“Yeah, well, I think she needs to go after the jackass,” Nicole muttered. She brushed a pine needle off her cheek.
“I’d pay to see that.” Riker’s head swiveled back and forth as they walked, his keen gaze seeming totake in everything around them at once. Nicole tried to do the same, but if she looked a way from the ground for more than three seconds, she tripped. Riker sighed, but he didn’t look back at her. “Are you having trouble walking?”
She clawed at a spiderweb stuck in her hair. “Excuse me for not having your super-duper vampire reflexes.”
“It’s not just vampire reflexes. I spent several years training in the military.”
Interesting. “When?”
“Are you asking how old I am?” he asked, amusement pitching his already deep voice even lower.
“I guess.”
He cast a glance at her from over his shoulder.
God, he was handsome when he wasn’t scowling at her, and she shivered in feminine appreciation. “How old do you think I am?”
Turned vampires aged very slowly, nearly ten times more slowly than humans. Born vampires aged similarly to humans until they reached maturity, and then they aged even more slowly than turned vampires. Determining age was nearly impossible in both cases.
“If you were human, I’d say late twenties.”
“I was twenty-nine when I was turned sixty years ago.”
“Wow. You’re a geezer.” She suppressed a smile at the dirty look he gave her. “How did it happen?”
Sudden tension turned the supple muscles in his back to stone. “My Army unit was sent to Spokane for a joint operation with the Air Force. At least, we thought it was a joint operation. We found out too late that we were there to be turned into vampires.”
Nicole stumbled over a root. Only Riker’s catlike reflexes kept her from falling on her face. As he held her by her upper arms, steadying her against him, she swallowed. She knew this story from history classes.
“That’s when the use of vampires by the military became illegal,” she said. “There was some sort of accident at the base. The base commander and several of his staff were killed by rogue vampires—”
“Not rogues!” he snapped. “Created. We were created, and we broke free. The history you learned? Itwas fiction.” His eyes had become hard-edged blades that challenged her to deny his version of events.
“They wanted supersoldiers. What they got was a pissed-off bunch of vampire soldiers who knew exactly how to strike back.”
He still hadn’t released her, but she didn’t fight him, kept her voice low and nonconfrontational. “How many of you escaped?”
“Out of thirty of us, I only know of seven who made it out alive. My two best friends died. One didn’t survive the turn. The other got away with me. We made our way to Seattle, where MoonBound found us. But Steve . . . he was never the same. He was violent. Insane. Eventually, he didn’t even recognize me anymore.”
One out of a hundred vampires came out of their turn with their wires crossed, but so far, no one in the scientific community had determined why that was.
She palmed Riker’s cheek, an automatic response that made no sense, but neither of them fought it.
The contact, tentative as it was, grounded them in the here and now and pushed the past back where itbelonged.
“I’m so sorry, Riker.” She skimmed her thumb over the sharp outline of his cheekbone. He watched her warily, his nostrils flaring. “And before you accuseme of lying, I want you to know that I’m sorry about Lucy, too.”
“You know her?” His wariness lingered, but at least he wasn’t angry anymore. “How?”
Nicole paused. She didn’t want to throw Lucy under the bus, but at this point, keeping secrets from
Riker was only going to cause more distrust. “She helped me escape.”
“Let me guess. A secret tunnel?” When she didn’t answer, he cursed and stepped back. “I thought we found all of her passages. She’s like a damned gopher.”
He looked up at a hawk sailing overhead, waiting until it disappeared in the treetops to ask, “Why did she help you?”
“I sort of knocked her over. It was an accident,”she added when Riker shot her a troubled look. “ She was bleeding, and I helped her.” She thought about
Lucy’s request and hoped the vampires who had taken her would treat her to something sweet. “And let’s just say I owe her some chocolate.”
She was surprised to see a genuinely fond smile playing on his lips, almost paternal. “She’s got a way of getting what she wants.”
“Was she always—”