Blood Guilt Read online

  ****

  This—pounding down a dark city street in pursuit of vampires—was Mihaela getting away from it all. Once a hunter, always a hunter.

  Shadowing her quarries with swift efficiency, keeping them in sight without getting too close, Mihaela had time to think, savagely, that perhaps Konrad was right in his belief that all vampires everywhere should be exterminated. At this moment, watching vampires hunt a child, he certainly seemed closer to reality than Elizabeth’s daydream of toleration and integration.

  Hands in pockets, both curled around lethally sharpened stakes—training overcame everything, and she never traveled without at least two wooden stakes—she followed with grim determination, swerving down side-streets and through ill-lit alleys and narrow flights of steps.

  Oddly, even in quieter territory, the vampires made no move to close in on the child. Did they sense her following? Were they being circumspect, or luring her into a trap? Most vampires avoided tangling with hunters if they could avoid it; killing one simply brought too much trouble down on their heads. But since Saloman’s revolution, they were all behaving differently. In many ways, they were less afraid than they had ever been, and since they’d never been exactly timid or shy of bloodshed, this scared the hell out of Mihaela.

  She had no idea where she was. Following along a dimly lit alley, she saw the vampires halt at the end, where it seemed to open into a wider back court. Slipping silently closer, she thought it looked like a delivery area for shops or, judging by the smell, more likely a pub.

  The vampires paid her no attention. Keeping them in her wary vision, Mihaela cast a few quick glances beyond them. The boy was there, standing in front of a man sprawled on a metal barrel, with his back leaning against the wall of the pub. On the wind, she caught the child’s voice, high and excited, though she couldn’t make out the words.

  The man on the barrel sat very still, with the sort of boneless flop she associated with the very drunk. Was this the child’s father? Was this who he’d been looking for all day on his own? Mihaela’s heart went out to the boy. She squashed her upsurge of anger against the irresponsible piss-head of a father. She had to protect both of them now from the hovering vampires.

  She tensed, for the vampires began to move, not fast as they could, but with an air of slow, unstoppable determination. She drew in her breath, running swiftly forward. But other shadows were moving in the yard too. On all sides, they detached themselves from the darkness, advancing on where the boy stood talking to the drunk, who at last lurched to his feet, finally aware of the danger.

  Picking up speed, Mihaela acknowledged something was very wrong here. There must have been twelve vampires altogether. Too many for this country, this city, this small meal of one adult and a child. What the hell was going on?

  The boy turned around to face his attackers, took one circumspect step backward, just as the drunk launched himself at one of the vampires. The god of the inebriated must have smiled upon him, for by some miracle of luck, his fist connected with one an instant before his foot kicked another to the ground. Or perhaps he was just used to brutal pub brawls.

  Mihaela didn’t wait to find out. Focusing on the fair head of the boy, she staked the vampire in her path—a recently fledged weakling, for she barely felt his strength adding to her own—and sped toward her goal. His companions seemed to feel his death, though, for some of them turned to stare at her.

  One flew at her, snarling, his fangs white in the blackness of the yard. Mihaela kicked him, hard, and staked him as he doubled-up, lashing out with her free elbow at another vampire who tried to take advantage of her distraction. They weren’t expecting a hunter, or it wouldn’t have been so easy to kill him, but by now they’d all have her scent.

  Given vampires’ superior speed and might, a fight with a human could have only one realistic end—unless that human was a hunter. Not only trained to counter vampire speed, hunters could also grow far stronger than ordinary humans, because with every vampire kill, they gained some of that vampire’s power. Of course, vampires also gained by killing each other, especially if they took the blood of their victim. Plus, they grew more powerful with age.

  Mihaela was a strong hunter. But there were just too many of them here. She had no chance. Her only hope was to get the humans away and somehow frighten the vampires off.

  She shouted, “Run, kid! Get out of here!” Where’s the bloody father? He should be with him… Dodging a vicious blow from another of the vampires, she made out the drunken parent, falling under a hail of kicks and punches. A flash of a car headlight winked through from the road beyond, just as the drunk sank his teeth into one of his attackers, who exploded almost instantly into dust.

  Mihaela froze.

  “Oh shit,” she whispered. She couldn’t look away as he heaved himself to his feet, hurling one of his attackers into the rest and lashing out before they fell on him again.

  No human drunk, but a vampire; an extremely powerful one that she really, really didn’t want to see here.

  She paid for her moment of stunned distraction as a vampire cannoned into her, knocking her off balance and snarling for her neck. She stabbed him with a backward thrust in the thigh that surprised him enough to let her make the kill. He was stronger; his energy flooding into her almost made her gasp.

  So the numbers were reduced, but the boy still stood by the barrel, flattened into the wall, his eyes wide. Mihaela couldn’t fight them all, and she didn’t trust the powerful vampire currently being beaten to a pulp by his fellows.

  “Police!” she yelled at the top of her voice. “Help!”

  It was hardly likely to bring the cavalry galloping to their rescue, but at least it gave the vampires pause. Which was interesting. She’d wondered if they’d care about such attentions. After all, there were still enough of them to deal with the coppers who, even if they came, were unlikely to turn up mob-handed on a Tuesday afternoon.

  “And there are more hunters coming,” she informed the vampires more quietly, as she kneed one in the groin and pushed him into the crowd.

  Stumbling back, he recovered and glared at her. His muddy eyes flashed venom.

  Mihaela’s world reeled.

  Suddenly she felt not a seasoned vampire hunter at all, but a child facing a monster of unspeakable proportions as her world collapsed and died around her in blood and horror.

  The vampire, a stocky being with thick, rough brown hair straggling down to his neck, grinned. Just for an instant, she could have sworn recognition gleamed in his red-tinged eyes. Then, as if he’d given some silent order, which he probably had, all the vampires backed off. One grabbed her by the throat on the way past. She swiped his legs away with her foot and staked him as he landed on the ground. The pressure on her throat vanished with the vampire, and she whirled to find the lead vampire advancing on the child.

  Springing forward, Mihaela threw herself between them.

  “No,” she said, both stakes pointing straight at the vampire’s chest from different angles. “Not this time.”

  Spite twisted his face. He even swayed forward on the balls of his feet, and her every nerve prepared for the swiftest action of her life. His ear was covered by his hair, so she still couldn’t be sure. If it wasn’t for the child, she’d have fought him just to get at his ear, and then killed him whatever the result.

  The vampire laughed and stepped back.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll get him later.” And he turned and walked away.

  Breathing hard, Mihaela glanced round the whole yard. It was impossible to see how far the vampires had withdrawn. They needed to get out of here, fast.

  She turned to the boy. “Are you all right?”

  The child nodded. Mihaela tried to smile, held out her hand to him with more hope than expectation. He looked at it, then at her face, and then grabbed her hand as if it were his only lifeline. It was.

  “I’ll take you home,” Mihaela promised. She began to walk with him toward the far exit, fr
om where she’d seen the car headlights. The “drunk” vampire lay in a still, black heap on the ground. Clearly, he wasn’t dead, though she doubted he was far from it. But Mihaela wasn’t stupid; she’d spent a long time around vampires, and although he hadn’t appeared to be part of the group attacking the child, she couldn’t trust him any more than she would a rabid dog. She gave him a wide berth and hurried on to the road. She’d deal with her conscience later, along with her responsibility, once she’d done her duty by the little boy who must be terribly traumatized by the night’s events.

  “What’s your name?” she asked, as gently as she could. Her voice showed an annoying tendency to shake.

  “Robbie,” the boy answered easily enough.

  “I’m Mihaela. Do you have a surname? A second name?”

  He appeared to think about that, then shook his head.

  “Okay. Do you know where you live? Is it close by?”

  The boy shook his head. “Not really. I walked a long way.” By his accent, he was local, at least.

  “You can’t remember your address?”

  Robbie thought again. “No,” he said apologetically. “Not now.”

  “Ah. Have you moved house recently?”

  “I’m always moving.”

  Mihaela glanced at him, but he didn’t appear to be sad. Nor did he appear to be overwhelmed or even upset by what had just happened. Shock did funny things to people. Look at her. Two shocks in one incident and she really had to fight to focus on her job, the same job she’d been extremely good at for ten years and more. At least she could neither see nor hear signs of anyone following them—although the skin pricked at the back of her neck in fear.

  “Robbie, I’ll have to take you to a police station,” she said, heading in the direction of noise and traffic. “I’m sure the police’ll be able to find your parents.”

  “My parents are dead,” Robbie said flatly.

  Mihaela swallowed. “I’m sorry. Who do you live with, then?”

  He sighed. “Jim and Peg now.”

  “Are they related to you? Foster parents?”

  “Aye,” Robbie said, not very interested.

  “What are you doing out on your own?”

  “I wanted to see them, talk to them, ken?”

  Ken? Her floundering brain finally latched on to an old conversation with Elizabeth. “Ken” meant “know,” and a lot of Scottish speech was peppered with the word, much as other people say, “you know?”

  “See who, Robbie?” Mihaela asked.

  He jerked his head back the way they’d come.

  Mihaela’s grip tightened on his hand before she forced herself to relax it again. “You know these—people?”

  “I ken the one with the broken ear.”

  For the third time that afternoon, Mihaela’s world rocked off its axis. A little girl furiously fighting for her life, gnashing at whatever she could reach; the ear of the vampire who’d already killed her parents and sister.

  “Coincidence,” she whispered. Her anxiety had unhinged her. Was it really likely she’d come to Scotland to encounter her parents’ murderer after all these years?

  It doesn’t matter. I’ll get him later. He’d spoken to her in Romanian. Despite the fact that her words had all been in English. So he was Romanian and recognized that she was. From which it was still a leap to imagine she’d faced her greatest enemy, the vampire she’d almost given up hope of ever encountering again. And let him get away.

  It doesn’t matter, she promised him. I will most certainly get you later. Not just to find out but to kill him. Whatever was going on here, and whether or not he was the same vampire who’d killed her family, hunting children was beyond the pale. Even Saloman didn’t condone that.

  But her first duty was to the child himself.

  “How do you know the one with the broken ear?” she asked.

  “I found him. I can hear him. I heard the other one too, the one who’s hurt back there.”

  “You hear them?” she repeated, gazing down at him curiously. “You mean—over distances?”

  “Aye. They don’t need to speak. I can hear them.”

  The child was telepathic? Psychic?

  “And these—men—called to you to come?” she asked, genuinely frightened for him now.

  Robbie frowned. “Today, the man with the broken ear did. But I heard the other one, though he wasn’t talking to me. That’s the way it usually is. The way it was the first time too, with him with the broken ear.”

  “Robbie!”

  Mihaela was so involved in the boy’s words that at first she barely registered the yelling of his name in a raucous, female tone. Then, swinging around in relief, she saw a large, fake blonde leaning out of a car that skidded to a halt just beside them. “Where the fu—devil have you been, you wee shi— We’ve been worried sick!”

  Mihaela glanced from the hardly comforting woman—who, to give her her due, was hardly likely to be at her best after the anxiety of searching for a lost foster child for the better part of the day—to Robbie, who sighed.

  “Peg and Jim,” he said, with resignation rather than fear; but it was enough to make Mihaela feel like a villain for handing him over.

  “Who’re you?” Peg demanded with suspicion. In the circumstances, it was natural.

  “I found him wandering on his own outside a pub,” Mihaela said. “There was a fight. He could have got badly hurt. He must be very frightened.”

  “Him?” Peg snorted. “I don’t think he’s ever been frightened in his life. In the car, Robbie. Wait till I get you home.” As Robbie sighed again and climbed into the car, he cast an oddly wistful smile over his shoulder at Mihaela.

  “Will he be all right?” she blurted.

  “Oh aye,” Peg said.

  “Thanks,” added the car driver grudgingly, leaning over his wife to talk. “He’s always doing this. Runs away as soon as you turn your back. God knows how he got all the way here.”

  “Robbie, you mustn’t,” Mihaela said to him urgently as he fastened himself into the back seat. “Don’t go when they call. They’re dangerous. And—” But the car drove off before she’d said all she needed to, all she wanted to.

  The boy was safe with his carers, and yet she felt both bereft and frightened for him. She wondered if there was a way to see him again, to check he was all right, for Peg and Jim did not fill her with confidence.

  If I were his foster mother…

  Well, you’re not. You can barely look after yourself, never mind a dependent child!

  Mocking herself, because in fact her parenting skills, or lack of them, had always been irrelevant—vampire hunting was a 24-7 job that didn’t allow the distraction of young family or even the relationship necessary to acquire one—she stood back out of the way of people heading into the pub and tried to drag her thoughts back to the important issues.

  She needed to know what so many strong vampires, at least some of them foreign, were doing here. She needed to know if the vampire who threatened Robbie really could get him later, and if he really was her own family’s killer. And…

  She came around to it carefully, trying to avoid it and knowing she couldn’t. She couldn’t take the chance.

  She turned and retraced her steps back along the road to the alley that led to the pub’s back court. She expected him to be gone. She hoped he’d be gone. She hoped she’d made a mistake in identifying him. After all, it had been dark, and how likely was it to encounter two vampires from her past in one afternoon?

  More likely if one of them had made his home in Scotland.

  Her heart beat faster as she walked into the yard, hands once more grasping the stakes in her pockets. The dark heap of mostly dead vampire had gone. Which meant, surely, he’d either died or recovered. She swallowed. Neither possibility made her feel good.

  She stood still where she’d last seen him, wishing she’d brought a detector, while she quartered the court. She thought the vampires had vanished, but she couldn’t be
sure. At any rate, she’d learned long ago never to make dangerous assumptions.

  To her left, the barrel no longer sat flush against the wall. There was a gap of blank darkness between. He could be masking. Any of them could be masking. She stared hard at the gap between the wall and the barrel, walking slowly toward it until it resolved into a body.

  Without warning, a light came on, shining out from the pub wall. Mihaela froze, waiting for someone to appear, but there was no door as such into the yard, only barred windows and the trap through which beer was delivered to the cellar. Perhaps someone inside had just remembered to switch on the light for security reasons.

  Mihaela approached the barrel, withdrawing the stake from her pocket. She gazed down at the injured, blood-spattered vampire, illuminated now like some gothic-novel illustration. Pale skin, dark, untidy hair with just a hint of auburn shining through. He wore a rough wool workman’s jacket over his usual jeans and T-shirt; his arm and one leg were bent at grotesque angles, and he stank of enough alcohol to repel a down-and-out. But it was still, unmistakably, the vampire Maximilian.

  Chapter Two

  Mihaela sank to her knees, her stake raised for the kill. Unbidden, she remembered the vision of this vampire that haunted her dreams: his face cool and calm above hers as he efficiently staked the vampire who would undoubtedly have killed her. She remembered her own stupefaction as she’d gazed up at him amid the carnage, stunned by what he’d done and terrified as to what it meant. They’d fought on the same side in that battle to save the hunters’ library from the insane Luk’s marauding hordes of undead; but she’d never expected a vampire to trouble to save her life.

  It was a debt.

  You can’t afford debts to vampires. You can’t take the chance. He was here when the others were; Robbie was drawn to him, whether or not he spoke in words…

  She stared down at the scored, bleeding face, still handsome with all its injuries. He wasn’t the disreputable twenty-year-old he appeared; he was a six-hundred-year-old vampire with a penchant for treachery, who’d once commanded the strongest community of undead in the world.