by Michele Hauf
Her fragrance lingered, hanging on the damp night air like a cloud partially tainted with the iron odor of fright, and blood.
Icy knife pricks of discomfort returned.
He had told Madison to run, and she had done so, blindly. Instead of sprinting to what she would think of as safety, however, she had met someone else along the way. Something else, smelling not quite so sweet.
He instantly recognized the image forming next to hers in his mind. Stewart Chase. The twins had indeed found each other here, not long ago. And all because St. John had left her alone for what was, in his world, an insignificant amount of time, but was in hers direly significant, the difference between life and death and another type of existence after real breath was gone.
St. John tried to appease the gnawing marks on his back that continued to pain him. Even without Nosferatu on the way, his dealings with the Hundred, and among them a traitor of the worst kind, this particular meeting between Madison and what was left of her brother could have bad consequences for everyone.
Monteforte would know this, too, and that in splitting his allegiances, St. John would become weaker in regard to any one of them.
The screech of sirens roused St. John from thought. The sirens were close, slicing shrilly through the heaviness of the otherwise deceptively quiet London night. Intermittent with those sirens, he heard the approach of a car.
He spun, slamming his stinging back against the side of the building, and waited for the arrival of the woman he felt with every sense in his body. The flame-haired object of his soul’s desire was coming back to him. Stewart, bless that damn hybrid, hadn’t harmed his sister.
When the car pulled up, he saw Madison through the window. He couldn’t rush out there and tear the door from its hinges. What he could do, though, was offer up a prayer of thanks for her return, even though his prayers were seldom, if ever, answered.
* * *
As the detective’s car came to a stop in front of her hotel, Madison shivered. Her inner radar told her that St. John hovered just out of sight.
She wasn’t sure she could withstand another encounter with him just now. Yet she couldn’t wait for it.
He had warned her to run because he believed the creature in the Germand hotel lobby had been extremely dangerous. She knew he’d been right. Just the sight of that hotel had caused a flare of unease in her. And there had been still more danger on the surrounding streets.
“You’ll need to come back to the department with me to make a statement,” Crane said, cutting the engine. “You have time for a quick shower and a change, that’s all.”
Probably sensing the distressing way he had put that, he hurried on, more gently. “You look like you need that shower, as well as a good, stiff drink.”
Madison searched the dark. “They’ll find out who’s in that place, and who the sweater belongs to?”
“We’ll do our best.”
The detective got out of the car, crossed to her side and helped her out. She hated the fact that she needed his arm in order to stand.
“I’ll take you up,” he said in a tone that let her know he’d accept no argument.
“I can shower by myself, Detective.”
“Of course you can, so I’ll wait in the hall.”
He wasn’t smiling when Madison looked. His forehead showed deep furrows as he said, “You saw St. John again? Could the blood on your hands be his?”
“No. Not his.”
She didn’t dare address the reason why the detective had been spying on her, and instead thought about the Germand hotel, and how wrong it had felt leaving St. John there. Had it only been hours ago that he’d held her in his arms?
“Is something wrong?” the detective asked.
“Funny question, isn’t it, given the circumstances,” she said.
She realized as they passed through the lobby that she’d begun to hate this place, and every hotel like it.
“There’s a hospital a few blocks away. It might be a good idea to stop there,” D.I. Crane said in a tone of honest concern.
“Thanks, but I really do need that shower.”
Her stomach was queasy, but Madison couldn’t recall the last time it hadn’t been. As for the weak-kneed condition currently crimping her style, well, that had to go. She was smarter than this, stronger than this. She was alive. She hadn’t been hurt by whoever had abducted her. In fact, she had gotten away without much fuss at all, as bizarre as that was.
Her journalistic side wanted to know why she had been allowed to leave the scene of a possible homicide, and why her abductor had let her walk when he had to figure she’d go straight to the police. The detective beside her had probably asked himself those same questions.
Would he also consider that whoever had taken her to that apartment might have done so for a very specific reason? So she would find the body in it?
The clock over the lobby desk told her she’d been gone an hour. One freaking hour, when it felt like twenty.
She eyed the detective as they approached the elevator, finding it interesting that he’d give her a pass to return to the hotel for a quick cleanup, when that kind of leniency surely had to go against police policy in any country. She had been part of a crime scene. Even after they’d taken samples from under her nails, she remained the bearer of important details, and a credible witness.
Contrary to Teddy’s analysis, British D.I.s weren’t stupid or notorious for fits of lovesickness. Nevertheless, too damn many things were popping up that any skilled journalist would have gone after with lights and cameras blazing...which was exactly what she intended to do.
As she and the detective stepped into the elevator, the smell of the blood on her hand made her stare at her fingers. She’d bitten some guy, acting like one of Stewart’s vampires. She had tasted the awful stuff twice tonight, and wondered how vampires could like it.
However, the dried blood on her hands seemed to signify something of real consequence. And damn if that didn’t always bring her back to Stewart, and the way his insane explanation for the events of the past two days would go down.
Vampires. In London.
As the elevator started up, Madison delved into her memory of her brother’s files, unable to help herself. Because there had been, she was sure, blood on the old man’s lips at the Germand.
Blood that may not have been his.
Stewart had written that there were two Londons, one for the living and one for the dead, and that the two worlds had collided in the worst possible of ways. He had suggested that innocent people were suffering the consequences of the secrets known only to a few savvy souls.
What if there were actually such things as vampires, and everything she’d been through was tied in to that?
What if what she had seen on the old man’s face at the Germand had been blood, as in he’d been drinking some?
What if vampire existence somehow explained the disappearance of the four Yale girls who had been seen at that hideous hotel, and Stewart knew it and that’s why he’d come here?
Vampires, in London.
For real.
Screw the shaky stuff. She had a job to do and by God, she would do it. Finding that body tonight only served to up the ante.
“I remembered something,” she said to D. I. Crane. “I’m sorry I can’t recall where the information came from, but it was to check out a hotel around the corner called the Germand. Do you know it?”
The detective nodded. “Fancy place for fancy people.”
Again, she thought of the image of the old man in green.
“Can you send someone there to investigate whether the girls might have been there recently?” she asked. “Right away?”
“I can, and will,” he said, eyeing her quizzically. “It was a good tip? Trustworthy?”
She was shivering again, and positive that Christopher St. John waited for her. He felt close enough to touch.
Who was St. John, really?
He had rubbed his hands over her on a dance floor, and had taken her, body and soul, in a hotel room. He had stepped in front of her on the street, and in that awful hotel, in an attempt to protect her.
Protector. Beings who were liaisons between immortals and humans. This was the term she had bandied about the night she’d met him. And just after he’d offered his assistance with this case.
St. John. With his easy access to all sorts of clubs and private hotels, was there any doubt that he might also be socially well placed enough to be able to pull the strings necessary to get her a shower and her current chaperone?
Had the Protector, in lieu of not being able to do his job, recruited someone else to do it for him?
She gave the detective a covert glance before her gaze strayed to the bloodstains on her hands.
The dried blood was the same color as the blood that had pooled on St. John’s scratches. Not the faded hue of dried blood, but much darker, older.
Her stomach tightened. A flash of white heat seared across her neck. This meant something, surely?
It certainly didn’t have to be proof that Christopher St. John had lied about not being mortal. Or that the old man in green in the Germand’s lobby had been unearthly.
So, how could she prove these things once and for all?
“Proof,” she whispered, earning her a second raised eyebrow from the detective beside her. “I have one stop to make,” she said when the elevator stopped at her floor.
“No time for that,” Crane said.
“I just have to let my crew know I’m okay. It’ll take a second.”
Crane didn’t actually nod, though he didn’t look happy about this.
Passing her door, continuing down the corridor, Madison stopped, lifted a hand and knocked. In spite of the ungodly hour, the door opened and Teddy stood there, looking not worried, but excited.
“There was something on the tape you wanted to show me,” she said. “You sent a text about finding something strange in the footage you shot yesterday?”
If Teddy replied, she didn’t hear it. Her heart rate was escalating. St. John had entered the building. Her body knew it and was already heating up.
She had to see that footage. She had to see it so that she could put Stewart’s obsessions behind her, and get on with her own.
She knew exactly what she’d be looking for on that tape: a man in the doorway of a pub. A man who would show up on that tape because he was mortal, not some idiotic version of her brother’s wicked imagination. That was the vampire deal, right? No captured image for the undead?
D.I. Crane grunted his displeasure over allowing her to stretch the leeway he’d allowed her. As his hand closed on her elbow with a subtle pressure, Teddy switched on the monitor.
The picture came on the screen. Madison zeroed in, ready to laugh, feeling relieved.
She watched other newscasters scrambling to get to the scuffle going on in the distance, and paid attention as the camera turned in Teddy’s capable hands.
“What the—?”
She stared in disbelief at the doorway as the camera swept past it. She wanted to shout for Teddy to rewind.
Empty.
Christopher St. John was not in that doorway.
But St. John had been there. She had seen him. Possibly Teddy had taken too long to focus the lens.
“Did you see that?” Teddy asked excitedly.
Her cameraman rewound the tape, and pointed at the screen.
Dazed, trying to rally, Madison saw the face in the crowd that Teddy was alluding to. So did the detective beside her.
“That’s Janis Blake,” Teddy said, rewinding again. He looked to Madison for confirmation. “Isn’t that one of the missing girls?”
“Damn well looks like her,” Crane replied, loosening his grip on Madison.
The two men in the room would assume she was as stunned as they were to see a familiar face in the crowd—the face of the youngest of the missing Yale Four. They might even have been right if this had happened two days ago.
Unfortunately, she was stuck in the loop of video footage preceding that flash of the missing girl’s face, seeing the pub’s doorway over and over in her mind, and picturing Christopher St. John standing in it.
The room went unnaturally quiet. Madison observed the scene around her as if it, too, was being played back on a machine in slow motion.
The detective studied the screen, with one hand on his phone. Teddy beamed, realizing he had made an important discovery. The room, for her, had gone hazy. Her ears filled with static. In that scratchy noise swam a memory, a message meant only for her, and for times like this.
“You will crave this touch as much as I will.”
And there was something else, another voice overlapping St. John’s.
“Mad one,” the voice tonight, on the street, had whispered. She remembered that only now.
“Stop fighting, mad one,” that voice had directed.
Fending off a rising panic, Madison swallowed a cry. Only one person in the world used that nickname for her. Mad one.
She flashed back to the hand on her mouth and the fact that the abductor hadn’t really harmed her. Blacking out had nothing to do with him hurting her; she just hadn’t been able to hang on.
She’d been so scared.
But she hadn’t been tied up in that awful place where she’d been left. Escape had been easy. The abductor hadn’t meant to hurt her. He meant for her to find that body.
Her abductor hadn’t been just anyone, reason now told her. It had, in fact, been her brother. Her twin. Stewart. No one else on the planet knew his nickname for her.
The wall felt hard and unyielding against her injured shoulder. She was shaking, had been shaking nonstop for what seemed like hours, from distress and fatigue and so damn many loose ends. Now, there was light.
No!
Hell...
She had provided the police with a blood sample from her attacker, and it might have been Stewart’s DNA they would discover. She might have bitten her brother’s hand.
Locking her jaw to keep the shouts trapped inside, Madison reached for the doorknob. She had to see St. John. She had to confront him. No matter what he was, if he had connections, she’d ask him to use them to get her brother back.
The detective’s voice stopped her from leaving. Slowly, and with her heart revved by a new kind of panic, she turned to face him.
Chapter 16
A foul wind, impossible to ignore, reached St. John as he stood beneath Madison’s window. The Nosferatu hadn’t yet breached the city proper.
They had been sent to find the royal blood in his veins and in the veins of the other Knights offered immortality, exactly as his Makers had long ago predicted.
Evil, it seemed, never gave up or gave in. The thirst for greed never waned.
Peeling himself from the wall, St. John rolled his aching shoulder blades. What was happening in London, and about to get worse, went so far beyond the concept of right and wrong, as well as the most basic, normal perceptions most people had of the world, as to be unrecognizable fragments of those ideas.
Ruthless monsters were coming, due to the fact that a traitor had infiltrated the Hundred, desiring to upgrade his personal stockpile of power.
With his etched skin searing, St. John searched the street, setting mental boundaries for the battle to come.
In his mind, the haunting refrain of a question issued through moist, parted lips plagued him.
“Are you a vampire?”
After all this time, St. John
wondered if he might be losing his mind.
* * *
“Can you skip that shower?” D.I. Crane asked Madison as she went to leave Teddy’s room. He turned to her cameraman and said, “I’ll need that tape.”
Madison’s hand was frozen on the door. He hadn’t mentioned anything about St. John. When he looked at her again, she said, “I need my purse and my credentials. I’ll skip the shower but I need a quick cleanup. I’ve got blood on my hands and knees.”
Crane nodded as he opened the door. “We’ve got to get back to the station with this information.”
“Back?” Teddy sounded confused.
“I’ll have to go with the detective,” Madison said. She didn’t sound like herself, and wondered if anyone noticed.
“At this time of night?” Teddy said.
Madison shrugged, hoping she looked nonchalant, feeling like hell. Now wasn’t the time to go into what had occurred. Explanations would take time she didn’t have.
The news world would be rocked by what was on this tape. This network exclusive would advance the careers of everyone on their crew, but at this moment, she couldn’t have cared less about her job. St. John was near. Her brother was near. Answers as to what the heck was going on were required from both.
“There’s something I was supposed to tell you,” Teddy said, as if just remembering. “A man stopped by.”
Madison looked to the detective to make sure he didn’t sense her sudden stiffness, and found him making another call.
“What man?” she asked.
“Don’t know,” Teddy said. “I wasn’t paying attention. I only remember that I’m supposed to tell you that he came by. I must have been groggy, or too excited about the tape. Sorry. I think he knocked at my door.”
Madison controlled her reply. “It must not have been important.”
“Want me to go along, wherever it is you’re going?”
“I’ll have her back before breakfast,” Crane said.
Teddy made a point of looking at his watch. “That’s about an hour from now.”
“Is it?” The detective seemed surprised. Probably his night had also been long.