The Redeeming

by Jennifer Ashley

  Tain remained on the other side of the large room, looking out of place in the gilded, eighteenth-century perfection of the chamber. “You mean when people realize that the most powerful of the demons can be killed?”

  Samantha nodded. “The other clan demons might be eager to take over Lamiah territory while the Lamiahs scramble around trying to find another matriarch. Plus, ordinary humans might start believing that if one matriarch can be killed, they all can, thus destroying the power of the demon clans. I really need to talk to that Townsend woman.”

  “Only if I’m with you.”

  “Fine.” Samantha sighed again and leaned her forehead on her spread fingers. “What is going on here? One night I’m doing a routine stakeout for Mindglow, and the next I’m chasing a demon serial killer capable of murdering a matriarch.” She looked up at Tain. “Funny how all this started the day you showed up in my life again.”

  Tain regarded her calmly. “I’m not the one doing these killings.”

  That hadn’t been what Samantha had meant, but she admitted that Tain did look like a demon killer with his hard body, swords at his sides, his hair buzzed short, and the pentacle tattoo marking his face. Any demon would run screaming from him, and Samantha knew she should as well.

  “You took down the demons attacking Merrick’s easily enough,” she pointed out.

  Tain shrugged, unworried. “They were on a killing rampage. I’m a warrior, but I fight to protect, not to slaughter.”

  “Is that why you came to Los Angeles?” Samantha rested her elbows on the desk, giving him a little smile. “To protect us against rampaging demons?”

  “Partly.”

  His one-word answers drove her crazy. “What was the other part?”

  His blue eyes fixed on her. “To see you.”

  Samantha lost her smile, and her heart sped. How nice if he meant he’d come because he liked her, not for some strange, cryptic, Immortal reason—to make up for the past or something like that.

  “You know, when a demon feeds on a life essence, it gives the feed-ee a high,” Samantha said after a time. “After a while it grows addicting for the victim.”

  Tain’s gaze didn’t waver. “So I’ve heard.”

  “I’ve seen it happen again and again in my career. That’s why Mindglow is illegal—it takes away the last vestiges of a person’s ability to resist a demon. A human can get over their addiction by staying away from demons for a while, but Mindglow always turns the no into a yes.”

  Tain folded his arms, commanding the room without moving. “You fear I’m giving you my life essence because I’m addicted to having a demon feed on me?”

  “It’s a possibility,” Samantha said cautiously.

  Tain’s look said that Samantha didn’t understand him at all, and he didn’t have time to explain himself to her. He moved slowly across the room, stopping a foot from the desk. “You should think instead that I’m a healer who needs to be healed.”

  Samantha’s throat was dry. “And me taking your life essence heals you?”

  “For now.”

  Samantha had always considered herself a stolid person, able to take in horrific crime scenes and help the victims without breaking down. She channeled her compassion for the victims and her anger at the perps into making sure she did everything in her power to find the ones responsible.

  But with Tain, her emotions were all over the place. Samantha knew she shouldn’t trust him, and then she turned around and trusted him implicitly. Doubt and surety went back and forth with crazy rapidity, and it didn’t help that she was falling in love with him.

  Falling? A cynical voice laughed inside her. You fell in love with him the day you first laid eyes on him, and it’s only gotten worse since then.

  Like now—Samantha was on duty, this was a crime scene, and Tain shouldn’t be here. But she couldn’t stop herself rising from the desk, going to him, leaning into him. Tain slid his hands to her hips, and she rested against the solid strength of his body.

  He always smelled so good, of male musk and the outdoor scents of wind and rain. Samantha had made love to this god-man, had taken him inside her and entwined with him.

  Tain’s breath was warm as he kissed her lips. She could drink him in all day, taste the sharp spice of his mouth, enjoy the heated caress of his lips. Samantha slid her hand to his cheek, unable to stop herself, fitting her palm over his tattoo.

  His life essence came to her, less powerfully than when they made love, but still intense. Samantha didn’t want to want it, but she didn’t stop herself pulling a bit of it inside her, letting it fill her empty spaces.

  Tain deepened the kiss, bunching her hair in his hands as he opened her mouth with his. Being with Tain had made Samantha understand why demons wanted life essence, especially one like his. Demons were creatures of the dark who craved the light; they were strong, yet needed humans who were physically weaker than they to fulfill a part of themselves they couldn’t.

  Tain was ten times stronger than a normal human, ten times as magical as the most powerful life-magic creature Samantha had encountered. He could crush her like a fly, yet he was healing her and making her whole.

  “We have to stop,” Samantha said, forcing her hand from his face. “If we don’t, I’ll pull you down on this desk with me, and I know we’d break it. It looks delicate.”

  Tain’s smile was positively sinful. “I don’t care about the desk.”

  At the moment, Samantha didn’t much care about it either. “I’d get fired.”

  “Then I’ll keep you with me and safe.”

  “That sounds nice.” She rubbed her cheek on his shoulder. “Maybe after this case is done, I’ll take some vacation. We can go—I don’t know—anywhere. A tropical island in the middle of the Pacific where I can sip mai tais and watch you walk the beach. You won’t be wearing anything, of course.”

  “Neither will you.”

  “But then if I spilled my mai tai, I’d be cold.”

  “Not with me there,” Tain rumbled.

  Samantha imagined him licking the droplets of liquor from her skin, and she grew a little dizzy. “This is a nice fantasy.”

  “I can make it reality in the blink of an eye.”

  She looked up at him, startled. “How? You can teleport us, or something?”

  Tain touched two fingers to her forehead. “I could put it into your head, make you see it. It will be real, and it won’t be.”

  “You’re tempting me.” Samantha traced the points of his pentacle tattoo. “I’m supposed to be the demon.”

  Tain only smiled again. Damn, he looked good when he did that, as though he knew her most secret desires and could make them come true. He made her want to forget all about the matriarch, the Lamiah clan, her career, and dead demons, and float off with him into his tropical fantasy.

  Samantha swore she could feel an island breeze touch her skin, smell coconut oil and the sweet scent of a mai tai mixed with the salt of the sea. If Samantha closed her eyes, maybe she’d see Tain with bright sunshine on his bare backside as he strolled away from her down the beach.

  The door to the reception room swung open, and Samantha jumped away from Tain. She banged into the little gilded chair which started to fall. Tain caught the chair and set it upright, looking in no way guilty or ashamed to have been caught holding Samantha.

  Logan shut the door quickly behind him, his raised brows indicating surprise but not censure. “McKay wants you off the investigation,” he said to Samantha.

  Samantha blinked, startled out of her embarrassment. “What? Why? I’ve barely started.”

  Logan regarded her calmly, though she sensed his wolf was alert. “Because you’re clan Lamiah and because of the majordomo’s claim that the matriarch wanted you to take over when she retired. Serious conflict of interest, my friend.”

  Samantha stared at Logan in dismay. “No one really believes that, do they?”

  “The press might,” Logan said. “She’s here, by the way. McK
ay. Taking over the investigation herself.”

  “Terrific. Making it look as though she doesn’t trust me.”

  “Making it look as though she’s protecting her favorite detective. If you are nowhere near this crime, no one can accuse you of jiggering the results.”

  Samantha suppressed her wave of anger, knowing there wasn’t much she could do about being kicked off the case at this moment. “Yes, all right,” she said, jaw tight. “I’ll walk away if it’s that big a deal. You can have my notes, although the majordomo didn’t tell me much more than she told you.”

  She handed Logan her notebook, and Logan looked grateful she wasn’t making a fuss. He tried to keep things lighthearted. “Go home and kiss your new boyfriend.”

  “Very funny.”

  Tain said nothing. When Logan walked out again, closing the door carefully behind him, Samantha twined her fingers through Tain’s. “Will you come with me to talk to this Ms. Townsend? I want to know how a woman with diagrams on killing demons fits into all this.”

  Tain leaned down and said into Samantha’s ear, “If I come with you, are you willing to pay a price?”

  Samantha’s body heated. “Possibly.”

  Tain smiled at her, and the faint tropical breeze came back. “I’ll make sure I think of a good one then,” he said, and led her out.

  Septimus the vampire was an Old One, one of the original vampires made by a forgotten dark goddess at the dawn of civilization. He’d stayed alive all these centuries by being smarter and more wily than his fellows as well as stronger.

  Once upon a time, he’d controlled vast lands, and people who’d bowed down to him as their lord and master. Now he lived in a glittering, modern city and controlled an empire of vampires—lesser vamps of course, because almost all the Old Ones were gone. Septimus enjoyed his power. He liked to keep his finger on the pulse, so to speak, of everything that went on in this city.

  His lover, the beautiful Kelly O’Byrne, had made Septimus happier lately than he’d been in a long time. He was toying with the idea of making her immortal, so she could stay with him until the goddesses decided to send him back to dust.

  At the moment, Septimus was in his cushy private office in the back of his very lucrative club, listening to one of his employees tell him about Tain.

  “Are you sure about this?” Septimus asked him.

  “I saw him,” the vamp said.

  “I need to be very certain, or his brothers will back me into a corner and do horrific things to me.” Septimus leaned back comfortably in his leather armchair. “I’ll be begging them to stake me and get it over with. And there’s no telling what they’d do to you.”

  The other vamp swallowed nervously. “Tonight he went to a meeting of those No More Nightmares lunatics. Then he followed them back to their headquarters, which isn’t far from here. He slipped into the building and back out again. I lost him after that, but one of my men found him later back up near Wilshire getting on a bus.” The vampire shook his head as he adjusted his silk tie. “All that magical power, and he takes the bus.”

  “The ways of Immortals are strange to us,” Septimus said. “What else?”

  “He ends up at that half-demon cop’s apartment. He goes inside and stays a while. Probably shagged her, but I didn’t have a chance to see.”

  “I’m not interested in his sex life. What else did he do?”

  The vampire consulted his notes. “He and the cop come barreling out about nine tonight and head up to the matriarch’s house in Beverly Hills. The Lamiah clan bitch got her heart cut out.” The vampire paused to smile. “I’m sorry I missed that.”

  “I know about the death,” Septimus said, placing his fingertips together. “I’m only interested in Tain and what he did the afternoon before the matriarch’s death.”

  “You think he killed her?”

  “I don’t know whether he killed her. That is why I’m asking for your report.”

  The vampire smiled again, letting his fangs show. “Your pet Immortal went to the matriarch’s house earlier this afternoon while his girlfriend was at work. The human I have watching him during the day says the Immortal went back to the matriarch’s place and got inside.” His smile widened. “What was he was doing in there, I wonder?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Shit. Septimus moved in his chair, suddenly uncomfortable. “I’m not asking for speculation,” he said sternly. “Just facts. How long did he stay? Does your man know who he spoke to?”

  The vampire had to shake his head. “No. He didn’t stay long, maybe twenty minutes. Then he slips back out—no one seeing him—and walks away.”

  “What time was this?”

  The vampire flipped through his notebook. “Four fifteen. He walks all the way down to Santa Monica Boulevard and hops a bus again. My man lost him there, but I intercepted a cell phone call between his brother and the brother’s wife talking about meeting at that No More Nightmares rally.” The vamp paused to shake his head. “Those people really are crazy—women getting all excited about killing demons. If they start going after vampires, I’m moving to Idaho.”

  “Their meetings make people feel empowered,” Septimus said, unworried. “They don’t want their safe little lives threatened.”

  “Well, they’re not threatened by me,” the vampire scoffed. “I only do humans who come to the club and ask for it.” He smiled again, his dark eyes shining. “They beg for it.”

  Septimus restrained himself from rolling his eyes. He supposed that once upon a time he’d enjoyed having people fall all over themselves to offer their bodies for the night and their blood for his thirst, but lack of control always irritated him. Septimus liked control, lots of it.

  He made a dismissive gesture. “Thank you, that’s all I need tonight.”

  “You want me to keep following your Immortal?”

  “No.” Septimus leaned back again. “I’m satisfied. Your bonus will be attached to your end-of-month check.”

  The vamp tucked away his notebook. “You know, I’d give up the bonus if you let me have one night with the half-demon cop. I bet her blood is fine.”

  “No,” Septimus said. “She’s off limits.”

  “She’s demon. Who the hell cares if I drain her?”

  “I said no,” Septimus repeated, without heat. “Touch her, and you’re dust.”

  The vamp looked disappointed but nodded. Septimus had no doubt he’d obey, because all Septimus’s vampires knew the consequence of disobedience.

  Septimus sat for a long time after the vamp left, thinking over what he’d been told. Once or twice, he reached for the phone on his desk, then lifted his hand away.

  When Tain had first arrived in Los Angeles, his oldest brother, Adrian, had called Septimus and said, Keep an eye on him. Adrian hadn’t actually said, Put a twenty-four-hour watch on Tain with detailed notes, but Septimus liked to be thorough. If Adrian did ask for a report, Septimus would have it.

  Of the five Immortal brothers, Tain worried Septimus the most. Even Hunter had some sort of shut-off switch, and he and Septimus in the last year had become friends—as far as an Old One and an Immortal warrior could be friends. Septimus knew Hunter wouldn’t kill him unless Septimus either went on a mass rampage through the city or in some way tried to hurt Hunter’s wife and child.

  Tain, on the other hand, was a walking time-bomb. Last year, Tain had been a crazed killing machine, ready to rid the world of life magic as well as death-magic creatures. True, Tain had been instrumental in ending the battle against Kehksut, but then he’d disappeared into the blue, doing the gods knew what. A year later, the man resurfaced in Los Angeles, still with darkness swimming behind his eyes.

  What would it take to push Tain over the edge? Or had Tain already been pushed and was taking his revenge, one demon at a time?

  And was Samantha Taylor another piece in his vengeance game? Or did Tain have something else in mind for her? Septimus hated not understanding exactly what was going on. It made his
fingers itch.

  The door opened and Kelly entered, unannounced. She was the only one allowed to come and go from his club office as she pleased, and the other vamps understood that she was completely untouchable.

  Kelly had been filming most of the day for an independent studio on a movie that might propel her to superstar status. Septimus had read the script, watched some of the filming, and knew Kelly was poised to take the world by storm.

  Kelly’s smile warmed him as she took his outstretched hand. “You look so serious, my love,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  Septimus took in her breathtaking smile, his blood heating. “I find myself on the horns of a dilemma.”

  Kelly stroked one finger across his lips, then leaned and kissed them. “You’ll figure it out. You always do.”

  “That’s why I love you.” Septimus pulled her to his lap, his needs stirring. “Are you ready for me?”

  Her voice went low. “Aren’t I always?”

  Septimus’s body thrummed. He loved her scent, the way she touched him, the beauty of her. Kelly let him savor her any way he liked, and she only smiled at him and loved him back.

  Septimus kissed her lips again. Then he tilted her head to one side and tenderly bit her neck.

  Early the next morning Samantha drove with Tain to a high-rise in L.A.’s downtown financial district, not many blocks from Septimus’s vampire club. The directory inside the lobby boldly said that No More Nightmares had a suite on the twelfth floor. Samantha had discovered while researching that they had a main office here and branch offices throughout the state.

  On the twelfth floor Samantha and Tain walked out of the elevator to find a line of glass-fronted offices, most of them still dark. The office with No More Nightmares, A California Nonprofit Organization on the door had lights on inside, but the door was locked.

  Samantha knocked on the glass door, showing her ID and badge through it to the startled woman who came out of the back.