Siren Song

was on our side. The second his hand touched the door handle I felt the barrier waver and fall. Still, I waited. I waited for that golden instant when he was outside the car and couldn’t see. If I was lucky, it would be before the others got the door to our part of the limo open and their guns trained on us. They were bound to do it, but I was betting they were going to head for the damaged door.

Time slowed to a crawl. The driver climbed out of the car. I slid from my seat into a crouch. As his door slammed shut I sprang upward, champagne bottle at the ready.

The windowsill scraped against my back as I passed through the sunroof, but didn’t slow me down. In an instant that seemed to take forever, I soared nearly ten feet into the air. Thanks to adrenaline and vampire strength, I’d gotten a lot more loft than I’d expected. More than my captors had planned, too. The three cars had pulled onto the side of the road in a line, with the limo in the center. To my surprise there seemed to be only four men escorting us. Under the circumstances, I was thrilled.

The night was to my advantage. I could see the men as clearly as if it were daylight, despite the deep shadows that made the landscape disappear. Each man glowed and pulsed in time to the blood flowing beneath his paper-thin skin. I stayed in the air longer than should be realistically possible and it confused them.

The man in the front squad car was the smartest. He’d ignored the obvious exit of the door and already had his gun out, trained on the sunroof. The leap had startled him, but he was recovering, his weapon moving up to track my progress. So he got the prize. If it caught the guy with him so much the better. I flung the champagne bottle with all my strength to the ground at his feet. The shaken, pressurized alcohol exploded like a bomb, sending vicious shards of glass outward, shredding his face and legs as he screamed in agony.

The limo driver had been turned slightly to open the door to the passenger cabin, so he was a fraction too slow on the draw. By the time he had his gun out I’d landed on the roof. He looked at me squarely, confidence in his cold blue eyes. So I hissed and bared fangs, my skin creating its own gray-green light. It startled him enough that he gasped and took a step back. That was what I’d hoped for. I had just enough time to send a spinning kick into his temple. I heard bone breaking and knew he was dead before he hit the ground.

Two down. But there was a luxury sedan racing toward us, black, with tinted windows. I didn’t have time to do more than note it as a blur because the third man had me at a disadvantage and I’d lost sight of the fourth entirely. I was betting he’d slid underneath one of the cars. The Jimmy Choo pumps Vicki had given me for my birthday weren’t intended for the slick surface of the waxed roof. They put me off-balance and my counterpart was armed and ready. He braced his semiauto on the frame of the car door that was shielding his body and began firing. He was coming alarmingly close despite my speed. I couldn’t take him. But I might not have to. Because the driver of the sedan was aiming it straight at the shooter while the wail of police cars in the distance grew louder with each second.

I did the only sensible thing I could think of. I jumped back down through the sunroof and hit the button for the door locks and roof, hoping to hide behind the nice, thick, bulletproof glass until help arrived. I nearly landed on Dr. Scott. He was slumped on the floor, eyes rolled back in his head and breathing shallow. I didn’t know if it was a delayed reaction to the earlier attack or if they’d gone after him again. All I could do was lift him onto the seat cushions and put cool, damp napkins on his forehead and the back of his neck while I waited for help to arrive.

Jeff was in psychic shock. The cops—the real cops—took him away in an ambulance, along with the limo’s real driver, who’d been found drugged and unconscious in the trunk. They didn’t take me. I asserted self-defense and asked for my attorney. So did Ivan.

Ivan Stefanovich had been driving the sedan and had opened the rear door to find me hovering over Jeff. I was honestly shocked to see him. A couple of weeks ago, during the fallout from my last job as a bodyguard, he’d been wounded badly enough that I hadn’t expected him to make it. Then again, he was one tough bastard. Ivan served as the right-hand-man-cum-security-chief for King Dahlmar of Rusland. The same King Dahlmar whose son I’d helped rescue from a major demon. Rusland is not be a big country, only maybe the size of Ohio. It’s tucked in between the Ukraine and Poland and touches on the Czech Republic as well.

Recently discovered reserves of natural gas made Rusland politically important. Ivan was an international headache for the cops—and he had diplomatic immunity. So we waited, with some seriously pissed-off cops. They wanted to hurt me. Hell, more than hurt me. I was a vampire and I’d been caught red-handed at a kill scene. I was toast—right up until they found out that the bodies on the ground had no bite marks and that I left no blood on the swab they ran around inside my cheeks. It didn’t make them any happier to discover the men in the uniforms around the real squad cars weren’t actually police. That pissed them off a lot. But at least they weren’t pissed at me after that. So I got to wait for my attorney inside a spelled circle, in handcuffs, as they processed the crime scene, instead of being staked on the spot.

Ms. Graves, if you can hear me, nod your head. Ivan’s voice came clearly inside my skull. He’d told the cops he was a registered mage. I’d forgotten he was a telepath. He’d only used that talent in front of me once—at the World Series game when we’d discovered one of King Dahlmar’s sons was being kidnapped.

I gave a tiny nod. Nothing noticeable.

Good. I was afraid the spelled circle would interfere, as the barrier around the car did.

Since until recently I had no psychic talent, I’m not very good at talking mind-to-mind. I hoped my intense concentration wasn’t showing on my face as I replied, Not that I’m complaining, but how did you know to come riding up like the cavalry?

I could almost hear the puzzlement in his thoughts. Either I sucked at thinking at him or the reference was too American for his English.

I was waiting outside the tribute to your deceased friend. I wished to speak with you. I saw them attack the driver. When the police guarding the doors did nothing, I decided to wait for a better opportunity.

Shit. The police outside the party had seen the switch? And didn’t stop it? That was wrong. Really wrong. Thank God Ivan had been there. But why had he? And why had he come riding to the rescue? My past experiences with him hadn’t shown him to be the most altruistic guy on the planet. In fact, he’d calmly left a man to die in order to follow his orders.

He answered my questions as if I’d voiced them aloud. I wasn’t surprised he’d been listening to my thoughts. Not everybody has Jeff’s ethics.

My king does not know I have come to you. But you may be our only hope.

What in the world could I do that a nation’s king and all the money and favor of a hundred countries desperately trying to gain a strategic ally couldn’t? What do you want from me?

“All right. That’s enough, you two. I said no talking.” Ivan’s reply—if he had been going to make one—never came. The detective who’d set up the magic circle I was standing in straightened from where he’d been chatting with someone near the bodies. Whatever the guy had told him hadn’t made him happy. He stalked over to where I stood, my hands securely cuffed behind my back. He bent down, pressed his finger to the edge of the circle, and began muttering a spell. Sound disappeared from the world and my vision sparkled like I’d been slammed face-first into a brick wall. I gasped in pain as the increased power burned across my skin. I didn’t say anything, but he must’ve seen me flinch, because a look of satisfaction flickered across his face for just an instant. It was so quick, it could’ve been a trick of my imagination. But I knew it wasn’t.

When they eventually released me to go to Birchwoods, Ivan was long gone. We never did get to talk. That worried me. Because once I got inside the facility, I probably wasn’t going to be allowed calls or visitors for quite some time. There wasn’t anything I could do about that, but it was a problem just the same. I pondered it on the long drive down Ocean View. This time I had a real police escort, and more. News crews had been minding their scanners and we wound up with lots of company. The more the merrier, as far as I was concerned. I wanted witnesses to this whole debacle. Something had gone horribly wrong within the police force to have this happen. There apparently hadn’t been any sort of citywide all-points bulletin when I went missing, because that was one of the questions the nice reporters asked the incident commander. Keeping everything public and under the media microscope offered me the best possible protection. It’d be a damned nuisance. But I could