He didn’t meet my gaze. “Someone who didn’t deserve to die.” He hesitated, then added softly, “Someone I loved.”
“Then she had no contract out on her?”
“No. But she was good friends with someone whose house was slated to be cleaned.” He glanced at me then, and the brief bleakness in his eyes left me in no doubt that the cleansing had been total—every man, woman, and child. “She was at their house when I went in there to fulfill the contract. I didn’t even see her—didn’t even realize what I’d done until afterward.”
“That’s when you gave up life as a cazador?”
He nodded. “When I came out of the killing haze, there I was, covered in her blood, with her broken body at my feet.” In his dark gaze I saw echoes of a pain that still wasn’t healed, even though I suspected this had all happened a very long time ago. “I swore to never again kill on somebody’s order. It is a vow I have kept to this day.”
Which wasn’t to say he hadn’t killed. I’d seen him do it more than once, and had no doubt that, even after that event, he had a history littered with bodies. He was a very old vampire, after all, and none of them were saints.
Even the ones who were descended from angels.
“How long were you a cazador?”
“Two hundred years.” A humorless smile touched his lips. “I was very good at it.”
“After two hundred years, you’d expect nothing less than expertise.” I hesitated, then asked, “So how long ago was all this?”
“I was a little over three hundred when I started.”
So it was over seven hundred years ago that he quit. “Three hundred years was a decent age for a vampire to reach back then, wasn’t it?”
“There have always been older ones, but yes, the past was a bloody place to survive.” He grimaced slightly. “Humanity might not have had the numbers that it has today, but it had a whole lot more superstition, and a tradition of killing anything it didn’t understand.”
“So why weren’t the old ones cazadors? I would have thought the older the vampire, the better cazador they’d make.”
“True. But also, the older you get, the more you appreciate the years and your life.” His smile regained some warmth, and amusement crinkled the corners of his eyes. “Like all Hollywood and literary myths, the one about old vampires mourning what they are or regretting their long existence has very little to do with reality.”
“And yet there must be some who do kill themselves, because in most myths there lies a kernel of truth.” Even the worst of the werewolf myths had the occasional grain of truth behind them. Besides, he himself had once believed that an old friend had walked out into the sunshine because a love affair had gone horribly wrong.
Of course, that had turned out to be little more than a cover story spread by a madman intent on creating an army of clones, but why would he have even believed it if it had never actually happened before?
“Indeed it does happen, but rarely.” He glanced at me, the warmth in his eyes growing stronger. “And before you ask, no, I have never loved anyone that much. Even if I did, I doubt I would contemplate such a thing.”
“Because you never give all of yourself to one person?”
“Because I love life too much.” He gave me an amused look. “And you’re a fine one to talk about never giving all of yourself to one person.”
“Hey, I tried. Not my fault it didn’t work out.” Not my fault he’d made demands that were just impossible for me to obey—even if I had been able to. “Besides, I will commit when my soul mate finally decides to make his appearance. Until then, I’ll just have to muddle along as I am.”
“Okay,” Rhoan said from the backseat. “Enough chitchat. Jack says eight of those fifteen names have gone missing in the last six hours. There were witnesses to two of the kidnappings, and both gave descriptions matching Aron Young. One of them also gave a description of the vehicle—a white van that matches the plate number you asked Jack to trace earlier. Jack’s currently trying to patch into the satellites to track him.”
I twisted around to look at him. “So the eight were definitely taken, not killed?”
“Yes.” Hope had dawned brighter in his eyes. “And we’ve got an address for the house he lived in at Beechworth. Apparently, it’s just outside the town itself.”
“No indication as to the current owners and whether it’s occupied?” Quinn asked.
“The current owners have no relationship to Young, apparently. He’s tried ringing the listed number, but there’s no answer.”
“Young wouldn’t be up there yet, anyway.” After all, he’d only taken Liander little more than an hour ago. “Besides, there’s no guarantee that is where he’s going.”
“We’d better hope it is, because otherwise Liander’s a dead man.”
“Give him more credit than that,” Quinn said softly. “He’s a fighter, and he has something worth fighting for. You.”
Rhoan gave a soft, derisive laugh. “He might have decided otherwise after my stupid behavior tonight.”
“Well, with any sort of luck, you’ll get the chance to fix that.” I gave him a dark look and added, “And you had better.”
His smile was wan, but there nevertheless. “It’s like that old cliché says—you never know what you’ve got until you almost lose it.”
“Just make sure you tell Liander that when we finally rescue him.”
“I intend to, trust me.” He blew out a breath that didn’t seem to do a whole lot to ease the tension still evident in his body.
I resisted the urge to say “you’d better,” and asked, “I don’t suppose Jack found the files for Young’s disappearance?”Rhoan snorted softly. “Apparently it’s regular procedure for regional police offices to purge computer files after twenty years. They have a hard-copy record, but it’s still being found.”
“Just as well we can go straight to the source, then.” I dragged my phone out of my pocket and pressed the button to ring the Directorate. “Has Jack got any other information about the house Young used to live in?”
“He’s going through the council records for house approvals. He’ll let us know if he finds site or floor plans.”
“What can I do for you, Riley?” Sal said.
I shoved the phone to my ear, and said, “I need to be put through to a Jerry Mayberry. He used to be the local police officer up in Beechworth. He’s retired, but apparently he’s still living up there.”
“Hang on, and I’ll see what I can do.” She put me on hold, and tinny elevator music blasted me. I winced and shifted the phone away from my ear.
“How is the cop going to help us?” Rhoan asked.
I glanced around at him. “He was the cop on duty when Aron Young disappeared. He might be able to tell us a little more than what was reported in the papers.”
Sal came back online. “Okay, I found an address and a phone number. You want me to patch you through now?”
“Yes. Thanks, Sal.”
“Hang on, then.” I went back on hold for a second, then there was a click, and the phone was ringing.
And ringing.
Come on, come on, I thought, then glanced at the clock and realized I was actually ringing at an ungodly hour. The poor man was probably tucked up nice and warm in his bed.
Eventually a gruff voice said, “Hello?”
“Is this former sergeant Jerry Mayberry, from the Beechworth Police Station?”
“That would be me.”
“Mr. Mayberry, it’s Riley Jenson, from the Directorate. We’re investigating several murders that appear to be linked to an old case of yours, and I was wondering if you could help me with some details.”
“I’ll try, but my memory is not as sharp as it used to be.” He hesitated. “The Directorate, you say? Which section?”
“Guardian division, Mr. Mayberry.”
“Martin Bass still in charge there?”
I smiled. There was nothing wrong with this man’s mind. Nor, I suspected, his memory. “There’s no Martin Bass working in the guardian division, sir. Jack Parnell has been in charge for the last eight years or so.”
“Ah, yes.” His tone softened a little. “What case we talking about?”
“Aron Young’s disappearance.”
“Ah. That was a strange one.”
“In what way, Mr. Mayberry?”
“We had evidence of rope marks on a tree limb, we had blood splatters we believe came from the victim, and we’re sure he was killed. But we never found a body and none of the kids would talk.”
“But you think they knew something?”
“Oh, yeah. Half of them were drinking or taking drugs within weeks of Young’s disappearance.”
“How many kids we talking about?”
“Seven. They were good kids at heart, but a little wild. They tended to egg each other on when in a group situation.”
And that was when a lot of bad things had happened. Peer pressure could be an incredibly powerful thing, especially when you were a teenager and trying too hard to fit in. As I suspected Young might have been. “What do you think might have happened?”