Blood Born (8 page)

Then the moment was gone as fast as it had appeared and she was her usual focused, determined self. “Do you have to leave immediately? I want to show you something,” she said abruptly.

He needed to get some rest. He needed to feed. He’d been traveling all night, the sunlight was draining, and he hadn’t fed in several days now, something he needed to do more often when he was exerting this much effort. Hunger was gnawing at him, fraying his self-control. The last thing he wanted to do was to put off feeding so long that he went into a frenzy. But his curiosity was sparked, maybe because he caught an air of banked … excitement? self-satisfaction? about her, and he wondered what could have brought that on. He said, “No, I can stay for a while.”

“This way,” she said, and led him through a door toward the back of the building, then up a flight of stairs. He wondered why they didn’t take the elevator, but he preferred the stairs anyway—there wasn’t enough room in an elevator to really fight, if he needed to—so he didn’t ask. As they climbed she said with a sigh, “You are so stubborn. Together, you and I could easily rule the Council. Two blood born vampires, with
our combined power and age—no one would dare to challenge us.”

“I have enough power to suit me,” Luca said easily. “I like my life as it is.”

“You’re a hired gun!” Marie argued. “We send you after rogue vampires and you dispose of them like any capable garbage man. You’re better than that. You deserve more.”

Luca smiled. He wasn’t going to allow Marie to get a rise out of him, as she obviously intended. “Maybe I like being a hired gun. No worries and plenty of money.”

“You have no idea of the amount of money you
could
have. Look at Valerik.”

Valerik was one of the vampire senators. He’d changed his name, established all the proper records, and he was capable of withstanding daylight. Maybe he’d glamoured people into voting for him, but that wasn’t Luca’s problem.

“Valerik is a twit, and he always has been.”

“That’s beside the point. Now that he’s in office, he’s become a very
rich
twit.”

They’d reached the second floor, and from there took a long hallway that led to a plain door that opened onto another stairway. The building was like a maze, purposefully confusing, with doors that led nowhere and other doors that led in circles. No one had ever invaded the Council headquarters, but if they ever did, finding what they were searching for wouldn’t be easy.

“Where are we going?” Luca asked, looking around to note the details of this part of the building, where he’d never been before. He reached out to touch her energy, to read her, but she was too strong and too guarded for him to see beyond the surface.

“Here,” she said, stopping before a door and fishing a key from the pocket of her black capri pants. “I have just what you need. She’s pretty, young, and tasty.” She
looked over her shoulder and smiled at him. “And she likes it.”

The door opened on a small studio apartment. There was a tiny kitchenette, a living area with a long couch and a flat-screen TV, and a full-sized bed butted up against one wall and set apart by a lacquered Chinese screen. A pretty, dark-haired young woman looked up when the door opened, and smiled as she got to her feet. Naturally, there were no windows—no threat of sunlight, no way for the pretty girl to signal for help, if she ever decided she didn’t “like it.”

“Kristi, darling, this is Luca. He’s hungry.”

Instead of being afraid, as most humans would’ve been, Kristi turned that beaming smile on Luca and began to unbutton her blouse. For a moment, Luca wondered why she was so accommodating, and then he saw her eyes.

“You’ve drugged her,” he said, his tone flat. He didn’t like that Marie had somehow known how hungry he was, and he didn’t like the risk of kidnapping a human and using her against her will.

“I have not,” Marie responded sharply. “Kristi has simply been glamoured.”

“For how long?” Luca asked.

“Just a few weeks. When she goes home all she’ll remember is this lovely villa and the view of the ocean, and the man with whom she had a short, but passionate summer affair. She might wonder why he doesn’t call, she might try to find him, but other than that she’ll be fine.”

“She’ll be a vegetable.” Being glamoured wasn’t without its side effects. A one-time, short-term glamour wouldn’t cause any noticeable brain damage, but something this continuous would leave the girl a drooling idiot. It wasn’t new, to keep food on-site, particularly where the Council was concerned. In the old days, it
hadn’t been hard to find and keep willing donors for many years. These days, with communication so widespread, that simply wasn’t possible. When people went missing, the authorities mounted massive searches, unless the missing human was one of the homeless, which pretty much meant no self-respecting vampire wanted to feed from them anyway.

That left drugging and glamouring, but drugs left the blood bitter-tasting. Usually a human was kept only a short while, and glamoured into forgetting.

“No, she won’t. I’ve been working on this, refining my touch. I use barely a breath of power. When we release her, she’ll have suffered very little damage. Trust me,” she added in a low voice, “she’s better off here than she was where we found her.”

Kristi shrugged off her blouse and unfastened her jeans. Luca held up a hand to stop her. He wasn’t about to fuck and feed on an empty-headed girl who had given up her free will—or had it taken from her—and had probably spread her legs for every Council member, and probably the on-site staff as well, who was interested in having her. Certainly her blood had been taken; if anyone had given her blood as well, during sex, then she was on her way to being bonded and he didn’t want to be the one who went over that threshold with her. The last thing he needed was to find himself bonded to a mentally handicapped blood donor. Marie might say Kristi would be all right, but that didn’t automatically translate to reality.

Damn her, anyway. He needed to feed, and somehow she’d known that, dangling this helpless fruit in front of him. In the end, though, Kristi’s lack of will helped him hold back.

“I like the hunt,” he said, motioning for the girl to be seated. She sank back, her expression disappointed and even hurt.

“Don’t we all,” Marie snapped, then she shook her head and made a motion as if to wipe away her ill temper. “I miss it,” she said wistfully, “the days when we could move around without having to worry about computers and identification and all of the other things we have to deal with now.” She heaved a sigh, then gestured toward Kristi. “Command her to fight, if that’s what you want. She’ll do whatever you tell her.”

“Knowing that kind of takes the fun out of it. Thanks, but no thanks. How many others have you kept glamoured this long?”

She shrugged. “It’s been an ongoing project of mine, to minimize the risk we run when we bring food here. The less often it has to be done, the less likely we are to have difficulties. Intense, long-lasting glamour has always been one of my gifts, but for the past twenty years or so—not very long, really—I’ve been fine-tuning my touch. It’s very delicate, like touching a butterfly with a feather. Their minds are so weak, the ordinary glamour is a sledgehammer to their brains.”

“Is Kristi the only one here?”

“No, there are a dozen more on site. Male and female, all young, all pretty, and entirely ours. This is the way it was before, with humans serving us the way they should.”

On the couch, Kristi whispered dreamily, “I can hear the ocean. It’s so relaxing.” She stared at one of the walls as if she were looking out a window at the pounding surf.

“What did Hector think of this new arrangement?” Luca asked. In the past, donors had been housed here for a few hours, perhaps a day, then their memories were wiped and they were returned to their rightful places in the world.

Maybe she heard the disapproval in his tone, because she stiffened and her dark eyes narrowed, but she contented
herself with saying, “He saw the logic of the arrangement.”

Maybe. If Marie could glamour that many people for that long without irrevocably damaging their minds, that would certainly make feeding the Council less of a logistical problem. He shrugged. “I can see the benefit, I guess, but I’m still not interested.”

Marie shrugged, too, then closed and locked the door. If Kristi was so willing and the glamour so perfected, Luca wondered, why bother with the lock? Marie turned, headed for the stairway with a sway in her hips. “Find whoever killed Hector,” she said without looking back. “I know you’ll be looking regardless of what the Council says or how long it takes the fools to reach a consensus. The murder of a councilman can’t be tolerated, or we’re all at risk.”

Was her concern genuine, or was she simply throwing up a smoke screen? After all, her insistence that humans should be subservient was in line with the rebels’ way of thinking, but not unusual at all in the vampire world. Probably all of the Council members felt the same way, even though they bowed to necessity when it came to keeping their own existence secret.

Luca followed her back to the entryway, then let himself out. The hot summer sunlight seemed to eat at his skin, but he didn’t show any reaction as he strode away. When he was out of sight of the building, he checked to see if he’d been followed—he hadn’t—then he began backtracking. He knew who had killed Hector, but not the Council member behind the murder. How deeply did the betrayal go? How organized were these rebels, and how close were they to bringing disaster down on them all? Yes, he was hungry, and the hunt called to him, but he had control over even his most basic needs, and feeding would wait … for now.

Her captors left her alone more frequently these days than they had in the beginning. Nevada Sheldon had been twenty years old when she’d been taken, a college student oblivious to the dark world beyond—and yet so close to—her own. She’d certainly had no idea that she was a witch. At first she hadn’t believed them. True, she’d had good instincts all her life, and on occasion small wishes would come true, but she’d never considered those little oddities to be a sign of power. Everyone had things like that happen, right?

The power she possessed now would have been frightening and unmanageable for the girl she’d been then, but now she had the strength to move forward and make the best of what she’d discovered, what she’d become.

Nevada didn’t know if the vampires who had taken her and her family almost three years ago thought she was totally cowed, or if they were so arrogant they didn’t think she could possibly harm them or interfere with their plans. She voted for arrogance, because no one topped the vampires in that. Three years ago she hadn’t known they even existed, but since then her survival
had depended on learning as much about them as she could, and fast.

And yet,
they
needed
her;
they needed her to break the spell cast by an ancestor she hadn’t known about until they’d told her about her witch blood, which was something else she hadn’t known about, much less that she was evidently descended from a long line of über-witches. Because they needed her, they’d assured her that she wouldn’t be harmed, but at the same time, they had no qualms about threatening her parents and her younger brother and sister to make her do what they wanted.

She’d been terrified at first. She hadn’t known what they were talking about, only that she and her entire family had been kidnapped by these monsters, then separated. She was kept in luxury in a large bedroom in a mansion, while her family was kept, the vampires said, in a dungeon somewhere. After being held in total seclusion, except for the monsters, after being scared half out of her mind, finally it had occurred to her that she had a weapon against them: herself. They used her family to force her to do what they wanted, but, by God, they had better keep them alive and at least reasonably well-treated or she wouldn’t do a damn thing the monsters wanted.

Standoff. After trying unsuccessfully to bully her, they had finally relented and shown her cell phone pictures of her family, and every now and then they would place a call and she’d be allowed to talk, very briefly, to one of her family just to reassure her that they were still alive.

So long as her family was alive, she would
try
to do what the vampires wanted. They set up a work area in the middle of the huge bedroom, bringing in tables and a comfortable chair, and then they had brought her tons of really old books, books so old she was afraid to turn the pages because she kept expecting them to fall
apart under her fingers, but they never did. There were so many books that they were stacked everywhere, piles of them, some of them so huge and heavy she couldn’t lift them and had to either call one of the vampires for help or shove and tug at the books herself to get them out of the way. She did a lot of shoving and tugging, because as a general rule she’d rather eat ground glass than ask a vampire for help.

For the first several weeks, she’d been at a complete loss. A witch? Her? If she’d been a witch, wouldn’t she have stopped them from kidnapping her family? But they’d told her she “must learn”—yeah, that was real specific—and the threats against her family had spurred her to at least
pretend
she was doing something, so she’d begun leafing through those old books. She didn’t like touching them, had to force herself to look at the pages. They gave her a creepy feeling. The paper smelled … weird, as if wasn’t really paper at all, but something else she couldn’t identify. And some of the pages were stained with what she thought was blood, which
really
gave her the creeps. If these books were about witchcraft, it was the bad kind of witchcraft, not the kind that was all about being one with nature and treating people with respect, stuff like that.

Some of them were in some kind of weird language she couldn’t read. How the hell was she supposed to “learn” if she couldn’t read the language? On the other hand, if the vamps had been able to read the books, they wouldn’t have needed her; likewise if they suspected she really had no clue how to learn what they insisted she learn, so she kept her mouth shut and dug into the books.