Stalking a stalker wasn’t an easy task. Reece Cahill had been at it for a year and a half now with nothing to show for it but a series of false leads and near misses. A saner man would have given up by now. A wiser man would have asked for help long ago. A better man wouldn’t have started this hunt in the first place.
Reece groaned. He was waxing philosophical again and that meant that he ought to get some sleep. Unfortunately, he still had a lot of data to sort through. The credit card receipts had led him here, to upstate Vermont, but it would take more research to help him pinpoint his target’s exact location. That is, if the target was really here.
The vampire he was tracking was currently using the name Grayson Raynes, but Reece knew that he’d used several other names in the past. Kyler Stone. Erik Loninger. Nolan Calleros. And of course, the name that Angela Catellini told him at the beginning of his quest: Zarek Kakopoios.
Because he had several identities, Reece was unsure of his target’s most basic information. Grayson Raynes was supposedly twenty-seven years old, while Erik Loninger was thirty-five. Black hair, blonde hair, blue eyes, hazel eyes. Short, tall. Light skin, olive skin, dark skin. The details always clashed with one another. Zarek Kakopoios was a chameleon.
Thankfully, in this day and age even chameleons left a paper trail. That seemed to be the target’s most notable weakness. According to various sources, he was anywhere from four hundred to three thousand years old. He was an Old World vampire. And Reece deduced that the technological changes of the past fifty years had happened too rapidly for Zarek to grasp. He left too many loose ends.
When the words on the police report in front of him blurred together, Reece rubbed his dry eyes. He shouldn’t have come down here so soon. He could have done this excruciatingly tedious work back home in his office. Instead he was sitting on a bed that sank so deeply under his weight that his pile of papers kept spilling into the depression. And for the third time that day, he was trying to ignore the loud moans from the couple in the room next door. The walls here were just too thin.
Reece threw down his highlighter and leaned back on the bed. Goddess, he was tired. And lonely, even though he really wasn’t all that far from home. He’d chased Zarek all around the country and had even flown to Europe a few times. But now he was barely more than a hundred miles away from Montreal, from Lex.
So why did she feel so far away?
Of course, he already knew the answer. He had shut her out months ago. He knew that. And ven though he lamented it, he knew that it was for the best right now. As soon as Zarek was dead, Reece could let go of him and leave the past alone. He could finally think about a future.
But for now, he had to work.
He turned his attention back to the police reports and began to comb through them again. In the last month there were fourteen people reported missing in this region of Vermont. About half of them were males, a third were out of the age range that Zarek normally preyed on, so that left only two possible victims. And, as it happened, both of those girls had already been found—one dead and the other alive.
Reece had to remind himself that this was a good thing. If Zarek was in the area stalking another victim, then he hadn’t taken her yet. There was still time to stop him. But unfortunately it didn’t give Reece much information to work with in order to find him.
Damn it, he wanted to kill this bastard. The hate in him was so pure that it frightened him. He was a witch, a healer. Hate was not something that he normally practiced. But Zarek…when Reece found him, he was going to do the same illegal spell on him that he’d done on Angie Catellini. The vampire would feel the slow, agonizing pain of crumbling into dust. And that would still be better than he deserved.
For centuries Zarek had preyed on young girls from every walk of life. Once he took her, he changed the girl into a vampire to prevent her from aging, and then he used her for his own gratification. He shared her with others, passed her around like a toy. He debased her in every way imaginable—physically, mentally, and emotionally. Then, when the girl was broken and shattered, utterly dependent on him, he killed her and moved on to another.
Reece had seen it all in Alexandra’s mind. Zarek had tortured her for twenty-seven years. As her soulmate, Reece witnessed it every time he touched her.
He still remembered how badly he’d panicked at the hate and rage that had seized him after the first time he’d touched her. But that was nothing compared to what he felt now, after researching the vampire’s carnage for over a year. If he didn’t kill Zarek, Reece was afraid that the hate would eat him alive.
The cell phone on his nightstand vibrated and the loud, buzzing noise startled him. He grabbed his phone and glanced at the caller ID before answering.
“Karissa, what’s up?” he asked without preamble.
“Well, hi to you, too, Cahill,” she said sarcastically.
He winced. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m a little busy right now.”
“Busy with what?”
“Daybreak business.” It was his standard lie. No one on his team could know about his personal vendetta. They knew next to nothing about Alexandra as it was, and Reece intended to keep it that way. Lex herself didn’t even know what he was doing. She had made some peace with the past and he had no right to drag her back into it.
“You haven’t brought anything to us. Why don’t you delegate some of the work, Cahill? That’s what a team is for.”
“I can’t,” he said wearily. “Daybreak gave this job to me. It’s classified.”
“Is that right?” Karissa asked in a mocking tone. “Classified like the job you took last year that killed Nick’s sister?”
Reece inhaled sharply, feeling like he’d been punched in the stomach. How dare she bring up Beth like that? The lamia had been Nick’s half-sister, but she’d also been Reece’s closest friend. And he still blamed himself for her death. It killed him that he couldn’t tell Nick or anyone else on the team what had happened to her, but it was essential that the details of the DC mission be kept confidential. Lex’s life depended on it.
The fate of the world depended on it.
He ground his teeth and tried to swallow down the pain. Karissa had every reason to lash out at him. He was the team leader back in Montreal, but the truth was that he hadn’t been leading it for months. Karissa wasn’t the only one who was frustrated with how preoccupied he’d become.
Normally, he would have understood that, but his fuse was shorter these days than it had ever been. “Look,” he said coldly, “I want to get back to work. Did you want something?”
There was a long pause on her end. “What is the matter with you lately?” she asked with exasperation. “You’re blowing off your team, you’re blowing off your soulmate, and you’re—”
“Excuse me?” Reece snapped. “What do you mean, I’m blowing off my soulmate?” Goddess knows that everything he’d been doing over the last eighteen months was for Lex.
She sighed. “Nothing.”
He rubbed his eyes, trying to stay calm. Karissa was a pathological meddler. She was the type of girl who loved to gossip and match-make. When one of her friends was having a problem, she rushed headlong into it, ready to fix it even if she hadn’t been asked. If she was bringing up Alexandra now, then she had probably heard something about her from a friend of a friend of a friend. Whatever it was, he needed to quash the rumors right now. He couldn’t afford to have anyone talking about Lex.
“Don’t play this game with me, Karissa,” he said. “This is reason you called, right? So just spit it out.”
Reece could imagine the girl biting her lip as if she was actually debating whether or not to say anything to him. They both knew that she didn’t have any intention of minding her own business. “It’s just…I’m worried about you and about Lex. I think you should come home.”
“Why? What’s wrong with her?”
“Nothing’s wrong with her. She just, you know…she misses you. She needs you here.”
Warmth surged through him, sweet and unexpected. “She said that?” he asked when he found his voice again.
“Well, pretty much.”
Alexandra missed him. Even after a year and a half, it still meant so much to him to hear that. He just wasn’t sure why it was so surprising.
Reece glanced back at the pile of papers on his lap and sighed. “I’ll be home as soon as I finish this. Can you tell her that?”
“Why don’t you tell her yourself? Call her right now.”
He wanted to. Goddess, he wanted to, but he just couldn’t talk to her right now. He was too on edge and he didn’t want her to know. After all of the hell that she had been through, she deserved a calm, stable, well-adjusted soulmate. “I don’t want to wake her up. When you see her tomorrow, could you tell her I’ll be back soon?”
“Fine,” Karissa ground out. He could practically see the girl rolling her eyes at him. “Just don’t make a liar out of me, Cahill.”
“I won’t,” he swore.
The human girl was quiet for a moment. “Look, I’m sorry about what I said. About Beth.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s all right.”
“We need you back here, Cahill. All of us.”
When Reece hung up, he felt truly awake for the first time in days. He went back to his stack of papers, his vision sharp and his mind clear. It was past time that he had finished this. Alexandra missed him, his team needed him, and he had just made a promise to them all that he was damn well going to keep.
The hum of the bus was soothing. Alexandra hated to fly and the train ride to New York City would have been almost ten hours, so she had decided to take the Greyhound out of Montreal. Curled up on her seat with a blanket wrapped around her as the grayish landscape of Quebec passed by, she almost felt content.
Then she shifted to put her feet up on the empty seat next to her and she froze.
The middle-aged woman in the seat across the aisle was staring at her again. The woman hadn’t fallen for Alexandra’s make-up job, like the man at the ticketing desk had, and she was wondering why a young, teenage girl was traveling to New York alone in the middle of the night. She suspected that Lex was running away and she was taking note of her features in case she heard something on the news about a young girl from Montreal disappearing.
Of course, an intuitive human would have known what the woman was doing by reading her gestures and any vampire would have known simply by reading her thoughts, but in that moment, Alexandra actually knew the reasons for her interest in a young runaway. The woman’s only daughter had disappeared fifteen years ago was never found. She was memorizing Lex’s appearance now as part of a lifelong quest to ensure that some other mother wouldn’t have to go through the pain that she had.
Alexandra frowned and turned her head away from the woman, letting her curls fall into her face. It was a struggle to keep her breathing deep, to keep her fear from taking over.
She’d inherited the gift of enhanced telepathy from the vampire who had changed her. It was an ability that he had exploited in his slow destruction of her, and for years after she’d escaped from him, she’d been terrified of it. More than that, she’d hated herself for how much she liked using it. For most vampires, drinking blood from a human victim was the ultimate rush, but for Lex and others with similar powers, tasting a person’s soul was far more intoxicating.
As hard as she tried to control it or ignore it, the power had a will of its own. It rose to the surface unexpectedly, thrusting her into the souls of others before she was even aware of what was happening. She was only starting to understand that it was useless to fight it. She had only recently realized that it could be used without hurting the other person or herself. Lex was beginning to see that the power usually only gave her useless information about random people—like the middle-aged woman watching her—and to know intimate details of a person’s life did not necessarily mean that Alexandra was a monster. It did not mean that she was turning into her maker. It was taking her subconscious mind a long time to accept what her rational mind already knew, however. Change and acceptance were hard for her. It was difficult to relinquish a belief that had kept her safe—albeit, alone—for so long.
A sudden pain assaulted her. There was no reason for her to try to change any more. She was leaving Reece and wherever she ended up, Alexandra would be alone again. It wouldn’t matter if she had learned to live with her power or not. The end result would be the same.
Lex sneered at herself. She hadn’t escaped the control of a sadistic bastard for nothing, and she’d be damned if she was going to leave her soulmate for nothing. If she wanted to shut people out, she could have done that in Montreal. She and Reece really would have made an interesting pair, then—two strangers sharing an apartment who just happened to be soulmates.
No. Wherever she went, she could never allow herself to fall back into old habits. She and people she cared about had sacrificed too much.
The vent next to the window started to blow cold air on her face. It was only running to circulate the air, but she would never understand why buses, subways, and buildings, needed to pump in freezing air. It was winter, for crying out loud. A mixture of snow and sleet was falling outside.
Pulling her knees into her chest, she wrapped her arms around them, trying to stave off the shivers. Lex closed her eyes and imagined how warm the sun would feel as soon as she got further south. This was just a test of mind over matter. She could will herself to be warm.
Just as she started to relax her rigid hold on her knees, the bus jerked to the right, throwing her into the window next to her. A moment later, she was thrust towards the aisle and slid onto the floor as the driver tried to keep the bus from skidding off of the road. The human passengers cried out and suitcases toppled down from the overhead racks.
The bus slid again, tossing Alexandra like a rag doll back towards her seat. Her head slammed into the wall and she saw stars. It felt like the world around her was spinning. She kept falling, somehow tumbling through the ground, smashing into objects that she couldn’t identify.
More cries filled the air, nearly drowned out by a metallic, ear-splitting shriek.
Then everything was silent and still.
When her vision cleared, Alexandra realized that she was lying on top of the large window and was pinned under an over-sized paisley suitcase. She was staring into the blank eyes of the elderly man that had been sitting in front of her. The world was on its side.
The bus had skidded on the slick, icy road and tipped over. Judging from the damage, it must have gone over more than once before it landed on its side.
Lex sat up slowly and saw that the two-dozen passengers had all fallen onto the window, which was now under them. A few people moved, trying to get up, and others were abnormally still.
She got onto her hands and knees, ignoring the way that her head spun, and felt for the pulse of the elderly man next to her. He still had one, though it seemed faint to her. Leaving him, she crawled over to the other passengers near her, checking each one to see if they were alive or dead.
Finally, she came upon a body that had landed on its stomach. Rolling it over, Alexandra recognized the middle-aged woman who had been watching her throughout the ride. She had a pulse, but she wasn’t breathing.
On instinct, Lex tipped the woman’s head back, pinched her nose, and breathed into her mouth, watching to make sure that her chest rose and fell. After two seconds, she breathed for the woman again. And again. And again.
She wasn’t sure how many breaths it took, but the woman finally gasped and coughed violently. Then she looked up at Alexandra with glassy eyes.
The inside of the bus was chaotic as the other passengers cried and shouted. A few cars pulled over to the side of the highway to help. Sirens sounded in the distance. The wind howled. But Lex heard none of it through the thunderous pounding of her heart.
The woman was grateful. There was no mistaking it. Looking into her brown eyes, Lex was suddenly drowning in her gratitude. The air seemed saturated with it. With each breath, more and more of it diffused into her bloodstream. And every cell in her body rejected it.
She scrambled backward, breaking eye contact, but it did no good. The woman was still alive, still grateful. She was still looking at her as if Alexandra was a savior. As if she had done something right. As if she was a good person.
No one had ever looked at her like that.
She could deal with hate and disgust—those were the two emotions that she completely understood. She could handle lust—her maker and then her friend Tristan had taught her the power that her body could wield. And since she’d met Reece, she thought that she might be able to tolerate love. But the woman’s gratitude was far more than she could bear. God damn it, she wasn’t worthy of it. She wasn’t. Alexandra was tempted to tear into the woman’s throat and drain her dry just to prove her wrong.
Instead, she shot to her feet, grabbing her purse and duffel bag from where they had gotten tangled around the arm of a seat. Then, vaulting over the passengers that were huddled together, she ran to the front of the bus. Pausing long enough to thrust her foot through the windshield, she plunged through the shattered glass.
An ambulance screeched to a stop in front of her and she nearly knocked the driver over as he slid out of his seat. He called after her, but Lex didn’t slow down and she didn’t look back.
The road was icy under her boots and the sleet soaked through her coat in a matter of minutes. Her wet hair fell into her face, sticking to her clammy skin. She didn’t know where she was going, only that she needed to put more distance between her and the woman on the bus. She needed to get further and further away. Boosting herself over the guardrail on the side of the highway, she sprinted into the woods.
Alexandra had always been a good runner. During the first few months that she’d spent with her maker, she had waited for a chance to break away from him. She wouldn’t have even needed a head start; all she’d needed was the opportunity, but he hadn’t given her one. He’d been keeping slaves for centuries by then—long enough to perfect his game, to learn from his mistakes. His grip on her was like a vice and it wasn’t until she was completely broken that he loosened it. By that time, she couldn’t have imagined existing without him. He had become her world.
As vehemently as she would deny it, she knew that he was still a part of her. His blood and his power ran through her veins. He still took up space in her mind and his voice still hissed in her ear. And all these years later, Lex was still running from him, from what he had forced her to become.
Out, damn'd spot!
Miles away from the bus accident, she tripped over a large branch and fell to the ground. For a long while, she simply lay there, panting as the sleet drizzled down on her. As cold as it was, it was somehow still refreshing. Cleansing. The freezing water washed away her hot tears. Her fingers and toes had gone numb and the rest of her body wasn’t far behind.
It felt too good. Lex had to force herself up before she fell asleep right there in the woods. She wouldn’t die of hypothermia, no, but thawing herself out when she woke up would hurt like a sonofabitch.
She trudged through the woods until she reached a quiet, two-lane road. From how exhausted she felt, she guessed that she had run at least ten miles from the crash site. Her joints felt stiff and her wobbly legs seemed heavy. She had burned herself out.
After she had walked another mile or so down the road, Alexandra saw a sign for a motel and turned into the parking lot.
A gust of heat greeted her as she stepped inside the reservation office and her skin tingled painfully. The man behind the desk looked at her, aghast. “Are you all right, miss?” he asked. “Do you need me to call an ambulance?”
Lex touched her face and her fingers came away wet with cold water, makeup, and blood. She didn’t know if she had gotten scratched up when the bus crashed or while she’d been racing through the woods. Frankly, she didn’t care. “No,” she replied wearily. “I just need a room.”
The man looked uncomfortable. “You need to be eighteen to reserve a room. Is there someone that I can call to come get you?”
She dug through her purse for her new driver’s license and set it down on the desk. “I am eighteen. Just give a room.”
He spun the ID around so that he could examine it without picking it up. Then he stared at it for a long moment, swallowing a few times. Finally, he looked back at her. “Look, miss, this is a nice motel and we don’t want any trouble—”
Alexandra snapped. She withdrew the remainder of the four hundred dollars that she’d been carrying in her purse and slammed it onto the desk. Turning her eyes on the man, she let him see the unnatural light that shone from them. “Give me a goddamn room, please,” she whispered.
She let him go and the man reached under the desk for a key. “Room Twelve,” he said with a hitched breath.
“Thank you very much.” Lex snatched the key from him and started to storm out of the office. But through the door, she saw a mountain range in the distance. “Where the hell am I?” she asked the clerk without looking back at him.
“Phoenicia,” he replied.
She made an impatient noise. “And where the hell is that?”
He hesitated before he answered her. “In the Catskills.”
“Great,” Lex grumbled as she pushed the door open and stepped back out into the sleet. “Just great.”
Part 2
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