Chapter 9

The senator from New York had been a mess. The memory of Gerry Jorgensen’s face, downcast and overcome with lines of fear, worry and sorrow, sat heavily on Jesse. She’d seen her share of faces like his; people hanging on to threads of belief, whether that thread was religion or plain old personal willpower. But for herself, things were different. This case wasn’t about extortion, terrorism or hefty return fees. This case was unique.

She hadn’t been able to verbalize the words choking her. At the morning’s meeting, she didn’t mention the strange lead. Dealing with bloodsuckers wasn’t anywhere near the realm of human comprehension. In her mind, thoughts of crazed vampires holding Elizabeth Jorgensen had coated the government offices with a slick layer of uncertainy that only she could see.

There had been no ransom note, no call in the three days since Elizabeth had gone missing, and more than likely wouldn’t be. It was possible, she supposed, that vampires needed money, but thought it highly unlikely they’d keep their fangs off a young woman long enough to organize. The officials sharing the room with the senator were clueless as to the possibilities, and her secret had made her heart ache, because it was a secret she had to keep, for now. The senator still maintained hope for his daughter’s safe return.

The r in the word risk floated above her head, as did the question of whether or not the golden vampire had told the truth. If he had an agenda of his own for trying to lure her from the city, would it involve a trade? Herself for Elizabeth? A fresh blood donor?

Who the hell was he, anyway? Did vampires have names, first and last? There was no way she could have brought any of this up in such weighty government offices, insinuating that her informant might or might not be the kidnapper, and that he wasn’t mortal. And if she had told them the truth, passing along the information the vampire had given her, what then? Likely,

she would have been tossed out on her ear and labeled a crank in spite of her reputation and references. She would have been sent home.

Going home was not an option. She’d known this the minute the exquisite creature had stopped in that field. She’d been certain of it when his eyes had turned on her. His presence hung with her, right beside the Jorgensen girl, tearing her concentration into two equal parts.

She made all the typical moves, said the right things to the people helping the senator, without bothering to pay close attention to what the others in the room suggested. Yes, they started the usual rounds of searches. Feelers were already in place. Things were moving in manageable lines. But phone taps and security guards weren’t going to help if Elizabeth had been taken out of the city by vampires.

The question of what a bunch of vampires wanted with a young girl, if not money, played over and over in her mind on a continual loop. The answer brought on a round of dry heaves. Food. They wanted to feed on the girl.

She’d barely made it out of the room after being shown a photograph of Elizabeth Jorgensen, a slim, pretty young brunette. Visions of Elizabeth had messed with her equilibrium as she’d rested her head against the bathroom sink, repeatedly dowsing her face with water, groping for composure and wondering how long vampires might last on the blood of one poor girl.

How long did it take for life to drain away, one drop at a time? Elizabeth might already be dead. Lord help them all if she became like them.

“Please, no. Not that,” Jesse muttered, feeling faint from the sheer number of loose ends, and less than confident in her abilities at the moment. If the blond vampire proved credible, it would mean that a whole new world ran parallel to the known one, darker than anything anyone might imagine, and layered with its own rules. In order to confront the special circumstances of this case, and without knowing for certain what the rules governing the undead actually were, she’d have to add both knowledge and a few new skill sets to her repertoire, and wasn’t sure how to go about it.

Well, actually, she did know where to start. He had warned her of this by telling her she’d need his help.

She’d walked in a fog to the car, and had remained silent on the ride to the airport. She glanced sideways at Stan now, having been motionless in her seat in the chopper for some time as they winged their way out of the city with no armed guards, not a single CIA agent in tow and none of the usual negotiations arsenal as they headed for the countryside.

She was on her own here. There was a good possibility she was the only hope standing between the missing girl and her death.

Mulling over her plan, Jesse peered out the window. She would send Stan off as soon as they landed, and Stan wouldn’t like it. Men had a built-in protective gene that made them want to watch over the women. Even vampires, it seemed, were not exempt, if the chiseled one who had killed his cousin had truly done so for her sake.

She was putting her life on the line to explore that point, though accepting the vampire’s invitation was very probably tantamount to its own death sentence. Still, it was the only thing she could think of to do.

In just minutes now, she’d know how it would turn out.

Her hands lay quietly in her lap. Her breathing was irregular as Stan darted the chopper in and out of the snowcapped mountain passes. Stan hadn’t said more than twelve words to her since she’d hopped onto the seat. His face was set and his cap in place, without its usual jaunty angle—suggesting that he was waiting for the order he assumed might come any minute now.

Jesse replayed that order in her head, not wanting to be alone, scared. But being frightened wasn’t anything new. Being frightened this far off the grid wasn’t a new experience, either. She’d waited all these years for just such an occasion. The chance to face a vampire and reap revenge for her loss.

For my family.

There was no way she’d expose Stan to the leeches. He had been so happy with his four-hundred-count sheets. He’d looked comfy in his boxers and brown socks when surprised in the hotel doorway. If she never saw Stan again, she’d remember those things. If today was the day her time was up, it would be important to know that Stan had gotten safely away.

The air in the chopper was loaded with unspoken thoughts that made Jesse afraid to look down at the ground. If she saw the vampire there, would he be gloating? Smiling? Sharpening his teeth in preparation for a meal willingly self-delivered?

“Shit.”

“You just said that,” Stan remarked. “Not five seconds ago.”

Glancing over at him, Jesse sensed his need for conversation.

“E.T.A.?” she asked in an attempt to keep Stan, and herself, on stable ground.

“Ten minutes, but I can always turn around,” he replied.

Jesse watched Stan’s frown deepen.

“Just saying,” he muttered.

The plan, Jesse reiterated, was to wait until they landed before telling Stan to hit the road. She didn’t have the strength to fight him and everybody else. She didn’t know how to keep Stan away from the vampires. She wished she had brought the military with her, all of them loaded up with an endless supply of silver-bullet-spraying automatic weapons. Maybe even a few of Stan’s tanks.

“Boss?”

“Yeah?”

“You aren’t going in there alone. I won’t let you.”

It was a sentiment she didn’t need; one that made her stomach clench. In silence, Jesse looked out over the fields. Recognizing the meadow at last, she experienced the now-familiar flicker of excitement deep down inside.

All cops had this strange love-hate relationship with anxiety, she reasoned in self-defense over that flicker of excitement, and she’d had her share of years on the beat. After a ton of stress overload piled up, the anxiety became more like excitement, fueling the need to get on with the task and see where it took her. Would she evade death this time? Facing a gun, gang, robbery, had never been like confronting an honest-to-God freak of nature. Normal reactions weren’t going to get her far here. They would find the castle, tucked into the mountain like a canker, and he would be there.

“Boss?”

Jesse shook her head, refusing to engage Stan in conversation. She wanted Stan with her, and Stan probably felt that. She didn’t want to face this alone, and had to. She had always been alone, preferring it that way. This was nothing new. Relationships hurt. Intimacy led to loss. It was the usual mantra.

However, if she had a real friend, she thought now with sadness, it would be someone exactly like Stan. Smiling grimly over that, Jesse took a stronger grip on herself. It was going to be Jesse Stewart, solo. All by her lonesome.

Drawn by a sudden chill, she looked up, saw the castle as they rounded a grove of trees. Her chest tightened.

“Who are you?” she whispered, alarmed by the scale of the vampire’s lair.

His fortress was several stories high, white enough to be almost blue and topped by miles of dark slate roof. In times gone by, this would have been the perfect spot to ward off intruders.

“Prince Charming’s castle,” Jesse muttered facetiously, chills covering every available inch of her body, and then some.

On this outing, she could clearly see that only a portion of the castle had fallen into ruin. A single turret. The rest of the building remained, a gigantic edifice that must contain a hundred or more rooms. Chances were good it housed at least one dungeon.

She was willing to bet it lacked a furnace.

“I didn’t like it before, and like it even less now,” Stan grumbled, heading for the building. “I don’t suppose it needs a landing pad. You know, since vampires turn into bats. With wings.”

Jesse locked her attention on the castle. She was at a huge disadvantage in a place that size, where its occupant knew all the twists and turns of his not-so-humble abode. Hell, she was at a disadvantage anyway, even if she didn’t actually go inside.

“Land reasonably close,” she directed, her voice registering her doubt. But this meeting was crucial. She had questions in need of answers. Maybe the vampire would give her those answers before he killed her, and she could get them to Stan. She had tracking devices in her coat pocket, her duffel bag, and taped to her underwear. She was wired to Stan through a freckle-size microphone duct-taped to her chest.

Maybe that was why her chest felt so tight.

He won’t kill me for a while, Jesse told herself to soothe the gnawing pressure, and it was a good idea to hang on to that hope. He’d had two opportunities to kill her already, and had passed. He had placed his mouth on her, instead, and had whispered warnings about this case that now rang in her ears with the efficacy of a shout. Fact was, there was a good chance his warnings were only signs of greed, and that he wanted to keep the privilege of sinking his teeth into her for himself.

Well, here she was, about to knock on his front door. She’d find out soon enough which way this was to go down.

There were silver bullets in her gun and extra custom-made rounds in her bag. The sharpened stake lay in her parka pocket. She wore GoreTex boots with plenty of tread for adhering to slippery surfaces, and had brought a climbing rope she knew how to use. Short of burning incense in a chapel, along with a few muttered prayers, she was as ready as she’d ever be to face the devil in his own den.

“I see a flat spot,” Stan announced. “Not exactly a landing pad. More like a missing driveway.”

He banked, and leveled out the chopper. “Do you see anyone down there, Jesse?”

“Who in their right mind would be down there?” she snapped, then regretted it. Stan’s jaw was tight. His hands were white-knuckling the controls.

“If,” he said hoarsely, with a quick, meaningful glance in her direction, “you think I’m leaving you here, you are mistaken.”

“You forgot the key word, Stan.”

“What’s that? Please?”

“Boss. The key word here is boss, and it applies to me, whether I like it or not.”

Another glance from Stan that she felt, rather than saw. “Whether or not you like it?” he said.

She nodded. “That’s no pleasure palace down there, but it’s my plan to go in, and I’m sticking to it.”

“I’m going with you.”

“I’m going alone.” There, she’d said it at last, point-blank. No taking the words back now. No misunderstandings.

“Then you’ll have to fight me first,” Stan argued.

“I have a gun,” Jesse pointed out.

“I’m bigger and stronger than you are, and eat guns for breakfast.”

Jesse would have laughed at that, any other time. She wished it was that time now.

“I’ll need what strength I have for whatever I find in there,” she said soberly. “Fighting with you is stupid and draining.”

Stan fell silent.

“I’ll have your back, then,” he finally declared, turning the chopper so that its front windshield faced the castle, setting the bird down in a flurry of displaced snow. “Everybody needs someone at their back. Even you.”

His statement brought an unexpected moistness to Jesse’s eyes. She was, she thought, becoming a whimpering idiot, and turned her head to hide the gathering tears, refusing to let them fall. Her fear had escalated. She’d bitten her lip, and the cold made the puncture sting. Her hands, minutes ago quiet on her knees, were shaking noticeably. But she would follow her plan. Stan would get away, and she would face this. It would be step two in confronting her past, whatever the outcome.

“Stan,” she began, her unspoken sentence fading with the idea of how absurd what she was about to say might sound to him. “I have to do this for reasons you know nothing about. I owe it to someone I loved.”

Stan’s big head swung toward her. “Whoever that is, they’d be even happier to know I didn’t listen to you or leave you here.”

She did not have the energy to continue the argument. And she could not explain anything to the man sitting beside her. Any further show of friendship on Stan’s part, and she was afraid she’d cave. Already the icy air flooding in when she pushed the door open made her want to scream. The skin surrounding her scar pounded, keeping time with her pulse.

In a hundred rooms, there were at least a thousand windows, she estimated. Was the glorious bastard with the golden hair observing her from one of them? Sharpening his canines?

Tearing off the headset, Jesse jumped out of the chopper, landing squarely on both feet in the slush. Stan was powering the bird down; she waved at him, pointed adamantly to the sky. “Go,” she shouted above the whir of the blades. “Please,” she added. “Please, Stan.”

And Stan, processing the direct command, gave her a look of sad weariness, then finally nodded his head.

Standing rigidly against the wind and the debris the chopper kicked up, with her legs apart, her head lifted and her eyes blurring with frozen tears as Stan did what he was told, Jesse watched him lift off—against his better judgment, and against hers.

She thought about all the times she had successfully reunited missing children with their loved ones, and how often she had faced dangerous bastards and nutcases crazier than squirrels. Why not, she thought, go all the way by confronting the undead?

Taking in a big gulp of icy air, Jesse pressed a hand to her chest and whispered “testing” into the microphone to make sure her vocal cords were working.

She had come.

What had it cost her to do so?

Lance moved quickly through the castle’s passages toward where the chopper had left his guest. Her presence was bright, like a night-light in the dark.

He had not called her to him. It had been her decision to seek him out. Did that make her extraordinarily brave, or foolish?

Tuning his ears to the fading sounds of the helicopter, far off now as it flew over the forest, Lance’s interest began to simmer.

Jesse was alone.

Damn her, alone.

He could try to protect her from the creatures she sought, but who would protect him … from her?

Hesitating in his flight down a long stone stairway, feeling her through several layers of granite as if she stood before him, in person, Lance resolved that others in the distance were also sure to turn their attention this way. From the underground dens where his off-kilter relatives hid from the light, those vampires would soon realize that humans rode in helicopters. With hearing similar to radar, they’d be able to perceive the chopper’s waves of displaced air in the quiet landscape surrounding their hiding places as being unusual. Even those knowledgeable about himself—his strength, age and power—might venture this way by nightfall, if hungry enough.

At the worst, he had until dark to speak with Jesse. At best, if he could quickly get her inside the castle’s thick walls, he might have twenty-four hours with her before having to lock her up and toss the key, for her own safety.

That was, after all, why he had lured her here. To keep her safe.

Sighing over the image of Jesse being locked up anywhere without a fight, Lance hurried on. The little hybrid deserved to know the truth, and that she had built her life around a false premise. She hadn’t lived, after her brutal attack, because of any miracle of therapy, but because of what she’d been given. A gift that had left her with a foot in both worlds. How was he to know that this gift would also insure that she’d never completely fit in with the rest of the human race? How was she to understand that, if he didn’t enlighten her?

Yet telling her about his world, including her in it by confessing what he’d done to make her this way, meant he would have to break the ancient oath ruling his own existence. Explaining what had happened to her would mean telling her about himself. A risky concept.

Confessions had never before been a temptation. Not once since his creation, his rebirth, had he uttered words to define himself, and what he had become. Rather than tell his story to the other woman he had loved, so long ago, he had driven that woman away.

Maybe, he thought now with a powerful lunge in stride, he just hadn’t loved the other one enough. He didn’t recall ever feeling like this: anxious, energized, wary. Jesse had tugged at his heartstrings early on, and continued to do so.

So little, the young Jesse had been. So perfect, so frightened and brave. It was a shock to know that she still had a hold on him, and that he thought of nothing else but seeing her again, being near her, if only for a few more hours. True enough, by giving her a sampling of his blood, he had stretched the boundaries of his oath as a Guardian. Still, he had been careful not to truly harm Jesse either time.

He who had survived duels, tournaments, battles, plagues, wars and the sluggish passage of time, at last felt the residual beating of a heartbeat that had been dulled for centuries. He was drawn to the woman he’d shaped into something special, provoked by his own creation.

He’d been famous in some lifetimes, in his own way, he thought as he headed down the staircase, and anonymous in others. He had been both honored and despised, reviled and rejoiced. And always alone. Jesse wasn’t going to change that. Nevertheless, his choices were to keep the vow of silence fully, or break it. His options were to help keep Jesse alive by locking her safely away, or else tell her everything and hope she’d leave the country before anything worse happened to her.

There was a third alternative he didn’t want to contemplate. A terrible one. He could give her more of what she’d need in order to survive this fight. More blood. His blood. Shore her up, further the connection as the blood built up within her to the level of a new strength. If not actually bringing her over to his world, coming precariously close.

Either way, kept in the dark or dipped in the light of understanding, the hunt for Elizabeth Jorgensen would be Jesse’s coming of age. As well as his own, perhaps.

“What will it be, Jesse?”

Hunger for her filled him as he strode on, that hunger reminiscent of raging need that was nearly all-consuming and an entity in and of itself. He had helped to create the very thing that attracted him now. He had done this.

And she was here, within reach.

His dark-haired, brown-eyed hybrid stood there, unmoving, as he threw open the great oaken door with a force that echoed through the castle’s foundations. Never ready for the full effect she had on him, Lance stopped abruptly.

Out of her element, Jesse looked small, not much more than a child, as she stood a few paces away, bundled in a heavy orange coat, with a green canvas bag dotting the snow by her feet. A courageous, fierce child, who also looked cold, frightened and uncertain.

Although she held no weapon in her hand, it didn’t take an immortal’s keen senses to know she’d be prepared. He smelled the iron of the gun at her back, and more weapons were stored in the bag. Searching her face, noting her downcast eyes, he said, “You must be frozen. Won’t you come inside?”

Must get you inside. You are way too conspicuous out here.

Her reply was terse. “You’re going to play the part of host? Lord of this castle?”

“It is my home,” he said.

“Really? Maybe you’ve just taken the place over from its former occupants.”

“I’m afraid it actually is my home, lock, stock and barrel, as the saying goes. My refuge, if you will.”

“Yet you told me about it.”

“Actually, I didn’t.”

He watched Jesse process that, knew she delved back in memory to seeing him in the meadow. He also saw that she wasn’t going to ease up. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other to gain better purchase on the icy ground.

“How many humans have you invited here? I wonder,” she said, perhaps rhetorically, not voicing the rest of her thoughts on the subject.

“Two. Humans,” he replied, using her delineation.

“You said to trust you, so I suppose you won’t warn me if this is a mistake,” she said.

With his gaze riveted to her chilled, expressionless face, Lance fought the desire to make her look up. One little suggestion, and you will do as I ask. But then, what sort of host would I be?

“Isn’t it a bit late for this conversation?” he remarked. “I did mention that your quest for the missing girl, in this instance, is a mistake. You knew the danger in coming here, and yet here you are, alone. Unless you have reinforcements in the trees, awaiting your signal.”

He didn’t have to tear his attention from her to know that wasn’t the case, and that no one waited in the distance. It was just Jesse and a tiny arsenal of weapons that he could flick away with a simple hand gesture if he chose.

He wondered again why she had dared this, and if her blood had dictated this meeting without her knowledge.

“Why don’t the officials in the city know about you?” she asked, her discomfort obvious in her tone. “Does anyone around here know about you, and what you are?”

“Some of them do,” he admitted. “However, it has been a long time since I had contact with any of my neighbors. It wasn’t a pleasant sort of contact when I did.”

Jesse appeared to be surprised by that. Her beautiful brown bloodshot eyes opened wider.

“So,” she said, “if I had mentioned to the men at the meeting this morning about the vampires holding Elizabeth, they would have understood? Believed?”

“They wouldn’t be here, as you are, but yes, they may have understood. Some of them, anyway.”

“Why wouldn’t they have been here?”

“I seriously doubt you’d want to know the answer to that question.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure I would,” she insisted.

“Then I’ll tell you, if you’ll come inside.”

“I don’t think I’m ready for that. How about if we talk out here?”

Lance understood her reason for being on his door step. He had anticipated this very thing. She had come to him prepared to barter for whatever information he had regarding the Jorgensen girl. Short of that, she planned to use the weapons she’d brought with her to gain the information.

She wasn’t sure he was telling the truth, and trying to gauge which way this current confrontation was to go down. If it turned out he had something concrete to offer, she was, by her presence here, willing to offer up something to return the favor. That thing very possibly was herself.

Lance almost grinned at the absurdity of it all. In order to help her, he had to earn her trust. Not tossing her over the side of the hotel obviously hadn’t done the trick.

This courageous beauty was, in essence, agreeing to sacrifice herself for Elizabeth Jorgensen’s return. Make a trade. What drove her to this? Her own hopelessness coming to the fore? Joy of watching the happy family reunions of others?

Her willingness to sacrifice herself dazzled him. She had put her blood to good use, and for decent causes. She would be a respectable adversary for anyone on the wrong side of the law. Yet her presence here also indicated that her wounds went deeper than he had at first seen, if her own life mattered so little to her.

There was a certain recklessness in her stance, he noted. Her face was pale, but her eyes, red-rimmed from lack of sleep, still shone. Jesse’s vendetta against the monsters responsible for the death of her family had been temporarily shoved into the background, overtaken by her need to help another young girl fight an unknown fate.

Jesse was living vicariously through the victims she helped. In this case, Elizabeth Jorgensen. In the happy endings of others, if there were any, Jesse might imagine she gained closure on her own issues—though this was never really the case.

She knew what vampires did. She maintained no illusions about what would happen to her if she met with them, after her brief encounter with himself and the scavenger in the city’s alley. She realized all too well that she couldn’t stand up to a vampire, really, and that in a battle of wills and muscular strength, he would win.

Yet here she stood.

His admiration for her was no small thing. For the purity and strength of her convictions alone, he wanted to reach out to her, comfort her, as he would have done when he was mortal. But he wasn’t that person now.

Lance’s hands fisted, a subconscious tensing. Jesse didn’t want consolation, and hadn’t come here to get it. Nor would she accept any that he offered. In her eyes, he was the enemy. She was here for information, ready to barter whatever she could, her face as white as the snow at her feet, but undeterred.

How many successful cases and happy reunions will it take for you to find peace, Jesse?

With my blood inside you, helping to drive you, is peace possible? Alas, I’ve never found it.

“Very well,” he said, feeling a surge of caution about telling her anything right then, drawn to Jesse with an intensity that set his teeth on edge. “I’ll tell you some thing, a reward for being here.”

The need to be close to her wouldn’t benefit anyone in the long run, not her, not himself, he concluded. But he couldn’t take his eyes from her. Although he was loath to hurt her further, hurt is what she had come here for. And there was always a chance the Jorgensen girl would still be alive when they found her.

For now, no matter what their agendas might be, he had to get her inside the castle walls, contain her scent and her presence here and keep those things from reaching others. He needed time with her in order to decide how to proceed.

“In the past, certain officials in this city made a deal with the creatures you call vampires,” he explained, since it was clear Jesse wouldn’t budge without some show of faith on his end.

He watched her features fall with just those few words.

“A deal with vampires? You’re lying,” she said.

Lance shook his head. “You asked for the truth, and came a long way to get it. At my invitation, and as my guest, I see no reason to lead you astray.”

“Can’t you?” she snapped. “When I can think of a few reasons without trying hard.”

She’d bitten her lip. A drop of blood, now darkened with cold, beaded beneath her teeth like a ruby gemstone. Lance took a step forward, catching himself before taking another.

“What deal?” Jesse demanded in a voice that had noticeably lowered in volume, either from cold or disbelief. “What kind of deal would anyone make with a vampire?”

“You are frozen. Your heart is sluggish,” he complained.

“Screw that. Tell me what you know. Clarify.”

All right, Jesse. Another hint.

“A deal was struck for the officials not to notice a few missing people each year,” he said, then waited for her reaction, which came swiftly.

“No!” she shouted, horrified as the meaning of that disclosure settled in. “For what? What could possibly cause anyone to turn their backs or make a deal like that? Killing innocent people?”

“In return for not noticing the missing people, the vampires were to stay out of the city.”

Against her bloodless face, Jesse’s arteries stood out like veins of blue marble. The ruby droplet on her lip had turned as black as the night to come, and that speck called to him with a voice of its own.

Staring at her lip, feeling his own blood jump in response, Lance carefully held himself back from the quick rise of the forbidden thirst that gnawed at his insides.

“You told me they were all over the city,” she said. “The vampires.”

“Vampires, like everyone else, sometimes renege on a deal if it suits them. They weren’t the only ones to change direction. The city officials did not always honor their own agreements. After many people went missing, complaints started coming in. The officials faced a public outcry.”

Jesse’s gaze rose further, seeking truth.

“Vampires were humans once,” Lance continued. “Every one of them, at one time, walked and breathed and made choices, for better or worse.”

Tearing his attention from her lip, Lance swept his gaze over the rest of Jesse’s face. He said, “People are both good and bad, liars and saints. A vampire’s personality changes when it dies and reawakens to its shocking new world with the ravages of hunger upon it. As in all worlds, there are decent creatures you call monsters, and real ones.”

He waited for her to either say something or challenge his own place in that world he had so briefly described. She didn’t do either.

“Vampires reanimate, creating more of their kind, whether by accident or on purpose,” he went on. “Each time a vampire creates another vampire, the blood in their veins further dilutes, so that every new generation of vampires has better odds of veering off balance and forgetting former alliances. And so on. The original blood of an immortal is ancient. The form it has taken in the ‘bloodsucker’ population is what drove me here to this castle’s remoteness in the first place, away from all of that, not toward it, as I had vowed.”

It was the reason he and the others like him had been created—for overseeing those others stumbling accidentally upon immortal life. Culling the good from the bad. A divine executioner’s task. Yet there were only seven blood brothers in the beginning, and only seven today if they had all survived. Their creator had died after giving birth to the Seven, drained of the blood she had willingly given to them—blood that was royal, beyond the limits of the history of civilization, and preserved in the vascular bundles of himself and the other six of his true brethren.

Some of that blood now swam in the capillaries of the woman across from him.

Has it brought you here, Jesse?

“There are hundreds of the creatures you call vampires in this part of the world alone,” he said.

“Liar,” Jesse repeated weakly, the light of defiance dimming in her eyes.

He needed to tell her more. Explain enough to get her moving. Tell her that guarding against such fanged hordes, worldwide, was a pathetic plight, and how his vow had enlarged over time into the necessity of helping the mortals those monsters came into contact with. But the thought of his blood mingling with hers, inside her, coupled with his own rising thirst, was a seduction, a thrill akin to puncturing a nerve. He wanted to make love to her, and merge their bodies. She alone was brave enough, strong enough, for a tryst with his soul. Maybe his loneliness would finally be abated with a woman who was no mere woman at all.

You would know the truth if you looked, Jesse. Don’t you know you’re special?

“Please,” he said. “Come inside.”

She didn’t move.

Come, Jesse, he sent to her, tapping into the bond that had shown up on her lip as a crimson jewel. A bond she had not even begun to acknowledge, at least on the surface.

She took a step, holding back as best she could, uncertain as to why her foot had moved.

Come.

She took another rigid step, her expression stricken with understanding. She knew what he was doing.

With a sideways shift and a slight bow from the waist, Lance moved aside, leaving the doorway to his castle clear.