“Do you mean, did Carling order me to take her side?” Duncan asked. He smiled at her, all vestiges of the hard edged stranger gone. “No, she didn’t. She wouldn’t do that. I must take Carling’s side because I love her, and I agree with her stance more than I agree with Julian’s. But that doesn’t mean I can’t see Julian’s side of things too.”
His ability to see all perspectives of a situation would be one of the things that made him such an outstanding attorney. She had to smile. It could make him an outstanding friend as well. Or enemy. It was one more thing that she liked so much about him. His quiet, incisive intelligence had its own kind of bite.
He was still speaking. He said, “And there’s also a big difference between me and Julian.”
“What difference is that?” she asked, growing fascinated despite her initial discomfort.
A thrill ran through her nerve endings as Duncan took one of her hands and played with her fingers. “Thousands of years,” he told her. “You see, I accept Carling’s rule over me. She made me, and I’m young enough to remember how I felt when I agreed to that. Yes, she has the Power to force me to her will, but in the last hundred and seventy years, she has almost never done so, and she never has without having a compelling reason for it. But Julian was turned at the height of the Roman Empire. He and Carling, and Rune too—the three of them are different from us.”
“Us?” she repeated in surprise. “As in you and me?”
“Yes, as in you and me,” he said.
She smiled at him, amused. “Do you realize I’m probably close to two hundred years older than you?”
He grinned. “I was thirty when I was turned, so if you’re over three hundred and fifty, then yes, you are. But the age difference between you and me is a drop in the bucket when you look at millennia. They are all so much older than we are. I think it makes them fundamentally different in some way. And Julian is very dominant. Carling has never changed anyone against their will, so he must have once, long, long ago, agreed to her dominance, but I think he has chafed under her Power for a very long time. Imagine what it must have been like for him when it looked like she was dying.”
She frowned. “I suppose, even if he cared for her, in some ways it must have felt like a relief.”
“That is how I see it,” Duncan said. “For many years they worked well in partnership with each other. They played off each other’s strengths very well. But she didn’t die when she was supposed to, and he wasn’t freed. Now he can’t stand the thought of being under her Power again. And if they ever saw each other in person, she could potentially force him to her will—he is her progeny, after all. I don’t think Julian ever hated Carling before. But I think maybe he has learned to hate her now.”
“The way you describe it, it sounds like they’re in the middle of some kind of duel.”
“That’s a good way to describe it,” Duncan said. “Only this duel may take centuries to play out.”
She shuddered and curled her fingers around his. “It disturbs me to think about you possibly getting caught in the middle of their—” What should she call it? Disagreement sounded far too simple. “Their clash of wills.”
“Oh well,” he said wryly. “’Every family has its ups and downs.’”
Seremela went into delighted shock. “Did you just quote Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine from The Lion in Winter, or was that an accident?”
He smiled into her gaze. “What if I did?”
Under the full bore force of such close contact, her breathing grew restricted. “I loved that movie.”
“I did too. I’ve also had a lot of reason to quote it through recent years.” He pressed a kiss against the back of her hand. “Speaking of families, I think we’re getting ready to land. Once we get the SUV and our supplies, it should take us about an hour to get to Devil’s Gate. Then we can collect your niece and take her home.”
She chuckled. “You make it sound so easy.”
“After Carling and Julian? You bet, this is easy,” Duncan said.
Seremela shook her head at him and gave him a pitying grin. “You say that only because you haven’t met Vetta yet.”
Chapter Four
Death
By the time the plane had landed at the Reno-Tahoe Airport and they had disembarked, met with the travel agency Duncan had used to book the SUV, signed for the vehicle and then inspected the food, water and camping supplies to make sure they had everything they needed, most of the daylight had slipped away. Duncan drove and once they reached US-395 S, traffic opened up and they made good time.
Reno was like many cities in the desert where they seemed to leave the populated area all at once. As he picked up speed on the open highway, he asked Seremela, “Do you mind if I roll down the windows?”
“Not at all,” she said, although he noticed that she glanced at the western sky.
The sun hadn’t completely set but it was low enough on the horizon that at times it was obscured by the hills in the west. The colors of the summer desert evening were large splashes of deepening tan and gold sliced with elongated black shadows, and the departing day left fiery banners of rose, lavender and purple strewn across the sky.
Duncan touched the controls embedded in the driver’s seat door, and the windows lowered several inches. Nevada could reach triple digits in the heat of the day in June, but the heat cooled rapidly in the evening and the fresh air merely felt pleasantly warm.
After a moment, he said, “You know, some Vampyres are rigid about eschewing daylight hours. They will not step outside of shelter until the sun has completely set, and they are well under cover by sunrise every morning. It happens a lot with older Vampyres. Some of them turn agoraphobic and almost never leave their shelters. I’m not sure why. Perhaps as time goes by, they feel the odds stacking against them for having a fatal accident.”
She stirred. A few of her snakes had lifted to the open window, tongues flickering to taste the desert air. To his amusement, a few others rested on his right shoulder. “I guess I can understand that,” she said. “Sunlight is so lethal for you.”
He nodded. “We live side-by-side with death. It’s always there, just a few hours ahead or behind us, around the corner, or a few steps out from the shelter of a roof. But when Carling turned me, I told myself that I would not become like those other Vampyres. I would take sensible precautions but never live in fear.”
“What kind of precautions do you take?” she asked.
“Well, for one thing, I do have a large house,” he said. “If I have to take shelter from the sun, I refuse to feel cramped when I do. All the windows have metal shutters that operate on a timer. They automatically close and lock from sunrise to sundown.” The system took a manual override code to open them any time during the day. Nobody was letting sunlight spear into Duncan’s home without his express permission.
“I’ve heard of those shutters,” she said. “Don’t Carling and Rune have the same kind of thing in their new home too?”
“Yes.” He slanted a glance at her. “And I can’t tell you how exciting it was when full spectrum sunscreen became available. I would slather it all over and comb it through my hair before sunscreen spray made that a lot easier. For a while I looked like a throwback to a 1940s mafia kingpin.”
She chuckled and relaxed. “So it really helps?”
“It does,” he told her. “It protects against accidentally coming in contact with direct sunlight, and it can give a Vampyre up to ten minutes of leeway time to find shade. It has limitations—no Vampyre in his right mind would totally trust his life to waterproof sunscreen and go swimming in the daytime. But it’s especially effective at dawn and dusk, like now, when any sunlight is indirect and fading fast. And I always wear it whenever I go out in the daytime.”
“Good to know,” she said. “I suppose you use sunscreen clothing too.”
“Of course,” he said. “All of my clothes are made of UPF 50+ material that blocks up to 98 percent of UV rays. On i
ts own, it’s not enough, but it is added insurance. And whenever I have to go out in the day, I always keep a cloak nearby, which is also made with sunscreen cloth.”
As he gave her the information, he could see that her natural scientific curiosity had taken over and her nervousness eased. The silence that fell between them after that was thoughtful and companionable, and he smiled to himself.
He’d have to be a liar or blind to claim he wasn’t affected by her beauty, because he was, but what really engaged his interest was her quick mind. It was such a goddamn pleasure to seduce an intelligent woman.
Because that’s what he was going to do. Seduce her. Yeah, this lowdown dirty dog was going on the hunt. He would coax her into sharing her secrets of warmth and passion while candlelight gilded the insanely gorgeous iridescence of her skin. Just the thought of it made his fangs descend, and the whip of the night air turned exhilarative as his groin tightened painfully.
His urges and feelings were in an uproar every time he thought of her or let his imagination run unleashed. So much for compartmentalizing his appetites.
Maybe he would bite her.
Maybe she would bite him.
He kept his mouth shut and his jaw clenched, and he was savagely glad for the deep shadows in the car, and that somehow he managed to keep the vehicle steady on the road.
Maybe she would bite him all over.
Goddamn.
Despite the fact that they had left the city behind and drove in full desert, traffic picked up again when he turned onto State Road 342. Soon a glow of light shone like a dome against the darkness of the night sky, and Duncan knew they were getting close. He followed the flow of vehicles which slowed to a crawl on the two-lane highway, until they came upon a shadowed wall of rock that rose on either side of the road.
“There it is,” Seremela whispered.
An elusive tingle of land magic brushed his senses, along with a sense of other magic sparks flaring in the distance.
Their headlights flashed on a historical marker. Duncan caught a glimpse of the text but it was too small and dense to read. Several yards past the marker, a large, clapboard sign had been erected. Written in orange neon spray paint, the words jumped off the board.
The sign read:
Devil’s Gate
Pop: 28, 993 suckas
69,345
Past 100,000
Who the fuck knows?
He glanced at Seremela who looked back at him, wide-eyed. Then they both burst out laughing. Seremela said, “Even if the tent city is outlandishly bloated, medusae are rare enough that it won’t be hard to find her. People tend to take notice when we are around.”
“I’m sure they do,” Duncan said. Giving in to impulse, he trailed his fingers down her warm, slender forearm and clasped her hand. Her breath caught, the tiny sound all but inaudible, but with his sharp Vampyre’s hearing, he heard it easily.
She didn’t pull away. Instead she turned her hand over and held his, palm to palm. He rubbed his thumb along the smooth skin on the back of her hand and wondered how she could sit there so calmly, because good gods, he was on fire all over for her, and she seemed completely unaware of the fact. He knew he had a good courtroom face, but he didn’t know it was that good.
He drove one-handed, staying sedately in a line that crept toward the tent city at ten miles an hour. A few trucks pulled away and drove off over open land, but without knowing the terrain, he judged it best to follow the main stream of vehicles for now.
They were being stopped up ahead by a hulking troll who then directed them toward the right where they parked in a line. When it came his turn, Duncan released Seremela’s hand and rolled his window down further.
The SUV creaked as the troll laid a hand on the roof and bent down to peer inside at them with small eyes and an incurious expression on his gray rock-like face. “Parking in our lot is three hundred a night,” the troll rumbled. “Cash only.”
Duncan’s eyebrows raised. “Their lot.” If any of them actually owned this piece of land, he was Pee-wee Herman.
“Three hundred dollars!” Seremela exclaimed, leaning forward. “A night?”
The troll gave her an indifferent glance. “You want to keep your car from being stolen? You want to keep your stuff, and all your tires too? That’ll be three hundred dollars. In advance. You don’t like it, lady, go park somewhere else, and good fucking luck with that, ’cause you’re gonna need it.”
For three hundred dollars a night, Duncan could get a room at one of the best hotels in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the world. He shook his head and shifted in his seat to pull out his wallet.
“Duncan!” Seremela exclaimed telepathically. “That’s highway robbery.”
“Of course it is,” he said. “The troll and his organization probably vandalize and steal from anyone who doesn’t use their parking lot. But if it keeps our supplies untouched and we can get away trouble free, it will be worth it.”
He pulled cash out of his wallet and offered it to the troll. The massive fingers closed over one end of the bills and tugged, but Duncan held on to them until the troll looked at him in exasperation. He said softly, “Anything happens, and I’m holding you personally responsible. Not anybody else. You, bucko.”
Maybe the troll finally took a good look at his face and recognized him. Trolls were Nightkind creatures too, and Duncan was, after all, extremely well known. Or maybe something in Duncan’s voice got to him. Whatever it was, the troll masticated his massive jaw as if he chewed on something sour, but he muttered, “Nuthin’s gonna happen.”
“Very good,” Duncan said. He let go of the cash and flicked two twenty dollar bills out of his wallet. “After we park, we’re going to need reliable information. Where?”
“Down Main Street, north side,” said the troll. “Look for the pharmacist. Name’s Wendell. He’d sell pics of his mother’s tits to the highest bidder. But they’d really be of his mother’s tits.” As Seremela stared, the troll lifted his rocky shoulders. “What can I say, guy’s got a code. Sort of.”
Duncan bit back a smile. “He your boss?”
“Yeah.” The troll patted the roof of the SUV, straightened and lumbered back a step. “Now git outta here.”
Duncan drove the SUV gently over the rough, pitted ground toward the end of one row of vehicles where a ghoul in an orange reflective vest stood, flashing them with a flashlight.
“I brought cash too,” Seremela said. “I’ll pay you back.”
“Let’s not worry about that right now,” Duncan said. “It’s unimportant. Let’s just focus on getting your niece.”
“Okay.” She stayed silent for a moment as he parked the SUV. Then she said, “Wendell.”
“The pornographer pharmacist,” Duncan said, deadpan.
“It’s not funny.”
“Of course it’s not,” he said.
A soft, odd noise escaped her. It sounded a lot like hot air hissing out of a tea kettle. He looked at her suffused face, found her looking back at him, and then they both burst out laughing again.
He pulled the emergency brake and killed the engine. “Let’s go see what Wendell has to say for himself.”
“Okay,” Seremela said, eyes dancing, “but if he tries to sell me a picture of his mother’s tits, I’m so out of there.”
Duncan laughed again. “Trust me, I’ll be right on your heels.”
They both sobered as they climbed out of the SUV. Duncan said, “The troll spoke the truth, but we should both keep a light pack with us just in case. This would not be a kind place to be stranded in without resources.”
She nodded, her expression turning grim. She had a large soft bag with a shoulder strap, and she rifled through the contents and shifted over a few items from her carry-on. The last thing she added was a bottle of water. Then she pulled the shoulder strap over her head, lifted her snakes out of the way and settled it firmly across her torso.
Duncan’s bag of essentials, with the w
eapons, money and sun protections, was a leather backpack. He pulled out a Beretta 9mm and a five inch hunting knife on a belt. After strapping the pack to his back, he buckled on the knife belt and tucked the gun into the waist of his jeans, making sure the butt was well visible.
Seremela’s gaze lingered at his waist when he turned to her, but she said nothing about the weapons. She did not carry an obvious weapon, but he noticed that she did not tie back her snakes. Usually she bound them back loosely with a simple scarf at the base of her neck, as though they were dreadlocks. That allowed them to move around but limited their range of reach. Without them restricted in any way, she looked wilder, more feral and exceedingly deadly.
He heartily approved. He asked, “Okay?”
She nodded again. Face calm, eyes sharp. Gods, this woman was hotter than Death Valley in July.
He couldn’t resist touching her again. He cupped her cheek and rubbed his thumb gently along the soft, plush arc of her lips. Her expression softened, and the look she gave him was filled with equal parts tenderness and amazement. He wanted to ask her what caused her to look so surprised when he touched her with affection. He wanted to kiss her slowly and savor that first, intimate taste of her.
Hunger hissed along his nerve endings and turned aggressive. Her mouth would be so soft, the tender flesh giving way under his. He wanted to coax her lips apart and enter her with his tongue, and just the thought of deepening the kiss was so sexual his groin tightened.
Someone shouted nearby, splintering the moment. Frowning, he glanced around at the dust filled parking lot then he offered Seremela his hand. She took it.
“After this is over and we get back to Miami,” he asked, “where are we going to go for our first date?”
Half a dozen of her snakes rose up to stare at him, and the nictating membranes snapped shut over Seremela’s eyes. Then opened. Then shut. And opened. She blinked rapidly and it stopped. “First date?”