Companions (29 page)

The place must be gloriously colorful with the sunlight shining in, but it was dark here now.

Darkness could be a fugitive's friend, but not when you run from a vampire.

Despite the futility of it, Selena took a chance and ran. It was the expected move, of course, only another game for Rosho, but Selena figured you never knew when you might catch a break. You try, or you give up, she thought. If she gave up, she knew she would end up worse off than Sandy Schwimmer by the time Rosho was through with her. Maybe the smart thing to do was simply to kill herself and get it over with. Damn it, why wasn't she carrying a weapon? Or at least a cell phone?

"Glass," she said, and ducked around a huge sculpture shaped like a half-opened seashell. Glass could be used as a weapon. As far as Selena could tell, Rosho wasn't bothering to chase her. He was between her and the main entrance, she was sure of that. He could move fast enough to be between her and any possible exit as soon as she headed for one. She needed to break some glass.

The seashell was too big to do her any good. Everything nearby was too big. She raced around frantically looking for something breakable in a room full of glass. The irony nearly choked her. Or perhaps the choking sensation came from fear, fear he projected at her. "That's cheating, you bastard!"

His laughter rang through the gallery and in her head, followed closely by images of things he had done to Sandy, to Steve, and what he was going to do to her.

"I'm not impressed," she shouted. He appeared in front of her a second later and pushed her against a wall beneath one of the huge colored glass windows. The pain of the impact nearly made her pass out.

She might have welcomed the sanctuary of unconsciousness if she wasn't certain Rosho would follow her and make her nightmares very real. "This time I'm impressed," she said, rather than let the pain get to her.

He held her in place with one hand, and slowly ran his other hand over her breasts and belly and thighs.

"I haven't begun to impress you."

"You don't know how to get a real date, do you? Rapists have very inadequate personalities."

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"Rape is about power."

That, too. She could grit her teeth and cope with his touching her. Rape she could survive, it was his teeth she worried about.

He sensed her thoughts and reminded her, "You're a companion. Having anyone but your master inside you will be unbearable torture."

She fought hard to do it, and knew her expression came out more as a grimace than the dangerous smile she tried for, but she did bare her teeth. "You'll be surprised at what I can bear. Whatever you do, I will kill you."

He ignored her bravado. He kept on groping her as he put his lips to her ear and said, "I can only play for a little while, Toy, but I wanted you as an appetizer. When I'm through here, I have to join your friends. I can feel the strigs and the mortal killing my servants one by one, foolishly unaware that they are about to take my creatures' places. Then I'm going to gather a new group of slaves. Your witch family will belong to me. I'll start with your mother, your aunt, pretty Paloma. But I won't touch silly Karen. I already told you I didn't want her. Siri has possibilities."

Selena realized that she'd let a shopaholic with a platinum card loose in a mall. Here were all these gifted people gathered together in one place, and he was going to collect them as prizes and property, and no one could stop him. Siri has a vampire lover, she thought. So does Haven. Wouldn't they protest? Did Rosho plan to fight every vampire out there and become king of the world? Then she remembered what Lawrence had said about Enforcers allowing the dominance games to get rid of troublemakers. A bunch of rebellious companions would definitely be judged troublemakers. And she'd brought them all together in one place.

"Yes," Rosho said. "It's all your fault."

He kissed her then, a long, slow crushing of his mouth against hers. She wasn't sure what he got out of it, but she was left with the sensation that he'd forced her to swallow acid. She supposed the expected response was for her to spit on him, but, while it was tempting, she kneed him in the groin instead. The idiot actually didn't see it coming. The brief look of surprise on his face was priceless, except that when he hit her he had his claws out and tore a line of deep cuts from her right shoulder down across her left breast. When she screamed, he let her fall to the floor.

Glass,
she thought, searching around blindly. I
need some broken glass.

As if in answer to a prayer, sharp fragments of glass began to rain down on her out of the sky, like a shower of lethal confetti. The sound of the overhead window breaking as something heavy hurtled through it reached Selena as an aftershock. Rosho whirled away from her, but it was the growling that got Selena onto her feet. She stared past Rosho's shoulder, and what she saw in the center of the light pouring in through the broken window was a snarling black wolf.

A-Big-Bad-Wolf.

Selena began to laugh. It was not at all the sort of thing a sane person should do when faced with a pair of monsters, but laugh she did. Rosho turned around and slapped her, which certainly killed any
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impending hysteria before it had a good chance to get started.

She didn't think Rosho'd broken her jaw, but she opened and closed her mouth a few times to make sure as she glanced between the hole in the window, the wolf, and vampire. She put her hands on her hips. Then she said, "I suppose you were waiting for the perfect entrance line before you bothered to show up."

Steve morphed from wolf shape to take the form a tall, naked man. Watching the transformation was a dizzying experience. He looked at her and shrugged. "I was waiting for the dog show to be over. I didn't make best in show, so I ate the Border collie that did."

"Bad dog."

Sarcasm was her way of showing relief and joy at her own true love having bothered to show up in the nick of time. Her heart hammered wildly in her chest, and the pain was almost forgotten in the flood of delight spreading through her at Steve's appearing like an avenging demon out of the night. He'd come to rescue her! He did care! Wasn't he wonderful?

She did not bother masking her annoyance and suspicion. "Why are you really here? And what took you so long? Do you know what he was going to do to me?"

Istvan basked in the flood of anger his darling Selena unleashed on him. He saw her gaze shift worriedly to the broken window. "Don't worry, hon," he told his cop girlfriend. "The alarms are all off, and the crowd's thin on this end of the pier."

"Magic." She spat the word out. "I am so sick of magic."

"It's forensics that pisses me off. We'll just have to make sure your fingerprints aren't on anything before we leave."

While he spoke to Selena, most of Istvan's attention was on Rosho. The old vampire had frozen at the sight of his shifting shapes, and he continued to stare at him, mouth working like a landed fish's.

"Idiot," Istvan said. "What do you think happens when a
dhamphir
becomes a vampire?"

Rosho got his flapping jaw under control to say, "Myths… the legends…"

"All true."

Rosho shook his head. He took a belligerent step forward. "You are nothing… a gypsy peasant. You tasted like mud."

Istvan didn't blame Rosho for not wanting to believe, even with the evidence before him. "You never were very bright. You've heard the whispers about me for centuries, but unless someone is saying your name, you don't hear their voice."

"He really can do all that movie vampire crap, you know," Selena said. She had a way of sticking large pins into any attempt at pomposity. "I used to think it was smoke and mirrors. It's not, is it, Steve?"

Selena had a grudging understanding of magic, but what he did — what he was — went far beyond the scope of any other magic that had ever appeared in the world. Or as close as made no never mind when
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Lady Valentia wasn't around to make him look like a rank amateur. Selena would know in her soul it was true, but it came as no surprise to Istvan that it had taken her outer senses a while to acclimate to the notion of being the chosen bride of the real Count Dracula. What nice girl would want that in her bed?

Selena, of course, was not a nice girl. Being good didn't mean you had to be nice, he thought fondly. It was one of the things they had in common.

"I'm sorry I had to let the old fool hurt you." Rosho was going to pay heavily for every drop of Selena's blood he had shed. Companions healed quickly, and he was tempted to kiss it and make it all better.

"Can you do bats?" Selena asked conversationally. "I've never seen you turn into a bat."

"We'll talk about it later, hon. I have to work now."

"And why did you let him hurt me? You've been here the whole time… waiting."

"I used you as bait."

"I figured that out. You set this up the night he killed Sandy."

"Yes."

"Bastard. You were running a sting operation on this jerk, weren't you? Letting him stalk me while you stalked him? You might have mentioned it to me."

"I couldn't risk tipping him off, could I? I serve the Laws. He had to break the Law before I could do what I've wanted to do to him for centuries."

"That's called entrapment," she said. "A good lawyer could get him off."

Rosho shifted his gaze back and forth during this interplay, panic creeping deep into his bones. "What Law? I have never broken the Laws of the Blood!"

"Really?" Istvan asked. "The Law states you must defeat a vampire in combat before claiming his property."

Rosho tried to sneer. He laughed, but the sound was shaky. "I have not yet taken your property."

"True." Istvan nodded. He looked at Selena. "I couldn't let him go that far."

She touched the row of cuts on her chest. "Thanks."

"You look delicious, by the way." The flash of anger in her eyes told him that was not the right thing to say. "Sorry." He looked back at the old vampire. "I guess you haven't quite broken any Laws, Rosho.

You want to fight?"

Rosho's confidence suddenly returned in a blast of psychic power. His laugh this time was very real. "It would be pleasant to have you in my power again, boy."

He still didn't believe. Rosho the noble boyar warrior couldn't let himself believe in defeat. Good. Istvan prepared to take a step forward.

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"Broken glass," Selena said before he moved. "You're naked."

"I have very tough skin," he said. "But since you mention it…" Istvan bent, selected a long, sharp shard of red glass, and flicked it through the air. "Peasant boys don't use swords," Istvan said over Rosho's hiss of pain.

The glass dagger was buried in Rosho's chest. "But we're pretty good with knives."

Rosho's features changed into a fanged hunting mask, and he leapt.

Selena watched them, and in some ways was able to sense what was going on, but her eyes only caught blurs and flashes, evidence and residue of violence filled the room as the vampires struggled. Glass flew, blood sprayed, she heard the snapping of fangs and the scrabbling of claws on tiles, the meaty rending of tough flesh. She pressed herself against the wall, stayed very still, and hoped to not be noticed. She was glad to stay out of the line of fire for once. Mortals needed to know when to keep their heads down when the immortals played their games with each other.

While they fought, she worked on trying not to be resentful that Steve had used her. She saw his point in not tipping his hand to Rosho. She worked even harder on not resenting having to be rescued. It wasn't because she was a
girl
in a green satin dress. She was tough, but she was mortal. She was not in their league without a great deal of firepower once the sun had set. She considered edging toward the door, maybe making a run for it, maybe continuing her initial goal of helping Haven, Larry, and Yevgeny, but staying still was probably safer. Besides, she was too curious to see the end of the game to leave now, even if she didn't have any doubt of the outcome. And Steve was here. For once she gave in to the stupid companion compulsion to be near her lover.

A moment later she was a little too close as a blow from Rosho sent Steve hurtling backward into her.

"Nice butt," she observed, squeezing it before she pushed him back into the fray. He gave her a dirty look, and stopped a handful of claws aimed for his throat with a flick of his hand. She noticed that Steve hadn't bothered sprouting fangs or claws for this bout with his old enemy, and all the blood was Rosho's.

"You're showing off," she called after him.

Steve turned his back on the wounded vampire to talk to her. She couldn't help but notice his erection.

"I have been waiting for this for a long time."

"Yes, well… if you two would rather be alone…"

Rosho jumped on Steve's back. Steve plucked him off and slammed Rosho onto the floor at her feet. "I think I'll kill him now," he said to Selena. "Should I make it quick and merciful, or take my time about it?"

Selena considered the line of destroyed lives this stupid, selfish creature had caused going back hundreds and hundreds of years. It didn't take her long to make her choice. "Take your time, dear," she told Steve. "I'm not in any hurry."

She didn't look though; she closed her eyes and wimped out on watching Rosho get what he had coming to him. What she heard was bad enough, and it would be the background music for nightmares to come.

She eventually put her fingers in her ears, but that didn't help.

First he dumped Rosho's remains in the lake. Then Istvan pulled some silk scarves out of a display case in the gift shop and cleaned off much of the blood before returning to Selena. She was still standing hunched over beneath the broken window, eyes scrunched tightly closed, her hands covering her ears.