Serafina and the Silent Vampire (6 page)

“How come?” she prompted when the voice in her head stopped.

Blair shrugged. “We believe oral speech wasn’t used by the Founder, the first of our kind, and so it’s never been available to the rest of us. Communication with humans is unnecessary, and all vampires can communicate with each other telepathically.”

“And you can communicate with me because I’m psychic? Even though I can’t hear humans’ thoughts? Not beyond spotting lies, anyway.”

A smile flickered across his lips. “I’m dead. You talk to the dead.”

She stared at him.
Am I being had here?

“Come on, Serafina. You wrote the book on how to do the having. You know the difference between fake and real.”

“Do I?” Was he really reading her mind?

“Only the bits you project. For the rest, you can teach yourself not to leak.”

Leak?
“Oh for…!” Refusing to be drawn, she broke off. “All right. Supposing I buy in to this. You’re a vampire. I can sense the presence of the dead, solid or not, so why didn’t I sense you last night?”

“You weren’t looking very hard. And besides, I was making sure I didn’t project.”

“Scared of me?” she taunted.

“On the contrary, I knew nothing about you. I was spying on the others.”

“What others?”

“The other vampires who killed Jason Bell and turned him.”

She wouldn’t know if he was lying. She was so full of his deep, terrifying chill there was no way she could sense anything so subtle as truth. Or was that just an excuse not to touch him?

She said hastily, “You’re asking me to believe this city is full of vampires, and yet I’ve never noticed
one
before last night?”

“Well, up until a few nights ago, there
was
only one. Two on occasion. Very rarely three. Quite frankly, I now consider Edinburgh overcrowded.”

Sera regarded him with a fascinated eye. “Overcrowded with vampires?”

“Exactly.” His gaze fell to her lips, lingering long enough for her to stumble into speech through discomfort.

“So where did they all come from?”

“From the south. Some of them. Two of those I killed, and the one who got away.” His gaze dropped lower, to the region of her throat. She was creeped out. At least she thought she was. There was no other reason for her stomach to spin or her skin to tingle as if he’d caressed it. Bitten it, more like.

“And the others?” she managed.

“Made here.”

“
Made?
”

“By the southern vampires,” he explained. Reluctantly, it seemed, his gaze lifted once more from her throat to her eyes. Sera, who always looked everyone straight in the eye, found it curiously difficult to withstand.

“Why?” she demanded. “I mean, is that normal vampire behavior?”

He shrugged. “No.” As if he couldn’t help it, he lifted one hand and, just like last night, touched the side of her throat.

Oh Jesus.

Staying quiet beneath his fingers was one of the hardest things she’d ever forced herself to do. And yet it wasn’t so bad—not like last night’s wild blast of infinite pain and icy darkness. This was controlled; she was seeing and feeling only what he wished to convey. There was solitude, at once lonely and necessary, corrosive and pleasurable. She had a glimpse of a beautiful woman with fangs like a wolf, saying farewell with a mixture of sadness and impatience as she vanished into the darkness. And some strong but equally ambiguous emotion relating to the being beside her.

“Freedom,” Sera gasped out. “You value freedom.”

The vision, along with the sense of solitude, was vanishing, but the fingers on her throat, gently kneading the skin around her jugular, were more, not less, insistent.

“And blood,” he said, his voice low and deep inside her mind. He bent his head closer. “Serafina… How apt. Fire and beauty…”

Sera swallowed. She knew what her name meant. It was all she had from her parents, and all she’d ever dared to find out about. They’d given her it, even though it sat oddly with MacBride and promptly died or buggered off in some other way. Right now, she didn’t care about that. She felt all fire and beauty inside, almost like a revelation granted by the vampire’s cool, stroking fingers on her skin, his seductive voice in her mind. She caught a faint scent of earth and spice, and for no reason at all, her stomach twisted and sent tingles dancing downward between her legs.

Oh fuck!
Sera dragged the despised stick from her pocket and pushed it into his chest. “Don’t tempt me.”

To her surprise, his eyes gleamed with something that looked like laughter. But at least he straightened and let his hand fall back onto his denim-covered thigh. There was a bulge in his jeans that had to be…
No. Just don’t go there.

He said, “We are, by nature, solitary, territorial creatures. Creating a new vampire is rare, since too many can only impede the safe supply of blood. I need to be rid of these interlopers.” He tapped one finger on his thigh as though in deep thought. “Do you know, I might let you help me.”

Sera curled her lip. “Might you? Why? Can’t you find them on your own?”

Something changed in his dark eyes before his thick lashes dropped down, covering whatever it was. When they rose, he looked merely amused, but Sera was triumphant.

“You can’t, can you?” she crowed.

He shrugged elegantly. “I can pick up their scent if I’m in the right place at the right time.”

“Like a dog at a lamppost?” Sera interpolated.

The vampire regarded her without overt pleasure. “Not exactly. But you, you can track by touch. I thought so last night when you ran from me, and today you proved it by following me here. I confess, I wasn’t best pleased initially, but now…”

From his jeans’ pocket, he took a piece of cloth, black silk. “I picked this off a bramble bush in the garden last night, close to where we met. It might belong to a human. But I doubt it.”

“Why?” Sera looked at the frayed, torn cloth without touching it. It could have been part of just about any dress she’d seen last night.

“It’s not the sort of place humans go in all their finery. Besides, there was a vampiress at the party with a torn black dress.”

With odd reluctance, Sera reached out and took the piece of cloth from him. For obvious reasons, she didn’t want to close her eyes in his company, so she merely stared hard at the silk.

The red, swirling mists were still there, but they lurked in the background almost like old friends. Resentment and intrigue seemed to ooze from the cloth in equal measure; a trace of laughter, a surge of lust, deep and patient, and a vague scent of earth and spice.

“You,” she gasped. “I’m just getting you.”

He smiled lazily, watching the flush suffuse her face and neck. He could probably smell the blood rushing with such embarrassment through her veins.

“Take it with you,” he offered. “I’m sure you’ll get more when you’re less…disturbed.”

Indignantly, she stared at him, floundering for words.

“Your friends are outside,” he said mildly. “I thought you’d want to leave.”

Her phone went off before he’d finished speaking, and, glad of the interruption, she grabbed it.

It was Jilly. “Sera?”

“Yes, I’m fine. Just coming,” she mumbled and broke the connection, shoving the phone into her pocket as she stood up. She glanced at Blair, who rose politely with her. He was too close, and the fire and the butterflies intensified; but again, she refused to admit her weakness by moving away from him. “Exactly what is it you expect me to do if I find any of these…creatures?”

“Tell me,” Blair said. “And I will come and kill them.” His sensual lips tugged upward. “You look shocked. Remember, these are the
creatures
who killed your friend Jason.”

“And you’re the good vampire?” she retorted with blatant mockery. “The one who doesn’t kill?”

“Not very often,” he amended.

“And yet you’re quite prepared to kill several of your fellow…fellows,” she finished weakly. She still felt foolish saying the word vampire with any seriousness. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll kill you first?”

“At the moment, they seem to be ignoring my existence. Which I find rather rude when they’re stealing my supper.”

“What if I don’t agree to anyone being killed?”

“Serafina. They’re already dead.” His sharp teeth gleamed, and terror and attraction tore through her in equal measure. “Like me.”

Jesus, how could he say those things,
be
those things when he stood there looking at her like
that
?

“There you are,” said a sultry female voice from nowhere. “Come back to bed, gorgeous.”

Startled, Sera stepped back, her gaze flying to the speaker, a rumpled brunette in a black minidress that hung slightly askew across her hips and breasts. She had the swollen lips and contented eyes of someone newly awake after a satisfying bout of good sex. The thought appalled Sera for all sorts of reasons, most of which she’d no intention of analyzing.

The woman sashayed up to Blair and almost fell against him, wrapping her arms around his neck. As she pressed her cheek contentedly into his chest, she appeared to catch sight of Sera for the first time.

“Oh,” she said, blinking. She lifted her head. “I didn’t know you had company. Shit, am I in the middle of something?” She sounded both accusing and uneasy, prepared for either anger or distress. Her sleepy eyes were suddenly watchful.

But Blair didn’t seem remotely put out. He simply put one arm around the woman’s waist and half turned her to face Sera properly. His voice in Sera’s head was merely polite. “This is Tess.”

Sera swallowed. “Hello. I’m Sera.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Tess said warily. “Tess Mason.”

Sera swung back to the blandly observing Blair. “Is she?”

“A vampire? No. She’s supper.” He smiled provokingly. “And breakfast.”

“No, she bloody isn’t.” She faced Tess with determination. She hadn’t needed to ask. There was no death about this girl, who looked merely randy. “Something’s come up,” Sera said firmly. “I’ll give you a lift home.”

She moved toward the girl, had even touched her arm, when she found Blair standing between them. Like a dog guarding his bone.

She stared defiantly up at him, clutching the stick in her pocket. Would it really work? His eyes were hard with something of the same look she’d glimpsed before he killed the vampires. She tensed, ready to strike and knowing she’d have to be fast. She’d only get one chance. If that.

For a moment, it hung in the balance. Then his lips quirked, and he stood aside. “You’re right,” he agreed. “Something
has
come up. And it’s getting increasingly hard to do anything about it.”

Uncertainly, Sera searched his face. In a human male, she’d have understood that as crude innuendo. In a vampire, what the hell did it mean?

While she speculated, he took Tess’s hand; but although Sera started forward in fresh alarm, he merely kissed the girl’s fingers like some gallant of old. It would have been a graceful gesture had his gaze not been on Sera the whole time. Tess, however, seemed enchanted, smiling mistily into the back of his head—besotted or mesmerized?

Sera pushed rudely past, seizing Tess’s arm and almost dragging her out of the room. Her neck, her whole back prickled all the way out and along the hall. He could still stop them if he chose. There was really nothing Sera could do.

But it seemed that, for whatever reason, he didn’t choose. Perhaps he really did want her help. At the front door, which was still ajar, she couldn’t resist glancing back. He stood in the hall, watching them, the gloomy light casting sinister shadows across his left eye and cheek. He looked mysterious and deadly. And
so
inappropriately sexy.

As Sera emerged from her inner office the following morning to show her new client to the door, she found another, less welcome visitor waiting for her. PC McGowan, the red-haired policeman who’d taken such a dislike to her at the Bells’. Elspeth’s eyes were rolling frantically in his direction to warn her, but Sera had seen him at once, sitting in one of the comfortable waiting chairs.

“See you at five,” Moira Gordon, her client, said with a smile that didn’t touch the sadness in her eyes.

“I’ll be there,” Sera returned, uncomfortably aware of the constable’s glare as she opened the front door for Moira and closed it behind her. And in fact, before she’d even turned, he was in her face.

“What are you going to tell that poor woman? That her dead mother wants her to give you a load of money she doesn’t have?”

“Her mother isn’t dead. What do you want?”

The policeman dragged his bitter gaze away from the window where the tired, not so well-dressed figure of Moira Gordon crossed the road toward the bus stop.

“Nice premises you have here,” he said with unmistakable resentment. “Business must be going well.”

“It’s growing,” she said calmly, “but if you mean it pays the rent on this place, no it doesn’t. I paid five years rent in advance from a legacy.” Namely, Mattie and George’s house, which she’d sold because she couldn’t bear to live there without them.

This obviously wasn’t the answer McGowan expected, but he only grunted before smiling with rather more relish. “There’s been a complaint against you.”

Oops. Have I been careless?
“By whom? For what?”

“By Mr. Jason Bell. For harassing him at his place of work.”

Sera grinned with blatant mockery. “Really?”

“There are more annoyances than physical threats,” the policeman said defensively. “We were sent video footage of you breaking into the C & H car park.”

Sera sat down on one of the other waiting chairs. “Goodness. Well, I climbed over the barrier and hung around waiting for him.”

“Why?”

“To be sure he was all right. At least you and I can agree the events at his father’s party were a trifle strange.”

He blinked at that, as though determined not to agree with her publicly about anything. “Well, Jason and his father seem to consider the matter closed. Why don’t you?”

“Ah, Constable”—although she remembered his name perfectly well, she peered at his name tag—“McGowan. If I told you that, you’d assume I was taking the piss. What else did that video show? Fighting?”
Men leaping impossible heights and distances, vanishing into dust…?

“Hardly,” said Constable McGowan coldly. “If it had, you’d have been under arrest.” His tone left no doubt that he was sorry not to be able to deliver that particular outcome. Sera was more interested in the fact that Jason must have somehow doctored the tape before giving it to the police.

Or perhaps vampires didn’t show up on camera? Or mirrors? Was she becoming as gullible as the people she’d been known to part from their cash?

“So you’re not here in any official capacity?” she suggested.

He stood up. “Oh yes. Rest assured I’ll be making a full report. In which I’ll state that I’ve warned you to leave off harassing
all
of the Bell family.”

“I’ve never harassed anyone in my life,” Sera retorted. “And I doubt there are many policemen who can say the same. As for the Bells,” she continued inexorably as his face flushed an indignant if unbecoming rose color, “I’m still employed by Ferdinand Bell to locate his stalker. If Jason comes back to you, you might suggest he take things up with his father rather than the police. Good morning, Constable McGowan.”

She stood dismissively, but as she turned to march away, he reached out to detain her. His grip on her wrist wasn’t angry or rough, but it was firm enough to turn her back, and he immediately released her.

Too late. The vision was already in her mind. Some deep, corrosive grief, a young girl full of life struck down by a speeding car. A sickening thud, screeching tires; blood and tears. And money trickling through worn, old fingers.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“What?” McGowan looked confused but recovered quickly. “Look, I know that woman, Mrs. Gordon. I know the family. The last thing they need is your sort. I’ll be watching.”

“Watching what?” Sera demanded.

“You know,” McGowan said darkly and made his exit.

“What’s he got against you?” Elspeth demanded indignantly.

“He thinks I’m a charlatan who preys on human tragedy.” Of course, he had his own tragedy. Who didn’t? She winked at Elspeth. “Got to make a living somehow. Five o’clock, I’ll be at Moira Gordon’s in Muirhouse.”

“You’ve got an appointment here too at nine,” Elspeth said doubtfully. “Couldn’t you make it earlier?”

Sera frowned. “The Seelie brothers? Damn, I’d forgotten about them.” She combed her fingers through her hair and shrugged. “No, nine it is. It needs to be dark and spooky. Can you remind Jilly and Jack I’ll need them tonight?”

“Do you want me to stay late?”

Sera didn’t miss the note of eagerness in Elspeth’s voice. She gave a slightly rueful smile. “To be honest, Elspeth, I don’t believe you’ll like what you see.”

“Playing tricks, are you?” Elspeth said disapprovingly.

“Told you.” Sera turned and walked over to pick her jacket off the coat hook.

“I’d better stay and make sure you don’t overstep the mark,” Elspeth said severely.

Sera laughed, shrugging on the jacket. “Oh, I will. I
so
want to rip the Seelies off. See you later—I’m off to visit Ferdy Bell!”

****

She found Ferdy in a somber mood, although he seemed pleased enough to see her.

“My wife’s gone round to check that Jason’s flat is fit to live in,” he said, ushering her into his study as usual, but he frowned as he spoke, as if his mind was on something else entirely.

“How is Jason?” Sera asked casually. “Seen much of him?”

“No, not really. He came round late last night to tell us he was moving back into his flat, even though the decoration still isn’t complete.” He sat at his desk and glanced at Sera. Ferdy wasn’t a tall man but she suspected few people in his life ever noticed that because he had such a big, confident personality. Although retired, he was only in his fifties, still slim, fit and dapper. His dark hair was neatly cut around his shining bald patch, and even in the midst of these troubles, to call them nothing worse, his smooth face radiated health and energy. “He was meant to be staying here until the flat was ready.”

“What made him change his mind?” The garlic and crucifixes all over the house? Did these things work after all? She must ask Blair…

“I don’t know,” Ferdy said slowly. “He seems restless, unlike himself.”

There was a reason for that, of course, but how the hell did you tell any father his only son was a vampire?

Might
be a vampire. Let’s not get carried away here, Sera. Blair might still be the ultimate con man. Able to con
me
.

“And what of your stalker?” Sera asked. “Any signs?”

“No.” Ferdy picked up a pen, twisting it between his fingers. “Do you know, I think it might have been all about Jason?” He dropped the pen and met her gaze, and suddenly his ever-present confidence was gone. “I’m wondering if he…
got
Jason. The night of the party.”

Sera reached out and patted his hand. With the contact, her instinct to trust the sincerity in Ferdy’s face and voice was confirmed. Like the hour he’d believed his son was dead.

She said, “I feel I should tell you, Jason complained to the police about me harassing him. I did go to his office to speak to him, which he didn’t want. But in the circumstances, I have to ask you what you want to do next. If you’re satisfied your stalker, whoever or whatever he was, is no longer a threat, our agreement is complete.”

Ferdy gazed out of the window at his beautiful garden in the rain. For the first time since Sera had met him, he looked like an old man. Every line on his face seemed to have deepened into a wrinkle; every fold of skin appeared to sag.

At last, he brought his gaze back to Sera. “I may be a foolish old man. I may be senile. I’m sure there are many who think so and wonder how I did the job I did for so many years. But Jason is my life. And Emily’s life. We want our son back.”

After a moment, Sera said quietly, “You got him back.”

“Prove it,” Ferdy said. “Prove that he’s still my son. Or prove he isn’t. Can you do that?”

It was another job, another fee. She got paid whatever the result, which was a great deal for Serafina’s.

She swallowed. “I don’t know,” she admitted.

“Will you try?”

She searched his gaze. Something else was beginning to gleam in his eyes. Beyond the anxiety and the grief was excitement. Something else to do. She drew in her breath. “What if we find it isn’t Jason?” she asked. “What if we find he’s been somehow…altered?”

“If he’s a vampire?” Ferdy said. Oh yes, there was relish in the way he said the word. Ferdy was dealing with his crisis in the only way he could, and who the hell was she to judge honesty? “What would you recommend?” he asked. “Could he be changed back?”

Sera blinked. “I don’t know. But I think I can find out.”

****

Before she left Ferdy’s, she had another walk around the house and grounds, this time clutching the piece of black cloth that Blair had given her. But time and rain seemed to have washed away all lingering traces from the party. Even Blair’s powerful echo was barely noticeable. Besides, to get any kind of feel from the fabric, she really needed to unpeel Blair’s layer from it, and that seemed impossible. She went back home to her flat to try something else.

Pushing everything away from the middle of the living room floor, she vowed to clear up tomorrow and sat down in the center of the space she’d made. In her lap, she held the piece of black silk and Jason’s cufflink, each covered by either hand. She closed her eyes and concentrated.

She conjured the misty redness by thinking about it, but after a little, it seemed to take on a life of its own and swirled wildly until it gaped to let her glimpse a gloomy room and a desk at which sat two spirits. Spirits in the sense of dead. In the sense, in the
feel
, that was Blair. Only this was Jason. She could have spoken to him now, and he would have heard her. But that was no longer a good idea. He was at work, and he was asleep. So was his companion. And his companion, although dressed in a smart gray trouser suit, was the owner of the black silk. The woman who’d directed her through the maze to Jason’s body.

She gasped as the mists closed down, swamping her like a deluge of blood. With shaking hands, she pushed the cloth and the cufflink onto the floor and rubbed her forehead.

Who was the female? Someone who worked at C & H? Was Blair right that she had turned Jason? If so, she was hardly the stalker Ferdy had feared. She would have been recognized, surely, as a friend of Jason’s.

She never had much clue as to the time a vision portrayed. It could be years in the past, or it could be the present moment. In this case, since Jason hadn’t been dead for long, it had to be some time in the last couple of days. Or right now.

She threw her head back in distress because she needed to know more, and yet she didn’t want to go back. Those walking dead gave her the sort of creeps she’d never had from any spirit before, even the angry and disturbed who’d troubled her since childhood.

Slowly, she reached out again and picked up the piece of silk. This time, as if the link had strengthened, the female’s spirit swamped her. Blood and greed and fierce intelligence. And obedient adoration for someone or something. She had a glimpse of a house, a room, full of dead spirits. Full of vampires, waiting for the word.

What word?

On the question, she was flung out with such force that she let the silk fall to the floor and wondered in panic if the female vampire had felt her presence. Would she become a target of these creatures? Would alliance with Blair save her?

She rose to her feet, swept up the cloth and the cufflink, and stashed them back in the bureau before heading into the bathroom for a shower. “Drop it, Sera,” she whispered to herself as she stepped under the gently steaming jets of water. “Tell Ferdy to keep his money and move on. It isn’t worth it; Serafina’s doesn’t need this.
I
don’t need this.”

And yet she owed Ferdy for whatever had happened under her nose at that party. She owed him and Jason, for playing jokes instead of protecting them as she’d promised. She’d broken her word, and if there was one thing she despised above all others, it was that. It had happened to her too often in the past: a lonely, desperate child beginning to hope because an adult had promised something which never materialized—from little things like sweets or a trip to the play park or the cinema, to bigger ones like
“You’re family now.”
She never was, apart from with Mattie and George.

The old, familiar pain washed over her, and for once, she closed her eyes and let it come. They’d been the only real family she’d ever known. Of course, Sera had been a total cow when she’d first gone to them, a cheeky and unhelpful twelve-year-old, and, because underneath it all she’d liked them and wanted so much for them to like her, she’d been clutching very tight to the hard shell she’d learned was her only protection from
real
hurt—not hits and kicks, which she could dodge or give back, but the worst kind. Rejection.

But Mattie and George had never rejected her. Patiently, they’d waited and, with kindness and fun, broken through her protective layers. And she had the impression they were almost as surprised as she by the strength of the bond which grew so quickly between them then. She’d loved them fiercely and knew that any good in her had come from them. From them, she’d learned never to break her word, because they never had. Or at least not until Mattie died. Mattie had promised never to leave her, but neither of them had had any control over that. Sera had been upstairs listening to music while Mattie’s life expired only feet below her.