Blood Revealed

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  “She’s not really an outsider, though, is she?” Dominic said, as if Patrick had spoken aloud.

  Patrick didn’t voice the tiny seed of irritation he felt. Dominic would read the irritation for himself and besides, he did it so often that Patrick had grown used to it.

  “I suppose she’s not an outsider, if you are looking at it from the perspective of the vampires. You know I was thinking from an industry point of view. That’s a habit that isn’t going to go away anytime soon.”

  Dominic sat up. “Do you mind that I’m going to work with her tomorrow?”

  “Of course not,” Patrick said quickly.

  “Then what is it about her that you don’t like? Something was biting you this afternoon.”

  Patrick sat up, too. He wasn’t tired, of course, but he had come to like lying beside Dominic while he fell asleep at night. He had heard Sebastian and Nial talk about this phenomenon before and now he understood it better. Keeping a favorite human company while they slept was a privilege.

  It seemed that Dominic wasn’t interested in sleep. He was going to pursue this.

  “I told you, I don’t trust her,” Patrick replied.

  Dominic gave a little shrug. “You don’t know her. How could you trust her? You’ve spent thirty years keeping your guard up, wary of anyone who wasn’t a professional. It’s not like you can drop that habit overnight. You just said so yourself.”

  Patrick couldn’t dispute that.

  Dominic wasn’t finished yet. In the dark he tilted his head as if he was looking at Patrick closely, except Patrick knew that he could only see him as a dark shadow. “In Blythe’s case, you don’t want to put your guard down.”

  “Let your guard down,” Patrick corrected. It was very rare for Dominic to make a mistake with his grammar.

  “Whatever. Don’t dodge the point.”

  Patrick forced himself to find an answer for Dominic. It seemed only fair that he explain himself. He wasn’t sure why he was wary of the woman. She was the antithesis of anyone he had ever been romantically involved with—a single mother, not in the industry, not stunningly beautiful, although she had an odd attraction about her that seem to derive from her physical strength and possibly a mental strength, too. She was a brunette, she had short hair and she wasn’t impressed by his fame.

  So he didn’t have his guard up because he wanted to avoid a relationship with her, because that was never going to happen. Besides, there was Dominic.

  “Thank you,” Dominic said softly, a small smile forming at the corner of his mouth.

  “I think,” Patrick said slowly, “that it really is just habit. A holdover from before. All my protective shields go up when I come across a fan. It’s automatic now, after all this time.”

  “She isn’t a fan. She barely looked at you. It’s not like she asked for your autograph.”

  Patrick realized he was smiling. “She is a fan,” he said flatly. “After all this time, I can spot them, even when they don’t say anything. They have a way of looking at me, from the corner of their eye, when they think I’m not noticing. And there’s an alertness about them, as if they’re trying to notice absolutely everything and are soaking it up for later.”

  Dominic scratched his head. “I don’t get it. Doesn’t the word fan come from fanatic? Aren’t all fans gushy and gooey and the women hysterical? They used to throw their underwear onto your balcony.”

  Patrick laughed. He couldn’t help it. “I could have opened a national franchise for used lingerie with the number of panties and bras that got tossed at me over the years. It’s one of the weirdest things that my fans in particular used to think was a good idea to get my attention. Those are the ten percenters, though.”

  “My fans were far more civilized,” Dominic muttered. “Autographs and lots of sex.”

  Patrick felt his eyes grew wider. “You slept with them?”

  “Why not? They liked me and I liked them enough to make it mutual. There are not a lot of sexy women of the right age in the classical music world. I didn’t have to beat them off with a stick like you do.”

  “If you had looked beyond dragging your ten percenters into bed with you, you would have found more. People can be fans without drooling all over you. Most of them are. They’re the ones who will buy everything you make and perhaps even follow your profile online. They’ll pick your movie to watch because you’re in it, yet they’re not obsessive and they have lives of their own.”

  “And Blythe is one of those sorts of fans?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “And because she is, you don’t want to like her?”

  Patrick sighed. “Put like that, it sounds incredibly superficial. Like I said, I think it’s just a habit, a holdover. Maybe I should give the woman a break. She is your new working partner.”

  Dominic rolled his eyes. “It’s just this one time.”

  “That’s not where it will end. I know you’ll be good at this and I know that she will be brilliant at it. You won’t be able to stop. It’s not just this one time at all.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Can you hear the Summanus if we’re talking?” Blythe asked. “It will look more natural if we chat as we go. I don’t want to freak out the neighbors by looking like two black ops on patrol.”

  Dominic smiled at the idea of looking like a black ops anything. “It’s not exactly hearing, but there’s no mistaking their signature when I sense that. Talking is fine.”

  They were moving along the sidewalk of a quiet street in San Bernardino. It was nine in the morning. It was going to be a bright, cloudless day. Already the warmth from the sun was soaking through Dominic’s shoulders.

  At Blythe’s insistence, they were both wearing sturdy trousers and boots and long-sleeved shirts made of cotton, light enough so that the heat wasn’t a major issue. Cotton was best for minimizing the toxin, Blythe had explained. Man-made fibers were no shield at all.

  The most disconcerting thing about the pair of them, though, was the broad sword strapped to her hip. Although on Blythe, it looked very natural. She wore it like she was comfortable with it, which meant she had worn it a lot.

  “Aren’t the cops going to arrest you for carrying a weapon?” Dominic asked.

  “Not around here. Everyone knows who I am and what I do, now.” She was casually scanning the street ahead of them as she walked and it seemed to Dominic that her jaw was tight. “They might ask what the hell I’m doing during the middle of the day. Mostly I’m out at night, same as everyone else.”

  “You said there were others…?”

  “I didn’t see the point of dragging them along until we actually found a nest.” She tapped the cell phone sitting on her other hip. “I’ll yell for them when we find something. Don’t worry. They’re there and waiting. Eager, actually. I had to argue them down from an armed patrol. That wouldn’t have gone over with the cops.”

  Dominic rarely noticed what a woman was wearing, unless it was blatantly sexy and designed to entice. Yet he couldn’t help noticing the difference in Blythe’s clothing today. She wasn’t wearing jeans like him. Her cargo pants that were tucked into ankle-high boots. Both the pants and the boots were a dark green. She wore a sleeveless tank top underneath a light windbreaker that was also green. She left the breaker unzipped and when she moved he could see the handgun nestled up against her side, just under the small rounded breast.

  She wore no jewelry. Her accessories were strictly defensive and included the sword and a knife tucked into her boot. Dominic had learned to spot knives, including the hidden ones. He was pretty sure she had another knife somewhere else. Hard experience had taught him that if someone was carrying a knife openly, that could be easily taken away from them, they usually had a backup somewhere else.

  Everything she wore underlined a military background and her defensive posture now. She may not call it working, yet she had reverted to a soldier’s mindset.

  “Were you a Marine?” Dominic asked.

  �
��Hell no,” she said. “I was plain old Army infantry. Nothing special.”

  “An officer?”

  Her gaze swiveled toward him then back to scanning the street. She waved a fly away. “I retired from active service as a lieutenant,” she said softly.

  “Then you had your own battalion?”

  She laughed. It was short and hard, with underlying tension. “I was only a lieutenant. Captains and majors run battalions. Lowly lieutenants get to run squads and sometimes platoons.”

  “Then you had your own squad?”

  There was a pause before she answered. “I commanded the hundred and first infantry division.”

  Dominic sensed there was more and waited.

  “I held the command for eighteen days,” she said finally.

  “What happened?”

  “Afghanistan happened.” She nodded ahead. “We’ll haul left at the corner and circle the block.” Dominic didn’t need to read her mind to know that she was deliberately changing the subject. He didn’t mind. As she had spoken the name of her division he had felt a storm of impressions, including gun fire, flames and screaming. Things exploding, the sound so loud nothing else could be heard. And the heat. The oppressive heat was everywhere.

  She didn’t have to paint a picture for him. He already had it.

  “Isn’t it unusual for a woman to hold a combat position?”

  “The average woman just isn’t strong enough for combat. Pit a two hundred pound man against a hundred and thirty pound woman and it’s no competition. I stepped into command sideways. The division’s C.O. and sergeant both died in the same explosion. I was the most senior officer after that.”

  She cleared her throat. Her gaze kept quartering ahead relentlessly. “As I said, I held command for eighteen days. Then there was a thing that happened and then I returned to civilian life.” As she spoke her mind was throwing up resistance that bloomed gray and thick. It wasn’t that she didn’t want him to know, it was simply a subject she didn’t want to deal with. Dominic wasn’t even sure she knew how resistant she was to probing in that area.

  “You’re from Chile aren’t you?” she asked abruptly.

  “I was born in Viña del Mar. I grew up in Santiago.”

  “So how did you end up in Argentina in a bar fight?”

  “There was a thing that happened,” he said, deliberately borrowing her phrase. “And after that I spent a few years floating around South America and making my way slowly up to Mexico, then into the States. I was travelling on a fake ID, with no way to draw on money from home. That tends to drive people into the unsavory side of life. Back then, I didn’t mind. It was a relief to have something to focus on.”

  “The need to survive does sharpen the attention,” she said easily.

  They turned the corner. This was a busier street, a thoroughfare. There were not as many cars parked along the sides of the street and far more passing through.

  “Not that I know anything at all,” he said, “It seems to me that the Summanus would nest during the day as far away from human centers of population as possible. Shouldn’t we be looking where there are no people?”

  “That’s probably where we going to find them,” she agreed. “I also want to measure how sensitive you are to them.”

  “You mean you want to know from how far away I can sense them.”

  “So we are going to make a big circle around the neighborhood, then gradually move inward.”

  He considered that. “That implies that you have a general idea of where you think they are.”

  “I’ve made a guess or two.”

  “So why not go straight there?”

  “Because I’m guessing. Better to systematically cover the whole neighborhood. That way if I’m wrong, I don’t miss them.” The tension was back in her voice and her shoulders.

  He should move off the subject, but there was still a glaring inconsistency he had to answer first. “What if they aren’t in this neighborhood it all?”

  “Then tomorrow, we do another one.” This time the sharpness in her voice was unmistakable.

  “Did I say something, Lieutenant?”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Blythe.”

  Her jaw flexed as she held her teeth together.

  “Something is pissing you off,” he pointed out. “I’m pretty sure it’s not me. I might have said something. Unintentionally, of course.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t stop thinking about my kids. About how close it was.”

  And from her mind, he got a flash of an image. A black Summani standing between her and a boy who he assumed was her son. She couldn’t get to him. She couldn’t reach her son.

  Her helplessness and her rage at that helplessness was strong.

  “I understand now,” Dominic said.

  At this time her sigh was gusty. Some of the tension went out of her shoulders. “That mind reading is useful.”

  “It drives Patrick insane. With him I can’t help it.” He grinned. “Most of the time, anyway.”

  Her surprise was as clear as a shout. She said nothing. She kept her attention ahead, endlessly scanning. Then she frowned. “That’s odd,” she said softly.

  “What?”

  “No birds. Not even a single pain in the ass seagull shitting on everything.”

  “You said this was a busy road.”

  “There’s a dumpster on the other side of that convenience store across the road. The seagulls usually fight it out with the crows over the scraps, yet there isn’t a bird in sight.”

  She halted, then turned on her heels in a complete semicircle, looking from one end of the street to the other, for as far as they both could see. “No dogs, either.”

  “This is Los Angeles,” he said. “Wouldn’t all the dogs be at home waiting for their master to take them for a walk on a leash?”

  “This is San Bernardino,” she said. “There are plenty of strays here. They’re all hiding, too.”

  “The heat?”

  “Maybe.”

  They started walking again. This time Blythe did not talk. Dominic stayed silent. The route took them over the top of the culvert, with chain-link fencing separating them from the drop to the concrete below.

  As they stepped onto the elevated roadway to cross the culvert, the smell met them.

  “Oh my God!” Blythe breathed. She made gagging sounds. It was the first time that Dominic had noticed the delicate, feminine side of her. He grinned.

  “It’s very bad,” he agreed. In fact it was worse than bad. The stench was acrid, catching at the back of his throat and making him feel that if he had breathe it in for much longer, the consequences would be sickly. As he took another shallow breath, his stomach rumbled uneasily.

  Blythe picked up the pace and they were almost jogging by the time they reached the other side of the culvert and had moved back into the residential area of the street.

  Fresh air never tasted so good. He took deep breaths of it.

  “It’s highly localized,” she said and glanced over her shoulder, back toward the culvert.

  “Do you think something died down there?”

  “That wasn’t a rotting carcass smell,” she said flatly.

  “You speak from experience?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He rolled his eyes at his own denseness. For a short moment he had forgotten who he was talking to.

  “Should someone report it?”

  “I’m pretty sure somebody already has. That stench is hard to ignore. I think the city has better things to investigate than a bad smell.”

  They started walking again. At the next major intersection Blythe turned left again. Dominic realized they were indeed walking the borders of the neighborhood. The street they turned into was tree-lined and shady, quite unlike most of the suburbs of LA.

  Blythe was quiet and preoccupied. Dominic left her alone. He didn’t dip into her mind either. Instead he simply walked and enjoyed the morning air before the real heat
of the day kicked in.

  “There was something about a smell that I remember. Someone sent me an email…” She was frowning now. Then she gave a short laugh. “Australia. Tourists in a cave in Australia all fled because of the smell. Some people vomited, it was so bad. No one could find the source.”

  “Do you think it’s related?”

  “I won’t make assumptions. There’s not enough data yet.”

  Dominic thought of the way his stomach had protested, but said nothing.

  * * * * *

  They made it all the way around the big circle Blythe had drawn on the map that morning and were on the first inner circle lap when Dominic’s pace slowed.

  Blythe turned back to look at him.

  His eyes were almost closed. His chin was up as if he was smelling the air, although he wasn’t sniffing. “I think….”

  She moved closer. Her heart was running harder. “Where?”

  His head turned as he tried to pin down the direction. “It’s very faint.”

  “Give me a direction, she told him. “Then we can get closer and it will be stronger.”

  She realized she was gripping the edges of her cell phone compulsively. She made her fingers let go and stretched them. Nothing had changed, she reminded herself. He’d caught the faintest whiff, that was all.

  Dominic turned in a circle, his eyes closed. A minivan went by slowly and the woman driver bent to appear through the side window at them. Blythe ignored her.

  “Take a guess,” she told Dominic. “It doesn’t matter if you’re wrong. If we head in that direction and it doesn’t grow stronger, we’ll just try a different direction.”

  He opened his eyes and looked at her. “It’s very hard to explain this to someone. There’s not an actual direction. It’s just there. Like sunlight. It’s just all around you.”

  “Light comes from the sun,” she said patiently. “Whatever it is you’re experiencing, it’s coming from the Summanus. So there is a direction. You just have to figure it out.”

  She flexed her fingers, stretching them and trying to loosen them. If her suspicions were right and the Summanus were where she thought they were, then it would be easy to point him in that direction. She wanted him to figure it out for himself. She wanted to see if he could.