He swallowed the last bite and chased it down with a swig of milk. “At least until we can figure out a better solution.”
AT SUNDOWN, JACKSON AND LILY had left Casa en las Colinas and headed to the field office. His shift tonight was uneventful.
“Dom wants to talk to you in the computer lab,” Lily said as Jackson was finishing up his report.
He never turned them in like he was supposed to after being on duty, but since he wanted to get back up to Arianna, he decided not to procrastinate the way he usually did. Lily would be shocked to learn he wasn’t waiting for days to do a bunch of reports at the same time.
“Great. I can’t wait.” He pressed Enter and logged out of TechTran. The screen went black for a moment before the Guardian logo materialized pixel by pixel and started rotating.
Lily propped herself on the edge of the workstation next to him, leaned on the half wall and lowered her voice. “Hey, I wanted to tell you that I tried a little experiment on Arianna.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. I knew you were worried about her being immune from mind manips.”
He glanced around nervously, making sure no one was within earshot. Several other Guardians had just left and Mitch was on the other side of the room, out of earshot if they spoke quietly. “And…?”
“Well, she’s not immune.”
He stared at her a moment. “She isn’t? How do you know?”
She explained how they’d been painting their nails together. “I specifically told her the color I was using.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Well, I reached over, did a quick mind wipe, telling her that she never heard what color I was using. A moment later she’s asking me what color it was that I was painting my toes with.” She wiggled her fingers and kicked a foot out, revealing the red polish. “RazzleDazzle Me, love.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. When I did a manip on her that one night, it worked at first. It wasn’t until the next day when her memory was jarred that it all came back to her.”
“I know that. Which is why I planted the thought that she and I hadn’t done our nails together, that we hadn’t even been in my bathroom, that the conversation we had during that time had occurred in the workout room where we’d just come from.”
“And…?”
“And I asked her about her nails the next day. She couldn’t remember when she’d had them done.”
“That doesn’t prove anything. It wasn’t a traumatic event. Those tend to stick with a person, not the color of someone’s nail polish.”
Lily shrugged. “I don’t think that matters. I tried to trigger it and got no response.” She crossed her arms on the top of the workstation and rested her chin. “I think the problem is that she may be immune to you.”
When they arrived in the computer room, Jackson could hardly focus. He blindly put one foot in front of the other, not paying attention to a word Lily was saying as they walked down the corridor. The fact that Arianna was immune to him could only mean one thing. He was losing one of the most important abilities a vampire needed in order to live among humans in secret.
He was reverting. And Lily knew it.
Dom and Cordell were sitting in front of a bank of monitors when he and Lily entered the room.
“What have you been able to glean from that woman?” Dom asked.
“Gleaning?” Mitch asked. “Who’s gleaning? I want to glean, too.”
Jackson glared at all of them, hardly able to control his anger. He could feel his pupils dilating and, goddamn it, his fangs were starting to emerge.
Dude, chill. Calm down. It’ll be all over if you attack anyone.
“I’m not gleaning anything from her,” he said through clenched teeth. “I’m making sure things are safe for her and her cousin, that’s all.”
He held his hand up when he saw the field team leader was about to say something more about it. Probably a wisecrack about his sexual habits.
“I don’t want to hear it, Dom. I’m not sending them back to that house totally unprepared. That girl is a sweetblood, and Darkbloods know where she lives. If I wiped their minds and sent them back home, you and I both know DBs would be there as soon as sundown arrived.”
“Jesus, you’re sensitive. I was talking about Xtark. If she’s got a thing for you, maybe she’d be willing to be our eyes on the inside. God knows, we could use it.”
Use Arianna? A wildfire of anger surged instantly inside him. His pupils stretched, his gums ached.
He hated that she worked for Xtark in the first place, so there was no way on God’s green earth he’d go along with this.
“Fuck, no. She is not going to be a mole for the Agency.”
Dom was saying something else, but Jackson wasn’t listening. He felt a sudden restless detachment from his surroundings and his ears began to ring. He wanted to break something. Rip something or someone apart. Instead, he pounded a fist on the table. It felt so good that he did it again. One of the table legs collapsed, and a printer crashed to the floor.
Cordell jumped to his feet.
“What the hell is wrong with you, Foss?” Dom said, picking up the state-of-the-art printer that probably cost the Agency some coin.
Lily had her hands on her hips. “I’d say someone’s got some anger-management issues that need to be addressed.”
Like he didn’t know that. He stormed to the far side of the room and leaned against the wet bar.
He seriously needed to get a grip. This uncontrollable anger wasn’t good. Maybe he should take a leave of absence to get things sorted out. A part of him knew he couldn’t keep hiding and yet he couldn’t tell them what was going on, either.
When he heard laughing, he glanced through the fronds of a large potted plant. They’d righted the table and the printer and the three of them were staring into one of Cordell’s curved monitors. What were they looking at? A funny picture? A comic? A video? He listened to the murmur of their voices, Cordell chuckling with that deep voice of his and Dom doing some good-natured cursing. Were they laughing at his outburst?
He felt like a damn outsider with this secret. Too nervous to be around them. Too nervous to let them close. It was as though he wasn’t a part of the club any longer. He stared down at his hands; they were going blurry.
Fuck. He turned around and pinched his eyes shut. What the hell was he going to do? He couldn’t go on this way, but what choice did he have?
He felt hot and sticky all of a sudden. Almost queasy. The feeling of detachment was getting stronger and stronger.
Lily’s voice got a little louder. He heard footsteps.
“I don’t know where he went.”
Jesus H. I’m right-the-fuck here.
Using every effort to control himself, Jackson white-knuckled the edge of the counter.
“What?” he snapped then immediately felt guilty about it. Lily didn’t deserve to be talked to like this. She was a good friend who’d done a lot for him. This was his problem, not hers.
Her eyebrows were raised, one slightly more than the other. “Sorry, I didn’t see you back here. I—I thought you had left.”
“Well, I didn’t,” he growled, turning on the faucet and splashing his face with water.
Hell, Lily was perceptive enough that even if he’d smiled, if he made himself sound all sugary sweet, she’d have read right through his fakeness. He was a fraud, a loser, and he wasn’t going to be able to hide it for much longer. He was a heartbeat away from becoming the very enemy they pursued.
It’d be better for everyone if he just finished up here at the field office and left before any of them started asking the kinds of questions he didn’t want to answer.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE MOMENT VENTRA
WALKED into the entryway of the old house, she stopped listening to a word the Realtor was saying. One look at the vaulted ceilings, the coved moldings and the marble floors, and she knew this was the place. Not only did it remind her of the haunted house depicted in the first level of Hollow Grave, but every room had a heavy, expectant atmosphere, ripe with promise.
“Draw up the papers.” With a flick of her hand, she dismissed the man and peered into what probably once was a kitchen.
“Given the water damage, the condition of the roof, the remote location, we should offer them—”
“There is no we here. I want this house. I don’t care how you make it happen.”
With a little work, this place would be fitting for a Seattle sector mistress and member of the Xtark Software board of directors. Her meeting with the Alliance had gone as well as she’d hoped. Better, in fact. Not only had they officially made her the new leader here in Seattle and assured her a place on the board, but they wanted to hear her ideas about the members-only clubs for those who wanted Sweet straight from the source.
Although the Night of Wilding party had been discovered by Guardians, and broken up before it really had started, the Alliance was intrigued with the concept she’d come up with.
She’d told them her vision of opening an exclusive, invite-only club for vampires in the Seattle area and that she’d help other sectors open up similar ones in their areas. She thought about telling them of her plans to offer this exclusively, one-on-one, to her best clients, but had decided against it. She didn’t want to show her hand all at once. Better to hold something back. You never knew when you’d need to play that wild card.
How long would it take to collect the bones she’d need for a chandelier? she wondered as she looked up at the two-story entry. Months? Years? But hers would be different than the one at the Alliance headquarters. Hers would be made entirely from the bones of sweetbloods.
And she knew just who the first ones would be. She’d start with those who’d gotten away from her already.
“You mean, you want me to draw up an offer right now? I don’t think that’s wise.”
Stunned by how the man continued to question her wishes, Ventra had a hard time believing he was one of the most successful Realtors in the area. Oh, sure, he looked the part with his Brooks Brothers suit, handmade Italian shoes and platinum Rolex, but he needed to realize that the customer’s needs and desires came first. And she wanted this damn house.
“Do you not have the documents with you?” She took a step closer and heard his heart rate speed up exponentially.
She honestly tried not to smile—coming from her, she knew it wasn’t a warm or welcoming expression—but she couldn’t help herself. This man was almost a foot taller than she was and probably outweighed her by a hundred pounds, and yet he instinctively sensed the danger. The power she had over humans never failed to thrill her. It emphasized the vampire race’s superiority and that humans were simply here to serve them.
The pulse under his jaw drew her attention like a beacon, calling to her, and her fangs broke through her gums. His blood scent reminded her that, next to Sweet, it was one of her favorite types. Not particularly rare, but still a good one. And laced with fear, it’d be even better.
A flicker of unease crossed his face and he glanced at the closed door. “Yes—yes, I have them. It’s just that—”
She struck fast, slamming him against the wall, and sank her fangs into his flesh. Given the height difference, she clung to him with her legs wrapped around his waist. One of her shoes clattered to the floor.
“Oh, my God.” He tried to peel her off, fingers clawed desperately at her arms, but it was futile. She was much stronger than he was.
She grabbed his wrists and immobilized him as she fed, but he continued to struggle and groan. They always did. Although she had the ability to implant a thought suggestion to calm them down, she never used it. Blood tasted so much better this way and adrenaline-laced energy had an extra zip.
After several mouthfuls, she reluctantly withdrew and sealed the puncture wounds. Unlike her normal feeding habits of draining the host dry, she still needed this human’s services. Unwinding her legs from his waist, she dropped to the ground.
His eyes were wild and he clamped a hand to his neck. “What did you just do to me? What are you?”
Not bothering to answer him, she calmly smoothed down her skirt and tried to drown out the high-pitched, piglike sound of his voice. Then, as she secured a loose bobby pin in her chignon, she slipped her foot back into her shoe.
Enough with the sobbing.
With lightning quickness, she pulled the handkerchief from his lapel and dabbed at his face. His expression softened ever so slightly as if he wanted to believe that she was capable of showing compassion. In reality, however, she didn’t want to come up with an excuse as to why tears and snot were running down his face.
She reached up and her fingertips grazed his temple. “You’ll remember none of this. Only that you will be drawing up the purchase documents. But just know that I’ll be back later to finish what I started.” Then she turned away to lick the blood from her lips.
ARIANNA SAT CROSS-LEGGED on Jackson’s bed and scrolled through the comments on her Weird Wednesday feature. “Oh, wow, this is not good.” Jackson had brought a laptop from the field office and somehow got the okay for her to access the internet. She wasn’t sure what he’d had to do to get them to agree to that, but she wasn’t arguing. She didn’t, however, have free rein. Everything outgoing was routed through their servers and approved first. But at least it was better than nothing.
Jackson looked up from the table where several guns were laid out for cleaning. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“I have a regular feature on Wednesdays where readers can post strange things they’ve heard about or seen. I’ve got…let’s see…three—no, four—comments about missing people.”
“From around the country? People go missing all the time.”
“No. They’re all from around here. Let’s see. One happened at Big Daddy’s, a sports bar downtown. Ever heard of it?”
“Yep, been there a time or two.”
She read the next one. “Another went out for cigarettes and never came back. This one was—wow—missing from her bedroom. Crap. She’s just a few years older than Krystal. And this one…whoa.”
Jackson put down the gun he had just disassembled and looked up. “What is it?”
“This last one happened near the Devil’s Backbone. Shit. The night after we were there. Guy was a teenager, just like Blake’s friend. Do you think the disappearances are linked somehow?”
“Hard to tell. Can you write up a brief summary on each one? Names, ages, date missing, location. We’ll send it to Cordell to see if it matches any known Darkblood activities that other Guardians are aware of.”
After compiling the list, she went back to working on her post about their visit to the Devil’s Backbone. The pictures were good and the account was decent enough, but she couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that it was all for nothing. She sighed, wishing she could exhale her frustrations in one big breath.
“How’s the article coming along? I’ll be interested to read it. The place looked like an overgrown forest to me and not the mouth to hell.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what an urban legend is. Could be real. Could be fake. But either way it’s supposed to be interesting.”
“I get the sense that you don’t think it is.”
“No, it’s not that. I’m pretty sure my readers will be interested.”
“What, then? Is the computer not working out? I can ask if Cordell can configure things differently.” A blue lock of hair slipped forward into his eyes.
“The computer and everything are great,” she said, turning back to the screen.
“Much better than my old laptop, actually. No, as I wrote this post, I kept thinking that I know what happened to this boy and where it happened, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I just don’t like feeling so helpless.”
“You said yesterday that your blog was much more than finding answers. It’s entertaining, it’s—”
“But it’s not right to be entertained when a boy has died. I don’t want to be an ambulance chaser, Jackson. I don’t want to capitalize on someone’s misfortune. That’s not what this is all about.”
“You’re hardly an ambulance chaser, Arianna. Blake would not have had a voice if it hadn’t been for your blog. Just like you, no one believed him until he found Paranormalish. Now, at least he knows he’s not crazy.”
“Maybe so, but Darkbloods are out there preying on people, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Listen. After yesterday, I’ve thought a lot about your blog and what it means to you and your readers. I do believe you provide a valuable service. What do you call what you just noticed with those missing people?”
She shrugged it off. “It’s nothing that someone reading the news wouldn’t be able to figure out.”
“Maybe not, but Guardians can’t be everywhere at once. In fact, up here in the Seattle field office, our agents are spread thin. Darkbloods have been fairly quiet lately, but I have a feeling it’s because they’re regrouping, rebuilding their power base after the Night of Wilding debacle.”
He leaned back and clasped his fingers behind his head. “We caught a lot of the underlings and a blood assassin, but the mastermind eluded capture. Word on the street is that even though the party was broken up before it got started, the Alliance brass is very interested in the concept. Guardians in all the North American field offices are keeping their eyes open for any similar activities starting up in their areas. If your blog can help alert us to potential problems, well, then, I’d say it’s providing a pretty damn good service.”
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