One of the toga-clad teenagers shifted slightly. Energy whispered down the link, a mere echo of the power that Quinn flung across the room at the kid who had moved.
"Stop," he said, voice holding the steel of command. The kid froze and his eyes went wide. As wide as his mistress's suddenly were.
"And drop that weapon," Quinn continued. "All of you, drop your weapons."
Weapons clattered to the floor. Every kid had at least two.
"Kick them under the chaise lounge, out of reach."
They did so. I glanced at Vinny. For the first time, there was fear in her eyes.
"Ready to be a help rather than a hindrance?" Rhoan asked softly.
She nodded. Rhoan lowered her back to the ground and eased his grip on her neck. "Now, be pleasant and answer Riley's questions."
Vinny licked her lips, then said, "What do you want to know?"
"Why is Aron Young kidnapping and murdering those who were in tenth grade with him?"
"As I told you before, he seeks vengeance for his death."
"Why now, though? Why not in the years immediately after his death?"
"Because he was unable to get out before now."
So he had been kept prisoner by his parents. "How did he get out?"
"His mother - she was sick. Her heart or something. She let him out."
And then she'd died, and he'd buried her rather than let her rot where she lay. I guess even evil bhutas had one soft spot. "Tell me where he is."
"I gave you an address - "
"One address," I cut in sharply. "Vampires intent on foul deeds always have more than one hidey-hole."
I'd learned that the hard way.
Amusement flitted briefly through her eyes. "That is true. I cannot, however, give you that information, because I do not have it."
Shit. I was so hoping that Vinny would give us the easy answers, but I guess I should have known better. Fate was never one for giving me the quick way out.
"Is there anything else you can tell me about him? Anything that might help us find him?"
She considered me for a moment, then said, "Try his home. I tasted memories of it in his thoughts."
"We have people in his home. He's not there."
"Which home, though? I do not speak of the home after his death, but rather the home when he lived. The place where it all started."
Beechworth. But how would he get that many people up there, let alone keep them contained? Beechworth was a good three-hour drive from Melbourne. There were eighteen teenagers in that school photo, which meant there could still be fifteen on Aron's hit list. That was a whole lot of people to hunt down. A whole lot of people to control.
And then I remembered the plate number I'd gotten from Ron Cowden. Young owned a van, and that could certainly carry a number of people.
"Let her go, Rhoan."
He glanced at me. "We got everything we need?"
"I think so."
He released her and stepped back. Vinny retreated to the safety of her chair, but her toga-clad fledglings didn't move to comfort or caress her. Quinn was still holding them immobile.
The scary thing was, it didn't even seem to be much of an effort.
"You are no longer welcome here," Vinny said, her gaze sweeping us and her eyes dark with anger. "Please leave."
I turned and followed Rhoan and Quinn toward the door. But as I neared it, Vinny added, "I could have been a powerful ally, Riley. It is a shame you have chosen the other path."
I turned to face her. "I have shared wine with old ones and dark gods. A young emo vamp is a long way down the ladder of the things I fear."
She smiled her cold smile. "It is good to know even guardians get things wrong."
"Oh, I get lots of things wrong, but there's one thing you should always remember." I met her cold gaze with one of my own, and saw something flicker through the brown depths. Just what that was, I couldn't say, though it wasn't fear. That scent had not been one she could claim through this whole event, even though it had been in her eyes. Which made me wonder if even that had been nothing more than an act. "I always bring down my enemies, Vinny. And you might want to consider whether you really want to be that."
And with that, I turned and walked out the door.
Chapter 10
That was a threat even Jack would be proud of," Rhoan commented, as we climbed back into his car. "Looks like he's going to make a proper guardian of you yet."
"Bite it, brother." I didn't even want to contemplate actually having to back up my words if Vinny decided to make trouble for us all.
"Where to next?" Quinn asked, as he started up the car and drove off.
"Beechworth, obviously," Rhoan said, then glanced at me. "If you believe what she said was the truth."
"I do. You want to ring Jack, and see if he can get us an address? And ask if he's had any luck with those names in Liander's photograph. I'll give the cow a call, and see if she can patch me through to the guy who used to be the cop there."
"You know," Quinn said conversationally, "for a woman who didn't want to be a guardian, you're sure doing a whole lot of guardian-type organizing."
"You can bite it, too, vampire."
"Oh, I have, and it tastes divine."
A smile tugged at my lips. "How about you concentrate on driving, seeing as we're going so fast?"
"Ah, but I'm old, and with age comes versatility. I can now manage to do two things at once. As I believe I demonstrated earlier this evening." He raised an eyebrow as he glanced at me. "You enjoy it, don't you?"
I smiled. "Sex? Vampire bites? Yes to both."
"You know what I mean."
I sighed. "Yes. There are still lines I won't cross, but I can't not do this job anymore. The thrill of the chase is highly addictive, I'm afraid."
"Oh, yes," Quinn said softly. "It can be very addictive."
The odd note in his lilting tones caught my attention. "You were a cop sometime in the past?"
"I was a cazador."
I raised an eyebrow. "And that is?"
"Cazadors are vampire enforcers. They were policing the vampire world for the old ones long before the Directorate ever came into existence."
"I've heard tales of them," Rhoan said, with the phone to his ear. "From what I understood, not all of them were on the side of the angels."
"Unfortunately, that is true." Quinn shrugged lightly. "It is very difficult not to become addicted to the kill rather than the hunt if you do it for a long time. Especially if you're a vampire. That's why cazadors are now employed for no more than a couple of decades. The risks of addiction are far less that way."
So they still had them? Meaning there were worse psychos out there than what the Directorate dealt with? That was a scary thought. "Even if they are only doing the job for a few decades, wouldn't the craving to kill still become a problem?"
"Vampires learn very early on in their rebirth to control their darker desires. It generally takes a lot of time - and bloodshed - to break that training."
I studied him for a moment, seeing the darkness beneath his serene expression. Seeing the sorrow. Once it would have worried me to know what he was feeling, but not now. Maybe I'd grown up. Maybe I was simply more accepting of the gifts and intuitions that were mine. After all, even if they now kept me in this job, they also helped me survive it. "Who did you kill?"
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 cliche 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?"