A Stone-Kissed Sea

  “You’ll be able to eventually,” Baojia said, soothing her. “And the time will pass faster than you can imagine.” He paused. “I want you to think about your family when you choose your aegis, Makeda.”

  “You think I should go with yours because of Katya.”

  “No,” Baojia said. “I think you should go with Lucien. Because of Katya.”

  Lucien froze. Oh, the young assassin was smart.

  “What?” Makeda sounded horrified. “You think I should choose Lucien?”

  Was his protection really so distasteful to her? He remembered the smell of her blood—the agony and ecstasy of her bite—and his own blood rushed south.

  “Lucien is a child of the ancients. His mother is the oldest vampire known to our kind. She is the source of our blood. Our power. Saba owes allegiance to none. In many places around the world, she’s worshipped as a goddess. She is not a power, Makeda. She is the power. If any came before her, they are not remembered. And if they are not remembered, they do not exist.”

  The silence in the small room was oppressive, and Lucien wished he could see Makeda’s face.

  “And Lucien is this woman’s son?” Makeda finally asked.

  “He is.”

  “So if I chose his aegis—”

  “It would put you and your family under the protection of arguably the most powerful vampire in the world. If Saba ever called her blood…”

  “We would all feel it.”

  “I believe so.”

  Not that she would, Lucien thought. His mother wasn’t interested in empire anymore. Once, she’d ruled a continent. She said the responsibility gave her a headache.

  “You think my family and I would be safer under Lucien’s aegis.”

  “Katya already has your father’s loyalty and obligation. If she had yours as well—”

  “All our eggs would be in the same basket,” Makeda said, grasping the implications immediately. “But if I choose Lucien, my family would have both Katya’s protection and Lucien’s.”

  “It would.”

  “Dual protection like that would give Katya pause should my father ever fall out of favor with her.”

  Lucien closed his eyes and focused on her voice.

  Makeda’s mind ensnared him. A curl of anticipation tightened in Lucien’s gut when he thought of her already brilliant mind enhanced by amnis. She would be dazzling. Luminous. Captivating.

  A queen.

  Desire for her burned in his blood.

  ❖

  Lucien waited in Baojia’s office until the vampire returned. Baojia glanced at Lucien sitting in the office chair on the other side of his desk, and his mouth tightened.

  “In the future, I will not hide your presence from her,” he said. “Don’t put me in the middle of your arguments.”

  “Will she choose my aegis?”

  “She hasn’t decided,” Baojia said. “For now, leave her alone. Your presence is too disruptive.”

  “I haven’t done anything to—”

  “Stop,” Baojia hissed, glaring at Lucien. “You know exactly what you do to her. Sometimes I think you delight in it. Makeda is my child whether she chooses my aegis or not. If I was worried only for her emotional well-being, I would keep her as far from you as I possibly could.”

  Lucien steepled his fingers. “You know I’m the better choice.”

  “I do. It doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

  “I thought we were friends.”

  “I don’t like it when my friends manipulate my other friends.” He didn’t sit as Lucien did. It didn’t matter. Both of them knew Baojia’s power was a fraction of Lucien’s. “You’ve made it clear you need her mind, and that’s the only reason you saved her life. How do you think that makes her feel?”

  “Makeda is a rational woman. She understands why her life had to be preserved.”

  “Stop pretending there is only science between you. You didn’t do this for rational reasons, Lucien. Don’t lie to me.”

  Lucien said nothing.

  “If she chooses you,” Baojia said, “this antagonism must stop. She will depend on you, especially within the first year. Whether you are honest about your feelings for her is your choice. But your feelings are not her fault, so find a way to handle your resentment.” Baojia paused. “I expected better of you, Lucien.”

  The quiet admonition pricked Lucien’s conscience. He closed his eyes. “She tempts me. I don’t like it.”

  “Everyone in the lab saw your bickering for what it was,” Baojia said. “And we all know why you didn’t sire her yourself.”

  Because siring Makeda would have killed off the possibility of anything more than a paternal relationship.

  “I won’t insult either of you by cautioning against an intimate relationship,” Baojia continued. “The roots of… whatever you two have were evident months ago. But you are more powerful than she is. You are older and have more control. Show your honor and let her lead in this.”

  He kept returning to the addictive pleasure of her bite. “And if I can’t?”

  “Don’t use weakness as an excuse.” Baojia picked up a note near the phone on his desk. “We both know your self-control is unparalleled. It’s the only reason you can work with patients as you do.”

  Because a vampire performing surgery in the throes of bloodlust wasn’t something Lucien could allow to happen. His mind touched on the cool self-control Makeda had mastered in her own body, and he wondered if her transition to immortal life would be easier because of it. She was, in her own way, as controlled as he was.

  Except when she’d bitten him.

  “I need to go into town,” Baojia said. “I managed to convince the human police that Makeda sustained only minor injuries, but I had to use amnis when they wanted to question her. If I don’t resolve things, there will be too many questions. The human who owned the car filed a report.”

  “Whose car was it?”

  “Her neighbor. Philip Marin.”

  Something about the neighbor scratched at his mind. It was the same neighbor who had interrupted Lucien at her house weeks before. They weren’t lovers; Lucien would have smelled the human on her skin. There had been only the faint whiff indicating casual contact.

  So why did Makeda have access to his car in the middle of the night? And why had that car slid down the hill when Makeda was a competent driver? It could have been a random accident caused by the storm, but not knowing irritated Lucien. Makeda had only scattered memories of the minutes before the accident, which wasn’t unusual in humans who’d experienced head injuries, so she could offer no insight to the cause of the crash.

  “Have you spoken to Philip Marin?” Lucien asked.

  “No.” Baojia looked up. “The police said he left a few days ago for a meeting in Palo Alto.” His eyes narrowed. “Right after his car was crashed and a friend was seriously injured?”

  “The meeting could have been unavoidable and he was informed she had no major injuries. Has he called her phone?”

  “No. Natalie has it. No calls except from her family and a few colleagues from her former lab. Natalie’s been dealing with them.”

  A phone call would be the bare minimum a friend might expect in this situation. Philip Marin’s actions were leading Lucien to speculate he’d left town for other reasons. Protective anger simmered in his belly. “Was the car examined?”

  “The car is barely recognizable.” Baojia nodded toward the door. “But I know someone in San Francisco who can sort through it. I’ll need to call him up and get him into the impound lot. Shouldn’t be a problem. In the meantime, I’m going into town to talk to the police. You coming?”

  Staying at the lab would only make his thoughts circle around Makeda. “Who’s monitoring her?”

  “She wanted to be locked in alone. She has a store of blood and her notes. Ruben is watching her, and I have two extra guards on call. One human and one vampire.”

  Ruben was Lucien’s second-in-command of the lab, but he
was also trained by Baojia. The guards were simply a precaution.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said. “Let’s see if Makeda’s accident was really an accident.”

  ❖

  Lucien stared impassively at the human who was trying not to panic. Philip Marin was buried up to his neck, his pale face had lost the sun-kissed tan, and pallor had stolen the calculation from his expression.

  “I don’t know any more than that,” the operative said. “I was supposed to watch her. The night of the accident, I panicked. She said she’d had a breakthrough. The breakthrough. I knew my bosses didn’t want that to happen.”

  “And your bosses are…?” Lucien had his suspicions, but he’d rather know for certain.

  Philip was silent.

  “Your birth name isn’t Philip Marin,” Baojia said, standing next to Lucien in the cavern cut by the Pacific Ocean. They’d found Marin two nights earlier in San Francisco, trying to find passage to Europe on a freighter. “Interpol identified your prints as belonging to Stavros Marinos, a low-level criminal with drug connections and a history of identity theft.”

  “You’re a nobody, Philip.” Lucien dug his feet into the wet sand around the human. The earth pressed in, turning Marin’s face red as he struggled for breath. Lucien eased back. “Tell us who hired you.”

  “They’ll kill me,” Philip choked out. “They’ll kill me no matter what—”

  “Don’t you understand?” Lucien crouched down, his bare feet flexing in the gravelly sand of the sea cave. “You’re going to die. You are not leaving this cave alive. You stole her life, Philip. You must answer for that.”

  Terror filled Philip’s eyes. “I can give you names.”

  “I know you can.”

  “I was hired in Istanbul. Zara Olegovna hired—”

  “Zara is dead,” Lucien said. “Who else can you give us?”

  Panic as waves lapped at the rocks near the entrance. Tiny sea creatures were beginning to skitter along the pebbles.

  “I don’t know! Aris was my boss, but it was Zara who—”

  “I told you Zara is dead, Philip. Give us something new, and we’ll kill you before the crabs begin to nibble your face.” Lucien took a stick and flicked it along Philip’s ear. “They have very small claws. It might not hurt much at first. It will probably be the tide that kills you.”

  “Laskaris!” he cried. “Rumors were everywhere in the city. He wants to take over the Greek court. Kill his rivals. Regain the glory of Athens and that kind of bullshit.” Philip descended into panicked blathering in his mother tongue.

  Laskaris. It was exactly who Lucien had suspected based on his mother’s reports and the information he’d received from allies, but he needed more than rumors. The old Greek was the de facto leader of the oldest vampire court in Europe. Athens had once ruled the Western world, and many vampires still looked to it as the epitome of wisdom even though the four immortals that made up the court had become lazy and self-indulgent.

  “Laskaris is funding production of Elixir?”

  “I didn’t work for him. Not directly. I worked for Zara. She’s the one who brought it to him. She came up with the idea… Laskaris ran with it. He wants an empire. Wants to fucking take the world back to the Stone Age and shit. That’s all I know.”

  “Why kill off humans?”

  “He says there’s too many. They’ll be too hard to manage. The Elixir is population control. He takes out enough humans and vampires, the rest will be easier to conquer. He’ll take out his rivals, starting in the Mediterranean, then move on from there. He thinks he’s fucking Alexander the Great or some shit.” Philip blinked rapidly, his eyes never leaving the waves. “You’re going to kill me.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want to drown,” he whimpered. “Please God, don’t let me drown.”

  Lucien looked at the waves creeping into the cave. “Yes, I imagine it’s quite terrifying.” He looked back at Philip. “Do you think Makeda was terrified when she couldn’t steer your Jeep and she started sliding toward the trees?”

  Philip began to sob.

  “I’ve never liked cars,” Lucien said. “They can trap immortals just as they can trap humans. The difference is, vampires are much harder to kill. Not like Makeda.” He ran a cold finger under Philip’s jaw, tapped on the pounding pulse. “She was like you, Philip. Soft. Breakable. She didn’t survive the crash.”

  The human would be useless for any further interrogation. It didn’t matter. He’d confirmed what Lucien had suspected. He stood and turned to Baojia. “Keep the waves back until I can speak to her.”

  Baojia raised an eyebrow. “Offering up her murderer?”

  “It’s her decision to make,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the quivering human buried in sand. “Besides, she needs the blood.”

  Lucien walked out of the cave and up the rocky path leading to the bungalows where his patients had once lived. No patients anymore, just the burgeoning power of a woman who tested every one of his instincts. When he reached her door, Ruben stopped him with a single raised hand.

  The stocky vampire had been his assistant for almost three years, leaving his home in San Diego and following Baojia to Northern California when he’d learned of the scientific research Katya was funding. He’d been a biologist as a human. Now he was Lucien’s assistant and Baojia’s pupil.

  “Sorry, boss,” Ruben said. “She doesn’t want company. She specifically mentioned yours.”

  “I have her murderer buried in a cave down by the beach. I need to know what she wants to do with him.”

  Makeda pounded on the door, and Ruben turned and unlocked it. As soon as the dead bolt slid free, an irate Makeda wrenched the door open.

  “Who?”

  “Your neighbor, Philip Marin.”

  Shock. Then awareness. “The steering. I remembered something about a deer. Thought I must have swerved… But no, it was the steering. I couldn’t move the wheel. I started down the hill, and the road started to twist.”

  “Marin tampered with the power steering. He was desperate to stop you from reaching the lab, and he took a chance you’d reach the cliffs before it gave out. If it had gone out on the highway, you’d have had no issues. But once you reached the hills—”

  “He wanted me dead.” Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”

  “He works for the vampire funding production of the Elixir. He was ordered to watch you. He panicked when he thought you were close to a cure.”

  “Where is he?” Makeda bared her teeth, her fangs long and already red with her own blood. “Where is that bastard?”

  Lucien caught her arm before she could take off into the night. On her own, Makeda could go on a killing spree. There were still humans at the compound, including Natalie and her children. If bloodlust overwhelmed her senses, she wouldn’t know a loved one from an enemy.

  “With me,” he said, “or you don’t take a step out of the building.”

  She tried to tug her arm away, but Lucien held firm. Ruben didn’t raise a hand, not even when Makeda looked to him for help.

  “Sorry, Mak. I made bad decisions my first year that I’ve had to live with for seventy. I’m with Lucien on this one.”

  Makeda said nothing more but left her arm in Lucien’s hold and began walking. As soon as she hit the outside air, her face turned toward the ocean.

  “It wants me,” she said on a breath.

  He’d wondered whether she’d have an affinity for fresh or saltwater. Apparently Baojia’s blood ran true. Makeda needed the sea.

  “Come with me,” he said. “Slowly. Be deliberate in your movements, or you’ll appear too fast to the human eye.”

  “But there’s nobody around.”

  “Practice now. Build the discipline now. Your mind will be particularly malleable for the next six weeks.”

  “Six weeks? Exactly?”

  “Very near to exact.”

  Makeda paused and thought as she slowly walked down the cliff.

&nbsp
; “Piaget’s theory of cognitive development?”

  He wasn’t surprised she’d made the connection. “Related, in my opinion. Amnis enhances processing and that involves the physical as well as the mental. It seemed natural there would be a link between human and vampire cognitive development. The next two years will be crucial for you.”

  She continued to pepper him with questions about the science as they walked at what felt like a snail’s pace down the cliffs. “Does a twenty-four-month time line hold in vampires?”

  “Anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that, but there’s no way to test it.”

  “Has human cognitive theory affected how newborns are trained in the modern era?” Makeda asked.

  “For some of the more scientifically inclined.”

  Lucien relaxed as they walked and talked at deliberately human speed. Her arm remained in his grip and—whether she realized it or not—her face remained angled toward the ocean. No wonder, as it was the element aligned with her amnis. The tension in her skin eased as the sea air touched it.

  “I have my own theories,” he continued. “My mother scoffs at them.”

  “Oh?” She glanced at him from the corner of her eye. “I imagine so. How were you trained as a newborn vampire?”

  “She made me hunt lions.” Lucien shrugged when Makeda’s eyes went wide. “They weren’t endangered then. Lions are very good at hiding, and they are very patient.”

  “But vampires are faster than lions.”

  “So are gazelles, but lions still kill them.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Makeda couldn’t stop breathing in the misty air. It was manna. She felt as if she could survive on the sea air alone.

  Until she scented a hint of human blood.

  Lucien’s hand tightened on her arm, and she heard growling.

  “Calm, Makeda,” he said. “Calm.”

  The feral sound was coming from her own throat.

  “Stop.” She forced her feet to a halt and tore her eyes from the mouth of the cave where the delectable scent originated. “I want to walk in the ocean.”