“You’d think, but we both know how family is, especially your daddy’s side.”
I grimaced. “They don’t seem to be overly blessed with sanity traits.”
“True that. Now, tell me about this so-called vampire you’ve fallen for.”
“I haven’t fallen for him,” I was quick to point out. “It’s all biological. C. J. Dante makes it quite clear that each Dark One’s Beloved is uniquely perfect for him. It’s something to do with genes, but I’m not sure what, because talk of genetics was tantamount to heresy at the compound.”
“Darling, you forget that I know you. You have the softest heart of anyone I’ve ever met. You’ve fallen in love three times in the last month, alone.”
“That was with actors,” I said, waving away that idea. “And two of them were Hemsworths, which means I’m excused. Also, seeing movies is still new and exciting, so seeing half-naked men on giant screens is a bit overwhelming.”
“They’re filming a new James Bond,” he said simply.
“And I’ll be in the theater every day of the movie’s run,” I said, fanning myself a little. “So long as they have scenes where he takes off his shirt.”
“You see? You’re a hair-trigger romantic. You fall in love at the drop of a hat, and that’s with fictional people. I can only imagine the state of your emotions now that you have your fingers on a real man.”
I stopped imagining Merrick starring in a James Bond movie, and considered his point. “I like Merrick, of course. I like him a lot. But I’m not wildly, crazily, head-over-heels in love with him.”
“You’re not doing the fuck-buddy thing, are you?” he asked.
I glared at him. “No! Not that I’m sure what that is, other than extremely offensive terminology.”
“Sorry. Let me rephrase: what do you get out of the relationship?”
I stared at him, confused. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Relationships are give-and-take, Tempest. If all you’re doing is giving, then that’s not a relationship—that’s slavery. Emotional slavery.”
“I’m not a slave,” I protested. “Merrick gets me feeding him, and redeeming his soul, and I get ... I get ...”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Yes?”
“I get a super-hot man. One who’s immortal, and who won’t get old, and grow hair out of his ears, and develop a beer belly.”
“And what happens when you get tired of this super-hot guy who just takes from you and doesn’t give anything back?”
“Dark Ones usually fall in love with their Beloveds,” I said slowly.
Ellis pounced on one word. “Usually? That means there are times when they don’t fall for their salvation in lady form. What then? What if your Merrick never comes around?”
I stared sightlessly at the gorgeous scenery slipping past us as we headed for Nice, blind to the sparkling blue water, the scenic towns, the expensive villas and yachts and low-slung sports cars. What would I do if Merrick never realized just how perfect I was for him? I couldn’t imagine a more hellish life than falling in love with a man, spending my life with him, being as intimate as two people could be, but never touching his heart.
Ellis patted my knee while I pondered this horrible future. “Don’t worry sweet cheeks. Uncle Ellis is here to make everything right.”
“I don’t know that you can,” I said gloomily, going back over everything Merrick had said to me. “What if he was using the protection thing as an excuse?”
“I don’t follow.”
I gestured vaguely. “He kept saying he wanted me safe, that I couldn’t go with him because Cousin Carlo would hurt me, but what if that was just a nice way to tell me he didn’t want me around?”
“Deep,” Ellis said, nodding. “That’s very deep. I can’t tell anything until I meet this Merrick of yours, but never fear, I won’t leave you to deal with the bastard alone. No one brutally and cruelly tramples your heart, gets into your pants, and then casts you aside without another thought while I’m around.”
I slumped down in the seat, a pathetic ball of confusion, worry, and misery.
Chapter Ten
Merrick took one look at the thief taker, and knew he wouldn’t like the man.
“Hi! I’m Savian Bartholomew. You the vamp who’s looking for a mortal?”
For one thing, the man smiled too much. He was downright cheerful, his long face and English accent all but radiating genial good humor.
“Whew, it is hot here, isn’t it? I don’t know how you lot stand going around with those long leather coats and fedoras and sunglasses all the time. Well, the sunglasses I understand, but you must be sweltering under that duster.”
Then there was his chatty nature. He stood right next to Merrick in the shade of the portal shop building, long tendrils of some blooming flowers drifting down from hanging baskets, effectively making a screen from the people shopping and meandering along the streets. Savian chatted away just as if Merrick was a normal person, and not one of the dreaded Four Horsemen. What the hell was wrong with this man that he greeted him like a long-lost friend instead of treating him like he was a pariah?
“My secretary—really my wife, Maura—she’s a dragon, but she’s a whiz at keeping records—told me that you’re trying to track someone who was just down the coast near Genoa. Like to see a picture of Maura? Here we are at St. Moritz last winter. And here’s the sprog. Attractive little beast, isn’t he? Maura insisted he be named after me.” Savian donned an expression that Merrick assumed was meant to imply modesty. “He’s a clever little devil. Gets that from his mama, of course. Well, now! Here we are, and you need my services. Luckily, I just finished up a job in Vienna finding a troll who was wanted for some child support, and was able to take a portal out here. They really need to put in some portal shops in the north of Italy—it would have taken me forever to get here by train. But that’s neither here nor there. Let’s hear about what you’d like me to do.”
It was Tempest, Merrick decided with an odd sort of martyred satisfaction. She was infecting everyone else until soon there would be no one left who feared and shunned the sight of him as was right and proper. “There is a man named Carlo who, until a few days ago, was located in the area near Genoa. We believe he is connected with the company known as the Revelation. You know of them?”
Savian gave a low whistle. “Yes, I’ve heard whispers about them. Not a lot of info is going around, but word on the street is that they’re offering some pretty big sums of money for beings with special abilities to go to work for them.”
“What sort of work?”
Savian shrugged. “No one seems to know. There’s a story going that a mage tried to investigate them, and promptly disappeared. No idea if he’s reappeared or not.”
“Hmm.” Merrick considered this new information. The Revelation that he knew wasn’t trying to lure people in with offers of money—that appeared to be a new tactic. “If you hear of anything more, let me know. Information about the Revelation is worth money to us.”
“Right you are. Now, who is it you want me to find?” Savian all but beamed at him.
Merrick found himself wanting to be back at his villa, where he could accuse Tempest of turning the world against him. Or rather, turning it for him, which was completely unacceptable. “The man is known to us only as Victor, although he might also be appearing as a mortal named Carlo Marcuzzi.” Merrick gave the entirely too-happy thief taker the information he had gleaned from his sources, and the few items Tempest had mentioned.
Savian looked at his watch. “So it’s been, what? Two days since you’ve lost track of Carlo?”
“That’s about right.”
“Hmm. I’ll have my bloodhounds get to work on the trail, but that’s a bit long, even for them.” Savian grinned when Merrick frowned, and added, “Bloodhounds are what I call my team of sprites.”
“You use sprites?” Merrick wondered if he’d made the right choice in calling in this particular thief taker. “Th
e little balls of light?”
“That’s only one of their forms. Most of them look perfectly human, since that’s the preferred form. Attracts so much less attention than a sentient ball of light. I have four sprites around the world who I use to pick up markers on cold trails.” Savian pulled out his mobile phone again and tapped out a text message. “The nearest one is in Paris, but she can be in Italy shortly via the portal.”
“What do you do if the sprites are the ones finding the trail?” Merrick didn’t like the idea of paying a vast sum of money to a man who simply used others to do his own work.
“They just find the signs that I can’t see. Once they identify the marker the individual leaves, then I pick it up and follow the trail.” Savian looked up from his phone. “You don’t know what a marker is, do you?”
“Of course I do,” Merrick said, bristling slightly. “It’s my job to hunt people. Markers are a sign someone has passed by a location.”
“Well ...” Savian rubbed his chin. “Yes and no. In your job, that’s probably right. But for us, for thief takers, we use a different sort of trail. Every immortal has a certain marker unique to them. Dragons have dragon scales; you Dark Ones shed something we call sanguine, which is more or less an arcane-based blood residue. Trolls leave minute plant spores, and demons, of course, trail demon smoke everywhere.”
Merrick couldn’t help but glance down at himself. “I’ve never heard of sanguine, but I know that I do not leave any sort of a blood trail.”
“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong, although I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of sanguine. It’s just the name we thief takers give it, and it’s not something you can see unless you have a sprite pointing out just what to look for. Each Dark One’s trail is unique, hence the need for the sprites.”
“But Carlo might very well be human,” Merrick pointed out.
“Well, if he is this Victor dude, then luck is on our side.”
“How so?” Merrick asked, confused.
“If he’s been around vampires, or any other immortal being, then he’ll have traces of their markers on him. The fact that the marker is changed slightly by contact with him will clue Imelda the sprite into the fact that it’s not the immortal itself who left the marker.”
“So she finds the marker, identifies it to you, and then you follow the trail? Can you do that, considering that Victor left the house two days ago?”
“I’ll give it a shot. If there hasn’t been a lot of immortal traffic in the area, there should be some residue. Of course, the samples degrade over time, so the sooner we get to it, the better.”
Merrick wholeheartedly agreed with that sentiment and, after a few more instructions, sent the thief taker on his way. He found a hotel room, and slept away the daylight hours.
He dreamed, though, dreams filled with images of Tempest that both aroused and enraged him. He woke at one point with an erection, and a determination to cut her out of his life at the first opportunity.
A gnawing feeling reminded him that it had been a while since he last fed, but an odd sort of reluctance gripped him.
“Eat,” he told himself the following evening, scanning the crowd outside the hotel, looking for a likely subject. He prefered feeding from women, since men tended to be more aware of personal-space issues, but today, as he eyed the people outside an artisans’ market, no one seemed appealing.
Except Tempest.
“I don’t need her, no matter what she claims,” he said aloud, garnering him some odd looks from passersby. Fine. If he didn’t want a human, there were animals in the vicinity. He was sure to find some accommodating horse who wouldn’t mind donating a little blood.
He grimaced even as the thought rolled through his head. He’d never before been overly picky about his food source, and now here he was making an issue out of nothing.
“This is just yet another reason why I can’t have a Beloved,” he informed his hotel room when he returned to it. “It provides yet another way someone could use her against me. Well, I’ll have none of it. I simply won’t eat until I get over this uncomfortable phase.”
He wallowed in his righteous indignation for a bit, but distractions soon left him feeling hungry and grumpy.
“I can’t believe you were so close to Victor and let him get away,” Nico, one of his brother Horsemen, said some six hours later. It was almost midnight, and the four men had gathered together on a rare videoconference.
“Because I don’t know for certain who he was,” Merrick explained. Nico, the youngest of all the Dark Ones to belong to the Horsemen, had a notoriously short fuse, and always acted before thinking. “There is a chance that Carlo Marcuzzi is Victor, but it’s far more likely that he’s a front.”
“I agree with Merrick,” Ciaran said, rubbing his face. His blondish red hair stood on end as if he’d just gotten out of bed, which Merrick assumed he had, given the time difference between Nice and Quebec. “We’ve worked too hard to find Victor to rush forward when a little observation will tell us if this man is him.”
“What do you suggest we do, Merrick?” Han asked. Behind him, Merrick could see the naked form of a woman lying in a bed, just barely covered with a sheet. Evidently Han had been dining when the call had come through. The faint sound of feminine snoring could be heard. “Do you want us to drop our lines of investigation and come to France?”
Merrick considered his options. It went against his nature to ask for help, even from his fellow Four Horsemen, but he had to put aside his pride in order to focus on their goal. “I have a thief taker working on Carlo’s trail, but that aside, the informant who set me on to him insists that Victor is still in this region. It might be helpful to have more than one Horseman here. Nico, what trail are you following?”
“One that led to a Slavic genetics company, but it hasn’t gone anywhere.”
“A genetics company?” Ciaran smothered another yawn. “Why would Victor want to meet with them?”
“That’s what my informant told me,” Nico said defensively.
“And you see how well that turned out,” Ciaran responded.
Nico’s face darkened. “My informants are normally reliable, which is why we knew Victor was operating out of France and Italy to begin with. What have yours told us? Nothing, that’s what. I don’t even know why you’re in Canada when Victor is in Europe.”
“Calm down,” Merrick interrupted before the two men got into an argument. “Ciaran is following the Revelation’s movement of money in the States, and Han is tracking down the Dark One who supposedly got away from Victor.”
“And I suppose you expect me to drop everything and rush to Italy now?” Nico asked, his tone still irate.
“I’m not telling you to leave Moscow,” Merrick growled, close to snapping at the younger man. He knew Nico was dedicated to the cause, and had an uncanny knack of telling when someone was being deceptive, but his youth and inexperience rubbed Merrick the wrong way. “I’m simply telling you what I’ve found, and that an extra set of eyes might be beneficial. If you believe your contact will provide you a link to Victor, then pursue it. There’s nothing to say we can’t come at the man from different angles.”
“I’ll go to France,” Han said, glancing back over his shoulder. “I’m done here, anyway. The man reported to us as having escaped appears to be a figment of someone’s imagination. At any rate, I couldn’t find proof he really existed.”
“I can go to Europe, too,” Ciaran said with a yawn. “It looks like the financial information isn’t going to pan out as much as we hoped. I’ve found some references to money laundering through South America, but I suspect the federal officials are watching the accounts, since activity suddenly ceased last month.” Ciaran spent the next five minutes detailing what he’d uncovered regarding transactions involving banks in Belize, the US, and Austria. Merrick disregarded most of the information about the transactions themselves, since it was the people behind them that interested him.
“If all of yo
u are going to meet, then I might as well as join you,” Nico said as soon as Han wrapped up the summation of his investigation. Nico’s tone was tinged with petulance that Merrick thought was unworthy of a Horseman. “Although I don’t see what good having all four of us together is going to do. If Victor isn’t in the area, then all we’ve done is wasted time.”
“If you have a better lead, then follow it,” Merrick told him. “It would be foolish to ignore what could be viable information just to join the rest of us.”
“I don’t want it said that I didn’t do my part,” Nico said with a distinct edge to his voice, and disconnected from the video chat.
“Someone is going to have to talk to him,” Merrick said. “And it can’t be me, because he takes everything I say as a personal attack.”
“He’s young,” Han said, running a hand through his hair. “I’m sure we were all just as fervent as he is when we were that age. Right, I’m off if there’s nothing else to discuss.”
Ciaran stretched, and rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “I have one or two things to tie up here, but nothing of importance. I believe Merrick is correct in saying the Revelation is focused on Europe, since all my leads here have dried up.”
“It could well be that they put out some false tracks for us to follow away from the heart of the organization,” Han added. “I’m inclined to agree that we should be focusing on Europe, Italy in particular. And Merrick knows that ground better than any of us.”
“You wouldn’t know it by my results,” Merrick said, mentally damning himself for not having run Victor to earth by now. Invariably, his thoughts moved to Tempest, and the horror of what could happen should she fall into the Revelation’s clutches.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’ve done more than all of the rest of us put together. You not only found two of their operatives. You were so much of a threat they almost killed you. You’ve done your part and more,” Han said soothingly, and, with a stretch, signed off.
“You all right?” Ciaran asked Merrick, squinting at the computer screen. “You look tired. You’re not still feeling the effects of your run-in with Victor’s men?”