by Margaret Carter, Crystal Green, Erica Orloff, Patricia Rosemor
Killed hope tumbled through her, lost before it’d even been found.
Could she go after the vampires all alone?
Without thinking, she touched the ever present good-luck charm around her neck. A baby ring.
Griffin.
She clamped her fingers around the smooth circle of the totem.
I’m coming for you no matter what.
Sustained by the thought of what she had to do, Camille raised her gaze, dropped her fists to her sides.
“Isn’t there anyone?”
A hank of her red, arrow-straight hair escaped her braid and caught the wind, covering her view of the men. With a curse, she cuffed aside the offending strands.
The spectators hadn’t moved during her challenging silence. At least not physically. But they’d retreated just the same. It was in the way the men looked at each other from the corners of their eyes. The way they kept their shaggy heads bent.
A fragile female voice said, “There is no one.”
Camille turned around, finding her mentor, Dr. Beatrix Grasu, a silver-haired matron decked in a tweed skirt suit, horn-rimmed eyeglasses and a pair of Ugg boots.
Camille’s heart melted a little at the sight of her. Bea—the woman who had taken Camille in, cared for her, given her strength after the most terrifying night of her life.
“An entire population of Dracula snacks.” Camille switched to English while striding away from the circle. No use announcing her defeated faith to these men. “We should’ve hired those female bikers in Bucharest. Even untrained, they’d last longer than these guys.”
“Random women,” the doc said. “They have no personal issue in this. The people of Vasile have much more at stake. They want to fight at your side, these men do.”
“Their good intentions aren’t enough.”
The elderly woman rolled her eyes at the irony of it all, then lifted her face to the sky, sniffing. “There are more charms decorating doorways, darling girl. Garlic and wild roses. They are ready for an attack, even more so than yesterday.”
“Superstition. Right.” Camille stood by her friend’s side, shook her head and glanced over her shoulder at the gathered males. They shuffled their opinci, rough pigskin shoes, and withstood her withering inspection.
She lowered her voice. “Catering to male egos has cost us an entire morning. No matter how much these guys protest, let’s get the women out here. We can’t screw around anymore.”
Bea smiled sweetly, making Camille think that maybe everything would be okay. The ever-optimistic doc had always told her so while educating Camille in the ways of vampires and science, giving her a sense of wary hope.
“And how will you select your females?” the old woman asked. “Your prey—they do not wrestle. Why you are practicing a triangle hold on these men, I do not know.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Camille’s natural impatience returned, in spite of Bea’s calm. “You’d rather recruit a mob and just give them our toys, but I need people who think on their feet, too. People who can get themselves out of a fix. They have to be speedy, just like those creatures, or they’ll be token sacrifices. We’d be in a situation like I found myself in at Juni—”
Her voice caught.
She’d tried so hard to forget about it—a nightgown flapping over moon-pale skin, Griff yelling her name and reaching out for her….
Camille closed her eyes, fighting the memory, hurting too much to continue talking.
The clang of a goat’s bell filled the silence as she steeled herself. She opened her eyes to find Bea watching her with familiar concern.
“Aunt Bea,” Camille said, using the Mayberry nickname that reminded her that, somewhere on earth, there was a place that felt like home, “any male who can’t take me on is going to die within the first second of a confrontation with those bitches. I can’t let that happen.”
Bea’s gaze softened in sympathy and, even though Camille just wanted to fold herself into the doc’s safe arms and pretend she was a real aunt who’d just baked gingerbread in the kitchen, she couldn’t.
Weakness wasn’t an option. Wiping all feeling from her body, she walked back to the crowd, switching to Romanian.
“Are your females any tougher?” she asked them.
There was a ragged laugh from the back, near the faded planking of the inn walls.
Camille waited for the designated smart-ass to step forward. She loved knocking the piss out of people who didn’t take her seriously.
The peasant men turned around to see who was stupid enough to be ticking off “our huntress”—a moniker they whispered behind her back. As the crowd parted, it revealed a tall, muscle-honed man clad in army-green fatigues, combat boots and a wicked machete sheathed by his side. He had hard-edged features: squinting eyes that still echoed his mocking laugh, a pugilist’s often broken nose, a cleft chin with a day’s worth of beard stubble. His light brown hair wasn’t exactly cut in military fashion; it was too long. The style smacked of the way his type—army assassins—singled themselves out as more than soldiers by refusing to conform to the basic grunt shave.
And then there was the ugly scar decorating his neck.
Without being introduced, she knew exactly who he was.
The man called Sargent leaned against the inn and extracted a Marlboro from a box in his T-shirt pocket. A thorny cross positioned by the side door lingered above his head. Two men framed the notorious mercenary: a platinum-haired guy dressed in white hippie wear, and a time-wrinkled peasant wearing a hand-embroidered shirt and a sheepskin-lined vest. He seemed fascinated by Sargent.
“Gee, I knew my luck would run out sooner or later.” Camille tweaked a sarcastic smile to Bea. Translation: Just what we needed, more vampire munchies.
Holding back a grin, the doc shook her finger at her student, lowered her voice. “Be nice to the man.”
When Camille glanced back at the notorious killer-for-hire, the old man next to him stared longingly at Sargent’s ciggie. The commando shrugged and gave him one. Then he lit a flame to his own, the furious shade of red bathing his face. An instant later, the nasty glow subsided as he handed the match to the old guy.
“Women have no place in war,” Sargent said in Romanian, the cigarette bobbing between his lips. “Especially rich heiresses who think this is some kind of spat.”
Camille had known he’d speak the language. In fact, when she’d discovered that Sargent had been hired by Flora Vladislav and the other Juni peasants to go after the strigoiaca, she’d learned a lot of other things about him, too. How he enjoyed slaughtering just for the hell of it. How he was relentless in his pursuit of anything remotely associated with fangs.
She absently touched her baby ring.
Sargent stepped away from the wall and walked toward her, a drift of cigarette smoke curling from the side of his mouth. His hippie friend shook his head, then entered the inn, abandoning the scene.
The mercenary saluted her with the cig. “You got here before I did.”
So Flora Vladislav had told him about her, too. “Get used to second place.”
He didn’t find that funny. “Word travels fast out here. I understand you’re on some kind of mercy mission.”
“From what I hear, I doubt you’d understand anything that has to do with mercy.” Her pulse started thudding at the thought of what he’d do to Griff if he found him before she did. What he’d do to all the captives and vampires.
According to Flora, Sargent had killed his first vampire years ago. He’d been on some secret military mission and was attacked by a female vampire informant during an ambush she had orchestrated. Supposedly, Sargent had snapped. Robbed of trust and his perception of the world as he knew it, he’d made a name for himself as a preternatural terminator.
As he sauntered closer, Camille’s gaze lingered on his neck scar. The web of dead skin.
What, exactly, had turned him into a killer? What deep instincts had changed him from a soldier to an animal with the worst of reputation
s?
He came to stand right in front of her, forcing her to lift her chin to meet his glare.
Right. Make me back down, she thought.
With an amused lift of the eyebrows, Sargent grinned, sucked on the cig until it burned into a crackling column of ash, then tossed it into a patch of dirt. He ground it to gray matter beneath the toe of a beaten combat boot and puffed out a cloud of smoke.
This time he used English. “You can pack up the carnival now. Time to go back on home to the States.”
His own American accent turned some heads. The peasants eyed him with a measure of relief and caution, probably because he’d saved them from further mortification at her hands. Or probably because of that white-hot badge of violence on his neck.
“You don’t trust women enough to fight?” she asked, taking one step closer to him, bringing them chest to chest. “If the men I’d hired to take care of this situation in the past had been successful, I wouldn’t be here myself.”
The peasants shifted, no doubt sensing the tension.
“Never send a man to do a woman’s work, huh?”
“Are you here to join the team or what?” She made a please-don’t-make-me-ill face.
“Let me see if it’s worth my effort.” He took two steps back, then ran a slow gaze up her body.
His attentions left a running trail of reluctant awareness over her legs, her belly.
“Done yet?” she asked. “I’m on a schedule.”
Much to her chagrin, he continued his easy inspection until he got to the baby ring on her chest.
Griff’s ring.
The wheels were turning in his head: why would a crankbuster like her be wearing a sentimental trinket?
He didn’t need to know. No one did.
“I suppose you’re next in line for some roll-in-the-dirt schooling,” she said, gesturing to the ground.
“Thought you told your great-aunt that you’re in some kind of hurry.” Sargent winked, probably thinking he’d rattle her composure. “When I get you rolling in the dirt, we’ll want lots of time.”
Automatically, her spine straightened, and she berated herself for allowing him to chalk one up for his team.
They continued to stare at each other. Hell, she’d be damned if she looked away first.
Knowing Camille’s stubborn streak quite well, Bea cleared her throat, then addressed the crowd in their language, thanking them for their courage. Asking them to send out their women since it was their best bet against the threat to this village.
The vampires.
Everyone scattered, including the doc, who came over and pulled her student’s face toward her, making Camille lose the staring contest.
“Hey, Bea—”
“Prepare.”
With that, Doc cast a considering glance at Sargent, then left him alone with Camille.
“I’ll give this to you,” he said, grinning because he knew he’d won. By default. “That wrestling show was spiffy. But if you get a vampire between your thighs, it won’t beg you to stop squeezing. Not like our friendly Vasile peasants. The strigoiaca will dine on your femoral artery. You know, it’s the one near those balls of yours.”
“Oh, score for you, Mr. Sargent. Impressive work upholding your reputation. You truly are an ass.”
Sargent maintained his condescending demeanor. From what she’d heard from Flora Vladislav, he’d spent years developing that battle face. Years wearing the paint of war, moving through deserts and cities without sound or error.
That was the rumor, anyway. Flora and the Juni women, the ones who’d lured Sargent here with their life savings in order to cleanse the area, had told Camille all about him when she’d gone back to Juni and announced her intention of saving the captured men herself.
“So,” she said, still stinging from the way Flora had rejected Camille’s own rescue plan. The villagers hadn’t believed in her. At all. “You don’t mind being a murderer? Killing living creatures for blood money?”
“Someone’s got to be the exterminator around here.”
His offhand comment ripped at her. Goaded her into resorting to her least favorite form of persuasion.
Using her Howard family fortune to make him go away.
“Flora and her village couldn’t possibly be paying you as much as I could,” she said.
“To kill vamps?”
“To leave.”
For a second, his rigid toughness evaporated. It looked as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
But, true to form, he recovered quickly, reverting back into egomaniac mode. “And what’re you planning to do with those beasts? Sweet-talk them into being good little bloodsuckers and playing nice with the nearby villages?” He held up a finger. “Or maybe you’re going to jujitsu them into wholesome, upstanding citizens.”
Jerk. In order to keep control, she intentionally backed off, sighed, checked her state-of-the-art, rocket-science watch. “Lecture completed?”
“I’ve got a lot more to say.”
He was starting to look as angry as she felt.
“Frankly,” he said, “it’s people like you—simple, naive newcomers—who make my job harder.”
To emphasize his next point, he reached out, grasped one side of her neck. She didn’t panic. Instead, she forced herself to watch him with what she hoped was removed detachment, daring him to go further.
And he did.
His thumb threatened the tender center of her throat, but she stood her ground, actually smiling in his face.
He smiled, too, and not very nicely.
Her ring shifted, brushing against Sargent’s hand.
“You know what vamps do,” he said softly. “They go for your pretty little necklace holder here. They feed on you, sometimes out of hunger, sometimes out of boredom. Depends where you run into them, what their culture is, what their needs are. But there’s always one constant.”
He pressed against her windpipe, not enough to hurt her, but enough to stress his meaning. She’d be damned if she allowed herself to start choking.
Sargent continued. “Uh-huh, one constant, Miss Bleeding Heart. You never give vamps a chance.”
By now, adrenaline was singing through her body, the blood in her neck veins kicking under the pressure of his grip. Her breathing quickened, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of hearing her voice falter.
“The vampires don’t need to be killed in order to neutralize them.” There. Strong as steel. Bastard. “Beatrix and I know they can be turned.”
“Holy—”
His reaction allowed her enough time to windmill her arm over the one he was using to captivate her throat.
Zinging that arm up, then downward, she caught him in the soft inside of his elbow with a chopping motion, breaking his hold. With her other hand, she planked his arm away. In the next instant, she backed off, taking up a defensive stance, punch ready.
Sargent casually peered at the resulting red mark on his arm. “I suppose I deserved that.”
“Don’t pull it again.” She was still on guard.
“Relax. I’m done.” He held up his hands, palms outward. “Damn, you’re jumpy.”
“‘Jumpy’ doesn’t cover it. Touch me again and you’ll sing like Frankie Valli in ‘Walk Like a Man.’”
He laughed. Actually laughed. “All right. Just tell me why you’re so sure you can save our fanged friends. Why would you even want to save them?”
Although she kept her distance, she lowered her fists. “If you take a step, I’m going to practice my science experiments on you.”
“I believe it. And I’m actually sort of curious about what you have up your lab coat.”
“Heh. My sides are splitting with laughter.”
“Come on, Howard. Coddle me a little. Spill.”
How much could she tell him without seeming as if she was on a one-way trip to failure? She’d been told she was crazy enough times to make her wary of explaining.
She paused, then said,
“Dr. Beatrix Grasu—who is, by the way, a professor at the University of Bucharest and not my great-aunt—”
“Then why do you—?”
Camille held up a hand. She wasn’t about to detail her emotional attachments. Not to someone who wouldn’t comprehend the term.
“As I was saying, Dr. Grasu was able to get one of the strigoiaca on an autopsy table.”
“So I heard. Question. How does the university feel about her slicing up vampires? Doesn’t that cause some unrest?”
“Dr. Grasu now works in the lab I fund. And we’ve learned enough about the strigoiaca that we can contain them…and recapture their prey.”
Griff’s voice floated into her head, soothed her as it always did in her most hopeless moments.
I love you, Lady Tex.
“So,” she said, “what’s your price? How much money will it take to get you out of here?”
Sargent’s lips drew into a single line of determination. Still locking gazes with her, he rubbed his cheek against a shoulder—the side with the neck scar.
“There’s not enough currency in the world to send me away,” he said. “Ever.”
Something fisted in her gut, squeezing, pulling her inside out.
“There’s something else I’ve been wondering….” he said.
Camille went into protective mode once again. He sounded way too human this time. He wanted something. Information. The upper hand. Whatever it was, he wasn’t going to get it.
He must’ve taken her silence as a go-ahead. “Flora said you were an anthropology student who asked way too many questions last year in their village. That for almost a year, you’ve been hiring mercenary after mercenary to track those female vampires that attacked Juni. She said your friend is missing—”
“Not your business.”
“Ah, short. To the point. You know, I don’t care much about your personal details, even though I do feel sorry for you, what with your parents dying like they did….”
Camille cut him off with a sharp look that hid her anguish. She’d been practicing the expression—the avoidance of the reminder—for years.
Sargent cleared his throat.
“I need particulars about the vamps. Having an eyewitness account could only help me, and according to Flora, you saw them take your…friend.”