Laws of the Blood 1: The Hunt (16 page)

Selim smiled. Could it be that the kid had a sense of humor? “What if they were naked girls? That’s what
interests you at the moment, isn’t it? Girls?”

Sterling’s eyes narrowed menacingly. “You trying to insult me,
dhamphir
?”

Selim laughed. Not because he was the one who’d been insulted, but because Geoff Sterling, despite his threat display, was blushing. The heat of embarrassment that rose from his skin added to the surrounding temperature. “All I asked was if you preferred naked girls. If you’re a vanilla vampire.”

The term had actually been coined
about
Selim. He supposed it was his one contribution to vampire culture. Most vampires were bisexual. Selim was told that it wasn’t gender that mattered for sex, but the strength of the human’s gift. Selim didn’t get it, never had, though he’d had his choice of partners—women, boys, animals, and eunuchs—from the moment he’d first shown an interest in sex. And that was
before
he was a vampire. He’d only lusted after women then; only lusted after them now. He was considered not only odd, but downright dull in his tastes by those who knew his preferences.

Sterling grew more belligerent. “Vanilla?
You’re
calling
me
a pervert?”

“Is that what it’s considered now?” Selim put his hand over his heart. Then, cobra-swift, he grabbed Sterling’s throat and shook just a little before releasing him. No one else on the street noticed the brief assault. “It was a simple question. Do you like naked girls?”

Sterling coughed. “Yeah.” He gave his characteristic shrug. “Only one naked girl interests me at the moment.” He sneered. “I’d love to see a naked angel,” he added, then frowned. “That sounds like a porn title, doesn’t it?”

“It certainly does.”

Sterling obviously didn’t like that notion. “I’ve watched at her window some nights. She always comes home alone, you know? Goes to bed by herself. She’s gorgeous, could have any man she wants. But she’s waiting . . . waiting for someone special.”

“You?”

He nodded. “I learned how to walk in her dreams today. In mine, I mean—shared her thoughts when I was—”

“I know what you did. So, you want to keep practicing?”

Sterling nodded. “I wouldn’t let anyone else have her.”

Looked like Sterling had made his decision about Moira Chasen. Selim didn’t know whether to be happy for the young couple or annoyed at having to find some other prey for the strigs. He wondered if O. J. was in town.

“Let’s talk,” he said to the boy, who nodded.

Selim led Sterling to the nearest coffee shop, which was several miles away. Sterling had no trouble keeping up with the running pace Selim set. They dodged traffic and ran along the top of a gridlocked line of car roofs before turning off the freeway. Sterling was breathing hard by the time Selim led them into the coffee shop he had in mind. A psychological as much as physiological reaction. Selim let Sterling pay for the tall cardboard cups of espresso-loaded latte. They settled on a bench under the shop’s outdoor awning. No one noticed they were there.

Selim leaned back on the bench with a contented sigh, breathed in the scent of night-blooming jasmine and exhaust fumes, and crossed his legs. Traffic cruised by, the headlights forming a thick stream of light that reminded Selim of lava. The coffee was still too hot for his taste. He concentrated on Sterling while he waited. The boy was staring straight ahead, reading the movie ad on the back of the bus stop across the street, perhaps. He glanced up at the sky and the outline of house-covered hills in the distance. He looked everywhere but at Selim, though he was very aware that Selim was looking at him.

Finally, Selim said, “Why’d you follow me?” Selim
carefully watched the conscious effort Sterling put into not shrugging.

The boy’s voice was cool when he said, “Boredom?”

“You don’t know why you followed me.”

Sterling’s head swiveled toward Selim. He leaned forward. “
Dhamphir
, I—”

Selim casually slammed him back against the bench. Normally he didn’t explain. Normally, he didn’t mind. “I am
not
a
dhamphir.
Vanilla is an insult I’ll put up with, but do not ever call me that again. There’s only one
dhamphir
in the whole damned world, and one is more than enough.” Well, there was another. He almost smiled, thinking that if Siri were here, she’d add, “And we’re not talking about Princess Leia.” Siri wasn’t here. She might never be again. The thought did not help Selim’s mood. “Understood?” he growled at the young vampire.

Sterling swallowed. Nodded. Selim took his hand away from Sterling’s chest. He hadn’t realized his claws were out. There was no blood scent in the air, so at least he hadn’t broken the boy’s skin. The dream he’d had about Istvan was making him a little touchy on the subject of
dhamphirs.
“Sorry,” he said. “Overreacted. You spilled your coffee.”

Sterling ignored the hot liquid that poured out of the dropped cup and pooled on the sidewalk by his feet. “But—you’re—you,” he stammered. His eyes were wide and dark, but there was no other sign of the change in him. Hunger burned down inside him, but it was overshadowed by confusion, and another, growing need.

Oh.
Selim began to see what was going on.
This punk kid? Oh, please!

“I—don’t—” Sterling gave up fumbling for words and scraped his fingers though his hair. He leaned forward, hands on his knees, and stared at the ground. He was breathing hard. “I’m burning up inside.”

“Moira?” Selim questioned. Hoped.

Sterling shook his head. “I’m so hot and horny I can’t stand it.” He looked back at Selim, bleakly
unhappy and infinitely confused. “Moira’s not part of this. She was all that mattered . . . until.”

“Until last night?”

Sterling nodded. “I don’t know what’s happening. Jager wasn’t human . . . but his scent . . .” Sterling licked his lips, and a shudder wracked him. Revulsion and longing blended in him, and it hit Selim’s senses with a carrion reek. “Feeling Jager’s death hit me even stronger than when I witnessed the killing in Seattle. I thought that was just some freak reaction to trauma.”

Selim gulped down the coffee. It was still hotter than he liked, but he barely noticed. He tossed the empty cup in a nearby trash bin as he asked, “How many have you killed?” Geoff Sterling looked around uncomfortably. “There’s no one to hear,” Selim told him. “Talk to me, boy.”

“One.” Sterling couldn’t look at him.

The bleak pain in the young vampire’s emotions was clear evidence to Selim. “One. The night you were born.”

“It was disgusting.”

“And it damned your soul forever yadayadayada. Or didn’t your parent give you that speech?”

Sterling turned a fierce glare on Selim. “It’s true! We’re evil. Unnatural. Monsters. Damned. I thought being strig would make it easier to revel in the evil. I thought I was going to love being a vampire.”

Selim put a hand on his shoulder. “You’ll get used to it.”

“Have you?” Sterling asked.

Selim found that he couldn’t look the boy in the eye for a few moments. “Do you miss the daylight, Geoff?”

“No,” Sterling answered. “That’s not it. I don’t miss being human.”

“You don’t want to hunt them.”

“I don’t—I enjoyed hunting Moira.”

“Courtship. Not the same as hunting. You got a hard-on from Miriam’s hunt.”

“But it wasn’t—” He had to take several deep breaths
before he could admit, “I had more of a hard-on from last night. When I felt you kill Jager.”

The boy’s shame stank to high heaven. His pained confusion burned against Selim’s shields. “You sick pervert.” Selim said the words kindly, with deep, unwilling understanding. “You’re terrified that you’re just like me.”

Sterling’s nod was a tight, pained movement, as though he were fighting against rigor mortis.
We’re not dead, we’re different,
Selim reminded himself as he watched the boy struggle with his emotions.
We don’t die when we change, we jump species, like a disease that mutates from being able to infect one type of animal to infecting an entirely different species. Only we become the other. Become the disease? Vampirism as blood disease? Now there was a heretical thought. One never to be spoken aloud. The Strigoi Council had violently dismissed the notion. Like members of any fundamentalist religion, anything that might question their faith was rejected as sinful, evil, wrong. Sort of like vampires? Well, a sense of irony was never a qualification for membership on the Council.
He wasn’t sure what was.
Age and wisdom, maybe? Really sharp teeth?

“I don’t want to be like you.”

Selim was glad that Sterling had finally interrupted his rambling thoughts. The hours were passing. They were talking too much, and it looked like they had a lot more to say. It would be a shame if the sun came, and they were still sitting outside the coffee shop. They’d probably get mugged in their sleep or hauled off to a hospital. Possibly a morgue. Selim had no idea what he looked like when he slept; he only knew that he slept like the dead from sunrise to sunset.

“Like me how?” Selim questioned the younger vampire. “A vampire killer?” It was all a matter of what emphasis was put on the words, wasn’t it? “Too late for that.”

“I saw Istvan in Seattle.”

Selim curbed the impulse to ask what Istvan was like.
He supposed the boy’s remembered terror told him enough. “Oh?”

“I can feel myself turning into a
dhamphir
and I—”

Selim’s laughter penetrated Sterling’s painful confusion.

“What?” Sterling demanded in outrage.

Ignorance was considered something of a virtue among their kind. Vampires had developed concepts of compartmentalized knowledge and Need-to-Know long before humans had figured out that knowledge was power. Among the Strigoi the strictest law was one of silence. What one did not know could not be shared or sold, tortured from you by an Inquisitor, or read from your thoughts by some nosy psychic human. What one did know could only be bestowed on others one drop at a time. No human who didn’t belong to a vampire could ever know any of the truth.

As Selim well knew, the young always felt they were dying of thirst. Those drops of knowledge, history, truth were never enough to quench the fever. It was inevitable that young ones adopt some of the legends humans made up about vampires. Even more inevitable that they invent their own vampire legends.

“You can’t
become
like Istvan,” Selim bestowed this important drop of truth on Sterling, after he’d stopped wheezing with laughter long enough to get the words out. “
Dhamphirs
are born hating vampires. It’s not a disease that can be passed on or caught. Or a perversion. They’re natural-born Hunters. Historically, most
dhamphirs
weren’t even vampires.”

Sterling looked at him like he was crazy, a typical reward for correcting a cherished misapprehension. “But . . . you’re a vampire.”

Selim waited in silence, wishing for another cup of coffee from the now-closed café, while Sterling sat back on the bench and tried to think through his confusion. Selim stretched his legs out before him and looked relaxed while he kept a careful watch on the sky. It was
quite a few minutes closer to sunrise when Sterling asked, “What are Hunters if they’re not . . . like him?”

“Enforcers of the Laws,” Selim replied. “Shepherds of the blood-children. Cops. Like their mother or father before them. You have to be reborn in the Nighthawk line to begin with if you’re going to have the fangs for the job.”

Sterling touched his canine teeth as though he felt them growing already. “Oh.”

“Then you have to be one of the few who feel the sacred call,” Selim went on. He waved a hand casually. “And there’s this . . . magic . . . thing . . . you have to do.”

“Sacred call?”

“The hunger that’s burning in your gut right now. Hurts like hell, doesn’t it?”

Sterling laid a knotted fist on his abdomen. “I’m a Hunter?”

“Maybe.”
If you live through the testing,
Selim added to himself. That was a drop of knowledge he wasn’t ready to give the boy at the moment. Sterling was already unhappy enough at the urges growing in him and what answers Selim had offered. Selim checked his watch. “You like basketball?”

A puzzled Sterling nodded.

“I’ve got season tickets. Interested in the Lakers game tomorrow night?” Siri wasn’t likely to be there. It was better than going alone.

Sterling looked flattered, then he shook his head. “Sorry. I have a date.”

“A date?”

“With Moira.”

“A date?” Selim repeated. Skepticism flowed off him in waves. “You’re going to . . . ?” He drew back his lips suggestively.

“No!” Sterling was laughably appalled at this crude gesture. “Not yet. It’s a real date. I went back to the club after I saw you last night. Got up the nerve to introduce myself to her. She said she’d noticed me.”
Sterling sounded infinitely impressed by her discernment, even though he’d been stalking the girl for some time.

“Of course she’s seen you.”

Sterling was too intent on thoughts of his beloved to pay any attention to Selim. “She’s nice. Lonely. I didn’t have to use any psychic stuff. I asked. She said yes. I listened to her thinking about me last day, but I didn’t telepathically intrude. I thought we should get to know each other before . . .” He drew back his lips suggestively. “You know.”