Laws of the Blood 4: Deceptions: Deceptions (3 page)

She nudged him with her foot, and the girl snarled and moved up behind her. Olympias laughed again. Ah, to be so young! Thank the goddess she was not. She looked over her shoulder. “What’s your name?”

The girl’s eyes looked like two dull coals in the night, her breath came in sharp, hard gasps, cutting through the gentle evening breeze. “Lora.”

“From where?”

“He’s mine,” was Lora’s insistent answer. “My right. You can’t stop me.”

Olympias put her hands on her hips and reminded Lora of the rules. “You have a right to claim a companion if you’re ready, but not in this town. Not without my permission.”

Lora made a sharp, furious gesture. “My nest leader said I could—”

“Your nest leader didn’t talk to me.”

“I want him!” Lora pointed at the bunny. “That doesn’t interfere with your rule, your highness.”

Olympias had been a queen more than once in her life and took the title as right rather than as the sarcasm it was intended to be. She nudged the man in the ribs.

To her surprise he had will enough to grab her around the ankle. “Don’t.” The word was barely even a whisper, but he shouldn’t have been able to speak at all. Bitch stirred, looked at her questioningly, but she didn’t order the hellhound to rip his throat out.

Instead, she stepped back and smiled down on Lora’s intended trophy. “Well, well, well.” She didn’t want to probe too deeply, but didn’t have to to realize what a psychically gifted prize Lora was defending so tenaciously. Tough with it. Trained to use it? “Quite a find you have here.”

“He’s mine.”

“You’re getting boring.” She made herself concentrate
on the girl. Olympias backed Lora up against the tree, slowly, revealing to the young vampire the knowledge of just how powerful she was, step by torturing slow step. The girl hadn’t shown much respect up until now. Lora was crying like a suckling by the time the back of her head hit the shattered trunk of the tree. “Maybe he’s yours,” Olympias conceded once she’d put Lora in her place. “Maybe he’s a dead man.”

“No!”

The girl’s concern was touching and disgusting. Olympias didn’t know whether to sneer, snicker, or give Lora a reassuring hug. What she didn’t give was an inch. “You have no right to hunt even for a companion in this town. I could kill you for stepping over the border into my territory.”

“Not your—territory.” Lora fought against terror, and Olympias’s control. “Not here—”

Olympias grabbed Lora by the jaw again, made her meet her eyes. “I could kill you, couldn’t I?” She didn’t wait for a nod, but forced Lora’s head to nod up and down. “I’m glad you agree.” She backed off and gave in a little to the girl’s obvious need. She could remember what it was like to be so young, more’s the pity. “Maybe I’ll let you have your love bunny, but I have to check him out first. See if there are any complications. Your nest leader should have given me a call, then this would have been settled already.”

She waited for Lora to give her the name, but the girl said nothing and was able to block Olympias’s quick probe. All Olympias was able to discern was that the block had been enhanced by a stronger talent than Lora’s. So whoever her leader was didn’t want any part of this trouble? Slacker. Olympias took as little interest as possible in nest politics. She preferred to concentrate on the mortal kind, so she didn’t bother to express her disgust.

She jerked a thumb toward the park entrance. “Get out of here,” she told the girl. “I’ll be in touch.”

“But—how? He—”

“Bitch.”

The hellhound sprang at the young vampire, all fangs and red-eyed ferocity, and two hundred pounds of sleek, immortal muscle and fierce loyalty to its mistress. Lora shrieked and ran, the hellhound close, but not too close, on her heels. Olympias had every intention of calling the hellhound back as soon as Lora was out of the park.

In the meantime she glanced down at the mortal lying on the ground. She was going to have to be very firm with this one to get him to forget. His eyes were wide and too alert for the situation as she bent over him. “Who needs a companion?” she asked rhetorically, brushing fingers over his short-cropped hair. “When you can have a dog?”

“
S
OMETHING HAS GOT to be done about that woman!”

Roger Bentencourt couldn’t have agreed more. He’d thought so about Olympias many times before. This time, however, he was determined to do something about it. He nodded understandingly and patted Lora’s hand sympathetically. The sympathy was real, even if his thoughts were not as intensely focused on the young vampire’s problems as she would have liked. Vampires were vain creatures. He thought it was a good thing that the legend about their not being able to see their reflections in a mirror was indeed a legend. Of course, even if it were true, he supposed they’d find satisfaction in seeing their reflection in their adoring companions’ and slaves’ eyes.

Lora failed to notice any distraction on his part as he patted her hand again. Rather, he patted her claws as Lora nervously snatched her hand away. Her flesh burned to the touch. The girl was suffering, but he found the contact electric and quite pleasant. She left the patio and paced the long length of the walled garden, while he remained seated on the patio. It was pleasant here in Alexandria this evening, with a breeze coming up from the
Potomac to stir the leaves and cool the patio. He gazed up at the sky, more mindful of the time than the young vampire. Living at night was something he’d been getting used to for the last several years; his time sense was certainly heightened. He found it very advantageous to be a vampire’s companion. Though, of course, there were a few minor drawbacks.

“I’m not looking forward to carrying you inside if you’re out here when the sun comes up,” he called to Lora. “Maybe I’ll let you get sunburned and mosquito bit.”

She stalked back to the patio. “Don’t tease.” She sat back down, and he poured her a glass of iced tea from the pitcher on the glass-topped table. She raked her fingers—fingers now, not dagger-tipped claws—through her short brown hair. She was a pretty girl at the moment, with gamin features that rather reminded him of a young Audrey Hepburn. Dressed in a denim skirt and sleeveless pink oxford shirt she certainly didn’t look like the sort of person you’d suspect of being a vampire. Not that anyone was likely to suspect anyone else of being a vampire in this day and age. One of the many things the strigoi got wrong was their paranoid belief that, in a world grown increasingly jaded as horror after human horror mounted through the twentieth century, anyone would actually consider a minor nuisance like themselves a serious threat at the beginning of the twenty-first. The world, of course, would be quite wrong about the threat, or could be, if the strigoi would abandon their fears and outmoded Laws and get on with claiming their natural destiny. Well, it wasn’t up to him to preach the error of their ways to them. He was but a lowly companion, after all. A servant. A concubine. Or, perhaps “boy toy” was a more apropos term in this age. He chuckled at the notion.

Lora brought him out of his reverie with a sharp snarl. “What are you laughing about? The Greek bitch is going to wreck everything, I know it!”

“Would you like Rose to talk to the Enforcer?”

His mild question was met with the derisive laugh he expected. She shook her head. “I love Rose, I really do, but . . .” They were seated in the garden of Rose Shilling’s house. Rose was the leader of this Virginia nest and Bentencourt was her companion. Lora was one of the two fosterlings in the household. Alec was away on a business trip. Rose was inside reading; he was aware of the contented hum of her thoughts. The temptation was, of course, to be by her side, but she was a woman who found a great deal of contentment in being alone. It had taken him a great deal of work to court and seduce the reserved English vampire into taking him as her boy toy. Now that she had him as her devoted possession, half of the time she seemed embarrassed by the situation, the other half, she didn’t seem to know quite what to do with him. Bentencourt found Rose’s diffidence quite delightful, but Lora was right, Rose was no match in any way for the Enforcer of the City.

“Rose thinks everyone is as reasonable and civilized as she is.”

“Turned out she was wrong about Olympias. They’re of the same blood, you know,” Lora went on, and laughed again. “Our mild Rose and that bitch queen who won’t let the rest of us enter her precious city.”

He couldn’t hide his own sneer at the sound of the woman’s name. “Rose is of the Nighthawks?” he asked. Despite all he knew about his mistress, this information came as a surprise. He drummed his fingers on the table, the sound sharp on the thick circle of smoky glass. “Really? Two of them so close by? It’s a wonder they haven’t fought it out. Don’t they avoid each other?”

“I don’t know. Nighthawks don’t all turn out Hunters, I guess. I think there’s some kind of change they have to go through. Like getting made into a queen bee or something,” Lora added.

Bentencourt nodded, tucking this new bit of information away. It was so hard to draw even little bits of
information from any vampire, harder still to sift legend from rumor from lie when he did. He’d have to do more research of course about the change that turned an ordinary vampire with the Hunter mutation into one of them. He wasn’t surprised Olympias had turned into a monster’s monster. After all, she’d been a power-hungry man killer in her mortal life; the transition to strigoi wouldn’t have changed her much.

He glanced off to the east. “Sky’s getting light. You better get to bed.”

She was strigoi, he was mortal. He should not be the one giving the orders, no matter how mild and solicitous his tone. Alec would have noticed; that was why he was currently away on one of the frequent business trips Bentencourt arranged. Lora didn’t notice that he’d given her a command as she rose from her seat. Obeying Bentencourt was something that was becoming habitual in Rose’s household. Besides, Lora’s mind was on the man he’d decided she should take as a companion. Colonel Michael Falconer would be an invaluable source of information of certain classified operations within the Pentagon, if Lora could manage the mating. If not, well, Falconer could still be sacrificed to the cause.

“Sweet dreams,” he told Lora as she went off to her room. He looked toward the sunrise, his mind already busy with plans for the day. Lora would attempt to spend her sleeping hours inside the mind of her future lover. When the attempt proved less than successful her frustration would be even harder to deal with when she woke. It was likely that Lora would be driven to do something foolish that would probably get her killed. What happened to the young vampire and her mortal victim wasn’t important; distracting Olympias was. Destroying her would be even better. Someone should have destroyed her before the vampire found her in the wild forests.

No, no, he warned himself as he watched the sky lighten, don’t let the hate control you. Tuck the schemes to rule the night away, put it deep, deep down where
Rose will never try to look for it. You don’t own Rose yet, she owns you still. Let yourself love her, that’s easy, and all Rose cares about. Live your daylight life where there’s so much to do. He had an appointment to keep today, on Rose’s business, but first he’d settle down for a few hours’ sleep beside his vampire lover.

He took a long sip of tea from which the ice had long ago melted. “And for the gods’ sake,” he murmured, resisting the urge to lift the glass and salute the chariot of Apollo, “whatever you do, don’t let yourself live in the past.”

He prided himself on his honesty and clarity of purpose, so he let himself recall that in the past, Olympias had always won.

“Can you believe it?” Grace spoke to the rest of the Walking team as though Falconer wasn’t there, as the three stragglers shuffled in and took places around the meeting room table. “Mike was mugged last night.”

He lifted his aching head and said, “
Colonel Falconer
.” It would not do any good, of course, to remind the assembled crew of loons that he was their commanding officer. Even though he wore a suit—not his uniform during business hours—he did occasionally try to tone down the loons’ enthusiasm with reminders of his rank. Maybe all he really could claim to be was the senior loon, but he tried.

He wished he hadn’t told Grace someone had attacked him, but she’d made such a fuss about his bruises when he walked into the meeting room and found her already there. Maybe he’d blurted out the answers to her volley of questions because he’d been in such shock at seeing one of his people in early. Now that Sela, Jeremy, and Donald had dragged themselves one by one into the meeting room on the second floor of the highly classified Walker Project’s Rosslyn office space, Grace Avella began to regale them with the story.

Grace was a California girl who’d come to Washington
to go to college. Donald was from the Midwest and studied at Gallaudet. Jeremy had been involved with various government psychic development programs for a long time before being accepted as a Walker. Sela was a single mother with kids in college. She’d been an admin assistant with the Bureau before taking on the same sort of job with the Walker Project as well as being one of the Walker team. Sela, Grace, and Donald had become involved with the project through volunteering for a university paranormal perceptions study that had initially screened more than two thousand people. Though these three were the only ones who’d made the cut into this highly classified program, none of the three seemed to realize how very special they were.