Still. Cade had to be sure.
“Were you bitten?” he asked.
The man looked at him strangely. He blinked twice. Cade repeated the question.
The man looked down at his arm. “Oh. This. No. I was slashed. By one of those things. What happened to them?”
“I happened to them,” Cade said. “This is important. Are you sure you weren’t bitten?”
The man took a step back from Cade. “Isn’t this enough?” he asked. “They nearly took my arm off, and then one of them spat this shit into my eyes—”
“It spat at you?”
The man stepped back again, suddenly wary. He looked at the gun in his own hand, as if trying to decide what it was for.
“Yeah. Are you going to tell me what the hell happened here? What were those things? And who are you?”
“How do you feel now?” Cade asked, ignoring the questions.
The man blinked again. “Uh . . . well . . . not bad, I guess. All things considered, I actually feel . . . pretty damned good.”
Then he laughed. And blinked again. Cade saw his eyes. The pupils had already changed.
They were diamond-shaped.
Damnation, Cade thought. But he wasted no more time on regrets. He moved.
HOWARD REALIZED he wasn’t just hungry. He was famished. A voice inside him was screaming at him, trying to tell him that there was something wrong with this intruder, that the man on deck was dangerous, but he didn’t really care. He was feeling better every second. He felt pretty fucking invincible, in fact.
Above all, he felt hungry.
He realized, in a split second, that the man had decided something.
Howard dropped the gun. He didn’t know if it was empty or loaded. At that moment, he couldn’t have even told you what a gun was for.
With a snarl, he readied himself to fight. But it was already over. The man vanished in the time it took Howard to blink.
He stopped, confused. An instant later, he felt a crushing pressure around his neck from behind. The man somehow put him in a choke hold.
Howard thrashed. He used the new claws that were emerging from his fingers to tear at the man’s arm, trying to escape.
Just before the very last of his human mind departed, before everything in his head became nothing but smells and heat and instinct and rage, he heard the man say something.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
It meant nothing. It was noise. Aside from the sound of Cade snapping his neck, it was the last thing Howard—or the creature he’d become—would ever hear.
THREE
If it’s secret, it’s legal.
—President Richard M. Nixon
A
year before, Zach Barrows would have laughed in your face if you told him vampires were real.
Now he sat next to one on a couch in the VIP waiting area of the West Wing.
Never let anyone tell you Washington, D.C., is dull, he thought.
Cade, as always, was perfectly still. Since Zach had become the liaison between the White House and Cade, he’d learned Cade was as motionless as a corpse in a casket most of the time. He had the unlined face of a college student, wearing a cheap suit with no tie. The only hint of anything unusual was the handmade metal cross on a knotted leather cord around his neck. It made him look like a rocker dressed up for a court hearing.
At his feet was a leather case, something GIs used to call their AWOL bag. The zippered top was closed.
Zach realized he was wringing his hands. He stopped. In the eleven months Zach Barrows had been working with Nathaniel Cade, he’d faced death more times than he could count. Less than twenty-four hours ago, he’d been sitting in a Combat Talon transport, tracking the movements of inhuman creatures off the coast of Somalia.
But this meeting made him feel like calling in sick.
It was late, but not so late that the West Wing was empty. People walked by, faces serious, clothes wrinkled, papers in their hands. Zach remembered doing the same walk himself when he worked here. Being inside the White House could make someone getting coffee feel like he was responsible for national security.
Most of the staffers were too intent to notice Zach or Cade. But someone glanced at them, then did a double take. The staffer’s momentum carried him a few more feet, then his face lit up with a grin as he headed back to Zach.
“Barrows, man, how are you?”
Zach winced. He didn’t want to be recognized. Blake Thomas. He’d been an intern when Zach was still deputy director of White House political affairs.
Zach was on his way up then. Or so he thought. He’d worked for the president when Samuel Curtis was still a senator, and was one of the tacticians who helped Curtis win the White House. But without warning, the president pulled him out of his job and partnered him with Cade.
Blake looked way too happy. This is going to be painful, Zach thought.
He stood and offered his hand anyway, blocking Blake’s view of Cade.
“Blake. How have you been?”
“Oh, terrific,” he said, grin spreading even wider. “I’m on the health care initiative now, spearheading the Medicare/Medicaid billing code review. Really interesting stuff. You’d be amazed at what they’re trying to pull in the subcommittees.”
Oh God, Zach thought. He’d made the mistake of showing interest. Everybody in D.C. was doing vital work. They were all this close to changing the way the country worked. Just ask them.
“That’s great,” he said. “Good seeing you.”
“So what are you doing? You just totally vanished, man.”
“Not much,” Zach said. “A little consulting.”
“Dude. That’s so unfair. After all you did, to get fired like that.”
Zach clenched his jaw. His cover story. As far as anyone in the daylight world was concerned, Zach was a non-entity.
“It’s not that bad,” he said.
Blake leaned close. “Look, if you want, I can make a few calls. Maybe get you in with a lobbying firm or something.”
Zach caught Blake’s joy at looking down on his former boss. The misery of others was always entertainment around here.
He thought for a second about telling Blake the truth:
Actually, I’m the latest in a long line of liaisons to a hundred-and-forty-year-old vampire who works for the President of the United States. See, there are things in this world much older than we are, and they don’t like us very much. About every week, there’s another attempt by them to break through and wipe out humanity like an ugly mildew stain in the shower. And my friend here? He’s the vampire. I call him my friend, but that only means he hasn’t tried to eat me. Yet.
It would have been a serious breach of national security. But it would have shut Blake up.
Blake finally noticed Cade.
“Hey,” he said. “Blake Thomas. Nice to meet you.”
Cade turned his full attention to Blake. Zach could feel it. He said nothing.
But Blake’s expression went slack. His legs began to shake slightly.
Zach knew what he was feeling: panic. The inexplicable urge to run, as fast and as far as he could.
Cade had that effect on people. Mainly because he wasn’t people.
“Um, well . . .” Blake said, struggling with the sudden onrush of anxiety as some vestigial part of his brain blared an alarm at him.
“Don’t let me keep you, Blake,” Zach said.
Blake trotted out of the room, fresh sweat staining the pits of his shirt.
Zach sat down again, feeling a little better.
An assistant wrapped in a short skirt emerged and told them, “He’ll see you now.”
Cade picked up the bag and stood.
Zach did the same. Too late to go home now, he thought.
WILL PRADOR, the new White House chief of staff, rose from behind his desk.
Prador was the guy Zach compared himself to when he really wanted to feel like a failure. He was only a couple of years older than Zach, but his résumé read like he’d been in politics for decades: coordinator of statewide campaigns before he was out of college; political director of a high-level think tank in the off-year; TV pundit; consultant; then a highly visible spot as the media director for Senator Samuel Curtis’s run at the White House.
And now, chief of staff. The job Zach wanted before he became caretaker for the president’s pet vampire.
Zach and Prador worked together on the same side of the same campaigns for years. But Zach had no idea who was sitting on the couch along the wall.
He didn’t rise. He was dressed in a very expensive black suit with a blinding white shirt and red tie. He simply eyed Cade and Zach with a kind of bemused hostility.
Zach immediately went into information containment protocol, which was standard whenever they dealt with someone who wasn’t in the loop.
“Nice to see you, Will,” he said, before Prador could greet them. Then he extended his hand to the man on the couch.
“Peter Tork. This is my partner, Mike Nesmith. We’re with the president’s Internal Security Service Office.”
The man didn’t take Zach’s hand. He just smiled a bit wider.
Up close, it was difficult to say how old he was. The suit was well tailored, but he was obviously fit underneath it. His hair, though white, was still full and thick. His face was a waxen mask, as if the years had polished it smooth. It seemed frozen in place, even as it moved.
But the man’s most arresting feature was his eyes. They were pale, milked of any color except a dull, reflective silver.
He wasn’t looking at Zach. His attention was focused on Cade.
Zach kept his hand out. “And you are . . . ?”
“You can cut the shit,” Prador said to Zach. “This is Colonel Graves. He’s inside the knowledge.”
Zach was immediately concerned. That meant this guy, whoever he was, knew about Cade. And nobody was supposed to know about Cade.
Zach noticed neither Prador nor Graves appeared too nervous around Cade. That happened from time to time.
With Prador, Zach wasn’t surprised. It was probably Prador’s greatest gift—he was never rattled by anything. Photos of the candidate in a leather corset show up on the Internet? No problem. Down by twenty points in the latest poll? No problem. A supernatural war against the United States, and a bloodsucking fiend was America’s only real weapon? No problem. If Prador had any emotions, he kept them in a secure vault controlled by a legal trust.
As for Graves, some people were simply so self-absorbed, so nonobservant, that they couldn’t feel the dread Cade regularly inspired in others. If they actually stopped and noticed the thing sharing their breathing space—
Then Graves got up and stood face-to-face with Cade.
He didn’t move like an old man: no muffled groan, no levering himself off the cushions with his arms. He just stood, and crossed the rug to Cade.
“Mr. Barrows,” he said. “Mr. Cade.”
Cade and Graves continued to stare at each other. Cade appeared troubled. “Do I know you?”
“I thought vampires never forgot anything,” Graves said. “I’m sure you’d remember me if we’d met.”
Cade didn’t say anything else. Zach was more alarmed than he wanted to show. He couldn’t remember Cade losing a staring match before. He didn’t even think it was possible.
Graves knew who they were. He knew
what
Cade was. And they’d walked in here without a clue.
Zach realized this meeting was going to be worse than he thought. He suddenly felt very conscious of the fact that he was wearing last year’s shoes.
Prador got right to the unpleasantries.
“You’ve really fucked the dog now, Zach,” he said in his usual, infuriatingly calm voice.
Cade sat down, placing the bag on the floor. Zach remained standing. Something was going on here, but Cade left this sort of thing to him. It was human politics, and it barely registered on Cade’s radar.
Zach, however, was born to it. He could find a hidden agenda in any conversation, and felt double crosses and half-truths like seismic waves. This was the division of labor: Cade killed monsters, and Zach dealt with politicians.
“Look, Will, we just got off a plane from Somalia—”
“I managed to figure that out from the half dozen news reports that have been playing every hour. Did you see the Fox headline? ‘Slaughter on the Water’? They’re writing it off as piracy, thankfully. Is that what you call being discreet?”
“It was necessary,” Cade said, his voice as dry and cold as winter air. Prador didn’t appear impressed.