Radiance (Brotherhood of the Blade Trilogy #3) (5 page)

As the four of us were leaving the castle grounds in the black SUV, with Ambra at the wheel and me riding shotgun, she said to me, “You never told me about your vampire kill last night.”

“It seems anticlimactic to even tell you now, but it happened when I went to rescue Corbin in the forest. Remember when we heard him scream and I left to go get him?”

“
Oui, oui.
I know that part. Go on,” she said impatiently.

“
Well, after I wounded him in the shoulder with my silver blade, Corbin was too weak to get himself home. When I found him, a vampire had him by the throat. We fought. Corbin helped me by throwing snowballs and rocks and hitting the vamp with a big stick.”

“
Oh, my
gawd
,” Daphne said.

“
By then, he had turned from a wolf back into a man?” Ambra asked.

“
Yes. The moon set and he had just transformed when she was about to make his neck artery into her meal.”

“
She?” Ambra asked.

“
Yes, it’s the first time I killed a female vampire. It felt weird, believe me.”

“
A vampire is a vampire. Either gender will kill you just as dead,” Daphne said.

“
True,” I said. “Samantha Moon had plenty of chances to off me before I knew we were allies.”

“
Who was she?” Lucas asked.

“
Delilah.
I killed Delilah.”

Ambra pounded the steering wheel but kept driving on the dark, icy mountainous road. “And you are just now telling us this part? That you killed Delilah, one of the ancient vampires we’ve been after?”

“It’s because it hurts to tell you the kicker. I haven’t told anyone yet, and only Corbin knows.”

“
Knows what?” Daphne asked.

“
Delilah’s last words.” I paused. “As the final death rattle bubbled up, she said, ‘I have Kristin.’”

“
Mon Dieu
,” Ambra said, slowing down. Everyone else gasped. I wanted to crawl into a hole and cry.

“
Drive on,” said Lucas. “Ambra, let’s get the bastard who killed your cousin Nina, and probably your husband, Pieter, too.” He looked at me. “And then, before the trail goes cold, we’ll figure out the location of Delilah’s lair, which is probably Nero’s lair, or near it, and we’ll go get your daughter. You have more intel, I hope?”

“
I do, but tonight is about the hunt for Linus Ankeny. I want us to focus on that, so I’ll brief everyone later on the Delilah intel and details of the fight.”

“
Good idea,” Lucas said, and clapped me on the shoulder from the back seat.

Ambra said tightly, “Someone put Ankeny’s address in their smartphone and turn on the voice to direct me to his neighborhood.”

We continued on in silence for a while, except for the voice of the smartphone, which gave driving directions in French. We were almost there when we were suddenly faced with the unexpected: a gated community.

Ambra passed by the guard gate without turning down the street. She found a dark place to park on a side road and turned off the car engine.

“Are we going in over the wall?” Daphne asked Lucas in the back seat.

“
No. I don’t like it,” Lucas said. “It’s a rich, exclusive community. There’s going to be security everywhere—armed guards, security cameras and alarms.”

Her disappointment evident, Ambra asked, “Should we postpone the mission? Wait until he leaves his neighborhood?”

“He’s apparently quite well-off and, as a consultant and not an employee who has to go anywhere regularly, it could be a long surveillance,” I said. “Maybe even weeks. Or it could be unless the police get to him before we do.”

“
So, what do we do?” Daphne asked.

“
I have an idea,” Ambra said.

“
We’re all ears,” I said.

“
I call him on the phone and ask him to meet me somewhere.”

“
What?” I said. “He won’t fall for that.”

“
Wait a minute,” Lucas said. “Let her talk. What’s your plan?”

Ambra tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. “The truth. I want to tell him who I am and that I want to kill him and that I am waiting for him. I’ll set myself up as bait, and the three of you cover me until I take him down with my silver scythe.”

I shook my head. “It takes away the element of surprise. And he’s almost seven feet tall. We aren’t talking a pushover. You’d be setting yourself up for an ambush, instead of the other way around. And your phone number would be in his phone. We don’t want that. No trails that lead back to us.”

“
I wonder how tough he is,” Ambra said.

“
He might not be that strong, unless he’s an ancient,” Daphne said.

“
We don’t know who his creator was. That’s a big unknown factor,” Lucas said. “He could beat the stuffing out of us like Delilah did to Rand and Corbin.”

“
Hey, I’m okay. She didn’t kill me.”

Ambra turned around in the driver’s seat of the SUV. “I’ll go by myself. I’ll walk up to the guard at the gate. I’ll have him call Linus and tell him who I am, and then, I’ll walk in and it’ll be one on one with no risk to all of you.”

“No, Ambra. You’d be the first one to tell me how foolish that would be,” I said. “And the security cameras would have your picture.”

“
Are we back to the beginning then?” Ambra said a little tersely.

“
Let me think for a full minute without anyone else saying anything,” Lucas said.

We all stared out into the night and finally, Lucas said, “Screw it! Let’s go over the wall and break into his house.”

“What about security cameras?” I asked.

“
What have we got in the SUV, ‘MacGyver’?”

“
Let me look.” I climbed to the back of the SUV. “Duct tape, electrical tape, rappelling stuff, red Solo picnic cups, flashlights, batteries, laser pointers, bolt cutters and lots of automotive crap. Some river rocks for landscaping. A couple pairs of emergency skis and boots in various sizes and poles. Oh, and a package of high-quality airline barf bags.”

“
I stole those barf bags on my last flight,” Daphne said.

“
For what?”

“
Because they were free.”

“
Charming. You stole them from our own private jet?”

“
Shut up,” Daphne said good-naturedly.

“
Get down, traffic’s coming,” Ambra said.

Everyone ducked except me since I was in the back where the windows were heavily tinted. I got a good look at the car going past.

“What can you do with all that junk?” Lucas asked after the car had passed and everyone put up their heads again.

I scratched my head and then I put all of the stuff back and put on a pair of gloves before I got one river rock out of the package.

“What are you going to do with that?” Ambra asked.

“
Throw it through the guy’s windshield. His orange Corvette just passed us.”

“
Merde!
” Ambra started up the SUV and before I could even get in the front again, she laid a big scratch of rubber and went in hot pursuit of Ankeny’s car.

“
How do you know it’s him?” Lucas asked.

“
He has a sticker in the back window of Linus from
Peanuts
,” I said.

“
I don’t know what that is,” Ambra said.

“
Peanuts
is an American comic with a character named Linus. Get it?”

“
Yes. Was he alone? I don’t want to hurt anyone else,” Ambra said.

“
Unless he had someone’s head in his lap doing him a favor—which is hard to do in a Corvette—it looked like he was alone.”

“
Men!” Daphne said, disgusted.

“
Sorry,” I apologized. “Just thinking out loud.”

“
You have no internal editor, Rand,” Daphne said.

“
I’m not that complicated of a guy,” I said.

It was hard to keep up with the Corvette, but the SUV had some power and the Corvette didn’t handle so well in the mountain turns through the Alps. Either that, or perhaps the vampire driver had too much car for his skill level or even some liquor in him, if vampires even drank alcohol. Either way, on a hairpin turn, Ambra passed him in the SUV on the outside, next to the cliff, which made us all scream, even me. But she got ahead of the vehicle that had one person looking at us in complete bewilderment. In fact, he turned on his high beams and got as close as he could.

“Jerk!” Ambra said and moved the SUV to the other lane when he tried to get past on the curve.

“
Don’t let him pass, Ambra,” I said, “not even if he bumps us, which he won’t, because we’re practically driving a tank and he’s in a fiberglass car. He cannot push you off the road, but you can push him, if you have to. We’ve got eight cylinders and four-wheel drive.”

“
Make him stop shining his high beams. I can’t see,” Ambra said.

I opened the back window and threw the rock into his windshield, which broke—Ankeny’s orange Vette veered off the road, crashed through the guardrail and went off the edge of the cliff.

Ambra slowed down. Her face was pale in the light of the dash. “Now what?”

“
Let’s go finish him off,” I said. “Find a place to pull over, Ambra. We have to climb down the mountain.”

“
Are you freaking kidding me?” Daphne said. “This was supposed to be an urban vampire hunt.”

“
We had to wing it,” I said. “We didn’t know it was going to roll out like this tonight.”

“
You two older vampire hunters can wait in the nice warm SUV,” Ambra said. “Come on, Rand. Let’s get the skis on and go kill the vampire.”

I put on skis and the backpack with the rappelling and climbing equipment, everything I thought we might need. “Bring it on.”

It took us about half an hour to ski down to the burning wreck that provided plenty of firelight as it crackled and dangled on the edge of another precipice. The vampire was outside the vehicle in an expensive suit, coat, and loafers, and trying to use trees and bushes to climb up the snowy mountainside, but he kept slipping further and further down as the fire was melting the snow. That heat caused a few snow slides.

As we skied almost to him and used our wedge technique to stop a short distance away, he said something in another language.

I replied, “Speak English!”

While holding onto bushes with his bare hands, his feet kept slipping out from under him. He shouted in a heavy accent, “Why did you try to kill me?”

Ambra said, “You killed my husband, Pieter, and my cousin, Nina.”

“Ambra Von Arx? She said you were dead!”

Ambra hyperventilated a few times. “Who did?”

“Nina. Obviously, she was protecting you and lying to me. Just as I suspected.”

“
Did she know you were a vampire?” I asked.

“
Of course. It’s kind of obvious when she was my regular feeder.”

“
She loved you!” Ambra cried out.

“
You knew about me?”

“
Background checks tell all, vampire,” I said. “So do emails.”

“
Emails. Hmm, how clever of her. But too late.”

“
Why did you kill her?” Ambra asked. “She was a lovely woman.”

“
Yes, she was. She would do anything for me.”

“
Then why?” Ambra said.

“
I am a wealthy man, and the way I got that way is, I make more money at collecting life insurance payouts than I do working as an engineering consultant with a 40-year-old engineering degree.”

“
You killed her for the insurance money?” I said, aghast.

“
Yes, I proposed, we had a civil ceremony, we went on a honeymoon, and we took out life insurance policies on each other. There! Now you know it all.”

“
You’re a psychopath!” Ambra said, tears running down her cheeks and freezing there like icicles.

“
And now, you must die, too. So the whole family will be ended.”

Ambra flinched.

I said, “If that was a threat, Ankeny, you’re in no position to kill anyone, with your car wrecked and your bare hands clinging to that bush on the side of a mountain.”

“
Who are you?”

“
Rand Sebastian, Brotherhood of the Blade. I’m displeased to meet you.” I held out the end of my ski pole. “Grab on. You can go over the edge of the cliff and suffer your way back up with your broken undead body, or you can come up here, and face your accuser,” I said. “You killed her family and now, she’s gonna kill you.”