Did Jeremy need blood beyond what Mariane could provide? Apparently, he did. Or maybe it was for guests. Who the f**k knew?
Colin took a cautious step toward the archway on the other side of the kitchen, mindful of the slippery goo covering the floor. The next room was much bigger, with a high, angled ceiling and lots of furniture. A huge entertainment center took up one entire wall, now blasted to bits like everything else. Colin cleared the room carefully, aware of a sick feeling building in his gut. Where was Mariane?
He entered the back hallway. There were only three doors here, two of them open. One was a bathroom, obviously empty, but he cleared it anyway. The second was an office of some sort, the equipment trashed, files overturned in what was by now a familiar pattern of destruction. The trashed equipment in this room alone was worth thousands, which made him think this wasn’t a simple case of breaking and entering. Either that or they’d been after something other than easily pawned electronics.
Colin stepped back and eyed the final door. “Dammit,” he mouthed soundlessly and made his way down the hall.
The door was pulled closed, but not latched. Colin paused for a moment, listening and hearing nothing. He stood back against the wall and pushed the door open with the fingers of one hand. A quick look showed more of the same, an almost random trashing of the room and everything in it. He stepped through the doorway and immediately put a wall at his back.
“Ah, shit,” he swore softly.
Mariane lay in the middle of a big bed, blood soaking the sheets beneath her. Colin closed his eyes briefly, letting a wash of grief sweep over him before steeling himself for what had to be done. Every human instinct he possessed told him to rush to her side. Instead, he cleared the room, stepping into both the walk-in closet and attached bath before crossing to the bed and propping the shotgun within reach.
“Who did this to you, baby girl?” he murmured. She’d been beaten, tortured it appeared, her arms and legs covered with shallow knife cuts, designed to hurt like hell without killing the victim. None of the individual cuts would have been fatal, but the cumulative effect of so many . . . They’d left her lying na**d, her legs spread wide. The blood and bruises on her thighs and vaginal area told him she’d been raped, and Colin gritted his teeth against a wave of anger so strong it nearly brought him to his knees.
If she was breathing, he couldn’t see it, but he leaned over and placed two fingers against her neck, expecting to find nothing but confirmation of what he already believed to be true. Instead, he felt a weak pulse—barely there, but she was alive!
He straightened immediately, pulled the cell phone from his belt and speed dialed 911. The closest trauma center was a good sixty miles away, and most of that was twisting mountain roads, but he didn’t know what else to do, who else to call. He knew battlefield medicine, had spent hundreds of hours in training sessions. He’d dealt with bodies torn apart by guns and explosives, but this . . . He forced himself to think clinically, to ignore the brutal nature of the attack. Okay. Shock was probably her greatest enemy right now. He cast about for something with which to cover her. He needed to raise her body temp and keep her warm. But all he could see were blankets as bloody as she was. Towels. He ran back into the bathroom as he waited for the 911 operator to come on the line. It would probably play hell with any forensic—
“Nine-one-one, what is your—”
The rest of her spiel was lost as the roar of an angry vampire filled the house.
Chapter Two
Colin backed two quick steps away from the bedside, grabbing up the shotgun as he went. In the blink of an eye, Jeremy was in the room, fangs fully distended, eyes flashing red fire as he confronted the invader.
“Jeremy,” Colin said evenly. “You know me. You know I didn’t do this.”
The vampire stalked across the bedroom, his movements eerily graceful, gliding forward like a big hunting cat. He growled softly, threateningly, but his gaze kept flicking to Mariane, anguish replacing the rage on his face.
“I’m calling nine one one, Jeremy. Let me get some help for her.”
The vampire’s head snapped around at that, his gaze deadly cold despite the fires burning there. “You touch her and I’ll kill you, human. I don’t need your help.”
Faster than Colin could follow, Jeremy was at the bedside, lifting Mariane in his arms, bloody tears rolling down his face as he saw what they’d done to her. A low keening rose from his throat, rising in volume until it became a furious howl.
“There will be justice for this,” he snarled, his gaze once again pinning Colin in place. “Mark my words, human. This will not go unavenged.”
And then he was gone, nothing more than a blur of movement and a slam of noise as the front door hit the wall in the living room.
“Well, shit,” Colin whispered. He lowered his head and just breathed, letting his body recover from an adrenaline rush that dwarfed whatever he’d been feeling when he’d first entered the house.
“Jesus H. Christ.” He sucked in a last deep breath and called 911 again, canceling the earlier call. Then he walked out to his truck and grabbed his gear. Jeremy might not want his help, but he was going to get it anyway. This was a crime scene and Colin was the closest thing they had to a police department in Cooper’s Rest. Not that he was a real police officer. Legally, he was no more than private security, which meant this case fell under the jurisdiction of the County Sheriff. But the people around here didn’t want the Sheriff or anyone else poking into their affairs, and that went double for the vampires who’d elevated privacy to a fine art. That’s why the self-appointed town council had hired him in the first place. He hadn’t been to any police academy; the nearest he’d come were a few criminology classes at the college down in the city. But he was qualified to handle just about every weapon that existed and could put a man, or a woman, on the ground in nothing flat, regardless of weight or training. He also had the ability to size up a situation and the confidence to deal with it. Which was what he intended to do with this one.
Cooper’s Rest was his home now, the place he’d somehow ended up in after leaving the Navy. This tiny village in northern Washington state was about as far from where he’d grown up as it was possible to be, but it was a quiet, peaceful place, full of mostly good people who wanted to be left alone. And it suited him just fine.
But now someone had invaded this peaceful place, had invaded his home, and Colin wasn’t the kind of man to sit back and wait for someone else to see justice done. He was going to find whoever had done this. And when he did, he wasn’t going worry about reading anyone their Miranda rights.
Chapter Three
Vancouver, British Columbia
Sophia gripped the edges of the armrests, her nails gouging holes into the fine leather. She hated flying. She especially hated flying through the daylight hours, hated trusting her life to humans. She might be nearly three hundred years old, but that didn’t mean she lived in the past. She watched CNN, went online and read the newspapers. She knew how often these planes fell out of the sky, right along with their human pilots and, maybe, vampire passengers.
It was possible, she mused, that a vampire could survive such a crash. Possible, but not certain. It was definitely not a theory she wished to test, nor did she want to learn whether a vampire could breathe underwater for however long it would take to reach land if the plane went down in the middle of the ocean.
Not that that particular outcome was a problem at this point. The ocean was no longer beneath her. Nor was the sun shining on the other side of the airplane’s thin skin as it had been for much of the previous leg of her journey, which had taken her from her home in Rio de Janeiro to a stop in Toronto. She thanked whatever gods smiled on vampires that she at least had the resources to travel by private aircraft, one with a suitable sleep compartment for her daylight needs.