For a moment she thought he was going to ignore her and she wasn’t certain how she felt about that—good? bad?—as his mouth continued lightly moving on her skin. Then he rubbed his chin against her calf in a gentle caress and finally lifted his head. “There,” he said, his tone slightly thick. “All better.”
And it was. She stared down at her knee. The trickle of blood was gone, all the pain was gone … she couldn’t even see the scrape. “That puts a whole new twist on kiss it and make it better,” she said in wonderment. She lifted her hand, examined it in the yellow glow of the porch light. No scrape there, either. “Wow.”
He smiled as he reached down and gripped her hand and pulled her to her feet. Her knees wobbled and he put his hand under her arm, held her steady for a moment until her balance settled.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” she said, feeling embarrassment heat her cheeks because she hadn’t already thanked him; after all, he had saved her life. “He was … he was going to kill me.” A slight frown knit her brow as she looked around. “Where is he?” Was he lying unconscious behind her car? Was he dead? Just … gone? And shouldn’t she file a report, or something? Oh, right, Luca had said she didn’t need the police, so no report.
“He’s gone,” Luca said. “He won’t bother you again.”
Well, that was a relief. She barely wondered why she would so blithely take his word for it, then the moment of doubt was gone and everything was okay.
She couldn’t stand there all night, she thought. Nor was she inviting him inside for a cup of coffee—for one thing, she didn’t want coffee, she wanted to go to sleep, but the main reason was that a thread of unease suddenly ruined her contentment. She didn’t know him; she couldn’t invite him in. She should find her keys, thank him again, and put an end to a very long and upsetting night.
Where were her keys? They’d been in her hand, so of course she’d dropped them. She sighed as she looked around, but they weren’t in sight; for all she knew, they were somewhere in the shrubbery. “My keys are down there somewhere,” she said ruefully.
“Here they are,” he replied almost immediately, stooping to pick up something in the black shadow of a bush. He straightened with her keys in his hand.
She blinked at the dangling keys. “How did you find them so easily?”
“The streetlight was shining on them just right.”
She took the keys, smiled shyly at him, and went up the steps to the front door. Her back to him, she inserted the key and turned it, then pushed the door open. She turned to look back at the man who stood at the foot of the steps. “Thank you again, Luca.”
He went very still, an expression of surprise, almost shock, on his face. “It was my pleasure,” he finally said.
Saying “thank you” didn’t seem like enough. She needed to do something more, something tangible. “I’m the night-shift manager at Katica, a restaurant down on—”
“I know where it is,” he said, a trifle abruptly.
“Come by tomorrow night and I’ll see that you get a free meal.” He still looked a bit taken aback by something, and less than thrilled by her suggestion, so she added, “The chef is really great. I can promise you a meal you won’t forget, and a special bottle of wine.”
“Thank you,” he said, sounding rather formal. He even dipped his head in a truncated bow. “I’ll stop by if I can.”
“I’ll look for you, then.” Chloe stepped into her house, then closed and locked the door, set the alarm. She felt remarkably calm, considering all that had happened. She knew she should be shaky, but the horrible details seemed very distant, and all she could think about was maybe getting some sleep—
“Chloe!”
“Dammit,” Chloe said as the voice suddenly whispered urgently in her ear. There went the hope of sleep. Something had to be done; this had to stop.
Standing outside, Luca stared at the door as it closed behind Chloe Fallon. He felt as if he’d been body slammed. She had remembered him. She had not only remembered he was there, she had remembered his name.
Not only was she not supposed to remember him at all, he’d glamoured her into forgetting Enoch’s attack had ever occurred. He’d healed her wounds—and hadn’t that been an exercise in self-control, he thought wryly. She’d tasted … God, she’d tasted the way he imagined ambrosia would taste, and the scent of her had wrapped around him, gardenia-sweet on a warm summer night. He didn’t understand it. She was pretty enough, not beautiful but definitely pretty: a normal little human working a normal little job, her strength puny, her senses dull in comparison to his—and still he’d had to fight the sudden screaming urge to flatten her there on the ground and take her, body and blood.
He shook himself, looked around. Enoch was nothing more than a pile of dust lying on the driveway on the other side of Chloe Fallon’s old car. The slight summer breeze was already dispersing him.
That had been close; if he’d been any farther away, he wouldn’t have been able to reach them before Enoch killed her. He’d heard what Enoch asked her, if she knew what she was, if she’d heard him yet.
She evidently had no clue, at least not yet, but Luca knew. She was a conduit, and her Warrior was trying to contact her—and the rebel vampires were evidently trying to hunt down and kill all the conduits before the Warriors could come through, to set the stage for a vampire takeover.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
What the hell was going on?
There wasn’t a simple answer, concerning either Chloe or the uprising, so Luca put the question aside for the moment to concentrate on the necessity of cleaning up after himself. He rounded Chloe’s car to examine what was left of Enoch, which consisted of the clothes he’d worn, a pair of scuffed boots, the heavy gold ring that Council employees always wore, and a handful of dust. Luca scooped up everything but the dust, which would soon enough disperse in the gentle breeze. He’d dump the clothes in a trash bin somewhere; the ring went into his pocket.
He’d almost been too late for Chloe Fallon. He’d even hesitated a second when he saw Enoch seize her, thinking Enoch was simply going to feed. Then he’d heard what Enoch said, the questions he’d asked her, and realized there was something much bigger going on.
He was sorry he hadn’t been able to question Enoch, but from the second he’d intervened he’d known how it would turn out. Enoch’s eyes had flared with panic when he recognized Luca, knowing at once what it meant: that Luca knew he had killed Hector and had followed him. For Enoch, it had been a fight to the death, because he would rather die than let Luca take him alive. Unfortunately, he’d taken his knowledge with him.
This was one time Luca’s reputation had worked against him. If Enoch hadn’t been so frightened he wouldn’t have fought so hard, and if he hadn’t fought so hard Luca could possibly have subdued him. Instead, he’d been pushed to his own limits by the frenzy with which Enoch had attacked, and in the end had had to literally tear his opponent’s head off. Luca was drenched in blood, something Chloe hadn’t noticed thanks to the reassuring glamour he’d used.
Now he was back to square one. No, worse, dammit: Enoch had been his only lead, so now he had no lead at all.
The hell of it was, he wasn’t completely unsympathetic to the rebels or their cause. When had the vampire community turned corporate? When had they become more concerned with maintaining secrecy and order than with living their long lives to the fullest? Luca could see how easy it would be for a strong leader to convince frustrated vampires that, with planning, a takeover would be easy enough. Damn, it probably wouldn’t take much of an argument to convince Luca himself.
The problem was, he could see where such a rebellion would lead. The vampires might take the upper hand, for a while, but it wouldn’t last. Humans had the numbers, and the ability to close themselves in their homes and simply not allow access. Any war between humans and vampires would come down to individual skirmishes across the country—and then the world. The vampires’ natural weaknesses wo
uld be discovered, they’d be hunted down and slaughtered when they were at their most vulnerable, and then the few strongest who were left would have to virtually seclude themselves from the world to keep from being found out, emerging only when they absolutely had to feed.
He’d seen it all before. The outcome had never been a good one, for the vampires.
This uprising had a new slant, taking out the conduits to prevent the Warriors from coming through. Damn those bastards. The humans had a formidable ally in the Warriors, and they didn’t even know it, most of them living their lives without ever coming in contact with one. The Warriors watched from whatever plane of existence they inhabited, and they decided when the human race was in trouble and needed help, reaching out then to contact their descendants so they could be called. Luca had even fought beside one or two of them in a few of his many battles—an uneasy alliance if ever there had been one—and he had a healthy awe of the sons of bitches.
If the conduits were being taken out, then the Warriors already knew, and they would already be trying to make contact and come through. Luca closed his eyes for a moment at a growing sense of impending doom, maybe not for him, personally, but definitely for the kindred as a whole. With the overwhelming numbers the humans enjoyed, they would need only a few warriors to lead them and the tide would be turned. Whoever was behind this uprising was either an idiot or thought he had a good chance of eliminating all the conduits in time.
Imperfect as it was, the status quo was preferable to all-out war with the humans, especially if—no, when—the Warriors became involved. No, their lives weren’t as pleasurable and free as they had once been. Yes, they had sacrificed a lot of their power to the complexities of the modern world. But they didn’t live their lives in constant conflict, they were no less powerful simply because that power was so seldom revealed.
Besides, Luca enjoyed being invisible… invisible to every human except Chloe Fallon.
Dammit, all he really cared about was finding out who was behind Hector’s murder. Enoch had been the weapon, but Luca wanted the hand that had wielded it. Enoch’s death put him in a bind. He had no contact on the Council, no one he could trust. The Council and those who served them was a closed circle—a family of sorts, even if a dysfunctional one. With Enoch dead, there was no one on the staff whom he suspected more than any other, so he had no idea whom to follow and whom to ignore. He had no idea where the uprising was being headquartered. He did know that conduits were being hunted down in an effort to prevent those bastard Warriors from showing their faces—
And he had a conduit right here, virtually under his nose.
Luca turned and thoughtfully looked at Chloe’s door. A light in the back of the house was still on, so she was still awake. Then, as he watched, the light winked out.
She was safe enough right now, in the sanctuary of her own home. Enoch’s boss didn’t yet know that he hadn’t survived the night, but they’d soon send someone else to do the job. Come daylight she likely wouldn’t be in any significant danger; the next attack on her would probably take place after dark, when a vampire was at his peak and the night hid a lot of secrets. So the next night was logically the earliest they would try again.
Luca considered his options, which weren’t as clear-cut as he liked. First, though, he had to do something about the problem of Chloe Fallon. She could not be allowed to remember him.
He’d never had something like that happen to him before. It was unheard of, damned annoying … and intriguing. Why didn’t his natural ability work on her? Who—what—the hell was Chloe Fallon? Why was she apparently immune to the innate magic that made people forget him, a magic so strong that until now it had always been effective on humans, and even on most vampires; only the older, stronger ones could remember him. She wasn’t resistant to a direct glamour; he’d calmed her down with the merest flick of his power as he took away her fear and anxiety. He hadn’t glamoured her into forgetting him because he’d simply assumed she would, the way other people did.
He couldn’t afford to be sloppy or overconfident at this stage of the game. He wasn’t invincible, any more than Enoch had been. Maybe it was good that this had happened, now he’d be more on his guard.
And yet … she’d remembered him.
He was so accustomed to being forgotten, to being nothing more than a ghost drifting in and out of humans’ lives, that he had long since accepted solitude as his natural state. Being so old, having so many people and vampires pass into and out of his life, had blurred many of the details of his memory; thankfully so, otherwise he’d have long ago been crushed under the burden of loss. He did have very clear memories, though, of trying time and again to establish some way of remaining in the memory of someone he’d loved, only to fail every time. There was a particular heartbreak in loving a woman, whether human or vampire, and having moments of connection as sweet as nectar—until that moment when she turned away to do some simple chore, and he vanished from her mind.
Eventually he had stopped trying, stopped loving, withdrawn more completely into himself. There were vampires who remembered him, of course, but he had so thoroughly severed his emotional ties that being with them felt odd. All vampires knew of him, but essentially he was set apart, unconnected. It had been a very long time since he’d even felt the hunger to be seen, to be recognized, to be remembered.
Until now. Until it had actually happened.
Maybe he shouldn’t be surprised that there was the occasional glitch in his abilities. Maybe he needed the reminder that he was no more invincible than Enoch had been; he couldn’t afford to be sloppy or overly confident at this stage of the game.
But how had it happened? Maybe there had simply been a delay; maybe she’d completely forgotten him by now. There was a strong probability that that was what had happened. No one was the same; whether vampire or human, they all had their quirks, their strengths and weaknesses. Maybe the synapses in Chole’s memory fired longer, or whatever, so the brief period of time when she hadn’t been looking at him hadn’t been long enough for the memory of him to fade. By now she should have no idea anything unusual had occurred tonight, no idea she had almost been murdered, no idea he existed. He ignored the cold sense of desolation that filled him at the thought; he’d lived through it many times before.
He’d find out if she had truly remembered; he’d go to her restaurant tomorrow night. But whether or not she remembered him, he would be her shadow, because another vampire would be coming for her, and Luca had to be there, waiting.
Chloe climbed into bed and pulled the covers over her head; the covers she cocooned herself in weren’t necessary for a summer night, but the warmth and the softness soothed her. She’d turned on the small TV that sat in the corner of her room, looking for, hoping for, a touch of normalcy. The muted sounds of an old movie on the television served to remind her, on a subconscious level, that even though it had been a rocky few days, all was right with the world. She’d been feeling so nice and peaceful, until that damn voice had started up again.
She expected to lie awake worrying about it, but instead she went to sleep almost as soon as she closed her eyes.
The dream came, but it was different; she wasn’t catching glimpses of a long blond braid that made her feel so uneasy she immediately woke. Instead, she was in another world—very literally. She didn’t know where, exactly, but the place felt real and not real, here and not here. There were rolling green hills and fertile valleys, gentle and lush, framed by majestic mountains. On the field below the hill where she stood, soldiers prepared for battle. No, not soldiers, exactly; some of them—most of them—didn’t wear any kind of uniform. In fact, some were barely dressed at all, which was definitely interesting. Being as appreciative of the male form as the next woman, she took a moment to consider exactly how interesting.
But some of the others wore uniforms that marked them as coming from different times, different cultures. Revolutionary war uniforms, some that looked like WWII uniforms, som
e … Roman? There was every type of weapon imaginable, from slings and stones to automatic firearms. Some of the soldiers sparred, some of them were cleaning their weapons, some were exercising. It all looked so real. She could even see some of them sweating. Now that she looked closer, she could see some women mixed in with the men, women who looked as fearsome as the men did.
“Weird dream,” she whispered.
“This isn’t a dream.”
Chloe wasn’t surprised when the old woman moved to stand beside her, wasn’t surprised to recognize her. This wasn’t the first time Grandma Annie had visited her in something that felt like much more than a dream.
“If it isn’t a dream, what is it?” As disturbing as the last few days had been, Chloe simply couldn’t be upset when Grandma Annie was with her. It was as if the spirit of the woman spread a circle of peace around her wherever she went. In life, in death, in whatever this was …
“This is a very real place, as real as your world. It’s the home of warriors who wait to be called, who live and die again and again in order to serve the greater good.”
“Warriors,” Chloe repeated. It was an odd word to use in a modern age. There were soldiers in the world, there were leaders, there were even heroes, but warriors? The word evoked primal, even brutal images.
“They can’t come on their own. They need help to come into your world in a physical sense,” the spirit said. “They need your help.”
“Help?”
“Ask,” Grandma Annie whispered. “Call them to you.”
And then, in the way of dreams, Chloe was somewhere else. Grandma Annie was gone without so much as a wave good-bye; the warriors Chloe had been watching were gone, and she stood alone upon a sheet of ice. It was so real she could feel the cold rising off the ice. Her nose was freezing, and so were her feet. She was so cold and so alone, and she longed for warmth and her grandmother and the circle of peace.
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