Laws of the Blood 4: Deceptions: Deceptions (21 page)

“Ms. Czerny? Sara?”

“Yes, Roger?” she asked, recognizing the companion’s voice, even though she had never heard him sound agitated before. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Rose is fine. However, there’s a bit of a problem with Lora. You should tell your mistress that Lora is on her way to Falconer’s house right now. She’s going to do something rash.”

“I see,” Sara answered. She didn’t know what she was going to do.
She
had no idea where Falconer lived, or even where Olympias was at the moment. She’d said she was heading to Adams Morgan; it was a busy, lively area of the city. Vampires moved fast; Olympias was probably already eating dinner in one of a dozen neighborhood bistros. Sara cursed herself. She should be on top of this! She didn’t let any of her own concern show when she answered the companion. “Olympias is aware of the situation. Thank you,” she added, and hung up the phone.

Sara didn’t know what Olympias would do. She didn’t know if Lora’s taking Falconer was a good or bad thing. She had never felt so out of the loop. But it did occur to her that there was one person who desperately did need to be brought into the loop. Mike Falconer was Andrew’s son. Part of what was driving Andrew to suicide was desperation about what had happened to his son. Andrew at least deserved to know what was happening, and she was going to tell him.

“Hey, Sela,” Falconer spoke into the phone. “Tell me what you’ve got.”

“Maybe I should use telepathy,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “It’d be more secure.”

Falconer sat back in the deep leather chair in his home office and crossed his long legs. A glass full of amber ale rested on the table beside him, and there was a book in his lap. He wore sweat pants and no shirt, and was feeling more relaxed than he had in days. “I’m not in the mood for telepathy tonight. Mundane suits me fine.”

“You’re no fun.”

The Walking session this afternoon had been harder than usual. The actual Walk itself hadn’t been so bad, but he’d had trouble returning to full awareness of his body’s physical surroundings afterward. There was a part of him that thought he
ought
to be disturbed at the slow reentry to the corporeal world, but he felt like he’d had a mini vacation instead. He’d been in a cloudy, peaceful place. It hadn’t been SOP, but he’d come back feeling fine and still been able to give a full, detailed report on his mission.

“I am so fun,” he told Sela.

She gave a deep, wicked chuckle. “Then maybe I should come over and give you my info on Ms. Olympias in person.”

Falconer sat up a little straighter. Memories blazed through him at the mention of her name. “What have you got?” he asked, mind all business, but body reacting another way entirely. How could he want someone so much at the sound of a name?

“Not much,” Sela answered. “But it’s a beginning. Seems Olympias’s name was put on the guest list to your party at the request of a lobbyist named Maggie Donner. This Donner is with—”

The crash of shattering glass from the window behind him drowned out the rest of Sela’s words. Falconer dropped the phone as he sprang out of the chair. As he whirled to face the broken window, a young woman rose up off the floor, dusting shards of glass off her clothes and shaking it out of her short brown hair.

“What the hell—!”

She looked at him with a hungry, possessive gaze, and smiled a horrible, bright smile. Fangs gleamed in the room’s mellow lamplight, and her eyes gleamed, without any trick of the light.

“I’ve come back for you,” she said, stepping forward, glass crunching beneath her feet. She licked a drop of blood from a small cut above her lip.

Falconer’s stomach heaved at the gesture. For a second, Falconer stared unbelieving at the creature who’d invaded his house. She was beautiful and hideous. She aimed lust at him like a weapon. It beat at his senses, and he felt her calling to him, trying to reach deep into his mind and make him think it was he who craved her.

He shook his head wildly and looked around for a weapon.

He knew that a silent security alarm had been tripped when the window broke and was alerting the nearest police station. He heard Sela’s voice faintly shouting from the phone lying on the chair. He knew that this invader didn’t care about such mundane precautions as alarm systems and witnesses. This was a monster out of nightmares. His nightmares. Impossible, and very real. He remembered her face, and the other one. It hadn’t been a dream. It was all too real, and happening again. She wanted him. Her hunger was terrifying.

“The vampires in the park are real,” he said loudly, hoping Sela would hear as he backed toward the door. “This one—and Olympias.”

T
HE FIRST THING he did was throw the beer into her face, then the beer glass. She only laughed. Then he grabbed the lamp. He wished it was a cross, but the base was wood; maybe he could somehow use it as a stake. The room was plunged into semidarkness, lit now only by moonlight coming in from the broken window and the glow of the computer screen.

As he backed toward the door, lamp held before him like a shield, the vampire looked around the room. “We have got to redecorate this place. You’ve been living alone too long, darling.”

Darling? Wasn’t she supposed to be talking about sucking his blood and damning his eternal soul? How’d she get in here? Didn’t vampires have to be invited in? Or was that just in the movies?

“I don’t know if I’ll let you stay here, or have you move in with me, but I’ll decide on living arrangements later.” She smiled, and when she did, her fangs seemed to grow even longer. He definitely had the impression she wanted him to look at the sharp, elongated incisors, as though doing so was equated somehow with him
staring at her naked boobs. She wanted him to look at her boobs, too. He could feel her wanting him to want her. Her thoughts pawed at him, the ephemeral touch obscenely possessive.

This talk of domesticity was equally obscene and made him cold with dread. “Get out of here,” he demanded. “Get away from me.”

“You don’t love me yet,” she pouted, coming toward him. “That’s ungrateful—after I’ve sent you so many dreams of me. Don’t you remember my touch on your mind?”

He remembered a feeling of unease, the occasional sense of being stalked that he’d dismissed as Walking-induced paranoia. He did remember being chased by her—now he remembered it, though Olympias had gone out of her way to make him forget it. Olympias was one of them. A vampire. Like the Audrey Hepburn look-alike with fangs he was facing. Like the male one he had seen dreaming and Walking.

Olympias was a vampire.

He could almost ignore the threat before him as his mind tried to wrap itself around the anger, sense of betrayal, and fascination that fact caused him. Fascination, not fear. What that said about him, and about Olympias, he didn’t know.

What he did know was that he had to get away from this vampire before he could worry about what anything else might mean.

He backed into the wall near the door and flipped on the overhead light. Any tiny hope he had that the bright light might somehow stun her vanished when she laughed. Her mouth was beautiful when she laughed. Her smile was stunning. He stared at it, and for a brief instant, he almost smiled back.

Falconer took his eyes off the vampire’s mouth and studied the rest of the intruder’s face carefully, though he instinctively avoided looking into her eyes. He
knew
he could be caught by the hypnotic force of her gaze if
their eyes met, though he didn’t know how he knew. Another old movie myth, maybe. She was beautiful, delicate and dark haired, skin as fine as alabaster. Incredibly beautiful. Magically beautiful. The unearthly beauty was something she wore, something she’d put on, like makeup.

“Olympias hasn’t bothered to try to impress me.”

He said it as he reached for the doorknob. The next thing he knew, his wrist was broken, and he was screaming.

The vampire held him up by his broken wrist and slapped him so hard he thought his head might come off. “Don’t talk about her! Say her name again, and I’ll rip your tongue out.” A moment after she made the threat she laughed. “I’ve got too much use for your tongue, sweetheart, but I’ll rip something off. Maybe I’ll start with your toes. Can’t think of any use for your toes.” She stepped hard on his foot and pressed herself against him. “Except maybe to go dancing.”

Her desire called to him, with the heat of her body and the heat of her thoughts. She was in heat, he realized through the haze of pain. She was literally suffering from a need to mate, and she’d chosen him for her partner. The knowledge was sickening, her need suffocating. He wanted nothing to do with her.

But if she bit him . . . if she bit him, he
knew
he’d want her then. They controlled you by taking your blood, infected the ones they made their lovers. He knew that. Didn’t know how he knew. Maybe from Olympias. Maybe from something he’d heard as a—

—heard as a kid.

The almost memory dissipated like smoke as the vampire reached for his crotch.

That was when he hit her with the lamp. As hard as he could. And he was not a weak man.

Of course the blow only served to make her angrier. “Bastard!” She wrenched the lamp out of his hand, then threw him across the room. Falconer hit the desk, felt his
back crack against the computer. He fell forward onto the floor. He caught himself on his hands, and nearly passed out from the shock of pain as his weight came down on the broken wrist. He collapsed face first onto the rug and almost didn’t notice when the heavy computer screen crashed down on his back.

The vampire kicked the screen off him, then began kicking him. “You want her! I can smell her on you, you cheating bastard! You’re mine. Mine!”

Every sentence was punctuated with a kick. Into his ribs. His head. Falconer tried to roll away, and she followed him, still raving. Still kicking. He finally managed to grab her ankle with his good hand, and pull. Instead of knocking her off her feet, it only made her laugh. She shook him off like she would an annoying insect, laughed, and dragged him to his feet once more.

She propped him up against a wall, put her face very close to his, held up a hand adorned with sharp claws, and whispered, the words a dark caress, “Now I’m going to make it hurt.”

And she did.

What penetrated the pain after a long bout of agony was another voice. It was a deep voice, but a woman’s voice all the same. She was full of anger that was as cold as his attacker’s mad fury was full of heat. He heard words, but they rasped against his psychic senses like a blade being drawn. He couldn’t help but smile when he heard her, though he tasted blood.

What Olympias said was, “Get away from him, you bitch.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Exactly—she’s a
hell
hound. Haven’t you ever seen one before?”

“What the hell’s a hellhound?”

Obviously, Andrew had not seen anything like Bitch before she and the huge dog came crashing through the bushes to his campsite. It frequently amazed Sara how
ignorant many vampires were about their own history and culture. Maybe because she wasn’t a vampire she found the subject more fascinating than those who actually lived the life. “Some people simply don’t appreciate what they have.”

“What?”

“Never mind. We don’t have time to talk. We have to go.”

“Go? Go where?” Andrew grabbed her by the shoulders when she turned to hurry back toward the walking path. He spun Sara back to face him. Bitch growled, but didn’t lunge. Andrew’s expression was full of trepidation. “What’s going on? Has Olympias decided to kill me?”

“You think she’d send me for that? This is about your son,” Sara hurried to explain. “Do you want to see him alive or not? No, he isn’t dead,” she hastened to inform the melancholy vampire. “But he might be if we don’t hurry. At least, I think they’re going to have a cat fight over him, and who knows how he’s going to end up.”

“They? Who are they? Who’s him?”

Sara didn’t think Andrew realized he was shaking her. Bitch growled again, and he stopped. “Mike Falconer. He’s the bunny—excuse me, the mortal Lora’s after, only Olympias wants him too, only I don’t think she really realizes that that’s her problem and it doesn’t have anything to do with why Lora can’t have him, because there’s politics and secret military stuff involved, and Olympias can’t allow vampires to be discovered by secret military stuff. You see.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Neither do I. Except that I found out this evening that your son is alive. You haven’t been seeing his ghost, but a psychic projection that’s—”

“Secret military stuff?”

“Yes. He’s psychic.”

“I know. He’s my kid.”

“Which is why Lora wants him.”

“Because he’s my kid?”

“Because he’s psychic.” She tugged at his arm. “Come on. Lora’s going to bite him tonight. That is, if we or Olympias don’t stop her. My money’s on Olympias, but if she doesn’t get there first—I don’t know what we’re going to do. Because I brought Bitch to track Olympias, and if Olympias doesn’t get to your son’s house first, I don’t know how we’re going to find him.”

“My son’s house. My son.” Andrew sighed, closed his eyes for a moment, as though he was savoring the words. Then he looked at Sara again and asked, “Does he live in Georgetown?”