A Touch of Crimson

The primitive gesture did crazy things to her insides, but she was too furious to be swayed by it. “So you violated my privacy by digging in my brain to find the personal things I didn’t want to talk about?”

“Yes.”

“Fuck you.” Lindsay would’ve loved to walk away in a huff, but she was stuck by their location. She wondered if he’d planned that all along.

“I know who you want,” he said, “and I assure you, you’re going to need my help to snare her. You’re definitely going to need my help getting her to identify her accomplices.”

She stared at him, wondering how it was possible to feel violated and hopeful at the same time. He’d seen the attack in her mind, seen that Amazon-sized bitch with the flame red hair and skintight black leather outfit. “You didn’t recognize the two guys with her?”

“There are thousands of vamp males with spiky, crayon-hued hair like that. Even body size and ethnic features aren’t much help when the memory is as fractured by terror and grief as yours is.” His wings flapped restlessly, as if her remembered pain affected him. “At some point during the attack, you stopped seeing and started focusing on feeling. That’s what resonates most in you-how it felt to watch your mother bled dry, how it felt waiting for your turn.”

Which never came. There hadn’t been a scratch on her when she broke away screaming for help. The damage they’d inflicted had been entirely mental and emotional. Watching her mother being drained of life. Hearing the lurid taunts. Feeling the pressure of claws against her flesh as she was being held down…

“But you know the woman?” she pressed, needing a clue. Anything at all that could help her find the vampires responsible for the event that had forever changed her life.

“Oh yes. Vashti is unmistakable. She’s second-in-command of the vampires.”

“Second-in-command… Vampires like that are running the show? And that’s not enough to wipe them all out?”

“It’s enough to wipe her out, and her accomplices.” Adrian’s mouth thinned into a grim line. “You and your mother were ambushed in broad daylight. The Fallen are the only vampires who aren’t photosensitive. They can bestow temporary immunity to minions by sharing their blood, but either way, one-or more-of the Fallen is ultimately responsible for the attack. Considering that, it’s a wonder you survived. They should have killed you, too, to protect their identity.”

“I wasn’t enough of a threat, I guess. Stupid move on their part.” She blew out her breath in a rush. As pissed off as she was at Adrian for picking her brain without her permission, she also wanted to kiss him senseless. He was now the key to unlocking the mystery of that day. She now had the “who”; she just needed the “why.” Then she could kill the fuckers and close that chapter of her life. “So, now that we’ve gotten the extortion portion of this discussion out of the way, I’ll be going with you.”

“You will follow orders implicitly.”

“Yes. I promise.” Lindsay made a gesture of an X over her chest. “Cross my heart.”

Adrian beckoned her with a crook of his finger. “We need to head back.”

Her body hummed with excitement and growing exhilaration. She suspected that if he ever flew with her over longer distances, she just might orgasm midflight. Like a biker bunny who got off on the vibrations of a Harley- Davidson. Adrenaline had always made her hot. Adrenaline combined with Adrian was an inferno. Her gaze took him in, sliding over him from the top of his dark head down to his bare feet… which weren’t quite touching the coarse ground.

She was so screwed.

CHAPTER 9

Syre swiveled his desk chair around and faced the carefully crafted Main Street scene outside his office window. Reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell painting, the small town of Raceport, Virginia, was modernized by the dozens of Harley-Davidson motorcycles lined in neat rows along the curbs.

“Adrian admitted he killed her? He just came right out with it?”

His lieutenant’s normally melodic voice throbbed with anger and sorrow. Vashti paced like a caged animal, her stiletto-heeled boots clicking rhythmically across the hardwood floor.

“Yes,” he answered quietly.

“How are we going to retaliate? What are we going to-?”

“Don’t do anything, Father.”

The eerie calm in his son’s voice broke Syre’s heart more than fury would have. Pushing to his feet, he faced his only living child. Torque lingered in the shadows by the threshold, avoiding the advancing rays of the sun that slanted over Syre’s desk and cut the room in half.

“Nikki wants-wanted-peace between us and the Sentinels.” Torque’s handsome features were ravaged by grief, his sloe eyes red rimmed and his mouth bracketed with deep-set lines. “She would never wish to be the cause of a war.”

“Your wife didn’t cause this,” Vash snapped. “Adrian’s brought war on himself.”

Syre clasped his hands at the small of his back. “He claims she attacked him.”

“Fuckin’ ridiculous.”

“I would agree, but he said she was foaming at the mouth. Rabid. And he didn’t recognize her-he has no idea he killed my daughter-in-law. How is that possible, unless her appearance was drastically altered? Nikki’s been missing for two days. Who knows what was done to her during that time? She could’ve been poisoned with drugs.” He looked at his son, who’d often witnessed just how horribly a minion’s unique body chemistry could react to certain human drugs.

“Maybe it’s not Nikki, then,” Vash said quickly. “Maybe it was someone else.”

“It was her,” Torque confirmed hoarsely. “I felt the moment her life slipped away.”

Syre nodded, knowing that the usual bond between vampire and minion was doubly strong when love was involved. He himself felt Shadoe’s deaths keenly, no matter the distance between them. “What do we know about the abduction?”

Torque scrubbed a hand over his face. “She was dropped off at the airport around ten o’clock. I called the coven at midnight, because she was late picking me up in Shreveport. Viktor was sent to look for her. Nikki was gone and there was a trace scent of lycan dogs around the helicopter.”

Looking at Vash, Syre commanded, “Track the lycans. Bring them to me.”

“I thought you’d never ask.” Her amber eyes were cold and hard as stone. A half century past, a pack of lycans had ambushed and killed her mate. She now harbored hatred so poisonous it was killing her in slow degrees. “I can get them to tell us what Adrian’s orders were.”

“If Adrian had something to do with it.”

Torque frowned. “Who else would be responsible?”

“That’s the bigger question.”

Vash cursed under her breath. With her waist-length red hair and black leather bodysuit, she embodied popular-fiction descriptions of vampiric beauty. She never hid her fangs, arguing that some mortals paid for vampire teeth veneers. “Adrian told you he killed Nikki. What more do you need?”

“Motive.” Syre arched his neck to relieve the building strain there. His fangs descended with the stretch, just as his former wings used to express his mood. “At his deepest core, Adrian is a Sentinel. That sounds simplistic, but it’s really not. He’s like a machine-he has his orders and he doesn’t deviate from them. That adherence to accountability is his greatest strength-and his most predictable weakness. He wouldn’t suddenly go rogue; it’s not in his nature. To strike this way-this would be a countermove, not a first assault.”

“Maybe his orders have changed,” Torque suggested wearily.

Vash snorted. “Maybe he’s lying. He might’ve made up the self-defense story to cover his ass, with the ultimate goal being to piss us off and make us retaliate, so he has an excuse to come after us. Maybe he’s sending a message.”

“You forget, he still answers to the Creator,” Syre said wryly. “And if he wanted to make a statement, he would have pinned a note to Nikki’s broken body and left her on my porch. He wouldn’t leave any room for speculation. My