by L. A. Banks
CHAPTER 14
SASHA STOOD WITH effort. Even though the wounds had healed, her body was tired, her heart heavy, muscles sore, and the beer was making her sleepy. She slowly made her way over to a pay phone, glancing at everyone, and trusting no one as she walked to the back of the establishment. Most of the customers had left because of the imminent storm, but something was raising the hair on her arms. She glanced at Max, who was engrossed in a heavy conversation on his newly stolen cell phone, but he also looked uneasy from where she stood watching him. A strange scent flitted by her nose as she connected the call and left Holland an urgent, detailed message. On guard, she kept glancing around. The scent of death was near; she just wasn’t sure how close.
The second she hung up the telephone, a tall, fair, femininely handsome man stepped out of the shadows. His sudden presence made her start and then she composed herself. She was not in the mood to verbally joust with a vampire tonight. He seemed to know that and the fact that he was irking her also seemed to amuse him. Twisted. But she had to admit he had style, just like the vamp in Korea had, but not as much.
Giving this new vampire a quick appraisal as they both assessed each other, she noted his long sandy-brown hair that flowed over his shoulders like a shimmering wave of silk and the perfectly tailored faun-hued velvet jacket he wore. That helped her judge his undead age—definitely an eighteen-hundred-era-type. Thick, corn-silk lashes framed his wide hazel eyes as he gave her an appreciative, once-over-lightly gaze. He offered her a lovely smile from his full, cherub-pink lips and shook his hair back in that sensually arrogant way only prima donna vampires could.
“Well,” he finally said, having preened to his satisfaction. “It seems the baron’s assessment is correct. You are absolutely delicious.”
“I don’t know who you are. I don’t know where you came from. But I’m having a really long night.”
“And charming, too, I see.” The vampire sniffed, leaning against the wall beside her, nonplussed.
“Can I help you? Like—”
“The question is, can I help you, ma chérie?” He placed a finger to his lips. “I could be your Deep Throat, oui?” he said with a droll little chuckle. “Geoff will positively die. Again.”
Sasha frowned. She hated men who laughed at their own jokes, especially dead men who used double entendres.
“I think you gentlemen gossip too much. The baron was disappointed, I’m sure.” She was out. The last thing she had time for was vampire mind games.
“Let me say this before your amour catches a whiff of me downwind. He’s in such a primal state of mind, and I do not want to have to regenerate from a battle . . . not to mention that it’s murder on my tailor.” He pulled his perfect cuffs down and pushed away from the wall. “I have only agreed to help you because the baron lost a bet with me. It seems that although he is several hundred years older than I, and he used every power of persuasion on you, all he did was arouse you a tad . . . but not bed you, she-shadow.”
Sasha stepped back and narrowed her gaze.
“Oh, please, we all know about the other variations on a theme. She-shadows are fantastically exotic to us because we cannot bite them in the throes . . . your blood is tainted with the silver wolf and it just makes us ghastly ill.” He pressed his hand to his chest and made a face. “So, one must use extraordinary restraint when seducing one . . . which is also difficult, especially when you hard-transition in bed. Silver about the neck,” he said, nodding at Sasha’s amber charm. “Wards, amber, turquoise, it’s a wonderful sport.”
“Get to the part about why you would help me, anyway. The baron didn’t screw me, so that means what, exactly?”
“So harsh a term, ‘screw.’ We’re vampires . . . we luxuriate in the sensual arts. Nevertheless, the baron was intrigued by you, challenged, smitten . . . a tad obsessed.”
“Be serious. After being dead for however long, with all the babes in history, you have got to give me a better reason than that.”
He smiled and waved his graceful hand. “Touché. Fine. He helped you for the same reason I will. Our way of life is being challenged by this arms-race madness. As long as you couldn’t really do much more than shoot each other, what did we care? Spilled blood was your folly and our feast. You, my dear, or your human counterparts, I should say, are part of our food chain. Once humans began the insanity of potentially obliterating each other in a nuclear holocaust, those of us, demons though we have been called, with special interest in unpolluted blood, had to become involved. Think of it as conservation. If you are dust and ash, soon we would be, also.”
“Comforting thought.” Sasha shook her head and folded her arms over her chest. “So, you monitor our nukes.”
“Of course we do. We are much more intelligent. We can’t allow you to blow yourselves up.” He sighed melodramatically. “You’ve become lemmings leaping over the edge of your own demise, now that you’ve discovered some of the nether regions of the apocalypse—otherwise known as demon doors . . . merely dimensional distortions caused by your own incessant warring. But like naughty children, you’ve opened the one with the snarling dogs. How quaint.”
“And that’s a problem for you, how?”
“You don’t know?”
A hard frown creased her brow as she stared at him, very aware of his hypnotic power and his vast strength hidden by the graceful exterior. A monster was a monster. That’s why she wasn’t screwing the baron while getting intel in North Korea, no matter how tempting it had been. Shogun was another matter, but she shook the thought.
“Enlighten me,” she said flatly.
“We have all night if you lose the big bad wolf . . . I could bring about a hundred and fifty years of practice to bear . . .”
Sasha snarled.
“I suppose not.” He sighed and pulled a lace handkerchief from his sleeve and gently blotted his nose.
Switching tactics, Sasha let her shoulders relax. “All right, I’m just snarly because I’m frustrated.” She watched the vampire perk up. “Knowledge, intel, that’s what really gets me motivated to bargain.”
“A game . . .” he said, delight and sensuality singeing his voice.
She looked over at Max, noting that his lip was beginning to curl.
“He has an awful temper, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah, so let me just say, I’ll negotiate. But I need to understand what’s in this for you.”
He smiled and studied his nails a bit. “We hate the werewolves. Infected, uninfected, ours is a long feud. I’m sure by now you know that vampires forget no slight. But these wolves . . . they compromise our way of life, poach our territories, and generally befoul the feeding grounds. We have enough willing humans to trade their souls for power, money, fantastic sex, regular blood feedings, and immortality—we don’t need to do serial killings to eat people. That is soooo twelfth century.” He sniffed into his hanky. “We understand that there are some nefarious forces that are about to try a very bizarre test, and we do not want this virus out among the general public any more than you.” He leaned over and breathed in her freshshowered scent. “Any human with that wolf virus in their blood is off limits for dinner. If it goes widespread, it will be just like the great potato famine for our species.”
He pulled back and glanced at Max, who had stood up. “Now that I have given you something, later you can give me something . . . since fair exchange is no robbery.”
“How far does it go—how wide, how high?”
He blew her a kiss as he disappeared. “Very high up, across many constituencies . . . people you wouldn’t imagine, places you wouldn’t imagine. Ta-ta.”
Uneasy from what she’d learned, she walked back to the table where Max was standing. They both looked around and sat at the same time.
“Vampire source? Or pickup?”
“Both.”
He nodded. “They always are.”
“At least this guy wasn’t hostile.”
“Yeah,” Max said, sipping his b
eer but not relaxing. “But we have to be careful, though. We don’t know who’s working both sides of the fence.”
“True,” she said, her voice clipped, and not liking his tone in the least. “I’m aware of that.”
She watched the muscle in his jaw pulse for a moment before he downed his beer.
“Just make sure you are,” he finally snapped, and called the bartender over.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she practically said through her teeth.
He accepted the beer from the bartender and set it down hard on the bar. “Mine.”
“What?” She could not believe he was going there. “Oh, give me a break, man.”
“I’m not sharing, under any circumstances, fuck that.”
She tilted her head, suddenly feeling dangerous. “Let’s get one thing straight. You don’t own me. That whole ‘mine-yours’ thing was—”
“Said playing for keeps,” he said with a snarl underlying his words.
“Be clear,” she said, the lethal tone in her voice matching his. “I’m still a free agent. I will always be my own woman. I’m with you because it’s my choice, not because I’m afraid of you—so if a little werewolf taint is making you act stupid, you’d better check that bullshit at the door.”
His gaze narrowed on her. His eyes held a bizarre combination of outrage and hurt. Okay, maybe she had gone a little over the top by flinging the werewolf taint in his face, but he’d pushed her.
“I’m tainted, too, probably—from roughhousing with Rod. All right,” she said after a strained pause. Fury lingered in the small space between them, and she used her words to cut through it, but she still wasn’t taking his crap. “We just went through some unbelievable madness, so we’re both hyped. Let’s everybody calm down and get back on point.”
Sasha sent her gaze toward the shelves behind the bar and picked up her beer to take a long, quenching sip. “I’ll watch your back, you watch mine,” Sasha said as she set her pilsner glass down and raked her fingers through her hair. Men. “The vamp said that they were monitoring everybody’s activities, knew that special interests were trying to get the virus out into the general population— but the reason they were helping us was because it would affect their food chain if that happened. Now I owe the asshole.”
“No you don’t. You don’t owe him jack. He was picking your brain and only got as much from you as you knew. That’s why I hate those vampire SOBs. Slimy. If he told you a name, a chain of command, something you didn’t know, then I’d say, yeah, you owe him. We’ve got solid leads—we know Guillaume and Dexter went rogue. Like they told me, somebody tore off the general’s face, and stole Rod’s tainted blood and replaced it—that means, like Holland told you earlier, there’s an internal leak. Right now, we don’t know who’s the puppet master . . . but guaranteed, that vampire who approached you was gathering intel so they can do a hit. They’re not big on Western due process.” Max leaned forward and hunched over his beer, surly now.
She rubbed her palms down her face, hating to admit that his assessment was probably right. It was the jealous male thing that had made her check him. “I’m exhausted. That has to be it. I should have seen that clear as day.”
“You’re a free agent, you can see it or not. It’s not my business, I suppose.” He slid off his stool and stood.
She held his arm. “All right. Maybe I took it—”
“It’s cool,” he said, yanking away. He glanced at her hand. “No ring, no permanent bond. Fuck the shadow culture, right?”
She closed her eyes with a groan and dug her fingers into her hair as she leaned over her beer. “No. Just a battle-weary woman who is not used to being told what to do—and who will never get used to that . . . but who has honor.” She glanced up at him. “I have more class than to screw some stray vampire for some intel, and the fact that you said something to me really pissed me off.” She sat back and took an angry sip of her beer. “But you always gotta look at things from the side of the person doing the accusing.” She glanced up at him. “Would you have done it if a stray vamp female sporting a pair of double-D jugs blew in your ear with some info? Should I have come up to you and said, down, boy—mine?”
He looked away, jaw pulsing, but she noticed he hadn’t moved. “It’s not like that . . . I—”
“I what!” She set her beer down hard, sloshing the dark brown fluid out of her glass. “Either you trust me as your partner—on every level—or you don’t. Tell me right fucking now, or I’m out. I’m not going through this every time we have to—”
“Listen,” he said, leaning forward to speak to her more privately. “What say we get lost until we get eight good hours of sleep? Eat. Replenish. We can’t do a thing while we’re both about to drop where we stand. Fatigue will make anyone edgy, all right? I’m sorry.”
She looked at him hard and then looked away.
“I’m tired, you’re tired . . . and I almost lost you behind a demon door—so, yeah, seeing you cozy up to one of the most dangerous breed of entities shook me for a minute. There. You satisfied?”
Sasha began fastening her leather bomber jacket without looking at him, but despite her resolve to remain pissed off, she felt that emotion slowly ebbing.
“I’m beat, need to go lie down, curl up somewhere warm and sleep off the adrenaline rush.”
“You’re seducing me,” she said, unable to stifle a yawn.
“I was just on my cell with the home pack,” he said in a weary tone as though sudden fatigue from their argument had drained the last of his energy. “I’ll fill you in about what happened to the general on the way while we find somewhere to hole up for the night—somewhere nice. And you’re safe. I swear all I can do is sleep.”
WOODS WOKE UP and struggled against his binds, trying to sit up. Fisher coughed and then began bucking his body, fighting to get free.
“Whoa, whoa, easy, gentlemen,” Crow Shadow said, a spill of black hair falling across his face in a curtain as he cut a piece of wild ram off the fire spit.
A large man stood slowly, thick and tall, his motions lumbering as he picked up two canteens. He poured some water into his mouth first to demonstrate it wasn’t tainted.
“I’m going to cut you loose,” Bear Shadow said calmly, flashing a huge hunting knife with a smile. “You can stretch, take a leak, eat, and drink. But if you run, you’re dead men. You cannot give away our position. Understand?”
“What do you want from us?” Fisher said, drawing back from Bear Shadow’s knife.
“Oh, Great Spirit—we don’t want that from you.” Bear Shadow shook his head.
Crow Shadow sighed. “You ought to have some appreciation. It’s not like you woke up in Mexico in a tub of ice and cold water without kidneys or something. We’re not body parts salesmen, we’re not sexual predators, we’re not bounty hunters for humans, and we’re not werewolves. It’s minus seventeen outside and we had a lot of people hand you off from country to country to get your asses here so Sasha can come claim you. So we are salvation. Any other immediate questions, gentlemen?”
XAVIER HOLLAND STEPPED out of his meeting with the colonel. Chaos reigned in NORAD. A five-star general from MacDill Air Force Base, Joint Strategic Command, was in teleconference with the Secretary of the Army, getting briefed and ready for a presentation that would hit the Oval Office.
His questions were quick stabs of words to his staff as he grabbed the reports chronicling the Sirius Project, Operation Dog Star. He looked at the monitors.
“Did anything come in from Lieutenant Trudeau yet?”
Winters shook his head, double-checking incoming lines in the doctor’s office. “No, sir. Not yet.”
EVEN THOUGH MAX was curled behind her and the bed was warm and soft, Sasha’s mind kept worrying the problem like a dog worries a bone. Her eyes were closed, her body drawing in slow, steady breaths, but her mind was on fire, racing, zooming. It just wouldn’t shut down. The riddles continued to knife at her mind until she could feel a pierc
ing heat at her back and against her chest.
She slightly arched away from Max’s chest, touching her amulet to bring it away from her skin and to get his away from her back. Where the amber had rested against her left a tingling sensation.
“You have to sleep and just let your mind ease, Sasha,” he said groggily. “Or it will continue to send the amulet a beacon.”
“How does it work, this beacon?” she asked quickly, suddenly wide awake.
“Only pack leaders and shamans have one of these,” he said in a slow, rough voice, dozing between words. “Only the strongest alphas who lead a pack can make it through the demon doors to return . . . you saw how dangerous it was. And only shamans have them to commune with the dead or see the dead; others would not understand the whispers.”
She sat up. “Your grandfather is a shaman, plus your grandmother on your father’s side was one from Haiti, right? This is so old, so valuable . . . if I’m not your mate, I should give it back.”
He rolled over. “I do not want to talk about anyone on my father’s side.”
She noticed he avoided the “mate” comment again.
“Hey, we’ve got to use every resource at our disposal,” she said, losing patience and sliding over his body to face him. “I’ve seen the power of these wards—it saved my life, and I’m honored to wear this amulet . . . especially since it came from your mother.”
He stared up at her. “My grandfather said he would make you an amulet . . . I assumed it was new.”
She touched the one on his chest. “No. That is not what Doc said.”