A Wicked Hunger (Creatures of Darkness 1) (10 page)

Just about the time Rita
crawled off the bed and sauntered from the room, sans a couple of pints, Cortez entered. How long had he been waiting out there for Mace to finish up? Not that Rita would have minded her boss watching, Mace thought. Cortez had undoubtedly seen her engage in more sultry acts than a simple feeding.

“How are you feeling?” Cortez asked, though it was clear there were more pressing questions burning in the back of his mind.

“Been better.” His chest ached as his healing flesh battled against the encroaching acid and shrapnel. Luckily, the alcohol Balthazar had poured over him earlier help to nullify most of the destructive chemical. “Should be on my feet by morning,” he added. “There are a couple things I need you to do for me.”

Cortez cocked his head. “Now you ask for favors?”

“Yes,” Mace replied simply. “The jeep outside in your parking lot will need to disappear, preferably tonight. Same with the three bodies I left on the mountain pass. There’s a motorcycle up there as well. It’ll be reported stolen soon. Take it, sell it, strip it for all I care, but it shouldn’t be traced back here.”

“Is that all?”

“No. I’ll need a replacement vehicle. Cora and I will leave here in the morning.”

“I’m going to need some answers, Mason. What the fuck is going on?”

Mace let out a breath. There was no getting around it. “The night Brayden disappeared, arsonists burned down his apartment building.”

“Yes, several other vampires had resided there. They labeled it a hate crime.”

“Right. And with all the bodies virtually incinerated, and Brayden missing, the local investigators easily declared him deceased. It was Trent who came to me last year with the news that his blood was discovered on the black market.”

“Why didn’t he come to me?” The fire behind Cortez’s eyes betrayed his cool tone.

“You know why.”

“I could have helped in the search. There are witches I could call upon to
scry—”

“Don’t you think we tried that?” Mason paused, waiting for Cortez’s rebuttal, but none came. “Anyway, I joined the VEA the next day. With Trent’s connections, he was able to streamline the process and we’ve been partners ever since, with our main goal finding Brayden. I was going to tell you when we had…something, but it was like we were always chasing shadows.” He let out a haggard breath. “Then
came Cora.”

“Yes, the female. If you’re so intent on finding my brother, why are you taking time to guard this girl?”

“It’s…complicated. I…well, she’s the only clue we have at the moment. Part of the theory is her late husband was testing product on her before approving it for sale. She had no idea. We have samples of her blood being analyzed now, but that’s just schematics. Trent and I both smelled Brayden on her.”

Yet
, now it was his own scent all over her.

The thought was too satisfying. 

“Toward the end,” Mace continued, “her husband was giving it to her more and more. Often for no reason at all. We figured he’d received an influx of blood that needed testing, so we beefed up surveillance on him and his associates, hoping to catch a drop off. That was probably our biggest mistake. Two days ago, our suspects were eliminated as if by well-trained assassins, creating a virtual dead end for us.”

“Still, why bother with the girl?”

“Should we just leave her life in the hands of fate then?” Mace hissed.

“If she has no further use in the investigation, I see no point—”

“Whoever killed her husband and the others wants her dead in a bad way. Think about it. Why bother hunting down one ignorant female? Why spend time and resources searching for her when the first attempt on her life failed? Why risk being caught over someone seemingly insignificant?”

Cortez went silent.

“I’ve wondered about the excess blood her husband was pushing on her. I have a theory about it. Trent has his own opinion…” Mace drew in a breath and let it out slowly before going on. “I think Winston and his cohorts were trying to figure out how to turn a human.”

The sound of something shattering in the hall drew their attention. Cortez yanked the door open.

Coraline stood pale and motionless but for a quiver in her hands. At her feet lay a multicolored mess surrounded by bits of glass.

Mason cursed.

Her voice came so faintly that normal human ears would not have heard. “That won’t happen, will it?”

“No,” Mace assured. “And it’s only a theory of mine. Winston and his cohorts were arrogant enough to believe they could live forever.”

Cortez regarded his stained rug with an air of indifference. “But it
is
possible—”

Mace shot him a scathing look as Cora went stark white.

“You care too much for this female’s feelings, Mason,” Cortez chastised. “It
is
possible to turn a human. That much is common knowledge. Yet not even most vampires possess the wisdom of how it’s done. It’s a secret guarded closely by the eldest of our kind. If you’re right, that means a group of humans are trying to discover what very few of us know. It could provoke a new chapter in their war.”

“I said it was only a theory,” Mace growled, trying not to let Cora’s horrified expression bother him. “We have no concrete evidence, except…” He darted his eyes to Cora and averted them too quickly.

Her shoulders slumped. “I’m evidence.” It wasn’t a question, but a bleak understanding. And in that single phrase there seemed to be a farewell of sorts; a goodbye, perhaps, to her old, safe life. Maybe even to her previous, not so safe life, both having been free of vampires and blood. Mason felt a twinge of sympathy over that, but it was overshadowed by something far more powerful, something that gave him too much satisfaction than he was willing to admit at the moment. 

Cora met his gaze as if she were sensing from him what he was trying so hard to bury. And for the first time, it was he who looked away.

* * *

“Really, I don’t mind letting you have the whole bed to yourself.” Cora repeated yet again.

Cortez had provided her with a slip of a nightgown, black and lacy, giving Mace a conspiratorial wink before taking his leave. Mace didn’t know whether to thank or curse the man.

Mason rolled his eyes. “I already feel unmanned as it is, I’ll not have a female in my charge sleeping on the floor while I’m babied on a comfortable mattress.”

After their host had left, Cora had spent an hour in the adjoining bathroom crying. If he thought she would have accepted him, he would have ignored the agony of moving and gone in there to comfort her. Yet he had no idea what he could have done or said to cease her tears. He was just as much responsible for her sorrow as Winston’s callous use of her, or the discovery that her entire life with him had been a lie. Worse, Mace was the one who had stripped away her rose-colored glasses and shoved her into a world she wasn’t ready for, a world that terrified her. And he was the one keeping her there.

Her puffy eyes tentatively glanced his way as she finally slipped under the covers next to him.

“There, see?” He offered a reassuring smile. “Plenty of room for the both of us.”

She returned his grin with an inadequate, thin-lipped facsimile.

She didn’t bother with the pillow barricade tonight. Was she becoming more relaxed around him, or did she believe he was too injured to try anything lascivious? A broken spine wouldn’t stop him if she offered him a fair chance.

She snapped off the bedside lamp and then settled back, pulling the covers to her chin. Mace closed his eyes and focused on her breathing, trying to determine the moment she fell asleep. Only then could he fully relax. Although she’d been fairly silent since exiting the bathroom, he was getting the impression a cyclone of questions circled around in her head. She had kept
pausing and staring off into space as if in deep thought, shaking herself free of it moments later. He wasn’t looking forward to the inevitable interrogation.

Unfortunately for him, she wasn’t anywhere near sleeping, and it wasn’t long before the cyclone broke free. “Mason?”

“Mm?”

“What would have happened to me if I’d been turned, if that was truly Winston’s purpose?”

She’d gone straight to the one question he didn’t want to answer. “What do
you
think?”

“He might have continued using me, I suppose.
Started selling my blood on his black market.”

“Or used your blood to turn himself and his friends.”
Mace added bluntly.

“And then what?”

“I guess they’d’ve had no more use for you.”

She shuddered. “You said Trent had a difference of opinion. What was his theory?”

“He was more inclined to think Winston was receiving blood through several other sources, but I never smelled anyone except Brayden on you.”

“What do you mean
never
? When were you ever around me besides that day in the hotel?”

Mason’s pensive silence guided Cora to the truth.

“You were the one watching us,” she gasped. She didn’t know how she hadn’t put it together till now—with all his cryptic comments about Winston, his knowledge of their life. She automatically began listing the obvious clues that had previously eluded her. “You instantly recognized me in the hotel, even with the wig, while Trent had not. You knew I liked coffee cake because you saw me eating it. You never answered when I asked if you had known Winston.”

Mace let out a sigh. “Ten months ago, a tip about Winston’s involvement in the black-market blood came in and I was assigned to tail him.”

“So then, were you there when I first met Winston?”

It took a few moments for Mace to answer. “I was.”

How surreal to look back with the knowledge that someone had been watching her that day…and then on. And not just anyone—a  vampire. This vampire.

She waited for the jilt of indignation, the ire that should be forming deep in the pit of her stomach. The only reaction she could muster was a jaded
meh
. After all that had happened to her—orphaned at a young age, Edgar’s torture, life in the slums, her rags to riches fairytale love story, and her fall from grace via Winston’s betrayal, subsequently being targeted for death—a vamp-stalker who seemed bent on protecting her was all of a sudden low on her outrage meter. 

Or maybe she was just too tired to fully assimilate the information.

“If Winston had been feeding me more and more blood, how could I not have noticed? I didn’t drink
that
much wine.”

“He had you see a doctor once a week, right?”

She nodded absently. “Doctor Albright. I was malnourished. She was giving me weekly vitamin shots to boost my immune system.”

“I don’t think that’s what she was giving you. I couldn’t follow you inside without soliciting suspicion, but when you left there, you always smelled strongly of Brayden. After your first visit six months ago we started watching Albright and her staff.”

“Oh goddess, how many people are in on this? Wait…you said I
smelled
? How close would you get to me?”

“Once I was assigned solely to you, I was never very far.”

“Meaning?”

“Close enough to guess which perfume you used that morning.”

She swallowed the tiny lump nesting in her throat. “Am I that unobservant? How had I not noticed you?”

“It’s my job not to be noticed.”

“But seriously. It’s not like you’re inconspicuous by any form of the word. Yet never once did I think, ‘hey, there’s an inhumanly handsome man following me around’? And you’d been following me for how long? A month? Two?

“Since two weeks after your wedding.”

She drew an astonished breath. A vampire had been watching her for seven months and not a note of alarm had tickled her intuition? She had always assumed her experience with Edgar had made her more adept at spotting—as well as evading—his kind. She’d gone years without a single encounter. Or so she’d thought.