“Just knowing you would consider it means the world to me.”
“Then you would do it, if I asked?You would transform me?”
Pleasure and pain again warred within him. “No.”
Her lips parted in surprise. “Why?”
“I told you how the virus works. If you aren’t a gifted one, your body won’t mutate the virus and you will turn vampire instead of immortal.” He fingered a satiny strand of brown hair that had escaped from her ponytail. “Every one of us has black hair and dark brown eyes.”
Understanding dimmed her hazel gaze. “You think I would turn vampire, that I don’t have the right DNA.”
“Do you possess any special gifts you haven’t mentioned?” he asked, not really holding out any hope. “Telepathy? Telekinesis? The ability to shape shift? Teleport? See the future? Know an object’s history by touch? Heal with your hands? See the dead?”
She shook her head with the first gift mentioned and continued wagging it back and forth as he named a few others. “Nothing. No special gifts.”
“Then I won’t transform you and risk your turning vampire.”
Sarah stared up at Roland, so depressed now she didn’t really know what to say. No matter what path they took, they were screwed. They could either go their separate ways, maintain a human/immortal relationship he seemed to think would be doomed, or transform her, which would probably turn her into a bloodlusting lunatic vampire.
“This really blows.”
“I know,” he agreed fatalistically.
“Isn’t there a blood test or something that would let us know for sure whether I have the right DNA?”
“Yes. If you decide you want to be transformed, I can take you to one of our labs and have a sample tested to be sure.”
But she could tell he didn’t think there was a chance in hell she would turn immortal.
Hmm. Alone without Roland. Bitter with Roland. Or murderously crazy.
Sarah wasn’t too thrilled with the choices.
“Anybody home?” a voice called out upstairs.
Roland’s eyes immediately flashed bright amber as fangs burst from his gums.
He was gone in a blink, moving so quickly he seemed to vanish.
Sarah took off after him, running from the room, down the hall, and up the winding staircase.
“Don’t-kill-me-it’s-Marcus!” was shouted, the words emerging one on top of another.
Indistinct masculine voices followed, growing more clear as she reached the ground floor and headed for the living room.
“David gave me the code to get through the security gate and a key,” Marcus was saying. Roland must have asked how he had gotten in without tripping the alarm.
“When?”
“When I moved to North Carolina. Every immortal in the state has one.”
“I don’t.”
“That’s because you’re antisocial,” Marcus replied as though explaining it to a child.
Sarah pursed her lips. She was beginning to think the other immortals used that particular label just to aggravate him.
“If you had accepted his invitation,” Marcus went on, “he would have given you one, too. Hello, Sarah.”
“Hi, Marcus,” she greeted as she joined them, noticing a third man standing nearby.
Roland was scowling at his friend. “Did you make certain you weren’t followed?”
“I saw, heard, and smelled nothing.”
“I didn’t see anything either,” the other man said. He was about five-eleven with dark blond hair, blue eyes, and a muscular build. Stepping forward, he offered his hand to Roland. “Chris Reordon.”
Roland shook it. “I recognized your voice.”
Chris offered his hand to Sarah next.
She smiled. “Sarah Bingham.”
“Nice to meet you, Sarah.”
When Chris gave her a friendly smile, Roland sidled up next to her and draped an arm around her shoulders.
Was he jealous?
The warning scowl he sent the blond certainly seemed to indicate he was as he motioned for them to sit down. “What have you found out?”
Sarah and Roland sat beside each other on the sofa. Marcus took the cushy chair on Sarah’s other side while Chris sat in one of the chairs opposite them and dropped a manila file folder on the coffee table between them.
“The vamps seem to have gone deep underground,” Marcus said wearily. “Lisette and I have spent every hour of darkness searching for them for the past three nights and haven’t found a thing. If they’re feeding, they’re doing it well outside our territory and are being damned careful to stay under our radar on their way in and out.”
“Any idea where Bastien’s lair is?”
“None. There’s been no sign of him either. It’s almost as if they all dropped off the face of the bloody earth.”
Sarah watched Roland’s scowl deepen and wondered if perhaps he and Marcus had killed them all.
If all of his henchmen and fellow vampires were dead, would Bastien flee or stay and rebuild his numbers?
“What about missing persons?” Roland asked Chris. “Could he be busy recruiting?”
Chris shook his head. “No new missing person reports since he torched your house. And my men at the county morgues said there haven’t been any new feeding deaths camouflaged as car crashes, shootings, suicides, or farming acci-dents. As Marcus said, any vamps in the area are finding their nourishment elsewhere.”
So maybe there were no more vampires left, she thought hopefully.
Chris seemed to be following the same train of thought, because he leaned forward and braced his elbows on splayed knees. “Is it possible you killed them all and Bastien is on the run?”
“No,” Roland immediately responded. “This guy has it in for me. He isn’t going to give up after just three skirmishes.”
Inwardly Sarah shook her head. Three skirmishes in two days. Three days of training. All together it seemed as though months had passed.
Marcus nodded. “I agree. Whatever this is, it’s personal. He isn’t going to give up that easily.”
“As to that”—Chris flipped the file open—“I’ve been doing some digging and trying to find out who the hell this guy is. Since you said he looked to be about thirty and is lucid enough to organize and maintain a small army, I figured he had to have been transformed within the past ten years or so. Unfortunately, every Bastien or Sebastien, first or middle name, born in England in the past fifty years has been accounted for. I expanded the search to include Scotland, Ireland, and Wales and came up with the same results, which means it’s an assumed name. He’s going to be hard to track down.”
Vampires were usually fairly easy to trace because, unlike immortals, they tended to keep the names they were given at birth. They might try to change it once or twice to avoid suspicion, but inevitably reverted to the first once the madness kicked in and it became more difficult to arrange and keep up with aliases.
Roland glowered. “So you’ve got nothing?”
“Not exactly,” Chris said, unfazed by Roland’s ire and Marcus’s growing irritation. “Like you immortals, when vampires use assumed names they usually use family names because they’re easier to remember. I put the genealogy geeks on it and they found this.”
Rifling through the papers, Chris chose three, turned them upside down, and slid them across the coffee table to Roland.
Sarah, Roland, and Marcus all leaned forward to peruse them.
It looked like something printed off of various Web pages. One said something about the House of Lords. Another was the passenger list of a ship. She couldn’t tell what the third sheet said. The writing was too small. However, there was an old sketch, displayed near the top, of a man who resembled Bastien.