Hunger Read online

  Fury eventually won out over lust, however. They had known, of course, that they were being filmed at the time but they had let themselves get carried away just the same. At least he could take comfort in the fact that all of their lovemaking had not been captured. He had fried the cameras before that could happen.

  “Enough,” Halo said with disgust as he began to turn away. But Danton’s hand on his shoulder stayed him.

  “Wait for it,” he said.

  Halo arched a brow and turned his attention back to the camera. There was a blip as the scene of passion between Halo and Felice came to an end and Roth’s face appeared center screen. Halo was so filled with loathing at the sight of him it was almost overwhelming. He had to take in a calming breath, trying to release it slowly, but as Roth spoke Halo’s temper rose by several degrees.

  “Halo,” he said. “You have executed a very surprising and efficient escape. Remarkable. I clearly underestimated you on several counts. I made mistakes. I’m big enough to admit that. Are you? Are you big enough to admit that you have made fatal mistakes where I am concerned? I could have killed you…several times over in fact. How does that make you feel? How does it make you feel knowing I got the best of you? You may have succeeded in escaping, but I’ve still won. And there’s always tomorrow for me to get it right. You had better stay on your guard at all times. Me and my people will be hunting you, hunter. You and your little concubine. I never did tell you why I chose her. I guess you’ll have to catch me to find out.”

  Roth laughed, almost maniacally, and the recording ended. By the time it reached its end Halo was gripping the camera so hard he was crushing its more delicate components.

  “Easy,” Danton said, prying his fingers from around the camera, “there could be clues on here. Who knows how many recordings are on this thing? There’s no telling without watching it all from beginning to end and it’s clear there’s a lot of data here.”

  “Probably the entirety of our time in captivity,” Halo said hoarsely.

  Danton comforted Halo the best way he could, risking rejection as he patted Halo’s shoulder with one large dark hand. Danton was very tall and was the only black vampire Halo knew. Probably the only one in existence. Danton’s history was quite colorful and he was one of the few vampires Halo respected, knowing something of what he had endured in his lifetime. He didn’t know the whole story, but he knew enough of it. His origins were as unique as the man himself.

  Halo shrugged off his nostalgic contemplations and turned away from Danton.

  “I’ll watch the tape first,” he said gruffly. “Alone.”

  He wanted to make certain there wasn’t anything on it that might embarrass Felice any more than she would already be embarrassed. He remembered every last detail of every last kiss they had shared. He wanted to see if it was all committed to tape. He wanted to see if Roth had purposely left only a snippet of the passion he had shared with Felice. If so…why? And what had happened to the rest of it? He struggled with the idea of what it meant if Roth had those images of them—naked and locked in erotic embraces. What would he do with those images? Personally, Halo couldn’t care less. He didn’t care if there was film out there of him fucking around with a woman. In fact, before today—before Felice—he would have eagerly engaged in a recorded sexual escapade in spite of the fact that it was the duty of all vampires to avoid having their picture taken whenever possible—to keep future generations from realizing they never aged. That had been easier to accomplish in previous years, but it was nearly impossible now with cameras everywhere. So it wasn’t a fixed law, just a strong rule of thumb.

  However, Felice, he knew, would mind. She would mind very much if pictures or a film of her naked and exposed were to get out into the miasma of cyberspace. She was private and struck him as shy to that kind of exposure. It enraged him to think of her being made so vulnerable against her will.

  What Halo didn’t understand was why such things would be important to Roth. He was missing something. Something that was right in front of his face. All he needed, he felt, was that one piece of the puzzle that would make all the others fall into place.

  Halo was grateful the cameras had conked out before they had had full-blown sex. In fact, he doubted Felice would have given in to her passions had it been otherwise. But just to be safe, just to be sure, he would watch the tape in its entirety on his own later.

  As they inspected the warehouse, he became aware of footprints made with dust and bits of pearlescent-looking debris. He instinctively knew it was a clue of import, but what it meant was beyond him at the moment. So he took a sample of the debris and put it in a piece of folded-up paper he found. Halo then walked the perimeter of the warehouse to see if he could find the source of those pearly footprints.

  He found nothing that could explain them, so he assumed they came from a substance located at another location. It could mean a clue to finding Roth.

  After securing the paper in his pocket, he went about searching the rest of the warehouse. It was empty save for some large crates in the center of the main floor. The crates they had used for cover when they had escaped. With Danton’s help, he pried open one of the crates. Inside he found another puzzling clue. There was fertilizer in one, soil in another, and in the final one was grass seed.

  So someone was gardening. Or at least planting a lawn. Or perhaps the contents of the crates had nothing to do with the man who had commandeered the warehouse. But Halo found that hard to believe. Roth had to have had the warehouse for some time in order to retrofit it to serve as Halo and Felice’s prison. It wasn’t as though the location had been selected on the fly. But what did gardening supplies have to do with a sycophant?

  More mysteries. Frustrating ones. He wanted it to be more straightforward. That was unusual for him. As a hunter he usually thrived on clues and how to interpret them into leading him to where his mark was hiding. It was all part of the thrill of the hunt. The more challenging the prey, the more thrilling the hunt. And the more satisfying the victory.

  However, as long as Roth was out there Felice would not be safe. That idea truly irritated him.

  No. It enraged him. The severity and passion of the thought took him by surprise. When had what happened to this human female come to mean so much to him? Perhaps, he thought, their lovemaking had created a sense of intimacy.

  And when had it become “lovemaking” instead of “fucking”? He didn’t make love—he fucked.

  It was an aberration he didn’t find amusing. It confused matters. It confused him. He liked things straightforward and simple. His relationship with Felice was becoming complicated.

  Like that, for instance. Why did he consider it a “relationship”? He might have put it down to simple verbiage, a simple use of the word, but there was feeling behind that word, just as there was behind “lovemaking.” Feelings he wanted nothing to do with, he reminded himself firmly. Feelings that would only lead her on when there was no hope of a future relationship between them—not that he was the “relationship” type. No. There was nothing to worry about on his end. He was practical and basic, knew what he wanted and where it would end. But Felice could be led astray; she could pick up things from his word usage or actions that might lead her to think there was more than there was. More than could ever be.

  Still, he found his own feelings more than a little fascinating. He found them disturbing, distracting. He was a man in control of his own destiny and actions, but it seemed that ever since the moment he had met Felice, his life had been spiraling out of his control. That had been the feelings brought on by captivity, he told himself, by the closeness of being in a situation of danger together. It was nothing more than that.

  Yet even as Halo told himself that, there was a niggling doubt in the back of his mind. A doubt he wasn’t ready to face so he pushed it farther back and went on about his business.

  Having exhausted all clues from the warehouse, he was anxious to get back to Felice.

  As he dro
ve back with the team that had been dispatched to the warehouse, Halo sat lost in thought. There was a great deal to reconcile; some things he was willing to think about and some things he wasn’t. Everything that he felt was unnecessary he discarded as unimportant. He focused on his clues to Roth instead of dwelling on his overriding concern for Felice’s well-being.

  It turned out to be a fruitless employment. He couldn’t focus or concentrate as thoughts of a small and fragile human woman continually encroached on his conscience. How much of her present situation was his fault? How much injury to her could have been avoided had he simply thought of a better way of getting them out of there? If he had jerked the truck right instead of left when escaping the bullet might have missed her entirely.

  Halo wasn’t the sort to second-guess himself. He viewed it as an exercise in futility and a waste of his time, yet he couldn’t seem to shake the feelings of guilt that tagged along with him. He wasn’t the type to take on any responsibilities outside of the hunt, so why did he feel responsible for her?

  What was so damn special about her?

  When he finally returned to the hospital wing Halo was surprised to find it a flurry of activity. There were visibly injured vampires with burns and other gross wounds standing around in the halls and the emergency area’s bays. The nurses and doctors were overwhelmed. There weren’t enough of them to go around. He snagged a passing nurse by the arm and asked, “What the hell happened?”

  “Someone set off a bomb on the fourth floor,” she said. “Didn’t you hear it?”

  “I wasn’t here…”

  “It just happened. The humans haven’t even had time to respond yet. They’ll be crawling all over the place soon enough.”

  The fourth floor? What the hell was on the fourth floor? It was a trading floor, he recalled then, where stock portfolios were managed. It was a key source of the revenue that kept the vampires solvent.

  How had someone snuck a bomb into the building? What was the purpose? And how had they gotten past the guards, the keycarded elevators and stairs, and a roomful of lawful vampires?

  A sycophant couldn’t have done it and they wouldn’t send in a human as both would stick out. That meant that someone had sent a clean vampire to do their dirty work. Then again, Halo had made it past the guards and into the elevator even though he had been dirtied up. His reputation had had something to do with that. The same thing could have happened with someone else. If no one had been paying attention…

  Odds were, though, it had been a clean vampire who had done it. A so-called lawful vampire. Usually the two went hand in hand. But what if Roth or Draz was coaxing clean vampires into doing their dirty work? That would leave the vampire nation exposed and vulnerable. It would make them paranoid as they realized they couldn’t trust anyone.

  When Roth had finally crossed over to the dark side he had taken vital information with him and no doubt had sold it to the highest bidder. That bidder had been Killean, a scum-sucking vampire who had been in charge of all the sycophants along the waterfront. Killean was now dead, but the information was still out there and had no doubt been shared with Killean and Roth’s boss, Draz. And that information in Draz’s hands was dangerous.

  There was nothing they could do about it now, but repercussions were bound to occur because of that leaked information. Things like the threat to the summit where a powerful treaty had just been signed. Things like the kidnapping of a powerful hunter and an attempt to turn him into a sycophant. Things like getting a lawful vampire to bomb vampire central.

  An attack on the fourth floor was an attack on the infrastructure of the vampire economy. True, everything was saved and tracked in an advanced computer system and also in the systems of all the banks they did business with, but it would cause chaos and suspend trading, not to mention expose them to the outside world. A bomb detonating was not something that could be hidden or glossed over. Fire would break out and need to be extinguished. That meant letting human rescue services into the building—and whenever humans saw the inside of that building it put the entire nation at risk of exposure.

  Halo turned around and headed down to the fourth floor to see what had happened. He wanted to make certain the building was still sound. After all, Felice was upstairs. He wouldn’t have her safety threatened again so soon after the last time.

  Luckily the structure of the building had not been compromised, Halo found out after talking to an authoritarian on the scene. It had just been a device meant to hurt vampires and make a lot of noise, not bring the house down. The glass had been blown out, however, and cold air was sweeping through the floor. Most of the fires were being put out, but now the place was beginning to be crawling with humans. Just as predicted. He was prevented from going to the real scene of the crime by a cop and it irritated him. He could probably do a lot more about finding who had set the bomb than the cop could.

  The first thing Halo would do was review the tapes at the front door. It was the only place in the building with cameras—for obvious reasons. It was also there for the same reasons humans had cameras. For these reasons.

  Then something occurred to him. He would be on those cameras, coming in covered in blood. Halo needed to get to those tapes before the humans did.

  He returned to the swarming lobby and went up to the security desk. He recognized the guard from earlier. He could tell just how uncomfortable he was with the infestation of humans in vampire territory.

  “I need the tapes from the cameras. And you have to keep the humans from seeing them,” he said.

  The guard frowned.

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so,” Halo growled.

  The guard blinked and then reached to pop out a DVD from the camera recorder. He handed it to Halo with some reluctance. It was clear he didn’t trust him.

  “How do I know you’re not just hiding the fact that it was you who planted that bomb?” the guard asked.

  “I guess you’ll just have to trust me,” Halo said with a wicked smile.

  “Trust you? You came in here dirty earlier.”

  “Yet you let me up,” Halo pointed out. “Who’s at fault then?”

  The guard swallowed noisily. He didn’t respond further.

  Halo took the DVD and went back upstairs to the clinic. He searched for and found Felice’s room. She was in bed, sleeping. Her arm was in a sling and resting against her ribs. He hooked an ankle around the leg of a chair and pulled it up to her bedside. He sat down, spinning the DVD between his fingers as he thought long and hard about all that had happened.

  He was no doubt going to be a suspect in this bombing. What he had to do was come up with a viable alternative. He was clean now, but who would trust him after knowing he was dirty during the time the bomb could have been planted. Maybe this was all an attempt to undermine his position in the upper echelons of their government.

  But how was Roth to know he had actually fed from Felice? He could only make assumptions because the cameras had been out. Still, it had no doubt radiated off him when he had handled the guards. Had Halo left anyone alive to report that to Roth? He didn’t think so. But neither was he certain no one else had seen him during his escape.

  Was he just being paranoid? Maybe the bombing had nothing at all to do with Roth. But if not it was a hell of a coincidence. Halo didn’t believe in coincidences. He might only have been a part of Roth’s plan. It was possible he had captured other vampires and turned them in the same manner he had tried to turn Halo.

  However, that meant the guards had let a sycophant pass. Why not? They had let him pass. Although he hadn’t been all that dirty, he was dirty enough. Rafe and Simone had certainly reacted to him. Why hadn’t the guards? Maybe they had been instructed to let him pass. Instructed by Roth.

  A nurse came in, interrupting his musings. She checked on her sleeping patient, taking Felice’s pulse and reading her pressure from the automatic cuff around her good arm. The fact that it didn’t wake her attested to the exhaustion
she was suffering from and the healing she had to do.

  “I need a DVD player,” he said gruffly to the nurse.

  “I’ll get you one. We have a few in storage for patients who want them.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  The nurse left and he went back to his thoughts. There was nothing he could do about any of it except start examining the evidence. Really it was an authoritarian’s job to do so and he was overstepping his bounds, but that bomb had been planted only floors away from Felice and he had promised to protect her. Halo had to make certain he knew what had happened so he could act on it. If he handed over that DVD he would be handing over control of the situation before he had a chance to get into it.

  The nurse came back with the player and plugged it into the TV in the room. He waited for her to leave and then slid the disk into the player. He popped on the TV and began the tedious task of watching the feed from the front entrance camera.

  “What’s that?” Felice asked about an hour later, startling him. He didn’t realize she had awakened. He used the remote to pop off the TV and turned his attention to her.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, getting up out of his chair and sitting on the edge of her bed so he was facing her. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “It’s not nothing,” she insisted, trying to reach for the remote. He held it out of her reach and she had to give up. It hurt her too much to move. “Tell me what’s going on,” she pleaded with him.

  Silently he debated the merits of telling her. He was surprised that his first instinct was to protect her. He had never been the coddling sort. But she had been through so much—and much of it his fault. His guilt was eating at him. It was an emotion he wasn’t used to feeling.

  In the end he went with his nature. It wouldn’t be fair to keep her in the dark and he would be underestimating her if he thought she couldn’t handle it.