Blood Revealed (16 page)

“Before you toss Dominic into the thick of a Summanus nest to fight his way out,” Patrick continued, “it would be nice to know you are forming your theory based on something other than what your neighbor boasted about.”

He really didn’t like her, she realized. Yet it was a fair question.

She reached down and pulled up the leg of her trousers, then pushed down the top of her boot and turned her leg so that the side of the calf muscle and the big, thick and red scar there was visible. Then she turned her hand over so that the inner wrist was showing, where the smaller and older scar still showed pink. “I speak from experience, Mr. Sauvage,” she assured him.

There was another small silence while everyone ogled her scars.

“Summanus toxin,” Nial said. “If you don’t mind, I would like Winter to examine those. She may be able to tell us something about the toxin and a possible antidote.”

That meant she would have to come back to this big house another day. That would be another day of lost pay. Her heart sank a little.

“That would be a problem?” Nial asked, his voice cool. He had spotted her reaction, even though she had tried to hide it. She had heard that vampires had super senses.

“She loses too many shifts already because she’s out fighting the Summanus,” Dominic said. “She has to keep the money coming in.”

Blythe sighed. “I have children,” she explained.

“How many?” Patrick Sauvage asked and his tone was considerably warmer than before.

“A boy, Jake. He’s fifteen. And Simone and Eloise. They’re both sixteen.”

“Twins. How delightful,” Nial said.

“They’re sixteen,” Blythe said flatly. “No one is delightful at sixteen. However, I think my kids are better than any other kids in the world, so we’ll leave it at that.”

“You’re on your own?” Patrick asked.

“Since shortly before Jake was born,” Blythe replied. She gave him a stiff smile. “Not every man is a hero, except in his own mind.”

“And sometimes not even there,” Patrick Sauvage replied. His mouth quirked in a wry grimace.

Startled, Blythe studied him. That was a comment that would need reflection, later. She looked at Dominic. “Would you help me find the Summanus? Find where they sleep? The risk would be minimized because we would do it during daylight hours and you wouldn’t be alone. I’d bring others who have had experience fighting the Summanus.”

“What about your job?” Dominic asked.

She hesitated. That was a good question. She didn’t know how much goodwill she had left at the hotel. She had dropped shifts a lot in the last few weeks and even though all the managers knew what she was doing, it was trying their patience.

“I’ll pick up your wages,” Nial said flatly. “Whatever hours you spend hunting the Summanus will be paid hours.”

“You can’t…” she began.

“He’s richer than Croesus,” Sebastian said lazily. “Take his money. He won’t miss it. In fact, you should hit him up for a danger bonus while he has his wallet open.”

“A good idea,” Nial said. “Let’s say five hundred a shift. Does that sound reasonable to you?”

Blythe stared at him, the words not quite making sense. “Five hundred?” she said blankly.

“Five. Hundred. Dollars. Per shift, as danger money, on top of your normal wages,” Sebastian said slowly, grinning. “Say yes before he changes his mind.”

“She says yes and thank you,” Dominic said.

Blythe let out a shaky breath. Nial had just more than tripled her normal wage. That made her an official mercenary, something she had sworn she would never become.

Dominic was right. In her mind, she had agreed to it already.

* * * * *

Afterward, they laid in silence in the dark, their heartbeats returning to normal. When the silence extended for longer than Patrick thought he could stand, he spoke. “Are you worried about tomorrow?”

Dominic rolled onto his stomach and looked at him. It was dark in the room yet Patrick could see the details of his face clearly.

“I think
you
are,” Dominic said.

Patrick sighed. “Yes.”

“She says it will be perfectly safe.”

“Except that no one has ever come across a sleeping Summani before. You don’t know if they can still move around, if they can fight back…”

“I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.”

“I don’t trust her,” Patrick said. It took guts to say it aloud, even though he knew that Dominic could pluck the thought from him without the words, if he wanted to. Yet he had to say it, to know that Dominic had heard him. “She is hiding something.”

“Maybe. Maybe she’s just a single mother, with worries she keeps to herself.”

“You know that from what you saw in her mind?”

Dominic shook his head. “I tried not to dig into her mind. I can’t always read everyone as easily as I can read you and I don’t always want to.”

Kids. Patrick worked that one over in his mind one more time. Three kids. Blythe Murray defied all the stereotypes of a single mother. She was controlled, contained. There was no hint of a frazzled and overworked woman juggling too many things at once.

On the other hand, her concern about the money proved that she was just as challenged as the average single parent trying to spread too few dollars over too many expenses.

Then he forced his thoughts away from the subject. Getting to know people outside the industry was always a very bad idea.

“She’s not really an outsider, though, is she?” Dominic said, as if Patrick had spoken aloud.

Patrick didn’t voice the tiny seed of irritation he felt. Dominic would read the irritation for himself and besides, he did it so often that Patrick had grown used to it.

“I suppose she’s not an outsider, if you are looking at it from the perspective of the vampires. You know I was thinking from an industry point of view. That’s a habit that isn’t going to go away anytime soon.”

Dominic sat up. “Do you mind that I’m going to work with her tomorrow?”

“Of course not,” Patrick said quickly.

“Then what is it about her that you don’t like? Something was biting you this afternoon.”

Patrick sat up, too. He wasn’t tired, of course, but he had come to like lying beside Dominic while he fell asleep at night. He had heard Sebastian and Nial talk about this phenomenon before and now he understood it better. Keeping a favorite human company while they slept was a privilege.

It seemed that Dominic wasn’t interested in sleep. He was going to pursue this.

“I told you, I don’t trust her,” Patrick replied.

Dominic gave a little shrug. “You don’t know her. How could you trust her? You’ve spent thirty years keeping your guard up, wary of anyone who wasn’t a professional. It’s not like you can drop that habit overnight. You just said so yourself.”

Patrick couldn’t dispute that.

Dominic wasn’t finished yet. In the dark he tilted his head as if he was looking at Patrick closely, except Patrick knew that he could only see him as a dark shadow. “In Blythe’s case, you don’t
want
to put your guard down.”

“Let
your guard down,” Patrick corrected. It was very rare for Dominic to make a mistake with his grammar.

“Whatever. Don’t dodge the point.”

Patrick forced himself to find an answer for Dominic. It seemed only fair that he explain himself. He wasn’t sure why he was wary of the woman. She was the antithesis of anyone he had ever been romantically involved with—a single mother, not in the industry, not stunningly beautiful, although she had an odd attraction about her that seem to derive from her physical strength and possibly a mental strength, too. She was a brunette, she had short hair and she wasn’t impressed by his fame.

So he didn’t have his guard up because he wanted to avoid a relationship with her, because that was never going to happen. Besides, there was Dominic.

“Thank you,” Dominic said softly, a small smile forming at the corner of his mouth.

“I think,” Patrick said slowly, “that it really is just habit. A holdover from before. All my protective shields go up when I come across a fan. It’s automatic now, after all this time.”

“She isn’t a fan. She barely looked at you. It’s not like she asked for your autograph.”

Patrick realized he was smiling. “She is a fan,” he said flatly. “After all this time, I can spot them, even when they don’t say anything. They have a way of looking at me, from the corner of their eye, when they think I’m not noticing. And there’s an alertness about them, as if they’re trying to notice absolutely everything and are soaking it up for later.”

Dominic scratched his head. “I don’t get it. Doesn’t the word fan come from fanatic? Aren’t all fans gushy and gooey and the women hysterical? They used to throw their underwear onto your balcony.”

Patrick laughed. He couldn’t help it. “I could have opened a national franchise for used lingerie with the number of panties and bras that got tossed at me over the years. It’s one of the weirdest things that my fans in particular used to think was a good idea to get my attention. Those are the ten percenters, though.”

“My fans were far more civilized,” Dominic muttered. “Autographs and lots of sex.”

Patrick felt his eyes grew wider. “You slept with them?”

“Why not? They liked me and I liked them enough to make it mutual. There are not a lot of sexy women of the right age in the classical music world. I didn’t have to beat them off with a stick like you do.”

“If you had looked beyond dragging your ten percenters into bed with you, you would have found more. People can be fans without drooling all over you. Most of them are. They’re the ones who will buy everything you make and perhaps even follow your profile online. They’ll pick your movie to watch because you’re in it, yet they’re not obsessive and they have lives of their own.”

“And Blythe is one of those sorts of fans?”

“Pretty sure.”

“And because she is, you don’t want to like her?”

Patrick sighed. “Put like that, it sounds incredibly superficial. Like I said, I think it’s just a habit, a holdover. Maybe I should give the woman a break. She is your new working partner.”

Dominic rolled his eyes. “It’s just this one time.”

“That’s not where it will end. I know you’ll be good at this and I know that she will be brilliant at it. You won’t be able to stop. It’s not just this one time at all.”

“Can you hear the Summanus if we’re talking?” Blythe asked. “It will look more natural if we chat as we go. I don’t want to freak out the neighbors by looking like two black ops on patrol.”

Dominic smiled at the idea of looking like a black ops anything. “It’s not exactly hearing, but there’s no mistaking their signature when I sense that. Talking is fine.”

They were moving along the sidewalk of a quiet street in San Bernardino. It was nine in the morning. It was going to be a bright, cloudless day. Already the warmth from the sun was soaking through Dominic’s shoulders.

At Blythe’s insistence, they were both wearing sturdy trousers and boots and long-sleeved shirts made of cotton, light enough so that the heat wasn’t a major issue. Cotton was best for minimizing the toxin, Blythe had explained. Man-made fibers were no shield at all.

The most disconcerting thing about the pair of them, though, was the broad sword strapped to her hip. Although on Blythe, it looked very natural. She wore it like she was comfortable with it, which meant she had worn it a lot.

“Aren’t the cops going to arrest you for carrying a weapon?” Dominic asked.

“Not around here. Everyone knows who I am and what I do, now.” She was casually scanning the street ahead of them as she walked and it seemed to Dominic that her jaw was tight. “They might ask what the hell I’m doing during the middle of the day. Mostly I’m out at night, same as everyone else.”

“You said there were others…?”

“I didn’t see the point of dragging them along until we actually found a nest.” She tapped the cell phone sitting on her other hip. “I’ll yell for them when we find something. Don’t worry. They’re there and waiting. Eager, actually. I had to argue them down from an armed patrol.
That
wouldn’t have gone over with the cops.”

Dominic rarely noticed what a woman was wearing, unless it was blatantly sexy and designed to entice. Yet he couldn’t help noticing the difference in Blythe’s clothing today. She wasn’t wearing jeans like him. Her cargo pants that were tucked into ankle-high boots. Both the pants and the boots were a dark green. She wore a sleeveless tank top underneath a light windbreaker that was also green. She left the breaker unzipped and when she moved he could see the handgun nestled up against her side, just under the small rounded breast.

She wore no jewelry. Her accessories were strictly defensive and included the sword and a knife tucked into her boot. Dominic had learned to spot knives, including the hidden ones. He was pretty sure she had another knife somewhere else. Hard experience had taught him that if someone was carrying a knife openly, that could be easily taken away from them, they usually had a backup somewhere else.

Everything she wore underlined a military background and her defensive posture now. She may not call it working, yet she had reverted to a soldier’s mindset.

“Were you a Marine?” Dominic asked.

“Hell no,” she said. “I was plain old Army infantry. Nothing special.”

“An officer?”

Her gaze swiveled toward him then back to scanning the street. She waved a fly away. “I retired from active service as a lieutenant,” she said softly.

“Then you had your own battalion?”

She laughed. It was short and hard, with underlying tension. “I was only a lieutenant. Captains and majors run battalions. Lowly lieutenants get to run squads and sometimes platoons.”

“Then you had your own squad?”

There was a pause before she answered. “I commanded the hundred and first infantry division.”

Dominic sensed there was more and waited.

“I held the command for eighteen days,” she said finally.

“What happened?”

“Afghanistan happened.” She nodded ahead. “We’ll haul left at the corner and circle the block.” Dominic didn’t need to read her mind to know that she was deliberately changing the subject. He didn’t mind. As she had spoken the name of her division he had felt a storm of impressions, including gun fire, flames and screaming. Things exploding, the sound so loud nothing else could be heard. And the heat. The oppressive heat was everywhere.