She was one of the Chosen. One of the rare mortals who possessed the Belladonna Antigen and, with it, the potential to become a vampire. Vampires sensed her kind, smelled them, and could not fight the instinct to protect them. He’d inherited that, too. But in the professor’s case, it felt like something more.
He had rolled the professor onto her back, so the misty rain fell on her cheeks now. Vaguely, he heard his sister trying to hold off the man in black, who was trying to get past her. She was exerting her will, but he was fighting it as if he knew how. Further support of her theory that he was DPI, which would have given him training in dealing with preternatural mind control. Luckily a huge crowd was closing in, too, giving James a heartbeat more time.
“I said stay back!” Brigit shouted. Her voice in that moment was something beyond human. The power it carried could not be resisted. Even James looked up at her, then from her fierce expression to the dazed faces of the people around them. They’d inexplicably stopped in their tracks and were unable to convince themselves to move forward again. The government man included.
“Stay back,” Brigit kept saying, holding her hands up, palms out. She was really straining. Her eyes were beginning to emit a soft glow.
“Easy, Brigit,” he warned. “Don’t go too far.”
“You handle your gift and I’ll handle mine. Get on with it, J.W.”
He nodded, looking down at the woman again. Her eyeglasses were crooked and her eyes were closed, thick sable lashes lying on her smooth skin. Upturned nose, full lips, Audrey Hepburn cheekbones. Her life was fading. James turned his palms up and stared down at them, and then he felt them begin to warm. Turning them downward again, he laid them over the exit wound in her chest, ignoring the blood and gore.
Her blood was flowing as his hands grew warmer, and he sensed very strongly the extremely rare Belladonna Antigen every vampire had possessed as a human. She was almost family.
The part of his family he had rejected. And yet, he could not turn away from her. Wouldn’t have, even if he could.
As his hands grew hot, he pressed them between the woman’s breasts. His palms immediately began to emit that familiar, yellow-gold luminescence. He shifted his body and tried to block the light from the spectators around him, and prayed that his sister would be able to hold their attention long enough.
James felt the professor’s chest grow hot, matching the energy of his palms. He saw the glow of his hands reflected there and knew the healing was beginning to take. He felt that sensation again, the one of his soul sort of reaching out from his body to connect to something more, something bigger, far beyond any individual sense of self. There was a greater whole and it was one, and he was part of it, in those moments.
His gaze shifted suddenly and without warning to Lucy Lanfair’s face, and at that same instant her eyes flew open. Brown eyes. Staring straight into his.
“I know you,” she whispered.
“Easy. Take it easy.”
“But I know you. I know you.”
And then her eyes shifted lower, to his hands on her chest, and she saw all the blood—and there was a lot of it. She started sucking in openmouthed, shallow breaths, and he knew she was on the edge of panic. “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God—”
“It’s okay,” he told her. “It’s okay. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“What … what’s that light? What are you doing?”
The glow intensified, just as it always did at the end of a healing. It grew brighter and then died, just that fast. Like the flash of a firefly on a summer country night.
“Get the fuck off her, pal!”
A pair of hands gripped his shoulders, jerking him bodily up and away from her. He’d been unaware, for a few ticks of the clock, of what was happening around him. Other black coats had emerged—some from the studio, others from the dark-colored vans that were lining the street. An ambulance had backed up to the curb, and the medics sprang into action the second James was no longer blocking their way.
He was weak. He was always a little weak after a healing, and this made two in one night, only a bit more than an hour apart. He felt disoriented, too. Il-logically, he didn’t want anyone else near this woman, and he started to push his way back to her, but his sister touched his arm.
There’s nothing we can do now, she said, mentally. Too many witnesses, and we don’t want these suits to know who the hell we are, J.W. Not if they’re who I think they are.
But they’re taking her—
We’ll get her. We will. But later. This is too risky.
Even as they carried on the mental conversation, one of the medics looked up. “There’s not a mark on her. I don’t understand. Where the hell did all this blood come from?”
“Just get her into the ambulance,” one of the men in black ordered, and then he turned, scanning the crowd—in search, James knew, of him.
The man had a scar running from the outer corner of his left eye, across his cheek, reaching almost to the center of his chin, and eyes the color of wet cement.
“You,” he said loudly, pointing at James, who was some twenty feet away. “I want to talk to you.”
Brigit tugged his arm. “We have to go. Now.”
He knew she was right. But it was killing him to leave Lucy Lanfair. Even as his sister tugged him toward her waiting car, James was looking back, watching them lift the gurney on which the beautiful professor lay, strapped down now, into the back of the ambulance.
She was looking straight back at him. She didn’t reach out, and she didn’t speak, but she couldn’t seem to take her eyes off him, either.
And then they closed the doors, and Brigit gave him a shove.
“I said wait!” Scarface commanded. He was reaching into his coat now, and James had little doubt he was about to pull a gun.
They’d made it back to the car, and James reached for the passenger door just as Brigit started the motor with a roar. Her window was down, and she was looking back at the man. As James predicted, he was leveling a gun.
“Freeze! Don’t make me—”
Brigit lifted a hand, palm up, fingers loosely touching her thumb.
“Don’t kill him!” James shouted.
She flicked her fingers open as her gaze intensified, and a beam of light pulsed from her eyes toward the man. Something exploded, shaking the sidewalk, and even the street, so powerfully that several onlookers fell down. Dust and rubble rained down as people ran screaming for cover. At the same instant, Brigit was gunning the motor again, spinning the tires, shifting rapidly through the gears as she sped away.
James turned in his seat, wondering if the debris falling on the crowd included bits of Scarface. But no, it seemed to be a magazine stand that had stood a few yards from him.
“Don’t worry,” Brigit told him. “The vendor had left his post to gawk at the lady who was gunned down on the sidewalk. No casualties, though I think letting that scar-cheeked bastard live was a mistake.”
“You sound just like Rhiannon, who, I think, originated the phrase ‘Kill them all and let the gods sort them out.’”
“Funny you should mention her.”
He closed his eyes. “Tell me that’s not where we’re going.”
“Who the hell else is going to be able to tell us what’s going on, J.W.?”
“I keep telling you, I go by James now.”
“Yeah. You do keep telling me that. It’s irritating. I wish you’d stop.”
She took a corner so fast that he was mashed up against the door, and he knew there was no going back now.
He’d been sucked back in. Just as he’d always pretty much known he would be. His family were not the kind who let go easily.
The ambulance attendant was sticking a needle into her arm the second the doors swung shut, and Lucy gasped at the unexpected pinch of it. Then she looked up at the young man and said, “I really think I’m all right.”
“Just relax, Professor Lanfair. You’re in good hands.”
“How do you know my na … uh …” Ocean waves came washing into her brain, crashing and then slowly sucking her logical mind back out to sea again. “What did you … give me?”
“Just relax now. It’s all fine. Just relax.”
He was smiling and his eyes were kind and sort of hazel. But they weren’t those other eyes. Those piercing, electric-blue eyes she’d been lost in moments before. And this medic’s hands, while soothing and strong, were not the same hands she’d felt on her before, either. That other touch had been so powerful she’d felt it in every cell of her body. A touch that she knew had somehow … healed her.
And that man. That face. That familiar, beautiful face. Something in her, something deep inside her, had recognized him—though she knew she had never seen him before in her life.
Perhaps, she thought, he was an angel.
“Time to wake up now, Professor. Come on. You’ve had a good rest. Wake up. We need to talk.”
Lucy opened her eyes. But the white room was tipping slowly one way, then the other, growing on one side, shrinking on the other, then reversing itself before just spinning slowly. There was a woman. Black hair with a white streak. A man with a big scar on his face. It must have been his voice she heard.
That was all she noticed before she slammed her eyes closed again.
“I’m going to be sick.”
“No, you aren’t,” the woman said softly. “Do you remember who you are, dear? Hmm?”
“Am in the hospital? Did I die?” God, she was so disoriented.
“You’re safe, and you’re fine, and you’re going home soon.”
Her voice was deep. A little gravelly. A Stevie Nicks voice. Lucy loved Stevie Nicks, mainly because her mom had.
“Now, tell me your name,” Stevie Nicks said.
Lucy smiled, remembering the soundtrack of her childhood, before it had all gone so dark. “Lucy. Dad used to call me Lucille. But I hated it. I wouldn’t hate it now, though. I’d love to hear him call me Lucille again.”
She tried opening her eyes again, but the room was still all out of sorts. She saw the man with the scar leaning close to Stevie—no, that wasn’t Stevie. She wasn’t wearing a scrap of lace or fringe, or a single trailing shawl. No, she was wearing mannish blue trousers with a white shirt tucked in, a thin belt, and a white lab coat, like a doctor.
“Can you get her to focus?” the scarred man said.
“If you get what you need, does it matter if it’s couched in her life story?”
“Time is of the essence here, Lillian. All hell’s breaking loose out there, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Maybe your containment team should have considered not having their work televised, then. Back off and let me do my job.”
The scar-faced man huffed, but he moved away from the bed.
Oh, Lucy thought. She was in a bed. And that white lab coat—yeah. Okay, this must be a hospital, then.
“Lucy, what’s your full name, dear?”
Lucy tried to focus, because for some reason she was afraid of making that man angry, and he already seemed awfully impatient. “Lucille Annabelle Lanfair.”
“Very good. And what do you do, Lucy?”
“I work in the Ancient Near Eastern Studies Department at Binghamton University,” she said, wondering why her tongue felt too big and her esses were lispy.
“And what does that work entail?”
“I teach classes about ancient Sumerian culture and the Sumerians’ written language. It was the earliest form of writing, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know that. That’s fascinating. Why don’t you tell me about this most recent translation of yours? The one that got you noticed by Will Waters.”
At the mention of the talk show host’s name, she cringed, squeezing her eyes tightly shut once more, and hearing again the gunshots, seeing the chaos, feeling the horror. “He’s dead, isn’t he? And that crazy old man, Folsom, too? I saw it.”
“Yes. Yes, they’re both dead. Some crazed fan. Did you meet Mr. Folsom?”
Keeping her eyes closed, she said, “In the greenroom.”
“And did you talk to him?”
She nodded. “He was … a little crazy, I think. Said vampires were real.”
“That is crazy. Did he say anything else to you?”
“Said this involves me, too. Said my translation wasn’t about humans, that it was about vampires, and about … them.”
“Who?”
She shook her head. “Twins, he said. Mongrel twins. Crazy.”
“I see. And did he say who or where these twins are?”
“No. He had to go.” Lucy felt her heartbeat quicken, and her breath came a little faster. “And then someone shot him—” Her voice broke as her throat went too tight for words to fit through, and hot tears surfaced in her eyes.
“It’s all right, Lucy. It’s all right. You’re safe here,” the woman who sounded like Stevie said softly. Lucy wished she would sing. “Now I want you to think about what happened right after that terrible shooting. What did you do?”
Lucy kept her eyes closed, but the scalding tears slipped through anyway. “I ran.”
“And why did you run?”
“It’s what I always do.”
The woman was silent for a moment. “When have you had to run before, Lucy?”
But before Lucy could answer, the man spoke, his voice deep and low and rough, like sandpaper. “When she was a kid. Eleven, I think. On a dig with her archaeologist parents in the Northern Iraqi desert, by special arrangement with the government. Bandits raided the campsite by night, shot the entire team and took everything that wasn’t nailed down. She was found cowering in a sand dune, sole survivor. It’s all in her dossier.”
Lucy felt the woman’s hand covering hers. “That must have been awful for you.”
“It was the worst day of my life. Until today.”
“I’m very sorry, Lucy. And I’m sorry to have to make you relive this, too. But we’re nearly done. Now, I want to get back to what happened at the studio. You were in the greenroom, but you saw the shooting. How did you see it, when the greenroom is so far away from the soundstage?”
“I … I saw it on the TV.”
“I see. So you saw it happen on the TV in the greenroom, and then you ran.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“And then what happened?”
Lucy sniffled hard and wondered why she was spilling her guts this way. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “S-Someone told me to stop. He was dressed all in black, I think. And he had sunglasses. So I froze, and I tried to stay still, like he said, but I just … I just couldn’t. My legs just wouldn’t obey. And I ran. And he … he shot me. He shot me.”
“But you’re all right now,” the woman said.
“There was all this blood. It was everywhere. And I fell down, right in it. And it started to hurt. And then … and then he was there.”
“Who was?”
“I don’t know.” She frowned, her eyes still closed, as if to keep the memory inside. “He touched me, and I felt like I knew him. And he had these eyes …”
“And what did he do to you, Lucy?”
“Nothing. He just touched me.”
“How, Lucy? Where did he touch you?”
“My chest.” She lifted a hand to press it to her own sternum, where she was sure there had been a gaping, jagged hole before. But there was only soft fabric, not her own clothing, and though she explored with her fingers, she felt no sign of any injury beneath it. “And then the man who shot me and … other men who looked like him were pushing him away and putting me in the ambulance. And now I’m here.”
“But you don’t know his name?”
“No.”
“But you said you felt like you knew him?”
“And yet … not. You know?”
“No. No, I don’t.”
“Ask her what she felt when he was touching her,” the scarred man barked.
She didn’t like his voice, and she didn’t like him speaking as if she wasn’t even in the room. And she wanted to go home. To her cozy one-story house with the flower boxes in the windows and the neat sidewalk that was all bordered in flawless flower beds, just like the house itself. Her house was sunny and yellow and orderly and neat, and above everything else, it was safe.
Safe. Like the big maple tree at her grandpa’s house, when she used to go there as a child and play tag with her neighbors. The giant tree was always safe. She’d convinced herself that her home was the same way. Off-limits. No one could get to her there. No pain, no violence. Home was her haven.
“When the stranger put his hands on you, what did you feel?” asked the woman with the Stevie Nicks voice and Cruella de Vil hair—Lillian, Lucy remembered.
“I was terrified. I’d just been shot. At least … I thought I had. I was covered in blood, and it hurt, it really did. But I guess I must have … hallucinated it, or maybe I hurt myself when I fell down.”
“What did you feel physically?” the woman went on. “When the stranger put his hands on you?”
“Oh, that. Well … his hands felt … warm. And then hot. And it seemed like there was a light sort of … coming from them. And it filled every part of me. And for just a second, I thought I might be dying, and that he was an angel.”
“An angel,” the man said, nearly spitting the words.
“That’s an interesting thing to say.”
Lucy sighed. “I really want to go home now. I’m all right, aren’t I? I mean, I wasn’t shot after all, right?”
“Well, there are certainly no bullet holes in you now,” the woman said, sounding cheerful. And then she got up and joined the man, then spoke in a very, very soft whisper, “The pentothal is wearing off. Is there anything else you want, before …?”
“Ask her about her blood type. We tested her, came back positive for the antigen. I want to know if she knew.”
Why, Lucy wondered, did they think she couldn’t hear them?
But Lillian was returning to her bedside now. Lucy heard the woman’s footsteps on the floor tiles. Smelled the soap she used, too.
“Lucy, do you know if there’s anything … unusual about your blood type?”
“Yes, there is. It’s … very rare. Only a few people have it. It makes me bleed easily. And it’s hard to find a donor to match me, which is why I donate regularly and have my own supply in storage. But that’s at Binghamton General—and I keep some at Lourdes, too. That’s another reason why I was so afraid when I saw all that blood all over me.” She paused, opening her eyes now. “If it wasn’t my blood, whose was it?”
“We don’t know. Can you tell me any more about your blood ty—”
“But how can you not know? If someone else was shot on that sidewalk, how could you not—”
“Lucy, I’d like you to take a breath and calm yourself.” The woman put a soothing hand on Lucy’s forehead. “A lot of people were shot at that studio last night. Inside and outside. It was chaos. And I wasn’t there. I’m sure someone knows the answers to your questions, but it’s not me.”
Lucy sighed. “I want to go home.” She sat up in the bed and looked around the white room while waves of dizziness washed over her brain. “Where are my things?”
“Lucy, about your blood type,” Lillian said. “Is there anything else you can tell me about the Belladonna Antigen?”
Lucy blinked and met the woman’s eyes. Her head was beginning to feel clearer. “How do you know? I never told you what it’s called.”
“We want to know what you know about it.”
“What kind of a medical question is that?” Lucy narrowed her eyes, suddenly suspicious of this woman, who she’d assumed was a doctor or a shrink—or maybe a grief counselor, sent in to help her process what had happened.
“You want to know if I’m aware that I’m going to die young? I am. There’s no treatment, and there’s no cure. People with this antigen usually die in their thirties. And I’m in mine now, but so far I feel fine. No symptoms.”
“And what would those symptoms be?”
“You tell me, you’re the doctor.” Lucy watched the woman’s face and knew, just knew. “Or if you’re not, then I’d like to know who you are.”
“I am a doctor. And I work for the government,” Lillian said. “And I think we’re all through with your questioning now. You can relax. I’ll be back in a moment.”
“I don’t want to relax,” Lucy said. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ve told you everything I know.” She was suddenly terrified, and while she thought she might benefit by demanding her rights or a lawyer, she decided to wait until those things were truly necessary. She didn’t like conflict or confrontation, but she liked the unknown even less. And she had no idea who these people were or where she was being held. And it was feeling more and more as if she was … being held. She’d assumed she was in a hospital, but she wasn’t so sure anymore.
The woman crossed the room to where the scar-faced man waited near the door, and then they stepped through it, leaving her all alone.
Lucy got up and went to the door—the windowless door—as well. And as she did, a feeling of fear rippled up her spine, because she had a pretty good idea of what she was going to find when she got there.
She closed her hand around the doorknob and twisted, her heart in her throat—and then it sank to her feet when the knob didn’t budge an inch.
Locked.
She was being held by people who had drugged her and questioned her. And might even have shot her.
But then her hands rose to her chest, and she pulled the fabric away from her skin and looked down her neckline. The necklace she’d found inside the crazy author’s book was still hanging there, Kwan Yin looking serene and gentle. But there was no sign of any wound in her chest. Not a mark.
And yet she remembered it all so vividly. She’d felt that bullet tear through her.
God, she wondered, how could that be?
But she knew how. It was that man. That angel.
He’d healed her.
She closed her eyes and whispered a prayer to him right then and there. “If you really are my guardian angel, please, come find me again. Save me again. I need to get out of this place. I want to go home.”
4
“Well? Where is she?” Rhiannon demanded.
James tipped his head to one side and met the eyes of the most powerful vampire he had ever known. Also the most beautiful. And the most dangerous. Rhiannon stood beneath a crystal chandelier in the foyer of the Long Island mansion that was her summer home, or one of them. She wore her usual choice of attire, a floor-length gown, with a slit up to her hip on one side and a neckline that plunged to her navel. Black satin that was almost as shiny as her endless raven hair, or the black panther, her beloved pet, that rubbed against her legs as she spoke.
“Good to see you, too, Rhiannon,” he said. “It’s been a while.” He glanced at the cat. “Hello, Pandora.”
Rhiannon made a dismissive sound like a set of air brakes releasing a brief spurt of excess pressure. “You walked away from us, J.W. Not the other way around. Don’t expect a warm welcome when you finally deign to honor us with your presence.”
“Rhiannon, he’s—” Brigit began.
“Where is the professor?” the arrogant one asked again, and this time her tone brooked no argument. No discussion.
“She got away,” Brigit said softly.
“She got away?”
“She was taken, actually.” Brigit lowered neither her head nor her eyes. She held the regal Rhiannon’s gaze firmly and strongly, and for just a moment James was amazed and impressed by his sister’s moxie. She’d grown up just as tough as everyone had known she would. And even though she’d been Rhiannon’s favorite, he hadn’t expected her to be able to stand up to, much less hold her own against, the most feared vampiress of them all. He could do so, always had. But that was because he didn’t particularly care whether or not he gained her elusive approval.
“Taken by whom?” Rhiannon asked, taking a step nearer, so the two women stood nearly nose-to-nose on the imported Italian marble floor. Black with swirls of silver. Pandora tensed, her sharp cat’s eyes watching every move, as her tail twitched.
“DPI,” Brigit said, not backing down a single inch. “Or that’s my best guess. There’s more going on here, Aunt Rhiannon. A lot more.”
