Masters of the Night (11 page)

The
Lammergeier
shook the rabbit from his
hand and clutched his mangled, burned fingers with painful cries.

The barn door opened.

“You just woke the whole countryside with your screeching! What the
hell are you doing?”

The
Lammergeier
pointed at the rabbit.

The woman snarling at him narrowed her gray eyes toward the rabbit’s
open gut. “Hand me that pitchfork!” she commanded.

Poking into the rabbit’s gut with the pitchfork, she caught the links
of a small chain on a prong and pulled it out.

“Well, well!” she breathed excitedly, holding it out in front of her.
“What is the Royal hiding?” She gazed at the bit of cross as though she had
just found the Holy Grail.

And was about to sell it to the Nazis.

11.

Wind turbulence.
The 747 rocked in the gusts, and the seat belt sign flashed its warning. Angie
buckled her seat belt.

Henri, where are you?
she
threaded helplessly to nowhere in particular.

Why did he have to go chasing off into the woods like that, going after
whoever
or whatever had stalked them?

You’re probably dead. You purloined my heart, and now you’re dead,
aren’t you, you bastard?

A whip of warmth rushed through her, startling her.

I assure you I am quite alive,
Henri threaded
toward her from the baggage hold.
I had to leave
town in rather a hurry after the barn was overrun with vermin.

Her breath caught and she gasped. He was directly below her!

She turned quickly from the window to see if the slayers seated around
her had noticed she had become ashen. Andre was in the seat beside her, James
and Kathryn sat across from her, their first class seats facing hers. The rest
were behind them sleeping.

Andre studied her intently, concernedly, his fingers pressed together.
“The turbulence is rocking us like a boat on a bad sea. Do you feel you’re
becoming ill, Angie?”

“I’ll be okay,” she forced, taking a deep breath. “It is a little
rocky. I’m just not used to flying. I’ve never flown much, especially long
distances.”

Especially with a
vampyre
flying along with me in my head.

Andre stroked his goatee and continued his study of Angie 101. “You are
not yet trained for clandestine battle,
Anjanette
.”

Yes, I know. I couldn’t throw a stake and hit the broad side of a barn.

“We may have difficult days and nights ahead of us as we continue our
search of your history.”

Henri, help us,
Angie threaded.
Is Nicholas in
atonement? I believe Nicholas and my mother being in ‘ye old local English
news’ together and in Sacramento on the same train is more than coincidence.
I’ll wager they knew each other and either she was staked in error, or someone
wanted it to look that way. Or he staked her. I’m suspicious of halos that glow
a little too brightly.

Nicholas has no halo. Beware of him Angie
, Henri whipped
toward her.

Angie averted her gaze from Andre, returning to the mountains of clouds
and valleys of sky outside her window. Vapors were floating through her—a
darkening …

A visage moved through her mind, moving toward a kill.
Moving through the fog in
ninteenth
-century
England with Henri at his side.
Nicholas, his fangs dripping with kill …

“There are too many unknowns here, Andre,” James was saying. “Including
that little English town steeped in too much serenity. There was a strange
eeriness hanging over those misty meadows.
That house on the
hill, for example—that was one scary bed and breakfast.”

There are definitely elements unknown here
, Angie thought.
Include the English woods beyond the Tudor house on a rainy night.

And they did not know what they would encounter as they continued
looking into her past.

If Nicholas killed my mother, why would he have killed her?
she
threaded hopefully
into the baggage hold.

I do not
know,
chéri
.

“If we are dealing with an Old World
vampyre
,
we need to proceed with caution,” Andre said, his tone solemn. “Old World
were
not like our city street vamps that can be cleaned out
in a single sweep. They were fearless. They were empowered. And they were pure
in their evil. An evil that helped them hide. That helped them devour the souls
of the innocent. That helped them kill. Ten thousand crosses on your neck would
not cause them too much concern. And if it’s not touching you, it’s useless.
They would not be able to take you if you wore one, but they would never back
away.”

Old World
vampyres
.
According to the
books Angie’s grandmother had given her, Old World
vampyres
were beautiful, hypnotically beautiful … and this, this man-thing, Nicholas,
was magnetic. Even from the photograph, he seemed to mesmerize and seduce the
world with his soft brown eyes. The books had said a
vampyre’s
eyes could be seductively soft—before they flamed with their evil intent—

“Old World
are
a rare breed,” Andre continued.
“There are few left in modern society. In their heyday, they were known as
ritualistic hunters who kept to the night and stalked carefully, hunters of
souls. And the dark companions who followed with them could rise up into the
night in formless black shadows that terrorized the heart to war for its
possession.”

Angie swallowed hard. Did Henri have dark companions?

“Why all the PMS over Old World, anyway?”
Brandi asked
smartly as she popped the top on a can of soda.

“It’s the difference between a puff of wind and an F-5, Nebraska
child,” James said. “One will simply rattle your windows. The other will bring
your house down around you.”

Andre gave her a disparaging glance. His young night Shadows could be
cocky at times, too self-assured. Perhaps they needed a war instead of a sewer
battle for a change.

“Nicholas is alone,” Kathryn’s wind bell voice chimed in softly as
though a tiny breeze had
tussled
the oxygen in the
plane’s cabin.

Angie glanced at Kathryn. Her aura was softening to pale lavender. She
was taking pity on the creature from the newspaper.

“We have nothing to tell us anything about him, Andre,” James argued.
“That’s a position that could prove uncertain at best, or place any one of us
in open peril. What if he’s an Old World master?”

Angie chewed on her lip. Henri was an Old World master.

His memories surfaced, a wildfire sweeping across every gray cell in
her brain.
Of life and death in the
vampyre
netherworlds.

And within those memories, a knowledge of what happened to defectors.
If Henri was a master and in atonement, the others would kill him.
And not gently.

Henri? Why would atoners be killed
by their own
?
Angie sent in a panic, gluing her gaze to the oval window now
reflecting a scattering of stars.

Henri’s answer floated into her heart, smashing it.

As soon as they reach absolution and their power diminishes, the other
vampyres
will fall on them and devour them, taking every
drop of human blood in their veins. Or if they become angry before then, they
will throw them in a Sun Well.

Sun Well?

Any punishment with the word “sun” in it couldn’t be good.

A deep circular well with smooth stone walls like glass, and a round
hole at the top. It is the way they kill their own. It kills all
vampyres
, even those who walk in the light. In that moment,
when the full force of the sun fills the well, the sun kills. The steep, sheer
walls are polished to a sheen like black glass, so when the prisoners of the
well begin to die and must return to mortality in their final moments and have
a reflection, no matter which way they turn, they must watch themselves burn.

“You’re staring holes through that window, Angie,” James commented
quietly.

She turned to find the entire troupe awake and studying her.

She blocked the football sized ball of panic in her esophagus.

When in doubt say something, just not the something you shouldn’t say.
“Henri knew Nicholas,” she said. “I see him as a shadowy figure somewhere
within my thoughts.”

“The union De
LaCroix
perpetuated with you is
strong—and still lingering,” James remarked, his eyes steadily on hers.

Damned wine glass circle.

“As we return to the states, you must all remain aware Henri may be
lurking. Watch out for him,” Andre warned. “He is a solitary hunter, but none
the less dangerous.”

Angie felt her heart beat painfully, and she fell silent again. She was
with a veritable boxcar of living arsenal
who
would
destroy the
vampyre
, given the moment.

James’ eyes moved to hers, dogging her again, trying to see past the
new wave of silence.

She exhaled with relief when the jet finally began its descent toward
Los Angeles. The wheels hit the tarmac. In not long, they caught the connecting
flight to Sacramento.

The flight was crowded on the smaller plane. The Shadows had to sit
apart. Angie bent her knees to let a small man with thinning hair and Ben
Franklin glasses squeeze past her. Introducing himself as Virgil Danby from
Washington state, he plopped into the seat next to her, and soon began talking
nonstop, complaining to her how stressful it had been trying to check a coffin
for the baggage hold. A rare coffin, he said. He was an archeologist, he said,
and it was a rare find, twelfth century.
Very ornate.
Then he smiled at her and kept smiling.
Then nodded oddly at
her over his glasses, as though trying to convey a message.

“The central valley is lovely this time of year,” he said as he went on
nodding like a bobble head and smiling relentlessly. “Have you ever been on a
moonlight tour of the wine country?”

“No, I’m sorry, I haven’t,” she said, trying to be polite, but he was
fraying her nerves. Was this silly little man who was old enough to be her
father hitting on her?

“It would be enjoyable with the proper guide,” he persisted, handing
her a business card.

“Thank you, but no,” she said, trying to hand it back. “I’m just here
on business.”

“I could arrange a night tour under the moon with one of our better
guides,” he continued to smile.
“Perhaps not as romantic a
stroll as in the English woods.”
He slipped the dried petals of a yellow
flower into her hand.

Her breath caught. She crushed them quickly, secretly, into her handbag
and snapped it shut.

Of course! She should have known when he mentioned a coffin that Henri
was with them on the flight!

He spent the rest of the flight reading a travel
magazine,
she spent the rest of the flight just trying to breathe normally.

The small business flight finally landed.

“A pleasure, miss,” the little man said, nodding good day as he pulled
his carryon from the overhead compartment and joined the bodies inching a line
down the aisle. “I’ll look forward to your call.”

Angie retrieved her bags from the airport conveyor belt, and the troupe
headed for the car rental service. She almost capsized the rolling luggage as
she kept looking back, wondering where Henri was.

Her mind and heart were on the
Tormentil
petals in her bag.
Tokens from Henri, tokens of his desire to
be with her.
She felt hot, stirred with excitement.

Andre leased an SUV for himself and a pickup for Kathryn and Angie to
use. Kathryn calmly drove like a speed demon, and they soon pulled up to the
curb in front of a store that had been a dry cleaners in its former life.

By nightfall the long, narrow shop housed two busy-looking desks with
computer stations, filing cabinets, and a back room with a hardwood table for
quick meals. An oil painting of a friendly, woodsy trail dissolving into a
stand of trees embraced one wall.

Angie push-
broomed
the last of the floor dust
out onto the sidewalk, then paused on the walk to look out at the city
glistening with the last of the dew of night and street light. Before long, day
would be balmy and golden and people would walk by smiling, unsmiling,
hurrying, not hurrying, casual, serious—shoppers, office workers, lovers, and
mothers—a whole bevy of innocents who knew nothing of the darkness that could
haunt the soul and the night.