“Linda knows.”
“Good. She seems like good people.”
Melanie smiled. “She is.” She was pretty damn courageous, too. Linda had been scared as hell when Vince, Cliff, and Joe had taken up residence in the network, but she had sucked it up and worked with them until she had lost that fear.
Unlike Dr. Whetsman and certain other colleagues.
Melanie guided her mind away from the job. She didn’t want to think of work when she had Bastien snuggled up with her. All she wanted to think about was how good it felt to have his large, warm, muscled form pressed against hers.
Well, that and . . .
“Go ahead. Ask me,” he murmured.
“Ask you what?”
“The question I imagine you’ve been wanting to ask ever since the meeting.”
“Are you sure you aren’t telepathic?”
He grunted. “I wish I were. It would take all of the guesswork out of dealing with people.”
“True.”
“So go ahead and ask me.”
“Who was the woman?”
“The one Ewen caught me draining?”
Melanie nodded as lethargy stole upon her. She shared Tanner’s belief that Bastien wouldn’t kill anyone who hadn’t done something seriously wrong. So what had the woman done? What had she been to him?
“She was a madam . . . of sorts. There were a lot of homeless children and poor children in what the ton would think of as the seedier parts of London. Always hungry. Working at a ridiculously young age to help put food in their mouths and on the family’s table.”
“I’m guessing there were no child labor laws back then.”
“No. Though a few fought for them.” He sighed. “Pedophiles are not new in our society. They were present in my youth and long before that. This particular woman catered to that sort of clientele, stealing, conning, or buying children and selling them into prostitution.”
Melanie didn’t understand people like that. People who seemed to have no conscience. “How did you find out about her?”
“There was a boy. He had been earning just enough to stay alive working as a chimney sweep when he stumbled upon a temporary resting place I had chosen after I stayed out too late to make it back to the apartment Blaise and I used to share. Blaise was dead then, recently destroyed by Roland and I was . . . lost. First my sister. Then my best friend. I had had to give up the rest of my family when I was transformed. So I had no one.”
Melanie gave him a squeeze.
“Anyway, this boy stumbled upon my hiding place and . . . He looked so damned skinny and hungry. And he was such a proud boy. I offered him a job, gave him some busy work so he wouldn’t think he was a charity case. You might say he was my first Second.” He shrugged. “I really just wanted to give him a warm place to stay, three squares a day. And his chatter filled the silence.” He sighed. “I don’t know. There might have been a little ‘I could have had a son like him if I hadn’t been turned’ mixed in there, too. It doesn’t really matter because he didn’t come home one day. And by the time I found him he was dead.”
“The woman . . . ?”
“Mistook him for fair game and sold him to the man who killed him.”
“So you . . .”
“Killed them both . . . and everyone associated with the woman. Her employees. Her other customers. I saved her for last. Unfortunately, Ewen came along just as I finished draining her.”
“He must not have been a telepath or he would have seen the reason you killed her.”
“I don’t know what his gift was. I only know he didn’t give me a chance to explain and nearly destroyed me before I finally managed to destroy him. I didn’t have a ready supply of blood then, so it took me three days to recover.”
“You should tell the others.”
“Do you really think knowing their friend died because he made an error in judgment will make his loss less painful or me more popular?”
“I suppose not.” She yawned.
Bastien brushed his hand over her hair. “It’s been a long night. See if you can’t get some rest.”
Melanie gave him a quick kiss and closed her eyes.
If he said anything else, she didn’t hear it. Sleep claimed her too quickly.
As Chris promised, a network employee delivered two thermal vision scopes—one for Bastien and one for Richart—and one pair of thermal vision goggles for Sheldon just before dusk.
Bastien liked the scope. So did Richart when he teleported home soon after. It fit in their pockets, and they could take it out and peer through it without altering the vision in both eyes. Call him old-fashioned, but he didn’t want to completely abandon his super-sharp immortal vision in favor of high-tech whatever.
Bastien took Melanie home once the sun set. She had a small place out in the country that reminded him of the tiny frame house Sarah had been renting when Roland had met her.
He suspected she was as obsessively neat as the immortals because the clutter he found there was minute at best. Mail scattered on the coffee table. A couple of dishes soaking in the kitchen sink. A jacket tossed on a chair.
Unable to resist, Bastien followed her into the bathroom and made love with her in the shower. It was so good it terrified him. With every touch, every look, every minute they spent together, he could feel the bond between them strengthening.
While she dressed for work, he meandered around and snooped freely. There were only two framed photographs in her small home. The couple pictured in them, their arms around each other in one and looped around Melanie in the other, must have been her parents. They looked happy in a way Bastien’s aristocratic parents never had.
Melanie’s furniture was mismatched. Some, he thought, had probably belonged to her parents. Some were purchases of her own. The atmosphere was warm. Homey. Welcoming. He wanted to sprawl on her beat-up couch, prop his feet on the coffee table, and just soak it and her in.
But duty called them both. So he took her to the network, left her with a kiss, and met Richart at UNC.
“You’re doing it again.”
“What?” Bastien looked over at Richart as the Frenchman held his thermal scope up to his right eye and scanned UNC’s campus for the fiftieth time from their position on the roof of Davis Library. “I’m doing what?”
“Mooning.”
Bastien snorted. “Last time I checked, my ass was still in my pants.”
“Not the drop your drawers and bend over mooning. The sighing as you fantasize about Melanie mooning.”
“Bollocks.”
“You’re infatuated with her. At the very least.”
Bastien thought about denying it, but . . . “Can you blame me?”
“No. But your distraction with her last night may have contributed to your not noticing the soldiers earlier.”
“So what was your excuse?”
He sighed. “I was distracted by Jenna.” He gave Bastien a rueful smile. “We’re a pair, are we not? Two hundred years old and behaving like we’re each caught up in a first crush.”
Bastien shrugged. “For me it sort of is. I’ve never felt like this before.”
Richart stared at him. “Never?”
“No time, really. When I wasn’t fighting other vampires who had succumbed entirely to the madness and avoiding fights with you immortals, I was hunting Roland.”
“I didn’t realize you fought vampires when you lived among them.”
“Hard to avoid. Sometimes they did the craziest shit. And I don’t mean crazy wild. I mean crazy demented. I knew some of them weren’t right. It just took me awhile to realize that they all eventually weren’t right.”
Richart grunted and looked at his watch. “Time to meet Stuart.”
“Already?” Maybe he had been mooning. He hadn’t noticed the passage of time. Bastien took out his cell phone and dialed as promised.