Topaz came awake quickly, just as she always did. She and Jack had taken refuge in an abandoned house about forty miles south of the crime scene in Oklahoma City. It was in the middle of nowhere, and in good enough repair that the locks would keep any ordinary intruders at bay.
She rolled onto her side, and smiled sleepily as Jack stretched his arms over his head, eyes still closed, then snapped one arm around her and hugged her tight. It felt good to be with him this way. Secure. Not doubting. Just knowing.
They made slow, delicious love, relishing the feelings they'd finally admitted having for each other. She hadn't thought life could ever be this good.
She kissed his chin, then eased out of his arms and out of their bed-a well-worn sofa that had been left behind. Feet bare, clad in her tank top and panties, Topaz walked to the front door and unfastened the deadbolt. The thing was so old and rusty, she'd been surprised it still worked. It took a little effort to unlock it. But she did.
"Running out on me already?"
"I just want to see what kind of night it is."
"Moon's a waning crescent. It's chilly and clear. Almost no wind. And it's dark outside. Now come back to bed."
She sent him a smile. "Patience, caveman. I'll be there before you know it." Then she twisted the knob and pulled the door open, taking a half step out into the fresh, cool night before she saw them and froze in place.
Men. Lumberjack-sized men. No. Not men. Her eyes scanned them, realizing they formed a living boundary around the place, even as she jerked back into the house, slammed the door and slid the lock. "I think we're in trouble, Jack."
Her tone, and the energy behind it, must have been pretty clear to him, because he was beside her almost before she finished the sentence, wearing his boxer-briefs and reaching for the door.
"Don't," she said. "Don't unlock it."
He frowned at her, then moved to the window, parted the layers of "curtains" they'd hung and glanced outside. He blinked long and slow, and then looked again.
"Drones." He said it like a curse word.
"Yeah. And it looks like they've surrounded the place."
"Hell." He moved to the other side of the room and took a look from another window, confirming her guess with a nod in her direction.
"Shit, Jack, what are we going to do?"
He met her eyes, then crossed the room to where she stood and folded her into his arms. "We'll think of something."
"What? Did you see how many are out there? Dozens!"
"Twenty-two," he said. "I only counted twenty-two."
" Only twenty-two?"
He held her harder and even laughed a little, but she knew it was fake. "Look, we'll just hang tight, see what they have in mind."
"What they have in mind is tearing us into bite-sized bits; Jack."
"I don't think so." He backed up a little, still holding her, but staring down into her eyes. "If they wanted to kill us, they'd be storming the place by now, wouldn't they? Why take up formation out there? Surrounding the place as if..."
"As if they don't want us to be able to leave," she said slowly. "Jack, what the hell is Gregor up to this time?"
"I don't know." He pulled out his cell phone. "We have to let the others know the situation, see where things stand with them."
He flipped his cell phone open, dialed Roxy's number and waited.
Baltimore.
It had been a lifetime since Briar had left this city with nothing more than a backpack stuffed as full as she could stuff it and the bruises her stepfather had left on her body. She'd been fifteen, bound for New York, determined to make it on her own.
She hadn't. She would have been dead if Gregor hadn't found her the night he had. She'd been drunk on cheap wine when her latest John had tossed her out of his car after she threw up on him. Hadn't even paid her. Called her a filthy whore and left, his tires spitting gravel as he spun away. That was where Gregor had found her. That was where he had changed her.
That was where he'd told her you couldn't trust anyone but yourself, a lesson she'd already learned the hard way. But she'd been a fool, because she'd begun to trust him. And in return, he'd damn near killed her. Would have, if it hadn't been for Reaper and his band of merry men. And women.
She would have vengeance on Gregor. She would.
But the list of men she intended to murder was a long one. And the man whose name was second from the top was still living right here in Baltimore. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. And it would distract her from the storm roiling deep down inside her. The one Reaper stirred up every time he tried to see something good in her. He was so wrong. Maybe this would prove that to him once and for all, and he would see her for who she really was.
Evil. She was evil personified. He'd killed because he couldn't help himself. He'd taken lives because that was what he'd been programmed to do by those who'd gained access to his mind. He regretted the blood on his hands.
She wouldn't. She would relish this.
She rose before he did, went into the bathroom and cranked on the shower taps. Then she closed the bathroom door and crept out of the hotel, into the newborn darkness.
The city was coming to life. She hailed a taxi and gave the man the address of the house where she'd grown up, every nerve tight and tingling as they drove.
And when the taxi stopped outside the house, at the outer edge of the city, she sat there, staring at it for a long moment.
"This the place?" the driver asked.
She shifted her focus from the yard behind the chain-link fence, where she used to play, to the driver, who was frowning into the rearview mirror and reaching up to adjust it, no doubt wondering why the hell he couldn't see her face in the glass.
She opened the door and got out, then leaned back in long enough to hand him a ten-dollar bill. The fare was $8.50. Close enough. Then she turned to stare at the house while the driver pulled away.
So many memories. Dammit.
"Who lives here, Briar?"
She spun around, first startled and then furious. Reaper was standing a few feet away, hands thrust into the pockets of his coat, wind blowing his dark hair.
"This is my business, Reaper. You shouldn't be here."
"Anger is coming off you in waves."
"I get that way when people poke around in my business. Or when I'm followed."
He shook his head slowly. "You were angry before you knew I was here, and too focused on that house to even sense my approach. Who lives here, Briar?" he asked again.
She lifted her brows, tipped her head to one side. "I did. Once."
"And now?"
She shook her head and started for the door. "Go away, Reaper."
"I'm not going anywhere."
"Then you can watch." She never broke her stride again, just went up to the front door, twisted the knob until the lock snapped and then walked right inside.
A woman Briar had never seen before rose from an easy chair, where she'd been reading a magazine and smoking a cigarette.
She was middle-aged, with dirty blond hair, a bad perm that had gone out of style twenty years ago, and worry lines around her eyes and mouth.
"What...who-I thought that door was locked. What is this?"
"I'm looking for Martin Rose. Does he still live here?"
"Well, yes, but-"
"Yeah, he's here. I smell the bastard." Briar started forward, crossing the living room toward the hallway that led to the den.
The woman sidestepped, blocking her path. "He's asleep."
Briar stared at the woman. "You might want to be careful, lady. This isn't your business."
"I'm going to call the police if you don't leave right now," the woman said, her voice rising with fear.
Before Briar could react, Reaper's hands were on her shoulders, firm, holding her. She wanted to turn around and punch him in the jaw, but instead she drew a calming breath.
"I'm his stepdaughter," Briar said, her words clipped.
"Why don't you just tell him I'm here and see what he says before you call out the National Guard?"
The woman blinked, staring at her. "No one could find you."
"I didn't want to be found. Who are you, my mother's latest replacement?"
The woman swallowed before speaking, clearly upset, though now she seemed to be fighting to remain calm. "I'm his nurse.
One of them, at least. Your father-"
"Stepfather."
"Your stepfather is a very sick man."
And about to get a lot sicker, Briar thought. "Either tell him I'm here or get out of my way, lady. I'm not going to ask again."
The woman sent a pleading look beyond her, no doubt silently asking Reaper to control her. As if. Apparently he didn't give any sign that he was going to help her cause, because the blonde sighed and stepped aside.
Briar stared down the hallway at the den's closed door and without looking at the woman said, "It would probably be a good idea for you to get the hell out of here now."
Nurse Nancy nodded jerkily, and, snatching a jacket from the back of a chair as she passed, she hurried to the door and through it.
Reaper said, "She's going to call the police the second she's a safe distance from us."
"Yeah, I can read thoughts, too." She was still staring at the door. "I'm asking you to leave."
"I'm not going to. You don't want to do this, Briar."
"No?" She turned to glare at him. "Let me tell you something, Reaper. If you try to stop me, I'll use your trigger word and let you do the job for me."
The threat stunned him. It was clear in the way he drew back slightly, as if she'd struck him with a fist and knocked him off balance. But she ignored that, along with the look of pain that flashed into his eyes and the wish that she could suck the words back. Too late.
She turned to the den door, twisted the knob and flung it open, stepping into the room in one long stride.
But it wasn't a den anymore. It was a bedroom, identical in every way to a hospital room, except that it was located in a house.
There was an IV pump standing to one side of the standard-issue hospital bed, with three bags hanging from the hooks above it, dripping steadily into tubes that wound and merged and joined one larger tube that was stuck into Martin's arm.
That was the first thing she noticed about him. His arm. It was white, whiter than her own, and the skin was like paper.
Between skin and bone, there wasn't much else. And as her gaze moved higher, she saw that the upper arm was just as thin as the forearm, before it disappeared beneath the short sleeve of a hospital gown. A blanket covered him from the chest down, his arms resting atop it.
It took her a while to force her gaze upward, to his neck, where the skin hung loose, as if the man beneath had vanished when it wasn't looking. Then, finally, she looked at his face. Sunken. Hollow. Gray. He didn't seem to be breathing. But after a moment he sucked in one long, stuttering gasp. Then nothing again.
"Good thing you got here when you did," Reaper said. "He'll be dead in a day or two, if not by morning."
She couldn't move, couldn't reply. There was a tremor working through her from somewhere down deep, making its way slowly to the surface. Her hands began to shake, her stomach, to clench.
"Well, what are you waiting for?" Reaper asked. "Do it. Kill him."
She closed her eyes, blocking out the view of the monster who'd haunted her dreams for the past seven years.
"You'll probably want to wake him up first," Reaper went on. "Though I don't know if that's even possible. So just do it. Do you want to strangle him, or just bash his head in with something heavy?"
"Shut up."
"Say the word and I'll do it for you. You know the word I mean, right, Briar?"
"Shut the fuck up!"
He shut up. She opened her eyes again, all the useless rage pooling inside her turning into something else, something heavy and dense.
In the distance, a siren sounded.
"We have to get out of here, Briar." His tone had changed. It was oddly tender now. Soft. His hand went to her shoulder.
She shook it off, knuckled a hot tear from her cheek and stepped closer to the bed. Standing right beside the man who'd taken her virginity at the tender age of eleven, she lifted her hands and bent closer, lowering them. Her left hand closed around his neck. She didn't need the right. One was enough to almost fully encircle it. Grating her teeth against the bile that rose in her throat at the physical contact, she tightened her grip. Do it, she told herself. Choke the life out of the vile bastard. It's long overdue.
Her hand trembled. Why was it taking her so long? She was a vampire; she could crush his larynx in the blink of an eye. Just squeeze, dammit.
And yet she didn't. She couldn't. Her hand shook harder, and then she relaxed her grip, jerking her flesh away from the disgusting contact with his and turning her back on the broken old man lying in the bed.
"You can't do it, can you?" Reaper asked.
She couldn't look at him. "Only because I'd be doing him a favor."
She brushed past him and walked out of the room, then out of the house.
An hour later they were back in the Land Rover, heading northeast. Briar had asked Reaper to let her drive this time, and he'd had no objections. She probably needed the distraction, he thought. She had reverted to the quiet, morose, almost clinically depressed state in which she'd been living during those first couple of weeks after Gregor had tortured and tried to kill her.
Once Crisa had joined their ranks, she'd begun a slow emergence from the darkness. But this episode with her stepfather seemed to have plunged her back into the depths once more. Briefly, he hoped.
"I'm sorry, for what it's worth."
"Sorry for what?" she asked, not looking at him. The headlights of passing vehicles painted her face in streaks of pale blue and luminous white. He watched her in the changing hues, but her expression never changed. It gave him no clue to what was going on within.
"For all of it. Whatever he did to y-"
"He raped me. Repeatedly."
"And you never told?"
"Who would I tell?"
"Your mother?" he asked, watching, probing, sensing the spike of emotion that didn't show in that brief moment before she squelched it.
"He told me he'd kill me if I ever told my mother. Told me she would never believe me, anyway. Told me she would hate me for it. Told me it would kill her. That was the main thing. When he told me it would kill her. 'Cause in the end, I was pretty sure it had."
He tipped his head to one side. "She died, your mother?"
She nodded, bit her lip as if to keep herself from saying anything more.
"How old were you?"
"Fourteen. She had pancreatic cancer. But I didn't know from shit, you know? I figured she must have found out my secret.
And that it killed her, just like that bastard said it would."
He nodded slowly. "That would make sense, I guess, to a fourteen-year-old." He looked at her face, watching its every nuance.
"You know it wasn't your fault, right?"
"Sure." She shrugged. "And the fact that every man I've ever known has treated me in exactly the same way really doesn't mean a damn thing."
He frowned hard, sensing she was finished with the topic, but he wanted to know more. "What happened to you after she died?"
"I lived with her mother, my gram, until she died, too, a year later. Then I was sent back to Stepdaddy Dearest. Or that was the plan. I had other ideas, though. I took off on my own, and I've been on my own ever since."
He nodded slowly and was preparing his next probing question in his mind when she said, "I would have done it, you know."
"Done what? Killed him?"
"Or forced you to, if you'd tried to stop me. I wouldn't have hesitated to use that trigger word on you to take him out."
"That would be about the worst thing you could do to me."
She lifted her brows, turned her head toward him momentarily. It was the first time her expression had altered in any way. "The worst thing I could do to you? Come on."
"No, it's true. If you racked your brain for years, even if you knew everything there was to know about me, my history, my secrets-"
"You have more secrets?"
"Even then, you couldn't come up with a single action that would be more of a betrayal, or that would ensure I never forgive you, than to use that trigger word to force me to kill someone."
"Why? You hate killing that much?"
He shifted in his seat, slanting her a sideways glance and wondering how the tables had turned so thoroughly. He'd been probing her psyche, and now she was poking around at his.
"I don't hate killing. I won't mind killing Gregor a bit. What I hate is having control of my own mind, my own body, my own actions, taken from me. It's like. He searched his mind for something to compare it to, something she could understand. And then he hit on it. "It's like rape."
He thought she winced a little.
"I did it once already," she said, after a long moment of introspection. "I used the trigger word."
"You used it to save my life. And your own. You had no choice."
She nodded and refocused on the road, but not before he thought he glimpsed a shadow of relief in her eyes.
"If you'd used it this time, to make me kill that old man, that would have been different. Especially when all you had to do was ask."
Her brows crinkled, and she turned her head toward him, her eyes searching. "What do you mean? You'd have killed him for me if I'd simply asked you to?"
He nodded.
"I couldn't even kill him. He's in a coma, helpless, sick and in pain."
Reaper shrugged. "He hurt you. He deserves to be sick and in pain, and he deserves to die violently. I do think he's suffering more by being alive, though. Lingering like that."
She nodded, but her eyes were stunned as she aimed them back at the road. "So why would you have killed him for me?"
"It's what I do. Doesn't bother me all that much when it's someone who needs killing."
She frowned. "I can't believe it. You seem like such a... I don't know, a white hat. You don't have any ethical problem with taking someone out like that? With playing God?"
"Why would I?" He drew a breath, sighed deeply. "I'm an extremely moral man, Briar. But I don't see things the way other people do. Never have, not as a mortal and not now. I look at it like this. If a person has a cancerous tumor growing inside them, they cut it out. Mankind is one body, and the individuals make up its parts. Bastards like Gregor, like your stepfather, they're malignancies. They need to be removed for the greater good."
She narrowed her eyes. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,' to quote Mr. Spock."
"Or to quote the Bible. 'If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.'"
"A principled murderer." She shook her head slowly. "Who'd have thought it?"
"I don't murder. I execute. There's a difference."
She nodded, then said, "So what happened to Rebecca was what you'd consider murder, then?"
"Yes."
"And who would you condemn for that crime?"
"Myself. And I have."
"But you weren't in control. It's like you said, someone took charge of your mind and your body without your permission."
"Doesn't matter. I was the weapon."
"Yeah. Well, when I see a shotgun get the electric chair, I'll agree with you." She drove for about a mile without a word, and then, out of the blue, she turned toward him and said, "What did her body look like?"
"Whose body?" He gaped at her. "Are you talking about Rebecca?"
She rolled her eyes. "Yes, Rebecca. When you came out of your rage and found her dead, what did she look like?"
"I'm not going to talk about this."
"Oh, come on. I'm interested, I really am. And you've been trying to draw me out for hours now, so here I am. Coming out.
Death fascinates me. So tell me what she looked like."
He lowered his head, closed his eyes. "She was lying on the floor."
"Face up or down?"
"On her side."
She nodded. "What was she wearing?"
"A skirt. A long white skirt with flowers embroidered around the hemline. A white tank top. A pair of flip-flops." He closed his eyes.
"Flip-flops? Still on her feet?"
"Yeah."
"And this skirt, was it torn? Bloodstained?"
He shook his head while she rushed on. "How was her hair when you found her?"
"God, don't do this. I can't-"
"How was her hair?" she demanded.
He took a steadying breath. "In a ponytail." Then he lowered his forehead into his palm and whispered, "No more, okay?"
"Okay. But all this death talk has made me hungry. Can we hunt?"
He closed his eyes very slowly, then opened them again and focused on her. Could she truly be as cold and bloodthirsty as she was pretending to be? "We've still got stores in the cooler in back," he told her.
"I was hoping to sink my fangs into something warm and wiggling, though."
"You want to kill someone tonight, Briar? Is that what you're saying? Because you had your perfect chance back there with your stepfather, and you blew it."
She shrugged. "I want to kill something worth drinking. I'd have puked if I'd tried to swallow his filthy blood."
"Or maybe you know that I'm starting to see through the mask you wear, and you're trying really hard to put it back into place."
"Is that what you think? That I'm really good, deep down? That I'm just pretending to be a bad girl?"
"That's what I think."
"Bullshit," she said.
He shot her a look. Without warning, she jerked the wheel and drove the Land Rover right off the road, onto the shoulder, then jumped it across the ditch and sent it bounding up the slight rise on the far side, until she reached a flat point a hundred yards from the road, where she finally stopped. She yanked off her seat belt, then turned in her seat and undid his, as well. And then, gripping the hair at the back of his head, she swung a leg over him, straddling him, knees on the seat on either side of him. She used the handful of hair to drag his head up to hers. Her mouth took his, open wide and hungry. And her hips arched, pressing her hollows to his bulges, and making him ache for her the way a drowning man would ache for a breath of air.
Jerking her head up, she stared down into his eyes, and hers were blazing. "You don't really want to believe I'm good, deep down, do you, Reaper? Come on, admit it. It's the bad girl you're hot for, and you know it."
"Bad, yeah. Not inherently evil, though."
"No?"
"And you're not. You're not, Briar."
"Oh, I am. And since you won't let me go hunting tonight, I'm just going to have to prove it."
And with one quick motion, she tipped his head back, and then she lowered hers. Her mouth closed on his neck, wet and seeking, opening and closing, sucking and caressing. He didn't fight it. God, it was too good for him to want to fight it. No man alive would have fought it. She wouldn't hurt him. She wouldn't. She could threaten all she wanted, but he knew her. He'd glimpsed her. She was no different than he was, deep down.
He lifted his chin up a little more. "Do it," he challenged. "Go on, do it." And as he said it, he reached between them and undid his pants. The sound of the zipper seemed to excite her even more, because the next thing he knew, she had scrambled off him, kicked off her jeans, and then returned to her former position. She sank over him without even a second's hesitation, already wet, and he knew, as much as she might deny it, that she wanted him.
He also knew that she felt the same things he did. The mysterious attraction, the longing to know more, to get closer. But he wanted more from her. He wanted to see some hint of emotion in her eyes.
She rode him, and he drove upward into her, over and over, as she kissed his jaw and his neck. Lips near his ear, she said, "Be sure to let me know when you get there, cowboy. I'm gonna make it good for you."
He wanted to tell her it was about her, that he wanted to make it good for her, but she was driving him beyond the ability to speak, and then, when his breath started coming more quickly, and she bounced up and down harder and faster, she felt it. He didn't even need to tell her.
She bent her head to his throat and sank her fangs in deep, so deep he felt them scrape bone. And she continued to thrash him with her body as she sucked the blood from his jugular. She drank and drank, and fucked and fucked, and he started to get dizzy, started to get weak. He'd already exploded inside her, and now his vision was getting blurry and darkness was starting to close in around the edges.
Drawing a ragged breath, he whispered, "Enough, Briar."
She lifted her head. Thank God. For a second there he'd thought she might have been about to drain him completely. Eyes glowing red, she stared down at him and whispered, "It's enough when I say it's enough." And then she lowered her head and resumed feasting.
Briar lifted her head from Reaper's throat when he stopped moving. He was still hard inside her, but he was out cold. Not dead. Not yet. But she'd taken far too much from him. Enough to debilitate him. Enough to render him unconscious.
"Enough to shut you the fuck up," she muttered. And then she climbed off him, righted her clothes and settled herself back behind the wheel. "Maybe I can drive in peace for a while now, without you picking at my psyche."
She glanced sideways at him as she drove the car over the uneven terrain and back toward the highway once more, and in spite of herself, a kernel of worry niggled at her. She would have to keep careful track of him, make sure he didn't wind up dead. If he got close, she would have to give him a few drops of her own blood to make up for some of what she'd taken.
She hit the highway and drove north, attuning her mind to his every so often, just to be sure he hadn't expired. He hadn't. He was dreaming about screwing her, probably thought they were still going at it.
She rolled her eyes and told herself that he was ridiculous, even as she shifted in her seat, aroused by the visions had she glimpsed in his mind. Dammit. She slid him a look and pursed her lips. "Fine. I admit it. I want you. I never felt this much attraction for anyone before, and to tell you the truth, I never thought I'd ever actually want sex. It was either forced on me, or it was a necessity for survival. A means to an end. I never got off in my life... until that time in the car with you." Her lips pulled into a small smile. "Hey, that makes twice we've done it, and both times in a vehicle. I wonder if that means anything? That esoteric bitch Roxy would probably have all kinds of interpretations for it."
She drove a little faster, passing traffic smoothly as she came to it. She flipped on the radio but kept the volume low and soothing. "This is kind of nice," she said. "Talking to you when you're too out of it to hear a word I'm saying, or to try to analyze or dig into my mind or prove to me or to yourself that I'm really some kind of sweet thing, deep down. 'Cause I'm not, you know. I'm a cold bitch, Reaper. You get too close to me, I'll take you down with the rest of them."
She stared at him for a moment, and a whisper of doubt moved through her mind like a warm breeze. She wouldn't take him down. She knew it. She wouldn't hurt him the way she intended to hurt all the others. He'd done nothing to deserve it. Nothing besides try to find something worth caring about in her. It was a futile search, but she couldn't hate him for trying. Dark and dangerous as he was, he was still one of the good guys. And the good guys tended to think there was good in everyone.
But there wasn't, not in her. Never had been.
Suddenly, out of the blue-black night sky, there came a blinding flash of pain hitting right in the center of her forehead and exploding outward. She shrieked in agony, her muscles clenching tight, hand jerking hard on the wheel in a reflexive response to the excruciating pain. She felt the tires leaving the pavement, felt the car going airborne, but even when the impact came, with its
crunching metal and shattering glass, she felt the pain in her head above everything else.