“It does to me. You knew I’d look for the weakest link, and you set yourself up to resemble one.” She watched his eyes, her own bright with nerves. “Where did I fuck up?”
“You were a little too heavy- handed with Kirchner,” he told her, at the same time subtly changing his stance. “Also, offering him sex was a mistake. He’s a celibate as well as a misogynist.”
She grew thoughtful. “I didn’t think the wife was window-dressing.”
“She’s an experienced bodyguard,” he said. “So are the two women posing as his teenage daughters.”
“You know, you’re giving me a great deal of free, valuable information, Don.” She pressed the barrel in a little harder. “I don’t think it’s because you like talking to your plants.”
Her pun amused him. “I admire your resourcefulness.” “Oh, you admire my tits and my arse,” she corrected, her voice changing from American to a working-class British accent. “He’s called you off, then?”
He saw no point in lying to her. “He has.”
“When am I to be taken?”
He gave her a wistful smile. “Now.”
He took her down with a minimum amount of trouble, knocking the gun away before he pinned her to the floor under his bulk. The weapon didn’t discharge, and Nella didn’t make a sound. She tried every trick he knew to dislodge him, and a couple of moves that were new. Then she stopped and lay under him for a moment, panting hard.
“Do me now,” she said, lifting her chin like an animal baring its throat. “Go on. It’s this or I have to open a vein. You can tell that pisser Genaro I got the jump on you, and you just reacted too fast.”
“No one gets the jump on me.” Delaporte wrapped one big hand around her neck. “And I tell him only the truth.”
“Ballocks.” She wriggled. “Do you need a bit of theater again to get the job done? Should I do the death scene from Othello? ‘Kill me tomorrow, let me live tonight.’ ”
Delaporte applied enough pressure to temporarily impede the flow of blood to Nella’s brain, causing her to lose consciousness. He released his grip in time to keep from killing her, and then moved aside, sitting on the floor beside her.
Judging by the mistakes she’d made, Nella had not been in the field for very long. Nor had she been trained properly. Delaporte disliked seeing the waste of a good agent, even one that worked for the other side.
No, if he was honest, he hated the thought of seeing this woman tortured and killed before her body was burned to ash in the lab’s massive incinerator. She’d been exceptionally brave and, in her own fashion, honorable.
He stripped off her nightgown and tore it into strips, which he used to bind her ankles together. As he rolled her over onto her belly to tie her hands behind her, the light illuminated her back and he saw what appeared to be a loose flap of skin on her shoulder blade. On closer inspection it turned out to be a small circle of thin, flesh-colored latex that had been glued directly onto her skin with spirit gum.
Delaporte found the edge of the latex patch and peeled it back slowly. Beneath it was a black oval with the outlined profile of a very familiar face.
He took out his mobile and dialed a number he rarely called. “My lord,” he said when his master’s low, powerful voice answered. “We have another problem here in Atlanta.”
Madame Butterfly stood over Rowan, her sword glittering like the madness in her eyes. “Hellspawn. I saw what you did. I saw.” She brought down the sword.
Rowan rolled out of the way, and landed with a thump on a hard floor. Sunlight blinded her as she groaned and clutched her aching head.
Another one of the nightmares, and now it had opera in it.
She grabbed the edge of the futon, using it to pull herself up to grab her watch and check the time. It was either eight a.m. or eight p.m. She really needed to invest in an alarm clock.
It took a while for her to wake up, not that she didn’t seriously consider crawling back under the covers and hiding there for the rest of her life. She drank two cups of coffee, one in the bathroom, where she saw what looked like the remains of a black eye instead of the beginnings of one. Hopefully her ability to heal quickly would get rid of most of it by the time she had to go to work.
As Dansant’s new sous-chef, an evil, gleeful little voice inside her head reminded her as she dressed. And wouldn’t that promotion make her everyone’s best friend.
On her way back and forth to wash up, she eyed Meriden’s door. She remembered Sean coming in her apartment, the soggy cuddling session, and not much else. There were no signs he’d done anything while she’d slept in his lap except put her to bed, not that she thought he would have. She would have never pegged him as a guy who would offer his shoulder to cry on. The breaking and entering, now, that was more his style.
She had unfinished business with Sean Meriden, but it would have to wait until she figured out a way to deal with Dansant.
Rowan made a bowl of cereal and idly picked up one of her new books to read while she ate. This one was a memoir, written in the late nineteenth century by an ex-priest who had been sent to exorcise some people who thought they were vampires, and in the process had lost his faith and given up the cassock.
According to the introduction the ex-priest had penned the memoir while he was in his eighties, which meant he’d gone vampire-busting in the late eighteenth century. The preface, written by some snotty editor, also warned that the contents were largely considered by the literary community of the time to be creative nonfiction.
There was a lot of Latin terminology to plow through, Rowan discovered, and by her third bowl of cereal she was pretty sure she agreed with the editor. The ex-priest alternated between ranting about secret societies within the church and cursed souls who’d tried to attack him and drink his blood while he’d doused them with holy water and prayed over them.
She was just about to give it up when she got to a page listing what the author had discovered about the people he referred to as “truly damned by God”:
They who are damned for eternity will be comely of appearance, the men strong and handsome, the women delicate and lovely. They exude the precious scent of God’s gift of torment, that of flowers, but it is a lie to lure and trap their unsuspecting victims. They will partake of neither food nor drink but wine. When brought into the light of heaven they will shield their eyes and grow agitated; if left in shelter they will sleep without breath or movement. They have knowledge of the black arts and wield these against their victims, each with their own spell to create confusion of the senses and to enslave with but a few words. Few can resist their murmurings and touches. They fornicate freely and respect not the bonds of marriage or betrothal. Nothing may cut their flesh but copper, which burns them like fire. They heal from any wound, but thanks be to God may be dispatched back to Hell by beheading.
She read the passage three times before she understood why it riveted her: confusion of the senses . . . enslave with but a few words.
Last night Dansant had used a few words to stop them from being mugged. Those boys had had the perfect opportunity to roll them, and yet they had done exactly what he had told them to without a murmur. They’d acted like he’d turned them into zombies.
She began comparing what she knew about her boss with the ex-priest’s crazy list. Strong and handsome, check. Smells like flowers, check. Never eats, never drinks anything but wine . . .
She skimmed through the rest of the book, looking for more lists, and stopped only when she saw the image of an old engraving of a Templar warrior sitting on a horse in the middle of a battlefield. It was a gory portrait, the ground around him littered with dead bodies.
The warrior-priest’s face looked exactly like that of Jean-Marc Dansant.
“No. He can’t be.” Rowan slammed the book shut as she thought frantically. She’d worked beside Dansant for weeks, had watched him cook, and she couldn’t remember a single time she had seen him taste the food. He never ate with her and the line cooks for the family meal; he would simply sit at the head of the table and drink a glass of wine. Last night when she’d given him a bowl of her stir-fry, he’d smelled it, but he hadn’t tasted it.
And in all the time she’d been here, she had never once seen him during the day.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, he’s not a vampire.” Saying it out loud didn’t make her feel better. “He works nights. He said it was hypnosis. Maybe he wasn’t hungry.”
She opened the book and stared at the engraving again, absently touching her neck. The artist had done a lot of fine detail work; he’d added tiny lines for the eyelashes and the warrior’s mustache, and a dot on his jawline in the exact same spot where Dansant had a tiny mole. . . .
Oh, shit. Rowan got up and ran out to the bathroom.
She checked her throat, her arms, and then stripped down to her skin and did a full body check. She found no bite marks or any signs to indicate she’d been used as a blood bank.
Of course there aren’t any marks, that slimy, malicious voice in her head purred as she got dressed. You heal too fast.
She didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t as if she could walk up to the executive chef and ask him if he was an immortal killer who fed on human blood. But she knew the dark kyn were a reality, and from the research she and Matthias had done, she knew they still existed in clusters all over the world, living apparently normal lives in order to hide in plain sight.
It wasn’t a stretch to believe one of them had decided to open a French restaurant. When you want to catch a mouse, you don’t set out an empty trap. You bait it with something they can’t resist.
Speculating like this was ridiculous. What she needed was a computer, so she could run some basic checks on her boss. Looking into his background would doubtless provide logical explanations for all of his weirdness, and that would settle things.
Rowan went to the nearest branch of the New York Public Library, which was busy but fortunately provided public-access computers. She sat at an open terminal, put down the notepad she’d brought with her, and logged into her Internet account. A window with a blinking red border popped up to inform her that she had exceeded her e-mail account storage limits.