Darker After Midnight (22 page)

Not real
, she told herself, tearing through tissue paper to retrieve the brand-new Nikes from the box.
Not real. Just an uncannily tactile, detailed trick of her unmedicated, probably dying, mind
.

“What are you doing?” He came out of the bathroom without her realizing it.

Not real
, she reminded herself. There was no need to answer him, or even acknowledge his presence. Focusing wholly on untangling the laces from the pair of sneakers, she made a desperate attempt to ignore him.

It wasn’t working.

He was no hallucination. He was flesh and bone, six-and-a-half feet of muscled, nearly naked male. He seemed calmer now, but there was no escaping the ember-bright glow of his eyes. Not to mention the razor-sharp tips of his fangs. Rising panic formed a bubble in the back of her throat.

“Tavia, we need to talk.”

“No, we don’t. We’ve done enough, I think.” She slipped on the first shoe and quickly laced it up.

He came over to her, his tawny brows low over those inhuman eyes. “There are some things you need to understand. Jesus, there are things about you that I need to understand—”

“Shut up,” she snapped, worry starting to burn even hotter than any embarrassment or confusion over his sudden departure a
few moments ago. She rammed her foot into the other shoe and yanked the laces tight. “And if I were you? I’d plan on staying far away from me, or I promise you, I’ll press charges. I can have every cop in the Commonwealth at your door in five minutes. A fleet of federal agents too.”

He actually had the audacity to chuckle, although it held little humor. “Press charges? Call the cops on me? Sweetheart, I’m a problem that no human law enforcement officer is going to solve for you. After what just happened between us, it should be pretty obvious to you that we’ve both got big problems.”

She stood up and met his grave look. “Don’t try to find me. Don’t come near me ever again. I just want to forget that any of this happened. I just want to go home.”

She took a step to move around him, but he caught her by the arm. His fingers held her firmly, not letting go even when she tried to wrench loose. “Let go of me, damn it.”

He shook his head, his eyes grim. “You have nowhere to go.”

“I’m going home!” She pulled out of his grasp, outrage spiking like acid in her veins. It was building inside her, making her skin tingle with heat. She didn’t have to see her scars—rather, the inexplicable marks on her chest and arms—to know that they were surging with more color now. Reacting to her temper like some kind of emotional barometer. She sidestepped him and headed for the open bedroom door. “Leave me the hell alone.”

He stood in the threshold before she even reached it herself.

Tavia gaped, came up short mere inches away from his bare chest. “Get out of my way.”

“You’re not going anywhere.” His face had become more than serious now. There was a threat in his otherworldly eyes, a warning that he would have no qualms about physically forcing her to stay for as long as he deemed necessary.

Tavia bristled at that threat. “I said move. I need to see my aunt. I need to call my doctor—why can’t you understand that I’m not well?”

“Whatever you are,” he murmured, his deep voice level, “it’s not unwell. You’re scared and confused. Hell, I’m not standing on
totally firm ground myself at the moment. Whatever you’ve been through—whatever you are—we need answers, Tavia. I’m going to help you get them.”

She shook her head, unwilling to hear him. Still not able to reconcile any of what she was experiencing. “All I need is to go home. Right now.”

When she tried to step past him again, he braced both arms up on the doorjambs, caging her inside the room with his body. “As soon as night falls, I’m going to take you somewhere safe. There are people I know who can help you make sense of everything. People far more suited to looking after you than I am.”

“I don’t need anyone looking after me. Least of all you or anyone you know.”

He exhaled a scoff, dropped his arms, and started moving forward. Pushing her into a retreat with just his encroaching presence. “You don’t trust me.”

“No, I don’t.”

“That’s probably smart, considering what nearly happened in here.”

Nearly? She was concerned enough about what
had
happened. Tavia took a pace backward on her heels, less afraid of him than outraged. Her fury coiled in her belly, mingling with the remnants of the thrumming power that was still alive and racing through her veins. “I don’t trust you because of everything you’ve done. Because of everything I’ve seen here. I’m not even sure I can trust myself anymore. None of this makes any sense to me.”

“It does,” he said evenly. “You just wish it didn’t.”

“Shut up.” She shook her head vigorously, anger and fear pushing into her throat. “I don’t want to hear any more. I just want to get the hell out of here.”

“That’s not going to happen, Tavia.”

When he started to reach for her again, something exploded inside her. It was her fury and panic, erupting out of her in a physical reflex. Before she could think about it—before she was even aware that her arm was moving—she shoved him with all her might. He flew backward as if yanked on a tether, but a second later he had regained his footing.

In less than a blink he was back in her face, looming over her with nostrils flaring, eyes blazing. “Goddamn it, I’m not going to hurt you.”

She didn’t dare believe him. Nor did she wait to find out if she could. The instant she felt his fingers come to rest on her arm, she pulled back her other one and let her fist fly—connecting with a bone-jarring
crack
on the underside of his jaw.

To her complete amazement, he went down with the impact. His harsh curse as he staggered onto his knees rattled the broken glass of the crudely barred window behind them.

Tavia didn’t hang around to go another round with him. As he tried to shake off the blow, she leapt around him. She tore out of the bedroom and through the large brownstone, across the inlaid marble foyer and out the front door to the morning bustle of the Back Bay residential area.

She heard him bellow behind her, but only dared a fleeting glance in his direction as her feet flew over the snow-dusted sidewalk. He stood in the open doorway, his arm raised up to shield his eyes.

He stayed there, hanging back, watching her from within the shadowed shelter as she dashed into the street and frantically hailed a passing taxi. The yellow cab slowed to a halt and she climbed in, giving the driver her address in a breathless rush.

The car lurched back into traffic, belching a cloud of opaque steam and exhaust that billowed up like a veil, blotting out the brownstone and the man Tavia hoped to never see again.

S
ENATOR BOBBY CLARENCE
had been a good Catholic apparently, but an even better politician. The church he’d shrewdly joined fresh off the bus from Bangor as a first-year law student at Harvard was only the largest, most prestigious in Boston. Some fifty years ago, this same church had mourned a parishioner who was more famously a beloved fallen human president, a fact that Dragos guessed had played a role in the ambitious young Clarence’s decision to join its flock.

Although the bachelor senator had no immediate family, outside the Cathedral of the Holy Cross that cold early afternoon, police were directing traffic to accommodate the crowd of funeral attendees waiting to get one of the two thousand seats at his service. The line of mourners stretched from the pair of red double doors at the entrance, out to the bricked sidewalk and around the large corner lot on which the massive neo-Gothic cathedral sat.

Dragos sat inside his idling, chauffeured sedan about a block down the street, impatient for the service to begin. He was risking a great deal, venturing out during daylight hours. Even with the precautions he’d taken—UV-blocking wraparound sunglasses, a brimmed hat made of dense, boiled wool, and a generous length of knit scarf to shield his neck and head—his nearly pure Breed genes
were a liability here. Being second generation of his kind, he could withstand less than a half hour in direct sunlight before his solarsensitive skin began to cook.

But some risks were to be expected.

Some things, he supposed, were worth a little pain.

He’d endured his share already, thanks to the Order. The killing of his Minion senator so soon after Dragos had turned him had been inconvenient to say the least. It still grated to have lost the human before his full potential could have been realized. But then again, Dragos’s plans wouldn’t have waited the handful of years it might have taken Bobby Clarence’s political star to complete its natural, some might say inevitable, ascent to the White House.

Dragos certainly had intended to help clear the way by any means necessary.

But fuck that. Bobby Clarence would soon be dust, and Dragos had better options to pursue. Assuming those options played into his hands as he expected.

“What time do you have?” Dragos asked his Minion driver for what hadn’t been the first time.

“Ten minutes before two, Master.”

Dragos hissed a curse against the dark-tinted glass of his backseat window. “He’s late. The service will be starting soon. Any sign of a Secret Service motorcade up ahead? Any federal vehicles anywhere at all yet?”

“No, Master. Shall I drive around the cathedral to have a better look?”

Dragos dismissed the suggestion with a curt wave of his gloved hand. “Forget it. He may already be inside. I need to go in before it gets any later. Drive toward the rear of the place, away from all the commotion and prying eyes. I’ll find a way in through the back.”

“Of course, Master.”

The Minion eased the sedan around the corner to inspect the perimeter of the cathedral. As Dragos had hoped, there was an unimportant little nook that provided service and staff access to the monstrous building. The waist-high wrought-iron gate stood open, nothing but a couple of small Dumpsters and a parked car
sitting on the poorly patched asphalt. Two red doors provided a couple of choices in terms of entry.

“Over there.” Dragos pointed to the one farthest back, where the afternoon shadows and a peaked eave provided a pocket of shade amid the glare of the afternoon sun. The Minion brought him in front of the door. Organ music vibrated from all around the building, a holy place unaware it was about to usher in the launch of Dragos’s unholy war. He stepped out of the car. “Wait at the curb until I summon you. This shouldn’t take long.”

The Minion gave him an obedient nod. “Yes, Master.”

TAVIA RACED INTO THE HOUSE
, leaving Aunt Sarah out at the curb taking care of the cab fare, since her own money—like her medicine—was left behind in her pocketbook the other night at the hotel. She felt on the verge of relieved collapse as the familiarity of home greeted her. All of Aunt Sarah’s soft, ruffle-edged furniture and assorted knickknacks on every available surface, the very things that had long ago begun to make Tavia yearn for a place of her own, with her own belongings arranged to her own taste, now felt as comfortable and welcome as the cocooning warmth of a fleece blanket.

The house felt normal.

It felt solid and real, when just a short while ago, she’d been sure she was trapped in some kind of harrowing, inescapable dream.

As she took a seat at the kitchen table, a gust of wintry air blew across the floor from behind her as Aunt Sarah came back into the house. “Where have you been all this time, Tavia? Don’t you know I’ve been worried sick about you?”

Tavia pivoted on the chair to face the older woman, feeling nothing but glad for the concern that radiated in from her wringing hands and wide, desperate brown eyes.

“The police were here yesterday,” she informed Tavia in a questioning voice, her hands fisted on her hips. “They told me if I heard from you, I needed to call them right away. Of course, I thought you were with them. Isn’t that what you told me? When we spoke
last, you said you were staying at a hotel downtown to help the police with their investigation.”

God. The police-arranged hotel suite seemed like a hundred years ago now. Everything that happened since that night seemed like it had occurred over the span of a lifetime. All she wanted was to put it behind her and get on with the life she knew. This life, the only one she wanted.

“You’ve never lied to me before, Tavia. It’s going to break my heart if you’re keeping something from me now, after all these years …”

“No.” Tavia took her aunt’s nervous hands in a light grasp and guided her to the chair next to her at the little table. “I wouldn’t lie to you, but a lot of very strange things have been happening lately. Terrible things, Aunt Sarah. The gunman from the senator’s holiday party—he broke out of police custody and killed Senator Clarence.”

“I know,” the older woman murmured. “It was all over the news. There’s a manhunt under way for him all across New England.”