Claimed by the Immortal (The Claiming) (6 page)

Had the power summoned them? Were they being influenced to make something unnatural look natural? This whole scene seemed off somehow.

“I can handle them,” Damien murmured.

Caro might be on leave. She might have even fallen off the cliff of reality, but she was still a police officer. No way was she going to encourage violence and most especially from a vampire who could probably leave these guys shredded on the pavement, if what she remembered was true.

She stepped forward, throwing back her jacket, revealing her weapon and her badge clipped to her belt. “You boys have a problem?”

Behind her, she heard the door of the shop lock. She certainly couldn’t blame Alika for that.

And then something shifted. It was one of the weirdest things she’d ever seen. Usually it took time to talk down troublemakers, but this was so different. Their gazes, intense only a moment before, changed. They looked around a bit as if wondering where they were.

She took advantage of the moment. “Just go find legal fun. Okay?”

Then she heard Damien speak in a tone that sent shivers all the way to her toes. “You heard the officer.”

As if on marionette strings, the young men turned and walked away together. No hesitation, just instant obedience.

She watched them disappear down the street and around a corner, uneasiness crawling coldly along her spine. Bad enough to face some unseen force, but to see it manipulate others was scary indeed. Damien was counting on keeping her surrounded by witnesses to protect her. Had this
thing
figured out a way around that? By using humans as its tools?

Annoyance, a good antidote to fear, reared up and she turned to Damien. “I could have handled that.”

“I’m sure. But how much time do you want to waste?”

“All we seem to be doing is wasting time.”

“Time is never wasted in the company of a beautiful woman.” Then before she could tell him to cut the crap, he added, “Actually, I learned a few things. My place, your place or Jude’s?”

Jude’s would have probably been the safest choice, because even though he had sent Chloe home, he was probably still there himself. But all of a sudden she didn’t want to be safe. Maybe it was the result of adrenaline, affecting her sense of risk.

Regardless, she knew she needed some answers, answers to questions she should have asked years ago of her grandmother, and questions she needed answered for her own peace of mind.

Then there was curiosity. The kind that made her body shiver. The kind that pooled heavily between her legs. She wanted to know. It was as simple as that, adrenaline or not. If she could get him to promise not to drink from her, how much harm could a fling do? Maybe it could drive away this damn sexual miasma that filled the air around him.

Nothing, life had taught her, was ever as good as you anticipated it to be. With any luck, he’d turn out to be a selfish, lousy lover and she could kick him to her mental curb and get past this.

One thing for certain, she had to get her head clear to deal with this threat. She couldn’t afford the continuing distraction of wanting Damien. Not if she had to be around him so much, and considering the limited number of allies she had right now, it appeared she was going to be around him a lot.

“Your place,” she said. Then she watched his eyebrows climb in surprise and enjoyed a brief sense of pleasure at having startled him. Small consolation considering what he was doing to
her
mind and emotions.

God, was she really thinking about making love with a
vampire?

But it wouldn’t be lovemaking, she assured herself. Damn, she hardly knew the guy. All it could be was sex. Simple and straightforward coupling. Uncomplicated. Just to get it off the table.

Caro liked to keep her tables clear. It was part of what made her such a good cop and such a good candidate for detective: problems were meant to be solved or dealt with, not allowed to linger and thus cloud one’s thoughts.

Dealing with this vampire seemed to have risen to the level of clearing the air or becoming swamped until she couldn’t see clearly. While she was distrustful of her ability to keep her emotions out of something like that, she was even more distrustful of her ability to concentrate when she kept getting drowned by the seductive presence of Damien Keller.

Just sitting beside him in the car had her aching with the anticipation of a teen about to make out in the backseat for the first time.

Vampires. Damn. Grandma had warned her. Which for some reason made her think of Red Riding Hood and the wolf concealed in granny’s clothes. She glanced at Damien as they drove toward his place and wondered if she was planning to get in bed with a wolf. Hell, he’d said flatly that he was a predator, and she was definitely on his menu.

Yet he claimed certain restraints. Well, she guessed she was going to find out. Of one thing she was absolutely certain: he had revealed something when he’d expressed concern about whether she would expose Jude. So he wanted to protect Jude. That meant he wouldn’t do anything that might cause her to hurt Jude.

And that, she reasoned, made her fairly safe. He had, after all, backed off like a scalded cat when she had rejected him. Although how she was supposed to protect herself against a creature that could move faster than her eyes could see, she wasn’t quite certain.

Somehow she imagined he wouldn’t hold still for a wooden stake through his heart—even if that might actually work.

Then the ridiculousness of her own thought processes struck her. She was thinking about having sex with Damien while also thinking about how to kill him. Maybe it was a damn good thing she was on medical leave.

“I’m losing my mind,” she said to the night.

“Want to go to Jude’s?” he asked.

“What good will that do?”

“Well, I don’t know why you think you’re losing your mind. I thought you’d decided you didn’t want to be alone with me any longer.”

“If that were my only problem....” If that were her only problem,
what?
There was no thought to complete. She sat staring into the yawning pit of a world she had refused to believe in all her life, and now she could no longer pretend it wasn’t so.

“Hah!” The sound escaped her sharply.

“What?”

“I’m fairly smart. It’s not easy to pull the wool over my eyes. I spend an awful lot of time outwitting people who make the mistake of thinking they’re smarter than the average cop. It’s actually usually easy. Do you have any idea how stupid most criminals are?”

“I can guess.”

“The idea of a criminal mastermind is mostly the invention of fiction.”

“All right.”

“So anyway, I consider myself reasonably smart, street-savvy and not easy to delude. Yet apparently I’ve been living a delusion all my life.”

“Mmm.”

That was totally noncommittal, she noticed. It didn’t assuage her any. “And I don’t even have the excuse of not having been told all my life that there was a world invisible to most of us.” She paused gloomily. “Of course, before I became a cop there were other worlds that were invisible to me.” The night streets, the gangs, the drug runners, the prostitutes...a whole lot that hadn’t crossed her path in the neat little middle-class neighborhood her grandmother had raised her in.

Becoming a cop had been like a bath of cold water, pulling blinders from her eyes as she faced the real sleaziness of the world. She’d dealt with that. Surely she could deal with this.

After she remained silent for a while, he spoke quietly. “Has it occurred to you that that world you just discovered was careful not to reveal itself to you?”

“I suppose.”

They pulled into an alley not far from the warehouse district, the kind of place that put her on immediate alert for trouble. Her hand went immediately to the butt of her gun.

“I’m only here for a short time,” Damien said. “I had to take what I could find.”

“If you keep reading my mind, we’re not going to get along well.”

“I’m reading your scents. I can’t read your mind.”

“Neither can I,” she muttered, half wondering what her little rant had been about exactly, and mostly paying attention to all the shadows that could hide threats.

But nothing stirred. He turned a corner off the alley into a small parking area and switched off the car. “We can still go to Jude’s,” he said.

For the first time it struck her that he might be as nervous about her as she was about him. The big, tough vampire who had made a bold pass at her wanted to take her to Jude.

The thought actually made her smile. She’d thought she knew who had the upper hand. She couldn’t have been more wrong.

“No,” she said, turning that smile his way. “Let’s get this settled.”

* * *

That smile wasn’t comforting. Nor were the words
Let’s get this settled.
Not that Damien had any deep need to feel comfortable, but he didn’t like not knowing what she meant.

He already had the sense that Caro Hamilton could be a formidable adversary. Not only had she been toughened by being a cop, but she was a nascent mage who might at any moment discover the powers she’d been keeping buried in favor of the popular concept of reality. Now that he and that formless energy that pursued her had shattered her concept, something else was going to emerge.

From long experience, he knew he didn’t want to get into it with another mage unless he absolutely had to. And the most dangerous mage of all was one whose powers were uncontrolled and unfamiliar.

He grimaced as he led the way to the steel loading doors that provided his protection from the nosy. The building in which he had settled had been abandoned nearly a decade ago, left to rats and insects and rot.

Nothing like his comfortable place on the outskirts of Köln, even though he’d wasted a little time and money to fix it up. Not much, though, since most of the hours he spent here were in the sleep of death. He
had
gotten rid of the rats and bugs.

It wasn’t much, and he watched her look around, taking in the mattress on the floor with a quilt covering it, a rickety table with two chairs, and a couple of oil lamps.

“It’s cold,” she remarked, keeping her coat on.

“I don’t feel the temperature.”

She eyed him. “Not at all?”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry it’s uncomfortable for you here. Let’s go somewhere else.” How careless of him to have even suggested they come here. He should have remembered she needed warmth. In fact, he rarely overlooked such things, and the oversight was so uncharacteristic that he knew a moment of uneasiness.

He had stayed here too long simply because he was enjoying the company of another of his own kind for the first time in too many centuries. But in staying, he had been reminded that he could no longer run on automatic.

“This is sad,” she said.

“What is?”

“That you live like this.”

“Trust me, I don’t live like this all the time. I have a home I’m sure you would find quite comfortable. This,” he said with a wave of his hand, “was intended to be only for a few weeks. I simply lingered longer.”

She faced him, standing with her feet apart, firmly planted as if ready for anything, and her question was almost a challenge. “Why?”

Why?
Why what? Why had he stayed, or was the question something deeper? It seemed entirely too truculent to be simple curiosity.

Then he smelled it, ambrosia in the air. Her sexual scents overpowered everything else, at least for him. He could no longer smell the dankness of the room, or the lingering odor of burned oil from the lamps. He listened to the throb of her heart, its rhythm of need unmistakable. He could hear the soft swoosh of the blood slipping through her veins, but more important, he smelled the desire in her.

The scent was growing. When she had parted her legs to challenge him, she had freed it, signaling him as surely as if she had spoken.

He hesitated only briefly, aware of what had happened the last time he had approached her. Now he knew what she wanted to settle. She hoped by giving in to the hunger they both felt, she could dispel it.

And maybe she could. There was only one way to find out.

He walked toward her, taking care not to approach faster than she could see. She took one step back until she leaned against the brick wall. Her gaze, though, remained steady, and she evinced no desire to move away.

He preferred better ambience for this, more grace and foreplay, more time to enjoy and savor. That could not happen in this cold, nearly empty room, yet she was choosing here and now.

So she wanted it to be as bald and unadorned as it could get.

He smiled faintly, knowing she was going to get more than she anticipated was possible under these circumstances. With the experience of centuries behind him, he could enter any woman’s mood, play any woman’s game and delight her in whatever way she demanded.

She was trying, though, to make it as difficult for him as possible. Ah, but for him nothing was too difficult.

When he stood just inches from her, she tilted her head a little to look into his eyes. He read defiance and determination in her face and posture, along with passion.

She wanted a cure. That was one thing he wasn’t going to give her.

“No blood,” she said throatily.

“No,” he agreed. Her game, her limits. To a point.

Then, utterly without warning, he slipped his palm between her legs, drawing it upward until he nearly lifted her from the floor. It was a bold, demanding, controlling gesture, and he half expected her to resist. Instead, all that happened was that a delightful groan escaped her and her eyelids fluttered. Her thighs clamped around his hand, but his strength was such that he could still move his fingers and palm, pressing, stroking, titillating. He used the seam of her jeans to taunt her more.

Even through her jeans, he could feel her damp heat, a pleasure of the greatest kind for him now that the only warmth he could feel came from a human touch. He reveled in it, savoring it, letting her heat flow from his hand, up his arm, encouraging more and more of it with the dance of his fingers.