“As you keep telling me.” She made the mistake of gazing into his eyes and once more fell into that golden jade trap. She’d seen men with prettier eyes, but none with the intensity of his. Whenever he was around her, he gave her his full attention. It should have made her feel self-conscious, not gratified. “What time is it?”
“Morning.” He retrieved a mug from the cabinet and poured a cup of coffee for himself.
She looked around the kitchen. “Don’t you have any clocks down here?”
“We do not need them.” He looked at her clothes. “I asked Rowan to fetch fresh garments for you.”
“She gave me some.” Now she felt self-conscious—and grubby. “I was going to change after I take a shower.”
He sipped his coffee. “Tell her if you need any potions or paint.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He frowned. “The unguents and colors women use.” He made a vague sweeping gesture. “To put on the face and skin after you bathe.”
“Do you mean lotion and makeup?” she suggested. When he nodded, she asked, “Your English is good, but I can tell it’s not your native language. Where do you call home?”
“No place.” Something—anger, regret—darkened his expression before he turned away from her. “When you are finished bathing, come to the library. We have much to discuss.”
The rising sun irritated Lucan’s eyes even after he put on the dark glasses his sygkenis had purchased for him, but Samantha seemed unbothered by the light. More annoying than his discomfort was the fact that they were being made to wait at the entrance to the property. “Why are we standing here when we could be inside?”
“We need a search warrant to enter the building without an invitation,” Samantha told him in an absent tone. She was watching the mortal standing inside the small shack that served as a guard post. “Open your window, please.”
Lucan pressed the button and held it until the glass slid down into the door. He understood her request as he breathed in a particularly sharp scent. “The sentry is afraid.”
“He is, and not of us. Wait here.” Samantha got out of the car.
While his sygkenis questioned the guard, Lucan sat back and closed his burning eyes. He had not tried to dissuade her from joining him on the hunt for this rogue Kyn; he knew from past experience that even if he ordered her to stay behind, she would simply follow him. Even when she had been human she had been utterly fearless.
Except when it came to her nature, he silently amended. Samantha could hunt vicious killers day and night, but when it came to feeding herself, she balked at the necessity as if she were a nun being asked to join an orgy.
He understood her aversion to their need for human blood. She was a child of the twenty-first century, and had grown up in a land of affluence and compassion. In America, it was said, no one needed to go hungry or die of starvation. She had also been brainwashed by dozens of ridiculous movies about vampires, all of which portrayed their natures as evil and their dependency on blood as uncontrollable and murderous.
The truth was far more complicated. After returning to their homelands from the Crusades, Lucan and many of his brother warrior-priests known as the Knights Templar had been stricken with the plague and had died. Three days after their deaths, they came back to life, clawing their way out of their graves and rising to walk the night. The warriors discovered they were no longer human, but vampiric creatures who could feed only on human blood. They were also incredibly strong, fast, and, with a miraculous ability to spontaneously heal, nearly impossible to kill. Each transformed warrior discovered he possessed a unique psychic talent along with a beautiful, powerful scent, and that the combination of both allowed them to bespell humans as well as control their minds. They became known by many as the “dark Kyn” of humanity.
The Darkyn soon discovered that they had to protect themselves and their kind, and formed secret communities known as jardins with their own ruling lords, territories, and strongholds. They also discovered that they didn’t have to kill humans in order to survive, and began the work of learning how to coexist with them while hiding among their societies. They transformed some humans into their own kind, and used other, trusted mortals as their servants and guards.
A century passed, after which two things happened: The Darkyn lost the ability to change mortals, and every attempt they made proved fatal to the human. At the same time, a group of religious zealots became aware of the existence of the Darkyn, and vowed to hunt down and kill the former Templars. The zealots formed an order known as the Brethren, and while impersonating Catholic priests pursued the Darkyn all across Europe. As they hunted, captured, tortured, and killed the former Templars, the Brethren also realized they would not outlive their enemy. So they began breeding, raising, and training their own replacements, and the secret war between the Brethren and the Darkyn had endured for the last six hundred years.
It wasn’t until early in the twenty-first century that Michael Cyprien, the seigneur who ruled over all of the jardins located in America, had accidentally changed a human into a Darkyn. Dr. Alexandra Keller, whom he had abducted and forced to perform reconstructive surgery to restore his ruined face, had become the first human in six centuries to survive the process of transition—this, according to Alex, only because she had first been genetically altered by the Brethren to become a vampire hunter. It was Alexandra’s blood that Lucan had used on Samantha as she lay dying from a fatal gunshot wound, and that had transformed her into Darkyn.
Lucan had never regretted taking away Samantha’s humanity in order to snatch her back from the cold clutch of death. By that time he’d known that he loved her more than any woman he had ever known, even the one he had once thought to be the great love of his life. Losing her would have been the same as committing suicide. Yet despite her transition, his sygkenis had not yet accepted what she had become. Sometimes Lucan wondered if she ever would.
Samantha was not using l’attrait on the guard; that much was obvious by the mortal’s tight-lipped responses to her questions. She still insisted on relying on human methods, a practice he found charmingly naive but highly inefficient. Tired and rapidly losing patience, he climbed out of the Ferrari and went to deal with the guard himself.
“I thought you were going to wait in the car,” she said when he joined her. Her eyes narrowed as his scent flooded the air around them. “Wait a minute.”
“I have waited twenty. This is faster,” he told her, and turned to the shack’s small window. “You, there. Sentry. Attend me.”
“Sir, as I told the detective …” The mortal breathed in, blinked, and gave him a foolish smile. “What can I do for you?”
“Where was this man of yours murdered last night?” Lucan asked.
“Right over here.” The guard pointed to the other side of the shack.
Samantha gave Lucan an impatient glance as she walked around and then stopped. The strong odor of disinfectant cleaner did not entirely mask the smell of blood and gunpowder.
Lucan examined the wall. “There.” He pointed to traces of pink staining the concrete.
Samantha crouched by the stain and examined the ground. “No shell casings, but …” She reached down with her scarred hand and pressed it over a spot in the grass, and then closed her eyes.
Her scent, as dark and seductive as midnight in the Amazon, grew strong and hot.
“His name was Theodore,” she murmured in a faraway voice. “No. Ted. He’s working on a crossword puzzle. He needs a five-letter word for ‘temptation’s fruit.’ ”
“Apple,” Lucan told her. To the guard who was coming out of the shack, he said, “Stay there and do nothing.”
The man beamed. “Whatever you say, sir.”
Samantha opened her eyes, but her gaze had a blind quality to it as she looked toward the drive leading to the building. “Del calls down. He says I have to stop him if I can. Some kind of trouble. Someone hurt.” She slowly rose to her feet and walked to the edge of the drive. “Fuck me, he’s been working out. How did he get so big so fast? Right, have to do this the way Del wants. He’ll listen to me.” She stopped speaking but her lips moved as she shaped more words. Her whole body jerked violently, and then she wheeled backward as if she’d been thrown.
Lucan caught her from behind to keep her from hitting the wall in the same spot where the blood traces were. “Samantha.”
She shook her head wildly. “No, oh, Jesus—no.” She clapped her hands to her head, stiffened, and then sagged against him, turning and burying her face in his chest.
Lucan knew Samantha’s ability allowed her to read the blood of the dead and through it see their last minutes of life, which often identified their killer for her. As much as it helped her with her detective work, it exacted a terrible price: She also experienced firsthand the victim’s death.
“Lucan, oh, my God.” She panted out the words, shuddering uncontrollably as she tried to collect herself. “The victim knew him. They were friends. And he tore his head off. With his hands. With his bare hands.”
“Shhhh.” He cradled her head and pressed her cheek to his heart. “It’s done.” Over her shoulder he saw a stocky man driving a golf cart toward them. “Was the killer one of our kind?”
She rubbed a hand over her damp face. “No. At least, I don’t think so. But there was something wrong with him. He smelled like …” She shook her head as she straightened her shoulders and seemed to regain control over herself. “I don’t know. Not like us. Not human. He smelled wrong.”
The man in the cart stopped a short distance away and got out. He had a self-important stride, one that faltered as soon as Lucan’s scent washed over him.
“Flowers?” the man muttered, looking confused.
Lucan beckoned to him as he put a supportive arm around Samantha’s waist. She had recovered from the vision, but he could still feel how shocked she felt. “Do you know the man who killed your guard last night?”
