Duncan Read online

  “Sire?” Louis said behind him. “You called for me?”

  “We need to break the security on Victor’s computers,” Duncan said without turning. “Forget the rest for now.”

  “Yes, my lord. I’ll begin at once.” There was an undercurrent of eagerness in Louis’s voice. For all his skill at fighting, Louis was a geek at heart, a technical genius who’d never met a security system he couldn’t break into. He’d been dying to get into Victor’s computers.

  “And Louis?”

  “Sire?”

  “I want everything you can find on Emma Duquet.”

  “How far back—”

  “Everything, Louis.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  Duncan continued to watch as Emma drove her car along the curve of the cul-de-sac, circling around before heading back the way she’d come. He thought of her lovely eyes, such an unusual color, the exact shade of pansies in the spring. He still remembered the flowers from his mother’s garden in that other lifetime. Things had changed so much since then. It was more than a different time; it was a whole different world. He frowned at the thought. He rarely remembered those days anymore, and now Emma’s pretty eyes had brought them to mind twice in one evening.

  She’d been telling the truth about her friend. What she knew of it, anyway. Part of what made Duncan so successful with humans was his vampire-enhanced empathy. It was an unusual talent among his kind. Vampires were far more likely to lose any connection they’d once had to human emotion, rather than to gain it. But even as a human, Duncan had possessed an intuitive feel for other people’s emotions. And somehow, when he’d become a vampire, that intuition had only grown. It had been too much at first, feeling every emotion of the people—human or vampire—around him. Even worse, emotions sometimes lingered in buildings or rooms, especially if the feelings were particularly strong or traumatic, like fear, hate, or even love. His abilities bordered on the psychic, but then many of the abilities bestowed by the Vampire transition did.

  Over time he’d learned to block out the general noise, learned how to tap into feelings selectively. And he’d definitely selected to tap into Ms. Duquet this evening. Her feelings had been very straightforward, and, as frequently was the case, knowledge of her emotions had led to knowledge of her thoughts. The two went hand in hand, after all. People often lied with their mouths, but their thoughts were always truthful. Combined with all of the other clues humans gave off, he could generally judge a human as well as he could one of his own vampire children. And since a vampire Sire knew his children as well as he knew himself, that was saying something.

  But if Emma Duquet was telling the truth, then Victor’s activities went far beyond corruption, beyond even the abominations he’d kept imprisoned in his basement. Which meant Duncan had to find out exactly what Victor’s crimes were before they came crashing down on Duncan’s head.

  Chapter Six

  The next night, Duncan opened the door from his private suite and stepped into the hallway, wincing as something big plummeted through the open stairwell and hit the first floor with a resounding boom. This was his people’s straightforward method of expeditious junk disposal. Unfortunately, it was creating a rapidly growing pile of debris in the foyer. Eventually, all that junk would have to be hauled out into the yard where it would sit until they had better security in place. There’d be no more uninvited visitors slipping past a heedlessly open gate.

  The rest of the team from California had arrived right on schedule late last night, and the house was much busier than it had been. The newly arrived vampires had all knelt and sworn a blood oath to him, transferring their allegiance from Raphael to Duncan. It was all done with Raphael’s blessing, which made the whole process much simpler. Duncan was their master now; their hearts beat at his command.

  And his current command had much to do with cleaning up the remnants of Victor’s corruption. All three levels of the old house were being searched thoroughly, which in many cases meant being literally torn apart. No one trusted Victor, but they weren’t entirely certain what they were looking for, either. Listening or recording devices, certainly. When those were found, they were removed and traced back to their control base, which thus far had proven to be a windowless room secreted away next to Victor’s daytime resting chamber on the third floor. That in itself was appalling, that he’d chosen to fashion a daytime resting place for himself on the highest floor. But then the basement would have been out of the question, since it had been filled with his half-sentient vampire slaves.

  In any event, many of the recording devices they had found were located in bedrooms, and the video collection in Victor’s hideaway gave proof that those bedrooms had been used frequently, if only for an hour or two at a time. More significantly, most of the men featured in those videos were faces Duncan and everyone else recognized from the evening news.

  He didn’t know yet if Victor had been actively blackmailing anyone—although he’d know even that before they were finished—but, if not, he’d certainly been stockpiling blackmail material against future needs.

  Duncan walked down the hall to where Louis had set up his equipment in an ongoing effort to unravel the various files from Victor’s computers. What he’d found so far was just more evidence of Victor’s rampant paranoia. In the human world, he’d have been living in a small apartment with tin foil over the windows and newspapers piled up to the ceiling. Instead, he’d been a powerful vampire lord, hundreds of years old and nesting in the D.C. area before the city had even had a name. Duncan didn’t know what Victor had done before they’d established the U.S. Capital here. Maybe haunted the battlefields of the revolution, preying on dying soldiers.

  Or maybe,Duncan thought to himself, I’m a tad bit prejudiced against the old vampire. He smiled ruefully, then sighed. They didn’t need him here. He supposed he could start ripping out walls with the rest of them, but—

  “My lord!”

  Louis’s excited shout had Duncan crossing quickly to the desk where his security chief was bent over the keyboard of Victor’s main computer. Two other vampire geeks crowded close and began making suggestions as Louis keyed through the data. Duncan stepped out of their way.

  “I’ve broken the main encryption, my lord,” Louis explained tersely as he continued to type. “But there are additional codes within some of these files.”

  “That one’s a simple alpha designation,” one of the others commented quietly. “Try opening—”

  “Fuck, there it is. Pictures and everything.”

  “What?” Duncan demanded. The others slid out of his way as he moved to stand behind Louis once again.

  “Women, my lord,” Louis explained, paging through a file.

  “Young, beautiful, human women,” another added appreciatively.

  “No names,” Louis put in. “Initials only, but with the pictures, it shouldn’t be too difficult . . . Did the woman the other night—”

  “Emma Duquet,” Duncan provided.

  “Right. Did she leave a picture of her missing friend?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, one minute.” Louis swiveled his chair around to the desk behind him and pulled his laptop closer. “I started digging into Duquet’s background like you asked,” he said as he typed. “Her full name’s Emmaline Marie Duquet, by the way, though she rarely uses it. She has a Facebook page she hasn’t updated regularly in years, but let me check . . . Yep. There it is. Her friend’s first name was Lacey, right?”

  “Yes,” Duncan said. He was watching over Louis’s shoulder, seeing pictures of a younger, less sophisticated Emma Duquet flash by, pictures clearly taken either before or right after she arrived in Washington. Or maybe it was worry for her friend that had taken away the sparkle in her eyes, the grin that said she was going to take on the world and win.

  “Lacey Cray,” Louis muttered, settling on a single picture of Emma with her arm around a lovely blonde about her own age. “Pretty name. Pretty girl, too. Too bad.”
>
  Duncan wanted to dispute the finality of Louis’s last words with their assumption that Lacey was already dead, but he couldn’t. Despite his reassurances to Emma last night, and as much as he’d like to produce Lacey safe and sound for her, he knew that wasn’t the most likely outcome.

  Louis turned back to Victor’s computer. “There are dates next to each woman’s picture, my lord. And different initials after each date. I’m thinking . . .” He stopped typing and looked up at Duncan, as if to judge his reaction. “Given what we’ve already seen of Victor’s personal porno collection, this is most likely a record of sexual encounters, my lord. The second set of initials are the men these women were paired off with, complete with dates.”

  “He was a fucking pimp,” one of the vampires whispered in disgust. “Hell, maybe that’s where his money came from. So far we’ve got him living like a Rockefeller, but no income.”

  Duncan glanced up. “Nothing?”

  “He owned a lot of property, my lord,” the vamp said. “But too much of it is in rundown neighborhoods, stuff he bought decades ago and forgot to sell before the market tanked. As far as I can find, he didn’t even bother to collect rent on some of them.”

  “What about better properties, places he might be using himself?”

  “A few of those, sure. I can get you a list—”

  “Do that now, and e-mail the information to Louis and Miguel. And keep looking. If he didn’t make money legitimately, where did it come from? It has to be there somewhere. Either that, or he didn’t keep those records on any of the computers we’ve found so far, in which case—”

  He grimaced as someone upstairs began laying into a plaster wall with what sounded like a sledge hammer. He let out a long, noisy breath and said, “If the records are in this house, I’m sure we’ll find them very soon. But in the meantime, Louis . . .” He met his security chief’s pale gaze. “. . . did Victor maintain any blood houses?”

  Louis shook his head. “Not in the city of D.C., my lord. He and his four were the only vamps he permitted to live here . . . well, other than those creatures in the basement. But there are plenty of blood houses in the surrounding states. Not always houses, of course, sometimes clubs, like what Rajmund has up in Manhattan. About half as ritzy, though.”

  “I want a list of anyplace within . . .” Duncan thought for a moment. “Let’s make it within two hours’ drive from here. I suspect Victor’s less savory entertaining was done somewhere other than this house. Not that he would have cared, but his guests might have. And Emma said Lacey talked about going to a party outside the city. How long will it take you to come up with that information?”

  “No more than a few minutes, my lord. Victor kept lousy records, but I started building my own database a few weeks ago, pretty much as soon as I arrived here to start getting things ready for you.”

  “Excellent. I’m going to track down Miguel,” Duncan said, “and you can meet us in the library once you have the list. The rest of you keep working on these files, and if you find anything noteworthy, call my cell.”

  Duncan found Miguel in the basement with yet another of the vampire crews that had come in last night. This one was very specialized and would only remain until their task was complete, which, from the looks of things, would be much longer than anyone anticipated.

  “This is all shit, Miguel,” a wiry, gray-haired vampire was saying. He slapped a beam of rotting wood and Duncan winced, hoping the entire house wasn’t about to collapse on their heads. They’d probably survive, but it might take a while to dig themselves out.

  Duncan grinned at the gray-haired vamp’s back and said, “Think of it as a challenge, Alaric.”

  The vampire spun around with a bark of laughter. “A challenge is you trying to last the full five minutes in the ring with me, my lord. This . . .” He waved at the musty, dark basement around them. “. . . this is plain old shit. And I’m not even talking about the vamp dust left over from Victor’s abomination experiment.”

  All laughter fled, and Duncan nodded soberly. “Louis cleaned most of it out,” he said.

  “And he did a fine job of it, too,” Alaric agreed. “But I’ll tell you, Duncan. I served in more than one war as a human and saw some pretty awful things. And God knows, I’ve seen my share of horrific sights as a vampire. But this? This place gives me the creeps. I wouldn’t want to sleep down here, even if the foundation wasn’t rotting and about to dump the whole house on my head.”

  Duncan regarded the other vampire thoughtfully. Alaric was the finest vampire contractor in North America. He’d built the daytime sleep vaults in every one of Raphael’s personal residences and scattered headquarters, including the new compound up near Seattle. There were a couple of other crews doing similar work in the vampire community. They’d all trained with Alaric, and that let them charge a very pretty price for their services. But there was no substitute for having Alaric himself in charge of your project, and Duncan would have paid any price Alaric asked in order to secure the safest possible resting place for his people. A vampire was completely helpless during daytime sleep. The recent murders of two of Raphael’s vampires, along with three more in Canada, had proved that beyond a doubt.

  “So, what do you propose?” he asked now.

  “It’s going to take time and a lot of money to put in a decent underground vault,” Alaric warned him immediately. “This whole city’s built on a fucking swamp.”

  Duncan didn’t miss the gleam in Alaric’s eye when he said that, although it was probably as much from the challenge as the price tag.

  “I don’t care what it costs. If it can be done, I want it done.”

  The vamp shook his head, laughing softly. “I’ll give you this, my lord. You do things right. Okay. Let me get the rest of my guys in here, and we’ll do a full inspection.” He gave Miguel a pointed look. “I won’t be needing you for that part.”

  Miguel looked affronted, but Duncan intervened quickly and said, “That’s good. I need Miguel with me tonight anyway.”

  His lieutenant gave him an inquiring look, but Duncan just signaled him to follow. Vampire hearing was entirely too good, and as much as he admired Alaric’s skill, he had no desire to share the details of his personal affairs.

  Miguel immediately took the lead, going upstairs ahead of Duncan, pausing to scan the hallway before stepping through the doorway. As if enemies were already lying in wait for them somewhere between the kitchen and the stairs. But Duncan didn’t say anything. The situation was still too unsettled. Security was better, but not yet up to Miguel’s—or Duncan’s—standards. There were vampires working all over the house, and yet it was still more than half empty. Eventually it would feel like home and safety. But not yet.

  Louis was already waiting for them in the library. “I e-mailed the data to both of you, my lord.”

  “What data?” Miguel asked, pulling out his smartphone.

  “Victor was giving parties with guests who’d rather not be seen,” Duncan replied. “Which means he was using a house that’s at least private, if not isolated. He wouldn’t have wanted neighbors seeing people come and go all the time; they might get nosey and see someone they recognize. But he wouldn’t have been using some rundown cabin in the woods, either. Victor was a snob. The house will be elegant, expensive, very possibly in an exclusive area of homes, but with substantial acreage for privacy.”

  “Leesburg, Virginia, my lord,” Louis said confidently. “Victor owned two properties there, both of which would suit, and there’s a blood house nearby, too.”

  “How far?”Duncan asked.

  “About thirty-five miles. This time of night, thirty minutes to an hour, depending on traffic.”

  Duncan nodded. It might be late winter, but the nights were still long. They’d have plenty of time. “Let’s go, then. Unless you’d rather stay here and knock down some walls for Alaric.” He started for the door, then glanced down at what he was wearing. Like the others, he was dressed casually, in jeans and
a sweater. He hadn’t planned on meeting any of his new subjects tonight, hadn’t planned on even leaving the house, much less visiting any of the blood houses. But it would take time for him to change, and besides these clothes were warmer. That decided it for Duncan. He grabbed a leather jacket from the old-fashioned coat tree near the door, pulling it on over his sweater. There was a leather hair tie in the jacket pocket, so he finger-combed his hair back and tied it into a rough tail. It would have to do. Raj’s Manhattan club might be tuxedo territory, but most blood houses were far less formal. And if not, well, he was their lord and master, and he’d wear whatever he damned well pleased. And if anyone had a problem with it, he wouldn’t mind a good bloodletting either.

  Chapter Seven

  The blood house didn’t exactly look like a hot bed of vampire activity. Located in a tony housing tract in an upscale suburb of Leesburg, it was a meticulously maintained contemporary home with a low-slung profile and pristine landscaping. The houses in this area were spaced far apart and surrounded by a broad swath of green forest, which gave the illusion of living amongst nature. The effect was lovely, and very private.

  It was two a.m., or vampire high noon, but there were no cars in the driveway or in front of the house. Duncan could detect two vampires inside, however, both wide awake.