Laws of the Blood 1: The Hunt (9 page)

“It’s too late for that, we’re already married.”

Her fear didn’t lessen any, and laughter died in the tightness of her throat. She saw what he wanted to talk
about, what Selim was finally ready to talk about. She let it go. It hurt like hell to throw away the opportunity, but she wouldn’t let him distract her now. She glanced out the arched balcony doorway. Faint gray light showed beyond the fanned-out tops of the pair of palm trees just outside. Selim was right. He didn’t have much time. Better to get to the point then and not waste it.

“What did you mean by telling Sterling that he could kill Moira Chasen?”

Selim’s features had settled into a more human cast by the time he spoke, which somehow made his words more chilling. “I meant he can kill Moira Chasen.”

Siri suddenly found it very hard to stand. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t expected the answer. And it wasn’t that she didn’t want—need—to hear it. It was just that she didn’t know what to do about it.

“You can sit down,” Selim said. “You look terrible. Do you want a drink?”

Solicitous as ever, he helped her to the old camelback sofa, then went into the kitchen and came back with a glass of ice water for her. Siri had fought down her revulsion and regained her temper by the time he returned. She thanked him for giving her the time for that. Taking the tall, frosted glass from him as he bent over her, she asked, “What am I supposed to do with this? Throw it in your face?”

He slid to sit cross-legged on the floor in front of her. “I’d prefer that to your throwing breakable objects this time. Cold water might help keep me awake.”

“That won’t work.”

He shrugged. “They say people need less sleep as they get older.”

Siri balled her hands into fists to keep from reaching out and ruffling his thick, dark hair. “Don’t.”

“What?”

“Don’t be cute.”

Siri looked around the room rather than at Selim. He was radiating persuasive charm at the moment, and she didn’t want to be affected by it. Having him close to her
never helped when she wanted to be clear-headed. She often advised him to move out of this old building, to get rid of all his accumulated stuff, but for the moment she was glad of all the
tsatkes,
photos, and
things
he kept around. Every horizontal space was covered with the mementos of a longer-than-mortal lifespan. Things she could look at. Things she could throw if the need arose.

The carpet was old, Persian, the pattern deep red and gold and cream. Soft and thick, comfortable to sit on. Comfortable to make love on, as she well knew. Except for the computer and a thirty-two-inch television set she’d given him two years ago, the furnishings in the big penthouse were mostly from the 1920s and ’30s. They reminded Siri of the set of some sophisticated, witty old black-and-white movie. Only she was feeling far more
film noir
than screwball comedy right now.

She finally looked back at Selim. She wasn’t any calmer, nor was his look of patient concern in the least bit endearing. Having lived through one Hunt when the prey deserved to die had been bad enough. She didn’t see how she could survive one when it was murder rather than execution. Her soul wouldn’t survive that. Neither would Selim’s, and she
knew
he had a soul. “Why would you let Sterling kill that girl?”

“Not just Sterling,” he answered. “It would be a Hunt for all the strigs in town. I have to give them someone,” he went on. “Might as well be the girl.”

Her blood curdled at this matter-of-fact reply. Did he have a soul? A conscience? She swallowed bile. “Why her?”

“It’s not my choice. It’s up to Sterling.”

“But she hasn’t
done
anything!”

“There are several good reasons to let the strigs have her. A celebrity’s disappearance could focus attention away from other, less famous peoples’ going missing. The media would concentrate on a beautiful television actress rather than some homeless junkie. So would the police. I can use that to cover the nest Hunts.”

“You’d let her die as camouflage?”

“Sure. You have a problem with that?”

“Of course I have a problem!”

He looked offended. “I think it’s a pretty good idea. That is, if Sterling wants to take out a celebrity.”

“If he wants to take out a celebrity, I’m sure O. J.’d be available!”

Selim shook his head. “Too famous.”

“But Moira Chasen hasn’t done anything!”

She seemed to think that if she kept repeating this point he would finally
get
it. He had several other reasons for letting the strigs hunt the girl if Sterling was stupid enough to want a kill instead of a companion. Selim decided not to try to explain them to Siri just now. His companion seemed fixated on this innocence issue.

“If she isn’t one of us,” he told Siri with brutal frankness neither of them appreciated, “Moira Chasen is just meat.”

Siri’s skin had gone beyond pale to sickly, nauseated green. Her revulsion was nearly enough to make her faint. It radiated back at him, turning his stomach as well. She went on doggedly, “Moira is an intelligent young woman who never asked to have a vampire come into her life.”

“Neither did you.”

“We aren’t talking about us.”

“Aren’t we? You’re pretending we’re something we’re not. Very bad move, darling.”

Siri kept doggedly to her point. “Moira doesn’t deserve to die. I thought you would help her.”

“Deserve has nothing to do with it. Why would I help prey?”

“She needs to be saved from Geoff Sterling!”

“No. Geoff Sterling needs to make up his mind what to do about her.”

“What about Moira!”

“Not my species. Not my problem.”

He meant it. The callous bastard meant it! “I don’t believe what I’m hearing.”

“Yes, you do.”
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.

She flinched from his thoughts; something she’d never done before. “Don’t.”

Selim rose to his feet in one of those faster-than-the-human-eye-could-see moves that had stopped impressing her—but did this time. Siri gulped back tears. She fought fear.

“Don’t what?” he asked. There was nothing human in his cold voice. “Don’t get inside you any damn time I want because I
own
you? Don’t let them kill people? Don’t let them Hunt? I can’t stop it. I don’t want to stop it. Contain it. Control it. That’s what I do. Vampires live to hunt. That’s what they do. There is no version of PETA in the world
you
and
I
live in. Vampires for the Ethical Treatment of Humans does not exist.”

Siri jumped to her feet. “Then maybe we should start it!” She threw the ice water at him, glass and all. “And you don’t
own
me!”

“No?”

The word was an arrogant shout, both inside and outside her mind, vocal and telepathic denial ripped into and through her. The intensity of his possessive protest surprised them both. Her knees went weak as the vampire’s angry roar reverberated around the room. Siri stumbled forward. Selim grabbed her and pulled her close. His grasp was rough. The look on his face was savagely angry. He was going to kiss her. And she wanted him to.

Except that the sun came up and he passed out before he got the chance.

Siri was left to look down at the lean body crumpled on the carpet before her with nothing to show for the evening but the worst case of emotional trauma she’d ever experienced. A mindless shudder of reaction overtook her, and she had to run to the bathroom to throw up before she could do anything else. Once she finished retching and washed her face, she was able to think again, only she didn’t want to. She just wanted to get
out, get away from Selim.
Escape
was the correct word.

All right. She wanted to escape from Selim. From the life. Loving him made her an accomplice, an accessory, a participant. She couldn’t deal with that anymore. At least she couldn’t deal with it right now.

She went back to where he slept on the floor, insensible until the sun set once more. It took a great deal to fight the impulse to drag him up onto the couch or at least get a pillow and blanket for him out of the bedroom. He was a soulless creature of the night. If he woke up with a crick in his neck and an aching back from sleeping twisted up on a cold floor, he deserved it. He deserved a whole hell of a lot more. A hell of a lot worse.

A stake through the heart was what he deserved, but all she could manage was to nudge him in the ribs with her foot. “I’ve had it,” she told the sleeping monster. “I’m gone. Out of here. History. I never want to see you again.”

It was something she should have told him years ago. Or at least 385 days before.

He couldn’t hear her, of course. He didn’t even hear her slam the door on the way out, though she, at least, got some satisfaction from doing it when she gathered up some things and left—after she got him that blanket.

“Y
OU’RE NOT ASLEEP
, are you?”

No. She didn’t sleep much anymore. Valentine wasn’t quite sure what it was she did in the daylight. At least not before she took up dream riding as a recent hobby. She wasn’t awake, certainly. Not in the sense that she could get up and walk around and go to the bathroom if she wanted to. Which she did at the moment. Way too much coffee last night was proving inconvenient. Maybe it was the caffeine that kept her up, though she doubted an artificial chemical stimulant had anything to do with her state of awareness. And a very odd state of awareness it was.

Maybe it was having Yevgeny beside her. She’d been sleeping alone for a long time. How many years?

“How many years?”

He echoed her thought, but with bitterness rather than the bittersweet contentment she felt. Too many, she guessed from the tone of his voice, from the tension in the hard body stretched out next to hers. He moved, and she could hear the subtle sounds the bed made as the big man shifted his weight. She could feel his hands on her. Not just the normal things—his body heat and the
texture of his skin. She wasn’t just aware of his hands moving over her inert flesh. It was more than awareness, but not quite reaction. Memories of the night, perhaps?

Valentine didn’t want to feel. Not now. She was busy.
Come with me,
she thought to Yevgeny instead.
Come into my dreams.

No.
He laughed. She felt his finger tap the center of her forehead. “You’re not alone in there, are you?”

Never mind the vampire telepathy nonsense, she was a storyteller. Of course she was never completely alone inside her head, but that wasn’t what he meant. She wasn’t doing what he thought, not yet. She wouldn’t, if he decided to keep her company instead.

“You want to drain what I’ve learned from me. Take it without having to pay.” Yevgeny ran his fingers along her jaw and down her throat. There was tenderness there, and an implied threat.

She smiled in the only way she could, letting him feel her amusement.
You want to have your fun.

“Yes.”

Sadist.

“It goes with the territory.”

You haven’t told me anything yet.

He cupped her breasts in his hands. “I’ve been busy.”

So had she.
Tell me something now.

“She’s a pretty little thing. I asked her for a date.”

Good. Anything else?

“Aren’t you jealous?”

No.

“You’re so smug,” he said. “So superior. So beautiful.”

Goes with the territory.

He kissed a spot between her breasts. Valentine’s reaction was no sensory memory from the night before. “Distracting, isn’t it?”

He continued kissing her for awhile, in various places. Valentine decided he was just trying to be difficult, stubborn, jealous, angry, and taking it out on her
the only way he could. She didn’t tell him to stop. She didn’t tell him anything at all. She did stay half-tied to her bed, half-awake, half-alive in a way she’d never known before. That didn’t stop her from hunting in her own way, from seeking the mind she’d been riding for weeks, from hunting the story that mind didn’t know it was waiting to tell her. Selim was hiding something, protecting some important secret from her. She hadn’t been able to dance it out of him yet, not even in his wildest dreams. That made her chase of him even more exciting. She was going to have to resort to inducing his worst nightmares soon. She didn’t look forward to that, but too much depended on having the Enforcer’s story for her to give up now.

She sought, and after a while she found. He lay in a twisted heap, passed out on the floor of a room that desperately needed redecorating. He was more dead to the world than usual, sleeping as much from sheer emotional and physical exhaustion as from what their kind so evocatively referred to as the Curse of the Night. Did they still call it that? She wondered. Did they count the curses—the Hunt, the blood, the loneliness and the night?

The Goddess had certainly done a number on them in her righteously angry fit of revenge all those thousands of years ago. The Great Loneliness was the worst curse of all. Now, how did that little old Law go?
“Your lovers will become your children, and your children you may not touch.”