“An impermanent arrangement?” Lily asked. “What is that to you, a hundred years or so?”
Tynan’s eyes went arctic. “The alternative is to just give you to Damien once you’ve outlived your usefulness. He’d find you in a heartbeat anyway. Is that what you’d prefer?”
“How do I know I can trust you?” she asked, voicing her greatest worry. This stranger expected her to run into the darkness with him. She didn’t want to be his next meal.
He smirked, but it was humorless, and Lily felt a chill as she saw just a hint of the remorseless killer in him.
“You don’t, of course. But you have my word, for what it’s worth,” he said, extending his hand to seal the agreement. “I can’t bite you, Lily. If you’re a true Seer, vampire venom will rob you of your ability, and I’ve got a vested interest in preserving that. An invisible curse stalks the dynasty I serve, the House of Ptolemy. Without a Seer to show Arsinöe, the Ptolemy queen, who the source of the evil is, her people will cease to exist. And if I fail to provide that Seer, or even if the one I find turns out to be more a danger than a help, then I
also
cease to exist.”
His words pulled at her despite herself, despite how little she understood. He looked so haunted in that instant that Lily was unable to resist the unfamiliar urge to comfort and soothe.
“I’m so sorry about your people,” she began, but stopped short when something dangerous flickered across Tynan’s face. It was a forceful reminder that whatever separated him from the creatures trying to kill her, it wasn’t much. They were all vampires. Monsters, if even a handful of the legends about them were true.
“They’re not
my people
,” he said in a harsh growl. “I am no Ptolemy.”
Lily blinked, confused both by his statement and his sudden anger.
“But I thought—”
“I’m a hunter, nothing more, though one with a very important job. Enough discussion. What we need to know won’t be found close by, and I don’t have much time. Damien ran off, but he won’t stay gone for long.”
She had no chance to either accept or deny it. Tynan
was at her side in a flash of motion, grabbing her by the arm to haul her from the room. He didn’t hurt her, exactly, but his grip was like a vise, and the abrupt change in him surprised Lily into compliance. She allowed herself to be pulled out the front door, struggling to keep up with Tynan’s long stride.
He paused on the little walk outside the door, tipping his head back to scent the air. Lily watched him with her heart in her throat. She wasn’t sure which was worse: to have this over and done with now, courtesy of Damien the psychopathic vampire assassin, or to head for whatever was waiting for her. A vampire queen? A group of vampires who called themselves the Ptolemy? Ptolemy. That name pricked at her memory. She knew it from somewhere….
“In the car,” Tynan said, jerking Lily back to the present.
He seemed satisfied with whatever he had (or hadn’t) smelled in the night air. Panicked that this was all happening so fast, she tried to stall. But she’d already come too far.
“But… but I don’t have my keys…. ”
He dangled them in front of her face, glinting silver in the moonlight. “In the car,” he repeated, looking pleased for once when she was speechless. It didn’t last long.
“My purse,” she began, taking a perverse sort of pleasure in his grimace even as he propelled her toward the car.
“There’s nothing in it you’ll need.”
“But… damn it, Tynan, wait!” she cried, digging in her heels as he switched from pushing to pulling. Her efforts accomplished nothing against the strength he was exerting, and to her dismay, he didn’t even look like he was trying. She whipped her head around to look at her
house, the front door neatly closed, concealing the mess inside that would inevitably be discovered, and soon.
It would look bad, very bad, to whoever found it. They would know she was gone.
They would think she was dead.
Maybe she would be.
“I have no clothes, no money, not even a damned toothbrush. Tynan…
wait
!”
It was the anguish in her cry that probably stopped him. He turned to look at her, those silver eyes, so very feline in the darkness, gleaming with light that could only have come from within. Lily held out a moment’s hope that he would see what he was doing, see how he was tearing her away from a life that she loved, a life that she needed, without even a moment to gather herself, to set things right—without even saying good-bye.
“You promise you’ll bring me back,” she said, desperate even for a believable lie. “This is all I have.”
She didn’t know why she’d said it, why she’d told a complete stranger the sad truth of her life. But there it was, laid out for him. And she saw something in the way he looked at her, some flicker of pity that made her want to weep. He might well betray her. But in that moment, she saw that he understood exactly how she was feeling.
“I promise you, I’ll return you once this is done. But until then, you have your life, and you have me. Those things are all you’ll need. Understood?”
Lily clung to that. She had to. “I… understand.”
He moved in a blur then, wrenching open the car door and bundling her into the passenger seat before Lily could collect her thoughts enough to say another word. As the engine started and Tynan backed quickly out of the driveway, all
she could think was that no matter what happened after this, the life she’d loved, that she’d so carefully built, was over as she’d known it. There was, however, the faintest glimmer of hope in all this darkness. She might get to know, finally know, what she’d been cursed with all these years. She might even discover how to contain it, control it, and, of course, use it to escape once she’d come up with a viable plan.
She stayed silent as they tore off down her street, leaving her house and all the trappings of her existence it contained behind them. In the rearview mirror, Lily watched it go, a single, treacherous tear escaping to trail down her cheek.
She was in the hands of a beautiful monster now.
And like it or not, she was headed back into the darkness.
T
Y’S SLEEK BLACK
Lexus slid through the night, racing down the highway at speeds that wouldn’t have been possible without a very expensive, very illegal radar detector installed in the dash. They’d spent the day sleeping in some nondescript little city in Eastern Pennsylvania, and delayed leaving this evening so that Lily could pick up some clothing and essentials. She’d been impressively quick with her choices; he’d give her that. But though he wasn’t a man who enjoyed a lot of noise and excitement, the chilly silence from his new charge had become nearly suffocating. Filling the wordless abyss of the last twenty-four hours with one-sided conversation fragments of his own had gone from odd to irritating, to just deeply depressing, very quickly.
It must have been the reason that Lily’s voice, when she finally spoke, sent hot little sparks of pleasure coursing through his system instead of simple relief.
“So we’re going to Chicago,” she said without looking
at him, her voice soft and low. “To some woman you used to work with?”
“Her name is Anura,” Ty said, sneaking a quick glance at Lily’s fine profile, at the determined set of her jaw. He looked away again when those pleasant little flickers of heat turned a bit too intense for his liking.
“She owns a club in Chicago called Mabon. Has for over a hundred years now.”
“A
vampire
club.”
Now she just sounded disgruntled, and he fought back a smile. She would get used to blood drinkers soon enough.
“A vampire club,” Ty agreed. “And a very good one. It’s one of the few that manage to be neither exclusively highblood nor exclusively lowblood. A difficult balance, but she makes it work. I didn’t work with her so much as she helped me out a few times when I badly needed it. Anura’s a good woman. And with her background, I think she’ll be able to identify your mark, or point us in the right direction if she can’t. She’s a highblood herself, and a very old one,” Ty continued, remembering how different Anura’s situation had been when he’d met her. “Even if the Empusae refuse to call her their sister anymore.”
“Highbloods and lowbloods,” she repeated with a sigh. “It all sounds a little… archaic.”
The displeasure in Lily’s voice quickly gave way to confusion, and a weariness that would pull at him if he let it.
“You’re used to living in the daylight world, Lily,” Ty replied gently, gladder than he should have been that she was finally engaging him. He knew he should be hard, cold, the sort of hunter and killer he’d spent years becoming. But sitting here, enveloped in her scent and all too
aware of the pain he’d already caused her, Ty felt himself softening, responding to instincts he didn’t even know he had.
“My world isn’t anything like yours, though we walk the same streets, live in the same cities,” he continued. “Where I come from, blood is power. Your mark is your destiny. And humans are either food, slaves, or pretty toys to be enjoyed and then thrown away. If you want to avoid becoming any or all of those things, then you need to pay close attention to what I’m telling you.”
“Okay, see, you’ve lost me already,” Lily said. “What do you mean, your mark is your destiny? What mark?”
In answer, he lifted his hand to his collar and pulled it down, exposing his right collarbone. He heard Lily’s sharp intake of breath and knew she’d made the connection.
“Oh my God.”
His mark had been a part of him for so long that he didn’t even see it anymore when he looked in the mirror. But he knew it intimately—it was who he was, who his sire, the sadistic bastard, had dictated he become: the Celtic knot formed of stretching cats, midnight black. And in the background, large enough that the knot looked to be affixed to its center, the ankh of the Ptolemy. The first mark had made him an outcast.
The second had made him a slave.
“My sire was a Cait Sith,” Ty said calmly, feeling the heat of Lily’s gaze on his skin. From the corner of his eye, he saw her hand flutter to touch her own collarbone. He pulled the fabric back over his mark and returned his hand to the wheel. “It’s a bloodline without a leader, with no centralized power. Tainted with Fae blood, it’s said, and it may well be true. We have our talents, of course:
The cat-shifting is useful, and we’re incredibly good hunters, even among creatures whose senses are naturally far beyond those of humans. But we’re still considered lowbloods. Gutterbloods, many would say.” He tried to keep the old bitterness out of his voice. He’d had to accept a long time ago that in the world that was the night’s underbelly, there were some things that were simply beyond his control.
“And… how does the mark get there?”
He knew she was wondering about the intricate marking on her own collarbone.
Just as he wondered.
“When you’re sired, which is to say when you’re made a vampire by another one, part of the whole deal is that after they drink from you, you drink from them. At least if you want to keep living. Their blood brands you. I don’t know how else to describe it,” Ty said. “But the mark appears the moment your change is complete. It can be modified,” he continued, remembering the way his blood had burned when the ankh had been added, the way his Cait Sith blood had rebelled against even that single drop of Ptolemy blood. “But it can never be removed. It’s how we’re known. It’s who we are.”
It was odd, talking about all of this to someone else. He had never sired another and had sworn he never would. He would never do to another what had been done to him, condemning someone else to a life with a mark that invited derision, fear, and often poverty.
It was as though she could hear his thoughts. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Lily watching him with intense curiosity.
“And who are you, then, Tynan MacGillivray? You told
me you’re not actually one of these Ptolemy you’re working so hard to protect. So what does your mark say to other vampires?”
“The most important thing it says is that I’m a lowblood.” He shrugged. “That makes me unworthy of notice to any
but
the Ptolemy, who tend to prefer my sort when they need people to do the jobs they don’t want to do. Every dynasty has their preferences. But Ptolemy, Empusae, Dracul, Grigori, and a few other smaller dynasties tucked away here and there, they’re where the power is. The highbloods, the ones from dynasties that can trace their roots all the way back to a specific god—or demon—are what you might think of as our aristocracy.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Uh, maybe I’m reading this wrong, but if these Ptolemy think you’re so worthless,
why
are you trying to save them?”
Ty passed another car in a blur, noting that he was doing ninety and might want to slow down a little. He tried to relax, to force himself to loosen up. Lily was only interested in the answers, not trying to judge him, he told himself. Still, it was difficult. He wasn’t used to being questioned. Loathed, yes. But not questioned.
“Because I’m a part of them, after a fashion,” he said, baring his mark again briefly to explain. “The ankh there—looks a bit like a cross with a loop at the top—came a few years after my siring. Arsinöe herself gave me just enough of her blood to force the mark.” He covered it again, unsettled by Lily’s keen interest in it. “I’m the queen’s personal hunter and am very good at what I do. I’m not supposed to save them, by the way. You are. I’m just facilitating.”