Master of Darkness (14 page)

Once they were at the spot where he'd knocked down the vampire, Joe tugged the leash out of Daniel's hand and put his nose to the
sand. The remnant presence of the crazy vampire didn't interest him, but the humans who had taken it away certainly did. Especially the woman. He'd recognized her as the one who'd been in the car with the Clan Prime. If he tracked her down, odds were he'd find the Prime Sid had handed the Dawn job. Which might lead him to Sid.

Sorting out the mass of scents that had been laid over the site since the day before was very difficult, but a faint impression finally emerged from the morass.

Joe looked up to find Daniel staring off at the water a distance away, and howled to get his attention. That got a
lot
of people's attention, but he wouldn't have barked even if he knew how. He
was
a werewolf; he had his pride. The howl brought the absentminded professor running, but Joe moved much faster and was waiting in the car when Daniel came pelting up, all breathless and sweaty.

“You need more exercise,” Joe observed.

“You need to put some clothes on,” Daniel answered.

Joe shrugged. “I have a towel in my lap.”

He stayed in human form only long enough to give Daniel directions, then scrunched down in the front seat and morphed, to make it easier
to catch the scent again. Running off on his own without a human helper would have been best, but it didn't do for a huge black wolf to be seen roaming the streets in daylight. It was not safe, especially for the wolf.

Tracking the scent took them through a lot of twists and turns, and Joe had to morph several times to give verbal directions, since neither he nor Daniel could communicate telepathically. It was after dark by the time they reached their destination, an ordinary apartment building. Joe had a multiple-morphing headache bad enough to make him want to snap something's head off. God help any rat that wandered out of an alley tonight.

After a thorough reconnoiter he sent Daniel home and settled down behind a thick row of bushes to wait. He was certain that this was the right place. He was equally certain that neither the woman nor the vampire was in the building. The vampire hadn't been gone long, and Joe considered following him. But something told him to wait, and he trusted his senses.

Sure enough, he hadn't been crouched in the bushes for long when the woman's car turned into the building's parking lot. She had to stop to punch in a code to open the entrance doorway. Joe took a chance and trotted out to sit in
front of the black VW Bug, directly in the glare of the headlights.

She noticed him and immediately opened the door and got out.

“Hi, Joe. What are you doing here?”

Good. She remembered him. She was also smart enough to keep the open car door between herself and the large animal in her way. She'd seen him knock a vampire to the ground. If she had a weapon, though, she didn't go for it.

Joe looked at her like a pup begging for food and tilted his head to one side, at the precise angle to produce maximum adorability.

“Okay, you're very cute. What do you want?” she asked.

He'd shown himself, he'd made himself look submissive. What more could he do? He stood and turned toward the garage entrance, pointing his elegant long snout at the door. He supposed he could whine and scratch at it, but that was going a bit overboard.

She grinned. “What is it, Lassie? Do you want the vampire? Is that it, girl?”

He growled low in the throat, and hoped she didn't hear it. He turned back to her.

As he did, she slid back into the driver's seat. Before he could spring after her, she reached
over and opened the passenger door. He didn't hesitate to jump into the car. She punched in her entry code and drove into the garage.

“I don't know why I'm doing this,” she said as she drove to an empty parking space.

She reached over and scratched between his ears. He leaned into her touch, not only to continue reassuring her that he was safe, but because it felt really good.

When she took some bags out of the back seat and got out of the car, he jumped out behind her. He trotted beside her into the elevator.

“I hope you aren't a barker,” she said when the door closed. “Because we aren't supposed to have animals in the building. I mean, having a vampire in residence is bad enough, but the neighbors would really complain about a dog—except that you aren't a dog, are you? I know a wolf when I see one. After looking at you for a while, that is.”

Okay, first off, she talked to animals. A lot of people did that, so it wasn't too strange that she was holding a one-sided conversation with him. Secondly, she took him for a wolf, and wasn't in the least bit afraid. Why?

He nudged her thigh, and she understood it for a question.

“Sid's from the Wolf Clan.” She rubbed his
head again. “So I guess that's who you belong to, right, Joe?”

Belong? His head came up, but he managed not to snarl at the woman. And in a way, she was sort of right. Long ago in the bad old days, when humans hunted them regularly, the Clans and the werefolk had made an alliance to help and protect each other. This had come to be known as the Affiliation, and werewolves naturally tended to run with the Wolf Clan. Which was one reason Sid was his partner.

When they reached the apartment, he wasn't sure what to do. He already knew the vampire was gone. And he wasn't going to morph back to human form in front of someone he didn't yet trust, simply for the sake of holding a proper conversation. But he wanted to find out what his nose could tell him.

So he followed her in and let her shut the door, though it gave him the feeling of being caged.

She put her bags down and called, “Wolf!”

Of course there was no answer. Joe found it odd that humans couldn't tell when they were alone. It was sheer numbers that made them kings of the world, because most of them didn't have any useful senses to write home about.

“Wolf?”

The small living room held a computer setup that looked like it could be used to control missions to Mars. She picked up a pad of yellow paper that had been left on the desk chair.

“Looks like he left me a note.” She glanced at it and chuckled. “It says he wasn't going to leave a note, but decided not to worry me.”

She sounded charmed, and her body chemistry changed subtly in response to thinking about the vampire. So you're turned on by this Wolf, Joe thought. But what does the note say? Any mention of Sid?

Her cell phone rang, and she put down the pad to answer it. “Wolf? What's that noise?”

“I could use a little help, sweetheart,” Joe heard the vampire answer.

“On my way. Where are you?”

“About three blocks west of the alley where we first met. On a warehouse roof.”

“Stay put. Should I bring Joe?”

“Let's leave the team out of it. Hold on.” There was a whoosh sound, then a shout. “I like this crossbow. Come alone. Hurry.”

“Stay,” the woman ordered Joe. She snatched a piece of equipment off the desk and left.

Once she was out the door, he morphed back to human form. “You kids have fun,” he murmured, and flexed his fingers. It was good to have
thumbs again. He scratched his chest, yawned, and proceeded to have a thorough look around the apartment.

He was intrigued when he found the small tape recorder on the desk. He was even more intrigued when he rewound it and began to listen.

Chapter Sixteen

L
aurent jumped off the roof as the VW pulled up to the curb. His ankles twinged a bit when he landed on the hard concrete but he was otherwise fine, as it was only a three-story drop.

Fine
was not a word that could be used for the two Manticore Primes he'd left with hawthorn wood arrows sticking out of their chests up on the flat roof of the building. Why wouldn't they just leave him alone?

Oh, yeah, the computer.

He pulled open the passenger door and tossed the laptop case into the back seat.

At last! He had the computer, retrieved from its hiding space in the aerospace museum. He was going to be rich! Even better, he was going to be free.

Laurent slid in beside Eden and grabbed her for a hard kiss. The taste of her sent his blood zinging, adding to his excitement.

“What took you so long?”

“Traffic.”

“Thanks for the pickup.” He threw his head back and cackled with glee. “Drive, my beauty. Drive.”

She gave him a quick, worried look. “You feeling all right?”

He patted her knee, then stroked farther up her shapely thigh. Her skin was warm, wonderful. “I've never felt better in my life. And you feel damn good yourself.”

She squirmed under his touch. “You're distracting me.”

“You want to pull over and fool around?”

She laughed, but her attention was on the rearview mirror.

Laurent sighed. He didn't have to look. He could feel them. “We're being followed.” He closed his eyes and concentrated. After a few moments, he said, “Hydras this time. The Manticores want me; the Hydras want you. We're a very popular couple.”

“In all the wrong circles.” She gently pushed his hand away from her thigh. “It's enough to make a girl want to stay home, with the zapper on and the covers pulled up over her head.”

“Not you,” he said, and put his hand on her shoulder this time. “You live for action, adventure, all that hunter stuff.”

“And you are Prime,” she answered, mockingly sententious. “Born to save the world.”

“Whether it wants to be saved or not.”

They shared a sardonic look and a moment of perfect understanding.

Then he remembered that he wasn't really a Prime of Clan Wolf. So the moment was a lie. And the lie twisted like a knife in his heart.

Weird
.

Laurent forced the pain away, but not before she noticed the change in him.

“What's the matter? Are you hurt?”

Her concern didn't help, so he concentrated on the situation.

“What shall we do about your Hydras?”

“Track them down to their lair and destroy them utterly?” she suggested brightly.

“That could be fun,” he agreed. “But I meant the ones behind us.”

“Lair's a silly word, isn't it?” she added.

“Right now I'd like to get back to ours. This could be a problem, since they have a telepathic fix on us.”

“I was thinking about that,” she answered. She jerked a thumb toward the back seat. “We
can be rid of them, if you don't mind having a brief headache.”

He glanced behind her. The zapper was resting next to his precious laptop.

“It's not hooked to a power source,” he tried hopefully.

“It runs on batteries as well as current.”

Great, the hunters had a portable anti-vampire weapon. “I hate we've all gone so high-tech,” he complained. “What happened to using our wits?”

“You mean your superior speed and strength against our primitive weapons?”

“And cunning,” he added. “We all used to use cunning.”

“Quit stalling. I can spend the rest of the night trying to outrun these guys, or we can disorient them and head back to base.”

He sighed. He wanted to see what was in the laptop. “Okay, we'll use the zapper. But if I go psycho violent on your ass, it's your fault.”

“You won't.”

She sounded way too confident, way too trusting. “I might,” he warned her.

“You'll have to work the controls,” she told him. “There's a timer control, so you can send out a brief pulse. We've never tried using it this way. In fact, we weren't sure it would actually work until—”

“You tortured me with it?”

“Oh, don't be such a baby. It's meant to blank out telepathy, not hurt anybody.”

He let it go, and pulled the zapper into his lap.

Headlights were coming up fast behind them now.

“I think they're going to ram us.” Eden's foot pressed down on the accelerator, and her tricked-out little Volkswagen flew down the street. She gained a block on their pursuers in a few seconds, and barely made it through a changing light at a busy intersection as it went from yellow to red. “That won't hold them for long,” she told him. “Hurry up and figure out the controls. Set it for ten seconds. No, twenty.”

He studied the zapper. “Got it.”

She slowed the car to let the vampires get closer. “Go.”

He pressed a button.

Blinding pain roared through his head. The crash of metal screamed in his ears, while a scream of agony tore from his throat. He had to get away. Had to escape.

Had to.

He had no control over his claws, or his fangs, or his muscles.

The pain—

“Now, that didn't hurt too much, did it?”

Laurent became slowly aware of the night, of the shredded upholstery, of his claws still buried in the dashboard, of the machine that was now lying heavily on his feet. He became aware of his ragged breathing, his rapid heartbeat, and the ringing in his ears.

He finally became aware of the absence of pain.

Mostly he became aware of how worried Eden was, despite her flippant question, and how sorry. But she wasn't scared of him. He'd just vamped out in a completely uncontrolled fashion, and she trusted him not to hurt her!

Her trust twisted like a double blade in his heart.

He slowly took his hands away from the dashboard and retracted his claws and fangs.

“Did it work?” he asked her.

“Yeah.” She glanced in the rearview mirror. “The Hydra driver's reaction caused a five-car pileup. I hope nobody was hurt.”

“At least nobody human.” He put back his head and closed his eyes. He desperately needed to rest.

“I left Joe at the apartment,” she said as he started to drift off. “Was that okay?”

He didn't like the idea of another hunter at
the safe house, but he wasn't up to complaining about it. “Fine,” he mumbled, and drifted off while she drove.