I rolled over in preparation for doing that very thing, but before I could do more, I had a sudden and unexpected bout of dry heaves that did my head no good at all. When I lifted my head and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, I noted that there were two men standing in the doorway, frowning at me. Neither had made any move to help or—at least that I noticed—reacted at all.
I dry-heaved a couple of extra times to give myself a chance to examine the invaders of my walk-in-freezer cell.
The nearest man was tuxedo-model beautiful, with dark, curling hair, liquid-brown eyes, and a thousand-dollar suit that managed to show off the muscles beneath without doing anything so crass as being tight anywhere. There was something predatory in his gaze, and he had that spark that made one man more dominant than another without a word being said.
I’d been raised by werewolves. I knew an Alpha personality when I was in its presence.
The other man was at least fifty pounds heavier and three inches taller, with the face of a boxer or a dockworker. His nose had been broken a few times, and over his left eye was the sort of scar that you got when someone punched you in the eye and the skin around the socket split.
The pretty man radiated power, but this one . . . this one gave me nothing at all.
His eyes were brown, too, but they were ordinary eyes except for the expression in them. Something very cold and hungry looked out at me. He wore worn jeans and a tight-fitting Henley-style shirt.
Visually, I could have been dropped into a scene in some Italian gangster movie. There was no mistaking the Mediterranean origins of either one.
My nose told me the real story. Vampires.
I was on my hands and knees, but standing up wasn’t going to help me fight off a pair of vampires, so I stayed where I was for a moment.
I was wearing my own clothes, but they were torn and stiff with my own dried blood—and that blood smelled like it was at least a day old. An unfamiliar, plain gold cuff around my wrist covered a nagging ache I hadn’t noticed before I moved. I reached up to make sure of what I was already pretty sure of—there was no necklace there. That meant I was missing my wedding ring, Adam’s dog tag, and my lamb—my symbol of faith that helped protect me from vampires.
I was missing something else. Something that mattered a lot more.
“She doesn’t need this in here,” said the vampire with the broken nose. He reached out and did something that released the cuff on my wrist. The skin all the way around my wrist was marked with puffy red dots, as if a mosquito had bitten me in even increments.
I very carefully didn’t move.
“You’ll have to forgive us,” said the beautiful vampire as he crouched down in front of me. The British crispness of his voice was only a little softened by his Italian accent. “We were told you were the most dangerous person in the TriCities and gave you the courtesy of treating you as such.” And he kept nattering on about injuries and a healer and blah blah blah.
I tried to reach out to Adam through our mate bond and touched . . . emptiness. Silence had fallen between us, not the electric, expectant kind. This silence was the emptiness that falls in the dead of night in the middle of a Montana winter when the world is encased in snow and icy cold, a silence that engulfed my soul and left me alone.
“—find you,” he was saying. “The witch’s bracelet blocked your inconvenient tie with your pack and mate until we could get you into our room here, where no magic can pass. If we had realized how fragile you were, steps would have been taken to devise a gentler method of extraction.”
I only cared about the “no magic can pass” part. If it was some sort of barricade magic or a circle, then this . . . silence was temporary, brought on by the cuff and continued by some effect of this location. Until I got out of this room, or possibly out of some outer enclosure, I wouldn’t be able to contact Adam using our bond. The imperative and hope I held on to firmly was “out.”
I was alive, I thought as I fought down the panic of the blankness where my mate should have been. Alive was a very good thing. If they had wanted me dead, I’d have been dead, and there was nothing I could have done about it.
I considered the word I’d heard earlier—“healer”—and the image of my own rib out where it had no business being and had a moment of wow. The only healer I’d ever seen who could do something like that was Baba Yaga.
Very good. I was alive. I narrowed my eyes at the two vampires.
They were the ones who had gone to a lot of trouble (apparently—judging by all the talking the pretty vampire was doing) to get me here. They could tell me what they wanted, then I could figure out how to get out and reestablish contact with Adam.
I gave a momentary thought to what Adam would have done when our link went dark. I had to trust he had dealt with it.
It was more than time to start making some plans. If I had been sure my legs would hold me, I’d have stood up then, but whatever they’d given me, the healing, or the accident, or some combination of the three had left me pretty wobbly.
Trying to stand up and falling on my rump would leave me in a worse negotiating position than simply staying where I was. So I sat, grateful that I hadn’t actually thrown up, which wouldn’t have done my dignity any more good.
I was all poised to wait for them to speak when something else the pretty vampire had said right at the first hit me.
“What idiot told you I was the most dangerous person in the TriCities?” I said incredulously. “There are goblins who could take me without working up much of a sweat.”
That was maybe a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much. Goblins were a lot tougher than they were credited with by those who knew them. They were in the habit of running first, second, and third, and only fighting when there was no way out. That running thing had garnered them a reputation as supernatural wimps, a reputation they actively cultivated. When they were cornered, they were vicious and deadly. We had only recently started working with them, and I’d developed a new respect for their abilities.
“Perhaps he didn’t mean ‘powerful’ and ‘dangerous’ in the usual way,” suggested the thuggish vampire mildly. Like Pretty Vampire, his speech had a touch of British enunciation, colored with Italian that was more of a hint than a real accent. Despite the fact that it was my question he addressed, he wasn’t talking to me. His attention was on Pretty Vampire. “Wulfe is subtle, and he often gives correct answers that lead to the wrong conclusions. Someone should have broken him of that habit a long time ago.”
Wulfe. Wulfe, I knew. He was the right-hand vampire of Marsilia, who ruled the vampire seethe in the TriCities. He was the scariest vampire I’ve ever met—and by now I’d met a few real contestants for that honor—but Wulfe could work magic, was crazy powerful, and unpredictable. Like just now, for instance. What in the world had I done to him to make him paint a target on my back and send Thug Vampire and Pretty Vampire after me?
Unlike his cohort, Pretty Vampire spoke directly to me. “You are the mate of the Alpha of the TriCities werewolf pack, who just negotiated a deal with the fae that turned your little conglomerate town of the TriCities in the retroterra of eastern Washington State into a safe zone for dealing with the fae,” said Pretty Vampire.
“We like the term ‘neutral zone’ better than ‘safe zone,’” I told him. “It sounds less judgmental and more businesslike.” Also more Star Trek–ish.
My stepdaughter called it a freak zone, which I thought the most accurate description. A number of the fae who had returned to or who visited the TriCities did so without glamour now—they’d quit trying to pretend to be human. Our summer tourist season, usually driven by the wineries, was looking to be the largest in anyone’s memory.