Don’t Bite the Messenger Page 7

  “What are you doing here?” My voice sounded husky and unused, which was about right. Unless I was ordering food or exchanging stories with the couple of local surfers who had finally acknowledged me, I didn’t talk much.

  “You invited me before. The invitation follows you, not the structure.”

  “No. No, I mean…” There were so many things I wanted to say to him, but I couldn’t find a few simple words. I took a deep breath, hoping to steady my giddy heart.

  “I am not here to hurt you.” Malcolm emerged from a dark corner and I spun, wet feet squeaking on the hardwood floor, when I caught the movement. He stopped, his hands hanging at his sides. We stood like that for a moment, facing one another in the darkness, wrapped in the sound of pounding surf and his crackling energy. He seemed to be having trouble with his control. I started toward him, absently dropping the basket on the counter, where it tipped over.

  “I came to check on you,” he said, his voice low. “Bronson was concerned when you couldn’t be found.” I stopped a foot from him, his tall, familiar form backlit by the torches. My hand rose of its own accord and rested against his chest.

  “Malcolm.” I almost believed he was really there and not a daydream that had followed me home. I thought of him constantly. Sitting on my board, drifting idly between rideable swells, I remembered each variation of his smile. I wanted to melt against him, to kiss him until the sun rose.

  “We weren’t sure you made it out of the building.” His voice sounded rough. My senses pricked up, responding to a sudden deficit of turbulence in the air. He hadn’t controlled his vampire energy, not exactly. He had just pulled it back.

  “Me?” I said. “What about you? You were still in there when it exploded. Was it another bomb?” He shifted beneath my hand, a shrug.

  “I went out the window at the same time they detonated. Caught some shrapnel. Nothing too bad.”

  “Nothing too bad,” I murmured, staring at him. Firelight illuminated him in patches. A jawline here. The bridge of his nose there. The smooth plane of his cheek. I turned toward a lamp on the end table, wanting to see him, but he caught my wrists.

  “No lights. Nobody can see me here.”

  “How very mysterious.” I smiled. “There isn’t really anyone around, you know. The trees block the neighbors’ view.” He didn’t say anything, and a cold touch crept across my back.

  “Did someone follow you here?” I whispered. Was that why it had taken him so long to come, because someone was still after me? Vampires tended to gather nearer the poles. I hadn’t seen a single blood lounge or sucker on Maui, and I’d driven everywhere that wasn’t gated. Of course, most nights I was tucked away at home before the sun set, so vamps could have been out and I wouldn’t have known.

  “Of course not,” he snapped. His hands dropped away from my arms and his energy disappeared from my senses so sharply it might have been torn away. I looked at him, and even in the dark knew that his expression contained no warmth. In fact, it was blank. I stepped back.

  “What happened after I left?” I asked, crossing my arms and holding each elbow. I wasn’t afraid of him. Any other vampire showing up in my house two months after I’d left them behind, yes. Malcolm? No. Not him.

  “You don’t know?” The lack of tone in his voice was disorienting. I resisted taking another step back, but swayed a little. He’d been angry when I left him in my apartment. Maybe that hadn’t changed. I shook my head, knowing he’d be able to see it even in the near-dark.

  “I haven’t been following the news.”

  “The man you knew as Price attempted a takeover, the very night you left,” he said.

  “Takeover?”

  “His real name was Vasiliev, one of the elder brothers of an old family. He burned out Bronson’s lounges, hit any of his residences where someone was home. Kidnapped and strung up his human helpers.”

  I dropped into a chair, wishing the cushions were firmer as all the strength ebbed out of me. Malcolm settled into the side of the small couch, one arm running along the wicker armrest.

  His human helpers. The people who ran his companies, his attorneys, his housekeepers… “My God,” I whispered. “Is…is In and Out…”

  “McHenry’s outfit escaped for the most part. With you taken care of, it was a business they would have needed after Bronson was eliminated.”

  “But he wasn’t, right?” I asked, my voice too loud, too high. “He’s all right? Rogers? Lucille…she’s all right?”

  Malcolm leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Why would it matter to you, what happened to them?”

  “It matters,” I cried. “Why wouldn’t it matter to me that people I knew could be dead? What is wrong with you?”

  “You left at a very convenient time,” he said. I snapped my mouth closed. Vampires are notoriously paranoid. They have to be, I guess, since the only value they share is power. Wealth. They’d have to watch their backs to hold on to that for decades, centuries. “Didn’t tell anyone you were going.”

  He didn’t have to say that I, of all people, would have known how to get a message to Bronson. I swallowed though my mouth was dry. “Malcolm, you were there. You know I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  “Do I, Sydney? I’m thinking I don’t actually know you at all.”

  I looked away, trying to stuff down feelings of guilt, along with a stiff wash of anger. He’d said he wasn’t here to hurt me, but I’d heard those words, that exact lie, before. For all I wanted to trust him, I knew how easily a man could hurt me.

  “Vasiliev left a message on Deglio,” Malcolm said quietly.

  “On him?” My stomach churned.

  “His body. Brought Bronson to the bargaining table with a promise of returning you, and then tried to kill him.”

  “What? No. That doesn’t…no.” I shook my head violently, pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. “I’m just a runner.”

  “You delivered a letter that destroyed the Vasiliev family’s attempt to annex the Master’s holdings.”

  “Why would Bronson even care about me?”

  “He had made it known you were under his protection. The last living member of his human stable, in the hands of his enemy. It’s equivalent to…to seizing a castle and replacing the coat of arms. A symbolic change in ownership.”

  “Why not keep someone else alive to bargain with? Why would using my name matter?”

  “You still haven’t figured it out? You were known for being the only runner in the state who wouldn’t take a bribe and couldn’t be influenced. Bronson is one of a handful of masters in the world who always received reliable intelligence. That made him powerful, and made you his most unique human asset. His prize.” Malcolm practically spat the word, and I winced.

  “But I wasn’t even there,” I whispered. Malcolm shifted, a quick, restless gesture that had me eyeing him for signs of aggression. I didn’t like him like this.

  “We didn’t know. At first we thought you’d died in the building. Price’s people had seen you leave, and he had sources among Bronson’s soldiers. When he realized that we didn’t know where you were, he thought it would be amusing to use our ignorance against us.”

  “Enjoy himself, did he?”

  “No. He died wishing he’d never been born or risen undead.”

  I looked up, startled by the heat in Malcolm’s voice. “Who killed him? You?”

  “The Master had that pleasure.”

  I swallowed. He sounded like it would have pleased him, killing a man. Bronson had killed his would-be usurper. What would he want done to me if he thought I’d been helping Vasiliev? The wind kicked up outside and the torches sputtered before the flames leapt. In the momentary flare, I saw Malcolm looking at the floor. Then he raised his head, his eyes lit by the flames and that internal glow he usually took care to hide. He would do whatever the Master ordered. I shivered.

  “He sent you after me?” The light dropped again, but I still saw him nod. I brac
ed myself. “To kill me?” He stood and, with an effort of sheer will, I managed not to shrink back.

  “To check you for bites.”

  It took me a moment to process.

  “Fucking what?” I jumped to my feet. “I was leaving! Lucille knew I was going. I’d been planning it, working toward it for years before I delivered that package. I had nothing to do with that takeover. Nothing.”

  “Lucille was taken from us early,” he said. All the air left me. The way she smiled when she clicked out to greet me. The gift she’d given me, which I’d had to live off for three days while hitching and driving through Canada. Her stupid infatuation with Doughboy McHenry. I rubbed at my eyes.

  “You know what you’re accusing me of.” My voice shook, betraying weakness. I didn’t even try to hide it. Unlike drinking vampire blood, being bitten had an almost hundred percent chance of enthralling a human. If I’d succumbed to a bite, I wouldn’t have had any original ideas or feelings of my own. I’d have been a mindless drone, a slave, a nobody.

  Malcolm just looked at me, eerily expressionless.

  “You know what,” I said. “I don’t think I like you anymore.”

  “Regardless, I have to check.”

  I rolled my shoulders back, reached up and pulled the towel free. It dropped to the floor in a damp heap. I glared past his shoulder, anger making my eyes hot and dry. I took a deep breath, trying to calm down, comforting myself with the notion that he’d feel terrible when he discovered that, of all the scars I carried, I had no teeth marks to condemn me.

  “I owed you a look anyway,” I said breezily.

  He didn’t only look. Bites would fade if the vampire made them with care, but they would always leave marks. Malcolm stalked up on me and raised both hands to slide my hair away from my face, brushing his fingers across my temples, behind my ears and along the nape of my neck. He was so close that if I looked up, my forehead would have brushed his jaw.

  His news had chilled me, and his hands were hot. I shivered as he slid his palm over my throat, a light, even pressure that continued across my collarbone and the length of my arms. His fingers threaded through mine for an instant and I turned away when my face heated. I really wanted to hate him for what he was doing, but I had wished for his touch for so long…

  He moved behind me, so close I could feel the warmth of his body. He traced the underside of my arms, pausing on a jagged scar on my left forearm before catching my elbows and pressing upward until I stretched my arms over my head. His hands ran down my sides, fingers gentle over my ribs and tickling light against my stomach. I opened my mouth to take in air and tasted the tropical night. I knew for a fact that it tasted nothing like him. It was raw where he was smooth, sweet where he was smoky.

  His hands moved to my stomach, drifted slowly upward. I bit my lower lip as my breasts filled his hands, and resisted the urge to lean back against him. Fingers brushed around my nipples, thorough and businesslike. He wasn’t even breathing hard, the bastard. I smashed my eyelids closed, tried to think of anything but the sensation of him touching me. His hands left me and I swallowed a whimper. Jesus, what was wrong with me that I was enjoying this?

  “You can lower your arms,” he murmured near my ear. I caught my breath, tried to disguise it by shaking my arms out, making a show of clenching and unclenching my fists even though they hadn’t really gone to sleep, and he certainly wasn’t hurting me. His hand slipped around the back of my neck and I snapped my head to the side, trying to see him, but he shifted away from my gaze. He was so strong he could break my neck without even exerting himself. What if he thought he found a bite? What if Bronson wanted to know if I’d been bitten, but had ordered him to kill me after the inspection for inconveniencing him?

  Malcolm’s palms moved across my back in harmony, back and forth. He paused again to investigate a series of small, round scars over my right shoulder blade, and his energy came back online in a flash, hitting my hypersensitive skin like an etheric bed of nails. I yelped and jumped away from him.

  “Sorry,” he muttered.

  The feeling disappeared as soon as he spoke. I rubbed my arms, now covered in goose bumps, and glared at him.

  “You’ll need to warm up before I can finish,” he said.

  “I need to what?”

  “I can’t feel correctly when you’re like that.”

  “Well, maybe you should turn your goddamn electrical shocks off, Malcolm. Christ. That shit hurts!” It didn’t actually, but it wasn’t comfortable, and anyway screw him. He winced when I spoke. Poker face, indeed. He wasn’t nearly as unfeeling as he was acting. Good. He should feel guilty.

  “I apologize,” he ground out. “Now, please, will you cover up?”

  I stomped into the bedroom, a series of dark, heavy curtains hung in a square around the bed in the middle of the house. I pulled the quilt off the bed and wrapped myself in it, then stomped into the kitchen. “Take your clothes off, cover up, blah blah blah.” I opened the freezer and extracted a bottle of vodka and a tray of ice.

  “What are you doing?” he asked from close behind me.

  “I think this occasion calls for a drink. Want one?” Maybe if he relaxed, he could take the stick out of his ass. I considered telling him that.

  “Please.” He sounded relieved.

  I rolled my eyes, hitched the blanket up under one arm and dropped the bottle onto the counter. I took two plastic juice glasses decorated with colorful fish out of the cupboard, cracked and upended the ice tray over the glasses. Most of the cubes bounced out and skittered onto the floor. Neither of us made a move to pick them up. I tore the cap off the vodka and poured generous drinks before fishing a carton of passion-orange juice out of the fridge and capping them off. I didn’t have to see well to know that his was barely tinted orange. I handed the cup to him without looking and downed half of mine in a series of gulps. He sipped and I saw him grimace in the light from the refrigerator as I put the juice away.

  “What are these?” he asked.

  “Mine’s a screwdriver. Yours is more of a screw-you.” I tipped my glass toward him. “Cheers.” I finished my drink, dropping the cup on the counter as the vodka ran in a hot line straight to my stomach.

  “With the amount of time you spend in bars, I would think you’d have learned how to mix a decent drink.” I could hear the smile in his voice.

  I froze, pressing both palms against the counter. How dare he? What, we were all friends now that we were taking a time-out from him considering me some vampire’s pet? I sloshed vodka into my glass and chugged it down. A drop escaped from the corner of my mouth. I wiped it daintily.

  “I don’t know,” I said, bitter and breathless. “Tastes fine to me.”

  “Sydney.”

  I threw the glass at the sink, irritated when it bounced instead of breaking.

  “Don’t you dare sound disappointed with me.” I can only stay mad for so long before I snap, and nobody had ever made me quite as angry as he had managed. “You know damn well that I didn’t run away on the eve of destruction because I knew it was coming. I ran because every time I turned around, something or somebody was being blown up. Because that life was a dead end. If I’d stayed, I’d have been caught up in this shit or the next attack, or killed by a damn drunk driver while out delivering your little love notes to each other. I worked hard and made a plan to get away. Enthralled humans don’t plan, Malcolm. Everyone knows that.”

  “You could have been under orders to,” he said, his voice flat again.

  I slapped him, then pulled my arm back and made a fist, ready to punch him. He turned his head toward me and opened his eyes, and the full force of that luminescent glow lit up the kitchenette. I stilled, my arm dropping to my side like a hastily abandoned plan. The blanket slipped down my chest. He blinked, looked away, and I was left breathing hard and seeing tiny stars. What was wrong with me? He was a vampire. Rule number three: don’t give a vampire a reason to hurt you, ever.

  He reached for
me and I flinched, backing hard against the counter. But he merely tugged the blanket back up to cover me. The backs of his fingers brushed over my breasts and I stiffened.

  “You’re warmer. Let’s get this over with.” He pulled me away from the counter and then steered me firmly through the curtains to the bed. “It would be best if you were not standing.”

  I dropped the blanket on the floor and lay on my back, knees bent and pressed together. I didn’t think I was strong enough to keep from reacting, and I really didn’t want him to know what he was doing to me, not when he didn’t even want to be touching me.

  “This is not what I would have chosen,” he said.

  “And you say I’m the one fucking people over because I’m under orders to? I’d offer you a mirror, but you wouldn’t be able to see your damn reflection anyway.”

  “I would think you, of all people, would understand.”

  I sat up, sputtering, until he pressed a hand against my shoulder, easing me back down.

  “I meant only that you’ve delivered good and bad news to hundreds of people. You should know better than to blame the messenger.”

  “Forgive me if I’m not sympathetic,” I muttered.

  The bed dipped when he sat on the edge, his hip brushing my calf. He picked up the blanket I’d dropped and laid it over my upper body. I closed my eyes, unable to handle the small kindness. He touched my ankle and my heart began to pound.

  He ran his hands around my shin and calf, brushing the sensitive skin at the back of my knee. I tried to think about surfing, the anticipation of an incoming wave, stretching out on the board, balancing as I paddled hard, the beginning of the swell catching the tail of the board, popping up. He tickled the bottom of my foot and I kicked him. Hard. He grunted and leapt off the bed.

  “Sydney,” he ground out.

  I raised both hands defensively. “It was a reflex! You tickled me.”