Blood Born (26 page)

Nevada shuddered. “I don’t like Loman.”

“Do you like any of us?” he asked drily.

“No,” she snapped, lying just a little. “But some of you are worse than the others.” Loman was in the category of “worse.” He was short, squat, ugly, and vicious, as much an animal as a man. He resembled a missing link, as if he’d never been quite human. He was rather troll-like, and openly devoted to the bitch.

She was terrified of Loman, who’d been one of those
guarding her since she’d been taken. It wasn’t just his appearance, it was the feral expression in his animal eyes that scared her. She lifted her chin with a forced strength. She rarely asked for any favors, afraid of what the price to her family might be if she overstepped her bounds. Knowing that they were so close, that they were truly alive and relatively well, gave her a new surge of strength.

“Can’t you put someone else in charge, anyone else?” she asked, her voice low. “I’m terrified of him. I can’t concentrate, knowing he might walk in at any time.”

He gave her a shrewd look. “If you study harder and learn how to break the spell, then you won’t have to worry about Loman. Time’s short, Nevada. You have to show us some progress.”

Maybe if she’d spent all her time trying to break the spell she might have already accomplished it, but a lot of her energy had been directed toward other things. She glanced down. “It’s coming along,” she said, trying not to feel guilty.

“It’s been
coming along
for months. You’ve been
close
for nearly a year. If you aren’t making progress—”

“I am!” she argued. “Watch this.” She hadn’t intended to show him this just yet, but she had to be flexible in her plans. She made a shooing motion with her hands. “Move back.”

Sorin obediently took a few steps away from her. Nevada closed her eyes and spread her arms. She inhaled, exhaled—five deep breaths—and then she began to chant words in a language she knew he wouldn’t understand, because it was the language of the books.

She didn’t have to open her eyes to know that a green energy was beginning to form and shimmer around her. She could feel it, feel the deep, warm tingle on her skin. It enveloped her, a bubble, a shield, a shimmering force
she created with her will and her words and the talent with which she’d been born. The bubble grew until it had expanded several feet around her. Eyes still closed, she whispered, “Sorin, come closer.”

He tried. She could feel him try. His steps were difficult, almost halting, as if something primal inside him was warning him to go back. When he reached the green shield, he couldn’t come any closer to her; it was as if a physical barrier existed. She could sense him pushing against the shield, trying to break it, but even with his enormous vampire strength he couldn’t reach her.

Within the circle, Nevada opened her eyes and smiled. “It occurred to me that I had to be able to cast the spell, before I’d know how to break it. This is a small, a very small, version of the original spell.” She said a few of the old-language words, waved her hand, and the barrier fell. It literally dissolved, drifting down in a cloud of sparkling green dust and then disappearing.

“Impressive,” he said, and she could tell he meant it.

“I might have to recast the original spell, and then remove it.”

“Will that work? Can you remove both your own spell
and
the original?”

“I don’t know. It’s difficult enough to cast a spell even this small, because it’s so powerful. To cast a spell strong enough to affect the entire world … I don’t know that I can do that.” Nevada glanced down at her worktable. “Some days I think I would be better off dying here, and leaving the spell intact,” she said bitterly.

“Your family would die, too.”

“I know. They’re all that keeps me going.” She squared her shoulders. “Some of the others, like Loman, they’re not like you. They’re dark and mean, and to let them loose on the world …”

“I’m a vampire, Nevada. Never forget that.”

“I don’t,” she said quickly. “But sometimes … sometimes I see a part of what you were as a human. You were a good man, I think. How can that completely go away? Something in you must still care, on some level.”

“No,” he said bluntly. “I don’t care for anyone.”

Illogically hurt, Nevada once more looked down. Sorin took her chin in his hand and lifted her face. “I’m a vampire,” he said once again. “For me, time is nothing. For humans, time is an instant in which they grow old and die. It doesn’t make sense for me to care about something that won’t be here very long. I might as well love a squash.”

After he was gone Nevada stood there, breathing deep and trying to control her emotions. She wanted to save Sorin, but how could she save him from being a vampire when his only other option was death? Something in her wanted to love him, maybe did love him in a weird way, but she had to let him go. She had to concentrate on the humans she could still help, like Chloe Fallon.

She had tried several times to reach out, to find the conduit; maybe she could tell whether or not the earlier spell had taken. Unfortunately, sometimes it seemed as if her growing powers and skills were like the tide, coming and going, strengthening and fading. She hadn’t gotten far in her original attempt at contact.
Remember
. What good would that do the poor girl?

But what if there was another reason she couldn’t reach Chloe? What if the conduit was already dead?

Chloe was vulnerable. No matter how he looked at the situation, Luca kept coming back to that inescapable conclusion. If he wasn’t here, or if he was asleep—and he had to sleep sometime—all Sorin or any other vampire had to do was capture one of her friends, a neighbor, someone off the street … hell, even a puppy would do, and Chloe would try to go to the rescue. They probably wouldn’t go that far, though; Sorin had used that ploy simply because an opportunity had presented itself. A more simple plan of action was to catch her leaving work, glamour her into following, and that was that. No more Chloe.

The situation was complicated, so complicated that he hadn’t even tried to examine all of his conflicting thoughts and emotions. He had two objectives: protect Chloe, and find the Council member behind Hector’s murder. On the surface they seemed to be diametrically opposed, because if he aggressively hunted down the traitor on the Council, he would be leaving Chloe unprotected. Looked at logically, though, he didn’t have to accomplish them simultaneously.

He
would
avenge Hector’s death. But Hector was already dead, and nothing he did now would change that. If he concentrated on protecting Chloe, he’d be
saving her from the same person who had ordered Hector’s murder; he would still discover, eventually, who that person was, and then he’d have his revenge, which really was a dish best served cold, anyway. He’d know more by then, and could make his plans without all these distractions … such as Chloe.

He sat on the couch in her living room, TV remote in his hand, flicking through channels that he wasn’t interested in, mainly to give himself something to do whenever Hurricane Chloe whirled through the living room. She seemed completely unable to sit still. She’d done laundry, she’d vacuumed, she’d gone into a frenzy of folding and packing in that disaster of a guest room. Every so often she would get on her computer, and he figured she was Googling his name or trying different people searches in an effort to find out something about him. She could have saved herself the trouble by simply asking, but he wasn’t in the mood for conversation, so he kept quiet.

If he wanted to keep her safe—and he did—the only way was to go into hiding with her. Otherwise, she was dead, and the only unknown factor was “when.”

Even taking her into hiding wasn’t foolproof. The rebels would have hunters of their own—Sorin, for instance. Sorin was damn good, probably the next best after Luca himself. And again, Luca couldn’t mount a twenty-four-hour guard over Chloe for an unknown length of time that might well stretch into months. He had to feed, and he had to sleep, and she’d be unguarded during those times.

All of that might be managed, somehow, but she simply wouldn’t go along with the plan. For one thing, she wouldn’t want to be stashed away in another country for an unknown length of time. For another, she didn’t trust him enough to go away with him. Other handicaps were that she was physically weak,
compared to even a fledgling vampire, and she could be glamoured.

No matter what angle he came up with, Chloe was vulnerable in one way or another. The only solution he could think of was to bond her to him, and everything in him shied away from such a drastic action.

It wasn’t the sex. God knows, he’d love to have sex with her. But sex was the smallest equation of being bonded. He’d bonded with a human once, and once was enough. Her name had been Ena. He could no longer remember her face, but like a sharp blade he remembered the pain. He’d fallen in love with her, and bonded with her hoping that the bond, the blood tie, would let her remember him, but it hadn’t. She had always responded to him physically—bonding did that—but for her it had always been like sleeping with a stranger she simply couldn’t resist. Because she couldn’t remember him, and it wasn’t fair to keep her from ever getting wed and having children, he’d taken himself out of her life and let her get on with living, while he kept watch over her from afar.

On his part, he’d always been aware of Ena, even when they weren’t together. He’d felt her emotions, her pain as well as her joys. And when she’d died in childbirth, at the age of twenty, he’d thought the grief and pain would drive him mad. She’d been a part of him even though he hadn’t been a part of her as he’d hoped. Her death had shredded a part of his heart.

His heart had long since recovered, but he had never bonded with anyone else again. He had never let himself be so tied to another human. Their lives were too short even in the normal course of things, and when he added in their foolhardiness … no. A thousand times no. Bonding was simply asking for pain, and Luca hadn’t reached such an old age by ignoring the lessons of life. Enduring eternity meant simplifying, and bonding
with a human was the perfect illustration of a complication.

He gave an inward snort at his own thoughts. As reluctant as he was to bond with anyone, Chloe’s response would be twice as negative, especially when he explained the process.

Yet bonding would protect her in several different ways. The main one was that no vampire, not even him, would be able to glamour her. The second was that it would give her enhanced strength and speed; nothing approaching vampire levels, but enough that she would have an extra second or so in which to escape, and sometimes that was all the time that was needed. The third advantage was that they would be able to sense each other; he would always know where she was, always know how she was feeling. And if something alarmed him, he wouldn’t have to take the time to explain things to her; she would simply know.

Reluctantly, he knew he’d have to offer her the option, but a huge part of him hoped she’d refuse. The emotional price, for him, was too high. Not that there was a snowball’s chance in hell that she’d take him up on it—yet he didn’t know how he could keep her alive if she didn’t.

    Chloe couldn’t settle down. For one thing, she had a vampire in her house; never mind that he was sprawled on her couch calmly watching television, he was still a
vampire
. Anxiously she watched the sun sink lower and lower in the sky. What would happen at dark? Would he keep watching television, or would he get hungry? And if he got hungry, was she dinner?

She tried to keep herself busy, between laundry and dishes and finally getting a start on straightening out the guest room, but there was only so much she could
do unless she wanted to sit next to Luca on the couch to watch television, which she didn’t. Besides, he’d appropriated the remote. It was interesting that being a vampire hadn’t negated the male attachment to the gadget.

So … if she had a vampire guest in the house, it seemed smart to find out as much as she could about vampires in general. She got on the computer in the kitchen and Googled “vampire.” It gave her a lot of literary references, some demonic stuff, “living dead,” yada yada, but nothing that was at all pertinent to the reality, or useful when it came to the care and feeding of one. While she was searching the Web, he came to check on her, and braced one hand on the back of her chair as he leaned over to read the article she’d pulled up. She didn’t click off the page, because she didn’t care if he knew what she was researching.

“That’s all wrong,” he said calmly, but with an amused smirk on his face.

“I know that.” If she sounded irritable, well, she was. “I Googled your name, too. You don’t exist.”

“What did you expect to find: ‘Luca Ambrus is a rare specimen of his breed, a blood born—’” He stopped and straightened, a peculiar expression crossing his face.

Something in that expression zinged her
gotcha!
gene. Chloe swiveled in her chair, her eyes narrowed as she stared up at him. “Whoops. You let that slip, didn’t you?”

He didn’t reply, simply stared back at her with that remote gray gaze of his, as if he wasn’t connected to earth or anything on it. She swiveled back around, pulled up Google, and typed in
blood born
. The first thing it asked her was if she meant
blood borne
. There were a couple of movies—or the same movie but a couple of entries, but nothing that was pertinent.

“Don’t bother looking,” he said. “There isn’t a National Registry of Vampires.”

“But how do you get around? How do you get on an airplane, or get a bank account so you can pay your utility bills, assuming you actually
live
somewhere, instead of hanging upside down in a cave. You exist, so there should be a trail of information.”

“There are always aliases,” he said carelessly. “And, yes, we live in houses. But those houses may belong to dead people, or nonexistent people, or a corporation. There are always ways to get around regulations. And for the record, I have lived in a cave, but I don’t believe I hung upside down in it.”