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“The parents escaped with the child.” She lowered her head. “That’s all the background I was given on her.”
He nodded slowly. “So even though DPI was never restored as a functioning government agency, Frank Stiles continued the work on his own. And part of that work included hunting and capturing this half-breed child who’d escaped them years before?”
“Apparently so. But she was hardly a child by then.”
“No?”
She shook her head. “Eighteen when he held her in Connecticut.” Her eyes shifted, downward and then left. “I did my best to protect her while he kept her. And she was still alive when the vampires came and broke her out.” She met his gaze again and maybe saw the doubt in it. “They didn’t kill me when they came for her, surely that should tell you something.”
“As a rule, my kind tend to get squeamish about coldblooded murder—even when it’s deserved. That they left you alive tells me nothing other than that they had weak stomachs.” He shrugged. “I’m something of an exception to that rule, myself.”
She sat very still, holding her breath.
“Stiles held the girl for how long?”
“I … don’t remember exactly. A few days. No more.”
“And he performed experiments on her?”
She lowered her head. “Yes.”
“Details, Kelsey. I need details.” He reached for her chin, tipped her head up so she faced him. “And I’ll know if you’re lying. I know you were lying about trying to protect her. You were as cruel to her as any of them. Fortunately for you, I don’t give a damn about that. My interest is in Stiles. So tell me—and tell me everything.”
The woman licked her lips, and he knew she believed him. She should.
“He wanted to know what kinds of powers she had. Whether she was immortal or not. What could kill her. That kind of thing. He kept her drugged, though, so she wasn’t aware of most of the experiments. She probably didn’t feel a thing.”
“Really.” His belly knotted just a little. “And what kinds of things didn’t she feel, Kelsey?”
She drew a breath, had the decency to look ashamed. Her voice a bare whisper, she said, “Electric shock, enough to stop her heart, just to see if it would start again. Drowning, to see if that would kill her. Various toxins introduced into her bloodstream at fatal doses. Blood letting. Blows to the head.”
“Jesus,” Edge muttered.
“She revived every time, and she was long gone before he could try things like bullets to the brain or wooden stakes to the heart.”
Edge rolled his eyes. Stakes indeed.
“She seems to age like a human. At least, she had the appearance of a normally aging eighteen-year-old, but she revivifies like an immortal.”
“And what else?”
She shrugged. “He took the usual samples. Blood, lots and lots of blood. Tissue, hair, bone marrow.”
“What did he do with them?”
She looked at him hard. “I don’t know. I thought he was trying to map her DNA, but he kept a lot of his work secret. Used to lock himself in a private lab for hours on end. One of the others who worked for him thought he had two sets of notes, one we could see and the other for his eyes only.” She shrugged. “I caught him once, injecting himself with something. But I never knew what it was.”
He pursed his lips. He suspected that Stiles had been trying to imbue himself with whatever it was that made the girl immortal—trying to steal her immortality, and whatever other powers she possessed, for himself. And it looked as if his suspicions were true. The bastard wanted to find a way to live forever without becoming a vampire, without being one of the Chosen, possessing the antigen. And maybe, Edge thought, he’d succeeded.
“In all the experiments, did Stiles ever find the girl’s weakness? Did he ever find out what would kill her?”
She closed her eyes. “Not to my knowledge, no. If he had, she wouldn’t have been alive to escape.”
It didn’t matter, Edge thought. He would. He would find Amber Lily Bryant, and when he did, he would find her vulnerability. Her poison. Her kryptonite. Because whatever it was, it would be the weapon he needed to kill Frank Stiles.
And for more than four decades, his one goal in life had been to kill Frank Stiles.
No half-breed vampiress was going to stand in his way. Not even the so-called Child of Promise.
He dropped the burned out butt of his cigarette onto the carpet, ground it under his heel as he got to his feet. “You’ve been very helpful, Kelsey.”
She closed her eyes, sitting very still. “And now you’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”
“Thanks, but I’ve already eaten.” He smiled at his own joke, but she didn’t seem to pick up on the humor. “You’re no threat to me, Kelsey Quinlan. You’ve told me what I need to know, and I doubt you’re stupid enough to try to warn Stiles, even if you knew where to find him, which you do not. I’ve been reading your thoughts all evening. So given all that, why do you think I would kill you now?”
“For my crimes against … your kind.”
He shook his head as he strode toward the door. “I don’t give a damn about my kind.”
Amber pulled her low-slung black Ferarri into the driveway of her parents’ palatial home—no matter where they lived, it was always palatial—at midnight. This one was a Georgian red-brick mansion in an isolated little inlet of Lake Ontario’s Irondoquoit Bay. It had come complete with secret passages and hidden escape routes and was one of their more recent acquisitions. The house on Lake Michigan had had to be sold five years ago. Secretly, Amber loved it here far more. Maybe because, for the first time, she’d begun declaring her independence.
“So what do you suppose this ‘family meeting’ is about?” Amber asked, glancing across the seat at Alicia. “Another reasoned attempt to get us to move back in with them?”
Alicia released her seat belt and opened her door. “So far they’ve kept their promise not to pressure us on that.”
“Yeah, in exchange for us staying within a twenty-mile radius.”
“After our little adventure in New York, Amber, we’re lucky they didn’t have us imprisoned in a convent somewhere.”
“God, it’s been five years already.” Amber opened her door, and they both got out. She closed the door and hit the lock button on her key ring. “What do you suppose the statute of limitations is on something like that, anyway?”
“For normal families, or ours?” Alicia asked. She shrugged, running a hand along the smooth shiny black fender of the Ferarri. “Still, I don’t suppose normal families buy such nice presents for their wayward daughters.” She wiggled her brows. “Though I still think you should have gone with the little red ‘vette. Then we could match.”
“That would just be too cute, ‘Leesh.” Amber rolled her eyes, flung back her hair and walked side by side with her sister—and she didn’t much care how official or unofficial it was, Alicia was her sister. It was an odd family, an odd, overprotective, obscenely wealthy family. The girls had two mothers, always had. One vampire, one mortal. And Amber’s father watched over and protected all of them—even though he looked young enough to be their brother.
Which was why she hadn’t told him about the dream that had been plaguing her for more than a year now. A dream that intrigued her—and terrified her, though she wasn’t sure why. Her dreams tended to be precognizant, and everyone knew it. So there was no reason to trouble the entire tribe until she’d figured out what this one meant.
Just who the hell was the blond-haired vampire with the fiery eyes that made every part of her being turn molten when they locked with hers? And what was in the ornately carved box he handed to her that made her heart turn to ice with dread? She could never remember. Never. But there was a cold certainty in her mind that what the box contained … was death. She didn’t understand what that meant. But she believed it. The tear in the vampire’s eye as he handed her the box was too real to be denied. Death. Whoever he was, he would bring her death.
Amber closed her eyes and focused her mind on her mother, ordering herself to lock the dream away and keep it entirely to herself. We’re here, Mom.
By the time the two were on the steps, Amber could hear the locks turning. The door was flung open, and Angelica, beautiful and forever young, was wrapping her arms around both of them. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here. You just don’t know.”
Amber hugged her mother hard, then stepped away. “Mom, we’re here every weekend. How could you possibly miss us already?” And that was when she picked it up—the tense, sad vibe her mother couldn’t have hoped to hide from her. Worry. Grief, even. She felt her blood rush to her feet and searched her mother’s face. “God, what is it? Has something happened to Dad?”
“I’m fine, Amber,” Jameson said. He stepped into the foyer with Susan at his side and held out his arms. Amber went to hug him, while Alicia hugged her mother, then they switched places and repeated the heartfelt, if obligatory, embraces.
Wringing her hands, Angelica hurried into the living room, with the others following. Amber kept looking at her father, asking him silently what was going on. He told her without a word to be patient and to brace herself for tragedy.
Amber was on the verge of tears even before she made it to the living room and settled into an overstuffed chair. Alicia, though unable to read minds with the accuracy of a vampire, was adept at reading faces and at feeling emotions. She, too, had picked up on the grief in the air. She sat in a rocking chair, reached out to clasp Amber’s hand. Susan sat on the sofa, and Angelica sat beside her. Over the years, as Susan had aged like any normal woman, she’d taken on an almost motherly role with Angelica. She protected her, loved her, and kept one hand on her shoulder now.
Jameson remained standing, seeming to gather his words in his mind.
“Father, for God’s sake, say something!” Amber exploded at last. “Has someone died? Are Eric and Tamara all right? God, is it Rhiannon? Or Roland? What’s happened?”
Jameson licked his lips and shook his head. “No one has passed, Amber. But it’s … it’s Willem.”
Amber blinked in shock. Five years ago, Willem Stone had saved her from the hands of a ruthless scientist who’d been treating her like his own personal guinea pig. Since then, he and the vampiress he’d fallen in love with, Sarafina, had become a part of her odd little family. But unlike the rest of them, Willem was a mere mortal. Not one of the Chosen, not one who could be transformed. Just a mortal man. The most exceptional, incredible mortal man Amber had ever known.
Almost afraid to ask the question, she forced the words out. “What’s happened to Willem?”
Alicia’s hand squeezed hers tighter when Jameson said the single word.
“Cancer.”
It was as if he were speaking a foreign language. She felt her brows bend into question marks. “What?”
“He has a brain tumor, Amber. It’s inoperable. And it’s … terminal.”
“No.” She searched her father’s eyes, then her mother’s and Susan’s. “There has to be something we can do. There has to be something—”
“He’s a mortal,” Angelica whispered. “Mortals. die.”
As she said it, Alicia and her mother exchanged a knowing look, one of sad acceptance, but it wasn’t lost on Amber Lily. She wasn’t used to dealing with death. She refused to accept it as the inevitable end to those she loved. Even the mortals.
“It can’t happen. Not now, not yet,” she said, as if saying the words emphatically enough could make them true. “God, Sarafina only just found him. How can he be taken from her like this? They should have had years together. Decades!”
“It’s not fair,” Alicia whispered. Then she licked her lips, shook her head. “But, it won’t kill him. Will’s the strongest man I know. He’ll beat it. He will.”
Amber nodded. “'Leesha’s right. God, he withstood torture in the desert, he was given medals for protecting all those men who would have died if he’d talked. He’s a hero. He faced down Stiles, he even faced down Aunt Rhiannon and Sarafina and lived to tell the tale!”
“This is different, Amber,” Susan said softly. “I know it’s not fair, but it’s the way life works. Death is—it’s a natural part of the cycle for some of us, honey. It’s just the way of things—part of being human.”
Amber lifted her head, staring for a long time at Susan, noticing her gray hairs, extra weight, the wrinkles around her eyes. She looked at Alicia, who’d changed in the past five years in far more subtle ways. She’d lost the look of a teenager, looked like a woman now. While Amber hadn’t changed at all. Not since that house in Byram, Connecticut. Not since Frank Stiles and his experiments.
She lowered her head. “Sarafina must be devastated.”
“Rhiannon is with them right now at their place in Salem Harbor,” Jameson said. “Eric’s doing research at the lab at Wind Ridge, but.” He shook his head. “There’s not a lot of time.”
Amber’s brows drew together. “How long?”
“Six months, at the outside.”
Her eyes fell closed even as the words were spoken, and tears flooded them. God, six months. It was less than a heartbeat. She sniffed and knuckled away her tears. “I need to go to him. I need to see him—both of them. How is he? Have you spoken to him?”
“It was Rhiannon who phoned with the news,” Angelica said softly. “She specifically asked for you to come.”
Amber nodded. “And what about the rest of you?”
“We’ll be coming later. First we’re heading down to Eric’s. Roland is already there. They need all the help they can get with the research,” Jameson said.
“Besides,” Angelica added, “we don’t want to overwhelm ‘Fina and Will. All of us descending on them at once might be a little too much.”
“They’ll want time alone, too.” Amber swallowed her tears, though they nearly choked her. “Coming with me, Alicia?”
“One of us needs to stay and keep the shop open, hon. Pandora’s Box can’t run itself. But if you need me, call me, and I’ll be there like lightning.”
“Alicia, I’d feel better if you went along,” Angelica began.
Amber interrupted her. “Mom, I’m twenty-three and perfectly capable of getting to Salem Harbor on my own.”
Angelica thinned her lips.
“We both learned from our mistakes, Angelica,” Alicia said softly. “We’re not teenagers anymore. We own a business now. The Box is already turning a profit. We’re responsible adult women. Both of us.”
“I know that.” Angelica shot a look at Jameson, and he gave her a silent nod.
Amber drew a breath and sighed in gratitude. Alicia was giving her time and space to do this on her own. Amber and Will—they’d formed an odd bond when he’d saved her life five years back. He was like the big brother she’d never had. She loved him madly, and maybe part of that was because he was an outsider, too. Part of this extended family of the undead, even though he wasn’t one of them. Just like Susan and Alicia. Just like she was herself. Well, not just like, she thought slowly. She wasn’t mortal, either. She didn’t know exactly what she was.
Nodding hard, her mind made up, Amber said, “I’ll pack up tonight. Leave early in the morning.”
“Should I call the airlines for you, Amber?” Susan asked.
“No, I.I think I’ll drive. It’ll give me time to … process all this.”
“Sounds like a good idea.” Alicia got to her feet. “Are you guys all right?”
“We’re dealing with it as best we can,” Angelica said. “It’s not easy on any of us. But Eric’s refusing to give up hope, and maybe there’s some chance he’s right.”
“But you don’t really think so, do you?” Amber asked.
Her mother lowered her eyes, but Amber heard the hopelessness in her heart.
Alicia said, “Amber, let’s get back. I’ll help you pack, maybe even make you a few snacks for the road, huh?”
Smiling her thanks, Amber nodded. She got to her feet, let her father hug her hard. “When you go out there, Amber, forget your own pain. Think of easing theirs.”
“I will.”
“I know you will.”
Edge was staked out in the shadows outside the kitschy little New Age-slash-magic shop in one of Rochester, New York’s suburbs, a town called Irondequoit. The sign in the window read Pandora’s Box, and included a stylized drawing of a treasure chest with its lid open and purple sparkles spiraling from within. The apartment where Amber Lily Bryant lived with her mortal roommate Alicia Jennings was on the second floor, and his research showed the two were joint owners of the shop, which they’d purchased from its former owners two years ago.
Why the Child of Promise was sharing an apartment and a business with a mortal, rather than living under the constant protection of a dozen vampiric bodyguards, he couldn’t begin to guess. None of the vampires he’d questioned in order to track her down had offered a reason. The information he’d been able to glean had been piecemeal at best, but he’d been persistent, nosy, less than ethical, and he’d picked up the occasional unguarded thought. Taken together, the pieces had led him here … where she lived in an ordinary apartment with an ordinary mortal girl. She must be the most sought after prize of every vampire hunter in existence—and he had heard of many, besides the rogue DPI agent Frank Stiles. And yet she lived like a mortal. Unprotected.
If she had guardians, he thought, they ought to be taken out and beaten.
There had been no one at home when he’d first arrived, but the two woman returned around 2:30 a.m. in a car that made his mouth water even more than the red Corvette in the garage had done. A black Ferrari. Not that he would trade his ‘69 Mustang for anything in the world, but hell, a man could look.
They pulled into the driveway, but not into the two-car garage that was attached to the rear portion of the shop.
He took great pains to mask his presence from the Child of Promise, to shield his mind, his thoughts, his very existence, from her. He had no idea what powers she might possess, whether she had the ability to detect his presence or not, so he was taking precautions.
Not that she would have noticed him anyway, he realized once he took in her state. She got out of the car, took two unsteady steps toward the two-story building where she lived, and then stopped, braced one arm on the brick wall and lowered her head. Her hair was long, perfectly straight, and so dark he’d thought it black at first. But it wasn’t. It was the darkest shade of auburn imaginable, deep shades of burgundy that gleamed in the glow of the streetlights. If pressed, he would describe her hair as black satin, rinsed in blood. It hung forward, so he couldn’t see her face. But he could feel her—sense her, the way he could sense any other living creature. She didn’t feel like a mortal, but not quite like a vampire, either. There was an electric energy about her, a static charge that made his skin prickle, his groin tighten and the fine hairs on his arms stand erect.
She made a sound, a sob that caught in her throat, and he realized she was crying.
Edge took an instinctive step closer, jerking into motion like a kneecap tapped by a doctor’s mallet, before stopping himself. He dismissed the gut reaction, covering it with his more characteristic sarcasm. Just what he needed, he told himself. More blubbering females. What the hell was wrong with this one?
The other one was beside her a second later, and then the two hugged each other fiercely, both of them sobbing. The other girl was clearly the mortal one. She had short hair, as blond as his own. It would be curly if allowed to grow long, but in its present state it shot out in all directions in a stylized mess that looked good on her. She was attractive. She smelled faintly of magic. He thought she’d been doing more than stocking the shelves and managing the register in that shop of hers. She’d been studying, experimenting a bit, and keeping it to herself, he thought.
“I can’t wait until morning, Alicia,” Amber said, when she could control her sobbing enough to speak. “I need to leave sooner. As soon as I can get ready.” She sniffled, wiping her eyes and stepping out of the other woman’s arms. “I didn’t see any sense in giving Mom a reason to object.”
“And she would have. She’s trying, Amber, but she can’t help but be overprotective. Throw a few things in a bag, hon. I’ll go online and get the directions while you pack.”
Amber nodded, and the two went up the exterior stairs to the second floor apartment, arm in arm, locking the door behind them.
Not that a locked door had ever been a problem for Edge.
2
Edge couldn’t take his eyes off the woman, and she was that, a woman, not a girl, and not a child—of promise or anything else. Twice, she stopped what she was doing, went very stiff and alert. She felt his presence, despite all his efforts to conceal it. She felt his eyes on her.
He leaned against the bricks on the little balcony outside her bedroom, watching her through the sheer black curtains as she packed clothing into a suitcase. Every now and then she would pause as grief swept over her. He could feel it. She wasn’t shielding herself tonight—either because she thought there was no one around who could read her, or because she didn’t care. He rather thought it was the latter. He wasn’t certain what had happened to her tonight; he thought perhaps someone had died. It was that kind of grief. And yet, there was something else lying beneath it. Something she was struggling to ignore. A kind of stubborn denial. A streak of rebellion he recognized. A fighter looking for a fight.
It was buried under all that grief, but it was there. He would know it anywhere.
As she moved around her bedroom, adding items to her suitcase, he was finally able to see her face. She had these huge, deep, wide-set eyes, oval and thickly fringed. They were stunning, her eyes—such a dark shade of blue he’d thought at first they were ebony. The rest of her face was beautiful, pale and delicate and finely boned. He’d never been overly fond of beautiful women. Wouldn’t have given this one a second look—if he’d had any choice in the matter. But it didn’t seem as if his mind or body were obeying his personal preferences here. She drew him on so many levels his head was spinning.
It must be one of her powers, he decided.
He turned away. But he had to watch her, had to figure out what she was doing, how he could best get her to tell him what he needed to know. So he looked back again, just in time to see her glancing out her bedroom door into the hall, before closing the door and locking it. She was trying to be quiet, acting … sneaky.
Frowning, he watched, riveted.
She climbed up onto a chair and, reaching above her head, pushed one of the ceiling panels upward. Now this was interesting. Reaching into the opening, she tugged out a large file box, one of those cardboard numbers for storing documents and file folders. Edge moved closer to the glass, riveted as she climbed down, set the box on her bed and removed the lid. Her lips pursed, she tugged something out of it: a black three-ring binder, with a white label on its spine.
Squinting until his eyes watered, Edge focused on that spine and eventually managed to read the words on its label.
X-1: Volume A.
“X-1,” he whispered. It was Stiles’s name for her. Then those binders—the box was full of them—had to be his notes. “I’ll be damned,” he muttered. “She’s got everything he learned about her—all of it, right there.”
And maybe the answers Edge needed. The key to Stiles’s vulnerability.
She skimmed pages for a while, and Edge slipped inside her mind, trying to listen in. Her parents thought these notebooks were still locked in the safe at their home, he heard her thinking. She felt a little guilty about that. Someone called Eric had made copies of everything and taken them to his lab, while the originals had been secured in the house at Irondequoit Bay. Only they weren’t. They were here, hidden in her bedroom. He couldn’t get deep enough to read through her eyes, to see what she was seeing—but he felt her frustration before she slammed the book closed.