Nightbred: Lords of the Darkyn (14 page)

“Holy cow.” She had no reason to buy something this beautiful and useless, but she wasn’t sure she could make herself take it off again.

The salesgirl appeared behind her holding a pair of matching black platform heels, a tiny beaded black bag, and a headband of black crystals. “Could you? Just so my hatred is
completely
justified?”

Chris added on the accessories and then gazed along with the salesgirl at the results. “Damn. You have a business card, right?”

“Yeah.” The girl absently dug one out of her pocket and passed it to her as she kept staring. “Damn.”

Chris paid for her purchases and packed the bags into the trunk of the rental before she walked over to a sandwich shop to grab something to eat. She discovered she didn’t have much appetite, but forced down a salad and a tall glass of orange juice anyway.

Her next stop was a drugstore, where she bought a selection of first-aid supplies and took them into the customer restroom. The cut on her thigh had already started scabbing over, and thanks to Jamys probably wouldn’t become infected, but as per her training she cleaned it and applied a new adhesive bandage.

Chris had always imagined taking on the responsibility of providing blood for a Kyn lord would be a little revolting. It wasn’t that she was squeamish; she didn’t mind the sight or smell of blood or the pain of the small wounds required to start the flow.

The thought of being used as someone’s food was what had troubled her; she was a person, not a Happy Meal.

Helping Jamys this morning had dispelled all her worries. When she’d realized how weak he’d been, she hadn’t even hesitated. Watching him drink from the cut she’d made on her thigh had made her feel strangely protective, almost possessive. That had quickly turned into very divergent feelings as soon as his hands grasped her leg.

She should have known. Burke had warned her that sometimes blood wasn’t the only thing Kyn wanted while feeding on a mortal, especially if there was any kind of physical contact. He hadn’t mentioned how badly the
tresora
would want it, though, and maybe that had been on purpose, to keep her from finding out.

She didn’t regret being intimate with Jamys. How could she? He’d made her light up like Las Vegas, and after that horrible nightmare of being trapped in that tomb, she’d needed it. Her only real regret was that she hadn’t done much for him in return—but secretly she’d loved that, too. How many women could honestly say that they got their guy off with a single touch?

Chris parked outside her final stop, a community blood bank that was one of many owned by the
tresoran
council. All she had to do was show her
jardin
identification at the desk and they’d bring her a large cooler stocked with fresh units. Two coolers, if she wanted that much. She had no reason to feel guilty about getting it.

I can’t go on feeding him myself every day, and it’s too dangerous for him to hunt. This is the only alternative.

At the desk inside a smiling young woman greeted her, and then inclined her head in the public shorthand for a bow as soon as Chris placed her ID on the counter. “Will your lord be coming to Miami tonight, Miss Lang?”

“No, this is for a visitor.” She had decided against mentioning Jamys’s name; she had no idea if it might get back to Lucan. “I’ll need a two-week supply of stores. Also, if you have one, a nine and a couple of clips.”

The girl nodded. “Right away.”

As she waited by the counter, she looked over at the people waiting in the lobby. All of them were mortal, and she was pretty sure two of the men in suits were
tresori
. With their backs to the walls, the pricey but discreet style of their clothes, and the clean-cut hair, they gave off that sort of official vibe. Both seemed to be ignoring her in favor of the magazines they were reading, which seemed a little odd.
Tresori
always checked out everything around them; their training instilled a kind of professional paranoia that became almost second nature. That was exactly why she’d taken a hard look at the people in the lobby.

One of the men seemed engrossed in the latest issue of
People
, while the other was thumbing through a copy of
Time
. The only problem with the second guy was that the mag in his hands was upside-down.

Maybe he’s dyslexic,
Chris thought as she wandered down the counter, pretending to check out the literature while getting in better position for a closer look. Out of the corner of her eye she saw both men shift subtly in response.
Nope, they are watching me.

One of the men rechecked her position by bending down to untie and retie his shoe. As he did, his jacket sleeve slid back to reveal part of his forearm and half of a black cameo tattoo, the center of which should have contained the profile of the man’s Kyn lord, but was instead covered in scar tissue.

Chris, who had never seen a
tresora
with partially mutilated ink, had to force herself to read the front of the pamphlet she wasn’t reading.

Tresori
assigned to guard the blood bank would have been stationed at the entry points to the building; watchers wouldn’t have allowed themselves to be seen at all. Chris wandered back to check the number of names that hadn’t been crossed off the sign-in sheet, which was seven; she’d counted nine people waiting in the lobby.

More than anything, the man’s scarred tattoo frightened her. She’d never seen anything like it. And why would a
tresora
hack out of his own flesh the face of his Kyn lord?

Chris waited until she saw the receptionist emerge with the cooler from a back room. Chris vaulted over the counter and ran to the girl, whose eyes went wide.

“Side door?” When the girl gestured, Chris took the cooler and smiled. “Thanks. And the nine?”

“In the cooler.”

She ran for the exit, bolting through it and sprinting for the rental car. She had enough time to get in and drop the cooler on the seat before she saw the two
tresori
run around from the front of the building. She ducked down and slipped the keys in the ignition as they trotted past her, both looking in every direction before they hurried to a big black cargo van.

As soon as they’d climbed inside the van, Chris started the Lexus, reversed out of her space, and sped out of the lot. They were good, she thought when she saw the van appear in her rearview. She floored the accelerator as she scanned the road ahead for an intersection with some cover, and once she reached one with a green light, she coasted to a stop and turned on her emergency flashers before she reached into the cooler.

Chris left the engine running as she got out of the car, raised the hood, and waited in front of it, watching for the van. It slowed as it approached, and then as she’d hoped, it stopped behind her rental.

She stepped out from behind the hood and threw a unit of blood at the van’s windshield; it burst and covered the glass and part of the hood with blood. With the nine-millimeter she’d taken out of the cooler, she shot out both front tires, and put another three rounds into the van’s engine before she dropped the hood on the rental, climbed in behind the wheel, and sped off.

Where there were
tresori
, there were bound to be backup
tresori
, so Chris drove around Miami until she was certain she wasn’t being tailed. Dumb and Dumber didn’t belong to Alenfar or she would have recognized their faces, which meant they’d been brought in from another territory. She could describe them to Jamys and see if they matched anyone who served his father, but most American
tresori
wouldn’t have fallen for her stalled-car routine. She’d bet money they were European—maybe a couple of trackers working for the council or even Tremayne.

But why follow me?
In the grand scheme of things, Chris knew she was less than nobody.

The sun was setting by the time she returned to Biscayne Bay, and once she parked the rental, she walked down the dock to the boat. None of the fisherman she passed seemed out of place, and none of her internal alarms were going off, but once she and Jamys saw Gifford tonight, it would probably be safer to move the boat to a different spot.

She could hear the shower running belowdecks as soon as she climbed on board, and smiled a little as she brought the cooler down and left it on the table. She had to make another trip to the car to get the rest of her shopping bags, but by the time she returned, Jamys was waiting on deck for her.

“Christian.” He took her bags and set them aside before he lifted her from the dock to the boat. “What is all this?”

“Clothes, shoes, girl stuff, that kind of thing.” She hugged him, drawing back only when he didn’t return the embrace. “You found my note, right?”

“Yes.” He took her right hand and brought it up to his face, but he didn’t kiss it. “You smell of blood and gunpowder.”

“I had to shoot a van. I picked up some stores for you, did you see the cooler?” She carried the bags below, where she began to put everything away. “I bought the most amazing dress. You have to take me somewhere nice someday so I can wear it and make all the other women hate me.”

He was staring at her. “You shot a van?”

“Yeah, after I threw blood at it.” She checked her watch. “We should leave soon; Gifford’s lecture starts in an hour.” She held up a jumper to her front. “Does this make me look scholarly, geeky, or just sad?”

He took the jumper from her and tossed it onto the bunk. “Tell me about this van.”

Chris dropped the perky-teen act. “Two guys followed me into the blood bank. Clean-cut, dark suits, not too bright. I tried to outrun them, and when I couldn’t, I took out their ride, which was the van.”

His expression darkened. “Were they mortals or Kyn warriors?”

“I think they were
tresori
.” She went and sat down on the edge of the bunk, and rested her elbows on her knees. “But one of them had a really creepy tat.” After she described the mutilated black cameo, she glanced up at him. “The scarring was too perfect for it to be accidental. Would the Brethren have done that to him? Wait, never mind.” She mentally kicked herself for reminding him of his own ordeal.

“They have been known to cut off tattoos from captured
tresori
,” he said slowly, “but it would be in their interests to preserve the likeness of any Kyn lord.” He sat down beside her. “Do not be afraid to speak of anything to me, Christian. I am your friend.”

“I know, I just hate reminding you of the bad old days.” She used her shoulder to give his a gentle bump. “We should get going.”

Jamys pulled her onto his lap and kissed her until she forgot to breathe. When he lifted his mouth from hers, he said, “Wear the dress.”

“It’s a lecture in a museum, not a night at the Mynt Lounge,” she reminded him. “But I could model it for you later.”

Chapter 13

L
ectures at the Miami Maritime Museum were well attended, and Jamys and Christian arrived shortly before all the folding chairs provided for the audience filled up. Others stood as the museum’s director introduced Professor Charles Gifford, a short, thick-bodied man who looked distinctly ill at ease in his tweed suit.

“He looks like a repo guy,” Christian murmured.

Jamys spotted the scars on his hands and forearms. “He was a fisherman.”

“Good evening,” the professor said, and launched immediately into a talk about piracy and its evolution through the ages.

Jamys paid close attention to the details Gifford offered about specific ships and captains, but at no time during the next hour did he mention Hollander or the
Golden Horde
.

“Today we apply the label of piracy to any number of crimes: copyright infringement, illegal audio and video transmission, even unsavory corporate acquisitions,” the professor said in his summation. “We hear news stories about drug runners who hijack and kill fishermen for their powerful boats, or lawless Somalians who attack cargo ships and ransom their captains.”

“Or have our Facebook pages hacked,” someone among the audience muttered, causing a ripple of laughter.

Gifford nodded. “While the savage nature of any sort of piracy appalls us, it is in reality a seafaring tradition that has existed for thousands of years.” He curled his big hands around the edges of the podium. “Pirates are alive and well, ladies and gentlemen, and they aren’t going anywhere. Not as long as there are ships in the sea, treasures to be coveted, and men willing to kill for them. Thank you.”

As the audience applauded, Jamys noted the bashful reddening of Gifford’s blunt features, and the speed with which he left the podium. While the museum’s director took his place to invite the audience to help themselves to refreshments, the professor shook a few hands and then disappeared into an adjoining exhibit room.

“Seems like he’s better with history than people,” Christian said as she rose from the folding chair next to his. “Time to put my sad little jumper in action.”

“It is not sad.” He guided her around the exodus of people heading for the buffet tables. “It is modest.”

“So is a chastity belt.” She sighed. “But I think I look geeky enough to pass, while you”—her eyes shifted to the tattered blue jeans she’d asked him to wear—“are making me and every other female under this roof very hot and bothered.”

Jamys bent his head. “I should like to bother you again,” he whispered against her ear, and enjoyed the shiver he felt hum down her back. “Until you drench me.”

“Journal first.” She tightened her fingers. “Wet and wild later.”

They made their way into the exhibit room where Gifford had gone, and found the professor standing in the middle of a treasure display and adjusting some lighting.

“Barry,” he said as they approached. “These bulbs are too bright. Have we got any forty-watt back in the maintenance closet?”

“I can go check for you, Professor,” Christian said, “but my name’s not Barry.”

“Huh?” The historian glanced over his shoulder before climbing out of the display case. “Sorry, kids. This exhibit won’t be opening until the weekend.” He gestured at the door. “There’s punch and cookies out there.”

Christian gave Jamys a wry look. “We’ve already had our cookies, Professor. We were wondering if we could ask you a couple of questions about Father Bartley’s journals.”

A shuttered look came over the historian’s face. “I’m afraid I don’t have time for that. I wrote some articles about the journals. You can read them on my Web site.”

“We will, thank you.” Jamys reached out, and as soon as Gifford began to shake his hand, he nodded to Christian and sent his thoughts into the other man’s mind.
You want to answer our questions completely and honestly.

Gifford’s tight expression smoothed out. “What would you like to know about the journals?”

Christian quietly closed and locked the door before rejoining them. “Professor, are the journals authentic?”

“Yes, they are. I bought them from a private collector who let them go for a song.” He grinned like a boy. “Would you like to see them? They’re right over here.”

“We would,” Jamys said.

Gifford led them over to another display where a small collection of leather-bound books had been arranged inside a glass case. “The priest wrote everything in Latin, so it’s difficult to read, but I can translate it. I went to Catholic school and I almost became a priest.”

Christian made a face. “What changed your mind?”

“Sex. I discovered I liked it too much to spend my life as a celibate.” Gifford unlocked the case. “Father Bartley was much more devoted to the church. He came to Port Royal in the late sixteen hundreds, but on the day he arrived, he decided to move his mission to the north side of the island.”

“Why?” Jamys asked.

“The governor of Jamaica at the time was Sir Thomas Modyford,” Gifford said. “Sir Thomas didn’t care that England was no longer at war with Spain; he hated the Spaniards, and by extension loved the pirates who attacked their ships. He protected them from prosecution, allowed them to use the port as safe haven, and was rumored to have personally funded a few raids.”

“Like a private army of cutthroats,” Christian said.

The professor nodded. “Sir Thomas had a strategic advantage as well. Jamaica lay smack in the center of the major shipping lanes in what at the time was considered the Spanish Caribbean, so for the hundreds of pirate ships that were based out of Port Royal, it was like fishing in a barrel. Their raids made Port Royal one of the wealthiest—and most decadent—cities in the world.” Gifford stopped at one page. “Ah, here it is. Father Bartley wrote this the day his ship came into port: ‘Never in my most despairing moment could I have envisioned such a garden of demons. Everywhere I turn there are pirates, assassins, and prostitutes, all engaged in the most brutal of behaviors, and the vilest of carnal acts. The port is riddled with gaming houses and grog shops, each packed to the very walls with villains. From the windows of the brothels, which occupy every fifth building, women lean out with bared bosoms to proposition those passing on the street below. I fear if I were to remain in this New World’s Sodom, I will be torn apart by the very beasts that inhabit it.’”

“Sounds a little like spring break,” Christian murmured.

“Leaving was a wise decision, because Port Royal was already doomed,” the professor told her. “A few weeks after Father Bartley went to the north side of the island to set up his mission, a major earthquake and tidal wave leveled half the city. Two thousand people were killed instantly, and another thousand died from injuries, starvation, and cholera in the aftermath. The survivors attributed the disaster to God’s wrath, visited upon the wicked as judgment for their countless sins. A few claimed to have seen a blood-drinking angel of death stalking pirates at the docks just before the tremor started. Whatever the cause, the city never recovered.”

Jamys exchanged a look with Christian. “Did the priest write anything about this ‘angel of death’?”

“Not a word,” Gifford said. “He never returned to Port Royal. Would you care to hear a passage about an interesting conversion of the native heathens, or how to conduct mass in a grass hut?”

“We are interested in the confession the priest took from the dying pirate,” Jamys said.

Gifford sighed and shook his head sadly. “I promised I wouldn’t talk about that, but okay.” He reached for one of the journals.

“Who made you promise?” Christian asked.

“A man who gave me a lot of money I didn’t report to the IRS,” he admitted. “I buried it in some airtight cases in the backyard but the dog kept digging them up. So I donated most of it to the museum. Anonymously, of course.”

“He seems to be volunteering a lot of information,” Christian murmured to Jamys. “Does that usually happen?”

“No.” Although his ability was powerful, humans under its compulsion always responded directly to the suggestions he made. “Professor, why do you tell us of these private matters?”

“The man who gave me the money said that if anyone made me break my promise, I should tell him all the terrible things I’ve done. Like the time I dressed up in my seminary clothes and pretended to be a priest having sex with my girlfriend.” Gifford thumbed through the journal. “Here’s the passage. It begins with the priest offering absolution.”

Jamys frowned as Gifford launched into his reading. “I am not the first Kyn to compel this mortal. I can feel a trace of another lingering in the patterns of his thoughts. The Kyn who questioned him may have left a command in Gifford’s mind to expose his most guarded secrets.”

“Do you know any Kyn who can do that?” When he shook his head, Christian studied the historian. “If the Kyn who got here before us meant it to be a self-destruct button, it wasn’t a very good one. I mean, cheating on taxes and playing X-rated Confessional won’t get the guy arrested. At best there’d be a month of scandal mongering by the local papers and TV stations. He’d probably get kicked off the museum board.”

“Which would destroy his reputation.” Jamys reached out to Gifford and touched his shoulder. He intended to command the mortal to stop reading and tell him everything he knew about the man who had paid him for his silence, but as soon as he connected with the professor’s mind, he felt a now-familiar barrier.

Instead of hurling his ability at the wall as he’d done with Chris, Jamys held back, sending tendrils of his mind in all directions. In a distant corner of the human’s thoughts he found a gap in the barrier, and slipped into it.

You will show me who you are,
Jamys thought, easing into the powerful presence and permeating it from within with his own ability.

A parade of mortals and immortals began flashing through Jamys’s thoughts: a slave-collared thrall, the leader of a slave rebellion, a haughty courtier, a devout Templar, a brooding monk, a defiant sailor. Each of the males had the same brutally handsome and eerily familiar face, one that grew gaunt or sleek by turns but never aged. Each carried the hammer of a smith, and in their cold gray eyes an eternal fire burned.

Jamys saw the sailor become an avenging angel, and the angel a secretive explorer, and the explorer a reclusive farmer. As the man changed, so did his garments, becoming more fitted and modern as he changed lives again to work as a train conductor, a wealthy businessman, a laughing showman, a dreadlocked common laborer, a bald-headed janitor.

Jamys finally recognized the man as he shifted into the casual garb of the sailboat owner, and reached deeper.

The immortal had lived hundreds of different lives, changing himself to suit the demands of each new era, but he had never been happy. He carried a terrible burden, one he shared with his human kin, who had slowly dwindled away over the centuries. Something else had happened to the immortal, was yet happening, something wondrous and terrible that had sent him back out into the world. He had to bring together the last of his mortal bloodline with the sons he had sired so long ago, the three medieval knights made immortal like him—

Jamys staggered as he was forced out of the professor’s mind by a surge of power unlike any Kyn ability he had ever encountered.

Gifford’s eyes grew unfocused. “You are clever, boy,” he said, his voice dropping to a resonant baritone. “But I have wiped clean from the mortal’s mind everything he knew of Hollander and the
Horde
. You will learn nothing from him.”

Christian stepped back. “I know you.” Her voice shook as she added, “You were in the tomb with me.”

Gifford’s eyes glowed as he turned his head toward her, but the voice Jamys heard speak next came from inside his own mind. “Live, and you kill a hundred, a thousand, a million.” He looked at Jamys, and the voice inside his head grew icy. “Kill her, and you shall save them.”

Jamys stepped closer, and gazed into the historian’s eyes. “Touch her,” he said clearly, “and you will never again live another life on this earth.”

Gifford began to laugh and shake as his eyes rolled back into his head. A moment later he sank to the floor.

Christian grabbed him in time to keep him from hitting his head. “Okay, I think the professor’s had enough.”

Jamys crouched down beside her and checked the mortal. Gifford appeared unconscious, but his breathing was regular and his heart beat steadily. “He is asleep.”

Christian picked up the journal Gifford had dropped along with a page that had fallen out of it, handing the journal to Jamys before she unfolded the page. “This is a map. Looks pretty old, too. No
X
marking the spot, but there’s a ship’s course marked on it from what looks like Jamaica to Florida.” She showed it to him.

He eyed the date and some words scribbled at the bottom of the map. “This had to be the final course of the
Golden Horde
. The pirate must have drawn it for the priest before he died.”

“If we follow the ship’s course, maybe we won’t need an
X
. Let me see that journal again.” When Jamys handed it to her, she turned to the front leaf before she went still.

Jamys inspected the rectangle of red-bordered black paper in the front of the journal. In the center were two inverted, overlapping scarlet triangles with the letters
LHS
stamped in gold across them. “What is that?”

“It’s a bookplate. Collectors use them to tag their personal libraries.” She closed the journal and stood, her shoulders rigid. “I know the guy who sold this to Gifford.”

“How could you know this man?”

“Easy.” She gave him a bleak look. “I used to work for him.”

* * *

Once the nightclub had been cleared and closed, armed guards emerged from the tunnels to take their assigned positions throughout the stronghold. In the largest of the conference rooms Burke met with the mortal household staff to brief them, while Aldan assembled the garrison in the lists to do the same.

Lucan remained in his office to review the last week of video recordings from the security cameras, in hopes of finding some clue as to the identity of the Kyn who had tampered with his mind and taken control of his body. He saw no one and nothing unusual, save for the most recently arrived group of refugees, who were now being kept under guard at a nearby resort hotel.