Vampire Thirst (16 page)

From the entrance, he heard Joel offer to teleport Z to Tardieh’s villa, since she had never been there before. Tardieh’s blood boiled. He wanted to go back and claim what his heart still thought it was rightfully his. He ran his hand through his hair and breathed slowly. He’d rip that fucking organ out of his chest if he had to, but he would find a way of getting Zoricah out of his system.

Chapter 3

“After turning onto Camino del Jardin Botanico, just outside Malaga, you’ll find a narrow dirt road that will lead to the Lake Embaise del Limonero. There, you should…”

Zoricah listened to Joel’s directions to Tardieh’s villa, but her mind was barely registering anything. All she could think of was how cold Tardieh had been, how distant. His dismissal had pierced deep into her like a flaming spear straight into the left side of her chest.

“After the first gate, it gets too tricky. So call me, and I’ll pick you up. You won’t be able to fly over his mansion. It’s completely protected, even against teleportation.”

“Zoricah.” Dyam touched her arm, making her jump. “Are you sure you don’t want us to wait for you?”

“No, thank you, Dy. I need to sort some things out first. I’ll meet you guys in a few hours, OK?”

It was a lie. What she really needed to sort out were her trembling hands and churned stomach.

The two warriors bowed low, then left.

Only then did Zoricah release the long breath she’d been holding. It didn’t help, though. The lump in her throat remained solidly where it had lodged itself as soon as she took a look at Tardieh’s closed stance. The way he asked her why she hadn’t called, clearly hinting she should’ve phoned instead of coming over, had simply been too much. He obviously hadn’t forgiven her for not accepting his proposal. But she hadn’t said say no, for Hiad’s sake! She just asked for some time to think things through, to get her head around it. Even though they first met over two hundred years ago, they had actually been together for less than a month. Did she love him? Yes. She loved him with all her heart and soul. Sometime between fighting razbians and saving Deirdre, she had fallen head over heels for him. But this wasn’t the case of an ordinary man asking for an ordinary woman in marriage. By Apa Dobrý, he was the vampire king! Who came with a package - a very heavy package filled with baggage, responsibilities, and powerful enemies waiting for him to slip up so they could guillotine his head off. She tried to explain that to him in New York, but to be frank, she hadn’t done a fantastic job at it. When he popped the question, her heart let out fireworks but her mind went into overdrive. She felt like she had been split in the middle by two equal forces. One that said ‘fuck the rest of the world’, and another that could only see a very gloom future for them. The undeniable truth was, vampires detested dracos, and vice versa. Tardieh was a very popular king, but his council was full of vipers, just waiting for an excuse to overthrow him, to start a civil war against him. And his fall would be on her shoulders - the vampire society would never accept her as their queen.

She shook her head then rubbed the palms of her hands over her tired eyes. Another undeniable truth was, Zoricah loved Tardieh. Period. She had never felt this much pain for anyone in her life. They needed to sort out their differences, find a middle ground, a solution, whatever. It just hurt too much to be apart. She would try and talk to him again tonight, make him listen to her this time around, until he saw her side of the story. Yes, that’s what she’d do.

She crossed the balcony’s threshold over to the large living room, determined to fly out to his villa and get their quarrel over with. Her heel got caught in something, making her pause.

“What in Hiad?” Looking down, she spotted a shiny object poking out from between two large tiles on the floor. Intrigued by the out-of-place gadget, she bent down and pulled it up. It was a metal handle. She yanked at it. After a couple of attempts, it gave way and one of the tiles came off, revealing a hatch within its frame. She opened the hatch and saw a narrow stairway leading into utter darkness.

“Holy Apa Dobrý,” Zoricah whispered.

“What’s wrong?”

Her heels spun around at the same time her hand raised her pistol toward the voice behind her.

Tardieh stood regally in the middle of the room not even ten feet away.
Mighty Soartas
. His tall, muscular figure made the vast room look like a shoe box. His hard emerald eyes carried a hint of concern. Just a hint – and that was enough to warm Zoricah’s heart a little.

“I thought you were gone,” she said, lowering her gun.

“What’s that?” he asked, instead of giving her a proper explanation for why he had hung back.

Unfortunately, she would have to let that go overlooked. Their talk would have to wait a little longer. “It looks like a hidden dungeon.”

He walked over and crouched beside her. “It’s too dark for even my eyes to see.”

Zoricah pulled out a small torch from her belt-holster and pointed it down the black hole. The light hovered around, revealing a few bulky objects. “Are those beds?”

“Wait here,” Tardieh ordered, then vanished into thin air.

Yeah, right. The Hiad she would.

Zoricah held her gun up, positioned the torch just above it and went down the dark staircase.

The basement seemed to run along the entire length of the house. It was full of hospital beds and large lockers. Unlike the other quarters, this room was impeccably clean and very well equipped.

Tardieh turned around and gave her a knowing look – obviously intended to chide her for not following his orders. She cocked an eyebrow at him.
You’d better get used to that, King.
 

“What are those?” Zoricah asked, pointing at some large compartments in the far corner of the room, that looked like oversized industrial freezers. She walked over and opened one of them.

“Argh!” Bile rose to her throat at the sight in front of her.

In one nanosecond Tardieh was right by her side. “What is it?”

He held the freezer door open and looked inside. He probably didn’t need her torch to see the pile of lifeless bodies, tossed up like pieces of bad meat. But it was the expression stamped on those corpses’ faces that whooshed the air out of Zoricah’s lungs. They were filled with horror and agony, frozen from the time when they were killed.

Tardieh pulled his cell phone out and punched a few numbers. “Dyam, come back to the abandoned house. We found what we were looking for.”

It took them a good hour to fully examine the dungeon. It was definitely being used for surgical experiments. Unlike the corpses and victims they found in New York, these bodies were not only of females. There were also males and children amongst them. But none carried visible scars or any other sign of surgical procedure, just dark, ugly patches that covered their entire skin, as if they had been burnt from the inside out.

“I don’t get it,” Joel confessed. “How did they manage to kill these vampires without extinguishing them?”

Good question.

Yerik’s partners, whoever they were, could have killed the dracos and left them rotting in there if that took to their fancy, but not the vampires. Vampires could only be killed by fire or decapitation, and either way, the bodies would have been incinerated. There shouldn’t have been any vampire corpses left.

Something was not right here. Zoricah went over to the steel metal lockers that filled the back wall, and opened a few. “There’re just a few bottles of ether and other sterilizers in the cupboards. Nothing out of norm for a surgery room,” Zoricah said with a frown.

“Just piles of bodies tucked away in freezers,” Dyam added from the main desk table by the east wall. There was a state-of-the-art computer on it, and several other devices that looked like monitors. “Fuck,” he cursed. “The computer is protected by a password.”

“This is no abandoned house,” Tardieh stated. “This room is still very much in use, which means, the owners will be back.”

Zoricah nodded in agreement. “We should put a stakeout in place.”

“I’m on it,” Joel replied already punching some numbers on his cell phone.  

Zoricah allowed herself a flitting glance at Tardieh. He was keeping his distance, but moved every time she moved, shifted every time she shifted. She knew he was very much aware of her, the same way the lion was aware of the snake.

She wasn’t a snake, was she?

“I think I found something.” Dyam’s urgent voice brought Zoricah’s mind back to the mission.

The vampire warrior pulled out a manila envelope from one of the drawers and hand it to Tardieh.

“Photos,” Tardieh declared after opening it.

“Let me see them?” Zoricah took the pictures from his hands without making eye contact.
Two can play that game, honey.
 

She flicked through the photos. They were black and white images of buildings, houses, mansions, villas. Some looked new, others very old. She paused at the sight of one that looked awfully familiar. “Isn’t this the farm house we found in New York?”

Tardieh analyzed the image. “Yes, it is.”

“And isn’t this a shot of this mansion’s façade?” She asked, showing him another one.

Their surprised gazes locked. Excitement washed over the previous wariness in his beautiful green eyes.

“Holy Apa Dobrý,” Joel cried out. “Are these photos of what I think they are?”

“Yep,” Tardieh replied without breaking her gaze. A ghost of a smile played on his lips. “These must be images of all the places Yerik and his partners have used as labs.”

“Finally a good lead,” Dyam breathed.

“But there are almost a dozen other photos here. It will take us forever to find where all these houses are located.” Zoricah hated party-pooping on their small victory, but it was true.

“I can run a query in the Interpol database and see if anything pops up,” Joel suggested.

Zoricah frowned and looked at him. “You have access to Interpol’s system?”

“You could say that,” Joel replied with the most mischievous grin Zoricah had ever seen.

Wow. Zoricah knew that, despite what humans thought, the international investigation bureau was really run by supernatural beings, and its database had been set up by a team of fae masters who had spent a good decade improving its firewall. She had known Joel was good, but not that good.

“It may still take some time.” Tardieh’s baritone voice reverberated in the room.

“And we still need to find out what the fuck was done to these people,” Dyam added through clenched teeth. He had left the desk and was now by one of the freezers, staring at the bodies inside. His jaw was clasped tight. “By Apa Dobrý, I’m gonna cut the heart out of the fucker who did this.”

His rage was reflected in all of them.

“So do we, my friend,” Tardieh replied gravely. “We
will
find Yerik’s accomplices and end this genocide, I promise you.”

“The fastest way is to go straight to the source,” Zoricah hinted.

Three pairs of eyes stared fiercely back at her.

“It shouldn’t be too hard to find an inmã, a soul of one of these victims in
Apa Sâmbetei
.”

“They have probably crossed the third river already,” Tardieh pondered, reminding her that even she, a
Calathor
and demigoddess, could not reach an inmã who had gone deep into the Land of the Souls.

“Maybe,” she conceded. “But when death is too traumatic, the inmã may take a long time to find their way into the Gardens of
Apa Sâmbetei
.”

“It’s too dangerous,” he replied, shaking his head.

She gave him a knowing look. “Like that has ever stopped me from doing my job.”  

“Fucking Hiad, Z,” Tardieh cursed low and walked away.

Zoricah took a deep breath.
Damn it.
She chided Tardieh for being hardheaded but there she was, doing exactly the same. He could be mad at her, but one thing was clear, he still cared enough to try and stop her from putting her life in danger.

She walked over and met him by the narrow staircase. “I must try, Tardieh, it’s the fastest way of getting us a good lead into what’s really happening here,” she murmured. “I’ll be careful, I promise.” She brushed her hand over his firm arm, wanting to feel his skin, his unique cold-warmth. It had been over two weeks since they had been together. Too long.

He shifted and looked straight into her eyes, but instead of tenderness, she found only ice. “Whatever,” he said and shrugged her hand off him. “Let’s get this over with, then.”

Zoricah closed her eyes and suppressed the ache caused by Tardieh’s invisible fist crushing her heart. By Apa Dobrý, she was getting tired of that shit. Granted, she wasn’t Miss Perfect-Girlfriend, her package also came with a lot of baggage, and in the past, her overdeveloped sense of independence had been the main reason for her broken relationships. But Tardieh needed to wake up and smell the coffee. And fast.

“Do you need us to get into a circle, like the last time?” Dyam asked, referring to the night they had helped her bring Wyvern’s daughter back from the Rivers of
Apa Sâmbetei
. It was the same night she made love to Tardieh for the first time.

“Zoricah?”

“Yes,” she replied, finding her voice again. “I’ll sit in the middle.”

They pushed the beds aside and cleared the area. Then she motioned for them all to sit down on the floor.

“Hold hands,” she commanded while taking her place in the center. “Whatever I do, don’t break the circle.”

“What happens if we do?” Joel asked. He was the most curious vampire she’d ever met.

“You don’t want to know,” she replied. A cold chill ran up her spine with just the thought of the consequences. It took a lot of energy to travel between spiritual planes. If the circle was broken, she might not have the power to cross back and be trapped between the Rivers of
Apa Sâmbetei
forever.

“Just lock your hand in mine, and make sure you don’t break the connection,” Tardieh said - no, more like growled to Joel.

Zoricah crossed her legs and closed her eyes. Images of Tardieh’s stern gaze, hard jaw, thick lips flooded her mind.
Damn it.
She took a deep breath and tried again. She forced her mind to concentrate on the memory of all those corpses shoved away like rotting beef in that freezer. What in Hiad had been done to those inmãs? Pure terror was plastered as their last expression.
A wave of utter sadness soared into her already crushed heart.