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Catch gaped at her.

Turner’s jaw twitched and he bit back a laugh. “It was last time.”

“I’ll get it,” Catch said. “You disappear.”

Turner shrugged and went to the kitchen. No vampire could enter the house without invitation, and whatever else Catch was, he wasn’t stupid. Shame the same rules of entry didn’t apply to a mongrel like him.

Two bags of Plasmix emptied, the hole inside him still there, Turner’s fingers hovered over a third. He shouldn’t need it, but maybe it would boost his willpower, numb his libido. Oh yeah, he’d woken when he shouldn’t. That was why he was hungry. Nothing to do with Catch. Turner sucked up the last and tossed the empty bags in the garbage.

When he came back into the hall, the front door was closed and Matty jumped up and down, holding an envelope, her eyes bright with excitement.

“I got mail. I got mail.”

“Good for you. Now leave us alone,” Turner snapped. He pushed Catch into the drawing room and closed the door with the pair of them inside.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Turner asked.

Catch had it all ready in his head, the exact thing he wanted to say, and he couldn’t speak. Turner took his breath away. He hadn’t changed a bit, still the same arrogant, bad-tempered, gorgeous guy. Catch opened his mouth and managed one word. “Dava.”

Turner glared at him. “I can count. I know she’s out.”

“Not just out. She’s disappeared.”

“Ah.” Turner sighed. “Gabriel?”

Turner didn’t seem surprised she’d run but then neither was Catch.

“No movement by Gabriel. Yet.”

“Fine. You’ve told me, now you can go.”

“Turner, please.”

“The SBI worried I’m all eager to help him?”

“They don’t know I’m here.”

Turner strode toward him and shoved his shoulder. “Well, you’re not. Get out.”

“No.”

“This is my house. I don’t want you in it.”

Catch stood firm. “There’s trouble coming. I feel it.”

Turner came right up against him, close enough to kiss. Catch wished he would.

“So what do you want to do?” Turner asked. “Be the hero? Stand up for me instead of running away? Speak up for me instead of speaking against me?”

Catch winced. “I want to help you.”

“By making a move on Matty?”

“I didn’t know she was…yours. I’m sorry.”
Oh God.
Part of Catch wanted to rip Turner’s head off, the other part wanted to fuck him senseless.

“She’s not mine,” Turner muttered, and Catch’s heart stuttered.

“But—”

“I don’t want to talk about Matty. You lied to me.”

Catch banged his head on the wall. He hadn’t even registered he’d been moving backward. He never backed away from anything.

“I had to lie, otherwise you’d have served the same sentence,” Catch said.
Or be dead.

Turner stared at him a moment and then stalked away across the room. When he reached the opposite wall, he stormed back. “You let twenty years go past and then you come and want to make everything right? What can you say now that you couldn’t say then?”

“While Gabriel and Dava were still incarcerated, you were safe. Now you’re not.”

“Why would they want me? I’m nothing to them.”

But the flicker in Turner’s eyes told Catch he wasn’t sure that was true.

“I lied to protect you,” Turner whispered. “And you didn’t come and find me.”

Catch sighed. “I lied to protect you and I
did
find you. Twice a year for the past twenty years I’ve paid you a visit. I needed to see you, make sure you were okay.”

“You were that creepy feeling skating down my spine? Well, I wasn’t fucking okay,” Turner snapped. “What gave you the right to decide that was all I needed?”

Twenty years ago, after it was all over, Catch had thought Turner would rip his heart out if he’d got near enough. He deserved it. Had anything changed?

“Sit down. Let me talk to you,” Catch said.

He breathed out when Turner settled in the middle of the couch but then sent a look daring Catch to sit anywhere near. He took the chair opposite.

“You know some of this but not all,” said Catch. “I went to work for Gabriel’s organization Purelight Calling almost two years before you came on the scene. Golding, the head of the SBI, had grown alarmed about the number of vampires joining the cult and I was sent in undercover. Two years of slow work, getting vamps to trust me, and I moved up the ranks. Gabriel’s a master manipulator. He could sell sand in a desert. He sold sunshine to vampires. Some would give anything to walk in daylight and the money poured in for his research.”

“But you can only go so far on promises and rhetoric,” Turner muttered, a bitter tone to his voice. “He needed to prove what he claimed. Who better to have on his side than a respected historian? The
most
respected vampire historian. And he made sure I found what he wanted me to.”

Catch swallowed hard. “Gabriel wasn’t the first to claim that vampires originated from another planet, that myths and legends about Transylvania and the Carpathian Mountains had been created to ensure that fact remained hidden.”

“Not the first, no, but it doesn’t suit the Council for vampires to believe we come from space. If mortals accept there’s life out there, then that’s a step toward accepting we really exist, that the threat we pose is real and the need to destroy us urgent. Better we’re make-believe creatures who mortals invented to scare themselves than real-life monsters who invaded their world long ago.”

Catch sighed. “It sort of makes sense vampires would come from the stars. Why would they evolve in a world where light means life?”

Turner gave a short laugh and leaned back in his seat. “Thing is, we don’t and haven’t evolved. We haven’t changed over centuries. Longer than that.”

“So where do you think vampires came from?”

“The question I devoted my life to answering. Then along came Dava and Gabriel and you. And Gabriel preached that our origins lay beyond the Milky Way, that vampires had arrived with a means to survive in the light and that means would soon be available again. And I was going to help him find it.”

“Unwittingly,” Catch said.

“But it wasn’t, was it? He sucked me in like all the others.”

And that, Catch thought, was Turner’s cross, that he’d not seen straight through Gabriel’s bullshit.

“Is it true that it was your idea to use Dava to persuade me to the cause?” Turner asked.

Catch had once told him no. Now he told the truth. “Yes.”

Turner’s fingers tightened on the edge of the couch.

“But I hadn’t met you,” Catch said. “I didn’t know you then.”

“And if you had, you’d have said no to Gabriel? I bet you laughed about me, a geeky academic being led by his dick, and when Dava failed to make my cock jump, you stepped in and, guess what, I was always hard for you. Laugh about that too? You fucked with my head until I couldn’t think beyond wanting you, needing you, trusting you.” Turner’s fists clenched at his sides.

Catch swallowed hard. “I felt the same.”

“Right.”

He didn’t know how to make Turner believe him. “I wanted to stop the whole thing, but my boss insisted it continue. When Gabriel’s plans grew larger than a scam, the Council needed to see who’d support him, who they could trust.”

“Hardly fair, was it? Smacks of entrapment. Who among us wouldn’t want to walk in the sun?”

Purelight had evolved into something far larger than a misguided, evangelical group of sunseekers, something far darker. Gabriel had milked more and more funds from an increasing number of suckers on the promise of a new life. He didn’t need to proclaim himself messiah, others did it for him. The more powerful he grew, the more ordinary vamps loved him and the more the Council feared him. Once Gabriel started to talk about Revelation, coming out to mortals, his fate was sealed.

Turner stood and began to pace. “You know how I felt when I was handed those books? When I read that the earliest vampires arrived here with a way of walking in the sun? As though all my life had led to that one point. That my reason for being had just been revealed. That all the misery I’d gone through, the mortal life I’d lost, the world I gave up—it had been worth it because now I was going to help make the lives of all those like me so much better. We’d be equals with mortals instead of hiding in the shadows.”

“Gabriel didn’t want to be equal, he wanted to be better,” Catch said, and stood up. “And he didn’t want it for all vampires, only for a select few. You can imagine what a guy like him would do if he could actually walk in the sun. No mortal would be safe.”

“I still believe in the innate goodness of our kind. We have our share of murderers and crooks, but no higher percentage than exist in the mortal world.”

There was defiance in Turner’s voice and Catch didn’t contradict him, but Turner was wrong.

“By the end, I had a feeling Gabriel had come to believe his own lies,” Catch said.

“You really think so?”

Catch squirmed. “It got hard to figure out what was the truth.”

Turner snorted. “It was all lies. Vampires didn’t arrive here on a spaceship, bringing a plant extract that enabled them to withstand the sun. Why choose the Earth? If they had the capacity for space travel, there had to be more suitable, darker planets. The diaries they wrote, those books I pored over, were nothing but fakes. Excellent fakes because, after all, Gabriel had plenty of money to employ the best forger, but fucking fakes nonetheless. I suspect the guy who produced them is long gone, dead the moment he handed them over.”

Turner had just spouted the official line, but Catch had no idea whether either of them believed it. Turner had been so obsessed with the diaries, so convinced they were the real thing, Catch had almost believed in them too.

Turner stepped in front of him. “And just as I’m about to confront Gabriel, someone I trusted with the truth persuades me not to, makes me promise on his life not to say a negative word about the books. He shows me his true face and asks me to trust him. And I do. Then Logan, my lover, denounces the Purelight Calling, calls the books fakes and goes into hiding. And I find my name is on the list of accused along with Gabriel’s.”

“Because if it hadn’t fucking well been there, you’d be dead,” Catch shouted. “Do you think Gabriel would have let you live if he thought you’d betrayed him? Once I realized he wasn’t going to be executed, that instead he’d be imprisoned, I knew someone on the Council had intervened on his behalf. Better that it seemed you were fooled right up to the end, better that it looked as though you still believed—”

Turner’s face was inches from his. “You destroyed my reputation. That idiot, Turner, the historian who knew fuck all, who’d believe in Santa Claus if you showed him a reindeer with a red nose, hey, he wasn’t really a bad guy, just a stupid one. They laughed at me. Fucking laughed at me.” Turner spat the words out. “I trusted you and said I believed in the books right up until the end. I continued to say nothing, but you didn’t come.
You didn’t come
. And no one wanted another book from me. No more lecturing. No more respect. No more of anything. And no more you.” He slumped back on the couch.

Catch’s heart pounded. “I knew you’d hate me. I couldn’t tell you why I’d lied.”

“So whose face do you have on this time? Is there someone else lurking inside? Endless good-looking guys you can morph into? You need to humiliate me all over again?” Turner’s voice was dull.

Catch took a deep breath. “My ability to change my face is what got me into this mess in the first place. I had no choice about working for the SBI.”

Turner narrowed his eyes. “No choice?”

Shit, too much.
No one needed to know
that
truth. “They made an offer I couldn’t refuse,” Catch said. “Money
and
an adrenaline rush? You know what I’m like.”

“Do I?” Turner stared at the floor.

“I wanted you to live. The only way I could make that happen was to give you up and make out you still believed in the books. Gabriel would have pulled you in, blamed you. I didn’t want you in prison for decades.”

Turner lifted his head. “You fool. Where do you think I’ve been for the last twenty years?”

Chapter Thirteen

Hearts
could
break, Catch thought, because his was crushed. Facing Turner, looking at the man he’d ruined, Catch wished he’d chosen to hide outside Milford Hall and protect Turner from a distance. Catch might have thought he’d done the right thing twenty years ago, but Turner would never believe him. Even now, he couldn’t tell him everything—that he feared whoever had pulled the strings on the Vampire Council to keep Gabriel alive might still harbor plans to stage a coup, using Gabriel as his cover.

But he couldn’t just give up.

Catch sat on the couch next to Turner and put his hand on his arm. Turner shoved him away and rose to his feet.

“Please,” Catch whispered. “I’m sorry. There’s not been one day when I haven’t thought of you and wondered if I’d done the right thing or couldn’t have found a better way to protect you.”