Vamped Up (7 page)

Lost in thought and more tempted than ever to try on her deceased mother’s necklace, Eve slowly unclasped the dainty silver lock. Reached around her neck. Fastened it together.

As the necklace settled on her skin, finding its natural place on the center of her chest, frigid gusts of wind blew through the courtyard, rousing leaves and students alike. Trees shook, rumbling overhead. Leaves twirled violently in the sudden wind. Students studying in the sun were sent flying after their papers as they tumbled and danced over the courtyard lawn. Thin layers of clouds were suddenly painted across the sky. Like a heavenly artist decided last minute that the painting of CBU was incomplete without strokes of white.

Chills scattered over Eve’s body as a warm flush spread from her chest down her shoulders, then her arms. Her heartbeat slowed, pounding in her chest, pairing with each slow inhale . . . and exhale.

Dante sat straight, watching the freak blast of winter weather scatter students to classes.

“Come on, let’s go,” he said, eyeing the increasing cloud cover with concern. “Have you eaten lunch?”

She shook her head, unable to formulate words under the circumstances, and brought the amulet forward to examine it. Tunnel vision focused her gaze on the deep black of the onyx and nothing else. She swam in its midnight depths, drowning. Even Dante’s words sounded muffled and very far away.

“Eve,” Dante said louder, with more determination. “Let’s get out of here and get you something to eat. I hear there’s a great place that’s not too far and you’re looking a little pale.”

She nodded, blinking fast, and realized too late that something didn’t feel right. Her chest was buzzing, warm and tingly. She was light-headed. A little dizzy. Could it be her imagination? That everyone else seemed suddenly chilled, bundling into their jackets while Eve was heating up?

She reached around, tried to unclasp the necklace. It wouldn’t unhook. She dropped the end and readjusted her fingers, trying to pull from a different angle. Wouldn’t give at all.

Winds picked up. Wispy white clouds darkened to an ominous gray.

Eve yanked a little harder on the chain. Damn it. For being so delicate, the thing had a mighty hold. She knew she shouldn’t have put it on. Now she couldn’t get it off.

As the first drops of rain fell on Eve’s shoulders, and a large gust of wind knocked over her bag, she snapped out of the daze that had come over her. She put the velvet box into her bag, then slung it over her shoulder. Maybe grabbing a quick bite to eat would bring some blood back to her brain and take away the dizziness. Maybe a solid meal would give her the strength she needed to figure out what was really going on and who’d sent the necklace to her after all these years.

“A quick bite wouldn’t hurt, I guess, but I’m driving.” Eve headed to Ruan’s Tahoe parked in the closest parking lot, with Dante in tow, the necklace radiating soft waves of warmth through her. “And I can’t stay long. I have an appointment to make before nightfall.”

“So do I.”

“Gotta get your workout in?” She let the question hang between them, giving Dante a chance to speak what was on his mind.

A small quirk teased the corners of his lips, his true plans left unspoken.

Eve had a really bad feeling about what had happened in the courtyard—her mother’s necklace, the eerie change in weather, and the way her body was responding to it. For the first time in Eve’s life, she wished for the power to see the future. Maybe then she’d know how to explain the feeling that something terrible was about to happen to her . . .

Chapter Eleven

“Ingrid Carmello, revered vampire elder, was found drained and floating in the bay early this morning. Vamp authorities arrived on scene, took the elder’s body to a private facility, and wiped the memories of the fishermen who recovered her. If you have any information related to Ingrid’s death, please contact Sergeant Stakeman at Crimson Bay PD: Secret Vamp Victim’s Unit.”

“I
CAN’T BELIEVE
I agreed to this,” Ruan mumbled, squinting at the slant of his own handwriting dead-smack in the middle of a page of ancient scroll. Yet here he was, trying to figure out what the hell he had to do with any of this. “
Manent optima coelo
.” He uttered the words slowly. Deliberately. As if each syllable deserved its own breath. “The best things await us in heaven,” Ruan said, when the translation of the passage hit him. “But you already knew what it meant.”

“It’s Latin,” Eve said, nodding. “Take a look at the rest.”

The few pages in question had been taken away from the Crimson Council meeting for private examination under Slade and Dylan’s watchful eye—the only reason the Crimson Council let it out of their sight. Little did they know, it was the only way Ruan would’ve examined the scrolls at all. He wasn’t about to make a spectacle in front of everyone. If he did, in fact, discover something in the pages that might somehow incriminate or associate him with those cursed death shades, he sure as hell didn’t want a crowd.

He hadn’t heard of death shades before the Crimson Council meeting . . . but only remembering a quarter of your extended life—a hundred years, to be exact—tended to put a damper on being able to say anything with 100 percent confidence.

Dylan had laid out the pages over his old desk in ReVamp’s back office, where she probably figured he’d be most comfortable. Considering Ruan hadn’t been back to work in a month, her instincts were off base. He could cut the tension between them with the blade on his belt.

She backed away from his shoulder, giving him much-needed breathing room to examine the remainder of the writing. Good thing, too. The pressure in the room was making his mind crawl.

“Slade and I have been working on deciphering the scrolls for weeks. I did some research on reading them, and I know the top and bottom references, here,” Dylan said, turning to the bottom scroll and tapping her finger over the two parts, “are related. But as long as we don’t know what that jumble of letters means, we can’t make sense of when or where that passage is going to happen. The rest of the scrolls are written in Valcish and might as well be destroyed, for all the good that does us. That’s where we could really use your insight.”

She was treading lightly, trying not to demand his help. Even though her intentions were transparent, Ruan appreciated the gesture. He eyed the letters carefully:

gtw drh sos aiv xkqgal—jzvv gyvumww sycoxhb kcmv hki wpxc bwijqg chdwex . . . lnm gqi lc evv toj jx bzpp gvpqnifaxp lby wdtoaxg sqwppgcujvw qxl hts fezu etu.

His eyes naturally scanned to the top of the page. To the passage reading,
place of horror, time will come, elders will fall, all will succumb.

“We need you to help with as much as you can,” she continued. “Especially the part that’s in your handwriting.”

Ruan took a deep breath and chastised himself for agreeing to come here and look over these old scraps of paper. Why would the scrolls be in his handwriting? He’d never held the pages in his hands before. At least not that he could remember. And he sure as hell wouldn’t have helped write them. Yet here he was. Staring at ancient scrolls, scrawled in his own slanted hand.

“Can you make out anything, Ruan, or are we wasting time here?” Slade leaned against the far wall that had been repainted a hideous shade of dried-blood brown. Ruan never would’ve let that color choice slide. Then again, since he’d left, Slade had been allowed to do whatever the hell he wanted with ReVamp. “You’ve had enough time to come to a conclusion. How ‘bout you loosen up and tell us what you’re thinking.”

Ruan eyed Slade carefully from his Docs to his leather pants. From his trench coat to the weapons around his belt. Shifter hadn’t changed much in a month. He was cockier, though, if that was possible, with his chin held higher than normal and a fuck-you frown on his mouth. Ruan figured Slade’s unwavering confidence had everything to do with the fact that only a month ago, Ruan thought he was madly in love with Dylan. Caused quite the friction between him and the therian-turned-vamp.

In the end, though, Dylan had chosen Slade over him as her life partner. Good choice, too, seeing as Ruan would’ve dumped Dylan like yesterday’s news once he set his eyes on Eve.

It’s not that Dylan wasn’t beautiful—she was drop-dead gorgeous, with glowing amber curls and wide, sky-blue eyes. And it’s not because she wasn’t smart and couldn’t challenge him like he needed—her IQ was probably higher than any vamp within a hundred-mile radius.

It’s just that once he met Eve, and caught sight of something familiar behind her eyes, he knew in his heart that there was no other woman for him. A part of him—a lonely part deep inside his soul—sparked to life. It was like he’d been dead before meeting her. A walking shadow. A burnt-out bulb. Though there was no way he could’ve known it. Every other woman he’d met in his life paled in comparison. Her brilliance had bewitched his soul from the start. There could be no other match for him. Ever.

“You’ve gotta be able to give us something.” Slade stalked over, and leaned across the desk. He turned the scrap of dirtied paper over again, and pointed to the bottom of the scroll. His offensive stance was pressing. The six-foot-something Assassin had a hard glare in his eye and a tick in his jaw. Ruan had a fleeting thought to toss the hybrid sucker back. “The page in your handwriting has to do with the section Dylan and I have been studying; you can’t deny it.”

At least they agreed on something. “The council seems to think so. It’s not a coincidence that these are the only two pages they gave us.” Ruan turned back to examine the first page, the one completely scribbled in Latin.

“Which means someone knows more than they’re telling us,” Slade mumbled.

“Right.”

Dylan leaned closer to Ruan, her mahogany curls falling over her shoulder, her velvet voice soft. “I’m sorry about the way you found out about this. You have to believe I had no idea what was going on.” He wanted to believe her. She was the most honest person he knew. But he couldn’t, wouldn’t, be used again by anyone, inside or outside their haven. “Do you know what the letters mean?” It was more than a question. It was a helpless plea.

Sighing, Ruan tried harder. He traced his calloused fingers over the letters, one by one, his mind running through a myriad of explanations. “It’s a cipher.”

“What do you mean?” Dylan asked, her brows pinched tight.

“An algorithm used as an encryption with a key to unlock the message.”

“Can you break it?” Hope elevated her voice.

Damn, Ruan hated to be the one to burst her bubble. “Without the key, a complex cipher is unbreakable.”

“It’s a jumble of letters that no one but you knows how to figure out, Ruan.” Slade said. “I’d say the situation is already complex.”

“There are different kinds of ciphers,” Ruan explained, trying to keep his cool when all he wanted to do was storm out of the office and crawl into his bed, leaving people on the council to clean up this mess. It was after nightfall and Eve would be home from work soon. Damn, he couldn’t wait to lift her into his arms and carry her to bed.
How quick could he sum this up and skip out?
“Shift ciphers and Caesar ciphers are simple ones that shift every letter of your hidden message by a certain number. A Shift cipher moves letters of the alphabet over, where A = B, and B = C. It’s like creating a second alphabet.”

Slade’s red eyes stared into the distance as if he was writing the shifted alphabet on the white board in his brain. “You mean like the games newborn vamps play when they want to send secret codes to their vamp buddies, like where to find their spiked blood stash?”

Ruan hated to admit it, but under the tension-riddled circumstances, Slade’s humor was a mild stress reliever. Eyes rolling and fighting the smile pulling at his lips, Ruan backed up to take in the entire scroll.

In the dim yellow lights of Ruan’s old office, the smudges on the scrolls were shadowed, worn, and impenetrable. Smoke damage had tinted the entire sheet a dark gray. Singed edges made the paper curl so much so that Dylan had to hold down the corners with a stapler and a black rose paperweight.

Ruan squashed down the twinging pulse in his neck with his thumb—the damn twitch always acted up when he felt something was askew.

He brushed his hand across the bottom of the scroll and the passage Dylan and Slade discovered. When he pulled his hand back, the hair on his arms stood on end. There was much more to the writing on these pieces of scroll than they were seeing. Like Evil itself had printed the words. “Right, Slade. Just like newborn vamp play. Although considering you’ve only embraced your vampire blood the last month or so, you’re still newborn yourself. Want a blood-dipped pacifier? I might have one stashed somewhere.” He pulled open a drawer and rummaged around.

A grumble erupted from Slade’s chest. Dylan smacked him in the shoulder, quieting him. She scanned over the letters on the scroll, whispering aloud. “Even if you shifted those letters over, it still wouldn’t mean anything.”

“We’re not dealing with newborns. Elders are brilliant. And if they wanted their message hidden really well, they wouldn’t have used a simple cipher. They would’ve probably used what’s called a Vigenère table, which is as complex as you could get.” When Dylan and Slade stared at him quizzically, he sighed. Was he the only one who studied this stuff for fun?

“It’s where you write out the alphabet twenty-six times in different rows. Each alphabet is shifted cyclically to the left compared to the previous. Imagine a giant block of letters. Here,” he said, yanking open the front drawer of what used to be his desk. “I’ll make this easier.” He pulled out his keyboard—what used to be his keyboard, he corrected—then jumpstarted the computer. “Imagine a large square with twenty-six lines through the middle.” When Windows started up, he hopped online, and searched for
Vigenère table
. He enlarged the image and right-clicked to print. “The entire alphabet would make up the first line. On the second line, directly below the first, the alphabet would be written again, this time starting with
B.
”

As the printer at the back of his ten-by-ten office came to life, he strolled over and received the paper. “Twenty-six rows of the alphabet, one row for each new line, starting with the next letter over. You take the plaintext, or word you want hidden, and cross-reference it against the keyword letters to get your cipher. To get back to the plaintext you do the reverse. But without the keyword you won’t know what the hell you’re looking for.”

“So we have to know the keyword,” Dylan said, biting her thumbnail.

“Bingo.” He handed Dylan the paper with the Vigenère table and waited for her to examine it.

“And the council thinks you know it.” Slade walked to the only window leading to a perfect view of ReVamp’s back room and peeled apart the blinds. His back went rigid, though he tried to hide it by adjusting the heavy leather trench coat over his shoulders. What was he seeing out there that had him on edge? “Do you have any idea how you could’ve written this? Or why you don’t remember?” Slade spoke over his shoulder, his eyes not releasing from something in the lab.

Ruan shook his head, racking his brain for a spark of memory. “There’s only one explanation . . . I must’ve written it before 1912.”

“What happened in 1912?” Slade asked. “Besides the damn Crimson Bay Massacre everyone is so spooked about, which I don’t understand,” he rambled, thinking aloud, “because what would a bunch of suicidal vamps taking a stand against therian restraints almost a hundred years ago have to do with the death shades and the scrolls?”

Dylan sighed and paced from one side of the room to the other, the printer paper clutched in her grasp. Clearly, Dylan had told Slade nothing about the secrets of Ruan’s past.

“You got the gist all right,” Ruan said, swiping a hand across his jaw. “Vamps refused to feed from mundanes on therian demand. They were massacred in the courtyard of Fort Point for not handing over their humanity to therians on a silver platter. Except something else was going on that night. Someone powerful—probably a vamp—had discovered how to unleash something potent from the Nether Realm for their own benefit and was playing both sides. Knowing what we know now, it was probably the same death shades we’re dealing with. The traitor gave valuable intel about the underground vampire attack that was meant to surprise the therians in the fort. Right before the vamps unleashed full-scale war on the shifters and the death shades being released inside, the place exploded. All souls lost.”

“What’s that got to do with you?”

Ruan waited to see if Dylan would offer up her involvement in his past. When she stared through the blinds, pale as a ghost, revealing nothing, Ruan said, “Dylan found me washed up on the beach behind Fort Point . . . in elite, full-scale uniform . . . with no memory.” At that, Slade’s gaze snapped around, settling on Ruan. Disbelief—or perhaps wonder—shadowed his expression. “I was the only known survivor of the massacre. I’m at least four-hundred years old, yet I can only remember a quarter of my life. And if it weren’t for Dylan, I wouldn’t be here at all.”

God, he wished he could remember what happened to him. Everything before 1912 was a void. A dark, endless abyss from where not a single piece of memory could surface. He didn’t care about losing his life before the massacre—his wife, his home—if he had one. Where there was no memory, no emotion was attached.

“It’s like having permanent amnesia. Everything’s just gone.” Ruan moved to the blind-covered window leading to the lab.

Dylan cleared her throat, jerking Ruan’s attention back around. He watched her pick at the corners of her fingers, then brush her hands up and down her arms like a draft in the room chilled her. She kept her eyes clear of him. Ruan had never had this feeling before, but now it seemed like she knew something about his past that she wasn’t sharing.