The Darkest Kiss (Riley Jenson Guardian 6)

"Then she had no contract out on her?"

"No. But she was good friends with someone whose house was slated to be cleaned." He glanced at me then, and the brief bleakness in his eyes left me in no doubt that the cleansing had been total - every man, woman, and child. "She was at their house when I went in there to fulfill the contract. I didn't even see her - didn't even realize what I'd done until afterward."

"That's when you gave up life as a cazador?"

He nodded. "When I came out of the killing haze, there I was, covered in her blood, with her broken body at my feet." In his dark gaze I saw echoes of a pain that still wasn't healed, even though I suspected this had all happened a very long time ago. "I swore to never again kill on somebody's order. It is a vow I have kept to this day."

Which wasn't to say he hadn't killed. I'd seen him do it more than once, and had no doubt that, even after that event, he had a history littered with bodies. He was a very old vampire, after all, and none of them were saints.

Even the ones who were descended from angels.

"How long were you a cazador?"

"Two hundred years." A humorless smile touched his lips. "I was very good at it."

"After two hundred years, you'd expect nothing less than expertise." I hesitated, then asked, "So how long ago was all this?"

"I was a little over three hundred when I started."

So it was over seven hundred years ago that he quit. "Three hundred years was a decent age for a vampire to reach back then, wasn't it?"

"There have always been older ones, but yes, the past was a bloody place to survive." He grimaced slightly. "Humanity might not have had the numbers that it has today, but it had a whole lot more superstition, and a tradition of killing anything it didn't understand."

"So why weren't the old ones cazadors? I would have thought the older the vampire, the better cazador they'd make."

"True. But also, the older you get, the more you appreciate the years and your life." His smile regained some warmth, and amusement crinkled the corners of his eyes. "Like all Hollywood and literary myths, the one about old vampires mourning what they are or regretting their long existence has very little to do with reality."

"And yet there must be some who do kill themselves, because in most myths there lies a kernel of truth." Even the worst of the werewolf myths had the occasional grain of truth behind them. Besides, he himself had once believed that an old friend had walked out into the sunshine because a love affair had gone horribly wrong.

Of course, that had turned out to be little more than a cover story spread by a madman intent on creating an army of clones, but why would he have even believed it if it had never actually happened before?

"Indeed it does happen, but rarely." He glanced at me, the warmth in his eyes growing stronger. "And before you ask, no, I have never loved anyone that much. Even if I did, I doubt I would contemplate such a thing."

"Because you never give all of yourself to one person?"

"Because I love life too much." He gave me an amused look. "And you're a fine one to talk about never giving all of yourself to one person."

"Hey, I tried. Not my fault it didn't work out." Not my fault he'd made demands that were just impossible for me to obey - even if I had been able to. "Besides, I will commit when my soul mate finally decides to make his appearance. Until then, I'll just have to muddle along as I am."

"Okay," Rhoan said from the backseat. "Enough chitchat. Jack says eight of those fifteen names have gone missing in the last six hours. There were witnesses to two of the kidnappings, and both gave descriptions matching Aron Young. One of them also gave a description of the vehicle - a white van that matches the plate number you asked Jack to trace earlier. Jack's currently trying to patch into the satellites to track him."

I twisted around to look at him. "So the eight were definitely taken, not killed?"

"Yes." Hope had dawned brighter in his eyes. "And we've got an address for the house he lived in at Beechworth. Apparently, it's just outside the town itself."

"No indication as to the current owners and whether it's occupied?" Quinn asked.

"The current owners have no relationship to Young, apparently. He's tried ringing the listed number, but there's no answer."

"Young wouldn't be up there yet, anyway." After all, he'd only taken Liander little more than an hour ago. "Besides, there's no guarantee that is where he's going."

"We'd better hope it is, because otherwise Liander's a dead man."

"Give him more credit than that," Quinn said softly. "He's a fighter, and he has something worth fighting for. You."

Rhoan gave a soft, derisive laugh. "He might have decided otherwise after my stupid behavior tonight."

"Well, with any sort of luck, you'll get the chance to fix that." I gave him a dark look and added, "And you had better."