Laws of the Blood 2: Partners (14 page)

He’d woken up with an urge, and not just the usual one to take a piss. A voice in his head called to him to look
for vampires in the ruins under the square in his dreams and he’d given in to it. This wasn’t the first time this week Haven had let a gut feeling lead him around Washington state, but he was getting tired of it. He trusted his instincts, but right now he didn’t feel in control of them, and that bothered him. It made a spot between his shoulder blades itch, kind of like it was warning him that he was about to be stabbed in the back. He gave a sour sneer as he looked around.

He wasn’t sure what had called to him, whether it was his own sixth sense or the influence of some psychic evil fucking with his mind, but he wasn’t fool enough to come without backup. Santini was around somewhere. If this was some sort of trap set by the werewolf, they could handle it. Besides, Santini had wanted to see if he could get any information about the nut cult from the regular drunks and druggies who called Pioneer Square home.

Haven was going to do what the dreams suggested, look underground for the lair of any local bloodsuckers. He didn’t have much hope for finding vampires in a place that was basically a local tourist trap, but he knew from experience that the brain-damaged ones frequently sought out the obvious hiding places. There had been fang marks on the corpse in the woods and on the bodies in Special Agent Novak’s files. So there were vampires involved as well as the monster that had sniffed out the dumped body. Haven figured he’d take out the fiends he knew how to handle first, then he’d concentrate on the werewolf and whatever else was haunting this dark, dreary city.

Probably all working together,
he thought as he lit a cigarette. His gaze was caught briefly by the sight of a large fake owl on a second-floor window ledge. Someone had attached it to the building to scare off pigeons. Then he turned his head and looked directly at the girl with the dark red hair who had been inching her way toward him for the last five minutes.

Their eyes met as she came out from under the shadow of the trees at one end of the square. She lifted her head slightly and smiled, and Jebel Haven got hit by lightning. The sensation faded after a moment, but for that moment, he couldn’t remember why he was here in the first place. Or even where here was. He knew it wasn’t to pick up a girl. Of course, it had been awhile . . .

He ran a finger down his jaw and tilted his head sideways to look at her some more. Not bad. Not spectacular, but she had something. Enough of something that Haven gave himself a moment to wonder about the shape hidden by her baggy blue raincoat. Enough of something to keep him staring and to start his blood racing. Correction: She had spectacular legs, even wearing what he supposed were called sensible shoes. He hoped that the skirt beneath the raincoat was a short one, because his best guess was that those legs went on for about a week. A man needed a good long view to appreciate them properly.

He stepped away from the crowd, closer to her. It was a hesitant movement on his part, not his usual style at all. He tossed away the cigarette and crushed it under
his heel. She smiled ever so slightly at this. She was shy, vulnerable, not his type.

He said, “You know I’m trouble, right?”

“Undoubtedly you are,” she answered in a deep, husky, bedroom voice that didn’t match her looks at all.

She came a few steps closer, or maybe he did. His plan to explore the underground was shelved in favor of asking her what her sign was and did she come here often. “You going underground?”

“Been there, done that.”

“Yeah,” he answered. “Me, too.” He had the feeling neither of them was talking about walking around the subterranean streets of Seattle.

They were all alone in a big, noisy Friday night party crowd. Music spilled out from bars, but there was a little island of silence around them. He felt as if he should pour bright, clever conversation into the silence, making a gift of words to impress her. He knew she liked words, and pleasing her was important. He wished he’d shaved closer and had better clothes.

The tour group was led off by a cheerful guide, but Haven and the girl stayed behind. He didn’t want to do anything but be with her. He did not believe in meeting the girl of his dreams. Why not? He hadn’t believed in vampires five years ago. If they were real, why not go with the idea of love at first sight? Not that love was exactly in his game plan, but why not take the night off with a little female company? Haven chuckled, a low, wicked sound, and that broke the spell.

“Who are you?” He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “What do you want?”

“You don’t have to be rude,” she responded with a sharp lift of her head that almost made him laugh.

“I’m always rude.”

“So I see.”

She took a step back, toward the shadows. He followed.

She’d had him! For a few seconds there, Char knew she’d drawn Haven to her in the good, old-fashioned, tried-and-true, put-a-vampire-glamour-on-the-object-of-desire way. Okay, Jimmy had always said that nobody but a loser vampire nerd would pick up chicks by hypnotizing them in this day and age. Well, she
was
a chick, and a nerd as well as being a vampire, and doing the fatal attraction thing had seemed like the simplest way to distract someone as dangerous as Jebel Haven. Problem was, when she
looked
at him, he
looked
back. The results were disturbing and distracting. Took her mind right off seducing him, and put it on . . . well, seducing him, but for all the wrong reasons.

Maybe she should have gone about this differently, or rather, traditionally. The easy way would be to unleash the urge to hunt, stalk the man, absorb his fear like a dark drug, consume his emotions, feast on his flesh, and dump the remains. Looked at objectively, that was a fairly disgusting scenario and one she wanted no part of. Whatever danger he posed to the strigoi, Haven did not deserve a death that should be reserved for only for the deepest and most irredeemably evil of mortal kind.

“And members of grunge bands,”
Jimmy had added when he’d taught her the basics of vampire killing. But
she was pretty sure he’d been joking, even if he had left town right after Kurt Cobain’s body was found.

The point was, she’d been attempting to attract Haven to find out what he was doing in Seattle, not to initiate a hunt. When it came time for her to murder Jebel Haven, she would do it in a humane way, which would give her inner beast no physical, emotional, or sexual gratification. Damn it.

Well, whatever she’d done and however he’d responded didn’t matter now. He was still looking at her intently, but his manner was now wary.

Char was not sure what to do next, but she was distracted by bumping into someone as she took another step back. When she turned around to apologize, there was Santini.
I used to be smarter than this,
she thought as she noticed the two men exchange looks.
I really was.
Of course Haven brought Santini with him. The two men were partners, there for each other, watching each other’s backs while they defended the world from vampires. She almost growled at them that they’d just met their first real vampire, but she already knew that they didn’t think vampires were particularly intelligent and saw no reason to prove them correct just now.

“Hi,” Santini said, with a smile that was curiously charming. “We’ve met before.” He said this to Haven rather than to her.

“We weren’t introduced,” she answered. She’d recognized Santini, and he remembered seeing her with Della. How charming.

Haven’s hand landed on her shoulder. “The girl from the shelter.” Not a question.

Nor was it a problem, Char decided. She looked into Haven’s very suspicious face. Might as well get this over with and confront the situation head-on. “Are you looking for Daniel, too?” she asked.

Haven looked around and scratched his jaw. She heard the rough scrape of his finger against dark stubble. “Come on,” he said, and directed her toward the nearest coffee bar with his hand still tightly grasping her shoulder. Santini didn’t come with them.

C
HAR COULD HAVE
broken his hold on her easily enough, but since he was doing exactly what she wanted, this was no time to oppose any macho high-handedness. They reached the front of the line quickly, and he ordered two black coffees. Char translated this for the confused counterperson, and they ended up taking a pair of regular double-shot talls to a booth in the back. She let Haven pay.

“Where are you from?” Haven didn’t know why the hell he cared, but he asked anyway.

“Portland.” Char supposed that if she was going to get information from him, she might as well give some in turn. She took a sip of coffee, grimaced, and reached for a packet of sugar.

“How do you know Danny Novak?”

“I don’t, but I am trying to trace him. He’s missing from a—youth home—in Oregon. The director asked me to look into it.”

“Why you?”

“Why not? How do you know Daniel?” she asked in turn. “Why are you hunting him? You’re a long way
from home and your usual pursuits, Haven.”

Haven leaned back in the booth and studied the girl through the rising steam as she took delicate sips of coffee. She somehow managed to look fragile, ladylike, and tough as steel at the same time. She’d taken off her raincoat, and he thought it a pity that her long legs were tucked out of view under the tabletop. Under the coffee shop lights her tousled hair looked like wet autumn leaves. She had big gray eyes, flat cheekbones, a pointed chin and wide mouth, porcelain skin, and a general glow of curious enthusiasm.
Perky
, he thought,
pretty rather than beautiful
. She had nice tits, though, round and full and nicely outlined by the lightweight blue sweater she was wearing.

She also knew his name and that he was looking for the Novak kid. “What do you mean, ‘
usual pursuits
’?” He took a sip of coffee and tried to ignore the scalding heat that spread from his mouth and all the way down his throat when he swallowed. It took him a second to get his breath back, and she watched him with big gray eyes the whole time. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

Char considered her answer. The longer a strigoi was around, the more likely it was for him or her to go by a single name or attribute. She’d certainly been working on developing her persona, the vampire identity of Char the Hunter. Well, she hadn’t done anything yet to earn the persona, but she’d been thinking about it a lot. Sitting across the table from a man as bone-deep dangerous as Jebel Haven, she felt rather silly proclaiming her
Charness
. She knew very well that in theory she could kill him in a blink, but she owed this character who had
done a good many bad and brave things a bit of respect.

“Charlotte McCairn,” she answered his question. “My friends call me Char. I mention this in passing,” she added, “not as an offer of friendship.” Then, because she was far too curious and couldn’t help but ask since she had the man in front of her, “Is your name
really
Jebel Haven?” She assumed the name to be an alias but hadn’t tried to trace the man’s identity beyond the incident that had changed him from a criminal to a hero.

“Yes.” Haven didn’t know why he answered. Maybe it was because the intense, focused interest she turned on
him
was almost impossible to resist. Kind of cute, too. “My dad worked for an oil company in the Middle East. He heard that Jebel means mountain, or something like that, in Arabic. Thought it was cool. And I don’t like being called Jeb,” he added. Sometimes Baker or Santini called him Jeb, but they were friends, so he let them live. He put the cup to one side of the table and leaned closer. “And how do you know who I am?”

Char stirred another packet of raw sugar into her coffee and considered how to answer him. She flicked a few of the brown sugar crystals into her hand and licked them off her fingers. She was surprised at the intense way Jebel Haven focused on this simple action. It occurred to her that some of her clumsy effort at seducing him had carried over into this meeting. When she glanced at him, he looked as coolly self-possessed as ever. She assumed an equally poker-faced countenance for a few seconds.

Finally she smiled and answered quietly, “That’s
easy, Mr. Haven. I know who you are, because I, too, am a vampire hunter.”

His surprise registered against several of her senses, but his expression didn’t change one bit. “Really?” was his sarcastic response.

He glanced around. He had amazingly dark brown eyes and quite long lashes. No one was close enough to where they sat to overhear. She wondered if he wondered about the absence of anyone at nearby booths and tables on a busy Friday night.

Once he was sure they weren’t overheard, Haven said equally quietly, “You kill vampires.”

She was surprised that it wasn’t a question. She gazed at him steadily. “I notice you have not yet denied the existence of such creatures.”

“I’ve met a few fiends from hell,” he answered.

“So you have.” She drank more coffee, enjoying the combination of caffeine, sugar, and delicious irony without disrespecting the man’s skills.

In a manner of speaking, he had faced fiends from one religion’s version of hell. Faced them and fought them quite bravely, but until a few minutes ago, he’d never met any vampires. Strictly speaking, Char supposed that he still hadn’t met any regulation strigoi, as she was something of an
ubervampire
these days.