by Margaret Carter, Crystal Green, Erica Orloff, Patricia Rosemor
As the vamp grabbed Howard by the jacket and spun her around so the huntress was against the tree now, Sarge sheathed the machete and went for a longer-range weapon.
The crossbow.
He searched the ground, found it.
The other women were helpless, inexperienced, adrenalized, clearly afraid to take a shot with their pistols in case they hit Howard. One of the braver ones, a tall, braided teen, ran at the vamp, weapon extended.
In the instant it took Sarge to lift the weapon to his shoulder, she’d already made his shot unsafe. Dammit.
The vamp merely slapped the peasant away. The woman hit the nearest tree with a sick crunch.
Two peasants sprinted to their friend’s aid while the other two backed off, staring, their frozen headset lights giving Sarge a safer chance at hitting his target.
That’s when Howard took an elbow and slammed it into the vamp’s jaw, not that it did much good. But it bought some time. Enough for her to shove one of those oval things from her second belt over the vamp’s mouth. The monster clawed the air, furious, as she latched on to Howard and lifted her into the air, above her face.
Clear, thought Sarge. He pulled the trigger.
At the last second, the vamp angled her body, causing the arrow to zip right past her, into the tree trunk.
Damn. Sarge hadn’t missed since his Shooting House training days. Shame boiled through his veins as he reloaded.
“No!” yelled Howard. “She doesn’t have a weapon now.”
He marveled that she still wanted the thing alive.
Her necklace dangled over the vamp’s face, and the monster stopped. Tilted her head. Observed the ring.
Sniffed it.
The moon broke through the trees, revealing a look of naked heartbreak on Howard’s face. Then the light rolled over, welcoming the near darkness back.
Without warning, the vamp hurled Howard to the side. She skidded along the dirt, crashed into the two women who hadn’t run to the aid of their other friend. They quickly recovered their balance and yanked their boss to a stand.
The vamp slowly turned toward Sargent.
Drawing on all his calm and training, Sarge fired.
With ease, the vamp reached up. Caught the arrow in midair. Found it useless, then dropped it.
Okay. Not his day for projectiles.
He drew his machete again, positioning for the kill.
With her hungry eyes burned onto him, the beast ripped at the device on her mouth, digging the skin around her lips to a pulp.
Now this was the definition of pissed.
She shook her head, again trying to remove the oval restraint. Unsuccessful, she stopped, threw back her head in a silent scream.
Then she exploded toward him, eyes fiery infernos.
But he was waiting.
At least, he would’ve been if the dart hadn’t pierced the side of his neck, knocking him to his knees with the power of whatever Howard had dabbed on the tip.
As a flurry of more darts caught the vamp in midattack, she slumped to the ground, jerked, then stilled.
All the women kept their stances, pistols aimed. Emptied.
He remembered how, yesterday, Camille Howard had lined up the female peasants, tested them with firearms to see who could shoot the apples from a grove of nearby trees. Remembered how Dr. Grasu had told him that many of these women had been raised to use pistols because of the revolutionary turmoil in Romania over a decade ago.
Remembered how Howard had become inexplicably tolerant of his presence today.
I’ve been used as goddamned bait, he thought.
Watch out, Ashe had told him. And Sarge hadn’t. He’d been too careless, just like the last time a woman had screwed him over.
As he fought dizziness, Howard lowered her dart pistol, strolled toward him.
Damn her. Didn’t she understand what she was doing?
With the last of his strength, he tightened his grip on the machete, crawled to the vamp. Raised the blade.
One swift strike of his weapon decapitated what was once a girl named Ecaterina.
Worry about removing her heart later, he thought, crumpling to the forest floor, the sweet stench of dirt lulling him to reluctant rest.
But before the void claimed him, he focused on her. The latest woman to betray him.
Surrounded by a fuzzy halo, growing mistier by the second, she bent to a knee. Watched as he grew weaker. “All I wanted to do was stop you,” she said, voice soft, gaze filled with something close to regret. Then she leaned in closer. “But congratulations anyway. One vamp down, four to go, right?”
“Damned straight,” he whispered. He didn’t have the energy for much conviction.
“Wrong.” She stood, all hints of remorse gone, a livid figure against the backdrop of night. “When we find the tribe, they’re not going to just go after you men—they’re going to want to replace the female they’ve lost, just as Ecaterina was the replacement for the one killed in Juni.”
Waves of dizziness washed over him. He wanted to tell her that killing the vamp—all vamps eventually—was the right thing to do. But he couldn’t move his lips anymore.
“Well done, stud,” she said. “You’ve just made every woman on this mission a target.”
Her image was swallowed by a black hole where nothing existed anymore.
Where he didn’t have to think about how a woman with a baby ring around her neck could offer him up for sacrifice.
Chapter 4
London, approximately one year ago
Three months before the strigoiaca came to Juni
Camille’s chest burned as she ran past the Georgian town houses on Cartwright Gardens, dizzy from fleeing the man at the Euston Station tube stop.
He’d been aiming at her.
Aiming a camera. She’d blinked in the sudden flash. Captured. Knowing, once again, they’d found her.
So she’d fled. Hidden herself away.
She ran and ran and…yes. There it was, straight ahead, across from the quaint neighborhood gardens.
Safety. Refuge from the memories of that day.
She darted up the steps to the redbrick building, crashing against the mahogany door, pounding on it.
“Griff?” she yelled.
Then she glanced in back of her, expecting to see the photographer dogging her heels.
It didn’t take but a few minutes for Griff to throw open the door, his eyebrows drawn together in confusion.
“Not to be rude, but…” She brushed past him, slammed the door, moved to a lace-curtained window where she could peek at the street.
All she saw was the hint of evening fog. Twilight was a shade away, lending the window glass a spring-in-England chill as she brushed her knuckles against it.
“Usually,” Griff said from behind her, “after I’m dating a girl for two weeks, she’s bolting out of my flat instead of into it.”
Camille’s breathing was just now smoothing out, making her responding laugh one big pant. She held a hand over her heart and reached behind her with the other, seeking him. Still, she watched the street.
He slid his fingers over hers, warming them, his body drawing closer as he also looked out the window. The scent of him overwhelmed Camille—Ivory soap and musk. He wrapped his other arm around her waist and nuzzled aside her hair. Then he kissed the side of her neck. The soft pressure of his lips measured the tempo of her fluttering pulse.
“Hey,” he said, speaking into her skin.
“Hey.” She smiled at the little greeting pattern they’d already fallen into.
Hey. I love seeing you again.
It was so much easier to “hey” than to tell him about her deepest secrets, the paparazzi, her parents. Still too early to scare him off with her horror stories. She was too greedy for these addictive, invading emotions, the mindless yearning to be with him during the day when she was studying and he was at home designing his Web sites. The giddy insecurity of never having felt this crazy about a m
an before.
Total infatuation.
With a last look out the window, she turned around, skimmed her hands over his shoulders and slipped her fingers into all that dark, thick hair. At the same time, she guided him away from the window.
He seemed to gauge her for a second, taking in the disheveled slant of her long coat, the slight layer of sweat on her forehead. “What made you run?”
“I wanted to see you, is all.” Change the subject.
She leaned over, rubbed her mouth over his.
Persuaded, he smoothed his hands over her hair. Her face. Then he officially welcomed her with a kiss, sending quiet electric shocks through her body as he pulled her into the parlor. There, sensuous, melancholy music ebbed, flowed, echoing their caresses.
She came up for breath, lazily focusing on the TV.
White silk bedsheets. A brooding, tuxedoed man leaning over a reclining woman, preparing to bite her neck.
Griff’s mouth brushed against Camille’s jugular vein, and she startled back to the reality of him.
“Any luck at the university library?” he asked.
“No good research today.” Teasing, she stretched against the length of him. He responded, hardening against her lower stomach.
“Griff?” she asked hopefully.
An ache, a slow twisting between her legs, getting her ready. Willing.
“Not that I’m easy, but I’m not a blushing virgin, either. When…?”
“Tex, I’m not in a rush.”
She shifted against him, feeling evidence to the contrary. Whenever there’d been a man in her life, she’d wasted no time. Her background—her parents, the paparazzi—normally sped things along because the breakup always came too soon.
Griff stroked his thumbs over her temples. “I’m not sure that what I’d like to say fits into the ‘less-than-one-month’ rules. But…” He took a deep breath, exhaled.
“Is this one of those bad conversations?”
He laughed, coasted his palms from her head down to her shoulders, underneath her coat and to her hips. “I suppose this might be a good time to let on that I’m not all that brilliant at having a girlfriend.”
Oh. Here it came.
“Tex, what I’m trying to say is that…before…my mates and I weren’t all that serious about, um, women.”
Was he blushing?
“So I’m some kind of record for you?” she asked.
“You could say that. In all truth, you seemed like a bit of a challenge in the gallery.”
Uh-oh.
“But then…” He trailed off.
This was suddenly a new Griff. A guy who’d lost bluster and was revealing a new side of himself. Camille was touched by his guarded vulnerability.
“I know this is difficult,” she said, trying to make light of the situation so it’d be easier for him. But guilt was stabbing her, because she wasn’t brave enough to expose anything major to him yet.
He assumed a sheepish grin. “I’m trying to say that you’re not like the others. There was that soulful look on your face while you inspected Sunflowers. Remember?”
Green leaves, red slashes on skin. Wilted stems, lifeless bodies.
“I remember,” she whispered.
“That day, I wanted to take you in, make you feel better. I can’t say that’s ever happened before.”
A bright yellow warmth spread through her, burning away some of the deeply seated frustration.
“I should tell you something, too,” she said.
Don’t forget, she thought. Sunflowers can also cut. They can also make you bleed.
Why was she going to tell him this? Because he’d opened up to her?
“Tell me anything.” One of his fingers crept under her sweater to loop into the rim of her jeans. Fingertips brushed her waist, warm and wicked.
The intimacy jolted her system, and she hesitated.
Do it.
“That first day we met,” she said, “we let out just enough of ourselves to retain some distance, didn’t we? And you told me more as the days went on.”
A shadow passed over his dark eyes. When Griff was young, his family had been poor. So poor that, when he was ten, his parents had sent him, a third child and extra mouth to feed, from Manchester to London to live with relatives who wanted to open a fish-and-chips shop. They didn’t have children of their own, and Griff would work for them, free, in exchange for a new family.
“You never saw your parents again,” she said. “Just like me. But for different reasons.”
Just say it.
She exhaled. “There’s this picture of me when I was fourteen. I’d been in the papers before, because of society functions I attended with my parents. But this photo was different. I was staring at the camera and there’s blood all over my hands, my face…”
Tenderly, Griff took off her coat and led her to sit on his overstuffed couch. He stroked her hair while she swallowed, recovered.
Someone on the TV screamed. When Camille turned to see who it was, she found a woman bending over the victim’s dead body, slashes of red against white silk sheets. The actress wailed again, withering from pure agony.
Though Camille had spent all her life avoiding such pain, she couldn’t tear her eyes away this time.
“I’m the one who found my parents. I’d just come home from winning first place at the science fair.” She smiled, recalling Mom and Dad’s pride in all the stupid inventions she’d produce daily.
Then the smile disappeared. “I kept trying to wake them up, but…There was blood splattered all over the walls. Some paparazzi managed to sneak into our penthouse while the cops secured the crime scene. And that’s when they got me.”
On the TV, the woman stood, strolled to a side table laden with food, picked up a long carving knife.
Camille continued softly. “Right away, Uncle Philip took over my parents’ hotels and media outlets. I was shuffled off to a nanny who raised me like I was her own kid, thank God for her. She remarried and took me with her to Houston. My uncle was relieved, to say the least.”
It was so much easier focusing on the TV, where the woman climbed into a carriage. It traveled away from her mansion, swallowed by mist and darkness.
“All that time,” Camille added, “I kept asking Uncle Phillip when they were going to make an arrest. When would I get to testify and see the bastard put away?”
“Did they catch him?”
The TV woman came to a crypt, opened the door. Her shadow pooled over a gaping coffin.
Camille’s mouth went dry. “No, they didn’t. There were stories about how one of our business competitors hired a street guy to take care of my parents. The detectives on the case thought they had the guilty party—Harry Boston, a competitor—but his money got him off the hook. I believe to this day Boston is the one, because a few months after the murders, my uncle sold our radio stations to the guy, just like he’d been waiting to pounce. He’d been after the properties for years. Uncle Phillip just shook his head and said, ‘There’s nothing I can do, Camille. No concrete evidence. Nothing.’ So I hired an army of PIs and…”
“Still nothing. Tex…”
“I wish I had the strength to go after the killer myself.”
Hands fisting, she couldn’t look at Griff, couldn’t stop watching the woman on TV.
The slayer raised her arms over her head in preparation, screamed in fury, then stabbed the vampire.
But the thing came back to life.
Griff cupped her jaw, angling her back to face him. With wonder, she saw that he was in anguish for her.
Overcome, she held his knuckles to her cheek, trying to make him feel better now.
“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?” she whispered. “The impotence at not being able to do anything? Don’t you feel just a little of it with your parents? Don’t you want them to pay for giving you up?”
His eyes widened at the barely restrained rage in her voice. “I’ve accepted it. Certainly, I fee
l the need to hang on to everything I’ve earned—my auto, my business—because I’m afraid it’ll disappear, but…”
“But you never dream of justice?”
He looked surprised.
“Don’t worry.” Camille tried to laugh, but it was a wasted effort. “All my therapists tell me to play out my revenge scenarios on punching bags. And they seem to think I seek logic and order in all my books, too.”
“I can’t say I blame you.”
“You can’t? You don’t think I’m going to explode from repressed fury one day?”
“I would hope not. At least, not in the parlor. I’m rather fond of my hard-earned, yet meager, furnishings.”
“Cheeky.” She nestled against his chest, shivered as his arms enveloped her.
It was only now, at the end of her confession, that she realized her heart was racing.
“If you decide to hang around with me,” she said, “you’ll have to get used to the media attention. They dog me when they need some lurid copy.”
“I like a proper fight now and again.”
She hesitated, told him about today’s photographer, then added, “I usually leave when they find me.”
“Then I suppose it’s time for a vacation.” He played with a strand of her hair. “Where to? The Algarve coast in Portugal? Or maybe Monte Carlo, since I have a rich girlfriend who can afford such trips.”
“Sounds good, but wherever we go, I’ve got to get started on my dissertation.”
When her attention drifted back to the vampire movie, he noticed.
“I can’t work without the telly noise,” he said. “Curse of the Blood Count. A classic. Say, perhaps we could go to some Transylvanian castle. Aren’t there some bloodsucker legends you could research?”
From the tone of his voice, she knew he was kidding. They’d only been dating two weeks, after all. Two intense, female-version-of-blue-balls weeks.
But he’d gotten her mind to spinning.
“From a purely sociological standpoint, that would be fascinating,” she said, watching as the fanged one was fully resurrected by a drink of the actress’s fake blood. “How have vampire legends shaped the lives of the most superstitious people in Romania? Peasants, villagers…”