Dark Xanadu (16 page)

Kent let it go. It didn’t move. He lifted Angela into his arms.

“What’s going on, Kent?”

“Take that chair with us, Brennan, and whatever you do don’t let it go or let up pressure on that plate. Angela, I’ll explain later. Soon.” He ran up the stairs, with Brennan following with the chair. The police were probably outside, waiting for them. He heard Brennan’s phone buzz. Whatever. If that spring in the chair was what he thought it was, they needed to get the hell out.

He ran out the front door, looking more like a well-dressed burglar or maybe a kidnapper than a Mormon missionary, carrying a girl in a very un-conservative dress. Genna’s car pulled up as he got there, but there weren’t any cars around with red and blue flashing lights.

Brennan threw the chair back into the house. Mario’s voice came, faintly, from somewhere inside the house. He heard only the first sentence before Brennan closed the door on the sound.

“Now you’ll feel what we felt.”

Behind them, the house blossomed into flame, catching far too fast not to have been set up before hand. A series of explosions rocked the place. The roof crumbled inward. This had been prepared more carefully than Kent had been able to do in L.A. Maybe Mario’d injected gasoline or something into the walls. Brennan had smelled it. He hadn’t. He knew when he’d burned down the house in L.A. it had smelled to high heaven before it caught.

“Holy shit,” said Kent.

Brennan stood there and stared. “No kidding.”

Angela’s face was white. “We were meant to be inside when that happened, weren’t we?”

Kent nodded. “Yes, we were.”
Mostly me. But they would have happily had you burn to serve that end.

“But why was that one guy in there? I heard his voice.”

“Mario? I don’t know.” That was the one thing that made no sense at all. And the words indicated that he knew exactly what was happening. If, as Kent suspected, the explosions and the fire were all triggered by the lack of pressure on the metal plate in the chair, he hardly needed to be on the scene to make sure his plan went well. Not to mention that the sun was already up, and it took a lot of energy for a vampire to stay up late like that. He’d been upstairs, too—no way Mario would’ve been upstairs where the sunlight could come in through the windows.

One thing was clear, though. They needed to beat feet if they didn’t want to answer questions as to why a house burned down right after they had entered illegally. “Let’s go, guys. Quick. Can’t stand here staring.”

Brennan opened the back car door so he could climb in with Angela. No one said anything. Genna pushed open the front door for Brennan.

Genna was the first person to speak, and it was only after she drove off. “The police car just cruised right by the house, so I circled and came back. False alarm, guys.”

As if on signal, sirens sounded in the distance. That police car that passed was probably going to be a first responder. There was no way the fire hadn’t drawn the attention of the people in the neighborhood, and the police would almost certainly get descriptions of them from the neighbors. First and foremost, though, their eyes would be on the fire, so hopefully those descriptions wouldn’t be very good.

Mario knew who they were, though. Even escaping his trap, they were still in it. When Mario learned of the descriptions, and Kent had no doubt that he would, he’d know who to suggest to the police. He hadn’t taken the Lexus because he figured the bad guys would know his car, but the cops wouldn’t have too hard a time tracing the red Saturn back to Genna once they knew to look for her. Mario knew about Angela, too, so she’d be caught up in it as well. Any evidence that she’d been tied up in the building, or kidnapped in the first place was now turning to so many ashes, with only the marks on her wrists and ankles to show for it.

Chapter Ten

He rescued me
. Those words kept playing in Angela’s mind. Genna and Brennan had gone home, and now she and Kent were all alone. He’d broken into a house to rescue her. She wondered if Edward would have done that. Maybe he would have tried, but she doubted he would have succeeded. She didn’t hold that against him, but Kent was a very different man. More dangerous than Edward. Peter and Mario had kidnapped her to get at him. He was mixed up in something big, and probably illegal. There had been no worries of anything like that with Edward. But Kent was willing to take risks to get her back, too, even though the last thing she’d done was walk out on him. She didn’t know whether to kiss him or slap him.

He sat on the mauve velvet couch in her apartment, watching her from across the room. He hadn’t objected when she’d squirmed out of his grasp. She’d wanted to be held, but now she was confused.
What the hell is going on?

“What the fuck is going on, Kent? What is it you really do for a living? Drug running?”

“No, nothing like that. I’ve told you nothing but the truth, Angela. My money comes from a security business, which I bought and sold.”

“So you’ve done nothing illegal.”

“Well, I broke into a house a couple hours ago.” The corner of his mouth twitched up. It was almost—no, it was definitely a smirk. Even in this situation, he was irritatingly sure of himself.

No, he wasn’t much like Edward at all. And her body responded to that, but she wasn’t about to listen to her cavewoman brain at this point. “Is that all you’ve done that’s illegal? What did Mario mean by making you feel what they felt?”

He shook his head. “No, it isn’t the only illegal thing I’ve done. Sit down.”

“No.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You don’t have to sit down next to me if you don’t want to, but I’m not going to look up at you. Sit.”

She pulled up a kitchen chair, turned it around so its back pointed toward him, and remembered she was still wearing the short dress. She turned the chair around again, sat down, crossed her legs, and pulled down the hem.

“The green-haired guy who grabbed you—”

“His name is Peter.”

“Is it now? How perfectly ordinary. Peter. Was Peter the one who sucked your blood, Angela, or was it Mario?”

“Yes. Peter. But you’re not quizzing me. I want answers from you.”

“You’ll get them.” Kent’s jaw was set. “First, go look in a mirror at the neck wound, and tell me what you see. Then I’ll explain everything I can, and I won’t ask a single question until you’re satisfied.”

She didn’t like the part of her that wanted to do anything he said right at the moment. But she wanted that explanation, and she was willing to look at her neck to get it. “Fine,” she said, and stalked to the nearest mirror, in the bathroom.

There wasn’t a mark there. He could see that, of course. He probably thought she was making that part all up. Was that his point? She knew what she remembered, though, as much as she’d love to wipe that little episode completely from her mind.

At least he didn’t look smug when she came back. He still had that serious, grim look on his face that he’d had when he’d told her to go look at the mirror. He waited for her to sit down, and then began. “You were bitten, quite savagely probably, but there’s no bite mark. Hard to believe, isn’t it? But that’s what happened. In Peter’s saliva is an agent which helps wounds heal very quickly; you won’t find the same substance in any normal human. But Peter isn’t normal, you see. He sucks blood. He tapes up his windows to make sure the sunlight can’t get in.”

“He thinks he’s a vampire.”

Kent shook his head. “No, Angela, as nice as it would be to think Peter simply delusional, it’s not so. Yes, someone who thought they were a vampire might drink your blood and tape the windows. But no one who simply thought they were a vampire could make your neck heal like that. Peter, I’m afraid, is the real thing, despite looking nothing like Bela Lugosi.”

Angela stared at him. This wasn’t happening. There had to be some other explanation.

“Mario. You met him, too. The man whose voice we heard as we left the house. Mario is also a vampire. He and I have a history. I think it’s fair to say that I tried to kill him. And I definitely killed some his friends by burning a house down while they slept—that would be during the day. I killed two more by chopping their heads off. I didn’t fight fair, not at all. They’re stronger than normal humans, faster, too. Fighting fair against a vampire is a good way to die, and they’d killed too many of my friends. Submissives mostly, women they took from BDSM clubs, lured to their houses, and drank dry. They’re very charming. I promised not to ask any questions, so you don’t have to answer. Think about it yourself. But did they ever get you to do something that, when you think of it now, you wouldn’t have done?”

Angela’s mouth started to form the word
no,
and then she remembered how she’d quite willingly inhaled from the bottle that Peter had put next to her nose. Did that count? She didn’t say anything.

“One of them most definitely tried, Angela. That guy you were supposed to meet, when I met you. Morgan. He’s a vampire, too, and he tried to roll your mind when we were at that dance club.”

“So why didn’t he?”

“Because I was there to stop him.”

“And what are you? A werewolf?” Angela meant for it to sound like the most ludicrous suggestion ever, but somehow it didn’t come out that way.

Kent shook his head. “No. Someone—a vampire—told me werewolves exist. Maybe they do and maybe they don’t. He told me some truths and some lies, one of which was that I’d be safe from revenge out here on the east coast away from Los Angeles. I’m normal enough. In karate, however, we learn to project our
chi
—our life force, if you will. We strike with our whole self, not just our foot or our hand. It turns out a similar technique blocks the ability of vampires to charm. When he tried to use his glamour on you, I projected my
chi
as a shield.”

“He was a loser.”

“I have a feeling there are plenty of women who’d tell you otherwise.”

Stacy and Monica. Oh, no.
She would have dismissed it all as fantasy if it had not been for the bite on her neck. “I was set up to meet that guy by a couple friends, both of whom raved about how amazing he was in bed.”

“He might be able to make them believe that without even touching them. Has he hurt them?”

She shook her head. “No. Not physically, as far as I can tell. I think…both of them were looking for something a little more than just a guy to spend some hot nights with, you know?”
And so am I.

He nodded. “Most vampires try to leave no trace of anything out of the ordinary. They don’t kill their victims, which means they need more than one to get enough blood. I won’t say I like them but I wouldn’t go chopping their heads off for the crime of not breathing, either. Mario’s friends were special, and the only reason I’m alive is that the other vampires in L.A. were happy enough to get rid of folks who might blow their cover.”

“So, are there vampires here that would feel the same way?”

Kent shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know who is in charge here. Or how to get in touch with them. Unless…”

“Morgan?”

“Yes, exactly. Can you get a message to him?”

“I don’t know where he lives or what his cell phone number is, but I’m sure either Stacy or Monica has some way to get in touch with him.”

“Well, then, it might be worth a try. Or it might be a way to get a whole lot of vampires mad at us at once. We can’t possibly actually reach him until night, of course, but we can leave a message.”

“At least Dark Xanadu isn’t open tonight. You’ve no place you need to be, right? I mean, maybe Mario and his friend can figure out that I live here, but we could spend the night somewhere else.”

Kent frowned. “Not exactly true, sadly. It’s true that Dark Xanadu doesn’t have a club night tonight. But a group has booked the space.” He paused for a moment. “A swinger group that existed before but liked my space better than the nightclub they were using.”

Angela gulped. She was open about lots of things, she thought, and goodness knew her mind had opened a more over the last week about sex than it had been. But try as she might to rationalize her relationship with Kent as just a learning experience, the idea of him with another woman did not please her one bit, and the idea that he would hop from bed to bed pleased her even less. “Do you…participate?”

Kent laughed. “No. Not my thing. There’s a bit of crossover between their crowd and the BDSM crowd, to be sure. Part of the reason they like our space is they want to use some of the equipment. But no, I only planned to be there to make sure they don’t break anything.”

“Any reason they would?”

“No.”

That was simple. “So you don’t have to be there.”

“Yes, I do. That’s where they’ll come looking for me, Mario and Peter. And believe it or not, the old thing about vampires needing an invite is true. Unfortunately, they’ll have no trouble getting one as guests of someone they charm outside.”

Didn’t he get it? Did he have a death wish?
“That’s exactly why you shouldn’t be there, Kent.”