Dark Ones - Even Vampires Get The Blues Part 9

"Another time," I said firmly, having way too much to deal with at the moment to add battle-hungry ghosts to my list. "I think Paen's right. There's nothing more we can find out here."

"So what do we do now?" Finn asked as we said a polite good-bye to the ghosts, gathered up our things, and climbed the slight hill to the overlook area where all the cars were parked.

"We'll just add the guy who attacked Clare to our list of things to investigate. In the meantime, I don't think it would be smart of you to go anywhere on your own, just in case this man decides to shoot you again. Or worse."

"Nothing can be worse than shooting an innocent gown," Clare said, smoothing a hand down the fabric she held tenderly in her arms.

"I will be happy to act as a bodyguard," Finn said, giving Clare a look that was unmistakable. I glanced from him to Paen, but my would-be lover was clearly thinking of other things.

"Oooh," Clare said, momentarily distracted by Finn's lascivious look. "That would be fun. I've never had a bodyguard before."

"You can't go out in daylight," I pointed out, not wanting to interfere with what could be a budding romance, but obliged to make sure Clare was protected during the day.

"I can. I just have to have protection. How do you think we came here earlier today?" Finn glanced at his watch. It was now the second hour of deep night (better known as one in the morning). "Or rather, yesterday."

"You can go out during the day?" I asked Paen. "I thought Dark Ones couldn't? Or is that just a vampire old wive's tale?"

"It's partially true," Finn answered for him. "My brothers and I can tolerate a lot more than Paen, but even he can go out if he has enough protection from direct sunlight."

"How can you tolerate more than Paen?" I asked, distracted by the idea of vampires who could walk in daylight.

"Finn-" Paen said warningly.

His brother ignored him. "We all, the three of us, are Moravians. Paen is a Dark One. That means we have souls, but he doesn't.

Our parents weren't Joined when he was born."

"Huh?" I asked, more confused than ever. "Joined?"

"That's enough, Finn," Paen said, stepping over a low chain barrier at the edge of the overlook."Joining is the procedure a Dark One undertakes with his Beloved, the woman who can salvage his soul and make him whole again. Mum was Dad's Beloved, but due to a war, they didn't complete the Joining until after Paen was born."

"They don't want to hear about our family history," Paen said, striding over to his car. "There are more important things to be discussed, like what steps are to be taken next in the search for our statue."

"I don't know, I'm kind of interested in hearing about this," I said, smiling at Paen. He glowered back at me.

Finn looked from his brother to me, a smile growing slowly on his lips. "Sorry, Paen. I didn't realize you don't want me telling Sam about Beloveds. No doubt she wouldn't be interested if I told her how there is one woman who can save you, a woman who completes you and makes you whole again. I won't explain about the seven steps to Joining, because that would probably just bore her. Nor will I go into the fact that a Beloved knows she is such by the fact that she is marked by a Dark One, and that the marking usually takes the form of a strong psychic connection."

"G.o.d d.a.m.n it, Finn, just shut up!" Paen exploded.

My jaw dropped a little. A strong psychic connection? Something like being able to mind-talk?

No. Ignore him. He's a fool and he doesn't know what he's talking about.

You answered me, I thought at him, oddly pleased by the touch of his mind against mine. It felt... right.

Paen frowned at me, but said nothing else.

Chicken. "All right," I said aloud. "Finn, if you want to volunteer to be Clare's bodyguard, that would do a lot to relieve my mind. As for what steps we're going to take next to find your statue..."

I closed my eyes for a moment to think. I was never at my brightest in deep night, and after the drain of speaking with ghosts- and sharing my vision with Paen-I was left limp and exhausted, sapped of the energy needed to make a decision.

"You will go home and get some rest," Paen said authoritatively.

"I beg your pardon?" I asked, looking at him in surprise.

His eyes glittered like shadowed mercury. "You're exhausted, and at the end of your strength. You will go home and rest."

"You seem to misunderstand the basic client-investigator relationship," I told him, straightening my shoulders in an attempt to look chock-full of vigor. "I'm the one who makes the game plans. That's what you're paying me for."

"I am your employer. I have paid you to work for me," Paen said. "That ent.i.tles me to give orders."

"In your dreams!" I said, too tired to come up with a snappier comeback.

"Sam doesn't look tired to me," Finn said, eyeing me, standing next to Clare's car a few feet away. "She looks pretty good, as a matter of fact. How do you know she's tired, Paen? Do you have some special insight into Sam's feelings? Something you would instinctively know about, oh, say, a Beloved?"

We all looked at Paen. He glared back at us. "I will take Sam home. Finn, you do the same with Clare. In the morning, we will plan out a new strategy for locating both the statue and the man who attacked Clare."

"Wait a minute," I protested, dropping the intriguing idea of a Beloved. "You are not the boss here-I am. And I already have a plan for locating your statue."

"Really?" Paen asked, crossing his arms over his chest. "What would that be?""To start with, we will do the same thing we have been doing for another client-I'll check with the antique network and see if anyone has an interest in black monkey statues. Since you can't tell us much about it, Clare is going to do a little research into just what the statue looks like, and its provenance. Once we have a little more information on the statue itself, I can pull out the big guns."

Clare gasped in horror, and instinctively reached for a wildflower growing at the side of the overlook.

"And what would your big guns consist of?" Paen asked, his eyes so dark they looked like a stormy sky.

I took a deep breath. "I'm going to scry."

"No." The almost inaudible whimper slipped between Clare's lips as she stuffed petal after petal into her mouth.

Paen frowned. "What's wrong with Samantha saying?" he asked Clare.

Her eyes got huge as she looked at me with wordless pleading.

"It won't be like that," I told her. "Stop frightening the clients!"

"I'm not frightened," Paen said. "I am, however, a bit confused. I thought scrying was a standard divination technique?"

"It is."

"Then what's the big deal with you doing it?" Finn asked.

"I'm not actually a Diviner," I explained to him. "I studied as one for a while, but I... er... left the Order."

Paen's eyes narrowed. "You left them because you realized you were not meant to be a Diviner?"

"Something like that," I said, giving Clare a look that was meant to keep her quiet. It didn't work, of course. No one can shut a faery up when she's determined to blab.

"Sam was kicked out of the Diviners' Order after she scryed," Clare said, swallowing the last of the petals. "She was part of a scrying circle, and she lost control."

"It's not as bad as she's making it sound," I told Paen, more than a little mortified to have my dirty laundry aired in such a manner.

"How can you lose control scrying?" Finn asked at the same time Paen asked Clare, "What happened?"

"She opened a temporal rift that sucked in two Diviners," she answered, meeting my potent glare with a haughty look. "They should know, Sam! You're dangerous when you scry!"

"A temporal rift?" Paen looked at me as if I was wearing my underwear on my head.

"It's not that uncommon," I said abruptly, tossing my things onto the backseat of Paen's car. "Happens all the time."

"Hardly that," Clare said. She turned to the men with an eloquent gesture that stated how distressed she was by the very thought of me giving in to my Elvish birthright. "It took the head of the Diviner Order three weeks to get the Diviners back from where Sam had sent them."

"Inadvertently sent them," I corrected. "It was just a minor little glitch."

"And you're planning on scrying the location of the statue?" Paen asked, clearly stuck on that point."Yes." I gave them all a level look over the top of Paen's car. "I admit that I had a little control issue before, but I know what I did wrong. I was scrying by the moon. I'm part sun elf-unlike most Diviners, the moon does not give me power, it dilutes it.

This time, I will scry by sunlight. Everything will be fine, just you wait and see."

Famous last words, eh?

Chapter 6.

The next two days pa.s.sed like... well, like two days. Busy, mostly. Frustrating, definitely, both on a personal and a professional level.

"Are you coming back tonight?" Clare's voice was rather breathless against my ear as I cradled the phone to hear her over the noise and confusion of the Glasgow train station.

"Yes. I should be home around dinnertime. What's been going on there today?"

A smothered giggle followed by a deep rumble of a masculine voice answered that question. "Um... we don't have much to report, actually. Finn and I have been working through the list of antique buyers, but with no new information. Oh, Mr. Race called to see if we'd had any progress. I told him you were in Glasgow working on a tip for another case, and he was a bit put out. He said he wasn't paying us good money to work for other people, and he demanded that we put all our attention on his case. He also said he was in London for a day or two, and he'd really like you to meet him there."

"London? I thought he was in Barcelona?" Something rustled in a nearby trash bin. I hoped it wasn't rodents.

"He left. He said he could put you up for a couple of days if you wanted to contact some of the English collectors in case some of them have heard anything about the ma.n.u.script."

"I hope you told him we already have, with no luck."

"I tried to, but he doesn't seem to want to listen to me. He just kept saying that people are more forthcoming if you approach them in person, and what a good idea it would be for both of us to go to London and search."

"He can just go soak his head," I grumbled, eyeing an itinerant man to make sure he didn't decide to relieve himself near the phone cubicle I occupied. I spent a few minutes d.a.m.ning whoever it was who stole my cell phone a few days earlier, then pulled my mind back to the present. "Did you tell him we were devoting all possible energies to finding the book for him?"

"Yes, but he didn't like the fact that you were away working on another case. So, the private auction lead was a total failure?"

"Not just the lead, the last two days have been a bust." The homeless man curled up on a bench and quietly picked at various parts of his body. I turned away to stare at the graffiti in the phone booth, depressed and oddly unsettled. "It took me an entire day to track down the collector who was selling off part of his collection, and another day to convince him to let me take a peek at it before the bidders got at it. I'm just sick at the waste of time, Clare. Paen's mother doesn't have two days for us to waste like this."

"You had to check it out," she consoled, stifling another giggle.

I sighed to myself over that, too. In the time I had been gone, Paen had been absolutely silent, not even bothering to check in with me by phone. It was as if he had lost interest in me personally-which even I realized was ridiculous. I'd known the man only three days. There wasn't time for us to establish an emotional bond.

Yet I had spent the last few days thinking about Paen, feeling as if a part of me was missing because he wasn't around, and dreaming the most lascivious, erotic dreams about a man I barely knew.

"What's that?" Clare asked, her words dissolving into a squeal.

I poked morosely at the coin return. "Nothing. I'll be there by suppertime. Tell Finn hi for me. And if Paen calls..." I stopped, furious with myself at the demanding urges buried deep within me. He wasn't a potential mate. He wasn't even boyfriend material. He was a client, a man who didn't believe in the importance of emotional attachment.

And I was starting to think I was close to falling in love with him.

"Tell him what?"

"Nothing. See you in a few hours."

I argued with myself all the way home, until I was too tired to see reason anymore. The last few nights I hadn't slept much-no doubt that was affecting my sanity.

"Oh, now this is bad," I said to myself several hours later as I hauled my wheeled bag off the train platform. "I'm so obsessed with the man, I'm starting to see him everywhere. In a kilt, yet."

"Sam," the kilt-wearing, Paen-shaped vision greeted me, taking the handle of my luggage. He must have noticed my confusion, because he added, "Clare told me you were coming back tonight. I take the fact that you haven't called to announce you found the statue to mean your visit to Glasgow was unsuccessful?"

I stared at him in sleep-deprived bemus.e.m.e.nt for a few seconds. He paused and raised an eyebrow. "Is something the matter?"

"No. Yes. Maybe. It depends-why are you here? And why are you wearing a kilt?"

He ignored both questions, gently rubbing his thumb under my left eye. "You have dark circles under your eyes."

"I know. It's because I haven't slept well the last couple of nights, thanks to you."

"To me?" He frowned, then took my elbow and propelled me toward the main doors. "I have left you completely alone for the last forty-eight hours. How can I be to blame?"

"Because you've left me completely alone for the last forty-eight hours."

"That doesn't make any sense," Paen argued.

I stopped outside the doors, moving to the side so we were out of the flow of traffic. "Of course it does. Paen, three days ago we met. You told me you wanted to sleep with me. I, against my better judgment, agreed to do that simply because I wanted to prove to you that s.e.x without emotional commitment was shallow and meaningless."

"You agreed to sleep with me because you fancied me," he said, his beautiful eyes lightening.

"That too. The point is, you made a big deal about us sleeping together, then you just left me!"

He frowned, his brows pulling together in a black slash over his eyes. "You'd had a trying day. You yawned three times on the way back from Dunstan Moor. Clearly you were not in an optimum mood to appreciate my s.e.xual technique."

"In other words"-I poked him in the chest-"you chickened out." "Don't be ridiculous," he said, grabbing my elbow again and pushing me along the sidewalk toward the parking lot. "I was being considerate, just as I have been the last two days, a fact you totally seem to have misunderstood."

"Given that you never once called to see how I was doing in Glasgow, I think it's reasonable to a.s.sume you were avoiding me because you regretted ever making those rash statements regarding personal relationships."