Claim the Night

Jude was a predator, and right now she believed it to her very bones.

Theresa froze, instinct taking over.

Then he leaned toward her, slowly, as if he didn’t want to frighten her. “Don’t move,” he whispered.

She didn’t think she could have, at least not at that moment. Was he about to drink from her?

His hands cupped her cheeks. His skin was cool and smooth, smoother than human flesh. Jude touched her mouth with his. A light touch. His lips were parted, and he inhaled, taking her breath into him. He sighed, and she felt the coolness of his breath like an autumn breeze.

Then he kissed her.

Dear Reader,

What would a vampire fear more than dying permanently? Like most of you, I’ve read Bram Stoker and Anne Rice, and some other tales about vampires. The myth continues to evolve.

But I got to wondering: This change to being undead and surviving on blood, what would it do to a person if it really happened? Would need kill conscience? And what in the world would cause a vampire more fear than the thought of dying permanently?

Out of that came Jude Messenger, vampire private investigator and demon slayer. Jude not only fights the evil of the night, but he battles himself as well. Then he meets Terri, a rather independent medical examiner who drives him nearly insane with needs he has long battled, and worse, she puts him in danger of the thing vampires fear more than permanent death: The Claiming.

Hugs,

Rachel

RACHEL LEE was hooked on writing by the age of twelve, and practiced her craft as she moved from place to place all over the United States. This New York Times bestselling author now resides in Florida and has the joy of writing full-time.

Claim the Night

Rachel Lee

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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Chapter 1

He smelled her long before he saw her. A sweet, luscious smell wafted to him on the breeze, the kind of scent that raised his hunger to dangerous levels. He paused for a moment, invisible in the dark shadow of a building on a nighttime street dotted only infrequently with the yellow of street lamps.

He gave himself some time to drink in the intoxicating scent, a few moments of masochistic torture because he knew he wouldn’t heed the siren call to feed. He’d stopped heeding that call a long time ago, except for an occasional, harmless but necessary half-pint.

Besides, he had found those willing to share, a few trustworthy humans who would allow him to feed in exchange for the sexual thrill.

But this scent called to him, as only a few had over the centuries. He lifted his head, drinking it in, forgetting for a few seconds that he had work to do, a job to complete. For just a few seconds he allowed himself to remember how it had once been when he’d hunted freely, merely to satisfy himself.

Then he shook himself out of the hunger, and closed off his needs. He had changed, times had changed, and practice made control easier, though no less painful.

The job, he reminded himself. The address was only two blocks away. He moved freely, shadow to shadow, with a speed that would make him nearly invisible to all but the most perceptive. In this part of town there were no crowds to mingle with and thus hide among. The warehouse district was almost deserted and at night, only those with evil in mind dared to emerge after darkness claimed the street.

Evil had brought him here.

He was still half a block away from his target when he smelled the intoxicating scent again. But this time it was even more compelling because now it definitely held an overtone of fear.

And fear was another siren call for his kind, a part he had come to loathe.

He paused, torn. The evil he had come to deal with or the evil he sensed about to happen?

A woman’s cry pierced the night, making his decision for him. Forgetting the shadows for speed, he dashed toward the sound, the scent, moving now at a speed that rendered him invisible to human eyes.

Three blocks to the east he found her. She stood surrounded by four punks, one of them holding a knife, every single one of them looking as if they enjoyed frightening her as much as one of his kind might. He could smell their evil intentions. And something else. Something he couldn’t identify, but it disturbed him.

“Don’t touch me,” she demanded, taking an aggressive posture, as if she was willing to attack them. Little good it would do when she was outnumbered. “Don’t. Take my money. Take my credit cards.”

“Hey, sweetie,” said the guy with the knife, “what makes you think we want your money?”

The others laughed. “Naw,” one said, “she’s got a better treasure than that.”

He could have, in less than a minute, killed all four of the thugs. Once he might have. But the sight of the frightened but feisty woman prevented him. While those four didn’t deserve to live, neither did the woman they threatened deserve the nightmares he would leave her with if he savaged those men.

He stepped forward so they could see him. “You don’t want to do that.” The Voice.

They all hesitated, looking at him as if suddenly confused. The woman herself looked at him as if he were a savior. He knew better. She had no idea the kind of danger she might be in from him.

“Go,” he said. “Go home now.”

Slowly, almost like zombies, the four men turned away from the woman and began to disperse.

“Go home now,” he repeated with more force, and they began to run.

The woman stood there, frozen, even though she should have responded to the Voice as well. Perplexing, but not the first time someone had been immune.

She was dark-haired, petite. Even with his extraordinary night vision, however, he could not see the color of her eyes. Probably too dilated from adrenaline.

“How did you do that?” she asked, barely whispering. His acute hearing picked that up, too.

“Cowards are easy to intimidate,” he answered, a half-truth.

He walked toward her and she took a quick, stumbling step back. “Stay away.”

He stopped. “I’m not going to leave you here alone. Where do you live?”

“I’m not telling you that!”

He almost sighed, but he could hardly blame her. “I am not leaving you here alone,” he said again. He didn’t want to use the Voice on her, didn’t want to try it again even though it might not work. He avoided manipulating humans unless it was the only way.

“I’ll get a cab.”

“Where?” A faint amusement curled his thin mouth. “Don’t even suggest calling one. They won’t come here at night.”

He saw her shoulders sag a bit. “How did you get here?” he asked, feeling his curiosity stir.

“None of your business!”

Now he did sigh. “I have a car. I can take you home.”

“If you think I’m going to get into a car with you …”

Not even centuries of practice could give him perfect patience. He had to get this piece of bait away from the predators that lurked for blocks around, and he couldn’t go back to his investigation unless he made sure she was safe. Time was passing, dawn approaching steadily and inevitably. Limited time, limited patience, now two tasks instead of one for the short hours he had.

He reached her so fast she gasped when he stood right in front of her. Then, utterly without compunction, he picked her up, hardly noticing her weight, certainly not slowed by it.

“I’m not leaving you here,” he said yet again and began to stride toward his car, not as fast as he could because he didn’t want to scare her any more, but fast enough.

“Let me go!”

He should have just put her to sleep. “I can take you to your home, or take you to my office, but I am not leaving you here.”

Just a touch of the Voice. Just a hint, but it stilled her until they reached his car. So she wasn’t completely impervious. Perhaps. Impossible to tell exactly what she was responding to.

He had chosen his vehicle because it wouldn’t attract attention in this neighborhood: a few years too old, dented, even rusted. Not a hood ornament or hubcap to steal.

“You can’t do this,” she said as he put her on her feet beside the car.

“I am doing it. My office or your home.”

“I don’t want you to know where I live!”

“My office then. You’ll like my assistant.” He opened the passenger door for her.

Still, she hesitated. “Your assistant?”

“Chloe Crandall,” he said, seeking to create a sense of normalcy for her. “A bit strange for my taste, but a nice young lady all the same. Then you can argue with her about how you’ll get safely home.”

Still stubborn, she glared at him. “Who are you?”

He reached into his breast pocket, inside his long leather coat, and passed her his business card.

Jude Messenger, Licensed Private Investigator, Messenger Investigations, Inc. Phone numbers, email, fax, but no website.

She looked up from the card at him. “A private investigator?”

“Yes.” Would she ever get into the car? At this rate he’d never get back here to check into his case.

“Can I keep this?”

“Not only can you keep it, you can have a whole stack of them if you want. Leave them everywhere you go like breadcrumbs.”

At that, one corner of her mouth twitched up ward. Some Rubicon had been crossed in her mind. At last she slid into the car. He closed the door behind her and forced himself to walk at human speed around to the driver’s side.

When he got behind the wheel, however, he gave her no further quarter. The tires squealed as he peeled away. As good as she smelled, he had to get her out of the confines of the car as quickly as possible. He couldn’t afford a slip, even a minor one.

“Could you slow down, please?”

“No.”

“You’ll get us killed!”

He laughed. How could he not? “You’re safer with me at any speed than you were back there with those guys. How did you get there?”

Silence. Well, he had more important concerns. Let her keep her secrets.

But then, hesitantly, she answered. “I was with a friend. She wanted to go to some clubs. I … ordinarily don’t enjoy that, but she didn’t want to go alone.”

“Wise.”

“Who was wise?” she asked. It almost sounded like a challenge.

“Both of you. Clubbing can be a bad scene. Going alone even worse. So let me guess. She met someone and there you were all alone.”

A sigh reached him in the darkness and with it the truly enticing scent of her breath. His hands tightened on the steering wheel.

“Yes,” she said presently. “She met someone, and I decided to go home. This guy she introduced me to earlier seemed safe enough. She knew him.”

“I understand.”

“So when he offered to drive me, I said yes. But he came this way, and tried to … tried to …”

He didn’t need her to finish. “You ran.”

“Yes.”

“That’s a clear picture.” He wondered if he should ask her who this guy was who tried to take advantage of her, then decided she’d probably get angry at him for interfering. People rarely appreciated offers of help they hadn’t asked for.

His hyperacute senses detected no heartbeats nearby at street level, at least none that weren’t in the slow rhythm of sleep, so he ran a couple of red lights, certain no cops were near enough to see. He heard his passenger gasp, but he ignored it.

“Do you obey any laws?” she demanded.

“Not when they get in the way of saving lives.”

“My life isn’t in danger anymore.”

“I’m not talking about you. I don’t stroll that part of town without a reason.”

“Oh.”

He listened to her silence with some satisfaction. Humans tended to have such a narrow view of the world, with little real appreciation for the evils that truly existed.

A block later she asked, “I interfered?”

So she cared beyond herself. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“I know that. I’m just … I’d hate to think someone else might suffer because you saved me.”

“Your danger seemed the most immediate.”

“Thank you. I was terrified.” And she sounded reluctant to admit it. “I’d have fought, but with four of them …” She let it trail off.

“I know.” He could still smell the fear on her, though it had faded considerably. Making it easier for him to maintain control. But the scent of her blood—there was a time he would have followed that scent around the globe.

With another squeal he took a sharp corner, then zipped into a parking space in front of his off ice.

“We’re here,” he said. “I’ll take you to Chloe.”

It didn’t look as if anything was alive or awake on the street, but one little light burned redly next to a doorbell a half dozen steps below street level. He guided her down, swiped his key in the security lock, and heard the bolt slide open.

He shoved the heavy steel door open and urged her in ahead of him. She seemed reluctant now, afraid again. Of course, the hallway was unlit out of deference to his night vision.

“Chloe?” he called out to reassure his companion.

A moment later a doorway opened in the dark hallway, and yellow light spilled forth. Chloe emerged from her office, dressed in some weird version of not-quite-punk, not-quite-stripper black leather and lace. She dyed her hair black and wore it in spikes. The whole getup was topped with an amazing amount of black eyeliner and dark shadow.

“Jude,” she said, her light, youthful voice sounding surprised. “I didn’t expect you for a couple of hours.”

“A little hitch,” he explained, motioning to the woman beside him. “She was about to be assaulted by some thugs.”

Chloe, for all she was weird—and to deal with him she had to be weird—at once surged forward. “Oh, my gosh! Are you all right?”

His rescued human relaxed at last. “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

“Take care of her,” Jude said to Chloe. “Get her home. I’ve got to go back.”

Chloe’s eyes leapt to him even as she wrapped a supporting arm around the woman. “You mean you didn’t …?”

“Not yet. I have to get back.”

Chloe started to shake her head. “It’s late, Jude. Way late. Let it go until tomorrow.”

He’d been dealing with the threat of sunrise for nearly two hundred years. He didn’t need anyone to remind him, or warn him. But when he checked internally, he reached a conclusion that displeased him.

“You’re right. It’ll have to wait.” The passage of the night hours somehow had engraved themselves inside. Hours before dawn he could feel the sun’s approach, and while he needn’t fear the light until the sun fully rose, he had learned to measure his nights by an internal clock.

His clock said there wasn’t enough time to retrace his steps and approach the man he’d been seeking. Not at the height of summer when the days were so long, the dawn so early.

He hated to let this matter wait. It had taken him a whole month to track down this one man. What if he moved again?

But truthfully, he would probably be able to follow the guy’s trail even if he moved all the way across the city. Because he had scented it, caught it, memorized it.

Much like he’d memorized the scent of the woman he’d saved. In some corner of his brain, she was catalogued, and he could follow her anywhere. Or recognize her again even if decades or centuries passed.

Hell. He swore under his breath, watching as Chloe settled the woman with a cup of tea and plenty of youthful mothering. Himself he took into the back office, a room without windows, one where he could work even during the day if it was absolutely necessary.

It seldom was a good thing, because the sleep of death was hard to resist. And when he did resist it, sooner or later he had to make up for it, usually during night hours that were rightfully his.

He pulled some blood out of the refrigerator by his desk, and drained the bag without bothering to use a glass. Cold, and not completely alive, tainted with anticoagulants, it never quite satisfied the craving, but it kept him healthy. One of these days soon he needed to call on one of his acquaintances, one of those who would let him feed. No substitute quite made up for the warm, pumping blood of a living donor.

When he finished draining the bag, he sealed it away in an airtight container marked Biohazard. Soon the drops that were left would begin to rot, and the smell of rotting blood was even more repulsive to him than it was to humans. At all costs, that sickly odor had to be concealed.

He’d made the right decision, he told himself. By dawn that nameless woman out there would probably have been a brutalized corpse. While he couldn’t read minds, he could smell intentions and emotions, and those thugs had been full of evil intent and a determination to leave no witness behind.

And something more. Something not quite right in their scents. Not drugs, which he could identify almost as accurately by scent as by a lab test. No, some other odor that left him feeling deeply disturbed.

He would have to deal with them eventually. Of that he had no doubt. But right now he was concerned about his more immediate target. The killer he sought was demonically oppressed, if not possessed, which meant the cops would never find him. Never. At least not until the demon was removed from the picture.

He drummed his fingers impatiently on his desk, and looked at the clock. It told him what his body already knew: not enough time, not tonight. For an ordinary killer, maybe he could squeak it in, but not a possessed one.

A knock on the door called for his attention. “Come in, Chloe.” He knew it was her because her scent wafted more strongly under the door.

She pushed the door open and stuck her head in. “Our lady friend doesn’t want to go home just yet, and Garner just arrived.”

“Garner?” Just what he needed: a visit from an inept hunter who was trying to win his spurs while making a complete nuisance of himself. And a rescued woman who now didn’t want to go home. A damn three-ring circus in his outer office.

“Sorry,” Chloe whispered. “I told him you were busy but he seems to know something about the, um, target.”

Things really couldn’t get any better, could they? he thought sarcastically as he pushed back from his desk. Garner mixing in with a dangerous case and that woman ….

Realizing he hadn’t yet shucked his leather coat, he tugged it off and tossed it over his chair. It was the kind of oversight a human might notice, and he didn’t want the woman to notice any more than she already had. Though he was fairly impervious to the ambient temperature, he kept the office comfortable enough for humans, like Chloe. That coat would appear out of place, and with Garner adding to the chaos of the night, he didn’t want one more damn thing to seem out of place.

He stepped into the front office, his gaze first going to the woman. Not only was her scent absolutely intoxicating, but she was far prettier than he’d noticed in the earlier chaos. Long inky hair, wide blue eyes and lips that seemed to beg for a kiss. She sat in one of the client chairs near Chloe’s desk, her legs crossed in a way that revealed surprising length in a woman so small. Her arms were folded tightly, but they failed to conceal the mounds of her breasts, not too small, not too large. She was as much a visual delight as an olfactory delight. Eminently desirable, eminently drinkable. A dangerous combination.

He dragged his gaze away and looked at Garner, who was leaning casually against the wall. Blond, barely twenty-four, Garner suffered from delusions of grandeur brought about by a Gift. The young man looked elegant, in a rough sort of way, and appeared composed, although Jude could smell that he was far from as calm as he appeared. “What do you want?”

“I know something about the, ah, target you’re after.”

“And how would you know that?”

Garner actually flushed a little. Since he wasn’t undead, he still had blood pressure that responded to his emotions.

“Get in my office,” Jude said impatiently. “And close the door.”

Garner didn’t argue, for once. He did exactly what he was told.

Then Jude returned his attention to beautiful and problematic woman. “Why don’t you want to go home?”

She bit her lower lip, revealing a glimpse of perfect, white teeth. “Because that guy who offered me a ride? He knows where I live.”

Chloe spread her hands as if to say, How can you argue with that?

Easy. “Chloe will take you to the police. File a complaint against him for sexual assault. They’ll run him down.”

“But I don’t have any proof he did anything. And if I go to the police …” Again she stopped, as if unwilling to say more. “I don’t want to make him madder,” she said finally.

“More likely he’ll cool down and decide he made a big mistake. Maybe he just had too much to drink.”

The woman shook her head, biting her lip harder.

Jude smothered a sigh. “What aren’t you telling me?”

The woman hesitated, then the words came out of her in a rush. “I kicked him in the groin. And he got so mad he started to swing at me and that’s when I stabbed him.”

“Stabbed him?” Had Jude been mortal he was sure that by this point he’d be looking for a double whiskey and a chair.

“With a pen,” she said quickly. “It’s not like I had a knife or anything.”

Jude decided on the chair after all. And maybe a whiskey later, though it would have little effect on him. He sat.

“How badly did you stab him?”

“Not too badly. I got him in the shoulder and I’m pretty sure the pen couldn’t have gone in more than two inches, max. I’m fairly certain I didn’t hit anything but muscle. Then I got out of the car and started running, and he chased me for maybe half a block screaming he was going to kill me.”

“Oh.” He wondered how he had missed that part of the night’s activity. Probably too focused on what he was there to do, or maybe he’d arrived shortly after this altercation. Either way … So the guy had threatened to kill her. Even on his most sanguine day he couldn’t dismiss such a threat out of hand.

He looked at Chloe, then looked at the woman. “What’s your name?”

“Terri. Theresa Black.”

“Okay, Theresa Black, are you absolutely certain you’re telling me the truth?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because there could have been other reasons to stab this guy.”

He smelled the indignation as much as he saw it. All right, she was telling the truth. She’d defended herself from an attacker.

Chloe spoke. “You don’t have time.”

“You’re always worried about my time,” he grumped at her.

“Maybe because I don’t want to look for another job? You don’t have time tonight. There’s Garner. And other things.”

Like he needed her to remind him.