He fumbled the chord as he realized he was listening to Patrick listening to him play.
He snatched his hands away from the keyboard as Patrick and the others walked into the room.
“Don’t stop playing because of us,” Patrick said.
Dominic shook his head and stood up. He dropped the lid closed, not quite letting it slam.
There was a stranger among them, a woman, who must’ve been the one who had confused Patrick. Dominic studied her curiously. She was almost his height, with hair as black as his and a self-possessed air that was intriguing. Perhaps that was why Patrick had been confused. Most people who first met Patrick tended to become self-conscious because of his fame. However, this woman was patently not moved. She wasn’t even looking at him.
With a start Dominic realized that she was studying him, instead.
Her eyes narrowed. “How old is the knife wound?” she asked.
Dominic touched the scar on his cheek that most people never even noticed under the three day growth he maintained. “I got it about four years ago, in a bar in Argentina. I pissed off the wrong people. I did that a lot back then.”
“Death wish?” She seemed amused. “Argentina’s wrong people are heavy weights.”
“It might have been,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” He rarely thought of the first years after the diving accident in any way at all. It was a black time and there were parts of those years he couldn’t even remember, including how he got to Argentina in the first place.
“If you emerged with just a scar on your cheek, then you know how to fight. Congratulations on coming out of it alive.” Her eyes were alive with interest. He knew she would have asked him more if they had not been surrounded by people. Instead, her gaze flicked toward Nial. “This is Dominic, I’m guessing.”
Dominic grinned at her. “I am Dominic. You came to see me?”
“Blythe is our new military expert,” Patrick said flatly.
She rolled her eyes. “Hardly that. I do know little bit about the Others.”
Dominic pointed at her. “You write that blog, the one about survival.”
“The blog has become much more popular since the Others arrived.”
“They used to talk about it in Acapulco, when I was there. Pros and cons. Mostly pros. They liked you.”
Blythe looked pleased.
“Let’s all sit down,” Nial suggested. “Blythe says she has an idea that is right up your alley Dominic.”
Dominic settled himself on the sofa opposite her and waited for her to speak. The others all sat around them. Patrick sat next to him.
Blythe lean forward over the coffee table. “May I speak frankly?”
Dominic deliberately held himself back from listening to more than her words. She was intriguing and this was a startling opening to the conversation. He decided he would rather be surprised than dig into her mind and find out for himself what she was thinking. “Frank is good,” he told her.
“Nial has explained to me that you are deaf and you hear only because you can read minds.” She gave a self-conscious laugh. “I would’ve said it was the stuff of fantasy, but with the arrival of the Others and the revelation of the vampires, we’re all living in fantasy times these days. So a mind-reading deaf man really doesn’t seem all that extraordinary, next to those things.”
“Has no one introduced you to Winter yet?” Dominic asked.
Blythe’s gaze flickered toward Nial uncertainly.
“Winter is a Curandero,” Nial explained.
“She can heal people with her touch,” Sebastian said, “and that is only the beginning of what she can do. She’s over at the house, cleaning up, so I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for another day to meet her.”
Blythe licked her lips as she absorbed that information. Then she gave a small nod. Her gaze came back to Dominic. “Teaching humans how to defend themselves against the Summanus is only a start. So far the Elah have only been seen outside the cities and no casualties have been reported, so it’s possible they may be a neutralized enemy, if they are an enemy at all. That is still to be established. The Ĉiela are too few in number to be seriously considered a threat and they have not attacked humans yet, either. I’ve been tracking sightings and there haven’t been any Elah or Ĉiela seen for several days. The Summanus, though….”
She didn’t have to finish the sentence. Everyone in the room was more than familiar with the human toll taken by the Summanus.
“Teaching humans to defend themselves against the Summanus is critical,” Dominic argued.
“Yet still only the beginning. You know that saying about teaching people to fish?”
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and he feeds himself for life,” Patrick said softly, pulling the quote up from his encyclopedic memory.
Dominic looked at Blythe politely, waiting.
“We can keep fighting the Summanus as they invade our cities,” she said. “We can pick them off one by one. On the other hand, if every single human became a fighting machine and killed a Summani every day, we would still be outnumbered. I have done some number crunching that says the Summanus number in the millions. They will overwhelm our cities like cockroaches unless we do something more than simply pick them off when we see them.”
Dominic shrugged. “That makes sense, but I don’t see where I come into this.”
“Nial says that you can hear them in your mind, when they are close.”
Before the news had broken that the Summanus had reached Los Angeles, Nial and Sebastian and he had met their first Summani. Possibly, they were one of the first in the city to see them, although if the Summanus had arrived in the numbers that Blythe was speaking of, then they were not the only humans and vampires to see them that night.
They had been returning to the car after one of the endless press conferences and media interviews that Nial and Sebastian had been forced to endure after the revelation. The car had been parked in a low lit public parking area surrounded by trees.
Dominic had felt the murky shadows in his head, like travelling fingers of black mist draping themselves over his thoughts. It was a little bit like not being able to breathe under water. It was the most uncomfortable sensation he had experienced mentally since Winter had woken up that part of his mind.
The novelty of it had slowed his footsteps while he explored the sensation, trying to figure out what was wrong. At that time he had thought the issue was with him, that there was something wrong with his head. Yet he had sensed the very alien intelligence behind the writhing black fingers dragging his spirits downward.
He gripped Sebastian’s arm. “There’s something there. Something not good,” he whispered and nodded toward the trees.
Neither Nial nor Sebastian doubted him. Neither did they hesitate, which might have been fatal. Without speaking, the two immediately picked up their pace to a speed that Dominic could not match. They moved to the car, unlocked it and got in before he was halfway across the parking lot.
Nial backed out and accelerated the car toward Dominic, without sparing the tires. They had squealed in the still night. Sebastian threw open the door and Dominic fell into the back seat even as the car started moving again.
They reached the end of the row and Nial turned the car toward the exit. That was when the Summani stepped out of the trees. Perhaps the Summanus were still learning human ways then, because it did not try to get out of the way of the car. Instead, it stared at them, its arms working as if it was trying to figure out how to fight the car.
“Holy shit!” Sebastian cried.
Dominic was too shocked to say anything aloud. Even then he recognized the creature as the source of the black inky fingers and their depression in his mind.
Nial stamped on the gas and the nose of the Audi dipped as it leapt forward. The corner of the hood clipped the Summani. Its legs were so tall they were taken out from underneath it. The heavy body slammed into the hood, crumpling
it, before sliding off and rolling along the tarmac behind them.
That had been the first Summani Dominic had ever seen. It hadn’t been his last.
He looked at Blythe now. “Yes, I can sense them when they’re near.”
She nodded. “That’s a great early warning system you have there. Have you thought of using it another way?”
“What way?”
“Have you ever wondered where the Summanus go during the day?”
“None of us of had the time to wonder that,” he said. “I’m only thankful they do disappear during the day.” If the Summanus had been able to travel during the day, then life in the cities would have become impossible. They were nocturnal, though, so daily life could carry on during daylight hours with a semblance of normality.
She leaned forward again, clearly coming to the crux of her proposal. “I have been thinking about it,” she said. “Every single nocturnal creature on earth nests during the day. Some species nest individually and some of them nest in groups. They all hole up for the day, usually somewhere safe and enclosed. That’s probably why no one has ever found the Summanus during the day. You could find them. You know when they’re close. You could track them down.”
Dominic stared at her, trying to absorb that she was serious. He realized he was dipping into her mind when he felt the confirmation for himself. She was in deadly earnest.
“And what do I do with them when I’ve tracked them down?” he asked curiously.
She sat back, relaxing. “We kill them all.” Her voice was harsh and unforgiving.
Chapter Eleven
“I’m not a fighter,” Dominic told her.
“He’s not,” Patrick Sauvage agreed quietly.
“We’re all fighters, now,” Blythe argued. She could see the doubt in Dominic’s eyes and needed to drive the wedge in. “Besides, you didn’t get that knife wound while picking daisies. You might not have been born a fighter and you might not have chosen it, yet sometime in your past, you’ve fought for your life. Fought hard. And won. That’s a saleable skill these days.”
Dominic’s black gaze flickered over her face. Was he reading her mind, now? She kept her thoughts focused on her plan, just in case. Nial had explained that whatever Dominic might pick out of her thoughts, he would keep to himself. He had to read her mind if he was to hear what she was saying. She just wasn’t sure she wanted Dominic to know what she was thinking, even if he did keep it to himself.
She had thought it would be odd dealing with a deaf man who could hear. Because he was no different from a person with full hearing, until this moment she had forgotten that he “heard” what she heard herself saying.
“You don’t have to worry,” she added, “I will be with you and anyone else who is good with a sword.”
“Sword?” Sebastian repeated, startled.
She sighed. “This would be much easier if you’d read my blog. The Summanus have the reach of us, but they don’t use weapons. Just their hands and the thorns on their elbows and the back of their knuckles.”
“And they use their jaws,” Nial pointed out dryly.
“Exactly. Bullets just slow them down, even soft-nosed ones. With a sword, though, even the shortest human either matches or can outreach a Summani. If you can get the tip of the sword into their abdomen area, you can rip out their entrails. That kills them dead. Or, if you’re good enough with the sword, you can decapitate them. That works very well, too.”
Everyone was looking at her with eyes wider than normal.
“People email me with their observations,” she said defensively. “I just collate the data.”
“So you haven’t personally decapitated a Summani with an antique Zweihänder, then?” Sebastian asked.
She reminded herself that everyone in the room except Dominic was a vampire and had lived through times when swords were commonplace. Was Sebastian testing her? Or teasing her? She wasn’t sure, so she looked back at him steadily. “I haven’t seen a two-handed German longsword in my entire life. My neighbor is a fencing enthusiast and he borrowed a sword from the local medieval enactment group. He got three Summani that night and no scratches himself.”
“Serves you right, Sebastian,” Nial said, while everyone else smiled. Dominic chuckled.
“Sebastian raises a good point, though,” Patrick Sauvage said quietly.
Blythe still couldn’t quite accept that she was sitting only three feet away from him. He looked nothing like he did in the movies…and yet it was recognizably him. And for some reason, he didn’t like her. He was reserved, rather than being fulsomely charming like most of the movie stars she had met who had stayed at the hotel.
“Before you toss Dominic into the thick of a Summanus nest to fight his way out,” Patrick continued, “it would be nice to know you are forming your theory based on something other than what your neighbor boasted about.”
He really didn’t like her, she realized. Yet it was a fair question.
She reached down and pulled up the leg of her trousers, then pushed down the top of her boot and turned her leg so that the side of the calf muscle and the big, thick and red scar there was visible. Then she turned her hand over so that the inner wrist was showing, where the smaller and older scar still showed pink. “I speak from experience, Mr. Sauvage,” she assured him.
There was another small silence while everyone ogled her scars.
“Summanus toxin,” Nial said. “If you don’t mind, I would like Winter to examine those. She may be able to tell us something about the toxin and a possible antidote.”
That meant she would have to come back to this big house another day. That would be another day of lost pay. Her heart sank a little.
“That would be a problem?” Nial asked, his voice cool. He had spotted her reaction, even though she had tried to hide it. She had heard that vampires had super senses.
“She loses too many shifts already because she’s out fighting the Summanus,” Dominic said. “She has to keep the money coming in.”
Blythe sighed. “I have children,” she explained.
“How many?” Patrick Sauvage asked and his tone was considerably warmer than before.
“A boy, Jake. He’s fifteen. And Simone and Eloise. They’re both sixteen.”
“Twins. How delightful,” Nial said.
“They’re sixteen,” Blythe said flatly. “No one is delightful at sixteen. However, I think my kids are better than any other kids in the world, so we’ll leave it at that.”
“You’re on your own?” Patrick asked.
“Since shortly before Jake was born,” Blythe replied. She gave him a stiff smile. “Not every man is a hero, except in his own mind.”
“And sometimes not even there,” Patrick Sauvage replied. His mouth quirked in a wry grimace.
Startled, Blythe studied him. That was a comment that would need reflection, later. She looked at Dominic. “Would you help me find the Summanus? Find where they sleep? The risk would be minimized because we would do it during daylight hours and you wouldn’t be alone. I’d bring others who have had experience fighting the Summanus.”
“What about your job?” Dominic asked.
She hesitated. That was a good question. She didn’t know how much goodwill she had left at the hotel. She had dropped shifts a lot in the last few weeks and even though all the managers knew what she was doing, it was trying their patience.
“I’ll pick up your wages,” Nial said flatly. “Whatever hours you spend hunting the Summanus will be paid hours.”
“You can’t…” she began.
“He’s richer than Croesus,” Sebastian said lazily. “Take his money. He won’t miss it. In fact, you should hit him up for a danger bonus while he has his wallet open.”
“A good idea,” Nial said. “Let’s say five hundred a shift. Does that sound reasonable to you?”
Blythe stared at him, the words not quite making sense. “Five hundred?” she said blankly.
“Five. Hundred. Dollars. Per sh
ift, as danger money, on top of your normal wages,” Sebastian said slowly, grinning. “Say yes before he changes his mind.”
“She says yes and thank you,” Dominic said.
Blythe let out a shaky breath. Nial had just more than tripled her normal wage. That made her an official mercenary, something she had sworn she would never become.
Dominic was right. In her mind, she had agreed to it already.
* * * * *
Afterward, they laid in silence in the dark, their heartbeats returning to normal. When the silence extended for longer than Patrick thought he could stand, he spoke. “Are you worried about tomorrow?”
Dominic rolled onto his stomach and looked at him. It was dark in the room yet Patrick could see the details of his face clearly.
“I think you are,” Dominic said.
Patrick sighed. “Yes.”
“She says it will be perfectly safe.”
“Except that no one has ever come across a sleeping Summani before. You don’t know if they can still move around, if they can fight back…”
“I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.”
“I don’t trust her,” Patrick said. It took guts to say it aloud, even though he knew that Dominic could pluck the thought from him without the words, if he wanted to. Yet he had to say it, to know that Dominic had heard him. “She is hiding something.”
“Maybe. Maybe she’s just a single mother, with worries she keeps to herself.”
“You know that from what you saw in her mind?”
Dominic shook his head. “I tried not to dig into her mind. I can’t always read everyone as easily as I can read you and I don’t always want to.”
Kids. Patrick worked that one over in his mind one more time. Three kids. Blythe Murray defied all the stereotypes of a single mother. She was controlled, contained. There was no hint of a frazzled and overworked woman juggling too many things at once.
On the other hand, her concern about the money proved that she was just as challenged as the average single parent trying to spread too few dollars over too many expenses.
Then he forced his thoughts away from the subject. Getting to know people outside the industry was always a very bad idea.
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