Quinn

by D. B. Reynolds

  The bitch had regretted her choice of playthings well enough later, when both Quinn and Garrick had grown into their power. But that was another story.

  “Look,” Garrick said, pulling him back from memory lane. “I usually don’t give a damn who you fuck. But this girl . . . she’s killing vampires. And if that’s not a serious complication, I don’t know what is.”

  “Don’t worry about Eve,” Quinn told his cousin. “She might prove useful. She probably knows more about the local vamps here and in Dublin than we do.”

  “And how useful is she going to be once she discovers you’re a vampire?”

  Quinn didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to think about that, but his cousin was right. Not if, but when Eve discovered what he was . . . “Let’s forget about my sex life,” he said, abruptly changing the subject. “That’s not why we’re here.”

  “Could’ve fooled me,” Garrick said under his breath, then looked up with a bland expression, as if to deny he’d said anything at all. “You think it’s time to call in the troops?”

  Quinn cocked his head, thinking about his answer. The only question left was timing. Quinn hadn’t brought his fighters with him right away, because he’d been reluctant to risk their lives before he’d had a chance to judge the battlefield. He wanted to know that he could defeat Orrin Sorley and take Ireland as his own.

  He wasn’t worried about that anymore. And he needed his people here. Every vampire lord had an inner circle of vampires he trusted absolutely. Not only to carry out his orders, but to cover his back. Once Quinn made serious moves into Sorley’s business operations, whether it was smuggling or something else, the Irish lord would start paying attention. And that attention would be hostile. Quinn was working for Sorley, but he wasn’t sworn to him. He owed the vampire lord nothing, and Sorley wouldn’t like that. And what he didn’t like, he’d try to destroy. It was the vampire way, and Quinn was going to need more than Garrick by his side.

  He was also going to need serious daytime guards. The move to Dublin, combined with the arrival of Quinn’s own fighters, was going to infuriate Sorley, but it would also make him nervous. And that was a bad combination in a powerful vampire. Quinn and his people were going to need better security than a few locks and an alarm system. But being the control freak that he was, Quinn had planned for that, too.

  When he’d been back in Maine, running the state’s vampires for Rajmund, he’d employed the same daytime security company that Raj used. It had been run by a man named Adorjan, who worked exclusively with vampires. When Quinn had begun recruiting his own fighters, the first thing he’d done was to contract with Adorjan for a daytime security force that would protect his people while they were training in the U.S., and then transfer overseas when the time came. Adorjan had taken on the assignment enthusiastically, and even planned on leading the security force himself. Quinn hadn’t been surprised, since Adorjan was Hungarian and obviously a transplant to the U.S. He’d figured the man was homesick.

  The surprise had come when Adorjan had approached Quinn and asked to be turned. He didn’t want to lead Quinn’s daylight force, he wanted something more. He wanted to be a vampire. He wanted to live forever.

  Quinn had cautioned him, told him there were no guarantees. Adorjan was a powerful human, not only a big man, but one with an innate authority, a desire to lead. There was no telling what the vampire symbiote would give him, no assurance that he’d retain his natural strengths. He could wake as the weakest sort of vampire, one who essentially lived as a human.

  Adorjan had been willing to roll those dice. Either way, he’d told Quinn, he’d be going to Ireland with him. Either way, he’d fight by his side. So Adorjan had become Quinn’s first child. All the other vampires in his group were sworn to him, but Adorjan was his. He was hardwired to protect Quinn at all costs. And fortunately, he’d been reborn as a master vampire. He was Quinn’s security chief and bodyguard, and he’d be the one arranging the transfer of Quinn’s people—both vampires and humans—to Ireland.

  “Yeah,” Quinn told Garrick now. “It’ll take a few days for everyone to get here. We’ll be more than ready for them by then. Why don’t you give Adorjan a call, and . . . hell, what’s the time difference here? Do we even share darkness with Maine this time of year?” He saw Garrick flipping numbers in his head. The guy was a math whiz. A little time zone calculation should be nothing.

  “Yeah,” he decided. “We can catch them just after sunset if we call in the middle of the night here.”

  “Good. I want everyone moving within two days. The daylight guards can fly commercial and go right to the new house. They shouldn’t have any problems getting through customs. But I want the vampires on a private flight to Paris or London. Actually, make it Paris. After Raphael’s visit, I doubt the French vampires are paying much attention to the airports. They’re too busy staying alive. From Paris, our people can travel in pairs to Dublin—airplane or ferry, I don’t care, as long as it’s discreet.”

  “Right. I’ll handle it. What about the rest of tonight? What’s the plan?”

  Quinn grinned. “Tonight, we’re going to meet my new team of smugglers.”

  “Great. What do they smuggle again?”

  He laughed. “Let’s go find out.”

  “MAM? YOU HERE?” Eve called out as she let herself into the small house her mother had lived in for as long as Eve had been alive. She’d been born in this house. Her father had died in this house. Her brother had died while the family still lived there. Sometimes, she wondered if the house was cursed, and blamed her mother for not having moved long ago. She looked around and found no memories of her life here. There were pictures of her father and mother, pictures of Alan, and of the three of them before she’d been born. But there were none of her. Brigid hadn’t wanted another child and made no secret of it. She’d had Alan, her beautiful boy. She didn’t need a girl child slipping in and stealing a share of the love—from husband and son both—that should have been hers alone. Eve’s entire life had been colored by her mother’s resentment, and now her brother’s death. But if her dreams meant anything, then maybe Alan didn’t want her to stay that way. Maybe he wanted her to live, to walk in sunshine.

  “Mam?” she called again, although, she didn’t know why. There was nowhere else for the woman to be at this time of night. She never left the house after dark, and, as far as Eve could tell, the only place she ever went during the day was her bi-weekly supermarket trip, and the occas­ional visit to church.

  “Stop yelling. You sound like a fishwife.” Brigid Connelly’s voice was raspy from a lifetime of smoking, accompanied by the slap of her slippers on the thin carpet.

  “Good evening to you, too, Mam.” She even tried to make the words cheerful. Her mother wouldn’t have cared either way. “I was in Dublin earlier, and I brought some of those pasties you like.” She set the grease-stained bag on the small kitchen table.

  Her mother picked it up and tossed it aside. “They’re cold.”

  “Well, of course, they’re cold. It’s an hour’s drive.” Eve had ridden the train into Dublin that morning and picked up her car, grumbling all the way on the drive back. Except when she’d been re-living her night with Quinn. A shiver of pure lust had her nipples hardening in anticipation, and she had to fight off the sensation. A visit with her mother was no time to be fantasizing about sex. Spectacular sex. Stop it!

  Brigid fumbled in her housecoat pocket and came up with a crumpled pack of cigarettes. “Did you get my Marlboros?”

  Eve sighed. “Yes.” She dropped a plain white plastic bag onto the table, which her mother grabbed much more eagerly than she had the sweet pasties. The cigarettes didn’t come from Dublin. Those she bought from a local smuggler to avoid the stiff taxes designed to cut down on consumption of tobacco in Ireland. All the taxes ever did was increase profits for smugglers, but since it mostly affec
ted the poor, no one seemed to care. And the truth was that her mother would give up breathing before her Marlboro Golds. Eve couldn’t bring herself to worry about it, and maybe that made her a bad daughter. But her mother had never made any secret of the fact that Eve’s birth had been a mistake. “A surprise,” as Brigid had politely put it, back when she’d still bothered with such niceties. Back before her father and brother had died, and Brigid had been left with no one but the daughter she’d never wanted.

  “You look like a whore.”

  Eve blinked, still capable of being shocked by her mother’s disdain. “Thanks, Mam.”

  Her mother made a dismissive noise, lit a cigarette, and drew deeply. She blew out the smoke and said, “You find your brother’s killers yet?” It was the only thing she cared about. Eve had mentioned once that she’d seen the men who killed Alan. That had been early on, when she’d been overwhelmed by loss and had stupidly expected her mother to share her grief, even though they’d never shared anything else. Brigid’s only response had been that Eve—who’d been barely 23 and a university student at the time—should “probably get on that.” Eve still wondered sometimes if the only reason she hunted vampires was to somehow win the love of her mother by stalking her brother’s murderers. Could she really be that pathetic?

  “Not yet,” she answered with false cheer. “But you’ll be first to know.”

  She got another one of those dismissive noises from Brigid, this one laced with the scent of tobacco smoke.

  Eve watched as her mother shuffled to the worn chair in front of the television and sat down, staring at some game show or other as if there was no one else in the room. “You want some dinner?” Eve asked, knowing the answer and not sure why she bothered to ask.

  Brigid waved away the question with the hand holding her cigarette, never taking her eyes from the TV screen. “Like you can cook.”

  Eve sighed again, more deeply this time. “Okay, then. I’ll be off on my whorish way. I’ll let you know if I find the killers. Assuming they don’t kill me first.”

  Another wave of the cigarette.

  She stood there a moment longer, waiting for . . . she didn’t know what she was waiting for. She only knew it was never going to come. Without another word, she let herself out. She’d need to take a shower and wash her hair before going hunting. Vampires’ senses were much more sensitive than a human’s, and it was difficult to play the seductress when she stank of cigarettes.

  QUINN DIDN’T HAVE much trouble finding the gathering spot for Sorley’s local vampire gang. For one thing, the boat captain had been a treasure chest of information. In fact, Quinn was sure the human had known far more about the local operation than his vampire clients had suspected. Dangerously more. It was one thing to employ humans for certain necessary tasks—like piloting a boat through daylight waters— but it was something else entirely to trust them with the inner workings of vampire business. That sort of thing would stop once he was Lord of Ireland. Sorley ran a sloppy ship—no pun intended. Quinn would not.

  Apart from the captain’s intel, however, was the simple fact of Quinn’s power. Howth wasn’t a huge city. It had fewer than 10,000 residents, with a good number of those being clustered in dense residential districts of commuters from Dublin. Vampires generally weren’t found in family-oriented suburbs. At least, not the kind of vampires who ran smuggling operations. That left the small fishing village of historic Howth, which was more densely populated, and had a much smaller geographic reach. Quinn’s power let him search for and identify both vampire and human life signs, and the cluster of local vampires stood out like a beacon to his senses.

  “Too predictable,” Quinn muttered, as he and Garrick stepped out of the Range Rover and headed for what looked like a large, weathered boathouse with light leaking around the warped doors. Admittedly, the lights were dim. These were vampires, after all. But anyone with a brain would look at that building and wonder what was going on. And now that they’d drawn closer, he could hear music—in a place where there shouldn’t have been any activity at all after dark.

  “Not many cars,” Garrick observed.

  “Maybe no one needs a car around here.”

  “Where do they live? You think there’s a nest nearby?”

  “That’s what we’re about to find out.”

  No one challenged them as they walked right up to the warehouse and opened the door. A wash of light and sound immediately greeted them, making Quinn shake his head. Had no one ever heard of a double entry system around here, with the inner door not opening until the outer door closed? It wasn’t only light leakage, it was security. You couldn’t force an entire troop through the entrance if they had to crowd into a tiny vestibule. Not that anyone here would notice. What if Quinn had been an enemy? One guy with an Uzi could do a lot of damage.

  The warehouse they stepped into had boxes and crates stacked on both sides, some standing on the floor, some shoved onto metal shelves that lined the walls in perpendicular rows. Quinn looked around, waiting for someone to notice. He wasn’t expecting obeisance, didn’t even expect recognition of his power since he was shielding it from detection. But he was a stranger who’d just walked in on their blatantly illegal operation, and no one seemed to care. He was no longer amazed at Eve’s success in killing the two vamps the other night. A sexy woman, a dark alley . . . hell, it was like taking candy from a baby. Did they have that saying in Ireland? Maybe he’d teach it to this lot. He nodded to Garrick.

  Putting two fingers to his lips, Garrick let forth a piercing whistle. Quinn smiled. He’d always envied his cousin’s ability to do that. No matter how hard he’d tried, he’d never managed it.

  The chatter cut off like a switch had been thrown, the music dying with an unpleasant electronic squawk soon after.

  Seventeen vampires turned to stare at Quinn, with varying expres­sions of surprise and hostility. He waited. After a few minutes—the idea of one guy with an Uzi sprang to his head again, but with himself as the target this time—an average looking vamp emerged from the crowd, stepping around several much larger guys. Quinn sent out a smoke-thin wisp of a probe, testing the vampire’s power, unconcerned about the local’s ability to shield himself from detection. Quinn could penetrate any deception with ease, unless this guy had real power. In which case, Quinn would still be able to break through. It would simply take a bit longer. That wasn’t the case, however. The local had a master vampire’s strength, which he wasn’t trying to conceal.

  The vamp took two steps away from the crowd and studied Quinn. “Who’re you?”

  Quinn’s lips curved in a bare smile. If this vampire was in charge, Sorley should have called to warn him that Quinn was coming, should have done him the courtesy of telling him that Quinn was now in charge here in Howth. But, of course, Sorley hadn’t done that. Quinn wasn’t surprised. Sorley had probably hoped the local vampires would manage to kill Quinn, thus eliminating the danger that Quinn represented to his rule over Ireland. It was a vain hope, given the disparity in power between Quinn and the local. And it was a stupid move on Sorley’s part. He risked alienating some of these vampires with his willingness to let them die, and it also pissed off Quinn. Of course, he was going to kill Sorley anyway, but it was the principle of the thing.

  “My name’s Quinn Kavanagh.”

  “American,” someone sneered.

  “Irish,” Quinn countered, without bothering to track down the speaker. “Raised in the U.S. since I was a child, but I’m home now.”

  “Are you?” the apparent leader asked mildly. “And what do you want now that you’re home, Quinn Kavanagh?”

  Quinn tilted his head curiously, letting just a touch of his parents’ Irish lilt flavor his words. “Are there no manners in Ireland anymore then? I give you my name, but you don’t give me yours?” Whatever name the vampire gave him was likely to be a pseudonym, a nom de guerr
e, but Quinn needed to call him something before he killed him.

  “Christie,” the vampire said.

  “Well, Christie, you have a choice here.” Quinn let a measure of his true power leak through. Not all of it, not even close. It wasn’t necessary to show his cards yet, not for Christie or anyone else he’d met so far. In fact, he wouldn’t let even Sorley know the true depths of his power until the final battle, when he challenged the Irish lord for the territory. “I’m taking over the Howth smuggling operation,” he informed Christie plainly.

  “Says who?” someone called from the back of the pack.

  “Says Sorley.”

  Christie’s face gave away his surprise, before he managed to conceal it. “I heard rumors of your . . . surprise visit to Lord Sorley. So, you’ve got the guns.”

  “Sorley has the guns,” Quinn clarified.

  Christie’s eyes flared briefly. “What about Jacobs and Clarke?”

  Quinn considered his response. He assumed Jacobs and Clarke were the two vamps who’d been sent to receive the gun shipment before they’d had the misfortune of running into Eve. Maybe they’d even been friends with Christie. Still, Quinn had no reason to stand here and be interrogated. They were vampires, and he’d already demonstrated the only thing that mattered in their world. Power. On the other hand, treating Christie with the respect Sorley had so obviously denied him might make this transition go more smoothly.

  “I never caught their names,” he said smoothly, and let Christie conclude the rest.

  The Howth vampire sighed, then gave the tiniest bow from the waist. “You probably want a briefing.”

  Quinn tipped his head. “That would be useful.” He started forward, with Garrick at his back. The locals may have accepted him, but they certainly hadn’t embraced him. As Quinn approached the open door of a small, glassed-in office, the music started up again. He stopped and turned around. “The music stays off permanently,” he ordered. “We’re smugglers, not a bunch of drunk teenagers.”