Bond of Darkness Read online

  “This might help, too, sir.” Steve slid the single, precious sheet of paper out of its folder and handed it to Posada.

  He lifted an eyebrow but said nothing, simply started reading. An instant later, his head snapped up and he stared at her. “Where the hell did you get this, Reynolds?”

  “A CI gave it to me, sir. I’ve worked with that source for almost fifteen years and always found him completely reliable.” Well, that was true enough, as far as it went. She kept her head up and her breathing calm, refusing to give in to nerves. “He gave me the tip which broke open the Llano Estacado Bank robberies.”

  “Wow.” Posada shook his head. “Cordero!”

  The only man in a business suit swung around and came back. Posada handed him the page. “What do you think?”

  “Routing numbers look real. I’d have to double-check the account numbers. Inside—” He looked up. “I’m drooling, boss.”

  Posada slapped him on the back and the two grinned together.

  Steve unwound just a little bit, marveling at how the room seemed a bit brighter now that Ethan’s gift wasn’t a trap. On the other hand, what would happen to her if Ethan ever became the only one who could help them?

  SAN ANTONIO RIVER WALK, LATE THAT EVENING

  The saloon’s DJ cut the latest Keith Urban hit off short, apparently tired of hearing good lyrics. In its place, he installed a high-energy rock anthem from a new British band, cranking up the volume to stadium levels. How many patrons did he want to deafen with this ode to self-indulgence?

  Ethan edged forward to count and bumped against the manager’s wooden desk, sending a pile of liquor receipts sliding toward the floor. He slammed his elbow against them, hoping his MP5 would forgive the indignity of becoming a management prop. They settled back into place and he patted them down, stabilizing them against the music’s insistent pulse. His beloved submachine gun nestled comfortably back into the crook of his arm, ready to be fired at the twitch of his finger.

  He gritted his teeth and cooled his heartbeat, reminding himself yet again what he was here for. He was backup tonight, not primary, since he reeked far more than Jean-Marie did. At least to vampiro senses.

  Jean-Marie was a superb spy, capable of learning any bit of information, and an astonishingly good assassin, judging by results rather than skill with guns. His two centuries as a vampiro gave him the ability to blend into crowds, with almost no identifiable scent. Only Don Rafael would have had a better chance to ambush any of Devol’s bandolerismo. But he was back at Compostela, with Doña Grania.

  Right now, Jean-Marie was concealed high overhead on the saloon’s roof, upwind of any bandolero’s likely approach. Ethan watched from inside, ready to move in any direction. Madame Celeste had hit San Antonio’s tourists brutally hard, stretching the local compañía to its utmost. Hennessy, the Dallas adalid, had brought his compañía down to help, concealing them in the most scented shrubbery along the River Walk. Luis’s men watched the police and commercial surveillance cameras, where they’d also ensure no vampiros’ faces were permanently recorded.

  All they needed now was for one of Madame Celeste’s bandolerismo to walk past. For all the reports of prosaico deaths and rumors of vampiro sightings, there were no guarantees one would appear at the fattest nighttime tourist attraction in Texas—the Crystal Star Saloon on San Antonio’s River Walk.

  Ethan smiled faintly and subtly flexed his shoulders above his MP5. Should one of those bastards appear, they’d show him a deathly good time—after they got the prosaicos out of the way.

  Steve would enjoy a party like this, plus her superb shooting skills and uncanny ability to sight opponents would be an incredible asset. But it was far too dangerous to involve a prosaica, even a trained cop.

  “Two women are leaving,” Rough Bear reported from the saloon’s security station. “We’re now down to seventeen prosaicos in the main room and two staff. Another woman is standing up.”

  Reckless female, Jean-Marie snorted.

  Ethan grunted his assent. One a.m. was not when he’d advise a lady to stroll alone through a thickly landscaped park of cypress, palm trees, and other flowering plants and trees, scenically lit by ornamental lanterns. No matter how much the local bureaucrats touted their city’s safety at all hours.

  At least Rough Bear could see the saloon’s classic décor clearly—its rough wooden paneling and brick walls, long bar with the large assortment of bottled temptations, scattered small round tables, bent-frame wooden chairs, leather- and denim-clad waiters and waitresses. And all of it under very modern lighting, sound, and security systems which could be discreetly hired at the blink of an eye. Such as the Santiago Trust had done tonight, to observe the other guests.

  “Ethan.” Rough Bear’s voice sharpened, icily clear through their expensive headsets.

  Even the hairs on his arms came to full alert. “Yo?”

  “Roald Viterra—that big blond—is dancing with a prosaica. I didn’t see him before because the DJ was blocking my view.”

  Shit. If that torturer got his hands on a girl . . . “Did you catch that, Jean-Marie?”

  “Copy,” the Frenchman said far too laconically. He must be evolving and rejecting plans faster than his tongue could tell them.

  “Do you want to move now?” He had to ask.

  “No, we have to wait until he comes out.” Jean-Marie gave the expected answer.

  I’m a good enough shot to take out Viterra from here, without harming the girl, Ethan countered, continuing the argument on a more private channel. All I’d have to do is step into the entrance hall.

  How the hell would you explain shots fired inside a nightclub?

  It’s Texas. Somebody lost their head for a moment.

  Nobody’s that insane.

  We’re in Texas. We can fix the trial.

  No. Women would be hurt. Jean-Marie slithered forward, the sound of steel grinding over a tile roof barely apparent.

  Ethan snarled privately but deferred to his elder hermano.

  “He just looked around but didn’t seem to see anything,” reported Rough Bear. “Now he’s got the girl by the hand and is leading her outside, fast. The southern side door,” he added.

  South side? Crap. That was Jean-Marie’s worst view.

  “Positions, everyone,” Ethan ordered, and bolted out of the office, racing for that side door. He had snipers atop several roofs farther downstream. Surely one of them could take out Viterra.

  He shoved past a janitor, barely bothering to hide his gun under his denim jacket. Prosaico lives were his concern now, not their delicate sensibilities.

  The door slammed before he could reach it and he wrenched it open. The night air was hot, moisture wrapping his throat like an unseen hand. Honeysuckle teased his nostrils, while a woman trilled with laughter over a man’s compliment.

  Why had he ever thought he wanted Steve to flirt like that with him? Thank God one woman at least had some sense.

  “Who has Viterra?” he demanded of the men linked to him.

  “I do. But I can’t shoot him without hitting the girl,” Jean-Marie reported far too calmly. Dammit, there was no time for Jean-Marie to come down from his roof.

  Somebody else had to do better.

  Would Steve accept the older, more feral vampiro code of justice under these circumstances, when a woman had been kidnapped by a known murderer?

  Ethan sniffed, testing the layers of scent for the girl. Where were they? Ah, there!

  “Too many trees,” said Hennessy from the bridge, undoubtedly cursing the River Walk’s curved layout which made it impossible to cover all lines of fire. “Plus, there’s the—”

  “Girl?”

  “Aye, her, too, Ethan,” Hennessy agreed, in his still-fluid brogue.

  If Hennessy didn’t have a shot . . . Shit. Ethan ran faster, dropping all pretense of being a tourist until he moved with vampiro speed. He was arriving from a different angle than the others and might have a better chance.
r />   He slid through a clump of plants, saving valuable time and steps on the sidewalk, and ignored signs promoting the gaudy Mexican restaurant nearby. A carved stone bridge gleamed like moonlight ahead, shrouded in foliage but with a few gaudy umbrellas just visible at its base. Cars hummed on the streets overhead, faint reminders of other prosaicos nearby.

  A woman was giggling softly a few steps ahead. “Oh, you’re so sweet,” she purred, clearly anticipating a delightful night.

  Ethan bared his fangs. No, not in his Texas. And not where one of these bastards could hurt Steve.

  A breeze whispered past, teasing his nose with honeysuckle and other flowers.

  A boot scraped on the concrete and the woman’s murmurs abruptly became a screech. Ethan glanced up at the bridge.

  Viterra stared down at him, his face contorted in rage.

  Ethan immediately fired a quick burst from his MP5. The bullets pinged off the stonework and the woman screamed, loud and long.

  Viterra was already gone, and Ethan raced after him, tasting bitter betrayal in the honeysuckle’s perfume. “Who has a shot?”

  Empty silence.

  The prosaica cursed him, words gentler than those he used for himself. A quick look over the parapet showed Viterra leaping off a boat and through a café’s patio, shielded by the bridge’s bulk from anyone’s vision except Ethan’s. He snatched a waiter away from making change and dragged him along, the man’s denim-clad legs futilely scrabbling over the tiled floor.

  Ethan snarled and leapt to follow, unable to shoot again.

  Two steps later, the bastard had rushed into a hotel and was gone, dropping the waiter like a sack of flour.

  Ethan ground his teeth and kept going, knowing damn well his chances of success were negligible. Shielded by their sense of smell, nobody could get close to Devol’s followers except a prosaica.

  ELEVEN

  DPS HEADQUARTERS, JULY 10

  Steve balanced the heavy filing box on one hip and blocked the conference room’s door with her booted foot, determined not to let the fast-moving steel nip her fingers yet again. They kept the room continuously locked now, hiding the towering piles of unanalyzed case files, like glaciers eager to break apart into icebergs. Once the task force had started asking around, far too many cases had come to light.

  After that, files had poured into Austin, escorted by hardfaced cops with little to say and a desperate, uneasy hope in their eyes. It wasn’t right to have one or two women die in a week from unexplained causes, when the same jurisdiction might see that many in a year. And when they were young and healthy? Hell, she, too, would run out of tests to call for and words to use in the “cause of death” box. Multiply that by four big cities and more than two hundred miles of interstate highway . . . She’d personally stopped counting at three dozen killings.

  She slid the box onto the side table and picked up the log sheet, ready to start checking in its contents.

  “How many do you have there?” Mike Morris eyed the innocuous brown and white cardboard suspiciously.

  “Two, one of them a suicide. Suicide was a nurse so more toxicology work was done than usual.”

  “But nothing found.” He double-checked his gun and shoved it into its holster.

  “Not so far. Finished for the week?”

  “Yeah. Put in my forty and the bosses have officially forbidden any overtime. Everybody else is already gone.”

  “Crap.”

  “You got it.” He grinned, his teeth startling white against his normally somber face. “My wife’s helping out at a camp for special-needs kids this weekend. Now I can go with her and enjoy the rug rats, too.”

  She smiled back at him, warmed by his simple joy. Once she’d hoped to be as comfortable around small children as he was. It probably would never happen. But if it didn’t—“Show me your pictures on Monday, ’kay?”

  “Sure thing. Don’t let the cleaning crew walk you out again, hear?”

  She laughed and waggled her fingers at him, silently promising not to be that stupid twice—especially after Posada’s lecture on working late. Morris was gone a minute later, jauntily whistling the latest Tim McGraw hit.

  She finished logging in the new cases and stretched, eyeing the possibilities for a late lunch. Cold cheese pizza, cold veggie pizza, and cold—she lifted a lid—mushroom and meatball pizza. Better options than anything in her kitchen certainly and she’d learned long ago not to turn down pizza if she didn’t want to cook. Still, after years of eating little else, she wasn’t in a hurry for more.

  She tore off a piece of cheese pizza and settled down with her sweet tea to read one last case file before going home. And try not to think about spending another Friday night alone. Or more irritatingly, with Ethan.

  This girl was a University of Texas coed, who’d died outside an Austin bookstore. Like all the other case files, hers was most notable for what it didn’t contain. The X-rays were very brief, for example, with only the standard set and nothing highlighted. Toxicology had done a full screen and found nothing, including no illegal drugs. She had no known preexisting medical conditions and, thus, nothing requiring further explanations on that form, either. Nothing resembling a real cause of death was mentioned on any of the forms.

  And yet there was far too much smoke, given all these deaths with similar modi operandi, not to have a fire.

  Steve finished the slice and decided not to tackle the rest. She’d never worked out of headquarters before but Dan’s list of suggested restaurants was posted on the back of the door.

  Wiping off her hands, she turned the page and read the first observation about the girl from the forensic investigator who’d gone over the death scene. Most of this was as minimalist as everyone else’s reports, except he described the deceased in a little more detail than usual.

  The girl’s head had been arched to one side and stretched back, like several of the others, thus exposing her jugular. A precise drawing was included, showing its exact angle.

  Steve stirred, something flickering behind her eyes. But it was gone before she could catch it.

  Given the hot weather, the young lady had been wearing a deep V-necked tee. The investigator’s drawing also showed how she looked, with the fabric fallen open and two small acne papules just above the great vein. The investigator had even helpfully drawn the small sores with a red pen.

  Outside, two secretaries were loudly wishing each other a very good weekend, as measured by success in hunting men. Cute men.

  Steve turned the page, determinedly not listening to them. She propped her chin on her hand, curving her neck and shoulder against her arm. She’d rather be shacked up with a single, perfect lover. Tall, blond, beautiful as a god . . .

  The autopsy report was just as neat and detailed, full of steps taken, tests run, observations made. It, too, included a series of excellent drawings, showing the deceased’s exact condition.

  Steve started to flip the page, looking for the full toxicology report—and stopped. There was something about that picture . . . The neck was wrong. Where on earth were the two papules?

  Her pulse moving faster, she double-checked the autopsy report. Nothing about little red sores, whether in a drawing or the written report.

  But the forensic investigator specifically described and showed red papules on the neck, above the jugular.

  How could they have occurred? And why would they have disappeared?

  Two papules. Just above the jugular.

  She rubbed her neck—and remembered another time when a man’s hands had done exactly the same thing, while his voice had purred enticements in her ear, and her body had trembled in anticipation. His mouth had closed over her throat and he’d bitten down hard, sucking her blood.

  Her body jolted yet again, shuddering in an echo of that shattering orgasm.

  She’d had two little marks on her throat afterward and nothing at all the next day. Just like this coed.

  But she’d always put that down to healing. The coe
d had died. Could vampiro saliva so accelerate the process that all traces of contact vanished, even without assistance from a living body?

  Ethan, Ethan the vampiro.

  But he wouldn’t murder women! Not Ethan.

  She shoved her chair back so hard that it slammed into the boxes behind her. She flung herself out of it and began to stride around the room, barely noticing the boxes she dodged.

  Next to this, his execution of Garcia Herrera faded into obscurity.

  Ethan was the only vampiro she knew. He had the means to kill all these women, given his fangs and his strength, his ability to create the small bite marks which healed so very quickly. And no two women had been killed at exactly the same time. It was barely—barely!—possible one man could have done all the killings.

  But not him! Oh, dear Lord, now she sounded like all the other women she’d ever interviewed who denied up until the last minute that their loved one would ever lift a hand in anger to anyone.

  Except she was a trained investigator, a professional, a Texas Ranger. She should know.

  Of course, there could be more vampiros but she’d never met any, nor seen any signs of them.

  She pounded her fists against the uncaring boxes.

  Dammit, not Ethan! Not her lover of fifteen years!

  She swung around and leaned her back against the files, the silent witnesses to dozens of murders. She was a cop. Above all else, she had to have justice for these women. But how?

  Risk everything to bring the truth into daylight, even if it meant talking to Ethan in person.

  Steve brought her big Ford Expedition to a decorous stop before the impassive gates, gravel shifting under her tires like the butterflies flitting around in her stomach. If she’d had any other choice, she wouldn’t have come, especially when she wasn’t even sure she had the right place. After exhausting every other option, she’d finally checked out every large rural property which hadn’t changed hands since Texas entered the Union. This was the only one big and secretive enough to hold Ethan, and its inhabitants had even agreed to let her in.