Two

Conrad Morton wiped the sweat off his face and chest and threw the damp towel on the parquet floor. With his foot, he pushed around the black terry cloth fabric, wiping sweat that had dripped to the ground. Although the unpredictability factor of a slick floor could enhance a workout, Conrad preferred optimal conditions for the weapons training.

He kicked the used towel on top of others in the corner and opened a new quart of water. He drank a few gulps then swished some around his mouth. After four hours, he’d usually wrap up the daily exercise regimen, but today’s high left him particularly eager for more. After all, he had nothing better to do.

From the glass weapons case, he collected a set of shuriken and threw one at a time at a wooden dummy a hundred feet away. When thrown expertly, the six-pointed stars were invisible to the human eye. Even vamps could be surprised by them. Although the sharp blades hardly inflicted much damage on a vampire, they lodged deep into the flesh and caused distraction. Conrad’s team depended on distraction.

On his way to collect the shuriken, he performed a series of karate kicks, which he’d choreographed into an elaborate gymnastics routine. He leapt, and flipped, and somersaulted toward the dummy, his muscles obeying his commands fluidly. Ninety percent of vampire hunting required more brains than muscle, but when it was time for the trap and capture, his body had to perform with razor-sharp precision.

He pulled the shurikens out of the dummy. Holding three in each hand, he kicked, somersaulted, and flipped a good distance away across the room then fired the stars again. If the dummy were a real person, he’d be aiming at its carotid and femoral arteries, or the sensitive strip of energy points along both sides of the spine. Severing a vampire’s major artery could cause enough blood-loss to disorient or weaken, but because of their almost instantaneous regenerative powers, vampires never allowed themselves to bleed very long. That was why it helped to hit them with a penetrating blade in a hard-to-reach area like the spine.

Unfortunately, for the last four months, no vampire had been careless enough to leave a trace. In down times like these, Conrad appreciated every dollar invested into the remodel of the manor’s extensive wine cellars into a gym and firing range.

He replaced the stars with a spear and focused on the complex set of moves, cursing when he missed one. He repeated the whole routine ten more times. Mistakes could be deadly, to himself as well as his team. Everyone had to be ready all the time. All of his warriors were perfectly-tuned killing machines with specialized skills on and off the streets. Even now, Fiona and Michael scoured the Internet for signs of a vampire kill. Lack of clues in recent months suggested that rumors about Conrad had circulated among the vamps and kept them in hiding. They were out there though. No matter how many he’d killed, more kept crawling out of the woodwork.

Conrad licked off a drop of sweat from his lip, tasting the salt in it. Sooner or later, another vamp would pop out on the radar screen, and as long as Conrad had one drop of sweat left in him, he would hunt down one after another until he found what he was looking for.

Wiping his chest and arms with a clean towel, Conrad glanced down at the long abdominal scars where a vampire had slashed him five years ago with Conrad’s own blade. The scars now served as a constant reminder never to underestimate a bloodsucker, no matter how weak he might appear.

Conrad wrapped the towel around his neck and headed for the narrow stone staircase that led to the first floor. Scaling three stairs at a time, he popped out the door in the corner of a spacious lounge, which the hunting team had appropriated as the main hangout area.

Only two of the hunters currently occupied the lounge. Wearing a set of headphones, Derek sprawled in the leather armchair by the window. His eyes were closed and his head bobbed rhythmically. At the carved oak table, Angelique wrote in a notebook. She must have noticed Conrad with her peripheral vision, because she looked up, found his gaze, and gave a single nod before resuming her writing.

The trauma of the attack still imprisoned her features in a stony veneer. She seemed to thaw only in Jeremy’s presence, but Jeremy was in the field at present, hunting for clues. Conrad had saved her life, the way he had saved every member of his team from becoming a vampire victim. They all repaid him with years of loyal service while ostensibly employed at Conrad’s Fortune 500 video gaming company. For the kind of intelligence gathering Conrad needed, research for video games created a perfect front.

Conrad reached the wide marble staircase leading to two more floors of the Sussex manor. The communications and ops room occupied the second floor. The third floor housed the sleeping quarters, including his private suite.

Conrad had bought the manor and the company with the loot discovered after his first kill. As it turned out, older vampires accumulated all kinds of wealth and stashed it all over the world. Killing Devora ten years ago had made Conrad a multi-millionaire. It had also brought him Fiona and Michael, his first two recruits. After being rescued from Devora’s murderous trap, neither wanted to do anything but help him hunt down the vampire bitch who’d tortured their emotions and thrilled in their pain. The ordeal had made them inseparable. Ever since, they’d followed and obeyed him with a devotion few fathers ever received.

At the third floor landing, Conrad turned right across the gallery decorated with Chinese landscape tapestries. At the end of the gallery, he entered his suite. The front room doubled as an office, but Valerie’s desk sat empty. Her damned sense of discretion! As much as it amused him to see her disappear into the background in the presence of one of his women, someday soon she’d have to understand that, as his personal secretary, she rated way higher than any of them. He didn’t have to guess what kept her away at the moment, and he grew irritable by the second.

He swung open the bedroom door.

“There you are, lover,” the blonde purred, stretching under the sheet of his massive bed. Conrad grinned at how conveniently the sheet slipped to reveal her already hardened nipples. Ignoring her, he headed for the bathroom. They’d given each other what they needed last night, and he had no intention of prolonging the encounter.

He shed the black towel on the white-and-black mosaic tile floor. His black cotton workout pants followed. He turned on the hot water and got into the wide shower stall. He leaned against the wall while several jets massaged his still quivering back muscles.

A shadowy outline of a figure reflected through the frosty glass shower door.

“Not now,” he warned the blonde.

The shadow stopped. “Excuse me, boss,” Fiona’s voice faltered. “We may have something.”

Conrad’s heart jumped. He pushed the sliding shower door aside and stepped out. Fiona held out a towel, and he smiled when she averted her eyes from his nakedness. Nothing and nobody could shake her fidelity to Michael.

“I’ll be right there,” he said. She nodded and walked out.

The blonde, whose name he’d forgotten, sat pouting in the middle of the bed when he emerged from the bathroom.

“Fiona,” Conrad called out just as Fiona’s hand grasped the bedroom doorknob. “Would you have Derek take her back to town?” he said.

Without a backward glance at the blonde, he rushed to his walk-in closet, threw on a pair of pants and a silk shirt and ran down to the second floor research room. Michael sat in front of one of a dozen computer screens, three of which were manned by fast-typing geeks. The room buzzed with a high-frequency whir and the clicking of keyboards. As Conrad leaned over Michael’s shoulder, the younger man pointed to the police report on the screen.

“Budapest?” Conrad inquired.

“Murder,” Michael confirmed. “The pathology report indicates blood loss. Dr. Hoffstein is already on his way.”

Conrad’s whole body responded to the promise of action. This could be an old vampire, newly emerged from many years in hiding.

“And the victim?” he asked.

“Petra Karoly, 39, architect, married, two children. She was found next to her car in the office garage. Killed at approximately 2:20 a.m.”

“She could be a typical career woman caught on the wrong side of a car-jacking. What else you got?”

“Here,” Michael said. “The entrance to the parking structure has only a gate arm. To drive in after 8 p.m., you need a key card, but anyone can walk in. The other access is from the building, but you can’t get into the building elevator without an ID card. Karoly’s car was on the third level. No camera there, but the parking entrance camera has a 24-hour feed. Theo is pulling it up now.”

Michael kept typing. One screen closed, another opened into a smaller window.

Even though they still lacked evidence to justify a vampire suspicion, Conrad’s mind already calculated every detail that could provide the slightest clue. Before he sent the whole team out in the field, he needed reasonable proof that Petra Karoly was killed by a vampire.

“The husband?” Conrad pressed.

“At home at the time of death, but there are no witnesses to corroborate that. The kids were asleep.”

Conrad pressed his fist hard against the computer desk. There could be half a dozen ways in which a vampire had nothing to do with Petra’s death. He reached over Michael’s arm on the keyboard. The young man gave him room without hesitation, and Conrad typed into the machine. The morgue’s image of a body appeared. He enlarged it so it filled the whole screen.

Conrad stared at the death face and the thin upper body with no muscle definition. Even if she had been the greatest architect in the world, Petra Karoly now mattered only because a vampire might have killed her.

Conrad’s lips cracked into a smile. As far as dying went, it wasn’t a bad way to go. A vampire drew power from absorbing someone else’s essence into himself. That implied that the essence of the person lived on.

“Boss?” Michael called, but Conrad kept looking at the victim. As ugly as the body was, if it had been struck down by a vampire, nothing could be more precious.

“Boss,” Michael called again. “Theo has the parking camera images.”

Conrad snapped toward Theo’s desk. Michael rose from his seat and followed.

On Theo’s screen, they observed the accelerated playback of people walking into the parking structure up to two hours before the murder. The camera pointed to the garage’s driveway and the sidewalk immediately in front. A man with a briefcase hurried in. A cleaning lady carried a bucket. A couple passed holding hands. Nothing distinctly vampiric stood out about any of them.

“Hold on,” Conrad said. “Go back.”

The images rewound. “Start there.” When the playback resumed, Conrad focused on the empty driveway. “There, do you see?” Conrad pointed at the gate.

“What?” Michael asked.

“Go back again,” Conrad instructed, holding his breath. A shadow slipped by at the bottom edge of the frame. “There!”

“It’s a shadow,” Theo said. “It could be electrical interference or conversion anomaly.”

“Play it again,” Conrad said.

Theo obeyed, and Conrad watched the shadow appear for only three seconds, as if pausing in front of the parking gate before going around it. The video played without a hint of pixilation or snow. Conrad could almost taste the quickening excitement in his blood.

“Slow motion,” he commanded.

The screen went blank for a second then the shadow reappeared.

“Pause,” Conrad directed while considering the possible light source that could have created the shadow. Although the narrow camera angle couldn’t show a street lamp, Conrad bet one hung right outside the garage entrance.

“Can’t you slow it down more?” he demanded, anxious to prove that the shadow came from a figure he saw in his mind.

The next replay yielded nothing new. “Damn it,” Conrad cursed, drawing Michael’s attention. If this was a vampire kill, he had little time to pick up the trail. Petra Karoly had been dead for hours. The vampire who’d killed her could be hundreds of miles away by now.

“We’ll get it,” Michael promised.

“Get the team ready,” Conrad said and marched toward the door. Michael caught up with him on the stairs.

“We don’t have enough evidence yet,” Michael objected. Conrad ignored him.

In his suite, he grabbed a small suitcase from the walk-in closet and threw it on top of the unmade bed. When he returned with an armful of battle gear and clothing, he confronted Michael’s quizzical stare with a set jaw. Under Conrad’s steely-eyed command, Michael’s gaze averted to the side.

“Jeremy is in Geneva,” Michael offered.

“I’ll meet him in Budapest,” Conrad said. “Get his update on ammo and medical supplies. Call the pilot and ready the jet.”

Michael nodded.

Conrad folded a climbing rope. He added thick hiking socks and boots. When Michael remained beside him, he straightened to face him.

Michael blinked, looked askance then confronted Conrad’s gaze. “Why are you doing this? Jeremy can get the proof from the doctor sooner than you can get there.” Even before he uttered the last word of reproof, his gaze fell in submission.

Michael would never understand. He’d found meaning and purpose in his love for Fiona and their joined destiny. Conrad lived only for the hunt. Night after night, day after day, closer and closer to a creature so awesome that he could feel the power that held the ultimate secret.

He would do anything for that power. Anything.