Touch of Darkness (4 page)

The scene cut to street level on the bundled-up newscaster from the local news talking to Connie. Yeah, she’d played it up to the max. She’d waited to talk to the press until she was sitting on an ambulance gurney with Blank’s cat carrier beside her while an EMT worked on a tiny scratch on her face.

Peg grabbed the remote before I could and hit the button to turn off the mute:

“… at the residence of local celebrity Mary Kathleen ‘ Kate’ Reilly. I am speaking to Connie Duran, a tenant in the building. Tell me, Ms. Duran, do you know if anyone else was home at the time of the collapse?”

“Just me and Kate Reilly, the owner. My two neighbors are in Las Vegas this week.” She patted the cat carrier as though it were her own. “Thank God for this cat! Kate was sleeping, and he just hopped on the bed and wouldn’t leave her alone. He was acting so weird it got her to wandering around her apartment. That’s when the whole building started to creak and water started pouring down the walls of the stairwell. We ran for our lives, and only just made it out. If it weren’t for this cat, I’d be dead.”

Well, water wasn’t exactly pouring down the walls, and she was never in the stairwell with me. But hey … at least she kept the press off my back.

Wait! I saw a flash of myself for the briefest moment as the camera was panning. It was when I felt the hand on my shoulder and turned to find nobody there. But there had been someone there. Peg noticed too. “I didn’t know you knew Lewis Carlton. I thought he retired from the NBA and moved to Detroit. Does he live down in LoDo now?”

My mouth went dry, because I should absolutely have noticed Carlton at the accident scene that night. Carlton is ex-NBA all right—a former power forward and all-around bad boy. He wears the ring, the bling, and the ride for a man who left at the top of his career. But at seven foot two inches he’s also the most lethal Thrall queen I know. Head of the newest nest, in Pueblo, he’d saved my life once when an enemy tried to kill me. But, and I ticked off the questions on mental fingers: Why would he appear at the collapse of my building? Why was he in Denver at all, not to mention squeezing my shoulder? Where would he get enough oomph to blind me to his presence…and for what reason?

A new image appeared on the screen. Peg grabbed the couch as her knees started to buckle. “Oh my God, Kate. I didn’t realize—”

“Kate… Katie… talk to me.” Tom’s voice was growing panicked, but I couldn’t seem to speak. The image, one shot today, froze as though the satellite signal stalled. It was … gone. It was finally coming home to me as I stared. Both walls had collapsed inward, down to the main floor. It was a pile of rubble. My mind wouldn’t focus enough to form coherent thoughts: my building…my home… everything I owned—

“Breathe, Katie, breathe.” Peg grabbed the phone from my limp fingers and raised it to her lips.

“Tom, it’s Peg. We were watching the weather channel and they showed Kate’s building again. I think everything just hit her.”

I could hear him swearing, hear her filling him in on what was being shown on the news. I didn’t even try to contribute. All I could do was stare, transfixed, at the scene frozen on the television screen. The signal blipped and lines flashed before it returned to the program. Peg knelt down on the floor in front of me as a commercial break came on. Very gently, she pressed the phone into my hand, and moved my hand to my ear, as if she didn’t trust me to do it myself. She might well have been right. There was a lot to process at the moment.

“It’s going to be all right, Katie.” I heard Tom’s voice as if from a distance. The connection was fine. I wasn’t. He knew it, or guessed, because he was speaking very carefully, gently. Even long distance, over the telephone, he could tell I was in bad shape. “I wasn’t going to tell you about the walls until later. Dave at the station called me here at the airport to let me know that none of our guys were inside at the time. I’m sorry you had to find out like this. But it could have been so much worse.”

Right. I should be grateful. It could’ve been worse. Things can be replaced. People can’t. But oh God, my house, our furniture, my pictures … everything. It wasn’t too bad in my mind when the walls were standing. A roof can be fixed. But a whole building—

The room phone was ringing, and Peg rose to her feet. She ducked into the bedroom and snagged the extension. I could hear her talking in the background as I listened to Tom telling me how he loved me, and we’d get through this, just like we’d gotten through everything else…together.

I desperately wished he was here. I actually ached to feel his arms around me, smell the scent of his skin as I buried my head against his neck. I’m strong. I’m tough. I’ve spent most of my life taking care of business and taking care of myself. It’s only been these past few months with Tom that I’ve been able to let myself be vulnerable again, let myself trust someone else to take part of the load.

“Say something, Katie.” His voice had gone soft and worried.

“I love you.” My voice sounded odd, thick, and choked with tears.

“I love you too.” He sighed. “God, I wish I was there, or you were here. That we were together.” There was a frustrated growl to his voice. I hoped he was somewhere private, or that he stayed calm enough not to change. The thought of what might happen if he changed forms in the middle of DIA brought me out of my shock. “Me too.” My voice was still shaky, but better. I tried for a weak joke. “We’ll have to time our disasters a little better next time.”

“Right. I’ll take a note.”

“Do that.” My voice didn’t break, and I hoped he couldn’t hear the tightness that came from trying to hold back yet another set of tears. I don’t cry often, or well, but today just seemed to be the day for it.

“Are you going to be okay?”

A harsh snort that wasn’t quite a laugh escaped me. “Do I have a choice?”

He gave a rueful laugh. “That’s my girl, always the realist.”

“Katie,” Peg interrupted, she held out the phone to me, her expression serious. “I hate to say it, but you’d better take this.”

Now what? “Who is it?” I knew Peg wouldn’t bother me unless it was important, but I really really didn’t want to talk to anyone but Tom right now. I’d just had a serious shock. I wanted time to myself to … well, wallow I suppose.

“Some girl named Ruby Willow. She says it’s an emergency and sounds pretty panicked.”

Oh, shit. Ruby was one of the two surrogates for Tom’s werewolf pack. Werewolf females are sterile, so the pack encourages the males to find human females to breed with, marry, and have babies that the pack helps raise. The Denver pack currently had two surrogates, Dusty and Ruby. Both were pregnant, and both were staying in a hotel down the block with Rob. But while Dusty and Rob were a happy couple, Ruby’s boyfriend Jake had been killed in a battle with the Thrall, leaving his teenaged future bride pregnant and relatively alone. The pack took care of her well, which was good … because I knew her family had disowned her. But she’d loved Jake desperately, and she’d been having a very hard time dealing with the loss.

“Tom, Ruby’s on the other line and says it’s an emergency. I’ll call you right back.”

“Shit. Yeah, do that.”

I closed the cell, cutting off the call without saying goodbye. I knew he’d understand—approve even. Ruby had been living on the streets when she’d met Jake. She was tough and had been through enough that if she said it was an emergency, it was. She wouldn’t, pardon the expression, cry wolf.

I grabbed the phone from Peg’s hand.

“Kate here.”

“Oh thank God!” Her voice was breathless with relief. In the background I could hear fierce growling and barking accompanied by swearing, sirens, and a woman’s moans.

“What in the hell is going on?”

“Dusty’s in labor. We’re at the emergency room at a hospital here in Vegas, but the ob-gyn on duty in the emergency room is a Thrall host. You know they’re enemies and with her defenseless and all… well, Rob sort of went nuts and changed form and now he’s blocking the whole hallway, snapping and barking. He won’t let anyone near her, and they’re going to call the police. Kate, I don’t know what to do!”

Shit! “Have them call in another doctor to treat her.”

“They have, but I don’t think he’s gonna get here in time. Her contractions are only two minutes apart! I’ve been trying to time them, but I didn’t attend all the partner classes like Rob did.”

I took a deep breath and tried to think rationally. This was insane. Why in the hell was she calling me? What was I supposed to do about this? I mean, I’m probably the only other person in Vegas who knows the Denver werewolf pack, and I’m Not Prey, but neither fact was likely to be useful in the current situation—

Unless … inspiration hit. It might not work, but it was sure worth a try.

“Put the vampire on the phone and make sure Rob can hear me talk.”

“Got it.”

There was a pause, during which the barking stopped. I still heard low, menacing growls, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.

“Dr. Drewrey here.”

He talked with just the slightest bit of a lisp, a dead giveaway that he’d only recently gotten his fangs. Unless, of course, he’d lisped before. But I doubted it.

“My name is Kate Reilly. Do you know who I am?”

“I’ve heard of you.” His voice was cold, bitter. I wasn’t exactly surprised. To some of the lesser vamps I’m something of a “bogeyman.” After all, the only way you can get to be Not Prey is to survive an attack. To do that involves killing the vamp attacking you. I’ve survived more than one, and wiped out two entire nests in the process, including most of the human herds the nests had fed on. Far as I know, I’ve killed more vampires than anyone else on the planet. Which is why the vampires hate me so much. But I’m Not Prey. While they detest me and want me dead, by their own rules they have to treat me with the respect they would treat a queen vampire and they can’t lie to me. It’s a handy thing that might just get me out of the current mess.

“I’m Not Prey. You can’t lie to me.”

“I’m a little busy here.” His sarcasm made the lisp more pronounced. Okay, I had to think quick now and try to imagine any possible problem with delivering a baby.

“Just reminding you of the rules, doctor. Because I want you, right here and now, to honestly promise me that you will treat Dusty Quinn to the best of your medical ability, as if you were a human doctor and she was just another patient. I want to hear you say that you won’t harm her or the baby in any way because she’s a surrogate for the werewolves…that you won’t withhold treatment or deny drugs, or give drugs or treatment that are wrong for her or the baby, or make mistakes or omissions for any other reason.” I paused and then, before he could speak, added, “And

… that you and the queen collective won’t let anyone else in the hive attack her or the baby or harm them while they are patients in the hospital.” I had to take a deep breath after all that. But it should cover most of the issues. The trick to dealing with the Thrall is to use a lot of compound sentences. You have to cover all sorts of weird, improbable, or impossible situations and pray hard that they don’t find a loophole. Because they will if they can. There are tens of thousands of minds in the collective for them to draw on. And I knew at least a few of them were attorneys who were skilled at contract negotiation. One of them is P. Douglas Richards, Esq., the queen of the Denver hive. I heard him take in a slow, hissing breath. He wasn’t happy with the request. But doctors take oaths to “do no harm.” I would have expected a simple agreement, or at least a grudging affirmative. Instead, there was a long silence as he and the hive considered every nuance of what I had said. That made me believe Rob had been right. Something was definitely fishy. I automatically opened my psychic senses to their full extent, trying to catch a hint of what was going on within the hive. Unfortunately, the queens had anticipated that, and my mind was met with dead silence. Terrific. Just terrific.

I could hear Dusty panting and whimpering in the background. Judging from the sounds she was making, the baby would be arriving soon. Since I’d gotten involved with Tom and his pack members had moved into my apartment complex I’d learned a lot about surrogates and werewolf pregnancies. Werewolf deliveries are almost always complicated and difficult. Dusty needed medical attention now. If not Drewrey, then at least one of the ER docs. I decided to try a telepathic link to Rob, but didn’t have any luck. He’s been working with Tom to retain more of his human mind when he changes form, but he still has a long way to go. Stressed as he was, I wasn’t really surprised that human Rob wasn’t “home.” Disappointed, but not surprised.

Finally, the doctor spoke. The words came out haltingly, as if each individual syllable was being pulled out by force.

“I personally, and the queens, on behalf of the collective give you our word that the girl and her … spawn will receive the best medical attention available at this hospital and that no one connected with our people will do anything to harm her or the infant while they are at this hospital.”

The growling stopped and Ruby grabbed the telephone. “Oh, thank-you, Kate! Whatever you did worked. Rob’s backed off and is letting the ER doctors work on her. Thank-you, thank-you.”

Hallelujah! It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough for the moment. Dusty and the baby were safe. But I couldn’t help but notice the promise had only been while they are at this hospital. Which made me wonder just exactly what we’d be facing when they left. I’d warn Mary. We’d work out some sort of protection when the time came. In the meantime, Dusty and the baby were as safe as I could manage.

But oh yeah, right, I almost forgot. The vampires are supposed to be the “good guys” now.

4

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There are reasons I don’t generally drink much. First, I don’t want to lose my edge. My life is too dangerous, too violent to take that kind of risk. I was dealing with the second reason this morning. A hangover made my eyeballs feel like they’d been packed in sand, my head ache enough that my thought processes didn’t quite seem up to speed. I hadn’t thought I’d had that much champagne. But the thing about alcohol is that it affects your judgment—including about how much alcohol you can handle.