Laws of the Blood 1: The Hunt Read online

  “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.

  Chapter 8

  “YOU’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 el
se?

  “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.”

  Yevgeny was right. She was distracted. Or maybe it was just some kind of residual guilt popping to the surface at what she’d been doing with Selim. She didn’t have time for guilt. And what was that boy doing on his living room floor? What had he been doing that tired him out like that? She concentrated on finding out, on settling onto him, softer and more encompassing than the blanket he was wrapped in. Never mind that Yevgeny’s body now covered hers. She settled into Selim.

  Dream it all out, my child, Valentine whispered. Tell Mama why you’re so sad.

  “Okay, I admit to being a hypocrite,” Siri said. She paced back and forth across the living room with the phone held to her ear while her friend waited patiently for her to continue.

  Siri lived and worked in a stately old house in Pasadena. She was a matchmaker; an old-fashioned job, perhaps, but she made a good living at it. While she used all the latest in electronic gadgets to impress her clientele, she relied on a natural-born talent for putting people together. Even when her own world began to fall apart, her hit ratio among human couples hadn’t suffered. She hadn’t been open for business today, hadn’t returned any client calls or E-mail. What did it matter if she helped people find true love when Selim thought it was perfectly all right to feast on any mortal that happened to be in the neighborhood when he was feeling peckish?

  “It’s not as if I didn’t know that they kill people,” she went on. “I know they get off on stalking people.”

  “It’s part of the hunting instinct.”

  “But I saw what they do to any human who dares to stalk them. And what he plans for this young actress is completely unacceptable. And it’s my fault. I took her problem to Selim. If she dies, it’s going to be my fault. I can’t warn her. I mean, who believes in vampires, for God’s sake?”

  “Siri, maybe you should come over.”

  This was not a conversation she should be having on the phone. At the very least, she should be using euphemisms. Security was always an issue. Secretiveness imperative for survival. Face-to-face was always the preferred communication method among them, or mind-to-mind. “You know that’s forbidden,” she reminded Cassie.

  “Not for you.”

  “Not for the Enforcer’s companion, you mean. I’m not. We broke up.”

  Cassie’s laughed sharply. “Yeah, right.”

  She was wearing a hole in the carpet with her pacing. She hadn’t been able to sleep today. She’d called Cassie the instant the sun set. “Really,” she told Cassandra. “Selim doesn’t care. You know what he’s been like lately.”

  “Inattentive?”

  “He’s a heartless bastard. Besides, I’ve met someone else.”

  Cassie laughed again. “Sure you have.”

  “I have.” She made herself think about the arrogant blond. It wasn’t easy. She told herself she was just too used to thinking about a skinny Egyptian jerk. “He’s a companion. Gorgeous—in an Aryan master race kind of way. He was a companion, actually. Knows exactly what I’ve been going through.”

  “How?”

  “Some strig dumped him.”

  “What strig?”

  “I don’t know. Yevgeny won’t tell me.”

  “You can’t just dump a companion.” Cassie was outraged. “It’s—”

  “Against the rules. I know.”

  “It’s against nature.”

  “So’s being what you are.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “It’s not your fault. Yevgeny wants to see me,” Siri hurried on before she and her best friend got into an argument. “He’s interested. Says he hangs at the Viper Room, and I should meet him there. I’ve never been to the Viper Room. What should I wear? Something black?”

  “Black is good . . . since you’ll be going to this guy’s funeral when Selim finds out about it.”

  That sounded so sweet. It just didn’t ring true right now. “I don’t know if I’m going,” she told Cassie. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” About anything. The phone signaled, and Siri sighed. “Got another call.”

  “It might be Selim.”

  If it was, she’d hang up. Surely she had enough independence left to do that. Time to forget about Selim. Move on. “It might be work,” she told Cassie. “I’m going to concentrate on my work for now.”

  “And hope the Hunt passes you by?”

  Siri didn’t answer the question. She hung up on the vampire. There was a vampire on the other line, but it wasn’t Selim. She hung up on him anyway.

  “You’re having trouble with your love life.” It wasn’t a question.

  Selim put his feet up on the couch and shifted the phone to his other ear. He’d woken up from a day filled with really bad dreams to the sound of a ringing telephone. He hadn’t expected the voice he heard when he answered, but he adapted quickly. “It happens,” he responded. “Everybody has problems.” Bloodsucking fiends are people, too, he added to himself. He didn’t mention this thought to the caller. Don Tomas wasn’t exactly famous for his sense of humor.

  “This is no time for it to happen.”

  Selim did not appreciate the reminder. “I need her eyes and ears and other gifts,” he agreed.

  “You need to be clearheaded when the rest of us can’t be.”

  “Thank you very much for that reminder, Don Tomas,” Selim answered acidly. “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you take over my job in this town?”

  Selim expected outrage in response, arrogant denial that Tomas Avella was that kind of man. Or at least haughty silence. Instead Don Tomas answered, “Cassandra would like that.”

  Selim’s feet hit the floor with a painful thud as he sat up quickly. “Do you know what you’re saying?”

  “That there would be no vampires in this town if I could hunt them.”

  “Tomas—” Selim warned. “Careful.” That the old vampire felt no compunction about using such blunt language over the phone shook Selim.

  Tomas took no heed. “I would do anything to protect my son. To protect my family. They’ll kill him if they get the chance. You know that.”

  Selim shuddered. Had Tomas been walking inside his dreams today? Or were they shari
ng a dream? Or was there a vision they were sharing? He was too polite to ask, but he did promise, “I won’t let that happen.”

  “I prefer the safety of my loved ones to be in my own hands, Selim. I’ve already sired a monster. I could change into one for his sake.”

  “No, you couldn’t, Tomas. Do you really want to?”

  “No. Got your attention, though, didn’t I, Hunter?”

  Selim relaxed. He laughed. The sound was unconvincing to his ears, but acknowledging Don Tomas’s words as a joke was better than pursuing them as treason. Don Tomas would never have been so direct, so out of line, if the bloodburn wasn’t starting in him. People said stupid things when the hunger got them. Got reckless. They all thought they could rule the world, have everything their hearts desired, run in the daylight just because they wanted to.

  “You’ve reminded me to look out for Sebastian,” he told Don Tomas. “Believe me, I will.”

  “With your thoughts distracted by your own problems? Can I trust you to keep the Laws when your own house is in chaos?”

  “We’re not in chaos. We’re just . . . What are you suggesting? That we go to a marriage counselor? Are you offering your services as one?” There was vast amusement in the silence on the other end of the phone. Selim smiled. He got up and walked to the balcony with the cordless phone tucked under one ear. He already knew that she wasn’t waiting at the Jamba Juice bar up the street. He stepped outside and looked that way anyway. “I miss her.”

  “It drives you crazy,” Don Tomas said in his ear. “But you have to do it.”

  It wasn’t advice, it was just the truth. Selim went back into the living room. “It won’t get in the way of my job.”

  “Good. What about Jager?”

  Selim knew that this question was the real reason Don Tomas had called. “Just a friendly reminder?”

  “Exactly. You’ll be taking care of the problem soon?”

  Selim was restless and wanted to pace. He sat back on the couch. “Tonight.”