The Darkest Kiss

The scary thing was, it didn’t even seem to be much of an effort.

“You are no longer welcome here,” Vi

I turned and followed Rhoan and Qui

I turned to face her. “I have shared wine with old ones and dark gods. A young emo vamp is a long way down the ladder of the things I fear.”

She smiled her cold smile. “It is good to know even guardians get things wrong.”

“Oh, I get lots of things wrong, but there’s one thing you should always remember.” I met her cold gaze with one of my own, and saw something flicker through the brown depths. Just what that was, I couldn’t say, though it wasn’t fear. That scent had not been one she could claim through this whole event, even though it had been in her eyes. Which made me wonder if even that had been nothing more than an act. “I always bring down my enemies, Vi

And with that, I turned and walked out the door.

Chapter 10

That was a threat even Jack would be proud of,” Rhoan commented, as we climbed back into his car. “Looks like he’s going to make a proper guardian of you yet.”

“Bite it, brother.” I didn’t even want to contemplate actually having to back up my words if Vi

“Where to next?” Qui

“Beechworth, obviously,” Rhoan said, then glanced at me. “If you believe what she said was the truth.”

“I do. You want to ring Jack, and see if he can get us an address? And ask if he’s had any luck with those names in Liander’s photograph. I’ll give the cow a call, and see if she can patch me through to the guy who used to be the cop there.”

“You know,” Qui

“You can bite it, too, vampire.”

“Oh, I have, and it tastes divine.”

A smile tugged at my lips. “How about you concentrate on driving, seeing as we’re going so fast?”

“Ah, but I’m old, and with age comes versatility. I can now manage to do two things at once. As I believe I demonstrated earlier this evening.” He raised an eyebrow as he glanced at me. “You enjoy it, don’t you?”

I smiled. “Sex? Vampire bites? Yes to both.”

“You know what I mean.”

I sighed. “Yes. There are still lines I won’t cross, but I can’t not do this job anymore. The thrill of the chase is highly addictive, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, yes,” Qui

The odd note in his lilting tones caught my attention. “You were a cop sometime in the past?”

“I was a cazador.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And that is?”

“Cazadors are vampire enforcers. They were policing the vampire world for the old ones long before the Directorate ever came into existence.”

“I’ve heard tales of them,” Rhoan said, with the phone to his ear. “From what I understood, not all of them were on the side of the angels.”

“Unfortunately, that is true.” Qui

So they still had them? Meaning there were worse psychos out there than what the Directorate dealt with? That was a scary thought. “Even if they are only doing the job for a few decades, wouldn’t the craving to kill still become a problem?”

“Vampires learn very early on in their rebirth to control their darker desires. It generally takes a lot of time—and bloodshed—to break that training.”

I studied him for a moment, seeing the darkness beneath his serene expression. Seeing the sorrow. Once it would have worried me to know what he was feeling, but not now. Maybe I’d grown up. Maybe I was simply more accepting of the gifts and intuitions that were mine. After all, even if they now kept me in this job, they also helped me survive it. “Who did you kill?”

He didn’t meet my gaze. “Someone who didn’t deserve to die.” He hesitated, then added softly, “Someone I loved.”

“Then she had no contract out on her?”

“No. But she was good friends with someone whose house was slated to be cleaned.” He glanced at me then, and the brief bleakness in his eyes left me in no doubt that the cleansing had been total—every man, woman, and child. “She was at their house when I went in there to fulfill the contract. I didn’t even see her—didn’t even realize what I’d done until afterward.”

“That’s when you gave up life as a cazador?”

He nodded. “When I came out of the killing haze, there I was, covered in her blood, with her broken body at my feet.” In his dark gaze I saw echoes of a pain that still wasn’t healed, even though I suspected this had all happened a very long time ago. “I swore to never again kill on somebody’s order. It is a vow I have kept to this day.”

Which wasn’t to say he hadn’t killed. I’d seen him do it more than once, and had no doubt that, even after that event, he had a history littered with bodies. He was a very old vampire, after all, and none of them were saints.

Even the ones who were descended from angels.

“How long were you a cazador?”

“Two hundred years.” A humorless smile touched his lips. “I was very good at it.”

“After two hundred years, you’d expect nothing less than expertise.” I hesitated, then asked, “So how long ago was all this?”

“I was a little over three hundred when I started.”

So it was over seven hundred years ago that he quit. “Three hundred years was a decent age for a vampire to reach back then, wasn’t it?”

“There have always been older ones, but yes, the past was a bloody place to survive.” He grimaced slightly. “Humanity might not have had the numbers that it has today, but it had a whole lot more superstition, and a tradition of killing anything it didn’t understand.”

“So why weren’t the old ones cazadors? I would have thought the older the vampire, the better cazador they’d make.”

“True. But also, the older you get, the more you appreciate the years and your life.” His smile regained some warmth, and amusement crinkled the corners of his eyes. “Like all Hollywood and literary myths, the one about old vampires mourning what they are or regretting their long existence has very little to do with reality.”

“And yet there must be some who do kill themselves, because in most myths there lies a kernel of truth.” Even the worst of the werewolf myths had the occasional grain of truth behind them. Besides, he himself had once believed that an old friend had walked out into the sunshine because a love affair had gone horribly wrong.

Of course, that had turned out to be little more than a cover story spread by a madman intent on creating an army of clones, but why would he have even believed it if it had never actually happened before?

“Indeed it does happen, but rarely.” He glanced at me, the warmth in his eyes growing stronger. “And before you ask, no, I have never loved anyone that much. Even if I did, I doubt I would contemplate such a thing.”

“Because you never give all of yourself to one person?”

“Because I love life too much.” He gave me an amused look. “And you’re a fine one to talk about never giving all of yourself to one person.”

“Hey, I tried. Not my fault it didn’t work out.” Not my fault he’d made demands that were just impossible for me to obey—even if I had been able to. “Besides, I will commit when my soul mate finally decides to make his appearance. Until then, I’ll just have to muddle along as I am.”