"William, I can explain!" Eleanor whimpered. She made a move to cover her nakedness.

"Why hide yourself from me now, you little wh.o.r.e?"

She gasped. It seemed strange that a brothel owner and avowed prost.i.tute would act as if she'd been slapped in the face when called what she was. But I had never judged Eleanor until this moment.

She gathered what dignity she could and stood up straight, lifting her chin. Hugo stepped forward and spoke before she could.

"I thought my message of earlier this evening was clear enough. You need to leave London now while you still can. Go back to your quaint river town and wait until you're called upon."

"Called upon?" I asked. "By whom?"

Hugo laughed-a nasty, grating, unhuman sound. "The old lords, of course. In fact, you'll have to leave right now. I'm late for an appointment with them." "Oh?" I said. "For what purpose? Amuse me."

Hugo's lips trembled with rage. He was clearly not used to being mocked, and I sensed he couldn't fathom why I didn't show fear at the mention of the old ones.

"I have to a.s.sume you don't know who I'm talking about. I speak of the vampire council." He overenunciated the last two words as if he were speaking to an imbecile. "I am appearing before them tonight to introduce a plan that will put me in their favor and under their protection. Care to know what my plan is? Perhaps that would amuse you."

Behind him, Eleanor's entire body shuddered, and she uttered a little cry. "Be silent!" Hugo commanded and she stilled. He turned back to me and said, "My plan is to sacrifice your precious little Renee. The blood of virgins is especially nourishing to the old lords-and especially appreciated. When they find out what her magic blood can do, they will wish to thank me. In fact, an undead messenger just came and went." The smirk faded on Hugo's mouth when he didn't receive the reaction from me that he had antic.i.p.ated.

"Oh? What did he look like?"

Hugo looked thoroughly confused. "He was tall, an ancient blood drinker with a gray beard. What could you possibly know of-"

"Tell me, where is Diana right now?" I asked.

"Hunting with that whelp of a son of yours, I suppose. How the h.e.l.l should I know?"

"What if I told you that Diana had already presented your plan to the old lords as her own-with some modifications. And that she did so in order to secure a seat on the Council for her new lover."

"You lie! You'll say anything-"

"You had no idea those were the stakes, did you? You were willing to sacrifice Renee for the 'favor and protection' of the Council when you could have negotiated to become one of them. What a fool you are."

"All this is nonsense. Why, I-"

"Did this undead messenger happen to have a scar across his throat?"

"Well...yes." Hugo's face betrayed a flash of concern. He was beginning to get an inkling that perhaps I wasn't as ignorant as he'd thought.

"I gave him that scar a hundred years ago."

Hugo's mouth fell open, working like that of a great fish. I paused a moment to enjoy his reaction. "Who-who is he?" Hugo stammered.

"You seem to think you're an authority on the old ones. Tell me, have you ever heard of a blood drinker known as Ulrich? Ah, I can tell by your reaction that you have. Your visitor earlier-that was he."

I could practically see the wheels of Hugo's mind turning, trying to think of an explanation. "Of course," he said finally. "It makes perfect sense that the Council would send someone of his stature to issue their invitation."

"Does it really? Sending the most feared blood drinker on earth to serve as an errand boy? I think not. Let me tell you what I know to be true. Diana went behind your back to use Renee as a p.a.w.n to advance herself. Do you even know where Renee is being held?" "Diana said she would find a place underground for Renee," Hugo said. "I'm not a nursemaid." He was still projecting a brave front, but I could smell his newfound doubt for his lady love. And his fear of me was growing.

"She has taken Renee to within an eyelash of where the old lords themselves reside."

"Why would she do such a thing?" he asked.

"You still don't understand, do you? Your plan is going ahead without you. But with one slight change. They plan only to sacrifice Renee's humanity. They will make her a blood drinker."

"'They'?"

"Yes. As it happens, Ulrich is Diana's new lover."

Hugo was nearly stammering. "How would she have met him? She's with me most of the time, and I've never met him myself!"

"I've yet to discover that," I said. "I'm sure the answer will be fascinating."

"Why did Ulrich send for me?"

"So they can feed you to the old ones." I drew out my words slowly, enjoying every one, relishing the pure horror on his face.

For once Hugo was speechless. He began to back slowly toward Eleanor. "Is-is there really a seat to be had on the Council?" he sputtered. I could see rage and terror warring with each other in his eyes.

"Yes, only not by you, but by the man who cuckolded you by f.u.c.king Diana."

"I should have killed her," he muttered to no one in particular.

"Yes," I agreed, "you should have while you had the strength. But it's much too late now, isn't it?" Hugo nodded dumbly. What a pathetic display. I remembered the conversation with Olivia and her vampires in which we speculated how to take on Hugo and what his plans for Renee might be. Little did we know that Hugo was just a p.a.w.n.

"You were so pleased with yourself when you thought that all I ever cared about was yours. Diana, Will, Eleanor, Renee. Now you have nothing, and you've done me a favor in the bargain. You've shown me that Diana and Eleanor were not worth the having."

Eleanor put both fists to her mouth to stifle a cry of pain. She tried to reach through to my mind in order to beg my forgiveness.

She projected images of happy times together, of mind-shattering s.e.x, but I blocked her as I should have done from the beginning.

Hugo was standing even with her now. In a sudden movement, he grabbed her and held her in front of him, thinking to use her as a shield.

"Did you hear what I said before? I said Eleanor is not worth the having. If you think to use her as a hostage, you are a bigger fool than I took you for."

He pushed her away from him and turned as if to run. I was on him in a s.p.a.ce of time too brief to be measured, pushing him to the floor with so much force I heard his backbone break. Eleanor screamed.

"As for Will," I continued, "he is mine. He's the one who led me to the place where they are keeping Renee. He allowed me to learn of Diana's plan for you. Renee will be mine in a matter of hours. So you see, you have cost me nothing. " I looked at Eleanor. "Nothing of value, anyway."

Hugo made his move for me, but I had already antic.i.p.ated it. He tried to hurl me aside with a sweep of one powerful arm. I rose to my feet in a move too fast for him to see, and as he blinked, wondering how he'd missed me, I cuffed him on the ear as a headmaster would an unruly schoolboy. Enraged, he dove fangs first for my legs, as if to rip away my kneecaps. "I tire of this," I said, and hauled him to his feet. "Stand and fight like a blood drinker if you can."

Bellowing with rage, he came forward and swung a meaty fist at my chin. I dodged to my right and he connected only with air.

His momentum took him to the wall where the weapons and implements of torture were hung. He grabbed an ax and smashed it against the wall, breaking off the head so that only the jagged wooden handle remained.

"Over the last five hundred years I've heard your name spoken on far too many occasions." He balanced the newly formed stake in his hand.

"I'm not surprised to hear that my wife still thought about me while she was mated to you. The comparison doesn't flatter me overmuch. Is that why you forbade her to speak of me to Will?"

Hugo gritted his teeth and feinted to his right. I didn't go for the fake. "I didn't want to hear him whining about his father."

"I'd imagine the boy would rightly conclude that any male would be a better father figure than you." He drew back and charged me, but I sidestepped, sending him sprawling. He roared in pain, and there was desperation in the sound. No matter how quickly vampires healed, he still would not survive to be whole again, and on some level he knew it.

Hugo had built a reputation throughout Europe as a powerful and widely feared blood drinker, but he was no match for me on this night. Then again, his chosen female had, like a parasite, sapped every ounce of power from him that she could. Now that he could do nothing more to enhance her chances of survival-or her upward mobility in the hierarchy-she'd made plans to dispose of him.

I circled him so that I was once again facing Eleanor. "Do you see this, my dear? Do you see the blood drinker with whom you have twice cast your lot? Behold Hugo in all his glory, owner and despoiler of all that is mine. What do you think of him now? Can you possibly explain why you put your faith in him? Why you put your very existence in his hands?"

She only whimpered, red-tinged tears running down her pale cheeks. "Answer me!" I shouted.

By that time, Hugo had made it to his feet, and with what looked to be the last of his strength, threw the ax handle toward my chest, jagged end first, like a spear. It was a desperate gesture. I easily caught the spike in midair.

"You disappoint me, Hugo. I expected a better fight out of you. But then, what can you expect from a blood drinker who uses women to get what he wants? Not to mention one who throws bombs at those of his own kind and then runs away like a coward." I took an unhurried step toward Hugo, who frantically looked around him for an escape.

"And you, my dear," I said, addressing myself again to Eleanor. "What can you possibly be thinking right now, knowing that you bet on the wrong horse, as Jack would say? Knowing that your benefactor is about to die?"

I closed the distance between Hugo and myself and plunged the stake into his heart. With a bellow of defeat, his body disintegrated into a heap of dust. The room was dead silent for a moment.

I looked at Eleanor, the stake still in my hand. "Ashes to ashes," I said philosophically. "Dust to dust. And good riddance to bad rubbish."

Eleanor only stared in shock.

"So, why did you do it?" I asked her. "Why did you trust him and not me to protect you?"

I could see that Eleanor was trying to calm herself, but the rapid rise and fall of her beautiful b.r.e.a.s.t.s betrayed her panic. "When I left Savannah with them, it was because I was angry at you for neglecting me when Diana came to town. After she came it was like I ceased to exist."

"So you said when the sh.e.l.ls showed me you and Hugo on the plane. And the second time? Even though I said I would come back and give you your freedom, you betrayed my whereabouts to Hugo. Despite the fact that he beat you, abused you, and bled you from the time you left Savannah with him."

Once again I concentrated my psychic awareness on Eleanor's thoughts to detect any falsehood immediately. And again I felt nothing from her mind. Eleanor took a deep breath. "He knew you were in London. He said he smelled you on me the first time you came here. He said if I sensed you through my offspring bond and told him where you were staying, he would save me."

"Save you from whom?"

"From Diana. He said Diana would be able to seduce you, and then she would destroy you. And next she would kill me, so she wouldn't have to compete for Hugo's attention. He promised he would save me from her."

"Do you know me so little as to think I would get involved with Diana after she kidnapped Renee and ran with you and my son? Do you really think I'm that stupid?"

"She is beautiful, and you are a man." She shrugged and sniffed. "And you love her."

"What a fool you are." I felt sorry for Eleanor then, sorry enough to consider, just for a moment, letting her go. But she knew too much about me and the few I held dear. And she had demonstrated weakness, disloyalty, and poor judgment. Still, after all she had meant to me, and for all the times she had pleasured me beyond words, I decided to give her a sporting chance.

I tossed her the stake I still held and unblocked my mind. Recognizing the chance in her own mind, and being the opportunist that she was, she flooded my consciousness with s.e.xual sensation even as she tucked the stake under one arm. The memory of her every caress washed over me. The combined feel of every time she had taken me in her mouth or between her legs and wrung from me the most exquisite and agonizing pleasure hit me all at once.

I wondered if Eleanor realized the danger in opening one's mind to outgoing signals. The consciousness is a two-way street.

"Before you come closer," I said, "swear to me again that you did not reveal Renee's value to Hugo and Diana."

"I swear it." She came toward me, licking her lips. When she was within an arm's length, she went down on her knees, and unfastened and lowered my pants. She put her cheek against my bare flesh and licked along my shaft until I was rock hard.

Standing again, she shifted the stake to her teeth as a flamenco dancer would hold a rose. She put one hand on my shoulder and locked one leg around my hip. Raising herself on tiptoe, she grasped my c.o.c.k in the fist of her other hand and put me inside her.

With her legs locked around me, she rode me, taking all of me with every stroke. The feeling was so intense, and my rage so complete I failed to notice her take the stake out of her mouth. I pulled her against me and kissed her, savoring her taste, like wild berries and cream. She freed her mouth from mine just enough to whisper, "Please forgive me, my love. All I want is for things to be the way they used to be between us. Take me back to Savannah, and we'll live happily ever after."

"It's so tempting," I lied. I laid a line of kisses down her neck as I savored the feel of her silken warmth around me. Her heat reminded me of the s.e.x we'd shared when she was alive. She'd adored me. I had hoped when I made her immortal that we would be equals.

Of course, if she'd been my mate for eternity, she would eventually have become stronger than I, just as Diana had done with Hugo. But I hadn't cared, because I trusted her. I thought I would have no need to kill my mate as so many males did when their females became strong enough to threaten them. I waited five hundred years for someone who I would not mind becoming more than my match. If conflicts arose, her power would only be an a.s.set to me. Or so I reasoned.

But the struggle with the old lords had intensified, and to survive, I couldn't afford to have a lover I could no longer trust. Or one who could not size up a situation and make the judgments that would lead to our survival rather than our destruction. I might have given Eleanor a chance to redeem herself if not for the lie she'd just told me. She had offered up Renee as food for demons, and for my own self-respect I must prove to myself that I could kill her, even though I had loved her.

My own thoughts had temporarily crowded out the images with which Eleanor filled my mind. But she regained my attention when, in her desperation, she included the wrong image in the mix. I saw us in one of our more acrobatic trysts on her boat-sized bed, and it reminded me of the little game we liked to play.

The game where she tried to kill me.

I could feel myself climbing that exquisite stairway toward s.e.xual release and heard myself groan. Like any attentive lover, Eleanor recognized the signs of my climax, and I felt an easing of the pressure on my left shoulder.

She raised the stake as high as she could over our heads, and I bit down on her throat at the same second that I climaxed in wave after wave of satisfaction. I made no move to block the stabbing stroke. I didn't have to. My fangs tearing the flesh of her neck and locking onto the blood vessels there shocked her entire system and the blow glanced off my shoulder. I sucked her blood as if I was starving, as if I had lain in the earth a hundred years without a meal.

I tasted my own blood, that with which I 'd animated her such a short time ago, and its magic filled me. My body rose up involuntarily and floated above the floor, and I took Eleanor with me. We floated there in a dance both gentle and brutal, and I sucked until I felt her life force begin to fade.

I raised my lips from her throat and saw her panic-stricken eyes, like those of a mouse in the jaws of the cat. "I'm sorry, my dear," I said, and before delivering the killing bite, added, "I'll see you in h.e.l.l."

Jack When I got to the mini-storage unit that I usually called home, I waved at Tom, one of the gatekeepers I paid handsomely to guard my daytime resting place. He raised his hand in greeting, pressed the b.u.t.ton that opened the automatic iron gate, and waved me through.

I pulled into my usual parking spot in front of my unit and saw that Seth 's truck was already there as expected. I knocked on the reinforced metal door and let myself in. Seth was sitting in front of the television watching the late movie with a beer in his hand.

"What's on?" I asked.

"The Wolf Man," he said.

"You're kidding me, right?"

"Nope. Look here." He motioned me to sit on the couch next to him and pointed at the screen. Lon Chaney Junior was talking to Claude Rains. "Lon Chaney Junior is supposed to be Claude Rains's son. What is wrong with this picture?"

"I don't need my super-duper vampire sense of smell to know that you're drunk," I said. "That's one thing that's wrong with this picture, what with you in the fight of your life tomorrow night."

"No, no. I mean in the movie."

I hoped I wasn't in for a long, sodden lecture about accuracy in werewolf pictures. As he'd asked, though, I studied the pair of long-dead actors. Chaney was about a foot taller than Rains and had the look of a boxer who'd been punched in the face too many times, a natural-born ruffian. The fine-featured Rains was built more or less like Werm.

"There's not much familial likeness there," I observed.

"Dude, they don't even look like they're the same species," Seth slurred.

"How many beers have you had?"

Seth looked at me blearily. "Don't worry. I'll buy you some more." "That ain't the point. Do you really want to go into a fight to the death hungover?"

"No problem. Tomorrow, I'll just have some hair of the dog. Or in my case, wolf." He issued a wheezy laugh and wound up in a coughing fit.

I took the empty beer bottle out of his hand. "You've had enough. You've got to get some rest."