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Hawkes Associates was the last place he wanted to visit. He’d been here once, days after arriving in the mortal realm. He’d left with a new bank account, a new car and a new uncle—but no answers.
Now, three months later, he suspected what Hawkes wanted from him. Vail had no intention of working for his pseudostepfather, who was officially his uncle. But Rhys Hawkes—half vampire, half werewolf—was interesting enough for Vail to give him another chance.
He’d swing in, listen to what the centuries-old half-breed had to say, suck down the five-hundred-euro-a-bottle wine Hawkes kept on hand, then breeze off to the Lizard Lounge where he could slake his thirst for faery ichor. It wasn’t FaeryTown, but close enough.
The elevator doors slid open to reveal a lean young man with shoulder-length red hair, freckles and muscles that would intimidate a bouncer at a biker bar. The man nodded his head to the tunes blasting through his earbuds. He took one look at Vail and lunged for him, vising his hands about the vampire’s neck.
Not about to be taken down, and judging his strength equal to his attacker’s, Vail shoved the redhead against the wall. With a glance aside, they were both aware the security guard stood nearby, but the mortal with a pistol secured at his hip belt didn’t make a move. Smart guy.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Trystan Hawkes growled. He released his hold on Vail and tugged out the earbuds. The werewolf sneered, and spit, “Longtooth.”
“I love you, too, brother. Just come from talking to Daddy?”
“He’s not your father.” Tryst set back his shoulders and assumed a modicum of calm, but his adamant sneer told Vail what he wouldn’t say. He had already said it all, so why bother again? “You slumming with the normal folk?”
“Your daddy called me here.” Vail waggled a brow in a malicious tease. “Maybe he likes me better, eh?”
Tryst chuffed. “In your demented sparkly dreams.”
Vail did not sparkle, though the faery ichor he had imbibed had seeped through his pores and left a sheen on his skin. It had freaked out Tryst the first and only time they’d met right here in this building. Things had gone downhill from there.
“Glad to see there’s no love lost,” Vail countered. “Wouldn’t want my werewolf brother to go all mushy on me.”
He wanted to punch the bastard, but a frustrating sliver of need inhabiting his hardened black heart also wanted to pull the creep in for a brotherly hug. What a wib you are, Vail.
“You must be a force, brother,” Vail said. “But wait. You don’t run with a pack. Just a sad little omega wolf—”
The wolf wielded a sneak-attack high kick. Tryst’s hard rubber sole landed on Vail’s jaw and ratcheted back his skull on his spine. He saw stars for a few seconds.
Rubbing his jaw, Vail smirked. “Nice one.”
“You keep her insane,” Tryst said forcefully.
“She’s my mother, too. Like it or not,” Vail said, but he couldn’t get behind the retaliation. Did he keep her insane?
“You.” Tryst stabbed Vail in the chest. The wolf reeked of aggression. “Stay away from our family.”
“Seems your damned family keeps wanting to pull me in.”
“You have no right being here!”
“Yeah?” Vail slammed Tryst against the wall, pushing his anger through his brother’s shoulders. “I paid your father’s damn blood debt! A debt you should have paid.”
Trystan’s pale blue eyes went soft. He blinked and looked aside. Vail felt the tension in his brother’s muscles slacken under his grasp. He stepped away from the werewolf.
He’d spoken the truth. Neither could deny it. Tryst and Rhys Hawkes, and perhaps even his mother, Viviane, owed him more than they could ever give. But Vail knew the blood debt was one bargain for which he’d never know reciprocation.
“Gentlemen?”
The security guard knew they were brothers.
“It’s cool, Harley,” Tryst said to the guard. “All in jest. Brotherly love, and all that crap.”
The guard nodded, but his smile didn’t express amusement.
The lanky wolf nodded once, an odd acknowledgment, which either agreed that, indeed, he should have paid the debt himself, or that he didn’t care what Vail had suffered.
Vail didn’t have to guess at his brother’s meaning.
Tryst curtly waved him off and strode toward the entrance, calling, “Stay out of my life, vampire!”
Vail flipped off the werewolf and jumped inside the elevator as the doors closed. Releasing his breath, he then shook out his fists, working his tense muscles loose.
The surprise of learning, three months earlier, he’d a brother could never top the innate desire to connect with Tryst. Vail didn’t know where that feeling came from, but he’d fight it to the death, if he had to. Tryst hated him without knowing him. Vail had best accept that.
You are unwanted in Faery. You will be unwanted in the mortal realm.
Tough words to hear from his enemy. But not difficult to believe they were true.
Landing at the top floor, he assumed calm as he slicked back his hair and strode into the marble hallway. The place always smelled like leather polish, and that disturbed his respect for nature.
The receptionist, a petite, strawberry blonde with a sexy librarian’s penchant for tight, tailored clothing, adjusted her glasses at the sight of Vail and sat straighter behind her desk, offering a bright red cupid’s bow smile.
Vail winked at her, and she noticeably swooned.
Mortals. They were too easy.
Hawkes was on the phone, and gestured him inside the sparely furnished, large corner office.
Swinging by the bar, Vail nabbed a goblet of the expensive wine and sucked it down. It tasted like fruit warmed by the sun, but could never match any faery vintage.
He walked to the window that wrapped the two corner walls of the office. Spreading out his arms, he felt the sudden daring desire to jump through the glass, to discover the exaltation of flight. Despite growing up in Faery, the closest he’d come to flying was a raging orgasm. Not to be disregarded on the list of adventures one must constantly pursue.
Yet any attempt at flight would result in a vampire smashed on the tarmac—not dead, but aching and damaged for weeks, surely. He’d save it for desperation.
Rhys Hawkes showed his age with sublime protest. Pushing three centuries, Hawkes had told Vail his hair had once been black with a gray streak striping one side. Now it was gray with threads of black here and there. His harsh European bone structure battled for notice but the man’s whiskey eyes were always what garnered observation.
The man was the father of Trystan Hawkes, Vail’s brother. Vail and Tryst had the same mother, Viviane LaMourette. He and his brother had been born on the same day; Vail first, then Trystan not two minutes later.
They were not twins.
Vail’s father was a vampire who had once been Rhys Hawkes’s nemesis—and his brother.
Viviane LaMourette was all vampire—bloodborn in the sixteenth century—but also insane.
What a twisted web woven through this family’s history, Vail thought with a mirthless smirk. Made for interesting coffee table talk, if one owned a coffee table. Well, he did own the coffeemaker.
Mortals and their curious habits.
Vail had never met his father. He would, as soon as he could get Hawkes to cough up information on how to find him. If anyone knew where to find Constantine de Salignac, it had to be his own brother. Yet Rhys had been evasive the first time Vail had begged the information from him.
Vail needed to see the man who had driven his mother insane. To look into his eyes, and to know whether or not his own eyes were the same. And then? Well, then.
Hawkes hung up and gestured for Vail to sit on the other side of the sleek stainless-steel desk before him. The man wore a comfortable gray sweater and dark jeans, and a silver wedding band on his left hand. He looked more Aging Rock Star than Vicious Half-Breed.
“I’m pleased you’ve come. It’s been months, Vaillant. How are you getting on in the mortal realm?”
Vail slouched onto the chair and propped an ankle across his opposite knee. He shrugged fingers through his hair, liking the scrape of the iron rings he wore on most fingers against his scalp. He noted Hawkes zoomed in on the rings.
Cracking a lazy grin, he tilted his head. “I’m assimilating. But it’s got nothing on Faery. So what’s up, Uncle?”
“You feel ready to visit your mother yet?”
Hell, not this scam again. Vail leaned his forearms onto his knees and shook his head.
No, he’d never met his mother. He was too freaked to know she was literally a loony after his father had buried her in a glass coffin under the city of Paris for over two centuries. Rhys had told him the tale when he’d first visited.
What was even freakier? Thanks to a warlock’s spell, Viviane LaMourette had been kept in a stasis for those centuries, alive and aware, yet frozen.
But the freakiest thing yet? She had been pregnant before being buried alive, and the stasis had also affected the embryos in her womb. She’d given birth to Vail and Tryst nine months after Rhys had finally found her in the twenty-first century. Two hundred and twenty-five years after she’d been buried.
Talk about a long gestation period.
He eyed Hawkes. Did the half-breed look hopeful? What was it with the paranormal breeds in this realm? They were all so … emotional.
Vail should have never left Faery. Not that he’d had much choice.
“A visit to my mother is not on my radar.”
Rhys tilted his head, nodding with weary acceptance. Vail could smell the man’s feral nature, and it reminded him of open fields dotted with summer blossoms, edged by verdant forest. And he could see a faint, red, ashy aura surrounding him, which proved there was vampire somewhere inside the man.
“That all you want from me, old man?”
“What’s that stuff?” Rhys pointed to Vail’s eyes. “You go out to a nightclub last night?”
“I do the clubs every night.” Vail smeared a forefinger under his eye, smudging the black ointment he wore. “It’s for the faeries. I need to be able to see them.”
“Hmm.” Hawkes nodded. “I suppose.” But he could never understand why.
When a mortal wanted to see a faery they smeared an herbal ointment around their eyes. When a vampire wanted to see one in the mortal realm, he did the same. The magical, mythical elixir never worked for mortals. It worked for Vail because he’d come from Faery and knew the right ointment to use—the ingredients could only be obtained from a sidhe healer.
“Makes you look like a rock star with a heroine addiction,” Rhys commented.
“I have no addictions,” Vail said, but was ashamed his voice faltered on the word addiction.
“Right.” Rhys leaned back in his chair, assessing Vail to the very marrow. A certain faery, Mistress of Winter’s Edge, had utilized the same assessing gaze on Vail. He had never liked that look, and so openly defied the man by stretching back his shoulders and looking down his nose at him.
“I need you to come to work for me,” Rhys said, repeating the same words he’d spoken the last three times he’d phoned Vail.
“Not this again—”
“This time it’s different,” he rushed out. “No office work. No pickups. This is a recovery mission. Actually, it’s a private investigation thing.”
Vail lifted an eyebrow. He had no such skills. “You lose something?”
He glanced to the wall where a large safe door hung open. The firm stored smaller items here in Rhys’s office, with a massive storage area in the basement of the building, which was entirely owned by Hawkes.
Inside the safe were priceless artifacts, totems, magical objects, currency in all denominations (and from all centuries), and other collectibles. Hawkes Associates was a security house for the paranormal nations, and took in objects of value and stored them for as little as a week or as long as centuries. If you were an immortal, it was a good thing to have a storage facility that would be there as you walked through the centuries. This Paris office was one of about half a dozen locations all over the world.
“As a matter of fact, something was stolen from us about a week ago. But that’s not the assignment. Well, it is, but not.”
“Don’t have time for this, old man, just spit it out.”
“Charish Santiago, kingpin for a splinter group of vampires unaligned with any tribe, wants me to find her daughter. She’s been kidnapped.”
“You want me to track a missing vampiress?” Vail thumbed his chin. “You know I don’t do vampires.”
“Yes, you can’t stand them. And yet you are one. How does that work again?”
“They disgust me.” Vail leaned forward. “They are weak, reek of mortal blood, and are unworthy of regard.”
Rhys sighed heavily and tapped his fingers on the desk. They’d had this conversation before. Vail didn’t need to convince the man of his prejudices. Hell, he knew it was a ridiculous prejudice. But when a vampire was raised in Faery, he developed certain dislikes, and vampires were one of them.
“What if I told you this mission isn’t going to benefit the vampires, but rather Faery?”
“I don’t get it.”
“A valuable Seelie court gown was also taken, along with the vampiress. Her name is Lyric Santiago. Seems she was wearing the gown at the time because she was about to hand it over to the Unseelie prince, or some dark lord—I don’t recall his title.”
“Lord of Midsummer Dark?”
“Yes, that’s him. I believe Zett is his name. You know him?”
The muscles strapping Vail’s jaw tightened. Zett had been his nemesis since childhood. But Vail had had the last laugh before being banished from Faery months earlier. Zett had been outraged. Heh.
“Ever wonder where the title Vail the Unwanted came from?” he tossed out.
Rhys nodded. “I see. So you don’t like the guy.”
Vail blurted out a huffing chuckle. “To put it mildly.”
“More reason to help me recover the gown.”
“And the vampiress?”
“Yes, her, too. But it’s the gown I’m focused on. Up until ten days ago, that gown was in the safe here in the office. We’d taken it in from the Seelie court as a means to cleanse it of some dark sidhe vibes. Something like that. I don’t understand it, only that it needed to be in the mortal realm a fortnight. They intend to reclaim it after that fortnight. Which is marked four days from now. Someone stole it from me, and I’ll give you one guess who that someone was.”
“The Santiago clan?”
