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“Yes. Or just about anything else.”
Her brain told her that the man was clearly delusional, and she thought what a shame it was that such a gorgeous specimen was mentally warped. But she couldn’t really brush off his claim that easily when she’d been on the receiving end of his healing touch. Could she?
“You don’t really believe me.”
“I … I don’t how I can doubt you. And yet, it just doesn’t seem … plausible.”
He shrugged, drove for a while in silence.
She rested, waiting, wondering if she’d offended him somehow, regretted it if she had. He’d saved her life. And then found her on the beach.
How had he done that?
“Here we are,” he said, and he pulled the car carefully over onto the shoulder of the road and brought it to a stop.
“Here we are where?” There was nothing around them.
“Proof.” He opened the car door and got out, and to her surprise, he moved toward a black bit of road-kill just ahead. A crow, its feathers all askew, its body limp.
She frowned, intent on James as he crouched down beside the bird. A car sped past, its back draft blasting his hair and clothes briefly, but he didn’t even seem to notice. He was holding his hands over the bird. “Good,” he said. “It’s still warm.”
Compelled beyond resisting, she opened the car door and got out, moving closer to him without even planning to do so. She squinted, leaning forward. Was there light coming from his hands? There was. A soft yellow glow that seemed to emanate from his palms.
Shifting her focus to his eyes, she thought she glimpsed a similar light there, but then he closed them. She kept moving nearer, then knelt right beside him.
There was a sudden flapping, and then he was holding the crow between his hands, wings contained. The bird’s black-currant eyes were open, and it parted its large dark bill to release a series of loud squawks that did not sound like gratitude.
Then James rose, lifted his arms, parted his hands, and the crow flapped its big wings and took flight.
Lucy stood there for a long moment, watching until the gleaming black corvid was out of sight. “That bird wasn’t injured,” she said quietly. “That bird was dead.”
He shrugged, saying nothing.
“Are you telling me you can raise the dead?”
“Sometimes.”
He had avoided her eyes until then. But he looked into them now. “But besides that—I’m really just an ordinary man, Lucy.”
“There’s nothing ordinary about you.”
He shrugged, lowered his gaze. “I just … I don’t want you to be afraid of me.”
“Afraid of you?” She continued to stare at him, her mind lost in wonder. “You’re some kind of an angel, or … or a superhero. I’m not afraid of you.”
“Good.” He met her eyes again, and for the first time she saw his smile. “Good.” Then he took her arm, and they started back toward the car.
“How did you find me?”
“All too easily, I’m afraid,” he said, opening her door for her.
She got in, and he rounded the front of the car and got in, as well.
“What do you mean?” she asked when he was seated.
“I need to know how you escaped,” he told her.
She shook her head. “As I said before, I didn’t. I was there—”
“Where?”
She frowned, thinking back. “I don’t know. I was unconscious for most of the ambulance ride—they drugged me. I woke in a hospital-like room, but it wasn’t a hospital. Or at least, not an ordinary one. I was interrogated as if I were a terrorist or something.”
“About what?” he asked. “The shooting?”
“A little. But mostly about you, and then they started asking me about my blood type, which is rare. And I have no idea how they knew that.” She shook her head, more confused than ever. “Much less why they would even care. Eventually they fed me, and then I was out again. I suspect they drugged the food.”
“Probably.”
“I woke up on the beach.” She met his eyes. “And you were there.”
He had been about to put the car into gear and pull away, but he stopped in midmotion and looked at her. “They just let you go? Just dumped you on that beach for me to find?”
“I don’t know that they could have expected you to be the one to find me there, but yes.”
“Oh, they expected it.” He drew a deep breath. “Do you trust me, Lucy?”
She tilted her head to one side, searching his eyes. “I think so, yes.”
“Good, because I have to ask you to do something for me.”
She nodded. “I guess I owe you a favor, given that you’ve saved my life—maybe twice now. What is it?”
“Take off your clothes.”
5
James tried not to notice the things he couldn’t help but notice as the frightened, introverted professor stood behind a conveniently located grove of trees in her bra and white cotton panties, with her arms up over her head.
He tried not to notice, but he noticed anyway. Her skin, smooth and tight. Her lean body. She wasn’t curvy. She didn’t have mounds of cleavage busting out of a lacy push-up bra. She was lean and toned. Her skin didn’t sport a dark coppery tan but was almost as pale as his undead relatives’.
And warm, as he ran his hands over it. From her shoulders to her wrists. Underneath her arms and down to her lithe waist and then to the barely flaring hips. From her soft belly over her rib cage and all around her breasts, all the while trying not to touch the breasts themselves. Then he turned her and examined her nape, her shoulder blades, her lower back. He stopped where the underpants began, crouching down to begin checking those long, lean legs of hers.
He found the telltale bump, no bigger than a mosquito bite, in the delicate crease where buttocks met thigh, and she jumped when he ran his finger over it.
“Hey!”
Her voice was raspy, a little bit breathless. She was either humiliated or as turned on as he was, and then he wondered if it might be a little bit of both.
“Sorry. It’s right here.”
“What’s right here?”
“I’ll show you in a sec. Grab hold of the tree, this might pinch a little.”
She did as he told her, and he squeezed the tiny bump like a blackhead. It popped like one, too, except that the object that came out of it was tiny and metal.
To her credit, she didn’t squeal. She flinched hard and sucked in a sharp breath, but that was all.
He said, “All done,” and held the thing on the tip of his forefinger as she turned.
She frowned at it, wishing for her glasses. “What is it?”
“A tracking device. It sends out an electronic signal so that someone on the other end knows where you are at all times.”
Lifting her eyes to his, she said, “They put that in me?”
He nodded at her clothes where they were hanging over a nearby limb. “Better get dressed. Now that we’re rid of this, we can be on our way.”
“But why?” she asked, grabbing the jeans and stepping into them. “I mean, if they wanted me, why let me go? And if they didn’t want me, why implant that … that thing in me?”
“So you could lead them to me,” he told her.
She stopped with the shirt in her hand and studied him for a long moment, then resumed dressing. “Why are they looking for you?”
“Because I’m different. And with the DPI, that’s pretty much all the reason they need.”
“What’s the DPI?”
“A government agency,” he said, and didn’t elaborate. Instead, he refocused on the device, already thinking up ways to get rid of the little unit. “You ready?”
“Yes. Ready.” She looked at his hand. “Are you going to crush it under your shoe, or bury it, maybe throw it into a stream or something?”
“Or something,” he told her. And then he started walking back toward the car. As they reached the winding road, he waited. Two other cars went by, followed by a pickup, all headed in the direction she and James had come from. When the truck passed, he tossed the tiny unit and it landed right where he intended it to: in the bed.
“Now they’ll be looking for us in the opposite direction.”
“You’re brilliant.”
He smiled at her and opened her door. “You can barely keep your eyes open, can you?”
“No.” She got in, leaned her head back and closed her eyes.
“Maybe you can relax enough to sleep for the rest of the ride. They can’t follow us now, and I think you’re finally convinced that I’m one of the good guys.” It was a real shame he was going to have to prove otherwise to her when they reached their destination, he thought grimly. But in this case, the ends justified the means. And he couldn’t be sure she would refuse to help his cause, once they got there, so maybe she could go on thinking he wore a white hat.
But if she did balk, then he would have to force her cooperation.
For a moment he went still, stunned by his own train of thought. That was not the kind of thing James Poe ever did. Force someone to do something they didn’t want to do. Much less someone like her. Innocent, frightened, delicate.
Beautiful.
He wondered what was happening to the moral code he’d lived by for his entire life. But he didn’t really have a choice in the matter. The existence of his entire race was at stake.
Brigit paced and worried. She had taken Aunt Rhi’s advice and headed into her bedroom for a nap, but she had awakened the moment she sensed that J.W. was gone. She felt him more acutely than she felt anyone else. Upon rising, she’d made the unfortunate choice to turn on one of the twenty-four-hour news channels to hear what was being said about the events of the night before.
Veteran newsman Matthew Christopher was in the middle of interviewing a suit-wearing politician who spoke as if from memory. “Lester Folsom’s book was pulled for reasons of national security, Matt,” he said, as if speaking to a slow student who didn’t quite get the point. “As demented as poor Mr. Folsom was, we can’t ignore the fact that he did indeed work as a covert agent, and in that capacity, he was privy to massive amounts of sensitive information.”
“Apparently enough to get him shot,” the newsman replied.
“No one has proven that the murder had anything to do with—”
“Don’t give me that,” Matthew interrupted. “A guy’s about to release a tell-all, an exposé, about his work as a covert op, and he gets blown away, execution-style, on the eve of that. Do I look like I was born yesterday?”
“Matt, you’re not giving me a chance to explain—”
“There are sources, Mr. Jenner, who say Folsom’s work involved the paranormal. The unknown. Some of the blogs are claiming he was about to reveal the actual existence of a race of vampires. How do you respond to that?”
The guest made a face. “Anyone can post anything on the internet. You know that. No right-minded person would believe—”
“We might know what to believe if the storm troopers hadn’t raided every book distribution center in the country, destroying every copy in existence so none of us could read for ourselves …”
“You’d be reading fiction. With just enough real information thrown in to cause serious problems.”
“Are you concerned at all about rumors that there were a handful of advance copies floating around? That WikiLeaks has published what they claim are actual excerpts from the Folsom manuscript on their website?”
The bureaucrat measured his words. “As far as we know, we’ve managed to find every copy.”
“It’s for sure you got all of Folsom’s. And his notes, and everything else he had in his house in the Caribbean. Relatives claim soldiers gutted the place.”
“That’s an exaggeration.”
“They say you stripped it to the bare walls. Even rolled up the carpets.”
“Well, I wasn’t a part of that team, and I’m sure the family’s feeling very violated, and perhaps, in their grief, might just be blowing things a tiny bit out of pro—”
“Tell me this, Mr. Jenner. Is there, or has there ever been, a secret division of the CIA devoted to investigating cases involving the paranormal?”
Jenner looked Matthew Christopher right in the eye, leaning slightly forward in his seat. “Absolutely not.”
“Who shot Lester Folsom, Mr. Jenner?”
“We don’t know. But believe me, the murder of a CIA operative, even a retired one like Folsom, is something we take very seriously. We’ve put every resource we have on this, and we will not rest until Lester Folsom’s murderer is—”
Brigit clicked the remote control, accidentally hitting the channel selector rather than the off button. The riot taking place on the TV screen held her riveted. Flames were licking at the early morning sky, devouring what looked like a brownstone. The tagline on the bottom read Riots Break Out in Brooklyn. The reporter was saying that a gang of self-proclaimed vigilantes apparently believed the residents of the two-family building were vampires, and so they’d set the place on fire and burned them alive.
She hit the remote again, turning the TV off, and closed her eyes. Where are you, big brother? The world is going insane, and it’s not safe out there for you.
He spoke to her mentally. I’ve got the professor.
