Cade stepped out into the mansion’s opulent hallway and closed the door behind him. Thick plush carpet sank under his booted feet as he put on his chauffeur’s cap and straightened his gray tunic with a jerk. Before he could turn, someone bumped him hard from behind.
Surprised, he pivoted just as a woman stumbled past. He glimpsed a white profile, dazed eyes, and a thin trickle of blood flowing from twin punctures in her throat. She faltered, sagged against the carved wainscoting, then pulled herself upright and started down the sweeping staircase that led to the mansion’s lower level.
Dropping his eyes to watch her descend, Cade stiffened. Just below the hem of her short skirt, long red welts striped her shapely legs. She’d been beaten across the thighs with a riding crop. And he knew damn well who’d done it.
With a growl of fury, he looked up just as Gerhard Hirsch stepped out of his own suite across the hall.
Lifting an elegant hand, Hirsch smoothed the blond waves of his hair. There was a smear of blood at the corner of the German’s wide mouth, and his gray eyes glittered with power from the aftermath of his feeding. Shooting the cuffs of his elegant gray suit, he started down the hall after the woman he’d abused. Even after sixty years, Hirsch still had the Master Race swagger of the Gestapo officer he’d been when Ridgemont Changed him.
Cade took one long stride to meet him and slammed his fist right into that perfect chin. The impact sent the German stumbling backward with a startled yelp. Cade snarled and followed, fists bunched.
Hirsch caught himself against the wall and threw up a forearm to protect his face. “What the hell is wrong with you?" he demanded, wiping blood from his split lip.
“I’m sick of watching you abuse every woman with the bad luck to cross your path.” Rage lengthened Cade’s corner teeth to fangs. He pushed closer as Hirsch straightened hastily and retreated a wary step. “How long has it been since I showed you what I can do with a bullwhip, Gerhard? Maybe a cut for every stripe you just gave that girl….”
Unease flickered in the German’s eyes before he drew his muscled body to its full six-foot-six-inch height. “Try it, McKinnon,” he spat. “It won’t be that easy this time. I’m not a fledgling anymore.”
“Maybe not, but you’re not free either.” Cade gave him a taunting smile. “I am.”
Hirsch stiffened. He still lived in Ridgemont’s thrall, unable to disobey any mental command his vampire sire gave him. “My freedom will come.”
“You’ll lick Ridgemont’s boots for another century. Maybe two.” A low laugh rumbled from the other end of the hallway. Cade’s muscles coiled in involuntary reaction to a sound he’d associated with suffering for more than a century.
“It’s been sixty years, boys. Isn’t it time you learned to get along?" Ridgemont strolled toward them. His power beat against Cade’s psychic shields with an evil so intense it seemed to squirm. “I keep expecting to come in and find one of you has killed the other.” He paused an artistic beat and smiled. “At least wait until I’m around to watch.”
Ridgemont was four inches shorter than Cade, but his wool Armani suit was generously cut to accommodate the bull shoulders he’d built swinging a broadsword with Richard the Lionheart. His blunt, scarred face looked no more than thirty-five, but something in those eyes was older than the Eden snake.
He gave Cade a slow smile. “I’ll be going out tonight. A…date with Elle. You will drive, of course, but perhaps you’d care to join us for the festivities?”
Cade remembered the last time he’d been forced to participate in one of the ancient’s hunts. “Sorry, I don’t find screams arousing."
"It’s not the screams,” Hirsch said. “It’s the shamed moans afterward.” His grin gleamed white and repellent against his sharply handsome face. “Enough power to gorge on.”
“Some of us can get a reaction from a woman without resorting to torture,” Cade told him. “Try making one of them come once in a while—if you can.”
Hirsch’s lips drew back from his teeth, but before he could retort, Ridgemont cut him off. “Ah, but wait until Valerie arrives. Now, that one will be truly delicious,” he said, in that velvet rumble that made Cade’s skin crawl. “You have no idea what it’s like to take a woman who is one of us, my spawn. The pleasure…no mortal woman can match it. And the Change itself—that first, deep feeding, so rich with the taste of terror. Then the final voluptuous surrender as you force her mind….” The ancient sighed like a gourmet contemplating some particularly rare French delicacy. “It’s a pity so few can survive the transformation. I’ve had only a handful of vampire lovers in eight hundred years.”
“Too bad you couldn’t resist the impulse to kill them all,” Cade said, his face expressionless.
Ridgemont shrugged. “I have a low tolerance for female defiance. Still, Valerie should last at least a century. And she’ll give me such power…Perhaps enough to bring even you to heel.”
Cade didn’t flinch; it was an empty threat. Even if his plan failed, the ancient would kill him for making the attempt.
His sire tilted his head, contemplating him in a way that made his muscles tense. “It’s fortunate you resisted the urge to kill her, all those years ago.”
It damn well hadn’t been an urge. It had been a psychic compulsion Ridgemont himself had planted after starving Cade for two weeks. Then the ancient had cut Valerie until the smell of flowing blood had ripped away what little sanity he’d had left. “Yeah,” Cade gritted. “Luckily, I’m stronger than you expected.”
“Indeed,” Ridgemont said, with a slight smile. “I must admit, I was impressed that you managed to resist the temptation. But I’ve always wondered, McKinnon…” He dropped his voice to a suggestive purr, “…just how close did you come to ripping out that soft little throat?"
Cade managed not to flinch.
“You look a little white around the lips, gunslinger,” the ancient observed in the cool, cultured voice that had fooled so many into thinking he was civilized. He took a step closer until the lapels of his suit jacket brushed the front of Cade’s chauffeur’s uniform. “I’ve always wondered what would have happened if you’d lost that particular battle.” One corner of his mouth kicked up in a cruel smile. “I suspect killing that child would have snapped you like a bird’s wing. Then I could have made you do…anything.”
“No.” Cade stared coldly into his sire’s eyes. “Because I’d have killed you for it.”
“You wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.” Ridgemont grinned darkly. “But I’m sure you would have made it a very interesting five minutes.”
He let his own cruel smile curl his mouth. “Maybe I’d have made it a little too interesting.”
“Don’t overestimate yourself, gunslinger.” The ancient’s power slammed against his mental shields like a fist. “You wouldn’t be the first of my spawn I’ve killed for forgetting his place.”
Cade stared into those reptilian eyes, refusing to yield to the brutal psychic power his enemy had built over most of a millennium. There was a certain cold pleasure in his ability to resist. Even five years ago, Ridgemont could have driven him to his knees.
No more. He was free now. It had taken him decades of struggle, but he was no longer a slave. The need boiled in him to strike out, to watch the bastard’s blood fly under his fist, to get some of his own back for one hundred and twenty years of abuse. He fought the impulse down. What he had planned wasn’t as satisfying, but it would have to do.
Ridgemont’s cold eyes narrowed. “You should watch that stiff neck, gunslinger. I’d hate to have to break it for you.” Yet oddly, there was a hint of something in his gaze that was less frustrated than…pleased? He turned away abruptly and headed for the stairs. “Come. I’m hungry, and my lovely meal is waiting.”
This is it. Cade felt his muscles coil in anticipation. Involuntarily, his mind began a countdown of the last seconds of his life.
“Speaking of meals,” Ridgemont said as the three of them descended the staircase to the sprawling ballroom, “you’ll need to pick Valerie up tomorrow at La Guardia. She’ll be on the midnight flight.”
“Unless those Kith instincts warn her she’s walking into a trap.” The ancient laughed, a short, nasty boom of sound. “If they do, she’ll ignore them. I’m offering her a great deal of money to ghostwrite my memoirs. She’d be a fool to turn me down.” He flashed his fangs. “Particularly after losing her job.”
As Ridgemont, of course, had personally arranged. Last week the ancient had flown to Atlanta for a meeting with Valerie’s publisher, supposedly to discuss investing in the newspaper. Instead, he’d psychically altered the man’s memories. Now the entire staff of The Atlanta Daily Independent believed their star reporter had been caught making up a story. He’d also ordered that none of them tell her anything about it, ensuring she’d be unable to mount a defense against the trumped-up charges.
And since she’d never met her mysterious “benefactor,” Val had no idea he was the same man who’d orchestrated her parents’ murder seventeen years before. Cade meant to make sure she’d never find out.
The three vampires strode through Ridgemont’s silent mansion. It was almost midnight; the servants and assistants who attended the ancient’s business had gone home. To keep his heartbeat from betraying him to his sire’s exceptional hearing, Cade concentrated on the decor—the original Rembrandt hanging on one wall, the Ming vase precisely positioned on the Chinese Chippendale table. All very beautiful, but he doubted the ancient noticed. Ridgemont was more interested in making a lavish display than anything else.
In the foyer, Cade strode ahead, boots clicking on the marble floor. He opened the door for his enemies with mocking subservience. They swept past him into the fragrant evening air. He locked up and followed them down the mansion’s front steps to the limousine he’d left parked at the curb.
Ridgemont stopped beside the car and looked back at him. Knowing when he was being put in his place, Cade reached out and opened the limo’s rear door, touching the bill of his chauffeur’s cap in a taunting salute. Ignoring the gesture, the ancient ducked into the car.
Hirsch was already in the front passenger seat as Cade slid behind the wheel.
Looking into the rearview mirror, Cade met Ridgemont’s cold gaze through the back seat partition. His heart pounded in long, slow beats. Time slowed to a crawl. He slid the key into the ignition.
But before he could turn it, the car was flooded with the sweet bite of peppermint. Abigail! She was trying to….
No! Ridgemont’s telepathic command blasted through the car.
Hirsch! DON’T LET HIM START THE CAR!
The German lunged forward as Cade started to twist the key. He let go of it just long enough to slam an elbow into Hirsch’s face. His foe still managed to shatter the ignition housing with a blow of one big fist.
Oh, hell. Cade grabbed Hirsch by the collar and heaved him headfirst into the windshield. Safety glass exploded, showering them all with glittering fragments. Ignoring the German’s curses, he flung open the door and lunged out to meet Ridgemont, who’d thrown himself from the limousine.
Cade ducked the ancient’s first roundhouse and buried a fist in Ridgemont’s belly with all his supernatural strength. The vampire retaliated with a backhand blow that sent stars shooting through his skull. “What did you do to the car, gunslinger?" Ridgemont snarled. “I saw my death when you put your hand on that key.”
“A half pound of C-4 wired to the ignition.” Cade spat blood into the grass and gave him a vicious grin, mentally cursing Abigail. Ridgemont wasn’t precognitive; she must have sent the vision to him. “The cops wouldn’t have found anything but a crater.”
The ancient’s blue eyes widened. “And you would have turned the switch.” He coiled into a crouch. The right sleeves of both his suit and shirt had ripped, revealing thick muscle bunching underneath. “You’d have blown us all to hell.”
“Oh, yeah,” he snarled back as they began to circle. “Best place for us.”
Ridgemont’s fist shot toward his face. Cade threw up a forearm block, deflecting it the inch that saved his skull. Even the glancing blow was like being hit by a coal train. He went flying, tucking into a roll as he hit the ground. His momentum tumbled him a dozen yards before he got his feet under him again. Reeling upright, he shook his head to clear it. His ears were ringing. God, that bastard could punch.
When he looked up, Cade saw Hirsch charging toward him, blood streaming from the dozen cuts marring his too-handsome face. Ridgemont closed on him from the other direction, his speed inhuman. Cade took a deep breath and stepped to meet them both.
He blocked the first few punches and got in some of his own, but then Ridgemont landed a right to the jaw that damn near finished him. As he shook off a wave of blackness, Hirsch slammed his fist into his ribs. Something cracked and flared into agony. He ignored it, ramming a kick into Ridgemont’s thigh. The vampire went down.
Before Cade could follow up, Hirsch was there, keeping him so busy with a flurry of punches, Ridgemont had time to get to his feet and wade in again.
Every time Cade blocked one of his opponents’ blows, the other would streak a fist or a foot through his guard. He fought on, ignoring the impacts even as his body became one blazing mass of pain and blood slicked his skin from a dozen cuts.
Cade was going to die, and he knew it. He could take Hirsch, but he couldn’t take Ridgemont. He’d lost too many fights with his sire to have any doubts on that score. And he certainly had no chance against them both. They’d kill him and go right on terrorizing anybody they chose. Including Valerie, who’d suffer for a hundred years—if Ridgemont let her live that long.
Snarling, Cade drove a fist into the ancient’s smirking face. He had time for an instant’s victory before his head detonated with a red starburst of pain as Hirsch’s knuckles plowed into it. Staggering back, he blinked away blood.
Both vampires were grinning now, hunger hot in their eyes. They’d feed on him once they got him down. Then somebody would get a sword and hack off his head or cut out his heart, and he’d be finished.
He took a deep breath, smelling the stink of blood and sweat—and the cool, sweet scent of peppermint.
From the corner of one rapidly swelling eye, Cade glimpsed Abigail hovering nearby, watching the fight with panic on her translucent face. Realizing he’d spotted her, she pointed urgently toward the fence circling Ridgemont’s property a hundred yards away. Run, Cade!
I’m sick of running, he told her, mind to mind. I’m done with this.
If you die, who’ll save Valerie?
Cade ducked a punch and swore under his breath. He wanted it over. He was sick of this game he could never win with an opponent he could never defeat. But dammit, Abigail was right. He couldn’t allow Ridgemont to take Val.
Whirling, Cade sprinted toward the fence. It was fifteen feet tall and topped with foot-long spikes, but he gathered himself and leaped. Clearing it with a foot to spare, he hit the ground running. Blood rolled down his face and broken bones shifted and burned in his chest, but he didn’t stop.
“Coward!” Hirsch started to leap after him.
“Let him go,” Ridgemont growled, and the German felt his muscles freeze in the grip of his sire’s will.
Unable to move, Hirsch rolled his eyes to stare at the ancient, so furious he forgot himself. “Are you mad? He almost killed us!”
Ridgemont grinned, licking blood from his split lip. “He did, didn’t he?"
Suddenly freed, Hirsch stumbled forward, then regained his footing to whirl on his master. “Do you want to die?"
The ancient stretched his thickly muscled body and winced, putting a hand to his ribs. “I want a good fight. Terrorizing sheep holds no challenge.” He sucked in a breath at a particularly nasty twinge. “Jesu, the gunslinger has a punch like a destrier’s kick.” Shaking his head, he looked over at Hirsch. “I’ll kill him in my own time, Gerhard, but meanwhile he’ll give me all the challenge I could want.”
***
Three blocks from the mansion, Cade stumbled to a halt and reached out his mind, searching for the nearest taxi and drawing the driver to him.
When it arrived, the man almost drove by anyway, forcing Cade to send out another compulsion. Evidently his battered face and torn uniform didn’t exactly fill the cabby with confidence.
The car rolled reluctantly to a stop. He dragged open the door and collapsed across the back seat, gasping as cracked ribs shot pain through his side. The cabdriver peered at him in the rearview mirror and asked in thickly accented English, “Hospital?"
“God, no. I’ll heal—though I wouldn’t turn down a little morphine in the meantime.” Sucking in a breath at a particularly nasty twinge, he gritted out the Queens address of his current safe house.
By the time he got out of the cab, Cade’s head was spinning. It took an effort to force his swollen, bloody fingers to pick the proper bills out of his wallet to pay the cabby. As he accepted them, the driver looked into his bruise-swollen face and winced. Glancing into the man’s mind, Cade saw his own face and winced back. God, the bastards had outdone themselves this time.
Bloodied and exhausted, he turned to limp toward the aging two-story Victorian, noting that the garage doors were still down. With luck, nobody had made off with the Lexus while he was gone; he’d hate to have to acquire another car before the trip to the airport.
Climbing the three steps to the porch, Cade had to grit his teeth against the kettledrum throb in his head. He suspected he had a concussion to go with the busted ribs. That hunch was confirmed when it took him endless minutes of dizzy fumbling to get the door unlocked, punch the entry code into the burglar alarm, then lock the door and rearm the alarm. It was necessary, though. No matter how deep his healing sleep, if Ridgemont came to call, the alarm should jolt him awake in time to protect himself.
He hoped.
Limping for the stairs, Cade wrapped a bloody hand around the banister and began dragging himself toward the second floor bedroom. He knew he’d be lucky to make it there before he collapsed in his tracks.
He had never actually lived in the house, had rarely even spent the night. It was nothing more than his base of operations, a place to keep his weapons and money and organize his various campaigns. He slept, when he slept at all, at Ridgemont’s mansion. He preferred having his enemies around him when he bedded down. At least that way he knew where they were.
Like the rest of the house, the bedroom was Spartan and clean, furnished with a double bed, a ladder-back cane chair, and a bureau. None of the furniture matched, but then, decorating hadn’t exactly been a priority when he’d set up the safe house.
Wanting only to slip between the covers and heal for twelve hours straight, Cade staggered to the bed. A big gym bag was in his way, sitting in the middle of the bedspread. He picked it up and dumped it in the floor.
But as the bag thumped to the worn carpeting, an instinct for self-preservation worked its way through his haze of pain and exhaustion. Groaning, Cade gingerly lowered himself to one knee so he could unzip the bag and pull a sawed-off shotgun out of its thick nest of money.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer notwithstanding, a wooden stake wouldn’t kill a vampire. It took decapitation or cutting out the heart, and the twelve-gauge could do either with one double-barreled blast. Not as cleanly as a sword, perhaps, but easier to use coming out of a dead sleep.
Still, it was a damn good thing the gun was already loaded. The spinning in his head was picking up speed, and he doubted he had the coordination to get shells into the thing now.
Cade slid the weapon just far enough under the bed that he wouldn’t step on it if he got up to use the john, then fell across the mattress without bothering to undress. Concentrating hard, he dragged off his boots and hauled his leaden legs into the bed. As the room revolved like a merry-go-round, he squeezed his eyes shut.
And smelled peppermint. Are you angry with me?
He didn’t open his eyes. “Why did you do it, Abigail? You would have been safe from him. And with me finally dead, you’d have been free to go to God.”
It wasn’t worth it. Not if it meant watching you die.
“I had to watch you die, and you suffered a hell of a lot more than I would have.”
Cade, I stayed for you. How could you think I’d allow you to kill yourself?
Put like that, she had a point. She’d been risking her soul for him for more than a century. He should have known she’d do anything to keep him alive. Even betray him.
Abigail was quiet so long he’d have thought she was gone, if not for the scent of peppermint. Finally she asked, Do you think they’ll come after you tonight?
That was a damn good question. With a groan, Cade reached out his mind for another scan. He didn’t sense anything, which meant the two vampires were still outside his range. At least Ridgemont was; Hirsch had only been immortal for sixty years, and his power barely registered to psychic senses. Which was why Ridgemont wouldn’t send him alone. Cade could kick Gerhard’s ass, and they all knew it.
“I think they’re probably back at the mansion,” he said at last, and winced as his ribs protested. “Hopefully nursing a few broken bones of their own. And dawn’s too close now. They won’t bother coming after me tonight.”
Though sunlight didn’t actually cause vampires to burst into flames, the burns it inflicted were nasty. Neither Hirsch nor Ridgemont would want to spend time out in all that ultraviolet searching for him. And they’d definitely have to search. He’d concealed his ownership of the house with the hard-learned paranoia of a man who’d been a slave too long.
Just to be on the safe side, I’ll keep watch, Abigail said. The scent of peppermint faded.
Cade sighed and shifted gingerly, trying to find a comfortable position. By the next evening, his vampire metabolism would have healed his injuries, but between them and the fight, he knew he’d be left dangerously drained. He’d have to find a woman and feed quickly tomorrow night if he meant to meet Valerie’s plane before Ridgemont did.
As to exactly how he’d spirit his lover from under his sire’s nose… He’d cross that bridge when he got to it.