“It’s good to see you, Gair. To see you so healthy.” Aedan offered his hand.
Gair switched his napkin full of cookies from one hand to the other and shook Aedan’s hand. “This shouldn’t take long, you getting approval to work this case. Just be ready to answer questions regarding the incident at Château Dumont.”
Aedan groaned as the old man shuffled away, headed back to the snack table. He had thought tonight was just a formality. He hadn’t anticipated having to hash over an incident that had been unfortunate but not his fault. He already felt bad enough about it; he didn’t need a bunch of old ladies who didn’t know what it was like to be in the field accusing him of getting sloppy.
“Hey, sexy.”
Aedan turned. “Fia.” He put out his arms to her and hugged her tightly when she came to him. She was a gorgeous woman, full of what could only be defined as sass. “Arlan kick you to the curb yet?”
She kissed his cheek and took a step back. She was dressed in full FBI agent attire à la Men in Black: dark pants suit, white shirt, and black boots. All that was missing was the dark sunglasses and Will Smith for a sidekick. “Not yet. But I’m sure he’s been tempted.” She chuckled. “So how are you?”
Council members were beginning to take their seats in the large circle of folding chairs.
“I’m good. Great,” he said.
She scowled. “I’m serious. This whole Jay thing has got to have you spooked.” She knitted her brow. “And what’s with the blonde in the bar?”
Aedan always tried to put up a barrier to block his family and friends from his head unless he wanted them in it.
“Don’t tell me you’re hooking up with a human. I thought both of us learned from our mistakes.” She looked at him hard.
“If we’ll all take our seats,” Peigi announced from the far side of the room, “we can get this ball rolling. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover tonight, folks.”
Aedan glanced at his aunt, then back at Fia. “Stay out of my head.”
“Stay out of human bars,” she warned with a chuckle, walking away. “Nothing but trouble.”
Although Gair was the chieftain of the sept and would be until the end of time, it was Peigi who ran the day-to-day operations of the family. Meetings didn’t interest Gair all that much; he came mostly for the snacks. It was Peigi who had been running them for the last fifteen years or so. Peigi opened the meeting without any fanfare and, thankfully, Aedan was first on the agenda. Once his business was complete, he wouldn’t be required to remain at the meeting, which could possibly last until dawn. He hated Council meetings. He hated red tape. Everyone in the sept was required to serve on the Council occasionally, but he avoided it as often as he could. He didn’t like making decisions. He liked being handed a task and fulfilling it.
Peigi gave a brief reminder of who Jay was and his peculiar circumstances and why it was important that Aedan be permitted to work despite his current status as inactive. She explained that Mark Karr and the state police would be the ones to do the detective work, and that, basically, Aedan’s job would be to follow through on the High Council’s judgment of execution, once the criminal was located. She then opened the floor to any questions or concerns.
“We’ve got to stop making rules and then breaking them.” Mary Hall was the first to speak. She usually was, if she could manage to get Peigi to recognize her. She was what Peigi referred to as a squeaky cog in the wheel. She believed Mary Hall and members like her were necessary to the workings of the sept, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed the process. Mary had an issue with everything.
There were several muffled utterances. A lot of people didn’t like Mary’s comment. And more than one chuckled or whispered a sarcastic remark, not out loud, but they were thinking it, and in such close quarters, they might as well have been shouting. Everyone heard, including Mary, whose cheeks flushed red.
Mary Hall rose from her folding chair, mouth tight. “This is serious.”
She might be an old fuddy-duddy at times, but she was still vampire and still very much lethal.
“You can mutter under your breath as much as you want, Tavia,” she accused her, cutting her eyes at one of the town’s business owners. “A hiatus is a hiatus.” She folded her arms over her ample bosom. “We impose these rules to keep ourselves safe and to protect the humans we’ve vowed to protect. We know from experience that leaving someone in the field too long can be dangerous. They crack, and then we have to clean up the mess.”
“He’s going to let Mark do the legwork. All he has to do is the kill,” Tavia argued.
Mary looked at Aedan. “He isn’t the only competent member of the sept. Let someone else take the case.”
Again, there were murmurings.
Peigi glanced at Aedan.
He had been hoping he wouldn’t have to speak. He cleared his throat, but did not stand. “I know our suspect better than anyone.”
“But you don’t know him at all; otherwise, you’d have caught him,” Mary challenged him.
“Anyone for another pecan sticky bun?” Mary Kay asked cheerfully, rising from her chair.
“I’ll take one.” Gair raised his hand.
It fascinated Aedan that they could be gathered in a room talking about serial killers and baked goods in the same breath. “I almost had him last time,” he said. “He escaped only minutes before my arrival.”
“Escaped being the key word,” Mary said tartly. She looked at Peigi, who sat in a folding chair balancing a clipboard on her knees. “I thought part of the reason Aedan was called in for a cooling-off period was because of the incident at the Château Dumont. Is anyone going to bring up that matter?”
“Apparently, you are,” Tavia quipped.
A couple of Council members chuckled.
“I was cleared in that investigation,” Aedan said testily. “Everyone’s heard the story.”
Mary rested her hand on a hip that could have held up a dictionary. “I’d like to hear it from you.”
Aedan looked to Peigi for a life ring. She tossed him a piece of Styrofoam. “A quick recap,” she suggested. “Mary has a point. You never actually appeared before the Council.”
“I was busy. Chasing bad guys,” Aedan argued.
“And turning into a gorilla in a park in Paris,” Mary accused him smugly. “You boys don’t think these things get back to us.”
He groaned. “That was a joke. That had nothing to do with what happened at Dumont. No one was hurt.”
“Please, Aedan. A brief recap of the incident at Dumont.” Peigi offered a quick smile.
She was obviously taking care not to let anyone think she was playing favorites. It still pissed him off. He took a deep breath, promising himself he wouldn’t let this drag him down emotionally, but it became an empty promise as he began to talk. It was like that when innocent people were murdered.
Dallas rolled onto her side and glanced at the bedside clock. She had left Tat to close the bar. She was beat, and she wanted to turn in at a decent time. It was 1:20. And still she couldn’t sleep. She closed her eyes, groaned, and rolled onto her back again. The minute her eyes closed, though, she saw Aedan. He was in a mansion of white stone. People around him were speaking French. One moment he was standing there, serving champagne on a silver tray, and the next moment the white floor was covered in blood.
Dallas’s eyes flew open as she sat upright in her bed. “What the hell?” she panted, her heart pounding. “Who is this guy?”
Aedan had been working undercover that evening at Château Dumont. Because he could hold a morph for only a short length of time, no more than half an hour, he had chosen to stake out a party in Bordeaux in his own form. It was hard to be inconspicuous when you were a six-foot-five redhead, but it was amazing to him that, particularly among the vastly wealthy, if you put on a waiter’s uniform and carried a tray of drinks or hors d’oeuvres, you practically became invisible. It was a truth that applied everywhere in every culture.
Ae
dan had been there with another team member; they had ramped up their investigation on a man who was a known sex offender and bought and sold children in the sex slave market. So far, the French government had been unable to make a conviction. He was a sly, handsome man, this Alphonse Michel. A man as evil as any human Aedan had ever known.
Aedan and his companion, Eilin, thought Michel was aware he was under surveillance, but not by them. In fact, he probably wasn’t aware that the Kahills even existed. He was a suspect in several international cases and was probably under surveillance not only by the French government but by the Spanish and Greek, as well. Aidan and Eilin were there to see whom he spoke to; they were working on his connections and possible additional suspects. Aedan had had no idea the stakeout was going to go bad until it did; it was usually that way. The whole premonition thing, that wasn’t one of Aedan’s gifts.
It had been a beautiful evening on a terrace in the French countryside at a château that had once been a castle. One minute Aedan was offering a champagne flute to a pretty young French guest who liked to flirt with the servers; the next minute someone opened fire with a semiautomatic weapon. Aedan quickly assessed that he was not the as-sasin’s target; a French undercover investigator was. The Frenchman was dead before he hit the ground. Michel’s bodyguards drew and fired at the man with the gun, spraying bullets, not taking into consideration their boss’s party guests, or family for that matter. Another stranger with a gun appeared, apparently a partner to the first assassin who killed the Frenchman.
Aedan’s first thought as the gunfire sounded was to protect his partner, then the civilians. A stray bullet hit the host’s daughter in the first burst of gunfire. Eilin took cover behind the bar. Aedan sent the tray of champagne flutes flying and reached out to drag the daughter out of harm’s way. She was covered in blood, her own and the man’s who had been the original target. Blood spattered, then pooled on the white marble floor of the balcony where the host had been serving cocktails to his guests. Pandemonium broke out as the air cracked and popped with the gunfire. Guests ran screaming. Two guard dogs were released from somewhere in the house and tore across the terrace, barking ferociously. A waiter was hit with a spray of gunfire as two more gunmen returned fire on an unknown party guest carrying his own weapon.
Aedan never ceased to be amazed at just how far a few drops of human blood could go; and when it was more, like the amount a man loses while bleeding to death on the floor, it seemed as if it ran in rivers. Aedan had become so accustomed to human blood that it rarely tempted him; he didn’t want it. Not in these circumstances. It actually horrified him, the way humans spilled each other’s blood so easily.
Aedan’s job, in circumstances such as what had occurred at Château Dumont, required that he leave the premises at once; he could not get caught up in police investigations. He wasn’t even supposed to help defend the humans. His orders were to get himself and his partner safely out of the environment. But he couldn’t just leave the injured young woman bleeding on the floor.
Aedan! Eilin telepathed as she raced across the balcony, headed for the doorway that would lead them to safety. We have to go! Leave her!
But the HF in his arms was breathing heavily; she’d been hit in the chest. He fell in behind Eilin, but he carried the girl, thinking he could at least remove her safely from the fray.
They came around the corner of the doorway, meeting two men carrying automatic weapons. Eilin and Aedan both wore concealed pistols, but this was not an assignment that should have required serious weapons. Eilin was the first to bare her fangs. She flew into the nearest man, giving Aedan time to set the bleeding girl down on a settee. As he spun around, he set his fangs, hurling himself into the body of the second man, who was so shocked by the attack on his companion that he couldn’t get his weapon up fast enough.
There was always a moment when Aedan released his fangs when he felt out of control. Adrenalin pumped through his veins, and he felt the ancient need to consume human blood. He hit the man with the gun full force with his body, sinking his fangs into his neck. The man screamed and fell back, losing his weapon in the fall. A part of Aedan wanted to finish him off, to drain him of every drop of blood in his body; this was no innocent bystander. Who carried automatic weapons into a cocktail party?
Aedan! Let’s go, Eilin telepathed, grabbing him by the collar of his white jacket.
As they took off, Aedan remembered looking back at the young woman lying on the settee, blood blossoming on her white strapless dress.
He blinked. “I’m sorry?” he said aloud. One moment he had been on the marble terrace halfway around the world; the next moment he was standing in front of a folding chair, looking at Mary Hall’s pudgy face.
“Was there nothing you could have done to prevent the bloodshed?”
Aedan took a moment to gather his wits. “There was nothing I could have done, Mary,” he said evenly. “We were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the review panel agreed. We got caught up in an event we couldn’t have foreseen.” He paused. “Four died, but the girl lived. Michel’s gone into hiding, but he’ll climb out of his hole soon enough; they always do. The investigation remains open.”
Mary Hall crossed her arms, not satisfied, but appeased, and sat down.
“Anyone else?” Peigi questioned. “No?” She went on without waiting for a response. “A show of hands as to who’s in favor of allowing Aedan to work this case, but no other cases, over the next few months while he’s here with us?”
Five minutes later, after a majority of hands were raised, Aedan was back outside, in the cool night air, headed for home. With the matter of the Council taken care of, his thoughts drifted elsewhere. He hadn’t gone to Brew tonight. He thought about Dallas. He wondered if she was relieved he hadn’t showed up.
He’d just have to go by tomorrow and find out.
Chapter 6
The best laid schemes of mice and vampires . . . Aedan had actually once met Robert Burns, while on assignment in Edinburgh sometime in the mid-eighteenth century. Pleasant enough fellow, but not someone he would have thought humans would be quoting hundreds of years later.
Aedan’s scheme for the day had been to stop by and say hello to Teesha, who was still hospitalized, touch base with Mark and see how the investigation was going, and then go over some files the sept kept on serial criminals like Jay. Then he was going to change the filters on Peigi’s heating and air unit, and have dinner with her and Brian and whatever teenagers had parked their butts on Peigi’s couch. Then he planned to head to Brew, have a beer, and hopefully share in a little clever repartee with the gorgeous blonde he couldn’t get out of his head. He wondered if he was attracted to her because she reminded him so much of Madeleine. Or maybe after a couple of hundred years he was lonely.
They were halfway through a dinner of pork chops, macaroni and cheese, and stewed tomatoes, one of Aedan’s favorite home-cooked meals, when Peigi’s house phone rang. Peigi had made enough food for an army, but none of the teens had stopped by, and Brian was in the middle of some sort of to-the-death fight with Nazi zombies; he hadn’t come to the table. Aedan felt bad for Peigi, but he didn’t say anything. He was on his second helping of mac and cheese when Peigi picked up the phone.
“Gair?” she said with surprise. “Sky falling? You never call.” She carried the phone back to the kitchen table. Gair was one of those vampires who preferred good old face-to-face conversations or telepathic exchanges. He actually walked to people’s houses and rang their doorbells to speak to them. Gair also had the rare gift of being able to telepath across town; most of them had to practically be in the same room to get a message through. The only problem with Gair’s ability was that the message was then out there for any vampire to pick up on. There were no private long-distance telepathic conversations with Gair.
Which meant something was wrong.
Aedan set down his fork.
“Yup. He’s here. Hold on.” She offered the phone. It was obvi
ous from the look on her face that she knew something was wrong, too. “He wants to speak with you.” She shrugged as she handed him the phone.
“Gair, what’s up?” Aedan said.
“Damn if he didn’t die,” Gair grumbled on the other end of the phone.
“Who?”
Gair sipped loudly on a beverage. “Victor. You’d think he’d know better, taking off like that at his age. He knows what a pain in the ass it is when one of us dies off the reservation.”
Aedan heard something beep—it must have been Gair’s microwave. He was making dinner.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Aedan said. “Mary okay?”
“Just got off the phone with her. She was all teary. Like she didn’t know this was going to happen. He still has his head on, for heaven’s sake; he’ll be alive in three days. They were playing bocce. Some kind of seniors’ tournament.”
“Did he die in public?”
“No. If there’s one good thing in this, it’s that. Mary had the sense to get him back to their place before he kicked. Ouch! That’s hot.”
Aedan pushed his plate forward, suddenly feeling full. “You okay?”
“I want the spaghetti hot, not the plate. You would think in this modern age you could get a microwave dinner that didn’t burn your fingers and freeze your tongue. I need you to get on a plane, fly to Boca Raton, Florida, rent a van, and bring his body home.”
“Tonight?” Aedan had been looking forward to seeing Dallas. All day, while he was sitting with Teesha, waiting for Mark, changing the filters, he’d thought about Dallas, about the sound of her voice, about the smell of her. He was definitely smitten, and today he hadn’t even tried to deny it. By tomorrow he’d be dead set against any kind of relationship with her, but today he was enjoying the thought of the possibility. He’d decided that tonight, if she was receptive to his arrival, if she didn’t kick him out of her bar, he was going to broach the subject of the exchange that had taken place between them the night they met. He was intrigued. Wasn’t she?
Voracious - (Claire Point Vampire 5) Page 7