Secret Worlds (446 page)

Charlie lowered his hands. “It seems to me that if bad guys are trying to find other bad guys, than they are either trying to knock someone off, or they want to get everyone together for some bad guy convention. I’m guessing it’s the latter.”

“I think you’re right,” I agreed. “There’s something else. Before Henry came, I had a chance to question the vampires. One of them said ‘The Dark Prince’ was behind this.”

The color immediately drained from Charlie’s face, and his mouth opened.

“Do you know him?” He didn’t respond, and that’s when I knew. “He’s the one who killed your wife, isn’t he?”

“I should’ve known,” he whispered. “It’s all been leading up to this.”

“So what do we do?”

Charlie straightened. “We fight.”

The next several days, Charlie worked overtime. Many calls were made to the other Deific offices, and several agents were sent undercover, including Alana and Michael, who seemed to be more upset than anyone.

Before they left, Michael pulled me aside. “Henry told me that one of them took your picture.”

I nodded.

“When did he take your picture? Was it before or after you used magic?”

“After.”

His brow wrinkled. “Someone thinks they’ve found you. Watch your back, Eve.”

His words sent a cold chill up my spine. There were only a couple of people who might try to find me: Boaz, if he somehow survived, and any relatives. The thought of coming face to face with either of them rocked my frame.

After Michael left, I went into Charlie’s office. Papers were scattered all over his desk; several of them had spilled onto the floor. Charlie’s head was lowered and rested in his hands. I thought he was asleep until he suddenly jerked upright and stared at me as if he’d never seen me before. Dark circles hung beneath his eyes and his brown hair was wildly out of control.

“Okay, Charlie. This is getting ridiculous!” I said. “Go home!”

“How can I? The man who murdered Moira is out there, and now he’s come back for more blood. I have to stop him, but—” He picked up several papers and tossed them off his desk. “—I can’t find him!”

“Maybe you’re too close to the situation.” I sat in the chair across from his desk and slouched down. “Take a break and come back and look at everything with a new perspective. When’s the last time you ate?”

His shoulders slumped forward. “Maybe you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right. Let’s go get something to eat and then you are going to go to bed. If you won’t leave the Deific, then at least crash at my place for a few hours.”

He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “There’s a truck stop diner just outside the city. It’s private and they have the best eggs benedict.”

“Eggs it is,” I said, pushing my way back out of the chair. Charlie was looking at paperwork again by the time I reached the door. I practically had to drag him away.

***

It was especially dark outside as we drove away from the city and its light. Only the glow of the full moon shined, casting an eerie quality along a thin layer of frost blanketing the cold ground. Spring would come sooner than expected thanks to an unusually mild winter.

There were few cars on the road this time of the night. Charlie hadn’t said much, and I left him alone to his thoughts. It was strange to have him so quiet, but I didn’t try to bring him out of his somber mood. Tonight, no matter what, I was going to tell him the truth about me. Now how to start the conversation…

Charlie stiffened and sat up straight. “Not now,” he moaned.

“What is it?”

He glanced in his rear view mirror. I turned around to follow his gaze. Behind us, a car’s headlights shined brightly in the distance.

“I’ve got that same feeling I had when the Deific was attacked.”

“But where? I don’t see anyone.” The car behind us had turned off, leaving us alone on the road.

Charlie glanced at my waist. “Put your seatbelt on.”

Knowing I was immortal, a seatbelt never seemed important, but I obeyed anyway. I pulled over the shoulder strap, but my hand slipped off. I stretched it out in front of me. “Um, Charlie, your seatbelt—” The gray seatbelt strap was jagged on one end as if it had been torn.

Charlie’s hands tightened further on the steering wheel. “Get in the back.”

I began to crawl in back of the vehicle but stopped. “The back ones are ripped, too.”

Ignoring the road stretching out in front of us, Charlie turned to me. “It’s you they’re after, isn’t it?”

It seemed an eternity that I stared into his eyes, when in reality it was only a fraction of a second before something big and hard smashed into the side of Charlie’s Toyota. It had come from a side street traveling at a fantastic speed. Our car flipped several times, and I rolled with it until I was finally thrown from the passenger window.

My body landed in the weeds on the shoulder of the road, and something cold pierced my chest on the right side of my sternum. I cried out in horrific pain, clawing at whatever had stabbed me.

The car stopped rolling several feet from me in a twisted heap of broken metal and glass. The still night held its breath, and so I did, too. I wasn’t sure who could be around, and I didn’t want to give my location away. The ground was wet, and it soaked through my sweater and to my skin. But the icy coldness was secondary to my pain. I lifted my head. There was some sort of a stake sticking out from my chest.

Charlie’s moan from within the car broke through the silence. The night gasped for air in a voice of a thousand different sounds: a horn honked in the distance, a dog barked, crickets chirped, and a loud engine revved. The truck that had hit us slowly crept forward; one of its headlights was broken. The remaining good light shined on the upside-down Toyota.

Charlie was cursing as he struggled to get out of the car. After kicking the door open from the inside, he crawled out. His clothes were torn and his head bloody.

“Eve!” he called.

“Here,” I whispered loudly, hoping those in the car wouldn’t hear me.

Charlie limped toward me, dragging one foot behind the other. The truck slowly turned, following his movements. The one good headlight turned Charlie into a dark shadow.

He knelt next to me, and his expression turned to horror when he saw my condition. I could only imagine what I must look like. Many of my wounds had already healed, but I could still feel sticky blood covering my body. Charlie inspected the stake in my chest, the one wound that wouldn’t heal until he removed it.

“What is this?” I asked, clawing at it again.

“I think you’ve been stabbed by a roadside memorial cross,” he said, his voice cracking.

Whether from shock or because it really was funny, I began to laugh.

“How can you be laughing?” Charlie said. “You should be dead!”

He tore the bottom of his shirt and held it tightly against what he thought was another wound on my head.

The truck behind us inched forward, reminding me of our dangerous predicament. “Charlie, you have to listen to me. I need you to drag my body into the woods.”

“No way! I’m not moving you. You could bleed to death!”

“But they’re watching us. Pull me into the woods—now!”

For the first time, he remembered the truck and was surprised to see it still there. He stood up and shouted, “What do you want?”

Its engine revved.

“Get me out of here,” I whispered again. I didn’t want whoever was in the truck to see me heal.

This time, Charlie didn’t argue. He took my arms and pulled me into the woods, away from the threatening truck. An unexpected ravine made Charlie stumble, but he managed to keep me on my back even though I practically slid to the bottom. The light from the truck remained above us, spreading along the tops of the tree branches.

“Get this thing out,” I said once we were safely into the forest. I stood up and used my own hands to try and pull the cross out.

Charlie looked dumb struck. “How can you be standing?”

“I still have legs. Please, help me!”

“If I pull that out, you’ll bleed to death.”

“Trust me, I won’t. We have to get out of here before they follow us on foot, and I don’t want to run with a stake in my chest.” I continued to struggle with the splintered wood.

“This is insane! You were just thrown from a car and stabbed in the chest, but you act like you’ve only stubbed your toe.”

The sound of a truck door opening made my heart pound. I grabbed Charlie by the shoulders and in an urgent voice said, “If we don’t get out of here now, we’re both dead. Do you understand? Now rip this thing out of me!”

Charlie grabbed the cross with both hands and pulled while I pushed away from it. Finally it broke free. Blood poured from the open wound, and I cried out and fell to the ground.

“I told you it was a bad idea,” he said and helped me up.

Two figures stepped into the beam of the headlights. A deep, raspy voice called down. “Leave the girl, and you might just live.”

Charlie pressed his torn shirt to my wound.

“You leave your girl, and I’ll leave mine,” he shouted back.

The figures turned to each other. The shorter of the two jumped down the gully at an impossible length.

By this time, my wound had healed, and I no longer felt any pain.

“Let’s go,” I said, grabbing Charlie’s hand. As I turned to run, Charlie bent down and picked up the bloody wood cross. We didn’t make it far before the two vampires appeared before us, blocking our escape.

Charlie stepped in front of me before either of the vampires could speak, holding up the cross like a weapon. Something must’ve happened to his shoulder in the accident, because he flinched at the movement.

“What do you want with us?” he asked. “We don’t want to fight—”

Charlie’s words were cut short by the vampire’s meaty hand, which had closed around his throat. Charlie’s eyes widened when the vampire easily lifted him off of the ground.

I reacted quickly, grabbing the cross from Charlie’s hand and driving it into the vampire’s heart. His shocked expression lasted only a moment before he crumbled lifeless to the ground. Charlie dropped to his feet gasping.

The second vampire lunged for me, but I was ready, my powers having grown even before the car rolled. I raised my hand palm-up in the direction of a tree not far from us and closed my fingers. Its roots let go of their hold on the earth, and when I jerked my hand in a downward motion, the tree crashed upon the charging vampire, barely missing Charlie. The tree limbs pierced through the vampire but just missed his heart.

“Let’s go!” Charlie said, grabbing my hand to run.

We raced up the gully toward the idling truck. I hopped behind the driver’s seat and jammed the clutch into reverse. The truck was clawing its tread into the road before Charlie could close the door.

“I think we’re okay,” Charlie said after we’d driven a few miles. “We’re not being followed.”

I glanced into the rearview mirror. Only darkness reflected back.

“Do you want to tell me what happened back there?” Charlie asked. “How you’re acting like you weren’t just thrown from a car?”

“I’m a fast healer.”

“You might have blood that clots fast but not that fast. Are you using magic?”

Lights from a gas station appeared over a small rise in the road. I pulled into its parking lot and drove behind it. When I stopped the car, I turned to Charlie. “I am a fast healer,” I repeated. “Look.” I pulled down the top of my blood soaked shirt just below the clavicle where the stake had pierced me. “See? There’s nothing there.”

He touched it lightly with his fingers. “How is this possible?”

“I don’t know how else to tell you other than to just come right out and say it, so here it goes: I’m immortal.”

“But how?”

I faced forward out the frosted window. “Boaz.”

“He bit you? But wouldn’t that make you a vampire?”

“I wasn’t bitten. I was injected with his venom, but it had been altered. I received only the immortal part of it, not his power or blood lust.”

“Why would Boaz do that?”

“It’s a long story,” I said and wrapped my arms close to my chest. Even though the heater was on in the truck, I couldn’t get warm.

“I think it’s time I heard it,” Charlie said.

“I do, too.” I took a deep breath and began my story at the beginning, speaking first of my powerful and abusive parents, the pact they’d made with Boaz, the way I’d naively and foolishly fallen for Boaz, how he turned me, and finally I ended on the necklace and how Lucien had saved me.

When I was finished, Charlie stared at me with his mouth open. “And I thought my life was difficult.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. The timing never felt right.”

“Timing is everything,” he agreed. “But that still brings us back to why vampires, and quite possibly The Dark Prince, are after you. What’s the connection?”

I shook my head, a sudden panic swelling in my chest. “You don’t think Boaz is actually alive and calling himself The Dark Prince, do you?”

Charlie laughed. “I’ve met the vamp that calls himself that ridiculous name. It’s not Boaz.”

“Then maybe someone else from my past is working with him. It could be my grandfather, my aunt, or—” I swallowed hard, still unable to stomach her betrayal. “My former best friend, Liane. She is the one who told my parents where I was before they captured me and put me in that coffin.”

Charlie leaned back into his seat, seeming to ponder my words. “I’ll have some people look into all of them. It’s important we find this connection before anything else bad happens.”

I agreed, not liking at all the sick feeling spreading in my gut.

The next day, Charlie left town. Michael had called and insisted he come to Ireland as soon as possible. Charlie didn’t tell me what for, but by his expression, I knew it was bad. He wasn’t sure how long he would be gone for, but he assured me he would have men look into the people from my past. He also assigned two Deific guards to follow me around. Just in case.

Because of this new threat toward me, I pushed my abilities as far as I could, which helped me develop a new gift that not even Dr. Skinner could explain. With certain people whom I came in contact with, I would only have to look at them, and instantly I knew their feelings, thoughts, and intentions. They always seemed to be individuals who were going through a difficult time in their life. It was as if their souls screamed for relief and somehow I was able to tune into their cries. Sometimes I wondered if my magic grew this way because it’s what I wanted. Now, maybe, I could be more of a help to both Lucien and Charlie.