Laws of the Blood 1: The Hunt (29 page)

V
ALENTINE KNEW THAT
Selim didn’t feel the emotions coming from the other side of the door. She had barely felt the young vampire’s approach herself, something registered on the edge of her senses while she’d concentrated very, very hard on keeping Selim’s attention where she wanted it. He was good, though. Very good, very strong in person and wide awake. He kept escaping from the mental traps she wove, kept coming back to his purpose for coming here. She hadn’t had the energy to spare to warn the youngster off, she had thought that he wouldn’t be foolish or brave or desperate or needy enough to follow Selim wherever he led. She’d been wrong.

Well, it wasn’t the first time lately.

Valentine sighed and opened the door. “Hello, Geoff,” she said to the bruised and battered child at her door. Tear streaks had washed through some of the blood on his face. The bruises were already starting to heal, but he still looked a fright. Selim didn’t look much better, she realized. It was just that the blood crusted under his nails and on his clothes wasn’t his. Somehow that made it easier to ignore.

She took the boy’s arm and led him into her living room. “I believe this is yours,” she said to Selim, but he only glanced up briefly with a quick, annoyed glare and went immediately back to reading. Well, at least her story was holding his interest. She concentrated her attention on the lost creature that had dragged itself to them for—what? Succor? Sanctuary? He stared at her, dazed, grieving, hurt, and helpless, and she wanted to hug him, to give him a nice warm cup of blood, tell him a story, and tuck him into bed. She pointed toward the bedroom.

“Shower’s through there,” she told him. “There’s some clothes in the closet that will be too big for you, but they’ll do. Get cleaned up; then we’ll talk.”

He stared past her, gaze hungrily reaching for Selim. “I—she . . .”

Valentine put herself squarely in Geoff’s line of vision, blocking off Selim’s existence with her own mental energy. She forced the boy to look into her eyes. “Moira is dead.” She said the words gently but made him listen with all her will. “Go take a shower.” He sighed, a breath that shook him down to his bones, and shuffled off the way she’d pointed.

Valentine watched him go, then glanced at Selim, then out the open terrace door as she went into the kitchen. In the distance she could make out the graceful outline of the World Center, and she realized that sunlight would soon be returning to the world. Odd, it felt like the night was just starting, when in fact it was nearly over. She felt refreshed, invigorated . . . maternal. She frowned at that and took a steak out of the freezer. When she had it defrosting in the microwave, she returned to the couch. Selim was holding a loose page in his hands, staring at the words as though his glare would be enough to make them go away.

She took a seat beside him and pried the page out of his clenched fists. “You’ve gotten to the fight with Istvan, haven’t you?” she asked without bothering to look at the paper. Selim turned a stunned look on her. “Of
course, I changed his name to Corsare. It was necessary to make some compromises, but you recognized the source material.” She patted Selim on the knee, aware that she didn’t have his full attention, even when he blinked and his eyes focused once more. “What are you going to do about Geoff?” she asked. “The boy needs a lot of help.”

“Istvan.” Selim took a sharp breath. “Istvan is coming. I have to fight the
Dhamphir.”
He shook his head, glared at her. “I felt this coming, hoped I was imagining things.”

“You were.”

Selim drew away from her comforting touch, sprang to his feet to look down at her accusingly. “How am I supposed to protect Sebastian against something like him? Damn it, Valentia, how could you draw that hell down on the child? Sebastian’s a baby. A human baby—”

“Born of vampire parents. Well, one vampire parent.” She sat back and drew her legs up, wrapping her arms around her knees. “Amazing, isn’t it? He’s only the second one I’ve ever heard of. I was delighted to find out about the boy. Gave me just the focus for the conflict I needed. A real reason for the audience to sympathize with a vampire hero. You have to save the child from Istvan, who doesn’t want him to grow up to challenge his rule of the strigoi, and then you and Siri kiss, and credits roll over the romantic ballad on the soundtrack. We break twenty million on opening weekend, no sweat.” She smiled up at him. “Am I good, or what?”

“I have to fight Istvan,” Selim repeated. Then, very slowly. “I. Have. To. Fight. Istvan.” He spread his arms out to the world and sent out a silent howl of tortured, fatalistic pain.

Valentine looked upon her bloodchild uncomprehendingly for a moment; then she took in the pages of the manuscript that were scattered in no order on the table, the couch, and the floor. She put her feet down with a sharp thud and crossed her arms beneath her
breasts. “Oh.” After a pause, she added, “I think I see your point.”

Before she could say any more, the microwave chimed loudly, and Geoff Sterling shuffled out of the bedroom. She chose to deal with the more important crisis first. Going to Geoff, she took his hand and led him to the counter that separated the kitchen from her office. She pushed him into one of the two kitchen chairs. She put a plate of warm meat in front of him a moment later and handed him a knife and fork. He looked at them as though he’d never seen silverware before. He looked at her as though he had nothing to live for. Geoff was wearing one of Yevgeny’s tailored white shirts, with the too-long sleeves rolled up.

Valentine considered a great deal of advice for the boy, but Selim was waiting. She settled on, “That steak’s rare. Don’t get any blood on your shirt.” She left Geoff staring at his plate and went back to the vampire by the couch. “Stop acting like we’re all going to die,” she ordered him. “It’s just a movie.”

Selim put his hands heavily on her shoulders. “Woman, you are
so
crazy.” She stepped back, and Selim hands fell to his sides. His gaze was on her, but she felt his thoughts race, searching for answers, plotting, all his senses reaching out, hunting.

“For something that isn’t there,” she told him. “For trouble that isn’t coming.”

“You’ve
seen
it,” he accused her. “I’ve
felt
it. We see and feel and know the future, Valentia—”

“Valentine.”

“Don’t you remember what you really are?”

“I try to forget as much as possible, actually.” She waved a contemptuous hand toward the night, the world beyond her window. “Who needs all that crap? Especially at my age?”

He stared at her, those big, dark, beautiful eyes full of worry, full of the conviction that she was mad, full of dread and concern for the child. She wasn’t going to argue about her sanity, maybe she would even admit that
her definitions of reality were slightly askew. It went with the job. Goddess knew, it went with the business. Who was truly sane in Hollywood?

She took Selim’s hands in hers. She felt how different they were from human hands only because it had been so long since she’d touched one of her own kind. Body temperature was a little higher, skin that was soft, yet subtly tougher than human, a faint ridge at the base of fingernails that masked the sheathed claws. The differences from human were no more pronounced in Nighthawks; it was mind-set and magic that set them that further step apart from human. Or maybe it was a step closer. Valentine liked to think so. In fact, she liked to think that there was really very little that separated them from the people they used to be. The proof that drinking the Goddess’s blood didn’t really take them away from humanity was in the occasional birth of vampire children.

“Sebastian’s a miracle child,” she told Selim. “So was Istvan. Istvan would never want to harm another
dhamphir.
I just made that up.” She didn’t tell him that the spells referred to in the script were real. Why admit to even more crimes against the dictatorship he served? “I’ve been mucking around in your subconscious for weeks, my dear.” And that was crime enough, against a person, not antiquated Laws, and for that she was sorry. “You just picked up the idea that Istvan was involved from me.” She squeezed his hands. “You’re really good for such a kid. You almost caught me a couple of times. I’m quite proud of you.”

Selim didn’t seem to absorb her praise, but he did listen to her explanation. He twined his fingers with hers, drawing her closer to him. He radiated danger, but Valentine was unafraid as he looked down at her, his expression gone still and blank. “Maybe he isn’t coming for Sebastian,” he agreed with her. “But what about the rest of us when he finds out what you’ve done?”

“You aren’t going to kill me,” Valentine answered
him. “You aren’t going to stop me. We both know that.”

“If I don’t take care of it, they will send him.”

“He’s a good boy. I can reason with him.”

Geoff Sterling’s wild laughter interrupted whatever they would have said next. Valentine pulled her hands from Selim’s and went to the grieving strig. Geoff’s laughter shifted to shuddering sobs as she crossed the room, then turned to a thundering howl of pain. Selim was but a step behind her. It was Selim who took the boy by the shoulders and shook him hard.

“He’s seen Istvan work. I think that’s what set him off,” Selim explained to her. “But not what this is about.”

“I know. I saw you with Kamaraju.”

“I’m not sure who I’m going to kill first,” Selim said. “You or Kama.”

Selim looked for her reaction as he put his arms around the young vampire and drew him into a tight embrace. Sterling quieted and held onto Selim for all he was worth, whispering over and over the name of the girl he’d lost.

Valentine stood back with her arms crossed. She glanced from Selim and Sterling to the balcony and back. “You’ll have to decide on that tomorrow,” she told him. She got between the two men and took Sterling’s arm. She wiped tears off his face, put her hand over his heart, and waited until his ragged breathing had calmed a bit. She urged him toward the couch. “Sleep there,” she told him. “We’ll talk when we wake up. No dreams,” she added softly, looking deeply into his eyes and his mind. “No dreams at all today. Just rest.”

Dawn was just a few moments away when Geoff headed toward the couch. Valentine took Selim’s hand. He was looking at the lightening sky, watching for the sun that was about to trap them together with their unfinished business until night fell once more. “Come on, princeling,” she said. “You can sleep with me.”

He didn’t protest. You couldn’t argue against
daylight. He went with her, the enemy of the Law, into the bedroom and settled down beside her to sleep.

“Tell me about the child.”

Siri looked at the man driving her car, and couldn’t recall how he came to be in the Mercedes or behind the wheel. She didn’t like to let anyone else drive. She smiled dreamily at Yevgeny. “What do you want to know?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Everything. What happened to his mother?”

The air-conditioning was on too high, chilling her down to a shivering mass. Siri looked at her watch. It told her that the time was 10:25; the sunlight glinting off concrete, chrome, and shiny metal skins of the cars all around them on the freeway told her that it was morning. She welcomed the heat of the sun, but couldn’t get to it, not even to roll down a window. She tried hard to remember where the night had gotten to, how she had come to be where she was, and with who, but the compulsion to respond to whatever Yevgeny wanted overrode every concern and question.

“Oh, she’s a vampire now,” she told Yevgeny.

“Really? How interesting.” He changed lanes and speeded up. “Shouldn’t giving birth to the little monster have killed her? Shouldn’t he have killed her when he tore out of her womb?”

“That’s a myth,” Siri responded tartly. “Legend. Modern medicine intervened, actually. Cassie had the best ob/gyn in town. Sebastian was delivered C-section, a few weeks early. That was Selim’s idea, just in case the myth proved to have some basis in fact. He wasn’t born with fangs and claws, so it probably wasn’t. Cassie did almost die, though, from complications to do with a blood transfusion she wasn’t supposed to have. Someone at the hospital screwed up.”

Siri still got angry at the memory. She was convinced it had been an attempt by someone, possibly Kamaraju, to kill off the
dhamphir.
Except the murderer was
already too late when the attempt was made. There was no proof, though. Neither Selim nor Tom had ever found the technician to question him. To Siri’s suspicious mind, this was proof that it hadn’t been a screwup or accident. She had enough control over her own thoughts not to offer this information, though she couldn’t help but continue giving Yevgeny what he asked for.

“You know a companion can’t take anyone but their vampire’s blood?” she went on. Yevgeny nodded. “After some technician pumped about a pint of the wrong type of blood into a woman too drugged to stop him, she went into convulsions. To keep her alive, Tom had to take her Hunting, do the makeover thing. She was
so
pissed off.”

Yevgeny took his eyes off the road long enough to give her a very curious glance. “She didn’t rejoice in her rebirth?”

“Hell no.”

“Why not?”

“She’d just had a baby! She didn’t want to leave her husband and house. She especially didn’t want to leave her child, and there was no way Tom was going to send his son to someone else’s household. In the end, she didn’t leave, which has caused all sorts of friction in the community, but she’d rather stay at home with Sebastian than do the vampire thing, anyway.”