Of Blood and Passion (6 page)

“What about the human captives who will be saved if Vamp City dies? You give them no thought!”

“There you are wrong, cara mia. I do give them thought. When you renew the magic, most of the vampires will reclaim their consciences and their souls. The barbarity will end. Some vampires will continue to feed and abuse humans—it has been so since the dawn of time. But the majority will not.”

He gripped her chin, forcing her to meet his gaze. “You rail at me for lying to you, yet you lie to yourself. Your concern is not for the captives, Quinn. To some extent, yes. You are not without heart. But your primary concern is and has always been Zack, even at the cost of your own life. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why?”

“He’s my brother.” She glared at him, the ache in her chest spreading.

“Have you considered what it would do to him if you died trying to save him? You protect yourself, Quinn, above all others, above anything and everything else. And everyone else be damned. Even Zack.”

“Go to Hell.” She jerked free of his hold, refusing to listen to this anymore. He was full of bullshit. “You’re wrong. I’m protecting him. It’s the one thing I can do, the one thing I can give him.”

“Can you not simply love him?”

Zack had so many who loved him. She’d never been his whole world, but he was, and had always been, hers.

A gentle hand caressed her hair. “You protect yourself, Quinn. Understandably so. You have known too much betrayal in your life—the mother who abandoned you by dying, the father who brought a woman into your life who could not love you, then sided with that shrew against you. The friends who abandoned you at the first sign of your differentness. It is surprising,
tesoro
, that you are as capable of love as you are, and you are capable of great love. It shines within you every time you look at your brother.”

Quinn squeezed her eyes closed, trying to shut out his words and failing.

“You are not alone anymore, Quinn. Within this safe house are many who have not shunned you despite your power. Who, in fact, care about you very much.” His hand stroked her hair. “You are my weakness,
amore mio
. You may not put your own safety first, but I must. I cannot help my need to protect you any more than you can help your own to protect your brother.”

As she watched Arturo now, she knew what he was thinking, knew that he saw in her quick turnabout just more willingness to sacrifice anything and everything for Zack. But how could she not? From the moment her dad and stepmother brought him home from the hospital, he’d been the only one in the world whose love she’d never doubted, the only one she’d always been able to count on. How many times had she been banished to her room as a child? Yet Zack had always come to check on her, and often to join her, even if it was only to lie on his stomach on the rug beside her bed and play his GameBoy while she did her homework.

“We leave in an hour,” she repeated.

“Then let’s meet in the sitting room in half an hour so I can do our glamour,” Micah said.

Arturo’s mouth compressed as he met Quinn’s gaze. Without a word, he turned and walked away.

A
half an hour later, Quinn entered the sitting room beneath Neo’s, a room as Spartan as the bedrooms, if a bit larger. Two dark gray sofas sat at right angles to one another, an oil lamp glowing from the end table between them.

Arturo sat on one of the sofas while Micah stood facing a male she didn’t know.
A Gonzaga guard.
Even as her heart skipped a beat, Micah turned to smile at her.

“Kass is done,” he said casually.

It took her brain a moment to catch up.
Kass is done.
Kassius. Her gaze snapped to the unknown guard. In his eyes, she recognized her friend. The eyes were the one part of the body that could not be hidden behind glamour.

“Kassius,” she breathed and the stranger smiled at her. Micah’s gift was extraordinary.

“Ready?” Micah motioned her over.

Taking a deep breath to gather her scattered wits, Quinn shook her head. “Do Arturo first.” It was Cristoff Gonzaga’s guards who were scouring the city for her, under orders to capture her and bring her in. Believing one had breached Neo’s sanctuary had unsettled her more than she cared to admit, more than she already was thanks to the furtive conversation she’d overheard earlier, one that continued to play havoc with her imagination in the worst possible way. And at the worst possible time.

For a moment, as she’d stared at the guard, she’d thought he’d already betrayed her.

Arturo watched her now with deep, fathomless eyes and she wondered if he’d felt that stab of fear, that moment’s belief in his duplicity. If she didn’t find a way to put aside her doubts,
if she couldn’t trust him,
their mission was doomed.

Micah moved toward Arturo. “It looks like your up, Ax.”

As Arturo rose from the sofa, he watched her, his expression shuttered in a way that made her think he didn’t want her to know just how much her lack of faith in him cut.

The truth was, despite the doubts preying on her mind, she did, for the most part, trust him. They’d been through so much together over the past days and weeks—had risked their lives for one another over and over again. He cared about her, she knew he did. Just as she cared about him.

But trust had never come easily to her. It had always been a fragile thing, made even more so with the stakes so terrifyingly high.

Micah lifted his hands to Arturo’s face and Arturo closed his eyes.

“Will Lukas have difficulty without your help tonight?” Arturo asked Micah.

“He won’t be able to get the kids out of the city until I get there—I’m the only one he has working with him who can still move between the worlds—but he’ll continue to round up all the kids he can find. I don’t think there are too many of them left. With any luck, I’ll be able to meet him at the rendezvous point before sunrise.”

“Who’s Lukas?” Quinn asked. Bringing children into this hell world had been a new low, even for vampires.

“A friend of mine. Lukas Olsson,” Micah told her. “He’s been rescuing the kids being brought in and has amassed a surprisingly large team of vampires to help him. More than fifteen, last count, from kovenas all over the city.”

“Children do not belong in this place,” Arturo said tersely. “It has always been the law.”

“They’re all trapped,” she murmured, watching as Arturo’s features began to waver beneath the magic in Micah’s hands. “So they need you to get the kids back into the real world.”

“Right-o,” Micah said. “I feel for Lukas. He’d been living on the outside, had fallen in love with a human woman, when he got trapped here the night the trap sprung.”

“Does she know what happened to him?”

Micah made a sound, a strangled groan. “She does now, though Elizabeth didn’t have a clue until she walked into V.C. through a sunbeam not long ago. Lucky for both of them, Lukas found her before she could be enslaved. She’s back in the real world, waiting for him to be free to come to her.”

Which meant either Micah or Arturo had gotten her out. Probably. The Traders could still come and go as they pleased, but of the vampires, only Micah and Arturo could hand humans through the boundary circle.

“It’s too bad you can’t free the trapped vampires the way you can the humans.”

“Yes,” Arturo said. “But that would have defeated Phineas Blackstone’s plan to destroy us.”

Truth. “I’m surprised you’re able to rescue so many kids,” Quinn said, “considering it’s the vampires who ordered them brought here in the first place.” They’d been declared fodder for the next Games, essentially vampire gladiator contests.

“A reprehensible choice by the committee,” Kassius said. “Though if there is an upside, the depths of depravity of this declaration appears to have awakened many a slumbering conscience.”

“I think it’s more than that,” Micah said. “I think souls are beginning to reawaken. The magic of Vamp City is finally losing its hold on us.”

They’d all begun to believe that the magic Blackstone had used to create and renew the city had been filled with such hatred that it had slowly poisoned the vampires’ souls.

“So what do you do with the kids you free, Micah?” Quinn asked. “You don’t just leave them on the streets of D.C., I hope.”

Micah threw her a look that said she should know him better than that. “While Lukas and the others steal their memories of all they’ve seen, I slip into the real world and steal a vehicle. Last night, I found a school bus.”

Quinn’s brow rose.

Micah grinned. “I drove it to the boundary circle, then carried the kids out, two at a time, and loaded them on board, fast asleep. There were more than two dozen of them. I drove them to a residential street, enthralled the first passerby I saw to call the cops, then waited in the shadows until they arrived.”

“That must have been a sight when they first realized who was on that bus.”

Micah nodded. “I didn’t wait around, but I’m sure it was chaos.”

So many people within Washington, D.C. had gone missing of late. The return of so many of the children would have the city euphoric.

“Are kids still being brought in?” she asked.

“Not to my knowledge,” Micah said. “Not since the Games were cancelled.” He studied Arturo with satisfaction. “What do you think, Quinn? Kass?”

Arturo had disappeared beneath Micah’s hands, replaced by another Gonzaga guard, this one with light brown hair and a wide, genial face.

Micah turned to her. “Ready, kiddo?”

Quinn nodded and walked over to him. He’d glamoured her before, multiple times, and it didn’t hurt in the slightest. She was usually barely aware of the transformation occurring. Besides, she trusted Micah implicitly. It was his involvement in that whispered conversation that eased her mind the most. Because although Arturo had given her reason to doubt him in the past, Micah never had.

As Micah’s hands slid lightly over her face, Arturo and Kassius discussed the plan for tonight—how the four of them would travel onto Gonzaga lands in pairs, each person glamoured to look like a different one of Cristoff’s guards. The only real danger would be if they had the poor luck to stumble upon one of the actual guards they were glamoured to look like.

Quinn refused to entertain that possibility. They’d make it safely to their destination, she had to believe that. Of course, once inside Gonzaga Castle, any semblance of safety would be nothing but an illusion.

Micah closed his eyes as the pads of his fingers lightly grazed the surface of her skin and her flesh began to tingle. Slowly, the feeling spread over her scalp, then down her neck and body.

Finally Micah opened his eyes and frowned. “It’s criminal to make you look like a man, Quinn.”

She snorted. “Whatever it…” She stopped abruptly at the sound of the deep male voice that had just uttered her words. “This is too weird.” The other times she’d been glamoured, she’d remained a woman. Neither time had her voice noticeably changed.

Arturo handed her a small mirror and she took it, then stared at the unattractive male peering back at her, one with her own green eyes.

“You look just like Egor,” Kassius told her.

Micah grunted. “Thankfully she doesn’t smell like Egor.”

Quinn glanced at Arturo and found him watching her with those dark, enigmatic eyes.

“A word of warning,” Micah said. As he reached for her, he overshot her shoulder, then smiled and dropped his hand to give her shoulder a squeeze. “You’re not as tall as Egor, though you’ll appear to be. Keep your mouth closed around others unless you have no choice. Someone paying close attention might notice that your voice isn’t coming from your mouth but the area around your neck. And don’t let anyone touch you. You may look and sound male, because I’m good at what I do, but it’s all an illusion. If they reach for you, get out of the way. The moment they touch you they’ll know you’re female.”

Micah turned his magic on himself and, minutes later, Quinn found herself surrounded by three strange Gonzaga guards. She knew who they were beneath the glamour, of course. But it brought back memories of the last time she’d faced Gonzaga guards, the night she’d been ripped off her horse by one. The night Zack had nearly been killed. Once more, she questioned how well she really knew these men, these vampires.

As nerves braided her insides, Arturo pulled something out of his pocket—a roll of SweetTarts—and handed it to her. When she glanced at him, she saw gentle understanding in those dark eyes. He knew the situation unnerved her. He could feel her emotions.

She took one of the candies. “Thanks, Vampire.” Hearing that deep male voice come from her lips startled her all over again.

A stranger’s smile creased his unfamiliar face, traveling lightly to eyes she knew exceedingly well. Arturo’s hand rose to her shoulder unerringly, his mouth brushing her ear. “You know me,
cara mia.
You
know
me.” Then he released her and turned toward the door, leading their foursome into the community room now empty but for Mukdalla.

“Be careful, all of you,” the Trader woman said. “We need you back here, safe and sound. Which of you is Quinn?”

Quinn lifted a hand and glanced at her companions. “I’ll meet you upstairs.”