Blood Born (35 page)

The only time he and Kate had to talk was at night, after everyone had gone to bed, and even then they had to talk in whispers because the walls were thin. He was so tired, worn out by stress and long hours, that he couldn’t stay awake long, but he managed to ask some questions and get some answers, even though he didn’t like those answers. Kate was convinced that vampires had killed Jim Elliott, but Jimmy couldn’t get his mind around that. Maybe he could accept spirit guides and ghosts and mental
powers, but vampires? They were monsters, fictional characters. The other beings Kate sometimes talked about were from beyond this world; vampires, if they existed, were very real and living in this one.
That
he had a hard time accepting. Maybe he simply didn’t want to accept it; hell, who would?

Thank goodness Kate didn’t try to sell the idea to anyone else. The knowledge that his dad had been murdered was hard enough to live with, but vampires? He didn’t want his girlfriend being dismissed as a nut-job on her first visit.

But if she was right …

When he had a moment alone, Jimmy spent some time in Mrs. Lesser’s basement, which had been tricked out as a home office slash recreation room. Using their computer, he did searches on vampires, blood-drained bodies, strange murders that might tie into his father’s. Most of what he found was total crap. That was the Internet for you, so he wasn’t surprised. There were references to movies, books, creepy goth clubs. He found one rambling blog written by someone who’d used the unimaginative pseudonym “Van Helsing.” Yeah, right. This Van Helsing went on and on about vampires living among us. The way the blog meandered from one unprovable and unlikely sentence to another made Jimmy less inclined to believe a single word.

He was staring at the computer screen, concentrating hard as he tried to make sense of what had happened and wishing that Kate had kept her suspicions to herself—though he’d never tell her that—when a voice whispered in his ear.

He’d heard the voice before, the night his dad died. He knew the tone, the timbre of it. What the voice said wasn’t a word though, not a word he recognized. It sounded like
Roar
, with a hard “K” sound at the end.

It was pretty damn bad when disembodied voices didn’t even make him jump anymore, when the light cast from a flash that shouldn’t be there didn’t even make him turn his head.

“Please tell me vampires are totally fiction,” Jimmy whispered.

There was a pause, then the same deep, ghostly voice said, “Cannot.”

Jimmy sighed. “Well, that’s just great.”

    They were at the Willard, a hotel so expensive that Chloe’s eyes had almost bugged from her head when Luca took her there. For crying out loud, they were just a block from the White House! The Washington Monument was practically in front of the hotel. The luxury suite Luca had arranged for them was larger than her house, Chloe noted, and it was definitely better furnished and decorated. Who knew being a bloodsucker could be so lucrative? Then she laughed at her thought. They were in Washington, D.C., where bloodsuckers in thousand-dollar suits abounded. What better place for vampires?

The people here were very nice, but definitely odd, though she had to admit that people had a tendency to become odd when Luca was around. He’d checked them in using a fake ID and a very real credit card, gotten keycards, and then leaned forward to whisper something to the well-dressed desk clerk working the night shift. The clerk had quickly entered something into the computer and turned away, then when he’d turned back to the desk he’d seemed surprised to see Luca. “Ah, Miss Smith, I didn’t realize that you had a guest with you. Do you need another key?”

“Miss Smith,” Chloe muttered as they went to the elevator. “How … unimaginative.”

Luca winked at her, and pinched her bottom.

On the way up to the suite, they weren’t alone in the elevator. An elderly man got in at the next floor, greeted both Chloe and Luca in a friendly manner, then took a station at the front of the elevator as if he planned to spring forth as soon as the doors opened, though he definitely looked as if his springing days were over. But when the elevator had stopped at their floor and Luca and Chloe had stepped past the old man, he’d flinched, laughed, and said something to the effect that he hadn’t seen Luca get on the elevator.

Senile, maybe, she’d thought at the time.

The suite, with its huge oval living room, took her breath away. All she could think was, it was a damn good thing she’d brought a dress, because this definitely wasn’t a T-shirt kind of place. She wandered around, exploring, her eyes wide. “Why do we need a second bedroom?” she asked, then stopped in her tracks as a chill swept through her. Could Luca have gotten tired of her already? After all, this bonding thing didn’t promise a happily-ever-after, just a tied-together-forever deal.

“It gives us another exit if we need one,” Luca said. “That makes three: the foyer entrance, and a separate entrance in each bedroom. Always give yourself more than one way to get out, if you can.”

Oh, good. She was thinking like a woman, everything was all about emotion, and he was thinking like a man, planning escape routes. Some things never changed even when the species were different.

She started to ask Luca if he was hungry, but caught herself in time. She herself was starving, so she ordered a meal for “Sue Smith” from room service and began to unpack as she waited for the food to be delivered.

While she unpacked, she stewed, nervously rearranging
the drawers. She put Luca’s clothes away, too. Her thoughts were random and quick, flitting from one thing to another. Luca. Vampires. Warriors. Ordinary concerns, such as work. Shaving her legs. She should be living her life like a normal person with normal worries.

She was so hungry that when the doorbell rang in the foyer, she rushed to answer it. A dignified middle-aged man in a uniform pushed a rolling cart into the oval living room. The aroma of the burger was tantalizing; there was nothing like comfort food when one’s world was falling apart. If she couldn’t have her mother’s meat loaf and mashed potatoes, a cheeseburger and fries were the next best thing.

Luca sat on the sofa, still and contemplative. No one did
still
like a vampire. The room service guy nodded to them both, then politely asked if he’d gotten the order correct. The meal was for one, with a single plate and one glass of water. Luca smiled. “Yes, that’s right.”

She signed the bill, added an extra tip even though the surcharge was outrageous, and handed over the leatherette folder. The delivery guy nodded, thanked her, and headed for the foyer, where he turned, thanked her again, and then said, “Sir, I didn’t see you there. Is the order correct? It’s for one, but I can bring another plate and a glass of water, if you’d like to share.”

Chloe froze.

“The order’s correct,” Luca said, smiling politely. “Thank you.”

The room service waiter exited and they listened to the foyer door close behind him. Chloe turned to the calm vampire sitting on the sofa as if there was nothing at all wrong in the world. She stared at him for a moment, her mind racing. Then she said, “He didn’t remember you.”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Neither did the man in the elevator, or the desk clerk. Or Valerie! I thought it was a glamouring thing you did to her, but it wasn’t, was it?”

“No.”

For a moment, she forgot that she was hungry. A chill swept over her as she thought of other things, the stunned look on his face when she’d called him by name, the careful, almost alarmed way he’d acted. “No one remembers you,” she whispered.

“No. No one but you.”

She swallowed. “Why do I remember you? Is it because I’m a conduit?”

He looked at her, an unreadable expression in his piercing gray eyes. “I don’t know. No other conduit has remembered me, not that I’ve met many of them—that I know of, anyway.”

She got the feeling Luca wasn’t accustomed to encountering anything he didn’t understand, not because she could read anything on his face, but because she felt what was inside him.

Chloe then turned her attention to something she could understand: hunger. She sat at the wheeled-in table and took a few bites, swabbing her fries in ketchup, aware that Luca watched her closely. Maybe the ketchup got to him, reminded him too much of blood, but abruptly he stood. “I have something to do in the bedroom. Don’t disturb me.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked. Sleep? Unlikely. Masturbate? Even more unlikely, not after the night—day … whatever—they’d shared. Not when she was right here, handy and frighteningly willing. “Some gross vampire thing I don’t want to know anything about, I suppose,” she guessed, trying to sound nonchalant even though she felt anything but, then she couldn’t stop herself from smiling at him.

“I’m going to put myself in a meditative state so I can locate Sorin.”

Chloe almost choked on her most recent bite of burger. Forget nonchalant. “
Locate
him? I thought we were hiding from the psycho!”

Luca smiled gently. “Either we find them, or they’ll find us. I’ve never been the type to sit around waiting for anything to come to me. I want the advantage of surprise.”

“Great,” Chloe said as she took another bite of what very well might be her last cheeseburger; at least it was a good one. Come to think of it, she’d be perfectly happy to hide here for a while, if the alternative was hunting vampires. Forget her job; she was willing to be jobless and live in this beautiful suite with its oval living room. She’d never been in a physical fight in her life; in school she’d always been the peacemaker, the one who tried to mediate the inevitable squabbles that erupted between her friends. She wasn’t a coward, she didn’t think, but she was definitely out of her element. All that aside, she knew without a single doubt that if Luca was going to rush into battle, she’d be rushing right along with him … the jerk.

    Instead of immediately returning to D.C. as he should’ve, Sorin found a room in New York and holed up for the rest of the day. He was tired, and he liked the city; in an odd way he fit in here. He’d been born a farmer’s son, had lived most of his human life inside one or two square miles, as most of his contemporaries had. And still, he felt as if he’d been born to a place like this. Though reading energies wasn’t one of his gifts, even he could feel the energy of this city; even he could get lost here.

He needed to get lost for a while. He needed time to think.

By not killing Phillip Stargel, he’d basically committed treason, though committing treason against a traitor was a convoluted idea. Jonas wasn’t psychic, he wouldn’t know exactly what had happened, but he’d realize Stargel was still alive, and active. If Jonas reported the truth to Regina, if Sorin told her the job was done and Jonas contradicted him, she’d gladly take his head—or try. No, she wouldn’t do it herself, she’d simply set three or more vampires on him, and not even he could win against those kind of odds unless he were very, very lucky and they were very, very bad fighters.

Then again, Jonas had no reason to go out of his way to volunteer information. The way Regina had treated him, why should he? Instead of making Jonas a part of the higher order, she’d used and abused him, she’d treated him no better than the humans she kept prisoner.

At the end of a long day spent in a hotel room in Manhattan, sleeping some and thinking too damn much, Sorin decided he didn’t regret his decision to allow the conduit to live. He’d never thought that the human race was without value—after all, he’d once been human himself, and vampires couldn’t live without humans to feed off of. Nor had he ever really wanted to make slaves of them all, though when one of them pissed him off he’d think fondly of it, for a while. At the end of the day, he simply wanted to be a part of that life again, to be accepted for who and what he was. The constant hiding, changing his name and location on a regular basis, keeping the secret of his existence … that was what he wanted to leave behind.

As night fell, he became restless, and the thought surfaced that humans had their uses, beyond providing food.

He walked around until he found a busy nightclub,
where the line waiting to get in snaked down the block. Sorin walked to the front of the line, glamoured his way past the waiting throng and into the exclusive club filled with beautiful women, loud music, men trying to get laid, and copious amounts of alcohol. He couldn’t lose himself in drink, but he did sometimes like the taste of a good whiskey and the memory it stirred.

He walked up to the crowded bar and patrons instinctively parted, moving smoothly out of his way. He ordered a Scotch whiskey, and as the bartender placed it before him a pretty brunette—a human who apparently did not have the protective instincts of the others around him—sidled up close to him. He looked into her dark brown eyes and she flinched a little as something inside her instinctively noticed the monster inside him. She didn’t walk away; she should have, but she didn’t.

She wasn’t drunk; she’d come here for another reason entirely.

“I haven’t seen you here before,” she said.

“I haven’t been here before.”

Her smile was practiced, a little strained. “That would explain it.”

Sorin took a sip of his whiskey. Normally he preferred vampire lovers to humans; the emotional component could be messy, and so many humans reminded him of children, they were so inexperienced and ignorant. But this one was looking for sex, nothing more, and tonight he could use the comfort of sex and nothing more.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Ryan.” He couldn’t be honest with her, the way he’d been honest with Phillip Stargel. Besides, Ryan was the name on his fake driver’s license and very real credit card.

“Ryan what?”

“Does it matter?”

“No,” she said honestly. “I’m Janie,” she said, offering her hand.

It didn’t make much sense to him to shake a woman’s hand. He took the offered hand, lifted it slowly, kissed the knuckles and allowed his lips to linger there. She shivered, and he heard her heartbeat pick up. She liked that. Modern human men were idiots, the way they treated women. They didn’t know how to seduce, but then the women let them get away with expecting sex for the cost of a dinner, so there was blame to share. He could screw her in the men’s room or in the alley behind this place, but where was the challenge in that? The satisfaction would be short-lived, and he needed more, especially tonight.