Laws of the Blood 1: The Hunt (14 page)

Yevgeny shot to his feet. She rose from her chair. They stood toe to toe; a very large man loomed over a very small woman. A portrait had been painted of her once, on a palace wall. Someone in this century had found that portrait and dubbed it “La Parisienne.” She had lived in Paris, too, once. But she’d seen sunlight last on the Isle of Crete. Hers were a little people, lithe and
supple and strong. She was not afraid of bulls. She had danced with them in her youth.

She stared down her great, angry bull of a man now. She put her hand on his chest and pushed, just a little. Yevgeny sat with a hard thud.

“I forbid it,” she repeated. “I love you.”

His head came up sharply. The bright blue eyes beneath the golden arch of brows met hers. His mouth worked. “But—”

“It’s not good being a vampire,” Valentine said. “Trust me on this.” She stepped back, put her hands on her hips. “Now, tell me something I can use.”

“There’s a child.”

She needed to sit down. She did. On the floor. Dizzy at the notion, shaken, she felt the truth of his words deep in her bones, in the marrow where blood was born. She looked up a long way to where Yevgeny smiled viciously down on her. The world faded in and out and in. Valentine blinked. “A child?” The question was no more than a faint, frightened rasp.

“Siri knows about him,” Yevgeny told her. “She hides it well, but I got through her shields. A little. Her and Selim’s real worry was that Jager would somehow attack the child. She’s good,” he added. “But then, you know that. You wouldn’t have called on me if you could have gotten to her yourself. Why can’t you ride her, the way you do the other one?”

Yevgeny’s jealousy was a strong, hot stink in her mind. She ignored it. Valentine stretched her legs out in front of her. “A child?” she repeated. “I’ll be damned.”

“That’s the traditional view, yes.”

She ignored his sarcasm as well. “Who? How? So that’s the secret he’s been keeping.” She’d been rummaging around in poor Selim’s head for weeks, hunting for material she could use, and here he’d been dodging her, faking her out all the time. How’d the ungrateful little bastard manage to keep something so momentous from her? When did he get to be so good?

It had been a couple hundred years since they’d seen each other. Time flew. People changed. “Damn.”

“I detect more admiration than complaint in your tone,” Yevgeny said. “About what?”

Her mind was racing. She ignored his question. She almost forgot his presence as she got up and began to pace. She moved with growing restlessness from the office corner through the living room to the kitchen, from the kitchen out to the balcony, then back through the living room. Yevgeny stayed perched on the desk, arms crossed over his wide chest. He watched her as she circled the apartment, but her muttered words weren’t directed at him. “A child. There has to be something going on with the child.”

“What’s so important about the child?” he asked her. “How did a vampire have a baby in the first place?”

“Is it a boy or girl?” she asked. “Who’s the father? Was it on purpose or an accident? What happened to the mother? Where’s the kid being hidden? What’s Selim planning to do to the little darling?” She rubbed her chin. She paused in her wanderings and discovered she was back by her computer. “Boy,” Valentine said. “A little boy. A cute, adorable, big-eyed little boy.”

“How do you know?”

She sat down and flexed her fingers over the ergonomically designed keyboard. She closed her eyes. Ideas popped and flowed. She knew suddenly what she had to do, where all her searching and agonizing and false starts had to lead. Her restlessness was gone. She was sharp and alive once more. Possibilities were suddenly endless. She hadn’t felt this good in years.

She laughed. She closed the file on the screen. She began a new file. The blank white screen was a beautiful landscape before her. She didn’t need Selim’s dreams anymore. She could take it from here.

“This is going to be so good,” she murmured and began to work. She barely noticed when the door slammed behind Yevgeny, and she was having too much fun to care that it did.

“Y
ES
,
THANK YOU
,” Selim said, though there was no one there. “I slept very well.” In fact, the recent pattern of dreams that featured reruns of his life alternating with possible futures had continued. The lights were programmed to come on at sunset, so the room wasn’t dark. It was big and messy, his clothes from the night before left scattered where he’d dropped them, a fresh layer over the clothes from the night before that. He stared upward, with his head resting on a pile of four pillows. Two of them were hers. She’d tell him he was a pillow hog if she were there. The ceiling, he thought, could use painting.

He kicked off the covers. “Everything could use fixing up.” There was no one in the bed with him, but he stretched a hand out across the queen-size expanse just the same, searching for . . . what? He was talking to . . . who?

Stupid question. His first thoughts were always of her. His first words always to her. Even when she wasn’t there.

Where was she? What was she doing?

“Who’s the blond?”

He kept his thoughts to himself, and reached toward the bedside table to take the cordless phone from its cradle. A moment later, Selim put down the phone. There had been no irritating beeping signal telling him there was voice mail waiting when he picked it up. That was odd. It was irritating. It was damned irritating.

“This is what you wanted,” he told himself. “No.”

That he was feeling sorry for himself after his first meal in years and his first good day’s sleep in weeks irritated him. Last night had been a very good night. Of course, the evening would have been perfect if he’d gotten laid.

“How crude,” he chided himself as he got up and set about preparing for the night’s work. Was that any way for the son of a sultan to think? Just because he’d had a harem once . . .

Why not now?

Perhaps he had become too American, too modern, he thought as he began to shave. Perhaps that was his problem with Siri. That he had allowed one partner to become too important to him. If he wanted to get laid, all he needed to do was take a second companion or a slave or even spend an evening with one of Alice Fraser’s possessions, one of the girls who gave blood.

No. Definitely not. What would Siri think? He would not hurt her like that. What would everyone else in town think? And they were bound to find out about it. She had her pride. Her place. He would not do that to Siri.

“And who is the blond?” he asked the angry man who looked back at him out of the bathroom mirror.
Put it out of your mind,
he ordered himself. He had work to do.

He didn’t need Siri’s help with this. He’d do it the old-fashioned way. He turned on the television and channel surfed. Within a few minutes, a local news program caught and held his attention. He sat impatiently through a long, lurid report of another murder in Griffith Park. It was the sort of story the media loved to sink its teeth into and gnaw on, one with sound bites from
experts on serial killers and cult rituals. There was much indignation and calls for the authorities to move quickly to bring peace and safety back to blah blah blah.

It was the story about the convenience store robbery that interested him. The one where the police who arrived on the scene shot the store owner. People in the neighborhood were angry, bitter. This wasn’t the first time the cops had hassled and harassed them. Now someone was dead. Tensions were running high. People were ready to take to the streets.

“I can work with this.”

Selim clicked off the television and went to have a look at the scene in person.

“The new car’s dark blue. I miss the burgundy red one.”

She’d found the new Mercedes in her garage that morning. Flowers, with a note from Selim, had arrived in the afternoon. The note said he hoped she liked the color. No apologies, certainly no explanations. No invitation or mention of seeing her soon, either. But he had kissed her last night, and the fire between them had been just as strong and deep as ever. She touched her bruised lips; the only marks on her from last night came from Selim.
Son of a bitch.

She wasn’t going to let herself go to his place. He made no effort to see her. Impasse.
He saved your life last night,
she reminded herself.

He’s still a son of a bitch.

You like him that way.

What’s to like? He’s a killer.

Two nights ago, that didn’t bother her. The truth was, she didn’t object to people being killed. There was nothing wrong with people being killed. Certainly nothing wrong with vampires being killed. There had been a dead body in the trunk of her car last night. She hadn’t objected to that at all. She would have been happy to help kill that particular vampire.
Yeah, but Larry Jager deserved it.

“It’s a beautiful new luxury car. Blue. Red. What’s the difference at night?” Cassie’s voice called Siri’s attention back to the conversation.

“I can see them in the daylight. Besides,” Siri complained to Cassie, “you see just fine at night. I thought your eyes picked up a different spectrum or something.”

“Or something,” Cassie answered. “It’s hard to explain.”

“And you’re not going to.”

“Can we talk about something else?”

Even though the conversation wasn’t being conducted on cellular phones, circumspection was always—mostly—the order of the day. Siri and Cassie still got together for the occasional private chats, but vampires weren’t supposed to socialize with other vampires’ companions. They were being real sticklers for their stupid rules right now. Companions weren’t even supposed to talk to other companions. Everyone was supposed to stick to their own nest and wait for the night of the Hunt. It was the Law.

The rules were complicated and stupid, and they were never fully explained. She doubted if they’d even been codified or written down. Were there vampire lawyers? Loopholes? You were just supposed to obey without question. Until she’d come on board as Selim’s girlfriend, no one in Southern California had ever talked to anybody else. There wasn’t any Law against it, she’d discovered, it was tradition. Even Selim rarely had contact with the others, though he kept tabs on them in a quiet, secretive way.

Siri simply couldn’t stand the lack of communication. Besides, she was endlessly curious, a professional busybody, and had this tendency to see things about people she knew before the events happened. The fact that there was anything resembling a vampire community these days was her doing, but she was a mere mortal, to be ignored when it suited them. They were up to important vampire stuff right now. Life-and-death decisions. Mostly death. She had no place in their—Selim’s—
councils while he picked and chose which humans died.

“Bullshit,” she muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing. What do you want to talk about?”

“About . . . last night. You’re sure he’s—”

“You don’t have anything to worry about. I promise.” Her friend’s obvious concern helped get Siri’s mind off her own complaints. Never mind that she felt used and unloved. There was a child’s life at stake, and that was more important. Selim considered Jager a threat to Sebastian. She’d found out the hard way that the strig was totally out of control. “It’s taken care of,” she promised Cassie. “You and Tom can relax.”

Cassie sighed. “I wish. Sebastian’s so vulnerable,” Cassie went on. “There are some old stories about children like him.”

“What stories?”

“I don’t know.”

Of course not. “Don’t you people ever talk to each other?”

“You don’t have to sound so annoyed. We’re a secretive people.”

“You mean Gypsies?”

Cassie laughed with no great enthusiasm. “I mean that Tom says I don’t want to know.”

“So you don’t want to know. Honestly, Cassie, what’s wrong with a little knowledge?”

“It can get you killed.”

Siri had the distinct impression that the “you” in this case wasn’t just the object of a sentence or an offhand comment. She refused to take it personally, as either threat or warning. Not from Cassie. She did take time to count to one hundred rather than go into a lecture about the unreasonableness of it all. Cassie had her own problems with all those Laws, much worse problems than Siri’s.

Siri curled her feet under her on the couch and switched the receiver to her other ear. The television was
on, but the sound was off. Who needed sound to watch a Timberwolves-Bucks game on ESPN?

Maybe it was Selim’s constant secretiveness that was getting to her, even more than that other thing. No, it wasn’t.

“I’m thinking about getting a cat,” she told Cassie. “It’s getting lonely around here.”

Cassie laughed. “A cat. To go with the crystal ball?” They’d met at a New Age bookstore, back before either of them met the—persons—they were currently involved with. “You sound like an old-maid witch.”

“I don’t need the crystal ball. I’m not old. Or a maid . . . though I’m beginning to forget what sex feels like. And didn’t you used to read Tarot cards?” Siri reminded Cassandra. And it wasn’t like one of them had set up a date for the other one with their new boyfriend’s best friend. Neither had known that the other was involved with a vampire; they’d actually gone their separate ways, lost track of each other. Neither was surprised, though, to meet again the way they had. They’d warned each other for a long time that the cards and the visions held strange, dark fates for them both.