“We’re taking them back with us. It’s getting too dangerous for us to risk our women.”
Andreas didn’t need George and Marshall’s anger to know how that particular statement made them feel. “And what century do you think you’re living in?”
George sucked his cheeks in as though he was about to spit, but then swallowed. At least civilization had taught him that much. “This one. You know as well as we do that vampire women are precious. The future of the race depends on them.”
“Vampires can mate with mortal women.”
“But not always make vampires. Most of the children of that kind of union are mortals like their mothers.”
Andreas shrugged. “They’re usually Talented in some way. If the survival of a race depends on the subjugation of half of them, is it worth preserving?” He gave them a look of pure contempt. “By demanding that Nancy and Roz disappear inside your strongholds, you’re denying them the right to make up their own minds. If they want it, fine.” If families meant that kind of attitude, he was better off without one.
Roz lifted her head and confronted her cousins. “You’re living in the past, boys. Give it up, go home, and tell them what we decided.”
George breathed heavily through his nose and shook his head. “We can’t. We’re under orders to bring you back for your own good.”
“Who ordered you?”
Andreas suspected she knew. Only a few people had the authority to compel vampires like these.
“Your fathers.”
Roz made an exasperated sound between her teeth, but it was Nancy who spoke. “I’m marrying Don, so I won’t be breeding with any vampires anytime soon. My mother’s okay with it; my dad agreed reluctantly; so what’s your problem?”
Marshall shot Don a sharp glance. Don smiled back, seemingly not at all put out by the presence of these powerful beings. But then he’d lived with one for a while. “He’ll have to be approved.”
“I’ve had permission from my folks to tell him what I am. That’s all the approval I need. If there’s anything else my father wants, he’ll have to ask nicely for it.”
Good for her! Andreas wanted to applaud but only allowed himself a smile. “Looks as if they made their choices, boys. Just get back to the family and let them know.”
“Can’t do that.” Marshall’s voice turned sharper, and all Andreas’s senses went on alert. “We’re taking them back, and that’s all there is to it.”
Grimly, Andreas realized George had circled around him. The vampires neatly bracketed him. If that was all it took to take him down, he’d have been dead meat a long time ago.
Without warning, he lashed backward with one foot, taking Marshall smartly in the chest and slamming down his mental screens. As he’d expected, George darted forward, hoping to attack him while he was off-balance.
He circled his leg, regaining his equilibrium and using his left arm to swing out. The mental attack came from two places at once. These two must be a couple of hundred years old at least, fully mature vampires, and they had full, highly trained control of their faculties.
Pain lashed at him from George, lying on the floor, and from Marshall, taking him from a different angle at the front of his brain.
He nearly lost it until a single, searing needle swept into his mind, splitting the contact between him and Marshall, enabling him to strike back and deflect the attack of blinding agony George had hoped to incapacitate him with. Roaring in fury, he bared his teeth and stretched his hands, allowing the claws to shoot out from their sheaths under his fingernails.
The answering hiss of twenty unsheathed claws met his attack, but here he could confidently fight on. Two to one was nothing, even against strong males, for a man of his training.
Or so Andreas told himself. “You won’t take them,” he growled, the words almost inaudible against his strong fangs and the fury bubbling up inside. They understood.
One blow wasn’t enough, and when George sprang up from the floor, they attacked him without hesitation. The click of the catch on Don’s pistol sounded through all the roaring rage, though, and the explosion sent the world into ringing, echoing cacophony.
Marshall fell to the floor, eyes wide with pain. Don had hit his mark, and the bullet had gone straight through his leg. Blood pooled on the expensive cream carpet.
“Oh, great, look what you’ve done!” Nancy’s angry cry split incongruously through the testosterone-fueled shouts and fury.
“Darling, we’ll make it right.”
“Only if we get the whole room recarpeted. That bastard’s paying for it. Bleeding all over my floor!”
Andreas could hardly credit what he was hearing, but that was nothing compared to Don’s gawping mouth and dazed eyes. “Nancy, sweetheart, I shot him.”
“Yes, but not without provocation. You two can just get out of here! We’re doing all right on our own. We don’t need big strong vampires to tell us what to do.” Nancy strode forward and poked George in the chest. “So go.”
“Sorry, babe. Can’t do it.” George glanced at Marshall, who still lay groaning on the floor. “I’ve got this one. Get up, grab the other one, and we’ll be on our way.”
Several things happened at once. Marshall surged to his feet, albeit wincing and favoring one leg, the one not spurting blood. He grabbed the edge of his shirt, ripping a strip from the fine material to make himself a tourniquet. Don watched, openmouthed.
Andreas was too busy to take much notice of events. He leaped at Roz, grabbed her, and concentrated.
He flashed out.
Chapter Eight
Roz felt the air eddy. Colors swirled around her, disorienting her senses before they settled once more. “What did you do?” she demanded, pulling away. She glanced around. “Oh. Where are we?”
He watched her, wariness darkening his eyes. “At my house in New York State. I’ll take us back anytime you like, but I thought we could both do with time off.”
“Time off, huh?”
His voice rose a little. Roz guessed he worried what her reaction might be. “I sensed others arriving at the apartment. Backup. We would have lost, and they would have taken you back.”
Her jaw firmed. “I felt that too. I was prepared to go back, at least until I’d explained to them.” Fucking Gardiners! “They were okay until they thought we might be in real danger. Then it’s, ‘Oops, save the women, the breeding factories!’”
“What were they thinking?” He lifted a hand, and soft lights came up. “What century do they think they’re in?”
“Some of them think they’re still in the Victorian era.” She watched him. “Impressive telekinesis. All the bangs and flashes. Clever touch.”
He opened his hand to reveal a small device and laughed softly, the sound rippling through her body as though he’d touched her. “Modern electronics, not telekinesis. The twenty-first century.”
Her answering smile drove the last of the wariness from his eyes. “Good thinking, Batman.” She shook her head in exasperation. “They want to protect us, even from ourselves. That’s why Nancy and I escaped to New York. What they don’t see, they can’t criticize us for. As soon as Nancy and I hooked up when I came back to the States, we found we had something in common. The need to get away from the babying.”
His vicious interjection surprised her with its violence. Without thinking, she stepped forward and laid her hand on his arm. “No, they don’t mean anything by it. They want to look after us, the way they think is right.”
“And what about you? Don’t your rights amount to anything?” His mouth compressed to a straight line. “I’ve never been exactly a supporter of women’s lib before, but that was ridiculous. I felt like reminding them that women are people too.”
“So you just took me from there without asking?”
He grinned. “You wanted me to ask you first? How about I take you right back? Just say the word, and we’re there.”
She examined his face. He was perfectly sincere. It was lik
e listening to a being from another world, compared to the attitude of her family. But they weren’t natural chauvinists. Some of them felt driven to it. “We haven’t many females left.” She reached up her hand to touch his face, compelled by an impulse she barely recognized, she’d felt it last so long ago. Tenderness, some might call it. “For some reason, Gardiners are mainly males. Our women are even less fertile than most. The doctors are doing their best, but it’s like a plague. So they’ve taken to coddling us, rescuing us, taking care of us.”
“You still have the right to live your own life.”
“Maybe.” She stroked his cheek with her thumb and watched his eyelids droop when he responded to the caress. “But you have to see their point of view.”
“Why?” He turned his head and captured her thumb in his mouth, as though he had to taste her, before releasing it to speak again. “I owe them nothing. Neither do you, Roz. You can’t help what you are any more than I can.” He gave a rueful chuckle and adjusted the fit of his pants. “I don’t seem to have any control around you. We always end up like this—pounding away at each other like rabbits and then falling asleep. I want more. I want to know you and to know why you were so scared tonight. That’s not like you. Talk to me.”
She swallowed. Why did he have to be so damned perceptive? Then she realized something that might help to distract him. Apart from the sex, which she had every intention of getting to before long. “Why aren’t you collapsed on the floor in exhaustion?”
He stared at her. Then his face relaxed. “Oh, right, the flashing.”
“Yeah, that. What’s with you keeping on your feet all the way upstate when most vampires can’t flash to the end of their own town without collapsing afterward?”
He glanced away, his expression almost sheepish. “I have no idea. I can just do it. That’s all. It’s not a family thing, that is, not specific to a particular family that I know of. Cristos investigated it as soon as I started flashing away to get out of trouble, and he couldn’t find anything except it’s a quirk, maybe genetic, something a very few vampires can just do.” He gazed down at her, grinning. “It made me a better agent. That’s for sure. Not many people know how easy I find it. Now you do. So that’s one more of my secrets. You tell me yours now. Why were they taking you home? Why were you so nervous? Why didn’t you just say no and tell them to fuck off?”
She swallowed. She couldn’t deter him, so she’d have to tell him. “They have a husband lined up for me.”
“So? They can’t make you, can they?”
“They might. I agreed. I was stupid, but at the time I didn’t care. I just wanted to give in, give up, and I thought it was a way to bring me back. They needed me, and they loved me.”
Puzzlement shaded his eyes, clouding his mind. He really didn’t understand.
“You don’t know all the story. Perhaps I should tell you.”
“Perhaps you should.” He looped his arm around her waist and led her toward a long, low sofa in the center of the room.
Only then she thought to look around her properly. “Tell me about this place.”
He laughed softly. “It’s a Frank Lloyd Wright-style house. I can’t afford the apartment I’d like in New York, so I have small, snug places—the ones the real estate people call studio apartments—and then I flash here whenever I can. I rent that rat hole because I’m between apartments. This was the only place I was confident to bring you without any danger.”
She tensed at the reminder of what could have happened. Vampires flashed from place to place, but they did it blind. They had a mental picture of where they were going, but if they collided with another person, or a piece of furniture they weren’t expecting, they could die. In these days of the Internet, flashing was a little safer; they could tap in to webcams for a live picture, but the situation had left them no leisure for that.
Andreas had saved them both. Himself from a severe beating, maybe even death, and Roz from a future she no longer wanted. When she told him, though, he might take her back and give her to her cousins.
Therefore, she wasn’t in any hurry to give him the information. She’d have to tell him sooner or later this evening, but because they didn’t know Andreas or his hideouts, they wouldn’t be able to find him.
One more time with him, that was all she wanted. Then she’d go back and face the music. Music she had made for herself. “How did you find this place?”
“The usual way. I went looking, once I’d saved enough money to afford it. My job pays well. I have no family, and I’m young in vampire years, so I’m probably what you might call poor, but I had enough for this.”
“You’re not poor in the ways that count.” She moved away, and his arm slipped from her as she toured the room. This place called to her in some strange way. She felt at home here, comfortable, as she experienced in few places before.
The subdued light cast gentle spots on certain parts of the room, leaving others in shadow. Lights came on above pictures hung on the walls, giving the room more definition. She stood in a long living room containing two comfortable sofas, one facing the windows, the other set against the wall for easy viewing of a large plasma TV. A tiny stereo sat on a shelf, surrounded by well-worn books—paperbacks, hardbacks, jumbled together in no particular order. The room was comfortably warm. As a vampire, she could adjust her body temperature to suit her surroundings, but there was no need here. No whirring noises betrayed a unit, but she guessed at underfloor heating. The polished floor held a few rugs but little else. Colors were rich but subdued, deep reds, ambers, autumn shades blending together to form a discreet harmony.
It was a room she could live in, breathe in.
“I like it.” She turned to face him. “Like” was an understatement, but it was the best she could do right now. She felt washed out, tired of fighting her family, her feelings, and herself. Just plain tired.
“I’m glad you like it. The room welcomes you. I welcome you. When I saw this house, I knew I had to have it.” He gave a short laugh. “I discovered later, from a friend of mine, that it was in a propitious position.”
“Let me guess. The Sorcerer, right?”
“Yeah, Fabrice. He’s more than a contact. He’s a friend. We’re the same age. We trained together. Remember agent training?”
She smiled, although not all the memories were happy ones. “Oh yeah.”
He moved closer to her, but slowly. “Cristos doesn’t let any of his agents use their Talents during training.”
She gasped, eyes wide. “None?”
“None. Well, mortals go through it, don’t they? So we had to. Fabrice is officially a consultant, but like all Department 57 ‘consultants,’ he’s been through the basic training program. As a field agent, my training’s been a little more…rigorous. I can fight during the daytime when I don’t have my vampire strength, and I can fight more mature vampires, using the mortal abilities. Your cousins, although mature vampires, were civilian vampires without that ability. They were taken by day, and their captors drugged them at night, when they were at their strongest, to keep them subdued.”
“Yes, they’d do that.” They both paused, giving the dead a respectful moment of silence.
“Do you do government jobs? I mean, purely government jobs, with no Talents involved?” she asked.
“Sometimes,” he said.
That seemed liberating to Roz. It had always been all or nothing, in the family or out. Neither had truly satisfied her. “How do you manage without a family?”
“I have friends, and I have a family, of a sort. Cristos fostered me. He’s the nearest I have to a father. The Department gave me friends and people I’m as close to as any family. It suits me.” He took another step, and a shadow crossed his face. She made the last step toward him, and he slid his arm around her waist. “I used to pray for a family sometimes, plead with God to give me a place to belong. Every vampire I met had a family. Perhaps they would come to claim me one day. Perhaps they’d discover the sigil
that I should have branded in my brain. Roz, I still want that.” He whispered the last words and, as though their mouths were magnetized, lowered his head as she lifted hers. Their lips met, fused, clung.
But it didn’t feel the same this time; it felt gentler, as though they were kissing for the first time, exploring each other. He angled his head, and she strained up to him, but their lips moved softly. She savored the feel of his mouth, softly caressing, his tongue, exploring, stroking against hers, moving to touch her sensitive palate. She shuddered under his hands.
He lifted his head and gave her several sweet kisses before moving to her throat. She arched for him, the ultimate trust gesture of one vampire to another. He could drain her, and she would let him. His turn to shudder. He knew that much of vampire lore. But he didn’t stop, moving gently down to her collarbone, taking a soft nip near her artery to stimulate rather than to draw blood.
“I’ve never told anyone that before,” he murmured, his breath hot on her neck. “Cristos guessed, but I’ve never volunteered the information. I was always afraid, you see, of being laughed at. But not you. I knew you’d listen and not condemn.”
“How could anyone laugh at you?” It passed her understanding. “You’re strong, capable. You’ve made a life for yourself. You don’t need anyone.”
“Right now, I need you. More than I’ve needed anyone else.”
His words proved the ultimate stimulant, and when he straightened, they needed no more words. He kept his arm around her waist and led her up the open-plan staircase at the end of the room to the upper floor.
His bedroom and his sanctum. The bed, draped in a cream cover, bisected the long room, the echo of the one below, but soft carpet covered the floor, her feet sinking into it as he led her to the bed.
Department 57: Rubies of Fire Page 9