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He had one advantage: He was faster than the men chasing him. His father’s DNA had given him that. All he had to do was get out far enough in front, then shift course, and they’d never find him.
What he wanted more than anything was to get back to Rumy’s place, to The Erotic Passage, because he and Shayna would be safe there. However, he’d bet every cent he had on the likelihood that Daniel had men waiting to intercept. He’d never get within a thousand yards of Lake Como, maybe not even Italy, without being attacked.
As he flew, he glanced down at the Great Plains stretching out beneath him. Shifting slightly to check his back trail, he saw Daniel’s men in the form of a few specks scattered in a long row, essentially on course for Italy and Rumy’s club. They’d lose visual in a few more seconds. But he knew one way to help things along, a trick he’d learned from his surrogate father, Gabriel, a vampire of tremendous power.
Slowly, he built a secondary disguise around himself. Daniel would have been able to see through the disguise, but not his lackeys.
When the shield was complete, he decided to test it out and dropped three hundred feet, straight down, then hovered in the air. He held Shayna tightly against him, keeping her safe.
Slowly, he levitated backward until he semi-reclined in the air. In this position, he could watch the men in flight above him, but still remain levitating in altered flight. Yeah, he had some chops.
Daniel’s men drew closer and closer, but remained in the same horizontal line as well as altitude, eyes forward.
Not one vampire hesitated in the air. No one looked around or down or anything. Besides the fact that they couldn’t see him, they weren’t even looking for him.
He took a breath, then another, and finally heaved a sigh when the warriors disappeared from sight. He could feel their flight pattern as if he’d built it inside his head. He was right. They were all were headed east in the direction of Lake Como.
And that meant Daniel had called them back, no doubt to join a second contingent already waiting to intercept Marius near Rumy’s famous sex-club complex.
Marius remained in position pondering his next move. Now that he knew for sure he couldn’t return to Rumy’s, he had to find shelter elsewhere. He needed to hide out, regroup, explain things to Shayna, and hopefully get her on board.
Like both his brothers, Adrien and Lucian, he had several secret homes scattered around the world, places he could escape to when needed. He had a place in the States, but decided against remaining in North America. Daniel may have left some of his forces behind to search the continent for him.
Keeping his disguising shield tight, he shifted course to the south and formed a mental image of his home in the Andes. He had a residence in the hill caves near General Carrera Lake on the Chilean side.
Once he fixed his mind on the bedroom of that dwelling, he took off, flying on autopilot toward South America, unconcerned about weather, planes, birds in flight, mountains, anything. Traveling in altered flight would allow him to pass easily through anything solid, and his internal vampire guidance system kept him on course.
Fifteen minutes later, after traveling thousands of miles, he closed in on the lake. If he’d been at Ancestral power, like both Daniel and Gabriel, he could have made the trip in a tenth of that time. More than once over the past year of imprisonment and torture at Daniel’s hand, Marius had considered engaging his latent Ancestral power. Yet he hesitated, for the simple reason that he didn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps. He’d long since made the decision to avoid rising to Ancestral status if he could possibly help it.
He began to slow, and eased through the hills, descending through solid matter as though it were no more significant than heavy fog. His cavern was sealed off from the outside, which made it ideal in terms of remaining secure from human trespassers.
But it had one other advantage. Three hund
red years ago, he’d hired an Ancestral to create an intricate layered disguise over the small private home so that very few vampires would ever know of its existence. With luck, Daniel didn’t know about it, either.
He touched down in the bedroom, dropping out of altered flight, and carefully settled Shayna on his bed. She looked absurdly pale against the dark-gray silk comforter. She was probably cold as well, being human. His own vampire genetics kept him warmed up no matter how low the temperature fell.
He took a down comforter from an adjacent armoire and covered her up. The fact that she released a sigh and visibly relaxed told him that he’d called it right.
Removing his coat and hanging it on a peg next to the armoire, he crossed to the fireplace. He stacked up a bunch of kindling, then created a tepee of smaller logs. Within a few minutes, the fire took hold and started warming up the room.
He’d left almost everything about the cave in a semi-finished state. The original architect had hired craftsmen to square up the walls and to create a rough-hewn ceiling that flowed in a circle, with a portion indented to a peak. But nothing was smooth or polished.
He’d always liked the effect.
With the fire heating the room, he returned to the bed. Two stone shelves, also carved from rock, created shallow bedside tables. He lit a branch of candles, the only lighting in his home. His own vampire vision kept the space in a glow, but he didn’t want Shayna coming to consciousness in a pitch-black room.
He sat down on the bed next to her, frowning. She represented something to him, something he had a hard time placing. Maybe it was her innocence, even though a year and a half ago, she’d made a fairly typical mistake of falling for one of her professors.
Once she’d won Rumy’s online game that identified her as a human with tremendous if latent tracking abilities, he’d had her investigated. Marius knew quite a bit about her, including the fact that she had no immediate family left. Though she’d been on her own for a long time and very independent, her life as an American college student would in no way have prepared for the things she was likely to see and do if she stuck with him.
He slid a finger under the blood-chain at his neck. The metal had been infused with his blood when it was forged, and he had a matching chain in his pants pocket ready to bind Shayna to him. Once bound, their powers would combine, they’d form a tracking pair, and they could then go on the hunt for the extinction weapon.
He rose up slightly and drew the second chain out of his pocket, holding it in his hand as he settled down beside her once more.
The prudent course would be to slide the chain over her head right now and be done with it. She’d be enraged, but he could force her with any number of threats to get her to help him find the last weapon. And for a long moment, he debated doing just that.
She moaned softly, though still unconscious. She’d be coming around quickly now, and she’d be in pain.
