my mouth shut and followed Leon to the next room, where we entered an elevator. It whisked to the sixth floor—the penthouse. When it stopped, a voice filled the spacious box.

  “Name and business.”

  I couldn’t discern if the sultry voice was male or female, but I hoped whoever it was had the key to our confinement.

  “Leon Nasri, and my partner, Camryn MacKay,” Leon stated.

  His partner. I was used to working alone, but I found I rather liked the way Leon called me that, as if we were an established team.

  “Yes,” the voice said, drawing the e out in a sensual note. “The queen is expecting you.”

  The elevator doors opened with a ding, and I couldn’t help but gawk at what awaited us. It was like stepping out of a time machine and entering into some eighteenth-century circular hallway. The furniture and walls were draped in gold, with intricate inky-black stitch patterns woven into the fabrics. Solid oak dressers lined the walls, and impressive paintings in thick oak frames with gold embellishments gave the sense of walking through an art museum. I didn’t know much about art, but I wondered if the paintings were originals. For some reason, I figured they were. The interior continued in the same style as we entered the next room.

  A woman sat on an eighteenth-century couch, which reflected the drapes and patterns as in the hallway. She had her legs elegantly crossed in front of her, and midnight hair was woven into an elaborate arrangement above her head. Gold chains, pins, and makeshift roses kept the creation intact. Her ruby-red lips were tightly pressed together, and I couldn’t help but disappear into her dark gaze. As I stood there, mesmerized, her expression changed to that of amusement.

  “My, it’s been a long time since I have been in the presence of your kind. It’s oddly refreshing.” She waved a hand at the matching couch opposite her, and I went to sit down with Leon. “So, Miss MacKay, how do you find my city?”

  Leon tensed beside me, but his eyes were downcast, and he didn’t object to the claim in Ursula’s words. He was clearly avoiding her gaze, but I had no such qualms.

  “It’s been my home for two years now, and I’ve enjoyed living here.” Until I realized the city was home to a bunch of supernatural crazies. “I had no idea what hid behind these walls, though.”

  “Outside of the veiled world, only vampires and trusted associates—or humans who willingly donate their blood—enter this establishment. It’s necessary to keep up pretenses.”

  “Is this how all vamps operate?”

  Her lips peeled back a smidge, enough to give me a glimpse of her sharp fangs. “You should take care, young witch.”

  Hell’s bells. I’d offended her. Attempting to salvage the situation, I decided to push some humility into my voice. “My apologies. It’s all new to me, and I’m only curious as to how it works.”

  Her face relaxed. “As is to be expected. To answer your question, the inumbratious, those born of shadows—or as is commonly used in this age, vampires—like living closer to the human world. We tend to establish ourselves in large cities where we can grow businesses that are open during the night. For obvious reasons. We might have daylight opening hours, too, which are handled by trusted humans, but we like to be awake to keep an eye on our investments.”

  A night club made perfect sense, and it wasn’t hard to imagine the benefits of living in highly populated areas. The buffet table was certainly bigger, making it easier to cover up what they were doing, not to mention blend and feed. I didn’t know anything about what blood was to the … inumbratious … other than what the movies depicted, but seeing as how I had already offended her once, I let the matter slide. I couldn’t see myself adopting her word for their kind any time soon, though, but I would refrain from calling them fangers or vamps from now on. At least in Ursula’s presence.

  Leon laced his fingers on the stone tabletop between us and the vampire queen, getting down to business. “Saga has filled you in?” he asked, though it didn’t sound quite like a question.

  She blinked, her long lashes batting over her captivating gaze. It appeared my power kept her from messing with my head and memories, but I couldn’t deny the pull of it. “I have only been up for about an hour, Leon. Saga filled me in last night, but I have heard nothing since.”

  “Then I’ll tell you all we know so far.”

  When Leon finished his account, excluding my connection to Naunet, he sat back and waited for Ursula’s response.

  The vampire queen rose from her seat. She was neither tall nor short, though her mile-high heels gave her a push into the taller region. She strode over to a chest of drawers and scraped her fingernails against the pewter plate on top. “It cannot be.” The detachment in her voice made it seem like she was talking more to herself than either of us. She slipped her hand behind the wall mirror, retrieving a key, and proceeded to slide it into the lock on the bottom drawer. She found an envelope and returned to the couch.

  “This letter is more than two hundred years old and records the end of dhampirs and shields alike.”

  Leon straightened like an arrow beside me, his eyes flicking up for a second before he looked down again. “You mean dhampirs existed? I thought vampires couldn’t breed with humans.”

  “Oh, it’s rare, and it’s been forbidden for hundreds of years. Since the shield war, any such union has been, shall we say, regulated. Dhampirs are extremely dangerous. On the few occasions this has happened since, the mother never made it to full term.”

  Sighing, I raised my hand, unable to fathom that there was something more dangerous than the woman across from me. “What is a dhampir?”

  “It’s someone born of a human mother and a vampire father,” Leon replied, “but I’ve never come across one. I thought they were a myth.”

  “Indeed,” Ursula said, carefully retrieving an ancient letter from the envelope and unfolding it. “You’re young, empath, too young to have witnessed the madness and destruction a dhampir leaves in its wake.
But make no mistake, they are not to be underestimated. We had good reason for banning the making of these abominations. A dhampir is born with a vampire’s need for blood and inhabits many of the same traits as us. That said, they also inhabit human desires, and the two sides of their being are conflicting, driving them to madness. Not only that, but unlike a vampire, they can walk in the sunlight and are much harder to kill.”

  “Walk in the sunlight,” I mumbled. If it walks like a vampire and drinks like a vampire, but isn’t one.

  “They do not share our vulnerabilities, Leon, and you cannot kill one as you would a vampire.”

  His forehead creased with concern. “Then how?”

  Her gaze swayed back to mine. “She can.”

  Dumbfounded, I shook my head vehemently. “I wouldn’t know the first thing about it. I didn’t know I was a witch at all only two days ago.”

  The vampire queen smoothed out her puffy skirt as much as it allowed. “I suppose there’s no way around it. It’s not something we talk about, but witches and vampires share an equal responsibility for the extinction of shield witches.” Her lips drew up into the first hint of an unsettling smile. “Or, at least, what we believed was the end of the shields. During the seventeenth century, the inumbratious sired many dhampirs. The Fauve had other concerns those days, and we struggled to regulate the territories. Many slipped through the cracks, and as the dhampirs grew older, they united.” She leaned forward and handed me the letter. “You see, dhampirs grow up to hate all veiled world creatures, no exceptions, and that hatred grows into a burning desire to kill. They went on a witch hunt, which included hunting vampires. It was then we made peace with the clans and covens, in order to unite against a common enemy. As I said, though, dhampirs are hard to kill. They are stronger than vampires, and since they can walk during the day, they slaughtered us while we were asleep. When things spiraled out of control, I formed an alliance with the clan leaders and vampire royalty all across Europe, and we decided our best weapon was one particular kind of witch. A kind many feared.”

  “A shield witch,” I breathed.

  She gave a curt nod. “While you cannot unmake me—I am all vampire—dhampirs are humans with vampiric traits and magic, which work differently than mine. When a shield borrows the magic from a dhampir, they render the vampiric side useless. All shields across Europe gathered to join their magic. It was, all in all, a success.”

  Leon’s clammy hand wrapped around mine and gave it a gentle squeeze, and I realized I’d been reaching for him. I carefully retracted my arm and folded my hands in my lap.

  “What happened to the shields?”

  “The war lasted for years, and the dhampirs attacked entire families of shields during that time, attempting to eliminate the threat. At the culmination of it, the remaining dhampirs banded together to face the last shields in open battle. I didn’t witness it myself, but witnesses have told me that it looked like a bomb went off.” She pointed at the letter, and I studied it for the first time. Inky drawings of a battlefield filled the page. “Everyone on that battlefield died as one. After the dust settled, the clan leaders and vampire queens banned all interbreeding between humans and vampires. It’s a dark chapter in our past, and not one we care to talk about. While the shields were feared by many, even other witches, they sacrificed themselves for us all. Until Saga called me last night, I believed they were truly gone. Yet, here you sit.”

  Above the drawing, a few lines in French stated the end of shields and dhampirs alike, from what I could gather, just as Ursula had said. There was a short description of each side’s powers, strengths, and weaknesses—though my French wasn’t good enough to interpret all of it. My eyes, however, were drawn to the image of a man kneeling in the grass, wielding a shield in his hands as debris showered him from above.

  Leon exhaled through his nose in a hard breath. “And somewhere out there is at least one of these abominations you speak of.”

  “I won’t lie, it’s not good. Before the shield war, there were seven shield covens on record in Europe, each with ten or more witches. None were supposed to have come out alive. We can only pray Miss MacKay is facing just a single enemy, because we have no other defense against these creatures. And if there truly are some left, they will be old, old enough to remember the war.”

  “How do you know?”

  She clicked her tongue, and Leon hung his head submissively. “All vampires have to be accounted for. We are much more organized now than back then, and the war solidified our need to unite. Any younglings must be presented to the person in charge, and any unlawful relationships have to be reported to the Fauve. In fact, I was one of the founding members. On the few occasions when one of our kind has broken this law, and impregnated a human, we take care of it. No exceptions.”

  I shuddered as the implications of her words dawned on me. Did they wait until the child was born, or did they kill the mother before then? If what Ursula said was true, it had to be the latter. It rocked me to my core, and my pulse quickened.

  Ursula’s eyebrows rose to her hairline. Could she hear my heart beating? Either way, I wasn’t about to cry bloody murder and accuse the queen of slaughtering innocent humans, however much the truth revolted me. Instead, I inhaled sharply and folded the letter in on itself.

  “Is there no other way to kill them? And please, call me Cam.”

  She cocked her head to the side. “Very well, Cam. You can slow them down. If, and only if, you manage to get close enough and capture one, I suppose you could starve them to death. It would take a few weeks, but they depend on blood to survive. That is their only weakness.”

  “Decapitation?” I asked, hopefully.

  “Only if they have shield blood in their veins. You’d need to get close enough, and you would need an extremely sharp silver blade. While silver in and of itself isn’t fatal to them, it burns. Even if you managed that, severing the head from the body isn’t enough. You have to incinerate them. It’s a bit of a strenuous job, but I suppose that is another way to kill them. And, my dear shield witch, make no mistake, killing them is the only option.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  I awoke to “Seven Nation Army” blaring from underneath my pillow and turned to my side on Leon’s couch-turned-bed with a pounding headache. I rubbed at my jaw, wincing at the tenderness of my decreasing bruise. Using the heel of one hand to rub the sleep from my eyes, I answered the phone with the other. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Camryn. My name is Dunstan Flett. I was Edwin’s attorney.”

  Was? I sat up, suddenly wide awake.

  “I spoke to Wolfgang, who said to call you next,” he said, and I barely registered his Scottish accent. The name rang a bell, though, and I knew Edwin had frequent contact with his attorney. I’d just never met him. “I regret to inform you that Edwin passed away five days ago.”

  Disbelief barreled through me. “What? How?”

  “I’m afraid it took a while for anyone to discover his body. Wolfgang found him at his girlfriend’s home. No sign of her anywhere, but Camryn—” he took a deep breath. “I feel like you need to know this.”

  “Spit it out.”

  “No point in dilly-dallying around it, I suppose. His body was exsanguinated.”

  I blanched, and tears stung my eyes. While I sniffled into the pillow, Dunstan carried on speaking.

  “Wolfgang is arranging a memorial in two days. He says not to worry about anything, he’ll make sure to invite everyone. All he wants you to do is get to Copenhagen before noon this Wednesday.”

  My throat constricted, and I struggled for breath. “I’ll be there,” I said between sobs.

  “Again, I’m sorry for your loss, Camryn. Edwin and I go back more than twenty years. He was an exceptional man.”

  The call ended, and I clenched my fist around the phone as my body convulsed with grief. The pain of loss engulfed me. I heaved for breath and allowed tears to spill, soaking the pillow. My heart was a slow beating drum in my chest, and I
couldn’t seem to get enough air. Wistfully, I swiped my finger over the screen and tapped the top number in my favorites. It rang until Edwin’s voicemail replied. When the sound of the beep came, I called him again. His familiar voice spoke in my ear, and my heart broke to think I would never have another conversation with the man who raised me. He had been a stern man, but he had loved me the only way he knew how. And I had loved him as much as any child could love a father.

  “Cam?” The couch rocked a little as Leon propped himself on the armrest, his hand softly stroking my hair. “What’s wrong?”

  Bleary-eyed, I peered up at him. “My guardian. He—he’s dead.”

  His forehead creased with concern. Before I knew it, his arms wrapped around mine, and he lifted me into his embrace. I curled up and cried like a baby in his protective hold, not caring that I was only in my panties and sports bra. I grabbed a fistful of his shirt and nestled my head between the dips of muscles in his chest. In the midst of all my sorrow, Dunstan’s words floated around in my mind. Exsanguinated. Slowly, anger seeped into the sadness, and rage bubbled up inside. I would find the person responsible and make them pay in kind.

  Once the storm quieted to a dark cloud, I found my voice again. “I have to go to Copenhagen on Wednesday. There’s a memorial.”

  Leon pulled back a little and stroked a few strands of tangled hair away from my face. “Of course. I’ll be happy to drive you.”

  “That’s not necessary. I can take the train.”

  “But I’d like to. Besides, there’s at least one dhampir out there who’s likely after you, and you might need backup.”

  I sniffled, drying my nose on his shirt. “His body was exsanguinated,” I said through clenched teeth.

  The muscles in his arms tightened around me. “All the more reason you’re not going alone.”

  “Fine. You can come, but don’t try to be a hero. You have Noelle to return to.”

  He released me and averted his eyes. “Maybe you should get dressed. There’s a towel in the bathroom for you. Oh, and Saga called when you were asleep about a meeting tonight. The leaders are getting together to discuss the threat, and they specifically asked for your attendance. With this recent development, however, I’m sure they’ll excuse you.”