Twilight Prophecy
Maggie Shayne
Save the Vampire, Save the World An ancient prophecy tells of one chance to prevent the annihilation of the Undead. Twins James and Brigit, part human-part vampire, believe that they are that chance. In truth, the key lies with reclusive — and mortal — Lucy. As Armageddon approaches, anti-vampire sentiment fuels a war neither side can win, driving James to abandon his moral code and draw Lucy into deadly battle.But Lucy soon realises that she holds this powerful immortal’s soul in her hands, and that it’s her destiny not only to stop a war but to save him from his inner darkness. If she fails, his race will die — and so will her heart. Is the power of love strong enough to save the world?
Praise for the novels of
MAGGIE SHAYNE
“Shayne crafts a convincing world, tweaking vampire
legends just enough to draw fresh blood.”
—Publishers Weekly on Demon’s Kiss
“Maggie Shayne demonstrates an absolutely superb touch,
blending fantasy and romance into an outstanding
reading experience.”
—RT Book Reviews on Embrace the Twilight
“Maggie Shayne is better than chocolate. She
satisfies every wicked craving.”
—New York Times bestselling author Suzanne Forster
“Maggie Shayne delivers sheer delight, and fans new and old
of her vampire series can rejoice.”
—RT Book Reviews on Twilight Hunger
“Maggie Shayne delivers romance with sweeping
intensity and bewitching passion.”
—New York Times bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz
Twilight Prophecy
Maggie
Shayne
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Sharyn Cerniglia, a woman who is so special, so beautiful
and so pure of spirit that her aura sparkles and shines with it.
Sharyn has shared many things with me, among them her wise
advice, her keen insights, her motivational pep talks, and the
source of her knowing, which has changed my life. But above
and beyond all of that she has given me her friendship, the
worth of which cannot be measured. Thank you, dear
Sharyn, for being my sister-friend.
1
James dressed in white. White lab coat, white scrubs, white cross-trainers. Sometimes he broke it up with a colored shirt, but for these visits, he mostly stuck with white. Made him fit in.
That was important to him. Fitting in. Though deep down, he knew he didn’t. Not anywhere. He was one of a kind. One of a pair, really, but even his twin was his opposite.
Fitting in here, though—or at least, projecting the appearance of doing so—was necessary. A matter of life and death, and maybe part of the elusive thing he’d been seeking his entire life: a reason for his existence.
He nodded in a friendly, confident way to the people he passed in the antiseptic, cluttered corridors of New York Hospital for Children. It was a busy place, even after visiting hours. As soon as he saw his chance, James ducked into one of the patient rooms.
And then he paused and went silent as he turned to look.
There, asleep in the bed, lay a little girl who slept with a knit hat pulled down over her head to cover the fact that she had no hair. No eyebrows, though that was harder to hide, despite the dimness of the room. There was a sickly sweet scent clinging to her, the scent of cancer. And while most human beings wouldn’t have been able to detect it, he could. He wasn’t entirely human, after all, much as he hated to admit that. Vampiric blood ran in his veins, heightening his senses well beyond the norm. So he smelled the cancer mingling with the stronger scents of antibiotics and the iodine concoction that stained her skin near every puncture wound. The little girl’s arms looked as if they’d been used for pincushions. It was barely 9:00 p.m. but she was asleep, her body exhausted. Her spirit worn down. Her name was Melinda. She was ten years old.
And she was terminal.
His eyes on the sleeping child, he moved closer to the bed. Watching her, keeping his steps silent, he reached out his open hands and laid them gently on the center of her chest, palms down, thumbs touching. He closed his eyes, and opened his heart.
“Doctor?” a woman asked.
James opened his eyes but didn’t move his hands. He hadn’t noticed the woman sitting beside the bed. Hadn’t even checked to be sure the room was empty. This little girl had been his entire focus. And he thought that for as long as he’d been sneaking in and out of hospital rooms by night, he really ought to know better.
He just got so caught up in his work….
“What are you doing?” the woman asked.
He smiled and met her eyes, willing the unnatural glow in his own to bank itself, to hide from her. “Just feeling her heartbeat.”
The woman—the little girl’s mother, if physical resemblance was anything to go by—lifted her brows. He saw her clearly, despite the darkness of the room. “Isn’t that what your stethoscope is for?”
“Do you mind if I finish?” He inserted authority into his tone this time. That was what a real doctor would do, after all. “You’re welcome to stay, but I do need silence.”
Frowning, Melinda’s mother rose from her chair to watch him. He kept his hands on the girl and felt them growing warmer, knew that soon he would give himself away. He had to distract her. “Would you mind getting me her chart? It’s over on her nightstand, I believe.”
Nodding, though still obviously suspicious of him, she moved to the nightstand. And James let the power he’d felt rising up in him continue to move through him, into his hands and into the child. A soft golden-yellow glow emanated from his palms for a long moment, and he let it, not stopping even when he knew the mother was turning back toward him. Even when he knew from her sharp gasp, that she’d seen.
The power would flow as long as it needed to. Sometimes it took a second, sometimes a minute. But only it knew when it was finished.
“What is that?” the woman asked. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Shh,” he whispered. “Just a moment, please.”
“A moment my ass. Who are you? Why haven’t I seen you before? What’s your name?”
The light beamed brighter.
“God, what is that?” And then she was striding to the door, flinging it open. “Help! Someone help me, there’s a stranger in here and he’s—”
He lost her words in the softness of the hum that filled his head. It was a vibration, a harmonic tone that made his entire body vibrate in resonance with it, and it felt like … well, he couldn’t describe what it felt like. Never had been able to. But he thought it must be what it felt like for one’s soul to leave one’s body at death and to emerge into oneness with the universe. It felt like bliss and perfection and wonder and ecstasy.
The glow died. His hands cooled. A nurse came running, and the room’s lights came on. Blinding and harsh. As he lifted his head and finally refocused on the here and now, he became aware of several people standing in the doorway, frozen in that suspended moment before action set in.
But his main focus was on the little girl. Her eyes were open and staring into his, and she knew. He knew she knew. The exchange between them was real and utterly silent, overloaded with meaning. She might not be able to describe it or explain it or even understand it, but on a soul-deep level she knew what had just happened between them. He smiled warmly and gave a nod of affirmation, and he saw the relief, and then the joy, in her eyes.
She smiled back at him, and then someone was grabbing him, pulling his arms behind his back and holding them there, while another someone snatched the name badge from the lapel of his white coat and said, “Call the police.”
“The police are already here,” said a familiar—and welcome—female voice. “He’s been lurking around here for a while,” the uniformed “officer” explained. “Someone already called it in.” She took hold of his arm. “Come on, buddy. Let’s you and me have a little talk in private.”
“I want to know what this was all about,” the mother demanded.
“Can I see some ID?” one of the nurses said at the same time, addressing his captor.
“Yeah, yeah,” Brigit said, her impatience palpable. “How about I get him out of the poor kid’s room first, huh? I’ll need to question each of you just as soon as I have him securely tucked away in the backseat of my car. Do not go anywhere.”
She moved behind James as she spoke, and he felt metal on his wrists, then heard the telltale click of handcuffs snapping tight. She certainly was pouring it on. She took him by an elbow and turned to lead him out of Melinda’s room. As the door swung closed behind him, a tiny, beautiful voice said, “It’s okay, Mamma. I think he was a angel. Not the kind that comes to take you away. The kind that comes to make you better.”
He smiled as he heard those words. Yes. This was his purpose. It was the only thing that gave him any pleasure at all in this isolated, lonely life of his: using his healing gift to save the innocent.
Then his captor shoved him into the elevator, and they rode in silence to the ground floor. He looked her up and down. Her Goldilocks curls were bundled up tight, and her pale blue eyes, with their ebony rings, refused to meet his. When the elevator doors opened, she escorted him unceremoniously outside to her waiting car—a baby-blue, fiftieth anniversary edition Thunderbird—where she opened the passenger door.
He got in. She went around, got behind the wheel and started the engine. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a key. “Turn toward the door,” she ordered.
James turned toward the side window, so his back and cuffed wrists faced her. She inserted the key, twisted it and the cuffs sprang free. But even as he brought his hands around in front of him, he saw one of the nurses from Melinda’s room coming through the hospital doors, frowning as she moved toward the car.
“Incoming,” he muttered.
And then the nurse had rounded the car and was tapping on Brigit’s window.
Brigit rolled it down in the middle of the nurse’s “I knew it! You’re not a cop at all, you’re—”
Brigit released a growl like that of a panther about to strike. Not human, that sound. It sent chills up even James’s spine. He knew she’d exposed her fangs, and probably showed her glowing eyes, as well.
The nurse backed away so fast she fell on her ass, and then Brigit hit the gas and they pulled away, tires squealing before catching pavement and launching the T-Bird into motion.
“That was unnecessary.”
She glanced his way, fangs still visible, eyes still aglow. “Says who?”
“Says me. And will you put those damned things away?”
She shrugged, but relaxed enough to let the razor-sharp incisors retract. Her eyes returned to their normal striking ice-blue shade. “So are you done bitching now? Ready to throw in a ‘Hi, sis. Thanks for saving my ass back there. Great to see you again.’?”
He sighed, shaking his head. “It is good to see you again, little sister. How are you?”
“I’m good. So far. And you?”
“Fine.”
“Typical. One-word answers always were your thing. And I see you’re still trying out ways to use your gift. You decide to eradicate death altogether now, or just for those you deem too young to die?”
He lowered his head. “I didn’t need your help, you know. I do this sort of thing all the time.”
“I know you do. Unlike you, big brother, I care enough to keep track of my kin.”
He closed his eyes. “I’d see you more often if you didn’t give me this lecture every single freaking time.”
“What lecture? The one about abandoning your family? About turning your back on what you truly are, J.W.?”
“It’s James.”
“It’s J.W. It’s always been J.W., and it’ll always be J.W.”
“And I didn’t abandon my family or turn my back on what I am.”
“No? When’s the last time you exposed your fangs, J.W.? When’s the last time you tasted human blood?”
The last time.? It had been when he and his sister—his twin—had been adolescents, and their honorary “aunt” Rhiannon had insisted they imbibe. From a glass, not a warm pulsing throat, and still it had repulsed him.
“You’re lying to yourself,” Brigit said. “It was delicious. It set your soul on fire and left you craving more, and you know it as well as I do.”
He was startled, but only briefly. “I’m not used to being around someone who can read my every thought.”
“Yeah, well, whose fault is that?”
“Look, I admit, the blood was … appealing. That’s what repulsed me. I don’t want to be … that way. And I’m not denying who I am, I’m choosing who I want to be, even while trying to discover why I’m here, why I was given this power.” He turned his palms up and stared at them, as he had so often throughout his life. “Power over life and death.”
“You’ve always been so sure there’s a reason,” she said softly.
“I know there is, Brigit.”
She nodded. “Well, I hate to admit this, bro, but you’re right. There is a reason. And I have recently discovered what it is.”
He stared at his beautiful twin, his opposite in almost every way. And yet they were the only two of their kind. He was certain she was kidding at first, because she had always teased and taunted him about his yearning for meaning, his quest for understanding. His innate sense of goodness and morality. But she didn’t laugh or even smile at him this time. And her face was stone serious.
“You think you know why we were born?”
“Yeah. And it’s not to run along the seashore revivifying dead starfish and tossing them back into the waves like you did when we were kids, or to cure little girls with cancer.” She licked her lips and shot him a quick look. “That’s what you did, just now, isn’t it? Cured her?”
He felt warm all over, and his smile was genuine. “Yeah. She’s gonna be just fine.”
Brigit’s lips curved upward, too, before she bit back the smile and put her trademark stern expression back in place. She was a hard-ass. Or at least she liked people to think she was. They’d played these roles all their lives, and he often wondered why she’d taken to hers as easily as he had taken to his.
His was easy. He was the good twin. The healer. The golden child.
Hers was a harder role to embrace. She was the bad twin. The destroyer, in a manner of speaking. And yet she’d never once complained about the label, even mostly seemed to try to live up to the tag—or rather, live down to it.
“Well?” he asked at length. “Are you going to tell me?”
“I think I have to show you.” She nodded at a magazine that was rolled up and tucked into the cup holder between them.
He sighed, about to argue with her, but when he met her eyes, he found her mind open, as well. Nothing hidden, no barriers, which was a very rare thing for his sister. He narrowed his eyes and felt only sincerity coming from her. No pretense, no hidden motives.
“The end of the world is coming, bro. It’s coming—and we’re the only ones who can prevent it. That’s why we were born. To save our entire race. Read the article while I drive. The page is folded over. I just hope we’re not already too late.”
“Too late?”
“I think it’s going to start tonight,” she told him.
He shook his head, still not following. “You think what’s going to start tonight?”
Brigit licked her scarlet-stained lips and sighed. “Armageddon. At least for our kind, and maybe for theirs, too.”
“We’re one-quarter human, Brigit. Their kind is also our kind.”
“Fuck their kind.” Her eyes flashed.
“Either way,” she went on. This might be it for everyone. Unless we do something about it.” She looked at her watch. “In the next forty-five minutes, as a matter of fact.”
“And where, exactly, is Armageddon going to break out in forty-five minutes?”
“Manhattan,” she said. “At a taping of the Will Waters Show.” She looked his way again and caught him staring at her as if she’d been speaking in tongues. “Will you just read the damned article? And buckle up. We’ve got to move.”
Frowning, he buckled, then opened the copy of J.A.N.E.S. Magazine to an article about a recently translated Sumerian clay tablet, written by someone by the name of Professor Lucy Lanfair. He found himself stuck on the tiny head shot of the professor herself, almost unable to tear his eyes away to read the piece that had his sister so wound up. It seemed as if the professor’s brown eyes were staring straight off the page and directly into his soul.
Brigit pressed harder on the accelerator, and the car’s powerful engine roared like a vampire about to feed.
2
Lester Folsom wasn’t enjoying life anymore, and he was more than ready to leave it behind. But he wasn’t willing to take his secrets to the grave with him. Those secrets were worth money. A fortune. And hell, he’d risked his life often enough while learning them that he figured he’d earned the right to spill his guts and reap the benefits before he checked out for good. So he’d spent the past year doing exactly that.
He was old and tired, and he was damned achy. And it had happened all at once, too. None of this gradual decline one tended to expect from old age. Not with him. One week he was feeling normal, and the next, he noticed that it hurt to lift his arms up over his head. The balls and sockets in his shoulders felt as if they’d run out of lubrication, stiff and tight. And he felt something similar in his knees and wrists and even his ankles now and then. It had happened right about the same time his eyesight had gone to hell. And it had all been downhill from there. His hair had thinned, and what remained had gone silver. His back had grown progressively more stooped, his skin more papery, with every passing year.
The beginning of his end, as nearly as he could pinpoint it, had been fifteen years ago, right after he’d retired from government work. His pension was a good one. But not as good as the advance River House Publishing had given him for his tell-all book. That money had allowed him spend the past twelve months on a private island in the Caribbean, basking and writing. Reliving it all, and yes, occasionally jumping out of his skin at bumps in the night. But they’d all been false alarms.
They wouldn’t be, after tonight. If his former employer didn’t get him, the subjects of his life’s work would. Either way, he was history. And that was fine.
He’d had that year in the tropical sun. Sandy beaches and warm saltwater made bifocals and arthritis a whole lot more bearable. And now the year was over. The book would hit the stands one month from today. He figured he’d be dead shortly thereafter. But he was ready. His affairs were all in order.
“Five minutes, Mr. Folsom,” a woman’s voice said.
He glanced up at the redheaded producer who’d poked her head through the door into the greenroom. It wasn’t green at all. Go figure. “I’ll be ready,” he replied.
And then she opened the door a bit farther and allowed another woman to enter. “You’ll go on right after Mr. Folsom,” the redhead told her.
“Thanks, Kelly.”
Kelly. That was the young redhead’s name. You’d think he could have remembered that from twenty minutes ago, when she’d first introduced herself. Didn’t much matter, he supposed. She was gone now.
The newcomer—he immediately labeled her an introverted intellectual—nodded hello, then looked around the room, just the way he had, taking in the table with its offerings of coffee, tea, cream and sugar, and its spartan selection of fruit and pastries. There was a television mounted high in one corner, tuned to the show on which they were both soon going to appear, but he had turned down the volume, bored by the host’s opening segment.
The woman finished her scan of the room and looked his way instead, then lowered her eyes when he met them. Pretty eyes. Brown and flighty, like a doe’s eyes, but hidden behind a pair of tortoiseshell-framed glasses.
“Well,” he said, to break the ice, “it seems Kelly isn’t much for introductions, so we’ll have to do it ourselves. I’m Lester Folsom, here to plug a book.”
She smiled at him, finally meeting his gaze. “Professor Lucy Lanfair,” she said, moving closer, extending a slender hand. It was not a delicate, pampered looking hand, but a working one. He liked that. She had mink-brown hair that matched her eyes, but she kept it all twisted up into a knot at the back of her head.
He took her hand, more relieved than he wanted to admit that it was warm to the touch. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“Likewise.” She withdrew her hand, wiping it on her brown tweed skirt. “Sorry about the sweaty palms. I’m a nervous wreck. I’ve never been on TV before.”
“Nothing to be nervous about,” he assured her. “You look very nice, if that’s any comfort to you.”
“I’ve never been too concerned with how I look, but thank you very much. I appreciate it.”
A woman who didn’t care about looks. Well, now, that was interesting. “What is it you’ve come to talk about?” he asked.
She sank into a chair kitty-corner from his and unrolled the magazine she’d been clutching in one hand. “A rather startling new translation of a four-thousand, five-hundred-year-old clay tablet.”
He lifted his brows, his attention truly caught now. “Sumerian?”
“Yes!” She sounded surprised. “How did you know?”
“Not many other cultures had a written language in twenty-five hundred BCE. May I?” He nodded at the magazine, and she handed it to him. The Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Studies, J.A.N.E.S. for short, had a classic image of a ziggurat tower on the front, beneath which the headline screamed, New Translation Suggests Another Doomsday Prophecy for Mankind. He glanced from it to her. “This is your piece?” When she nodded, he said, “You made the cover. Impressive.”
“Yes, of a scholarly journal with a readership of about three thousand. Still, it’s nice to get the recognition. Though I could do without the sensationalism. What the prophecy predicts is meaningless.”
“Oh, don’t be so sure about that.” He shifted his gaze to the book he carried with him everywhere he went. “And you should be grateful for the sensationalism. You might not have gotten any coverage at all without it.”
“No, I guess not.”
“So, you’re a translator?” he asked, as he flipped pages to find her story.
“And an archaeologist, and a professor at Binghamton University,” she said softly.
Not bragging, just particular about getting her facts straight, he thought. She was a pretty thing. A bit skinnier than he liked, but women had been curvier in his day. She dressed down, though. Probably to be taken more seriously in her career. Pencil skirt, simple white blouse with a thin, cream-colored button-down sweater over it. Very plain.
“And now an author to boot,” he added.
“It’s mandatory in my field. ‘Publish or perish’ is more than just a figure of speech.”
Or in his own case, publish and perish, he thought. He found her article and, without time to read it all, skimmed ahead to the actual translation. Within the first few lines, he was riveted.
The offspring of the Old One,
All the children of the Ancient One,
Of Utanapishtim,
In a stroke, are no more.
In the light of his eyes, they are no more
To the last, to the very last,
Unless Utanapishtim himself … (Segment Missing)
“As I say, it’s not what it says that’s so interesting,” the skinny professor said, her voice breaking into his reading. “It’s that the Sumerians simply were not known to prophecy. But—”
He held up a hand to stop her distracting chatter as his eyes sped over the lines.
When light meets shadow,
When darkness is well-lit,
When the hidden are revealed,
War erupts.
Like a lion, it devours.
Like a tigress, without mercy, it destroys.
For the end is upon them,
The end of their kind,
The end of their race,
The race that sprang from his veins.
The door opened, and the redhead—Kelly—poked her head in again. “Time to go on, Mr. Folsom.”
“One moment!” he barked, startling both women. He had to finish reading. He could not stop there. He had to know.
Only the Old One … (Segment Missing)
The Flood-Survivor
The Ancient One
Utanapishtim
The Two must bring about … (Segment Missing)
The Two who are opposite
And yet the same,
One light, one dark,
One the destroyer.
One the salvation
“The twins,” he whispered. “This is about the legendary mongrel twins.”
“Excuse me?” Professor Lanfair asked.
“Mr. Folsom,” Kelly said. “We have to go.”
Ignoring them both, he flipped the page, but there was no more. Lifting his head, he speared the professor with his eyes. “That’s it? That’s all? They printed all of it?”
“Yes. At least, that’s all so far. There are still hundreds of broken pieces of clay tablets from that particular dig site in storage. There may be more to this tablet, but at the moment—”
“Mr. Folsom!” Kelly was not taking no for an answer.
He nodded, closing the magazine and handing it back to the doe-eyed bookworm. “It’s not a doomsday prophecy at all, Professor Lanfair. Not for humankind, anyway. This is about them.”
“About whom?”
He sighed, glanced at the redhead and then leaned close to the professor and whispered in her ear, “About the race no one believes exists—the very one my book is about to expose on national television tonight.” A sudden chill raced up his spine, and he glanced at the TV screen in the corner again, then narrowed his eyes and looked more closely. As the camera panned over the studio audience, he spotted a dark-suited man standing near the back, and then another near the exit. Both wore tinted glasses in the dim studio. His mouth went dry.
But he couldn’t back down now. He had to see this through. Returning his attention to the pretty professor who had stumbled upon what might be the key to everything, he pressed his personal copy of his soon-to-be-released book into her hands. “You’d better hold on to this. Don’t let anyone know you have it, and don’t let it out of your grip. No matter what.”
“I don’t under—”
“I’m about to tell the world that vampires really do exist, and that our government has known about it for the better part of a century. The darkness, my dear girl, is about to be well-lit. The hidden is about to be revealed. And there are those who don’t want that to happen. But the proof—” he tapped the book’s cover with a forefinger “—the proof is in there.”
Then he straightened away from her, nodded at the television set and said, “Turn up the volume and pay attention, Professor. Somehow, this involves you, too.” Then he walked out the door, letting it swing closed behind him.
He followed the youthful and impatient producer, who all but trotted down one long corridor after another. It was all he could do to keep up, and he was literally out of breath by the time she pushed open a pair of double doors and held one with her back while ushering him through. “Take your time crossing the stage,” she told him in a whisper. “Wave hello to the audience. And watch those cables on the floor.”
Will Waters, twenty-five-year news veteran, retired network anchor and current host of the nation’s top-rated prime-time news magazine, rose to his feet and extended a hand in Les’s direction. “Please welcome Lester Folsom to the show.”
Struggling to catch his breath, Les lifted his chin and began walking forward, his pounding heartbeat barely audible to his own ears due to the live studio audience’s obedience to the glowing “applause” sign. Silently, he wished he hadn’t missed Will Waters’s entire introduction. But he could guess at what it had entailed. The true contents of his book had not been revealed to anyone besides the publisher, only the barest of hints had been released to the press. That he had worked for a top-secret sub-division of the CIA for more than twenty years, a sub-division known as the Division of Paranormal Investigations, or DPI. And that his book would reveal the existence of things formerly believed to live only in the realms of fiction. Just what sorts of things—that was what he would talk about tonight. If those fellows in the back of the audience let him get that far, anyway. He’d have to get straight to the point with Will Waters. No time for small talk.
He stepped over a pair of heavy cables that snaked across the floor and made his way to the host, one of the most beloved newsmen in the world. Will Waters extended a hand.
And just as Lester Folsom closed his own hand around it, he felt something like a sledgehammer pound into his chest. And then again. And again.
It was only as he sank to the floor that the accompanying sounds—Pop! Pop! Pop!—registered in his brain. Not hammer blows. Gunshots. Bullets. They felt nothing like he’d expected. And vaguely, he became aware that the famous veteran newsman was on the floor beside him, jerking spasmodically as he bled out. Collateral damage. That was what those suits would call it.
As the light of this world began to fade and the light of another appeared on a distant horizon, Lester thought that they had got to him even faster than he had anticipated.
He’d done the right thing, though. And despite this sloppy effort at containment, there was no way they could keep his secrets quiet now. He’d opened Pandora’s Box, then made a graceless but timely exit before the havoc he’d unleashed could play out. From the sounds of the skinny professor’s prophecy, it wasn’t going to be pretty. He hoped she would survive, now that she was the only one with the proof.
The light on the distant horizon grew brighter. He could see it clearly even without his glasses. And then his shoulders stopped aching at last.
When the crazy old man left the greenroom, Lucy finally allowed the amused smile she’d been holding back with all her might to take possession of her face. She even laughed a little, quickly clapping her hand over her mouth in case he might hear beyond the heavy door. That would just be cruel. But really, vampires? Lester Folsom was obviously suffering from some sort of delusional break with reality.
Poor Kelly. He’d given the girl an awfully hard time. Lucy made a mental note to go a lot easier on the young producer when it was her turn to go onstage.
Sighing, she glanced down at the book the old man had pressed into her hands.
THE TRUTH.
Unimaginative title, but memorable in its simplicity. There was a string emerging from the top of the book, and a tiny jade Kwan Yin, goddess of mercy and compassion, pendant dangling from the bottom. A necklace. Pretty. What an odd thing for a man to be using as a bookmark. She wondered if Mr. Folsom was a practicing Buddhist or just fond of Asian art. She removed the necklace from the book and hung it around her own neck, tucking the pendant underneath her blouse, so she would remember to return it to the man when they passed again. She was sure she would see him on her way to the stage.
She stuffed the book into her satchel so she wouldn’t forget it and offend the old guy when he came back to the greenroom for his coat and saw his gift, abandoned there. Then she dropped her bag into an empty chair and went to the television to turn it up the old-fashioned way, since she didn’t see a remote, curious to see how the fearless vampire hunter would come off to the viewers.
She’d always had a lot of respect for Will Waters. She hoped that wasn’t about to be shaken, but she suspected it was. There were only two ways this interview could go down, the way she saw it. Either Waters was going to expose the old man as confused and possibly senile, or he was going to play along with this sensationalistic vampire nonsense for the sake of his ratings. Either way seemed a breach of what used to be known as journalistic integrity. She hoped she was wrong.
Lucy sat down, waiting for the commercial break to end. She had been pleased at the invitation to appear on a serious news program. Not because she had any desire to grab her fifteen minutes of fame. God knew she preferred solitude. Her favorite place in the world, aside from a dig site in the middle of nowhere, was the dusty basement of the archaeology department at BU. And she certainly wasn’t going to jump onto the 2012 doomsday bandwagon, as the show’s producers seemed to be expecting her to do. No, she was going to stick to the facts. This translation was an extraordinary new bit of information about the ancient Sumerians, how they lived and how they thought. Period.
Sensationalism was something she didn’t need. And she wouldn’t take fame if they gave it to her. Recognition for her work, that would be okay, because it might just result in good PR for the university, which might persuade the powers that be to further fund her work.
She was picking over the fruit tray on the table, looking for grapes that hadn’t yet made it more than halfway to raisinhood, when the show’s theme music announced that the break was over. As it faded away, Will Waters introduced his dotty next guest.
Lucy looked up at the screen, absently popping a grape into her mouth, and watched as Mr. Folsom made his way toward the set. His gait was slow and shuffling, his posture stooped. He took his time crossing the stage, then finally extended a hand to shake the host’s.
And then there was a series of popping sounds that Lucy recognized all too well. She froze in place, not believing what she was seeing on the TV screen, as both men fell to the floor, red blooms spreading on their white shirts.
Shock gripped her as her brain tried to translate what her eyes had just seen. The cameras began jostling amid a cacophony of shouting, rushing people. Some seemed to be racing toward the stage, but most were running away from it, stampeding for the exits.
The screen switched abruptly to a “technical difficulty” message, and it took Lucy a few seconds to realize that the sounds of panic she could still hear were coming, not from the television set, but from the hallway beyond the greenroom door.
And for just an instant she was back there again, sleeping in her parents’ tent on the site of an archaeological dig in a Middle Eastern desert.
There were motors roaring nearer, and then a series of keening battle cries and gunshots in the night. She felt her mother’s hands shaking her awake in the dead of night and heard her panicked, fear-choked voice. “Run, Lucy! Run into the dunes and hide. Hurry!”
At eleven years old, Lucy came awake fast and heard the sounds, but what scared her more was the fear in her mother’s voice, and in her eyes. It was as if she knew, somehow, what was about to happen.
“I won’t go without you!” Lucy glimpsed her father as he shoved his worn-out old fedora onto his head. He was never without that hat on a dig. Said it brought him luck. But it wasn’t bringing any luck tonight. And then he was taking a gun from a box underneath his cot. A gun! She’d never seen him with a gun before. Her parents were a pair of middle-aged, bookish archaeologists. They didn’t carry guns.
“You have to, Lucy. Go! Now, before it’s too late!”
“Obey your mother!” her father told her.
Her mother pushed her through a flap in the rear of the tent, even as men in mismatched fatigues surged from a half-dozen jeeps, shouting in their foreign tongues, shooting their weapons. Lucy’s feet sank into the sand, slowing her, but she ran.
There were screams and more gunfire. Every crack of every rifle made her body jerk in reaction as she strained to run faster through the sucking sand, until finally she dove behind a dune, burying her face.
But worse than the noise, worse than the shouting and the gunshots, was the silence that came afterward. The vehicles all roared away. And then there was nothing. Nothing. Just an eleven-year-old girl, lying in a sand dune, shaking and too terrified to even lift her head.
Something banged against the greenroom door, snapping Lucy out of the memory. Blinking away the paralysis it had brought with it, she realized that she had to get the hell out of this place, and she had to do it now. The door through which she had entered was not an option. There was what sounded like a riot going on beyond it. Turning, she spotted the room’s only other door, one marked EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY.
This qualified, she decided, and she grabbed her satchel and jacket, shoved the emergency door open and ran through it into a vast concrete area with an open, overhead door, like a garage door, at the far end, and the city night beyond. She raced toward that opening, onto the raised platform outside it—a loading dock, she guessed—and jumped from that to the pavement four feet below.
Running full bore now, she followed the blacktop that ran between two buildings until she emerged onto a New York City sidewalk. Blending with the masses of humanity, she walked as fast as she could away from the violence she’d just witnessed.
Sirens screamed as police arrived. She smelled fast-food grease from somewhere nearby. Across the street, four men emerged from a black van. They wore suits and long dark coats, and they strode very quickly toward the building she’d just exited. One glanced her way, but she quickly averted her eyes and kept on walking. The wind swept a playbill over her feet and on down the sidewalk, and air brakes whooshed in the distance. She kept going.
Guilt rose up to nip at her heels. She was a coward for running away. Surely she ought to seek out a police officer, and tell him what she had seen and heard.
But everything in her told her to do just the opposite. So that was what she did. Running away, saving herself while others died—that was she did best, after all.
And yet it didn’t work out quite that way for her this time. From behind her, Lucy heard a voice say, “Hold it right there, lady.” And somehow she knew he was addressing her.
Her feet obeyed. But her heart raced even faster. The fight-or-flight impulse was coming down with all its weight on the “flight” side of the coin. And every cell in her body was already in motion, pushing her, making it almost impossible to stand still.
“Are you Professor Lanfair?” the man asked. He was one of those men in black she’d spotted earlier. She could see his warped reflection in the back of a chrome mirror, affixed to the side of a hot little sports car she wished she could jump into and drive away.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to come with me, ma’am.”
No, I don’t think I am.
Her brain argued, told her to just calm down, take a breath and cooperate. The guy was official in some way, right?
And then he started toward her. His footsteps on the wet sidewalk were like a starter’s pistol. And they had the same effect on her. She burst into motion like a racehorse when the gate flies open, but in three strides she felt an impact in the center of her back. The force sent her falling, as if she’d been slammed by a speeding truck. She was already colliding with the sidewalk by the time she actually heard the gunshot.
The pain of it came last, like a red-hot poker had been driven right through her spine and out through her sternum. Her bag went skidding along the sidewalk, into the alley, everything flying out of it in a hundred directions.
Shot. My God, I’ve been shot. I’ve been shot, I’ve been shot.
She lay there, facedown and shocked beyond thought, in a warm and spreading pool of her own blood. See? A voice in her head whispered. I told you not to run.
3
James took off the lab coat in the car and was wishing he had something besides the white scrubs and cross-trainers he was still wearing when his sister pulled the Thunderbird to a stop in a convenient spot she’d no doubt had some part in orchestrating. Her mind was far more powerful than his. He could read thoughts and impose his will on mortals, too, but she made him look like a rank amateur in both areas.
Feeding on human blood enhanced the vampiric powers they’d been born with. Or so she kept telling him. He hadn’t imbibed enough himself to know. Nor would he—ever.
Brigit stopped the car abruptly. “Here we are. And we’re late, just as I feared.” She looked at her watch again while she got out on the traffic side and hurried around to the busy Manhattan sidewalk. There was a lighted marquee above the entrance to Studio Three, but Brigit was moving too fast for James to spend any time reading it if he hoped to keep up with her.
She got to the door, where a man in a dark suit said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, the taping is already underway. You’ll have to wait for a break to go inside. May I see your tickets?”
Brigit smiled her sweetest smile and beamed her ice-blue eyes at the man. At first he reacted just as any male would, with pure sexual interest, but then it went further. His eyes began to glaze over. His smile died, and his entire face went lax. Expressionless. He opened the door and stepped aside to let them pass.
“Nice guy,” she said. “Strong, silent type.”
“Yeah.” James didn’t hide the disapproval in his tone. It was wrong to manipulate human minds that way just because you could. “Really, sis, would it have killed you to just get the damned tickets?”
“Who are you, the ticket police?”
James ignored the question and moved with his sister into the darkened studio, where Will Waters was delivering his opening monologue—his customary commentary on the week’s news—on a soundstage in front of a live audience. Something prickled along the back of James’s neck. He stopped and gripped his sister’s forearm until she stopped, too.
Standing along the rear wall, behind the spectator seats, was a man in a long dark coat. In the dark, James’s vision was excellent. He’d inherited that ability, among others, from the vampire side of the family. It was one of the traits he didn’t mind making use of.
And he wondered again, as he often had, whether it was hypocritical of him to embrace the traits he approved of, while rejecting the ones he didn’t. Seeing in the darkness, however, did no harm. And it was almost as handy as the ability to walk around in the sunlight without becoming a living torch, a trait he’d inherited from the human branch of the family tree.
Who do you think he is? his sister asked without speaking aloud.
James had to focus to reply. It had been a long time since he’d tried mental communication on this level. Picking up thoughts, sensations, vibes was one thing. Conversation—language—that was far more complex. It came back to him easily, however. Like riding a bike, he supposed.
Don’t know, but there’s another on the right, and two more up in the balcony—one on each side. Look like government types.
Hmm. Men in Black. Brigit pretended to study her nails as she furtively looked in the directions he’d indicated. Do you think they know about the prophecy’s connection to the undead?
How could anyone know about that but us?
A lot of people know about vampires, J.W. DPI, the government. They might be after the professor.
Could they be bodyguards or something, maybe for another guest? James watched the men, feeling more alarmed by the moment and knowing better than to ignore his instincts.
I don’t even know who else is on tonight. Oh …
Brigit’s mental communiqué came to a halt as Will Waters’s words came clear. “Next up, our surprise guest. A man who worked for what he claims was a top-secret subdivision of the CIA for more than twenty years. Now he’s written a tell-all book, which he says will prove the existence of things he calls … paranormal. His book was due to hit the shelves next month, but we’ve just this minute had word that it has been abruptly pulled, its production stopped by the Department of Homeland Security. A DHS spokesman says the book divulges classified information that could put undercover agents and operations in jeopardy. As to the author’s claims of government knowledge of supernatural matters, the spokesman laughs and asserts that the author is clearly suffering from some form of dementia, but that despite his delusions, he’s still in possession of sensitive information that must be contained.
“Here to answer those claims and talk about what his book would have revealed, retired CIA Field Agent, Lester Folsom.”
James and Brigit stared at each other, stunned. “They’re talking about the DPI,” Brigit whispered. “And Folsom … haven’t I heard that name?”
“You didn’t know about this?” he asked.
“No, and from what Waters just said, I don’t think anyone did.” The old man who had to be Lester Folsom was already walking unsteadily across the stage, moving slowly. He stretched out a hand toward the host’s outstretched arm, and then suddenly gunshots rang out. The two men jerked with the impacts and blood spatter sprayed behind them.
James was riveted as the old man fell to the floor, and the famous newsman with him. His gaze shot upward instinctively, to the balcony, where the shots had originated, but he could no longer see the man in black up there. The crowd was on its feet, and people were rushing for the exits.
He started to move forward, toward the dead men, but his sister grabbed his shoulder. “Not them. Her. We have to get to her.”
“She can wait,” he said, turning and gripping her hand tight, as people hit and jostled them on the way out. “They’re dying.”
“They’re dead! And if you try to help them, those bastards will just kill them again and you with them,” Brigit shouted over the increasing din. “You think it’s coincidence Folsom and Professor Lanfair were on the same talk show, on the same night? The suits will get her if we don’t. Come on, she’d be backstage somewhere.”
“But, Brigit—”
“We need her, J.W. We need her to save our entire race, and maybe hers, too, if you need some added enticement. Come on.”
They ducked out the door, and he found it much easier to move with the flow of panicked audience members than against them. Sirens were wailing already as they emerged into the night and hurried up the sidewalk. James looked and looked for the woman whose photo had appeared in the magazine his sister had shown him. The translator. Professor Lanfair. But the crowds and now the cops—who were rushing up and pulling people aside, trying to contain their witnesses—were making it harder.
“That’s her, J.W. Just came out of the alley, and she’s flying! In heels, too!”
James looked in the direction his sister was pointing, but there were dozens of panicked individuals on the sidewalk. And then he heard a voice shout, “Hold it right there, lady.”
He saw one of the men in black leveling a gun at the back of a slender woman in a tweed skirt. He could only see the back of her head, but he felt her.
Turning wide eyes on his sister, he said, “Why didn’t you tell me she’s one of the Chosen?”
“I didn’t know. What the—”
Just then the professor jerked forward, even as James held up a hand, an unthinking reaction. He shouted “No!” but it was too late. The man in black’s gun went off, and the bullet tore through the professor’s body. James saw, as if in slow motion, the blood explode from the exit wound like a mist in front of her, even as her back arched and she slammed facedown onto the sidewalk.
And then there was no stopping him. He launched into motion, passing by the killer, falling to his knees beside her. Her brown hair was coming loose from its tightly wound bun, and it was glittering, too, with the rainy mist now falling on the city street. He rolled her onto her back, very gently, and his gut-level, genetically encoded need to aid anyone of her kind compelled him to help her. To save her.
She was one of the Chosen. One of the rare mortals who possessed the Belladonna Antigen and, with it, the potential to become a vampire. Vampires sensed her kind, smelled them, and could not fight the instinct to protect them. He’d inherited that, too. But in the professor’s case, it felt like something more.
He had rolled the professor onto her back, so the misty rain fell on her cheeks now. Vaguely, he heard his sister trying to hold off the man in black, who was trying to get past her. She was exerting her will, but he was fighting it as if he knew how. Further support of her theory that he was DPI, which would have given him training in dealing with preternatural mind control. Luckily a huge crowd was closing in, too, giving James a heartbeat more time.
“I said stay back!” Brigit shouted. Her voice in that moment was something beyond human. The power it carried could not be resisted. Even James looked up at her, then from her fierce expression to the dazed faces of the people around them. They’d inexplicably stopped in their tracks and were unable to convince themselves to move forward again. The government man included.
“Stay back,” Brigit kept saying, holding her hands up, palms out. She was really straining. Her eyes were beginning to emit a soft glow.
“Easy, Brigit,” he warned. “Don’t go too far.”
“You handle your gift and I’ll handle mine. Get on with it, J.W.”
He nodded, looking down at the woman again. Her eyeglasses were crooked and her eyes were closed, thick sable lashes lying on her smooth skin. Upturned nose, full lips, Audrey Hepburn cheekbones. Her life was fading. James turned his palms up and stared down at them, and then he felt them begin to warm. Turning them downward again, he laid them over the exit wound in her chest, ignoring the blood and gore.
Her blood was flowing as his hands grew warmer, and he sensed very strongly the extremely rare Belladonna Antigen every vampire had possessed as a human. She was almost family.
The part of his family he had rejected. And yet, he could not turn away from her. Wouldn’t have, even if he could.
As his hands grew hot, he pressed them between the woman’s breasts. His palms immediately began to emit that familiar, yellow-gold luminescence. He shifted his body and tried to block the light from the spectators around him, and prayed that his sister would be able to hold their attention long enough.
James felt the professor’s chest grow hot, matching the energy of his palms. He saw the glow of his hands reflected there and knew the healing was beginning to take. He felt that sensation again, the one of his soul sort of reaching out from his body to connect to something more, something bigger, far beyond any individual sense of self. There was a greater whole and it was one, and he was part of it, in those moments.
His gaze shifted suddenly and without warning to Lucy Lanfair’s face, and at that same instant her eyes flew open. Brown eyes. Staring straight into his.
“I know you,” she whispered.
“Easy. Take it easy.”
“But I know you. I know you.”
And then her eyes shifted lower, to his hands on her chest, and she saw all the blood—and there was a lot of it. She started sucking in openmouthed, shallow breaths, and he knew she was on the edge of panic. “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God—”
“It’s okay,” he told her. “It’s okay. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“What … what’s that light? What are you doing?”
The glow intensified, just as it always did at the end of a healing. It grew brighter and then died, just that fast. Like the flash of a firefly on a summer country night.
“Get the fuck off her, pal!”
A pair of hands gripped his shoulders, jerking him bodily up and away from her. He’d been unaware, for a few ticks of the clock, of what was happening around him. Other black coats had emerged—some from the studio, others from the dark-colored vans that were lining the street. An ambulance had backed up to the curb, and the medics sprang into action the second James was no longer blocking their way.
He was weak. He was always a little weak after a healing, and this made two in one night, only a bit more than an hour apart. He felt disoriented, too. Il-logically, he didn’t want anyone else near this woman, and he started to push his way back to her, but his sister touched his arm.
There’s nothing we can do now, she said, mentally. Too many witnesses, and we don’t want these suits to know who the hell we are, J.W. Not if they’re who I think they are.
But they’re taking her—
We’ll get her. We will. But later. This is too risky.
Even as they carried on the mental conversation, one of the medics looked up. “There’s not a mark on her. I don’t understand. Where the hell did all this blood come from?”
“Just get her into the ambulance,” one of the men in black ordered, and then he turned, scanning the crowd—in search, James knew, of him.
The man had a scar running from the outer corner of his left eye, across his cheek, reaching almost to the center of his chin, and eyes the color of wet cement.
“You,” he said loudly, pointing at James, who was some twenty feet away. “I want to talk to you.”
Brigit tugged his arm. “We have to go. Now.”
He knew she was right. But it was killing him to leave Lucy Lanfair. Even as his sister tugged him toward her waiting car, James was looking back, watching them lift the gurney on which the beautiful professor lay, strapped down now, into the back of the ambulance.
She was looking straight back at him. She didn’t reach out, and she didn’t speak, but she couldn’t seem to take her eyes off him, either.
And then they closed the doors, and Brigit gave him a shove.
“I said wait!” Scarface commanded. He was reaching into his coat now, and James had little doubt he was about to pull a gun.
They’d made it back to the car, and James reached for the passenger door just as Brigit started the motor with a roar. Her window was down, and she was looking back at the man. As James predicted, he was leveling a gun.
“Freeze! Don’t make me—”
Brigit lifted a hand, palm up, fingers loosely touching her thumb.
“Don’t kill him!” James shouted.
She flicked her fingers open as her gaze intensified, and a beam of light pulsed from her eyes toward the man. Something exploded, shaking the sidewalk, and even the street, so powerfully that several onlookers fell down. Dust and rubble rained down as people ran screaming for cover. At the same instant, Brigit was gunning the motor again, spinning the tires, shifting rapidly through the gears as she sped away.
James turned in his seat, wondering if the debris falling on the crowd included bits of Scarface. But no, it seemed to be a magazine stand that had stood a few yards from him.
“Don’t worry,” Brigit told him. “The vendor had left his post to gawk at the lady who was gunned down on the sidewalk. No casualties, though I think letting that scar-cheeked bastard live was a mistake.”
“You sound just like Rhiannon, who, I think, originated the phrase ‘Kill them all and let the gods sort them out.’”
“Funny you should mention her.”
He closed his eyes. “Tell me that’s not where we’re going.”
“Who the hell else is going to be able to tell us what’s going on, J.W.?”
“I keep telling you, I go by James now.”
“Yeah. You do keep telling me that. It’s irritating. I wish you’d stop.”
She took a corner so fast that he was mashed up against the door, and he knew there was no going back now.
He’d been sucked back in. Just as he’d always pretty much known he would be. His family were not the kind who let go easily.
The ambulance attendant was sticking a needle into her arm the second the doors swung shut, and Lucy gasped at the unexpected pinch of it. Then she looked up at the young man and said, “I really think I’m all right.”
“Just relax, Professor Lanfair. You’re in good hands.”
“How do you know my na … uh …” Ocean waves came washing into her brain, crashing and then slowly sucking her logical mind back out to sea again. “What did you … give me?”
“Just relax now. It’s all fine. Just relax.”
He was smiling and his eyes were kind and sort of hazel. But they weren’t those other eyes. Those piercing, electric-blue eyes she’d been lost in moments before. And this medic’s hands, while soothing and strong, were not the same hands she’d felt on her before, either. That other touch had been so powerful she’d felt it in every cell of her body. A touch that she knew had somehow … healed her.
And that man. That face. That familiar, beautiful face. Something in her, something deep inside her, had recognized him—though she knew she had never seen him before in her life.
Perhaps, she thought, he was an angel.
“Time to wake up now, Professor. Come on. You’ve had a good rest. Wake up. We need to talk.”
Lucy opened her eyes. But the white room was tipping slowly one way, then the other, growing on one side, shrinking on the other, then reversing itself before just spinning slowly. There was a woman. Black hair with a white streak. A man with a big scar on his face. It must have been his voice she heard.
That was all she noticed before she slammed her eyes closed again.
“I’m going to be sick.”
“No, you aren’t,” the woman said softly. “Do you remember who you are, dear? Hmm?”
“Am in the hospital? Did I die?” God, she was so disoriented.
“You’re safe, and you’re fine, and you’re going home soon.”
Her voice was deep. A little gravelly. A Stevie Nicks voice. Lucy loved Stevie Nicks, mainly because her mom had.
“Now, tell me your name,” Stevie Nicks said.
Lucy smiled, remembering the soundtrack of her childhood, before it had all gone so dark. “Lucy. Dad used to call me Lucille. But I hated it. I wouldn’t hate it now, though. I’d love to hear him call me Lucille again.”
She tried opening her eyes again, but the room was still all out of sorts. She saw the man with the scar leaning close to Stevie—no, that wasn’t Stevie. She wasn’t wearing a scrap of lace or fringe, or a single trailing shawl. No, she was wearing mannish blue trousers with a white shirt tucked in, a thin belt, and a white lab coat, like a doctor.
“Can you get her to focus?” the scarred man said.
“If you get what you need, does it matter if it’s couched in her life story?”
“Time is of the essence here, Lillian. All hell’s breaking loose out there, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Maybe your containment team should have considered not having their work televised, then. Back off and let me do my job.”
The scar-faced man huffed, but he moved away from the bed.
Oh, Lucy thought. She was in a bed. And that white lab coat—yeah. Okay, this must be a hospital, then.
“Lucy, what’s your full name, dear?”
Lucy tried to focus, because for some reason she was afraid of making that man angry, and he already seemed awfully impatient. “Lucille Annabelle Lanfair.”
“Very good. And what do you do, Lucy?”
“I work in the Ancient Near Eastern Studies Department at Binghamton University,” she said, wondering why her tongue felt too big and her esses were lispy.
“And what does that work entail?”
“I teach classes about ancient Sumerian culture and the Sumerians’ written language. It was the earliest form of writing, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know that. That’s fascinating. Why don’t you tell me about this most recent translation of yours? The one that got you noticed by Will Waters.”
At the mention of the talk show host’s name, she cringed, squeezing her eyes tightly shut once more, and hearing again the gunshots, seeing the chaos, feeling the horror. “He’s dead, isn’t he? And that crazy old man, Folsom, too? I saw it.”
“Yes. Yes, they’re both dead. Some crazed fan. Did you meet Mr. Folsom?”
Keeping her eyes closed, she said, “In the greenroom.”
“And did you talk to him?”
She nodded. “He was … a little crazy, I think. Said vampires were real.”
“That is crazy. Did he say anything else to you?”
“Said this involves me, too. Said my translation wasn’t about humans, that it was about vampires, and about … them.”
“Who?”
She shook her head. “Twins, he said. Mongrel twins. Crazy.”
“I see. And did he say who or where these twins are?”
“No. He had to go.” Lucy felt her heartbeat quicken, and her breath came a little faster. “And then someone shot him—” Her voice broke as her throat went too tight for words to fit through, and hot tears surfaced in her eyes.
“It’s all right, Lucy. It’s all right. You’re safe here,” the woman who sounded like Stevie said softly. Lucy wished she would sing. “Now I want you to think about what happened right after that terrible shooting. What did you do?”
Lucy kept her eyes closed, but the scalding tears slipped through anyway. “I ran.”
“And why did you run?”
“It’s what I always do.”
The woman was silent for a moment. “When have you had to run before, Lucy?”
But before Lucy could answer, the man spoke, his voice deep and low and rough, like sandpaper. “When she was a kid. Eleven, I think. On a dig with her archaeologist parents in the Northern Iraqi desert, by special arrangement with the government. Bandits raided the campsite by night, shot the entire team and took everything that wasn’t nailed down. She was found cowering in a sand dune, sole survivor. It’s all in her dossier.”
Lucy felt the woman’s hand covering hers. “That must have been awful for you.”
“It was the worst day of my life. Until today.”
“I’m very sorry, Lucy. And I’m sorry to have to make you relive this, too. But we’re nearly done. Now, I want to get back to what happened at the studio. You were in the greenroom, but you saw the shooting. How did you see it, when the greenroom is so far away from the soundstage?”
“I … I saw it on the TV.”
“I see. So you saw it happen on the TV in the greenroom, and then you ran.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“And then what happened?”
Lucy sniffled hard and wondered why she was spilling her guts this way. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “S-Someone told me to stop. He was dressed all in black, I think. And he had sunglasses. So I froze, and I tried to stay still, like he said, but I just … I just couldn’t. My legs just wouldn’t obey. And I ran. And he … he shot me. He shot me.”
“But you’re all right now,” the woman said.
“There was all this blood. It was everywhere. And I fell down, right in it. And it started to hurt. And then … and then he was there.”
“Who was?”
“I don’t know.” She frowned, her eyes still closed, as if to keep the memory inside. “He touched me, and I felt like I knew him. And he had these eyes …”
“And what did he do to you, Lucy?”
“Nothing. He just touched me.”
“How, Lucy? Where did he touch you?”
“My chest.” She lifted a hand to press it to her own sternum, where she was sure there had been a gaping, jagged hole before. But there was only soft fabric, not her own clothing, and though she explored with her fingers, she felt no sign of any injury beneath it. “And then the man who shot me and … other men who looked like him were pushing him away and putting me in the ambulance. And now I’m here.”
“But you don’t know his name?”
“No.”
“But you said you felt like you knew him?”
“And yet … not. You know?”
“No. No, I don’t.”
“Ask her what she felt when he was touching her,” the scarred man barked.
She didn’t like his voice, and she didn’t like him speaking as if she wasn’t even in the room. And she wanted to go home. To her cozy one-story house with the flower boxes in the windows and the neat sidewalk that was all bordered in flawless flower beds, just like the house itself. Her house was sunny and yellow and orderly and neat, and above everything else, it was safe.
Safe. Like the big maple tree at her grandpa’s house, when she used to go there as a child and play tag with her neighbors. The giant tree was always safe. She’d convinced herself that her home was the same way. Off-limits. No one could get to her there. No pain, no violence. Home was her haven.
“When the stranger put his hands on you, what did you feel?” asked the woman with the Stevie Nicks voice and Cruella de Vil hair—Lillian, Lucy remembered.
“I was terrified. I’d just been shot. At least … I thought I had. I was covered in blood, and it hurt, it really did. But I guess I must have … hallucinated it, or maybe I hurt myself when I fell down.”
“What did you feel physically?” the woman went on. “When the stranger put his hands on you?”
“Oh, that. Well … his hands felt … warm. And then hot. And it seemed like there was a light sort of … coming from them. And it filled every part of me. And for just a second, I thought I might be dying, and that he was an angel.”
“An angel,” the man said, nearly spitting the words.
“That’s an interesting thing to say.”
Lucy sighed. “I really want to go home now. I’m all right, aren’t I? I mean, I wasn’t shot after all, right?”
“Well, there are certainly no bullet holes in you now,” the woman said, sounding cheerful. And then she got up and joined the man, then spoke in a very, very soft whisper, “The pentothal is wearing off. Is there anything else you want, before …?”
“Ask her about her blood type. We tested her, came back positive for the antigen. I want to know if she knew.”
Why, Lucy wondered, did they think she couldn’t hear them?
But Lillian was returning to her bedside now. Lucy heard the woman’s footsteps on the floor tiles. Smelled the soap she used, too.
“Lucy, do you know if there’s anything … unusual about your blood type?”
“Yes, there is. It’s … very rare. Only a few people have it. It makes me bleed easily. And it’s hard to find a donor to match me, which is why I donate regularly and have my own supply in storage. But that’s at Binghamton General—and I keep some at Lourdes, too. That’s another reason why I was so afraid when I saw all that blood all over me.” She paused, opening her eyes now. “If it wasn’t my blood, whose was it?”
“We don’t know. Can you tell me any more about your blood ty—”
“But how can you not know? If someone else was shot on that sidewalk, how could you not—”
“Lucy, I’d like you to take a breath and calm yourself.” The woman put a soothing hand on Lucy’s forehead. “A lot of people were shot at that studio last night. Inside and outside. It was chaos. And I wasn’t there. I’m sure someone knows the answers to your questions, but it’s not me.”
Lucy sighed. “I want to go home.” She sat up in the bed and looked around the white room while waves of dizziness washed over her brain. “Where are my things?”
“Lucy, about your blood type,” Lillian said. “Is there anything else you can tell me about the Belladonna Antigen?”
Lucy blinked and met the woman’s eyes. Her head was beginning to feel clearer. “How do you know? I never told you what it’s called.”
“We want to know what you know about it.”
“What kind of a medical question is that?” Lucy narrowed her eyes, suddenly suspicious of this woman, who she’d assumed was a doctor or a shrink—or maybe a grief counselor, sent in to help her process what had happened.
“You want to know if I’m aware that I’m going to die young? I am. There’s no treatment, and there’s no cure. People with this antigen usually die in their thirties. And I’m in mine now, but so far I feel fine. No symptoms.”
“And what would those symptoms be?”
“You tell me, you’re the doctor.” Lucy watched the woman’s face and knew, just knew. “Or if you’re not, then I’d like to know who you are.”
“I am a doctor. And I work for the government,” Lillian said. “And I think we’re all through with your questioning now. You can relax. I’ll be back in a moment.”
“I don’t want to relax,” Lucy said. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ve told you everything I know.” She was suddenly terrified, and while she thought she might benefit by demanding her rights or a lawyer, she decided to wait until those things were truly necessary. She didn’t like conflict or confrontation, but she liked the unknown even less. And she had no idea who these people were or where she was being held. And it was feeling more and more as if she was … being held. She’d assumed she was in a hospital, but she wasn’t so sure anymore.
The woman crossed the room to where the scar-faced man waited near the door, and then they stepped through it, leaving her all alone.
Lucy got up and went to the door—the windowless door—as well. And as she did, a feeling of fear rippled up her spine, because she had a pretty good idea of what she was going to find when she got there.
She closed her hand around the doorknob and twisted, her heart in her throat—and then it sank to her feet when the knob didn’t budge an inch.
Locked.
She was being held by people who had drugged her and questioned her. And might even have shot her.
But then her hands rose to her chest, and she pulled the fabric away from her skin and looked down her neckline. The necklace she’d found inside the crazy author’s book was still hanging there, Kwan Yin looking serene and gentle. But there was no sign of any wound in her chest. Not a mark.
And yet she remembered it all so vividly. She’d felt that bullet tear through her.
God, she wondered, how could that be?
But she knew how. It was that man. That angel.
He’d healed her.
She closed her eyes and whispered a prayer to him right then and there. “If you really are my guardian angel, please, come find me again. Save me again. I need to get out of this place. I want to go home.”
4
“Well? Where is she?” Rhiannon demanded.
James tipped his head to one side and met the eyes of the most powerful vampire he had ever known. Also the most beautiful. And the most dangerous. Rhiannon stood beneath a crystal chandelier in the foyer of the Long Island mansion that was her summer home, or one of them. She wore her usual choice of attire, a floor-length gown, with a slit up to her hip on one side and a neckline that plunged to her navel. Black satin that was almost as shiny as her endless raven hair, or the black panther, her beloved pet, that rubbed against her legs as she spoke.
“Good to see you, too, Rhiannon,” he said. “It’s been a while.” He glanced at the cat. “Hello, Pandora.”
Rhiannon made a dismissive sound like a set of air brakes releasing a brief spurt of excess pressure. “You walked away from us, J.W. Not the other way around. Don’t expect a warm welcome when you finally deign to honor us with your presence.”
“Rhiannon, he’s—” Brigit began.
“Where is the professor?” the arrogant one asked again, and this time her tone brooked no argument. No discussion.
“She got away,” Brigit said softly.
“She got away?”
“She was taken, actually.” Brigit lowered neither her head nor her eyes. She held the regal Rhiannon’s gaze firmly and strongly, and for just a moment James was amazed and impressed by his sister’s moxie. She’d grown up just as tough as everyone had known she would. And even though she’d been Rhiannon’s favorite, he hadn’t expected her to be able to stand up to, much less hold her own against, the most feared vampiress of them all. He could do so, always had. But that was because he didn’t particularly care whether or not he gained her elusive approval.
“Taken by whom?” Rhiannon asked, taking a step nearer, so the two women stood nearly nose-to-nose on the imported Italian marble floor. Black with swirls of silver. Pandora tensed, her sharp cat’s eyes watching every move, as her tail twitched.
“DPI,” Brigit said, not backing down a single inch. “Or that’s my best guess. There’s more going on here, Aunt Rhiannon. A lot more.”
“Such as?”
Leaning still closer, looking as if she was either going to kiss Rhiannon on the mouth or bite her nose off, Brigit said, her tone dangerously soft, “Why don’t you back up out of my face and I’ll tell you?”
Rhiannon’s eyes narrowed. “You’re treading on dangerous ground, Brigit.”
“Just like you taught me to do.”
Rhiannon’s scowl lasted a few more seemingly endless ticks of the clock. Pandora flattened her ears and a deep, soft growl emanated from her chest. And then, finally, Rhiannon rolled her eyes and paced away, almost gliding, despite the four-inch stiletto heels she wore. “Fine. Talk. Take your time about it, too. It’s not as if our entire race is at stake, after all.”
“Drama queen,” Brigit muttered.
Rhiannon whirled. “Excuse me?”
They stared at each other across the room for a long moment, and James tensed, wondering if the great Rhiannon, formerly known as Rianikki, the daughter of an Egyptian Pharaoh who never let anyone forget her rank, was going to try to annihilate his twin sister. He was about to step between the two women when Rhiannon smiled. It was a slow, gradual smile, but a smile nonetheless.
“You are extremely fortunate that I love you as I do, firecracker.”
“And I know it,” Brigit replied. But her own face and voice softened, as well. “All right, come sit. Here’s the deal.” Moving to the nearby sofa, the two sat down, and Brigit began recapping everything that had happened. Relaxing, the large cat curled up at Rhiannon’s feet and closed her eyes lazily.
James ignored them, for the most part. He hadn’t been home in a very long time, and while this was not his parents’ place, he had spent a large portion of his childhood here. “Aunt” Rhiannon had insisted on having a hand in raising him and Brigit. And he’d always been secretly glad of that, too, because while he, already adored by all, hadn’t needed the extra attention, his sister had thrived on it.
After all, to everyone else, she was the bad twin. Oh, no one ever said it that way. Not out loud. But she’d been born with the power of destruction, and she’d spent her entire life having to listen to her parents and every other role model in her life telling her that her power was bad. That it was dangerous and must be controlled, contained, kept on a tight leash. While he had been born with the power to heal, with everyone always oohing and ahhing over it, telling him how special he was, how someday he would do great things with his powers. How he was meant for something very special.
No one had ever blatantly compared the twins, called him the good one and her the bad one. But it was still the impression they’d both received from the adults in their lives. And it was an impression that ran deep. It had filled him with a perhaps unwarranted sense of pride and of goodness that had eventually led him to leave his people in search of meaning. While it had, he sensed, left his sister with a feeling of unworthiness. Or would have, if it hadn’t been for Rhiannon.
She alone praised Brigit’s ability as something special, something worthy, something good. She was constantly telling Brigit how there could be no creation without destruction. How goddesses of death were also goddesses of rebirth. How sacred her power was, how holy. And how James’s talent meant nothing without Brigit’s to balance it.
He’d never really believed any of that. He’d figured Aunt Rhi was probably just trying to make Brigit feel better, feel worthy. And he loved her for it. He’d never liked thinking that his sister’s feelings were hurt just because he was born with the gift of healing, even restoring life, and all she got was the ability to blow things up.
“Did the healing take?”
It was a beat before James realized the two-thousand-year-old vampiress was addressing him. “Yeah. I think so.”
“You think so?” she asked.
“I can’t be sure. They took her away before I had the chance to—”
Rhiannon was glaring at him, her full lips as thin as they could get, arms slowly crossing over her chest, forcing her breasts together.
He looked away, sighed. “Yes. It took.”
“Are you sure?”
He thought back, relived it all in his mind, and then got stuck in remembering those eyes. Those doe-brown eyes, and the fear and confusion in them when they’d opened up and stared so deeply into his.
I know you.
What the hell was up with that?
“J.W….” Rhiannon prompted.
“Yes.” He knew the light and the heat flowing from his hands had peaked, then just begun to ebb when he’d been forced away from her. “I’m sure. The professor was fine.”
“Was being the operative word,” Brigit said. “We can’t be sure of anything now that those bastards have her.”
“You’re sure it wasn’t an ordinary team of paramedics?” Rhiannon asked.
“Men in black were giving the orders. We both saw it.” Brigit glanced at James, who nodded in confirmation. “We’re going to have to plan and execute a rescue,” she said.
“What could the DPI want with her?” James asked, trying to force his focus to stay on the matter at hand.
Rhiannon leaned forward to stroke her panther. “They must know about the prophecy, and that it applies to us. Our race. The descendants of Utanapishtim. The tablet says our race will be no more. And believe me, nothing would make the DPI happier than that. They see us as a threat. They’ve been hoping to get the green light to wipe us out for as long as they’ve known of our existence.”
“Why haven’t they gotten it?” James asked.
Rhiannon leaned back on the sofa, which was as ostentatious as everything else in her homes. Red velvet, with gold braid and fringe. “There are a few leaders wise enough to know that war with our kind might not be easily won. By keeping our existence secret, they’ve managed to maintain a tense but fragile, and entirely unspoken, truce. Now, though …” She lowered her head with a sigh.
James had never seen Rhiannon this worried before, and it got his attention. He moved to the sofa and sat down beside her. “Now?” he prompted.
She lifted her head, looked him right in the eyes. “Now, thanks to Lester Folsom and his book, the entire world knows we exist.”
“The book was pulled.” Frowning, James shot a look at Brigit. “Isn’t that what Will Waters was saying in the intro? That the government had banned it, called a halt to the release, confiscated every copy before it ever hit the bookstores?”
“Yeah, J.W., but you’ve gotta know when the author of a banned book is taken out on national TV, the public will start turning over every rock to find out what the book had to say,” Brigit said.
“And I have no doubt there are copies somewhere. And there are certainly people who know what was in those pages. His publisher, for one,” Rhiannon added.
“No doubt the DPI has already absconded with every computer that ever came within reach of the manuscript,” she went on. “But that won’t stop word from spreading. No, this cat is thoroughly out of the proverbial bag.”
“We need to know what’s in that book,” James said softly.
Rhiannon nodded. “I agree. But we also need to keep our focus here. Our main goal has to be to prevent the foretold annihilation of our race. And to do that, we need to understand the parts of that clay tablet that were incomplete, the missing pieces. And the other clay tablet in our possession, the one we’ve kept for centuries, never quite sure why.”
“I’d forgotten about that. Legend has it that clay tablet will one day save our race,” James said, recalling the tales told to him over and over throughout his childhood. The legends of his race, how they began, and the story of the tablet that must be protected. “Where is it?”
“Damien has it,” Rhiannon said. “I’ll get it from him. The prophecy suggests that all of this so-called Armageddon is heavily dependent upon the involvement of two things.”
“Yeah,” Brigit muttered. “Us.”
“And him,” Rhiannon said.
James frowned. “Him? Him, who? You mean Utanapishtim?”
“Precisely.” Rhiannon rose from the sofa, paced across the room, then turned and paced back again. “So what Folsom wrote in that book, and what the government intends to do about it, and whether it becomes public knowledge—all of that is on the back burner. Our first goals are these—we have to find and rescue the professor, so that she can help us locate and translate the rest of that prophecy. And we have to enlist the help of the very first immortal. The Ancient One. The Flood Survivor. The father of our race. Utanapishtim.”
“How the hell are we going to do that?” James asked. “A séance?”
“Of course!” Brigit said. “Aunt Rhi was a priestess of Isis—”
“Not was, is. And that’s high priestess,” Rhiannon corrected.
“Yeah, yeah,” Brigit said, no doubt pissing Rhiannon off again, James thought. “But that’s not the point. The point is that you know how to contact the dead and all that shit, right? Right? So is that it? Are we going to have a séance?”
“Not exactly,” Rhiannon said. “We don’t need to speak to the dead if Utanapishtim is alive.”
“But he’s not,” Brigit said. “He’s been dead for more than five thousand years, Aunt Rhi.”
“Yes, well, that’s where your brother comes in.”
Rhiannon speared James with her eyes, even as he felt his own widen. “You can’t mean … you want me to—”
“Raise him, J.W.”
He shot off the sofa as if it had electrocuted him. “I can’t!” The panther’s head came up, and she looked irritated at being disturbed from her nap by his sudden movement.
“How do you know?” Rhiannon asked him.
“For the love of—how could I not know?”
Rhiannon shrugged, graceful, sexy. “I’ve seen you raise the dead, J.W. You’ve been doing it since you were born. You started with your own sister, stillborn, blue, no heartbeat, not a breath of air in her lungs.” Rhiannon moved closer, reaching out and grabbing James’s forefinger, enclosing it in her fist. “You took hold of her just like this,” she said. “And she breathed, J.W. She breathed. You healed her. You brought her back to life.”
“I know. I know. And yeah, I’ve been successful a few other times since then, but only when the subject has just died. Never with anyone who’s been dead for long.”
“But have you tried?” Rhiannon asked.
“What, restoring life to a rotting corpse? Yeah, yeah, that’s how I spend my Halloweens. Are you fucking crazy?”
“So you’ve never tried, then,” Brigit said. She was rising now, too, growing excited, he thought, at this impossible, insane notion.
“No, I’ve never tried.”
Rhiannon nodded. “We’ll start small, say with someone a week dead. And we’ll build from there. We’ll need to find corpses in various stages of decomposition, of course, and—”
“Shit.” James’s stomach convulsed. He took an involuntary step backward. “No. No, this is sick.”
“Call it what you will. It’s necessary,” Rhiannon said.
“It’s to save our race,” Brigit added.
“No way. No way in hell.” James was shaking his head slowly in dawning horror. “And it won’t work. And even if it did, Utanapishtim isn’t going to be in some stage of decomposition. He’d be dust by now.”
Rhiannon shrugged. “Dust, bones, rotted flesh, all just different phases of the same basic components. If you can do it with one, you can do it with the others.”
“You’re out of your mind, Rhiannon.”
She lifted her perfectly arched brows and sent him a look that told him he was getting close to the danger zone.
And then Brigit’s hand landed on his shoulder. “J.W…. James. You’ve spent your entire life asking yourself, and the universe, why you were born with this power. Maybe this is it. Your answer. Maybe this is why. To save your family. Your people. There’s not much that could be bigger, more important, than that.
Is there?”
He stared at her. And he could barely believe that he was letting her talk him into it. Because she had a point. He had always wondered why. He’d always known he had this power for a reason, a big reason, and he’d been searching for it all his life.
Maybe this was it. And if there was any chance it was, then he couldn’t very well turn his back on it, now could he?
He lowered his eyes, released all his breath at once, swallowed hard and whispered, “All right. All right, I’ll … I’m in.”
“Good.” He heard the smile in Rhiannon’s voice, felt his sister’s arms close around him in a relieved hug.
“We’re going to have to get out of the city,” Rhiannon announced, moving quickly toward the nearest window, her cat at her heels. “We need someplace with privacy for these experiments. We’ll leave as soon as possible.”
“But, Rhiannon,” James said, lifting his head. “What about Lucy Lanfair?”
“Lucy … oh, the professor? Obviously we’re going to have to take her with us. We’ll pick her up on the way.” She glanced out the window. “But not tonight. It’s nearly dawn. I must rest. I suggest you do the same.”
Lucy opened her eyes and felt an odd, moist breeze on her face. Almost as if she were outside. She’d been sleeping very soundly and wondered what on earth had awakened her. Something had. And she was nowhere near ready to get up, not after …
No, she wouldn’t think about that. She needed to pull up the covers, roll onto her other side and …
Where were the covers?
Wait, where was the mattress? The bed? All she felt was sand and very finely ground pebbles.
Her eyes popped open, and the first thing they focused on was the giant orange curve of the sun, just beginning to rise over a distant horizon. She was … outdoors. On the shore of the ocean. She was grasping handfuls of sand and shells in search of blankets.
Waves whispered soothing sounds as they whooshed up over the sand, then burbled back out again. The wind smelled like seaweed and brine. She brushed off her hand, rubbing it against her shirt, then paused, because she was wearing clothes. A pair of jeans that were a size too big, and a white button-down shirt. A man’s shirt, she thought. Sitting up, she pushed a hand through her hair, which felt vaguely like a rat’s nest, and tried to remember how she’d ended up here. The last thing she remembered …
They’d fed her. She had supposed that was a plus, even if the food was tepid and sticky, and almost certainly prepared by peeling back the plastic and nuking for five minutes on high. Meat loaf with gravy, soupy mashed potatoes, green beans that tasted the way she thought paint would taste and some kind of cherry dessert that was so tart it made her pucker. About two tablespoons of each, whether she needed it or not.
Famished, she’d wolfed the food down so fast there hadn’t been time to ponder the taste overly much. A blessing in itself.
Or not. Because she didn’t remember anything else. Nothing at all. Apparently they had tranquilized her with something. It hadn’t hit her with the potency of the first injection, in the ambulance, and it didn’t have her spilling her guts on any subject they broached, like the one they must have given her just before starting their interrogation. And she didn’t have any doubt that was exactly what it had been. An interrogation by some secret government agency that wanted to know how much she knew about the murders of Lester Folsom and Will Waters.
Only that wasn’t what they’d questioned her about, was it? They’d seemed far more interested in what she knew about her angel. Her savior. That beautiful man who’d saved her.
Or had it all been some kind of a dream?
Maybe. Or maybe not. She couldn’t be sure, because she didn’t know anything for sure anymore. Except that there was someone walking toward her now, along the sand. Walking at a brisk but unhurried pace. She blinked, but her eyes were so unfocused that it was as if she were peering through a dirty window. She squinted, thought she saw a baby-blue car on the side of the road, some distance beyond him, then shifted her focus right back to him again. Yes, him. Definitely male, tall. And as he drew nearer there was something …
It was him!
She scrambled to her feet, forgetting all about the lingering effects of whatever dope they’d used to season her food. Unconsciously, she pushed one hand through her hair, even as she backed up a step, wobbled, then caught her balance again. Her brain was still foggy, her equilibrium off-kilter. Should she stand there, waiting, or run away? She didn’t know whether she was afraid of this guy or not. She didn’t know anything about him, except that he’d been leaning over her after she’d been shot down on the street outside Studio Three. And that she’d felt as if she knew him from somewhere. And that it had seemed as if he had … helped her. Healed her. Saved her.
On the one hand, if he’d helped her then, maybe he wanted to help her now, too.
On the other, if he were involved in any of that violence that had unfolded back there last night—God, had it only been last night?—then she wanted no part of him.
He stopped walking, maybe sensing her distress as she stood there with one hand trying to hold her wild tangles of hair to the back of her head and the other arm wrapped around her own waist, as if she could somehow protect her vital organs simply by covering them with a forearm.
He wore a tan, short-sleeved shirt with the top several buttons undone, khaki trousers, rolled up a little, and his feet were bare and sinking into the sand. Bare feet. That made him seem less scary, somehow.
“It’s all right, Lucy. It’s me. I’m the one who helped you, after—”
“I remember.”
He tipped his head to one side. “You look as if you’ve had a rough night.”
She blinked. “Rough? I witnessed a double execution, ran for my life, was shot in the back and somehow yanked from the brink of death by whatever magic it is you wield,” she said, and the words came pouring out, faster and faster. “Then I was kidnapped, drugged, held prisoner, questioned, drugged again. And now I wake up in the middle of nowhere in clothes that aren’t my own, and I don’t even have my purse or a hairbrush or—” Her throat closed off and her face pulled itself into an embarrassing grimace as tears strained to break through whatever invisible barrier had held them back so far.
And then they escaped, just as her knees weakened and her entire body went lax, as if there was simply no more fight left in her. She sank to her knees in the warming sand, her head falling forward.
But before she could collapse entirely, he was there. He caught her beneath the shoulders, his arms powerful and strong, holding her upright, and then … And then he pulled her gently to her feet and closer to him. So close that her body rested against his warm, solid chest. So close that she could inhale him, feel him all around her.
“You’re freezing,” he muttered into her hair, and those iron arms tightened just a little to hold her against his warmth. Just enough. She absorbed his heat and his strength as if he were feeding her very soul. And maybe he was. “It’s okay. It’s okay, Lucy. I have you now. I’m not going to let anyone hurt you again, I promise.”
She shook her head against his chest. “Who are you, that you should even care?”
“What the hell did they do to you?” His voice wavered a little as he dodged her question. “How did you escape?”
“I di-di-didn’t,” she managed in between chest-wrenching sobs.
“I’ll ask you to explain that … but later. I think right now you need a warm, soft bed and a decent meal.”
“I need to go home.” She lifted her head and stared up into his eyes, ashamed that her own were probably pleading and needy. And yet, she couldn’t help it. “I just want to go home.”
“I know. I know you do.” He scooped her up, right off her feet, and he carried her across the sand, away from the sea, as gulls cried and swooped overhead. The sounds of the waves washing over the shore grew fainter, and soon they were approaching his car. A shiny car, pale blue with a white convertible top that was currently up, not down. Probably one of those new versions of an old classic. He set her on the white leather seat as carefully as if she were an injured dove, even leaned over to fasten her seat belt for her. And then he got behind the wheel and pulled away.
Yes, she thought, as she drifted to sleep in the comfort of his car, he was definitely a good guy. He was going to take her home. She rested her head against the big soft seat, closed her eyes and basked in the warm air that was blowing from the car’s heater. Thank God.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Soon she would be safe and sound in her own bed again. And then she would try to figure out what on earth all this was about. Not that she even cared. None of it had anything to do with her. And it was all fairly ludicrous, as far as she could see. Vampires and secret agents and tell-all books and public executions. Drugging and questioning and cloak-and-dagger nonsense. None of it concerned her, other than to make her think a letter to the president was in order, and maybe a change of party affiliation soon, if this was the way her side wanted to run the world. Assassinating senile old men with vivid imaginations in the name of “national security” seemed beyond the pale, frankly.
And yet, something very remarkable had happened to her. There was no doubt in her mind that she had been shot and lying in a pool of her own blood on that Manhattan sidewalk. And then that man … this man …
She opened her eyes slightly and looked at him, behind the wheel of the blue car. He was a beautiful man. He had skin that was so flawless he almost seemed like a figure in a wax museum—the kind that looked just like the real person except for being perfect. That was how he looked. Perfect. And not just his skin, but his hair, which was shiny and appeared to be made out of strands of silk, in shades of honey and caramel and gold, one color blending into the next. And his eyes were that way, too. Vivid, electric blue, with a very fine black outline around the irises, and some kind of mysterious backlighting thing going on behind them. Or there had been when he’d been leaning over her on the sidewalk with his hands on her chest. Not pressing, to stanch the flow of blood. No. Not pumping, as if he’d been attempting CPR. He hadn’t been pushing against her. It was more like he’d been pushing something into her. Out of him and into her.
And there had been that glow from his hands and from his eyes.
God, he was unearthly. And so very beautiful.
She remembered that there’d been a woman with him, a blonde who’d hustled him away. And she’d been gorgeous, too, in the fleeting glimpse Lucy had of her.
He looked her way, then looked again as he caught her perusal of him. She was too tired, her brain still too numb from all the chemicals swimming through it, to be embarrassed at being caught. Still, she thought she ought to say something.
“I don’t even know your name.” It was better than nothing.
“It’s James. James Poe. Although my sister refuses to call me anything but J.W.”
“Your sister?” Ridiculous that she felt such a silly spark of hope that maybe he wasn’t romantically involved with the gorgeous blonde after all. It wasn’t as if she herself would ever see him again once he dropped her off at the bus station or airport or wherever it was he had in mind to dump her.
“Brigit. She was there, too, when … everything happened.”
“Oh.”
“We’re twins, you know.”
That made her smile a little. “Twins. That must be amazing. To have someone that close to you, who knows you that well.”
“It’s wonderful. And it’s horrible. Depends on the day.”
She breathed and relaxed. “I think you saved my life on that sidewalk, James.”
His face seemed to tense a little, and she thought he was trying to decide how to answer her. Finally he just said, “You should really get some sleep. We’ve got a bit of a drive.”
“But … you realize I need to know, right? I don’t give a damn about any of the rest of this. But what happened there on that sidewalk—when you put your hands on me—that I need to know.”
When he still didn’t say anything, she went on. “I felt the shot hit me—it was like being pounded by a sledgehammer. And then it burned straight through my body. Like how I would imagine a white-hot blade would feel.” As she spoke, she straightened up in the seat and pressed her palm to her chest. “And then I was on the ground in a pool of blood. So much blood. And all of it mine. I’m sure it was mine.” She lowered her eyes. “Or else I’m hallucinating, maybe losing my mind. Because it was that vivid. That real.”
He glanced her way briefly, and when she met his eyes, he gave her the validation she sought with a single nod. “You didn’t imagine it. It was real.”
She wondered if she could accept that.
“And then you came,” she said softly. “And you put your hands on me. I thought I felt heat, and I thought I saw … a light. It came from you, from your hands on me. Was that real, too?”
He didn’t answer.
“Are you an angel? Are you some kind of … guardian angel, James?”
He licked his lips as if he were nervous, and then nodded once, as if having made a decision. “You’re going to have to know sooner or later anyway, I suppose.”
She wanted to ask why he would say that, since she would probably never see him again after he took her wherever he was taking her and dropped her off. Right? She wanted to ask but couldn’t bring herself to interrupt just when she thought she was about to get some answers.
“I was born with a … a gift,” he told her.
“A gift?”
“An … ability that most people don’t have.”
She tipped her head to one side, watching him. “The ability to … heal gunshot wounds?”
“Yes. Or just about anything else.”
Her brain told her that the man was clearly delusional, and she thought what a shame it was that such a gorgeous specimen was mentally warped. But she couldn’t really brush off his claim that easily when she’d been on the receiving end of his healing touch. Could she?
“You don’t really believe me.”
“I … I don’t how I can doubt you. And yet, it just doesn’t seem … plausible.”
He shrugged, drove for a while in silence.
She rested, waiting, wondering if she’d offended him somehow, regretted it if she had. He’d saved her life. And then found her on the beach.
How had he done that?
“Here we are,” he said, and he pulled the car carefully over onto the shoulder of the road and brought it to a stop.
“Here we are where?” There was nothing around them.
“Proof.” He opened the car door and got out, and to her surprise, he moved toward a black bit of road-kill just ahead. A crow, its feathers all askew, its body limp.
She frowned, intent on James as he crouched down beside the bird. A car sped past, its back draft blasting his hair and clothes briefly, but he didn’t even seem to notice. He was holding his hands over the bird. “Good,” he said. “It’s still warm.”
Compelled beyond resisting, she opened the car door and got out, moving closer to him without even planning to do so. She squinted, leaning forward. Was there light coming from his hands? There was. A soft yellow glow that seemed to emanate from his palms.
Shifting her focus to his eyes, she thought she glimpsed a similar light there, but then he closed them. She kept moving nearer, then knelt right beside him.
There was a sudden flapping, and then he was holding the crow between his hands, wings contained. The bird’s black-currant eyes were open, and it parted its large dark bill to release a series of loud squawks that did not sound like gratitude.
Then James rose, lifted his arms, parted his hands, and the crow flapped its big wings and took flight.
Lucy stood there for a long moment, watching until the gleaming black corvid was out of sight. “That bird wasn’t injured,” she said quietly. “That bird was dead.”
He shrugged, saying nothing.
“Are you telling me you can raise the dead?”
“Sometimes.”
He had avoided her eyes until then. But he looked into them now. “But besides that—I’m really just an ordinary man, Lucy.”
“There’s nothing ordinary about you.”
He shrugged, lowered his gaze. “I just … I don’t want you to be afraid of me.”
“Afraid of you?” She continued to stare at him, her mind lost in wonder. “You’re some kind of an angel, or … or a superhero. I’m not afraid of you.”
“Good.” He met her eyes again, and for the first time she saw his smile. “Good.” Then he took her arm, and they started back toward the car.
“How did you find me?”
“All too easily, I’m afraid,” he said, opening her door for her.
She got in, and he rounded the front of the car and got in, as well.
“What do you mean?” she asked when he was seated.
“I need to know how you escaped,” he told her.
She shook her head. “As I said before, I didn’t. I was there—”
“Where?”
She frowned, thinking back. “I don’t know. I was unconscious for most of the ambulance ride—they drugged me. I woke in a hospital-like room, but it wasn’t a hospital. Or at least, not an ordinary one. I was interrogated as if I were a terrorist or something.”
“About what?” he asked. “The shooting?”
“A little. But mostly about you, and then they started asking me about my blood type, which is rare. And I have no idea how they knew that.” She shook her head, more confused than ever. “Much less why they would even care. Eventually they fed me, and then I was out again. I suspect they drugged the food.”
“Probably.”
“I woke up on the beach.” She met his eyes. “And you were there.”
He had been about to put the car into gear and pull away, but he stopped in midmotion and looked at her. “They just let you go? Just dumped you on that beach for me to find?”
“I don’t know that they could have expected you to be the one to find me there, but yes.”
“Oh, they expected it.” He drew a deep breath. “Do you trust me, Lucy?”
She tilted her head to one side, searching his eyes. “I think so, yes.”
“Good, because I have to ask you to do something for me.”
She nodded. “I guess I owe you a favor, given that you’ve saved my life—maybe twice now. What is it?”
“Take off your clothes.”
5
James tried not to notice the things he couldn’t help but notice as the frightened, introverted professor stood behind a conveniently located grove of trees in her bra and white cotton panties, with her arms up over her head.
He tried not to notice, but he noticed anyway. Her skin, smooth and tight. Her lean body. She wasn’t curvy. She didn’t have mounds of cleavage busting out of a lacy push-up bra. She was lean and toned. Her skin didn’t sport a dark coppery tan but was almost as pale as his undead relatives’.
And warm, as he ran his hands over it. From her shoulders to her wrists. Underneath her arms and down to her lithe waist and then to the barely flaring hips. From her soft belly over her rib cage and all around her breasts, all the while trying not to touch the breasts themselves. Then he turned her and examined her nape, her shoulder blades, her lower back. He stopped where the underpants began, crouching down to begin checking those long, lean legs of hers.
He found the telltale bump, no bigger than a mosquito bite, in the delicate crease where buttocks met thigh, and she jumped when he ran his finger over it.
“Hey!”
Her voice was raspy, a little bit breathless. She was either humiliated or as turned on as he was, and then he wondered if it might be a little bit of both.
“Sorry. It’s right here.”
“What’s right here?”
“I’ll show you in a sec. Grab hold of the tree, this might pinch a little.”
She did as he told her, and he squeezed the tiny bump like a blackhead. It popped like one, too, except that the object that came out of it was tiny and metal.
To her credit, she didn’t squeal. She flinched hard and sucked in a sharp breath, but that was all.
He said, “All done,” and held the thing on the tip of his forefinger as she turned.
She frowned at it, wishing for her glasses. “What is it?”
“A tracking device. It sends out an electronic signal so that someone on the other end knows where you are at all times.”
Lifting her eyes to his, she said, “They put that in me?”
He nodded at her clothes where they were hanging over a nearby limb. “Better get dressed. Now that we’re rid of this, we can be on our way.”
“But why?” she asked, grabbing the jeans and stepping into them. “I mean, if they wanted me, why let me go? And if they didn’t want me, why implant that … that thing in me?”
“So you could lead them to me,” he told her.
She stopped with the shirt in her hand and studied him for a long moment, then resumed dressing. “Why are they looking for you?”
“Because I’m different. And with the DPI, that’s pretty much all the reason they need.”
“What’s the DPI?”
“A government agency,” he said, and didn’t elaborate. Instead, he refocused on the device, already thinking up ways to get rid of the little unit. “You ready?”
“Yes. Ready.” She looked at his hand. “Are you going to crush it under your shoe, or bury it, maybe throw it into a stream or something?”
“Or something,” he told her. And then he started walking back toward the car. As they reached the winding road, he waited. Two other cars went by, followed by a pickup, all headed in the direction she and James had come from. When the truck passed, he tossed the tiny unit and it landed right where he intended it to: in the bed.
“Now they’ll be looking for us in the opposite direction.”
“You’re brilliant.”
He smiled at her and opened her door. “You can barely keep your eyes open, can you?”
“No.” She got in, leaned her head back and closed her eyes.
“Maybe you can relax enough to sleep for the rest of the ride. They can’t follow us now, and I think you’re finally convinced that I’m one of the good guys.” It was a real shame he was going to have to prove otherwise to her when they reached their destination, he thought grimly. But in this case, the ends justified the means. And he couldn’t be sure she would refuse to help his cause, once they got there, so maybe she could go on thinking he wore a white hat.
But if she did balk, then he would have to force her cooperation.
For a moment he went still, stunned by his own train of thought. That was not the kind of thing James Poe ever did. Force someone to do something they didn’t want to do. Much less someone like her. Innocent, frightened, delicate.
Beautiful.
He wondered what was happening to the moral code he’d lived by for his entire life. But he didn’t really have a choice in the matter. The existence of his entire race was at stake.
Brigit paced and worried. She had taken Aunt Rhi’s advice and headed into her bedroom for a nap, but she had awakened the moment she sensed that J.W. was gone. She felt him more acutely than she felt anyone else. Upon rising, she’d made the unfortunate choice to turn on one of the twenty-four-hour news channels to hear what was being said about the events of the night before.
Veteran newsman Matthew Christopher was in the middle of interviewing a suit-wearing politician who spoke as if from memory. “Lester Folsom’s book was pulled for reasons of national security, Matt,” he said, as if speaking to a slow student who didn’t quite get the point. “As demented as poor Mr. Folsom was, we can’t ignore the fact that he did indeed work as a covert agent, and in that capacity, he was privy to massive amounts of sensitive information.”
“Apparently enough to get him shot,” the newsman replied.
“No one has proven that the murder had anything to do with—”
“Don’t give me that,” Matthew interrupted. “A guy’s about to release a tell-all, an exposé, about his work as a covert op, and he gets blown away, execution-style, on the eve of that. Do I look like I was born yesterday?”
“Matt, you’re not giving me a chance to explain—”
“There are sources, Mr. Jenner, who say Folsom’s work involved the paranormal. The unknown. Some of the blogs are claiming he was about to reveal the actual existence of a race of vampires. How do you respond to that?”
The guest made a face. “Anyone can post anything on the internet. You know that. No right-minded person would believe—”
“We might know what to believe if the storm troopers hadn’t raided every book distribution center in the country, destroying every copy in existence so none of us could read for ourselves …”
“You’d be reading fiction. With just enough real information thrown in to cause serious problems.”
“Are you concerned at all about rumors that there were a handful of advance copies floating around? That WikiLeaks has published what they claim are actual excerpts from the Folsom manuscript on their website?”
The bureaucrat measured his words. “As far as we know, we’ve managed to find every copy.”
“It’s for sure you got all of Folsom’s. And his notes, and everything else he had in his house in the Caribbean. Relatives claim soldiers gutted the place.”
“That’s an exaggeration.”
“They say you stripped it to the bare walls. Even rolled up the carpets.”
“Well, I wasn’t a part of that team, and I’m sure the family’s feeling very violated, and perhaps, in their grief, might just be blowing things a tiny bit out of pro—”
“Tell me this, Mr. Jenner. Is there, or has there ever been, a secret division of the CIA devoted to investigating cases involving the paranormal?”
Jenner looked Matthew Christopher right in the eye, leaning slightly forward in his seat. “Absolutely not.”
“Who shot Lester Folsom, Mr. Jenner?”
“We don’t know. But believe me, the murder of a CIA operative, even a retired one like Folsom, is something we take very seriously. We’ve put every resource we have on this, and we will not rest until Lester Folsom’s murderer is—”
Brigit clicked the remote control, accidentally hitting the channel selector rather than the off button. The riot taking place on the TV screen held her riveted. Flames were licking at the early morning sky, devouring what looked like a brownstone. The tagline on the bottom read Riots Break Out in Brooklyn. The reporter was saying that a gang of self-proclaimed vigilantes apparently believed the residents of the two-family building were vampires, and so they’d set the place on fire and burned them alive.
She hit the remote again, turning the TV off, and closed her eyes. Where are you, big brother? The world is going insane, and it’s not safe out there for you.
He spoke to her mentally. I’ve got the professor.
You rescued her alone?
They let her go. Planted a chip, but I tossed it. We’re on our way.
Not here, Brigit replied, her lips moving as if to give more emphasis to her words. It’s not safe. Word’s out. Vigilante vampire hunters just murdered two families in Brooklyn. As soon as the sun sets, I’m taking Aunt Rhi and getting out of here.
Go to the Byram house, her brother told her. They think we abandoned it long ago.
Good idea.
Be careful, Bridge.
I will, bro. You, too. See you in Byram. Wait till after dark.
See you there, he assured her.
Brigit closed the channels of her mind, just in case there might be anyone around trying to pick up on mental transmissions. God, if the mortal world truly knew they existed … then they’d be lucky if any of them managed to survive.
She must have slept all day, Lucy thought as she came slowly awake. The sun was gone, having set beyond the distant horizon sometime before she lifted her head to stare through the car’s windshield.
They seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, driving along a narrow, twisting, dark road without a painted line or a streetlight in sight. The pavement was cracked and littered with potholes, and the edges were disintegrating chunks of broken asphalt. Forests stood clothed in a misty purple haze in the distance, and just as she was about to ask where in the name of creation they were, they rounded a hairpin curve and she saw a mansion straight out of an old Saturday afternoon creature feature.
It rose, gothic and dark, with countless sharp spires stabbing into the deepening twilight sky. A few of its arched windows were lit, but most remained black, like sad, vacant eyes. And the wrought-iron fence that rose tall around the outside leaned lazily this way and that, as if its spearlike points were tired of standing guard.
To Lucy’s horror, James turned into the twisting dirt path that passed for a driveway, passing in through the open gate and driving nearer the house she was sure must have been the setting for a plethora of Vincent Price films.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Don’t panic, okay? I know it’s scary looking, but it’s just a house, and it’s one of the few where they won’t be looking for us.”
“They aren’t looking for us. They’re looking for you. They let me go, remember?”
“This is just a stop along the way.”
“Where the hell are we? Why did I sleep so long?”
“We’re in Connecticut.” He stopped the car, shut off the engine. “And you slept so long because you were drugged last night, and … and because I told you to.”
“You told me to.” She looked at him as if he were insane.
“The power of suggestion is … it’s another of my …”
“Finally!” The driver’s door was yanked open, and a pair of female arms wrapped themselves around James before he could get out. The newcomer’s blond hair was barely visible from within the car, but her swimsuit-model bosom was level with Lucy’s line of sight as the woman released James to kiss his face, then squeezed him again. Lucy relaxed as she realized that it was just his sister, Brigit. Not that she cared. She was angry, she reminded herself. Which, by the way, was unlike her. She didn’t get angry. She negotiated; she talked things out with reason and with logic. She avoided conflict.
Until she’d been shot down in a Manhattan street and dragged into some kind of intrigue that had nothing to do with her.
“You said you would take me home,” Lucy accused James’s back.
“You said I would take you home. I just didn’t correct you.” His voice was muffled by the hug, until his twin finally released him and straightened away.
“Aunt Rhi and I have been worried sick. You took much longer than we expected. You should have checked in.” She peeked around him, smiled and bent down a little to wave her fingers at Lucy. “How are you doing, Professor?”
“I just want to go home.”
“Yeah, you look good and pissed off.” Brigit grinned. “Glad to see you have it in you, to be honest.”
Then Lucy’s door was pulled open, and she turned and lifted her head, startled, to find herself staring up into the powerful eyes of a woman who was frightening in her beauty, regal in her bearing and intimidating in her glare.
“One would expect a woman plucked from the very jaws of death itself to show a little gratitude. Wouldn’t one?”
She didn’t speak so much as purr her words, her voice deep and resonant and menacing.
“Of course I’m grateful. I just … none of this has anything to do with me. I’ve been through hell, and I want to go home.”
“Oh, well, that’s different then,” the woman said. She looked up, over the hood of the car, to the two on the other side. “She wants to go home, poor little thing. That changes everything, doesn’t it? Including the fact that our entire race is facing annihilation?” She snapped her eyes back to Lucy’s, and before Lucy could blink, she was pulled from the car, and lifted off her feet and into the air.
The regal one, her endless raven locks waving in the breeze as if with a life of their own, glared up at her, baring her teeth to reveal fangs that gleamed. She was holding Lucy up with one hand, clutching the bunched-up front of her borrowed shirt. And by her side, a black panther—a black freaking panther—crouched and snarled, baring its fangs, as well.
Lucy couldn’t speak, couldn’t scream. She was silent and shaking, and her heart pounded at a rate that had to be dangerous to her health.
“Put her down, Aunt Rhi.” James’s voice was firm as he came around the car and put one hand on the woman’s shoulder. “She’s here to help us, after all.”
“Pitiful that the salvation of our race lies in the hands of this puling, weak little mortal.” But the woman did lower Lucy to the ground.
Lucy looked back toward the gate at the entrance to this horror film set, her entire being itching to run. But there were others standing there now. And she thought they might be vampires, like this dark-haired one, who surely must be their queen. One of them even wore a cloak that floated and snapped in the wind.
Lucy shot an accusing look toward James, who’d saved her, only to pitch her into a pit of vipers more dangerous than the one he’d pulled her from. He was no hero, no angel. He was one of them.
And why did that realization bring such a crushing sense of disappointment with it?
“Only partly,” he said aloud. “I’m part human, too.”
She blinked in shock. “Did you … did you just …?”
“Hear your thoughts? Yes, I did. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude, but you were sort of shouting them at me.”
“At us all,” the one he’d called Aunt Rhi muttered, stroking the panther’s head. The cat pressed up against her hand like a devoted pet.
“Brigit and I are the two who are like no other,” James went on. “Part vampire, part human. The Light and the Darkness. Opposite, and yet the same.”
“One the destroyer, the other the salvation,” Lucy whispered, and in her memory she heard again Lester Folsom’s shocked words as he’d read the prophecy.
This is about the mongrel twins.
“Exactly,” James said. “We need your help, Lucy. We need your help to figure out how it is that we can avert the disaster predicted in that prophecy. The vampire Armageddon.”
“And you’re going to give it to us,” Rhiannon informed her. “Eagerly, willingly and completely. Anything less, and you’ll become … kitty treats.”
Her pet growled as if on cue, and Lucy tried to hide the chill that tiptoed up her spine.
6
The mansion was musty, dusty and falling down, but Lucy could tell as soon as she walked through its lopsided front door that it must have been amazing once. A large chandelier hung crookedly, wearing a canopy of cobwebs and grime, from the center of a water-stained cathedral ceiling. It was missing a few of the teardrop-shaped dirt-colored bits that might have been crystal prisms. There were lumps of furniture covered in filthy sheets, bookcases without any books, dust and spiderwebs everywhere. A few paintings still hung on the walls, but they were too filthy to see very well. A woman in a gown from some other century. A man on a horse. A landscape. The place smelled of damp plaster, mothballs and that instantly recognizable old house smell. And it felt sad, abandoned and lonely.
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