I thought you might be thirsty.
The words I'd just uttered hung in the air, so sharp I could almost see them. The vivid green eyes of the man—vampire—I'd said them to let little of what he might be thinking show.
Not that inscrutability was unusual for him.
Lord Marco Sebastiani was an Old One. The oldest vampire in Seattle. Ruler of the oldest vampire lineage in the city. For all intents and purposes, he was the city's vampire king, even if some of Seattle's other Old Ones did not rest easy with that fact.
Not a man to give anything away easily.
"I think perhaps you had better sit down, Ms. Keenan," Lord Marco said after a few more seconds' silence. He gestured to one of the chairs before his desk with a very Italian flourish. If he was more than mildly surprised to find me on his doorstep late at night offering to let him drink my blood, then his voice, like the rest of him, gave no hint of it. His heartbeat, to my werewolf ears, was steady. Unlike my own, which was racing. Though he didn't usually call me "Ms. Keenan," so perhaps he was more surprised than he seemed.
"I'd rather stand," I said, but, to be polite, I walked to the chair. Better not to annoy him. Marco was charming by default, but I knew how ruthless the creature hidden behind that handsome facade was when he wanted to be.
I gripped the curving carved back of the chair. It was old like him, and the deep green silk upholstery matched his eyes. I studied him warily. Even with his expression carefully neutral, his face demanded attention. He was undeniably handsome. The kind of face that might have inspired artists back in his native Italy. Maybe one of them had once caught sight of Marco across a piazza late one night all those centuries ago and carved him in marble. Marco's face wouldn't have changed in the time that had passed. Olive skin unlined. No gray in the near-black hair. Vampires don't age after they're turned.
But a statue would have given away more emotion, perhaps.
Marco put down the document he'd been reading when I'd been shown into his office, sliding it into a black leather portfolio. "I take it from your invitation—and that outfit—that you are offering to repay your blood debt tonight?"
Hearing it stated so bluntly made my stomach squirm. I stood straighter, squaring my shoulders, ignoring the fear. I'd tied my dark hair up. Between that and the strapless black top, my throat was on clear display. The blood debt I owed Lord Marco was causing problems between Special Agent Daniel Gibson—otherwise known as my fiancé—and me. It wasn't the only thing causing us problems, but it seemed to be the most easily fixable. I wanted to be rid of it. I lifted my chin. "Yes."
He lifted one dark eyebrow. "And I am supposed to just walk over there and bite you?"
This wasn't going exactly as I had expected. I hesitated. "Yes?"
Marco sighed. "I am sorry to disappoint you, cara, but I'm afraid I must decline."
My mouth fell open. "Excuse me?"
"I said no. Thank you for the offer, but no." One side of his mouth quirked.
"You can't just say no," I sputtered. It had never crossed my mind that Marco might refuse me. Werewolf blood was something of a delicacy to vampires. One they only usually tasted if it was freely given. Vampires and werewolves are closely matched when it comes to strength and speed. Not many vamps would choose to tackle an unwilling werewolf for a taste of their blood. Not if they were sane, at least.
"Actually, I can, Ashley. You owe me, not the other way around. It is my choice as to how and when I choose to collect that debt."
I clamped my teeth shut before I could say anything I might regret. Big bad vampire. Do not aggravate.
Marco nodded. "Take a moment."
I tried to count to ten before I said anything else. But I was too frustrated and only reached four before I blurted, "Why won't you do it?"
"Firstly, as I said, it is my choice, not yours." His words sharpened. "Secondly, knowing what I do about how you feel about vampires, I have no wish to inflict any distress on you when I have no need to call on the debt. Also, Smith's case is not settled. When we made this agreement, I told you we would consider the matter after the case was done."
I'd forgotten that part. Damn it. "It distresses me to have the debt," I muttered.
Marco pointed at the chair once more. "That is a different matter. Sit, and we will discuss this."
I sat. Defiance wouldn't do me any good at this point.
"You understand," Marco said, "that what I have said is fact. This is my choice. Your debt is mine to hold. Mine to end. Werewolf blood has value, but I do not take such things lightly. I would not call on you to pay without great need. Does that ease your mind?"
It made me feel a little better. I didn't think it would improve Dan's view of the situation.
"Or am I to interpret your silence as perhaps the problem being more complicated than you simply not liking the idea of having to submit to me one day? That someone else has trouble with what you owe? Daniel Gibson, perhaps?"
I thought I had a pretty good poker face. And Marco knew how I felt about vampires trying to read my mind. "What makes you think that?" I asked, seeking to clarify before I jumped to any conclusions about how he'd gotten to the heart of the problem so fast.
He shrugged an elegantly clad shoulder. "You are bonded werewolves. It is hardly difficult to deduce that he does not like the thought of you being in debt to me, let alone the fact that you owe me blood."
I sighed. "I don't know how to make things right between us."
"The two of you have been through a lot in a short time. But he cares about you, your Daniel. That is plain. Perhaps you just need time. And whatever it is you need, it is not this. This would anger him, I think."
I knew, with a sudden cold shiver of certainty, that he was right. And that Marco had just saved me from doing something very stupid. Crap. Or yay, perhaps. Either way, I had to find a better way.
I nodded slowly. "Yes. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have come."
His head tilted. "You are always welcome in my house, cara. You are still new to this supernatural world. And I can, perhaps, provide a perspective your wolves cannot." He smiled then, and it wasn't an entirely friendly expression. "Of course, such advice may not always be free."
I suppressed another shiver. No getting deeper into debt with the vampire. That wouldn't do me or Dan any good. Which also meant I couldn't ask Marco for the other favor I needed. The one where I needed him to try to find something my father had hidden in my memories before he'd died. I'd told Dan I wanted Marco to be the one to look for it. He'd thralled me once before to help me, and he'd been kind. The thought of being thralled again by any vampire freaked me out, but I'd thought maybe I could bear it with him. But not if he was going to ask for something else from me in return. Time for Plan B. Or C, or whatever the hell I was up to at this point.
I forced a polite smile. "Thank you. That’s kind of you."
That earned me a nod and a smile that wasn't quite so intimidating. "How is the investigation proceeding? Into the elusive Doctor Smith?"
"Slowly," I said. I couldn't say more. Dan, who was leading the FBI Supernatural Taskforce's investigation, wouldn't thank me for sharing confidential information with Marco. Old Ones sometimes operated in some gray areas. Dan wasn't big on gray areas. I would let him deal with telling Marco what he was willing to share. The Old Ones were on the hunt for Smith, too, but I doubted either side was sharing everything they found. "Have you had any luck?"
It had only been a little over a week since I'd escaped from Smith and his vampire conspirators, killing the vampire he loved in the process. So far, Smith—which wasn't his real name—had managed to disappear into thin air once more.
The not-so-good Doctor Smith had created a mutated strain of vampirism. One that could infect a human with a single bite instead of requiring an exchange of blood between human and vampire over a period of time. Basically, vampirism as plague.
If the mutation became common knowledge, it would go badly for the supernatural community. Humans don't react well to threats. They tend to kill first and ask questions later. The supernaturals lived among them, mostly in harmony because the supernaturals played by the rules these days. No one wanted to see that balance destroyed. Marco and the vampires were hunting Smith as hard as Dan and me. They were just doing it through different avenues.
Marco's expression went flat. "No. Which does not please me. Now, the night grows old. Which means I have things to do, and you likely should be sleeping. I will call a car, and it will take you home to your wolf."
I asked the driver to take me home rather than to Dan's house. I wanted to change and shower before facing him. There were no bite marks on my neck, but Dan would be able to smell Marco's scent on me just from me being in his house. Safer to scrub any trace of it away before I told him where I'd been.
In one way, Marco had done me a favor by turning me down. I didn't like owing him, but he'd been right about how Dan might react. Now, I just felt…weird. Guilty for going to Marco. Relieved he'd refused. Unsure how to explain to Dan what I'd done. At this point I had no idea if I'd just made things worse, even if Marco had more sense than me.
As we headed back to Mercer Island, the limo's wheels shushing softly on the dark wet road, I tried to tell myself that everything was going to be fine. Somehow, I didn't find myself very convincing.
And as I stepped out of the car and smelled another very familiar scent on the air, I realized I'd missed my chance to do even minimal damage control. I should have checked where Dan was before choosing my hiding place.
I hesitated as the limo drove off. My nose told me Dan was sitting on my front porch. I could still sneak in the back, but he'd come find me. Supernatural senses made being sneaky way more difficult.
"How did you know where I was?" I asked when I reached the bottom of the steps. It was misting rain, and my clothing wasn't any protection.
"Esme," Dan said. He didn't move from where he was sitting on the top step, his dark blue shirt and jeans blending him into the shadows. But the silver of his eyes was bright, which meant he wasn't happy.
I sighed. I thought I'd given my protection detail for the night the slip by heading to my office and then sneaking off in a cab. But Esme Watson, one of Dan's best agents—one of the top guns in the whole FBI Supernatural Taskforce, in fact—was sneakier than me on my best day. Maybe it was because she was a jaguar shifter. Built-in feline stealth or something. Or maybe it was because she was damned good at what she did for a living. I hadn't noticed a tail coming home, but then I wouldn't if she was doing her job.
Which she would do regardless of how I felt about it. Esme stayed well clear of the murky waters of Dan-Ashley relationship issues. Dan was her boss, she'd known him a lot longer than she'd known me, and even though she and I were friends—maybe even as close to good friends as the prickly cat got—she was playing Switzerland like a born diplomat. She would no more choose to put herself in the middle of a post-Marco confrontation between Dan and me than she would appear in public looking less than immaculate from head to toe.
"She said you were at Marco's," Dan said after the silence stretched a bit too long.
I nodded. "Yes."
"Any particular reason you were visiting an Old One in the middle of the night?"
Might as well just get it over with. "I went to pay off my debt."
I didn't see him come down the stairs. One second, he was standing looking down at me, and the next, I was staring at his chest, breathing in the smoky electrical scent of angry werewolf.
I froze. Dan wouldn't hit me. I knew that deep in my bones. But a werewolf in a rage was a chancy proposition, even for another werewolf.
"Show me." The words only sounded half human.
I tilted my head back even though baring my throat wasn't necessarily the smartest move. Push an alpha past a certain point and submission might well be met with aggression. But at the moment, I had limited options.
Dan drew in a deep breath, anger rumbling in his throat as his fingers touched my skin, resting on the place where my pulse beat. "He didn't do it."
I slanted a glance up at him, not moving away just yet. "No."
"Why not?"
"He said it was his choice, not mine. And that I was being…rash."
He squeezed his eyes closed, grimacing. "It's rare that I totally agree with Marco, but I have to this time." When his eyes opened, the silver blazed even hotter. "Can I ask what you thought you were doing?"
"Trying to make things easier."
He growled. The back of my neck prickled in response, my own wolf's desires warring between submitting and fighting back. Which was the story of our life at the moment. Dan was a dominant wolf, alpha but not Alpha. So was I. Finding how that worked as a couple was tricky. Particularly when our lives had been full of kidnapping, chaos, and danger since Dan walked back into my life a few months ago.
Situations precisely designed to push all the wrong buttons when it came to our instincts.
"How?" Dan asked, voice rough.
"We fight about my debt to him all the time. I wanted it gone."
His expression didn't change. Damn it, why couldn't he understand? "I just wanted us not to fight. To focus on what's important."
"And what is that, exactly?"
"Finding Smith. Stopping a plague of vampires." His expression darkened, and I hurried on, stomach churning. "You want me to say 'us,' don't you? Well, I want to say that, too. But can't you see that we're never going to be able to relax—never going to be just us—while Smith's still out there?"
Dan's stance eased fractionally, a change so slight a human wouldn't have noticed. But it was enough to make me hope that maybe I was getting through.
"You going to Marco doesn't get us any closer to finding Smith." He paused. "Unless you asked him to look inside your head?" His tone was too controlled.
"No. I don't think that's an option."
Dan's head tilted. "Why not? You said you trusted him." His brows drew tighter. "Did he do something to scare you?"
I shook my head. "No. But he made it very clear that his advice won't be free all the time. I don't want to owe him another favor."
The idea was to get rid of my debts, not add to them.
"We could always get a court order. It's related to the case."
I flinched. "No, thank you. I barely want to let any vampire in. I definitely don't want one who's annoyed and only doing it because he has to. And you don't need to wreck your relationship with Marco. He's too important." I didn't even know if the Taskforce would let Dan antagonize Marco, given who he was. Though, thanks to Smith, the threat we faced was maybe more important than politics. And we needed Marco to help us with the case. I would find another way, even if the thought made me shiver.
But I didn't want to think about that now. If I thought about it now, on top of everything else, I was going to scream.
I shivered. The rain had saturated my thin top, and I was getting cold. Werewolf metabolism helps us ignore bad weather, but not forever.
"Can we just go inside?" I laid a hand on Dan's arm. Felt the rock-hard bicep soften. "I'm sorry. It was a dumb idea. I just wanted to make things better. Have one less thing to worry about. I didn't want Marco to be able to call on me in the middle of the investigation." Not that it was likely that Marco would do such a thing while we were all chasing Smith. But the constant feeling that he could didn't help me focus. "I'm just trying to make this easier for us. I'm tired of fighting. And you don't like the fact that I owe Marco."
"No," Dan agreed, still frowning. I'd never quite figured out whether it was just the fact that Marco would get to drink my blood one day that he hated, or whether it was guilt because I'd incurred the debt to save him.
"Wouldn't you feel better if I didn't owe him? I would. I'm working on the other debt. I wanted this one gone, too." I'd incurred two debts to Marco in the last few months. To settle the lesser of the two, he'd asked me to help Lord Esteban, another of the Old Ones, with an embezzlement issue. Given Lord Esteban ran some of the nastier dark clubs in the city—places where people and supernaturals went for pleasures involving blood and pain—it wasn't a pleasant task.
To make things worse, Esteban's case had turned out to be tangled up with Smith's. I had yet to get to the bottom of the mystery of how exactly. I was a damned good forensic accountant, and I was used to dealing with supernatural clients and how complicated their affairs could grow over their long lives, but Esteban's were like a spiderweb spun by a very deranged spider. Every time I tugged at a thread, it snapped, or divided, or landed me deep in a pile of data that made no sense. But I would win in the end.
I stepped closer to Dan, looked up into his face. "I just want it to be over. I know it might have been dumb, but I want our lives to get to some sort of normal." I dropped my forehead onto his chest and breathed for a moment, listening to the thump of his heartbeat, feeling his muscles ease and his scent calm at the contact.
This. This was what I wanted. Dan and me. Time to be just us. Time for me to lean against him and just be with my mate, without worries of imminent disaster. To enjoy the bond we shared rather than fight it. To live in the place where everything felt right because we were together and not have that shattered by death and destruction and sorrow.
"I know," he said, the sensation rumbling through his chest as his voice hit my ears. His arms closed around me. "I know. We'll figure this out. Together."
I didn't know whether he meant us or the case. Or both. Whichever it was, I hoped like hell he was right.
We needed to find Smith before the situation got worse. Dan thought he'd left the state or even the country, but I wasn't so convinced. Smith—whoever he was—had roots here. He'd known my father, maybe even worked with him at Synotech or one of the other pharmaceutical companies where Dad had done his immunology research. Obviously there was something about Seattle or Washington that meant something to him.
Or there was something here he needed. Like whatever it was my dad had buried in my head.
So he wouldn't have gone far, even if he was freakishly good at hiding his trail. We just needed a break. Something to clear the path a little. Until then, we'd keep following the money. Research was expensive. He needed cash. For equipment. For a laboratory. For facilities to house the plague vamps. There hadn't been a rash of people being turned with one bite, so Smith had to be containing them somehow.
All that required serious dollars. I had to find the money. Follow the money. That was a very basic tenet of tracking down fraudsters.
Someone helping Smith had been siphoning cash from Lord Esteban, so we could keep digging there.
If that didn't work, then we'd look at other options. Maybe Smith had targeted other Old Ones. That was an unpleasant thought. In order to find that out, we'd have to speak to more Old Ones. Which would possibly mean enlisting Marco's help yet again.
I didn't want to do it. But I would if things got bad enough. The FBI wanted to catch Smith, wanted to stop his plague vamps. But I wanted to stop him because he was, perhaps, behind the events that had warped my life. He'd supported McCallister Tate, the vampire who'd killed my parents, my best friend, Julie Anders, and a whole raft of people in my hometown thirteen years ago. McCallister Tate, whose resurfacing had brought Dan back into my life a few months ago.
Tate was the reason Dan had needed to bite me, turning me into a werewolf. A change I'd never wanted, though it had saved my life, saved me from being turned into a vampire sired by Tate.
Not to mention it was something in my father's research that Smith had apparently used—twisted—to create his plague vamps.
And most recently, Smith had been responsible for the death of yet another person I loved. Rhianna Anders. Julie's little sister. Mine, too, in all but blood.
Though that was where my own guilt came into play. Smith was the reason Rhi had died, but the truth was she'd sacrificed herself to kill a vampire threatening me. And she'd used me to cause their deaths, thralling me and giving me an order I hadn't been able to refuse. I hadn't told Dan that part yet. I couldn't face it.
My gut twisted just thinking about it, the rage I tried to keep banked flaring to vicious life that burned away the sadness.
Dan wanted to bring Smith to justice.
I wanted revenge.