Master of Darkness (6 page)

She ignored this sarcasm. “Just how did it make you feel? I mean, it gave you nightmares and a headache. How bad can that be?”

He decided on honesty. “Enough so that I might have attacked you while trapped inside a nightmare. I could have hurt you without meaning to. If I hurt someone, I want to know exactly why I'm doing it. My nature is violent, and it's my job to control it. You could have turned me into a weapon. Unintentionally, of course.”

She'd gone pale, and Laurent took that as a good sign.

She pointed to a device sitting on a nearby shelf. The small components looked like random stereo equipment that had met and mated during a hurricane.

“I have no idea how it works,” she told him. “It's a modern addition to warding a safe house with the traditional stuff like garlic and hawthorn. It's supposed to keep vampire telepaths from finding us, not hurt anybody. I've no idea how to tone it down. My brother's the electrical engineer; I'm the software engineer side of the family.”

This information caught Laurent by delighted surprise. “Really? You're a computer geek?” He desperately needed someone to break into the Patron's laptop. “You're into software?”

Eden nodded. “A girl's got to have a day job.
Nobody hunts vampires for a living these days. Do you have a day—night—job?”

“I'm a gigolo.”

“Right.”

“You don't believe me?”

She shook her head.

Laurent knew that if there was one thing people found irresistible, it was being asked what they did for a living in a genuinely interested tone. “What
do
you do with computers, exactly? Web design? Game development?”

“Systems security,” she answered, with a proud lift of her head. Then she launched into technical terminology that left him totally lost. But he kept an interested expression on his face and went for another cup of coffee as soon as she paused for breath.

“We really ought to get to work,” she said when he returned.

“The night is still very young. You don't look very well rested.” He grinned. “Maybe we should go back to bed.” When she looked annoyed, he added, “Or there's Hell on Earth Week on the History Channel. We wouldn't want to miss the show on Devil's Isla—”

“I've already set a tape.”

“Well, then.” He rubbed his hands together. “I suppose we should get to work soon.”

She glanced at the computer screen. “I wish we had an update on what's been learned during the day.”

His original plan had been to hang around a while longer, seduce Eden, then continue his quest to find a hacker. And maybe a Dawn dealer. He wouldn't mind giving this Dawn stuff a shot; it'd be nice to see daylight without worrying about getting a fatal sunburn. He'd had a small hope of using this zapper thing as a personal anti-vampire shield, if it could be turned down. Then she'd told him about her job.

The Families had this belief that fate played a big role in the lives of vampires. It was thought that when your life was at a major crisis and you needed your fated bondmate most, they appeared and gave you what you needed to survive. It was a lot of mystical claptrap, especially the bondmate stuff, but the belief was based on a very high percentage of coincidences that seemed to prove the point. Of course, the Families also had an old-fashioned belief in a witchy-woman moon goddess and were only slightly less matriarchal than the whipped Clan boys.

But it looked like fate or dumb luck had intervened for good, for once in his miserable life: he'd found a hacker. He still intended seduction,
of course, but without any of that bonding nonsense.

He decided to answer a question Eden had asked earlier. This time it was a fair exchange rather than a gift.

“You asked if I knew something you didn't, when I was mocking the idea of the Tribes developing Dawn. I might have some information that you specifically can help with.”

“Might? Me?”

It seemed logical to continue with the world-saving Clan Prime mode. The weird thing was, he
had
been involved in the noble expedition to stop the Patron.

“I picked up some information on my last assignment. There was a mortal who called himself the Patron. He was from a hunter family, the Garrisons.”

She nodded, but looked disapproving. “One of the many retired families.”

“Garrison was extremely wealthy. He started by stealing from Tribe Manticore, and built a fortune from his ill-gotten gains.”

“Manticores? The lowest-of-the-low, scumbag Manticores once had a fortune? Who'd they steal it from?”

“From a great many people,” he acknowledged. “But the point is, Garrison stole it from
them. Who's the worse scumbag?” He held up a hand. “Never mind. He used his fortune to fund longevity research. Not because he wanted to help the world, but because he wanted to live forever himself. He experimented on vampires to try to find out why we live so long. The vampires were not volunteers. And some of the scientists working for him were renegades from Clan research facilities. We got it all straightened out,” he concluded vaguely. “In the cleanup operation, I've come into possession of Garrison's laptop computer, but I haven't had time to do anything with it yet.”

He hadn't actually stolen it from the Patron's Colorado stronghold. The laptop had been given to the Manticores as reparation by Garrison's great-granddaughter when she found out what her evil grandpa was up to. Laurent had risked his life to get the computer for the Manticores; he just hadn't bothered to turn it over to Justinian.

Whatever he did with the computer, he had to do it soon. Not only were the remnants of Justinian's pack after him, he had to worry about the information stored on the hard drive. He didn't think the Clans would do anything to block access to whatever was stored in the laptop—say, the passwords for hidden bank accounts—since
the Manticores had been promised whatever financial rewards they could extract from the information. The Clans kept their promises—they were rich enough to be able to.

But humans were another worry altogether. There might be someone in the Patron's organization with access to passwords, or at least clues on how to break in. So Laurent needed to get into the computer as quickly as possible.

And now he had his very own hacker. He smiled happily at Eden Faveau. Not only was she attractive and dangerous, she was just what he needed.

“You are all I could ever ask for.” He really wished that he'd remember that Tribe Primes didn't ask, they took. So he took her hand, and added, “In a technological sense, that is.”

Is that all?

Laurent heard her wistful thought loud and clear. Which surprised him, because he had no sense of her being psychic. Picking up nonpsychic peoples' thoughts was possible, even fairly easy—but doing it without any deliberate effort was unusual for him.

He could see that she immediately regretted the thought and pushed it away. It made her feel weak and stupid. He watched her resolve harden, watched her remember who he was,
what she was, and what their relationship was supposed to be. Maybe not adversarial at the moment, but—

“We could turn on each other at any time,” he said.

Eden was surprised at the bitterness in the vampire's tone. And she was embarrassed that he could read her so easily. Most people couldn't; she'd been told that she was hard to get a handle on. Maybe Wolf saw the simple girl that she really was. Or the anti-mind-reading techniques she'd been taught weren't worth squat.

“
Will
we turn on each other?” she asked him.

“You're worried about my self-control because I don't use the daylight drugs.”

“Yeah,” she admitted.

“I've spent a long lifetime controlling myself without them. I need blood, I need physical release, but I've always been in charge of how I get what I need.” He gave her a sharp-toothed smile. “Sex, blood, and rock and roll makes a Prime happy.”

“We're not here to be happy. I need to trust that—”

“I'm in charge,” he reiterated sternly. “And that's the only promise you need from me.”

She stood. “Then maybe we better go out and
make you happy. You've had the blood. You're not getting the sex—”

“So I'll have to settle for the rock and roll.” He tilted an eyebrow and looked knowingly at her. “At least for tonight.” He got up. “We do need to get the computer. It's likely that there will be Tribe Primes to beat up along the way.” He grinned, and put a bit of fang into it. “I can hardly wait.”

With a bounce in her step, Eden went to gather her equipment and car keys. She couldn't help but wonder at why she found the prospect of bashing heads side-by-side with Sid Wolf such an exciting prospect.

It was clearly way too long since she'd been on a date.

Chapter Seven

“I
s that why they were attacking you last night? Because of the laptop?” Eden asked.

“That was my guess,” he answered.

He was staring out the front windshield of her small car, and glancing at his lean, lovely profile distracted her for a moment.

“What's it like?” she wondered. “Being able to see in the dark?”

“I don't know. It's the only way I've ever seen. What's it like walking in the sunshine?”

“You could find that out anytime you wanted to. But I'll never see in the dark.”

She cringed when she heard the wistfulness in her voice. She was prepared for some scathing comment about a vampire hunter envying a vampire, but she received a gentle smile instead.

“Curiosity is normal,” he said. “At least for our kind.”

“Our kind?”

“We're the ones who know that the world isn't what most people think it is. We know that we're different. Me, because I'm not human. You, because you know that I exist. Our knowledge shuts us off from the
real
world. All we have is each other. We can't help but be curious.”

“Don't your kind want to be part of the real world? Isn't that why you developed the drugs?”

“I have no idea why the daylight drugs were developed.”

“You just don't personally approve of using them?”

“I don't disapprove of those who do. Don't your people want to let us be part of the real world, so you can have normal lives, too?”

“Yes,” she answered. “At least I do.”

Eden hadn't meant to confide that truth to anyone, ever. The Faveaus had been doing this vampire-hunting crap
forever
. Some ancestors had taken some kind of
Da Vinci Code
secret-society vow to protect the world from evil through all their generations, and now she was stuck with it. Nobody had asked her if she wanted in on the family avocation.

She tried not to resent it, tried to think noble thoughts and do noble deeds. Defending the
world was an honor and the right thing to do. Most of the time.

“I want to go to Hawaii,” she said. “I want to see lava.”

“But instead you're stuck hauling my pale ass around town in a VW Beetle hunting some holy grail of a computer, right?”

“Right.” She glared at him. “How'd you know I was thinking of that holy grail book?”

“Lucky guess.”

She doubted it. But if he wasn't reading her mind, they really
were
too much alike. Maybe he was right about their being alike, in a world view sense.

“But your people see mine as prey.”

“And vice versa.”

“Okay, I can see how you'd see it that way.”

He laughed. “If you'd care to check our shared history, you'd find that hunters have taken out far more vampires than vampires have humans.”

“What about the Kiev Massacre of 1405?”

“That was done by a crazy lone Prime with some kind of blood sickness.”

“That's the cover story the Clans offered. Our records say differently.”

“Well, neither of us were there, so I doubt we'll ever know the truth.”

He sounded a mite testy, and she supposed she did, too. The hot button issue they were talking about certainly wasn't helpful for their business relationship, so Eden attempted to concentrate on the assignment. It didn't help that they were sitting so closely together in her small car. The proximity hinted at intimacy.

She knew that he was uncomfortable because of the strips of silver around the doors and windows and the silver censer filled with garlic hanging from the rearview mirror. The back seat was filled with her equipment. What she wasn't wearing, that is. There were also a few things tucked under her seat and in pockets on the driver's-side door.

Mind you, while the vampire was uncomfortable, he'd smiled approval when he'd gotten into the car last night—well, grimaced as he gingerly took a seat. “Better safe than sorry,” he'd said.

Last night his comfort hadn't mattered to her, and maybe it shouldn't now. But—even if he wasn't her guest, he was her partner. Last night she'd thought of him only as a dangerous, not-quite-trustworthy temporary ally. Getting to know him a little made him more dangerous than ever, in ambiguous, complicated ways. Last night she'd found his proximity in the
small car disturbing simply because of
what
he was.

Tonight, layered over the knowledge that she was too close to a vampire was the electric awareness of Wolf as a male. She'd been trained to ignore the potent masculinity of Primes, but the training wasn't working.

She tried to clear her mind of the awareness her body couldn't deny, and get on with the job.

“So you went up against the Manticores,” she said, in an effort to both have a conversation and gather information. “Are they as nasty as I've heard? Was old Justinian involved? They're daring to show their fangs back in San Diego? Are we likely to be attacked by any sexist pig Manticores? Because I would love to stake them right through their tiny little di—”