The look she gave him would have made a lesser hound grovel. Lore grinned. “You have to keep up your strength.”
“You’re a monster!”
“So are you.”
She hiccupped. He wondered again if she was going to be sick but, to his complete astonishment, she started to weep, little mewing sobs.
This was too much. He abandoned the dirty glass on the nightstand and sat down on the bed next to her. He laid a hand on her head, feeling the smooth silk of her dark hair. Stiffening, she folded her free arm across her stomach, clutching herself.
“I didn’t ask for this!” she muttered under her breath.
“I’m sorry.” Lore stroked her hair, rattled by her silent, angry sobbing. These were tears of rage as much as sorrow, her teeth clenched against her grief. “I’m working as fast as I can to find out who killed your cousin.”
When she didn’t pull away, he wrapped his arm around her shoulders. Talia was small by hellhound standards, but that made her fit neatly into the circle of his arm. She was so slender, he could feel her bones move as she wept. The utter, aching sadness of it stirred memories of his own. Species didn’t matter when it came to the kinship of sorrow.
Slowly, very slowly, Talia quieted. “You’re warm,” she murmured.
He pulled her closer. Vampires were always cold, and he had heat to spare. The perfumes she had been wearing had faded, and now he could smell her clearly, her unique musk imprinting on his memory. It smelled familiar, like a sweet tune he’d forgotten only to hear it in the most unexpected setting. He closed his eyes, memorizing the feel of her body against his. It felt so right.
This was wrong. He was the Alpha of his pack, and he shouldn’t be holding a strange female. He could feel his motivations turning murkier by the second, the desire to see justice done mixing with desire of another kind. So this is forbidden fruit.
“What happened to you?” Lore asked. “How did you end up in this mess?”
She closed her eyes. He studied her finely veined eyelids, delicate as a moth’s wing. “The answer depends on where you want to start.”
“The beginning.”
“When my brother turned thirteen, my father hung a picture over Max’s bed so that it was the last thing he saw at night. It was of a succubus devouring the flesh of her lover. It gave him nightmares. As long as I knew him, Max never bedded a woman more than once.”
Lore’s stomach rolled over. “Disturbing, but how did that get you here?”
“It says everything you need to know about where I came from. The rest was all me trying to make sense of everything my father did to us. I try to tell myself I’m not a victim, but it’s hard to believe sometimes. Home was like a prison, only stranger.”
She fell silent, as if talking had exhausted her. Lore kept his arm around her, feeling the tension in her muscles. She might be slumped against him, but she was wound to the breaking point. In the quiet, Lore could hear some optimist trying to start his frozen car.
“I know what it’s like to grow up in a prison,” he said.
“How did you get out?”
“One day, by pure chance, a doorway opened and a few of us escaped. It took a while before we could figure out the place we’d come to. Your world is so different. I’d never seen the sky or growing things.”
Talia put her hand on his forearm. It was a commonplace gesture, but it was the first time she’d made the first move to touch him. It made him feel humble and yet twice his size.
“As soon as I could, I went back for the rest. Many were held as slaves by the Castle warlords. We are stronger than many species, so the others kept children and wives as a guarantee that we would not turn on them. Many hounds would not leave their captive families behind. So I smuggled in goods that were scarce in there but plentiful here and bargained for every hound I could. Cloth. Books. Tools. Three pairs of shoes would buy a houndish child out of slavery. One by one, I got them out. Finally, I convinced the other species to help me rescue the rest of the pack who were still hiding in the dungeon corridors. It was a fierce battle, with many casualties. But no one was left behind as a prisoner.”
Talia blinked. “No one?”
“No.”
“You had nothing, and you got your people to safety. So why did this happen to me?” she whispered.
“No one asks to be the target of a killer.”
She seemed to choke for a moment. He saw tears leak from beneath her long, dark eyelashes. They trailed down her cheeks, glistening with a faint pink sheen. “That’s not it. I didn’t ask to be Turned.”
Lore stiffened, and she looked up. The stricken look in her eyes made her meaning clear. Few vampires were made, especially in these times when human law held sway. None were Turned without begging for it.
Unless Talia had already been murdered once before.
A cold, cold horror began to fill his chest. Beneath that, rage.
Chapter 16
Wednesday, December 29, 8:00 p.m.
101.5 FM
“Good evening, this is the CSUP news on 101.5 FM in Fairview. At the top of our headlines tonight is the fire that destroyed the South Fairview Medical Clinic and the campaign office of Michael de Winter, the first nonhuman to stand for election to city council. Although preliminary investigations do not reveal traces of an accelerant, according to Fairview Police Detective Derek Baines arson is indeed suspected. The news has rocked all of Fairview. Already, accusations of a hate crime are finding their way into the national media. Queen Omara, sponsor of de Winter’s candidacy, is rearranging her plans and will arrive in Fairview as soon as the weather permits.”
Wednesday, December 29, 8:00 p.m.
Lore’s condo
Talia heard the front door click shut. She was alone, lying on her side, her face to the wall. She’d cried herself into exhaustion and Lore had finally left, believing her asleep.
The anger and tears had been for Michelle, but also for herself. She’d pushed her own wounds aside for years, but they’d reopened, needing to be cried out, too.
Lore had simply held her. He hadn’t tried to tell her everything would be fine, and that made her enormously grateful. She didn’t need his lies—but then he’d said hellhounds couldn’t lie. That allowed a slim margin of trust to grow between them.
But what was she supposed to make of him? Mandog. Dog-man. Demon guy. She’d never met anyone like him. Hunters hunted monsters, they didn’t get to know them.
So what if she was one of the monsters now? It was something she’d been careful not to examine too closely. Existence was a day-by-day bargain between self-disgust and her instinct to survive. She’d never looked at her fellow Undead as anything but walking corpses. Maybe that had been shortsighted, but a person’s world view didn’t change just because they’d been bitten. Waking up dead wasn’t a great advertisement for interspecies relations.
But Lore was something else. As jailers went, he could have been much worse. There was no mistaking the power that clung to him like a second skin, but he hadn’t hurt her. That counted for a lot.
He did seem bent on finding the truth. That gave them something in common.
