“I sleep with one, too, but I know him less than I do the others.” Her lips were trembling.
The throbbing was becoming a pounding, a ravening need was coursing through him, reminding him of older times, before vampires had learned to cope with their needs and grew more civilized.
He could smell her flesh, almost feel her blood pulsing beneath it. “Pritti...” he tried to warn her. “Leave. Now.” His fangs were starting to descend.
She stared up at him. Her hands were still caught in his fists, but she spread her fingertips over his chest and gave a small smile. “You won’t hurt me,” she whispered.
“I can’t...I can’t promise that,” he ground out.
“Why wouldn’t you say anything?” she insisted.
He growled his frustration. The strong survival instincts of the symbiot were starting to take over. They would make him feed, regardless of what he wanted. He would become a mindless creature of animal drives. Pritti didn’t understand.
“Why?” she insisted. She showed no fear at all.
“Very well, then.” He pushed her up against the wall and pinned her with his body so that she could not jump away from him. “If the psi are organizing, I would guess it is for the same reason Ryan organized vampires—for freedoms and rights you don’t have now. And you’ve told me you stay living on the station because it’s the closest to off-world you can get now they’ve banned psi from leaving Earth.” His breathing had accelerated. And he could hear her blood now, hear the pulse. He shook his head to clear it. “You would stand to gain if you taught the psi how to jump through time, as you’re so practiced at it now.”
She tilted her head, as she studied him. Then she reached up and tugged at the opening of the short kimono-style shirt she was wearing. It pulled open, revealing her shoulder, her creamy white breast and her neck...with the carotid artery that beckoned to him.
“Feed,” she whispered. “Go ahead. You need it.”
He could not stop himself. He lowered his head and pierced the soft, pale flesh and drank her nectar. He heard her gasp of pain, but it was a distant sound. He sank into her sweetness.
“Enough. Enough, Demyan. Now. Stop!” She was hammering on his shoulder. Then her small hands were grasping his head, pulling him away from her.
He heard the ugly sound he made and hated himself. The animal in him knew she had no strength, could not push him away. And he needed more, yet.
Suddenly, she was not there.
He pushed himself away from the empty wall, spinning around to pursue her and was thrown forward as something heavy slammed into him from the left. He slid and landed hard up against the wall by the door. He heard something crack, tried to get up and his arm gave out under him.
He was punched up against the wall again. This time he could make out the object as it hit him—the side table that normally sat next to his bed. It shattered as it struck him, cutting deep into his arm.
He’d forgotten that Pritti’s mind was far stronger than she was.
“Pritti, stop!” he said, holding up his arm. “Enough!”
She stood in the middle of his room, her arms by her side, breathing hard. Blood ran down her neck, onto her chest. The jacket still hung open.
“Do you have it caged?” she demanded.
“What?” He realized that his clavicle was shattered, but already the bone was realigning, knitting together. His arm stung where the gouge was sealing and repairing itself.
“The devil’s spawn in you. Is it controlled?” Pritti demanded.
He took a breath. Another. She did understand, then. “Yes,” he said. “For now.” His fangs retracted. He’d drunk enough to last a little while longer. He slowly got to his knees and she hurried over to help him, which was faintly ridiculous, given her size.
He stilled her efforts simply by wrapping his arms around her and holding her and she let him. He looked over her shoulder and saw the destruction she had caused with her two missiles. Gold glinted, by the bed. His Faberge egg, the one the Tsar of Russia had given him, lay in a hundred pieces across the floor. Regret touched him. The egg was a reminder of his roots. His identity.
“Did you see?” Pritti whispered against his cheek. “While you fed, did you look inside me?”
He pulled her away from him enough to look into her eyes. “Pritti, I don’t look unless I’m asked. You’ve never understood how important it is that we voluntarily impose that restriction. But it is important and I abide by it.”
Her eyes were filling with tears. “I wanted you to see.”
“I will look, then.” He kissed her, the gentlest way he knew of peering into someone’s mind. When he had seen what she was showing him, he lowered himself back down until he was leaning against the cold wall once more. Sadness filled him. Pritti watched him, looking for acceptance.
“I understand,” he told her softly and cupped her cheek. “I see, now, why you stay.” He tried to smile. “And happy birthday, Pritti.”
Today she turned twenty-nine years old. No psi had ever lived beyond thirty-one. Vampires, unlike humans or other psi , would remember her long after she was gone.
* * * * *
Nayara watched Dionne Rinaldi walk into the room and couldn’t help running her gaze over the woman’s attire. Nayara had always eschewed human fashions as frivolous and impractical, but Dionna Rinaldi made sense of high fashion. She made it work in a way that turned heads. The silver-grey shimmering suit she wore skimmed every inch of her figure tightly, right down to her knees. An electric blue shawl wrapped her shoulders and hung to the floor behind her. The blue complimentted her eyes. Her hair had been arranged in curls on the top of her head.
Nayara, sitting at the head of the long table in the hastily assembled boardroom, wasn’t aware that she was adjusting her own clothing until Ryan lifted her hand away from her lapels. He glanced at her and shook his head the tiniest fraction and put her hand back down by her side. His fingertips brushed over the back of her knuckles before he lifted his hand away. His chair, as he was co-head of the agency, also sat at the head of the wide table, next to Nayara.
Nayara glanced around the room of assembled senior agency members to see if anyone had noticed her revealing fidgeting.
Cáel was watching her from his seat off to the side, where he sat in half-shadow. His dark eyes were probably absorbing every detail of her nervousness. He rarely missed such telling minutiae.
Ah well... She could live with Cáel knowing. He had proved more than once that he knew how to hold his tongue.
Justin showed Dionne to the chair placed in the space made by the U-shaped table and took his place at the end of the table itself.
“You asked to speak to us, Ms. Rinaldi,” Nayara told her. “You went to some trouble to arrange this meeting. Please sit and explain yourself.”
Dionne rested a well-manicured hand on the back of the chair and the other hand on her hip. She didn’t sit down. “I understand that despite having all of time at your disposal, you’ve learned the pointlessness of wasting time on trivia. So I will come straight to the point. Your public appearance at the charity ball in Vienna was a fiasco. And from what I hear, you’re attempting another PR event. A book?”
Ryan made a tiny sound. It wouldn’t carry to Dionne, but Nayara caught it.
Where had Dionne heard about the book?
Dionne nodded, despite Nayara maintaining her neutral expression. “A book, then.”
Someone around the table hadn’t kept a poker face. Nayara made a mental note to replay the media clip later and find out who she needed to speak to about boardroom strategy training.
Dionne continued. “Measuring by the Vienna ball, your pool of PR talent isn’t up to the task. They’re not doing you any favours.”
Nayara kept her head immobile, but slid her gaze toward Cáel. How was he taking this disparagement of his work?
Cáel was grinning openly. He was enjoying this.
Startled, Nayara returned her gaze to Dionne. “
And your proposal, Ms. Rinaldi?”
“My services,” Dionne said simply. “You people need me. Desperately.”
“And why do we need you?” Ryan asked.
Dionne smiled, showing perfect white teeth. “You’re trying to make humans like you. That’s the plan, isn’t it?”
Nayara sat very still. Had they been that obvious about their intentions?
“Come on, guys!” Dionne railed at them. “I’m good at my job! You think I couldn’t figure it out? You’ve been hiding away on this station for nearly two hundred years, then poof!, suddenly you’re throwing money at charities, going to glittering media events and you’re writing a book?” She laughed. “Any wet-behind-the-ears consultant could figure that one out.”
“Then I repeat the question,” Nayara said. “Why do we need you, if the plan is so obvious?”
“It’s an obvious plan and it’s a good idea,” Dionne said. “But you’re going to need PR muscle to punch it through, because things will—have—gone wrong. That`s because you’re dealing with vampires interacting with humans. It’s not a simple Melbourne Cup Race Day. You’re going to need the best to shepherd this through. You’re going to need me.”
Nayara let herself smile. “You believe you can...rescue our campaign?”
Dionne crossed her arms, her fingertips nestled between her breasts and her upper arms. “Yes,” she said. “I would be willing to make my fee contingent, if that helps sweeten the deal for you.”
Nayara struggled to keep expression from her face. A contingent fee? The woman was remarkably sure of herself...or else she wanted this job so badly, she was willing to throw down a sweetheart deal in order to close it.
Ryan was sitting back, letting Nayara take the reins on the negotiations. This was her field of expertise.
Nayara considered. There was more to this than Dionne was so far letting on. So, she needed more information. “What fee are you proposing?”
“Six and a half million credits, for the list of criteria we can settle later.”
It wasn’t a sweetheart deal then. The fee was possibly the most expensive consultant fee anyone on the planet had ever paid. It was a once in a lifetime deal. Dionne knew exactly what she was doing, then. She knew this would shift her from famous just in this lifetime to a permanent part of the history books.
“That is a steep fee,” Nayara observed mildly. She mentally blessed everyone around the table, who hadn’t twitched so much as a muscle when Dionne had quoted her price.
“It is,” Dionne agreed. “I can lower than price to five hundred thousand credits, with a little something thrown in on the top.”
Nayara breathed deeply. It was a sweetheart deal! Dionne wanted this job. The first exorbitant price was a blind, to make this cheaper price look so much more reasonable. The condition she was about to offer would be hard to meet, but would look more attractive than the six million price tag she had first demanded.
“And the little something would be?” Nayara asked, keeping the excitement out of her voice.
“At the end of the assignment, I get turned and...” Dionne held up her finger, even though no one had spoken, “I get my choice of which cast I am made into.”
Nayara failed to hide her shock. So did almost everyone around the table.
Even Cáel leaned forward on his chair, all amusement gone, as he looked at Nayara and Ryan, open astonishment on his face. Nayara could almost read his question.
What does she mean by ‘cast’?
Nayara stood up. “Clear the room. Everyone. Justin, you stay. Rob, Christian, Brenden. The rest, I’m sorry, this has just become a closed session.” She looked at Dionne. “You, too, Ms. Rinaldi. We will get back to you with an answer to your proposal in a while. Demyan, would you escort Ms. Rinaldi to the visitors’ lounge?”
Demyan was shorter than Rinaldi in her high shoes, but his glare and the rigid posture of his shoulders cut short any protest she might have been about to make. She meekly followed him out of the room.
“Hell’s bell,” Ryan breathed.
“Cáel, Ryan,” Nayara warned, as she saw Cáel threading his way out of the room.
“Cáel,” Ryan called softly.
Cáel looked around.
Ryan pointed to the chair Cáel had been sitting in. Cáel frowned, but turned and went back to his unobtrusive seat in the dark corner.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Nayara asked Ryan.
“He may as well hear it now. We’ll just end up having to tell him for the damn book later,” Ryan replied softly.
She hid her smile. “You know this can’t come out yet.”
“Why not?” Ryan asked reasonably.
Nayara opened her mouth, but no answer would come. Finally, she said, “Let’s worry about being accepted for ourselves first, before we add the complication of casts.”
Justin shut the big, manual boardroom door and dropped into his chair and looked at them. Silence fell.
Ryan pushed his fingers through his hair. “There’s no easy way to—”
“We have casts?” Justin interrupted.
Ryan sighed. “Yes.”
“Fuck!” Justin swore. It was an aggrieved sound. “And she knew about them! That makes me feel like a right stupid git. Why isn’t this common knowledge?”
“I imagine it’s because casts in most races are the cause of most civil wars and bloodshed within those races,” Cáel said from his dark seat. “Casts separates a species. It doesn’t unite it.”
“That’s one reason, yes,” Ryan said. “But mostly, it’s because knowledge of the casts has really only started to come together in any sort of cohesive pattern in the last one hundred years or so, as vampires were free to speak about their origins and their makings. There’s a lot of very old vampires who are still passing. They don’t hold with coming out. But their knowledge is invaluable...when they choose to speak. It’s still an incomplete picture.”
Rob rapped his knuckles on the table. “Wait, wait. Forgive an old Scot for being picky. Are ye telling me ye know the origins of vampires now?”
“We...think so,” Ryan prevaricated.
Cáel stood up and walked deliberately into the space in the middle of the table. “Think a minute before you ask the questions burning in your minds. I know you think you want the answers. Everyone wants to know where they come from. But consider...can you afford to know the truth? All of you have lived very long and mostly peaceful lives. They’ve been productive and sometimes happy and you’ve arrived at this spot in time. An unprecedented place in time where vampires are on the verge of acceptance by humans. You’re already living lives untrammelled by disguises or daily fear of discovery.” He turned, looking them all in the eye. “Consider before you open this Pandora’s box. Ryan isn’t hesitating because he doesn’t know the answers. He knows the answers. He doesn’t like what they’ll do to you when you know them.”
“Too late, Stelios,” Brenden growled. “That bloody woman opened the lid already. She knows about the casts. That means we have to know in order to deal with her.”
“You don’t have to deal with her,” Cáel pointed out. “Walk away. There’s other consultants. Other experts.” He looked at Christian, who nodded.
“We can’t afford to walk away from her,” Justin said. “She knows too much. Who are her sources? It’s better to have her working for us than against us.”
Cáel sighed. “The casts will divide you,” he warned. “Just when you’ve learned to work together.”
“It doesn’t always work that way, human,” Rob said softly. “All the clans of Scotland managed to settle their generations’ worth of differences and fight together for two wars, to win back Scotland. If the need is great enough, a race will unite.”
Cáel lifted his hands and let them drop. “I cannot gainsay you, highlander.” He went back to his chair and sat heavily.
Nayara felt fear curl in her gut. Cáel’s concerns were valid. She glanced at Ryan.
He grimace
d. “There are four casts,” he said.
She sighed.
“The names of the casts come to us from the past,” Ryan continued. “There is The Eridu, The Lagash, The Assur and The Malsinne. The Malsinne are the dark cast...” He hesitated. “We’re still sorting this out. Back in the past, to distinguish a cast member, you would track them back via their maker. But no one has kept records of such things for millennia. But the casts have distinct talents and abilities and we’ve found that one of the easiest ways of determining cast is by the vampire’s predilection toward psi talents.”
There was a small, puzzled silence.
Brenden frowned his way through it. “You mean to say, depending on which psi trick we pick up fastest, you can figure out which cast we belong to?”
Ryan nodded. “Some casts can’t pick up some talents at all. And there are behavioural clues, too. You inherit traits just like you inherited genetic traits from your human parents.”
The room was utterly silent. Nayara, who had heard this all before, watched the intense concentration on their faces and worried again if they were wise to pass this on right now. But Dionne had given them little choice.
“What are the traits, then?” Christian asked.
“Telepathy among members of your own cast is common to all. We think it may work even when you’re in your own timeline.”
“Not just human?” Christian asked sharply.
“Not just human,” Ryan verified. “The Eridu are predisposed toward precognition and emotional manipulation, especially through touch. There’s more of the Eridu still passing than not because they’re more inclined to want to stay out of humans’ way. They’re loners, the ones that like the long travel assignments.”
“Demyan,” Brenden declared.
Nayara glanced at Ryan. Fahmido had tentatively classified Demyan as an Eridu.
“The Lagash lean towards Omni-Linguism.”
Christian’s head jerked around from his conversation with Rob.
“They also soak up anything to do with flight or levitation. They have particularly good balance.”
Rob laid his hand on Christian’s arm. Christian was a swordsman and good footwork was a necessity for a master swordsman.
Byzantine Heartbreak (Beloved Bloody Time) Page 14