Blood Guilt (7 page)

Surprise as well as the force of her charge rolled Maximilian off Gavril, with her now on top of Maximilian, stake raised.

“He’s mine!” she raged. For the parents who’d loved her and the sister she must have played with, the hands that had held hers when she crossed the street…

Maximilian jerked under her, almost heaving her off; then he twisted and threw her against the sofa.

“Mine,” she repeated wildly, already acknowledging how stupid she sounded but not caring in the slightest. She seemed to have reverted to the child she’d been when she’d first confronted Gavril.

If only stupidity were limited to words. Behind Maximilian, Gavril leapt out of the broken window, escaping both of them. He carried a child in his arms.

Something shifted in Mihaela’s head, a flash of memory. She’d seen Gavril’s back before, as he’d leapt out of a window, carrying something… But that was hardly her priority right now.

“Robbie!” she screamed, hurling herself at the sill, careless of the lethal shards of glass in her desperation to see if Robbie survived and where Gavril took him. Something flashed to her right, disappearing round the corner into Castle Street. It was a start.

As she turned away, she realized Maximilian stood beside her. He didn’t look at her.

“Vengeance,” he observed, “is overrated.”

She had nothing to fight that with. Nothing at all. He jumped onto the sill like some monstrous bird and jumped. Some instinct made her grab at him uselessly. He hit the ground softly, firmly, like a panther, already running toward Castle Street.

Mihaela swung away, dashing her hand over her eyes. There would be time for tears, along with recriminations, later. Once she’d put all this right. She ran to the door, grabbing up her bag and coat and the discarded stakes from the fight.

Amazingly enough, the front door stood intact, although the wood had splintered where the lock had been broken. And an elderly neighbor stood on the landing looking concerned.

“Is everything all right, dear? Do you want me to call the police?”

“Oh no, that’s okay,” Mihaela said hastily. “It looks worse than it is. I’ll sort it out. Bye!” And she ran downstairs with a quick, silent apology to Elizabeth for leaving her home in such a state.

Since everyone else had gone that way, she hurried toward Castle Street while dragging out the vampire detector. Remarkably, something was still registering some fifty meters behind her. She spun around, and something on the pavement caught her eye. Bending to pick it up, she saw that it was her mobile phone. Robbie’s best hope.

“Shit,” she whispered, still clutching it in one hand as she stared at the needle of the detector in the other. A car came careering down North Street toward her, and the distance indicator flashed so quickly downward that she stared, frowning into the car as it roared past her.

The vampire Maximilian was at the wheel.

Mihaela pocketed the detector, ran to her own hired car, and set off in pursuit.

****

He drove like a maniac. There was no way she could keep up and live. But by a mixture of guesswork and sensible assumptions, she found herself crossing the Forth Bridge and heading for Edinburgh. She began to relax, flexing her white-knuckled fingers on the wheel. Edinburgh was good. Somehow, she could find them all there. And if necessary, she could call in the British hunters to help. Robbie’s safety far outweighed her petty desire for personal revenge against Gavril. What the hell had she been thinking?

She hadn’t been thinking at all. And now that she was, she wondered about Maximilian all over again. What exactly was his game? Had he used the little scenario to keep Robbie and get rid of rivals in one blow? If so, why bring him to her? None of it made any sense.

It made less sense as she reached the Gogar roundabout and a car shot over at breakneck speed to the accompaniment of several horn blasts from those he cut off. Mihaela swore, for the speeding car looked a lot like Maximilian’s. Now it was her turn to annoy her fellow drivers and drive right around the roundabout and follow back the way she’d come.

Her heart sank. They appeared to be heading to Edinburgh Airport.

And yet, as she was about to enter the airport car park, wondering how on earth she would find any of them, Maximilian, Gavril, or Robbie if they’d already checked in, her silent detector on the dashboard abruptly vibrated.

An instant later, a large gray car whizzed out of the car park. Maximilian.

Mihaela’s heart drummed as she wrenched the steering wheel around. Had Maximilian found Robbie? Had he taken him from Gavril?

Is Gavril dead? Did I fail in that too? What was he carrying when he escaped from our house all those years ago? Not a body. Not a person. It was smaller, much smaller than that…

It doesn’t matter. Robbie’s what counts. Only Robbie. Until he’s safe.

****

It was a long night. She never drew near enough to Maximilian to tell if Robbie was with him. She didn’t know if Maximilian was following a trail or trying to lose her, if he even knew she was there. She caught only tantalizing glimpses of his car in the distance—once at a petrol station, and once she drew close enough for the detector to go off again. In this way, she crossed Scotland in the dark, heading north and west until she reached craggy, beautiful coast.

He’s going home
, she thought in wonder. He’d taken Robbie back to his hidden lair—or was on his way there—where no one had been able to find him for centuries after Zoltán had defeated him for control of the East European vampires and he’d chosen to eschew the world.

But it was almost dawn. The vampires would have to shelter somewhere. All she had to do was look for Maximilian’s car. Or…

Slowing to a halt at the side of the road, she reached across to the passenger seat and rummaged for her powerful binoculars. She got out of the car and, shivering in the cold, gray dimness of pre-dawn, she scanned the sea for vessels of any kind. Not so much as a fishing boat.

She got back in and drove on, watching out for his car on the coast road and stopping frequently to look for any boats on the water. There were several tiny islands, most with no signs of habitation. But then she doubted Maximilian would leave many.

****

With his feet once more on solid ground and his immovable hand grasping the child’s shoulder, the vampire Gavril had yet another great idea that made him smile.

Using Robbie’s own power to help mask him from the human passengers, police, and immigration officers they walked among appealed to Gavril’s sense of irony. Even if Robbie had struggled, no one would have seen him.

But Gavril couldn’t help feeling particularly clever when the new idea came to him. Having Maximilian in the game was not something he’d anticipated. Encountering him in Edinburgh at the wrong moment had been fucking bad luck, and their best chance of eliminating him when he was drunk had been foiled by the hunter popping up from nowhere.
That
hunter, of all people…

However, Maximilian was the greatest threat to Gavril’s project. He’d already forced the planned experiment to happen without Robbie, and now, to avoid the spotlight, Gavril had to move faster than he’d intended. Worse, Maximilian wasn’t prepared to join him or even to turn a blind eye. Jealousy, probably, because he hadn’t thought of it first. Gavril had even offered him leadership of the project during that silent struggle in St. Andrews, but Maximilian hadn’t believed in his sincerity. Rightly, as it happened.

No way was Gavril giving up control of the earthquakes that would ravage the world, decimate the human population, and leave the way open for
his
rule. It was
his
discovery, his plan, and he was keeping it. Because it was such a great one that had been building in his head for a quarter of a century while he grew strong enough to implement it. And when his Scottish contact had discovered Robbie…

Well, it just had so many possibilities: mainly his own meteoric rise to power over the vampire world, but also, perhaps, through the mass slaughter of humans, the rule of vampires in general over whatever humans were left. There would have to be enough of them to supply the vampires with blood, of course, but he rather liked the idea of enslaving weak and deluded humans…

However, this part of his plan was more nebulous and dependent on how well the first part went. He didn’t really mind if things never went that far. The first step had been the experiment in Scotland—which had to count as successful, even without Robbie’s presence. The second, crucial step, was the real thing, which could be easily accomplished now with Robbie’s presence and the knowledge acquired during the Scottish experiment.

Mass death and carnage all caused by
him
. He, Gavril, would change the balance of power forever.

Oh yes, his plan was well on the way to fulfillment.

But the fact remained, Maximilian was a pest. Too strong to take out without a lot of allies and weeks of planning Gavril could simply not spare.

Then, guiding Robbie through the crowds of the airport, he had his brilliant idea. And the beauty of it was, it also inspired him as to how to deal with the annoying hunter. But first things first.

Ferdinand
, he called across the miles. And when that didn’t work, he gave his telepathic voice a little boost via Robbie.
Ferdinand!

A surge of anger and contempt struck him, causing him to stumble. Robbie glanced up at him in the first alarm he’d shown. Perhaps he wasn’t so stupid after all. Still, since it was best the boy wasn’t frightened, he smiled reassuringly at him, just as Ferdinand spoke inside his head.

You
had better have a damned good reason for disturbing
me
.

Oh, I have. I’ve just run into an old friend of yours. Maximilian.

The old vampire’s hatred almost exploded in one word:

Where?

****

The sun was beginning to rise, turning the gray sky into an increasingly spectacular pink-and-gold painting that reflected in the glacial, gently rippling sea. Despairing, Mihaela lifted the binoculars to her eyes one more time. And something moved, some shadow too far away to make out, disappearing over the horizon.

Or it might have been her imagination.

It didn’t matter. In the absence of his car, it was all she had to go on.

Chapter Six

Some three hours later, she cut the engine of her borrowed motorboat and used the oars to pull herself quietly onto the island.

It had been hard to find, which gave her real hope that this was the right place at last. She’d asked a lot of questions of the locals and looked at a lot of maps, always remembering the exact position of the shadow that might have been Maximilian and Robbie on a boat, or might have been nothing at all.

What if he’d been too late? What if the sun had risen and he’d burned up in front of Robbie’s eyes and the kid was left alone at sea? She didn’t really believe that. Maximilian was six centuries old; he simply didn’t make misjudgments like that. Despite his reputation for seclusion, she had to consider the more likely scenario that there were other vampires there, maybe even Gavril. And her best weapon in such an unequal fight was daylight. You didn’t get much of that in a northern winter day, so she couldn’t afford to waste any time.

Lugging the boat far enough up the beach not to get whipped back in when the tide went out again, she tied it to a rock for added security, and, with a quick glance at her silent detector, she began to walk toward the tumbledown lighthouse. Abandoned since the mid- nineteenth century, when a more modern and useful one had been built closer to the shipping lanes, it was regarded as more of a folly than anything else, for it had never served any useful purpose, at least according to the locals she’d spoken to.

She wondered, as she strode across the scrubby, sandy grass and climbed over mossy rocks on the hill, if he were watching her. Her skin pricked under her sheepskin jacket. Did he sleep in the daylight? The weird, eerie sleep of the vampire she’d witnessed before, mainly while clearing out fledgling communes in the mountains of Transylvania. Or was he like Saloman, who rarely so much as closed his eyes? According to Elizabeth, who should know.

The lighthouse no longer had a light. In fact, the higher part of the edifice had crumbled altogether. It did still have a door, which was closed. Mihaela pushed it, and to her surprise, it gave creakily to let her in.

Bad sign, she thought ruefully. There was no effort to keep strangers out. Plus, her detector wasn’t registering any vampire presence.

But neither was there anything here to attract anyone inside. There was most of a roof over the entranceway, but the rest was rubble. Any rare visitors who stumbled on the place would glance around as she was doing, and, realizing there was nothing to see, would leave again. Better than a lock, she thought with growing excitement, which might only attract attention.

If he’s really here, he’ll have masked his presence from human eyes as well as vampire senses…

Gingerly, she pushed her way past the rubble, staring hard at every surface until she made out the narrow door in the wall. Even so, when she touched it, it again became uncut wall to her eyes. Only by feel did she discover the handle. She pulled, and it opened smoothly, though only onto darkness. Delving for her torch, Mihaela shone it inside. There was nothing to see. It might have been a cellar once, small and cold. It smelled only of damp stone, and there was no way down. Or was there?

In her pocket, her detector began to vibrate.
Got you!

Mihaela crouched down and felt with one foot until she found a step, firm and solid, made of stone. She stood on it and, grasping her stake firmly in one hand, felt for the next step. In this way, curiously disoriented and vulnerable, she made her way down the steps and into the cellar. By shining the torch and staring so hard at every stone that it hurt her head, she found yet another door.

At first, she thought it was locked, for her first tug didn’t budge it. A second, stronger effort did, and that was when she knew without doubt that she was right. This was Maximilian’s lair.

By the light of her torch, she read the detector. A vampire presence registered several yards away but stationary. Somewhere beyond this room. The cellars must spread beyond the lighthouse, under the actual hill it stood on. The walls of this chamber were painted white, and all sorts of odd things filled the cavernous space—rocks and pebbles of various shapes and sizes, sea shells, feathers of different colors, pieces of sea-washed driftwood, a single, ancient, salt-stained boot, a tiny rowing boat, a red ribbon, piles of assorted seaweed and lots of varied junk that looked as if it had been washed up from the sea.

What did he want with it all?

Straining her ears for the smallest sound, she moved on to the next door, which wasn’t masked at all. How far did this labyrinth go? Before she opened it, she consulted the detector. The vampire presence did not appear to have moved, but since she had no idea of the spaces she was dealing with here, she had to be prepared to encounter him as soon as she opened the door.

Dropping the detector back in her pocket, she pushed the door open and leapt through, brandishing her stake at emptiness.

But not at darkness. There was daylight in this room, not exactly bright, but there, filtering through from a hole angled into the ceiling to strike one particular spot. She could even smell the salty seaside air. These walls were painted too, but not plain white. They were covered in huge murals, rugged landscapes, some stormy, some merely gray, some tinged with the delicate shades of sunset or early sunrise. They were peopled with a weird array of characters, from naked Renaissance-type nymphs to an old man in a raincoat and peaked cap. Not one of them smiled, and whatever the weather portrayed in the pictures and however bright the splashes of colors, the overall effect was of darkness, bleakness.

“Jesus,” she whispered, half laughing in nervous astonishment before she remembered to check the detector. He still hadn’t moved, so far as she could tell, and he was still beyond this room, although the distance was no longer so great.

It seemed likely he was asleep, that if Robbie was with him, the child was too. Would he wake when she passed through the next door, which, from some sense of rightness or of humor, he’d painted to look like a medieval wooden one with iron hinges?

Debating her next move, she looked around the painted room. It was lined with pots of paint, of the type you used to paint your house, lumps of stone and carved statues. Some wooden shelves constructed in the corner displayed tubes of oil and acrylic paints, stone tools like chisels and hammers. Little pots and palettes littered other shelves and a rudimentary wooden table. A stool and an easel stood in the middle of the room, well back from but facing the thin beam of daylight from the hole in the ceiling.

Unable to stop herself, she crossed to the easel to see what he’d been working on. A landscape on canvas, savage, stormy, magnificent in its way, yet curiously unrelieved. The colors were all dark, unrelenting, despairing.

The picture caught at her breath, tugged at some hidden, confused emotions deep inside her. It seemed to her he had a prodigious talent, and if vampires had no soul, he surely still carried the memory of one…

She turned away, looking instead at the half-formed stone figure on the table. It appeared to be human, female and voluptuous, its curves sensual and so alluring she wanted to touch them. But beyond that, it had no features, no neck or head. Under it were pencil drawings on paper. Lots of them. The top one looked familiar.

She glanced at the door, at her unchanging detector, and, keeping the stake to hand, she dropped the detector back in her pocket so that she could gently maneuver the drawings from under the half-made statue.

She was right. It made her flesh tingle just to look at Saloman’s opaque black eyes staring at her from the drawing. He’d caught it all, the Ancient’s power and arrogance, the profound depths of eyes that had existed millennia too long, the beauty of his face, of the way he held himself, at once soothing and challenging and letting no one, least of all himself, get away with anything.

She could read all that and more in Maximilian’s drawing. She’d never seen half of it in Saloman’s face before. Too busy being petrified.

She lifted it up to see better, acknowledging as she should have long ago what it was about that being which so attracted and enslaved her friend. As she held it up to the dim, narrow light, her eyes fell on the drawing below, and her heart skipped a beat.

Slowly, she lowered the drawing of Saloman and stared at the new one. Undoubtedly Mihaela. The drawn figure crouched on the floor, a pointed stick in her right hand, staring up at the “camera.” Her eyes were huge, her face severe, her expression at once aggressive, afraid and deeply, sensually aware. The whole impression was one of defiant vulnerability, and for some reason, it made her throat ache.

He’d seen all that, the bastard. He
knew
. Knew she’d take on any monster of the darkness without fear and yet couldn’t face an instant of gratitude. Not when it was linked with the power of such wicked, intense attraction.

But she’d forgotten to check the detector. And now she didn’t need it. She could
feel
him. She jerked her gaze up in panic, and there he stood, just on her side of the open medieval door. Her heart leapt into her mouth, and with it came stupid words.

“You remembered me.”

“It’s rare to find someone who looks more threatened by having her life saved than by the prospect of it being taken. I remembered that. And your beauty.” His eyes flickered. “I couldn’t get it right, though. I wanted to sculpt you, but the position was wrong, and I couldn’t make it work.”

She followed his gaze to the unfinished statue on the table and felt her eyes widen. “That is
me
?”

“No. I wanted it to be.” He began to walk toward her, and at last, she remembered the real reason she was here.

“Robbie,” she gasped, thrusting her free hand in her pocket to grasp the second stake. The first he’d have seen already, and she needed something to surprise him with if she was to win this fight. “Have you got Robbie?”

He shook his head. “Robbie’s with Gavril and the others. In Europe.”

“Where?” she demanded.

“Robbie doesn’t know.”

Her breath caught. “You’re communicating with him?”

Maximilian nodded and came to a halt a foot away from her.

“Is he afraid?” It came out as a whisper, because she couldn’t bear the idea.

“Not really. He doesn’t want to be there, but he’s interested. And they don’t hurt him.”

She swallowed. “Why did you come back here?”

“To collect what I need to find them.”

She searched his pale, reflective eyes. “I don’t trust you, Maximilian,” she whispered. Her lips felt cold and oddly rigid.

“I know.” His gaze dropped to the region of her mouth, causing her stomach to surge with memory; then, almost immediately, he lifted his eyes to the drawing on the table. He frowned, as if irritated by mistakes she couldn’t even see.

“What do you
really
want with Robbie?” she asked desperately.

“I want to know what Gavril wants from him.”

“Did you set us up? In St. Andrews? Did you bring them?”

“I wanted to see if they’d come, if they could reach Robbie through my masking. They shouldn’t have been able to, and yet they could.”

“You should have warned me!”

“I came back,” he said, as if that made up for everything. She shied away from that; it was her stupid action which had let Gavril escape with Robbie.

“Why me?” she managed. “Why did you bring him to me?”

He lifted his gaze once more to hers. Something burned behind the lightness of his eyes, like smoldering ashes. “Because you’d protect him.” His lips quirked slightly. It might have been a smile. “And because I like to look at you.”

“Why?” It was a stupid question, and through the burning of her cheeks, she wished she could snatch it back.

He didn’t answer at first. He stepped closer. His hand came up, and when she flinched instinctively, it paused. He waited, holding her stare, and then continued the journey of his hand until it touched her cheek, trailing his fingertips down the line of her jaw bone to her lips.
Oh Jesus Christ…

“Perhaps to get the drawing right,” he murmured. “And the sculpture. Perhaps to know.”

“Know what?” she asked huskily. She felt the movement of her lips against his finger, right down her spine to her toes. But pride wouldn’t let her back away, and somehow she couldn’t bring herself to throw him off.

He frowned, his eyes intent. “Life,” he said, bending closer, inhaling her like perfume. At least it broke the terrible eye contact for a moment. But as his hair brushed against her cheek, her neck, she shivered. She was aware of his lithe, strong body, not quite touching hers, and had to fight the insane urge to close the distance, to fit herself against it more closely even than when he’d lain on her and drunk her blood.

Oh shit, if he bites me now…

His head lifted a little, his gaze now on her lips. There was heat in his pale eyes, a silver spark of vitality she’d never seen in human eyes. It enhanced his beauty way beyond what was bearable. She drew in a shuddering breath, and he gave the faintest smile, as if he felt it on the finger that now glided along her lips, tracing the outline of her mouth.

The caress was gentle, the touch of a butterfly wing, and yet it sprinkled shards of pleasure through every nerve. Her breasts ached to press themselves against his chest. The hot dampness between her legs paralyzed her. At the corner of her mouth, his finger paused and bore down ever so slightly. And yet that lightest of pressure made her gasp, parting her lips, and his dying smile sprang back to life.

He lowered his head until his mouth hovered above hers. Barely a hairsbreadth separated their lips. Her heart seemed to have stopped beating, waiting for that tiny distance to close, waiting for her to close it.

What would it be like to feel the vampire’s kiss? To feel his cold, curiously sensual mouth on hers? Her whole being ached for it with a force that shattered her. Just a kiss, just one…

Which would put her in his power forever.

As his other hand touched her nape, she stepped back out of his reach.