Out of the Night (Harlequin Nocturne) (4 page)

Campbell helped his buddy, coworker, whatever the hell he was, pull the truck fully back onto the bridge. Then he glanced at Colin and the injured woman. “You two take her to the hospital then return that car to wherever you found it.”

“How about you let one of us take her home?” Colin asked.

Olivia knew he was referring to her, and though she didn’t fancy any more time in the presence of vampires, she’d much rather be with one who had no interest in feeding from her, one who hadn’t already almost killed her today.

But he was one fantastic-looking man.

No, he wasn’t a man. Hadn’t been for who knew how long.

Why couldn’t being turned into a vampire make one butt ugly?

Campbell gestured toward the woman on the ground. “She’s AB negative, too.”

“Of course she is,” Colin said with no little bit of sarcasm.

At the end of her mental rope, Olivia found the courage to speak to them as if they weren’t deadly monsters. “I don’t care who takes me home as long as I get there in one unbitten piece before I go for the trifecta of almost getting killed today.”

“Your day has been a bit of a horror movie, hasn’t it?” Colin asked.

Understatement of the century.

“Get in.” Campbell gestured toward the truck.

Despite what she’d said, she hesitated.

“Or we can leave you standing on the Brooklyn Bridge all night and see how you fare.” Campbell said it as though it didn’t matter to him one way or the other.

She pressed her lips tightly together and managed to find enough courage to give him the stink eye before she turned and climbed into the passenger seat of the truck. Once inside she started to shiver, more because the reality of the day’s events were crashing into her like hurricane-force waves than because of the cold night air. Not that the latter was helping any. She’d been running on adrenaline so long, she hadn’t really noticed the cold of approaching winter since before she’d been attacked the first time. But she was pretty sure her body had burned up the final ounce of her adrenaline, and she was going to collapse the moment she stepped across the safety of her threshold.

Campbell took off his leather jacket and tossed it at her before he climbed in. She looked at him with genuine surprise. Yes, he’d technically saved her life twice today, but something about him offering her the comfort of his jacket seemed more surreal.

“Your teeth are chattering,” he said. “They can probably hear you in Connecticut.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, it’s not been my best day ever.”

“Oh, I noticed,” he said, sounding tired and a touch exasperated.

She wanted to refuse his gesture, but the cold was really seeping in now, down to her bones. As she slid her arms into the sleeves, she noticed the distinct lack of warmth that would have been there if a human man had been wearing it.

“Why do you wear a jacket, anyway? You can’t need it.”

“Habit. Plus I like it.”

She admitted silently that she did, too. Despite the fact that he was a vampire, the jacket smelled as if it’d been worn by a man—in a good way. The scent of leather mixed with something woodsy, earthy. She pulled the too-big jacket close around her.

Out of the corner of her eye, she detected movement and glanced at him just as he pulled his shirt over his head.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m getting ready to have wicked vampire sex with you.”

She gasped with pure, undiluted fear and reached for the door handle.

He laughed. It was so unexpected that she stopped and stared at him, at all that expanse of toned, well-sculpted chest, free of hair just the way she liked them.

“That’s not even funny,” she said.

“Just trying to break the tension.”

She jerked her gaze away from his chest when it wandered there again, but unfortunately it caught his and the knowing smirk tugging at his lips. He lifted the shirt then proceeded to use it to wipe away the blood covering his face.

“Don’t worry. Your precious human virtue is safe.”

She didn’t believe him for a second, and some part of her that evidently had a death wish was disappointed.

When he finished wiping away the majority of the blood, he tossed the shirt in the back and started the engine. “Where to?”

She opened her mouth but nothing came out. Did she really want him knowing where she lived?

“The sooner you tell me, the sooner you get to step beyond the point I can’t cross. And it’s not as if I couldn’t find out anyway.”

She gave him her address, hoping she hadn’t just made the biggest mistake of her life. As he pulled back into traffic, she scooted as close to her door as she could. Not that the space between them afforded her any semblance of protection, but it was the best she could do in the current situation.

“You got a name?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. Instead she counted the seconds, minutes until she could truly be safe from this most confusing and frightening of vampires. He’d almost killed her then saved her, all within the space of a couple of hours. Add to that the fact that he was the most gorgeous male specimen she’d seen in ages, and she felt as if her brain were going to short-circuit, sending sparks out her ears.

Unable to look away, she watched him. But he stayed on his side of the truck.

“Why aren’t you attacking me?” What was she doing, inviting death now?

“Because I fed, nearly drank the blood bank dry of AB-negative.”

“Oh.”

He glanced at her as he made a turn. “Don’t think that makes me any less dangerous.”

“If you can control yourself, maybe other vampires can, too.”

He gave her a hard stare. “Some don’t want to.” He pulled to the curb and turned off the engine.

When she looked out the window, she recognized the dark street as where she’d been when the other vampire had stolen the truck with her in it. “This isn’t where I live.”

“No, but there’s something you need to see.”

“You said you were taking me home.” Her heart rate picked up again. Had everything been an act to mess with her head? Was he going to kill her now, drain her body and leave her on the sidewalk?

“I will, but first you need to see this.” He got out and rounded the truck, then opened her door. “Get out.”

“No.”

“Either you get out or I carry you.”

With fear consuming every part of her, she got out of the truck and followed him through a door and up a darkened flight of stairs. “Where are we going?” Only she was afraid she knew.

“Before you start letting the fact that I’m not draining you make you think maybe vampires aren’t dangerous, I’m going to show you how wrong you are.”

Olivia stopped, frozen by his words. But when he kept climbing, the dark and what might follow her frightened her more than keeping up with Campbell.

When she entered a large high-ceilinged room behind him, the thick coppery scent of blood nearly overwhelmed her, causing bile to rise in her throat. Other unpleasant odors—those of unwashed bodies, rot, a dank wetness—mixed with the blood. She put her hand over her nose and mouth and tried not to gag. Her horror only increased as Campbell walked toward one brick wall and lifted a thick set of chains anchored there.

“This is what happens to humans who get caught by vampires if they’re not immediately drained. You end up in a blood den, a living lunch for one vampire if you’re lucky. Dozens, hundreds if you’re not. It doesn’t take long for you to start praying for death.”

The stories weren’t half as awful as the reality.

“That girl we just saved...she was chained in here, along with about a dozen others,” he said. “You could’ve easily been headed to something similar if we hadn’t happened upon you earlier.”

It was all too much after everything she’d been through. She rushed to a corner and vomited. Cold sweat broke out all over her body, and she started shaking. Beyond the buzzing in her ears, she heard Campbell drop the chains and walk toward the door.

“I’ll take you home now.”

She lifted her head and looked at him. In that moment, she didn’t know if she hated him for forcing her to see this evidence of vampire cruelty firsthand or was thankful to him for reminding her that her fear was well-founded.

He disappeared down the stairs, but she took a few seconds to make sure she wasn’t going to heave again. Then she forced her shaky legs to carry her out of this room she was certain would show up in her nightmares.

Campbell didn’t speak to her for the remainder of the drive to her apartment. When he pulled to a stop outside her building, she wasted no time slipping out of the truck and hurrying through the front door of her diner, which provided access to her second-floor apartment. Only when she was safely behind the protective barrier of the glass did she venture a look back at him and find him staring at her. Despite the space between them, she felt the intensity of that stare and wondered what it meant. Wondered if she really wanted to know.

Chapter 4

C
ampbell pulled away from the diner in Hell’s Kitchen, hoping to leave not only the woman but also his dangerous thoughts behind. Because it’d been all he could do to not grab her and kiss her senseless. Too easily he could imagine stripping off her clothes and thrusting into her warm body. Just the thought had him hard as a stone pillar.

He shook his head as he headed back toward Tribeca, to the area where she’d been attacked earlier. If he was lucky, maybe the cold air barreling into the truck would knock some sense into him. Because as he’d watched the still-nameless woman step beyond the safety of her front door, he’d finally allowed himself to think about how beautiful she was. And not just physically. Though it put her in danger, he admired how she stood up for herself, how she fought back even when the odds were hopeless. He hoped it didn’t get her killed after everything he’d done to keep her alive.

When he approached the area where the blood den had been, he noticed some of his team heading for the door that led to the stairs. He pulled over and hopped out of the truck.

“You get everything sorted out?” he asked.

“All the humans dropped at the hospital,” Len said. “Colin and Travis are questioning the vamps at Detention.”

Detention was nothing but a big almost entirely underground room with white walls, but it still gave Campbell the creeps every time he stepped foot into it. Maybe it was the retractable door on the roof, the ever-present threat that those in holding could be exposed to the sun if they didn’t cooperate. He didn’t know if anyone had ever suffered that sentence before going to trial, but the Imperium was very good at spreading the word that they had. Keeping order through fear.

He followed the others up the stairs, his nose twitching at the foul smell of old blood.

Kaja sniffed and scanned the room. “A human has been here since we were,” she said, sounding surprised.

“It was the woman we saved in Tribeca earlier,” Campbell said as he walked across the room.

“You brought her here?” Sophia looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Why?”

“To impress on her how dangerous it was to get caught out after dark.”

“Harsh,” Billy said, being his typical vampire-of-few-words self.

“Oh, my God, Campbell,” Sophia said. “You don’t think she’d already figured that out? And it’s not as if she was deliberately walking the streets after dark.”

If anyone else had spoken to him like that, he would have told them to back off. But with Sophia it stung because she was the most agreeable member of his team, a bit like their mother hen.

“Way to kick her when she’s down,” Kaja said. “Why not toss her out of the truck a couple of blocks from her apartment and make her run for it while you’re at it?” With an eye roll she walked away with Len to investigate the scene.

Maybe he had gone too far. Sometimes it was hard to judge and balance his vampire and human instincts.

“You owe her an apology,” Sophia said.

“I think what she wants more than an apology is me to stay the hell away.”

“Then call her. Email. Text. Just don’t become so damned hard that you’re not you anymore.” With her words still hanging in the air, Sophia stalked off down the long room after Len and Kaja.

Billy gave him an “I agree with her” look before returning his attention to the smartphone where he was no doubt typing in details about the scene.

Seeing as how everyone else in the room was put out with him, Campbell decided to put his investigative skills to work somewhere else. He started to tell the others where he was headed, but then thought,
Screw it,
and took the stairs back down two at a time.

Sophia’s words kept hitting his brain like a battering ram as he drove the rest of the way to Tribeca. They kept up their assault as he got out of the truck and started scanning the area where he and his team had fought the other vampires.

He stopped walking and looked up at the sky, sighing. Sophia was right. He’d been a class A jerk. It was a wonder he hadn’t sent the woman into a nervous breakdown. Wasn’t his job to keep people safe, not scare them half to death?

He had to be honest with himself, if no one else. He’d taken her to that blood den to ensure she was terrified of him because once the red haze of his bloodlust had disappeared, he’d noticed just how beautiful she was. Long blond hair. The sense that she had wide eyes even when she wasn’t afraid for her life. Curves in all the right places. She was the type of woman he’d have so gone after back in his NYPD days. And someone off-limits to him now. He’d been damned lucky he hadn’t killed her earlier.

But the fact that she was alive drew him as if she were a siren upon her seaside rock. Not because he wanted to drink from her. No, she tugged on the part of him that yearned to be human again, the part he tried to forget.

As he wandered up the side of the street where she’d been fleeing, something glinted in the reflected glow of a security lamp. He knelt down next to the curb and picked up a cell phone, the same kind the team carried. Had one of them lost it in the midst of the fight?

He palmed it and headed back for the truck. With this area now quiet and no vamps nearby, he wasn’t going to find anything of any use in their ongoing investigation of the blood dens anyway.

When he slipped into the driver’s seat, he plugged the phone into the charger. Then he started the engine and headed back to the cave.

The team didn’t actually live in a cave, but they’d dubbed their underground facility the Bat Cave during one long day of watching—and making fun of—vampire movies. He actually smiled at the memory because it was the day when he’d felt them finally bond as something resembling a family unit. It was important for vamps to find support like that when they couldn’t go back to their human families. It kept them from losing their humanity, as well, and becoming nothing more than animals with ravenous cravings.

He kept his eyes open for any illegal activity as he covered block after block. But after the craziness of the previous few hours, the night had settled into normalcy. The human-owned buildings sat quiet and locked up tight. When he crossed into the more commercial areas, the vamp establishments were bursting with activity. Vampires shopping, working, clubbing and dining out—just as humans did during the day.

When he pulled into the garage, he noticed Matt Calloway, head of V Force Team 2, and another member of his team heading into the garage from the headquarters room.

“I see you’re going for the air-conditioned look,” Matt said with a teasing grin as Campbell slid out of his team’s truck.

“At least we didn’t turn ours upside down,” Campbell said, poking fun at the time Matt had been in hot pursuit of some nasty blood thieves and took a corner a bit too fast and ended up rolling into the front of a store. The vampire woman who’d owned the clothing store had chewed him out for twenty minutes straight.

“Touché,” Matt said as he saluted and headed for his own truck.

When Campbell stepped inside, he held up the phone he’d found. “Who lost their phone earlier tonight?”

Nobody claimed it, so he tossed it to Travis. “Figure out whose it is. Maybe we’ll catch a lucky break and it’ll hold something useful.”

He stepped into his room, shoved off his jacket, which still held the woman’s feminine scent, and pulled a clean T-shirt over his head. “Find anything at the den?” he asked as he came back into the main room.

“Squat,” Colin said, leaning back in his desk chair. “Though Travis is trying to figure out who owns the building.”

“That ought to be easy enough,” Campbell said.

Travis looked up from his computer. “You’d think, right? But someone went to a lot of trouble to hide the owner’s identity. The deed says PMG Inc., but that company doesn’t seem to exist.” Travis’s computer dinged and he looked at the screen. “Looks like this phone belongs to an Olivia DaCosta.”

When he read the address of the Comfort Food Diner, Campbell realized he now had a name to go with the beautiful face. And he had a sneaking suspicion that was going to make her even more difficult to forget.

* * *

Olivia kept waiting to wake up. But no matter how much she paced across her apartment on her twisted ankle, winced at the pain in her back or pinched herself, nothing changed. She really had been attacked by vampires and then been saved by the same species. A bubble of hysterical laughter threatened, but she tamped it down. If she was going crazy, she didn’t want to acknowledge it quite yet.

She noticed the light blinking on her phone and hit the play button.

“Olivia, I just got your message. I was in the shower. Please call me as soon as you get this,” Mindy’s concerned voice said. “I called your cell, but you didn’t answer.”

When the machine beeped and the next message started, it was Mindy again, sounding even more scared this time. “Come on, Liv, call me. I’m freaking out here.”

As Olivia made her way through the messages, they were all from her best friend, each one growing more frantic than the last. Her cell phone was who knew where. She’d lost it sometime between calling Mindy and the cascade of horrible events that followed. She picked up her cordless phone and dialed Mindy’s number.

“Liv?” Mindy sounded on the verge of tears, very unusual for her.

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Oh, thank God. You had me scared to death. What happened? How did you get home?”

Olivia let out a long breath. “You’re never going to believe it.”

“Try me. I’ve imagined just about everything waiting here by this phone, praying you were alive.”

Olivia pressed her palm against her forehead as she continued to pace the floor of her living room, unable to sit still even though she ought to have her foot propped up on a cushion and ice packs on all the cuts and bruises. “Someone stole my car, and I got attacked as soon as the sun set.”

Mindy gasped. “Attacked?”

Olivia heard the unasked question. “I wasn’t bitten. Nearly, but I’ve still got a heartbeat.”

“Were you able to get inside a safe building?”

“No. I couldn’t find anyone willing to open their door.”

Mindy cursed under her breath. “This new world has turned us into hardhearted bastards.”

While there were still good people in the world, Mindy’s assessment held enough truth that Olivia didn’t contradict her.

“You know I don’t believe in miracles, so how did you get away?” Mindy asked.

“This is the part you’re not going to believe.” She paused, thinking again about how crazy the truth was going to sound to her friend. “Vampires.”

“Vampires?” There was no missing Mindy’s disgust.

“Yeah, this black armored truck rolled up, and the next thing I knew, these commando-type vampires were fighting the other ones.”

Mindy was quiet for several seconds. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Olivia didn’t blame Mindy for sounding skeptical. She wouldn’t believe it either if it hadn’t happened to her. Part of her didn’t believe it despite that fact.

The details of the rest of the night flowed out of Olivia, faster with each word. It felt as if she were draining her body of poison.

“Wait, let me get this straight,” Mindy said, interrupting the flow. “The big vampire who attacked and almost killed you, he’s the one who later pulled you to safety?”

“Yes.” Olivia realized she was on the verge of sounding hysterical. “It’s all insane but one hundred percent true. And when I finally thought he was going to bring me home—” Her voice broke, and tears leaked out of her eyes to roll down her cheeks.

“What is it?” Mindy sounded worried, as if she wanted to help but was afraid to hear more.

“Never mind.” She shouldn’t be talking about this with Mindy, reminding her of how vile vampires were when she needed no reminding.

“No, it’s okay.”

Olivia took a deep, shaky breath. “He took me back to that blood den, made me go inside. Oh, Mindy, it was beyond horrible. It was like a castle dungeon and a slave ship all rolled into one. Chains.” She sniffed and wiped at her tears. “They had them chained to the walls. My God, the smells.” She felt as if she might throw up again at the mere memory.

“Don’t think about it anymore. Try to push it from your mind.”

Was that what Mindy had to tell herself each morning to survive the loss of her family? Olivia didn’t think she’d ever forget that place if she scrubbed her brain with bleach.

“I know none of this makes any sense, but after that I swear he dropped me off at my front door and didn’t leave until I was safely inside.”

Mindy was quiet so long that Olivia wasn’t sure she was still on the other end of the line. Finally, she spoke. “Had to be V Force. No other explanation.”

“V Force?”

“Vampire cops, if you believe in such a thing. I’ve heard they attempt to keep the vamp population in line, but I always figured it was a myth or some propaganda put out to make the little humans feel better.”

Well, didn’t this night just get weirder by the moment? “Damn fine job they’re doing.” Although they had saved her life, more than once.

Olivia spent the next few minutes answering more of Mindy’s questions before the simple act of talking became too taxing.

“Listen, I’m exhausted. We’ll talk more in the morning, okay?”

“Sure. You deserve a good night’s rest.”

But when Olivia ended the phone call, she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to sleep again. It’d been two hours since Campbell had brought her home, and she still couldn’t calm down. Trying to focus her mind on anything but vampires, she planned the next day’s restaurant menus, then the ones for the rest of the week. She followed that with a full inventory of the stock room. When sleep still seemed to be nowhere on the horizon, she even tried watching TV. Nothing stopped the anxiety that pulsed throughout her mind and body.

She desperately wanted to take a shower but couldn’t make herself do it even though she knew no vampire could get inside without her inviting him in. Somehow fiction had managed to get that tidbit of lore right. The limitation didn’t make sense, but it didn’t make it any less true. She found she couldn’t even force herself to change clothes, afraid to leave herself vulnerable for even a moment.