Blood Knot (2 page)

“
Nathanial.”

He nodded.

She let out her breath. It sounded a little shaky, the last dregs of the adrenaline still affecting her. “I don’t know why you are here, Nathanial. But then, I’ve learned I know nothing about anything, these last months.” She paused as the shakiness seemed to leap inside her. A hot, hard thing. Demanding, like an itch she couldn’t scratch. Or a need to be filled.

Quickly, she tried to adjust her body chemicals to deal with it. The bio-chemical mix was something new. Something she had never experienced. The physical symptoms it produced were compulsive. She could only dampen them down partially, but it would have to do. Nathanial would notice if she focused inwards for too long. She blinked and forced her attention back to the man in front of her.

Sebastian had told her very little about Nathanial’s true nature, except to say that he was centuries old. But in the years she and Sebastian had been working together, he had spoken many times about Nathanial as a man—about his intellect and political scheming. Winter could experience for herself now the power of his personality. Even though Nathanial simply stood in front of her, she could feel the way he was controlling the conversation. Leading her.

It annoyed her, but she wasn’t sure how to wrest the conversation back to her agenda. She didn’t
have
an agenda. He had come looking for her, after all. She had been caught flat-footed and now was back-pedaling madly.

And that was exactly what Sebastian used to complain about—how Nial would catch people unaware and leave them trailing in his mental dust. Manipulate them and make them do exactly what Nial wanted them to do. And oh, the
bitterness
in Sebastian’s voice when he had talked about Nial’s power to push people around that way…

And here she was, being moved around like a chess piece, exactly the way Sebastian despised. Winter was suddenly glad Sebastian wasn’t around to see this.

She swallowed, her throat dry and raspy. “What do you want, Nathanial?” She squeezed her arms again, digging her fingernails in. The peculiar surges were growing stronger.

Nathanial shrugged, as if it were obvious. “I have come to find Sebastian.”

This time, her laughter bubbled up from deep within some hard, aching place inside her. It spewed out before she could stop it. There wasn’t a single shred of humor in the loud noise that exploded from her lips. Even Winter could feel the hysteria attached to it and fought to hang onto the shreds of her control. “What makes you think I have any idea where he is?” she cried. A shudder ran through her.

Nathanial’s eyes narrowed. “Gods above…” he breathed.

Abruptly he was suddenly
there
, right in front of her. So close, she shivered again as her own body heat bounced off him and warmed the space between them. She was hot. Too hot.

He pushed his hand into her hair, his thumb against her temple, controlling her head. He lifted it up and around so the light from the doorway fell on it. She winced.

“
What are you?” he demanded.

Frightened, she tried to pull her head out of his grip. “Leave me alone.” But she was weak. Weaker than usual. And Nathanial was much, much stronger than a normal man. He was staring into her face. “You are not a vampire,” he declared. “You are human.”

She swallowed. “Yes.”

“
But you are gripped by blood-fever. I can see the symptoms for myself. How can this be?” He dropped his hands from her face. “You need to feed. Now.”

Coldness curled around the pit of her stomach. “No,” she whispered. “It’s too early.”

Nathanial’s gaze seemed to scoop up every little skerrick of data she was giving him. She wished he was not here, storing all this evidence. But there was no help for it. Bad timing. Very bad timing. Still, while he was here, she could use him. “Is that was these symptoms are? Blood…?”

“
Fever,” he finished. “Did Sebastian not teach you this?” He lifted his thumb to his mouth and drew the ball of it across the edge of his teeth.

She licked her lips. “I haven’t seen Sebastian for eight—” Ravenous need swept away her concentration, for Nathanial had brought his thumb close to her face. There was blood on it.

She began to pant. The smell of leather and cashmere and a delicious spicy aroma enveloped her. She reached for him, for the strength she needed. The blood.

“
Mine is not the blood you need.” Low words breathed in her ear. “Tell me who’s you need.”

“
Sebastian’s.” She felt a tear escape her eye.

“
He would not have abandoned you to the blood fever, not knowingly.” Nathanial spoke softly in her ear.

“
The house,” Winter replied, feeling a helpless vulnerability at having to give Nathanial this last secret. “The basement.”

She felt herself being lifted. Then nothing more.

* * * * *

Winter knew she was in her own basement before she opened her eyes. The sting of the IV needle was unmistakable. So was the quiet hum of the big laboratory refrigerator and the generator in the insulated furnace room that ran it.

“
You were going to tell me you haven’t seen Sebastian for eight months, weren’t you?” Nathanial said.

She opened her eyes and looked to the right, the direction his voice came from. Nathanial was resting on a bar stool, his long legs thrust out in front of him. One elbow rested on the bar itself, behind him. He’d removed the leather jacket. Beneath, he wore a royal blue sweater in some fine material, with a v-neck. Cashmere, she suspected.

In the better lighting available in the basement, she could see his features more clearly. Sebastian had spent the nearly two years they had worked together building up a fearsome picture in Winter’s mind of Nathanial and his ways—a manipulative, powerful, remote man who stopped at nothing to get what he wanted. The last time she had seen Sebastian, he had revealed the rest: that Nial was at least a thousand years old and had lived that long because he was a crafty, scheming and self-interested vampire who had grown detached from the human race.

What Sebastian had failed to add was that Nial—Nathanial—looked like a man in his mid- to late thirties and was stunningly attractive. Winter could feel the pull of his magnetism despite knowing what she did about him.

His eyes were the blue of a cloudless summer day and almost as dazzling as one. He had a square, determined chin, perhaps the only part of his anatomy that hinted at his true nature. The rest of him was utterly distracting. His shoulders were wide and well muscled, the hips taut and the legs long and just as well developed as the shoulders. He’d pushed the sweater up his arms to his elbows and the forearms flexed, showing the play of tendons and muscles and veins. His wrists were wide and his hands were big, which matched his height. Winter judged him to be about six foot four, by the way he stood over her.

Now he stood again and came over to where she lay in the extended La-Z-Boy. “How often do you have to feed, Winter?”

“
None of your business.”

“
It might be,” he replied. “I checked the rest of the fridge. Current health guidelines for maximum storage limits of blood in a laboratory refrigerator is either twenty-one days or forty-two days, depending on who you want to listen to. You don’t have a lot of Sebastian’s blood here. One feed left, if you use all of the bag I put on the pole.” He looked up at the IV pole next to her. “And you’ve just about drained it, so let’s assume that you use a half-pint per feeding. That means you have one feeding left in the fridge.”

“
He’ll send me more,” Winter assured him. “He always does.”

“
Really? When was the last time you received any?”

She bit her lip. “About six weeks ago,” she admitted.

“
How often was he sending the blood before that?”

“
Every three weeks.”

“
Every twenty-one days, in other words. National blood storage standards.” Nathanial curled his hand into a fist and let it unroll again, then flexed the fingers. “It didn’t occur to you to contact him and ask him why he had stopped shipping his blood?”

An image flashed through her mind of speaking to Sebastian, and being in the same room with him, too fast to grasp and properly visualize it. Panic touched her.

Winter looked at Nathanial. “Sebastian is the last person on earth I can bear to speak to, even if I must. I thought of it, yes. That’s all I did.”

Nathanial eyes widened, but that was all the shock he showed. “You will not, even if not speaking to him will bring you to this?” he asked, waving his hand toward where she lay. “Blood fever and your eventual death?”

“
Is that what will happen?” she asked dully. She shrugged.

Nathanial frowned. With a soft word in a language she did not know, he strode over to the small dining table in the far corner, picked up one of the chairs and placed it next to her La-Z-Boy. He sat on the edge of the seat and leaned close to her, his elbows on his knees, his hands gripped together between them.

“
What happened to you? To both of you?” he demanded. “A year ago, Winter Kennedy, you were living in New York and considered to be one of the world’s best acrobats.”

Winter rolled her eyes. “Quit with the pretty euphemisms, Nathaniel. I’m a thief. You’re a con man. Or at least you used to be once.”

Nathanial nodded. “Very well. Plain speaking, if you insist. My question still stands. A year ago, you and Sebastian were considered to be the most effective team in the world, bar none. Now you tell me you haven’t see him for eight months. I know you both pulled off that Sumitomo Mitsui bank job in Singapore last June. That was eleven months ago. What has happened in between?”

Shocked slithered through her, cold and sobering. “What makes you think we did the Singapore contract?” she asked, making it sound casual. “That’s more along Pedro Salvomir’s line, big banks like that.”

“
Twenty floors up, not a single guard hurt and no one can remember a damn thing?” Nathanial smiled, showing very white and even teeth. “That would be enough to brand the job as yours, even if Sebastian himself hadn’t told me you two had taken the contract.”

“
He told you?” She had run out of the capacity to be shocked any further and could only stare at him. “He met with you?” Surely Sebastian would have mentioned an occasion so momentous as meeting the man who had left such a huge scar on his life and his soul?

Nathanial’s smile faded. “There is so much you have yet to learn, Winter Kennedy. Our kind don’t meet. Not if we can help it. It reduces risks.” He shook his head. A small movement. “He called me.”

She drew a shaky breath. “He called,” she repeated flatly. “And didn’t tell me.” She reached over to yank the fat needle out of the crook of her elbow. “Well, that fits the pattern. There’s bushels he didn’t tell me.”

Nathanial’s hand came down on her shoulder, halting her. “Secrecy is necessary for our survival, Winter. After a while it becomes psychologically ingrained. You’ll understand all too soon.”

She pulled her shoulder out of his grip. “I’m not one of you.”

He smiled. “No, you’re not.” He sat back again, his hands threaded together between his knees, and let her pull her IV out. “What happened after the bank job?” he said. “Or was it the bank job that went wrong?”

Winter flinched. She couldn’t help it. She let the needle drop so it clanged softly against the pole. The blood bag was empty.

“
The bank job, then,” Nathanial concluded. “Tell me what happened.”

She shook her head. There was no way she was about to tell Nathanial that tale. Sebastian was bitter and still licking the wounds he wore from his time with Nial, so Winter knew that anything he’d ever told her about the man had to be filtered and adjusted through his biases, but even adjusting for Sebastian’s prejudices meant that Nathanial was a dangerous person to open up to. The habits of the con man had never left him and he stored people’s vulnerabilities and secrets like currency, to be produced at later dates for negotiation.

Nathanial gave a small hiss. “Sebastian is missing,” he snapped. “Have you not grasped that yet? I didn’t come here to pass the time of day with you.” He stood abruptly and took two slow steps away from her, as if he were controlling himself.

“
Missing?” She pushed the lounger into the upright position. “How do you know he’s not off on some jaunt somewhere, brooding?”

He didn’t look back at her. “Your blood supply has stopped, hasn’t it?”

Winter bit her lip. Adrenaline was seeping back into her system and she corrected it again. Now was not the time to panic. This could be nothing. Sebastian hadn’t spoken to her for eight months. “He’s a grown man,” Winter said, addressing Nathanial’s back. “He’s…hell, I don’t know how old he is. He wouldn’t tell me. He’s been taking care of himself for quite a while.”

Nathanial turned, then. “He was supposed to meet me last week. He didn’t. Unlike human meetings, these meetings are sacrosanct in our world. You make them, or ensure a message is sent to let the other know you will not be there. You never just not show. Something is very wrong.” He pointed at her. “There is something wrong with you, too, Winter. You know that.”

She couldn’t hold his gaze. She found herself looking away, at her knees in their worn jeans.

“
Yes, you agree with me,” he said softly. “Tell me what happened in Singapore. Then I might be able to begin to trace Sebastian…” He grimaced. “If it isn’t already too late.”