Laws of the Blood 1: The Hunt (28 page)

It was Valentia who put words to memory. “A brother you almost cared about died that night, and I made you take his life. You really didn’t know what was happening as I made you take his blood and mine one
after the other, spoke the words of the spell, and forced you to love me on his dying corpse as I spoke them. The magic was strong and hit you hard; so did his fear and pain as you absorbed his dying. It sickened you. But, then, a curse should sicken those who are trapped in it. I truly believed eternal life was a curse not a gift then, and you were infused with what I felt along with everything else. I’ve never known another fledgling to be as ill and disoriented as you were that night—but you lived. Your brother would have died anyway. Court politics, and not a vampire, would have put an end to his existence before the night was out. You were already dying. The Janissaries sent to assassinate the princes in the Cage started with you. You don’t recall that, do you? The palace coup? I saw it as I slept and could do nothing to stop it. I saw the knives go in, my love, and couldn’t even scream. The stab wounds bled you nearly to death before I was able to reach you just after sunset. I found you surrounded by dead palace guards. You didn’t go under the knife easily, but you went. You were still mortal, but changed enough from four years with me to survive longer than those who left you for dead could imagine. I forced some of my blood down your throat when I reached you, but I knew you wouldn’t survive as a human. So I ran to fetch you the first mortal I could. I found your brother hiding in the bathhouse. It would have been better if you could have Hunted, would have made your birth easier, but there was no time. You survived, changed. We escaped the seraglio,” she finished.

He looked at her, in as much pain as if he’d lived through that awful night and the nights after, once again. “And you left me,” he added. “After all that—horror—you disappeared.”

Valentia crossed her arms. “I did no such thing, Selim. I left you with the first nest I could find. You know I couldn’t stay with you, and why. I’m sorry, but I was still very religious in those days, no matter how harsh and old-fashioned it seems now.”

It was years before he recovered from that night, if
he’d ever recovered at all. He barely remembered the vampire that fostered him, other than he’d had no love for an Ottoman Turk and hadn’t made Selim’s new life easy. One night he’d sensed something very
different
than he’d ever known, and followed the sensation with growing excitement to Olympias, who’d eventually made him a Hunter of hunters.

Selim forced his thoughts to the current century, glad that memory had cycled him back into awareness of his purpose in life. It would be so easy to stay lost in the past with Valentia, to find out where she’d gone, what had led her to Los Angeles, to tell her all about his life since their abrupt, still-aching, parting. So easy to sit at her feet and pretend to be companion and mistress once more. Then he wouldn’t have to even think about killing her. About holding her heart in his hands and—

“What have you done?” he asked her. “Why?”

“How long have you lived in California?” she questioned back. “I’ve gotten a sense that it’s been quite a while from walking in your dreams, but I never sensed you before I saw you on television. Not that I’d been trying, of course,” she added with a musical laugh. “The only vampire I knew about was Don Tomas, but then, I didn’t want to know about any others. Been there, done that, had the body bags to prove it. I met Tomas once when I first came to town. That was in 1932, by the way. He sensed my presence by accident. It was pure coincidence that I moved into the same building where one of his companions lived. I convinced him to forget about ever seeing me, and I convinced his current lady to move across town. You were already in Los Angeles then, weren’t you?” she guessed.

He nodded. “I asked you why you’re attempting to destroy our way of life,” he reminded her. “Not for your autobiography.”

“I’m getting to that. It’s really very simple, in a complicated way,” she added. “Long story. Or maybe I should say it’s one story too many. I’m a creature of Hollywood far more than I am a creature of the night,
my dear. You see, I was living with an American writer in Paris, and he got an offer to work in the movies. We lived at the Garden of Allah and I moved in that circle for a while. Caught the screenwriting bug from some of the best writers in the world. My boyfriend—not a companion, just a boyfriend who drank too much and was not a day person—didn’t do too well in Hollywood. Decadence suited him, but the studio system didn’t. I ended up doing all his work. He made a very good front for me for the next fifteen years. By the time his liver gave out, I was established, quietly, in my own right. I survived the death of the studio system, corporate takeovers,
auteurs,
and high-concept artists. They all come to Valentine—not Valentia, dear—Valentine. You came looking for Valentine, I expect.”

He nodded reluctantly. “That’s the name Rasmussen gave me. I wish it wasn’t you.”

“Art told you.” She wasn’t surprised at her slave’s betrayal. “Nobody can keep a secret in this town.” She sighed. “I’m sorry for his family.”

“He’s not dead.”

She looked impressed. “You are good.”

“I have friends.”

“I know. They’re all in the script. Enemies, too,” she added. “There’s some really good action scenes in
If Truth Be Told
.”

Fear curdled in Selim’s stomach. He smashed a fist down on the glass-topped coffee table. Cracks starred out around the point of impact, but the thick glass didn’t shatter. “You know everything that’s happened,” he snarled the accusation at her. “Everything that’s going to happen, and you put it all into a script! You’re showing it all over Hollywood. Why?”

“Because I couldn’t think of anything else!” she shouted back.

Selim stared. He felt her agitation, but he didn’t comprehend her words. He tried asking his question again. “Why are you trying to destroy your own species?”

“I’m not.”

“But . . .”

“If by species you mean vampires, that is.” She leaned forward on the couch. “I’m not trying to destroy anybody. You know me better than that,” she added, with a haughty lift of her chin.

“Then what are you trying to do, out us?”

“Maybe,” she answered. “But only if the marketing people think it will help promote the movie. I mean, what harm could it do?”

“What harm? Valentia—Valentine—we’re real!”

“Yes,” she replied. She looked at him, with a faint, altogether infuriating smile. Her dark eyes laughed at him. “Your point?”

He understood now. Of course. “You’re crazy. Insane. Mad.” She didn’t look it, didn’t feel it, but what else could it be? Why else would she betray everything they were? “Didn’t you care that the Strigoi Council would come after you?”

Her mouth twisted in a disdainful frown. “Honey, I’ve been on the Council. They think far too highly of themselves.”

“What about the Law?”

“What about it? Who cares? Selim, have you looked at a calendar lately?”

“There are reasons we have laws. Reasons we live underground. Reasons no mortal may ever—”

“Ever heard of Thomas Jefferson?”

He snarled at her interruption of his speech. A speech they’d both heard too many times before, he supposed. He tried to drop the party line and concentrate on what she really wanted, what she was really doing. He ran a hand frantically through his hair while she waited patiently at the other end of the couch. “What about Thomas Jefferson?”

“He said, at least I believe it was Jefferson, that a little revolution now and then is a good thing.” Her bright and pleasant smile returned. “I’m fomenting a little one-strig revolution. Care to join me?”

Selim watched her carefully. All of her, probing as
deep as he could. On the surface, in fact far deeper than the surface, he found a woman who meant every cheerful, irreverent word she said. What else he found was hard to decipher, but there were deeply disturbed currents below the surface. There was a throb of hunger deep down inside her, boxed away, but straining for freedom. There were several kinds of fear, a great deal of worry. He concentrated on the fear, probed, with no subtlety. She sat there and let him, as though allowing his effort to mindrape her was some sort of reparation for invading his dreamworld and taking whatever she wanted.

“What do you feel?” she asked him after a while, as though she were overseeing the lesson of a newborn fledgling.

“Desperation,” he answered her. “Desolation. Emptiness. Wild, hopeless terror. Fear that nothing will ever be right in your world again. Self-loathing. Doubt. Living hell.”

“That sums it up nicely.”

He longed to reach out to her in compassion. The void inside her frightened him. “What is it?”

“Writer’s block.”

Selim opened his eyes. He hadn’t known they’d been closed. He glared at the woman on the other end of the couch. “Writer’s block?”

She nodded and shivered.

The fear of this thing was very real for her; he sensed that it went deep down into her spirit, that it burned and tortured her. He’d come here to rip out a Lawbreaker’s heart. Many things made him hesitate to do his duty. One of them was curiosity. “I don’t get it.”

“Of course not,” she replied. “You’re not a storyteller. But I’m feeling much better now. Writing
If Truth Be Told
broke a lot of creative energy free in me.”

He believed he began to, perhaps, make a little sense out of her words, her feelings. No, not sense. There was nothing sensible here. He tried to put words to what he pieced together. He said slowly, “You’re telling me that
you are going to get me killed—me, you, Siri, every nest and strig and every human that comes into contact with this story of yours—because you couldn’t think of anything else to write? Is that what you’re saying, Valentia?”

“Valentine. Valentine has been in Hollywood for over sixty years. Valentine isn’t a vampire. She isn’t of the strigoi, she isn’t a blood-mother, she doesn’t Hunt, she uses the magic only when she has to. She certainly doesn’t believe in the old religion. In fact she—I—didn’t realize anyone still did until I went wandering inside your head. What are you people doing living in the dark ages?”

“Surviving!” he shot back. “The only way we can. And how dare you,” he snarled at her, “blaspheme against everything we are for the sake of—what?” He searched for concepts, words through a bloodred haze of outrage. She merely watched Selim as he sputtered, then finally shouted, “What made you do it? Money? Prestige? Screen credit?”

She was on her feet. Shadows gathered and coalesced around her. Her eyes blazed, hot and red, burned into and through him. She shed all shielding. Power flowed out of her. Selim very nearly slid from the couch to fall to his knees. He barely managed to get to his feet and stay there, knees shaking in the presence of such sudden, raw energy.

It lasted only a moment, then was gone as quickly as she’d summoned it. She was a small, beautiful, vulnerable woman again. One who lived alone in a small apartment and dressed in ragged clothes. “My imagination remains,” she told him. “That’s all I need or want. But—” She blinked on tears. “It was going. I was lost, empty—and my agent had just gotten me a deal for a horror movie. I had to do something.”

“Did you have to break the First Law?”

“It’s a old Law.”

“But still a good one.”

She gazed at him, tears shining in her eyes. She
looked more childishly stubborn than like a being of incredible power. He felt more like an indulgent, if outraged, parent than a betrayed child or an Enforcer of the Law. “You broke faith with us, and I really can’t understand why.”

“How can I make you understand?” Her anger and outrage returned. “Have you
ever
had writer’s block?” She stabbed a finger at him. “You think the fever to Hunt is bad?” Her harsh laugh rang through the room. “You have no idea what hell is until you sit down in front of a blank screen and it stays blank day after day after fucking day! Or worse, have every word you wrench out of your soul be nothing but pure crap. I’m Valentine.” She jabbed her finger at herself. “It doesn’t happen to
me.”
She collapsed back on the cushions and sat back against the arm of the deep couch with an explosive sigh, her anger dissipating. “But it happened to me,” she went on, speaking as calmly as before. “I was supposed to be writing a horror story . . . so I wrote a real one. You want to read it?” she asked eagerly. “No, Rasmussen must have given you a copy. What did you think? I’m so glad you got into that fight with Jager. It’s just so pivotal to the—”

“I haven’t read it,” he told her. “Not the whole thing.”

“Oh.” She looked disappointed for a moment, then got to her feet. He watched her pad gracefully, bare feet silent on the carpet, to her desk. She brought back a stack of paper and handed it to him. “Let me know what you think. I’ll put on more coffee.”

The pages were heavy in his hands. He didn’t want to read any more than he already had, but his gaze was inexorably drawn to the words she’d written. “Fine,” he muttered, and began to read.

Valentine headed toward the kitchen. When the doorbell sounded, she stopped, and Selim’s head came up. She looked over her shoulder at him. The buzzer sounded stridently again.

“What did you do?” she asked Selim accusingly, clearly not expecting or welcoming an interruption. “Call for a side order of pizza to go along with my heart?”