Hunted By The Others (33 page)

He tried, and failed, to hide a smirk behind the glass of water. After taking a sip he put down the glass, offering me the bundle of black cloth he carried. I hesitated again, just for a moment, before shrugging off my worry and taking it. My brows about lifted to my hairline when I unfolded the cloth and revealed my guns. They weren’t with the stuff I took home from the hospital, so I’d assumed the police had found and confiscated them.

Now that I had my weapons back, I wasn’t sure what I would do with them, but it did seem to warrant some kind of response. “Thanks,” I said, carefully refolding the cloth and setting them aside.

“I wanted to apologize for my behavior,” he said with what sounded like regret. His eyes still sparkled with suppressed mirth, but I wasn’t about to point out the inconsistencies. A man like Royce apologizing for his behavior. Fancy that.

“I won’t lie to you. David was speaking the truth. I had thoughts of turning you, or at least binding you in the hopes that you would be able to maintain your will but still operate within my interests and perhaps take the focus from the two of them. It is probably for the best that it was destroyed.”

“That’s great,” I said, shifting uncomfortably and looking away. This was not a subject I was comfortable speaking about. Particularly when I was alone and in pain from the beating of my life, with a vampire sitting five feet away. “So you came all the way to my neck of the woods to tell me this?”

He sighed and rubbed his fingertips against his forehead as if he were trying to rub away the first signs of a headache. A human gesture from an inhuman creature. No matter how good he looked, no matter how warm and sincere his smile, I couldn’t put the thought out of my mind that it was the living, or maybe unliving, dead sitting across from me. When he looked at me, the amusement was fading, a small frown curving his lips.

“You do make things difficult. I’m trying to apologize. As you might imagine, I don’t do this very often.”

The first hint of sheepishness was creeping into my voice, but I bit back on it as best I could. I was pretty sure my cheeks were red, too. “Look, that’s great. I’m glad you’re getting in touch with your softer side. However, I’d like to remind you that you came damned close to tearing my throat out more than once and that doesn’t exactly give me warm fuzzy-bunny feelings toward you right now, no matter how sorry you are.”

He seemed to be a bit nonplussed, like he wasn’t sure whether to be offended or amused. Eventually, he offered a neutral “As you say.”

Warming up to my theme, I switched the soda to one hand so I could level an accusatory finger at him. “It’s probably been a long time since you’ve been human, but I know you felt a very mortal kind of terror for me, not just when I got my hands on the focus but also back in your office. You want to control everyone and everything around you so you won’t have to face the fact of your own potential mortality—it’s why you wanted the focus for yourself.”

He flinched as if I’d slapped him. In a way, I had. There was no way I could have known that without having had the focus to help me see into his thoughts. Maybe it was cruel of me to abuse the knowledge this way, but I needed to get my point across.

“As far as I’m concerned, there’s a part of you that’s still afraid that some nice, sunshiny day, I’ll come find your daytime resting place and put an end to you. You know I’m not afraid of you anymore.” The funniest part about that was how true it was. I hadn’t been afraid of him, really afraid, since I realized that he was more scared of me than I was of him. “That’s why you’re here making nice now, to win me over so I won’t turn you into a crispy critter. Am I wrong?”

He stared at me, his entire body gone into that odd, deathly stillness, only his eyes betraying some alien thoughts I couldn’t comprehend. Eventually, he dropped his gaze and looked away from me. His voice, normally smooth and confident, came out in a whisper. “No. You’re not wrong.”

“Great,” I said, though it seemed a hollow victory.

Summing up the reserves of whatever politeness was left to him, he straightened and looked pointedly into my eyes. Maybe he was trying to use his powers to spell me, or maybe he was just playing it straight. Either way, it was intense, charm or no charm to block his…uhh…charms.

“I would normally never turn someone without their consent. Believe what you will, but if I’d had a choice, I would not have done things the way I did. Like any other creature, survival is my priority. And—I mean this—I’m sorry for manipulating you the way I did.”

I took a deep breath to steady myself, ignoring the dull ache it caused in my ribs. With as much graciousness as I could muster, I said, “I accept your apology.”

He seemed relieved. Fancy that. “Good. There’s one other thing I came for tonight,” he said, dark eyes glittering with some emotion I couldn’t place. Whatever it was, I didn’t like it.

“What?” I finally prompted when he paused longer than seemed necessary.

In the blink of an eye, he was suddenly there, right in front of me, his lips pressed to mine and his fingertips lightly cradling the back of my head so I couldn’t pull away. I was too shocked to think, move, breathe as he kissed me. I’d never seen anything move that fast. The only thing my mind managed to register around the cool, velveteen softness of his lips was the fact that there was not even the slightest hint of fangs behind them. That, and the desire I felt, brief and intense, that shocked me almost as badly as his touch.

Before the thought of struggling even entered my mind, he pulled back, the fingertips of one hand lightly trailing under my jaw, before he stood. I stared at him, open-mouthed, in pure shock. Just then, I didn’t know whether to be angry, flattered, or afraid. So I simply gaped at him as a hint of that wicked, melt-in-your-mouth-sexy smile he’d won me over with back at The Underground curved his lips.

“Good night, Shiarra. I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again soon.”

With that, he turned, adjusting the lapels of his jacket as he walked over to and out my apartment door. I was still gaping when it shut quietly behind him.

Chapter 49

So that’s the story of how I became a vampire hunter and came to see Others as just another, if scary, kind of people. I haven’t actually hunted down any vampires since Anastasia but I keep finding little white cowboy hat pins in my apartment, my office, even one left on the passenger seat of my car one morning. I’m not sure how much longer Jack will let me ignore his little calling cards, but I’m willing to find out.

Arnold helped me put some spells on my doors and windows to keep the bad things out. Somehow, in the crazy aftermath of the fight, he and Sara had tumbled into each other’s arms and are now dating steadily. Stranger things have happened, I suppose.

Like the fact that Chaz comes over any night we’re both free. We’ve decided to give the whole relationship thing another shot. He promised not to come by during the full moon or shift in my apartment, and I promised not to freak out if he accidentally lost control and did it anyway. We go on double dates with Sara and Arnold sometimes. Talk about oddball relationships.

Royce has left me a couple of notes, sometimes in the mail, sometimes delivered as little cards with flowers. They’re all invitations to see him again. I’ve done my best to ignore each and every one, though some perversity has led me to keep them in a little wooden box in my bottom dresser drawer, the same red cloth–lined box that cradles a pair of matched guns. Next to the box is a coil of leather with three identical silver stakes sheathed all in a row. I wear the belt when I’m alone at night so it has someone to talk to now and then. I won’t tell if you won’t.

Like I said in the beginning, I’m a private detective, not an assassin. Since I’m human, without outside help there’s no competing with Others, so I’m doing my best to stay out of their world.

Unfortunately, they all seem to want in to mine.

Please read on for an exciting
sneak peek of the next
Shiarra Waynest novel,
TAKEN BY THE OTHERS,
coming in January 2011!

I don’t usually have people pointing guns in my face. Or in my direction at all, really. I’m a private detective, so I know some people have certainly
thought
about shooting me after I reported their illicit activities to my clients or the cops, but looking down the barrel of a forty-five was a new experience for me.

“Jack, can we talk about this without the gun?”

Jack was precisely as I remembered him. Tall, slender, with close-cropped blond hair and the coldest blue eyes I’d ever seen. His flannel, long-sleeved shirt was rolled up to just above his elbows and left unbuttoned for easy access to his shoulder holster. He’s clean-cut, looks like the poster boy for some white bread good ol’ boy magazine, and crazy as a loon. He belongs to a group of extremists and vigilante hunters who call themselves the White Hats.

His thin lips quirked in a polite smile. No real emotion shone through the empty mask. I was praying he was just using some of his psycho scare tactics again. I deeply regretted leaving my own guns in my bedroom all the way across town. Fat lot of good they did me there. Maybe I should have our receptionist frisk the clients before letting them into my office from now on.

“Shiarra, I’m disappointed. I’ve left you a number of invitations to come work with us. Why didn’t you get back to me? Did you succumb to Royce after the little fiasco this spring?”

That again. A few months ago I took a job I should’ve known well enough to leave the hell alone. When your business is failing and someone offers you a lot of money, sometimes you do stupid things. For example, accept a job trying to find some powerful magic artifact that a vampire was hiding from a bunch of magi. I suppose you could call accepting a proposition like that suicidal. These days, I just called it a bad business decision.

“No, I haven’t gone to see Royce since the fight at his restaurant.” One little white lie couldn’t hurt. He’d come to see me, not the other way around. I’d stringently avoided Royce since the day I got home from the hospital, when he visited to apologize and thank me in his own way for pulling his ass out of the fire. “Listen, I don’t deal in that shit anymore. Once was enough.”

“You’ve taken on clients, done other jobs for supernaturals since your recovery. You have strong ties to two of the most powerful Were packs in the Five Boroughs. You’re linked to the most influential vampire in the state. We need your expertise, and your connections.”

The only reason the Moonwalker tribe had anything to do with me was because, like Royce, I saved their butts from a crazy power-hungry sorcerer. They owed me. They only reason the Sunstriker tribe had anything to do with me was because the leader of the pack was my boyfriend. Aside from that, the occasional (non-dangerous) case notwithstanding, I tried to keep my connections to anything furry or with fangs to a minimum.

I took a deep breath to steady myself while I thought about how to get Jack to get the hell out of my office, and take his gun with him. He’d tried this tactic before; I wondered why he’d never figured out that waving a weapon in someone’s face was not a good way to get them to cooperate with you for any length of time. “You know I don’t like vampires. I don’t have much to do with Weres anymore, either. I don’t take jobs that have anything to do with the supernatural, no matter what the papers say about me.”

“You have the equipment and connections to be a hunter.” He frowned. “We need you. I won’t have you going to them, taking their side.”

“Whoa now, who said anything about that?”

His eyes narrowed, something passing through them I couldn’t read. “There’s a new player in the game. It’ll be down to him or Royce. Or us.”

I stared blankly. “Who?”

“Word on the street is that Max Carlyle is coming to town.” He stared back, expectant.

Silence. After a moment decidedly lacking any explanations, I urged him along. “And he is?”

“You really don’t know?”

“Would I ask if I did?”

He grinned; the flash of white teeth against his pale skin was ominous. Predatory. Too much like the things he hunted—vampires.

“My, my. I hate to spoil the surprise.” One hand reached up to rub his smooth-shaven jaw while he stared at me. After another long, drawn out moment of silence, he raised the gun, thumbed on the safety and tucked it away in its holster under his flannel. “Ms. Waynest, again, I must apologize for my methods. Unfortunately, your reputation leads me to worry about what needs to be done to ensure you’re playing on the right side of the field.”

Holding a knife to my throat in the dead of night after breaking into my bedroom didn’t exactly give me warm fuzzies, and neither did holding a gun on me in broad daylight. I was hoping my expression was more neutral than pissed, but wasn’t holding my breath.

“Look, for the last time—I don’t want anything to do with Others. I don’t talk to Royce, I don’t give a shit what the White Hats are doing, and I’m not about to do the tango with things that could eat me for breakfast. I’m a private detective, and that’s all. Someone go missing? Think your girlfriend is cheating on you? Great. I’ll go look for them. But I will not,” I stressed, leaning forward across the desk and pointing one admonishing finger in his direction, “be bullied into dealing with vampires and Weres again. Coming close to dying once was enough. You can’t pay me enough to put my own life on the line. Not again.”