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“How long have you been here?”
“I came to California just days after Marshall struck it rich at Sutter’s Mill.”
“Really? Wow. What was it like?”
“Those were wild times. In the beginning, you could pick nuggets up off the ground. I made a good part of my fortune then. I scoured the streams and riverbeds at night while the miners were asleep. I still have the first gold nugget I found.”
“That’s amazing.” It explained a lot, she mused. Like how he could drive such an expensive car, and how he could afford to maintain a whole town and feed everyone in it.
“It was a great time to be a vampire. During the seven years of the strike, over three hundred thousand people flocked to California. As news of the strike spread, people came from all over the world—Hawaii, Australia, Latin America, Europe, China. There was quite a mix,” he said, grinning with the memory. “Probably the best hunting ground I’ve ever known.”
“Thanks for sharing that.”
“Sorry.” She didn’t know the half of it, he thought. All those nationalities in one place, each with its own unique scent and taste. A real smorgasbord. No one in the States had really believed in vampires back then. Oh, there had been stories and myths carried from the Old Country, but few people truly believed.
Unfortunately for his kind, that had changed over the years. He feared it was only a matter of time before some idiot snapped a picture of one of his kind draining some unfortunate mortal and posted it on YouTube. The crap would surely hit the fan. Before digital cameras, it had been impossible to photograph vampires, but thanks to new technology, that was no longer the case. If the day ever came when the government got involved and started posting bounties on their heads, there’d be no place to hide.
Feeling the weight of Kadie’s gaze, he shook off his morbid thoughts. “How soon can you be ready to leave?” It had been a long time since he’d been back to England and he had a sudden longing to see the Hodder Valley in Lancashire, to show Kadie the view from Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, to stroll the streets of Liverpool and London, to visit the castle in Durham, a fortress so impregnable that the city was one of the few places that had never been captured by the Scots.
“Give me a day to pack and I’ll be ready to go. Are the plane tickets still good?”
“What tickets?”
“We’re going by boat?”
Saintcrow laughed softly. “Boats and planes are too slow, Kadie, my love.”
She stared at him a moment, and then grinned. “Ah. Air Saintcrow.”
He grinned back at her, then kissed the tip of her nose. “Kadie, what did I ever do without you?”
“I don’t know.” She slipped her hand under his shirt, her fingers running lightly over his stomach. “But I don’t intend to ever let you be without me again.”
Saintcrow’s gaze met hers and she knew he was thinking the same thing she was.... It was a promise made by a mortal to a vampire.
A promise she could never keep.
Chapter 34
Micah stood in the shadows alongside the driveway leading to Saintcrow’s house, his hands clenching and unclenching as he watched three men get into a late-model sedan and drive away. They were hunters. They had destroyed his sire. He’d had no feelings for Lilith, hated her for what she had done to him, and yet he had an overpowering need to avenge her death.
With preternatural speed, he raced ahead.
When the hunters reached the bridge, he was waiting for them. The driver braked hard when he saw Micah blocking his path.
The man in the passenger seat got out of the car. “What the heck are you doing, you idiot? Get off the bridge.”
Micah frowned. This was a hunter? An indrawn breath carried the faint scent of Lilith’s blood, but he detected no malice in the man, no sense of danger. What the hell?
The man in the backseat leaned his head out the window. “What’s going on, Rob?”
“I don’t know,” Rob replied.
Now the driver rolled down his window. “Hey, buddy, do you need a lift?”
Micah shook his head. Muttering, “No, thanks,” he moved out of the way. He would have sworn the men in the car were hunters. Could he have been wrong? They smelled like hunters, but they didn’t act like hunters.
Still puzzling over their odd behavior, he strolled back to town.
Everything was locked up tight.
With nothing to do, he turned his thoughts to finding a secure spot to spend the day. The first place that came to mind was the cemetery. It should have struck him as morbid. Not long ago, it would have. But what the hell, he was dead, after all. And his sire was there. He had visited her grave earlier. There had been no marker. Saintcrow had buried her deep, smoothed the earth, replaced the grass. There was nothing to show where Lilith was buried. Saintcrow had told him the blood bond was broken, so he had no explanation for how he’d known where to find her, but find her he had.
This whole lifestyle was bizarre, he mused glumly. Just when his life and career had been on the upswing, Lilith had wiped it all away. She had stolen his life, his hopes, his dreams, and left him with nothing but an insatiable thirst.
He was glad they’d destroyed her.
Walking through the residential area, he noted that all the houses were dark. Only three were inhabited. He paused in front of the first one where he detected a heartbeat. It belonged to an older woman, as did the second house.
The occupant of the third house wasn’t as old as the other two. She wasn’t asleep. And she wasn’t in the house, but in the backyard, crying softly.
Curious, he walked around to the rear of the house. He found the woman lying in a heap at the bottom of a set of stairs that led into the kitchen. There was blood matted in her hair. One ankle was swollen.
She let out a shriek when she saw him.
“Hey, calm down. I’m not going to hurt you.”
She stared at him, her eyes wide with panic, her heart beating wildly as she tried to scrabble away from him.
He knelt beside her. “Take it easy.”
“Go away!”
“You need help, lady. That’s a nasty bump on your head. What happened?”
“I . . . I slipped on the steps. I think I might have passed out.” She cringed when he reached for her. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to take you inside and bandage your head and your ankle.”
“No! You can’t come inside!”
Micah snorted. “Lady, if I was going to kill you, I could just do it here.”
