Laws of the Blood 1: The Hunt (22 page)

“You’re nuts, aren’t you?” she said when they had the peaceful area to themselves. She looked him over critically, with her psychic as well as her ordinary senses. “Flat-out crazy.”

He nodded. “Yes. Quite mad. I admit it.” He released his hold on her, at least the physical one. She knew she couldn’t get up and walk away if she tried. “I am trying to get better.”

“Define ‘better.” ’ she urged. Then, “You know, I thought you must have something to do with Jager, but now I see that’s impossible.”

“I’m too old,” he agreed. “Too good to have belonged to a putz like Larry Jager.” He smiled, and there was something slightly sane in his expression for the moment. “I’d be offended that you thought I was involved with Jager—if I hadn’t planted the suggestion in your head to begin with.”

“Planted—”

“My lady is a strig,” he went on over her stunned protest that anyone could control her thoughts. “If such a crude term can be used for what she is.” Love pulsed through him as he spoke of his vampire. Hate as well, and frustration that fed the madness, but the love was the strongest. “She’s special. Unique. You couldn’t begin to comprehend her. But she’s wrong about me. I hate it that she’s wrong. I hate having to defy her. I would do this differently if I could. I swear to you that I would.”

Siri’s fear escalated as Yevgeny spoke. Noon sunlight or not, the plaza darkened around them. The hot air turned icy cold. The cold darkness belonged to Yevgeny. It was where he lived. She felt his struggle to get out, knew that it was the source of his madness. His pain
was strong enough to cover the world. Siri almost felt sorry for him.

She had trouble breathing in the darkness but stubbornly struggled to find her voice. “Do what?”

He took her face between his big hands. The touch was gentle, warm, alien. She wasn’t used to being touched so intimately by anyone but Selim. She hated it when the force of his will made her lift her gaze to look into his eyes.

“You’re very good, Siri,” he told her. His voice was gentle, insistent, impossible not to listen to. “But you will obey my will.”

I belong to Selim.
She couldn’t speak the words aloud, but she knew he heard them because of his soft, mocking laugh.

“Your devotion isn’t that strong,” he told her. “Not after what he’s been doing to you lately.” He laughed again, but there was sympathy in it this time. She felt him inside her head, learning things, reading her. “It’s like I’m reading your diary,” he said. “Isn’t it, little girl?” That was exactly how it felt. “The secrets you keep inside you aren’t any different than mine. Your beloved is putting you through the same things my lady’s done to me. They do it for our own good when they should let the choice be ours.”

Yes,
Siri heard herself think, though she fought off the spark of rebellion a moment later. Was the rebellion hers? Was it absorbed from Yevgeny? She prayed for help, for—

“Selim’s sleeping. Do you know what’s happening while he sleeps? She’s riding him, walking with him while he dreams. Your beloved is with another woman right now. My woman, to be precise. She’s so good that he’ll never know she’s mindraping him, taking his life and turning it into her fiction.”

What do you mean? The “real” story? The script?

“Precisely. She’s with Selim for the sake of her art. She needs to get out and live, but she won’t listen to me when I tell her that’s what will help her storytelling. She
won’t live. And she won’t let me have the life I need. But the story she’s stealing from you and Selim will change all that. It’ll change everything. She has a hunting instinct she doesn’t even recognize anymore. She’s hunting vampires with words. Naming names and times of death.” He laughed again, bitterly.

Somewhere from a great distance yet only a few feet above in the tree over their heads, Siri heard the soft call of a dove. She used the sound as a beacon and tried to catch onto even more reality, but Yevgeny caught her consciousness too quickly, forced her to focus completely on him. “This is a taste of mindrape, darling,” he whispered. “But don’t worry, you won’t remember any of this. I promise you that Selim won’t suspect a thing. You haven’t suspected she’s been with him, now, have you?”

No. No, she hadn’t.
If I’d known someone was hurting him—

“Such delicious anger! But what could you have done, a child companion like you? I couldn’t stop her. Couldn’t even bring myself to talk to her about it.”

Siri felt sorry for Yevgeny, while at the same time hating his guts.

“She doesn’t think I should be jealous of her being with Selim for some reason, just because he doesn’t know,” he went on. “She’s as mad as I’ve come to be. She couldn’t get to you, though. Couldn’t read your mind, waking or sleeping. But you had your part to play in this story of hers. She wanted to know you. For character development. So she sent me to find you.” His awful, sad, mad laugh tore through Siri’s mind again. But there was triumph in his personal darkness now, as well. “It was through you that I found out about the little boy.” He paused. She felt him savoring her shock and fear. “She put a vision of what’s going to happen to him in her story.”

What? What’s going to happen to Sebastian? What future did she see?

“It’s very sad.”

The name
Istvan
floated up out of her own store of visions, past the barriers set on her by Yevgeny.
Istvan wanted Sebastian. Cassie and Don Tomas would die trying to stop him. And Selim—There were angels in it.

Siri didn’t see anymore.

She couldn’t feel her tears. She couldn’t feel his thumbs wiping them off her face, but Siri knew that’s what was happening. The very sound of his gloating voice was obscene, but she couldn’t stop it. “And the magic is going to be real. She won’t need a special effects team, because it’s going to be real. Except it isn’t going to happen the way she envisions it. I hate to disappoint her, but she’s going to have to write a new ending.”

Hope shot up through Siri’s pain.
You’re going to help Sebastian?

He sighed. “I’d like to. I really would. I hate the thought of a child having to die, but I’m afraid it can’t be helped. I read her secret book, you see. I know there’s another way. It told me what I have to do to be born. There’s a spell, one that needs the blood of a
dhamphir.
I don’t think Istvan would voluntarily give anyone a transfusion, do you? Or his heart? Better to receive than to give is his creed.” Siri almost laughed at this lame joke, except that her soul completely froze a moment later as Yevgeny said, “I’m going to have to use young Sebastian in the ritual, and you’re going to help me.”

“What do you mean there isn’t any more of this?” The little office reverberated with her angry words. Siri waved the paper in her hand at Joseph.

He’d just returned from throwing up in the faculty’s shared bathroom. His office was on the third floor of a quiet older building on the UCLA campus, surrounded by blooming jacaranda trees. The bare hardwood floor sagged a little. The walls of the small office were decorated with framed posters from
Casablanca
and
Duck Soup
. There was a framed photo of Joe with Jerry Bruckheimer on the wall as well. Siri knew the picture
had been taken at some seminar both Joseph and the producer spoke at, but it looked impressive.

“How does it end? Where’s the rest of it?”

“I told you the fax machine broke down! What to you want me to do?” he shouted back. “I’ve left a voice mail with my contact at Arc Light. All I can do is wait for her to get back to me.”

“How long will that be?”

“I don’t know!” He thought for a moment. “Wait—I could call Lisa. The casting director at Arc Light would have—”

“Not Lisa!” A red light was going off in Siri’s senses as she remembered the hostility between Kamaraju and Selim the night before. Siri shook her head. “No. Don’t bring it to her attention.” Joe had received a one-page outline that didn’t go into much detail, and a partial of the script of
If Truth Be Told
that gave far too much. The truth, indeed. Damning truth. They were screwed. “How many people have seen this?” she asked. “How many are going to?”

“How would I know?”

“You’re in the business!”

“I’m not a player. I’m a teacher.”

Joe’s frantic worry hit hard against Siri’s bruised psychic senses. For a moment the office disappeared, the crisis disappeared. For a moment she was somehow in the dark at midday with the sound of a dove cooing over her head. Her stomach knotted in terror that had nothing to do with this moment; then she was back in real time, with Joseph holding her by the shoulders and looking at her strangely.

“Vision?” he asked.

Siri blinked. “I guess.” The nausea faded. “I don’t usually want to throw up from visions, though.” She sat on the edge of Joe’s desk and fanned herself with the paper. She shivered.

“You don’t have time for visions right now,” Joseph complained. “You have to do something.”

“Me?” She felt her temper escalating again. At least
it helped focus her on the vampire community’s very real problem. “Me?” she asked again. “What about you? You’re the one who’s involved with the film industry. Did one of your students write this script?”

“How? Read my mind?”

“You or I could do it.”

Joe laughed. He pointed angrily at the paper she clutched. Paper she wasn’t going to let out of her hands. “Not in that much detail. Real detail. Would I have told anybody any of that shit? Besides, it’s not
my
name that’s mentioned in that scene.”

Siri took another look at the wrinkled pages. She didn’t want to look at the words. Only a faint hope that it wasn’t as bad as she remembered let her get into the experience a second time. False hope, as it, unsurprisingly, turned out.

SIRI:

You called me here! You were waiting for me!

 

SELIM:

No, you weren’t bait. What the hell are you doing here? Never mind.

(Siri reaches out, but Selim is not there.)

Angle

Jager moves along Sunset. People in crowd react to the sight of fangs and claws as he moves between streetlights and shadows. He is intent on hunting Siri.

 

JAGER:

Where are you, owl bait?

Angle

Selim steps from shadows behind Jager.

 

SELIM
(Sardonic whisper)
:

Owl bait?

Selim taps Jager on shoulder with hilt of silver dagger.

 

SELIM:

Yo, Hannibal Lechter. Your turn to run, little boy.

It went on for several more pages, ending just as Selim stuffed Jager’s body in the trunk of her car. While she hadn’t witnessed Larry Jager’s demise, she was certain every detail was absolutely correct, that it had happened just as the spare words of the script laid it out. She didn’t know how this could have happened. She didn’t know what to do about it.

She looked unhappily at Joseph. “I wish to God I’d never started this.”

His confusion was a palpable throb against her senses. “You admitting to writing that—heresy?”

“Break the First Law? Are you crazy? Of course I didn’t write it! I mean I wish I hadn’t told Selim about this script just because I thought it might distract him. I didn’t dream it would really be about our community. I just thought—”

“Doesn’t matter what you thought. Reality matters. What the Strigoi Council does about it matters.”

Siri held up a warning hand. “Never mind the Council. It’s Selim we have to worry about.”

“Selim’s going to be in trouble over this. What if the script mentions Miriam? How can I protect her?”

“You can’t, companion.”

“We’re all dead.” Joe paled. “We’re not supposed to be in movies!”

“We aren’t,” she pointed out. “Not yet. This film hasn’t been made yet.”

“But it’s been green lighted. It’s going to get made.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nobody Buffalo sixty-sixes an Arc Light production.”

Siri grabbed Joe by the front of his shirt and shook him like a terrier. “Speak English! What the hell are you talking about?”

“Power,” he responded, with a calm succinctness that was terrifying. “Money. Influence. Clout. Knowing
where the bodies are buried,” Joe added with a twisted grin. She let him go and stepped back as he went on. “Most importantly, the people at Arc Light have a moneymaking track record with the studios. They get what they want.”

“Money talks.” Siri breathed a despondent sigh. Joe nodded. She wanted to pound her head against the wall. She wanted to pack up all her belongings, stuff Selim’s unconscious body in the trunk of her car, and get the hell out of town. Possibly off the planet. Everything was bleak and hopeless and confused—and there was something inside her she couldn’t reach that was very, very important. It hurt to even try to think about it. She gave a hollow, aching laugh. “Yesterday I was only worried about all of East L.A. going up in flames. Now I have to deal with the whole town exploding.” Her temples throbbed with the mother of all headaches. “What the hell am I going to do?”