“So who the hell is it?”
Vayl’s eyebrow raised a tick. “I suspect it might be the visitor you frightened off before.”
“Who shows up at a vampire’s door at”—I checked my watch—“one in the morning?
“Perhaps he is an encyclopedia salesman.”
“Vayl.” I hid a grin. Such a charming trait, this tendency to get stuck in the past. As long as it’s just little bits of him and not the whole enchilada. The thought sent stabbing pains through my chest every time I remembered our most recent trip abroad, which had ended with his nearly losing all sense of the present in Marrakech. I said, “Nobody buys encyclopedia sets from door-to-door salesmen anymore, because they can get all the information they need from the Internet.”
His lips pressed together so tightly I’d almost call his expression a glower. “How can you trust an entity everyone willingly refers to as a Web? If it is as large as they say, you must know the spider that spun it is mountainous.”
The doorbell rang again. I said, “I’d like nothing better than to discuss what weapons people use to protect themselves against netbugs. But it sounds like your guest really wants in.”
He pulled me close. “Do not worry. It is probably a motorist who has lost his way. People who threaten me never ring the doorbell first. Besides, I saw him on the second-floor security cameras the first time he was here. He is an innocent.”
“How could you tell?” I demanded.
“It is one of my gifts.”
“Fine.” I started grabbing underwear. “But I’m not really prepared to entertain. Where’s my shirt?”
“I think we left it in the guest bedroom.”
Okay, that meant a run upstairs. But where were my pants? Oh yeah, the library. I’d probably never find my heels again.
“Do you know where your clothes are?” I asked.
“My pants are in the kitchen. And I believe you dropped my shirt in the billiard room,” Vayl answered as he slipped back into his boxers, his eyes sparkling like newly polished gems at the memory of our latest game.
“Okay, that leaves you to deal with the dude at the door.” I checked the monitor beside the light switch. “He looks nervous. Also tired.”
“He has probably been driving in circles all night. I suggest you take the back stairs. I will get rid of him as soon as possible, and then let us go shopping for dinner supplies, shall we? Tonight I think we should try cooking spaghetti again. Perhaps this time I can teach you how to boil pasta without clumping it.”
“Good luck with that. Although I’m sure Jack would appreciate a decent meal. He’s probably sick of Purina,” I said as we walked toward the back of the house, the doorbell insisting that we both move our asses because young-and-nervous needed to find his way back home!
“Wait a moment,” Vayl said as he opened the kitchen entrance to the newly fenced backyard. “Jack wants to go with you.” My enormous gray-and-white malamute stepped inside and brushed past him, nodding his thanks. (Yes, I’m serious. He’s überpolite. Even poops in the same spot so you don’t have to go “treasure hunting” every afternoon.) I hadn’t yet turned toward the servants’ stairs, but Jack divined my intentions and trotted up to the second floor before stopping at the top, grinning at me from white-toothed doggy chops as if to say, See what good shape I’m in? You should never leave me home during a mission again.
I ran up after him, patting his head affectionately as I passed him on the way to the guest bedroom. “You’re right. I missed you like crazy too. I’ll try to keep you close from now on, okay?”
The door I wanted had been thrown wide during Vayl’s hunt, the puffy pink duvet still pulled up to reveal the spot where I’d hidden under the four-poster bed. I crossed to the freestanding mirror where he’d tossed my tailored white shirt over the support structure. I threw it on over my bra. Stepped across the hall to the big, elegant room I shared with him to grab a pair of cheek-covering panties to slip on. And, of course, the pet that had preceded Jack had to come with me too, so on went the shoulder holster I’d left sitting on the mahogany dresser. Inside it rested a Walther PPK that had once shot only regular ammo. Then Bergman got ahold of it. Now, with the flick of a button, it transformed into a vamp-smacking crossbow.
Jack had spent the time sniffing hopefully at the sofa that sat at the foot of the bed, its soft gold leather inviting him to jump up and make himself at home. “Don’t even think about it,” I told him. “There’s a reason your bed’s downstairs. Now let’s bolt before you get into real trouble. I think I hear my pants ringing.”
We ran up the main stairs to the third floor, where I found my jeans crumpled beside the cozy brown suede chair where I liked to curl up every afternoon with a book and a can of Diet Coke. I pulled my phone out of the back pocket and stuck it between my ear and shoulder while I shoved my legs into my Levi’s.
“Hello?”
“Jaz? Where’s Vayl?”
“Hi, Cassandra. He’s with me.”
“He’s all right then?”
“What?” I felt my fingers go numb. Usually I reacted faster. It was my job to make sure my emotions didn’t cloud my judgment. Even for the two seconds it took me to realize my psychic friend was freaking out about my lover. “What did you See?”
“There was a mix-up in Australia. I accidentally packed one of your T-shirts in my suitcase. So I was folding it back into my luggage because Dave and I are coming up to visit you and Evie. It was supposed to be a surprise—” She swallowed a sob.
“Tell me now, Cassandra.” I tried to keep my voice calm. No sense in shouting at the woman who’d already saved my brother’s life with one of her visions. But if she’d been in the room I’d have shaken her till her teeth rattled.
“When I touched your shirt I saw you, leaning over Vayl’s body. He had a stake through his heart. The blood—oh, Jaz, the blood.” She started to cry for real now.
“Anything else? Come on, Cassandra, I need to know everything you Saw.” I’d zipped into my pants. Run to the stairs. Managed to make it to the second floor without breaking my neck. Jack was way ahead of me.
“I don’t know. There’s this explosion, but not like the kind you see in movies. It’s more… ripply. And at the middle is a young man. Younger than you. Taller, even, than Vayl, with full brown hair that keeps falling onto his forehead. He’s snarling, which makes two deep dimples appear on his cheeks. He’s standing in front of a tall oak door above which is hanging—”
“A pike with a gold tassel,” I finished.
“Yes!”
“Shit! Cassandra, that’s Vayl’s front door. And you’ve just described the kid who was ringing the bell.”
“Did he answer?”
“I don’t—”
A shot rang out, tearing my heart in two. Jack growled menacingly, already on his way down the final set of steps. I glanced into the well made by the turn of the stairs from second to first floor. Yeah, I could jump it. So I did, landing on another one of Vayl’s overstuffed sofas. The impact sent me rolling into the walnut coffee table fronting it, knocking it across the hall into a case full of antique knives. I raised my arm, protecting my face from the shattering glass.
Not knowing how far the glass had scattered, I protected my bare feet by jumping back onto the couch. Then I took half a second to assess the situation.
Twenty feet from me, at the other end of the hall in front of the open door, Vayl lay in a spreading pool of blood, the bloody hole in his forehead a result of the .38 Special lying on the floor. There were two reasons the young man kneeling over him wasn’t still holding it. He needed both hands for the hammer and stake he now held poised over Vayl’s chest. And Jack’s teeth had sunk deep enough into his right wrist that by now he’d have been forced to drop it anyway.
Only a guy as big as this one wouldn’t have been thrown completely off balance by a full-on attack via 120-pound malamute. Despite the fact that a hundred pounds of the guy was weight he didn’t need, his size h
ad kept him off his back, though it hadn’t allowed him to recover his balance enough to counter with the stake in his free hand. That would change if I didn’t reach the scene in time.
I jumped to the outer part of the stairs, holding the rail to keep from falling as I cleared the fallout from the display case. Another jump took me to the floor. Five running steps gave me a good start for a spin kick that should’ve caught the intruder on the temple, breaking his glasses in at least two places and taking him down so hard he’d be dreaming before his head bounced. But unless they’re drugged, people don’t just sit and wait for the blow.
He pulled back, catching my heel on his nose. It broke, spraying blood all over his shirt and Jack. His glasses flew off, hitting the wall, but remaining miraculously intact. And it didn’t take him down. In fact, it seemed to motivate him. Desperation filled his eyes. He ripped his hammer hand out of Jack’s grip, though the bloody rips in his forearm would hurt like a son of a bitch when his adrenaline rush faded.
Afraid his next move would be a blow to my dog, I lunged at him. I was wrong. He threw the hammer at me, forcing me to hit the floor. I rolled when I felt his shadow loom, knowing the worst scenario was me pinned under all that weight. But it never fell on me. I jumped to my feet and began to unholster Grief, though the last thing I wanted was to kill the bastard before I found out who’d sent him.
Still, I was too late. The intruder had retrieved his revolver and was aiming the barrel at my chest. He’d probably hit me too if he squinted hard enough and held his breath long enough to stop shaking. The only positive I could see was that I stood between him and Vayl. For now.
Jack growled menacingly and began to approach the man, his fur standing on end so that he looked like the miniature bear he sounded most like when he vocalized.
The gun wavered as the man said, “You tell that dog to stop, or I will shoot it.”
“No, Jack,” I said. “Sit.”
He came to an unhappy stop beside me. Once again I stood staring at my ultimate end. Because my Spirit Guide had informed me that my body couldn’t take another rise to life. If this scumbag capped me, I’d be done. And I so wasn’t ready.
I said, “I don’t know you. And I thought I’d pegged all of our enemies. You’re not a werewolf. You’re not Vampere. You’re definitely no pro.”
His eyebrows went up. So. He hadn’t been told about our work. Baffling. Still, whoever picked him had chosen well. Amateurs occasionally succeeded where professionals failed because they were unpredictable. And motivated. This one definitely had his reasons for being here. I could see it in the way his eyebrows kept twitching down toward his nose. He was a time bomb ready to blow everyone in the room to bloody bits.
He raised the gun. Uh-oh. While I’d been thinking, so had he. And it looked like he’d made a decision. “You need to walk away from that vampire,” he said.
“No.”
He pushed the revolver toward me, to make sure I understood he could pull the trigger. “I’m not playing. I will kill you if that’s what it takes to smoke him.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll die if you do that anyway.”
The remark confused him. Upset him. This isn’t a bad man, but damn, something has pushed him way past his limit. I watched his finger tighten on the trigger. I said, “Don’t. Dude, you’ll be killing a federal agent. They put you in jail forever for that kind of shit.”
“Jail?” He laughed, his voice rising into girl-land as he said, “I’m already in hell.” Which was when I knew there was nothing I could say to divert him. I looked down at Jack, touched the soft fur on the top of his head in farewell. Glanced over my shoulder at Vayl, only long enough for the pain to lance through my heart.
I could pull on him, make my final moments an epic shootout. But Jack could get hurt in the crossfire, and I’d never forgive myself if that happened. “Get it over with then.”
“NOT SO FAST!!”
I slammed my hands over my ears, though I was pretty sure the voice came from inside my head until I saw that the intruder was wincing and wiping blood from his earlobes as well.
The floor started to shake. Jack yelped and tried to hide between my legs as the polished pine floorboards between me and the intruder began to splinter and the fiery outline of an arched doorway pushed itself up from the basement below.
“Well,” I whispered to my dog. “This is new.”
I was pretty sure the intruder couldn’t see the plane portal rising to stand between us. Most humans never did. But he did get a load of the five-by-six-foot gap developing in the floor. And when Raoul seemed to step out of thin air, I didn’t blame him for needing to sit down. Which he did. On a plush, round-cushioned chair that was currently covered with wood chips.
My Spirit Guide recovered Vayl’s attacker’s weapon so easily I felt a little stupid that I’d ever been paralyzed by it. Maybe I was getting soft in my old age. Maybe seeing Vayl halfway dead had freaked me out more than I should’ve let it.
Raoul reversed the gun and lightly tapped the intruder on the forehead with it. “Wrong choice, Aaron. And I thought you knew better.” He lifted the back of his jungle camouflage jacket and stuck the .38 in the waistband of his matching pants as Aaron tried to get his face to stop twitching. Raoul regarded him quietly for a while and then turned to face me. “Stop trying to get yourself killed. Even the Eminent agreed with me on this one. It isn’t your time yet.”
“I wasn’t trying—it’s not? Cool!” Nice to think that the folks who called the shots upstairs had actually approved of Raoul’s helping me for once. Especially since it had involved saving my neck again.
“So what do you and the other Eldhayr think about this dude? What did you call him, Aaron?” I asked, pointing my chin toward the failed assassin.
Raoul pulled me aside. “I’m not allowed to interfere there.” He looked hard into my eyes, trying to communicate information I hadn’t known him long enough to decipher. He said, “All I can say is that it’s good, really good, that you didn’t kill him. Keep doing that.”
“What about Vayl?” I asked. “What can you say about him?”
“Do you really need to hear that he’s going to be okay? You already know that, Jaz. A bullet to the head can’t kill a vampire as powerful as him.”
I shrugged. It’s one thing to understand something intellectually. It’s something completely different to see your lover looking fully dead from a head wound. So I reminded myself again, He’s just been knocked out. If you lifted his head you’d see the back of his skull has probably already re-formed. You shouldn’t be trying to figure out how your stomach can manage to clench itself that tight. You should be patting yourself on the back for hooking up with a guy who’s that tough to kill.
“Jasmine? Jaz? Is it over? What happened?”
The voice, small and tinny, could’ve been mistaken for one of my inner girls, the various parts of my personality that I chat with when I’m überstressed or strapped for choices. But it was real. And hysterically worried. I suddenly realized I’d dropped my phone during the fight and now Jack was trying to dial China with his nose.
“Cut it out,” I murmured as I picked it up. “You don’t even like rice.” I laid the receiver against my ear. “Cassandra? I can’t believe you’re still there.”
“He’s important!”
“Of course he is. But he’ll be fine. Vampires are—”
“No! I mean, yes, of course. But I’m talking about the young man.”
“WHAT? You can’t be on Raoul’s side in this. This guy Aaron nearly killed us both!” I glared at the would-be murderer. He stared straight at me. Raised his chin slightly. But his lower lip was sending out an SOS I figured his mom could hear from inside her local beauty shop’s hair dryer.
Cassandra yelled, “Jasmine Elaine Parks, you listen to your future sister-in-law, dammit! Something is making me tingle like I’m electrified. Let me talk to Aaron!”
I held the phone out to him. “You have a call.”
He looked away. “I’m busy.”
“Either you talk to the nice lady or I punch your lights out.” His eyes, suddenly round and uncertain, went to Raoul, so I added, “Oh, don’t look to him for help. He’s like the UN. He’ll bitch and whine about my behavior, but he’ll sit back and let me do the dirty work because, in the end, he knows I’m the one who’s gonna save the world.”
Raoul growled, “That was a low blow.”
I shrugged. “I’m sorry. I know the Eminent is always tying your hands. I just tend to get pissy when people try to kill the guy I love.” I looked up at him. “But I do appreciate you coming when you did. Stellar timing, as usual.”
I shoved the phone toward Aaron. “The threat still stands, mainly because I’m still highly ticked off and I wanna hit something. It’d be so great if you gave me an excuse.”
Aaron took the phone, staring at me suspiciously as he said, “Hello? Yes. No.” He listened for a while before his face puckered. But he managed to master the emotion Cassandra had eked out of him before he said another word. Which was “Thanks.”
He handed the phone back to me. “Well?” I asked the woman on the other end, who deserved a respectful ear, both because she’d survived nearly a thousand years on this Earth and because she’d chosen to spend the next fifty or so with my brother.
Cassandra took a deep breath. “I can’t be sure without touching the boy, but I consulted the tarot while he and I were speaking. It points to the same signs the Enkyklios has been showing me. I have to do more research, but—”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“Whatever you do, don’t hurt him,” she repeated, this time in such a sober tone that I looked at him with less anger and more curiosity. Which was why I didn’t shove his head into the wall like I’d been planning to when she said, “I believe that, in another life, he was Vayl’s son.”
I stared at the guy, who looked so much younger than me that it was hard not to think of him as a kid. He glared back. And then, all at once, his face crumpled. It was like he’d only brought enough adrenaline with him to get him through fifteen minutes of action. After that the bravado shattered like an old piece of glass. I said, “You’re lucky to be alive.”
The Deadliest Bite Page 2