Companions (6 page)

He held up a hand. "Peace."

He'd been joking; Selena saw that now. Damn, but he could set her off. "Fine," she said, embarrassed at her temper. She hated when she let herself go. She'd worked for years to find a certain amount of emotional equilibrium, only to have every defense blown out of the water the moment this joker showed up and sank his teeth into her. She felt the aching spot just above her left nipple. "Why can't you just bite me on the neck like a normal vampire?"

He cocked an eyebrow in answer. No need for him to tell
her
that he wasn't normal. He pulled on a black shirt. "You say the oddest things."

She returned to an earlier question. "What are you doing in town?"

He considered telling her. That was her blood inside him, urging him to trust, confide, cherish, and share himself with what was his. They were alike, or they wouldn't be mated. She was tough. She knew the streets of her town. They'd partnered once before, reluctantly, after Maria set him up for the fall he'd spent five hundred years avoiding, and things had happened that shouldn't have. It was the second time in his lives he'd been trapped.

Selena's presence among the nest of vampires had been no accident. Maria Ventanova had searched long and hard to find him the perfect mate, had Selena waiting there, blood pumped full of adrenaline, a sacrificial diversion Maria hoped would save her own life. Maria knew he had never taken a companion, never wanted one, and that no strigoi, even Istvan the
dhamphir,
could go forever without eventually being struck by the overwhelming psychic bonding. It had worked, and it hadn't. Maria still died, and how he wished he'd been the one to take Maria Ventanova's heart.

He also noticed that Selena was carefully not glancing toward the desk across the room, carefully keeping her mind blank about anything to do with computers. He might be a bit long in the tooth, but he was almost as high tech as the West Coast vampires that prided themselves on being thoroughly modern monsters. He kept up, even had his own private hacker for research purposes. He owned a laptop that he'd been using at a truck stop earlier in the evening. But if Selena wanted to keep a medieval image of him, he wasn't going to enlighten her. The point of their relationship was that they didn't have a relationship. He wasn't going to ask about what she didn't want him to know. What he didn't know couldn't hurt her.

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He decided that since the trouble he was currently investigating wasn't in Detective Crawford's town but much farther to the west, it was best not to involve her. He said, "Maybe I came to see you."

"I may be crazed, but I'm not crazy. Why? What's going on that the local Enforcer can't handle?"

Even those who had the right to ask him questions generally didn't. Her attitude toward him was quite refreshing. "Just passing through," he told her. "Your streets are safe from me."

"But not my bedroom."

"You wanted me here." He grinned. "Briefly."

Her indignant surprise pleased him, because her indignation was for him, for once. She kept to business when she spoke. "If there's someone who needs eliminating in my city, I'd rather have you on them than anyone else."

Her nontraditional attitude toward him was always so… tempting.

The more time he spent with her, the more time he wanted to spend with her. That was the curse of companionship. Because the more time they spent together, the sooner she'd become a vampire. And there was nothing he hated more than vampires.

Despite a temptation to stay, with the excuse that he could check out any local rumors, he really had been just passing through, heading west. The last thing he'd planned on was turning onto a tollway from the interstate after he left the last truck stop and driving from the tollway to the north side of Chicago.

He'd left his vehicle a long way away from Selena's neighborhood. He had a long way to get back to it now before dawn. He had no intention of being seen or sensed by any of the city's strigoi inhabitants anywhere near her. He protected his companion in his own way, which was mostly by staying away from her.

Of course, recent research had indicated that —

He tried not thinking about the warnings he'd gotten from Lady Valentia about recent events in Los Angeles and a too-long E-mail with too many big words from Char out in Arizona on the same subject.

This was the bloodbond's insidious way of exerting a hold on him. He wasn't any ordinary strigoi. He was
dhamphir,
son of a vampire, reborn into the strigoi life, already the strongest of the Nighthawks, the enforcers of the laws. He was the Enforcer every other Enforcer feared; he would fight the bond. Of course, if he was going to keep control of the situation, he was going to have to stop biting Selena on the boob, even on a biannual basis.

Maybe next time he would go for the throat.

"Later."

Steve turned into smoke and was gone before she could ask what he meant. "How do you do that?" she demanded of the empty room. "And don't come back!" she added, just in case he was messing with her mind and was really still standing across the room from her.

Turn into smoke indeed! Real vampires couldn't do that, or so delicate inquiries had led her to believe.

They couldn't fly. They couldn't shape-shift. They didn't need to drink blood to live, but they did need to hunt. Vampires hunted mortals, Nighthawks hunted vampires, and the magic of immortality was drawn
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from the sacrament of consuming living flesh and fear. They did need to exchange blood for reproduction, which was where the legends of the caped dude sucking the blood of innocent virgins came from. Only the capes and the virgin parts were all wrong. Vampires craved sex as they craved all intense sensation.

What made them monsters was the driving, insatiable need to hunt. They ate emotions as much as they did human flesh. They craved the emotions of the ones they took as lovers as much as the ones they hunted to kill. Sometimes Selena didn't know if it was worse to be one of the victims vampires killed or one of the victims chosen to be a lover. From her point of view as one of those designated lovers, it wasn't a pretty place to be, even with a master as indifferent as Steve.

"Bloodsucking parasite," she muttered. "And that's just your good points."

They were stronger than mortals, very hard to kill, incredibly fast, and had amazing psychic powers.

Sunlight didn't destroy them, but they did sink into a near-death state between dawn and dusk. Even Steve needed to do dial. But Steve… Steve wasn't like the others in so many ways.

Selena looked at her alarm clock. Too late to go back to bed now. She glanced down at the rumpled sheets. She almost smiled at what was not an unpleasant memory.
Insatiable bastard.
"And I like him that way."

Definitely too late.

"The point is, there aren't many ways it could have gone down," Olympias told him. "We
can't
harm our own kind, but that doesn't stop one of our own from making arrangements with outsiders."

Istvan liked using his cellular telephone while he drove. It was better than telepathy, and the looks of stinging annoyance he received from drivers who noticed him made for nice sensory snack food while on the road. Even on city side streets at four thirty in the morning, there were enough annoyed people around to give him a buzz. But it was only empty calories after a night spent with Selena.

"It's possible for a strigoi to kill a strigoi without hiring a hit man," he answered the Enforcer who'd called him from her home in Washington just as he was looking for a place to sleep through the day. "It's even quite pleasant."

"Watch your tongue."

He laughed. "And my teeth? Admit that it's possible."

"You were a gifted child. You've always been different. You only made threats when we were together.

You didn't try it with me."

Olympias wanted to hear that she was special, even after all this time. She did it just to annoy him. "It's late," he told her instead. "Even later where you are. Go to bed. I'll find the killer for you. Don't I always?"

"Harm
is a more circumspect word, you know. Not that you were ever circumspect."

He knew she didn't like him talking so openly over the telephone. That was one of the reasons he did it.

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Never give a vampire any measure of comfort. That was one of the rules he lived by. Another was to find as inconspicuous a place as possible to wait out the daylight. He saw a parking ramp next to a shopping mall and turned in while he enjoyed Olympias's growing impatience with his silence.

"All right, what if it isn't one of us?" she finally asked. "What if it's a complete outsider?"

A mortal vampire hunter, she meant. There had been threats of that sort of thing in the past, but the threats had always been contained before any harm was done.

The parking ramp had three levels. He pulled into a spot on the second floor. It would be a nice, shady place to spend the day. He had no interest in mortals. "Hope not. I like to eat what I kill," he answered and switched off the phone.

He was still closer to Selena than he wanted to be, but it was also too late to do anything about it, other than try to keep his mind away from her as he slept.
This close? After the night?
"Fat chance," he muttered. He might as well have stayed in her comfortable bed rather than returning to his usual resting place.

He felt Selena deep inside him as he moved from the driver's seat into the back of the vehicle. He even caught himself smiling, remembering her first reaction on seeing his wheels.

"A Suburban?" She had sneered, her gaze raking the considerable length of the Chevy he called
home. She turned the sneer on him. "You a vampire or a soccer dad?"

"It's black," he had offered.

She shook her head. "Uh-uh. You want to bite
my
neck, you better get yourself some new wheels.

Show up in a black Jaguar, and we'll talk."

"I don't do necks."

Nor had he gotten a cool car. Though he had, to his chagrin, thought about it. The point of having a companion was that they were supposed to unconditionally adore their strigoi lover, no matter what they drove or looked like or did. Selena wasn't unconditional about anything. Or maybe he was just a wimp.

The box in the back of the Suburban was camouflaged to look like a pair of storage containers; it was not a coffin. He settled into his bed an instant before the paralysis that came with daylight overtook him.

He was tired enough to actually sleep, at least for a while. Sleeping, he knew he would dream.

He was not surprised when the first thing he heard in his dreaming, was,
"Ihave to go to the
bathroom."

It wasn't the first thing he'd thought he'd hear upon waking up. The woman's words were too
prosaic not to be real. It was a humiliating thing for her to have to admit, and probably not the
first thing she'd planned tosay when the vampire in her bed awoke, but it was no doubt the most
pressing thing on her mind.

Istvan had half hoped the woman was part of a long, erotic dream. Half, because too much of
any emotion was a dangerous thing. Of course she, and the dangerous situation, were very real. It
would have been easier to let her die at the hands of Maria's nest, but he had tasted her instead of
having the others hunt her, and now she was his. He did not know what had come over him when
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he arrived at Maria Ventanova's nest, but here they were, tied together by the bloodbond he'd
always rejected. He had responsibilities. She had needs. She looked at him with anger and
defiance, but she still needed something from him.

He knew he should make her ask. Defiance should not be permitted, dependence should be
fostered. That was the safe, traditional way to start with a companion.

He moved his arm and let her up. When she bolted out of the room, he followed her.

The bathroom was across a hall from the bedroom. Istvan took a few moments to check out the
other rooms. There was a second bedroom that looked to be used as an office/guest room. The
room held bookcases, a pillow-strewn daybed, and pots of orchids on a long table under grow
lights. He found the exotic blooms pleasant to the eye and smiled to find that the woman
cultivated such an interesting hobby.

He turned back to deal with the woman. When he entered the bathroom, he noticed that she'd put
on a short green bathrobe and that she was holding a large gun in a two-handed grip.

If you keep a gun in the bathroom, where do you keep the handcuffs?

He enjoyed her blush at the erotic overtones of his thought.

"Stop that!" She carefully aimed at his heart. She refused to look him in the face, though she
knew he wanted her to. He knew that she still knew he was smirking. "Stay out of my mind."

I can't do that.
He took a step forward.

He knew she'd never shot anyone before, but she was trained to do it. She had plenty of
motivation. Her memories flooded him, of him pressing her back on the bed, his hands on her, of
his mouth, the sharp prick of teeth, of him on top of her, inside her, of the hot intoxication when
his blood poured into her mouth. It hadn't felt like rape. She hated that she couldn't feel like she'd
been raped, no matter what she could objectively tell herself.

It had been rape all right. In a way, they'd both been raped.