"You withdrew money from—" Nicholas began with horror, sitting up beside her, but she interrupted.
"I'm sorry. I had no idea they could track things like that," she said apologetically. "I mean, jeez, who would have thought that Mortimer and those guys could do something like that?"
He would have, Nicholas thought, but didn't say as much. She hadn't known and he hadn't told her so he could hardly blame her for the mistake. The good news was it meant they hadn't put some sort of tracker on her or anything and weren't going to burst in on them here.
"I am sorry, Nicholas. I won't use my debit card again. I just never thought—I mean, it never occurred to me they would or even could do something like that. Checking bank activity is like a cop trick or something."
Nicholas was silent for a minute, but then decided it was time they got the big talk out of the way. "Jo… Mortimer and those guys are cops. They're enforcers, rogue hunters, the equivalent of vampire cops. They have access to any technology the cops do, any technology out there if they want it. They hunt rogue immortals."
Jo was silent for a minute and then said, "Bricker said you were rogue."
"Yes," he said solemnly.
She remained still for a moment, not looking at him as she digested that and then asked carefully, "What is a rogue immortal, exactly?"
Jo hadn't moved, but Nicholas could feel her withdrawing from him, putting some emotional distance between them. He could feel the emotional tearing as she began to draw a protective wall around herself, and his heart ached. Forcing himself to breathe deeply, he waited for the pain of it to pass and then said, "A rogue is an immortal who has broken our laws."
"You have laws?" she asked with surprise.
Nicholas smiled faintly. "Of course. No society exists without laws."
"Of course," Jo murmured, and then sighed and asked. "Tell me your laws."
Nicholas hesitated and then said, "We can turn only one in a life time."
She nodded.
"Couples are allowed to have only one child every hundred years."
"One?" Jo asked with surprise. "How do you manage that? I mean what do you do if one of your females finds herself pregnant sooner than a hundred years?"
Nicholas shrugged. "It's easily managed. Actually, getting pregnant and carrying to term have usually been the problem in the past."
"The nanos?" she asked.
Nicholas nodded and reminded her, "They are to keep the host healthy and at their peak. They see a baby as a parasite, using up the blood and nutrients the host needs. For one of our women to get pregnant, she has to double up on blood to keep the nanos busy and continue to double up on it until the baby is born. Otherwise the host's nanos will abort the fetus."
"I see," she murmured, frowning. "Is that what happened to Lucian's wife?"
"Lucian?" Nicholas asked with surprise.
"I heard Mortimer say that Lucian and Leigh had been traveling a lot since she lost her baby," Jo explained, and then added, "I assume they're both immortals too?"
"Yes," Nicholas said quietly. He hadn't realized that his uncle's life mate was with child. The man must have been over the moon about it, and had probably fallen just as far when she'd lost the child.
"So did she lose the baby because she didn't feed enough?" Jo asked.
Nicholas shook his head with certainty. "No. I'm sure that's not what happened. Lucian would have made sure she'd fed enough."
"Then how could she have lost the baby?" Jo asked with confusion. "The nanos should have—"
"The nanos repair illness and injuries, but they don't fix genetic problems, so I'd imagine there was a genetic flaw and she had a natural miscarriage," he said, and then thought that probably explained why the triple wedding with Lucian, Leigh, and two other couples had been delayed yet again. On the run and rogue though he might be, Nicholas had still managed to keep up with things in his family's life. While he'd had to avoid other immortals, there were mortals who worked for his cousin's company, Argeneau Enterprises, and he'd occasionally looked one or another up and read their minds and then blanked their memories of his presence.
It was in this way Nicholas had found out about the triple wedding. It had started out as a single wedding for his cousin Bastien and his life mate, Terri. But then Lucian had found Leigh and the two couples had decided to have a double ceremony. And then his uncle Victor and Elvi had been added to the roster and it was to be a triple wedding. However, the original date had been changed and the wedding delayed when his aunt Marguerite had gone missing, and then he'd recently learned it was to be delayed again, but the secretary he'd read hadn't known why. Nicholas suspected Leigh's losing the baby had been the cause of the last delay and wondered if the triple wedding would ever take place at this rate.