Before Dawn (5 page)

“Why?”

Savage shook his head. “We don’t know.”

It was Mercy’s turn to shake her head. “No, not why did he have pictures of me. Why were you after him to begin with?”

A pained expression crossed Savage’s face, and he hesitated. McGinnis answered for him. “In the last year, he’s tortured and killed five women that we know of.”

Some of the calmness faded, and the air was suddenly too heavy to breathe. Mercy forced herself to do so anyway.

Voice steady, she said, “He’s a…” The word stuck in her throat, refusing to form on her tongue, as if saying it out loud would make it all too real. But then again, it was already real. “He’s a vampire. Isn’t killing his blood donors an everyday occurrence?”

“No. Vampires don’t need to completely drain their food.” McGinnis hesitated, clearly unsure for a moment. Then he added, “And he didn’t drink these women’s blood. He let them bleed out from multiple knife wounds.”

“Oh,” said Mercy, her voice very small, very hollow. She closed her eyes, as if that would keep her from swaying on her feet. A hand clamped around her upper arm, and she was roughly pulled forward and pushed down into a chair. She was seated sideways, with her right shoulder and temple against the chair back.

McGinnis crouched in front of her. His rough voice was oddly gentle. “Mercy?”

She swallowed past the lump in her throat and forced her eyes to open and meet his. “You’re saying a misogynistic serial-killer vampire has chosen me as his next victim?”

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The darkness in his eyes was answer enough.

She wanted to laugh but was afraid she wouldn’t be able to stop. She drew in a breath, trembling as she did so. Nausea roiled in her stomach, but she fought it back, hands balling into fists with the strength of her effort.

Hands hovered an inch above her shoulders for a second before falling away. “He won’t get you.”

“He did once tonight already,” she said, so softly she wasn’t sure anyone heard the words but she.

An expression too fleeting for her to identify crossed McGinnis’s face, then it went blank, if a little stiff. An invisible hand squeezed her chest and another clenched in her stomach. She wanted to reach out and touch him, to do something to bridge that sudden distance between them. Before she could take back her thoughtless words, Savage spoke up. “That was my fault.”

McGinnis looked at the other man. “Like hell.”

“I let that French bastard get away from me tonight.” Savage’s hand rose and pressed gingerly to his side. He winced. “Twice,” he added and lifted his shirt.

McGinnis cursed while Mercy inhaled sharply. The upper half of Savage’s muscled torso was a patchwork of bruises of varying sizes. It looked like someone had taken a meat tenderizer to him. The lower half was wrapped tightly with a bandage. There was a thin line of red in the center of all that white gauze. Someone—some
thing
—had tried to gut him.

“Shit, you’re bleeding. I’ll go get my kit.”

Savage waved a dismissive hand at the other man. “I’ll be okay. Shallow cut. I was more pissed off about the shirt. It was my favorite one. Luckily, I keep a change of clothes in the car along with the first-aid kit.”

McGinnis’s shoulder muscles didn’t ease. “How’re the ribs?”

“There might be a fracture, but I’m good.” He grimaced slightly as he pulled down the shirt. “It only hurts when I move. Breathing’s not too bad.”

“You protected that pretty face of yours though,” McGinnis remarked dryly.

Savage flashed a quick grin. “Naturally. Don’t want to disappoint the ladies.”

“What happened?” asked Mercy, lifting her eyes from Savage’s torso to his face.

Savage shrugged, the movement easy despite his injuries. “I caught a break and found the hideout he’s using here. But he flew away before I even got through the front door.” He looked pointedly at Mercy. “All hot and eager to get to you.” Then at McGinnis: “I thought you had her covered.”

McGinnis’s lips thinned. “They called me in.”

“
What
?”

“Questions about my last report.”

“And it had to be done today?” Savage asked.

“Apparently.”

“Fuck.”

“Exactly.”

Mercy’s glance traveled between the two men. “Who’re ‘they’?”

“The people who fund this little operation,” answered McGinnis.

“And direct it,” Savage added.

McGinnis kept quiet, his silence sufficient commentary.

“So, we’re it for this,” Savage said quietly.

McGinnis lifted a brow in question.

“I waited at the house for him to return. When he did, I took a shot but he managed to dodge the bullet. He was hurt but still damned fast. Pummeled me, then ran off.” A smile stretched across his face as he reached inside the front pocket of his loose-fitting pants, pulling out a small device roughly the size of a cellular phone and waving it back and forth. “While he was otherwise occupied beating the crap out of me, though, I planted a tracking device on him.”

McGinnis’s smile made Mercy grateful she wasn’t the intended target.

“We’ll have to move tonight,” said Savage. “Don’t know how long it’ll take him to discover the bug.”

McGinnis shook his head. “There’s no ‘we.’ You’re too hurt.”

“You’re going to need backup.”

“Mercy can’t stay here alone, and I don’t trust anyone else right now.”

Mercy stared at McGinnis. She wanted to protest, not because she wanted to assert her independence, but because she didn’t want Ryan McGinnis coming back to her looking like his friend.

Oh, Jesus.
What was she thinking? McGinnis wasn’t coming back to
her
. If he came back, it would be to tell her he’d killed the vampire and she could get on with her life. If he didn’t come back—

She couldn’t finish the thought. The sudden emptiness inside her was actually painful enough to hinder her breathing. She pressed a fist underneath her sternum.

“Mercy?”

She shook her head. She had no business letting herself go down that road, especially not right now with her head so muddled.

“I can’t stay here indefinitely,” she said to McGinnis.

“It ends tonight.”

“You can’t promise that. Not really.”

The corners of his mouth tipped down. “No,” he agreed. “But I’m going to try damned hard. In the meantime, you’ll be safe here.”

While he went out and endangered himself. He wasn’t doing it solely for her. It was his job. It was something he did on a regular basis. She had to trust he could handle himself. Obviously, he’d done so in the past, and she had to believe he could do so again…tonight.

“Why tonight? Why did he choose tonight?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but he had to know that once we identified you we’d be watching you.”

“‘We’? Don’t you mean you?”

McGinnis’s uncertain eyes probed hers. “Yeah.”

Mercy’s fingers found the edge of the table and clamped down until they whitened. “How long?”

“Three months.”

Three months.

“It was you,” she breathed, eyelids drifting down as relief washed over her. “It
was
you.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Savage.

She opened her eyes, looked at him. “For the last few months, I’ve felt like I was being watched constantly. Even when I locked my doors and closed my curtains, I felt like someone was watching my every move.”

Savage and McGinnis exchanged a look. Mercy’s own words replayed in her head, then she stared at McGinnis as realization dawned. “You put cameras in my house.”

Even as his eyes went molten, the brown going golden, he gave a curt nod. She could feel the heat of embarrassment making a return trek up her cheeks. He’d seen her do things while she had thought she’d been alone, things she wouldn’t have done even in front of a lover. Now why did that knowledge make the rest of her body feel like melting?

Mercy dropped her gaze as she wrapped her arms about herself. Now was neither the appropriate time nor place, and Ryan McGinnis was so not the right man.

“That doesn’t explain the dreams though.” Just speaking about them made her temples throb. She massaged them, fingertips pressing hard and making small circles.

“What dreams?” McGinnis asked softly.

Her hands dropped into her lap. “Of…him.” She swallowed. “Can they manipulate dreams?”

McGinnis nodded, then asked, “What did you dream?”

Mercy took a deep breath. “Until tonight, erotic ones,” she said, keeping her tone even. She gazed up at him through her lashes. “Then tonight, the dream started out the same…”

“You screamed,” McGinnis reminded her when her voice trailed off. “And it wasn’t in a good way.”

“Because he cut me with something cold, something sharp,” she said, the words slow and careful as she forced herself to relive the images. An involuntary shudder ran through her.

“A knife?”

“Maybe,” Mercy murmured, and closed her eyes to better focus. The image in her mind’s eye sharpened one layer at a time, as if someone was peeling away film after hazy film. When the picture was as crisp as it was going to get, shock rippled through her and her eyes flew open.

“A stone knife,” she said, her voice clipped with urgency. “A stone knife that arrived at the museum this morning as part of the Native American exhibit.”

“Why would he want that?” asked Savage.

She shook her head. “No idea. According to Professor Harjo, who helped me put together the exhibit, it’s the least valuable item in the collection.”

“Anything else?” Savage asked.

“It’s supposed to have mystical powers, but then a lot of the artifacts are supposed to have some kind of mystical power or some legend attached to them.”

“If Edmond stole the knife,” began McGinnis, “it would’ve made the news along with your disappearance because someone would’ve noticed him smashing a display case.”

“But I didn’t put it on display,” she told them softly. “There were two knives available, so I put the more elaborate one on display.”

Savage tapped his fingers absently on the countertop. “What kind of mystical powers?”

“Some kind of healing power.” Mercy’s brows drew together, and mostly to herself, she murmured, “What would he need to heal?”

“A knife with healing powers,” said Savage, as if testing the oxymoronic words on his tongue. “Any truth to those mystical healing powers?”

“Of course not,” she replied automatically. “They’re just stories, told and retold and exaggerated with each telling. They’re not true.”

A dark slash of a brow lifted. “Like vampires?”

Mercy stiffened, then suddenly feeling crowded, rose from her seat, forcing McGinnis to rise as well. He, however, didn’t step back, and she found herself much too close to him, close enough to feel his heat, to breathe in his scent. Her body swayed, wanting nothing more than to fall against him and let him support her. She hastily pushed the chair back and stepped to the side, skirting around the temptation.

She took two steps away from them, realized the windows were directly ahead of her, and stopped. She hugged herself tightly, wanting to make herself as small as possible. But it was too late for that. The monster already knew she existed.

“What is it?”

She didn’t turn around. McGinnis’s question couldn’t compete with the unknown darkness on the other side of the glass.

She felt a presence at her back and knew it was McGinnis. Savage wouldn’t make her want to step back to close the distance between them.

“What other mind games can they play?”

“What do you mean?” asked McGinnis.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure, but I think he…searched my mind for the location of the knife. It happened back at the museum, when he…bit me,” she explained, finishing with a shudder. A hand moved over the wounds once more but she didn’t touch them, despite the layer of cloth between her hand and her breast. After a moment, the hand returned to her waist. She exhaled softly. “It hurt, a physical pain. Unlike the dreams.”

“Your guards are down when you sleep,” McGinnis explained. “When you’re awake, he has to fight to get inside your head.”

She laughed, but the sound wasn’t happy. “He didn’t have to fight very hard.”

“He drugged you.”

The muscles in her shoulders went taut, feeling almost brittle. “The champagne,” she breathed. Her eyes closed, her anger overcoming the fear of what was beyond those windows. The heat of her emotions warmed her, and she welcomed it.

* * * * *