In the Dark (44 page)

I watched him.
My cool, calm, violent protector losing his shit in front of me. I
didn’t know what to do. Would he break my arm if I tried to
touch him? Clam up if I spoke? I waited a beat, unsure, then decided
I had to do something.

“Hey,”
I said softly. I stepped towards him, one hand out. I saw genuine
surprise on his face as he registered me. Only for an instant. In the
next second, his expression slammed shut. He turned away from me,
shuttered and closed off.

“Leave
me,” he said in his usual stern tone.

I bit my lip.
Thought about it.

“No,”
I said.

His shoulders
bunched.

“Ian,”
he said in a warning voice.

“No,”
I said again. “I’m not leaving. You just lost it, totally
lost
it, and I’m not leaving.” I set a hand on his
back. The muscles there were rigid, like stone. I felt the barest
hint of a flinch when I touched him.

He didn’t
say anything. He didn’t move. I stayed where I was, one hand on
his back, uncertain that he wouldn’t hurt me.

“Who
died?” I asked, very, very quietly.

His back
tightened more, if that was possible.

I waited. And
waited. I didn’t think he was going to answer me.

Then, “Sarah,”
he said. So softly I wasn’t sure I’d heard him.

When he didn’t
say anything else, I hesitated. Was that a sister? His mother? A
lover?

“You loved
her,” I said, going for the obvious.

“More than
my own life,” he said back softly.

Lover, probably.

But then that
plaid scrap jumped back into my memory, and I knew. Unmarried
Scottish women didn’t wear plaid. They wore the plaid of their
husband’s clan.

His wife.

His
wife.
The idea of him married blew my mind.

“Did you .
. . ?” I trailed off, not wanting to finish that question.
Hoping he wouldn’t slice my fool head off for even starting it.

“The
hunger.” His voice had gone so quiet I almost couldn’t
hear him. “He made me and he left . . . he left me with her.”

Even with
incomplete fragments, the picture started snapping together in my
head. I felt Sebastian’s shoulders jerk a little. He was
crying. Not just a few tears down his cheeks, but actual sobbing.

Slowly, so I
didn’t startle or threaten him, I put my arms around him. He
let me, though he just stood where he was. I gently pulled his head
to my shoulder and held him while he cried. I expected huge, gulping
sobs releasing so much pent up pain and misery for the first time in
probably five hundred years, but he cried very quietly. He didn’t
seem able to stop, but he controlled it enough to be subtle.

All I could do
was hold him. If I’d ever done anything more unexpected in my
life, I couldn’t think of it. This man could kill me with
hardly a thought. Had killed who knew how many others as easily as
that. But right now he cried blood all down the front of my shirt and
let me hold him.

The tears took a
long time to wind down. I’d sort of expected him to regain
control of himself and push me away after a few seconds. Instead he
sobbed almost silently on and on, probably letting loose centuries of
this.

After a while he
stood up, wiping his eyes and turning away from me. I caught a hint
of embarrassment from the cant of his shoulders. My eyebrows
puckered. “What happened?” I asked quietly.

He didn’t
answer.

“Sebastian,
what happened?” I said again, a little louder. He sighed a
little, but still didn’t answer. I tried again. “Your
father made you and then ran away, left you alone with your human
wife. You didn’t know what was going on when you started to
feed from her, so you didn’t know how to stop and she died.
That was your first night as a vampire. Am I close?”

A shudder passed
through him.

I sighed.
“That’s horrible. I can’t even fathom how horrible.
You must miss her so bad.”

“Not a
night goes by that I do not miss her,” he murmured, almost to
himself.

I knew what that
felt like.

“So now
you know,” Sebastian went on. He looked at me, and I didn’t
know what I saw in his eyes. They were flat, but intense. Nervous?
“I’ve never spoken of it before now.”

Five hundred
years without saying anything? No wonder he fell apart like that. I’d
have gone a little crazy too with something so heavy weighing me
down.

He shrugged one
shoulder and looked away from me. I set a hand on his back again.
“Thank you for telling me.”

He shrugged
again, somewhat uneasy, somewhat resigned. He hadn’t
necessarily meant for the story to come out. I was just shocked it
hadn’t come out sooner.

“You are
too pale,” he said, a pretty obvious way of saying “I
don’t want to talk about this anymore.” “You must
feed. We should go.”

“Are you
sorry you told me?” I asked.

That made him
think a moment. Almost as if it surprised him, he shook his head.
“No.”

I smiled a
little. “I’m not, either.”

For a little
moment, neither of us said anything. Just stood there, me with my
hand on his back, him looking at me as if he’d never seen me
before. Then he stepped away from my hand and went to the door,
holding it open for me. “Come,” he said. “There are
things to do yet tonight. You must feed. I must hunt.”

As I passed him,
I paused. “Thanks, Sebastian.” I meant for the lesson in
self-control this time. For making an impression on me.

He inclined his
head. “Of course.”

We left the
practice room.

A
sound made me pause as Sebastian and I stepped out of the practice
room. The acoustics in the apartment muffled the noise, but I could
still hear it. Guitar. Coming from Amanda’s room.

I paused in the
hallway, listening. The twang of the strings stopped, then started
again, then stopped again. I knew that sound. Kent did it all the
time –
used
to do it all the time. Amanda was working on
a new song.

Whether or not
she was speaking to me, whether or not becoming a vampire was the
very best or worst thing for her, she still had it in her to work on
her music. A knot in my chest loosened a little.

Sebastian’s
eyes glinted in a faint smile. I smiled back. This wasn’t
fixed. But I had some small sense that maybe, just maybe, it could
be. I listened for a second more, then followed Sebastian back down
the hall into the living room.

Josephine rose
from her chair when we came in, her eyes darkly troubled, her mouth
pulled down. She came straight to me and put her arms around me. I
blinked, until I realized that Sebastian had his stoic face back on.
She was more worried about me and the crap going on in my world right
now. I had to wonder if they’d been talking about me. Sebastian
had seemed to have his grab-me-and-beat-me plan all figured out
earlier.

“You’re
not alone, you know,” Josephine murmured into my hair. “We’re
here for you. Both of you.”

That brought
tears to my eyes. I hadn’t realized how alone I’d felt
until Sebastian had started wailing on me. Well, not that part, the
part after, but still. Hearing Josephine tell me out loud that I had
help filled me with relief.

“Thank
you.” I hugged her back. “I really need you guys right
now. So does Amanda.”

Josephine gave
me a little extra squeeze, then let me go. “Put on a clean
shirt. Go get some food in you.” She brushed my hair from my
face and I wanted to cry even more. It was such a maternal gesture.
“We can talk when you get back.”

I wiped my eyes
and nodded. Went to change shirts.

Sebastian stood
patiently beside the elevator. Once I’d joined him, he hit the
call button. His mood had shifted gears. His eyes were dark and
brooding, not looking at me, or really at anything in particular.
Seeing things in his head that he did not like. Angry things this
time, not sad. The elevator opened and we stepped on.

I wanted to ask
what was going through his mind, then figured he was probably
plotting. I didn’t want to interrupt. Still, I gazed at him,
which he took as an outright question.

His hands
tightened into fists at his sides, then released. His face didn’t
change a hair. “Four nights. We have four nights left before
Specter comes for us. Three have been wasted so far. I do not know
what else to try. The pack will not show themselves and allow me to
follow them, I cannot track them in this forest of cement, and my
defense against their attack on the penthouse consists of myself, a
well-trained but inexperienced swordswoman, and two children. Our
only advantage is the limited number of entrances to our refuge.”

Now my mood
shifted gears. I swallowed. “You don’t sound too
hopeful.”

“I’m
not.”

“We have
to fight,” I said, my voice going a little high-pitched. I
tried to swallow down the panic.

Sebastian
glanced at me. “Of course we must. We may even survive. If all
falls out exactly in our favor.”

That didn’t
sound promising. I stared at the numbers above the door, little red
lights counting the floors as we approached the garage level. Trying
not to wonder if we would all die in a couple of days.

No, there has
to be something we can do. We just have to brainstorm and come up
with it. We can make this work.

“We should
all sit down and talk it over tonight,” I said. “Maybe we
can work out some kind of idea.”

Sebastian nodded
once, but I got the feeling he barely heard me. He was too busy
working out and rejecting his own plans. With a worried frown, I left
him to it. The elevator stopped on “G” and the doors slid
open on the parking garage.

In the same
moment I saw them standing there, Sebastian had his sword out and
leaped in front of me, quicker than my thoughts could finish forming.

A thin young man
with long black hair sat on the hood of Sebastian’s car. The
alarm wasn’t going off. A handful of other people stood
surrounding him. I didn’t know them and didn’t trust
them.

They could only
be the pack.

“Well,
well, well!” the dark-haired man said as he stood up off the
hood of the Vector. “Look who finally came out to play!”

“
S
pecter,”
Sebastian growled.

He tightened his
grip on his sword, waiting for the trick this time. Waiting to find
out why Specter had come. How they had gotten in was simple: Dragon
stood to the rear of the group, a tiny smile on his lips. Technology
had always fascinated him, from flintlock rifles to laser beam
security systems. Sebastian had never fooled himself that the
security this building offered would keep his pack out, had they
decided they wanted to enter.

He flicked his
eyes over his packmates’ faces, searching for more than
smugness. A reason. A hint of plans. He saw nothing there, but he had
to admit the rest of the pack might be unaware of Specter’s
plans. In order to keep them cooperative, Specter would have to keep
the extent of his desires hidden.

“My dear
old friend,” Specter announced, arms wide. “Please do
forgive the intrusion. You see, I have decided to retract my offer.”

He swept a hand
in Shroud’s direction. Ian made a distressed sound behind
Sebastian.

Shroud lifted
his head at Specter’s broad gesture, as if they had rehearsed
this. Perhaps they had.

“Shroud
has informed me that you’ve been fraternizing with the prey!”
Specter clapped his hands together dramatically. “Not merely
once or twice, but often, and closely, from what he’s seen.”
He examined Ian over Sebastian’s shoulder.

Sebastian let
him, silent.

“Above and
beyond your close association with named quarry, Shroud says he found
you out last night hunting. Hunting packmates. Do I need to remind
you what the penalty is for raising a blade against a fellow pack
member without calling challenge?” Specter crossed his arms. “I
am a patient man. But really, Cain, I expect some honesty out of you!
You could have refused, let me know the truth, told me how you felt .
. . I did
ask,
Cain. But oh well. Here we all are.”

Sebastian curled
a lip. He’d forgotten how much Specter loved the sound of his
own voice.

Specter flicked
his hands at them. “Back up, if you please.”

The pack moved
forward. Sebastian counted seven. He couldn’t take them all.
The elevator doorway gave him a narrow point to stand off, but he
knew Specter would beat him. And hoping Specter would stay out of any
fight had to be the most unrealistic wish Sebastian had ever made. It
would be madness to resist.

“No,”
he said anyway, running over and over in his head how he might make
this work . . . nothing came. If he fought them, they would win. If
they left him alive, he would almost certainly be injured, and at a
disadvantage if another opportunity to fight arose. Tricks or games
might work, except that Specter had taught him all he knew of verbal
play. It was too possible he would see through anything Sebastian
tried.

Specter stopped.
Made a face like laughter, a soundless laugh that did not reflect in
his dark eyes. “No?”

The pack
gathered behind their leader, faces hard, awaiting orders. Ready to
carry out Specter’s smallest whim, ready to destroy a stranger
for reasons none of them understood – nor cared to understand.

Slaves.

The word hit
Sebastian hard, but he could not think of another way to describe
them.

For that is
what they are.

Shock though it
was to think of them as such, to think of himself as such, he had no
time to contemplate it now. Sebastian narrowed his eyes.