by Keri Arthur
Although I couldn’t actually imagine them doing that when they still needed me to find the keys.
Valdis grew brighter, sending flashes of electric blue light across the pale walls. Azriel silently drew her from the sheath at his back and held her at the ready. The blade hummed with every movement. “Someone comes.”
“I gathered that.” I dropped the papers and the items I’d gathered from the two safes onto the desk, then looked around for some sort of weapon. But with the house cleaned for sale, there really wasn’t anything left. Not that Mom had ever had weapons in the house, anyway.
Which meant I’d have to rely on my own fighting skills, damn it. Because while I could fight, I preferred not to.
It wasn’t cowardice, merely practicality. I’d learned the hard way that I was never going to be as good as a guardian, despite the fact that I’d been trained by two of the best.
I flexed my fingers, then said, “What is it?”
“Vampire.”
I blinked in surprise. “A vampire? Really?”
He nodded, glancing at me. “You sound relieved.”
“I am. I mean, vampires can be nasty, but I wouldn’t put them in the same league as something that’s crawled from the gates of hell.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” an-all-too-familiar voice said from the hallway. “I could name quite a few people who would consider me far worse than any nightmare hell has ever produced.”
I closed my eyes and swore softly. This day was definitely going from bad to worse. Because the vampire out in the hall was the one and only Madeline Hunter, queen bee of the Directorate, major vampire supremo, and a woman deadlier than almost anything on the planet.
She sauntered through the doorway, her light steps leaving little trace in the thick carpet. She was a small, slender woman with longish dark hair and startling green eyes, but those eyes were as icy and as remote as her near perfect features.
“I never knew you and Mom were friends.” I crossed my arms and watched her warily. I might have agreed to work with this woman—or at least the council she represented—but that didn’t mean I had to trust her.
And Valdis’s reaction emphasized just how accurate my gut reaction was.
“We weren’t. But she, at least, had some manners.”
Which was a not-too-subtle dig at the fact that I’d refused her entry into my apartment a couple of months ago. “Mom gave up teaching me manners when I was a teenager. And I can tell you right now, they’re not about to improve anytime soon.”
Not where she was concerned, anyway. I had a bad feeling I was going to need my bolt-hole, and Hollywood had at least gotten the whole threshold-and-vampires thing right.
Amusement touched the corners of her lips but never cracked the ice in her eyes. Her gaze flicked to the warm presence beside me. “I gather this is your reaper?”
“This is Azriel, yes.” I didn’t bother pointing out that he wasn’t actually mine, simply because no one seemed to listen. “Azriel, this is—”
“Madeline Hunter,” he finished, and bowed slightly. “You walk a dark path, vampire. Beware of overstepping your own boundaries.”
She raised a dark eyebrow. “And would that be advice or warning, reaper?”
“Both.” He sheathed a still-glowing Valdis and glanced at me. “I shall leave.”
If you need me, call. The words were unsaid, but I heard them nonetheless. I nodded, and he winked out of existence.
Hunter’s gaze returned to mine. Her scent—a faint mix of jasmine, bergamot, and sandalwood—was surprisingly pleasant. But it sent a chill down my spine, because nothing about this woman was ever pleasant.
“Why would my mother invite you into her home?” She’d hated Hunter. Hated and feared her. I never really knew why, although maybe it was as simple as sensing that my destiny would be tied to hers.
“Because, technically, she was in my employ, just as you are.” Hunter pulled back one of the visitors chairs near the front of the desk and sat down, crossing her legs elegantly. “In fact, your mother and I had many a pleasant discussion in this very room.”
Yeah, I believed that about as much as I believed in the Easter bunny. “About what?”
Again that eyebrow winged upward. I suspected amusement, although it was hard to tell given her emotionless demeanor. “About you. About her debt to the Directorate and what she might do to repay it.”
“She helped the guardians bring down more than her fair share of criminals.”
Hunter picked a piece of lint off her pants with long pink fingernails and flicked it idly away. I had a sudden image of her doing the same to me, and a brief smile touched her lips, then drifted away.
The bitch was reading my thoughts.
“If you wish your thoughts to remain unheard, then kindly keep them to yourself,” she commented. “You’ve already asked your friend Stane to acquire some nanowires, have you not?”
Stane was Stane Neale, Tao’s cousin. He wasn’t only a computer whiz, but a major black-market trader. And if she’d overheard me asking Tao to get the wires, then she either had super-hearing or there were bugs in our apartment. “Yes, but I suspect even the strongest wire available won’t be able to stop you.”
“Oh, it won’t,” she acknowledged. “But they require a little more effort on my part, and therefore would afford you some of your much-relished privacy. It might even stop the reaper from following your thoughts.”
Given that the wires were designed to work against those who wore flesh on a permanent basis, I doubted it would affect Azriel. And I wasn’t as worried about him catching my thoughts anyway.
“You could show a little restraint in the meantime,” I said.
“I could,” she agreed, and flicked away another piece of lint.
An imaginary one this time, I suspected, because I certainly wasn’t seeing anything on her pants.
Again that ghostly smile crossed her pale lips before she added, “But I am not here to discuss your mother.”
I leaned back against the desk, my stance casual even though both of us knew that was far from the truth. “I never thought you were.”
She nodded and leaned back in her chair. “We have a problem.”
“We as in the Directorate, or the council?”
“The council, of course. You will never be on the Directorate’s books.”
“Odd, given that the Directorate approached me several years ago about becoming a guardian.”
“Yes, but my brother has since been informed of my plans for you.”
Meaning he’d made the approach without her approval? Somehow I doubted that. I knew enough about Jack and the guardian division to know that while he might have autonomy over the day-to-day running of the division, there weren’t many decisions that didn’t go through Hunter first.
“And just what, exactly, are your plans for me?”
She made a casual movement with her hand. “Nothing more than what you’ve already agreed to.”
What I’d agreed to was being a consultant to the council, but her statement had sounded a whole lot more comprehensive.
“Besides,” she added, “I believe you have an aunt and uncle who would strenuously object to you becoming a guardian. And right now, the Directorate can’t afford to lose either of them.”
Riley and Rhoan would do more than object—they’d lock me in a small room and throw away the key. And then they’d storm Hunter’s citadel and demand my release from Directorate duty.
Thankfully, they had no idea I’d agreed to work for someone even more dangerous than the Directorate, and I fully intended to keep it that way. Right now I didn’t need any more grief in my life.
“Why can’t the Cazadors handle your problem?” Cazadors were the council’s vampire assassins. They were highly trained, extremely deadly, and they got the job done no matter who or what got in their way.
Uncle Quinn—Riley’s mate, and the half-Aedh who’d taught me how to use my own Aedh skills—had been one many
centuries ago. He was also one of the few Cazadors to not only survive the experience, but walk away virtually unscarred. And to me, that only emphasized just how deadly he could be.
“I have no doubt they could handle it—if we had any idea just who or what the problem is.”
“Then how do you know it’s a problem?”
“Because we have a councilor who is dying, and the cause seems to be a sudden onset of age.”
That surprised me. Vampires didn’t ever age—and when they turned from human to vampire, they stayed at whatever age they’d been when they’d undergone the vampire ceremony. Which meant that if they were twenty when the ceremony was performed, but ninety when they died, they reverted to how they’d looked at twenty. The human population had been trying to uncover the scientific reasons for this switchback for years, but so far with little success.
Of course, there were psychic vampires who could drain the life force of their victims, thereby causing the sudden onset of age or even death, but surely Hunter and the Cazadors would have been able to track one of those without my help. “How would one vampire get that close to another without alerting them to their presence?”
Vampires might not be entirely human, but they were still flesh-and-blood beings with a heart and circulatory system. And all vampires—even the freshly turned—were extremely sensitive to the sound of blood pumping through veins. Which was no surprise given that their survival depended on a regular supply of the stuff.
“It’s not another vampire.”
Which also suggested it was something other than a flesh being—hence Hunter’s sudden reappearance in my life. And while there were plenty of mythical creatures who existed by feeding off the energy of the living—whether that feeding consisted of blood, energy, or even souls—we certainly weren’t talking about an ordinary victim here. This was a councilor—although she hadn’t said whether it was the local vampire council or the high council that ruled them all—but you didn’t generally rise to that level without a few hundred years under your belt. Which meant most of them were not only extremely dangerous, but more than a little knowledgeable about the darker things that haunted this world.
“I can’t imagine anyone—human, nonhuman, or even a creature from hell itself—being able to feed from a councilor without him knowing about it.”
“You and me both.”
She tapped her bright fingernails against the desk, but it was a sign of anger rather than frustration. Those nails were almost long enough to be weapons, and I had an odd feeling she was imagining them ripping through someone’s neck. Possibly mine, if I didn’t come up with an answer.
“Whatever this is,” she continued, “it attacked during the day, when Pierre was asleep. It wasn’t a physical attack, as such. He would have been aware of that. This is more abstract. His energy was drained, but he remained unaware.”
My frown deepened. As much as I hated to admit it, I was intrigued. Of course, anything game enough to take on a councilor and get away with it wasn’t exactly something I wanted to get involved with.
But it wasn’t like I had a choice, and she wasn’t actually asking me to kill it. I was only the hunter, and I intended to do my damnedest to keep it that way.
“So if Pierre isn’t sensing anything or anyone, how can you be sure this is an actual attack?”
She reached into her purse—which I hadn’t actually noticed until now, and that said a whole lot about the state this woman got me into—and withdrew her phone. She pressed a button, then turned it around for me to see. “This was Pierre Boulanger two weeks ago.”
He had dark hair, dark eyes, an imposing nose, and seemed to possess the sort of distant arrogance often found in those of royal blood.
“And this,” Hunter continued, “was Boulanger when I saw him not two hours ago.”
It didn’t even look the same man. In this photo, he was stooped over and could barely manage to look at the camera. It was as if the weight of his head were too much for his neck. His black hair was shot with gray, and his unlined face was now seamed and littered with age spots. And his eyes were the eyes of a madman.
I met Hunter’s gaze again. Her green eyes were assessing. I wasn’t entirely sure why, because she was the one who’d all but blackmailed me into helping the vampire council hunt down the prey that eluded the Cazadors. If she didn’t think I was up to helping, why even come here? “So you’re dealing with some sort of succubus?”
Hunter shook her head. “I spoke to Pierre when this attack first happened, a week ago. He could not remember sexual dreams.”
“And now?”
“He is, as you guessed, lost to madness. He remembers nothing.”
“I think the key word here is remember. I don’t know much about succubi, but I imagine that if one decided to target a member of the vampire council, then maybe it’s also decided to cover its tracks.”
“A succubus would not have the strength to erase Pierre’s memories; nor do they drive their victims mad. A succubus is not at fault.”
“Then what do you think it is?”
“If I knew, the Cazadors would already be on the job.” She reached into her pocket and withdrew a business card. “You have an appointment with Catherine Alston at eleven o’clock.”
I accepted the business card. It was one of Hunter’s, and on the back she’d scrawled an address. It was a city address—a penthouse apartment in the Green Tower, which was the latest of the government backed eco-building projects, and it had a price tag to match its credentials. But most old vamps also tended to be obscenely rich. I suppose it was one of the benefits of living so long.
I shoved the card into my pocket. “So why am I going to see Catherine Alston when Pierre Boulanger was attacked?”
“Because Catherine woke up this morning with a head of gray hair and an old woman’s face. Whatever is attacking Pierre is now after Catherine.”
“And you wish to stop this before Alston goes the way of Boulanger?”
“Catherine can wither and die, for all I care.” Mirth briefly touched Hunter’s lips but did little to crack the ice in her eyes. “She is not the reason I wish to see this matter resolved quickly.”
“Then what is?”
She studied me in a way that had fear curling through my limbs. This wasn’t about the need to stop a killer finding more victims. This was about me.
And her next words confirmed that. “There are some on the high council who think it would be better for us all if you were dead. I am trying to convince them that you might be useful for more than just finding the keys.”
I swallowed heavily. “So this is a test?”
“And you had better pass if you value your life.”
Chapter Two
“IF THEY KILL ME,” I SAID EVENTUALLY, MY throat so dry it felt like the words were being scraped out, “they won’t ever find the keys.”
“That,” she said coolly, “is precisely the point.”
“But—” I paused, my thoughts filled with panic and going a dozen different ways. “I thought the reason the council recruited me in the first place was to find the keys so that they could use them?”
“It was. It is.”
The rhythm of her nails on the desk suddenly stopped, and something flickered in her eyes. Something dark and very deadly. A chill hit me and the sick sensation of fear ratcheted up several notches—though up until that point I hadn’t thought that was possible.
Because, in that brief instant, I’d seen death. Not my death—not yet, anyway. But someone else’s, someone who’d had the stupidity to cross her path.
“Only a very small fraction have decided it would be better to keep the keys unfound,” she continued. “Unfortunately, all voices on the council must be heard, and efforts to persuade them otherwise have so far proven ineffective. Which means it is up to you to prove your worth to them.”
I licked my lips and said, “So this councilor who’s dying—is it possible that one of the lesser members of the c
ouncil has decided he or she needs to be higher on the ladder?”
“It is always possible, but there are easier ways to do that.”
I was curious despite the fear twisting my insides. After all, it wasn’t often you got the chance to hear about the inner workings of the local vamp council. They were a secretive lot at the best of times. Hell, most people didn’t even know there was both a local council and the overall high council, situated in Melbourne. “Like how?”
Her shrug was oddly graceful. “There is always the blood challenge.”
“Which I’m gathering is a physical challenge of some sort?”
“Of some sort, yes.” This time, amusement touched not only her lips but also her eyes, and it was a fearsome sight. “The winner wins the right to drain the blood of the loser.”
“Killing them?”
“No. Under most circumstances, it merely weakens them.”
I wondered about the exception to that rule, but didn’t say anything. Instead I asked, “Yet vamps do kill one another to gain position on the hierarchical ladder, do they not?”
“Of course. But that is different.”
I couldn’t actually see how, but then, vampires didn’t always think with human—or, in my case, nonhuman—sensibilities.
“So where are Boulanger and Alston on the hierarchical ladder?”
“It does not matter, as I doubt ascension is the cause.”
“Why? If both die, all those vampires below them automatically step up a couple of rungs, don’t they?”
“It is not that simple. There are levels rather than rungs. The kill and the killer must be acknowledged and confirmed before he or she can move up to the next classification.”
Which sounded a whole lot more formal and complicated than I’d expected. “It’s still something that should be investigated.”
“There are Cazadors examining that situation as we speak.” She pushed to her feet. “I wish an update once you talk to Catherine. I need to keep the council informed as to your progress.”
“And what if there isn’t any?”