Gallent hesitated, torn between caution and greed. The first lesser vampire shrieked again with joy as he discovered a twisted piece of moss right on the bank of the stream. Gallent made his decision and followed, dropping to earth, shoving aside his two underlings to peer down at the trail.
Traian struck hard and fast, slamming bolt after bolt of lightning into the area, blanketing the forest and stream with forks and whips of white-hot spears burning through the sky to earth. Thunder shook the forest, reverberating through the night. The trees lit up in macabre orange and red, glowing hot.
The vampires screamed horribly as fire ravaged the earth around them, burning pure, turning foul breath to ash. On the other side of the ferocious storm, Traian once again took to the sky, retreating to find a place to rest and heal before he returned to the hunt. It was his way of life, one he had known for far too long now.
He traveled quickly through the night. The Carpathian Mountains were riddled with networks of caves, where rich soil deep beneath the earth waited to welcome him. He was close to home. He had been steadily traveling back to his homeland to see his prince but had become sidetracked when he came across the vampires. He had spent the last few risings leading them away from the area where Mikhail Dubrinsky and his lifemate, Raven, were known to dwell.
His shoulder throbbed and burned. His neck was a fierce torment. There were a hundred places on his body that ached from the embers and darts and the terrible bites where chunks of flesh were missing. He found an opening into the cool interior of the mountain, went deeper still, through a labyrinth of tunnels into the earth. He floated down into the bed of rich soil and just lay there, feeling a sense of peace and solace in the wealth of welcoming minerals.
He would need blood to recoup. But for now, the earth welcomed him, would do its best to aid in his healing. He closed his eyes and allowed sleep to take him.
Austria
T
he theater doors opened to allow the smartly dressed crowd out. They emerged laughing and talking, a crush of happy people pleased with the performance they had witnessed. Lightning forked across the sky, a brilliant, dazzling display of elemental nature. For a moment the long, sequined gowns, furs and suits of varying color were lit up as if caught in a spotlight. Thunder crashed directly overhead, and the ground and buildings shook under the assault. The light faded, leaving the night nearly black and the crowd almost blind. The throng broke into couples or groups, hurrying to their limousines and cars, while valets tried to work fast before the rain began to fall.
Senator Thomas Goodvine stayed beneath the entrance archway, bending his head toward his wife to hear her over the buzz of the crowd, laughing at her softly spoken words, nodding in agreement. He pulled her beneath his shoulder to prevent her from being jostled by the steady stream of people hurrying to avoid the weather.
Two trees formed the unique archway to the theater, the branches interlocking overhead to form a small protection against the elements. The leaves rustled and the branches clicked together in the rushing wind. Clouds whirled and spun, weaving dark, ominous threads across the moon.
Another burst of lightning illuminated two large men pushing against the stream of theatergoers, apparently determined to gain shelter in the building. The flash of light faded, leaving only the dim lighting of the archway and the streetlights flickering ominously. Thelma Goodvine tugged at her husband’s jacket to bring his attention back to her.
“Gun! Down! Get down!” Joie Sanders plowed into the senator and his wife, her arms outspread, sweeping them both to the ground. In one move she rolled up on her knee in front of them, a gun in her outstretched hand. “Gun, gun, everybody down!” she shouted.
An orange-red flame burst from two revolvers in a steady stream toward the couple she’d been assigned to protect. Joie returned fire with her usual calm and dead-on accuracy, watching one man begin to topple, almost in slow motion, his gun still firing but up into the air.
People screamed, ran in every direction, fell to the ground, and crouched behind flimsy cover. The second gunman grabbed a woman in a long fur and dragged her in front of him as a shield. Joie was already pushing at the senator and his wife in an effort to get them to crawl back inside the relative safety of the theater. The second gunman propelled the sobbing woman forward as he fired at Joie, who rolled again to cover her charges’ line of retreat.
A bullet sliced through the flesh of her shoulder, burning a path of pain and spraying blood over the senator’s trousers. Joie cried out, but steadied her aim, ignoring the churning in her stomach. Her world narrowed to one man, one target. She squeezed the trigger slowly, precisely, watched the ugly little hole blossom in the middle of the man’s forehead. He went down like a rock, taking his hostage with him, falling in a tangle of arms and legs.
There was a small silence. Only the clicking of the branches could be heard, a strange, disquieting rhythm. Joie blinked, trying to clear her vision. She seemed to be looking into a large, shimmering pool, staring at a man with flat, cold eyes and something metal glinting in his hand. He rose up out of the crowd, slamming into Joie before she could scramble out of the way. She twisted just enough to escape the lethal blade, driving the butt of her gun upward into his jaw, then slamming it back down on his knife hand. He screamed, dropping the blade so that it went skittering along the sidewalk. His fist found her face, driving her backward. The man followed her down, his face a mask of hatred.
Something hit the back of his head hard, and Joie found herself staring up at one of her men. “Thanks, John. I think he smashed every bone in my body when he fell on me.”
She took John’s outstretched hand, and allowed him to help her out from under the large body. Joie kicked the gun from the limp hand of the first man she’d shot, even as weakness overwhelmed her. She sat down abruptly as her legs turned to rubber. “Get the senator and Mrs. Goodvine to safety, John.” The wailing sirens were fading in and out. “Someone help that poor woman up.”
“We’ve got it, Joie,” one of the agents assured her. “We have the driver. How bad are you hurt? How many hits did you take? Give me your gun.”
Joie looked down at the gun in her hand and noted with surprise she was aiming it at the motionless attacker. “Thanks, Robert. I think I’ll just let you and John handle things for a while.”
“Is she all right?” She could hear the senator’s anxious voice. “Sanders? Are you hurt? I don’t want to just leave her there; where are you taking us?”
Joie tried to lift her arm to indicate she was fine, but her arm seemed heavy and uncooperative. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She just needed to be somewhere else, just for a short time while the medics fixed her up. It wasn’t the first time she’d taken a hit and she doubted it would be the last. She had certain instincts that had taken her to the top of her profession. It was very dangerous at the top.
Joie could blend in. Some of the men liked to call her the chameleon. She could look strikingly beautiful, plain, or just average. She could blend in with the tough crowd, the homeless, or the rich and glamorous. It was a valuable gift, and she used it willingly. She was called in for the difficult assignments, the ones where action was inevitable. Few others had her skill with knives or guns, and no one could disappear into a crowd the way she could.
She took herself out of her body, watched the frantic scene around her with interest for a few minutes. The others assigned to the senator and the Austrian agents had everything under control. She was being put into an ambulance and hustled away from the scene. More than anything, she detested hospitals. She’d seen too many of them and associated the smells with death. More than a few of her coworkers—her friends—had gone through hospital doors and had not ever left.
Joie didn’t know if she truly believed in astral projection, but she had been having out-of-body experiences from the time she was a toddler. She had perfected her craft over the years, directing herself to fly away and leave her physical body behind when she didn’t want to be where she was. It was a useful, exhilarating gift, and all too real. Sometimes too real. Many times the places she found herself in were far more intriguing than where she’d left her body and of course, the danger was always in not finding her way back.
She’d read numerous articles about astral projection and most seemed to happen to enlightened people, people of faith who believed in a higher, better realm. She was far more practical, dealing with the seamier side of life and finding her faith was in nature and the beauty of the wild, untouched places she sought out both on an astral plane and with her physical body when she had time off.
The smell of the hospital was overpowering, making her stomach lurch. People moved around her fast, poking needles into her, talking in low voices, cutting her shirt away. She didn’t take painkillers as a rule and tried to tell them, but no one listened to her. An oxygen mask was slapped over her face. What was the use in staying in a place she didn’t want to be when she could roam the world in her mind? Whether she was actually there or not mattered very little. It
felt
real when she journeyed out of her body. She took a deep breath of the oxygen and let go of her physical body.
She simply took herself away now, soaring free. She wanted to be outdoors, under the sky or beneath the earth in a world of subterranean beauty—it didn’t matter, as long as it wasn’t within the walls of a hospital.
Joie felt weightless, free, skimming through the mountains she had studied so carefully. As she soared free, she planned a trip caving with her brother and sister as soon as the senator and his wife were safely back home. She crossed space. Smelled the rain. Felt cool and moist in the mist of the mountains. Far below her, she saw the entrance to a cave, spotlighted by the small sliver of moon that managed to peek around the thick cloud cover. Smiling, she dropped down to enter a world of crystal and ice. Whether she was dreaming or hallucinating didn’t matter; all she cared about was escaping from the pain of her wounds and the smell of the hospital.
Carpathian Mountains
T
raian lay in the cool earth, gazing up at the high, cathedral-like ceiling. His body hurt in so many places, he just wanted to rest. The beauty of the cave was breathtaking and took his mind off his physical pain. The network of caves he’d entered deep beneath the earth was part of a huge subterranean city. Great waterfalls of ice cascaded down from ceiling to floor, some lapping around one another until it looked as if great bows of thick ice had gift-wrapped the entire cave he lay in.
Despite the cold, some insects and bats dwelled in the realms above him, but he had gone deep, where few living creatures could exist. The cold helped to numb the pain and bring him a soothing sense of peace he so badly needed after the last few risings. In the far corner of the cave the formation actually looked like thick ice walls with a covering of ice clouds over them. As he worked at forcing some of the burning embers from his body he tried to imagine the forces it would take to forge such a dramatic thing of beauty deep beneath the earth.
Traian turned his head and saw her. His heart nearly stopped and then began pounding. The breath left his lungs in a long rush. She was hovering just overhead to his left. She’d entered silently and somehow gotten past his safeguards. Had he been so exhausted that he’d forgotten such an important life-saving detail? Impossible. He could feel the weave, strong and in place. No one—
nothing
—should be able to get passed his safeguards.
He studied the woman. She had a cap of dark, glossy hair, very thick—the kind a man would want to run his fingers through. The thought brought him up short. He didn’t have thoughts like that about women—at least any that he could remember—and he had lived a very long existence. Her eyes were large and gray, heavily fringed with thick lashes. She stared back at him with complete astonishment.
“You’re hurt,” she said. “If you were real, I’d send the paramedics.”
Her voice seemed to go right through his skin, wrap itself around his heart and squeeze so tightly he lost his breath. His vision blurred. Tiny pinpoints of light burst behind his eyes, a light show of colors. Pastels at first so that some of the ice formations took on subtle blues and greens.
“What makes you think I am not real?” He tested his voice, not certain if she was real or if he’d dreamt her up. He’d been wounded a thousand times and
nothing
like this had ever happened to him before. A woman hovering above his head? Floating in the air like an angel? He was so far removed from heaven none of this made sense. He wasn’t a man to panic and was willing to see what she would do. He had no doubts that he could kill her if she made a wrong move.
“Because I’m not really here,” she answered. “I’m in a hospital many miles away. I don’t even know where here is.”
Traian frowned and rubbed his eyes. Colors shot at him like sparks, a fireworks show inside of his head. Great. The last thing he needed with a new, potential threat was to lose his vision. She didn’t feel like a threat. If anything, there was a sense of amusement and serenity about her. She didn’t look transparent, but it was possible she was telling the truth. Her voice had a soft melodic echo to it, as though it was disembodied.
“You look real enough to me.”
“What in the world are you doing lying in the mud in the middle of a cave?” Her soft laughter rippled through him. “You didn’t mistake this for a beauty spa, did you?”
His heart nearly ceased beating. He blinked several times as the colors behind his eyes burst into a spectacular display of raining drops of dark color. When he stared at her his world was upside down. Her simple questions had wrought a change that would never be undone.
He was aware of everything—the coolness of the interior, the blue of the ice, the dramatic sweep of architecture formed thousands of years earlier. He was mostly aware that her hair was a rich brown, dark and glossy, the strands, several shades of brown, so many he hadn’t even known the colors existed. Her eyes were a cool gray and her lashes and brows matched her hair color. Her mouth was wide and curved at the corners, teeth small and very white. There were laugh lines around her mouth and eyes hinting at her sense of humor. Her skin was light gold, burnished by the sun.