Chasing Shadows (A Shadow Chronicles Novel) (29 page)

Parks nodded cordially. “Ms. Caldwell, good morning.”

I raised an eyebrow. “It is hardly that, Lieutenant,” I replied sardonically.

He nodded.
“Of course.
My apologies.”
Turning to the man and woman behind him, he added, “These are my associates, Sgt. Trimble and Sgt. Withers. We’ll be going around
to have a look at the wreckage, see
if there’s any usable evidence.”

“But you doubt you’ll find anything,” I observed.

“Now, Ms. Caldwell, there’s always a chance—”

I waved his words away. “Don’t bother trying to patronize me, Lt. Parks. You already said as much when you called this morning, and I am well aware that with the extent of the damage, the chances of your finding evidence you can use in court—should it ever get that far—are virtually nonexistent. Still, you have a job to do. Why don’t I let you get to it?”

Parks nodded and then gestured to his associates. They headed back to the SUV they had arrived in and I turned around, heading back into the house and shutting the door behind me as Lochlan and Mark came back down the stairs. Mark had managed to find my brother a plain gray t-shirt to wear, which fit well and didn’t look too incongruous with the slacks he had put on earlier that morning. He also looked a lot better than he had when they’d gone upstairs—he’d cleaned himself up and the bruises were continuing to fade.

“You know, Loch, you really didn’t have to come out here,” I commented as we all walked back into the kitchen.

“Saphrona, you had something terrible happen to you,” Loch replied. “I came because I wanted to support my sister.”

I smiled. “And that’s all well and good, but there’s really nothing for you to do here,” I pointed out. “All you got for your trouble was a beating you didn’t deserve. You’d have been better off staying home, or going to work even though it’s Sunday.”

“Which reminds me, I’ve been wondering,” Mark broke in. “How is it that you manage to work during the day?”

Lochlan regarded him casually. “I suppose that Saphrona’s explained to you the true nature of vampire biology by now, correct?” he asked, and Mark nodded. “Then you also know that regular consumption of blood not only nourishes my kind, but gives us energy, enabling us to stay awake during daylight hours. The nature of my profession requires that I work the day shift, so I’ve no choice but to be a pretender.”

“A pretender?”

I looked over at Mark. “Pretenders are vampires who are, in essence, pretending to be human.”

“Okay,” he said slowly. “So Loch, if you don’t kill, like you said the other day, where do you get your blood from? Do you get it from Saphrona?”

Lochlan scoffed.
“Egads, no.
I’m of the opinion that I’ve been drinking human blood far too long to give it up completely. I only have animal when I visit my sister, otherwise I get it from where I work.”

“And where is that?”

“At a biomedical research facility, my dear brother.
We’ve an attached blood bank.”

Mark raised an eyebrow. “And nobody notices when some of that goes missing?”

My brother shrugged. “The blood bank screens donations to make sure it is free of disease. Those samples which are deemed unsuitable for transfusion are then scheduled for disposal. I dispose of them.”

“You drink diseased blood? That sounds really gross. How can you do that without getting sick?” Mark’s tone was incredulous.

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be diseased to be unsuitable, but yes, sometimes I do. Better that than killing someone or making some poor git into a vessel. Besides, human illness does not affect vampires,” Lochlan replied, “though I will say drugs and disease do affect the taste of the blood. Many of the harder narcotics like heroin and PCP make it very bitter. Mild viruses like the common cold are hardly a bother, but when you encounter blood that has a venereal disease…”

He shuddered and made a face, to which Mark shook his head. “So just like me,
vampires never get sick?”

Lochlan and I looked at one another. “No.
However, we can be poisoned,” Loch answered.

Mark’s gaze roamed between us. “How?” he asked.

“Dead blood,” I replied. “A vampire cannot drink the blood of the dead, because it no longer contains the essence of life.”

“And the blood I acquire from the bank is all from living donors, so I’ve nothing to worry about,” added Lochlan.

“How is the blood of the dead poisonous?”

“It acts in us much the same manner as tetrodotoxin does in humans—it’s a paralytic neurotoxin. Numbness, arrhythmia, shortness of breath… the list of symptoms goes on,” Loch explained. “And like tetrodox, its effects on the body vary with the level of toxicity—or rather, the amount of blood ingested or introduced to the bloodstream. Precisely
how
it enters the body is also a factor, in that ingestion lengthens the amount of time before one becomes symptomatic, though not by much. An introduction directly into the bloodstream, such as by injection, would produce faster results.”

“Also, substances that are toxic or poisonous to humans can affect us too,” I added. “However, because we metabolize them differently, they’re usually not as severe in their effects as they are to humans. Again, it depends on how much of it we are exposed to.”

Juliette came out of the basement in that
moment, making me realize
that I hadn’t even noticed her absence. She carried with her, to my surprise, three bottles of blood from the deep freezer.

“Juliette, you didn’t have to do that,” I said as she placed one in the sink to temp and the remaining two in the refrigerator.

She shrugged. “I know that you’ve had Mark’s blood today, and your private business is none of mine, but I wanted to make sure there was some of this available so you wouldn’t have to take any more of his. Lochlan drank the only one you had thawed and I figured he was going to be here for a while, so I thought it a good idea to get more.”

Lochlan grinned.
“How very kind of you, my lady.
One might almost think you cared about me.”

Juliette shot him a sour look. “Don’t flatter yourself, bloodsucker. I’m just making sure you don’t get any funny ideas about my brother or those humans out there.”

“Not worried I’ll get funny ideas about you?” he countered, wiggling his eyebrows up and down suggestively.

“On the contrary.
I’d love for you to be that stupid, so I’d have an excuse for wiping the floor with you just like your sister did,” she said sweetly.

I snorted thinking of what he had said about her the other
day,
and Lochlan looked at me with a grin. Mark and Juliette, however, both frowned.

“You think I can’t take him?” Juliette demanded, her hands going to her hips.

I coughed so I wouldn’t laugh. “It’s not that. I’m sure you could give me a run for my money in the butt-kicking department.”

“Damn right I could,” she affirmed with a nod.

“Then what is so funny?” Mark wanted to know.

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter.
Best not to say.”

“Oh, but now they’re going to be insanely curious, dear sister,” Lochlan said with a grin, a clear indication that he was enjoying himself. “Should I tell your lover and his sister what I said about her the other day?”

“I don’t think—”

Juliette stepped over to him and poked a finger in his chest. “What did you say about me?”

Mark looked between Lochlan and me; after seeing my expression, he shook his head and said, “Jules, let it go.”

“No,” she retorted. “I want to know what he said about me.”

Loch sat forward in the chair he’d dropped into so that their lips were only inches apart. “I said that you had fire, that you were quite the looker, and
were
we not natural enemies I’d be inclined to take you to my bed.”

I could see her eyes widen. Juliette stepped back, staring down at him, and I began to wonder if she was contemplating slapping him. Instead, she said nothing and walked quickly out of the kitchen, dashing up the stairs to the second floor and, presumably, her room.

The silence that followed her exit was broken by Mark. “Keep your hands off my sister,” he said.

Lochlan laughed. “Not that you have any say in the matter, dear brother, but I daresay you have nothing to worry about there. Unfortunately, given that I am a vampire and she a shapeshifter, I shall never have the pleasure of putting my hands anywhere on her.”

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Mark nodded. “See that it stays that way.”

My brother grinned as he sat back in his chair, one arm casually draped over the back of it. “I’m getting the distinct feeling that you don’t think I’m good enough for fair Juliette,” he said.

“No one is good enough for Juliette,” I quipped. “It’s something the two of them have in common—neither thinks anyone is good enough for the other. It’s a sibling thing, I think.”

“So I’m supposed to think he’s not good enough for you?”

Mark snapped his fingers. “Damn. And we’ve been getting along so well.” He then tilted his head to the side, adding, “Of course, I’m kinda surprised by that, come to think of it.”

“Surprised by what, mate? That we get along?” Loch wondered.

“Yeah,” Mark replied. “First thing you wanted to do when you met me was kill me.”

I sighed. “
Mark, that
was something he couldn’t exactly help.”

“I know. But he controlled himself and sucked an entire pig dry instead of giving in to it,” he replied.

Lochlan sat forward. “I meant what I said Friday: I could not bear the thought of what hurting you would do to my sister. To know I would have been the cause of such pain was unthinkable.

“And I also meant it when I said I was happy for her that she has found you,” he went on. “All of us who are not bonded envy those who are, for it brings a peace to their souls that no words can describe. Despite that display she put on earlier, I have seen a change in my sister, a change for the better, and that’s because of you. It is clear to me that there is already a great deal of love between you, and I am not the sort of man who can hate someone who shows someone I care for such devotion.”

He shrugged then. “Besides, I have to believe that if you weren’t good enough for her, you would not be her bondmate. Thus it is not for me to decide.”

“In that case,” Mark said. “I’d like to thank you for caring about Saphrona enough not to kill me, and, well, for not killing me.”

“I’d like to thank you for that, too,” I said, shooting my brother a smile.

Lochlan nodded. “Truthfully, from what I’ve observed of you over the last couple of days, you really don’t seem a bad chap at all. We might well have been friends even had you not been my sister’s predestined love slave.”

Mark laughed and I could feel myself coloring with embarrassment.

“Change of subject,” Lochlan said abruptly, sitting back again. “Did either of you notice the coincidence between the name of our query and the name of the dragon lady’s species?”

I glanced at Mark, then back at Loch. “What about it? Don’t tell me you think she was
lying
?”

“Yeah, surely it’s just a coincidence,” Mark added. “I mean, Drake is a very
common last name.”

Lochlan sighed and raked a hand over his face. “I know it is. I just… Maybe I was just thrown, both by the fact that the author isn’t just getting her information from a vampire but is one, and the fact that there are actually dragon shapeshifters in this world. Dragons are supposed to be a made-up cultural and literary construct.”

“According to human history, dear brother, so are we,” I said pointedly.

“Aye, but people have seen vampires, or else where would they get their stories from?”

“Same could be said about dragons, man,” Mark countered. “Since they pervade the cultural mythology of a number of Eastern cultures in Europe and Asia, those stories also had to come from somewhere.”

“I suppose you are right, brother,” Lochlan agreed. “I think another thing what’s got me off-kilter is that so many crazy things have happened ever since Father set himself on this insane quest to find Vivian Drake.”

I scoffed. “You think you’re off
your
axis? In the last four days, I’ve had a visit from the sister who hates me, met my bondmate and fallen in love, faced an attack on said bondmate, went to Ireland for less than a day to see a psychic who turned out to be the same one I met a hundred fifty years ago, had to ask the father I despise for his help, and suffered the loss of my barn and twenty-eight of the animals who lived in it.”

“Not to mention hanging out with flea-bitten mongrel shapeshifters and having incredible, mind-blowing sex,” Lochlan added.

I leaned over and punched him in the shoulder.

“Ow!” my brother said, rubbing his arm. “Haven’t you beaten on me enough for today?”