Bad Blood (Cora's Choice #3) (2 page)

“
Habit. Vampires tend not to trust bullets as more than a deterrent. They’re good at slowing us down, but unless the shot is perfect, they aren’t entirely reliable with our kind.” He shrugged. “Or maybe the orders were to kidnap you if possible and kill you if not. She wasn’t specific, and we didn’t ask.”

“You don’t know who hired her
?”

“According to my friend
Clarissa, she didn’t know. It was an anonymous transaction.”

“You trust
her answer?”

“She wasn’
t in a position to lie.” The words had a decisive finality about them.

I rubbed my wrist, where
the tiny tear-drop shaped bond mark stood out against the skin. For a moment, I felt a tiny bit sorry for her.

Yeah, only a tiny bit.

The radio bolted onto the vehicle’s dashboard crackled to life, interrupting my thought.

“Mr. Thorne, it looks like we have a problem here.”

D
orian grabbed the handset. “What is it?”

“
Scouts are reporting a roadblock.”

“Aethers?”

“Police.”

“The police,” I said urgently. “They were possessed or something. They tried to shoot me.”

Dorian nodded curtly.
“I thought Etienne had sorted that,” he said into the handset.

“He dealt with the department.
These must be puppets.”

His
jaw flexed, annoyance flashing in his eyes. “Right, everybody. You know what to do.”

He hung up the handset with a decisive click and flicked off the headlights, droppin
g back slightly to let the rear SUV pass.

“
I
don’t know what to do,” I said.

He didn’t look at me
as he jerked the quick-releases that held the gun to the console between us. “Can you shoot?”

“No,” I said.
“I mean, if I guess if I had to—”

“
Then don’t worry about it,” he said tersely, pulling the gun free.

Behind me, I heard hard, metallic noises as the other men in the car readied their weapons.

“I thought that bullets didn’t work,” I said weakly. My unnaturally sensitive vision had adjusted to the darkness quickly, but I could see no sign of a roadblock, only the bouncing red taillights of the vehicle in front of us.

“O
h, they work well enough,” he said, shifting the shotgun’s pistol grip to his left hand. “The effects just aren’t often permanent—unless the opponent is human, which these seem to be.”

The radio
spit and crackled again. “Thirty seconds.”

Dorian raised an eyebrow at me.
“Can you answer that?”

I blinked, then scrabbled at the radio handset.
My fingers found the button. “Uh, got that.”

“Fifteen seconds.”
I could see lights ahead now, blue and red, bouncing off the landscape and into the night, but I still couldn’t see the cars themselves past the bulk of the SUV directly in front of us.

“
Got it,” I said again.

“Put it back,” Dorian said.
“And hold on.”

I fumbled to hang up the handset, then grabbed the edges of the seat with both hands as Dorian look a hard right off the road.
I braced as the SUV dipped down into a shallow culvert and went grinding up the opposite slope and into the open field. The car bobbed and swayed as it ran across the furrows, jerking me against my belt.

Dorian jerked the wheel again, and now we were running
in the dark parallel to the road with only the glow from the dash breaking the total blackness of the night.

Suddenly,
I saw the roadblock out of Dorian’s side window, a line of four police cruisers angled across the road with three more behind. In the flashing lights, I could make out the cops hunched behind their cars, pistols and rifles at ready as the two other SUVs came bearing down on them.

The
radio came alive a moment before the first one struck.
“Mark.”

The lead SUV hit the puncture strip across the road without slowing, the tires seemingly unaffected by the sharp spikes.
With a squeal of rubber and metal, it barreled into the front line of cruisers, throwing them aside like toys as the cops dove out of the way.

The second SUV jerked off to the left of the road
before it hit the strip, circling around the blockade on the opposite side as the first pressed forward. The lead Escalade churned into the back two cruisers, which gave way slowly in a burst of gunfire. A cop fell to the ground as we passed. Someone screamed.

“Oh, my God,” I said, looking back.

The lead SUV made it through the roadblock behind us as the second one angled back toward the road ahead of us.

“It’s not over yet.”
Dorian’s face was set in taut lines, but his eyes never wavered from the field in front of us.

A tangle of overgrowth
blocked our way ahead, and Dorian turned the wheel back toward the road just as half a dozen motorcycles buzzed out of the stand of trees, bearing down the other SUVs and blocking our only path out.

Dorian hit the window control with the
butt end of the shotgun’s pistol grip. As the window lowered, he calmly leveled the barrel out of it, toward the bikers. He squeezed the trigger, and the report of the shotgun tore through the night, hitting my eardrums like a solid force.

The shot
caught the lead rider in the chest, knocking him off and sending his bike sliding across the asphalt in a shower of white sparks.

I gaped, the scream cau
ght in my throat, but the other bikers came on, pulling pistols from their leather jackets as they closed in on the SUVs.

We bounced onto the road just behind the
Escalade that had pushed through the blockade, last in line again. There were more shots, the sharp, short barks of the bikers’ guns answered by deeper retorts from the SUVs. Dorian rolled up his window again.

A biker blasted past Dorian’s window, then one flew past mine.
For an instant, I was looking at his pistol through the window, pointed straight at me. I jerked to the side reflexively, but there was nowhere to go. The gun fired, and a tiny spider web of fractures appeared at the point where it struck the window as the biker was whisked away, but the glass held.

“Bulletproof.”
I could hardly believe my luck.

“Hardened.
Not proofed,” Dorian said briefly, yanking the steering wheel to the side to slam into another of the bikers that was attempting to pass. The rider went flying, the mass of the SUV making his body flop like a helpless ragdoll as he spun off into the underbrush.

Three more bikers streaked past, and we passed the crumpled forms of others.
I looked in the rearview mirror. They were tailing us now, regrouping as they turned around. The men in the back of the car exchanged a few words. Then, on cue, they rolled down their windows, angling their long, ugly guns behind us. They began to fire, and two more bikers dropped back, struck.

The remaining three slowed then, letting the distance between us grow until they dropped out of sight.

After several long minutes, the men in the back rolled up their windows again, and Dorian flicked back on the headlights and returned his gun to its holder on the console.

I stared at him
. He must have been aware of my gaze, but he gave no sign of it.

“What the
hell was that all about?”

“T
hey wanted to kill you,” Dorian said bluntly. “What part of that would you like explained?”

What I wanted to know about—more than anything—was the casual violence of Dorian’s response.
How could he point a gun at a human being and pull the trigger with as much thought as I might give to wadding up a piece of scratch paper?

He’
d risked your life with no more thought than that,
a part of my brain reminded me.
You, too, could have died when he took your blood, and you would have been just one more dead girl among hundreds.

I pushed
that down, hiding away from myself the lack of revulsion that scared me even more than that thought. I already knew what Dorian would say to them. He’d told me as much before. He wasn’t human, and so what he did wasn’t ever murder. He only killed those that he must in order to live.

“
How about the
why
?” I asked instead. “That was an awful lot of trouble to go to—and a lot of blood to spill—if someone just had a grudge against you.”

He glanced at me.
“It’s politics.”

“Politics don’t usually leave a body count,” I
countered.

He raised an eyebrow
. “How little you know. My enemies, such as they are, disapprove of my research.”

That answer took me by surprise.
Ancient blood feud, territorial wars, revenge—any of those would have seemed reasonable, at least coming from a vampire. But research?

His research sought to
develop medical tests that could better identify potential cognates, humans who were changed by a vampire’s bite rather than being killed by it as most were. Those tests had identified me out of thousands, and my bonding to him had been its first clear success.

“Why would anyone object to that?”

“There are many vampires, as you call them, who view humans as cattle, to be used as they see fit.”

His blue eyes held me caught in his gaze.
Cattle? No, cattle didn’t go willingly to the slaughter. But any human caught by a vampire would beg to be bitten by him, even though it almost always meant death.

Including me.

He continued, “But if it takes ten thousand feedings—and ten thousand deaths—to find a cognate, those who put no value on human life will have much support among our people. To hold human life to be important would mean that any feeding that results in death is wrong inasmuch as it can be avoided. And most vampires aren’t willing to believe that the very thing that keeps them alive is something that should not occur.”

“Okay,” I said
carefully, suppressing my urge to argue to hear him out. “I get that.”

“Now that I can reduce that to one in one hundred—and, most importantly, now that I have proof that I can do it in you—my position becomes much more attractive.
Once a vampire has a cognate, no more humans need to die for the length of the cognate’s life.”

The
number of deaths that his moral high road represented was still staggering, but whenever he spoke of it, I felt myself sliding into his way of thinking, like a rock caught in the orbit of the sun.

“And what
is
your position?” I asked. “Equality between humans and vampires?”

The corner of his mouth twitched
. “Don’t be absurd. But I do hold that humans, like vampires, have unique qualities that make them superior to animals. And that their needless deaths are a waste—and even a crime, if we had such a concept in our society.”

I took the words like a blow,
though I didn’t want to analyze why they hurt. “So when you…approached me, you didn’t think I was worth as much as you or any other vampire?”

“If I did, how could I have ever drunk from you?
Prolonging my life by four months by taking four months from yours.” He shook his head. “A vampire who believed in equality could have only one correct path—to die. And as you see, I am very much alive.”

“
That’s not right,” I protested. “It’s just not.”

“Is it not?
You wanted to give. I needed to take. And here you are, alive,” he said quietly.

I snapped, “Alive, sure.
But now you’re—you’re claiming that there’s something between us, but that only exists because you were willing for me to die. No, that’s too nice of a way of putting it. You were willing to kill me. Because you thought my life was that cheap.”

“It was that short,” he said
curtly.

My face felt hot.
I wouldn’t take that as an answer, not for anything. “And what about now? Is my life worth less than that of a vampire to you now? If that’s true, why shoot anyone? Why not just let them take me?”

He glanced over at me
, and his pale gaze made me catch my breath. “You aren’t human anymore, Cora. You’re mine. And you’re now worth more to me than any vampire in the world.”

That stunned me into
a momentary silence, which he used to turn the conversation back to its course.

“
They wanted you dead because you’re proof that my research works.”

I
shook my head and regrouped. “You still have the tests, though. Killing me doesn’t change that.”

“No, it doesn’t.
But my people believe what they see, and it could take years before we have another success to display even at the new odds. If you could be made to…disappear before you are formally introduced into society, my position would have been greatly weakened, perhaps for a decade, perhaps even longer. And a great deal can happen in that time.”

“But you let me go home,” I said.
“You knew there was a danger, and you let me go.”

“There shouldn’t have been a danger because no one who was not completely loyal to our cause sho
uld have known that you existed.” His expression was grim. “There is a traitor in our midst—possibly more than one—despite all our safeguards.”

“You
said you set guards over me. If there wasn’t any danger, why would you bother?”

“B
ecause I am a suspicious bastard. It cost me two good men, too.” The line of his mouth was bleak.

“Cost you?
You mean they’re dead?” I felt sick.

I was defi
nitely on board with keeping myself alive, but at what cost? The two guards were unlikely to be the only casualties—at least a few of the motorcyclists who had come after us were probably dead and possibly some of the cops at the blockade, as well.

Worse,
there was a good chance that, like the police who had stopped me earlier that day, they weren’t even acting of their own free will but were innocents who were manipulated by the vampire who wanted me dead.

You’re
perfectly willing for other people to die if it will keep you alive. You’re not so different from him, after all, are you?

I shuddered from that thought.

“I will provide for their families,” Dorian said.

“That doesn’t bring them back!”

His gaze flicked over me, and despite everything, I felt the familiar stirring in my center at his gaze. “What else would you have me do, Cora? I can’t work miracles. Their murderer has been dealt with, and their families will not want for anything. Those are the extent of my powers.”

“I don’t know,” I said
weakly. “Maybe don’t sound so cavalier.”

I should have died that night
, in his surgery. Or I should have chosen to accept my cancer as terminal—to go quietly instead of grasping at straws. This is all his fault, but it’s mine, too.

“Trust me, Cora.
I am anything but cavalier. But this is just the latest skirmish in a very long war, and the stakes are higher than you can imagine.”

“I didn’t ask for this,” I said.
I sounded childish. I didn’t care.

“I know.
And I am sorry.” Dorian’s look was keen. “This isn’t about you, Cora, and it’s not your fault. You’re just a symbol, a placeholder. It wouldn’t matter who was in your place. The battle would still be fought. It must be fought and won.”

He sounded more adamant about that than he
ever had about anything. A placeholder for them—and a placeholder for him, too, I realized abruptly. He’d been willing to kill the Cora who had walked into his surgery. And now he would kill for me, not because of who I was but because of what he’d made me into.

Did he care about me, Cora Shaw, at all?

Did I even want him to?

He
turned back to the road. “If it weren’t for the bond still forming, I wouldn’t have let you go home at all.”

“What do you mean?”
I was asking two questions in one—about the bond forming and about his use of the word
let
.

“It takes
time for the bond to gain its final strength. In the old days, we would stand guard over our cognates as they went through the conversion, and we would keep them as close to us as we could—that’s what the bond makes us desire, after all, and we didn’t know any better. The bond that formed then was very rigid. To be more than a room or two away would cause the most excruciating pain.”

I shivered at the thought of being tied that closely to anyone.
Even Dorian?
came the distant whisper, which made me shiver again.

Dorian didn’t seem to notice.
“We learned that if we stayed away as much as possible when the bond was fresh, it would become much more flexible when it finished forming. We could be apart for weeks, even, without going mad, or fly half a world away, if needed. A room or two would not even be noticeable. So while you were undergoing your conversion, I stayed in Manhattan until you showed signs of regaining consciousness. For you to return to your own home, resume your old life for at least a day or two after waking would further add to the flexibility. This is why I did not schedule your introduction to society immediately—I chose to wait for the bond to settle.”

“Oh,” I said in a small voice.
“And now?”

“And now that part of the conversion is
almost complete.”

“That part,” I repeated.
“And what parts are left?”

“
Nothing you need to worry about.” He didn’t even look away from the road.

Stung, I returned,
“I should be the judge of that. You didn’t think I had to worry about people trying to kill me, either.”

“That’s enough, Cora,” he said, and the words rippled with his will.

I shut my mouth with a click. I didn’t know if he’d force me to stop asking, but I was too much of a coward to find out. How much would he take from me if it meant enough to him that I obey?

But if I did
n’t ask a question for fear of him forcing me, I was being controlled by him just as surely as if he were messing directly with my head….

“I’ve just ordered announcements for your introduction to society to be held on Saturday,” he continued. “That should end this particular gambit on the part of my enemies, as soon as any remaining puppets are neutralized.”

Unable to
force myself to grill him about the bond, I put a bite into my next words. “So while I was in mortal danger, you paused to order invitations?”

H
e ignored my sarcasm. “Not at all. I ordered them while we were tracking you down.”

My expression must
have revealed my incredulity.

H
e added, “It was the fastest way to end further threats on your life. And it sent a message to whomever had tried to take you—you must realize that at that moment I fully believed that you were in someone else’s power—that I would stop at nothing to get you back.”

I believed him
. But we’d talk later about the idea of me being introduced—whatever that meant—to a society that largely wanted me dead.

Dorian said,
“It is considered out of bounds to attack someone’s cognate. We don’t have laws, exactly, but we have conventions, a code, that everyone largely follows. Killing a cognate is a precedent that cannot go unpunished. Someone who orders such an attack would be a target for every bonded vampire, and if his associates don’t immediately join in the condemnation, they would be targeted, as well. If you could be eliminated before you were introduced to society, however, I would have no proof that you ever existed, so there would be no violation and so no retribution.”

“You said
my introduction is still two days away,” I said. “So does that mean I’ll be under fire until then? And what about the cops? As far as the police are concerned, I’m the main suspect in a hit-and-run accident.”

“I had the invitation issued in the names of six of the most respected members of our society.
Their presence on the invitation vouches for your existence. Unconventional, perhaps, but effective. And the police have already been dealt with. As far as the department is concerned, the incident never happened. The roadblock back there had been set in motion many hours ago.”