“Robbie,” the boy answered easily enough.
“I’m Mihaela. Do you have a surname? A second name?”
He appeared to think about that, then shook his head.
“Okay. Do you know where you live? Is it close by?”
The boy shook his head. “Not really. I walked a long way.” By his accent, he was local, at least.
“You can’t remember your address?”
Robbie thought again. “No,” he said apologetically. “Not now.”
“Ah. Have you moved house recently?”
“I’m always moving.”
Mihaela glanced at him, but he didn’t appear to be sad. Nor did he appear to be overwhelmed or even upset by what had just happened. Shock did funny things to people. Look at her. Two shocks in one incident and she really had to fight to focus on her job, the same job she’d been extremely good at for ten years and more. At least she could neither see nor hear signs of anyone following them—although the skin pricked at the back of her neck in fear.
“Robbie, I’ll have to take you to a police station,” she said, heading in the direction of noise and traffic. “I’m sure the police’ll be able to find your parents.”
“My parents are dead,” Robbie said flatly.
Mihaela swallowed. “I’m sorry. Who do you live with, then?”
He sighed. “Jim and Peg now.”
“Are they related to you? Foster parents?”
“Aye,” Robbie said, not very interested.
“What are you doing out on your own?”
“I wanted to see them, talk to them, ken?”
Ken? Her floundering brain finally latched on to an old conversation with Elizabeth. “Ken” meant “know,” and a lot of Scottish speech was peppered with the word, much as other people say, “you know?”
“See who, Robbie?” Mihaela asked.
He jerked his head back the way they’d come.
Mihaela’s grip tightened on his hand before she forced herself to relax it again. “You know these—people?”
“I ken the one with the broken ear.”
For the third time that afternoon, Mihaela’s world rocked off its axis. A little girl furiously fighting for her life, gnashing at whatever she could reach; the ear of the vampire who’d already killed her parents and sister.
“Coincidence,” she whispered. Her anxiety had unhinged her. Was it really likely she’d come to Scotland to encounter her parents’ murderer after all these years?
It doesn’t matter. I’ll get him later. He’d spoken to her in Romanian. Despite the fact that her words had all been in English. So he was Romanian and recognized that she was. From which it was still a leap to imagine she’d faced her greatest enemy, the vampire she’d almost given up hope of ever encountering again. And let him get away.
It doesn’t matter, she promised him. I will most certainly get you later. Not just to find out but to kill him. Whatever was going on here, and whether or not he was the same vampire who’d killed her family, hunting children was beyond the pale. Even Saloman didn’t condone that.
But her first duty was to the child himself.
“How do you know the one with the broken ear?” she asked.
“I found him. I can hear him. I heard the other one too, the one who’s hurt back there.”
“You hear them?” she repeated, gazing down at him curiously. “You mean—over distances?”
“Aye. They don’t need to speak. I can hear them.”
The child was telepathic? Psychic?
“And these—men—called to you to come?” she asked, genuinely frightened for him now.
Robbie frowned. “Today, the man with the broken ear did. But I heard the other one, though he wasn’t talking to me. That’s the way it usually is. The way it was the first time too, with him with the broken ear.”
“Robbie!”
Mihaela was so involved in the boy’s words that at first she barely registered the yelling of his name in a raucous, female tone. Then, swinging around in relief, she saw a large, fake blonde leaning out of a car that skidded to a halt just beside them. “Where the fu—devil have you been, you wee shi— We’ve been worried sick!”
Mihaela glanced from the hardly comforting woman—who, to give her her due, was hardly likely to be at her best after the anxiety of searching for a lost foster child for the better part of the day—to Robbie, who sighed.
“Peg and Jim,” he said, with resignation rather than fear; but it was enough to make Mihaela feel like a villain for handing him over.
“Who’re you?” Peg demanded with suspicion. In the circumstances, it was natural.
“I found him wandering on his own outside a pub,” Mihaela said. “There was a fight. He could have got badly hurt. He must be very frightened.”
“Him?” Peg snorted. “I don’t think he’s ever been frightened in his life. In the car, Robbie. Wait till I get you home.” As Robbie sighed again and climbed into the car, he cast an oddly wistful smile over his shoulder at Mihaela.
“Will he be all right?” she blurted.
“Oh aye,” Peg said.
“Thanks,” added the car driver grudgingly, leaning over his wife to talk. “He’s always doing this. Runs away as soon as you turn your back. God knows how he got all the way here.”
“Robbie, you mustn’t,” Mihaela said to him urgently as he fastened himself into the back seat. “Don’t go when they call. They’re dangerous. And—” But the car drove off before she’d said all she needed to, all she wanted to.
The boy was safe with his carers, and yet she felt both bereft and frightened for him. She wondered if there was a way to see him again, to check he was all right, for Peg and Jim did not fill her with confidence.
If I were his foster mother…
Well, you’re not. You can barely look after yourself, never mind a dependent child!
Mocking herself, because in fact her parenting skills, or lack of them, had always been irrelevant—vampire hunting was a 24-7 job that didn’t allow the distraction of young family or even the relationship necessary to acquire one—she stood back out of the way of people heading into the pub and tried to drag her thoughts back to the important issues.
She needed to know what so many strong vampires, at least some of them foreign, were doing here. She needed to know if the vampire who threatened Robbie really could get him later, and if he really was her own family’s killer. And…
She came around to it carefully, trying to avoid it and knowing she couldn’t. She couldn’t take the chance.
She turned and retraced her steps back along the road to the alley that led to the pub’s back court. She expected him to be gone. She hoped he’d be gone. She hoped she’d made a mistake in identifying him. After all, it had been dark, and how likely was it to encounter two vampires from her past in one afternoon?
More likely if one of them had made his home in Scotland.
Her heart beat faster as she walked into the yard, hands once more grasping the stakes in her pockets. The dark heap of mostly dead vampire had gone. Which meant, surely, he’d either died or recovered. She swallowed. Neither possibility made her feel good.
She stood still where she’d last seen him, wishing she’d brought a detector, while she quartered the court. She thought the vampires had vanished, but she couldn’t be sure. At any rate, she’d learned long ago never to make dangerous assumptions.
To her left, the barrel no longer sat flush against the wall. There was a gap of blank darkness between. He could be masking. Any of them could be masking. She stared hard at the gap between the wall and the barrel, walking slowly toward it until it resolved into a body.
Without warning, a light came on, shining out from the pub wall. Mihaela froze, waiting for someone to appear, but there was no door as such into the yard, only barred windows and the trap through which beer was delivered to the cellar. Perhaps someone inside had just remembered to switch on the light for security reasons.
Mihael
a approached the barrel, withdrawing the stake from her pocket. She gazed down at the injured, blood-spattered vampire, illuminated now like some gothic-novel illustration. Pale skin, dark, untidy hair with just a hint of auburn shining through. He wore a rough wool workman’s jacket over his usual jeans and T-shirt; his arm and one leg were bent at grotesque angles, and he stank of enough alcohol to repel a down-and-out. But it was still, unmistakably, the vampire Maximilian.
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Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Blood of Angels (Book 2 of the Blood Hunters Series) Page 30