Sleeping With The Vampire (Immortal Vampire #2)

Chapter 2

Lucca

I am unable to relax until I see the turrets of Grey Castle appearing above the mist. The stone walls rise out from the forest, dark and forbidding. It has been the stronghold of my family for a hundred and fifty years and is supposed to intimidate and frighten.

There is a gate at the bottom of the valley, with a large iron door that is guarded at all times. Even should anyone overpower the security here, it would take them several minutes to reach the castle itself. My rooms, at the top of the eastern turret, look out over the valley and the road. I like to see everything. My favorite place is the Eyrie, a look-out from which I can see most of the castle grounds, giving me a good view of who is coming and going.

As soon as I am within the stone walls, I have two bottles of warm blood, at exactly the right temperature and feel my spirits revive and my energy levels rise. I was feeling a bit tired but I didn’t want to risk drinking just any blood. Our product is among the best and I enjoy the premium offering, which is the freshest and the strongest.

“You must be careful,” a voice comes from the window.

I turn and spot my Seer, in the shadows. She has entered through a side door and must have been waiting for me. Completely blind and older than I am, she is one of my most trusted counselors, able to see into the past as well as the future. Visions come to her but she cannot control it, cannot see more than she is given access to. This makes it difficult to interpret what she sees. Still, her counsel is invaluable and I have come to depend on her.

“I see great tension coming in the family,” she says in a low voice.

What else is new, I wonder to myself. There has always been fierce competition between my sons, who have each become powerful in their own right and demand respect for their roles in the family and the business.

She continues, “There will be death.”

I sit upright, taking note. “Whose death? Mine?”

“No,” the voice wavers and I realize her vision’s limitations. “But it is someone close.”

One of the sons perhaps, I think.

I wonder about this, what the implications are of her vision. She is telling me to reconsider investigating Tanata’s death, to stop my obsession with finding her killer. This has been the Seer’s advice to me before, but I can’t do that, mostly because I am convinced that whoever killed her, was really looking for me.

“The human girl is dangerous,” she says.

“In what way?” I ask.

She seems unsure. “I… it’s… not clear. But… when she comes into the family… she brings a dynamic…it upsets everyone.”

This is exactly what I want though.

I thought of my three sons, Ragnar, who was so arrogant and supercilious, Layrr who was too impatient and impetuous and even Sunil, who preferred to live in the city and be away from the castle. One of them would take over the business from me one day, perhaps become king and I knew each of them thought they deserved it more than the others.

The family’s fortune has become vast over the past few decades, mostly because of our involvement in the Syndicate, the top vampire families working together to run the blood bank, where humans willingly sell their blood. It is then treated, bottled and distributed. Following the Great War between humans and vampires, one of the stipulations was that unfettered hunting of humans be prohibited. This also ensured that there would always be a steady blood supply as well as provided income to humans. It gave us an uneasy peace in our world. Even though the rules were sometimes broken, mostly, vampires adhered to them.

“Will there be answers?” I ask, leaning forward.

“Perhaps not the ones you seek,” the Seer says. “This particular… I only see the family torn apart, your powers scattered. That is as much as I see now.”

She bows and takes her leave.

Her words disturb me, but I have no intention of changing my mind.

I take out my phone and check if she has called.

Nothing yet.

I lean back and allow myself the luxury of replaying our meeting.

Isabella “Izzy” Bonnici.

I was not quite prepared for how she would be in person. Ragnar had described her physical beauty as well as her strength, it was clear he had admired her as a bounty hunter and had pitted himself against her. He had avoided a fight with her, instead snatching her bounty more as a challenge to her than anything else.

So I knew she was a good candidate.

But she was so much more than that.

She was special.

Apart from her great beauty, she had a strength of character and virtue that pointed at a maturity way older than her years. She had insight and temperance, the capacity for self- control. She did not fear me, even though she was wary, and alert, which I admired. But there was something else.

Izzy was an original.

This was probably the quality I valued most in anyone. It was so rare and precious. After over two hundred years of meeting so many people, I had rarely encountered an original being. Most were variations of each other. People looked like each other, acted in similar ways, wanted the same things. Power, success, money. But not Izzy. She didn’t want any of that, I could see it. I would have liked to talk to her about what she wanted for herself, apart from finding her father’s killer. I found myself wondering about who she really was.

I had never met anyone like Izzy before. So sure of herself, so fearless and yet at the same time, humble and unaffected.

I thought of the women in my life, the very small number I had let in. The last, Tanata, had been by my side for eighty years and even though there was not much love between us, ours was a partnership that had been strategically beneficial and made our family stronger.

It had taken me a long time to reach the kind of position I had in the world now. I had not always been a king, had not always been able to command men.

Now, I had everything to lose.

It was a terrible feeling.

The phone rang.

It was Izzy.

“You were right,” she said, her voice rather flat. “My father was dying. I had no idea but it has been confirmed.”

She did not tell me how she found out.

“You will take my assignment then?” I asked, reminding myself to be gentle with her, not to be too direct. With them, you had to be more subtle, I had learnt.

“I am thinking about it,” she said.

“But you will?” I pushed.

“I don’t know, I have a bad feeling about it,” she added.

“I remember those,” I said rather drily and she laughed. It was a charming sound and I found myself wanting to hear more of it.

“I am only considering it because you said you had information about my father’s death,” she reminded me.

“And I do,” I agreed. “I think that we have someone of interest in common.”

“Who?”

“Michael MoZa. On the Council. ”

She said, slowly, “I know his name, of course.”

“He has been in his position for many decades and despite his age, is very powerful. When your father came to see me five years ago, it was to ask me about him.”

“About MoZa?”

“Indeed. He had a feeling that he was involved in the case he was working on. The bounty he was hunting, something felt off to him. As if the man was being framed.”

“Why did he come to you?”

It was a good question, I had to give her that.

“Someone must have told him that I did not see eye to eye with MoZa.” That was putting it mildly. As Chairman of the Council, MoZa had a lot of authority. But I had grown in stature and MoZa was trying to curtail my powers. He used his position to manipulate people behind the scenes. He was a dangerous enemy.

“Who was my father hunting?”

“It was one of us, going by the name of Chakrat. Very old and evil. He’d been accused of going on a killing spree in the Wildlands. There were numerous witnesses but your father could not track him down. He suspected someone was helping him from inside the Council.”

“MoZa?”

“Your father couldn’t be sure.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him to stay away from Chakrat. If he had MoZa’s backing, it would be fatal to try to bring him in.”

She mused, “Sometimes having a bounty out is enough, it does not have to be fulfilled. The council shows willingness to pursue justice but does not always push for it to be fulfilled.”

“Exactly.”

“I’m guessing, my father wouldn’t hear of it?”

I sighed. “He was honorable, wouldn’t hear of MoZa being anything but a faithful servant of the council.

“Do you think he was responsible for having my father killed?”

“I don’t know. But I suspect that he is involved in my wife’s death as well. That is too much of a coincidence.”

“I need some time to process this information and do some research,” she said. “I looked at the file, by the way, and your wife’s death was ruled accidental. What makes you so sure that it was not accidental?”

“We were leaving a dinner party,” I said slowly. “We were outside, I was talking to some people, she was walking towards a maze in the garden. I heard her scream. I was by her side within seconds. A stake had been driven through her. There was a wooden trellis and one of the pillars had come loose, fallen down. The report into her death said she must have tripped, pushed against the trellis, forced one of the poles to come undone, and fall on her, piercing her.”

“You don’t believe this?”

“Who would?” I said drily. “And besides, there was the angle of the spike,” I said. “It had not entered her from above, but from the side. It was driven through her with some force.” I paused. “There was damage to the hedge, it looked like someone was standing on the other side of the bush when they attacked. It was quite dense.”

“Who was at this dinner party?”

“I will give you their names but they are friends. Mostly. Our kind.”

“Vampires?” she asked

I confirmed.

“You think you were the target, why?”

“I was the one who wanted to see the maze. When we were standing outside, I said I wanted to walk over there and have a look. Tanata started walking but a message arrived on my phone and I checked it. I stopped walking and she walked on. I think someone was waiting for me to walk past and had not seen it was her. It only took a moment, that spike coming out of the hedge, killing her.”

“Did you go into the maze to look for the attacker?”

“I did, there was no-one.”

I had acted very quickly, moving through the air fired by fury. If there had been anyone there, I would have found them. But they had already fled.

“I did find something though,” I said. “Boot prints. Plenty of them, from a man. Someone had been there, cutting the twine around the poles. It wasn’t an accident. I told the investigator, he said it could have been from anyone walking the maze.”

She said, “I see.”

I snorted. “He didn’t want to investigate. that much was clear. Vampire hater.”

“What was his name?”

“Captain Morsey. Charles Morsey.”

“I will look into him,” she said.

“Sunil, my youngest son has already done that. He found that several big payments were made into Morsey’s accounts shortly after he finished the report. He is trying to find out who made the payments.”

“So if I get him to confess he was pressured into saying it was an accident…?”

“Then we’re done,” I said.

But I knew it wouldn’t be as simple as that.

I couldn’t have her solving the case that quickly.

I needed to have Izzy in my life for much longer, much, much longer.