Luca's Magic Embrace (20 page)

Samantha’s mouth gaped open at the sight, while Luca strode in and interrupted them. He bared his fangs and roared. “Out!”

The people froze mid-coitus, the blond woman’s mascara-streaked face staring at them defiantly. Luca knelt down to the man, who appeared not to have heard his order, and glowered. “I said get out. Now move! Move! Move! Move!” he yelled.

The couple scrambled around for their clothes. Upon seeing Étienne and Xavier’s exposed fangs, they stopped looking for clothes and ran out the door. Samantha grinned.
Vampires are scary when they’re angry.

Luca slammed the door behind him, scanning the room. “This room’s all we’ve got, so let’s tear it up. There’s got to be something here. Xavier, check all the floor panels. Étienne, you check the walls and light fixtures. Samantha, you’ve got the sofa. I’ll take the equipment,” he instructed.

They spread out and started searching. Samantha was more than grossed out by the plastic-covered sofa. She shuddered to think who and what people had done on it. “Gloves,” she called out, finding a box of surgical gloves on a small table in the corner that also housed towels, sanitizing wipes and a bowl of flavored condoms. Snapping on the latex life-savers, she began to rip the cushions off and delved into the cracks, looking for a clue.

Xavier inspected the heavily worn, oak floor planks. While the floor appeared well used, it presented as if it was in good condition. Aside from a few squeaks, he couldn’t find any loose boards.

Étienne scrutinized each brick in the wall, running his fingers along the grout. Not one stone was wavered. Save a few high hat lights, there was no other illumination in the room. Each one was tightly mounted and left no room for an opening.

Having already examined the Saint Andrew’s cross and spanking bench, Luca moved on to the massage table. On first glance, the padding looked clean and uncracked. Running his fingers underneath, he felt only smooth particle board until he came upon a section that was worn. Losing patience, Luca flipped the table upside down, exposing its warped underside. He noticed that one of the corners did not seem to evenly match the rest of the seams; it was slightly raised. Digging his fingers into the juncture where the particle board met the padding, he tugged until it popped.
What the hell? 
Someone had put chewing gum inside the backing as makeshift glue. It had hardened into nothing more than a small tacky spud, yet it had held tight.

Luca peeled back the panel until he spied a flattened cocktail napkin. He carefully removed it and called the others over. “Got something. A napkin. Looks like there’s writing on it, but it doesn’t make sense. Samantha, take a look.” Luca surmised it was not a foreign language, and sincerely hoped it wasn’t nonsense. It simply read, “
NIJE QN QSMGIOT.
”

Samantha gently took the tissue paper into her hands and unfolded it. Her eyes widened in surprise, unexpectedly realizing she’d written it. “Oh my God, Luca. I wrote this; it’s my handwriting. I know what this is; it’s a code. A code to conceal a message. Knowing me, I probably created a cipher. My co-workers and I sometimes play encryption games with them. You know, create codes and see who can break it. I wouldn’t have used something easy, though.”

“Can you break it?” he asked.

“Probably, but I need to think about how I created it, and I can’t think in here.” She fingered the napkin and held it to her chest as if it was made of gold. This clue could give her back her life. Excitement coursed through her body; she could feel the tendrils of magic stirring under her skin.

“Let’s go everyone, we’ve gotta get out of here,” Luca ordered. “The back door. It leads to an outside alley. Although it looks like someone decided to lock it up good, since the last time we were here. Stand back while I break it.” Luca went over to the door, the same one Samantha had used to leave after she’d silvered Dominique. Obviously management wasn’t crazy about people using it as an exit, so they’d put a chain and lock on it. Whoever thought a chain would stop a supernatural was a dumbass, Luca thought. He knew a simple steel chain wouldn’t keep vampires from breaking it, so why bother? Luca wrapped the steel chain around his fists, grunting as he broke it apart. He kicked the door open, and they all took off down the alleyway.

Samantha started to analyze the code as soon as they got into the car. She couldn’t wait to get home to crack it. On the precipice of solving the mystery, she smiled to herself. Inwardly, she celebrated the fact that despite all Asgear’s efforts to control her mind, some small part of her couldn’t be controlled. The code was evidence that she probably had stolen the periapt, and had taken great care to hide it from him. Yet despite her small victory, its clandestine location had drawn a very powerful and dangerous vampire into her circle. She prayed she’d find it before he found her again.

After taking a hot shower, Samantha checked her cell phone for the hundredth time. Neither Rowan nor Ilsbeth had attempted to log into the database. She was still feeling exhilarated from finding the code. Wrapping herself warmly in Luca’s robe, she held it to her nose and inhaled his masculine scent. Samantha shook her head, knowing that Luca was stealing her heart. She could feel herself falling for him, and wasn’t sure how or if she wanted to stop it. All she knew for certain was that she was going to find it very difficult to go back to Pennsylvania without him after they found the amulet.

She sighed in defeat, conceding that her heart might break into a million pieces if she didn’t have him in her life. Even though they’d only just made love, she felt as if she’d known him forever. She wasn’t one to just have sex with any guy. But on a whim, she had given in to her most carnal desire and let him make love to her. In the aftermath, she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was the one for her. She wished it wasn’t true. He probably had a thousand women on speed dial who’d come willingly running to service him…to be his donor or whatever else he needed.
How could she leave her heart open to a vampire?
The answer didn’t matter, because it was already done. Samantha contemplated whether or not she should move to New Orleans. As the thought popped into her head, she laughed to herself. Just a day ago, she’d been kicking and screaming to stay away from that city. But now there was Luca. And Luca was in New Orleans.

As she walked out into the kitchen, he was putting out sandwiches on the large granite bar. There was something heartwarming about seeing a large, sexy man preparing food for her.

“Hi there, the sandwiches look great,” she said.

“Hey, beautiful. Thought you might be hungry. I had Kade’s cook bring over something to eat, so you’d have strength to work. And to play with me,” he joked, pushing a plate towards her. “But work before play. So first, let’s take a look at the code while you eat, shall we?”

She took a healthy bite of turkey, and looked at the code: “
NIJE QN QSMGIOT
” What did it mean?

“So here’s the thing. When I do my ciphers, I usually use something called a date shift cipher. That way, I can stack the ciphers when I’m trying to make it really hard to decode. Also, all I have to do is change the dates and it will change the codes. I wrote a program that can run through figuring out a date cipher, so that’s not the problem. The real challenge is finding out what date I used.”

“I’ve heard of date ciphers. It’s going to make this tough to crack without the date,” Luca commented. When he’d joined the war, they’d often put their messages into codes; if captured by the enemy, they were indecipherable without the key date.

“Yes, you’re right. So what code would I have used?” she spoke aloud to herself.

“A birthday?” Luca suggested.

“No, too easy. I did this all the time at the office. Sometimes I would use someone else’s birthday, but given that I don’t know anyone down here, I don’t think I would have done that. A family member’s birthday would, again, be too easy. Sometimes I’d pick dates of important events. Things that only I would know,” she explained.

“Your graduation date, perhaps?” Luca realized in that moment that he didn’t know that much about her past; something he fully intended to investigate once they’d found the amulet.

“Maybe. I have used my high school graduation date in the past. Can you get me your laptop? I want to pull over my date cipher program from my home server, and try it.” Samantha was starting to worry that she wouldn’t be able to find the date. It literally could be any date, past, present or future.

Luca booted up the laptop and set it in front of her. He watched as she typed away; she chewed her lip, concentrating on what she was doing. He loved seeing her in his home, wrapped up in his black velour robe. She pushed the reddish curls of her freshly washed hair behind her ears as she waited for the program to open.

“Okay, read me the code,” she instructed and typed it into the space designated for it. “I’m going to try my high school graduation date, which was June 23, 1999. So what happens is that the computer will take all this information and work backwards to see if we come up with something that makes sense based on the code and date variables. In a date shift cipher, the date is generated sequentially without the slashes over and over. The letters of the alphabet are assigned to each number. So then you take your message, and the code assigns a letter based upon how many spaces you need to shift,” she explained.

“Can you give me a quick example before it runs?” It had been a long time since he’d deciphered a code on the battlefield and wanted to make sure he correctly understood.

“Sure. So my graduation date would be written like this.” She wrote down the number sequence, six, two, three, nine, and nine and continued, “So I would write the numbers over and over again until I had a little more than the alphabet. Like this.” She drew out the numbers until they were all the way over. “Then I would add the alphabet underneath, like this. So if I was looking to code the word, “sex” for example, I would go to the
S
which tells me to move over spaces. So the S turns into a
B
, the
E
turns into an
N
and the
X
turns into a
G
. So the code would be BNG. But still, you’d need to know the date I used in order to crack the code. But again, if you’d been given the secret code, BNG, you would need to know the date in order to solve the code.”

Luca laughed. “You’re brilliant! Perhaps in need of some lovin’, but brilliant,” he teased. He came around the bar and sat next to her to watch what happened online.

She smiled over at him but turned serious again as she watched the progress of the program. Within seconds, it finished bringing up the message. It made no sense, which meant the date was incorrect.

“Shit. That’s not it. You know what they say? Garbage in, garbage out. We need the right date,” she huffed.

Samantha closed her eyes and put her hands to her forehead trying to rack her brain for the correct date. Luca rubbed her neck while she concentrated.
Think. Think. What date would I have used? I was in a hurry. In danger. Scared.
It occurred to her that maybe she’d used the day she was taken by Asgear. It would have been fresh in her mind, something she’d want to remember. She reached back into her mind to search for the date but couldn’t seem to do it without a visual calendar in front of her.

Opening her eyes, she pulled up her calendar on the screen. “August. I was taken in August. August 11, 2012.” She flipped back to the cipher program and typed in eight, one, one, one, two and pushed enter.

Luca and Samantha watched patiently as the program worked backwards through the sequence to find out the code. Within seconds, the screen came up with a message:
MAID OF ORLEANS
.

“Maid of Orleans? What’s that?” Samantha asked.

“Maid of Orleans,” Luca said thoughtfully. “The Maid of Orleans is a statue of Joan of Arc. It was given to the city by France in the seventies. I’m not sure what we’ll find there but we’ve got our next lead. You did it, Samantha!”

Samantha was overwhelmed with relief that Luca knew what the message meant. She was one step closer to freedom. “Where’s the statue? Why would I have been there?”

Luca went over to the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of champagne. He talked as he uncorked it and poured it into flutes. “The statue’s in the French Quarter over near the French Market on Decatur. It’s not far from Sangre Dulce. Maybe wherever Asgear took you first, he had to walk you past it to get to the club. I’m not sure, but perhaps somehow you got away long enough to hide it. It might have taken only a few minutes to feign an escape, plant another clue or the amulet and then agree to go to the club.”

“Joan of Arc, huh? Kind of ironic, isn’t it?” Samantha commented.

“Ah yes, Joan of Arc. She was accused of witchcraft, and yet a very real witch chooses her as the place to drop the next clue.” He grinned wryly, handing her a glass.