“Joe Powell,” he said, holding out a hand with a glare that dared her to take it.

  She was tempted to crush his fat fingers, but he’d hurt her back if she did that, and then Robbie would get involved, and maybe her make-believe cameraman, and that wasn’t their job here tonight. She was supposed to be a distraction to the bad guys, not to Raphael and his team. So she offered one of those limp female handshakes that said she was simply too delicate for the real thing.

  He responded with a lifeless handshake of his own, but not before giving her a sneering up-and-down look that lingered much too long in the wrong places.

  Yuck. Cyn was glad she’d foregone dinner, or she’d have lost it right there on big Joe’s motorcycle boots.

  Robbie was not as circumspect, however. He’d seen the leer and didn’t like it. Appearing out of the crowd behind her, he asked, “Everything good here?”

  “Perfect,” she said cheerfully. “Robbie, this is Joe Powell. Turns out he’s the genius behind all of this.”

  “Is he?”

  “That’s right,” Powell snapped, as if someone had challenged his title. “You work for . . . her?” He jerked his head in Cyn’s direction.

  “With her. We both work at the same studio.”

  Joe grunted. “You’re a big one. Looks like you can handle yourself. You interested in taking down some vamps? Or are you just here for the story?”

  Cyn couldn’t tell if he was trying to recruit Robbie or dismiss him as some lightweight news producer.

  “I’m interested in getting my girl here—” he nodded at Cyn “—in the right time slot. She’s got talent.”

  Joe didn’t seem to have a comeback for that one, so he changed the subject. “I do the same thing around here. I let the boy be the front man ’cuz he’s so pretty.” He grabbed Keith again in a move that pretended to be playful, but if Keith’s grunt of pain was any indication, no one was playing. “Girls like him. That brings in the boys, and them, I can use.”

  “Use for what?” Cyn asked. She lifted her microphone, which wasn’t connected to anything, then gestured at her supposed cameraman. “Do you mind?” she asked. Not that it mattered since the camera wasn’t working any more than the microphone.

  “No, go ahead. But make sure you treat us right. No lies about what we’re doing or why. No tears for the poor helpless vampires,” he finished in a mocking croon.

  “I only want the real story,” she said.

  “The real story, huh? All right then, let’s have a drink in the back room. It’s quieter.”

  Cyn gave Robbie a quick nod. She wanted no confusion about who was going into that “back room” with Joe Powell. She wanted all the muscle she could get on her side.

  THE VAMPIRE HATE group gathered in the empty store wasn’t that large, even if Raphael counted those lingering on the sidewalk out front. He assumed they’d trail inside once the rally got underway.

  He knew Cyn was in there somewhere. He could find her anywhere, but that wasn’t necessary tonight. She was tall enough, especially in the high heels she’d donned as part of her costume for the evening, that she was visible over the heads of almost everyone else. He’d lost sight of her a few minutes ago, but since he’d seen her talking with the man she’d identified for him as Keith Tyler, and since Robbie and one of the other guards was with her, he assumed she was doing what she’d said she would—occupy the organizer’s attention so that Raphael and the others could search for Werner. Which meant he couldn’t stand there all night watching over Cyn.

  He’d already used his power to search for any vampire minds in the vicinity and found three. Two were in the row of one-story houses behind this strip mall, but he didn’t think they were his target. There had been humans with both of them, and he’d sensed no stress or pain. Still, he wouldn’t make an assumption that could cost Werner his life, and so he’d sent two of the human guards to knock on doors and find the two vampires.

  But he’d also found one lone signal, weak and starving but fighting to stay alive. That one seemed to be within this strip mall somewhere, but he couldn’t pinpoint it any better than that. The wounded vampire might be so delirious that it affected his strength and personality. Or it could be he was somehow concealing his appearance on the psychic plane. That was certainly possible, but Raphael didn’t know if Werner possessed that or any other particular talent. There was only one way to find out. Find him.

  “All right, fan out. We’ll start with these other stores. Tyler would want to keep his prisoner close. This is his shining moment. He hasn’t kidnapped some random vampire—this is a man who’s well-known. A man who, in his twisted mind, has deceived humans for years, getting close to their children and influencing their susceptible brains with vampire propaganda.”

  “My lord, not every store is empty. They’re closed for the night, but—”

  “I don’t care. For all we know, he works at one of those other places, or maybe one of his family does, and that’s how he knew which stores would be empty. I want to find Werner Thorsen.” He turned to Steve Sipes. “Steve, I want you with me. I may have to go deep, and I want someone alert enough to tell me if there’s an inbound threat.”

  “Of course, my lord.”

  As the guards rushed to check the entire line of stores, Raphael and Sipes walked to the very center of the parking lot, roughly thirty yards from the closest store entrance. With a nod in Sipes’s direction, Raphael dropped out of the physical world and into the power that made him a vampire lord. Shutting out everything around him—traffic on the nearby street, people walking to their cars and talking, the smell of garlic from a pizza joint—he sent his awareness searching. Knowing that Werner might be too weak to broadcast a plea for help, he started at one end of the strip mall and slowly, methodically scanned every building, every room, every mind he touched. He found nothing and was beginning to fear the vampire was dead, when he touched on the gathering of humans where his Cyn was still masquerading as a reporter. It was a small town with, presumably, little to entertain its citizens, especially those young enough to be looking for excitement. Or sex. And the anti-vampire rally promised both.

  Someone was speaking over a microphone, which had drawn the parking lot lingerers into the empty store space. It wasn’t a big store and so they were crowded fairly tightly, but they were all human. No doubt of that. Cyn wasn’t in that room, however. He followed the beacon that was his mate to a much smaller room in the back, where she sat with several human males. One was her bodyguard Rob, identifiable because of his link to his own mate, Irina, who was a vampire in Raphael’s service. The other standing close to her he judged to be Sipes’s man, which left two unknown men a few feet away. His magic didn’t give him a seating chart, but based on their relative positions, he assumed the two men were leaders of this hate group, being “interviewed” and thus distracted by Cyn.

  He cocked his head, as if he could hear the heartbeat of everyone present. He could, though he couldn’t separate one from the other. Except perhaps Cyn’s. Everything about her left a stronger impact on his senses, but the others were simply noise.

  At the same time . . . his mind was trying to warn him. There was something beneath the surface, not obvious unless one looked. He dropped deeper into his magic, counting on Steve to protect him, or to force him back to the real world, if necessary.

  Heartbeats. There were too many in the first room to bother with. As for Cyn and the others, there were five hearts beating in a complex rhythm that told him only their number and that they were all human. But there! He heard it again. No, he didn’t hear it, he sensed it. A vampire’s heart beat far more slowly, but that wasn’t what distinguished them from humans. Every vampire had some magic. Their very blood, the thing that healed them and kept them alive and young, regardless of how many decades or centuries had passed, was magic. It coursed through their veins. And that, he realized, was what his own magic was trying to tell him.

  There was a vampire in that building, behind the crowds, behind even the place where Cyn sat. . . . Christ, Cyn was in there.

  He forced himself back to awareness, ignoring the brief instant of disorientation caused by his abrupt return to the real world. “In there,” he told Steve. “Get the others, go in the front. I’m going in the back. And be careful. Cynthia’s in there, and she’s with whoever probably did this.”

  Sipes ran toward the building, shouting commands into the headset that connected him with everyone else, while Raphael put on a burst of vampire speed and raced around the length of the strip mall until he zeroed in on the empty store where someone was holding a badly wounded vampire prisoner.

  Raphael had a very strong telepathic gift. He could read any human’s mind, and most vampires’, though he rarely did. And he used his gift on Cyn even less often, since she’d decided it gave him an unfair advantage in their personal dealings. In times like this, however, it came in handy. “Lubimaya.”

  Her mind was suddenly alert. She had no special telepathic ability. In fact, her shields were unusually strong. But his was a familiar mind, and so she asked, “Raphael? Did something happen?”

  “I’m coming in the back. You and the others, duck.”

  He walked up to the locked steel door facing the alley, slammed his hand against it with a bolt of hard magical strength, and smashed it to the ground. People were shouting from the other side of the building, men and women both, which told him his guards were breaking up the crowd and giving no quarter. Those didn’t worry him. There’d been a different kind of shout from the door at the other end of the short hall. A man’s deep voice bellowing curses, while Cyn was demanding to know what was going on. Raphael knew his mate could defend herself. Moreover, he knew Rob would die for her, and Sipes’s man was, at a minimum, exceedingly well-trained and experienced.

  What concerned him, however, was the raspy breathing he could barely hear below the shouting, and the fading heartbeat of a very old vampire. The room door was plain wood, with nothing but a locking doorknob. He kicked it in using ordinary physical strength, and found a vampire lying propped in a corner as far away from a small barred window on the back wall as he could crawl. A quick scan of the vamp’s brain told him this was Werner Thorsen, and he was very badly wounded.

  Werner’s eyelids lifted slowly, as if it took every bit of his energy to do so. “Who?” he breathed, his voice a bare whisper of sound.

  “Raphael. I’m here, Werner.”

  “Have to tell you—”

  “Later. Let me see what they’ve done to you.”

  “No. My lord. The others.”

  “I know. Now be quiet.” Tamping down the fury that urged him to storm into that other room and tear every responsible human limb from limb, he forced himself to calm. Werner couldn’t wait while he raged against the humans. He would die if Raphael didn’t do something soon.

  Drawing a deep breath, he sent a tiny fraction of his power into the vampire, to relieve his pain and keep him alive while Raphael did the healing. If he offered too much power, Werner’s heart would explode, his blood never having been strong enough to bear that much magic. Too little and he might as well not bother. But Raphael wasn’t a vampire lord for nothing. He had nearly 500 years of experience controlling the power that raged in his veins. Werner Thorsen was one of his people, a vampire he’d sworn to defend and protect.

  And so, he did. The room was dark, but he was a vampire, reborn into a form that was designed for the night.

  Soothing Werner into a sort of sleep, he pulled the filthy blankets away and saw what they’d done. Fury threatened to overwhelm him once more, the silver glow of his eyes spotlighting the injured vampire in pitiless clarity.

  He’d been beaten to start. Not just one man, but several had all taken the vampire and pounded him viciously, until bones stuck through the skin of his arm and his face was a mass of cuts and bruises, swollen beyond any human norm. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The smell of burned flesh drew his attention downward to Werner’s left leg. His shoe was mostly gone. What was left of the leather had melted into his skin, leaving raw leathery blisters over blackened flesh. Glimpses of pink muscle stood out among the black, as the vampire symbiote struggled to heal the damage. Such a healing would have required massive amounts of blood as fuel, and Werner hadn’t been fed since his capture.

  The sun,” Werner rasped. “I couldn’t escape it.”

  Raphael glanced up at that small, barred window and realized what he meant. The room was too small to evade the sun altogether. Whoever had locked him in here had known that. The bastards would die for this. All those people out there who’d thought to have a little fun at the expense of vampire lives? They needed to learn the price of their viciousness. No one, human or vampire, had the right to kidnap and torture one of his people.

  “I’m here now,” he growled. “You’ll heal. My blood will heal you.”

  “My lord, I couldn’t—”

  “You can and you will. I made a vow when I took this territory for myself, and I . . . will . . . honor it,” he snarled, then raised his wrist to his mouth and, using one fang, ripped the skin and opened his vein. “Drink,” he commanded, holding the bloody wrist to the vampire’s mouth. “Slowly. It’s more potent than you’re used to.”

  Werner’s lips pulled back from his teeth as his fangs emerged, drawn by the scent of Raphael’s blood. A vampire lord’s blood. It was intoxicating and irresistible. The vampire drank weakly at first, the pull of his fangs barely moving the pooling blood on Raphael’s wrist. But eventually, the tug strengthened, until Raphael had to stroke a hand down Werner’s cheek to get him to slow down. Because he hadn’t misspoken when he’d said it was too powerful for the injured vampire to tolerate. He didn’t want Werner undoing all the healing Raphael’s magic had achieved so far.

  Finally, he eased his wrist away from Werner’s mouth altogether. The vampire was barely conscious at this point, his weary body seeking the rest it had been denied for days, while Raphael’s blood sped through his system, healing new and old wounds with equal fervor. When he was finished, Raphael took off his jacket and placed it on the floor, resting Werner’s head on it while he straightened the vamp’s limbs to ensure proper healing.

  “Raphael?”

  He’d known Cyn was there the minute she’d stepped up behind him, but he’d been too deep into Werner’s healing to pull his attention away. “Do you have them?” he growled.

  “Yes,” she said simply. “Hogtied and growling. At least, in Joe’s case. Keith is more terrified than anything else. Says it was all talk. They didn’t mean to hurt the old man and blah blah.”

  “You believe him?”

  “No. I don’t think he did this.” She placed a hand on Raphael’s shoulder where he still knelt next to Werner. “But I think he helped kidnap vampires, and I think he probably helped beat them up. Whether he killed them or not, I don’t know. So, it’s up to you what you do with him.”

  “And the other? The one you call Joe?”

  “Evil. He’s been hurting people his whole life. I’d bet on it.”

  “Is Sipes out there?”

  “Yes. The others are guarding the front, making sure the rally-goers leave. But Steve is here.”

  “Tell him to have a couple of his men load Werner into one of their vehicles. Carefully. I want him taken to Jannick’s house. He can’t be alone, but I want him to wake up to a face he knows.”

  “Of course. Robbie can help. Is that all right?”

  “Yes. You stay.”

  “You bet I’m staying.”

  He reached up for her hand, squeezing it tightly when she took his. “They tortured him, Cyn. And they call us monsters.”

  “I’m hoping you’ll give Joe and his cronies a taste of just how monstrous you can be.”

  He grunted in amusement, his lips curving into a deadly smile. “Oh, I will.”

  RAPHAEL WAITED UNTIL Werner had been carefully bundled up and taken to the largest SUV, where he could be comfortably placed in the cargo compartment. It wasn’t far to Jannick’s home, but some of the roads were rough, so Robbie offered to ride in back and hold him steady against any bumps and jolts.

  He sent the rest of Sipes’s men back to the hotel, as well. He’d told Sipes to go, but Sipes had refused, saying Raphael hadn’t brought him all the way here to sit in a hotel when things got rough. He hadn’t even tried to get Cyn to leave. First, she wouldn’t have anyway. But second, he wanted her with him. He’d need her with him. Need her to soothe him back from the raw edge of cruelty that tried to take over when he was forced by circumstance or desire to torture someone. He didn’t fool himself into believing he was a good man. He wasn’t a man at all anymore. But Cyn loved him, and she made him better, at least.

  “Steve,” he said, rising to his full height, “let’s give our prisoners a taste of their own hospitality.”

  A grin flashed on the human’s face. “Yes, my lord.”

  Sipes dragged Keith Tyler in on his own, but it took both of them to haul Joe Powell’s heavy carcass into the small room.

  “Do you know who I am?” Raphael asked Powell.

  The human glared above the gag someone had placed over his mouth. Raphael nodded at Sipes, who dug a finger under the fabric and yanked it down. When Powell immediately opened his mouth to yell, Raphael silenced him with a hint of power. The human’s eyes widened, and fear flickered within them for the first time.

 

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