Possession-Blood Ties 2 (24 page)

“So, if I’m a person of interest, then you must know something of what’s going on with the Soul Eater.” I waved her smoke away with feigned annoyance.

“I know he’s up to something. But you probably know more than I do, considering you’ve come all the way out here.” March leaned back in her chair. “I suppose you thought I’d

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have all the answers? And that I’d just give them to you?”

Helplessly, I nodded. “Stupid me, I guess. I just thought your vampire daddy might be keeping you in the loop.”

She chewed her lip, regarding me indecisively. Then she took a deep breath and exhaled noisily. “You’re looking for the guy in the desert?”

I reached for my bag, only to remember it was still in the foyer. “I have money. I’ll pay.”

“Don’t bring the vulgarity of money into this.” She pondered a moment, a look akin to pride on her face. “I wonder what kind of kickback I’ll get if I hand you over to Jacob.”

“You’ll get killed.” I racked my brain for any detail I could use to sway her, any warning. The truth seemed the best way to go. “He’s trying to become a god. I admit, I don’t know the guy real well, but with a name like Soul Eater, I don’t want him having cosmic power. Fledgling or not, you have to admit, if he manages to go through with this, everyone is fucked.”

“It will be the end of the human race and eventually the vampire race, blah blah blah.” She sighed, making a jabbering duck mouth with one hand as she rang a silver bell with the other. “He’s talked about doing something like this for years. Worked on it a bit with his son, actually. But he’s never going to pull it off.”

“Oh, yeah?” I snapped. “Guess who’s been raised from the dead?”

To her credit, her surprise didn’t show as much as it could have. She ground out her cigarette with a muffled curse. After a long moment squinting at me with barely veiled resentment, she conceded defeat. “I love Jacob with all my heart. But loving isn’t the same as trusting, by a long shot. What do you need from me to get your part of this done?”

“I don’t have any connections here. I need a road map, at least. And old newspapers, if you have them.” Where the Fangs went, chaos followed. There was no chance a sleepy area like Death Valley was going to miss marauding hordes of vampires. Something was going to end up in print.

With a long-suffering sigh, she lifted the silver bell that rested at her right hand and rang it again. The butler appeared and bent stiffly in deference to his mistress. March handed off the saucer she’d turned into an ashtray, then massaged the bridge of her nose with her fingers. “Have you taken the recycling to be done?”

Recycling? At least, March had an environmental conscience, if no other kind. Eyeing me with distaste, the servant cleared his throat. “I believe that takes place every other Thursday.”

“Load the newspapers in the back of her van. Just the local ones.” She turned to me again and arched a brow. “Unless you think scouring the New York Times would help?”

“Was there anything out of the ordinary in them? Anything at all you can remember that seemed…more sensational than usual?” Of course, I supposed sensational was relative to a man who worked in a vampire whorehouse.

“I am sorry, miss, I do not read them.” Turning back to March, he asked, “Will that be all, ma’am?”

She nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”

With another stiff bow, he left us.

“Sorry I couldn’t be of more help. We’ll make sure you get the proper supplies for your trip.” She grinned, looking pleased with herself.

I was still convinced she hid something. “Thanks for the hospitality.” I hoped she felt the

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sarcasm of my words as a bite.

“Well, sweetness, I got a whole bunch of human business coming in tonight. Episcopal Women’s Altar Society bus trip. Told their husbands they’re going to a Bible summit on gay marriage.” She stood, indicating I should do the same. I could take a hint. She was done supplying me with information that would lead to the death of her sire. “Just one last question?”

After a moment’s hesitation, she nodded. “Why not?”

“How come he didn’t take your soul?” We began to walk down the path. I thought perhaps she’d decided not to answer.

Then, without a hint of deception or theatrics, she said simply, “He took someone else’s.”

A chill went through me at the memory of how he’d taken Cyrus’s wife, Elsbeth, without a thought for his son’s happiness.

March shrugged, as though the fact her soul was spared by the death of another’s was par for the course. “I’m not going to say it was right. But I’m glad it wasn’t me who died.”

I believe there is a defining moment in everyone’s life where they seal their own fate through words or actions. My parents did it when they got in their car to visit me in college and, six hours later, wound up bleeding to death on the side of the road. I’d done it when I’d gone to the morgue to view Cyrus’s body, and he’d gone from being another John Doe to the creature who haunted my nightmares. A creeping wave of icy foreboding seized me. I couldn’t tell when, I couldn’t know how, but I knew March had already set in motion the events that would lead to her death.

“You’re not dead yet,” I reminded her, my throat suddenly dry. “But you will be.”

My warning didn’t alarm her as much as I imagined it should have. “Well, we’ll all be gone someday. No sense in fearing it.”

“I’ve died. Fear it.”

We sized each other up for a grueling minute. I would have paid several thousand dollars to know what she thought, but her mask of emotional obscurity was firmly in place. “Last town before the true desert is Louden. Drive like hell and you can get there before sunup.”

I didn’t see March again after she left me in the foyer. She didn’t say goodbye, so much as

“pleasure doing business with you,” and even then I didn’t truly believe it. The supplies that had been removed from my bag were returned to me, along with some I doubted I’d have any use for: sleeping pills, chloroform, bungee cords and gauze bandages. I looked them over and raised my eyebrows at the butler.

“For ‘human wrangling.’ The madam’s idea.” He didn’t sound enthused to be supporting me.

From an inside jacket pocket, he produced a map. “You’ll find the most efficient route to Death Valley is highlighted.”

“Why is she helping me, when she wouldn’t bother giving me a straight answer before?” I took my bag, heavy with its new cargo, and tucked the map into my jeans pocket. As I trudged wearily to the door, grateful to be out of this place, the butler’s voice stopped me.

“Perhaps she does not think you’ll succeed. Did it occur to you she might be helping you to your death?” His imperious tone was beginning to get on my nerves. “But I believe it is more a case of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’”

I didn’t turn to face him, and resumed walking, pausing only to open the door. “I won’t fail. This is a cakewalk compared to what I’ve been through.”

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“The madam also wishes you to know that if she sees you again, she will kill you on sight.”

I stepped out into the cool Nevada evening. The stars seemed to shine brighter here, and hung so close I almost felt I could touch them. The sight grounded me in the gravity and reality of what lay ahead of me.

I had most of the puzzle pieces. Now it was just a matter of fitting them together.

“She won’t see me again.” I took a deep breath of the fresh desert air. “But tell her I said ditto.”

When I left, I didn’t look back. I think I expected to see the place had been a mirage, evaporated into heat waves in the air.

The vampires sent to fix the door woke them. Cyrus held Mouse, who clung to him in mortal terror as the two creatures respectfully retrieved the broken door and carried it up the stairs. They apologized in advance for the noise they would make. Cyrus expected them to bow and scrape as they exited, such was their cautious demeanor. Angie had most likely put the fear of God—or, more aptly, the fear of Angie—into them.

“They’re gone,” he whispered to Mouse when the vampires had trudged noisily up the stairs. “You don’t have to fear them.”

It felt like a lie the moment he said it. Hadn’t he proved himself useless in protecting her?

If she connected his words with his shameful failure before, she didn’t give it away. She let go of him by increments, easing into her space on the narrow bed. They lay in the quiet darkness for a while, listening to the low voices of the vampires working at the top of the stairs. Occasionally, a mechanical whirring or rhythmic pounding shattered the calm, but Cyrus was so tired he could have slept through it.

He didn’t, though. Polite or not, he wasn’t stupid enough to trust the creatures. Not when they had such easy access to prey.

Mouse apparently didn’t trust them, either. Though Cyrus had thought her asleep, her voice surprised him. “It’s still night?”

“You haven’t been asleep long.” A nagging protectiveness in his head reminded him she should get her rest. But a selfish part of him was relieved she stayed awake. He liked talking with another person, something he hadn’t done enough of during his former life, and he feared the changes that were about to come.

Oh, he’d probably be turned into a vampire. As much as he wanted to stay human, if his father demanded otherwise he could do little but object. The deed would still be done. But he would make certain that Mouse never met the fate his past wives had. She would never be a vampire, and therefore would never be food for his father’s insatiable craving for souls. That, he would not abide.

“What were you like, when you were one of them?” The question was startlingly familiar. The memory brought hot shame to his face. “I told you.”

“You didn’t answer. You tried to scare me. I’m not scared of you now.” As if to prove her words, she reached up to brush the hair from his eyes. He didn’t want to admit the truth, but he wouldn’t taint their new bond with lies. “I was trying to scare you. But I told you the truth. I’ve done…horrible things.”

Her eyes, clear and honest, searched his face in the darkness. “Why would you do those things?”

It wasn’t a question he’d bothered to ask himself. The first answer that came to mind, the

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one most likely to be true, was monstrous, but he had no other reason to give her.

“Boredom?”

The fear and disgust he expected never registered on her face. “You killed and tortured people because you were bored?”

He made an affirmative noise in his throat. “And lonely.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” Her frown evolved into a quirked smile. “Of course you’d be lonely, if you killed everyone around you.”

“Not everyone. There were some I tried to keep.” He tightened his arms around her.

“Now that I have you, I don’t remember why I wanted to keep them.”

“I like that.” She laughed quietly and nestled her head against his chest. “You have me. It’s nice to belong to someone.”

After a long silence, she looked up. “What were they like?”

He didn’t want to talk about them now. It seemed wrong, somehow, as though he lived a double life. In a way, you have. It was a different life, but he couldn’t forget it. If he forgot his past transgressions, he might forget how to be the man he was now. And he liked that man.

“I had a wife.” He chuckled at that understatement. “I had many wives. Ten, I think. After five, it becomes hard to remember. And then there were others, ones I didn’t marry.”

“Did you love them?” There was an unspoken qualifier at the end of her question, punctuated by the quaver in her voice.

“I didn’t love them more than you.” It was a frightening truth. He’d mourned them all, but he’d come to expect losing them.

The workmen, apparently finished with their job, shut the door with a reassuring bang. Cyrus thought of locking it, but since it hadn’t kept out intruders before, he didn’t see the sense in leaving the comfort of the bed.

“Did you make any vampires?” Mouse fidgeted as though embarrassed by asking. He was about to answer, “What would it matter?” Then he realized the reason for her interest, and he couldn’t believe his stupidity. Of course she wondered.

“I would never make you become one of them.” He sat up, dragging her with him. He knew the tight grip he had on her arms must hurt her, but he couldn’t let her go. She had to understand his devotion was not dependent on his humanity. “Tell me you trust me.”

“I trust you,” she said hesitantly. “You wouldn’t make me one of them.”

“Tell me you love me.” It was suddenly vitally important to hear it from her, without explanation or dissection of their motives.

“I love you.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “I do.”

They made love again, frantic at first, with fierce kisses as they tumbled violently across the bed. Once he was inside her, though, wrapped in the reassuring warmth of her body, the urgency melted away.

Leaning above her on his elbows, he stared into her face. “Tell me again.”

She wet her swollen lips and pressed them close to his ear. “I love you.”

She repeated it over and over, and he let her.

No one had ever said it to him before.

15

The Key

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I f not for Carrie’s extensive library of medical textbooks, Bella wouldn’t have survived an hour past sunrise.

And that was saying something, considering how close Max had cut it to sunup. He’d skidded sideways to the curb in front of the apartment just as morning washed down the street in a deadly wave. He’d dragged her body from the passenger seat with little care and bolted to the shelter of the recessed doorway.