Demon Moon (49 page)

“No. I bit him, but I was careful; I'm positive I didn't swallow any.” Her cheeks heated slightly.

Colin glanced down at her, his fangs exposed in a brief, teasing grin before he said, “It arrived directly after—too soon for it to have been the bite.”

“And the fever began long before that.”

“In the plane?” Lilith said.

“I first noticed it in the car. Not long after…” Her voice broke, and she stared up at Colin. “Not long after you healed me with your blood.”

The last traces of his smile faded. “That is also when I first noticed the scent. But I've used my blood to heal thousands of people—everyone I've fed from, even after I returned from Chaos.”

“But none of them had hellhound and nosferatu tainting their veins.” Her mind raced. “Or it was the henna—all over my hands. What if there was a symbol in the design somewhere?”

“It could be any of those things,” Michael agreed. “Or a combination of them all, or something we've not considered.”

“In the hospital, was my room protected by the spell?”

“No,” Hugh said.

“My shields were down from the fever, but no wyrmwolves came. For two weeks.”

“Because I was not near enough to sense you,” Colin said slowly. “It's not you or me, but
us
.”

“Yes.” She saw the despair in his gaze, the tightness around his lips. “It doesn't matter,” she added quickly, though her stomach knotted. “I can keep my shields up. And I'll only be here for a few more weeks anyway.”

Hugh said quietly, “Michael, are there any alternative food sources for a vampire? Blood—but not from humans, or that isn't accompanied by a sexual urge?”

“No.” He ran his hand over the parchment and the liquid stilled, sank into the paper. “If there were, I'd have given vampires that choice long ago.”

The tight clasp of Colin's fingers on hers grew painful; she held on, uncaring.

The Doyen's crimson blood covered the Scroll with a list of all of the reasons they should—
had to
—let go, and dried into lines of obsidian.

After such a morning, it was a relief to spend the latter part of the afternoon in Colin's basement, lounging on the sectional with him as Lon Chaney Jr. lurched across the enormous screen.

She lost count of the times he buried his face into her hair, laughing—and even if his commentary resembled something out of
MST3K
, she heard the fondness beneath it. He apparently adored monster movies, and judging by the DVD titles stacked two-deep in the shelves, the era and medium didn't matter.
The Wisdom of Crocodiles
sat between
Frankenstein
and
Blood: The Last Vampire
; he'd offered up
Vampire Hunter D
and seven versions of
Dracula
for consideration before they'd settled for
The Wolf Man
—the only one Savi hadn't seen.

It was too much to hope for a happy ending, but at least a werewolf died at the end instead of a vampire.

“That
is
the happy ending,” he reminded her when she said as much a few minutes later, after they'd retreated to the kitchen. He absently shook the decanter of blood he'd pulled from the refrigerator. “The ungodly creature wiped from existence, the Earth restored to its natural order. And, indeed, any man so hirsute should be treated as a perversion. Will this disgust you?”

Her mouth stuffed full with rice from the takeout they'd picked up earlier, she could only shake her head. He poured the blood into a tall glass; it frothed at the top, like a cappuccino.

He grimaced and set it aside. “I'll wait; I detest foam. That smells incredibly good. Perhaps I will hold it below my nose as I drink, and pretend it is red coconut curry.”

“Do you miss eating?”

“Not when I'm feeding from you, sweet. But compared to swine? Yes.”

“I'm flattered.” She poked at a carrot with her fork. “You'll let me know when it starts to affect you?”

“Not it if hurries your leaving.”

“I'll be able to tell,” she said quietly. “You'll be shaky, stupid, tired. No libido. If my choice is between your weakness when Dalkiel's still out there, and my staying—” She shook her head. “It's not a choice.”

“And if Dalkiel is dead?”

“Shaky,
stupid
, tired,” she repeated, and hated the tremble in her voice. “With no sexual drive. Do you want to live like that?”

His jaw tightened. “No. Bloody fucking hell.” He unclenched his fists. “I'd still be beautiful; you could bounce upon me now and again whilst I lie in my daysleep.”

She snorted with amusement, but it didn't last. Her laughter ended on a sigh. “Talking to them didn't help us much, did it?”

“No.”

If anything, it had only raised more questions. “What did you expect Michael to say when he popped into the tech room earlier? When you said you didn't want to know the balance of your accounts.”

Colin stiffened; though the bubbles hadn't disappeared, he took a drink from his glass. Delaying his answer?

She forced another smile and waved the carrot in the air. “I know the balance of all your accounts; does that make me terribly vulgar?”

The glass clinked sharply against the countertop. “I daresay it makes you practical, sweet. Every woman should calculate her suitor's worth.”

“After calculating it, I daresay I must be brilliant.”

“Disagreement would insult your intelligence and my vanity.”

“You're insulting it by pretending there was nothing; even Hugh looked as if he was ready to argue with Michael, when usually I can't tell if he's upset.” Savi tried to hold her smile when he didn't answer; she failed. Her stomach ached. Shoving the curry away, she said, “I'm sorry. Not stopping again. You don't want to tell me; it's none of my business. A different topic then: You thought the same thing I did, didn't you? That Hugh didn't tell me about James Anderson because he was afraid I wouldn't forgive him.”

“Yes.” His gaze was steady on hers, dark as iron.

“When I was sitting alone in the tech room, I was thinking: All of this time I've been telling myself that Hugh
understood
me when I did that shit with the IDs as a kid, and that was why he never disapproved of me or lectured me about it. Because Nani sure as hell did.”

“As she should have.” He took another drink.

“Yeah. But then I realized he used his Gift on Anderson, and my first reaction was: He didn't understand me. He's just got such a screwed-up sense of morality that anything is okay; that his idea of what's right is so wide, it encompasses even the unforgivable shit. So what was a little bit of forgery to someone like him?”

Colin's brows drew together; he shook his head. “That's exactly opposite of what it is, Savitri.”

“I know; I remembered what you said of his warning to you, and I realized it's so
narrow
that the only thing that matters is that no one is cruel if they can help it, or interferes with someone's free will if they can help it, or kills if they can help it—but if it has to be done, it will be. So by the time he came in to talk to me, I was thinking that what he'd done to Anderson had to be done, and I wasn't comfortable with it—but I was okay with it. But if I hadn't spoken to you this morning, I never would have been okay with it; would have never seen that other way of looking at it. And I don't think I could be like Hugh or like Lilith, but at least I can see better how they decide those things.” And how, as head of the vampire community, Colin would have to make similar decisions. “And then I realized he does understand me, maybe better than I do myself.”

“It's an exceptionally annoying trait of his.” He downed the remainder of the blood.

“Yeah.” And a trait of Colin's—despite his tendency to talk about himself in any other circumstance—was to barely respond when something about Chaos came up. He didn't like to brood over the past, or things in the present he couldn't change. And he probably didn't want to worry her, either.

But she was worried
for
him, dammit.

She took a deep breath. “So when Hugh wants to argue with the Doyen about something that pertains to you, but stops himself, it scares the shit out of me. Because it means something that he doesn't want to happen needs to be done. And whatever it was, it scared you as well. And I only know two things that do that: wyrmwolves and Chaos. But the wyrmwolves are pretty much under control. So it's Chaos, right? You have to go back for some reason, and finding the bridge today made it the more urgent. Probably because of the nosferatu; if they realize what's going on with the wyrmwolves, they might try to copy it and break out of Chaos.”

“You deduced that from half a second's reaction?” Colin stared at her, his face a rigid mask.

“No. It was a combination of things. Something you said in the parking lot, the way you responded to Michael last week in the hall, seeing a new side to Hugh, thinking about the nosferatu and his execution.”

But she hadn't wanted to be right. Would Michael try to take Colin against his will? Was there any way she could stop it? She was human; Michael couldn't go against
her
will, even if he could a vampire's.

Sighing, she felt her frustration slip away; just once, she'd have liked to hold on to it—but she couldn't solve anything now, anyway. “It also helps that my freak brain remembers that half second really well.”

His expression softened but slightly. “I love nothing so much as morally conflicted women with freakish brains.” With slow, deliberate steps, Colin stalked around the counter and braced his arms on either side of her chair. Sudden heat built as he shoved himself between her legs. He lowered his nose to hers and said through gritted teeth, “But if you do not use your freakish brain to discover a way to stay with me, I'll hunt you across the Earth. I vow it.”

Her chest heaved; a flush of excitement spread over her skin. “Will you fuck me senseless when you catch me?”

“Yes. The first time, for you.” He nipped sharply at her bottom lip, and she opened her mouth, tried to catch his in turn. He evaded her easily. “Then slowly, for me.”

“I love it when you're selfish,” she said, and her back arched as he lifted the hem of her T-shirt and his teeth scraped her breast. Her hands threaded through his hair.

“This is completely selfish. An experiment to ascertain that my libido still functions.”

“I daresay it does,” she moaned as he rocked the evidence against her.

“I daresay.”

Two days later, Colin had to admit that although regular sex and blood were more conducive to charm, the damage had been done—his physical prowess had won over more of San Francisco's vampires than his smile. And Savi's video, Fia and Paul's oft-told description of the chase, Varney's open appreciation for his raise, and Darkwolf's quiet support had made the venture more of a success than Dalkiel's escape warranted.

“There's Darkwolf,” Savi said quietly. Her margarita sat untouched in front of her; though she'd not taken much alcohol of late, Epona had discovered her favorite drink, and seemed bent on showing her gratitude for the position by continually supplying Savi with a fresh glass. Another success, and one that had kept her busy with an influx of requests for IDs and documentation.

It was just as well; there was not much else she could do to flush out Dalkiel. Colin studied her face beneath the changing lights from the dance floor, the soft glow of the sconces above them.

Though her shields were up and her gaze alert, exhaustion seemed to hang about her; a touch of lethargy deepened her voice. The stress of Dalkiel's constant threat, combined with work and their nightly visits to Polidori's? The change in her sleeping pattern?

Or had he been taking too much? He'd not fed from her but once. There was little danger in taking a small sip while making love to her…except he'd made love to her with desperate frequency.

A subtle tension gripped her; Colin glanced away from her face as she said in Hindi, “He has Fishnet Shirt with him.”

Not in his Goth clothing any longer, Colin noted, but a pair of jeans, a heavy jacket, and a wide-brimmed hat…almost as if he intended it as a disguise. The vampire appeared haggard, hungry.

Grief emanated from his psychic scent.

“Ken Branning,” Savi reminded him beneath her breath. Her fingers played at her neck, hooking in the slim chain and around the pendant that doubled as an alarm.

“Mr. Branning,” he said, and his gaze shifted to Darkwolf. “Do we need privacy?”

“No.” Branning shook his head; his shoulders were hunched, his fists shoved into his pockets. “I'm going to say this and go.”