The Dark-Hunters (351 page)

“Why?”

“I don’t know. You have Hollywood to thank for that. Most humans who help them have the misguided belief that the Daimons can make them immortal by biting their necks and converting them. They can’t. You’re either born an Apollite or you’re not. There’s no way for them to pass along their powers or false means of elongating their lives to a human.”

She shook her head as if she couldn’t believe what he was telling her. “Have you any idea how hard this is to believe?”

“Yeah, well, you might not believe in Santa Claus either, but that doesn’t mean someone isn’t leaving presents for the kids on Christmas Eve.”

She frowned at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that behind every myth, there’s usually some degree of truth.”

Startled by the new voice, Susan turned to find Leo standing in the doorway behind her. She couldn’t believe it, but she was actually happy to see him.

“Hi, Ravyn,” Leo said in greeting.

Ravyn inclined his head to him.

Leo met Susan’s gaze. “Patricia needs to get the lead out of Ravyn before he heals over it. Why don’t you come out here with me while she works on him?”

His blasé tone amazed her. Oh sure. Why not? After all, the man or Dark-Hunter or whatever the hell he was had more lead in him than her plumbing.

It was just such a normal comment.…

Forcing herself not to roll her eyes, Susan followed Leo out of the room and passed the older woman in the hallway, who didn’t speak to either one of them. It was obvious that Patricia wasn’t any happier about all this than Susan was.

While Patricia entered the storeroom they’d just vacated, Leo led Susan up a back metal stairway to a large conference room. He turned on the lights and held the door open for her. The white walls and black ceiling gave the room a cold, contemporary feel that wasn’t helped by the glass conference table and black leather chairs. It had all the appeal of an emergency root canal, and something about the room made her feel like a grade school student getting called into the principal’s office.

“Have a seat,” Leo said before he shut the door.

It wasn’t in Susan’s nature to follow anyone’s orders, but she was too tired and upset at the moment to argue. She just wanted five minutes of peace so that she could lick her wounds and pull herself together.

“Are you okay?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said as she sat down. The leather creaked under her weight, which really just made her feel so much better about herself and her situation. “I woke up this morning, had my cornflakes and coffee as usual. Went to work for my sleazeball paper and saw my prized story had been butchered and turned to crap. Had my boss crawl all over my butt because I can’t leave reality behind me. So to help me with that, he gives me this assignment to track down some kid writing about a catman who prowls the market. Then while I’m contemplating the total absurdity that is my life, my best friend calls and tells me she has a lead for a real story that could get my reputation back. Only that story turns out to be one about the cops helping vampires eat us. I adopt a cat that I’m allergic to because my girlfriend is paranoid. I take him home to have him become the very thing I’d been told to find by my eccentric boss. And the next thing I know, my house is blown to shit. The Catman eats a guy in front of me, and my two best friends on the planet are now dead.”

She paused to pin an angry stare on that stone look of his. “Gee, I’m not sure how I should feel right now, Leo. If you have a clue could you please let me know? This isn’t exactly within my scope of past experience. I’m tired, I’m stunned, and I just want to go to bed and have all of this be some really awful nightmare. But I have a bad feeling that when I do wake up tomorrow, it’s just going to get worse.”

Leo gave her a sympathetic smile as he neared her chair. He put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I’m really sorry, Susan. But I wanted you—”

The door opened to show her a group of two men and one woman joining them. The first to enter was a tall, dark-haired man who had a lethal look about him. He was incredibly good-looking and dressed in an expensive gray sweater and black pleated pants. The man behind him looked every bit as dangerous, but his hair was a medium brown, while the woman was tall, athletic, and blond. Oddly enough, the woman looked a lot like Patricia and Alicia.

Leo straightened up and an air of authority literally settled onto his shoulders. No longer the quirky little boss she knew so well, he now struck her as a no-nonsense predator.

“Susan,” he said, indicating each of the three in turn. “Meet Otto Carvalletti, Kyl Poitiers, and Jessica Addams.”

She sighed. “Hi.”

They didn’t respond in kind. Instead, they took up stations around her in a mafia-like manner. As Susan lowered her gaze, she noticed something that they had in common with Leo … all of them had the same spiderweb tattoo on their hands.

A bad feeling went through her. But she wasn’t about to let them intimidate her. She’d been through enough today without that. Rising to her feet, she gave them each her own take-no-shit glare. “What’s going on, Leo?”

He ignored her to address the other three. “Knock off the Big Bad Scary, guys, and have a seat. We have a lot to go over and only a few more hours before the sun sets.”

To Susan’s complete shock, they actually obeyed him. It was extremely surreal and reminded her of a Chihuahua calling down a pack of Dobermans.

“What about her?” Otto jerked his chin in Susan’s direction. “Is she secured?”

Leo sighed as he sat down beside her. “I’m really sorry that you got dragged into this, Susan. I never meant for you to find out about any of it. That’s what I was trying to tell you when they walked in. I just wanted you to trace Dark Angel. You were supposed to keep living in your blissful ignorance, never learning that vampires exist.”

Ah, God, it just kept getting better and better. “So all the crap we write about in the paper is real?”

“No,” Leo said, to her surprise. “It’s all, as you say, crap. I only run the paper to make sure that none of the true stuff gets out. I mean, let’s face it, the ‘I adopted a cat and he turned into a man in my living room’ story isn’t exactly something you call the
New York Times
about. You call papers like ours. For the last sixty years, my family has run the
Inquisitor
so that they would get first dibs on any story that could expose us to the public.”

In a weird way that made sense, and the fact that it did truly scared her. “And the other reporters at the
Inquisitor,
are they like you, hiding the truth?”

“No,” he said, his face earnest, “they’re all pretty much insane. I usually hire crackpots because even if they stumbled onto the truth and tried to expose it, no one would believe them.”

Well, that explained so much about her co-workers and her own position. So much so that it cut her deeply. “You hired me because I’d lost all my credibility in journalism.”

His eyes burned into hers. “No. I hired you because you were one of the few friends I had in college. Without your help, I’d have never graduated, so when you got into trouble, I offered you a hand-up … the fact that no one would ever again take you seriously was just an added bonus.”

She glared at him. “Thanks a lot, Leo.”

He brushed her anger aside with a wave of his tattooed hand. “I’m not going to lie to you, Susan. I respect you too much for that.”

“Yet you’ve been lying to me all this time.”

He looked offended by that. “When? Have I ever denied that vampires were real?”

“You said it was bullshit.”

“No, I said bullshit pays for my Porsche … and it does. I’m the one, as I recall, who kept telling you to embrace the ridiculous. To believe in the unbelievable.”

He did have a point now that she thought about it. That had been his rant at her since the day she joined his staff. Sighing, she retook her seat. “So why did you send me after Ravyn if you didn’t want me to find out the truth?”

“Because I was hoping it wasn’t Ravyn that the student was talking about. I mean, let’s face it—there are a
lot
of Were-Hunters in Seattle, and since they live for centuries, to the uninformed it might seem like they’re immortal. I was hoping you’d go, get me a name and address, and then I could clean it up if it were real.”

“Why not just go yourself?”

He scoffed at her. “I’m not an investigative reporter. I have all the subtlety of a brick, which is why I’m more of an enforcer. Besides, I knew that even if you found out the truth and saw it with your own eyes, you’d never believe it. Somehow you’d find a logical, legitimate way to explain it all away that I could then use with other people. See?” He looked past her, to the other three, who’d been eerily silent all this time. “Now we have a bit of a problem.”

She snorted at Leo. “
You
have a problem? Try being in my shoes.”

Leo rubbed the back of his neck nervously. “Yeah, well, you
are
the problem, Sue.”

Her heart stopped beating. “How do you mean?”

“Civilians aren’t allowed to know about us,” Otto growled from his seat across from her. “Ever.”

“Uh-huh,” she said slowly. “You know with that sinister tone you should look into working for the IRS. I’m sure they’re desperate for people who can cow others with a single growl.”

Leo sat forward. “Sue, don’t taunt the cobra. He tends to bite.”

And by the look on Otto’s face she could see that Leo wasn’t kidding. She looked back at Leo as Kyl handed him a shiny black folder. He opened it briefly, then set it on the table.

Leo drummed his fingers on it while he addressed her. “Normally, we recruit members who have skills we can use. But sometimes we have unexpected things come up, such as the last twenty-four hours, where innocent bystanders accidentally get caught up by mistake. Those mistakes have to be corrected.” His tone was deadly and threatening.

Refusing to be intimidated, she crossed her arms over her chest and gave him an equally withering stare. “And how do you propose to correct me?”

“You have a choice,” Kyl spoke at last. “Either you become one of us or…”

She waited. When he didn’t finish, she gave him an arch stare. “Or what? You kill me?”

It was the woman who answered. “Yes.”

“No,” Leo said sternly. He looked back at Susan. “But we can’t take the chance that you’ll expose us. Do you understand?”

Was he serious? But then, all she had to do was look at the doom squad to know that answer.

“And what are
you
in all this, Leo?” she asked, needing to fully understand what she’d inadvertently been sucked into. “Why do these guys,” she indicated the other three at the table with her, “listen to you?”

“Because I’m the Squire Regis for Seattle, since my dad retired. I run the Theti branch which, by default, makes me the head of all the Squire branches in this area.”

“Theti?”

“Blood Rites,” Otto said in a low, guttural tone. “We do other Squire jobs as well, but we’re the ones who are licensed to enforce the Council’s mandates.”

“And we use any means necessary to keep our world a secret.” Kyl narrowed his eyes meaningfully on her.

This had to be the weirdest day of her entire life, and given the fact that she spent time with her grandmother, who swore that her female dog was Susan’s reincarnated grandfather and wore her clothes wrong side out to keep the lightbulbs from fading the dye, and with her co-worker Joanie, who had a penchant for putting Post-it notes over her desk drawer to keep the little men from leaving it, that said something.

They really meant to kill her.

“So what’s your decision?” Otto asked. He looked just a little overeager for her to say no.

“What?” she asked, unable to resist teasing the cobra—it just seemed like a moral imperative. “Had a dry spell of killing people lately?”

His face completely stoic, he responded dryly, “As a matter of fact, yes. If it doesn’t end soon, I might get out of practice.”

“God. Forbid,” she said in a mock tone of awe.

Leo cleared his throat, drawing her attention back to him. “Sue, I need an answer.”

“Do I really have a choice?”

“No,” they said in unison.

Leo’s face softened ever so slightly. “You know too much about us.”

Susan sat there in silence as the events of the day replayed through her mind. It was all too much to take. God, how she wished that she could just go crazy like her grandmother to get away from it all. But life wasn’t being that kind to her at present. Her sanity was intact, because heaven forbid she have any escape from her sucky situation. “And this new life you’re offering me. What does it entail?”

Leo glanced to the others before he answered. “Not much. Really. You swear an oath to us to keep your silence and you go on our payroll and into our system so that we can monitor you.”

Those words, combined with his tone, sent a chill down her spine. “Monitor me how?”

“It’s not as ominous as it sounds,” Leo assured her. “We just keep a tab on you from time to time to make sure you haven’t been talking to any civilians about us. So long as you maintain your silence, you get a lot of perks.”

“Such as?”

Leo pushed the folder toward her. “Private planes. Exclusive vacations. A 401(k) and stock options to beat the band. Funds to start your own business if you want.” He paused to give her a stern stare. “And the one thing you’ve never had. A family that’ll be there whenever you need it.”

That last bit stung and Leo knew it. Her father had abandoned her and her mother when Susan was only three years old. She had no memory of him whatsoever, and her mother had never taken her to meet his side of the family. An only child like Susan, her mother had been close to her parents, but they, too, had died while Susan was a small child, and then her mother had died in a car wreck three days before Susan turned seventeen.

She’d been alone ever since.

Family had been the one thing in her life that she’d always craved with a burning passion, and much like her respectability, it was as elusive as a unicorn’s horn. It was the one carrot Leo knew to dangle in front of her.