Blood Guilt (8 page)

He was a vampire. A very old and powerful one who could move with speeds she could only imagine. He could snatch her back in less than a heartbeat, long before she could reach her stake.

And why the hell would I do that?
whispered a furious, frustrated voice inside her, because now it was too late; now she’d never know his kiss.

And she’d live.

“Stick to looking,” she said harshly.

His eyelids came down like hoods, masking the wild, exciting heat in his reflective eyes. Mihaela, still aching with lust and raging disappointment, tried to concentrate on the relief. And yet she could still imagine his touch on her lips.

Furious with herself, because again she was losing sight of her primary purpose, she snapped, “How do you plan to find Robbie?”

He shrugged infinitesimally. “I’ve already sent word to Saloman and so to the vampires across Europe to look out for him and Gavril.”

She stared. “Is that meant to make me feel better?” she demanded.

“It makes me feel better.”

“So you can just wait, cowering back here?” She sounded like some awful, nagging wife, and even as she hurled the words at him, she knew it, knew she was being totally unreasonable. She just couldn’t stop herself lashing out at him.

“I told you. I’m going to find him.”

She waved one sarcastic hand to indicate the island. “This isn’t exactly on the direct route from Edinburgh to mainland Europe.”

“There are things I need. And you need to sleep before we travel.”

“I’m not traveling with you!”

His upper lip quirked. “I don’t require you to share my coffin. But please yourself.” He turned away, walking toward the painted, iron-hinged door. “You can sleep in here.”

“If you think I’m sleeping in your presence—!”

She didn’t see him move, but without warning, he was right beside her again, as close as before, and this time, he had her face between his large, cool hands.

“Flattered as I am by the courage you attribute to me and the terror I so clearly inspire, we both know you’re perfectly safe here. Stop being so angry. We’ll find Robbie and Gavril.”

Speechless, she could only stare at him, aware of the treacherous tide of desire rolling back through her. To feel those hands on her body… But already he’d left her, striding toward the door once more.

He was right. She was exhausted, and lashing out at Maximilian achieved nothing. Not even the assuagement of her own guilt. Dazed, she put one foot in front of the other and followed him.

“Why do you have all these doors?” she blurted. “You live alone, don’t you?”

“It gives me the illusion of a home,” he said with odd self-mockery. There was a pause while she stared at the back of his head. He opened the door. “Besides, it was an amusing project and passed the time.”

How long had he spent here? A century? More. She could barely grasp the mind-numbing boredom of that. How could he bear it? Because being among others was more unbearable still.

“Why do this to yourself? Just because you hated to lose? Or because you hated what you did to Saloman?”

Betrayed him and staked him and condemned him to three hundred years of agony, and a boredom, surely, even greater than Maximilian’s.

He walked into the “room,” and she thought he wouldn’t answer her. Then he said, “Yes,” and stood aside for her to enter.

There were no murals here, just rough, white-painted walls. An antique oil lamp resided on a flat-topped carved stone “table,” providing an unexpectedly warm, soothing glow. There was a simply constructed chest and bedstead made of wood but covered with intricate carvings. Something else he’d done to pass the time. Books, pencils, sheets of paper littered the floor. Maximilian swiped at them with his feet, creating a path for her.

“Yes,” she repeated. “What does that mean? You hated to lose,
and
you hated what you did to Saloman?”

He swung away from her, but not before she’d glimpsed the depths of blackness in his light eyes. The sight shocked her, paralyzed her.

This time she was sure he wouldn’t answer, and she couldn’t blame him. For whatever reason, Maximilian was in pain.

Then, surprising her all over again, he spoke. “The losing—losing to a bestial, lesser being like Zoltán—emphasized the futility, the wrongness, of what I did to Saloman. I thought my ends justified my means. But I was too young and stupid with ambition to comprehend the ends.”

He didn’t need to say that to her. She wished he hadn’t. It sounded too…human. And she could almost imagine he’d never said it before.

“I have no blankets,” he said, as if deliberately dragging her back to the mundane. He walked to the wooden chest and opened it. “You can use these to keep warm.”

He made no effort to touch her, merely dropped the pile of clothes onto the mattress, which was covered by a worn, white linen sheet. It was all ridiculously inviting. Madness to sleep so close to a vampire. Even knowing that, through Elizabeth, she was to some extent under Saloman’s protection shouldn’t have relaxed her like this. It went against every instinct, every lesson of her life and profession. And yet she longed to close her eyes, to rest, even if just for an hour.

She touched the heavy woolen overcoat and gave in. She glanced round. “Will you wake me in…?” She broke off. He’d already gone.

Even the door was closed over, although not shut tight. Mihaela shut her mouth and sat down on the bed. Since it was none too warm in these caves, she kept on her own sheepskin jacket and pulled Maximilian’s overcoat up to her chin before she lay down. The coat felt old and comfortable, and it smelled of Maximilian. Which was odd, since she hadn’t even registered that he had a smell. Salt and sea mist and sweet, strong earth, and something else she couldn’t place. It wasn’t unpleasant. It wasn’t unpleasant at all.

She closed her eyes, wondering if she could really sleep with a vampire on the other side of a semi-open door. It seemed she could.

****

Maximilian gazed down at the sleeping hunter. Her incredible beauty spoke to the artist in him. It spoke to every part of him, including his loins. Not surprising. It had been a long time since he’d had a woman. Isolation combined with his need to suffer had successfully dealt with the natural desires of the flesh. But there had always been something about this woman. The way she’d moved in a fight—he remembered her from St. Andrews Cathedral, even before the battle in the hunters’ library—made him want to grab her and still her fury against his own body, to turn her passion in a different direction. To sex, with him.

He curled his lip. She’d as soon couple with a slavering beast as with him. They were much the same in her eyes. Or at least in her carefully conditioned mind. The hunters had played upon her childhood trauma to make her what she was—an efficient and ruthless hunter with an implacable hatred of the undead that even Saloman hadn’t been able to fully break through.

And yet there were moments when he scented her desire, when he read something more than fear in her lovely dark eyes. She wasn’t immune to him. She hadn’t been immune this morning when she’d almost let him kiss her. Nor when he’d drunk from her. The feel of her body then, writhing under him with pleasure and blatant desire as he’d sucked the sweet, heady blood from her vein, still made him painfully hard whenever he thought of it. Which was often. With time, he could teach her, if not to love him, then at least to enjoy his body. Mihaela was unfulfilled, and he wanted to be the one who changed that, wanted it with a strength that took him by surprise.

She always took him by surprise. Perhaps it was part of the process of easing himself back into the real world, the excitement of his self-appointed mission, that made her a symbol of life to him.

Or perhaps he just wanted her because she was so damned fuckable with her fine, delicate bones belying the lethal strength of her body; the controlled grace of her clean, quick movements denying the urgent passions of her nature; her clear, almost translucent skin stretched taut across her cheekbones. Sleep had smoothed the lines of anxiety and tension from her face. Her dark lashes were thick and long, casting shadows down to her cheeks. He wanted to draw her like this. With a sudden, unprecedented urge to protect her, he wanted to lie down beside her and just hold her until she awoke.

And then he’d take her, body and blood, until she begged for mercy and came back for more.
Oh, and I’d give her more. And more and more…

He turned away before the sudden intensity of his lust awoke her. Instead, he set about building a fire under the chimney he’d cut out of the stone to rise in an insignificant hole in the hillside. He didn’t need a fire for warmth, but he liked the flickering glow of the flames. He liked to draw and paint in that kind of light. He’d paint her, Mihaela, like that.

But not while she was here. The chances were she already thought of him as a stalker along with all the rest of his crimes, because she’d seen his drawings. While the fire flared, he stared into the flames until he felt her move behind him. She made a tiny, touching noise in her throat as she came to and remembered where she was. Maximilian wondered if she’d notice his erection, which was always present in her company.

He smiled deprecatingly into the flames, then turned to meet her gaze. As if the fire licked his body, heat surged through him, blasting every wounded, sluggish, sleeping nerve back to utter awareness. He knew then that he’d seduce her.

Chapter Seven

She woke to the faint, friendly crackle of fire and the sweet scent of wood smoke. Although she knew instantly where she was, the fact didn’t bother her nearly as much as she’d expected. Even when she sensed his presence in the room. She turned her head on the pillow and saw him crouched in front of a small fire. The smoke was drawn up a makeshift chimney.

He turned his head, and her heart lurched. The flickering flames cast shadows across his face, making it appear more mysterious and secretive than ever. And yet he’d never looked more beautiful.

“What are you doing?” she asked stupidly.

He rose fluidly to his feet, reminding her, as if she needed any reminding, of the lethal power in his lithe, undead body. Her gaze lingered too long on the impressive bulge in his jeans. But that seemed to be permanent for him. She didn’t take it personally.

“Making you breakfast,” he said unexpectedly, and picked up from the floor a fish on the end of a two-pronged fork.

“When did you catch that?” she asked suspiciously.

“An hour ago. There’s an underground stream runs through these caves.” He bent and balanced the fork across the fire. “It’s a mackerel,” he added.

Bemused, Mihaela shut her mouth and sat up. “What time is it? How long have I been asleep?”

“A little after midday, and about three hours. You can sleep longer if you want to. I can’t leave here until nightfall. It comes early up here.”

She
could leave before that. But perhaps he was right. Perhaps it made more sense to go together. She’d no idea where to start looking for Robbie.

“Do we know which flight he took?” she asked, watching as he poured water from a jug into a cup, which he pushed in her vague direction.

He understood immediately. “Paris. From where he could go anywhere. We’d never have arrived in time to find out.”

Mihaela swung her legs out of the bed, dragging the overcoat around her shoulders as she stood, then went and picked up the cup. She gulped down the water and refilled it. The smell of cooking fish assailed her nostrils and made her stomach rumble.

“So we’re dependent on the vampire network,” she observed unhappily, walking across to sit with her back against the bed, at the point nearest to the fire.

“And the hunter network,” Maximilian said.

Her eyes flew to his, stricken. She hadn’t even let them know. Not Konrad or Lazar or Miklόs or even Elizabeth. Jesus, how tired had she been last night?

“Saloman will tell them,” he said.

“But I should have!”

“You thought the boy was with me. Contacting them last night would have made no difference.”

But I’d have been doing my job properly.
“How long will it take to find him?” she asked abruptly.

“I don’t know. It depends how well they can hide and how well Robbie can communicate his whereabouts.” He walked to the fire and lifted the fork, turned the fish, and straightened.

Mihaela shivered. She hated to think of Robbie in Gavril’s power.
My fault…

“It wasn’t,” Maximilian said, and her gaze flew up to his.

“Are you reading my mind?” she demanded, appalled. There were so many things he shouldn’t see there.

“No, but it isn’t hard to see what you’re thinking.” He walked to the chest and returned with a plate. Crouching, he removed the fish from the fire and shook it off the fork onto the plate. Muscles rippled up his naked arms.

She said low, “If I’d let you kill Gavril, it would all be over.”

“We’d have Robbie,” he acknowledged. “But it wouldn’t be over. We’d still need to know what they wanted him for. Gavril is not the only conspirator in this.” He swiveled around to face her. “You owe yourself revenge upon him. I should have saved him for you to kill.”

In spite of herself, an unhappy little smile curled her lips. “You’re trying to tell me we’re both to blame, which we both know isn’t true. But thank you.” She reached for the plate, tearing off some hot fish to cram into her mouth. It was burning hot and delicious but didn’t prevent her adding, “What I don’t know is why. If you were human, if you were a friend, I’d think you were comforting me.”

“And being a vampire, and your enemy, what could I be doing?”

She had no answer to that, so she kept eating. She felt his eyes fixed on her, felt her whole body awaken to awareness under his scrutiny. Then he reached for the pen lying on the floor close by, and his gaze fell instead to the doodles he was creating on the paper. For some reason, he seemed to give off an aura of patience which soothed her.

In fact, eating breakfast with him in these underground caverns felt bizarrely homelike. Somewhere in her rest, he’d become less threatening, almost more familiar. Certainly no less intriguing.

He said, “What do you remember about Gavril? Why did he attack your family?”

The familiar, stabbing pain began, but muted now, perhaps because she was relaxed, perhaps because she’d grown used to thinking of the unbearable event in recent days.

“I remember his eyes and the disgusting taste of his flesh. I don’t know why he picked our house. Luck, I suppose.”

“No.”

Mihaela stopped eating. “No?”

“No. He remembers you. There’s a connection between you. He attacked your parents deliberately. I think he knew them before the attack.”

Oh no, that wasn’t right. Even more than Saloman’s revolution, such an idea struck at the core of her belief system: the random, dangerously chaotic nature of vampire violence. To say nothing of the innocence of her parents. Perhaps Maximilian saw the peculiar, stricken feeling in her face, for he added, “I saw that much in Gavril’s mind. His murder had a purpose. He wanted something.”

“Blood!” Mihaela snapped, and stuffed the waiting fish into her mouth almost angrily.

Maximilian didn’t make the mistake of denying it aloud. Instead, after a few moments, he asked, “Who were your parents? What did they do?”

Mihaela frowned. She’d been seven years old when she lost them. Old enough to have known and understood what jobs they did. “My father was a scientist,” she said slowly.

“What kind of a scientist? Did he work for the government?”

“This was the Communist era. I suppose everyone worked for the government in some sense.”

“And your mother?”

Absently, Mihaela reached for the cup and drank a little water. It was cold and refreshing and brought to mind the image of her mother, dark-haired, smiling, holding a glass of water out to her for a sip. It was part of her bedtime ritual and came after the story, before the good-night kiss.

Her throat closed up. “I think she was a scientist too.”

“Did they work for the hunter network?”

Her mouth opened for instant denial and then closed again. She was as sure as she could be that her parents had not been hunters. Up until their abrupt removal from her life, they’d always been there. There had been no prolonged absences, no dangerous weapons in the house of her childhood. And the speed with which Gavril had killed not only them but Mihaela’s sister didn’t speak of hunter training.

But more people worked for the network than actual field hunters. There were researchers, librarians, scientists…

“I don’t know,” she whispered. Surely she would have found out; someone would have told her…

“Did he say anything when he attacked?” Maximilian asked, his voice steady, without emotion, helping her back to her equilibrium. “Do you remember any conversation?”

There had been noise, upturned furniture, screaming, a horrible ripping of flesh. Mihaela squeezed her eyes shut. “No. No, I don’t think he said anything. After he killed my mother, he pushed the desk over. A big desk that took up the whole of one wall in the living room. My father worked there. They both did… And then he—he grinned and grabbed my father and—”

She seized her hair in her fist without meaning to, clutching it so hard it tugged painfully at her scalp as the memories rushed past her mind in short, sharp flashes of redness. Her sister’s broken body. The struggle with the vampire, biting into his disgusting flesh, gagging on the lump she swallowed, spitting the rest in his face. The crashing open of the front door. And Gavril’s back as he leapt out of the living room window.

Her eyes flew open. “He had something.” She stared at Maximilian. “He took something from our house when he escaped. A brown paper folder, like the kind they used to use in offices. It was thick with papers inside it. That’s what he’d been grinning at when it fell out of the upturned desk…”

“Good,” Maximilian said. One word, and stupidly, it warmed her like praise.

“I don’t see how.”

Maximilian shrugged. “It tells us Gavril had a purpose, even twenty-five years ago.”

“But it would be a damned big coincidence if it turned out to be the same purpose he has now!”

Thoughtfully, she took another mouthful of fish. It was very fresh and tasted marvelous. “I don’t suppose you have a computer here?” she said without much hope. It would be interesting to know if, unlikely as it was, her parents had been seismologists, and she’d left her laptop on the mainland in her hired car.

Maximilian shook his head.

No matter. There’d be plenty of time to check on such things later. There was no denying he’d given her food for thought as well as for her stomach. The idea made her smile.

When she finished the fish, she laid the plate on the floor. “Thank you,” she said with difficulty.

He didn’t respond to that. Instead, he said, “We may have another advantage. I think Robbie has”—he broke off, as if searching for the right word—”a feel for stone. An affinity, as I do. He likes to touch it, and he draws it all the time—pavements, walls, buildings, statues.”

From his jeans pocket, he took something that glinted silver in the fire’s glow and held it out to her on his open palm.

Mihaela frowned. “A compass? How will that help?”

“It’s not really a compass. It’s an instrument of the Ancients. Saloman gave me it centuries ago. It can absorb and direct the holder’s power and point to a similar one.”

She frowned, leaning forward to see it better. “So if you hold it, it could point to Robbie? Because you both have this feel for stone?”

“If it senses him.”

“Does it work?” she asked dubiously. A few months ago, she wouldn’t have believed it. But she’d witnessed several enchantments since Saloman had come into her life.

“I’ve never used it on a human before. But it might help. This is what I came back for.”

She picked the compass from his palm, ignoring the electric frisson when their skin touched, and examined it. She twisted her body around and turned it in her hand, but the needle never moved.

“It doesn’t work,” she observed. “It doesn’t even point north.”

“It isn’t meant to.” He took it from her in two long, tapering fingers and placed it on his own palm. The needle swung. “It uses my power to see through the rock, if you like.”

“Wow. István would love this.”

There was a pause, then, “Who is István?”

Ridiculously, it crossed her mind that there was some kind of jealousy in his even voice. The thought unnerved her, not least because she was afraid she liked it. Angry with herself, she said stiffly, “My colleague, whose back was broken.”

Maximilian’s grey eyes lifted to her face and held. “You care for him.”

“I care for a lot of people,” she said impatiently. It wasn’t true. She cared for István and Konrad, her fellow team members, and for Elizabeth. For Josh Alexander, a little. No one else, lover, colleague, or dinner guest, had ever risen above the rank of acquaintance.

“No, you don’t,” Maximilian said. “You do what you perceive to be your duty: you kill vampires to protect humanity. But beyond the abstract concept, you love only a very few to whom you are fiercely, unreasoningly loyal.”

“Crap,” she retorted as anger flushed her skin. She refused to be read so easily by a vampire, by
him
. Especially when she herself was so unsure of what the hell was going on in her head. “What do you know of love or loyalty? Even by vampire standards, you’re a treacherous bastard.”

She jumped to her feet, knocking his coat off her shoulders because she couldn’t be still. Stuff this; she was better on her own. She didn’t need Maximilian to find Robbie. She had the hunter network and, through Elizabeth, Saloman.

Maximilian never moved except to curve his lips into an amused smile. “Are you trying to hurt me or rile me? I should warn you that either is dangerous.”

Mihaela laughed. “I’m not afraid of you. You can only kill me.” She hurled the words at him like the deepest insult as she stalked away.

However, she’d taken only three steps before he materialized from a blur a yard in front of her. Her breath caught at his speed, at his whole person, but she refused to halt as he advanced toward her.

“You’re wrong,” he taunted, his voice deep and soft, catching at every nerve in her body. “There are many more things I can do than simply kill you. I can keep you here for months and feed off your delectable blood whenever I like, make love to you as often as I choose, which would be very, very often.”

The heat of fury, and something else she refused to analyze, surged through her, working her body without permission. She lashed out before she meant to and was fiercely glad when her right fist connected with his foul, beautiful face. She might have taken him by surprise, or he might have let her. It didn’t matter now; the die was cast. She grasped the stake in her left-hand pocket and lunged.

Although he shouldn’t have expected the left-hand attack, he reacted as if he did, blocking her thrust on his arm. She yanked the stake free, leaping out of reach of his murderous fangs as blood gushed from the wound in his arm. He followed, and she thrust repeatedly with fist, stake, and feet. He blocked her every attack until he caught the wrist that held the stake and yanked her toward him. She couldn’t have resisted that if she’d tried, but she did manage to kick out at the same time with both feet, knocking him over. She fell on top of him, her stake plunging for his heart, because a hunter never hesitates if she wants to live.

Am I really doing this? Am I really going to kill him just because he said I have few friends?