When he was confident with the level of traffic, he went back into her room and gathered Robin up in his arms, flipping the light switch off on their way out.
Lucidia
She’d been afforded a few days’ rest before being called out on another mission, this one for a renegade vampire who’d stolen from Darian and tried to skip town. He didn’t get very far.
Lucidia watched the glowing red symbols on her arms fade, and then disappear entirely, once the creature’s pitiful existence had been ended. She pulled her phone out and called Darian quickly, before taking to the road.
Lucidia was going about ninety on the freeway in her sleek, black motorcycle. She’d switched her clandestine leather hood for a full-face helmet, which connected to her phone via Bluetooth and made it easy to take calls on the go.
The robotic voice announced a caller: Maxine, one of her informants.
She scowled and connected the call. “What?”
“Wow, okay. No ‘how are you’?”
Lucidia gave an impatient huff of air. “Howareyou – now what do you want?”
“Jeez,” Maxine mumbled. “Last time I stick my neck out for you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just got a tip.”
Lucidia wove in between an SUV and a minivan going less than half her speed. The lights raced into lines and she inched up the accelerator a bit more with her newfound irritation. “What kind of tip?”
“House Demonte sent out a strongblood.”
“I’m sure they did. It’s high time for half-forms.” When the weather got warmer, and their decrepit muscles were no longer frozen, they began slinking out of shallow graves.
“Yeah, yeah, but no other problems in that area,” Maxine said. She dropped her voice to a low whisper. “And it’s an area you asked me to watch out for.”
“What area?” Lucidia growled.
“Portland.”
That particular city increased both her feelings of annoyance and concern.
Twenty-five years ago, Robin (her illegitimate half-sister) was supposed to have died, and Lucidia was the one who should have delivered her to that death. Instead, she’d brought her newborn half-sister to a family in Portland: the Wrights. Lucidia’s father, Kenzo Draxos, had made her promise to stow Robin away, rather than just killing her like they normally did with weakbloods. It was a severe crime to muddle the bloodlines. Vampire overlords didn’t want their spy-slaves getting diluted, she supposed.
So Robin had had to go.
Weakbloods didn’t have any powers. The product of a half-human and a whole human seemed to just be a regular human. You can’t really tell weakbloods from regular humans, so if they were switched at birth, nobody would be the wiser. Except for Robin’s birthmarks, which were quite unique. Thankfully, at the time she decided to break orders and commit treason, she’d been the only person to see the red lightning strike marks on the baby’s arms.
It was a gruesome practice, infanticide, but try telling old-as-dirt vampire lords to abandon their traditions, and you end up with an aerated neck.
It should have been a quick, simple mission, but her father had begged her to find a home for the girl. She’d been really ticked off at the time, and considered offing the squirming peanut while she’d had the chance, but as she’d looked into those striking blue eyes, Lucidia had found something surprising: emotion.
Lucidia had felt an immediate attachment to her half-sister. No words were exchanged, no deals made, but in a single, defining instant, she’d been moved to agree with her father. Robin had to be protected, at all costs.
That’s when she’d searched for a family and found the Wrights: an older couple that had been trying to have kids for nearly a decade. They’d been amazed when Lucidia had handed them a baby across the table in an Applebee’s and awarded them a sizeable sum for their discretion. Mrs. Wright had looked like she’d just won the lottery.
So, that’s what happened then. But with a strongblood dispatched to Portland for no apparent reason, her carefully constructed lie had the potential to unravel and cause a lot of problems in the now.
“Who did they send?” Lucidia demanded, her voice low with anger. The thought of someone harming Robin was making her blood boil. After what they’d done to her father, imprisoning him for life, she wasn’t prepared to see her only other kin trapped in a vampire’s grasp. A Demonte vampire, nonetheless. Not to mention, after all these years, she still felt that strange, nagging need to protect the girl.
Oh, and there was the little matter of her treason. If Magnus Demonte got Robin, the whole world would soon know about her lie and disobedience to Lucidia’s own Master, Darian. She’d be dead within days.
Maxine looked up the name. “Reykon.”
“Arrogant prick,” Lucidia muttered. Though, for all his flaws, he was good at his job. That would work against her. “How long ago was he sent?”
“My contacts picked him out this morning. He’s got a target named ‘Robin’. That mean anything to you?”
Yes. “No. I’ll look into it anyway.”
“Any help?”
“No,” she said brusquely, hanging up.
Reykon Thraxos. A truly cocky strongblood, but skilled, all the same. There wasn’t any time to waste – if he’d arrived that morning, Robin was already gone.
There weren’t many things that scared Lucidia Draxos. Up until this point, there really wasn’t anything that scared her.
But the realization that Robin had been abducted by a strongblood and was in transit to Magnus Demonte terrified Lucidia to her core.
She felt her heart beating in her throat, the anger coursing through her veins, and she ripped down on the throttle, accelerating past a hundred.
Chapter 2: Taken
Robin
She woke up slowly. Her head was too heavy and kept falling down to the side, and someone was pulling her up each time. None of it seemed to make sense in her half-conscious, delirious state. The last thing she remembered, after all, was going to the apartment and then…
A bolt of fear ripped through her when she realized that she was in a moving car.
“What the hell?” she said. It was supposed to
