People would care if he hurt me was the subtext of my speech. I was pretty sure he heard it, but on the other hand, sometimes subtle wasn’t as effective as shoving it in front of his face.
“The Marrok treats me as a daughter,” I said, to that end. “My fae friend has killed to protect me. And my mate . . .” I tried to put it into words that were not a direct threat. “He would be very unhappy if I were hurt.”
“The Marrok broke all ties with you and your pack,” the vampire said.
I shrugged because that still hurt. “Yes. But that does not mean he would be indifferent if you hurt me. And Elizaveta Arkadyevna works for our pack.” Elizaveta was powerful enough that her reputation should have drifted to the far corners of the earth. His lack of expression told me that he, at least, knew who she was. “So do the goblins.” That last bit was probably not as impressive as it should have been, but it was true.
The vampire was quiet for a moment, then said, “You do not mention the vampire.”
“Vampire?” I asked, clueless.
“The one who has you blood-bound to her,” he said. “I tried to break the binding while you slept.”
And suddenly I wasn’t too busy to be terrified. I reached up and touched my neck with fingers that tried to shake. There were two puncture wounds in my neck.
I hate vampires . . . I hate vampires . . . I hate them.
This was the reason that vampires would never, ever be able to let the humans know about them. If a powerful enough vampire bit someone, especially more than once, that vampire could control them. They called it the Kiss. It was what allowed the Mistress or Master of a seethe to control the fledgling vampires who could not maintain sentience without feeding from a more powerful vampire. It is what allowed the maker to control his fledglings. A human who had been given the Kiss was a pet.
Thug Vampire had tried to make me his pet when I was unconscious and unable to defend myself.
“I could have done it anyway,” he said. “But it would have killed the one you are bound to, and I’m not sure I want her dead.” He smiled, reached up, and stroked my cheek.
I held myself where I was and didn’t jump up and scream. Mostly because I was certain that, dizzy as I still was, I’d land on my butt. But also because I thought that he was trying to work a bit of magic on me, and I wasn’t sure I wanted him to know it wasn’t effective. Tomorrow, his power might work just fine—but for right now, my quirky resistance to his magic was resisting for all it was worth.
“Love,” the vampire said thoughtfully after a moment, “is the most powerful force in the world. You are loved by many. Wulfe is right, that is power. The vampire’s hold on you was something you accepted, something you wanted. I could have broken it—but if I had, she would have died.”
She? It dawned on me that he’d been using the wrong pronoun. The vampire I was tied to was Stefan.
This vampire thought . . . that I was tied to Marsilia. Who else would the mate of the pack Alpha be tied to but the Mistress of the seethe? He hadn’t broken the bond because he wanted her alive. I was right. I was right. I knew who he was.
I knew who he was—and I was in real trouble. I could hear the blood pound in my ears frantically. Never a good thing when you are sitting next to a vampire.
“You are fond of her,” he murmured. “You love her. You asked her for the bond, and that is why it is so strong.”
There was something in the position of his body that told me that I didn’t want him to talk about Marsilia to me. Something weird in his posture that spoke of jealousy.
I raised an eyebrow at him and answered him in an effort to change the topic. “Right now, I’m not too fond of you . . . Mr. Bonarata.”
Iacopo Bonarata, the Lord of Night, head of the Milan, Italy, seethe, once lover of Marsilia, was the de facto leader of the European vampires—and probably anywhere else he chose to travel. He wasn’t the Marrok, who ruled because that was the best way to protect his people. He was just a scary bastard that none of the other vampires chose to challenge. He’d been unchallenged by anyone, as far as I could find out, at least since the Renaissance, when he rose to power as a very young and ambitious monster.
And he was jealous of my imaginary relationship with the Queen of the Damned, Marsilia.
Fortunately, my attempt to change the direction of the conversation seemed to have worked, and when I named him, the vampire threw back his head and laughed, a great booming laugh that invited me to join him.
For all that he wasn’t pretty, he exuded a sexual bonhomie that was very powerful. The only thing I’d felt that was anything like it was when the fae tavern owner, Uncle Mike, turned on the charm. For Uncle Mike it was magic, and it had nothing to do with sex. The Lord of Night was all about sex and earthy things—but it was also magic.
He’d been using it on me subtly from the moment Pretty Vampire had left my cell, but when he laughed, the magic simply boiled out of him like an invisible fog.
I caught the shadow of its effect, intended or not. This magic should have enhanced the sexual pull of the Lord of Night. It brushed over me without affecting me overly much.
The vampire’s sexual appeal was powerful even without magic—but, to me, he wasn’t Adam. That meant that I could have appreciated him without temptation. He was also a vampire, and that doubled my resistance to his magic.
The Lord of Night sat next to me, waiting for me to start drooling over him.
For my part, I sat stiff and sore—and very worried about what he would do if he realized his magic had no effect on me. Would he attribute it to my tie with another vampire, or my tie to Adam and our pack, or would he figure out what I really was?
The vampires from my neck of the woods hated and feared what I was. The walkers, the children of the ancient ones, hunted down a lot of vampires in the American frontier during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They ultimately failed, and the vampires exterminated most of my kind.
I didn’t know if Bonarata, who’d been in Italy for the whole time, felt the same way. If he even knew about what my kind could do. If he did, he might kill me out of hand rather than . . . whatever else he had planned for me.
But I could not make myself relax into him. There were some things I could not do—and pretending to be attracted to Bonarata was one of those things.
I didn’t want him to know what I was. I didn’t want him to know that the blood bond—created, ironically enough, to keep me safe from another vampire—tied me to my friend Stefan and not Marsilia, because I wasn’t sure how he’d react.
“So,” the vampire was saying while I thought furiously about the dangers of unpredictable, psychotic, obsessed, immortal vampires. “You know who I am. That is good. You may call me Jacob. Iacopo is difficult for my American friends, so I have recently changed my name to the English version.”
Apparently he was choosing to ignore the way I wasn’t reacting to his magic. That didn’t mean he backed it off.
“This was supposed to be a simple meeting.” His voice was seductive. Not beautiful, but deeply, richly masculine in a way that owed nothing to magic. “I desire to have a place where others would be comfortable meeting with me. When you created such a space, it seemed that some useful agreement could be made between your pack and my people. We meant to take you somewhere that we could talk, but your condition meant we had to take you for longer than we meant to. Somehow, I think that your Alpha will not react well to this.” Nearly every word out of his mouth was a lie. He must have thought that since I wasn’t a werewolf, I wouldn’t be able to tell. Either that, or maybe that I would be too far under his influence to notice.
He smiled a charming smile. “You know him best. How do you think I should proceed?”
“You should let me go,” I told him instantly. “And never come back to the Tri-Cities.”
His smile widened, but his eyes remained
cool. “Try again.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what you want. I fix cars. For hammering out interspecies treaties, your tools are better than mine.”
“You make a very good hostage,” he said. I was pretty sure he was noticing that I wasn’t panting after him as I should have been because there was a hint of irritation in his voice. Hopefully he’d credit my bond to another vampire; sometimes, Stefan had told me, such a bond could work that way. “Don’t you think that your mate will bargain to get you back?”
“Werewolves have a long memory,” I told him. I didn’t want to answer the question because the answer was yes, so I skirted it, like a politician up for election. “And they are regrettably straightforward. The wolves are not fae to hold to bargains they view as forced. Holding me hostage is not going to help you in the long run.” Flattery was usually a good tactic with old creatures. It never had worked on the Marrok, but he was more honest with himself about what he was than most people are. “But you already know that,” I told the vampire. “I suspect you already have something planned.”
He smiled again. It was supposed to be sexy, and it was. But he smelled like a vampire to me—and I had Adam.
“I could kill you and try again,” he offered gently.
And like turning a valve, he shut off the magic he’d been using to influence me.
Maybe I should have pretended to be interested in him, but vampires have better-than-human noses. Most people who are attracted to someone don’t stink of terror and stress. I wasn’t a bad actor, but I could not have disguised my reaction to sitting this close to the Lord of Night. If I’d tried, I’d probably have thrown up on him.
He pursed his lips. “You aren’t doing this right,” he informed me. “You need to convince me that leaving you alive is in my best interests. What can you do for me? What information can you provide to me to advance my goals?”
I rolled my eyes. “I think you screwed the pooch when you hit my car and kidnapped me. You’ll have to figure your own way out of this one or wait until my head doesn’t hurt.”
He leaned into me. His body was warm—and all I could think about was how much blood he’d had to consume to raise his body temperature to a few degrees warmer than human.
“Poor little one,” he crooned, cupping my face. “It was not my intention to hurt you.”
I really wasn’t myself. I am generally very good about accommodating megalomaniacal egomaniacs and waiting until it was safe to torment them. I had grown up doing that. But my head hurt, and he was creeping me out.
“Epic failure,” I told him. “I’ll have you know that I expect my archenemies to be competent.”
He laughed, and I forgot to breathe because he was so scary. All that joyous sound and the empty eyes. The seduction had failed—the terrifying, not so much. It wasn’t magic. It was just him.
“I do want a deal with Hauptman’s pack,” he said. “It is good for you that I don’t think he’d forgive me for killing you. Werewolves are sentimental that way. But it would be easy enough to kill you—and kill him. His second might be grateful.”
I met his gaze steadily and said, “I don’t think he would.”
Vampires cannot tell truth from lies the way werewolves (and I) can. But the older ones can usually sort it out anyway. Darryl would not deal with someone who killed Adam. I was certain of it, and I let the vampire know.
He smiled faintly. There was the sound of a polite knock on the door.
“Come,” he said.
The werewolf who entered was a surprise, and she shouldn’t have been. I knew that he had exiled Marsilia for feeding from his werewolf mistress. He and Marsilia were still lovers at the time—and that probably had made for added complications. I had the impression that Marsilia’s feeding from the werewolf had some deeper vampire meaning, like maybe she’d been trying to claim the werewolf for herself. I’d been told once that the whole event had to do with Marsilia disapproving of Bonarata keeping a werewolf. Werewolf blood was apparently more enticing than human, and the implication I’d gotten was that the Lord of Night was addicted.
The woman who entered the room was beautiful. Strong features were arranged symmetrically, but there was no extra flesh on her face at all, so the total effect was fragile. Her hair was dark and formally arranged in something that was far too elaborate to be called a bun. The hair artfully left loose showed signs of being naturally curly.
She wore a white silk dress that made it clear that she was naked beneath it—and that she was too thin. The white fabric contrasted with the honey gold of her complexion and brought out the scars, small white blemishes that might have been pockmarks . . . or the reminders of where fangs had broken her skin.
She wore a silver collar, but it couldn’t have been real silver because the only scars on her neck were from fangs.
“Lenka,” said the vampire, and she flinched and glanced up.
Her eyes were werewolf gold—a sign that she was quite, quite lost to her wolf.
She started to speak. I thought it was Italian, but I don’t know it, so it could have been Romanian or some other Latin language that wasn’t Spanish or French.
He made a chiding noise. “Be polite,” he said. “Our guest speaks only English.”
She glanced at me with those wild eyes. “He is mine,” she said, her voice as clear and precise as if she’d been born in London.
“Lenka,” the Lord of Night purred, “do I have to punish you?”
Her eyes dropped to the ground, and she shivered, smelling of fear and arousal at the same time. I wondered if he knew that there was nothing human left to her, and the only thing that made us safe from her was that her wolf was utterly broken.
“You have a phone call,” she said, her voice subdued.
“Ah,” he said, “I’ve been expecting this call. You’ll have to excuse me.” He wrapped his hand around the werewolf’s upper arm and escorted her out. He paused and looked back at me. “I will leave Lenka to guard the door. I assume that you, mate to an Alpha werewolf, understand that without me present, she will be quite unable to stop herself from attacking and killing you. As a favor to me, who values her, I ask that you not make me put her down for spoiling my plans.”
He shut the door behind him and did not lock it.
I knew only two things for certain. First, Bonarata had lied about a lot of what he told me. Second, he very much wanted me to run through that carefully unlocked door.
I stared at the door thoughtfully and glanced around.
I generally don’t give megalomaniacal monsters what they want. But that unlocked door was an opportunity I could not pass up. I smiled grimly, ignoring the burn the expression caused in the muscles of my much-abused face. Then I stood and started stripping off my bloodstained clothes in preparation to run for my life.
2
Adam
For Adam, it began during that game of The Dread Pirate’s Booty. You can decide for yourself if he handled my unexpected involuntary absence well or not.
ADAM FELT A FLASH OF PAIN THAT HAD HIM STAGGERING to his feet, heedless of the monitor that crashed to the ground, because it wasn’t his pain—it was Mercy’s. As the echo of that flash hit the pack bonds a breath later than it had hit his mating bond, he sensed the readiness that shivered through the pack as they also rose, alarmed, alert, and awaiting his orders.
“What happened? Is it an accident?” Darryl asked. “Is she okay?”
His Mercy was fragile in body if not in spirit. Fragile by werewolf standards, anyway. The whole pack was aware of her vulnerability and driven to protect her to a degree that would infuriate his wife if she knew about it.
“Not good,” Adam said decisively, used to covering terror with logic and action. He started for the stairs. “I’ll—”
Then silence fell in place of the pain.
The next thing he knew, Adam’s
shoulder hit the front door, knocking the sturdy (and expensive) steel door out of its frame and sending it flying out of his way. The wolf wouldn’t allow him to stop for a car, instinctively knowing that he’d be faster on his own feet.
Adam braced himself to fight off the change—because that, too, would slow him down until he was finished shifting completely. But the wolf didn’t try to do anything but give his feet more speed as he sprinted down the driveway and onto the road toward the last place they’d felt Mercy. Dimly, he sensed the pack running flat out behind him, heard the sound of engines—some of the more practical-minded figuring that a car or two might come in handy.
Cold sweat that had nothing to do with the effort of his muscles and everything to do with the way his mate bond ended in nothingness slid down his back as he pushed his body for another ounce of swiftness. His heart beat so hard that he could barely hear the footsteps of his pack.
He smelled the accident before he could see it. Diesel fuel, air bag, her blood—
There was a moment of time that was forever blank after he smelled her blood.
He came to himself standing on the hood of the remains of his SUV, staring into the empty cab. A semi tractor had entwined itself in the glossy black body of the SUV. The glass of the SUV was shattered, and something very strong had torn out the steering wheel to get to Mercy. Her seat belt was cut, and there was too much blood in the seat. Blood, broken eggs, and chocolate chips.
His human half fumbled a second, wondering if the person who had freed Mercy had been him, because he couldn’t remember. But Mercy was gone, and his wolf knew better.
Someone had been here ahead of them.
Someone had hit Mercy with a semitruck, then stolen her away from them.
They had left her purse, small and tidy because Mercy didn’t like to be weighed down by anything big. It lay unopened on the passenger seat.
Adam leaned forward until his head was through the broken window and inhaled deeply. Along with the scent of Mercy’s blood, raw eggs, and himself, he found the scents of four vampires. Vampires. Three of them were strangers. The fourth . . .