Incarnatio (10 page)

“Who are you?” When she
didn’t answer, he said, “What do you want?” “That is more like it.” Alisa
smiled. “Let us retire to your chamber of business, and there we will
discuss terms.” #

Samantha arrived at
Infusion
as soon
as her head cleared enough for her to drive. Seeing through the eyes of a
human turned into a zombie had left her feeling sick and unclean, as if even
the vision had somehow polluted her soul. At least now she understood the
intruder’s talent, and what had happened to Luce Figueroa. She could
warn Lucan and
together they’d hunt down this bastard and force him to free the people he
used like puppets.

The front entrance to the
club was not guarded, making Sam wonder where the hell Rafael and the men
were. She stepped inside and almost on the body of one of their bartenders.
Bending down, she checked his pulse; he had been knocked out but otherwise
seemed unharmed. As she looked across the club she saw other bodies, and
hurried over to the next.

Someone had come into the
club and knocked out every single human in the place, including Burke. It
had to be the Kyn who had taken over Wilson and Luce, and when she heard
voices coming from Lucan’s office, she broke into a flat run.

Of all the things Sam had
expected to see when she kicked open the door, Lucan in the arms of another
woman was not one of them. For a moment all she could do was stand there and
watch the skinny redhead stick her tongue in her lover’s mouth.

No
wonder he didn’t want me down here.
Her shock turned into a slow, simmering outrage. “Am I interrupting?”

Lucan pulled the
redhead’s clinging hands from around his neck and pushed her away. “The lady
is leaving now.”

“Do not forget what I
told you, Golden One.” The redhead brushed a final kiss over his lips before
slipping out of the office.

“
Golden
one?” Sam clenched her fists to keep from drawing her weapon. “Are you
kidding me?”

“It is not what you are
thinking.” Lucan wouldn’t look at her. “I did not invite her here, nor did I
ask her to touch me.”

“Yeah, I could see how
hard you were fighting her off.” She turned to go, but found herself being
spun around. “Oh, you don’t want to do this with me right now. Not when I’m
carrying copper rounds.”

“You must listen.” He
jerked her against him and folded his arms around her in a painful hold. “I
am sending you to Orlando,” he whispered against her ear, as if it were a
secret. “Tonight. You will stay with the Kyn at the Realm.”

“Excuse me.” She had to
speak loudly to hear herself over the roaring in her head. “Did you just say
you’re kicking
me
out?”

“Samantha, please.” He
tucked her head under his chin. “I cannot explain, but you must trust me.
You have to go. Now.”

“Trust you, but get out.
After I find
you
with a hooker.” She had to use her Kyn strength to pull free. “Lucan, we’re
not human anymore, and we’re certainly not married. You just have to say
it’s over. Which I think you’ve pretty much done here by sucking face with
that skank.”

“It is not over.” His
eyes turned to chrome, and then he glanced at the door before he lowered his
voice again. “I do this for your protection.”

“From who? Your new
girlfriend?” She laughed. “I think I can take her.”

“No.” His pupils
contracted and his fangs emerged as he seized her shoulders. “I am your
liege lord, and you will obey me, damn you. You are not to go anywhere near
her, do you hear?”

“Perfectly.” She slapped
him. “You son of a bitch.”

He didn’t stop her when
she left this time. It was only outside the office did she smell his scent
and his blood, and saw the fresh stain on her sleeve.

She remembered the last
time she had seen the whore he’d had in his arms. The girl had come to the
club looking for him about a year ago. He hadn’t even bothered to see or
speak to her personally, but had told Burke to give her some money and send
her away. When Sam had asked him about her, he explained that she had been
one of the mortals he’d paid to use for blood and sex. She’d taunted him
about his past bad behavior coming back to haunt him.

He’d sniffed and
pretended to be offended.
There is nothing wrong with such arrangements. After several hundred years,
a certain amount of skill and professionalism have their own attractions.

A guy
as gorgeous as you, with all your superpowers, paying for it.
She had laughed.
That
is utterly ridiculous.

He’d pulled her into his
arms.
Fortunately I don’t have to anymore.

Back then the hooker had
been vaguely attractive, in a tawdry, working girl fashion. Tonight she’d
looked twenty years older, her face and body rack-thin and her skin pasty
from what must have been a long stretch of malnutrition and drug dependence.

Samantha knew she wasn’t
perfect, and that she and Lucan had their problems. She imagined he had a
long list of complaints about her and how many ways she annoyed him. But
there was love, too; love that had changed both of them. They had been
loners who had been lucky enough to find each other, and after a wrenching
series of tragedies and heart aches, they had fallen in love. Fate had done
the impossible and seen to it that they would always be together. Lucan
might never be completely happy with who she was, but she knew he would
never deliberately hurt her or destroy what they had.

Not without very good
reasons.

I do
this for your protection.

She shook off the anger
and breathed in. The strong smell of gun powder tainted the air. That and
the blood stain convinced her to turn around and go back. She looked through
a gap in the door, and saw him tearing the remains of his shirt from his
torso, throwing it to the floor in disgust. At some point during the
evening, every glass object in his office had shattered – and it hadn’t been
during their confrontation.

Sam came in and watched
him pour a healthy amount of whisky over the still-oozing wound. “Did she
threaten to shoot me, too?”

Lucan’s head snapped up.
“I told you to get out of here.”

“I remember.” She closed
the door and picked up the remnants of his shirt. “Christ, she got her stink
all over you.”

“I do not have time for
this. Where is Rafael?” He tried to go around her, but halted as she wrapped
her arm around his waist. “For God’s sake, Samantha, go.”

“Not going. Not this
time.” She looked up into his eyes, and saw pain and fear behind the anger.
“She was sent here, wasn’t she? By the zombie lord. He made her do this –
all of this – to hurt me.” She felt him shake. “And you.”

He rested his forehead
against hers. “I’ll find him,” he murmured. “When I do, I’m going to tear
him apart. Slowly. Limb by limb. And I’m going to enjoy it.” He raised his
head. “Until I do, you will never be safe. Neither will any of these damn
mortals around us.”

“So we hunt him
together.”

“No.” His voice went
flat. “He has over three hundred mortals at his command.”

“Everyone on the plane,”
she said, nodding. She saw him frown. “He brought over his own zombie army
from Europe. The dead guy we found at the bistro was one he used up.”

“How used up?”

“He got angry after he
lost control of one of them for a few seconds. The longer they’ve been with
him, the more damage he does to their minds and their bodies. But when he’s
angry, I think it burns them up faster.”

“The loss of control
angers him.” Lucan sat down on the edge of his desk. “We have to break his
hold over the mortals. Somehow.”

“There is only one Kyn
who can do that,” Burke said weakly from the doorway. “Jamys Durand.” He
doubled over, and Sam went to grab him. As she helped him straighten, he
looked at Lucan. “My lord, my life is yours. I am so ashamed. I tried, but I
could not stop her. I could not get her out of my head.”

“Her?”

Burke nodded. “The one
who did this is a woman. Very old, and very powerful. One of the first Kyn
ever to walk the night. One of the worst, after she went mad in the
seventeenth century.”

“Who the devil do you
mean?”Lucan demanded.

“The Bloody Countess,”
his tresora said. “Erzsébet Báthory.”

“I thought she was dead,”
Lucan said. “Richard had her walled up and starved to death in her own
torture chamber four hundred years past.”

Sam frowned. Rafael told
her that the high lord had done the same thing to his own murderous wife.
“Is that the only punishment Richard doles out?”

Burke and Lucan glanced
at her and answered in unison. “No.”

“She must have escaped,
my lord. Only she had the talent to control the bodies and minds of
mortals.” Burke made a disgusted sound. “That is how she takes them, by the
incarnatio.”

“The what?”

“Embodiment, for want of
a better translation,” Lucan said. “A very few of the old Kyn could move
between bodies, and possess that of another. It was a talent common to them,
and known as the incarnatio.”

“How old is she?”

“No one knows, my lady,”
Burke said. “No one can remember a time when she did not walk the night.
Some say it is what drove the countess to madness.”

“Hang on,” Sam said as
she put together the web site she’d seen and the name Burke had mentioned.
“Are you talking about Countess Elizabeth Bathory? That nut job who killed
six hundred girls so she could take a bath in their blood?”

“Six hundred and twelve,
actually,” Burke said. “And she did quite a bit more than simply bathe in
it.” The tresora stiffened. “Please, my lord. Hit me.”

“Why?”

“I can feel her inside
me.” He gritted his teeth. “She is trying to take control again. Hit me
now!”

Lucan clipped Burke
across the jaw, knocking him out. Sam gently lowered him to the floor before
looking outside.

“The rest of them are
waking up,” she told Lucan. “And they don’t look too friendly.”

Lucan bent down, put his
shoulder to her belly, flipped her over it and ran.

Chapter Seven

No one answered any of
the phone lines at Lucan’s stronghold, which made Jamys fear that the worst
had already happened. After wiping the memory of the woman he had used to
place the call, he broke out the rest of Chris’s windshield, cleaned the
glass off the car and drove as fast as he dared to the club. Rafael
intercepted him at the door, demanding to know where Chris, Lucan and
Samantha were.

Jamys shoved the pages of
notes he had written into the seneschal’s hands and pulled him toward the
car. Rafael drew a dagger, but then he put it away and finished skimming the
notes.

“You are certain she is
in this place?”

Jamys nodded, pointed to
himself and then to the south.

“You cannot go in alone.”

He drew on the strength
of his dream as he took out his pen and wrote on the palm of his hand.
I
MUST.

“I will surround the
building with our men,” Rafael said. “But I can only give you a few minutes.
After that we must attack.”

A few minutes was all it
would take for him to succeed or die trying. Jamys nodded again, and went
back to the car.

Rafael leaned in to hand
him an old, worn dagger. “I know you have your own weapons, but take this.”
He pressed it between their palms. “It always brought me luck on the
battlefield.”

Jamys wished he could
speak his thanks. Instead he slid the blade into his forearm sheath and
drove off toward the Sunset Sails.

Red lights glowed in
every window of the old hotel, and the front entrance doors stood open,
welcoming him. Jamys walked in and saw Luce standing in the deserted lobby.

“We have been waiting for
you, dark one,” she said in the monster’s voice. She turned and walked down
a hall.

Jamys followed, keeping
his mind clear and his hand on his dagger as she led him into what must have
once been a grand ballroom. There hundreds of mortals stood assembled like
polite guests around the empty dance floor, where an enormous red cloud
swirled like a small tornado around a darker, less distinct shape.

As Jamys stepped onto the
floor, Luce went ahead of him and walked into the cloud, which tightened
around her as it forced its way into her open mouth. Her chest swelled out
as more and more of the cloud funneled into her, until it disappeared down
her throat and she closed her lips to smile at him.

Behind her, the body of a
thin, red-haired female lay stretched over the top of a large trunk. She
stared up at the ceiling, her fist still curled around the knife she’d
thrust into her heart.

“Never mind her. She was
too far gone to last more than a few hours.” Luce nudged the body off the
top of the trunk and sat down in its place. “Welcome to my new home. I have
been expecting you.”