face resolved itself, dimly lit, but recognizable. “Alec?” I asked, the memory of him emerging from the darkness of his house returning with an impact that had me struggling upright.
Something bound me, holding me back. I struggled with the thing, realizing as a metallic click sounded that it was a seat belt. I was in a car.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, pushing myself up from where I’d been slumped in the passenger seat. Pain bit hard and deep in my head for a few seconds, slowly ebbing away to a dull throb. “Oh, God. I remember now. You loomed up out of the darkness and scared the crap out of me.”
“I’m sorry for that, love.” Alec caught himself, making a little face. “I suppose I shouldn’t call you that anymore. Not since . . . Well. What’s done can’t be undone.”
“If you’re talking about Kristoff . . . ,” I began slowly, rebuckling my seat belt. With extreme caution, I felt the side of my head. There was a good-sized lump there. “No, it can’t be undone. Not that I would want to even if I could change it. Ouch. I don’t suppose you have an ice pack handy?”
He shook his head, glancing briefly at me before returning his eyes to the road. “You are happy with Kristoff? I had thought that you and I had a great future before us. It seemed to me that you thought so, too.”
“I don’t think we were ever really meant to be,” I said uncomfortably, and not just due to the headache. “I will always cherish our time together, though. And I can’t believe I’m saying something so predictable and trite, but I hope that you won’t allow my relationship with Kristoff to come between our friendship, or your friendship with Kristoff. Assuming, that is, that you are not really working for the Brotherhood and about to turn me over to them so they can perform insanely evil acts against my person.”
Alec’s lips thinned. He was, as I had had occasion to note at some length, an exceedingly handsome man. He was dark haired, like Kristoff, but where Kristoff had dark auburn curls, Alec’s hair was a rich, deep, dark chocolate, straight and silky, pulled back in a ponytail. His eyes were green like a cat’s, and although our physical relationship hadn’t gone beyond one night together, he had enough raw magnetism that even in my somewhat muddled state I felt the impact of his nearness.
“That you can even think such a thing about me pains me deeply,” Alec said, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.
“Well, you have to admit that you haven’t done much for making people think you’re a knight in shining armor. Where have you been? What have you been doing? And why have you kidnapped me?”
“I haven’t kidnapped you; I’ve saved you,” he said, shooting me an irritated glance. “There were reapers all around my house. I sneaked in through the attic and was going to retrieve a valuable when I heard people.”
I suddenly remembered the old diary Magda and I found. I slid my hand toward my stomach, relieved to feel the stiff vellum-and-goatskin journal resting against it. Alec must have seen the movement.
“Yes, my reaper journal. It would appear I need to find a new hiding place for it. Oh, don’t distress yourself, love. I didn’t take it from you. In fact, you will find it most interesting reading, although I would like it back when you are through with it. You might ask Kristoff to translate parts for you.”
“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t know-”
He made an abortive gesture. “It doesn’t matter. I was about to strike you down when I saw you near the stairs, having assumed you were a reaper-or rather, one of the reapers who would not hesitate to kill me-when I realized it was you. What was Kristoff doing, leaving you alone in my home?”
“He didn’t leave me alone,” I said, sick to my stomach and confused as all get-out.
“He didn’t?”
“No. He was out in the guesthouse. At least, I thought he was, but he didn’t answer me when I tried to contact him.”
Alec swore and slammed his foot on the brake, the car fishtailing wildly to the accompaniment of horns from the cars behind us as he pulled an extremely illegal U-turn across a grass strip dividing the highway, and headed us back in the direction we’d just come.
“Where are we going now?” I asked.
“Back to get Kristoff. They must have him. The place was swarming with them when I arrived.”
Fear rolled through me, leaving my hands clammy. Kristoff? Please answer me!
Silence hung heavily in my head.
“He’s still not answering,” I said, nausea leaving me weak and shaking.
“We’ll find him,” Alec said, his jaw tight. He glanced in the rearview mirror. “We were not followed. With luck, they will still be searching my house and will not have removed him yet.”
“I’m seriously confused, here,” I said, touching the lump on the side of my head again. “Are you on our side? Or are you yanking my chain? Because, so help me God, Alec, if you’ve done something to Kristoff-”
“We have devoted ourselves, both of us, to defeating the reapers,” he said grimly, his face set. “Such acts require much self-sacrifice, and at times have left us both in positions where we were close to destruction. I have saved his life a number of times. Do you seriously believe me capable of betraying him to the reapers? Or perhaps you think I am so desperate that I am willing to take another man’s Beloved?”
Shame filled me at his accusation. “No, I don’t think that of you. And I apologize for what I said. It’s just that you disappeared so completely, and no one knew where you were or what happened to you. And then the vampires all seemed to lose their minds and accused him of the stupidest things ever. Alec, I have to know-did you set up Kristoff?”
He shot me a startled glance. “Set him up how?”
“Make it look like he embezzled a bunch of money, and had something to do with your disappearance, and killed Anniki.”
“Oh.” He looked almost amused. “No, I did not arrange for that.”
“Then where did you go?”
He was silent for a moment, the streetlights as we passed under them checkering his face and making it almost impossible to read his expression. “I have been working.”
“Working how? For the reapers?”
The look he gave me was pure scorn.
“Sorry. Working for whom, then?”
“I have been attempting to uncover a connection between one of the reapers and a Dark One.”
“The mole, you mean?”
“You know about that?”
“Kristoff told me.”
He made a face. “I should have guessed.”
“I knew it!” I sat up a little straighter in the seat, ignoring the brief throb of pain in my head as pieces of the puzzle slid together. “You’re pretending to be a friend of the reapers in order to find out who the mole is, aren’t you?”
His smile was wry and brief. “It appears I have underestimated you. Yes, I have infiltrated the reaper organization. They believe me to be a friend.”
“Oh, I can’t wait to tell Kristoff!” At the mention of his name my spirits plummeted. “Assuming I can. Why did the Brotherhood go to your house?”
“I suspect that someone tipped them off to your arrival.”
“That’s impossible,” I said, gnawing on my lower lip, stretching out my senses to find Kristoff. There was nothing but a cold abyss, empty of all warmth and sensation, that was the man with whom I was now wholly and irreversibly in love. “No one knew we were coming here but Raymond, Magda, Kristoff, and me.”
“Someone must have known,” he insisted, making a run off the highway and sending us speeding through the night up a winding street that I recognized.
I thought briefly of the phone calls Kristoff had made, ostensibly to friends. What if one of his buddies was the mole? What if one of them had told the Brotherhood where to find us? Had they had time to badly hurt Kristoff, or was he not answering me in a misguided attempt to protect me? “Do you think he’s OK?”
“We’ll know in a few minutes,” he answered, and I shivered at the grim note in his voice.
There was no car in front of his house. A sudden spurt of worry hit me. “Magda and Raymond! They were here, too!”
Alec frowned for a moment.
“You remember Magda, don’t you? She was with me on the tour in Iceland.”
