Spartan Resistance (23 page)

Devon was one of their new recruits. He’d been a vampire only a little longer than he’d been an agency member. He’d only been made barely twenty years ago, which wasn’t long enough to make him useful as a traveler.

“That’s one thing this business with Gabriel is good for,” Brenden said. “It’s bringing a lot of vampires out of hiding and to the agency’s doors.”

“Do they think the agency will protect them?” Kieran asked. He sounded genuinely curious.

“Some,” Brenden said. “Others are just pissed at Gabriel.” He gathered up the reading boards. “Time to find a new bolt hole,” he groused. Hiding out in the kitchen after humans were long abed had been a way of finding five minutes of solitude.

“Your bolt hole is secure,” Kieran said. “I found you this way.” He tapped his temple. “Everyone else can do their own detective work, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Why did Devon interrupt your sleep?” Brenden got to his feet. Whatever it was, he was probably going to have to go back to the command center to deal with it.

“Wasn’t sleeping,” Kieran said shortly. “I don’t do that much.”

Brenden glanced at him, surprised.

“Dreams,” Kieran said.

“Not good ones, by the sound of it.” He swept up the pile of boards. “Devon?”

“He thinks there may be someone loitering around the front gate, monitoring traffic in and out. We don’t have sensors covering the public paths and the roadway, of course, but the house across the road is empty and usually registers as cold, except for minor heat signatures from doves that roost in the roof.”

Brenden headed for the kitchen door and Kieran turned to keep up with him. “There are no doves?” he guessed.

“Not for about twelve hours now,” Kieran confirmed.

Brenden made a mental note to give Devon a verbal pat on the back. For a beginner, it was a good pick up. He glanced at Kieran. “Did you scan?
Can
you scan from here, if you’re shielding the villa?”

“Not very well,” Kieran said apologetically. “There
might
be someone there. That’s the best I can do. I thought I’d check physically, but it’s your arena.…”

Brenden appreciated his deferral. If it had been something to do with the army Kieran and Rhydder were recruiting and training down in the catacombs beneath the villa, then it would have been just as inappropriate for him to stick his oar in. Although Kieran cared enough about the agency in general to come dig Brenden out and draw his attention to it, rather than roll over and go back to sleep, so Brenden nodded. “Sure. Come with me. I’ll quarter the area, figure out what scared the birds away. Then you can sleep easier.”

He dumped the boards on the desk in his office and glanced at the monitors through the glass. All quiet. There were a few of his people working at desks around the edges of the room, including Devon.

He glanced at the wall of weapons. Most people visiting the command center assumed the weapons were all display items, but only some of them were. He briefly considered grabbing something, then mentally shrugged. It could be a bat that scared the birds away. It could be nothing. And if it wasn’t, he was just in the right mood for some hand-to-hand combat, if fighting was needed.

“I can jump us there,” Brenden suggested to Kieran. “It’ll save time and save the walk down to the gates, too.”

“Fine by me,” Kieran said. He glanced around the compact office. “From here?”

“I only need room for landing and I know exactly where to land that can’t be seen from the road.” He brought his arm up around Kieran’s broad back and jumped.

The villa gates faced onto a quiet side road that ran off Lungotevere Tor di Nona. The house across the street, taking up the corner lot, was an ancient grey-walled building with small windows and only one street door. It had been empty for many years. It wasn’t common knowledge that the agency had bought the house not long after acquiring the villa and had left it deliberately empty.

Brenden aimed for a clear patch of grass just inside the gates and hidden behind the fat brick posts that held them up. The posts housed the scanning and opening mechanisms.

“Over the fence and around to the back of the house?” Kieran asked, glancing carefully around the posts.

“Good plan.” Brenden jumped the fence one-handed and slid along the shadows at the foot of it until he was well past the end of the house across the road. He didn’t move fast, but he didn’t slow down much, either. Kieran didn’t seem to have any issues keeping up with him.

They flitted across the deserted road. The air was cool with the first hint of the coming morning. At this time of year, it was only in the last hours of the night when any relief came from the belting heat of the day. Most Romans fled the city in August, heading for the countryside and beach resorts. At this time of day, all the tourists would be tucked up in their hotel beds, too. They had the city to themselves, almost.

A tall concrete wall separated the tiny yard at the back of the house from the alley that ran past it. Brenden tried jumping for the top, but couldn’t reach it, so he bent and threaded his hands together. Kieran understood. He stepped onto his hands and Brenden boosted him up to the top. There, Kieran rolled until he was lying along the top of the wall, then held out his hand and pulled Brenden up high enough for him to grip the edge of the wall and haul himself over it. Then Kieran dropped down silently into the yard.

The yard was empty, except for discarded pots whose plants had long since died from neglect. Dust lifted, disturbed by their feet. The dry smell wafted upwards.

Brenden considered the dust. There was a faint track through it to the back door, a rough wooden structure that was silver with age. The track would be invisible to the human eye.

He lifted his head to look at the second floor. There were small windows looking out onto the yard, including one at the far end that was only six feet above the wall, where it met the corner of the house.

Kieran lifted his chin to look, too, then touched Brenden’s arm to get his attention. He tapped the middle of his chest.

Brenden nodded and bent to hoist him back up onto the wall. Once there, Kieran rose to his feet and walked around the narrow edge like he was strolling along the Pont Sant’Angelo, to the corner of the house. He jumped to grab the broad window sill and drew himself up. He was surprisingly agile, for a human.

As Kieran eased the window open, Brenden took up position by the back door and opened up his hearing. Kieran was phenomenally quiet. Brenden didn’t detect a single squeak or shuffle from the second floor, until sixty second later, when a single board gave way with a sigh.

Immediately, there was a soft sound from the floor below, so soft a human might not have heard it. Brenden tracked the almost silent steps through the empty rooms mostly by the faint echo. Kieran had spooked whoever it was with his deliberately noisy footstep.

The door opened a few inches and held.

Brenden stayed silent against the wall beside it and waited.

When they came out, they moved faster than he had expected. They were several steps from the door before Brenden could push himself off the wall and launch himself after them. He didn’t bother running forward. He threw himself through the air, slamming into the small of their back and bringing them to the dirt by taking them right off their feet.

They struggled and Brenden fought to stay on top of him and control his thrashing. Then he flipped him over, just as Kieran moved swiftly out into the yard. Keiren helped Brenden pin him down. Only when the stranger was completely immobile was Brenden able to look at his face.

It was Laszlo Wolffe.

“What the fuck?” Brenden said.

Wolffe blew out a breath. “I could ask you the same thing.”

“What are you
doing
here? Why aren’t you in bed, tucked around Mariana like you’re supposed to be?” He kept his voice as neutral as he could manage.

Kieran was staring down at Wolffe, his eyes narrowed. “He
is
in the villa,” he said quietly. “I have almost everyone in the villa keyed so I can track them wherever they go, including Wolffe after tonight. He’s in the villa with Mariana.”

“Which was something I hoped you might be able to explain to me,” Wolffe said. “Would you mind letting go? I’d like my arms back.”

Brenden leaned back, taking his weight off the man, trying to figure it out.

“You’re vampire,” Kieran said, sounding surprised.

“Of course I’m a bloody vampire,” Wolffe said dryly.

Brenden sat on the ground and propped his arms on his knees. “Vampire?” he repeated, trying to catch up.

“The one in the villa is human,” Kieran added quietly and glanced at Brenden.

Wolffe sat up and pushed his hand through his hair. “Human?” he asked with the same tone of disbelief that Brenden had just used. “Who the hell is impersonating me? And
why
?”

“Wait,” Brenden said, holding up his hand. “If he’s human, that puts a different spin on it.”

“Time travel?” Kieran asked, proving he was as fast mentally as he was physically.

Brenden looked at Wolffe. “Why were you watching the villa?”

Wolffe let out a deep breath. “Three days ago, I got back from Evergreen. Early. My date…the woman I took there to get away from all the craziness, well…” He gave a tiny shrug.

“She left you for a richer man,” Brenden finished.

“How did you know that?” Wolffe demanded. “I didn’t tell anyone.” He hesitated. “Too embarrassed,” he added. “I sneaked back to Earth and figured I’d hide out somewhere no one would think to look for me. Think things through. Only when I got here, every media stream I came across was blathering about me and a woman called Mariana Jones, a human working for the agency.”

“So you came here to see who was posing as you?” Kieran asked.

“Exactly. I couldn’t figure out why someone would want to be me. Not at this point in time, anyway,” he added dryly.

“You mean, your sterling reputation with women?” Brenden asked.

“I’ve had a shitty streak lately,” Wolffe said, sounding sincere. “It doesn’t help that I’m still passing as human. Actually, I think that’s probably what’s tripping me up the most. It palls, after a while, the basic hypocrisy.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Brenden said shortly. “I came out over two hundred years ago.”

“It’ll be six centuries of passing, for me, next decade.” Wolffe sighed. He grinned suddenly, quickly. “You passed longer than I did, before the Revelation.” Then his grin faded. “So who is it in the villa with the lovely woman I saw on the nets?”

“You,” Brenden said shortly.

“His DNA matches the central bank record under your ID,” Kieran added. “Every other ID test passed. He
is
you, but he’s human.”

“How can that be?” Wolffe asked frankly. He did not dispute them or demand proof. It might have been Kieran’s flat assurance that convinced him.

“How much do you know about the agency and the travelling we do?” Brenden asked.

“Not huge amounts,” Wolffe confessed candidly. “I absorbed everything that was made public, of course. It’s only the last year or so that I’ve started taking serious notice. I think that in the back of my mind I was already deciding a change was in order.” His smile was self-deprecating. “Of course, by then I’d met Karen and things got complicated.”

Brenden realized he was smiling. Just a bit. He couldn’t help it. This version of Wolffe seemed much more…well, human. It was hard not to like someone who was fully aware of his own faults and foibles and regretted them.

“So the joker in bed with…um, Mariana, right? He’s me, from the future?”

Kieran squatted down next to them. “Brenden, I should head back. My absence might be noticed and my returning from the gate in broad daylight certainly will be. Under the circumstances it would be best if this news didn’t become general knowledge around the villa. At least, not until we understand what the other Wolffe wants.”

“My thanks for your help,” Brenden told him.

Kieran nodded at Wolffe, then waved Brenden back as he started to get to his feet to boost Kieran up the wall. “I think I’ve got it.” He took off with powerful steps, running across the yard. He worked his legs in a huge leap upwards and grabbed the top of the wall with his fingertips.

Wolffe watched him go over the top. “He’s sneaky, for a human.”

“He is,” Brenden agreed. He settled on his rear again, facing Wolffe. “It’s secure here. We can talk without you being spotted by someone from the villa. Then, we’ll have to figure out what to do with you. You can’t go around Rome or anywhere the media might expect you to turn up. But that’s something we can sort out later.”

“That seems reasonable,” Wolffe agreed. He settled his long legs so they were crossed. “But first, would you mind telling me what the other one has done since he showed up? I might be able to figure out what he wants, if I know that.”

Brenden scowled. “
That
is a long story. As for guessing what he wants, I’m more inclined to go pin
him
on the dirt and beat it out of him.”

Wolffe raised a brow. “He
has
pissed you off, hasn’t he?” Then he grimaced. “I supposed I should say ‘I’ pissed you off, except it wasn’t me. Well, not yet.”

“You’ll trip up if you try to use the correct tense and pronouns,” Brenden told him. “We’re still trying to invent an appropriate lexicon despite two hundred years of time travel. Do you have a middle name?”

Wolffe looked puzzled. “William.”

“The Wolffe in the villa has everyone calling him Lazlo. I’ll call you William and him Lazlo. That will make it easier to talk this through without tripping over the time paradox.”

“You don’t like him, do you?” Wolffe said.

Brenden hesitated. “It’s complicated.”

“Is the complication the lady Lazlo is with?”

Brenden took a deep, deep breath, controlling his reaction. “Look, William—”

“Call me Billy,” he said. His gaze dropped to his hands. “That’s what my family called me, when they were alive.”

“Your original family?” Brenden asked, startled. It was rare for a vampire to cling to anything related to his human life.