Laws of the Blood 1: The Hunt

by Susan Sizemore

  Maybe he would find a way.

  Chapter 16

  SELIM DIDN’T TELL her where he wanted to go, and Siri didn’t ask. She drove away from the Forum and let the connection between them take care of the rest. It felt good, right. Like old times. Except that the car smelled and felt new. Like an omen of a new beginning? Siri wondered. Somehow, she doubted it. Selim sat back in the plush leather seat and closed his eyes against the glare of oncoming traffic—or maybe against the glare of the annoyed, frustrated thoughts of people caught in the heavy traffic—and she maneuvered them through the streets and overcrowded freeways.

  They were heading west from Inglewood when Selim sat up and looked at her. “You don’t have to worry about Moira Chasen anymore. Sterling’s keeping her.”

  It was a peace offering, and they both knew it. Like he was offering her one life so she wouldn’t protest the loss of more. “Keep her?” she asked skeptically. “You mean forcing her to become his companion?”

  “You don’t sound pleased.”

  “Should I be? Should you?”

  “She’ll live.”

  Siri waited until she’d moved the car across three lanes of thick traffic before she responded to his harassed curiosity. “What about the media?” she asked him sweetly. “Moira lives in the public eye. Aren’t you worried about somebody finding out our little secret?”

  The silence that greeted her question was thick, shot through with surprise and embarrassment. She suspected he’d forgotten about the pesky little detail of privacy being very hard for a popular actress to come by. Privacy was imperative for their culture’s survival. Anticipating details and difficulties was his job. Ensuring the survival of the community was his job. He was usually very, very good at it. Something was distracting him when he should be more on top of things than usual. Siri wasn’t vain enough to think that he was being distracted by troubles in their relationship.

  “Oh,” Selim said at last. “Shit.”

  “Change of plan?” she asked, unable to shake the treacle-sweet venom from her voice. “Going to have to Hunt the girl after all?”

  “No,” he answered, adamant as stone. “Sterling’s made his choice. He’ll have to cope.” Selim sighed. “Once upon a time, I had it bad for Maureen O’Hara.” Another sigh. A romantic one.

  Siri snarled.

  “Never laid a fang on the girl,” Selim went on. “Followed her a few times. Daydreamed a little. But I decided it was too risky. She was too famous. Movie stars.” He shook his head. “One of the risks of living in this town is getting involved with actors. And when actors get famous . . .” His fatalistic shrug drew a soft, shushing sound from the leather upholstery. “We’ve avoided famous people until now, but I was going to have to let it happen sometime.”

  “So Moira Chasen gets to be the guinea pig?”

  “You would rather she was the main course?”

  Siri’s stomach turned as a graphic memory of Miriam’s Hunt replayed in her mind. “I get the point.”

  Selim stared out the windshield and kept his worry to himself. He didn’t know why he was bothering to hide it from Siri. Maybe he hated letting her think he wasn’t completely on top of every situation. Maybe he was trying to hide the sick feeling of his world spiraling out of control from himself. If he was, he wasn’t doing a very good job of it. Selim felt alone in a completely dark place. Cut off. Out of touch. At the same time, he knew he was being watched. He felt himself being manipulated, moved about like a puppet. Yet, it was different. Like an actor taking direction? No, he felt like the part, not the player. Like a role being played? That made no sense. He groped blindly for understanding, tried desperately to make sense of the vision that had stabbed into him like a lightning strike earlier, leaving white noise and shadow images behind.

  He was thinking too hard. Selim closed his eyes and tried to empty his mind.

  “What about that guy in Burbank?”

  He heard Siri’s words but made them be only noise. He let the yawning darkness have him. Maybe that was what he needed it to do. He went to the blackness with the hope that it wasn’t a threat but a retreat, a haven. In the darkness, he hunted, aware finally that he wasn’t alone.

  Someone’s been riding me, he thought. He whispered, “Holy shit.”

  “You’d be doing everyone a favor if you got rid of the serial killer that’s dumping bodies in Griffith Park.”

  Watching me. Asking questions. Turning me into a documentary.

  “Don’t think of it as a public service to humans. Think of it as protecting your hunting territory from another predator.”

  But who? Why? The how he understood. But it had to be somebody who was very, very good. Very old. He found no trace, no psychic trail of the old vampire who’d been mindraping him.

  “And just what did you see in this vision you’re currently so freaked about?” Siri demanded.

  He heard the concern and dread beneath her annoyed curiosity. He responded to her voice this time. “I saw myself in a fight.” That was all he was going to say. Except to add, “There were angels in it.”

  “Angels?”

  Selim opened his eyes. Siri’d pulled off the freeway and was slowly cruising along a side street. Dry, drooping palm trees lined the sidewalks. Beyond them, Selim glimpsed rows of tall, chain-link fencing topped with spiraling razor wire. He could smell the ocean not too far away. “Pull in here,” he directed, pointed at the entrance of a parking lot on the left.

  They weren’t too far off Rose Avenue, meaning they weren’t in the worst part of Venice, but certainly not the safest, either. Siri didn’t like it. She didn’t know why, considering who she was with. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” she muttered as she pulled into the empty lot. Empty, that is, except for the long, black stretch limo that was already there.

  “That’s just Kamaraju’s vibe,” Selim told her as she stopped the car. “He always smells bad.”

  Selim didn’t have to tell Siri to stay in the car, and she didn’t protest his leaving her, even though Kamaraju emerged from the back of the limo accompanied by his companion and the three other vampires in his household. Kama liked traveling with a posse. Selim was glad to see he hadn’t brought any of the two dozen nest slaves with him. Kamaraju was a true parasite, the sort of person who gave vampires a bad name. Kamaraju could protest that he broke no Law with the number of humans he kept in his service, since he had the age and strength to keep tight leashes on all of them. Skirting the Laws without actually breaking them was Kamaraju’s way. Easily bored, he did what he wanted, knowing how to duck when trouble threatened.

  Selim projected his usual coolly brisk and businesslike facade as he approached the vampire in the center of the group. He looked over Kamaraju’s companion critically as he approached. Lisa, dressed in a very short, strapless white dress clung devotedly to her vampire lover, her gaze worshipfully on him alone. Typical two-year-old behavior. The girl couldn’t get enough of the one who took her blood and gave his blood and magic in return. It was the most sacred, most important relationship of their kind. Kamaraju didn’t seem aware the girl was clinging to his arm. If he felt anything toward her at this moment, it was boredom. Selim didn’t see how Kamaraju could live with himself. He turned his attention to the trio of young ones to keep from spitting contemptuously in Kamaraju’s face.

  There were two males and one female in the group—Siri would know them all by name. All were dressed in black, stark and obvious contrast to Lisa’s white, all outwardly as bored as the vampire who fostered them. Each of them looked him over with cold, flat eyes as he approached, feigned disinterest doing a poor job of covering their curiosity, hunger, and fear. Selim didn’t pretend any disinterest in them; he met each one’s gaze until they looked away, each one convinced that the Enforcer was aware of their every thought of transgression. The whole process took maybe five seconds.

  “It is good to be king,” he murmured and turned his attention back to the fuming Kamaraju. Selim swept a han
d to indicate the parking lot. “You people look like we’re involved in a drug deal in a John Woo movie.” There he went again. Why did he keep comparing real life to a movie?

  Kamaraju ignored his comment. He pushed Lisa aside and strode forward, putting himself nose to nose with Selim. “Pervert!” The Hunting urge burned through his normally finely honed sense of self-preservation. “Murderer!”

  “Your point?” Selim asked calmly.

  “I know all about how you murdered Jager. He was my child.”

  “Which makes you a piss-poor father.”

  “I loved Jager.”

  “Briefly.”

  “It’s not the time we have with our companions that matters with our kind, Hunter, it’s the intensity of the moment.”

  Selim laughed. He didn’t look at Kamaraju as he answered. Selim looked over the other vampire’s black-clad shoulder, addressing the girl in white. “Time seems to get shorter and shorter for you with every companion, Kama. Stop taking slaves and start a harem.”

  Lisa was shocked and frightened by this advice. Her pain lashed at Selim; her silent plea for reassurance was ignored by Kamaraju, who was looking thoughtful. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t heard the suggestion before; it was an acceptable treatment for the ennui vampires frequently suffered. Lisa was a modern American girl who wasn’t as decadent as she thought. She was shocked at the notion of polygamy, but also totally unaware of the type of divorce Kamaraju practiced.

  Selim could only hope that she would think about the chances for her survival after she overheard this conversation. Maybe she didn’t know she was destined to turn into a vampire herself one day; awareness of the change came slowly, comprehension even slower, and it all needed to be savored. It took years of preparation. He knew too well the madness that came with being born too soon. He never wanted to see another creature put through the hell he’d barely survived.

  “That Jager lived ten years amazes me. He might have made it if you’d bothered to find him a good home. If anyone would have taken in a fledgling made after only a few years in your bed.”

  “He wanted the freedom to fly. It was his right. Not all of us need the Council and Laws.”

  “Making him my rightful prey even before he tried to kill my companion. Never mind all the other crap he learned from you.”

  “He learned to indulge his appetites. All my children do.”

  The young vampires had disappeared into the darkness of the parking lot, showing that Kamaraju had helped them master at least some of the basic tricks of the trade. Selim could still feel the trace of their heartbeats, but faintly, with his blood hunger more than with his psychic senses. Their hearts called to his, but the Law kept them safe for now.

  Kamaraju had enough control to back off, to fight his anger and urge to attack, but Selim read Karmaraju’s longing to do some damage, to prove his dominance over the city’s Enforcer. Vampires frequently battled each other, though not in Selim’s town. Selim caught a quickly fading but explicit and vivid image from Kamaraju’s mind.

  He was a step closer to the other vampire before he could stop himself, claws out and hands raised. He spat in Kamaraju’s face. “You call me a pervert?”

  “I don’t eat my own kind.”

  “I don’t fuck mine.”

  Kamaraju smiled. “There are times when it is allowed, Hunter. You said I should start a harem.” He gave a slight shrug and tried to make it sound like a joke. His eyes were dead flat and serious as he added, “I know you’d never volunteer, but—”

  “No challenges,” Selim said coldly. “You wouldn’t even think of it if the Hunger wasn’t getting to you.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.” Kamaraju mouthed the words. “It’s just hormones talking. That time of the decade.” He took a step backward. Lisa came to him, and he put his arm around her waist. His three fosterlings came out of the shadows. “What did you want to see me about, Hunter?”

  Selim took great pleasure in informing Kamaraju just who and where his nest was going to Hunt. Kamaraju’s temper boiled while he listened. Selim looked forward to the coming protest. The fledglings stirred restlessly but limited their objections to tense muscles and dirty looks. They kept most of their attention on Kamaraju, waiting to see how he’d respond. Selim waited as well, hoping the nest leader would react badly. But before Kamaraju could even manage to start swearing at him, they were caught by the headlights of another car as it turned into the parking lot.

  Cars had been going by on the street during the conversation, but this was first one that had penetrated the psychic warning barrier that kept the space free of everyone but vampire kind. The fledglings disappeared once more; Lisa retreated to the backseat of the limo. Siri opened the tinted driver’s-side window of her Mercedes to get a better view. Selim could feel her fingers hovering tensely over the ignition of the new car, ready to bring the engine to life if Selim signaled her to leave. Selim turned, arms crossed on his chest, to face the intruder’s blazing headlights. Kamaraju stepped up beside him, showing uncommon solidarity. Selim figured he was trying to impress the young vampires in his nest.

  “Why am I not surprised?” Selim said when the newcomer cut the lights and the engine and stepped out of the car. “Did I invite you to this party?” he added as Geoff Sterling approached him.

  Sterling shrugged sheepishly. “Couldn’t stop myself.” He didn’t look particularly happy about being here. He was wearing a tuxedo jacket over a tab-collared shirt. He was gestured back toward his car. “I was driving Moira to Crazy Girls for a drink. She’s never been there, so after this premiere we were at—”

  “Cut to the chase,” Selim suggested.

  “Moira?” Kamaraju asked. His gaze shifted from the young intruder to Sterling’s car. “Tasty.” Selim could feel her there as well, bright, curious, virginal. What was the boy thinking to bring an unbitten human to a meeting of vampires? What was he doing here?

  Selim took Sterling by the arm and led him to stand next to the Mercedes. “Got a bad feeling, did you?”

  Sterling nodded. “From you. I felt this compulsion—Don’t you just hate when that happens?” He looked unhappy. “We’re connected.”

  Selim didn’t feel it. Unless, of course, some of his fashion sense had rubbed off on the strig. Sterling looked very different since he’d recovered from his leather and torn lace phase. “Three days ago, you hated and feared me. I miss that.”

  “Me, too. I’d rather concentrate on Moira, but I’ve also got this need to—” He shook his head. Sterling looked across the lot at the scowling vampire standing by the limo. “Who’s the asshole? Jager’s ex?”

  It occurred to Selim that this kid from Seattle who’d lived as a loner since he came to L.A. could use a briefing on the town’s players if he planned to become one himself. “My companion knows all and sees all,” he told Sterling. “Have a long talk with her.” He glanced at Sterling’s car; it was something in a low-slung speed machine. Ferrari, maybe? “New wheels?”

  Shrug, followed by a wry smile and a wistful look toward the passenger of the sports car. “I’m trying to impress a girl.”

  “Courtship rituals elude me. Speaking of eluding,” Selim went on. “Did it occur to you that paparazzi might tail you to this—private—meeting? Please tell me you’ve got that covered.” Selim could feel Kamaraju sneaking around his shielding, attempting to listen in on the conversation. The other vampire’s curiosity had a very unpleasant feel to it; nothing new in that. Selim ignored Kamaraju while he waited for Sterling’s answer.

  “It’s covered,” Sterling assured him. He wiggled his fingers and rolled his eyes. He grinned. “People will ignore you if you just know how to ask properly. Telepathy has its uses. I got used to telling the media to go away when I was stalking her. She’ll have privacy with me,” he added, with a loving glance toward the woman in his car.

  Selim was happy to hear that the young vampire was already well aware of security precautions. He still wished Sterling hadn’t b
rought his—fiancée for lack of a better term—with him tonight. Selim decided that it wouldn’t serve any purpose to give Kamaraju a chance to complain about homeless hunting along the concrete river or question what a human was doing here. Selim opened the passenger door of the Mercedes with one hand, pointed Sterling toward the sports car with the other. “You don’t have to come running every time you feel something from me.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll call you.”

  “What if you need my help?”

  “I’ll call you,” Selim repeated, slowly and distinctly. Sterling returned to his car, and Selim settled into the seat beside Siri. Her curiosity filled his senses. “Drive,” he told her.

  “Fine.”

  He silently put up with her annoyance until they were well on their way to Pasadena. Finally, he asked her, “What’s Crazy Girls?”

  She spared him a brief glance. “It’s a strip club. Why?”

  He threw his head back against the thickly padded seat and laughed. “Thank goodness. The boy isn’t turning into Eddie Haskell on me after all.”

  “Who?”

  “You’re too young. Never mind.”

  “Fine.” Siri had many, many questions, but she could tell that Selim wasn’t going to answer any of them. “I don’t know why I put up with you.”

  “Chemistry,” he answered. Then he sighed and got serious. “Sometimes,” he told her. “I wish—”

  He was thinking about Kamaraju and Lisa and about Geoff and Moira. She didn’t catch the images, but she knew that’s what was bothering him all of a sudden, coloring his feelings toward her. “We aren’t like either couple,” Siri pointed out.

  “Maybe I should have courted you first,” he said, looking out the windshield instead of at her. “Maybe I should let you go.”

  “Maybe you should shut up,” she answered. “Maybe you should stop worrying,” she added as his pain pricked her. “We are. Why worry about past or future?”

  He still didn’t look at her. She felt his reluctance to talk. She’d been feeling this reluctance for over a year. She was surprised when he fought his way past it. “Maybe I should tell you—”