D. Reynolds - Aden

“We’ll talk, Detective Trevisani,” Aden said, then dismissed him from his mind as the human gathered up his remaining crew and hustled them out the door. Aden let his power fill the lobby, nudging the humans into doing what their hindbrains were already telling them. To get the hell out as quickly as possible.

“All right,” he said, watching as the last of the humans drove away. “Bastien, lock those doors until we can get a guard to man the lobby. Make it two guards, and be sure they’re suitably armed and armored. And call—”

He stopped as the elevator opened behind him, and the rest of his vampires flowed into the lobby, taking up positions around him until they formed a defensive square. Even knowing that Aden was far more powerful than all of them combined, they stood ready to defend him. The bond between a Sire and his children knew no reason, only instinct.

“Trav, is that clean-up crew on the way?”

“Yes, my lord. They should be here any minute.”

“What about the video?”

“One human did the shooting, the rest came in after. All of them were masked.”

“Damn. All right. Bastien, we need—” Aden’s attention was drawn to the front door where a wide-eyed vampire was tugging on the big brass handle and frowning when it wouldn’t open. He lifted his gaze to find Aden staring at him, and his eyes grew even wider.

“Do you recognize him?” Aden asked no one in particular.

Bastien stared at their visitor. “Goodwin something. One of Silas’s.”

“Goodwin Pierce,” Travis provided, blatantly placing himself between Aden and the front door. “Fairly low on Silas’s org chart and apparently, tonight, her messenger boy.”

“Or her sacrifice,” Kage growled. “Give the word, my lord, and we’ll send her a message of our own. It had to be Silas who took Sid. She already tried and failed once before.”

Aden tended to agree, but it wouldn’t help to kill the messenger. “Let him in.”

Freddy and Kage moved to flank the front door. Freddy glanced back briefly, then unlocked the door and pulled it open, immediately grabbing Goodwin and slamming him to his knees.

Aden studied the young vampire. And he was definitely young, no more than ten years turned, if that. Either Silas truly didn’t care whether he returned from this mission alive, or she’d chosen him precisely because he was so inoffensive that no one would bother killing him.

One thing was certain, the vamp hadn’t known what he was walking into. His nostrils were flaring at the smell of blood, his pupils so blown with fear that his eyes were almost completely black. He didn’t even seem aware that his fangs had emerged, an aggressive display that was almost a guaranteed death sentence in front of a powerful vampire like Aden.

Aden stepped out from behind Travis and Bastien. The night he needed to be protected from Goodwin was the night he’d stake himself.

“Who sent you?” he demanded.

Goodwin jerked, losing what little color he had as he stared up at Aden. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then seemed to realize his fangs were in the way. He retracted his fangs with a grimace of concentration and tried again. “The Lady Silas sent me, my lord,” he said earnestly. “She wanted me to give you this.”

He reached into his jacket and was immediately grabbed by Freddy, who immobilized him before he could produce whatever he’d been reaching for. Freddy, who was twice as big as Goodwin, kept him locked in a choke hold, while Kage carefully lifted the messenger’s jacket and extracted a rolled parchment.

“It’s a message, my lord,” Goodwin gasped out. “Nothing else.”

“Bring it here. And don’t kill him, Freddy,” he added, amused by the resignation on his vampire’s face, despite their grim situation. “Let’s see what Silas has to say for herself.”

Aden took the scroll from Kage and had to fight the urge to drop it in disgust. His lip curled, and he felt unclean the instant he touched it. He glanced up and found Kage watching him.

“What is that, my lord? I’ve never felt anything like it.”

“Human skin,” Aden growled, turning to glower at the unfortunate Goodwin who only squeaked his denial. Forcing himself to unroll the thing, Aden saw it was a formal challenge. Handwritten in the old way, using human blood and skin for the message.

“What the fuck is that bitch thinking?” he snarled. “She’s not old enough to have been around when we did this kind of crap.”

Goodwin remained silent in the face of Aden’s slur against his mistress’s character, proving he was smarter than his current predicament indicated.

“Silas is challenging me to a duel,” he explained to his vampires. “No surprise there,” he added, but then frowned. The challenge was straightforward enough, despite the archaic delivery. There was no mention of Sidonie, but then, the obvious play would be to spring Sidonie as a surprise weapon at an opportune time, inducing Aden to concede the challenge to save his lover’s life.

But that strategy would only succeed in leaving an unhappy Aden alive to challenge Silas another time. Something only a fool would do. And for all her failings, Silas was not that big a fool.

“Sire?” Bastien said quietly, clearly following the troubled direction of Aden’s thoughts.

“Something’s not adding up,” Aden said. “The Vampire Council will not forgive this display. Silas would know that. So, what does she gain by it?”

“You don’t think it was Silas,” Bastien intuited.

“I don’t know. Taking Sidonie is the kind of thing she would do, but this public mess… I don’t know.”

“But they’re clearly connected.”

“It would seem so,” Aden agreed.

“Could Silas be hoping you’ll forfeit the duel by going after Sidonie instead of meeting her tonight?”

“Perhaps. On the other hand, what’s to stop me from killing her quickly and then going after Sidonie?”

“Maybe her intent was to split your forces. She knows you have only the four of us. If you send one or more of us after Sid, you’ll be facing her without full back-up.”

“We’re assuming it was Silas who took Sidonie. What if wasn’t? What if this is nothing more than coincidence?”

“I’m not sure I believe in such a coincidence.”

Aden frowned. He wouldn’t have believed such a thing before tonight, either. But what if Silas wasn’t behind the kidnapping? Then where the hell was Sidonie? His jaw clenched, his gut telling him to drop everything and go after her. Fuck Silas, fuck the damn Council and their rules. But then his gaze roamed over the lobby, touching on each of his vampire children in turn. To a man, they were utterly loyal to him, and they trusted him to repay that loyalty with a care for their lives. If Aden lost the challenge to Silas, whether by forfeit or weakness, his children would be the first to suffer, perhaps even die.

But even more than that, he had an obligation to the larger vampire community to maintain the discretion that permitted them to live in peace among humans. Which meant dealing with the human police over the bloody spectacle that someone had left in his lobby. That was what it meant to be a vampire lord. It wasn’t the wealth or the prestige, though those were nice enough. But at its core, being a lord meant taking care of those whose lives were entrusted to you. And as much as it grated on him to accept it, more lives than Sidonie’s were at stake tonight.

Whoever had taken Sidonie had done so for reasons involving him. He was certain of that much. They’d taken her from his stronghold, after all—a bold move meant to make a point. If the power behind the kidnapping turned out to be Silas, then she would die tonight and Sidonie would be safe. But if it wasn’t Silas? He sighed unhappily. Then whoever it was would contact him soon enough, and in the meantime, they would keep Sidonie alive. It was a bad bargain, but the only one he had.

His attention was drawn to a black panel van that had pulled up out front.

“Trav?”

“That’s the vamp cleaning crew, my lord,” Travis confirmed.

“All right, let them handle this and the scene upstairs. Freddy, I want you to reach out to our local sources, everyone we know. If anyone’s heard word of Sidonie’s whereabouts, I want to know about it, no matter how doubtful the information. In the meantime, we have to mop up this clusterfuck someone left on our doorstep. Silas may not care about creating a spectacle of our affairs, but I must.

“And when we’ve finished with that . . . I’m going to go kill Silas and bring Sidonie back home.”

IT WAS LATE BY the time Aden finished cleaning up the mess the assassins had left behind, although most of his personal involvement was along the lines of wiping memories and dealing with the police. Apparently the doorman’s uncle was high in the police chain of command. He’d raised holy hell with Detective Trevisani and had insisted on a personal interview with Aden. The initial demand had been for Aden to present himself at the station house, which he’d refused outright. They’d tried the usual bluster, threatening to arrest him, but Aden knew his rights and, more importantly, his power. Let them try to arrest him. They wouldn’t make it two steps into the building before they forgot why they were there. The uncle had finally settled for a personal visit to the scene which Aden had been more than willing to accommodate.

But by the time the uncle departed with his thoughts suitably altered, Aden was seething. Silas, or whoever had engineered this clusterfuck, had been so wrapped up in their own needs that they’d disregarded one of the main tenets of vampire society. Vampires did not go around leaving piles of bodies for the human authorities to find, not even in the guise of human violence. Only the quick action of Aden and his people had ensured that there was nothing to tie vampire interests to the doorman’s death. Aden’s residence in the building became nothing more than a coincidence, with the police convinced that he and his people were innocent and had no specific knowledge of the day’s tragedy.