Being able to see in pitch darkness had its advantages. She could make out the groupings of gums and wattle. Low patches of mulga bushes, the various grasses. Occasional movement from groups of kangaroos or emus. Some rabbits and dingoes came close to their track, foraging in the cooler night air, but the guides could see them only if they passed ahead, where the headlights caught the brief shine of their eyes. There’d been some rain recently, so she knew there might still be some newer green leaves on the shrubs or patches of wildflowers that sprang up quickly after the blessing of water.
No more than a couple centuries ago, a handful of outcast Europeans had been forced to put down roots here. But a small group of those had seen something different when they looked at this country. Wide, open spaces. Freedom of determination. No bloody Poms telling you what to do. There was something old, wild and primitive in Australia, like a goddess of an ancient religion, amused and yet indifferent to the antics of the younger continents. A goddess who embraced those few who understood Her independence, Her dark and light spaces, Her harsh and unforgiving wisdom.
Ironically, that special group of white settlers who’d bonded with this land, the Outback in particular, had that in common with the even smaller smattering of vampires out here. While more dangerous conditions for vampires couldn’t be devised, even by dedicated vampire hunters, there were at least fifty in the Northern Territory and Western Australia. The only vampire she knew that lived in harsher sunlit conditions was one in the Sahara, and Lord Mason had reputedly lived there for centuries.
Of course, that was where the connection between the humans and vampires here ended. While Danny had no tolerance for the woman’s insolence, she couldn’t dispute Elle’s reaction. Thieves’ Station had been no friend to its neighbors, white, black or vampire. She hoped to change that.
Unfortunately, she was on her own for that. As she’d learned only too well on her recent trip to Berlin, the Vampire Council had as little concern for what happened here as the rest of the world. Out of sight, out of mind. Why care what atrocities the Northwest Region Master, Lord Charles Ruskin, was committing with humans, as well as with his own kind?
She’d deal with it. But first she had to deal with Ian. Damn it, she wished she’d brought the intriguing swagman with her. Her mind drifted back to the pleasant, feral memories of the past day. God, he’d been unexpected. She hadn’t had one so tempting in more than a century. That hard body, firm, clever lips and magnificent c*ck were certainly memorable all on their own. But she kept coming back to the sea green eyes, so sad and fierce at once. A lost warrior. One who’d failed to protect his family, and so had sentenced himself to solitude.
All those unresolved emotions had become luscious, dark needs, which betrayed him through his body’s cravings. The resilience of the human animal. The primal beast never stopped wanting to live, even when its intellect tried to convince it life wasn’t worth living.
But she wasn’t alone, she reminded herself. Those three men, her employees, each carried two of her marks. The first mark was a simple geographic locater. The second allowed her to be in their heads, speak to them or see their thoughts, though they, of course, did not have reciprocal access to her mind. While to humans who served a vampire it might seem an intimate bonding, for a vampire, it was merely typical and a wise security measure to have second-marked household staff. It wasn’t the same level as the intimacy of shared emotions, passion—things she supposed a vampire could share, if she chose to do so—with a third-marked, full servant.
The thought made her shift in her seat. She’d shared such intimacy with Dev, without any marks at all. Not all of it had been voluntary. A wicked smile touched her lips, but with it she felt a twinge of something else. She missed him. Strange.
Most vampires took their first fully marked servant by the time they reached a hundred. She was nearing her second century and had never taken one at all. During the period when convicts were still being brought to Australia, her mother had acquired some for labor, like a lot of landowners, and Danny had made use of dependable ones in her youth for second-mark purposes. That had always seemed sufficient to her, even as she matured.
Perhaps she’d take one eventually, but for now, such long-term commitments didn’t suit her. They brought irritation. Tedium. It wasn’t worth the bother. But she hadn’t been able to resist marking Dev once, so she could reach out and find him if she chose.
Make sure he still shared the world with her and hadn’t succumbed to the discouraging fragility of human mortality.
She bit back a sigh. She’d done the right thing, leaving the choice up to him, even though she’d been tempted to roll him up in his swag while he was unconscious and bring him along. They’d made less progress than she’d hoped. Traveling off-road in the Outback took time, even in broad daylight. One had to maneuver among the wiry and twisted tall eucalyptus, saltbushes and grasses like spinifex that could foul the grille, and watch for ruts and deep gullies. Mind the bands of sheep and cattle. Desolate open spaces could hold peril. The stability of creek beds had to be established before crossing, determine if it was possible to work from boulder to boulder on the few that still held water. So far they’d done a bang-up job. Her two guides’ blood was worth bottling. An Oz colloquialism about courage she found quite amusing, all in all.
Dev likely knew the dangers of this type of route quite well, including how to handle them. Ah, hell, Danny. Stop it. He was a human. A meal. But there was no reason she couldn’t divert her mind from a simmering anxiety about the approaching dawn by thinking about every inch of his pure male body in slow, lingering detail. The sculpted muscles and rugged hands, the sun-browned flesh that gave his face such appealing lines. He’d had strands of copper in his unruly red mane. The red suggested an Irish or Scot in his background, but his accent was pure Oz, that brusque Cockney mixed with the laughter of the Irish. The tragic warrior bard, traveling alone, mourning his love. She saw her fingers, passing through the russet strands of his hair, and she curled them on her knee as she remembered. The way he’d gone so still, watching her, his body restrained, but quivering with a power great enough to snap a man’s neck, she was sure.
She hadn’t needed to ask what had become of those men who’d taken his family from him. She’d been around long enough to know the haunted look of a good man who’d stained his soul with murder. It gave him a dangerous edge, because the man who’d done murder once would always be more capable of doing it the second time. And he’d already done it more than once.
“Lady D?” Harry, one of her men, leaned in to her window. They’d stopped to investigate a fallen gum during her musings, and she’d been only absently following their progress. “Getting close to dawn. It’s going to take us a bit to move that tree off the road.
Sand’s too deep to go around it. You want us to rig that canvas over your Rover until we get moving again?”
“That’ll work fine.” She nodded. “You boys holding up well? Do you need to have tea?” He flashed a grin at her. “No worries. We’ll hold. We’re taking shifts on the driving, and we’ll all rest better when we have you safely at home.”
Home. She hadn’t thought of Thieves’ Station that way for a long time, but she guessed that was what it was going to be now.
“All right. Go ahead and—”
The only warning was an odd whistling, the way the wind sounded when it was being cut by a projectile moving fast enough to slice it. Harry pitched forward. His arms, which had been dangling with casual ease on the sill of her window a moment before, now dropped limply into it with the rest of his upper body, showing the hilt of the knife lodged in his back, severing the spinal cord.
Lunging over him, Danny yanked the blade free and shoved out the opposite door, hitting the ground and rolling beneath the vehicle as a man shouted. The Land Rover up ahead exploded. With her vision, she had the horrifying ability to see the projectile hit the side, a canister that punched into the engine compartment a blink before it detonated the excess petrol. Mal and Pete disappeared in the flame that shot through the interior. The impact lifted the Rover into the air, tossed it up and over, against the troublesome gum tree, breaking it in the middle and catching it on fire as well. Fortunately the Rover had been parked far enough ahead to avoid igniting her cover.
It wasn’t much comfort. Three men, taken out in the first strike. She should have been more vigilant, watching for more than ruts in the road. It had been a niggling worry in the back of her mind since she’d received the letter from the solicitor. But that nagging feeling hadn’t been worth a zack, since she obviously hadn’t anticipated Ian trying something like this. She was a fool.
She cried out despite herself as her remaining two men, John and Roy, went down under a peppering of gunfire, this time coming from the driver’s side. They collapsed some ten feet away from her, Roy’s eyes full of an apology she didn’t deserve as the life died out of them. His rifle had fallen close to his nerveless fingers.
The fire swept down a eucalyptus, fueled by the flammable oil, and had already hopped over to another cluster of bushes. Bloody hell. She pushed away the pain, let fury take her. Fighting the automatic panic caused by so much fire closing in around her, she marshaled her thoughts. Gunfire from the driver’s side. The canister shot immolating the Rover had come from the passenger side.
As she quickly shifted around to the rear of her vehicle, an Essex pulled up behind, skidding to a halt.
Her fingers clutched the knife. Hand-to-hand guerrilla tactics were not her best skill, but she was far stronger and faster than a human and so far she’d sensed no vampire presence. Letting your minions do your dirty work, Ian? You bloody bastard.
God, why had she come out here? The first frisson of fear, that sense of being a doomed, trapped animal, gripped her, and she pushed it away again, more viciously. Think. Did they know she was under here?
“Here, kitty, kitty . . .” Two sets of feet stopped on the left side, another on the right. “Why don’t you come out from under there, and we’ll make sure you don’t get a bad sunburn? Only a few minutes to sunrise, you know. Somebody wants to see you.” With a snarl, she dropped the knife, rolled, caught both ankles of that one set of boots and yanked. It knocked the man off his feet, and she hauled him beneath, hand over hand, jeans to belt to shirt front, and had his throat beneath her palm before his scream of terror could split the air. She tore out his larynx and shoved, sending him twisting and spinning out the other side, ramming the legs of the man there, sending him stumbling back with a surprised oath. Seizing the knife again, she began to scramble forth and screamed as a flood of flame met her. She rolled back up toward the front wheels, knowing it was futile. Christ, not burning.