by Linda Howard
“Are you one of them?” Chloe asked. “Are you a … Warrior?”
A shrill beeping intruded; before she could get an answer, Chloe was yanked from her dream and into reality. The alarm clock was beeping loudly and continuously, and she wasn’t at all surprised to find that her bedroom was freezing, which was probably what had prompted the dream about being on the ice floe. There was apparently something wrong with her thermostat, dammit all to hell.
She slapped at the snooze button and pulled the covers up around her neck, curling into a ball and burying her nose in her pillow, searching for warmth. Chloe didn’t often wish for a man, but right now it would be nice to have someone to warm her feet on, someone to add the warmth of another body to her cold bed. She needed something solid in her life, when it seemed that nothing and no one was real.
A face swam into her memory, a face that was chiseled and strong, with long dark hair falling around it and pale gleaming eyes that seemed to pierce the darkness. He’d been here last night. He’d fought off her attacker, and everything had been all right. A sense of peace began to fill her, and she smiled a little. For a moment his name eluded her, and then it popped into her head crisp and clear: Luca.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Sorin arrived back in D.C. just before dawn, and he began threading his way through town to his secret lair. He could have slept at the mansion in Potomac, but that would have required a level of trust in his fellow rebels that he simply didn’t have. From the time he’d been turned he’d always preferred having a secret place to spend the day. Sure, sometimes he’d dozed with a woman he’d just had sex with, but when he was tired and really needed to rest, like now, he wanted to be alone.
He was later getting back than he’d wanted. First, locating the soldier conduit had taken longer than he’d expected, and during the drive back it had been raining like piss pouring out of a boot (had to love those human expressions) in North Carolina, which had slowed traffic on the interstate to a crawl. He had been able to see perfectly, but the poor humans had been feeling their way along in the dark and the rain.
The mission hadn’t been an easy one, either. The soldier had been a fighter, a real fighter, not someone who just filled a uniform and performed office duties. He had also been frighteningly close to realizing and accepting what was happening to him. There hadn’t been any confusion, no doubts about the stability, or lack of it, of his sanity. The human had begun to realize he was the route through which an Immortal Warrior would come into the world. He hadn’t known why, or how, but when Sorin attacked the man had very quickly realized exactly what he was fighting … and why. He hadn’t given up, he’d fought hard until his last breath.
How many other conduits were teetering on the edge? This was taking too long. They were cutting it too close. Eventually some of the Warriors would make it through, and things would immediately become exponentially more difficult. At what point would their numbers become too many for the vampires to handle? There was nothing he could do to hurry the process, though; Jonas was already pushing himself to exhaustion, trying to locate all the conduits as they became active, and evaluate how ready they were.
Sorin had chosen the best hunters from the vampires who had joined the rebels, but they weren’t plentiful; counting himself, there were only ten. He’d sent Enoch after the Fallon woman only because she was local; all of the other hunters were scattered around the country. Enoch was a strong vampire, and though he’d spent the last hundred years or so being what amounted to a majordomo for the Council members, that hadn’t diluted his strength any; his patience, maybe, but not his strength.
Frankly, the ten of them were stretched so thin he didn’t know how they’d be able to keep up. The Warriors undoubtedly knew what was going on and would step up the pace of contacting their conduits. Sorin mentally ran through the names of the vampires at his disposal; he already had the best of them hunting, but he needed reinforcements. The next group chosen obviously wouldn’t be as good, but they could take the less-urgent targets, the easy ones, such as the Fallon woman.
He was tired, he hadn’t fed in two days, and dawn was coming. When his cell phone rang he seriously considered turning it off without answering it. He glanced at the Caller ID—Unknown—but he recognized the number: Regina. He bit off a curse as he flipped the phone open. “Yeah.”
“Enoch hasn’t returned.”
Sorin pinched the bridge of his nose. The girl should have been an easy kill, much easier than the soldier in North Carolina, which was why he’d sent Enoch. “He doesn’t answer his cell?”
“He didn’t take it with him. It was found in his room.”
That was both bad and good. If Enoch needed help, it was bad that he didn’t have his cell. If something had happened to him, it was good that he didn’t have his cell, because then no one would be able to find out who had called him, and who he had called. Carrying a cell was always a risk, but one that so far had been a small one.
The risk factor might be going up, though. Enoch could have met with any number of accidents, a few of which could be fatal even to a vampire—say if he was hit by a train and decapitated—but Luca Ambrus was out there somewhere, angry and unaccounted for. Sorin had to assume that Enoch might now be a captive, though for the rebels’ sake he hoped the man was dead. Dead was better. Dead didn’t talk; dead didn’t give up names and locations.
The good thing was, Enoch had no idea about the mansion or where it was located. His knowledge revolved completely around Council headquarters. If he told Regina’s identity, that was tough shit for her.
Even if Enoch gave her up to Luca, the executioner might have trouble getting into Council headquarters. The security was superb, designed with an eye toward keeping out Luca himself, on the theory that if Luca couldn’t get in, no one could. How was that for irony?
“What about the Fallon woman?” he finally asked.
“She’s still alive,” Regina replied, her annoyance touched with a hint of fury.
So Enoch hadn’t even completed his mission; whatever had happened to him, had happened before he got to her. Something else to worry about, then, another little detail that affected his strategy. “Has her status changed?”
“According to Jonas she’s further along, but her status isn’t urgent. There’s still time.”
Sorin drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. That was good news. Still, if some other conduit didn’t go hot and he was pulled away again, he’d go after her himself. After all, a conduit was a conduit; they all had to be eliminated, and this one was right under his nose.
Sorin sometimes enjoyed his visits to the witch, but when he went to her room that day just after sunset, he was still feeling grim about losing Enoch. No sign of the vampire had turned up. Regina was both frightened and angry, which meant she was a bitch to deal with. Actually, she was always a bitch to deal with, but today she was worse.
If Sorin wasn’t happy with the witch, the feeling was mutual. Sometimes she seemed glad to see him; this wasn’t one of those times. She was sitting on the floor, her hands flat on the open pages of one of the larger spell books. She could have called any of the vampires guarding her to lift the huge book to the table, but no, she was too stubborn; she’d rather sit on the floor than ask any of them for anything. When he opened the door without knocking—he deliberately never gave her even that much advance warning—she jerked her head around and glared at him.
“Do you ever think that I might be in the middle of something delicate,” she snapped, “and when you barge in like that it destroys everything I’ve done? I was trying to get a spell started, but forget about that now. You want me to break your precious spell, but you won’t leave me alone long enough for me to concentrate on anything!”
She was in a mood, all right. He liked that she was getting temperamental; she was a far cry now from the terrified girl she’d been when he’d first brought her here. She was gaining power and confidence along with, or because of, her
expanding skills.
“A knock on the door would be just as much of an interruption,” he said coolly, stepping inside and closing the door behind him. “The only reason you’d want me to knock would be so you’d have time to hide something you were doing.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, like I can pick up this book and stuff it under the couch or something. There’s nothing here you don’t know about, and nothing comes in that you don’t provide. I practice doing spells. That’s what you freakin’ brought me here to do, right? But sometimes—just a thought, here—I might be changing clothes and I’d like to do that in private!” She was yelling at him by the time she finished, so angry she was arguing about something that hadn’t happened.
Sorin glanced at the book in front of her. It was one of the books in one of the incomprehensible languages. She had indeed progressed far, if she could now understand the writing. The smell of magic was in the air, not the heavy magic he’d scented before when dealing with death spells, but something lighter, more delicate, something tinged with Nevada herself. “You can read the book?”
“I’m beginning to understand some of the words,” she said in a testy tone, pushing her long hair back out of her face. “I’m feeling my way along, trying out different words to see how they work, using the process of elimination to—never mind, you can figure it out.” She scowled at him. “What do you want?”
Nevada Sheldon was a pretty young woman, petite and fresh-faced, with long, rich, red hair and pale skin from three years in captivity, never seeing the sun. She even had a few very endearing freckles sprinkled across her pert nose, but they had faded some. She was twenty-three years old now, the prime of her young womanhood spent locked in this room.
She looked so innocent, so normal, but she was a direct descendant of the Welsh crone Briallan, the powerful witch who had cursed vampires to be physically unable to enter a human’s home without invitation. It was Regina who had traced Briallan’s lineage, discovered Nevada, and sensed the huge potential in her. Their capture of Nevada and her family had made this rebellion possible. With her blood, her heritage, the inborn talents she’d tried to refuse—and the proper motivation—Nevada could learn how to lift the curse.
He wouldn’t be who he was if he didn’t on occasion wonder how Nevada would taste. She looked like forbidden sunshine, and she smelled … she smelled like … someone he’d once known. An unbidden, unwelcome memory swam to the surface. For a moment he froze in shock as he was spun back in time, a very long way back, and he had an impression of a small woman with a sweet smile, sitting in front of a fire with a shawl draped around her bare shoulders as she nursed a baby, his baby … his daughter. That was it, he realized with an inner shock. She smelled like Diera, his daughter. He hadn’t been able to watch Diera grow up; she had been his youngest child out of six, the only girl, and he’d been turned when she was just four. He couldn’t remember her face, and after all these centuries he almost never thought of the human family that had been left behind so long ago, but her scent … yes, he remembered her scent.
Now that he knew why Nevada’s scent got to him, he thought grimly, he could be on guard against it. Still, it was just as well that feeding from the witch—or glamouring her—was forbidden. Nevada needed all her strength to do what had to be done, and her mind couldn’t be dulled by blood loss or glamouring, not even a little bit. If he’d ever fed from her, then realized she smelled like his daughter … everything in him rebelled at the idea. Even though she wasn’t his daughter, the very idea brought back too clearly the time after he’d first been turned, when he had retained just enough sanity to know that he had to go far, far away from his family to keep them safe from him. His blood hunger had been so strong that if he had stayed, even without meaning to, he would probably have killed them all.
“We’re running out of time,” Sorin said, prowling around the room and taking a good look at everything. She had spell books scattered everywhere—not just on the worktable and the floor, but on the bed, the couch, the chair; he even spied one on the counter in the bathroom. She was working hard to give them what they wanted, but why wouldn’t she? It wasn’t just her life at stake, but the lives of her whole family.
She glared at him. “I’m doing the best I can. It isn’t easy.”
“If it was easy someone else would have done it years ago.” He stopped by the worktable and ran his fingers through a pile of crystals.
Nevada reached out and slapped the top of his hand, quick as a snake. “Stop it!” she snapped. He jerked his hand back, outraged that she’d been able to even touch him; with his vampire speed, he should have been able to evade her without even thinking. But he hadn’t been thinking about the crystals, he’d still been distracted by the unwelcome memories of his human family.
Nevada threw up her hands. “I had them arranged the way the book said, now I have to start all over again. Just go away! Damn! Don’t touch anything else, you hear? Nothing!”
Sorin snarled at her, his fangs elongating a little as his own temper spiked, but then he reined himself in. She was doing exactly what they’d told her she must do. “My apologies,” he said stiffly. “I didn’t realize they were arranged in a certain manner.”
A moment of silence, then she drew in a deep breath. “I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have hit you.” She paused, then in a small voice said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Her little slap had hurt his dignity, not his hand. The idea that she could hurt him physically was laughable, but he didn’t feel at all like laughing. He wanted her to figure out how to break the damn spell, because the other part of the equation—killing the conduits before the Warriors could come through—was becoming more of a problem with every passing day. Surely to hell one part of the plan could go well.
This would be much easier if she had known all her life that she was a witch capable of amazing power. Instead, she had grown up as a normal human girl, completely unaware of what she was and of her potential. She had to learn everything from the ground up in a very short length of time, an almost impossible learning curve for anyone. And yet, every day she displayed more power, more confidence in who and what she was, what she could do. Soon, very soon, she should be able to lift the spell.
It had better be soon, or everything was lost.
“How are Emily and Justin?” she asked, as she did every day. She had been very close to her younger sister and brother.
“They are well.”
“My folks?”
“Also well.” His answers to both questions were true, but he didn’t say how frightened her parents were. They had figured out who, or more important what, had taken them. In another day and age, that knowledge might’ve been a death sentence, but once the rebellion began in earnest the existence of vampires would no longer be a well-guarded secret. The entire family had been spirited away when Nevada’s existence and dormant powers had been discovered. She thought they were being held somewhere else, but in fact her family was housed in the basement of this very house.
“When can I see them? I need to see them.”
“Not until you do what you were brought here to do. They’re alive, and that’s all you need to know. Just be thankful I let you speak to them.”
Kidnapping her family had been the only leverage they had to force her into doing what they wanted. If he’d thought he could glamour her into serving him he would’ve done so months earlier, but glamoured humans never had full possession of their faculties, and Nevada needed every brain cell to be at maximum working order.
He might’ve turned Nevada—and might still, in time—but a new vampire was often weak and he needed her to be strong. She was likely to be so overcome by her new hunger that she wouldn’t be able to give her task its proper focus. And there was no guarantee that her natural powers would survive the change; becoming a vampire might very well completely wipe away her gifts. There were so many variables, there was simply no way to tell how she might react to being turned.
Even that wasn’t a guarantee that she would be allowed to live. If her witch powers survived the turning intact, Regina might insist that someone so potentially powerful be killed before that power threatened to surpass her own.
“I’m doing everything you asked. Letting me see them, just for a few minutes, wouldn’t hurt anything and it would stop me from worrying—” She broke off, but he knew what she was about to say. She worried that they were dead, and he was tricking her somehow. She shoved her hair back again. “I’ve learned so much, I can do things I’d always thought were impossible, but …”
“But what?” Sorin asked when she hesitated.
“But there’s a block of some kind, a shield I can’t get past. The spell you want me to break is very strong.”
“If you want it badly enough, you can get past that shield. You’re strong enough, you just have to learn how.”
She looked down at the table that was scattered with crystals, cracked leather-bound books, tarot cards, and vials of dull-colored powders. All the tools were there, if she learned how to use them. “Maybe I’m the block,” she whispered. “Maybe I’m more afraid of what the world will be like if you win than I am of losing those I love.”
“It’ll be a good world,” he replied.
Nevada tilted her head back to look him in the eye. “For you.”
“Things will go on pretty much the way they do now, but vampires will be in control. Government won’t operate on emotion and politicians prostituting ideals just to get re-elected.” He paused. “We already have three of us in Congress.”