“I don’t want her to live
apart from us,” Eduardo said. “She is too young, I tell her. She should be
married first. But does she listen? No. And now this.” He stood and abruptly
left the room.
Carmen watched him go
before she turned to Rafael. “Please, Detective, excuse my husband.” She
took a crumpled Kleenex from her pocket and wiped her eyes. “He drives the
streets all night, looking for our Luce. He blames himself.”
“Did your daughter have a
new boyfriend, Mrs. Figueroa?” Sam asked. Knowing how mothers felt about
their young daughters, she chose her next words carefully. “Someone she
might be spending some time with, or who might taken her somewhere out of
the area for the holidays, maybe on a trip to Disney World?”
“No.” Carmen lowered her
voice. “She never went steady with any boy.” She stared at the
brightly-wrapped presents under the artificial Christmas tree set up in one
corner. “She was a butterfly, my Luce.”
“Can you give us the name
of the boy she was dating just before she disappeared?” Rafael asked.
“I don’t think so.” The
woman shifted on the sofa and wouldn’t meet his gaze. “I can’t remember.”
Sam recognized the
woman’s evasiveness as being motivated by shame; she wasn’t telling them
everything because she already knew something was wrong with her daughter.
“Adam, could you ask Mr. Figueroa if he’d show you Luce’s room?”
Rafael nodded and left
them alone.
Sam moved to sit beside
the other woman. She didn’t like using her body’s scent, known as
l’attrait
among
the Darkyn, to compel mortals to tell the truth, but she had to know what
the woman was so determined to hide. “Did your daughter have a problem with
boys, Mrs. Figueroa?”
Carmen pressed a hand
over her mouth, as if to stop herself from saying anything. Then Sam’s
subtle, dark scent surrounded her, and she let her arm drop.
“She dated so many,” she
said, her pupils dilating. “A new boy every night. I told her she would ruin
her name if she kept doing it. That no decent boy would want her.” She made
a languid gesture. “She only laughed at me. She said she had to have it from
different boys all the time.” Her expression became blindly radiant as she
leaned closer to Sam. “You smell so nice, Detective. Like walking through
the mountains at night.”
She was becoming too
drugged by the scent, Sam realized, and moved away from the woman, taking a
seat across from her. “She was having sex with all these boys?”
Carmen nodded slowly. “I
heard her talking on the phone to her friend. She would go out to these bars
to find them. I caught her once here with a boy, in our house, and I told
her never again. Never again. She didn’t stop. I think she did it in their
cars, or at their houses.” Her voice grew wearier as the effects of
l’attrait
began to
wear off. “She would even steal boys from her friends at school.”
During her high school
years, Sam had known a few girls who had been such self-absorbed narcissists
that they would steal other girl’s steadies just to prove they could.
“You’re certain that she wasn’t simply dating the boys?” Sam asked.
“They were not just
dates,” Carmen said. “She went with them only to have sex with them. With
all of them. Her best friend told me that she was addicted – like it was
some sort of drug to her.” She frowned. “I didn’t want to say that.”
“You’re telling the truth
because you love your daughter.” Sam took out her PDA. “What bars did Luce
go to find these boys?”
“She liked Fort
Lauderdale beach,” Carmen said. “She always went there, her friend told me.
She even picked her apartment because it was close.” She gazed at Sam, and
the drowsiness vanished from her expression as her terror conquered
l’attrait. “You think she got in trouble with one of these boys? That he
might have taken her away to hurt her?”
“All we know is that your
daughter is missing, Mrs. Figueroa,” Sam said. “We have no evidence that
anything has happened to her. We may find out that she’s simply stayed with
someone for a few days.”
“She wouldn’t,” Carmen
insisted. “She never did.” She flushed miserably, and then her eyes widened.
“Wait. Luce told me once that she would be okay because she always took her
car wherever she went. She said it was so she could leave when she wanted if
she was having a bad time.” She grabbed Sam’s hand. “Please find our Luce,
Detective. I know she has done some bad things, but she’s still my baby
girl.”
Chapter Two
“Young man.” A frail hand
rested over his. “It’s time to wake up.”
Jamys Durand opened his
eyes to the sight of a wrinkled, gentle face surrounded by a halo of bright
white curly hair. For a moment he thought her a tired angel, until he
recognized her as the elderly mortal female who had sat beside him during
the journey.
“I didn’t want to bother
you, dear,” she said, patting his hand, “but we’ve arrived at the station.”
He removed his sunglasses
and checked the window. Outside the train, a crowd of people stood waiting
on the platform.
“You slept the whole
trip,” she said, smiling as she tucked the child’s garment she was knitting
into her tote bag. She turned a yawn into a sigh of relief. “I love visiting
the grandkids, but I’ll be glad to get home to my own bed.”
Jamys nodded and
collected his own bag, standing and offering a hand to the old lady when she
had some trouble rising to her feet.
“Do you have family
meeting you?” she asked as they moved out into the center aisle.
Jamys nodded again.
“You don’t like to talk
too much, do you?” Rather than taking offense, she chuckled. “My oldest
son-in-law, Thomas, is the same way. Of course my Margie talks enough for
three people. Even if he wanted to, around her he couldn’t get a word in
edgewise.”
The woman continued
chatting about her family as they stepped down from the train, until a bald
elderly man came and took her in his arms. She forgot all about Jamys as she
kissed and hugged him.
Jamys slipped around them
and scanned the platform. He didn’t pick up the scent of other Kyn, but
spotted a very young woman dressed in a black suit moving toward him. A
white-fur-trimmed, peaked red velvet hat covered the top of her short hair,
which had been dyed an unlikely shade of scarlet to match the hat and her
smartly tailored blouse. On her lapel she wore a small black cameo brooch
with an elegant ivory carving of an arrogant-looking man.
The colors and the cameo
she wore indicated that she served Suzerain Lucan, the immortal Kyn lord
ruling the southernmost American territory. Also Jamys’s host for the
duration of his stay.
For a moment he was
tempted to disappear into the crowd. Before Suzerain Lucan had come to
America, he had been the deadliest of the assassins who had served the high
lord of the Darkyn. Alexandra had assured him that Lucan no longer killed
for anyone, even Richard Tremayne, but Jamys wasn’t entirely convinced. It
seemed unlikely that a Kyn male who had spent centuries hunting and
executing the Kyn’s enemies would even wish to stop.
“Mr. Durand?” she asked.
When he inclined his head, a swift, fetching smile flashed across her narrow
features. “Merry Christmas, and welcome to South Florida. I’m your ride. I
mean” –she gestured toward the parking lot beyond the platform– “ the car is
this way, my lord.”
His young driver attended
to him with swift courtesy, opening the rear passenger door and offering him
bloodwine before she drove him from the train station. She also seemed to
know about his silence, for she didn’t ask him questions that required more
than a yes or no answer. But she did talk, like the elderly woman, quite a
great deal.
“Everyone is really
nervous about you coming down here,” she said as she skillfully maneuvered
the limo into the busy traffic downtown. “I haven’t been doing this
tresora
thing for
very long – Lucan’s guy, Herb, is teaching me – but I’ve never seen the
other guys so jumpy.”
Jamys could well imagine
how the jardin felt about Thierry Durand’s son coming into their territory.
The last news anyone here had likely heard about his father was that he had
gone mad. Then there was Thierry’s reputation as a Kyn warrior. During the
last years of the Crusades, Jamys knew his father had done terrible things
in order to protect the Templars retreating from their enemies. No one
remembered the centuries Thierry spent afterward, helping to build Kyn
strongholds in France. All they cared to recall were the countless heathens
the senior Durand had slaughtered.
Jamys knew his father’s
true nature was gentle and kind, and that the terrible things he had been
forced to do in his human and his Kyn lives had hurt him far more than the
torture he had endured. He’d only gone mad when Jamys’s mother, Angelica,
made him believe the Brethren had killed her. She had gone so far as to have
Jamys made a mute to keep him from revealing the truth.
Retreating into himself
had kept Jamys from facing what his mother had done, and his father had
nearly paid for his silence with his sanity and his life. Once Thierry
had been brought out of
madness through the love of his
sygkenis
, Jema, he
had
forgiven Jamys.
Now
if only I could forgive myself
,
Jamys thought.
“My name’s Christian, but
everyone who doesn’t hate me calls me Chris.” The girl spoke to the rearview
mirror, but the sound of her voice effectively brought him out of his dismal
thoughts.. “You’re not what I expected at all. I mean, I know you’re like a
million years old, but you look the same age as me. You won’t tell on me if
I forget to call you my lord, will you?”
Amused now, Jamys shook
his head.
“Excellent. Not that I
plan to forget or anything, my lord, but, well.” She laughed at herself. “I
guess I’m kinda nervous, too.”
Jamys would have used his
talent to reassure her, but while he could communicate his thoughts to any
mortal he touched, it usually resulted in them falling unconscious –
something he didn’t want the young one to do while she was driving.
Jamys looked out at the
walkway paralleling the road, and saw a steady stream of mortals strolling
under the bright lights of the restaurants and clubs. As Chris stopped at a
traffic light, one young couple caught his eye. The handsome young male had
an odd-looking helmet of light brown hair and an outdated rust-colored suit
that contrasted sharply with the shaved skulls and casual wear of the other
males around him. His companion, a stunning golden-skinned gazelle of a girl
who had painted her full lips bright red to match her sparkling mini-dress,
also looked distinctly out of place. Both moved in a decisive manner,
forcing the other humans walking toward them to move out of their way. Then
the young female turned her head and fixed her gaze on Jamys’s face. She
stopped walking, and oddly her companion did the same in perfect unison.
Her lips moved as she
spoke to him, but the noise of the traffic made it impossible to hear the
words. Caught up in the sadness of her eyes, Jamys felt a surge of blood
hunger.
The young female stepped
off the curb and walked toward Jamys, until the front of a taxi came to a
screeching halt only a few inches from her hip. She turned to regard the
driver, who stuck his head out of the window and shouted his poor opinion of
her gender and her intelligence.
That effectively broke
the spell over Jamys, who released the handle and sat back, bewildered by
his own reaction. Something about the girl had stirred him to hunger and
pity. As if he wanted to feed on her and comfort her at the same time. Chris
drove on, and gradually the ravenous feeling subsided.
Jamys began to glance
back, but the effect the mortal had had upon him made him think better of
it. He was alone in a small space with another mortal, and if the hunger
truly came over him again he might make use of Chris. Among the Kyn, feeding
on a mortal who belonged to suzerain without permission or the human’s
consent was considered a serious personal insult.
Fortunately Chris seemed
to be oblivious to what had just occurred. “Sam – Samantha, Lucan’s lady? –
she’s putting in some overtime tonight, so she won’t be at the club when we
get there. Even though she has the whole Kyn thing now like you guys, and
more money than God, she still works as a cop.” She pushed some of the
overlong wisps of scarlet hair back from her eyes. “She’s doing okay,
though. I think the cop thing helps her handle all this, mostly because she
isn’t using her powers for the dark side, you know?”
Guilt filled him as he
thought of Alexandra Keller, another mortal female from this era that, like
Samantha Brown, had been given no choice when she had been turned from human
to Kyn. Alex now served the immortals as their first physician and surgeon,
and she had spent nearly a week performing the special operations required
to reconstruct Jamys’ mutilated mouth. He knew she had done her best for
him; that had been another reason he had retreated into the self-imposed
prison of silence. As much as he wanted to speak, he could not bear to
disappoint her or his father again.