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Again, Kambyses turned, using his keen eyes this time, seeking any structure that might have hidden the vulnerable young vampire. There were none. At least none that wouldn’t have been used during the day and therefore risked discovery. Only…
His gaze swerved back to the crane giants, to the multitude of forklifts and carriers moving the shipping containers. What if Nico had been desperate enough to take shelter in one of these?
What if it had been moved?
Onto a ship?
That had already set sail?
If there had been breath in his ancient body, it would have left him in a rush. The unease erupted into the sort of panic he hadn’t felt since… His mind shied away from that time, the darkest of all his dark centuries. He would have to find Nico. That was all there was to it.
For the next several hours, he methodically fed on—and plundered—every dock worker he could find. After the fifth, he no longer fed. He only bit and then healed the wound right away, which was all that was necessary to seize a human mind. At the thirty-fifth, a night-shift worker who had just come on duty, Kambyses finally found what he was after.
Nico.
The memory in the worker’s mind was vague, almost dreamlike, muddled as it was by Nico’s apparent compulsion of the human. But Nico’s striking beauty was unmistakable. Tall and pale, strong and graceful, with perpetually tousled wild dark hair and piercing hazel eyes that danced with gold and rebellion. Dominique. His Nico.
The worker had been hypnotized by the young vampire’s strangeness, compelled by his French-accented Spanish words. “You see nothing but this open door. Lock it and be on your way.”
Nico had disappeared into the container.
The man had locked the door.
And left.
Kambyses stood, staring at the empty pavement where the container had been. Nico should have returned to Apokryphos despite the mayhem there. He should have had faith that Kambyses would keep him safe. He could even have helped wrap that incident up more efficiently.
Instead, he’d hidden in a shipping container.
“Foolish, young one. Very foolish.”
Finding Nico would be an exercise in patience, and it wouldn’t happen tonight. But happen it would. A youngling vampire without a sire to restrain him could be relied upon to kill—and kill often. Reports of disappearances at sea would be a given. Perhaps even a ghost ship would be found with no one left alive aboard.
All Kambyses had to do was wait.
While he waited, his priority had to be Apokryphos. What had caused the local authorities to suspect her? He had only compelled the warriors themselves, not those they answered to, any one of whom could move against him again.
It took several hours of ghosting through police stations, command centers, and private residences, avoiding twenty-first-century surveillance—or destroying it when he couldn’t—and tasting enough blood, pillaging enough minds, and murmuring enough compulsions to fill a year of nights. One by one, he worked through the chain of command, erasing all traces of the action against Apokryphos wherever he found it, then compelling those who had access to erase it from the official records as well. Kambyses’s silent heart thrilled with this challenge. It was a hunt such as he had not enjoyed in many decades.
Near dawn, he approached his final target, a simple house in a crowded suburb. Inside, the lights were on, the occupants preparing for their day. He counted four heartbeats, a family. Only the male interested him. Daniel Ramos, inspector with the Puerto Rico drug division, was the original source of the information that had launched the attack. Why? That was a question only the inspector could answer.
The sky was turning light, and there was no time to waste lying in wait. Kambyses rang the doorbell. A woman in a bathrobe answered, but he willed her to see nothing, compelling her to wait by the open door as he entered her home. Seconds later, he was in the bedroom with Daniel Ramos’s muscular, half-dressed body in his arms. The inspector’s memories flowed along with his blood.
They were full of Nico.
Nico melting out of the night. Nico greeting him, speaking to him. Nico…
Kambyses reeled.
It was Nico who had convinced this man that Apokryphos was a plum prize ready for capture. He’d even told them exactly when to strike.
The knowledge landed like a hard blow to Kambyses’s gut. Many of his younglings had plotted against him, but none had ever come this close to succeeding.
Kambyses barely remembered to erase all knowledge of Nico and Apokryphos from the inspector’s mind before he bolted from the house and back to the marina. For the second morning in a row, he saw the sun’s first greedy rays flashing off Apokryphos’s shining black hull and superstructure. As he staggered inside and hurried down to the engine room and safety, waves of heat washed over his body.
But they could not touch the nameless chill sinking roots into his soul.
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