Of course, that could be anywhere in the vast city of Paris. The buildings were close, the streets narrow and labyrinthine. Easy enough for mortal or vampire to move about unseen. Even if her minions had narrowed it down to one particular quarter, it would take Vail hours to cover it all.
One thing he had learned since arriving, the vampire tribes, while they kept to themselves, communicated from tribe to tribe in an amazing network. If you were a tribe member, you were accounted for. But even those unaligned with tribes were known. It was in the tribes’ best interest to keep tabs on everyone. A sexy, blonde ice princess like Lyric Santiago would surely be recognized by at least a few.
He did have a tribal contact, but would give the search a go first. Besides, that’s if anyone knew she was missing. The family was keeping this hush-hush.
He folded the picture of the vampiress and stuffed it in a back pocket. Appealing to any man with a healthy sex drive, certainly, with her high breasts and come-on-let’s-kiss white teeth and flirty, long-lashed eyes. But beyond the surface glamour, he wasn’t interested.
Vampires did not appeal to his palate. Sure, that was like calling the kettle black, but he’d grown up knowing that vampires sustained their lives through the heinous practice of imbibing on mortals. They drank their blood!
Vail would never succumb to such a base appetite. He didn’t need it. Faery ichor sustained him. So why bother succumbing to something that horrified him?
As if you don’t do the same, his conscience screamed. You sink your teeth into faery necks. How is that different than taking a mortal?
“They’re filthy and poisoned by their food,” he muttered, and walked onward.
Thinking of which, he was a bit peckish. It had been over a day since he’d fed. He should have fueled up for what he suspected would be a long night.
Striding the streets in the seventh arrondissement, he didn’t attempt to quiet the clicking beats of his boots. He wanted to be heard, to be seen tracking through the twilight haze.
Let them know what they can’t get away from.
Every so often the street was cobbled, a remnant from Paris’s earlier centuries. Vail liked that. And then he didn’t. He knew his father had been around since the mid-eighteenth century, as had Rhys Hawkes and his mother, Viviane.
Rhys and Viviane had fallen in love a few years before the French Revolution. Had they walked these very streets?
“Don’t care. They didn’t care enough about me. I don’t care about them.”
Jumping and hitting the bottom of a low, rusted tin sign with his knuckles, he set the ancient thing into a creaky swing.
Eyes followed him as he cut through the twilight; he could feel their regard prick at his spine. Some were mortal, peering out from windows as their televisions blared monotonously in the background. What a mind waste technology was.
Yet other eyes were Dark Ones, unwilling to test his strut. And woe to those who did employ the bravado to try him.
“Yippi-i-oo,” he sang lowly. “Where are you?”
A glimmer in the corner of his eye told him a sidhe lurked in the shadows, slithering along, following his steps. Curious, but not threatening. His hunger stirred. He sensed it was a lower imp or perhaps a sprite. Sprites were nasty and he didn’t care to go toe-to-toe with one of them. Their ichor was acrid, and he always ended up spitting it out.
Couldn’t be a sprite. Their iridescent sheen never allowed them to blend completely into the shadows.
As he turned a corner, Vail twisted his head quickly to spy the sidhe before it realized he’d been aware of it. The ointment he wore around his eyes gave him that sight.
He dashed forward, grabbed the thing about its narrow chest, and sank his fangs into its neck. Just a quick bite, something to take the edge off the jitters he’d felt tweaking his muscles. Hot ichor glittered down his throat and soothed his pangs. He dropped the faery in a collapse of pale violet limbs. It wobbled in a giddy daze from his bite. The swoon was good to mortal, vampire and even the sidhe.
Thumbing the corner of his mouth, Vail walked on and thanked his ability to see the sidhe. He hadn’t been well loved in Faery, and suspected if any of his former rivals were in the mortal realm of Paris they would not hesitate to call him out. Zett held the top position on that rivalry list.
“Come and get me,” he muttered—then stopped abruptly.
Ahead, a mortal male moaned. A pleasurable utterance that curled Vail’s smile smartly. Right out here, in the street, and not tucked inside a bedroom. Such moxie!
He didn’t hear a responding female voice, but he did smell cherries and jasmine. “Gotcha.”
Racing forward on the balls of his feet—now he wanted the element of surprise—Vail swung around the corner and into a dark alley cluttered with stacked terra-cotta flowerpots.
The man stood shoulders and back to the wall and the female was running her hands up his thigh and over his obvious hard-on. She wore a black scarf that covered all her hair, but Vail bet what was tucked beneath was long and blond. Clad entirely in black, the only spot of color was the red pointed shoes peeking from beneath the pant hem.
She leaned into the mortal’s neck, fangs glinting—then sighted Vail.
Palming a huge flowerpot to leverage his strides, Vail pushed it aside and behind him. It cracked and clattered on the cobbles.
The mortal man landed against Vail’s chest, groping to stand yet utterly confused about why he’d been pulled from the high of arousal. The scent of sex and cigarettes shrouded him.
Shoving him off, Vail tripped over the man’s legs and plunged forward, landing on the cobblestones. He looked up. The vampiress paused at a turn at the end of the alley. She flashed a defiant smirk at him and took off.
“It’s not going to be that easy to ditch me.”
Charging up from all fours, he performed a racer’s dash and made the corner, careening around it in time to spy the vampiress’s long legs slip into the open maw of a warehouse.
Taking in the building’s structure as he approached, he decided it was abandoned. The missing windows and flat, pebbled roof would provide her an easy escape while he wandered about in the dark trying to sense her. He could see well enough in the dark, but preferred to track her heartbeats.
Sniffing, he noted the jasmine and cherries. “You’re the one I want,” he said. “But I think I’ll let you come to me. Always prefer to be the one in control.”
He turned right and walked along the side of the building, tendering careful footsteps so he would sense any noise from inside. She wouldn’t be so stupid now she knew someone was after her.
At the opening to a main street, Vail got another whiff of jasmine. He eyed the stretch of apartment buildings and walk-ups directly across the street. Older, and likely lower rent, though this area was nothing to sneeze at. But dark. No streetlights to expose anyone’s secrecy.
“Perfect.”
“FUCK.”
Shoulders glued against the corrugated iron warehouse wall, Lyric listened for the stranger’s boot steps.
Why had he run after her? Who was he? And what a way to spoil supper. She hadn’t a chance to sink in her fangs and now she was beyond hungry.
All the adrenaline pumping through her system over the past twenty-four hours had stripped her energy and weakened her. In fact, she breathed heavily and panted. What was with that?
She’d gotten a quick look at him. Hair darker than Himself’s heart, slicked back like some kind of goth Elvis. Dark clothing and dark eyes. Really dark, like he used guyliner and smudged it.
Could be a druggie. Mortals, when high on meth, were strong, and if hurt or wounded, could still function without noticing the pain. That had to be it. He was a junkie who’d stumbled onto the scene of her trying to get the mark off, and decided he’d wanted a piece of her for himself.
Which meant she may get lucky and he’d forget what he’d witnessed and be diverted to a quest for more drugs.
Daring a peek around the doorway, she scanned the alley. The room she was squatting in was down the street. She could make a dash for it if she kept to the left side of the street in the shadows that hugged the walls. So she did.
Taking the back stairs up the side of the building to avoid the lobby, she then had to jump onto a neighbor’s balcony and lean over to slide through the window she’d left open a few inches. Years of training with Leo and her acrobatic skills aided her as Lyric mastered the leap and slipped into the apartment.
A twin bed with a lumpy mattress sat below the window. She landed on it in a roll and came up to sit on the edge of the mattress. The apartment, a recent acquisition, was dark. The full moon had cruised behind nasty gray clouds that promised rain before morning.
Could she do this? Actually pull it off? It wasn’t as though she’d ever spent time away from the family mansion. She possessed some facsimile of a social life, went clubbing and made dates, and hunted. But to live on her own?
Lyric sighed and wondered how long it would be before she dared go out again to look for supper.
“So, this is how the young and the kidnapped live.”
A tall, dark-haired man strolled out from the bathroom, leaned against the kitchen wall and hooked one foot up on the side of the butcher block.
Double fuck.
CHAPTER THREE
CAUGHT.
Eyes wide and mouth gaping. Blond hair tumbled from beneath the black scarf. Unbelieving. Now that was a look Vail would cherish.
“Who are you?” She backed toward the window, but he didn’t think she would bolt, because her body language said I want to listen instead of I’m out of here. “Who sent you?”
“Ah, now that is the question, isn’t it? Who sent me?”
“I just asked that. Got a hearing problem?”
“I found you by sound and smell, sweetie. That perfume is sexy, by the way.”
She rolled her eyes.
“And what’s a pretty little vampiress doing away from her kidnappers like you just were? They give you a long leash? Where are those rascally kidnappers, by the by?”
“Get out of here. This is private property.”
Vail looked toward the front door, where he’d had to break a security lock to get inside. The smell of jasmine wafting out from inside had told him this was the right place. Yet the fact he could enter without a proper invitation told him a lot. Vampires could only freely enter public property. Yet another frustrating hazard of living in the mortal realm.
“It may be private, but it’s not your property. Which makes it vacant, and that falls under the public category. You always come through the window?”
Standing and marching across the room, the vampiress tugged off the scarf and tossed it aside. She was trapped and, like prey, paced in abandon like they always did when seeking an escape. She worked it, though, her long strides swinging her narrow hips, which revealed a peek of sexy skin between waistline and the hem of her shirt.
Vail maintained his position.
“Who are you?” she demanded again in a remarkably authoritative voice, considering her slender physique and those gorgeous cheekbones. And look at all that hair. It wasn’t mussed at all, spilling like ribbons of white gold over her shoulders. “I need a name.”
“Vaillant,” he offered freely. “But you can call me Vail.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“Apparently, it’s the one my mother gave me.”
She pointed at his face and twirled her finger before her. “What’s that stuff beneath your eyes? It sparkles.” She gave him a sideways sneer. “Are you a freakin’ faery?”
“Such vitriol drips from your pretty mouth. What have the sidhe ever done to you?”
“Nothing.” She paced some more. “Everything! Just get out, will you? This is my place. Go find your own hovel.”
Vail leaned his elbows onto the butcher-block counter behind him and smiled as sweetly as he could manage. He didn’t do sweet, but he could get close to amiable if he tried.
“I don’t think so. I’d like to hang around and have you introduce me to your kidnappers.”
“If you know I was kidnapped, my mother must have sent you. Did you come to rescue me? To bring me back to Mommy and lay me before her sacrificial altar?”
Vail tutted. “You have mother issues?” Even saying it cut into his heart. If anyone had issues regarding their mother …
“I’m not telling you anything.” She stopped before the bed, stared at it a few moments as if it might bite her, then plopped onto it and, shoulders high and straight, fixed an innocent gaze on him. “Get out, Vail the faery.”
“I’m not sidhe. I’m vampire.”
She scoffed. “Could have fooled me.”
“Why, thank you. I take that as a compliment.”
He strolled toward her. The efficiency apartment was small and open, so it was but ten strides to stand before the bed. Squatting, he clasped his hands between his bent legs. “Now, about your kidnappers. I assume the introductions are not going to happen, because the guilty party is sitting right here, before me.”
She looked aside. A pale beam from a distant streetlight glimmered through the window and highlighted her long, elegant nose, narrow face and chin. Vail believed the ice princess label; she wore it gorgeously. Her eyes were deep blue, almost—no, not violet. That was a color he had only seen on faeries.
“There are no kidnappers,” he ventured. “Are there?”
“You think you’re so smart?”
“Actually, let me lay it out for you.”
“Oh, please do. I’m all about the faery tales tonight.”
“Then look at me, please.”
He waited, but she tilted her head away from his gaze. Vail slid a palm along her cheek, the light getting trapped in his iron rings, and forced her head up. He gripped her chin firmly, and she flinched, but not out of his grasp.
“We can make this rough,” he warned, “or we can do this nice and sweet. Which do you prefer?”
If she said rough, he’d lose it right here. Vail was not immune to an attractive woman. Very well, so she was sexy. It was those damned white teeth, clear eyes and a touch of impudence. Nothing else. Couldn’t be the soft, panting breaths that indicated she was still winded from her adventure eluding him. And it most certainly was not her scent that seemed to curl into his brain and dally with the smarts he’d claimed to possess.
The fact she was vampire kept him from shoving her onto the mattress and drawing his tongue down her long, slender neck and to the full mounds of her breasts that peeked above the low neckline of her shirt.
“Tell me what you think you know,” she said through a tight jaw. She shoved his hand from her face, and fixed her hard gaze on him. “Vail.”
“I work for Hawkes Associates,” he said. “You know about them?”
She nodded, but stiffly. She wasn’t about to drop the tough-girl act. If she was a thief, like the rest of her family, then she’d probably honed some excellent avoidance tactics.
“Your mother hired us to track down her kidnapped daughter. Seems she—that is, you—had been taken from the Santiago mansion only minutes before you were to meet the Lord of Midsummer Dark for some kind of exchange. Taken, in a valuable faery gown. Mommy wants back her daughter and the dress. You following me so far?”
She jutted up her chin, defiant, but gave a curt nod.
“Seems you, Lyric Santiago—” he liked that she flinched when he recited her name “—were supposed to go along with the Lord of Midsummer Dark, the dress, I assume, being some sort of pseudodowry.”
“Where did you hear that? I was only delivering the thing. There’s no way I’d go near him again …” She shut her mouth.
Again? She had been in Zett’s presence before? A fact to note. She wasn’t going to make it easy for him. And he didn’t want her to do so—it was more interesting this way. He liked watching prey squirm.
“Funny thing, though.” He thumbed his jaw, drawing out the moment and also inhaling her scent, which had deepened with her rising anxiety. Uncomfortable? She may be an ice princess, but he could thaw her out quick enough. “That dress was stolen from Hawkes Associates not ten days ago. Now, who do you think is tops on the suspect list?”
“You think I stole that ugly gown? Ha!”
“Ugly?” He stroked the side of his thumb along her cheek. She did not flinch, but he felt her muscles tense under his touch. Something about this scenario didn’t feel right, but he couldn’t pinpoint what, exactly. “I was told it was fashioned from faery diamonds, the most incredible and dazzling gemstone in the known world. Or unknown world, matters as they are.”
His thumb strayed to her lips, full, pink and soft, worth a kiss— Vail suddenly realized what he was doing.
What the hell was he doing? That had not been a harsh touch, but one of—admiration? Wib.
He stood, shoving his hand in a pocket. “You don’t like diamonds, Lyric?”
“They’re not so spectacular.”
“I imagine so, for one of your profession. You can steal them if you want them, eh?”
“I’m not a thief.”
“That has yet to be proven. What happened to the dress?”
“It’s a gown.”
“Gown. Dress.” Vail leaned over her. A tendril of blond hair swept his hand. It felt like summer. He fisted that hand behind his back to keep from touching her again. “What did you do with it?”
“They took it from me. And left me here.”
“‘They’ being these imaginary kidnappers of yours?”
She nodded. Liar.
“So you didn’t steal it?”
She shook her head.
“Nor did anyone in the notorious Santiago clan steal it?”
More negative head shaking.
“And now someone else has the gown, namely, your kidnappers.”
A positive nod.
Vail shoved her across the bed, pressing her shoulders to the mattress, which reeked of mildew and dust. Pinning a knee across her thighs, he prevented her from the anticipated sneak attack of her knee aiming for his jewels.
“You’re lying,” he growled at her. “There was no sign of force or struggle in your bedroom.”
“Force? The whole damned window was taken out!”
“But you expected that to happen, which is why the rest of your room was pristine. As well, the gown has not been sold because that is something the entire Faery realm would be aware of—”
“If Faery is so aware, why don’t they go right to the ugly thing and get it?”
“It’s not …” Like that.
Faery sensed the thing, but couldn’t pinpoint it. Not without expert trackers, and someone had to actually be wearing the gown to give out the strongest vibrations. And apparently the Seelie court was not currently aware it was anywhere but at Hawkes Associates.
“You plotted your own kidnapping to steal the dress yourself. Admit it!”
“It wasn’t for the gown—it was to get away from Zett!”
Vail pushed from the bed and walked a few steps away. Breathing out and raking his fingers through his hair, he then chuckled. He’d gotten the truth from her much quicker than he’d expected.
But seriously? The chick thought Zett had planned to take her to Faery with him? Vail doubted that very much.
On the other hand, he wasn’t privy to all Zett’s devious kinks. It was possible the bastard wanted Lyric for reasons unknown. And she had intimated they’d met previously.
“I get it,” he said. “You saw an opportunity and took it.”
“You’re not going to take me back to my mother, are you? I need time.”
A touch of measured panic warbled in her voice. She didn’t want to go back, but at the same time, she was not afraid of such an outcome.
“Time for what?”
The vampiress looked aside, giving him her silence again. The streetlight adorned her profile, glistening off fine cheekbones in a tempting tease. It reminded him of the constant glimmer in Faery, and of what made him most comfortable.
“I am going to return you to your mother,” Vail said, forcing away the image of light-kissed skin, “but the deal was you and the gown. Where is it?”
“I fenced it already.”
“Liar.”
“Junkie vampire.”
“Junkie?”
“You sparkle. Around your eyes and at your neck. It’s in your skin. I know what that’s from. You’re a dust freak.”
He laughed again and pointed at his eyes, which were neither bloodshot nor clouded, which is what happened to dust freaks. “You think so?”
She nodded, knowingly. The vampiress could not begin to know him. Ever.
“Think what you wish. The faster I can get this damned assignment wrapped up the sooner I can be rid of you.”
“Just walk away. That’ll take care of your problem, like that.” She snapped her fingers.
Vail leaned over her. “So who’s the fence?” She gave him the side of her face again.
After her false accusation, he had no patience. He gripped her chin and forced her to meet his gaze. He considered enthralling her, but the little he knew regarding vampire-to-vampire relations was that a vamp couldn’t enthrall their own kind. Since arriving in the mortal realm, his power of persuasion had been frustratingly absent. And if he dusted her, she’d be worthless.
“I don’t have a name,” she offered.
“How do you contact him?”
“He calls me.”
Vail swung a surveying look around the small apartment. The place was merely a safe house, he suspected. It was empty, save the bare-mattress bed. Just a place to hide out until … Until? “Where’s your phone?”
“I … lost it.”
He narrowed his brows—then remembered. “I think I can help you with that.” Reaching into his back pocket, he drew something out and slammed the phone on the kitchen counter. “I guess I’m staying the night.”
“No! Where’d you get that?”
“Found it under your bed when I was looking through your room for clues.” He crossed his arms and kicked out a boot to put his weight against the counter. “I’m here until your fence calls, sweetie.”
“I hate you!”
“Not feeling much love for you, either.”
“I hate it all. I hate this place. I hate this awful, smelly bed.” She stood and kicked the bed frame, slamming the entire twin bed into the corner.
“Hey now, that’s no way to treat those pretty red shoes of yours, is it?”
“And I hate you again,” she retorted. “And I’m starving, which, thanks to you, my supper got off but he didn’t get me off.”
“Frustrated?” Vail ran a hand over his crotch.
She understood the signal. Tiny fists formed beside each of her thighs. Her plan had backfired, and now he would drag her home to her mother, kicking her pointy red shoes and screaming hate and damnation to high heaven. He couldn’t wait to do it.
The petulant vampiress stomped into the bathroom.
“Where you going?”
“Where does it look like?” She slammed the door shut.
Vail hiked himself up to sit on the kitchen counter. After a few minutes had passed, he heard the shower turn on. Seemed kind of strange to strip with a stranger so near and to just … get clean.
If she thought to parade out naked in an attempt to seduce him, the ice princess had better rethink that plan. He was not interested. Despite the erection he’d run his hand over moments earlier.
Seriously, Vail? You did not get hard over a vampiress. It was … adrenaline. Yeah, that’s it.
This was going to be a long night. And he did not like the idea of sitting around, waiting for the fence to contact Lyric. She had to know the name of the fence. To assess the mental capacity of her minions, the vampiress was definitely the brains of the operation.
How to get the information from her?
Maybe if he brought the starving vampiress supper? Dangled a tasty mortal before her? Slashed its wrist and dribbled blood into a wineglass?
That would be too much fun. But not practical, and he wasn’t into the horror of mortal blood. And besides, a tough little chick like Lyric Santiago would probably grab the mortal from him and sink in her teeth before he got anything from her.
