by Lori Devoti
o0o
Lindsey walked down the street, her destination now clear in her mind—a coffee shop she’d seen while walking with Karin. She wasn’t sure why this place drew her, but she knew that it did, knew she would find her answers there.
The shop was one of those perpetually dark places with plants crowded in the front windows, gobbling up all the light, and walls painted caffe latte brown. The clientele ranged from a man with dreads and an easel to a woman sporting a bun and a brief case.
Lindsey waited in line patiently, her gaze wandering over her surroundings. There were two people behind the counter, one a girl of maybe twenty-two and the other a woman of probably forty. The forty-year-old arched a brow as Lindsey approached, then, with a sigh, asked for her order.
“I…” Lindsey looked around, suddenly unsure what she was going to say. While on the street, she’d been certain if she came here, her cousin would appear, but there were no familiar faces at the tables nearby.
The woman cleared her throat.
Lindsey shook her head to clear her thoughts and continued. “I was looking for a woman. Her name is Karin. I was wondering if she was here, or if someone knew how to get in touch with her.”
The woman dropped her smile and arched her brow higher. “Karin? There some reason we should know her?”
“I…” Was there? Lindsey hesitated. Why had she thought to come here?
“’Cause you know, we just know everyone in the Central West End.” The woman laughed and glanced at her coworker. The younger girl returned her laugh with an unsure smile.
A frown pulled at Lindsey’s brows. She was tired and maybe a bit foggy after her workout and interrupted nap, but she was still sure she was supposed to be here. “We were on the street.” Lindsey pointed toward one of the plant-filled windows. “Something happened.”
“Something?”
“Yes…” What? What had happened? There was the car and someone grabbing Lindsey, and then her apparent loss of consciousness, but none of that had any connection to this shop. Still, Lindsey was here and had to try. “There was a car. It drove up on the sidewalk and almost hit some children. Did you hear about that?”
“Can’t say that I did.” The woman looked around Lindsey at the person standing behind her in line, then at the girl working with her.
The girl, now adding foam to a customer’s latte, snorted.
Stymied, Lindsey stared at the pair.
Her gaze back on Lindsey, the woman asked. “Did you want to order? We’re getting a line.” The older woman pointed to the three people standing behind Lindsey.
Lindsey took an unsteady step backward, then thought better of it. She was here; she needed to do something. She moved forward again, cutting off a man in bike shorts and a helmet, and pulled a scrap of paper from her purse. After scribbling her cell number onto it, she held it toward the woman. “If someone mentions Karin or the car incident, can you give them this?” As an afterthought, she added her name to the slip and dropped it on the counter.
“If it makes you happy, you can leave it, but I’m telling you—”
Lindsey didn’t hear the rest of the woman’s response. Her attention was focused on the one clear spot of day shining through the front window and the man who had just passed by—Rodrigue.
If Karin wasn’t here, he might know why. He might be why.
Her head pounded. She placed two fingers against her temple and willed the pain away. It didn’t disappear, but it did subside, enough that she that she was able to focus on what she had to do next—follow Rodrigue.
Chapter Twelve
Marie Jean
1853
St. Louis
Henry’s son turned eighteen today, and Marie Jean had quite the party planned for him. At eighteen, he was a man. Time to leave childish things and childish protections behind.
Time to face his destiny—to face what his father was and his own fate.
Henry had promised her today would be the day. It was a little past midnight. They were to meet at the boy, Harry’s, home.
He had moved out two years prior. Marie Jean had fought with Henry then, warned him the boy was already suspicious of his own strengths and his father’s eccentricities. But Henry wouldn’t budge—wouldn’t kill an innocent, the weakling.
Lifting her skirts, Marie Jean picked her way along the street. Henry’s son had a taste for the unsavory. While not exactly located in the slums, his home was far from the luxurious neighborhoods she frequented. She curled her nose at a drunk passed out in the street and pulled her skirts close against her body to keep the expensive material from grazing against him. As she inched past, she heard yells—Henry’s voice stretched out into a whine.
“I tell you the truth. Do not make me show you. Do not make your last memory of me that.”
He was pleading. With who? Marie Jean had only one guess, and she did not like where it took her. Cursing her fledgling’s stupidity and weakness, she gathered her skirts into a rumpled ball and broke into a run.
The yells continued.
“I don’t believe you. I won’t believe you,” Harry, the whelp, yelled back.
Something crashed into a wall. Marie Jean smelled kerosene and burning wood.
Henry, you fool, what have you done?
She raced up the front steps and placed her hand on the doorknob. The metal was hot, searing. A hiss left her lips as she jerked back her hand. Too late. The heated knob had burned its design into her skin, left a throbbing, red imprint of the circular Greek key design on her palm.
Marred! She was marred.
She cursed and leapt off the porch, back into the street where she stared upward, trying to calculate from where the yells came and how she could get inside the building to save her fledgling from his own weak human conscience.
“She’ll be out there now. Look, for I cannot. I love her. I know it is wrong. I know what she made me into is twisted, but I love her still.”
A light moved to one of the top windows.
Marie Jean could feel the whelp staring at her. She tried to smooth her features, to hide the demon that had, fed by frustration, risen inside her, but it was a lost cause. She was too far gone. She opened her mouth and hissed.
The window rose higher, and the whelp leaned out. “Vampire,” he murmured, his eyes round with discovery.
Let him stare at her. Let him be in awe. He should be.
“So you believe me now?” Henry appeared in profile. His hair was wild and his shirt a mess. Far from the carefully groomed merchant she had first lured to her bed.
“Henry! Look at me!” she demanded.
“Please,” Henry begged, his focus on his son. “I cannot resist her any longer. Her demands… I am weak… Don’t make me become the monster she would make me.” He fell to his knees.
In front of his son! A vampire lowering himself in front of a dhamphir. Disgusted and filled with fear at what she was about to lose, Marie Jean searched for a way up the porch and into the room where they stood. If she could touch Henry, remind him of his dedication, he would do as she said—forget his son, kill him.
“Please…” Henry again.
Then she saw it—the flash of a dagger in the dhamphir’s hand. He slashed downward. The metal plunged into Henry’s chest. The vampire gasped and grabbed at the blade, but he didn’t try to pull it out. He lowered his head, and he sobbed. His son, his murderer, stepped back, his hands at his side.
Marie Jean cursed, French swear words flowing from her like blood from Henry’s chest. There was no saving Henry now. She would have to replace him—and she would. She was done taking things slow and playing it safe. One night, one weakness, and it was all for naught.
Numbers were the answer, and she would get them. And she would start tonight.
The drunk she had stepped around earlier had risen to his feet. Drawn like a moth to the now flaming lower level of the house, he stumbled toward her. She grabbed him by the front of his filthy shirt and pulled him
closer.
The dhamphir was still watching. Let him. Let him get so lost in the horror of what he had done and what she was about to do that he was eaten alive by the flames consuming his home.
Eyes on the window where Henry lay dying, she plunged her fangs into the wastrel’s throat and drank her fill.
Glass shattered overhead, and the dhamphir crawled out onto the roof. His father’s body was tucked under his arm, his clothes and the dhamphir’s both saturated with thick, dark vampire blood.
“Monster,” he yelled.
Monster. She smiled. She had known a monster. She had bedded a monster. This boy had no inkling of the horror that lived inside the most honorable of exteriors.
The drunk was dead and drained. Waste of humanity that he was, he was barely worth that. Certainly not worthy of being the first new member of her brood.
She picked him up and, simply to show the ignorant boy how little he knew, cast the body into the flames as she might have tossed an extra bit of kindling into the hearth. No effort. None at all.
Then she looked up and smiled again. “When you say that word, cherie, look into the mirror. I am no more or less of a monster than you—or many a man who walks these streets with pride.” She spat onto the sidewalk, then pulled a kerchief from her belt and dabbed at her mouth.
With another smile, she sashayed away. Let the boy have his moment of grief. He had, after all, taught her a much needed lesson.
Her time of servitude was over. It was time to build her brood in earnest.
o0o
Harry was sitting in his office when Emilie arrived. Today she was dressed to match the bar in a tight-fitting cigarette skirt and a stiff cotton shirt buttoned to her throat.
She sashayed into the room and slid onto a chair. “I called.”
“And?”
She twisted her lips to the side. “He won’t help you.”
Harry tapped one finger against his desktop. “Why would he think he was helping me?”
She laughed. “Montclair can be an ass, but he is no fool.”
“But he knows where she is?” For a century, Harry had been trying to find Marie Jean’s hiding place.
Emilie pulled a mirror from her purse and, staring at her reflection, ran a finger along her lower lip. She snapped the mirror closed.
“No.”
“You are sure?”
She dropped the mirror back into her bag and settled back into her seat. “Yes. If he did, I suspect he would have told you long ago.
“Montclair”—she pursed her lips—“is no fan of Marie Jean.”
Harry had long suspected that Rodrigue’s lieutenant did not share the prince’s blind spot where Marie Jean was concerned. He smiled. There was hope.
“In fact, you owe him a bottle of”—she waved her hand—“something. He is the reason your little prize is alive. Rodrigue, it seems, learned of her mother’s existence when Lindsey was a child. He sent Montclair to eliminate the risk.”
The risk of Marie Jean draining the woman herself and the female vampire strengthening her powers.
But Rodrigue could have chosen a much more direct plan, one that would have saved Lindsey from losing her mother and growing up alone. He could have killed Marie Jean.
“Rodrigue, however, didn’t know of the child. When Montclair discovered her, he apparently found some bit of humanity I, for one, didn’t realize he harbored.”
Looking less than impressed with this development, Emilie twisted one side of her mouth upward.
Harry’s fingers relaxed. Montclair had gone against Rodrigue’s wishes before. There was no reason to think he might not again.
“Call him back.”
She tilted her head. “I can, but I doubt there will be reason.”
Sensing another of Emilie’s games, Harry stilled. “Why is that?”
She fluttered her eyes. “He said it was too late. Rodrigue knows of the girl now. Besides, he and Rodrigue were on their way out.”
“Out?”
“Yes.” She reopened her compact and ran her fingertip over her lashes, curling them upward. After a moment, she looked up. “I believe they were headed to the Central West End.”
o0o
Climbing the stairs to Lindsey’s apartment, Harry told himself Emilie was playing with him. Even the prince wasn’t powerful enough to push his way past the wards Harry had in place, not without the talisman, and Brett had it—Harry had checked before leaving the bar.
And Lindsey couldn’t have been lured outside by a phone call or a rock thrown at her window, not drugged as she had been.
She had to still be inside safely asleep. He clung to the thought.
He knocked on the door, repeating the assurances in his mind. There was no answer, but, he reminded himself, he hadn’t expected there to be. He slipped the key from his pocket and into the lock.
Inside, the balcony doors were closed and the lights were off. He breathed in, expecting the tension that he’d been holding in his chest to dissipate.
It didn’t. He sensed no life in the space, no heartbeat or breathing.
He strode into the bedroom. The bed was empty; the bedroom and bathroom were too.
Lindsey was gone.
o0o
Rodrigue moved down the street like a sailboat skimming across a still lake. There was no effort to his movements and no notice of any of the people coming and going around him. Surrounded by the chaos of happy-hour clamor, he was the picture of complete calm.
Lindsey, on the other hand, was a mess. Her heart was beating as if it might fly from her chest, and sweat ran down her face and neck. The tickling in her brain was so strong now, she thought her head might explode.
But, with nothing else to do and no ability to focus on anything new, she followed Rodrigue as best she could while trying desperately to stay hidden from his view.
Twenty feet past the coffee shop, he paused; then slowly, he turned. Lindsey took a step back, behind a six-foot-tall potted plant. Rodrigue’s eyes closed, and his nose lifted in the air, like a dog sniffing the breeze. Then, just as slowly, his eyes opened, and his gaze locked onto Lindsey’s plant.
Fear shot through her like an icicle through the heart. There was no reason to think Rodrigue could see her hidden behind the plant and less reason to believe even if he could that she was in any danger here, surrounded as she was by people during one of the Central West End’s busiest times of day.
But she knew with zero doubt that he had, and she was.
She spun, looking for some quick escape. Behind her, two men closed in. They were young and blond and looked nothing like the dark and exotic Rodrigue in appearance or manner, but again instincts told her they were connected.
Her obvious exit cut off, she searched for another. To her right were stairs. They were wooden and rickety and obviously not meant for general traffic, but they were her only choice. All of her earlier fatigue shoved aside by a surge of adrenaline, she bolted up them.
The two blonds followed, not quickly but with purpose.
As she climbed, her panic doubled. The stairs didn’t, as she had hoped, lead to a deck or walkway where she might escape inside the building and find enough safety to call Harry or the police. Instead they led to a flat, tarred roof decorated with more potted plants, lawn chairs, and one much-used, dented barbecue grill.
She ran to the edge. Two stories down there was nothing but an asphalt alley or the hard surface of the main street she’d just left.
A blond head appeared at the top of the stairwell. Only one of the men—the other had stayed below.
Because this one didn’t need him, she realized. Because this one could kill her on his own.
Still moving slowly, taking his time, he tilted his head to study her.
Staring back at him, Lindsey gasped. He was the man, the monster, from her nightmare. He had killed her mother. The realization came to her out of nowhere, but she knew immediately it was true. Her mother was the woman in the visions, and this
man had killed her.
“You should have stayed hidden,” he said. “I risked a lot to save you once. I can’t do it again.”
Save her? From what? She edged backward and sensed, more than felt, open space behind her.
She wanted to ask, but she wanted the man to stop moving more, wanted him to back up and disappear back down those stairs, take his put-out expression and disturbing memories and go away forever. She waited, expecting him to pull out a knife or a gun, some kind of weapon to make her death quick.
Instead, he opened his mouth and hissed.
Shock jolted through Lindsey. She reached for the cross Harry had given her and insisted that she wear.
Fangs. The man had fangs like a snake…or a vampire. And somehow Lindsey didn’t think these were fake.
But the thought was insane. Vampires weren’t real. Vampires were from movies and nightmares.
Nightmares. Like her own. The blood. There had been so much. And the man, the way his face had twisted into that of a monster…
Her attention jerked back to him, and she edged her feet backward a bit farther, as far as she dared.
“Nowhere to go, blood of Marie Jean. Humans can’t jump, not that far and survive.” He paused his forward motion. “In fact, go ahead and jump. The blood of innocents has no appeal to me.”
“But you said I’d die.” She stuttered the words.
“Yes.”
And that was it. He didn’t move, but his posture said it all. She could jump and fall to her death on the pavement below, or she could wait for him to approach her and die—like her mother had died.
Blood.
Her blood consumed by this man—this vampire.
She knew now how her mother had died. Knew now that the nightmares were real.
Spittle rose in her throat. She turned her head and gagged.
She felt the vampire moving toward her. Unable to stop herself, she looked back at him.
His human face was gone, twisted into the monster face she remembered, a sick simile of the original. His lips were parted, and fangs grazed his lower lip.
“Jump,” he urged.
She rolled and scrambled to the side. Then, eyes closed, she threw herself over the edge.