Blood Guilt
Blood Guilt
Blood Hunters, Book 1
A sequel to the
Awakened by Blood
trilogy
by
Marie Treanor
BLOOD GUILT
All Rights Reserved © 2012 by Marie Treanor
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.
Dedication
To my agent, Robert Gottlieb, for his faith and guidance.
To Adrienne Lombardo and the ebook team at Trident Media Group for all their help.
And to my editor, Linda Ingmanson, with gratitude as always!
Prologue
The vampire stood silhouetted against her bedroom window.
Quicker than thought, Mihaela grabbed her stakes and leapt off the bed, poised to defend and kill, just as she was trained to. Her heart hammering in her breast, she faced the intruder: tall; slender; untidy dark hair falling forward over cheekbones that looked sharp enough to cut. Maximilian.
His lips parted, revealing his fangs as he walked toward her through the pale shaft of moonlight. He wore jeans and a faded black tank that clung to his lethal body. Mihaela plunged both stakes together from different angles, to give herself more chance of piercing his heart. Although she didn’t even see his arms move, both weapons were torn from her fingers and hurled onto the carpet.
The vampire reached for her, not to kill, bizarrely, but to take hold of the neck of her nightshirt and rip.
Time slowed and stilled. Naked, she stood in front of him, and they stared at each other.
Christ, he was gorgeous. Like a punk fallen angel, with all the beauty of youth and the sheer, powerful sex appeal that can only come with age. Six centuries of age. Even other vampires didn’t trust Maximilian. Everyone hated him. He was beyond the pale. Perhaps that was why she’d always felt this ridiculous attraction she’d never, ever admit to.
She lashed out at him with her bare hands, but he caught her fists easily, jerking her against him. Her struggles were useless, his strength too great. She felt his erection between her thighs and gasped at the surge of excitement enveloping her whole body. It was wrong, deeply, utterly wrong, and yet when he bared his fangs and bent to her neck, she couldn’t prevent the yearning, the dreadful, naked lust.
He pushed against her, and she fell backward onto the bed, helpless under his weight, panting with as much arousal as fear.
He lay between her legs. His mouth nuzzled her throat, and she was appalled by how good it felt. Then, without even speaking a word, he pushed into her body and bit into her vein, and she fell immediately into orgasm…
****
Mihaela sat up with a cry. Her heart thundered. Sweat trickled down her forehead and between her breasts. Between her damp thighs lurked the ache of pleasure and frustration. But at least her room was empty and the window closed. And her chaste T-shirt still clung undamaged to her body.
With shaking fingers, she pushed her hair back from her hot face and lay down on the pillow.
It wasn’t the first time she’d dreamed of the vampire Maximilian since he’d saved her life so casually. She just prayed it was the last.
Chapter One
In the gathering dusk of the winter afternoon, a small child weaved among the tourists and shoppers of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile with curiously adult intent. He wore a bright green anorak, and his untidy, sticking-up hair was a distinctive, almost white blond, even in the uncertain streetlight. Watching from the window of the cozy coffee shop, Mihaela remembered him. She was sure he was the same boy she’d noticed earlier in Prince’s Street. It hadn’t been clear then which of the scuttling adults he belonged to, although it had crossed Mihaela’s mind that the answer was none of them.
Frowning over her coffee as the boy darted between car headlights and dodged two large shopping bags, only to bolt through a gap between buildings, Mihaela again received the same impression. She supposed that he must live nearby. Still, he couldn’t have been more than six, and to Mihaela it was criminal to let so young a child roam the city streets, in potential danger from speeding traffic and every passing stranger. Especially in the dark.
She pulled herself up—after all, she was in Edinburgh on holiday to relax, not to save the world that could get along perfectly well without her interference—and gave a self-deprecating smile into her cup as she finished the last of her coffee. She tried not to wrinkle her nose, but British addiction to Nescafé or its several clones was a taste she could not share. Still, the brew had been warming against the northern December chill, and she liked the novelty of hanging around in cafés without discussing work or debriefing informants. She liked just watching the people go by on the ancient, cobbled street, huddled against the icy wind while she luxuriated in warmth inside.
She had nothing to worry about, she reminded herself as she rose and pulled on her hooded sheepskin jacket. Or at least nothing that couldn’t wait until she left Scotland to face the music of home. She
so
needed these two weeks of real, normal life to get her head straight. So far, she’d had three days. And the damp, insidious charm of Scotland seemed to be working. She felt more relaxed than she had in months.
“Pardon me, miss, are you local?” a man’s voice asked from the next table.
Mihaela paused in the act of picking up her bag and glanced over her shoulder. The speaker was American by his accent, somewhere in his thirties, maybe, and good-looking enough to turn heads. And he was smiling at her.
“No,” she answered, distantly from habit. “I’m just visiting.”
“Me too. I’m trying to find the Writers’ Museum, and this map just doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Mihaela glanced downward at the crumpled map open on his table and couldn’t help smiling. It had been stuffed into pockets and folded so often that much of the detail had worn away.
“I passed a sign for it, further up that way,” she offered.
“Have you been there?”
“No, not yet.”
“I’m going to try and make it tomorrow.” He smiled at her again as he crushed the poor, abused map back into his pocket. “I hope you don’t mind my saying, I love your accent. Where are you from?”
“Romania.”
“I’m from Chicago in the US. You enjoying Scotland?”
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
He smiled and rose to his feet. “Me too. Amazing country. Anyway,” he added as they edged their way together to the door, “maybe we’ll run into each other again. Maybe even at the Writers’ Museum.”
Mihaela cast him a quick glance of appraisal. He was casually dressed in a thick sweater and windcheater, perhaps a tourist, perhaps a businessman relaxing after some deal or other. Whatever his story, his blue eyes were bright and hopeful, and she sensed a fellow lonely spirit. And the possibility of holiday romance. Flattering, intriguing—and quite novel for Mihaela, who’d known little but one-night stands with total bastards.
She let her lips tug upward. “Maybe. If either of us can find it.”
His rather charming laughter ushered her out the door into the dark, biting cold. Smiling, because she just might be tempted to come back to Edinburgh tomorrow, she turned to say good-bye—and caught sight of the fair child again, darting out between buildings and rushing down the road.
Frowning, Mihaela followed his progress with her eyes. In the thicker darkness, he looked tiny and unspeakably vulnerable, his fair head bobbing and glinting under the streetlights. Another movement caught her attention—two adult male figures emerging from between the same buildings and setting off at a run in the same direction as the child.
Alarm bells went off in Mihaela’s head. The men could have been family members, chasing him to bring him home, but something in the way they moved, their carefully controlled speed, the power of their running legs, spoke chillingly against it.
“Good-bye,” she said, a little too abruptly, remembering at least to cast the friendly American a quick smile before she too sped off down the hill.
There was no point in even telling herself not to get involved. Relaxing on holiday was suddenly irrelevant because no one could see a child in danger and do nothing. And Mihaela was terribly sure now he
was
in danger. Although she carried no detector, in this case, she didn’t need one. The figures pursuing the little boy were vampires.
****
Mihaela had been fighting vampires all her life. She’d accepted long ago that she would die doing so. Hunting the undead was her
raison d’être
, her life, her job for more than ten years. It was even, indirectly, the reason she was here in Scotland. Because everything had changed in the last three months, since the fight to defend the Budapest library. On that shattering night, at great personal risk from both sides, three vampires had stood with the hunters and fought against their own kind.
Now, doing what she did best—tracking the undead through dark, unknown streets— Mihaela almost felt nostalgic for the days when the relationship between vampire and hunter was clear, when she’d needed a reason
not
to kill a vampire.
She was part of a very old and secretive world-wide organization whose prime duty was to protect humanity from the undead. And she was damned good at it. At the age of twenty-five, she’d risen to be a member of the elite first team in eastern Europe, which boasted the highest density of vampire population in the world, and now, six years later, she’d grown formidably strong and fast as the result of her kills.
And if a tiny part of her remained secretly unfulfilled, that didn’t matter, because she knew she was doing good work, protecting people not just from vampires but from the terrible knowledge that there were monsters in their midst.
Then, not much more than a year ago, an unworldly academic researcher called Elizabeth Silk had accidentally awakened the vampire Saloman, last of the pure Ancient race from which all modern hybrid vampires were descended, and Mihaela’s world was turned on its head.
But although Saloman’s power was more frightening than anything the hunters had had to deal with in living memory, and he quite candidly sought to rule the world, he hadn’t started the war with humans that the hunters feared more than anything. In fact, he instilled discipline in the chaotic vampire communities, laid down rules, and compelled obedience—and vampire-related murders drastically reduced.
The downside, of course, was that vampires were coming out of the shadows. And that too suited Saloman’s plan, because he wanted a return to ancient times when vampires had walked among humans, living in harmony—at least according to Saloman. When he’d fought to preserve the hunters from his own kind, they’d had to acknowledge he had a few viable points.
So now Mihaela and the rest of the world’s hunters had to adjust to the fact that vampires were not automatically for killing, not unless they proved themselves to be a threat. The hunters and the vampire overlord, Saloman, were working together toward a strategy of coping with the inevitable human “discovery” of undead existence, a revelation which had already begun spontaneously in the last year as a direct result of Saloman’s regime.
Although Mihaela had believed, mostly, in the new world order, it still felt weird, unholy. And when Konrad, her friend and team leader of many years’ hunting, had come to her with his proposal, she’d been appalled by the wrenching of divided loyalties.
He’d arrived at her bright, blessedly normal apartment one evening, about a month ago, restless, anxious, but with a new purpose and determination in his step, in the very way he carried himself as he strode into her living room and accepted a mug of coffee.
Konrad was an impressive man: strong, principled, determined. His life, Mihaela’s, and that of the third member of their team, István, were bound by common cause and mutual reliance. They’d saved each other’s lives and dressed each other’s wounds countless times. Rugged and serious, Konrad paced her small living room, holding his mug in both hands, then turned abruptly and fixed her with his intense blue eyes. She was glad to see all that vitality back, for since the library fight, he’d been listless, sullen, even obstructive, way beyond the normal disagreements with which the team often confronted missions. Mihaela began to hope that at last he’d come to terms with the new alliance, the new world. And then he spoke.
“It isn’t right, Mihaela,” he burst out. “We should be killing them, wiping them off the face of the planet. Starting with Saloman. Instead we’re holding hands with him, giving away vital information and getting nothing in return. This alliance was always wrong. It’s only working for
them
by turning us soft enough to be finally defeated, and then there’s nothing left to prevent vampire supremacy. Can you live with that, Mihaela?”
Mihaela shrugged unhappily. “It takes some adjustment. But we have to face reality, Konrad, not what we think should be the case. And the reality is, word is getting out about vampires, slowly but surely. We can’t prevent that now. We can only work with Saloman to make the ‘outing’ as peaceful as possible.”
“You sound like Saloman,” Konrad sneered. “Or Elizabeth.”
“Well, they were the only ones talking any sense before the library fight,” Mihaela retorted. “If Saloman hadn’t ignored our rejection and come to our aid anyway, we’d all be dead, and Luk and his vampire cohorts would be on the rampage.”
Konrad brushed that aside with an impatient wave of one hand. “It may or may not have influenced the outcome. Either way, it should have been nothing more than the temporary alliances we’ve occasionally been forced into before. I can’t believe Miklόs, even the Grand Master, are seriously considering this as long term. It’s disastrous for us, for humanity.”
“I don’t think so,” Mihaela said stubbornly.
“Don’t you?” He walked over to the sofa where she sat, and stared down at her. “Really? Have you considered that you’re blinded by Saloman’s civilized veneer? By the fact that his creation Maximilian saved your life?”
Mihaela looked away. She didn’t want to think about Maximilian, most enigmatic and reclusive of the undead, whose story had always captured her curiosity. The fight in the hunters’ library had been the only time Mihaela had ever seen him up close. Made by Saloman himself, he was six hundred years old, had once ruled all the vampires of eastern Europe, and yet he’d looked like some carefree youth in his torn black tank and jeans, his wild, dark hair falling forward across a face so perfectly beautiful in its masculinity that it seemed angelic.
He’d met her gaze for only an instant as he’d straightened from the kill that had saved her, an instant of stillness in the vicious battle that raged around them. His eyes, the fathomless, secretive eyes of the very old, had burned into her. Something had stabbed at Mihaela, sharper than a vampire’s fangs, a tug of fierce, animal attraction that was almost grateful recognition. Because she’d imagined a flicker of answering warmth in those impossibly cold eyes.
It had terrified her. More than death at the hands of the vampire Maximilian had just saved her from. Somehow, she’d managed to nod her gratitude. Maximilian had whipped away, the muscles rippling in his naked arms as he thrust backward with his elbow into an attacker and plunged his stake into the back of another vampire.
He moved like a dancer. A lethal, murderous dancer. Across the battleground, and, later, across her hot, frustrating dreams.
She shook his image away. “I’m not blinded by anything,” she retorted.
“Aren’t you?” Konrad sat down beside her, leaning forward to peer into her face. “So how would you feel if you ran up against the vampire who killed your family? Would you accord
him
the same courtesies?”
“
He
is a murderer,” Mihaela snapped. “Of course I’d kill him.”
“Perhaps he’s reformed,” Konrad sneered. “Like Saloman himself. Mihaela, when this all goes wrong, we need to be strong. Miklόs and Lazar are going to be useless. They’re completely in Saloman’s pocket now.”
She opened her mouth to protest, but Konrad was still talking.
“I want there to be a strong group of us still at the center of things. Hunters who haven’t lost their way in all of this, who stick to the original values of the organization without being bound by its current controls. Hunters who’re prepared to do the right thing—kill vampires. I’m forming a force now, not a breakaway group yet, not until it has to be, but a group
within
the network, remaining true to its ideals, who can counteract the damage of all this—
tolerance
. I want you there with me, Mihaela.”
Many things about Konrad’s proposal had churned her up. The bitter, vengeful part of her that still wanted payback for the crimes against her family, as well as for all the other atrocities she’d witnessed over the years, wanted to join Konrad in his destructive quest. This was an older, stronger loyalty than the fragile bonds forged with Elizabeth and the overlord Saloman himself. And she didn’t know what to do.
So when Elizabeth, sensing her stress, had offered her the use of her flat in Scotland to get away from it all, she’d jumped at the chance.
****
This—pounding down a dark city street in pursuit of vampires—was Mihaela getting away from it all. Once a hunter, always a hunter.
