Maybe this was her chance to learn more about him and the past he was still reluctant to talk about. While she could hardly talk to him about Seline, there was lots of other information she could mine. Centuries of it, in fact. The Michael who'd been in the stable was the Michael she loved—and yet, at the same time, he wasn't. Seline had warned her that he'd be rougher, darker. Harder. And in some respects, he'd been all of those. But he'd also seemed a whole lot more talkative, too. Her Michael played his cards very close. Maybe it was something he'd learned from Seline. Maybe they'd had no other choice once the Circle had begun making serious dents in the fields of bad guys. The mill loomed. She slowed and swept her gaze across the nearest buildings. There were a good half dozen smaller buildings surrounding one larger cluster, which she guessed would probably be the main mill works. Most of the buildings were clad in sheets of corrugated steel, but there were a few that were all wood. It was to one of these she found herself walking towards. That fact bought her up short.
Was it instinct that had bought her here, or something else?
She stood still and listened. Sheets of metal rattled on the roof of a nearby building, and the wind whispered through shattered windows, a forlorn sound that chased goose bumps across her skin. A takeout container rolled along the well-worn path that ambled through the buildings, blown in from God knew where.
No one seemed to be here, and yet ... something was.
She licked her lips and took a step back.
A rumble of sound rose from the night behind her.
She froze, knowing she'd fallen into Weylin's trap.
The wolves weren't patrolling the eastern perimeter. They were right here in this mill. With her.
Chapter Six
Michael strode down the center of Main Street, scanning each hotel with the infrared of his vampire vision. For a town that only had a small number of inhabitants, there seemed to be an overabundance of drinking holes.
Unfortunately, Dunleavy didn't appear to be in any of them. Vampires had a slightly different glow under infrared, and all the people currently in the hotels were human. So, where was he? While the fiend was young in vampire years, dusk had settled across the hills, and it would be safe enough for Dunleavy to start moving around. Yet he was nowhere to be found. Again. Maybe he was hiding in one of the mines, though given Dunleavy's preference for all things fine, it was hard to imagine him putting up with living in the dark, dank tunnels for any length of time. The rat had to have a hole somewhere here in Hartwell. It was just a matter of finding it. His gaze went to the blonde's home, and he frowned when he saw the blur of life inside. There was no way she could have gotten past without him noticing, so it couldn't be her. And besides, the red blur was smaller, and it seemed to have an odd energy pattern. It wasn't a vampire. Wasn't anything he could remember seeing before. It was almost as if the creature in that house wasn't even something that lived and breathed, in the normal sense of the word.
Frowning, Michael quickened his pace, striding beside the old boardwalk rather than on it to keep down the noise of his steps. The red blur froze anyway, head cocked to one side, as if listening. Then it scurried towards the rear of the house. Michael smiled grimly and blurred into the night, racing around the buildings to the back of her home.
He was just in time to catch the sneak climbing out of the rear window.
"Well, well," he said, grabbing the man by the scruff of the neck with his good hand, and holding him dangling above the ground. "What have we got here?"
The felon squawked, his wizened face screwed up in fear, scarred hands and booted feet both swishing wildly through the air but landing nowhere. "Nothing. Let me down."
"Not until you explain what you were doing in this house."