Desire the Night(25)

“I would have. He needed her. The count didn’t. Raoul could have had his pick of other women.”

“The phantom was a murderer.”

Muttering, “I think the pot’s calling the kettle black.” Kay thrust his handkerchief at him.

Gideon arched one brow. “Is that so? Just what are you accusing me of?”

“Nothing. I mean, you are a vampire. I just assumed … oh, never mind.”

He came to a stop, turning her to face him. “You’re right,” he said quietly. “I’ve killed a lot of people in my time.”

She bit down on her lower lip, her gaze not quite meeting his. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …”

“It’s all right, Kiya. I’m not making excuses for what I’ve done, but that was before I learned I didn’t have to kill to survive. Since then, I haven’t killed anyone who wasn’t trying to kill me.”

He started walking again and she hurried to keep up. “I believe you.”

“There was a lot of vampire hunting going on back in the early seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” he remarked. “Lots of superstitious nonsense back then. Witch hunts. Vampire hunters. A lot of innocent people died.”

She knew about that. She had read about the Salem witch hunts in school, had done additional research online. Now and then, she had overheard her father talking about ancestors who had been killed before the werewolf community went underground.

“Vampires have always gotten a bum rap,” Gideon said. “Back in the old days, anytime there was an illness no one could explain, or the hens stopped laying, or the cow dried up, the old men in the village would start looking for a vampire. And sure enough, sooner or later they’d find some poor soul who looked a little pale, or who was a stranger just passing through, and the next thing you knew, it was ‘off with his head.’ Sometimes they accused whole families.”

“That’s terrible.”

He shrugged. “People were a lot more superstitious back then, a lot more ignorant than we are today. Uncontrollable weather, unexplained deaths, insane behavior—the culprit had to be a vampire. It was probably the same for werewolves, wasn’t it?”

They were at the car now. Gideon held the door for her, then walked around the front and slid behind the wheel.

“Not so much,” Kay said, fastening her seatbelt. “We’ve managed to keep a low profile. No one believes in werewolves anymore,” she said. “Partly because vampires were getting all the notoriety for a while there. Then, too, there aren’t so many of us. We rarely go off on our own, and we’re bound to do whatever our Alpha says. There are only five packs left in the United States and all the Alphas have agreed not to do anything that would draw undue attention to the double-natured.”

“Where does your pack makes its home?”

“Jackson, Wyoming.”

“More open spaces,” he mused. There would be good hunting in Yellowstone and the National Elk Refuge.

Kay nodded.

“So, do you like living on your own, away from the pack?”

“Probably more than I should.” She bit down on her lower lip. “I’m going to miss my freedom when I go back.”

“Then don’t go.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have much choice.”

“Pack law and all that, I guess.”

“That’s part of it, although there are a few lone wolves. But …”

“You don’t want to be one of them?”

“Even if I did, it would never be allowed.”

“Because you’re a female?”

“No.” She took a deep breath and blew it out in a long, slow sigh. “Because my father is also my Alpha.”





* * *



Chapter 13

Verah hurled the black bowl across the room. It hit the fireplace with a resounding thud, raining broken glass and water on the hearth stones. She had spent the last several days trying to locate Gideon, but to no avail. She had a few hairs from his head, she had vials of his blood, but no matter which spell she used to conjure his location, nothing happened. What was she doing wrong?

Seething with frustration, she pulled her favorite grimoire from the shelf and thumbed through the pages, her exasperation growing as spell after spell failed to provide the information she needed. Near the end of the book she found a page devoted to vampires and vampire lore. A notation, written in the margin in a spidery hand, declared there were no known spells whereby vampires could be tracked because they were, for all intents and purposes, dead, and one could only perform ritual magic on the living.

It took all her self-control to keep from sending the grimoire after the scrying bowl.