Must Love Hellhounds

A GUARDIAN NOVELLA

Chapter One

That morning, two hours after she received an anonymous e-mail that included an address and a short message, Maggie Wren boarded a flight from San Francisco to New York. Accompanied by the hellhound that Maggie’s employer had demanded she bring with her, she arrived at JFK in midafternoon. The address led her to a brownstone in Brooklyn. Despite the busy streets and the glaring sun that exposed her movements, she picked the lock at the front door and dismantled the security system.

With a silent hand gesture, she instructed the hellhound to check the first level. Upstairs, the first two bedrooms stood open and empty, except for a shirt and jeans strewn over the floor of the second. Maggie kicked through a third door when she found it locked.

Her target-Geoffrey Blake-was sitting naked on the wooden floor, handcuffed to a radiator. He’d drawn his knees up and rested his back against the wall beneath a lace-curtained window. Although her foot slamming against the door could have woken the dead, his eyes remained closed.

Maggie swept the room with her gun before shoving the weapon into the holster beneath her blazer.

She crossed to Blake’s side, retrieving her lock picks from her jacket’s inside pocket. He wasn’t completely naked, she noted. Her gaze skipped to his black briefs as she crouched and reached for the handcuffs. Yellow smiley faces grinned up at her from the elastic waistband.

“At least someone is happy to see me,” Maggie said. Or maybe the smiley faces were just thrilled to be hugging his muscled abdomen. Smug little bastards.

“I would be,” Blake replied in a deep, dry voice, “if I could see you.”

He raised his head and opened his eyes, revealing irises of light blue-and no pupils. From rim to rim, the color was solid.

Maggie’s fingers twitched. The metal pick slipped out of the keyhole and jabbed his wrist. Shit. She murmured an apology, her mind racing.

Blind. Yet nothing in Blake’s dossier had indicated it. How had he kept the disability unlisted on his official records? Why keep it hidden?

And why hadn’t Maggie’s employer prepared her before she’d flown across the country to rescue him? More than that-what the hell had her employer been thinking by letting Blake come to New York alone? Had he actually expected his nephew-a man who couldn’t see, for God’s sake-to track down the woman who’d disappeared from a New York hotel room two days ago?

That the woman was Blake’s sister was even more reason not to have sent him. Caring too much led to carelessness. Which, Maggie thought, was probably why Blake was handcuffed to a radiator.

But at least his blindness explained why her employer had insisted that she bring the dog.

“You didn’t know,” Blake said.

Maggie worked at the lock, pulling herself out of assignment mode and slipping back into the deferential courtesy required by her newest occupation: household management and personal security.

Which, she’d often thought, was just a nice way of saying that she was a butler with a gun.

She popped the first cuff, moved on to the second. “Mr. Ames-Beaumont must have considered your blindness irrelevant to my objective, sir.”

“Is it relevant?”

“No, sir.” She had to get Blake out of here, either way.

“Sir?” His faint smile didn’t soften his strong features. The beginnings of a dark beard shadowed his jaw. His nose, Maggie thought, would have done a Stoic emperor proud. “If you are calling me ‘sir,’ then you must be the recently acquired-and, according to Uncle Colin, the already indispensable-Winters.”

There was no point in correcting him. She’d been called more offensive names before. And she didn’t know why Ames-Beaumont had taken to calling her “Winters,” but considering the salary he paid her, she’d decided that he could address her however he wished.

The billionaire owner of Ramsdell Pharmaceuticals had high standards for his employees-and the closer to his family those employees were, the higher those standards were.

And he’d called her indispensable. Not easily disposed of and replaced. She’d never been that before.

But she couldn’t afford to acknowledge the warm glow the secondhand praise brought, or the despair that it would change.

Yes, “Winters” was much better than what he’d soon be calling her.

“You are correct, sir.” Despite the tightening of her throat, her voice remained even. “I am.”

“Of course you are. And, of course, when we finally meet, I am like this.” Blake gestured at himself with his free hand. “Do you know why you’ve found me half-naked? Do you know what this is?”

Finally meet? He’d said that as if they’d communicated before. Maggie was certain they hadn’t. Blake had been in Britain since she’d begun working for his uncle three months ago. Before that, he’d traveled as often and as extensively as she had, but they’d never been in the same place at the same time-with one exception, four years ago. Maggie hadn’t seen him then; she would have remembered. And he couldn’t have seen her.

So whatever he meant by “finally,” it had little to do with her. More likely, it referenced a conversation between him and his uncle-perhaps the one where she’d been described as indispensable. “I don’t know, sir. What is this?”

“This is karma. This is every negative thing I’ve done, coming back to take a big bite of my ass.”

The tightness in her throat eased. She strove to match the light tone his response invited. “That is unfortunate. Particularly as, in my professional opinion, the consequences of your actions are worse than you imagine.”

“Why do you say that, Winters?”

“Because you are much more than half-naked, sir. And although I have many talents, protecting you from mystical kar mic forces is not one of them.”

He tilted his head, as if weighing that. “So chances are, I’ll lose my shorts before we’re done.”

She ignored the little jolt in her stomach as his smile widened, carving crescents beside his mouth. In the humid air, his overlong hair had curled over his forehead and at his neck and ears. Combined with the smile, his dishevelment was unexpectedly appealing.

The job, Maggie. “We’ll try to avoid that, sir.” Though unlocking the cuffs required touch rather than sight, she focused on her fingers. “Your uncle sends his regrets that he wasn’t able to come.”

“I could hardly expect a vampire to catch an early-morning flight to New York.”

Perhaps not a normal vampire, no. Even if one could rise from his daily sleep, he’d burst into flames at the touch of the sun. But Colin Ames-Beaumont wasn’t a normal vampire, and so he could have come-but his fiancée couldn’t travel during the day, and the vampire would never leave his partner unprotected.

“I was the most expedient option,” Maggie explained.

“How fortunate for me.”

Fortune had nothing to do with it. After reading the e-mail, she’d convinced Ames-Beaumont to send her, citing the same qualifications that had led him to hire her: a level head, weapons expertise, and a history of successful troubleshooting missions.

But Maggie hadn’t mentioned the “You can stop me, Brunhilda” written in the e-mail beneath the brownstone’s address, or that she had a very good idea who’d done this to Blake.

She grazed her fingers over Blake’s inner wrist as she opened the second cuff. He was perspiring in the stifling room, and his skin was warm. Warm, but not hot-and so not belonging to a shape-shifted demon acting as a decoy.

Blake’s large hand caught hers. It was difficult to remember that his eyes were sightless when he stared into hers with such intensity. “It’s good to know that you’re who you say, too.”

Maggie didn’t point out that she’d said her name was Winters. “There’s a needle mark on the inside of your elbow.”

Blake released her hand. “He took blood.”

That was… strange. “How much?” She didn’t think it had been too much; Blake’s color was good beneath his tan. “Can you walk? Were you drugged?”

“Yes. Some sort of sedative.” Blake lifted his jaw, exposing a swelling on his neck the size of a bee sting. “I was on the sidewalk outside my hotel. He pushed me into a taxi, told the driver I was drunk. I blacked out after that.”

And his abductor hadn’t tried to avoid being seen. Not a good sign. There were three primary reasons a criminal didn’t hide his identity: he wanted to be caught, he assumed he’d never be punished… or he already knew he wouldn’t get out alive.

“‘He’? You’re sure? And not a demon or a vampire?”

“Yes. Male. Human.”

That’s what she’d been afraid of. Demons were forbidden to physically harm humans, and so couldn’t do anything except tempt and bargain. Vampires weren’t bound by the same rules, but were helpless during the daylight hours.

But a human could be dangerous at any time-especially if it was the man Maggie suspected it was.

She prayed it wasn’t James. If it wasn’t, that meant she hadn’t made the wrong decision three years ago when she’d let him go. But if James had sent her that e-mail, if he’d abducted Katherine… she might have to really kill him this time.

And then flee to save her own life. When Ames-Beaumont discovered her deception and her connection to the man who’d endangered his family, the vampire would kill her.

After she sent his nephew home in one piece, perhaps he’d make it quick. And if she found Katherine, maybe Ames-Beaumont would let Maggie go.

Or at least give her a head start.

“Your clothes are in one of the other bedrooms,” she said, and stood. “Let’s get you dressed and head out.”

“Did someone come with you?” Blake asked.

Maggie glanced over her shoulder. Inside the bedroom, Blake was hitching his jeans up over a backside that, even chewed up by karma, still looked damn good. With his tall, leanly muscled build, all of him looked good.

But not flawless. A puckered scar marred his upper left shoulder. There hadn’t been a scar in front, so the bullet hadn’t punched through. Removing it would’ve required surgery, yet there were no gunshot wounds or hospital stays listed in his medical history.

According to his profile and the pile of write-ups from his supervisors, Blake did nothing at Ramsdell Pharmaceuticals but dick around behind his desks and research stations. According to his body, he did much more than that.

Maggie wasn’t surprised by the evidence his body offered. Although she hadn’t anticipated his blindness, she’d assumed there was more to Geoffrey Blake than his frequent transfers between Ramsdell’s international subsidiaries suggested. Even if nepotism and family connections had played a part in Blake’s employment history, Ames-Beaumont would never have relied on an incompetent man to lead the search for Katherine.

So Geoffrey Blake wouldn’t be inept-and no stranger to dangerous situations.

“No,” Maggie finally answered. “Except for a dog, I came alone.”

Blake cocked his head before giving it a shake. To Maggie, his silence seemed to be of confusion rather than just caution.

Or was it disorientation? She continued, “We’ll have your blood tested to make sure the drug-”

“No.” Blake turned, pushing his dark hair back off his forehead. “The Ramsdell offices in New York don’t have labs. We don’t send my blood anywhere else. I’m fine.”

She couldn’t blame him for his paranoia, not after he’d already had his blood stolen. “Very well. Are you ready?”

As an answer, Blake walked unerringly toward her. Guided by the direction of her voice, Maggie guessed. When he drew close and stopped, she had to look up at him. That didn’t happen often, whether she was in boots or bare feet.

Her gaze skipped from his knees to his ribs to his throat. A single blow would eliminate her height disadvantage.

But taking him out wasn’t necessary; getting him out was. “Have you trained with guide dogs?”

His expression tightened, but she couldn’t read anything in his face. “Yes. Uncle Colin sent one with you?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Maggie backed into the hallway and called out, “Sir Pup!”

The hellhound trotted into view and clambered up the stairs, his tongues lolling from each of his three enormous heads.

“We need the harness,” Maggie said as he reached the landing. “You’ll escort Mr. Blake downstairs and to our vehicle.”

Sir Pup brushed past her hip and padded into the bedroom, his black fur gleaming over heavy muscle. His middle head looked Blake up and down. His right examined the room, and with his left, he turned to glance over his shoulder at Maggie.

She had no doubt that the expression pulling at his lips and exposing razor-edged teeth was a grin.

Her eyes narrowed. “You won’t take him anywhere but to the vehicle and through the airport,” she ordered. “And you won’t leave him anywhere, either.”

The hellhound’s grin lengthened. Oh, damn. Most likely, she’d just added another idea to whatever mischief had already been percolating in his heads.

She returned her gaze to Blake and frowned. His skin had paled to a sickly gray. When he weaved on his feet, she stepped forward and caught his elbow.

“Mr. Blake?”

He visibly gathered himself. His chest rose on a long breath before he echoed, “Sir Pup?”

Maggie began to nod, then realized Blake wouldn’t see it. “Yes.”

“The hellhound? The one that my uncle watches from time to time?”

Actually, it was the other way around. Sir Pup was the companion to Ames-Beaumont’s closest friend, and it was true that the vampire sometimes let the hellhound stay in his mansion. But it was the hellhound who watched over Ames-Beaumont; Sir Pup helped Maggie protect the house on those days the vampire succumbed to his sleep.

Demons were the only real threat to Ames-Beaumont while he slept, and they had nothing to fear from Maggie’s gun-but Sir Pup’s venom could paralyze a demon, and his massive jaws could easily rip one apart.

Maggie was not willing to reveal the details of Ames-Beaumont’s security, however-even to his nephew. She said only, “Yes.”

“In his demon form?”

He wasn’t, thank goodness. But if Blake knew that Sir Pup had a demon form, then it was no wonder he’d been so pale a moment ago. Maggie was used to the three heads, but she didn’t think she’d ever be comfortable with the giant, terrifying hound he could become.

“No. Right now he looks like a three-headed black Labrador.” A very large black Lab. When Maggie knelt beside the hellhound, her eyes were level with his shoulder. “Once we’re outside, he’ll shape-shift back to one head. Sir Pup, the harness?”

The guide apparatus appeared in her hand. Sir Pup’s invisible, formless hammerspace allowed him to store almost any object, but even a hellhound couldn’t make a retriever-sized harness fit over a bear-sized torso.

“And shrink, please,” Maggie said, rolling her eyes. The hellhound was being a pain in the ass by forcing her to ask him to shift into a smaller form.

Probably, she thought, so that Blake wondered exactly how big the hellhound had been. Though Sir Pup was friendly enough to be considered a bad hellhound by Hell’s standards, he still enjoyed making people uneasy. He just had a better sense of humor than most hellhounds-and was less likely to tear out throats first, and eat the rest later.

Or so Maggie had heard. She’d never been to Hell, and so she’d never met any other hellhounds. If her luck was good-and if every negative thing she’d done in her life didn’t land her in the Pit as soon as she bit the big one-she never would.

And if her luck was very good, she’d never run into another demon, either. After discovering that her previous employer was one, she’d had enough of them to last her a lifetime.

She adjusted the last harness strap and gave Sir Pup a scratch behind the ears of his left head. His dark eyes glowed faintly crimson before rolling back in ecstasy. A freakishly powerful and terrifying hellhound, sure-but pettings and food were two things guaranteed to make him more biddable.

“Don’t leave him anywhere,” Maggie murmured, “and I’ll see that Ames-Beaumont buys out a butcher shop for you.”

Apparently satisfied with that bribe, Sir Pup pranced to Blake’s side. Blake curled his fingers around the harness handle.

“Why would it be a problem if he does lead me out to the middle of nowhere? You’ll be there.”

Blake had heard her? There was obviously nothing wrong with his ears. “I won’t be,” Maggie said, moving into the hall and gesturing for Sir Pup to follow her down the stairs. “I’m taking you to the airport. He’ll accompany you on the plane.”

“What plane?”

Maggie stopped beside the front door and glanced through the window. Her gaze skipped from vehicle to vehicle, from person to person. She didn’t recognize anyone, and no one tripped the instinctual alarm in her gut that, over the years, she’d learned to trust.

Of course, it had let her down a few times, so she kept her hand on her gun.

“Sir Pup, you have too many heads,” she reminded the hellhound before answering Blake. “I’ll charter a plane to take you back to San Francisco. Mr. Ames-Beaumont can look after you while I-”

“Not a chance,” Blake said.

“-find your sister,” Maggie finished over him.

“Find her where? Do you have information about where he’s taken her that I don’t?”

She opened the door. “No.”

Not yet, anyway.

Chapter Two

Once they hit the sidewalk, Geoff got his first look at Maggie Wren in four years. His first look in person, anyway. A little over three months ago, he’d seen her picture in the file his uncle had sent along with the rest of her history. He’d recognized the woman immediately, her pale eyes. They’d been impossible to forget, considering the last time he’d seen them it had been over the barrel of her gun just before she’d squeezed the trigger. She’d been a CIA operative carrying out a mission in Darfur -both of them a long way from home.

Where her home had been, exactly, he wasn’t sure. Abandoned as a child, she’d been moved around the foster system until she’d found a steady home at the age of twelve. From there, she’d gone into the military and had been recruited early into the CIA. For years, she’d been based in D.C., but had been away on assignments most of the time.

Her transition back to civilian life hadn’t been smooth. She’d lived in with her last employer, a congressman-and a demon. After she’d learned what the congressman was, she’d left his employ and taken a position with his uncle Colin.

Geoff hadn’t known her name until his uncle had sent over her file for his records.

And he didn’t know if she called the house she’d recently bought in San Francisco, not far from his uncle’s mansion, home. And whether buying it was defense against his uncle, or a signal that she was settling in for the ride. After all, she’d taken the job with his uncle, knowing what he was.

And so Geoff held out hope it wasn’t just another job to her.

Just going by appearances, the job suited her. Even Bils worth, the majordomo who’d lorded over the family’s British estate since Geoff had been in short pants, couldn’t have faulted the precise roll of pale blond hair at her nape, the starched white shirt, or the black waistcoat and jacket. The knife-edge crease in her black trousers had withstood travel and the New York humidity.

There was something inhuman about that sort of rigid neatness, but Geoff couldn’t call it demonic.

Calling her a Valkyrie might have fit, though. She was taller than he’d thought. Between her height and the hair, he understood why her fellow operatives had nicknamed her Bullet-Eating Brunhilda.

Rather, he understood the Brunhilda part. He assumed the bullets were another story, buried in a classified file that he hadn’t yet seen.

A man on the sidewalk glanced at Maggie’s face as he walked past them. Geoff couldn’t read her expression. Not once since they’d come outside had she shown any emotion.

She had been surprised by his blindness, but by now she’d covered it. He could imagine what she’d been thinking: What the hell was a blind man doing here?

There were two answers to that. The short explanation went: He wasn’t blind. He just couldn’t see through his own eyes.

The explanation for that was the long one, about Lucifer and the demons who’d waged a second war upon Heaven, and the man who’d brought an end to the battle by killing a Chaos dragon with his sword. The man had become a Guardian, an angelic protector. There were more Guardians, but it was the sword that had shaped the Ames-Beaumont and Ramsdell-and eventually the Blake-families.

That sword, changed by the dragon’s blood and imbued with the dragon’s power, had ended up in the home of Geoff’s ancestor. Two hundred years before, Uncle Colin and Geoff’s many-times-over great-grandfather, Anthony Ramsdell, had performed a blood brother ritual with it, and the sword had tainted their blood. Later, Geoff’s many-times-over great-grandmother-Uncle Colin’s sister-had also been cut by the sword. Both his great-grandparents had been slightly altered by the taint in their blood-and so had their children. Now and then, one of his relations was born with a bit of the uncanny in them, possessing empathic abilities, flashes of telepathy, telemetry, or foresight.

Geoff’s parents had been distant cousins; both could trace their bloodlines back to the many-times-over great-grandparents. So the taint had combined, multiplied, and he and Katherine had ended up the uncanniest of the uncanny.

Geoff had been born without pupils and with the ability to see through the eyes of anyone near him-but his connection to his sister was stronger. He could link to Katherine’s eyes whenever he wanted, no matter how distant she was.

But her eyes hadn’t been open since the evening before. That likely meant she wasn’t awake.

That likely meant she’d been drugged. Whether just to keep her quiet or because her abductor was aware of their connection, Geoff wasn’t certain. But considering that only their parents and Uncle Colin knew about the link between them, Geoff thought it must be to keep her quiet.

When Katherine woke up, she’d find a way to let him know where she’d been taken. In the meantime, Maggie Wren’s expertise would be useful.

If she hadn’t been involved in Katherine’s disappearance.

Since receiving the picture, he had been hoping to see her again, just to see. He’d been fascinated by her. Had barely resisted the impulse to pepper his uncle with questions about her like an infatuated schoolboy.

Not that it would have surprised anyone if he’d shouted his interest. The men in his family had a history of obsessing over women from afar.

Geoff was the first who hadn’t even met the woman yet.

And he hadn’t imagined their meeting would be like this. But it was probably best that he found out now if she’d betray the family.

He watched her through the hellhound’s eyes before he was forced to move on to someone else’s. Now that Sir Pup only had one head, the sensation wasn’t as bloody room-spinning as when Geoff had first connected with the hellhound’s mind. His vision was so clear and sharp, however, that it made Geoff’s brain ache.

Then there were Maggie’s eyes.

Geoff couldn’t keep up with them. He was used to taking in as much detail as he could in a quick glance, but this was beyond his scope. She constantly changed her focus; her gaze was continually moving. Everyone they passed was given a speedy head-to-toe examination, and she used every available reflective surface to keep watch behind them.

He had her eyes, but without her brain behind it, looking through them was almost as dizzying as seeing through the hellhound’s. And he could usually navigate busy sidewalks and streets by knowing his position relative to the people he looked through, but he couldn’t do that with Maggie. For the first time, he was grateful for the harness and the dog at his side. Uncle Colin had sent Sir Pup to protect him, but Geoff was just glad he wasn’t tripping over curbs trying to follow her.

He slipped into the eyes of the man walking behind them, instead.

The bloke was staring at her ass. Jesus, Geoff couldn’t blame the man. From the top of her head to her endless legs, Maggie Wren was worth a second look-then a third and fourth. But still, there were lines. You looked, then looked away. You didn’t stare down even the finest ass like a wolfhound at a dinner table.

Geoff stopped, turned. The man’s attention lifted to his own forbidding expression. Geoff waited until the pervert zeroed in on his solidly blue eyes before grinning. The pervert’s gaze snapped to the left, and he walked hurriedly on.

“Is something wrong, Mr. Blake?”

“No.” He used her eyes again. Her field of vision had narrowed slightly, and was shadowed at the upper edge, as if her brows had lowered.

She looked at Geoff’s eyes, then his mouth. Then she was away again, taking sharp, quick glances over his shoulder at the people walking behind them, focusing hard on their faces. She went back to him, then made a lingering-for Maggie-perusal of a man passing her.

The pervert, Geoff realized. She studied the back of the man’s neck, his knee.

Geoff jumped into another person, then another, until he found someone looking at her face. He saw her eyes, the gray cold and dangerous, before she slipped a pair of rimless dark glasses from her inside pocket. A hard smile touched her lips as the pervert looked back at her, met her eyes, and hastily glanced away.

And there she was. Geoff recognized that expression. There was the woman who could slip a knife into a man or put a bullet in his head. The woman Geoff had watched do both.

He pushed into her mind again as they resumed walking. Her shielded gaze ran over everyone she saw-and hesitated very briefly on their knees, their hands, their stomachs, and their necks.

Not just looking for threats, he realized. She was searching for their vulnerable points. Every person they passed, she lined up as a target.

But she’d been out of the CIA for three years now. Not enough time to unlearn what a lifetime had taught her?

Maybe it could never go.

The SUV she’d rented was black and boxy, and the back-seats had been removed. The harness disappeared from under Geoff’s hand when Maggie opened the rear door. Sir Pup hopped in, lay down, and then grew to the same size he’d been when Geoff had first seen him-through Maggie’s eyes-on the stairs. When the hellhound stretched out, his body took up most of the cargo area.

Maggie swung open the passenger door and took Geoff’s arm. He let her help him in. She was smart, she was observant, and she knew there were more things in heaven and earth than fit in the average human’s philosophy. If Geoff proved too capable, she might suspect that he wasn’t as blind as he appeared.

He waited until she’d climbed into her seat. “We need to return to my hotel-”

“It was on our route from the airport, so we’ve already stopped. Sir Pup has your things in his hammerspace.” Through her eyes, he saw his own puzzled expression. She continued, “It’s like a psychic storage space.”

Geoff nodded. He’d heard demons and Guardians had something similar. “Is my computer in there?”

He immediately felt a familiar weight on his lap. Geoff searched for his headset, his fingers moving along the edge of the laptop. “There was a microphone and-Ah, thank you,” he finished when the headset landed in his palm. A convenient thing, that hammerspace.

Maggie’s gaze left him as she pulled onto the street, but he didn’t need her eyes for this. With a combination of touch and voice commands, he searched the computer for the files he wanted… and was mildly surprised when he found them.

“Did they toss my hotel room, take anything?”

“If they did, they weren’t messy about it.” The car slowed. A look through her eyes showed a yellow traffic light before her gaze moved to his profile. “Did the one who drugged you say anything about Miss Blake? Anything about why he’d taken her, or who he was?”

“No. But a few hours before he grabbed me, hotel security e-mailed this to me. It was from the day that Katherine disappeared from her room.” He angled his laptop, showed her the photo he’d pulled up.

Maggie briefly glanced at the screen. Then she looked at the picture again and didn’t take her eyes away.

Through them, Geoff saw the same face a taxi driver had seen just before Geoff had blacked out. The same face someone outside the brownstone had seen, only moments after he’d taken Geoff’s blood and left him handcuffed to a radiator.

He saw the face Maggie did, but he had no idea what she saw when she looked at the picture. A friend, a former lover-an enemy? Or just a man she happened to have worked with in the past?

“This is the hotel elevator. He got off on Katherine’s floor,” Geoff said.

Maggie blinked once, slowly. Her voice was flat. “That’s a good lead. I’ll follow up on it.”

“While I’m flying out of here to safety? You might want to reconsider. When I didn’t check in last night, what do you suppose was the first thing Uncle Colin asked his fiancée to do?” When Maggie didn’t answer, he continued, “I’d bet he asked Savi to pull my phone records, then hack my e-mail accounts. She’d find out what I’d received in the past couple of hours, who contacted me, where I might have gone. And she would have found this picture.”

Maggie’s eyes closed, then opened. She stared ahead at a green light.

“And with Savi’s photographic memory, it wouldn’t take much for her to connect that face with the one in this picture.”

The second photograph was from a political rally in Washington, D.C., only a few months before Maggie had resigned from the CIA. The original photo had been enlarged to show Maggie-slightly blurry but recognizable-standing in the far background, wearing a dark suit and a military-straight bearing. Beside her was the same man from the first photo.

A horn blared behind them. Maggie tore her gaze from the computer screen and drove through the intersection.

Geoff pushed into the hellhound’s mind. Pain spiked through his head, but he was in luck: Sir Pup was watching her, and so Geoff could, too. He could see her indecision, the rapid beat of her pulse, the tension in the faint lines at the corners of her mouth.

But she wasn’t denying a connection to the man. And, thank God, she wasn’t trying to lie to him.

He asked quietly, “How did you know where to find me?”

She hesitated, then said, “I got a tip.”

“From…?”

Her gaze flew to the picture.

Had she forgotten he couldn’t see that silent admission? He wouldn’t remind her. “Do you think he’ll contact you again?”

“Yes.”

“Then you want me with you, Winters. Right now, I’m the only person standing between you and my uncle.”

Her lips firmed, as if in frustration, before curving into a reluctant smile. “Then let’s go find your sister, Mr. Blake.”

Chapter Three

According to the ISP, the e-mail she’d received that morning had been sent from southern New Jersey. Maggie doubted James was still in the same place, but it gave her a direction to go until she had more information.

A direction, but no solid destination-and reaching the same area he’d been in when he’d contacted her meant spending hours on the road. It had been years since Maggie had tried to leave the city on a Friday afternoon, but she doubted they’d be driving faster than a crawl. So there was business to take care of first: food and clothes.

She asked Sir Pup for jeans and one of the shirts they’d taken from Blake’s hotel room. They fell, still neatly folded, into her lap.

She glanced over at Blake. He’d called Ames-Beaumont and spoken briefly with the vampire, and was now carrying out the rest of their conversation via instant messaging-Blake typing, and then listening to the response through his headset.

Anxiety tightened her stomach. Blake had said he’d stand between her and Ames-Beaumont, but it wouldn’t be for Maggie’s sake. Blake wanted to find his sister, and Maggie was their one connection to James. Blake’s offer of protection wouldn’t last any longer than it took to find Katherine.

But even up to that point, his offer meant very little. Ames-Beaumont was family, and the most powerful vampire in the world-and Blake didn’t owe anything to Maggie. If his uncle came after her, Blake would be an idiot to stand between them.

So her goals hadn’t changed, even if Blake was now coming with her; she’d keep him safe and find Katherine. And if she managed to do both-and if the vampire didn’t hold her as responsible for James’s actions as she did herself-maybe Ames-Beaumont would let her go.

It had become her mantra: maybe he’d let her go.

Her fingers clenched on the steering wheel. God, she didn’t want this mess. She wanted her job. Before that e-mail, everything had been good. Her new life was insane, full of vampires and Guardians, and her employer was an eccentric, to say the least-but she had been, for the first time she could remember, happy. The world had become strange and new, but she’d understood the people around her, what motivated them, and she’d finally felt as if she fit somewhere. And that feeling had been bone-deep.

And one decision from her past had shattered it.

Blake clicked his laptop shut and slid off the headset. When the computer disappeared, Maggie tossed the clothes onto his lap.

His palms swept over the material, as if identifying it. His brows lifted. “Is this a hint? A shower would be better.”

“You don’t have an odor, sir,” Maggie said.

Sir Pup made a doubtful noise in the back. Relieved to have a distraction from the bleak thoughts circling in her head, Maggie glanced into the rearview mirror. The hellhound had covered the end of his nose with his massive forepaw.

Maggie didn’t fight to hold her straight expression. Blake couldn’t see her reaction, so she could relax, just a little. She’d keep her responses appropriately formal, but she didn’t have to be.

“I cannot detect any odor, Sir Pup,” she said, before looking at Blake again. “It’s to ward against any bugs-tracking or listening devices-that he might have inserted into your clothing.”

Blake fingered the collar of his shirt. “You think he’d do that?”

“I would.”

That must have convinced him. As she pulled into a fast-food lot, Blake shucked his jeans and shirt. When he reached for the folded jeans, Maggie shook her head. “Your shorts, too, Mr. Blake. And quickly, or the girl at the drive-thru window is going to get a good look.”

Sir Pup rolled over onto his back, chuffing great bursts of air. The hellhound version of a laugh.

It apparently amused Blake, too. He wore a smile as he hooked his fingers under the waistband. “Is this really about bugs? Or are you planning to take a peek?”

She didn’t need to. She assumed it hadn’t been a pair of socks filling out his oh-so-happy undershorts. She averted her gaze when he lifted his ass from the seat and worked them off. “We’re on the trail of your abducted sister, Mr. Blake. What kind of woman would I be if I did that?”

“One I’d like to get to know better.”

Maggie’s fingers flew to her lips to hold in her laugh. Oh, he was dangerous. She could end up liking him. And liking led to caring, caring to carelessness. She couldn’t afford that.

And he already knew enough about her. More than he should.

She wadded up his clothes and shoved them into the trash can sitting beside the drive-thru menu. The smiley faces didn’t seem so smug crowded in with the discarded coffee cups. Poor little guys.

The menu was loaded with junk. Not a problem, except that she would be motionless for the next several hours. She’d never liked feeling weighted down when she couldn’t move enough to work it off. “How hungry are you, Mr. Blake? We won’t stop again until later tonight, so order as much as you think you’ll need.”

Blake paused with his boxer-briefs on and his jeans halfway up one leg. Though he was bent over at the waist, there wasn’t a crease or a bulge anywhere that wasn’t muscle. “I could easily eat three hamburgers.”

Of course he could. Maggie tripled that for the hellhound and ordered coffee and a fruit-and-yogurt for herself.

She paid cash. James might be trying to track their movements, and she wouldn’t make it easy for him. Hopefully, though, he’d make it easy for her.

You can stop me.

It wasn’t a question or a challenge. It wasn’t a plea. Just a statement.

But how would she stop him? And why her?

She tapped her fingers against the steering wheel, pondering it. By mutual agreement, she and James had decided not to contact one another again-and, despite the circumstances, they had parted on good terms. Her gut said this wasn’t about revenge.

What, then? Was it just coincidence that his path had crossed with hers?

Maggie couldn’t make herself believe that.

Was it about Ames-Beaumont? Was James acting on his own, or had he been hired? And if someone was paying him, had James told them of his connection to her… and to Ames-Beaumont?

But why go after his family and not make any demands?

Frowning, she glanced at Blake. Where had he gotten that picture of her and James? And who had told Blake that the faces in the two photos matched? Not Savi, Ames-Beaumont’s fiancée. If she’d hacked Blake’s e-mail, she wouldn’t have seen the picture from hotel security until after Blake had been taken-so they hadn’t had an opportunity to compare notes.

So Maggie was missing a step, not seeing a connection somewhere. And since the hellhound was watching, she couldn’t use the interrogation method she was most familiar with: aiming her gun at him. That meant digging. Finagling.

Which also meant dropping a little more of the formality. Butlers did not initiate conversations, yet Maggie needed to. “You’re not what I expected, Mr. Blake.”

“I gathered that.”

“Not your blindness. Not just that,” she admitted. “I’ve looked at your dossier.”

“Have you?” Both his voice and his expression were neutral.

“Yes.” She had to look away from him to take the bags at the window. She passed the first to him, then set the others on the console between them. “It’s full of reprimands, complaints, transfers. You’ve been shuttled around Ramsdell for almost fifteen years.”

“I’m not very good at my job.”

She recognized a practiced answer when she heard it-a cover story. “Except that, every time you’ve been transferred to a new branch, a problem has quietly gone away. In London, it was embezzlement by a senior executive. Someone in the Paris labs selling research to a competitor. Using Ramsdell warehouses to smuggle cocaine in Florida. A problem with Ramsdell shipments getting to Doctors Without Borders in Darfur.” Those were only a few, but she didn’t need to go on. And if she wasn’t mistaken, there was a hint of surprise-and relief-in his face now. “You go in, act the doofus who yanks out the disability card at every opportunity and lets everyone think you’re getting by on the family name. And while whoever you’re after is feeling secure, because they don’t think they’ll need to pull the wool over the eyes of a blind man, you’re finding what you need to get rid of them. The pattern speaks for itself. Enough that when we heard about your sister, and Mr. Ames-Beaumont said that you were flying in to look for her, I thought it was a good move.”

“But you don’t think that now?”

“Now, I’m wondering how you manage it.”

“You don’t want to know, Winters.”

“I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you?” She let her amusement bleed into her voice, so that he would know she was smiling.

“Something like that.” He didn’t return the smile. “At least, my uncle would seriously consider it.”

A shiver raced down her spine. Whatever he was hiding, it was different from the knowledge that Ames-Beaumont was a vampire. And there were only two reasons Ames-Beaumont would kill without a thought: either his fiancée was endangered, or his family was. He would kill to protect the community of vampires he led, but only after deliberation. With his heart and his family, however, there were no questions asked, no shades of gray.

Since Savi was safe back in San Francisco, chances were that whatever Blake wasn’t revealing could threaten the family.

How incredible it must be to be a part of a family like that. And how terrifying to be considered their enemy.

She held herself steady, pulled back onto the street, and began to make her way to the Manhattan Bridge. As she’d expected, traffic was crawling.

And she was no good at finagling. “Where did the second picture come from?”

“Your previous employer’s files.”

Maggie shook her head. “The agency would have no reason-”

“Not the CIA. Congressman Stafford.”

A knot of dread tightened in her chest. Stafford knew she’d had national security and intelligence experience. But her references wouldn’t have given him that photo. He must have gotten it from another Washington connection… but who? “Where’d he get it?”

“We don’t know.”

And they couldn’t ask him. Stafford had been slain by the Guardians three months ago.

Blake unwrapped one of his burgers and bit in. When Sir Pup whined in the back, Maggie remembered to do the same for him. She twisted her arm back between the seats. Hot breath brushed her fingers before Sir Pup gently lifted the hamburger; even as she heard him gulp it down, two more whines came from the right and left. A hellhound’s appetite, in stereo.

She was in the middle of unwrapping the fourth when Blake said, “Tell me about him, Winters.”

“ Stafford?”

There wasn’t much to tell. Thomas Stafford had been a charming politician and the perfect employer until he’d tried to pin a murder on her. But it could have been worse. Even if he’d successfully framed her, a life in prison would have been better than if he’d maneuvered her into a bargain that bound her in service to him. A bargain that, if not fulfilled, would have trapped her soul in a freezing wasteland between Hell and the Chaos realm.

Yes, she’d take prison over eternal torment any day. Luckily, the Guardians had saved her from either fate.

“Not Stafford. The man in the photo.”

So Blake wasn’t going to finagle, either. But Maggie could deflect just as well as he had.

“If I tell you, then I have to-”

“His name is Trevor James,” Blake said. “He served with you in the CIA from the date of your recruitment and training until three years ago-when, under orders, you assassinated him. It was your last assignment; you retired after that.”

Her hands, her brain felt limp. Her voice was hollow. “How do you know this?”

“You were investigated by the Guardians and vetted by my uncle. He passed the information to me, for my records. Do you think he would allow you anywhere near his home if he wasn’t certain of you? To have any access to his family?”

One of Sir Pup’s heads nudged her shoulder, knocking her out of her stupor. She fed him another burger, and forced her mind to work again.

The deep vetting wasn’t a surprise. How deep they’d managed to get shocked her, but she couldn’t focus on that yet. She was still trying to figure out why Ames-Beaumont would have sent her file to Blake for his records. She wasn’t a Ramsdell employee.

But maybe, to Ames-Beaumont and to Blake, there wasn’t a difference.

Sir Pup whined again. Maggie ignored him, trying to read as much as she could in Blake’s face each time she took her gaze off the road. There wasn’t much to go on. For a man who had never seen another face-or his own-he had a highly developed sense of how much an expression could give away.

“Vampire communities have an enforcer,” she said, feeling her way through it. “Someone who protects the community from outside threats and enforces the rules within the community. In San Francisco, Mr. Ames-Beaumont fulfills that function. And that’s what you are-the Ramsdell enforcer. You protect Ramsdell Pharmaceuticals.”

Maggie realized that wasn’t quite right as soon as she’d finished. He wasn’t protecting the business itself, and that was why Ames-Beaumont had sent Blake her file. It was about protecting the family-every aspect of it-and Ramsdell Pharmaceuticals just happened to be the family’s primary financial resource. Blake probably had files on every employee working at any of the family’s estates.

Blake didn’t confirm or deny it. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and asked, “Which direction are we going?”

“South. Eventually.” Slowly.

He nodded. “I received information last evening. Katherine was headed south. She’s in a large caravan.”

“An RV?” His British accent, which she’d barely been able to discern until now, had become stronger. Did that mean he was suppressing an emotion, or loosening up? “A motor home in August isn’t going to be easy to pin down.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Sir Pup whined, and she gave him a quelling glance in the rearview mirror. All six of his eyes were focused on the bag sitting on the console. Three one-track minds, but it was all greed. A hellhound didn’t need food; he just liked to eat.

“Just a minute, Sir Pup.” She didn’t want to be distracted. “Where did you get this info?”

“Would you believe your friend talked in front of me?”

Would she? James was inviting her to come find him-stop him. But to blab in front of someone like a cartoon villain? “No. How do you know where she’s headed?”

“Why did you pretend to kill him? Why didn’t you carry out your assignment?”

She clenched her teeth. “You have my file, Mr. Blake. Why don’t you tell me?”

“I’ve seen the kill order. I’ve seen the report you filed, saying the mission was completed. I’ve seen the forensic report, which stated that the charred chunk of flesh they’d found-which was all they’d been able to recover after you’d blown his house to hell-was a DNA match to James. But none of those forms tell me anything that happened between.”

Her mouth fell open. A kill order and the follow-up reports? Those weren’t kept electronically, weren’t something Savi could have hacked. Someone had physically gone into CIA headquarters and copied records that she-or even her direct supervisor-wouldn’t have had clearance to access. A Guardian, maybe-teleporting, or slipping through shadows.

“You’ve obviously no intention of giving me an answer,” Blake said, but he didn’t sound frustrated. He sounded relieved.

And his accent was still audible.

“Are you going to give one to me?”

“No.” He smiled, and his eyes met hers, eerily direct. “But it’s for your own protection.”

“I could say the same.” But more than that, she just couldn’t-wouldn’t-divulge classified information. Blake could poke around all he wanted. She wouldn’t spill sensitive details about her job now, or fifty years from now. She pointed out, “And knowing what happened then doesn’t change anything. We still have to stop him.”

“Knowing how I discovered where Katherine was last night doesn’t change anything, either. We still have to get her.”

All right, she couldn’t argue with that. Yet there must be another way. “Sir Pup, would you let me shoot him? Torture him for answers?”

Blake had a deep, rumbling laugh. The hellhound pushed one of his heads between the seats, his expression curious.

She sweetened the offer. “For a steak?”

Though she could barely see him behind Sir Pup’s big head, she heard Blake say, “What did my uncle ask you to do if she threatened me?”

Instantly, Sir Pup’s head shifted four times larger, his teeth serrated like knives. Scales rippled over his fur; barbed spikes ripped through, tipped with blood.

His eyes glowed with crimson hellfire and fixed on Maggie’s hand, clenching the steering wheel. Cold sweat broke out over her skin. His mouth was gentle when his enormous jaws closed over her forearm, but she got the message.

She was trembling when he let her go. She hoped she didn’t sound as terrified as she felt. “Thanks, Sir Pup. That’s good to know.”

The hellhound shifted back to his former size and snagged the fast-food bag from the console. He retreated into the back, giving her a clear view of Blake again.

His face was gray, his hands shaking as he pushed them through his hair.

“Christ, Maggie,” he said. “I didn’t know that he would-I shouldn’t have asked him that. I’m sorry.”

She nodded. She hadn’t expected it, either. But she was glad Sir Pup’s demon form hadn’t just scared the shit out of her. Blake had obviously been just as-

Wait.

How the hell had Blake known what happened?

“You saw that. You saw him change.” Her heart knocked against her ribs. She stared at his solid-blue eyes, stunned-but couldn’t deny the evidence. “You can see.”

“I-” His eyes widened. His mouth closed. His jaw tightened. “You don’t know that,” he said flatly.

“I don’t? Because I sure as hell-”

“No, Maggie. You don’t. If anyone asks, you don’t know. Not until we find Katherine. Not until the problem with James is settled.”

“All right.” She understood that. Her knowing was something that didn’t go farther than this vehicle. Not even to Ames-Beaumont. Because if Ames-Beaumont learned of it while he was uncertain about her role in Katherine’s kidnapping…

Maggie smiled grimly. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had been killed for knowing too much. She stole a glance at Blake. His eyes were closed, and he was pressing his clenched fist to his forehead. If she had to guess, he was giving himself a heated telling-off.

But maybe, she thought, maybe he’d meant it when he’d offered to stand between her and Ames-Beaumont. If it came to that.

Not, of course, that she would let him. But it was still a good feeling.

Chapter Four

“She’s awake,” Blake said quietly.

Maggie blinked away her highway stare and glanced over at him. A few minutes ago, he’d been asleep. His eyes were still closed, but he’d raised his seat from its reclined position.

“She’s moving slowly,” he continued. “In the bedroom at the back of the caravan. She’s not tied, but the door won’t open. They’ve left her a basket of food, bottles of water. There are windows, and they’ve been darkened with some kind of film. She’s waving. No one in the other cars is noticing. The setting sun is on the left.”

“Heading south,” Maggie said hoarsely. A shiver kept running up and down her spine.

He was seeing, she realized. He was looking through his sister’s eyes.

Blake nodded. “On a divided highway. Two lanes each direction. The car behind them has South Carolina license plates. So does the one passing it.”

And she and Blake were only halfway through New Jersey. The RV had at least twelve or thirteen hours on them.

But not as many hours as it could have had. Whoever had taken Katherine would have been farther if they’d driven straight through. They’d pulled over either to rest or to wait for someone.

“There’s a water closet. The window doesn’t open. She looks all right in the mirror. No bruises.” The monotone recitation broke for an instant, and he laughed. “That’s right, Kate, flip me the bird. She’s got an injection site in her neck, the same as mine. They took blood, too. And she’s looking at the toilet, so that’s my cue to head out for a bit.”

Maggie’s heart pounded. She couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Blake was silent for a few seconds. Then he told her, “She can’t see through mine.”

“Whose are you seeing through now?”

“Yours.”

Maggie stared out the windshield. Sickness clawed at her stomach-she wasn’t sure why. Revelations like these were one of the reasons why she’d taken a job with a vampire. She couldn’t have gone back to normal life after finding out about dragons, or Guardians. She’d have always been looking, and wondering.

She drove and waited for the sick feeling to resolve. It finally did.

Her reaction wasn’t in response to his ability, but the implications of it. Blake possessed a form of remote viewing. What nation wouldn’t want to use that for intelligence gathering-or take steps to prevent it from being used against them?

Jesus. No wonder Ames-Beaumont was so obsessed with protecting his family. If he hadn’t been, every government in the world would have been trying to exploit them-or destroy them.

“And this is the reason Miss Blake was taken,” Maggie realized. “And it’s why they haven’t asked for a ransom. What can she do?”

She hadn’t really expected an answer. And she didn’t anticipate the ease with which Blake delivered it.

“She locates things,” he said. “Items, not people.”

That took a second to sink in. Once it did, Maggie frowned. “Then it could be anyone, looking for anything.”

“No. It has to be someone with resources, access to information, and organized. To begin, they knew she was on holiday in America.”

Maggie nodded. Yes, she’d have used the same opportunity-the target was alone and on foreign soil. “But not military. They wouldn’t be heading down the interstate in an RV. Probably not a vampire, because he wouldn’t need James to take Miss Blake, and he can’t drive during the day.”

“And there are at least two of them. Katherine was on the road when James was in New York last night.” His long fingers tapped against his knees, and a thoughtful expression creased his brow. “It could be a demon driving, if James was the one who drugged her.”

“You think it was a demon? We’ve got to call in the Guardians, then.”

Blake turned his head, met her eyes. Using her vision, she realized, to know where to focus his.

“No,” he said.

“We can’t go up against-”

“A demon has to follow the Rules-no hurting humans, no denying their free will-so he can’t do anything to us. If he’s got vampires with him, we only move in to find Katherine during the day. James is our biggest concern, and Guardians wouldn’t be able to do anything to him, because they’ve got to follow the Rules, too.” Blake paused. “And we’ve got Sir Pup.”

Which meant, Maggie guessed, that even though Ames-Beaumont worked closely with the Guardians, he hadn’t told them about his family… and he didn’t want to risk them finding out.

“Does anyone else know what you can do? What others in your family can do?”

“No one except Savi. A few others who’ve married into the family. Uncle Colin has kept it that way for two hundred years.”

Successfully? Maggie doubted that. Human nature was human nature; even someone like Ames-Beaumont couldn’t squash it. “No one has put it to use? Either for money, or for the government?”

“Some of us have put it to use. We just don’t tell anyone we’re doing it. As for the money, no one in the family needs it.” Blake leaned his head back, closed his eyes. “They’ve stopped. It’s dark. She can’t see much. Trees. A few small fires.”

“A campground?” When he nodded, Maggie said, “We can catch up while they’re stopped. Or at least get closer.”

“That’s-” Blake cut himself off, sat up straight. “They opened the door. There’s James. And another man, standing behind him. Tall, dark hair. The wanker looks right out of GQ.”

Blake flinched, once.

“The bloody bastard James drugged her. She’s out again.”

Around midnight, Maggie began alternating between a fixed stare at the highway and skipping her gaze around the interior of the car and searching the sides of the dark highway, all the while blinking rapidly. Her vision hadn’t been in such a hyperactive mode since they’d left the Brooklyn street.

She was keeping herself awake, Geoff realized.

“We’ll stop,” he said. “You’re knackered.” And so was he, despite the nap he’d taken earlier.

“I’m on West Coast time. I can go longer.”

“How early this morning did you get the e-mail?” Her silence told him it was very early. “We’ll get a hotel room.”

“Mr. Blake, I thought you’d never ask.”

Geoff smiled, but damn if he didn’t wish that he could see her face at that moment. She’d been overruled, yet was responding with humor. She’d held firm when he’d pressed for classified details about her orders to kill James. She was a woman he desperately wanted to know better.

And he might as well throw his cards on the table. “You only joke because you assume I don’t think about you that way, Maggie. You’re wrong.”

That apparently surprised her, because she didn’t reply-but he watched where her focus went: to his hands. She was a hands woman. And, remembering how her gaze had lingered on his bare stomach when he’d been handcuffed, and later, when he’d changed his clothing, he amended it to a hands and abs woman.

Her silence extended. She was looking at the road again, mostly. She glanced at the rearview mirror, once; Sir Pup lifted one of his heads and returned her gaze. The hellhound might appear lazy, Geoff thought, but was completely alert. Then her gaze returned to his hands, darted up to his mouth, and remained there until Geoff began to smile. Her attention flew back to the road.

He’d given her something to think about. And-thank God-she seemed to be thinking about it.

Unfortunately, he also had to push the issue in a direction that, if taken the wrong way, might spark her resistance. “And we are to share a room tonight.”

But, no-Maggie didn’t mistake him. “You don’t trust me,” she said.

“I don’t trust you to not try resolving this on your own. If we’re in separate rooms, you’ll likely run off in the middle of the night and attempt to find Katherine alone.”

“If we are in the same room, what’s to stop me from hand-cuffing you to the bed and leaving?”

Sir Pup pushed one of his heads between the seats again, his ears pricked forward. Unease crawled over Geoff’s skin until he heard the jingle of metal.

Maggie looked down and gave a short laugh when she spotted the handcuffs that had landed in her lap. “He thinks it’s funny,” she said. “And maybe even a good idea.”

In Geoff’s opinion, every good idea that involved Maggie and handcuffs wouldn’t include Sir Pup. “Would he let you handcuff me and leave?”

“I don’t know. He follows directions, but interprets them how he likes. If Mr. Ames-Beaumont told him to protect you-and Sir Pup agreed that you were safer handcuffed to a bed and away from James-he might not bite off my head for it.”

Geoff tried to see Maggie through the hellhound again, but had to pull out when the three perspectives pushed his vision into a nauseating spin. She was scratching Sir Pup’s ears, and his eyes were glowing with a soft red light.

Would the hellhound really hurt her? Or had the threat earlier been for show? Geoff had no doubt that his uncle had given Sir Pup orders to protect him-but the hellhound also apparently had a mind of his own. Like Maggie.

Suddenly, he liked the hellhound much better.

“Can you see through animals, Mr. Blake?”

“No.” It wasn’t a lie. Sir Pup couldn’t be included among normal animals, and Geoff had never seen through any dog, horse, or cat.

“Just through people?”

“Yes. And no more ‘Mr. Blake.’ I am not your employer.”

“Yes, sir.” She was smiling; he caught the edge of her reflection in the rearview mirror. “I plan to shower with my eyes closed, Mr. Geoffrey.”

“Right.” Geoff sighed. “And now I wish doubly that you hadn’t found out the truth.”

Blake took the first shower while Maggie set up her computer and called San Francisco on her encrypted line.

To her relief, Savi was the one who answered it. Though Maggie liked Ames-Beaumont, she loved the young vampire he intended to marry. Maggie had never met anyone like Savi-who was as genuine as Savi. In her profession, that quality had been hard to come by, and Maggie adored her for it.

Not that she would ever be so unprofessional as to admit it.

After a few friendly inquiries about Maggie’s and Blake’s status, Savi got to work. Within minutes, all of the files Maggie had requested were being downloaded to her computer. She engaged the speakerphone so that she could use both hands to type; in the background, she could hear Savi’s fingers flying at super-speed over her own keyboard.

After a few seconds, Savi gave a short “Woot!”

Maggie blinked. “What did you find?”

“Campground reservations. The entire state system is on-line. I’m in, so I’ll start running the registered plates.”

“All of them?”

“Why not?” She could easily imagine Savi’s shrug. She’d seen it a million times, on both the young vampire and the brilliant geeks who made up the CIA’s tech support. “Something might pop. A plate that doesn’t match the vehicle make, or is listed as stolen.” Savi snorted out a little laugh. “Stealing a motor home. That takes some balls.”

“More brains than balls,” Maggie said. “If it had been kept in storage, weeks might go by before the owner reports it missing.”

“Good point.” The clacking stopped. “Hey, Maggie… Colin’s not here, but I can speak for both of us.”

Her chest seemed to freeze. “Yes?”

“Katherine’s still alive. Chances are, they’ll keep her that way because they want something.”

“Yes,” Maggie agreed quietly. Her tongue felt numb. If she looked in the mirror, she was sure her face would be pale, her lips bloodless.

“So we’re still cool now. And it’s not that we don’t trust-” Savi stopped. Started again with, “Geoff is good at what he does. And you were good at what you did.”

“Killing people?”

“Getting them out of bad situations,” Savi said. “Troubleshooting.”

Usually by shooting whoever was causing the trouble. But Maggie wasn’t going to argue. “All right.”

“You know we’ve got the pictures.”

She closed her eyes. “Yes.”

“We wouldn’t have hired you if we didn’t trust you, and it helps that James led you to Geoff.” The deep breath Savi took was audible over the speaker. “But if you betray that trust without good reason, I can’t-I won’t-protect you from Colin.”

What was a good reason? But she only said, “I know. Thank you, Miss Murray.”

“Jesus, Maggie, don’t thank me. Just make it back, okay?” She sighed when Maggie didn’t answer. “All right. I’m going to finish up here, and I’ll shoot you everything I find when I’ve finished. Give Sir Pup a kiss good night for me.”

Maggie disconnected and looked over at the hellhound, taking up one of the two king-sized beds. He lifted his middle head and licked his chops.

Maggie shook her head. “Not going to happen, pup.”

The bathroom door opened. Blake came out, rubbing his hair with a towel and wearing a pair of pajama pants. The muscles in his chest and stomach flexed with each vigorous rub.

Maggie glanced away. Dammit. She hadn’t even realized how often she’d looked him over until she tried to avoid doing it.

“Why ‘thank you’?”

She turned, stared at him blankly. “What?”

“Savi said she wouldn’t protect you. You said ‘thank you.’ How does that work?”

“I appreciate knowing where I stand.”

Blake nodded and tossed the towel onto the bureau. “She was lying, though.”

“She doesn’t trust me?”

“She would stop him. Talk him out of it, if she could. And if she couldn’t, she’d help you get a head start, complete with a new identity.” The shrug of his shoulders did gorgeous things to his chest again. “But, of course, she can’t tell you that.”

“And you can?”

Small lines fanned from the corners of his eyes when he smiled. “I just did.”

“Why?”

He didn’t answer immediately. From her seat by the desk, she watched him settle on the bed with his long legs stretched out, his ankles crossed, and his shoulders propped by the pillows. He laced his fingers over his stomach.

She dragged her gaze away again. “Do you need a shirt, Mr. Blake? I believe Sir Pup has several more in his hammerspace.”

“I’m comfortable, Winters.” He grinned, and she was suddenly looking at his mouth.

Dammit. She stood and stripped out of her jacket and weapon harness. “Why, Mr. Blake?”

“I was in Darfur four years ago.”

Though her back was turned to him, she could see him in the mirror. He was no longer smiling. “I know you were. And?”

“And there are times when I’m looking through other people, I see things I don’t want to.”

Maggie closed her eyes, suddenly unsure she wanted to hear this. “Yes, I suppose your parents kept their bedroom dark.”

“Unfortunately, no.” She heard the smile in his voice before it left again. “Four years ago, I slipped into the head of a man with a young girl. She was maybe ten or eleven. Tied up on a bed. She’d already been… He wasn’t done.”

Maggie faced him. “I get it. Go on.”

“He must have been nearby, but I didn’t know where the hell he was, so I started looking. And I knew by his surroundings that it was one of the government houses, because everyone else lived in shacks.”

The same way he was looking for Katherine now, she guessed. Recognizing surroundings, narrowing down a location.

“What were you going to do when you found him?”

“Get her out of there. Kill him.”

Probably not in that order. “Did you find him?”

“No. Someone else did. I don’t know what she was doing there, what trouble she’d been sent to fix-but she opened the door, and she looked at him. She looked at the girl. And she shot him. Just raised her gun and fired.”

Realization struck, made breathing suddenly painful. “You were in my head then?”

“No. His.”

Jesus. “You weren’t… hurt… by being in him when he died?”

“No. I just lost contact. So I moved into the girl, stayed with her after you helped her to the exit. She limped down the street right past me, and I made sure she got where she was going. I tried to find you again, but…” He shook his head. “I didn’t.”

“He wasn’t my target,” she admitted. Not her target, never reported, and not classified.

“He should have been.”

Maggie toed off her boots and tucked them beneath the desk. “If the girl had screamed, it might have compromised my mission.”

“Yet you did it anyway.”

“Yes.” She hadn’t even had to think about it.

“With a reaction like that, you were in the wrong line of work.”

Yes, I was. But she only asked, “Why tell me this?”

“I never got a chance to thank you.”

“I didn’t do it for you.”

“What does that matter? You did what I couldn’t, and I’m grateful for it. Just as it doesn’t matter now whether you’re helping me find Katherine because she needs to be found, or if it’s because you feel responsible for James after letting him go alive. Either way, I’ll be grateful for the help when we find her.”

Who was this man? Was he for real? Her fingers were clumsy as she unbuttoned the cuffs of her sleeves. What kind of person offered trust like this? Acceptance? She wasn’t family. Their only connection was one of the few impulsive acts Maggie had performed in her lifetime. She shouldn’t even matter to him.

And yet… his acceptance and trust had begun to matter to her, too. It must have, because her throat was aching, and she wanted to say “Thank you” in return.

But as she moved toward the bathroom, she only said, “You aren’t at all what I expected, Mr. Blake.”

Chapter Five

She looked too soft with her hair blown dry and loose around her shoulders. She felt too soft, and so Maggie braided it into a rope before leaving the bathroom. Her only clothes were a tank and underwear, but she had no intention of looking down at herself.

Sir Pup hadn’t abandoned his sprawl across the second bed. She studied him, wondering how to maneuver through this. Sleeping had never been an issue before.

“It seems an easy choice, Winters. There’s hardly enough room over there for a child.”

She narrowed her eyes at the hellhound. “He could get up. He doesn’t need to sleep. Or eat. So I don’t need to buy him a bag of sausage biscuits tomorrow morning.”

Sir Pup yawned, exposing three sets of gigantic teeth, and rolled onto his back.

Maggie sighed and crawled onto the bed next to Blake.

“You caved?”

She reached for the light and clicked it off. “He probably wouldn’t let me eat tomorrow, either. It’s a practical decision.”

“And this marks the first time a woman has come to my bed for practical reasons. Usually, they say it’s a mistake.”

“I don’t make mistakes.” She turned on her side, facing away from him. “Not many.”

“You trusted James.”

She stared into the darkness. “Yes, I did.”

“Was that a mistake?”

She hadn’t thought so. But she had wondered, even back then, if caring about James as a person-and as a friend-had given her a blind spot, prevented her from seeing some terrible truth. But, in the end, she’d made her decision and lied about following through on the kill order.

The reasons behind the kill order hadn’t been given-reasons were rarely given-but the kill order itself hadn’t made sense. Operatives didn’t assassinate other operatives. Even if James had been a traitor to the country, if he’d sold government secrets, or come across sensitive information that an operative couldn’t be allowed to possess, the first step would have been to convict him. Perhaps the public would never hear of it-or even most agency employees-but there would have been hear ings. And if James fled custody and posed a security risk-which he hadn’t-Maggie shouldn’t have been the one to take him out. Someone higher up would have done it, very quietly.

And so from the moment her superior had given her the order, her gut had told her something was off. Way off. She’d have bet her life that James hadn’t committed a breach of national security, but had witnessed someone else’s. Someone within the CIA. Someone higher up the chain of command, who could distance himself from the kill by pushing it down through the ranks.

When she’d spoken with James on that final night, he hadn’t verified her suspicions. He’d kept his secrets as well as she did. But she’d worked with him too long, known him too long. And although she wouldn’t stay with the agency and try to discover who had betrayed them-that would have been signing her own death warrant-she wasn’t going to murder James for that person, either. So she’d told him to run.

Behind her, Blake turned heavily over, and she heard the thump of his fist against the pillow as he punched it into a comfortable shape. She could visualize him, on his stomach and his head turned to one side. And though he could be facing either way, she was certain that if she rolled over, she’d find that he’d turned his face toward her.

“No,” she said quietly. “I don’t think it was a mistake.”

As soon as he replied, her instincts were confirmed: Blake was facing her… and was closer than she’d thought. Not invading her personal space, but not across the bed, either. “James knew how to contact you. Do you know where he was before this?”

“I wasn’t in hiding. It’d have been easy for him to find me.” She paused, weighed the rest, and decided she could reveal it. “I didn’t want to know where he was. We’d agreed: no contact, ever.”

“Because the agency keeps tabs on you.”

“Yes.” Maybe not deep surveillance, but some. “Not enough that Ames-Beaumont considers my employment a security threat to him.”

“Savi would take care of that, anyway.”

Maggie nodded, the pillowcase cool and soft against her cheek. Then she remembered to say, “Yes.” She heard him thump his pillow again. “Is your sister awake?”

“No.”

“Tell me about her.”

“You don’t already know?”

Maggie thought of the files she’d had a chance to look over on the flight to New York. “I know she’s a police inspector in London. Her cases-solved rate is high.” Extraordinarily high. “She buys her groceries on Wednesdays and Saturdays, usually rents romantic comedies or horror movies-”

“The two genres have more in common than you’d think.”

She smiled and thought about turning over. If she explored him with her hands, her mouth, he’d be warm and solid. He’d kiss her, slide deeply inside her, and she’d wrap herself around him.

And they wouldn’t get much sleep. They’d be tired, and perhaps careless, when they started out again tomorrow. Katherine needed better from both of them.

Silently, Maggie clamped her hand between her thighs, and used the pressure to soothe the burn her imagination had sparked. “It helps to hear from someone who knows her well; memorizing data isn’t the same.”

“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t. Ask away, Winters.”

“She lived with a man for eight years. He moved out a month ago. Did he know about her ability? About you?”

“No.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes.”

Katherine had been in a long-term relationship-and she’d kept it hidden from her partner? But more than that, she hadn’t even revealed that she was concealing something. How would that affect a relationship? Would that be more difficult than revealing to the other person that there was something she just couldn’t share with him?

It probably depended on the other person.

“What has her emotional state been like?”

“It was a blow when Gavin left her. But this, she’ll look at as she would a job. She’ll keep her head. And she’ll be searching for a way out.”

Maggie closed her eyes. “Hopefully by tomorrow, we’ll give her one.”

Maggie’s multipurpose phone beeped at four a.m. She fumbled for it on the nightstand and squinted at the soft white glow. The text message had come from Savi: “Check your e-mail and finish sleeping on the plane.”

The plane? What plane?

She scrubbed at her face before engaging the encrypted mode on her phone and logging in. God, she hadn’t run on this kind of schedule in years. But back then, she also hadn’t opened her e-mail from bed, warm and comfortable, ensconced in blankets and with Blake’s back and shoulders against her own.

She had to resist the urge to press back tighter against him. Somehow, their position felt more intimate than spooning. And strangely familiar, like going through a door with an operative that she trusted by her side.

She read the message, then stumbled into the bathroom and blasted a hot, two-minute shower. Geoff was using her phone when she came out in her bra and panties, with Sir Pup-sporting only one head-peering over his shoulder.

Sir Pup turned to look at her. Blake’s hands went slack, the phone tilting in his grip.

She glanced at the screen as she walked by the bed, then did a double take. Blake was accessing his own mail, reading a message identical to the one Savi had sent to her… but he shouldn’t have been able to get that far. Using it for anything other than a phone call required Maggie’s password.

She lifted her arms and began coiling her hair into a roll at her nape. “Did Savi give you a password for my equipment?”

“You did, a few minutes ago,” he said. A slight frown had formed at the corners of his mouth, and his voice was still rough with sleep. “You look at your fingers when you use the keypad.”

That explained how he’d discovered the embezzlers at Ramsdell Pharmaceuticals. He’d just watched them input their fraudulent numbers, and they’d never known they were being watched.

But she had known what he could do and hadn’t guarded against it. If Blake hadn’t already been Ramsdell security, she could have just compromised Ames-Beaumont’s.

The potential mistake didn’t piss her off as much as knowing that she hadn’t even thought about guarding against it. Taking a risk with her eyes wide open was acceptable. Acting blindly and stupidly was not.

And why hadn’t she thought? Because she’d been cozy.

She jabbed in the pins that secured her hair, then stepped into her trousers and yanked them up. “Why didn’t you read my e-mail when I did, too?”

“That would be an invasion of privacy, Winters.” His brows lowered, darkening his expression. “I have limits. For instance, when you’re in there”-he tilted his head toward the bathroom-“I’ll not look without permission. But if you come out here dressed as you are now, I’ll take whatever eyeful I can.”

“But whose-” No, she didn’t need to ask.

Sir Pup had begun chuffing. His other two heads sprouted from his shoulders and joined in.

Blake weaved on the bed and pressed his hand to his forehead, swallowing hard. Obviously, looking through the three heads didn’t agree with him.

“If I may be so bold, Mr. Blake-you just got what you deserved.” Maggie pulled on her shirt. “You said you couldn’t see through animals.”

“I can’t. And don’t bloody call me Mr. Blake.” He stood abruptly and came toward her. “Are those why you were called ‘Bullet-Eating Brunhilda’?”

“No.” She didn’t look down at the scars scattered over her stomach as she buttoned her shirt. “It’s because I’m blond, and I’m tall, and men don’t use much imagination when they are nicknaming women. Your uncle, of course, is the exception-‘Winters’ is preferable to ‘the Ice Queen’ or ‘the Frost Giant.’”

“‘Winters’ has nothing to do with your hair, Maggie.” His gaze was steady on hers. “Will you turn around?”

Nothing he’d just said was what she’d expected. “Why?”

“Because there’s a mirror behind you. And because you’ve retreated behind that damnable butler’s tone, and so I’m not able to tell if you’re angry. I want to see your face, not mine.”

That was just too bad. “We have a plane to catch, sir.” She shouldered her weapon harness and deliberately swept her gaze down his bare chest, his ridged stomach. “You have five minutes to get ready. I suggest you get started.”

He stepped in closer. Maggie drew in a breath, waited for him to do more. To say something, to argue… to touch her.

God, she was looking at his hands again.

Her jacket hung on the chair behind her. She grabbed it, put distance between them. He stared at the spot where she’d been for a moment longer before turning his back to her and moving toward his own clothes. The bullet scar on his shoulder was pale against his tan.

“For the record, Maggie,” he said, “it wasn’t my intention to upset you. I’m simply not in the habit of asking first.”

No, he wouldn’t be. He couldn’t keep his ability a secret if he sought permission to use it.

The tension that had been stiffening her muscles slowly eased away. “For the record, sir-I am very easy to upset when I find myself awake at four in the morning.”

He was facing the other way, so she didn’t know if he smiled. She didn’t mind. He couldn’t see hers, either.

“Now that you’ve forgiven me, I ought not to admit this,” Blake said as soon as they were both settled into the SUV. “But I’ve no idea why we are to catch a plane. I only read half of Savi’s e-mail.”

Because he’d been distracted when she’d come out of the bathroom in her underwear, Maggie realized, and four fifteen in the morning suddenly felt a little brighter.

“The Ramsdell corporate jet is waiting at the Richmond airport,” Maggie told him. “It’ll take us to Charleston.”

“Savi located the RV, then?”

“No. But it’ll get us to the right state faster than we can drive, and we don’t lose the time sleeping.”

Blake’s smile was wry. “Sensible. And very kind of her not to point out that if I could drive, we wouldn’t have needed to stop.”

Yes. Last night, she would’ve slept while Blake drove, and they’d have been in South Carolina by now.

Maggie frowned, her fingers tapping against the steering wheel. “They stopped, too. James and the other one. And not to switch off-they could have done that in a parking lot or beside the road.”

But at a campground, Maggie realized, they could pay for the site and leave the RV. It would be a while before anyone listed it as abandoned.

And they’d drugged Katherine again rather than asking her to locate something. So that it’d be easier to carry her out of the RV, take her to another vehicle?

Blake must have been thinking along similar lines. “So they’ve left the caravan, changed their mode of transportation.”

“With a nearby destination, probably. If she’s drugged, even a hired plane is too risky-and so is taking the chance that she’ll wake up when she’s in a car. She’d get someone’s attention.”

“A local destination,” he repeated, his voice grim. “Where they can start questioning her.”

“Yes.” She glanced over at him. “We’ll be at the airport in ten minutes. You call Savi, fill her in. It’ll be somewhere isolated. Probably a house, rented or leased in the past six months.” The date Katherine had bought her plane ticket to New York. “Have her cross-reference names with the campground registrations and the real estate agent who was selling the brownstone in Brooklyn.”

“She won’t find anything.”

“No,” Maggie agreed. “But it’s better than doing nothing.”

He nodded, and she listened to the one-sided conversation with her mind hundreds of miles south. You can stop me, Brunhilda. But she couldn’t anticipate James, because she couldn’t see why he was doing this.

She lowered her window to let the wind rush past her face and finish waking her up. Even this early, the August air was warm. From the cargo area, Sir Pup whined. She rolled the rear window down, and a moment later one of his heads was blocking the view in her side mirror. His tongue and ears flapped like wet flags.

His eyes were also glowing crimson, but there wasn’t enough traffic to worry about his being seen.

“Demon,” Blake said quietly. “I’ll ring you again in a moment, Savi.”

Startled, Maggie glanced over at him. Was he worried about the red eyes? But she didn’t think he’d been looking at Sir Pup.

“She’s awake, in a bedroom, and there’s a man sitting in the corner who looks like Gavin.”

His sister’s ex. But it couldn’t be him; Maggie knew Ames-Beaumont had put men on Gavin’s tail the moment Katherine had disappeared.

And a demon could shape-shift to resemble anyone.

“Oh, she’s right pissed. Her hands are waving around in that way she has. He’s attempting to calm her. Good luck with that, you bastard.” A moment passed. “And there he goes, out the door. He’s locked it. Come on, Kate, give me something I can work with.”

Maggie’s phone beeped. Seeing that it was Savi, she simply engaged the speakerphone.

“There she goes to the window,” Blake said. “She’s upstairs. It’s dark outside, but there’s a light… a lighthouse, I think it is. It must be to the north of her. The water’s on the right.”

Faintly, she heard the clacking of Savi’s keyboard. Already narrowing the search.

“The house is white. There’s a dock, and a boathouse. A good-sized sailboat tied up.”

That meant money, Maggie thought. But with a demon involved, that wasn’t a surprise. “Do you see a name on it?”

“No. She’s searching through the room now. The drawers are empty. No phone. No television. No periodicals.”

“Nothing that gives away their location.” Savi stopped typing. “Do you think they know what Geoff can do?”

“If they did, they’d have blindfolded her.” Maggie took the airport exit. “They probably just don’t want her to feel comfortable, so that leaving the room will be a reward-”

Blake gave a short laugh. “Clever girl, Kate. She’s turned over a lamp on the nightstand. On the base, there’s a label: ‘Laura’s Antiques and Design, Hilton Head, South Carolina.’”

“Which is… ” There was a moment of furious clacking. “Right on the water. It’s an island.”

“And a tourist trap,” Maggie said. “Probably not isolated enough.”

“True. I’ll concentrate fifty miles up and down the coast. I’ll also find pictures of local lighthouses for you to look at, Geoff. Once the sun rises, maybe Katherine will be able to see enough that you’ll recognize one. And I’ll have the pilot file a new flight plan that will take you closer to Hilton Head than Charleston is. And, Maggie-I’m monitoring your e-mail, so that if James tries to contact you again, I can get you a location ASAP.”

“Thank you, Miss Murray.”

“Oh my god, I wish you’d stop calling me that. Does she do that to you, Geoff?”

He aimed a grin at Maggie. “Yes, Aunt Savi.”

“And that is a million times worse. You’re six years older than I am.” The vampire sighed. “Okay, I can’t put this off anymore. I’m on my way to tell Colin that a demon has Katherine. And that the demon probably knows what she can do.”

“In other words,” Blake said, “we shouldn’t be surprised if, by the time the sun sets tonight, you and Uncle Colin have arrived in Hilton Head.”

“Yeah, that about covers it,” Savi said. “Be safe until then.”

Silence fell between them after she’d disconnected, until Maggie said, “How much do you want to bet she chartered a plane within a minute of you first saying ‘demon’?”

His agreeing laugh faded too quickly, and he scrubbed his hands over his face. “Katherine hasn’t found anything else. Nothing to write with, either. She’s sitting, waiting.”

Maggie nodded. Unfortunately, that was what she and Blake would be doing, too.

Chapter Six

“Why did he choose ‘Winters,’ Mr. Blake?”

Maggie’s gaze was focused on the lighthouse filling the laptop screen in front of her, but Geoff immediately felt the shift of her mood. Her eyes had been in hyperactive mode from the time they’d arrived at the airport, so that Geoff’s reliance on Sir Pup’s guide harness was, once again, not completely faked.

And she hadn’t let up on the drive to Hilton Head, or after they’d entered the open-air café where they’d decided to have breakfast and look through the lighthouse photos Savi had compiled.

After Geoff mentioned his difficulty using her eyes, Maggie had made an effort to let her gaze rest on each photo. But she’d still managed to give a once-over to every customer, almost every pedestrian on the sidewalk, and many of the drivers passing by in their cars.

As she asked about the nickname, however, Maggie became too focused. Though Geoff had heard the hostess seating at least two newcomers, Maggie’s gaze hadn’t yet darted to them-which told Geoff that the answer was as important to her as their security.

And he wasn’t above using that knowledge to his own ends. “I’ll tell you, but only if there’s no more of this ‘Mr. Blake.’”

Her gaze lifted to his face. Christ, he hadn’t intended for his expression to appear that tense, that dark. ‘Mr. Blake’ didn’t anger him. It just… frustrated him.

“All right. Just Blake.”

No “mister,” and so no longer something she’d use with a superior, or an employer. He watched the line between his eyebrows vanish, saw how he eased back in his chair. Watched through her eyes.

And so Maggie knew, too, how much that had mattered to him. He began to push his hand through his hair, then realized how relieved the gesture seemed-as if he’d just fought a battle and won.

He was in the process of becoming completely wrecked by this woman. And seeing himself like this wasn’t helping his confidence.

He searched for someone who was looking at her, instead. He found one, two tables away, who was either staring blankly into space or fascinated by the platinum of Maggie’s hair in the bright sun. The focus wasn’t on her face, but Geoff could see her profile well enough to know her expression wasn’t giving much away.

And that she had a beautiful, incredible mouth.

With both hands, she brought her coffee cup to her lips. From any other angle, the ceramic rim would have hidden her smile, and he couldn’t hear it in her voice when she prompted, “Winters?”

“Winters,” Geoff said, “was the name of my uncle’s valet. His first valet, his second, his third, and his fourth.”

The corners of her mouth tightened. “I see.”

No, she likely didn’t. Not yet. She assumed that Colin, the son of a wealthy British earl, had lazily taken to calling all of his valets “Winters” so that he wouldn’t have to remember their names.

“They all were of the Winters family. Sons and grandsons. One a nephew. But it was the first who was in my uncle’s employ when he became a vampire. Whenever he traveled away from Beaumont Court, he took Winters. And it was the first Winters who was with him when he was cursed.”

He had no doubt Maggie knew of the curse. She would have noticed how few mirrors were in his uncle’s mansion. Every other vampire could see his reflection, but the taint of the dragon’s blood had erased his uncle’s. To a man as vain as Colin Ames-Beaumont, the inability to confirm his beauty truly was a curse.

“Oh,” Maggie said quietly. “Not just a valet. A gentleman’s gentleman. A man he trusted to do what he couldn’t-maintain his appearance, and protect him during his daysleep.”

“And, according to Uncle Colin, who remained one of his few links to sanity during those early years.” The family, of course, being the other. “There hasn’t been a Winters since the Second World War-not, at least, one who has served my uncle. His support of the Winters family allowed them to rise in class enough so that when my grandmother married a Blake, it didn’t raise any eyebrows. And Uncle Colin didn’t think it was appropriate for family members to serve as his valets, so he began to dress himself.”

With great care, she set her coffee cup on its saucer. “Your grandmother was a Winters?”

“Yes. And she hadn’t any more blond hairs on her head than I do.” He reached for his juice and raised it in a tiny salute. “And that, Maggie, is the story of the Winters name. You can infer what you wish from it.”

If she did infer anything, she didn’t share her conclusions. Instead, she slowly ate a piece of toast.

Geoff assumed her silence meant she’d been affected by it. Good, he thought. Very good.

Even if it meant that he was a bastard for telling her. He knew what she was looking for, what her psychological profile had laid out, describing a chain of events that had started when a young woman had given Maggie her last name, and nothing else. Then bandied about the foster system until she was twelve. She’d found stability, after that, with foster parents who hadn’t been able to have children of their own-and who’d taken in children not out of love, but to fulfill a sense of duty. The father had been a military man through and through, with a schedule for every aspect of the children’s lives. It had been constancy Maggie had desperately needed, but the sense of belonging she’d craved hadn’t been fulfilled until the service.

The CIA had known that, had used that when they’d brought her in. They’d depended on her loyalty-not just to her country, but to her fellow operatives. Whatever the CIA had given her, though, it hadn’t been enough after they’d told her to assassinate James.

And Geoff was a bastard for using that knowledge, too-but he was also determined to see that his family would be enough.

He lost sight of her a moment later. Damn, and double damn. The person he’d been looking through had come out of his reverie and glanced away from her.

When he slipped into Maggie again, she was studying his face. “Given how protective he is, I’m surprised that Ames-Beaumont hasn’t tried to force you out of the field.”

“You can be sure he’s tried. The first time I was shot, he threatened to break my legs every four weeks to keep me in bed.”

“The first time?”

“The scar you’ve seen was from the last-the latest one. That was eight months ago, in Colombia. And it was the first time I was too far from a Ramsdell facility. So I wasn’t patched up with vampire blood.”

By the movement of her head, Maggie was nodding. “Sir Pup carries blood in his hammerspace for emergencies. I haven’t had to use it yet-and I didn’t realize it healed that well.”

“It’s not completely miraculous. The others did leave a bit of scarring.” He wondered if his easy posture and the hint of his smile looked as casual to her as he hoped it did. “And it’s because of the blood that Uncle Colin will soon have his wish.”

Her vision darkened at the edges, as if her eyes had narrowed. “How so?”

“Ramsdell is building a new facility in San Francisco. The research will focus on the blood, which Uncle Colin has never allowed before-and so my focus will change, as well. I’ll head up security and operations, and only go out in the field when it’s necessary. And I’ll take a more direct approach when I do.”

“No more playing the doofus.”

He suppressed his wince. Even knowing “doofus” was true-hell, it had been deliberate-it wasn’t an easy thing to hear her say. “Yes.”

“And you’ll be living in San Francisco.”

“Yes.”

“Why the change?”

“It’s time. I’ve been protecting the family so long, I haven’t had time to start one for myself.” Whatever form that family took. “And I came out of Colombia; Trixie didn’t.”

Her gaze returned to his face. “She was… your guide dog?”

“For ten years.” He felt the familiar twinge in his chest and pushed through it. “She spoiled me. And traveling doesn’t have the same appeal without her. So when Uncle Colin told me about the plans for the San Francisco facility, I told him I would help him out.”

Her gaze settled on his mouth before moving to the photo of the lighthouse on her laptop. “There’s no interesting story behind my scars,” she said. “I wish I had eaten bullets, because that would mean that I’d taken a calculated risk. But it was just a mistake. I went left when I should have gone right. And I can’t tell you who carried me out.”

She couldn’t, but she didn’t need to; her implication was clear. James had.

“In other words,” Geoff said. “You want to save him from the demon, too.”

He thought she shrugged, but he found someone looking at her too late to be sure.

“I don’t know if he needs to be saved. But I’m not sure I could kill him. Not if the only reason is that he knows too much.”

Is that what she thought her role here was? That they expected her to perform a cold-blooded assassination?

“We’re just here to get Kate out, Maggie.”

“And then?”

“Uncle Colin will step in.” Which wasn’t, Geoff reflected, the best way to put it. He shook his head, and tried again. “When Katherine was eight, we were visiting a neighboring estate, and the lady of the house mentioned a locket that had gone missing twenty or thirty years earlier. My sister told her where to find it. The locket was of some historical significance, so the story was written up in the local paper. Just a minor little piece. But within a fortnight, two government men arrived at Beaumont Court to talk with her. When they left, they said they’d be calling on us again. My mother rang Uncle Colin. We didn’t hear from them again… but they are still alive.”

From across the café, he caught the edge of her smile. “He scared them.”

Terrorized them, because their deaths would only raise more questions. But fear created an ally of sorts; those two men would forever deny finding out anything unusual about Katherine or seeing the need for further investigation.

“And so if James can be persuaded to remain silent,” Geoff said, “we have no problem. The demon, however-”

“Needs to be slain.”

“Yes. But we’ll not likely be handling that, either.” From beside his chair, he heard an eager chuff. He shook off the memory of the giant demon dog, its teeth closing over Maggie’s arm. “And, so. No murder required. Just a rescue.”

Maggie was studying his face again. Specifically, his mouth.

“Maggie,” he warned. “Don’t look at me like that.”

Her gaze dropped to his hands.

“Not there, either.”

She met his eyes. He’d known few people who could hold his sightless gaze for more than a couple of seconds.

“I look everywhere,” she said.

“Yes. But not for as long as you look at me.”

She closed her eyes; he saw darkness. He heard the scrape of her chair. Warm lips pressed hard against his. Her fingers raked through his hair. His shocked inhalation brought her into him. Christ, she smelled incredible. Tasted like heaven. He wanted more, wanted to see her, too. But the idea of finding another pair of eyes to look through had barely begun to form when every sensation that was Maggie left.

Then she was back in her chair, and he was staring at his own astonished expression.

She looked down at her toast, picked up another slice. She must have noticed that her fingers were unsteady at the same moment that he did-her gaze snapped to the street, to the sidewalk, and began its familiar skip from face to face.

“I shouldn’t have-”

His temper flared. “You’ll not apologize for it.”

“Your sister is still missing.”

Yes, she was. Bloody hell. Katherine wouldn’t begrudge either of them that kiss, but dammit-there were priorities.

He nodded, pushed his hand through his hair. It’d felt better when Maggie’s fingers had done it. “More lighthouses, then.”

Blake found the lighthouse half an hour later.The photo had been taken from a position nearer to it than Katherine was, but it gave them a direction: about thirty miles north.

They’d only been on the road for a few minutes when the demon came to see Katherine again. In the passenger seat, Blake’s shoulders straightened, his eyes squinting slightly. As if, Maggie thought, he were trying to urge Katherine to look at something more closely.

“He’s GQ again. And he’s speaking to her, but Katherine isn’t… ” Blake tilted his head, frowning. “She’s not looking at him, so I’ve no idea what he’s saying.”

She shouldn’t have been surprised, but she was. “Can you read lips?”

“Not perfectly. Enough to catch a word here and there, put it together. Come on, Kate, you know I need to see his face.”

Oh, no, Maggie thought. She glanced in the rearview mirror, saw Sir Pup gazing steadily back at her. A hellhound wouldn’t know, and a man might not realize what that meant-but Maggie could guess.

Katherine was attracted to the demon. Probably trying not to be… but still attracted.

Demons, unfortunately, could be charming, so that their lies dripped like honey. And the shapes they took were usually as gorgeous as sin.

“He’s holding out his hand to her. She’s not taking it, but she is following him down the stairs. The curtains are drawn at the front windows.”

“So that no one can see in,” Maggie said. “Or so that she can’t signal to anyone.”

“There’s James, standing near the doorway of a dining room. He’s decked out in black, wearing a shoulder holster.” Blake frowned. “There’s food. It’s a nice setup. GQ is smiling, pulling out a chair for her. What the hell is he doing?”

“Playing good cop, bad cop,” Maggie said. “In a few minutes, James will get pissed, start yelling, pull out the gun. The demon will be the voice of reason and put himself between Katherine and the weapon.”

And then there was the food, she thought. How hungry was Katherine by now? Even if she didn’t want to feel gratitude, she would be thankful for the chance to eat. It was human nature.

Blake frowned. “So he’s creating an express version of Stockholm syndrome? He’ll make her trust him, so she’ll give up the location faster?”

“I think so.” Katherine knew the Rules, and what the demon couldn’t do to her. She wouldn’t worry about him, but look for ways to get around James. “They’ll want to keep her afraid of James, but they’ll also give her a friend.” A handsome, sympathetic friend. “One who can convince her that as soon as she helps him, he’ll let her go.”

Blake was silent for a few minutes, then said, “You were spot on, Maggie.”

“The fight?”

“Yes. The demon is taking her back upstairs now.” He pounded his fist against his knee. “And she’s still not looking at him, though he’s speaking with her. Still not… Oh, but she’s taken a scone with her and heaped it with jam.”

Jam? Maggie glanced over, saw his wide grin. “What?”

He shook his head. “We’ve only to wait now, and we’ll know what it is he wants.”

As soon as the demon left her alone, Katherine used the jam to write “dragon blood” on the bathroom mirror.

Which, Maggie thought, was not as helpful as it might have been.

“Dragon blood?” Blake scrubbed his hands over his face. “How would she find that? There’s only been one on Earth, and it was killed thousands of years ago.”

By the sword that had tainted his uncle’s blood. And-

Maggie’s stomach sank. “Is that what happened to you? And Katherine? You were changed by the sword?”

“Not directly.”

Born different, not changed. “Someone else. Your parents or your grandparents were tainted by it.”

“No. But go back two centuries, and you’ll land on them. What are you thinking, Maggie?”

“The reason your uncle hired me was that a few demons found out he was different from other vampires, so he needed that extra protection from them. And that if your family has been different for two hundred years, there will be a pattern that shows up. No matter how hard he tries to hide it. If a demon looked at him first, then looked at his family…” Maybe Blake’s pattern wasn’t as easy to establish. But his sister-“Katherine’s cases-solved rate is incredibly high.”

“And they took blood from us both.” His grim tone matched the lines of tension beside his mouth and nose. “So that’s how they knew. But that still doesn’t tell us where she’ll find dragon blood now.”

Her stomach seemed to sink lower. Maybe Katherine didn’t have to find dragon blood. Maybe the demon thought she already had it. “Do you know about the grigori?”

“No.”

That was no surprise. Ames-Beaumont, she knew, had only learned of them recently, too. “Demons can’t have children. But before the war with the angels-when the dragon was killed on Earth-Lucifer made some demons drink dragon blood. They were changed by it, and they mated with humans. The offspring are the grigori.”

She watched his face, and saw the horrified realization that his family had been changed by dragon blood. His voice was low and furious. “Is he trying to experiment with her? To see if he can impregnate her?”

“If he is, there is one silver lining: it has to be of her free will.” As in everything else, the demons’ Rules had to be followed.

“And so he does the nice-guy routine before he tries to-” He bit the rest off. Anger and horror battled for equal play in his expression.

“Yes.” She focused on the road again. “But maybe we’re wrong. It just might be… Oh, Jesus.”

The SUV sped past them, heading the opposite way, but she was certain she hadn’t mistaken the driver. James. Her heart began pounding, but she fought the impulse to slam the brakes, to whip the vehicle around and follow him.

She pressed the button that lowered the rear passenger window. “Sir Pup. It’s the black Land Rover that just passed us. Do you have your locator?”

“Is it James?” The fury hadn’t left Blake’s voice.

“Yes.” A tracking device landed in her lap. “All right, Sir Pup. Just lead us to him. If you can do it where no one can see it, detain him. But don’t shape-shift.”

The hellhound gave a disappointed whine.

Maggie slowed as soon as James’s vehicle was out of sight, then pulled off onto the shoulder. Sir Pup jumped out the window.

“Can he catch up at highway speeds?”

“Yes.” She watched the dark blur streak across the road. “If he’d run from San Francisco instead taking the plane with me to New York, he would have arrived before I did.”

“He’d have… Bollocks.”

Maggie met her own flat stare in the rearview mirror. “Do I look like I’m joking?”

“I don’t know. I’m with him. And he’s running… very fast.” Blake reached forward, braced his hand on the dash. “It’s a bad amusement park ride. Oh, hell. He’s purposefully running in front of oncoming vehicles.”

He probably was. Maggie pulled back onto the road and headed after the hellhound. And hoped that whatever chaos Sir Pup left in his path didn’t delay them too long.

And that he didn’t interpret “detaining James” as “eating his legs.”

At least, not yet.

Chapter Seven

James is a lucky man, Maggie thought. He’d stopped at a beachfront park, a location too public for Sir Pup to do anything more than lie in the sand a hundred yards away and stare at him.

Maggie parked and turned to Blake. “You can see him?”

“At one of the tables. He looks to be on the phone.” He held up his hands, moved his thumbs. “Not talking. Texting.”

And she would have to cross an open expanse to reach him. After a quick check of her gun, she said, “You’ll stay with Sir Pup while I talk to him.”

“Not a chance.”

She knew he’d say that. “He won’t talk with you there.”

“We don’t need him to talk. Just to point out the house.”

“Geoff, I need you to trust me.” And to be out of James’s line of fire. She couldn’t trust James, not until she knew what his role was.

And even then, it would be difficult.

A muscle in his jaw twitched. “This isn’t about trusting you, Maggie.”

“No. You’re angry on behalf of your sister, so it’s about you wanting to break your fist on his face.” She touched his hand, the tight, white-knuckled clench. “We can’t charge blindly into the house. We can’t take that risk.”

The fingers beneath hers loosened slightly.

“You can start punching after we get her out.”

He released a heavy breath and nodded. “All right, then.”

The relief that swept through her was too strong, she thought as she spotted James at the table. Relief like that came from caring.

And she wasn’t going to be careless with Geoff.

She knew the moment James spotted her. The expression on his boy-next-door face didn’t change, but beneath the table, his booted feet shifted slightly wider. Getting ready to dive to one side or the other.

She didn’t sit on the bench and offer an easy gut shot below the table. She leaned her hip against the tabletop instead, her arms casually folded beneath her breasts, her right hand on her weapon and concealed by her jacket.

“This can be easy,” she said. “But it’s up to you.”

He laid the phone down and placed both hands flat on the table. “I’ll make it easy.” With his chin, he gestured at the phone. “I sent you another message. You found me faster than I thought you would.”

And she’d never tell him how. “My employer has interesting friends.” Let him wonder about that. Wonder and worry. “And yours is a demon.”

“He used to be yours, too, Maggie.” He leaned back slightly, looking up at her face. “The demon is Langan.”

Their handler-her superior-at the CIA. The one who’d given her James’s kill order. She didn’t allow her surprise to show. And wondered if he was lying, just to make her stumble.

But it was possible. If Langan had been a demon, he couldn’t have killed James; giving Maggie the kill order would’ve been the only way to get rid of him without breaking the Rules. And Maggie didn’t know Langan’s current status… but she would have Savi check into it the moment the vampire came out of her daysleep.

“Langan,” she repeated flatly. “And what does he have on you?”

“A bargain. I help him find what he needs, and he doesn’t tell the agency that I’m alive… and that you faked the kill.”

A demon or vampire could have heard the pounding of her heart, might have sensed the fear that spiked through her. A human couldn’t. Her smile was thin. “I could make it real now.” She waited a beat. “That kill order was bogus. You know it, and if the agency looked close enough, they’d know it, too. Even if they dragged us back, we’d get the equivalent of a slap before they started hunting for Langan. So what else does he have that would make you stupid enough to bargain with him?”

Sweat beaded above his upper lip. “I took an assignment. A leadership change.”

A political assassination. “So?”

“I couldn’t complete it. I took the shot, but couldn’t complete the assignment. So I disengaged and reported to Langan. Reported everything.”

Maggie frowned. Failure wasn’t reason to-

Ice slid through her veins. “Couldn’t? Because he healed? Because bullets couldn’t kill him?”

“Maggie…”

“A vampire or a demon?”

He blinked. Was going to lie. But she knew, didn’t she?

A political assassination.

“ Stafford,” she breathed. And James hadn’t known Stafford was a demon. An American citizen, on American soil. Oh, God. She had made a mistake. She should have followed through on that order. “What was in it for you?”

“A promotion, and a desk.”

Disgust poured through her. She didn’t attempt to conceal her reaction.

James sat back. “Goddammit, Maggie. I was tired of seeing my-our-friends shot in the field. Tired of seeing them killed. And it was a demon.”

One that Maggie would have killed herself, if she could have. But James hadn’t known Stafford had been a demon until after he’d tried to kill him.

Not that it mattered now. Katherine did.

Maggie swallowed, forced herself to relax.

“A demon, yes. Okay. And another demon has you in this bargain now.” And if James didn’t fulfill it, his soul would be trapped in Hell. Which was, she thought grimly, enough incentive to make James do almost anything. “You just have to help him, is that right? You don’t have to actually give him whatever it is he’s looking for?”

“Right.” Almost tiredly, James nodded. “Just help. But he decides what ‘helping’ is.”

“Then we’ll make it simple. I’ll go after Katherine when you aren’t there, so that you don’t have to help him stop me. Like now.”

His lashes flickered. “I’m due back in a few minutes. If I stay much longer, he’ll be suspicious, and ready for you. This evening, I’m supposed to pretend to argue with him, leave the house angry and stay away for several hours. I’ll contact you then, and give you the address.”

Maggie straightened. “All right. Tonight.”

She waited at the picnic table until she saw the Land Rover pull out of the parking lot. The ocean seemed louder than it should have, filling her head with noise. The sand was deep and soft. Her feet were hot inside her boots and her body bathed in a light film of sweat by the time she made it to Geoff’s side.

Geoff was cold, pale with anger, his voice ice. “What the bloody hell was that?”

A small directional microphone lay in his lap-no doubt from Sir Pup and the supply of equipment in his hammerspace.

Well, that made everything easier. She wouldn’t have to repeat her entire conversation with James; she’d just have to explain it.

Geoff stood. “You let James go. Might as well have told him to tell the demon we were coming.”

No, he wasn’t cold. He was close, and he was pissed, and she could feel the heat coming off him as well as she could the sun. Sweat trickled down her back, between her breasts.

Maggie glanced at Sir Pup. “Follow him. Detain him gently. But don’t let the demon see you.”

White still edged Geoff’s mouth, but color was returning to the rest of his face. A breeze pushed at his dark hair and cooled the back of her neck. “What was that, Maggie?”

“He’s bound to help the demon. I won’t force him to break his bargain and damn him to Hell.” She had a feeling James was doing a good job of getting there on his own. “But if he’s heading back to tell the demon-to help the demon-and Sir Pup prevents him from getting there…”

“He doesn’t break it.”

“Exactly.”

She turned toward the parking lot. Geoff caught her arm. “And the rest?”

Langan, Stafford. Kill orders that Langan must have known would never be completed. And the certainty that she had narrowly escaped the trap James was ensnarled in now.

“I… can’t,” she said. “I can’t think of it now. It’s too much, it’s too big. Maybe after we get Katherine.” She closed her eyes. “And for just one moment I need to… this.”

She leaned in, buried her face in his throat. Tension held Geoff stiff for a second before his arms slid around her.

“I’m tired,” she admitted, and let herself rest against him. Not physical exhaustion. Emotional. As if she’d been slowly wrung out since receiving that e-mail. “I haven’t been this tired since I left the agency.”

His voice was a soothing rumble against her cheek. “We’ll be finished soon.”

“Yes.” She stepped back. Her hand drifted down his arm until her fingers linked with his. Then she let her hand drop back to her side. “We need to go.”

Chapter Eight

Maggie drove just above the speed limit, her gaze constantly returning to the device tracking Sir Pup’s location. He and James weren’t too far ahead-but not, Maggie had said, so close that James would spot their vehicle.

Geoff nodded, casting ahead in an attempt to find Sir Pup, and was surprised when she admitted, “It’s almost a relief. To know I was wrong about him.”

She’d said that she couldn’t talk about it yet, that it was too much. But maybe, Geoff thought, too much not to. At least a bit. “Wrong, how? The kill order was a setup.”

“Yes. That’s not what I-Not exactly.” She checked Sir Pup’s position, still on a steady course north. “I was afraid I’d have to choose.”

“Choose what?”

“I didn’t know.” He heard the long, shaky breath she drew. Saw her hand make an open gesture, grasping at air. “Choose something. Something that would turn out to be karma coming back to bite me on the ass. Something that meant I wouldn’t be going back home.”

Home. She glanced over at him, and he wondered if she saw his face. If she knew what she was looking at when she did.

“But now,” she continued, “I feel I’ve done what I could for him. And the rest isn’t my choice, or my responsibility.”

Geoff didn’t point out that it never had been. Saying it wouldn’t mean she hadn’t felt it hanging over her head.

“Anyway.” She took another of those long breaths, but this was deep, steady. “I don’t feel so tired now. Thank you.”

Surprise shot through him again. “What for?”

“For caring.” She searched his features, and this time he was certain she saw. “Don’t get careless, though. Or do anything stupid. And I won’t, either.”

She was in an emotionally weak moment. It was probably unfair to press her now. “After we retrieve Katherine, I want a week with you. Or two. Time set aside every evening. Even if we’ll do nothing more than sit in your garden.”

“I killed all of my flowers trying to discover if I had a green thumb.”

“I’ll not look at them if you don’t.”

The mirror caught the corner of her smile. “All right.”

He should have asked for a month. Geoff pushed ahead, found a driver, went farther-slipping into more than thirty people before the world exploded around him in sharp, brilliant detail. Each flap of a bumblebee’s iridescent wings as it flew past Sir Pup. Minute particles swirling from mufflers, the pits in the pavement rushing beneath his feet.

His head began to throb, but he didn’t want to lose the connection. Narrowing his own focus on the Land Rover helped.

“I have him,” he told Maggie, and that was all that was said between them until, ten minutes later, Sir Pup began to slow.

“James is turning right. It looks to be a shared drive, marked with a stack of yellow stone blocks. I-” He clutched his head, fighting nausea as everything blurred.

A house rushed by, a second. Then a glimpse of the boathouse Katherine had seen from her window before Sir Pup was standing, peering through green-leafed shrubbery at the driveway.

Low, Geoff thought. Lying or crouching.

“I believe…” He swallowed hard. “I believe he looked over the layout of the area. There are three houses, but they are a good distance apart and separated by trees and plantings of some sort.” His thumb was no greener than Maggie’s. “The driveway is lined with the same. He’s waiting there now, on a bend. He’s past the lanes for the other two houses.”

“We’ll be at the turnoff in about a minute.”

Geoff nodded. Good timing. “And there’s James,” he told her.

The vehicle moved along the driveway at a good clip. Sir Pup seemed to rise from the ground-then darted forward.

Tendrils of smoke rose from the tires as they skidded over the pavement. Geoff didn’t hear the crunch of the metal hitting flesh, but he saw the bumper dent from the impact, the drops of blood that splattered the black paint.

The world spun once, twice. Sir Pup rolled to a stop twelve feet from the vehicle, his unfocused gaze directed under the Land Rover.

Playing dead, Geoff thought.

His own body had clenched, he realized, as if braced for impact. He drew in a deep breath, then another. “Does he heal quickly?”

“Sir Pup?” Her voice had a sharp edge. “Why?”

“He jumped in front of the SUV.”

“Oh.” Her short laugh was high, relieved. “Yes.”

James’s booted feet appeared beside the Land Rover and jogged over to Sir Pup. The hellhound lay still until James knelt beside him.

To Geoff, it only appeared as if Sir Pup batted James with a forepaw. Then Geoff lost sight of him until the hellhound rose to his feet and looked over at the Land Rover. The windshield had shattered. James slid down the hood and crumpled to a heap on the driveway.

Geoff’s heart pounded and echoed in the suddenly hollow space between his ears. “And you say that while my uncle sleeps you’re alone with that dog?”

“I’ve never said that. Is James still alive?”

Sir Pup was sniffing at the man’s legs, his arms. At James’s throat, his pulse beat faintly beneath his skin.

“Yes,” Geoff said, then slipped back into Maggie’s eyes when she next spoke.

“There they are.”

Maggie rolled James over and stripped him of his weapons. Nylon cable-tie handcuffs bound his wrists behind his back, his legs at the ankles. With Geoff’s help, she loaded him into the back of the Land Rover.

She pulled off her jacket and tossed it on the front seat. “Can you shoot a gun?” When Geoff’s brows lifted, she said, “If the demon looks at you, you’ll be able to aim and shoot him. The bullets won’t kill him, but they’ll hurt him a little.”

And with luck, provide enough distraction that Sir Pup would be able to do his thing.

At Geoff’s nod, she fitted him with a 9-mm from Sir Pup’s hammerspace and screwed on a sound suppressor. Sleek and effective.

“We’ll drive up in the Land Rover,” she told him. “Sir Pup-you go on around.”

The driveway bent to the right and down a small rise. Maggie studied the house longer than she might have if Geoff weren’t looking through her eyes. A columned veranda wrapped around the front of the house. It rose three stories, topped by a widow’s walk. Exits in the front, she noted, and likely in the back.

For a demon, though, any window could serve as an exit.

“I walk ahead of you,” Geoff said. And before she could protest, he added, “So I can see where the hell I’m going.”

And when he could see where he was going, Maggie realized, he moved as smoothly and as confidently as any of the operatives she’d worked with. He took the front steps and moved to the side of the door. He held up his hand before she could kick through.

Geoff pointed to his eyes, then the door. It took her a moment to understand.

The demon was waiting for them-and looking at the door from the other side.

On the stairs, he mouthed clearly.

Her pulse raced, and she couldn’t stop her grin. The British and American governments had no idea what they were missing.

He reached down and depressed the door handle. It opened easily.

Maggie swept through low, aimed-and froze. Katherine stood on the stair landing. Tall and dark, just like Geoff. Her eyes widened, and she raced down the stairs.

Geoff came in beside Maggie and raised his arms. His gun.

Oh, Jesus.

“No!” Maggie launched herself at him-too late.

He fired. Katherine’s cheek opened up; blood spit across the wall beside her. She staggered, fell.

Maggie’s weight knocked him to the side. He caught his footing, caught her with his free hand.

“Maggie! What the bloody…” He stopped, and his brow furrowed. “What are you seeing?”

She looked back at the stairs. Katherine stared at them, her gaze clouded with death. Crimson soaked into the cream-carpeted stair pillowing her head.

Coldly, Geoff aimed again. “My sister’s eyesight isn’t that good, Maggie.”

And the wound on her cheek was healing.

The tricking, lying bastard. Maggie clenched her teeth and opened fire.

The demon lifted his head, the ragged wound opening with his grin. But he didn’t stay Katherine and let them shoot him full of holes.

And knowing that a demon couldn’t hurt them didn’t make him any less terrifying when he shape-shifted.

The change was instantaneous.

If Geoff was looking through the demon’s eyes, he wouldn’t see the scales that covered the massive body, the glistening fangs, the ebony horns that curled back over his head. Hands became claws.

But it was the knees that made Maggie want to sink whimpering to the floor and curl into a ball. They were just the wrong way. Like a goat’s hind legs, but she couldn’t look at them without imagining her own knees snapping backward.

Maggie instinctively stepped back as the leathery wings snapped open and air gusted over her face. Her heart jumped into her throat as the taloned wing tips slammed into the stair-well walls, forming a barrier.

The message was clear: The demon couldn’t harm them. But it didn’t have to let them pass, either.

Where the hell was Sir Pup?

Geoff’s gun clicked. Out of ammunition. And Maggie almost screamed as something brushed by her leg.

A dog. Golden retriever. Wearing a guide harness.

Oh, thank God.

“Yours, Mr. Blake?” The demon’s grin spread wide over his fangs. A sword appeared in his hands. “Foolish. The Rules do not apply to animals-”

Sir Pup shifted as he leapt. Maggie grabbed Geoff’s arm and swung him around, dropping them both to the ground.

She looked, but couldn’t follow what happened. The demon crashed through a wall. A painting thumped to the floor beside Geoff’s head, then tipped over them. The house shook. Sir Pup yelped, once, and the echoing growl that followed it turned her blood to ice.

Geoff squeezed her hand. Maggie pushed at the heavy frame. Beside them, a ripped piece of wing bled onto the floor.

“If Sir Pup uses his teeth,” Maggie began, then shrank back as something huge rushed by them-demon or hellhound, she couldn’t be sure. The floor trembled.

Geoff pushed her tighter against the wall, shielding her with his body as she finished, “If Sir Pup bites him, his venom gets into the demon. Paralyzes him.”

Paralyzes him was said into sudden, deathly silence.

Maggie sat up, and her hand flew to her mouth.

The once beautifully decorated house was destroyed. Plaster and drywall gaped open, exposing the walls’ support posts like wooden bones. Carpeting had been shredded. There was blood… everywhere. On the furniture, the floors, the walls. Her stomach roiled.

“Bugger me,” Geoff whispered beside her.

A shadow darkened the dining room wall. A shadow, Maggie realized, with three heads.

With his left head, Sir Pup dragged the demon beside him, knocking chairs out of his blooded path. He was limping, Maggie saw. Limping and bleeding.

The demon had the stump of a right arm and a bite taken out of his torso. And he was still alive.

She swallowed down the bile that rose and held back her shudder. “Hold him here, Sir Pup,” she said. “We’re going to get Katherine.”

Geoff went up the stairs ahead of her. The door was locked. He slammed his shoulder against it, and it splintered open.

Katherine stood on the other side, holding the heavy antique lamp like a baseball bat. Uninjured, but obviously scared out of her wits.

Maggie reloaded her gun through their hasty reunion.

They weren’t yet done.

Geoff dragged James inside while Maggie brought their rented vehicle to the house. Sir Pup could vanish the blood. They’d leave the broken mess.

Katherine found food in the kitchen and brought it out to the living room while they waited for James to wake up. Geoff’s sister didn’t kick the mutilated and paralyzed demon when she walked by him, stretched out motionlessly on the floor beside James. Which meant, Maggie thought, that Katherine was a better woman than she would have been.

Geoff spent twenty minutes on the phone with Ames-Beaumont. “Uncle Colin has canceled his and Savi’s flight,” he told them. “And has scheduled ours for this evening.”

Maggie nodded. It’d be enough time. James was already stirring.

“And he wants to know what they were looking for,” Geoff said.

Katherine frowned. “I told you. Dragon blood.” She looked at Maggie. “They said it was something that your congressman had. That he’d kept it since the war of the heavens, intending it for a time when it could be used. Now that your demon is dead, he wanted it.” She pointed at the demon. “It’s not much to speak of. A few drops trapped in a crystal rock.”

Maggie forced herself to look again at the demon’s missing arm, the wound in his side. How much power did a few drops have that the demon had gone through this?

“Do you know where it is, Kate?”

“Yes.” She flipped over a blood-spattered cushion on a sofa and sat. “And I’ll tell you where you can find it once we’ve reached San Francisco. You can hand it over to Uncle Colin, and he can give it over to the Guardians. If I don’t, I suppose I’ll soon be repeating this experience.”

Geoff’s face was grim. “And someone else will be forced into a demon’s service.”

It could have been me, Maggie thought. She sank into a shredded armchair and brought her legs up.

Langan would’ve known when he’d given James the assignment to kill Thomas Stafford that it couldn’t be completed. It might have even been plotted by both demons, so that they would have-if they needed one-a hold over a human who could carry out assassinations, who didn’t have to follow the Rules. It wouldn’t have been the first time Stafford had used a human to kill for him.

And knowing her psychological profile, they’d probably even predicted that she’d fake James’s death. But even if her resignation had surprised Langan, she had no doubt that her placement in Stafford ’s house had been his idea. He’d probably been the one to give Stafford that picture of her and James.

If the Guardians hadn’t slain Stafford, what might have happened? Would she, too, have found herself trapped in a bargain-forced to kidnap or kill to save her soul?

She laid her cheek against her knees and closed her eyes. But it hadn’t happened. Karma, luck, or maybe something else… She had escaped that fate, and ended up with Ames-Beaumont instead.

And Geoff.

Opening her eyes, she looked up and met his. They were slightly unfocused; they were never like that when he was looking through her. Her gaze moved to Katherine. His sister’s stare was as intense as Geoff’s could be.

She heard him say quietly, “Just a few more seconds, Kate.”

How wonderful to have family, Maggie thought.

Especially this one.

Chapter Nine

They made it simple for James.They sat him on the sofa and explained what would happen if he ever spoke a word about Ames-Beaumont’s family, or about what Geoff and Katherine could do.

They waited on the veranda while Sir Pup killed the demon in front of him.

When the hellhound was finished, Maggie cut through James’s handcuffs and let him go.

Maggie awoke in a familiar bed that wasn’t hers, with the most powerful vampire in the world glowering down at her.

She sat up, clutching royal blue satin to her chest. A chest that was, thank God, covered by the tank she wore beneath her uniform.

“Sir,” she said, and in the course of the word, tried desperately to remember how she’d ended up sleeping in his mansion.

She hadn’t fallen asleep on the plane. She did remember disembarking, and that her employer and Savi had met them at the airport. She’d said “Sir.” He’d said, “Good God, Winters. You’re bloody exhausted.”

That was the last she could recall. Which probably meant that Ames-Beaumont had given her a psychic shove and put her to sleep.

He sat on the edge of the bed, avoiding the sunlight streaming in through the eastern windows. When she’d first met him, she would have sworn the sun rose every morning purely out of hope it might shine on his face. There was beautiful, and then there was Colin Ames-Beaumont. He… glowed. Not physically, she knew, but psychically. The first weeks of her employment had been filled with humiliating leaps of her heart every time he’d entered the room she was in. Then she’d adjusted, the psychic effect had worn off, and she’d finally been able to look at him without catching her breath.

His deep frown could still affect her heart rate, though. She waited, holding her breath.

“I am disturbed, Winters.” His gaze, when it met hers, was slightly accusing. “I believe my nephew plans to steal you away from me.”

Her fingers clutched the sheet more tightly. God, she wished whoever had put her to bed had left her uniform on. “I have no intention of giving up my position here, sir.”

He tilted his head, and the sun hit the wild disarray of his hair, lighting the burnished gold. Mirrors were of no use to him, and Maggie knew he didn’t possess a single comb. “I can hear them plotting downstairs. My own family. She tells him where the dragon blood is, and he says he will persuade me to allow you to accompany him while he retrieves it.”

Maggie’s expression was a perfect blank. “It would be prudent, sir, for someone to accompany him-and to protect him.”

His gaze narrowed. “He also intends to spend a good fortnight flying about the world, so that if he were to be followed by some unknown party, they would lose track of him.”

“That also seems a well-conceived plan, sir.”

“A bloody expensive one, if you ask me. And what will I do, Winters? You cannot serve me if you are family.”

“I do not serve you, Mr. Ames-Beaumont. I am employed by you. I do not see any reason for that relationship to alter, whatever my relationship with Mr. Blake may become.”

He stood and slid his hands into the pockets of his tailored trousers. A pleased expression lit his features. “If you do become family, Winters-I suppose that means I will be able to pay you less?”

“I think, sir, you would have to pay me more.”

The vampire heaved a melodramatic sigh and turned toward the sitting room. “Do not break his heart, Winters, or we will have words.”

Maggie began to breathe again. She must have been breathing his entire visit-she only just now realized she was able to.

“And if he breaks mine, sir?”

He looked back and flashed a grin that seemed to be all fangs. “I would have to thrash him quite soundly. I have many nephews, but there is only one Winters.”

She was still clutching the sheet to her chest when Geoff came through the sitting room doors.

And she couldn’t allow this to happen again. Geoff in her bedroom? Yes. In her employer’s house? In his bed?

Far too awkward.

Geoff stopped at the foot of the bed. His hair was still damp from a shower, his jeans and T-shirt new. His gaze locked with hers.

And he couldn’t see her at all.

Her heart slipped into a heavy, steady beat.

“Uncle Colin said he spoke with you.”

“He did.” She threw back the covers and held his gaze as she walked on her knees to the end of the mattress. “And apparently, we will be spending the next two weeks in each other’s company.”

He reached out, his fingers brushing the sides of her waist. Her skin tightened and prickled with delicious sensation. “I’ll be happy with a fortnight in your garden, Maggie.”

She touched his jaw. “I wouldn’t be.”

“And I lied.” His laugh rumbled over her fingers. “I wouldn’t be, either. Ah, Maggie. I’m pushing you into this too fast.”

“What makes you think I can be pushed anywhere I don’t want to go?”

“No, I don’t suppose you could be.” He drew a deep breath. “Look, I ought to tell you-I crossed lines, Maggie. I had reason to go over your files, but I went over them again and again, and I went deeper than I should have. I was desperate to know you. If James hadn’t taken Katherine, if we’d met later, after I’d moved here, I’d have pushed you then. And if you’d said no, I’d likely have followed you everywhere in hope that someone would look at you, so that I could, too.”

Did he expect her to back away because of that? Not a chance. She didn’t know what they had now or what it would be, but she was going to grab on to it-on to him-and hold tight.

“So, stalking and surveillance.” She shook her head, smiling. “To someone like me, that’s either a precursor to killing someone… or to sleeping with them. So I think we’ll work out fine.”

He was still laughing when she bent forward and eased her mouth over his. Last time, she’d surprised him. It had been just a press of lips, her hands through his hair. Now she took her time, explored his taste, sought more of him to touch.

His hands at her hips pulled her closer, and he was warm, hot, would burn her alive.

Her pulse raced when she pulled away. “Not here,” she panted. “I can’t here.”

His large hand cupped her cheek. He kissed her again, then nodded. And she felt his disappointment when he let her go.

She walked past him, into the bathroom, and closed the door. A wall panel, when she slid it aside, revealed the one mirror in the house. He would see her there. She would lean back against the door, and he would lift her, and watch her face as she welcomed him in.

And it would be hard the first time, and rough, because she cared so much she knew that she’d be a little careless.

But it wouldn’t be her employer’s bed. She cracked the door open again and called out softly, “Mr. Blake?”