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moved slowly, and perhaps with some discomfort.
Their intimacy hadn’t been gentle. He regretted that.
She spoke over her shoulder, as if knowing he was thinking about her, and sensing that he would let her go, for the time being.
"One week from tonight," she repeated, then walked off into the red-tinted moonlight like the ghost of Hayden’s own botched bloodlust.
CHAPTER SIX
It took five hours of driving to get from the airport at Shannon to her grandmother’s cottage. Tired, wet from the rain shower, Kelsie found herself heartily welcomed into her grandmother’s fragile arms, and wanting to cry. Homesickness hit her hard. Familiarity was all around. But this was the same grandmother who might have kept things from her. Important things. She looked at Gran with new eyes, loving, and also silently accusing.
The weathered, feisty eighty-five-year-old, with her gray hair braided in two thick coils, had once possessed a strong, capable body, now softened with age. Cliff Cottage, with its view of castle ruins and the sea, had been her grandmother’s home, and the home of scores of Connors before her, for as long as anyone could recall. Was it now also a house of secrets?
"Gran, I’ve come home to ask you a question,"
Kelsie said.
Seated in her chair by the window, her grandmother gazed at her quizzically, as if she might have perfected the trick of reading minds and body language. Connor green eyes, a slightly watered down version of Kelsie’s own, examined Kelsie’s face as she sat on a stool at her feet.
"Isn’t it a fine welcome, then," Gran said. "You’ve not come to see an old woman, but to pump her for Linda Thomas-Sundstrom
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information."
Kelsie found the straight-to-the-point dialogue both uncomfortable an necessary. Nevertheless, if she was going to meet a vampire on his own soil, she’d need all the help she could get. The basics would be a good place to start.
"Gran, I’m wondering if you have withheld important information from me."
"Why would you think that, child?"
"I’ve been called a name I’m unfamiliar with."
"And that name might be?"
"Slayer."
Her grandmother’s face seemed to age further in an instant. The intelligent, gray-green eyes narrowed, and Gran’s lips twitched, as if there were things she wanted to say, but didn’t know where to begin.
"Ah," Gran said, visibly disturbed. "I see. So it’s true, then."
Feeling sick to her stomach and desperate, Kelsie said, "What’s true?"
"You were sent away to someplace safe, in case this happened," Gran said, with maddening disregard for answering a question directly.
"Evidently not safe enough," Kelsie said. "Does the name Flynn ring a bell?"
Her grandmother looked up. "There are none left with that name."
"There’s one," Kelsie corrected. "He will be here in a few days to meet a woman he called ‘Slayer.’"
In the quiet following her statement, Kelsie heard the ticking of the mantel clock. Had time, she wondered, become as much of an enemy as the 54
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vampire? What did her grandmother know about all this? Were these few days all Kelsie had left?
She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Flynn, and what they had done. To her shame, not a minute went by that she didn’t want to do it again. She had to get to the bottom of this, so that she could either call his bluff or…not.
"The beginning, Gran," Kelsie said. "What is a Slayer?"
"A Slayer is a vampire hunter," Gran said reluctantly. "With the sole purpose of hunting them down."
"Where do Slayers come from?"
"Only a few people are chosen for such a path. The ability comes through females most often, and is unavoidable once it settles in."
"Damn it, Gran." Kelsie had to work hard to keep from shouting. "Do these abilities run through me? Do I have them?"
"Did this Flynn recognize you?" her grandmother asked.
"Yes."
"He called you by that name?"
"Yes. He knew I’m a Connor."
The fact that her grandmother nodded was like a spear to Kelsie’s heart. "Then it’s true, child,” Gran said. "And I’m so very sorry."
Sorry? Kelsie had to get this straight, wrap her mind around what seemed so ludicrous. "How, Gran?
How can I be one?"
"I don’t know," she replied simply. "It’s an ability that’s rarely passed down."
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"Passed down? What do you mean?"
Gran’s expression flattened further. "If you are a Slayer, one of the chosen few, it’s because you are like your mother."
The sickness in the pit of Kelsie’s stomach threatened to erupt. Like your mother?
Blackness opened up in the part of her mind containing memories. Her sweet-scented mother had died on Kelsie’s tenth birthday. A car accident while on an errand, or so she had been told. Was that a lie?
Maybe not an accident? Kelsie thought with a frightening snap of perception. God. Had her mother been a Slayer, and died in some other way? Perhaps at the hand of a vampire?
Kelsie couldn’t make herself ask the question. Her hands were visibly shaking. Her face felt numb. If her mother had been a Slayer…and if her mother had met her death at the hand of a vampire…had that vampire been a Flynn?
Like mother, like daughter. The phrase rang in her ears.
"She…she was one?"
Gran nodded, keeping her focus on Kelsie.
"You encouraged me to go away," Kelsie said, recovering enough to speak. "Was that to protect me?"
Her grandmother nodded again.
"So," Kelsie began, almost inaudibly, "Connors have a blood feud with the Flynns? That’s real? If there are vampires and werewolves in the world…" her tone sounded slightly hysterical "…why not Slayers?"
She wished with all her heart that her grandmother would admit that none of it was true, and nothing more 56
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than a good bit of Blarney. No such luck was to be had, though. The seriousness of her grandmother’s expression struck terror into Kelsie’s soul.
"My mother hunted them? Is it what the title has to mean? Fighting and killing? The Flynn I met seemed so sure."
Her grandmother spoke at last. "I hoped, since the Flynns were gone, that you would never need to know about your family’s history. How was I to know what you might become, or that the remaining Flynn had left for far-off shores that would turn out to be the same as yours? I perceived no danger for you if you left here, Kelsie. Please forgive me for not explaining sooner. I’d thought to save you from this. Keep you from this." Gran’s voice rang with heartfelt emotion.
"How did you find him?"
Her grandmother had said him, not it. She knew this Flynn wasn’t one of the undead, that he was a living vampire. The distinction was clear. Kelsie held the sickness down, her energy draining with the effort.
"In a nightclub," she said.
Her grandmother’s eyes went to Kelsie’s neck.
"Lord. He didn’t—?"
"No." She knew what Gran was asking, and also that she could not mention how their physicality had gone way beyond a damned bite. Or that now she dreamed of him inside of her. How his closeness remained a nagging heat despite the distance and the terrible information she’d just gleaned.
"The ability isn’t handed down?" she asked, at length.
"No. Connor men have sought women through the Linda Thomas-Sundstrom
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ages with this special ability."
"Why?"
"I’ve come to imagine it was to keep the damage local. To keep Ireland from being torn apart by creatures unlike ourselves by marrying women who could face the creatures down."
After that, her grandmother sat silently for a while, her gaze on the window, her only movement the tap of arthritic fingers on th
e arm of her chair. It was several minutes before she spoke again.
"Will this Flynn come home to destroy the last young Connor, is the question in need of answering,"
she finally said.
"If I’m a Slayer, am I his enemy, Gran?"
"Yes."
"Do I have to be?" She was afraid to meet her grandmother’s gaze, fearing her grandmother would see other things—such as how Kelsie had run her hands over the vampire’s body, and opened herself to him.
Instead of addressing or answering her last question, though, the old woman got up from her chair.
Taking a cane from against the wall, she said, "I don’t want to be the only Clare Connor left on God’s green earth. Come on then, child. We have work to do before he arrives."
But as Kelsie got to her feet, she couldn’t dislodge the lump in her throat or the tears flooding her eyes when she imagined the fate that might have actually overtaken her mother.
Like mother, like daughter.
Katherine Connor had been a Slayer, and there was 58
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little comfort to be had from that fact.
Hayden disembarked from his private plane and paused to look around the tiny airfield. The one useful thing about inheriting family money carefully gathered over the centuries was the protection it afforded him.
He could come and go as he pleased. A car waited to pick him up.
As the scents of home hit him square in the face, he took in a deep, overdue breath. He’d forgotten how much a part of him this land was, but still approached the car with reluctance. He was home because of Kelsie Connor, and returning to Ireland was dangerous for them both.
Hayden nodded to the driver before climbing through the open door. Noting how few lights shone in the distance, he settled on the leather seat. After the illumination of Miami, with its circus-style neon and continuous noise, the utter darkness of the rural countryside, coupled with the total absence of sound, caused a pleasant ruffling of his senses.
He could hear himself think. His thoughts turned to her, as they had every waking moment for the past week. As the car started off into a nighttime landscape lit only by stars and the car’s headlights, Hayden envisioned Connor’s face and tried to reason with himself.
The dilemma was driving him mad. She couldn’t have been faking, he was almost sure. Connor’s arms and legs had wrapped around him. She’d been like nothing he’d ever encountered, but did she have an Linda Thomas-Sundstrom
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ulterior motive for her behavior?
He lowered the window to cool off his face, and tried to think about something else. Home. Ireland. An ancient land ruled by ancient edicts and timeless grudges. No one had dared stand in the way of the Flynn-Connor feud in all the years it had been going on. No one had put a stop to it. The two remaining recipients of that deathly grudge were supposed to have been raised to hate each other, and trained to fight to the death. But from what had already transpired between them, neither he nor Connor appeared to have the heart for this war. Quite the opposite. She’d have him think she didn’t know what she was.
He remembered the night her mother had died, because he had lost his father at the same time. Each of them—his father, Connor’s mother—had died by the other’s hand.
Hayden closed his eyes, let his head fall back against the seat. Fifteen years ago, Kelsie Connor would have been a kid. By now, though, a staff member for the Miami Tribune with a Connor grandparent of long standing in the Irish community, would have to know the score.
She would have to know that his father had gone after her mother, and that her mother had taken his father with her to the grave. Still…would Kelsie Connor have invited Hayden close if she knew those things?
Inhaling the familiar green smells, he thought he could smell Connor’s sultriness in the cool, fresh air.
Connor, damn her beautiful hide, haunted him in ways 60
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no female had. He couldn’t wait until they met again.
Opposites, yet with so much in common. Like himself, she had fled from a place that held too many memories. The land of her ancestors. It was ironic that he had stumbled upon her, thinking to go far out of his way to avoid that very thing.
Serendipity? Fate? Had those things played a part?
Was the feud to end here, either way? Death, or a second embrace?
Kelsie Connor had some kind of mysterious hold on him. She was a warm ray of sunlight on his face, though she wore a curse around her neck. She had called this meeting, dictated its terms, he reminded himself. For revenge? In order to own her birthright?
To get back at him for giving in as much as she had?
He should want those same things for himself, but didn’t. Never had. He’d thought to relegate the battles to the past. He had made a vow to leave the next Connor Slayer alone. That it turned out to be Katherine Connor’s daughter had been a shock. Now, anyway, their lives were impossibly intertwined.
What is that?
Memories scattered as Hayden jerked to attention.
He inhaled again, frowned, felt his fangs drop, and moved his lips in silent acknowledgment of what he’d found in the breeze.
Bloody hell and back. Although he was the last of the Flynns, he wasn’t the last vampire on earth, or in Ireland. The stink of the undead cruised tonight’s wind with the fervor of an awakened banshee.
It was a sure bet those others would scent a Slayer in their midst. Quite possibly Connor’s safety was the Linda Thomas-Sundstrom
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reason her grandmother had sent her away. If she truly hadn’t been aware of him, and therefore ready to destroy him, then she’d been telling the truth.
His Slayer was in more danger than she knew if she had just begun to find herself and her strength. If she hadn’t known what she was until he had gotten close, he was partly to blame for bringing her here.
He just couldn’t cut a break. All he wanted was…her. As well as whatever gross oversight Fate might offer up that would allow for past sins to be forgotten.
"Take care, Connor," Hayden said, with his head in his hands. "For me."
CHAPTER SEVEN
The wind on the cliffs was unrelenting as it whipped through Kelsie’s hair. The late evening sky was a deep charcoal-gray. Rain had retreated over the ocean.
What she needed was more time to think, and didn’t have it. She had seen the family book, and in it the long list of Connor and Flynn destruction dating back to the Middle Ages, the names meticulously penned by enemies keeping track of each other.
All those Irishwomen, Murphys, Connelleys, Malloys and more, brought into the family to do their duty and protect their land from an invading species.
Like Darwin’s noted laws, Slayer abilities might have been developed over time to deal with vampirism.
In Gran’s book Kelsey had found her vampire.
Hayden, a lyrical, melodious name, so like him. A derivative of Aidan, after Aodh, the Celtic god of sun and fire. Funny, Kelsie thought, that a creature who couldn’t exist long in sunlight carried the name of a sun god.
Gran, when pressed, had explained things about the Flynns, though not everything, and not to Kelsie’s satisfaction. Suspiciously missing were the main points, like in most old arguments. Not even Gran knew the origins of Slayer mysticism, nor the secrets and rituals of dealing with a vampire rival.
Gran’s daughter had been born with this gene. A Linda Thomas-Sundstrom
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boon for the Connors, who didn’t have to go looking for it, and also an anomaly, since Slayer “Sense”
didn’t usually run in families. And now, seemingly, another anomaly had appeared: Katherine Connor had passed this Sense along to her own daughter.
Surprise!
Yet Kelsie now understood it to be true. A kernel of internal memory had been awakened by her acknowledgment of the existence of vampires. This newness was as weighty a burden as it was mysterious.
Was it reasonable to think you could discuss things sensibly with a vampire? Point out the negatives of this ridiculous relationship? See Hayden Flynn without wanting to end up in his arms?
It wasn’t helpful to surmise why he had attracted her instead of killing her outright, or why their moments of intimacy had birthed a Slayer—even though those questions plagued her.
The biggest question of all: Why had she liked it?
Liked him?
As for actually being a Slayer…could she refuse the title? Shun it? She didn’t plan on hunting anyone, not even a gorgeous vampire from a family who hated Connor guts. Not even for a promotion. Hayden Flynn had said that he didn’t want to harm her, but could a vampire be trusted to tell the truth or keep his word?
As an insurance policy, she carried in her skirt pocket a sharpened stake that she’d discovered in her 64
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mother’s trunk. If Hayden Flynn came after her, she’d try to defend herself, yet she hoped it wouldn’t come down to kill or be killed. If Hayden Flynn wasn’t prone to violence, maybe it was possible for them to call a truce.
When Kelsie looked up again, it was to see that night had fallen with the quietness of fine snow, and that the walls and broken towers of the castle ruins opposite the cliffs had been lit by a single torch.
She hesitated. She wasn’t ready to see him again, might never be ready. But she was, in spite of everything, her mother’s daughter. She had set this date.
It took her only two more steps toward the castle to realize she was indeed in the presence of a vampire.
Vamp scent was everywhere.
But it was the wrong scent.
The wrong vampire.
Hayden saw the glint of light on the cliffs as he moved along the path after Connor, keeping her in view, as he had for the past few days. He sniffed the air, whispered
"No!" The reek of the undead filled his lungs. Without a Connor present to protect his land and hold the chaos at bay for all these years, Hayden’s worst nightmare had come to ground on his own damn soil.