Companions (12 page)

She plucked the envelope from under the wiper. It was heavy in her hand. There was a small piece of folded paper inside, and something else. When she tipped the object out of the envelope, a gold coin fell into her palm.

The gold coin bore the incised image of an owl on one side. There was writing in a language she couldn't read but did recognize on the obverse side. She knew exactly what this was and was pretty sure where it came from. What was it doing here? And why had it been given to her?

Selena got in the car and drove. She didn't unfold the piece of paper that came with the Enforcer's coin until she was seated at her desk in the precinct office.

"Raleigh, honey. it's not like we don't have a lot of other open homicides on our book."

"Yeah, but this one really — "

Selena watched guiltily as her partner shook his head. The confused look in his eyes hurt her, but she carefully did not urge him to continue. He was trying to remember the details of the decapitated corpse case. She didn't have time or energy or the stomach this morning to try to refresh his forgetfulness.

Raleigh was her friend and partner. Messing with his mind went deeply against her conscience. Besides, she wasn't a vampire. No one but a vampire — and an enforcer, at that — was good at permanent psychic mind wiping. She could suggest, but the suggestions wore off quickly.
It's safer for him not to
remember,
she reminded herself,
or at least not to care. Safer for everybody involved.

Aching conscience or no, Selena looked him in the eye, sucked in a breath between her teeth, and said,

"It's a dead-end case. We've got no witnesses, and what physical evidence we had was corrupted by the lab. Didn't I mention the forensic problem before?"

He stared into her eyes for a while, long enough for his eyes to glaze, and a blazing headache to start
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burning white hot between her eyes. Finally, Raleigh shook his head again. "No. No, you didn't."

"Sorry." She fought painful weariness but managed to keep her movement casual as she gestured toward her computer screen. "I've been exchanging E-mails on the lab screwup with Forensics. Thought I told you."

"I haven't seen the autopsy report."

"Body's been misplaced."

He looked more cynical than disbelieving. "You're kidding."

"The whole thing's a screwup, Raleigh." She tapped a stack of file folders piled on her desk. "Plenty here with a chance of solving. We're a lot closer to bringing in a suspect on the Herrera, for one."

"Yeah."

She felt like a rag, an aching one, but she managed a smile. "Want some coffee?"

He wasn't too fooled. "You look beat."

"Couldn't sleep. Came in early."

He glanced at his watch. "Eight-thirty now. How early is early?"

"I don't know. When's dawn this time of year?"

"Early. I'll get the coffee."

Summer, she remembered, had short nights. Which physically kept Steve out of the picture, or out of her hair, depending on what she was doing, for long hours yet. Once Raleigh was away from her desk, she picked up the envelope again and spilled the coin into her palm. God, but her head hurt, so badly that the lights in the room — from her computer screen, even the glinting gold of the coin — sent excruciating stabs of pain through her.

"I'm a cop," she muttered. "Not an Enfo — " Selena closed her hand on the coin. Hidden away in her tight grasp, the gold was warm and heavy and all too real. She had a moment's panicky thought that maybe even a mortal's holding the coin was a blasphemy that would bring a terrible retribution. Like maybe the owl image on the coin would burn into her hand the way the Eye of Ra thing had burned into the Nazi's palm when he grabbed the amulet in the Indiana Jones movie.

Far from frightening her, this image made her laugh at the ludicrous comparison. But then there was an echo of laughter inside her head, and she felt the brush of a presence inside her mind. She pushed at it. It pushed back. She stumbled, tumbled, grabbed hold, and they fell.

Selena's eyes flew open, and —

The golden wings fluttered, the talons reached out to grasp — If anything in the world could have
made Selena scream, that would have done it. Instead, she dropped it as though she had been
burned.

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Another hand snatched it out of the air, and she found herself looking into laughing blue eyes.

"It's only a trick of the firelight."

Those eyes she knew, though he looked so much different. Darker. Younger. "The mustache is not
you," she said, referring to the drooping mustache that framed his wide mouth.

"It's a fashion statement."

He wasn't wearing black, either. He was dressed in a wide-sleeved brown shirt decorated with red
and yellow embroidery and baggy pants tucked into worn, flatboots. She had to admit that the
mustache did go with this Eastern European outfit. He looked like an Istvan for once. And the
place… She looked around. They were standing near a campfire in a forest clearing. Primitive
tents and carts, dogs, and people populated the shadows. The stars were infinite overhead, and
close. The air was full of the scents of pine, woodsmoke, and horse droppings, but oh, so clean
and delicious to breathe.

She looked back at Istvan, utterly relaxed and smiling, tossing the coin in the air and catching it
over and over in the flickering firelight. He didn't look any less dangerous in his peasant garb.

There was a long knife sheathed on the belt that cinched his narrow waist. She'd doubted he'd
ever be mistaken for a nice guy, no matter where he was. And just where
—

"Ah," she said, understanding with a swift clarity that burst on her like one of those stars above
going nova. "This is where you live."

"You walked inside my head," he agreed. "You started it."

Even as she spoke, the usual urge to argue left her. Inside his head, he was human still. He hadn't
invited her in, but here they were. He wasn't trying to push her out or close her off, not yet.

Curiosity and a wary pleasure in being with him like this kept her from complaining that he
shouldn't have come dream walking into her thoughts in the first place.

She concentrated on the coin as it flashed up into the air, then down into his palm. "Why owls?"

she asked him. "Why coins?"

"Did you know that the Enforcer of Los Angeles is adealer in rare coins?" he asked. "No. Of
course you don't. Do you? "

"Maybe."

He didn't ask how. "Been over to his web site, have you?"

"Even Enforcers have to make a living."

"So they do."

She drew closer to him and to the warmth and light of the fire. "What is it you do?"

He gestured. It took in the camp and all the world that encompassed it. "I kill vampires."

"Why?" It was an odd question to ask, she supposed. And how odd to find anything odd,
considering the situation.

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"Family business," he answered.

She could feel a change around them, in him. He drew back, she held on fiercely, refusing to be
left behind as his mind shifted back through time, deeper into the reality of some long-ago time
and place. Perhaps he could have tossed her out, if there hadn't been that cord of connection
between them. For a moment, everything went black around her, suspending her between her life,
his, and the tangible world. Fear of the dark emptiness almost drove her away. Then she realized
what it was and deliberately spread herself out into the void and through the loneliness he wore
like a cloak… No, a black leather coat, she thought with a smile.

"We're going to have to work on this fifteenth-century mind-set of yours… Steve."

She heard him sigh. Felt him give in.

And suddenly they were seated before the fire. Hisarm was around her shoulders, her body
relaxed againsthis. He held the owl coin up to the light, tilting it to leftand right. The bird of prey
stamped into the pure metaldid seem to move on the surface of the gold. "There's no magic in it,"

he said.

"I see. It is a trick of the light. Where do they come from?"

"The coins? Or the vampires?"

"Either. Both."

"The coins traveled from a land far to the east, where the Silk Roads run. So did my people, I'm
told. The Roma. They say the Roma fought wars against the strigoi in ancient times and followed
after when the strigoi fled, but I think that's a lie. We're not a warrior people. Our blood's
entwined with theirs somehow, and we're the best at killing them. That much I know is true."

Silk Roads? She vaguely remembered a travel show she'd seen on television. "The Silk Road's a
trade route that crossed central Asia from China, isn't it? Vampires are from central Asia? "

"Where they came from I don't know. I only know that they built a great city there once. The city
is gone now, in ruins for hundreds of years, that much my father learned and he passed on to me
before he died."

He did not sound like he regretted his father's passing. She didn't offer condolences. "What
happened to the city?" She was pretty sure she knew what happened to the father.

He shrugged, and she felt the movement all through her body. "Destroyed."

"How?" She held her breath. The answer was important; she knew it. She felt his sudden
reluctance. He hadn't held back yet.

He didn't this time. "There are many stories, all of them whispered, none confirmed by the oldest
ones. But there's a deep fear in the old ones… about what happened in the city. It's the reason, I
think, that they treatthe ones they take to change so harshly. The city was not destroyed from
without. That much I've learned."

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And who living within would want to destroy a vampire city? It was a question she wasn't going
to ask or even think about. Even though she was in his head right now, she knew how easily he
could turn the tables and strip every bit of information he wanted from her. She would put up a
fight, maybe prolong the agony, but how much of a match was she for a pissed-off
dhamphir,
really?

"What the hell is a
dhamphir,
anyway?" she asked. She knew what her aunt had told her. She'd
heard whispered rumors. Might as well ask the source. "And why are they all so freaking oblique
whenever your name comes up? It's like they've got this Beetlejuice superstition going that if they
say your name three times, you'll appear."

"Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice
— "

"Don't you dare. "

"It was only a movie."

"And I don't believe in vampires, either. Let's not push our luck." He chuckled.

She said, "What are you?"

"You are too inquisitive. It will always get you into trouble."

"Or a promotion to detective lieutenant. We're talking about you right now."

"What I don't understand is why."

"You kill vampires. I nag them."

"My parents were married for ten years before the vampire took him. The strigoi was a great
lady, a boyar with a castle and many soldiers to protect her. Even if she had not been a vampire,
she could have had anyoneshe wanted brought to her bed. My father was a musician. When he
played at her castle, she kept him, a new companion to do whatever she wanted with." He spoke
in a bitter rush, getting it over with before she badgered him any more, she guessed. "It's not the
hunting I hate," he went on, staring grimly into the fire, his muscles tight with tension. "It's the
stealing of lives."

How well she agreed with that, she who'd had her life stolen by him.

After a while, he went on. "My parents had three children that lived already. My mother was left
to raise them without a man, though there were brothers and uncles to help. She was the best
fortune-teller in our familia, valuable to the tribe, but she couldn't even remarry as her man
wasn't dead… and wasn't going to be, since he was being turned into a vampire. After a few
years, the boyar drained him and turned him, and had no more use for him. So the fledgling
vampire wandered back to his familia, back to his wife, and she took him back to her bed. There
are some who can slake the craving for mating blood without it ever changing them. My mother
was such a one, but she wasn't immune from making a child with the vampire: me."

"That's what I'd heard, that your father was a vampire. But it sounded like an insult to me, like
calling someone a son of a bitch."

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"My mother was a good woman, but I am a son of a bitch."

"No argument there."

"I was born able to sense them, think like them, to hunt vampires with their own abilities," he
said. "That's what a
dhamphir
is, a vampire hunter fathered by a vampire. We protect the Roma,
and our people are proud of us."