Dark Flame (Flame 3)

Brannick scowled as he shifted a dusty, rolled up carpet out of the way. He didn’t like to hear that kind of praise, though he understood Juliet’s motivation. The women had been badly used by men for a long time. They would need to know he was someone they could trust.

He forced himself to focus on the task at hand and set the box on the growing pile off to the side. The owners of the house had agreed to let him run a tunnel up to their garage so that he could get abducted women out of Five Bridges. It was a dangerous set-up for everyone involved.

Brannick took great care to keep his operation on the down low. For that reason, he hadn’t used this particular tunnel in two months, a policy that helped keep suspicious neighbors from reporting unusual activity.

The three cartels that ruled Five Bridges paid a lot of money for tips leading to the discovery of exactly this kind of covert operation.

The upper part of the door leading down to the underground tunnel was half visible now. He needed to let the sex dream go and pick up the pace. He shifted a couple more dusty bags and plastic tubs.

Juliet wasn’t even supposed to be driving the van tonight. That was Mary’s job. Juliet coordinated with a team of Revel Border Patrol officers who worked their off-hours to rescue abducted humans, mostly female. The women were used in the sex trade in Revel Territory while pumped full of the dark flame drug. Each bore the teal flame markings on their hands, necks and faces. Drug addiction was hard to disguise in Five Bridges.

So where was Mary? For as long as he’d worked with her, she’d never missed a run.

As Juliet continued to talk to the women, answering their hushed questions, he glanc

ed at her again. She wore her long, curly hair pinned up but with a lot of curls hanging free. She looked messy in an artsy way, but then she didn’t. She looked fresh and alive. Beautiful.

He’d played with those curls in his dream.

Shit, that dream again and how the woman would make, intense cries of passion…

Once more, he forced himself to look away and to keep shifting the boxes. He pulled a heavy one, but set it off to the side. It should be closer to the bottom. He didn’t want the stack to fall over after they were gone. The door needed to be kept hidden at all costs.

He’d met Juliet five months ago, having arranged to look her over at the White Flame club in Elegance, to see if she might be a good fit for his operation. She’d come highly recommended by one of his extraction team, a hard-core Revel Border Patrol officer by the name of Keelen.

Maybe it was the vampire in him, or maybe the human part that had always been able to read people, but he’d trusted Juliet right away. He’d liked the way she held his gaze, spoke in a clear direct if soft manner, and set her chin when he asked about her commitment.

He’d liked her so much in fact that apparently he’d made her the star of his dreams.

The truth was, he hadn’t seen Juliet since his meeting with her at the club. He’d spoken with her several times on the phone and he’d checked her out on the net. She was an up-and-coming civic leader in Revel Territory as an apprentice to Agnes Munroe, who served on the Revel Board of Sages.

Mary was the one who drove the van to the exit-point houses each week. But she hadn’t shown up and when questioned, Juliet had said she didn’t know why.

Brannick had been shocked as hell when Juliet had pulled into the garage. He was profoundly attracted to the fae woman, something that didn’t make him happy at all. The moment he’d realized she was in the van and not Mary, his jaw had dropped and that dream had started playing over and over in his head.

The weird part, however, was that when she’d crossed the garage floor to greet him and shake his hand, he’d felt as though he was looking at a really good friend. If he believed in past lives, he’d say they’d known each other in one.

Or maybe, as he suspected, something else had been going on, something a powerful fae could have done with him.

Or to him.

Despite his drive toward the woman, he kept moving boxes. But that didn’t keep him from looking in her direction about every third trip.

Right now, one of the women wept. She sat in the seat closest to the open door and Juliet was comforting her. The human woman had bruises on her face and up and down her bare arms. She was missing a couple of teeth and of course had the teal colored flames on her cheeks.

Juliet went to the front seat of the van and returned with a small box of tissues. She handed the woman one, who in turn blew her nose. Blood came out.

He watched Juliet rubbing the woman’s shoulder as she spoke to her in a low voice. She kept handing her tissues and taking away the bloody ones. The woman leaned her head back and closed her eyes, her fingers pinched over the bridge.

There were only four women in the van, against the hundreds, maybe even thousands, who needed his help. He felt grim about the whole thing, about how impossible the odds were against any kind of success, long-term or not. As many humans as he rescued, more were abducted from the Southwest to fill the void.

He wouldn’t give up though, despite the numbers. He reminded himself of something he’d heard recently, an old quote from a Chinese philosopher, ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.’ And this journey was at least a thousand miles, maybe more like ten thousand.

He frowned. He swore he’d heard the saying spoken to him in the past few days, but he couldn’t recall who’d said it? He’d begun to wonder if living in Five Bridges for thirteen years as an alter vampire had started affecting his mind.

But as he turned back to his task, rage boiled all over again at the state of the world he lived in. Years ago, Five Bridges had devolved into a ghetto because of the drug and human trafficking that had made a cesspool of the place.

Sometimes his hatred of the flame drugs and their companion alter serums got to him. Thirteen years ago his family had been wiped out in one trip to the supermarket. He’d taken his family north from Phoenix to their cabin in Flagstaff to escape the summer heat. His wife had gone to the store for groceries and among the provisions was a six pack of corrupt soda.