Crimson City Part 1

Crimson City.

By Liz Maverick.

A Dangerous Pair.

"I'm not what you think," Dain said. "I'm not a good man."

"You wouldn't be here if you were," Fleur answered, her voice thick with emotion. "Neither would I." Her eyes shone an intense blue that seemed to penetrate his soul. Dain imagined he saw love in their depth, but he didn't dare ask. Not yet. Because he couldn't be sure of what was to come. And because he had enough emotion for both of them tonight.

"I'm warning you," he said, stalking her and pulling the jeweled combs from her hair. He crowded up to her. "I'm warning you."

"No more warnings," she barely had time to say. He pushed her down on the bed.

Chapter One.

Fleur Dumont flung herself out of the ninety-third-floor window and somersaulted along the vertical length of the skysc.r.a.per. She quickly adjusted to the altered plane of the fighting field and leaped into the air, one leg bent at the knee; the other leg she kicked straight out into the chest of her a.s.sailant.

Her foe lost his footing, but he recovered position within seconds, foregoing any attempt at bracing himself along the slick gla.s.s of the building beneath him. Instead, hovering in the air, he gestured to someone behind Fleur. A glance at the reflection in the windows below her feet confirmed two more enemies. Sweat pouring down the back of her jacket, Fleur pulled a pair of daggers from the sheaths strapped around her thighs and whirled in a circle, her weapons at the ready, trying to make herself a little more s.p.a.ce.

The sky blurred into a luminous rainbow as she turned, the night's darkness making the lights that streamed past much more vivid. Projected down to-ward the human world at street level, they originated from a fleet of flying advertis.e.m.e.nt projectors. Looped videos, holographies, multicolored skylight lasers-all touting a seemingly endless number of desires and cures. The lights were uncomfortable and distracting to vampires, but Fleur had trained outside enough to be able to ignore them when it counted.

The three vampires floating around her were, like her, armed with daggers, and she already knew firsthand of their power and skill. Well, size and numbers could not trump the strength and agility inherent in her blood, so at worst, they were equals. Fleur focused and moved in for the kill, directing a flurry of blows at all three men as she danced through the air.

Until one of the men s.n.a.t.c.hed a gun from his shoulder holster and fired. Caught by surprise, Fleur lurched away and hit the top of a billboard with her knee. She cartwheeled wildly off in the other direction amid a shower of sparks as some of the bulbs exploded from the impact. She went into free fall, just missing a remote-controlled drone that hummed by projecting an all-species evening edition of the news onto the thickening smog particles.

She let herself drop and took the opportunity to catch her breath, but the splash of violet on her right sleeve spurred her back into the fight. He'd capped her, all right. That p.i.s.sed her off, and immediately she reversed direction, purposely holding her left arm behind her and out of sight.

Just as she reached the three men and lunged forward with her knife, a watch chime froze all her foes in midaction. They stopped fighting immediately, and the session ended with the flat end of Fleur's blade slapping dully off Marius's chest armor. "That's time," he said. "And we're off."

Without another word, the men all turned and headed upward, Fleur on their heels. They alit gracefully on the edge of the huge picture window leading back into the training room, where the slick angles, metal, and gla.s.s wrapping the outside of the ma.s.sive landmark building gave way to a completely different world: dark woods, lusciously colored fabrics and touches of gilt.

"Come on, come on... finish this!" Fleur looked wildly from one man to the next, but the three Protectors were already stripping off their fight gear.

"Sorry, Fleur," Warrick said, swatting her dagger away as if it were a fly. "Nice work, but next time, don't expect a reflection to save you."

Fleur knew he was right. She wasn't quite where she needed to be. She should have been training from the day she was born, but the a.s.sumption had been that she'd never be called. That hadn't really changed, but the number of vampires left between her and serious responsibility had been whittled down to two: her half-brothers, Christian and Ryan. She could have gotten away with calling them brothers, straight up, but they simply weren't close.

Her cousins, the three Protectors standing before her, were her core family now. For Marius, Warrick, and Ian Dumont had never once swayed in their loyalty, not even amidst the power struggle during the war between the species when her mother had not only fallen from grace, but had fallen forever.

Still, Fleur wasn't convinced her cousins took her training seriously. Probably no one did. But at least they humored her, and they could humor her all they wanted as long as they gave her the training she'd requested.

She sighed and threw herself down on one of the carved rosewood benches lining the training hall. "I thought it was just going to be Marius today. Nice trick calling for the others."

"You know us too well. You're able to antic.i.p.ate our movements at this point," Ian said, busy flexing his chest muscles with the pleased air of a man who knew his body could not be more perfect. "And even with those d.a.m.n stuffy helmets on, I'm sure you still know who is who. From movement or sense if not by sight. We should bring in some outsiders for you to practice on."

Warrick stripped off his shirt and tossed it in the corner bin, then glanced over. "You're not hurt, Fleur, are you? You took a nasty bounce off that advert."

Fleur crossed her legs to hide the rip in her training suit and quickly peeled off her jacket so they wouldn't see the violet paint. If Marius had been toting a real UV weapon, she'd be lying on the floor writhing in pain. "I'm absolutely fine. Not a bad recovery out there, I think... So, what are you meeting about?"

She asked them the same question every morning. It had become something of a joke, since they all knew they wouldn't say. What went on in the war room, stayed in the war room. That's the way Fleur's half-brothers wanted it, though it wasn't the candid policy vampire leaders had exercised in the past. But, then, there had been quite a few policy changes recently.

Ian gave her the look she'd been expecting and promptly changed the subject. "Same time, day after tomorrow? We can try something new."

She shrugged and nodded.

"You're welcome to come for the beginning, you know," Warrick said, pulling a fresh shirt over his head.

Fleur managed a half-smile. Actually, she wasn't welcome. Inside the war room, they treated her as if she were still a small child; they tempered the discussion and waited until she gave up and left before letting the real discourse begin. It was a waste of time for everybody, and her presence made everyone uncomfortable, to boot. All because of her past.

The vampires of Crimson City were primarily descendants of four families who formed an organized body called the Primary a.s.sembly, which controlled the policies of survival for the entire vampire world. Fleur had been born into the Dumont family, and thus was a key link of the most powerful lineage. The Dumonts, by tradition, controlled the a.s.sembly. This was a legacy that should have run straight to her, and someday down to her children.

Yes, one vampire stood at the podium in the Primary a.s.sembly meetings to report on the intricate web of relationships between the species in Crimson City. One vampire sat with the inner circle comprised of the heads of the four families and their advisors, and made final decisions on matters of defense and survival. There were other vampires who controlled matters of business and internal welfare, but it was the head of city intelligence who most impacted the survival of their species, and as the vampires evolved, it was this position that had be-come a kind of de facto presidency for the vampire world. And upon the death of her mother in the first major battle between the species some years back, that vampire should have been Fleur Dumont.

But Fleur had made a mistake. Though her intentions had been pure, though she'd acted in the name of love, the bottom line was that in the same month as she'd lost her mother, she'd broken vampire code. She'd been young and inexperienced, and her crime had made it convenient for the others to bypa.s.s her for the leadership circle in favor of her older half-brothers. And though the rest of the Primary a.s.sembly had mostly forgiven her indiscretion, n.o.body had forgotten. Especially not Fleur. Years later, she still woke up every night with the memory of her shame.

She'd made a rogue. She'd created an enemy.

Vampires who belonged to the Primary a.s.sembly were called primaries. All others were rogues. A rogue was a vampire who had chosen to rebel against his own kind, ignoring the a.s.sembly's rules and way of life. Sometimes these were primaries who had chosen a life of chaos; more often, they were "made" vampires-humans who had been turned.

Which was one reason why the a.s.sembly had decreed so long ago that humans weren't to be turned. While many humans fell prey to romantic notions about life as a vampire, not the least of which was the lure of seemingly limitless wealth and life span, the fact was that most turned humans could not-or would not, Fleur wasn't sure-accept their new fates. These unfortunates most often turned against the Primary a.s.sembly and disappeared into the city, trying to pa.s.s as human once more. Sometimes they reappeared, often with thoughts of revenge on their minds. This had once been rare. It was not so rare anymore, and in the back of the a.s.sembly's collective mind, a worry was brewing that the rogues had banded together and were becoming a powerful force.

Fleur reminded most of the inner circle of disaster and of failure. By legacy she should have been a key player in the security and intelligence community of Crimson City's vampire world. Like her mother before her. Instead she existed in a strange sort of limbo, unable to detach herself from a sense of responsibility and thus forever on a heightened state of alert, yet never to be called for duty. It was like playing understudy to actors who could never get sick.

Marius, Warrick, and Ian finished changing out of their gear and collected their belongings. Warrick looked over his shoulder. "Oh, and watch for hidden weapons," he said to Fleur. "You never know what someone might pull. We can work on some new evasive actions sometime, if you like."

"I'll take you up on that," she said. Warrick's advice was always good-when it came to fighting, he was the best. He might be a Protector by legacy, but sometimes she thought he had more the temperament of a Warrior like herself. Or like she was supposed to be, anyway. Fleur sighed. She should definitely start asking some of the others to train with her, if for no other reason than unpredictability.

She thought to pose the question of who, but her cousins had already turned their backs and were engaged in a discussion about the imminent business of the day. Fleur pushed away the hair plastered to her sweaty face and neck, released the clips on her chest armor and just sat, twirling a dagger in her hands while they talked amongst themselves.

Warrior and Protector-was it all so important what one was born? She supposed it was. Besides the delineation between the four families, a vampire's cla.s.s was a huge part of her ident.i.ty. And while as far as Fleur could tell, Crimson City's humans were just beginning to come to terms with the implications that there was a difference between vampires-rogue or primary, Warrior or Protector; the cla.s.sifications were information that humans either didn't realize existed or didn't know what to do with-the vampires themselves were unfailingly aware of the differences.

Cla.s.sifications were determined, for the most part, by the genetics of the parents, but they could also be affected by blood the parents had ingested or other less explicable factors. There were many cla.s.ses of vampire. Protectors and Warriors were merely two, and were the most common types in the Dumont family. Protector vampires had a duty to protect their people, making full use of a heightened sixth sense that told them when those they cared about were in trouble, though Protectors seemed to connect with some individuals more than with others. Most Protectors had various psychic abilities; were sometimes capable of reading minds, sometimes were capable of other things. Protectors were trained for combat in the defense of their kind.

Warrior vampires, on the other hand, exhibited uncanny agility and strength-along with the potential for an adrenaline surge more powerful than that of any other cla.s.s. Biologically it was meant to help them withstand injury, and exact it on their enemies with exponential results. Sometimes Fleur was caught by surprise by her abilities, and in the most unlikely of places. It was not uncommon for her to be reminded that she was meant for other, bigger things, like when an unpleasant incident at a crowded sales event triggered an unusual amount of rage.

"Fleur, if I could have it my way, you'd be sitting in that meeting next to us. That's how it should be," Marius said. Then her cousins left the room, and the slam of the heavy mahogany door reverberated loudly in the cavernous s.p.a.ce.

Fleur let her dagger slip through her fingers to impale itself in the floorboards with a loud tw.a.n.g. "I don't know why n.o.body does anything about it if that's how it should be," she muttered.

Of course, she wasn't doing anything about it either. She wasn't barreling into the war room demanding her rights, her chance to lead. That would just make her look ridiculous. You couldn't demand anything when you hadn't a shred of power.

She replaced her training weapons in the cabinets lining the walls, then headed upstairs, pa.s.sing the war room on the way. She could hear all the voices arguing loud enough to distinguish themselves through the heavy mahogany door: her three Protector cousins-Warrick, Ian, and Marius; Christian, acting as leader; Ryan reporting as the primary intelligence officer; and the other men and women representing the various clans of the Primary a.s.sembly. The rebel groups excepted, everyone was repre-sented in that room; all of the lines were in attendance. Everybody who was supposed to be there, was there. Except Fleur.

She took the quick route to her rooms, slipping back out the window and making quick work of the fifteen floors straight up to the residential levels. She typed in her code. Her window slid open and she slipped inside. Someone was knocking frantically on the front door of her apartments.

"Fleur? Fleur!"

Fleur dodged the shopping bags dotting her floor and opened the door.

Paulina Marakova sashayed in with an overly dramatic double take directed at Fleur's disheveled appearance. Already dressed to the nines before breakfast, the redhead flung herself into the largest chair in the sitting room and arranged her amber taffeta b.a.l.l.skirt around her. "We're planning a very different sort of recreation for next week. The twenties. Except-we're all going as men! The girls are having a seamstress up to do tuxedos. You must come and be fitted. Drinks, ciggies, snooker... it's going to be a scream!" She laughed, exposing a set of delicate, full-grown fangs that she never filed down.

Like many of her peers, Paulina never left the vampire strata-for that matter, she never even left her building, except to go shopping in the district built high above Rodeo Drive where few humans and even fewer werewolves could afford to browse. She'd taken happily to her position as a younger daughter of Marakova heritage, but underneath the materialism that seemed to consume all of her energy, there was a very real and generous spirit. Fleur counted Paulina as one of very few of her kind who'd never once let her loyalty or friendship lapse, even during the worst of what Fleur had experienced.

Already bored with sitting in one spot, Paulina leaped up and began rifling through a fortune in high-heeled shoes, party dresses, and jewelry Fleur had left strewn about the room after shopping yesterday. "Gorgeous. This one's gorgeous. Oh! I have one word for you."

Fleur unbuckled and unlaced her high boots. "Only one?" she teased.

"Ichibana," Paulina intoned. "What do you think?" She floated her arm out in front of her, waving her fingers gracefully. "The art of j.a.panese flower arrangement. It's going to be all the rage, and I've hired a private instructor. Can you put on something decent and join me in half an hour?"

"It sounds lovely, but I've got a meeting." Fleur frowned. "Doesn't that make me sound like a killjoy! But next week's recreation sounds brilliant. I'll try to be there."

Such recreations of past eras, which many of them had actually lived through, were a favorite pastime. Almost every night in these highest reaches of the vampire strata was filled with some sort of similar entertainment. Indulgence was encouraged, as was decadence, for in this world the population could afford to always dress fabulously and the champagne never ran out. Fleur couldn't really complain about having been forced into the life of an idle heiress. It was simply knowing that she should have been something else, and that she was capable of more, which made things difficult.

"Look, darling. I have so much to do. Decide what sort of accessories you want, and I'll order them with your tuxedo." Paulina looked her up and down as Fleur slipped off the rest of her training clothes and stood in her underwear. "Tut-tut! You exercise much too much; you're losing all your curves. And I can't believe you waste such a lovely bra and panty set on that kind of action. La Perla, isn't it? So pretty!" Without waiting for an answer, she blew a kiss and plowed right back out the door.

Fleur dragged a robe from her closet and slipped it on, then walked to her desk, piled high with copies of memos, research reports, photos of high-ranking werewolf and human players in the intelligence and security communities. On paper, she was more than qualified to play her rightful role in vampire leadership. They probably had no idea how hard she'd worked to keep up to speed on things even as she was shut out from meetings and forced to walk the perimeter of the inner circle.

I've got to do something. I've somehow got to make them understand that I belong in that room. Marius is right. I must talk to Christian and Ryan about my situation.

They had to listen. She'd make them listen, if that's what it came down to. It was the principle of the thing. Her legacy eroded a little more with every pa.s.sing day. It was time to do something about that.

Chapter Two.

Dain Restart always walked to work fully armed. But whether his hands held a cup of coffee and a doughnut or a silver dagger and a pistol depended on instinct. Each day when he woke, he gave himself five seconds before rising to stare up at the stark white paint peeling off his ceiling; did his instincts tell him it was a dagger-through-the-heart sort of night, or an enjoy-your-coffee sort of night?

He actually liked the walk at dusk, halfway across town to the satellite office from his flat in The Triangle, a sort of DMZ for the vamps, wolves, and humans who'd chosen not to cl.u.s.ter in one of the three strata dominated by their own kind. He was one who'd made that choice, and everyone always asked why. Why did he insist on living in the relative h.e.l.lhole he'd chosen when he could easily live in relative comfort on the base?

Bottom line: It was here or the base, and the base made you soft. There was a reason the divisions headquartered out there were grouped under the umbrella, "Internal Operations." The official reason was because everything outside the base and inside the City was considered the external world, or the field.

But to Dain it was because life in the base was like being in a coc.o.o.n. That was the positive spin on it, anyway. Dain also believed that living in such a vacuum of safety dulled the instincts. He wanted the presence of a vamp or a wolf to be a sixth sense.

The vampires had built their skysc.r.a.pers to dizzying heights that sheared off at crisp angles into the sky, and those structures gleamed with the cold perfection of tinted gla.s.s and steel. Inside, the rooms were reputed to be a riot of color in sumptuous fabrics, gold detailing, and hand-polished woods. Yes, the world above was intimidating to most, as it was meant to be. There weren't many humans-or werewolves, for that matter-up there. To go up to Crimson City's highest elevation, you needed either a serious purpose or a serious death wish.

Naturally, humans had remained where they'd always been, at midlevel, cl.u.s.tering in neighborhoods throughout the valleys, beach cities, and downtown areas that hadn't been razed by the fires.

The werewolves were left to make use of the underground. The psychology of this arrangement wasn't lost on anybody, and it all made for a nice c.o.c.ktail of strained relations. That was why Dain made his home in The Triangle-it was one of the few places in town where he could really gauge in-terspecies tension. Didn't exactly make for great block parties, but this wasn't exactly a block party era, now, was it?

He was later than usual today, and as he stepped outside he was hurried by a honk from one of the chauffeured transports sent around to collect the members of the "Battlefield" Operations team for work. As usual, he pa.s.sed on the ride with a friendly wave. Then, after strapping his bag across his back, double- and triple-checking his weapons for readiness, he walked into the gray mist and headed for the station, the transport trailing behind him in the street.

As a senior field intelligence officer, he knew full well that he wasn't supposed to refer to his team as B-Ops or to the city streets as a battlefield anymore. B-Ops was just supposed to be Field or External Operations, and the city was supposed to be back to being plain old Los Angeles, not Crimson City. That was the party line. But the slang coined long ago when the wolves and the vamps first came to town and the streets ran red with blood-well, that wasn't going to disappear just because the suits sitting behind the walls of their base liked to cover reality with a thick layer of gloss.

What was the reality, anyway? As far as his superiors were concerned, Dain and his field teams owned the night. Out of their satellite station in the middle of downtown, whatever was going to go down in Crimson City, B-Ops either knew about it or was planning it. But as far as Dain's counterparts amongst the vamp and the wolf populations were concerned, the streets-day or night-weren't owned by anybody anymore, least of all humans.

Two blocks from the station, a cross-eyed mutt barked from behind a chain-link fence. Dain heard a thin buzz ramp up from the transport behind him as it switched on an electrical defense system, and he had to laugh a bit. This was what he thrived on, what he lived for: the charge in the air, the too-delicate nature of the peace that had been forged. He couldn't remember a time when a sense of being on the edge of chaos wasn't the norm. All the same, he was grateful for the constraints of law and order that his job provided.

Since he could remember, he'd had little opportunity to think about anything else save his work, the state of the city, and the rest of his team. Some might call it too insular a life. Dain called it just as well. He and most of his teammates had chosen Battlefield Operations for a reason.

Battlefield Operations and Internal Operations were two divisions established at city level under the jurisdiction of the Feds to address the tricky issue of human survival in a city now sharing s.p.a.ce with a melting pot of other species. While the the city's regular police department was still responsible for keeping the peace on the streets on a day-to-day basis as they always had, B-Ops and I-Ops concerned themselves with big picture matters of intelligence and strategic defense.

B-Ops contained teams of combat-trained field agents, spies, military personnel and intelligence hunters. I-Ops contained teams of information a.n.a.lysts, researchers, policy wonks, and other management types. If you had your head on completely straight, a past without at least one personal arrest, and your personality under complete control, you worked for Internal Operations. If you were a bit of a wildcard, you worked for B-Ops.

Dain fit the latter mold in spades. He'd once been a bounty hunter working dangerous, and sometimes illegal jobs. Oddly, he didn't remember any of it. He didn't remember a lot of his past, and what memories still lurked in his mind were blurry. He tried to remember the good things, the helpful things-like his wife Serena. Truth be told, he didn't care about remembering much except her, and some days he would just lie awake in bed trying to force those images to come into focus. All he had left were a few pictures and the scars on his arms from the chemical burns he'd received while trying to save her.

The vampires had killed her. There was a file on the whole thing, of course, but it was pretty slim. Just a cursory description of events filed by some hack who'd apparently had better things to do than to doc.u.ment the turning point of Dain's life.

Serena had worked for a consumer products company that was trying to expand operations into the vampire realm. They'd negotiated a tentative deal to build a factory up in strata +1, a very rare arrangement. Apparently, the vampires had played the humans for fools.

The deal had imploded along with the factory; Dain had received a call from his wife that she was in trouble. He'd kept the message on his cell phone for months. He could remember the exact intonation of her voice, the exact words she'd used, the way she'd formed her sentences. He just couldn't remember anything that wasn't on tape. Apparently he'd responded to her call for help and traveled up to the vampire strata... and by the end of the night he was in a hospital bed being treated for severe burns to his arms, with no memory whatsoever of what had gone down. All he knew was that he'd failed his wife and that there was no one person to hunt down and no simple way to seek revenge.

Thus, when chaos had threatened the city and the government called for recruits, Dain had nothing to lose and everything to gain by answering. It had been a blessing in a way, for people like himself, his partner Cyd, and others like them who now formed the nucleus of B-Ops-real fighters with real street savvy to personally monitor and respond to the primitive violence perpetrated by the fangs and the dogs. This gave them a purpose.

Dain shook his head. Humans always accused the vamps and the dogs of trying to "pa.s.s," trying to successfully play themselves off as human. Well, in a funny way, some humans were trying to pa.s.s, too. After he'd woken up in that hospital bed with no wife and no memory, he'd nearly lost it. He'd been tempted back into his former occupation, felt himself sucked toward taking out his anger and sorrow and confusion on everybody by killing them-by killing everything in his path. But the recruiters at Battlefield Operations had saved him. They'd given him a second chance at a life. And it was only fair that he stepped up now with every last ounce of his strength to keep what he'd received and to defend the people who'd finally, after so much time, given him a membership card as a respected part of society.

Today certainly seemed quiet enough. City security was humming along nicely at normal levels, and for the last month he'd had all his teams on two-day status, with full-blown station meetings only every other day. He turned the corner, the transport finally peeling off and pulling away into an adjacent parking lot. He'd arrived.

This downtown station was a night-shift outpost also used as a satellite office for the base out at LAX. His partner Cyd probably would have preferred working the day shift-less chance of b.u.mping into something you didn't want to b.u.mp into-except, this way she didn't have to go out to the base much. Cyd refused to go unless it was a direct order; Dain actually liked to get out there once in a while.

The station before him was riddled with graffiti and defended by a set of old-school iron window bars that clashed with the high-tech security equipment built into the structure. Dain turned and hoisted his coffee in a gesture of thanks to the driver over in the parking lot, then turned back to the door.

Highly guarded, the station house looked deceptively small from the street. It actually housed rooms for interrogation, incarceration, research, conferencing, and more. After a retinal scan and a blood p.r.i.c.k test, the doors unlocked and Dain headed straight for the break room. He could hear the uproar from way down the hall. Through the swinging doors, it looked like the night-shift teams were all in.

JB and Trask were sitting on the lunch table playing a hand of poker. Cyd seemed to be discussing her new holster with a teammate by the coffee machine, a blue candy cigarette flopping between her lips as she spoke. And a whole slew of guys barreled in behind him, in the middle of a shoving match.

"Okay, listen up!" he called.

After a few snorts, snickers, and last-minute wisecracks, the teams quieted down. "We're on two-day check-in. I've read last night's reports"-he looked at them sternly-"and I've never been so G.o.dd.a.m.n bored in my life."

They all laughed. "So, unless you've got something you want to discuss, we'll save the official powwow for tomorrow morning. Go ahead and download your a.s.signments and get out in the field. Anyone have anything? No? Fantastic. Then get the h.e.l.l out of here. I'll see you tomorrow. And remember-"

"Be careful out there!" the crew chimed in unison, amidst much eye-rolling. In a flurry of activity, everyone except Cyd grabbed gear and headed out.