Harlequin Nocturne September 2014 Bundle: Beyond the Moon\Immortal Obsession (47 page)

Yes, she was feeling stronger now. She felt ready.

“The police believe I'm withholding evidence and hiding Stewart's whereabouts,” she said. “They assume I'm purposefully hampering their investigation, and will charge me eventually unless I give them something. I don't have anything to offer them. I don't know where Stewart is, or what he is doing.”

“Maybe that's a blessing in disguise,” St. John suggested.

“Not a blessing. I think you know that. I think you understand. They think he might have killed a girl.”

“Yes,” he said so softly that Madison wasn't sure she heard him at all. “You deserve to know more, though not from me.”

“From you,” she argued. “I want to hear it from you. Who will tell me if you don't?”

She planted her legs apart in case the information he might eventually provide turned out to be as outrageous as everything else so far. She decided not to let him go until she had something more, and planned to block his exit if he tried to get away.

“Stewart can tell you. He should tell you,” he said.

“If he could be found.”

St. John nodded, and hesitated again, as if considering what she'd said. “Your brother was bitten,” he finally said.

“Bitten?” Madison repeated.

“Stewart was what you are. A Slayer. He thought his strength might help when facing the Ancients. The problem was that he wasn't strong enough to actually find them. The old one he did discover was the wrong one. I know this now. Stewart didn't have a chance to get the information on the girls that he sought. Fledglings found him, sent by a bigger monster. Too many of them. I'm sorry, Madison.”

Madison tried to make sense of this explanation, without success. “Bitten,” she said, reeling from the idea. “Are you saying that my brother is one of them now? He is a vampire?”

“Not one of them, exactly.”

“Then Stewart is alive? He's okay?”

When St. John didn't immediately reply, Madison knew that more bad news was coming. She snapped her body straight. As if to steady her, St. John pressed his chest tightly to hers.

Her ears filled with the sizzling buzz of a lightning streak, and the sound hadn't come from outside the wall of windows, where the moon shone brightly. The charge had originated right there, from St. John's touch. He continued to affect her this way.

But instincts about what he might say next were warning her to beware, pay attention, run away, suggesting that she actually was unprepared for the explanations to come.

She hung on, filled with dread.

“Madison,” he began, using her name like a lover's caress. “Your brother is killing vampires. He is staking vampires because he has to. Stewart is killing them because that is his destiny, even though he has become something like those he chases.”

Madison saw in the smooth planes of St. John's hard, proud face that he had told the truth. He had given her what she had asked for. It was up to her to connect the dots.

Stewart was a Slayer
and
a vampire.

Was that even possible?

What kind of special monster did that sort of mixture make?

St. John broke away from her. He moved toward the windows and looked out. His face, his expression, his demeanor had changed again when he glanced back at her.

With trepidation, he said, “You'll have to let the rest ride for now, my love. Time is up. The first of the Nosferatu has arrived.”

Madison had no idea what Nosferatu meant, though the word was more terrible than anything she had heard so far, and struck fear into her bones.

St. John was going to face some dreadful beast. Maybe more than one. He seemed calm enough about the upcoming engagement, when a dark river was carrying monsters closer.

Christopher St. John's expression was gentle when he looked at her, showing his worry and his concern for her. Monsters had arrived, and his thought wasn't for himself.

Looking to the window, and the red-tinted night outside it, Madison felt like screaming.

Chapter 23

“I
f you stay here, you'll be safe.”

St. John said this from the doorway, and in a way that made Madison want to weep.

“I've taken great care to keep this place hidden,” he said. “Possibly for just such a night as this one.”

Madison moved toward him, willfully making her feet move.

“I have to go,” he said quietly, his voice the draw for her that it always had been. “So much depends on what happens now.”

“Who is going to help you? Does the detective know?” she asked.

St. John shook his head. “Stay here, Madison. I'd have you safe, you know. Always.”

“My brother is still out there.”

“I couldn't stop them from biting him. I didn't know until it was too late. You must believe that I would have tried to stop it.”

She nodded. “He helped me. Stewart didn't hurt me. He isn't a monster.”

“I don't know what he is now,” St. John confessed. “No one really knows.”

St. John pulled her hands from his sweater, and held them clasped in his for a few seconds longer. “Wait for me here, my love,” he said. “Please.”

“Not knowing what will happen to you out there?”

“For now,” he said. “Just for now.”

“What if I do love you?” Her voice was faint. “What happens then?”

“It would make everything I have ever done worthwhile,” St. John said.

His voice echoed in the wide expanse of space he had called his refuge. It echoed inside Madison.

She had told him the thing she had barely admitted to herself. Love, she had said. What if she loved him.

It was a fascinating word to describe the complex emotions that had somehow entangled them both. There was no explanation for how it had arrived between two beings that had spent so little time together. But what was time, after all?

Did caring for another person, really caring about them and what happened to them, constitute being in love? Did the fact that she ached for St. John prove the truth of her feelings?

When she opened her eyes, she was alone.

Her immortal lover had gone.

“It would make everything I have ever done worthwhile,”
St. John had said, if she loved him. She didn't know how she would cope if he didn't return.

Her brother had come here to help those missing girls, and that had gone wrong. She had come here to find Stewart, and how would she categorize what had happened to her since?

Although she had felt strong the moment before, the room began to revolve around her as St. John's presence faded. She seemed to feel those enemies closing in.

However, this wasn't about enemies. The spinning sensation had been caused by the recognition of a title that she was afraid now defined her. A title that could keep her from St. John forever, if it were true.

That word lit up her mind, lit up St. John's apartment, reflecting off the windows, hitting her eyes with an uncomfortable glare.

Slayer.

She was what her brother was, St. John had told her, and it had been Stewart's downfall.

It wasn't a choice or an option, St. John had led her to believe. Genetics determined who would be a vampire hunter.
Born to it,
was the way this went.

Her parents had produced a set of Slayers without letting their children know. Their silence, before their deaths, had resulted in Stewart being nearly killed because he wasn't strong enough to hold his own when he came here.

Nearly killed.

She clung to that. St. John had said her brother had been bitten. Not killed. He hadn't used that awful death word.

There was hope. In a world threatened by darkness, there was some light, and she was starved for light.

“I believe you,” she whispered to St. John. “I trust you.”

She had to confess everything.

“If what you say is true, I see the horror of the future. I will be the one running through the shadows with a wooden weapon in my hand. I will be seeking fanged creatures that will know how to fight back. I will do so in your honor.”

When the flash of rightness came, streaking past her vision in prisms of multicolored light, Madison realized it was a sign of her soul opening up to what had been hidden there.

Slayer.

She held tight on legs that no longer wanted to support her. It all seemed too much.

After taking a step, she crumpled to the floor, refusing to give in to the waiting void that offered a temporary respite from the world, its secrets and what part she would play in it after this, if she chose.

How could she make it work, when she loved an immortal soul that she had been born to fight?

Love...

Opposites...

St. John had gone to confront a wave of unspeakable terror taking shape.
Them. Nosferatu.
But he had seen to her safety first. He cared for her that much.

Using the window for support, Madison picked herself up. Pushing back her fear, she sent her senses inward, in search of the thing St. John said had long lain dormant inside her.

What she found instead was Stewart's voice, calling.

“Maddie. Mad one....”

It was a voice she had to find.

* * *

St. John emerged from the Tube station through a blocked-off exit used by underground workers. He soon found what he was seeking. The creature was grotesque in the simplicity of its design, a tall, slender beast with the bone-pale face of the dead.

Nosferatu. Eternally damned, savage vampires with the bite of a bear trap and no remembrance of a soul. Creatures with no thoughts of their own, and no heartbeat.

At first sight, its features were human enough, save for the mouth and eyes. With its dead-white skin, its lips glowed red, as if it had been snacking on some poor soul on its way here.

Its eye sockets were black, bottomless holes, surrounded by circles of more blackness. Sparse, stringy hair, as white as its face, covered only the bottom portion of its head, curtaining large pointed ears.

The rank odor of death trailed behind this Hunter like a kite. Moldy earth, fetid flesh, death trapped in a body. Once free of the exit, the monster moved with a gliding motion, as if on skates, never seeming to actually touch the ground.

Its long, threadbare coat kicked up dust and debris as its arms swung menacingly at the air. This ungodly entity, not of the earth or what lay below, had been created to mock both places as a mindless beast on the rampage.

St. John observed it from the rooftop above, standing half hidden behind a sign made of the same kind of steel beams that reinforced his apartment, though these beams weren't silver-coated. Vampires couldn't detect anything through exposed metal. Metal, like sunlight, could hurt them, become the true end of them if coated. If silver pierced unholy flesh in the right place, they were dust.

In this day and age, a silver bullet through the head or through the empty cavity that had once held a heart was the quickest way to take down a monster like this one. A quick, final death that could be issued from a distance.

But that was too easy.

Since his own new existence had begun with drinking from a golden cup, he was exempt from the problems of metal. He had exposed himself to all kinds after that, and had for long years carried both shield and sword.

This hideous Nosferatu had caught a scent. Lifting its chin to sniff the air, it then swung around, searching for the source of the smell, failing to look up, perhaps sensing and disliking the heavy tonnage of beams.

The game of the moment had become hide-and-seek.

Unable to trace what it had scented, the beast's narrow head cocked once before its body went completely motionless, like a statue carved from a block of flawed marble. It didn't blink because it didn't have to, didn't breathe because it had no need for air, and never had to fake breath in order to fit in with any other kind of society.

Not even its long coat moved.

St. John heard its thoughts, and they weren't pretty. The mantra was a cycle of hatred, disgust and bloodlust looped together. He felt its venom and the chaos holding the white carcass together.

This sucker was a forerunner, the first trickle of a nightmarish stream of monsters on their way. It was also alone at the moment.

St. John's tattoos became a barely tolerable ball of fire, calling up the strength of his background, urging him to action. For the sake of the people of London, who might get in the way at any moment, and for the sake of everything he'd given up in his own past in order to prevent such a circumstance as this one from happening, he had to deal with this crazy sucker and the flood of others behind it, quickly.

Walking to the edge of the rooftop, he braced himself. With the wind on his face and his power rising swiftly to the surface of his skin, he began, measure by measure, to shed his disguise.

Chapter 24

M
adison's heart hammered. Restlessness returned.

“Stewart?” she said.

She pressed her forehead to the glass.

The street below St. John's apartment was dark. A big moon rode the sky behind a bank of black clouds.

St. John was out there somewhere, chasing demons. Her brother was out there, too, waiting for her.

The glass felt cool against her fingertips. The night beyond the glass resonated with indistinguishable shapes, and movement. Even St. John's refuge wasn't immune from the pressure of those things.

She didn't know how to help St. John. If she tried, she might distract him. She could go after her brother, though. One of those shadows on the street below might be Stewart. In finding Stewart, she'd find herself.

As she turned for the door, rage began to build inside her for whoever had hurt her brother. She didn't feel particularly brave or courageous. The thought of having to go outside, for any reason, made her stomach roil.

Damn it, though, she had to go out there, ignoring St. John's
“Please.”

Unable to stand the suspense, and with her missing courage overruled by sheer determination, Madison headed for the door.

“I'm sorry,” she said to the ghost of Christopher St. John. “You, of all...people, should understand.”

* * *

“You're looking for me?” St. John called out to the monster on the sidewalk, landing quietly beside it.

The thing had no tongue, making a reply impossible. Nor did it possess a functioning brain able to process surprise or fear. Nosferatu were terrors designed only for one purpose—to hunt their prey. They were ghosts of the worst parts of the human psyche. Animals, really, with one-track desires.

They wouldn't notice St. John's glowing white skin that had burned through his clothes, or the ripples of extraordinary muscle fueled by a mythical resurrection. They wouldn't be afraid of the halo of golden hair radiating outward as if he were a dark angel, or the reddened gleam of his Maker's blood tinting his eyes.

The beast's black sockets trained on St. John. He felt a shudder of satisfaction run through it.

St. John smiled. This one wasn't so very old, and therefore inexperienced.

“They sent only one of you?” he remarked as the creature moved first one arm, then the other, as though thawing from a deep freeze. “You do know what I am?”

The creature lunged so fast, it became a colorless smear. St. John, with equal speed, sidestepped the thrust of a specially made knife, pulled from the monster's pocket. He had only seconds to study that weapon, forged of both gold and silver, one of those ingredients the same as the chalice that had changed him.

Someone had their facts straight about the Grail, too. But most facts having to do with the Seven who drank from that holy cup were erroneous.

The Nosferatu spun in place and lunged again, catching the edge of St. John's sweater where only traces of it remained, clinging to his waistband. In a burst of extraordinary speed, St. John raised his arms, spreading the blooded sigils carved into him—the sigils that responded to the Nosferatu with an almost audible whine.

Cool London mist clung to his bareness as he widened his stance. The scars crisscrossing his body became livid reminders of past battles, each one of them scalding the cooler skin around them.

His tattoos burned hotter than the depths of the hell the monster beside him had sprung from. Not a cold burn this time. Powerfully hot.

His power focused.

He felt himself growing further into the terrible entity he had been created to be. The one he had to be in order to best the worst of the villains.

More muscle was there for the asking. His shoulders stretched, pulling at his bones. He heard his spine crackle with a live energy conceived of centuries of righteousness, after having being born in the dark. The two worlds met in his body, throwing sparks and shadow that were divinely beautiful and fiendishly terrible.

The Hunter came on, fast, strong, determined. Before it had moved too far, he had the thing by its throat and its weapon in his hand. As the Hunter's eyes locked with his, St. John sunk the knife deeply into the creature's gaunt chest.

“Are you an example of what I can expect?” he said to the monster. “Because that would be nice.”

There was an explosion of body parts, and a rain of mottled gray ash. St. John watched the ash fall, thinking that killing this beast had been alarmingly simple for a Blood Knight in pursuit of peace. There had been no fight to speak of. Not this time. This had been a warning. Merely a hint of what was to follow.

More monsters were coming. Two of them had entered London from another direction. Another slithered in their wake in the old tunnels beneath the city.

Their approach filled St. John with rage.

With the weapon grasped tightly in his hand, he paused. Raising his eyes to the sky, he was struck by a new pain. Madison had left the safety of his refuge. Her voice reached him along the thread tying them together.

“I'm sorry. You, of all...people, should understand.”

Muttering a sharp “
No!”
across the link connecting him to her, St. John sucked in a lungful of the crackling power that was his immortal birthright, and turned back toward the city.

* * *

Madison crept from the safety of St. John's building with her nerves on fire.

Stepping to the street, she waited, listening for footsteps, finding some and thinking that vampires probably moved soundlessly, and that footsteps meant the two figures she'd seen from the window had to be people. Humans. Mortals.

If she possessed the special genetics of a vampire Slayer, shouldn't she have been able to tell the difference between men and monsters?

Other than the footsteps retreating into the distance, the night was eerily silent. Long shadows, cast by the moon, made the street look seriously
noir.
She sensed nothing. Not one special trait kicked in to help her.

Setting her shoulders, gritting her teeth, she stepped off the curb. She walked to the center of the narrow street. There were no passing cabs or cars. The moon shone from straight up in the sky.

Ears straining, she felt the slow seep of a rising panic, not knowing which way to go, or what to do.

She ventured a call. “Stewart?”

Movement behind her spun her around. She hadn't heard this coming....

That was her last thought before a black-eyed monster, its appearance unimaginable even in nightmares, threw her to the pavement with a simple flick of its wrist.

* * *

The arrival of the Nosferatu sat like a bad taste in St. John's mouth. The fear of them meeting Madison, if that were to happen, fueled his outrage.

He twitched the thread connecting her to him as he sprinted street by street toward his apartment, and found that thread unreasonably taut. Across it, he heard Madison's scream.

Utilizing every bit of the power he had so carefully hidden, he raced on, fearful for the first time he could recall, and calculating how long it would take him to get to her.

Turning one last corner, his speed too fast to raise dust or debris, he slammed to a halt in front of two of the monsters he had sensed.

One of them leaned over Madison, who was stretched out on the ground.

“At last,” Simon Monteforte said. “We see the Protector in action.”

St. John flicked his eyes to Madison. Her breathing came in gasps, but her heart beat strongly. The Nosferatu hadn't harmed her because she wasn't on his radar.

“What is it you want, Simon?” he asked, his tone deadly serious.

“Look at you,” Monteforte said. “You're some kind of freakish angel, not one of us. You've never been one of us, and the others are too self-absorbed to see it. You glow from within, special, pale and pretty. You have the blood of angels in you, as well as your Maker's. Due to this, you have hidden yourself well from the Ancients. But you haven't fooled me. I want to be like you. I want you to tell me how to make that possible.”

“What is it you want, Simon?”

“The thing you've kept hidden from us. From me.”

“Name that thing you'd do all of this for,” St. John said.

“Power.”

“I'd have thought you had enough power. You are one of the Hundred.”

Monteforte waved that suggestion away with a subtle twist of his fingers. “That's ninety-nine vampires too many.”

St. John stood his ground, his bare chest reflecting the moonlight, his arms tense at his sides.

“What you want isn't possible,” he said. “You know it.”

“I will have the Grail, St. John.”

“The Grail is a legend.”

“As are you, supposedly, and yet your light blinds me. Which one of the Seven Blood Knights are you? The first? The last? I've paid a lot of people, some of them immortal, some not, to find out about you. And here you were, in our midst, the whole time.”

St. John observed the ancient traitor closely. Monteforte stank of this selfish greed. With Nosferatu by his side, under his spell, and Madison at his feet, Monteforte posed a real threat. He'd hurt Madison if given the opportunity, in order to hurt St. John.

However, St. John's expanded senses perceived another visitor in the shadows of the overhang of the building to his right. Someone not on the Nosferatu's radar, either, since the monster hadn't turned to look. Oddly enough, neither had Simon Monteforte, whose attention remained locked to St. John as if the old vampire's greed had indeed blinded him to anything other than getting his way.

St. John's sigils pulsed, the danger in them building until his back was crawling with movement indicating the promise of what he could do to the old vampire in seconds if Madison hadn't been involved.

It was a strange time to discover just how much he loved her, and to realize the extent of the agony he'd suffer if he were to lose her, or leave her behind.

“What would you do with the power you seek?” he asked Monteforte to gain time.

“Rule the world, as you and the others of your kind could, if you chose. Surely you've considered doing so?”

Monteforte gave a signal that amounted to little more than a slight raising of his hand, and the black-eyed monster took a gliding step forward.

Something else moved, as well. The shadow lurking near the building came on fast, and St. John heard Madison's intake of breath when she, too, identified who it was.

By then it was too late for Monteforte to ignore his surroundings. Casually, as if facing a conspirator, the old vampire glanced sideways. He said to Madison's brother, “I thought we took care of you, Stewart. Pity you didn't stay down.”

When confronted with so many monsters, hell had no option but to break loose.