Prince of Twilight

As he stood there, staring up at the room, Tempest stepped out onto the balcony, leaned on the railing and gazed out into the night.

He couldn’t take his eyes from her. And his preternatural vision didn’t fail him. He managed to drink in every detail of her face in a way he hadn’t been close enough to do in far, far too long.

The blush of youth had faded from the body of the woman in which his love lay sleeping. In its place were the angles of a female in the prime of her life. Her face was thinner, her eyes harder, than they had been before. Her hair was still blond but not as pale; still short but less severe. Its softness framed her face and moved with every touch of the breeze. She still bore a striking resemblance to Elisabeta, her ancestor. He longed to bury his fingers in those sunlight-and-honey strands, to bury himself inside her; to feel her shiver under the power of his touch.

She wanted him.

God, he could feel her wanting him. Yearning for him. And she knew he was close. She sensed him, perhaps not as powerfully and clearly as he sensed her, but it was there. And consciously or not, she was calling out to him. She wanted him still.

He had to school himself to patience. He had to know why she was here, what she was doing. He’d waited sixteen years to be with her again—more than five hundred before that. Surely he could wait one more night. But not much more than that.

He was hungry. He needed sustenance, blood to satisfy his body and perhaps calm the raging desire in his veins. To keep himself from going to her, for just a little while longer. And then, in the early hours just before dawn, he would go after the ring.

And that was precisely what he did. But when he got to the museum, it was to find the window broken, the alarms shrieking, sirens blaring and the ring…

Gone.

Stormy woke to the insistent sun beaming through the hotel room’s windows and searing through her eyelids. She rolled over in the bed and hid her face in the pillows, but the memory of her dreams woke her more thoroughly than the sun ever could have.

She’d dreamed about Vlad.

But she hadn’t dreamed about the two of them making love—which was odd, because she’d dreamed of that many times over the past sixteen years, never sure whether it had actually happened, or if it was just part of her senseless yearning for him. Or something more sinister—perhaps the longing of her intruder or one of her memories.

No. This dream had been more like a memory. Until the end. Then it had become a vision. He’d been standing there on the shores of Endover, where she had first met him. His castle-like mansion hovered on its secret island behind him, and the sea was raging in between. He’d been just standing there, staring at her.

Wanting her.

Calling to her.

The wind had been whipping through his long dark hair, and she’d remembered—yes, remembered!—the way it felt to run her fingers through it. His chest had been bare, probably because, in her mind, that was the way she preferred to remember him. His chest. Next to his eyes, and that hair, and his mouth, it was her favorite part of him. She’d touched that chest in her dreams. She’d run her hands over it and over his belly. Had it ever been real?

It felt real. More real than anything else in her life.

She rolled onto her back and pressed her hands to her face. “God,” she moaned. “Am I ever going to get over him?”

But she already knew the answer. If she hadn’t been able to forget Dracula in sixteen years, it wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon. He had a hold on her. Maybe it was deliberate. Maybe it was him messing with her mind, refusing to let her forget him, even while making her forget the details of their time together. Or maybe it was because of that other soul that lurked inside her. Because, though it had been dormant for a long time, Stormy knew that the other was still there. And if she’d begun to doubt it, Elisabeta’s recent appearance had driven the truth home. She lived still.

But was that why she couldn’t forget Vlad? Or was it just because he was the only man who had ever made her feel…desperate for him. Hungry for him. Certain no one else would ever suffice.

And no one else ever had. Or ever would. She couldn’t even climax with another man.

He certainly hadn’t had the same issues, though, had he? He’d never made contact, not once in sixteen years. And it hurt, far more than it should. Some days she convinced herself it was because he truly did care about her. That he was keeping away to protect her from the inner turmoil Elisabeta would cause if he did otherwise. But most of the time she believed the more likely reason. It was, after all, Elisabeta, not Stormy, he loved. And since he couldn’t have her, he couldn’t be bothered with Stormy at all.

She closed her eyes, and revisited, mentally, the initial parts of her dream—and knew it had been a memory. A snippet of the weeks Vlad had erased from her mind. He’d taken her to Romania, not North Carolina, smuggled her there inside a casket. She’d awakened in his castle, furious with him.

But why? What had happened there? Why had he let her go? God, why had he ever let her go?

Groaning, Stormy dragged herself out of bed, shuffled across the room and kicked the clothes she didn’t remember wearing out of her path. She went to the door and hoped, for the hotel staff’s sake, that her standing order had been delivered on time.

It had. Outside the door was a rolling service tray, with a silver pot full of piping hot coffee and a plate with several pastries beside it. There were a cup, a pitcher of cream, and a container with sugar and other sweeteners in colorful packets. Beside all of that was a neatly folded—and hot of the presses, by the smell of the ink—issue of the daily newspaper.

Her order had been filled to perfection—assuming the coffee was any good—and delivered on time. She’d specified this be brought to her room every morning of her stay between 7:30 and 8:00 a.m., and that it be left outside her door so that her sleep wouldn’t be disturbed.

Yeah, she was a pain in the ass as a hotel guest. But given what they charged for rooms these days, they ought to throw in a little extra service, the way she saw it. Not that they were throwing it in, exactly. She would be billed, she had no doubt. But the agency was thriving, so what the hell?

She wheeled the cart into her room, filled the cup with coffee and snagged a cheese and cherry Danish. It wasn’t Dunkin’ Donuts, but it was the closest she could get at the moment. Then she sat down to enjoy her breakfast and unfolded the newspaper.

The banner headline hit her between the eyes like a fist.

BOLD BREAK-IN AT NATIONAL MUSEUM—PRICELESS ARTIFACT STOLEN.

“No,” she whispered. But she already knew, even before she read the piece, what had been taken. The hole in the pit of her stomach told her in no uncertain terms.

And her stomach was right.

According to the article, the burglary had been a graceless smash-and-grab. Someone had kicked in the window of the room where the ring was on display, so they clearly knew right where it was. They had set off every alarm in the place but were back out the window and gone before the security guards even made it into the room.

It didn’t seem a likely M.O. for Melina Roscova. Stormy would have expected more grace, more finesse, from a woman like that. But who else would want the ring?

The answer came before she had time to blink. Vlad. That was who.

She’d dreamed of him last night. Had it been coincidence? Or had it been his real nearness making his image appear in her mind?

Did he have the ring? Just what kind of power did that thing have?

She shivered and knew that whatever it was, it frightened her. But she shook away the fear and squared her shoulders.

“One way to find out,” she muttered. She finished the Danish, slugged down the coffee, and headed for the shower for a record-breaking lather and rinse, head to toe. But halfway through, she stopped. Because…damn, hadn’t she fallen asleep in the bath last night? Why the hell didn’t she remember getting out of the tub and into bed?

She frowned as she toweled down and yanked on a pair of jeans and a black baby T-shirt with a badass fairy on the front above the words Trust Me.

“I must have been more tired than I thought,” she muttered. “It’ll come back to me.”

Telling herself she believed that, she slapped a handful of mousse into her hair and gave it three passes with the blow dryer. “And that,” she told her reflection, “is why I love short hair.”

She stuffed her feet into purple ankle socks, and her green and teal Nike Shocks, then grabbed a denim jacket and her bag—a mini-backpack—on the way to the door. There she paused before going back to grab her travel mug off the night stand. She filled it from the coffee pot, snatched two more pastries and the business card Melina had left her the night before, then headed out the door.

She moved through the hotel’s revolving doors and turned to tell one of the uniformed men who stood there to go get her car, but Belladonna was already there, waiting. She was parked neatly just beyond the curved strip of pavement in front of the hotel’s doors, along the roadside. Had she called down last night and arranged for the car to be there, then forgotten doing it? That didn’t seem likely, but between the drinks she’d had last night and the stress of being in the same city with that ring, much less Vlad, she supposed it was possible.

And that was as far as she allowed that train of thought to travel. She would deal with the burglary now. Just focus on that. The intricate and tangled web of her mind and her memory would only distract her. She had to see Melina Roscova. Because she had to find out what had happened to that ring.

My ring, a little voice whispered deep inside her mind.

It wasn’t Stormy’s voice.

It was a four-hour drive to Athena House, or would have been if she hadn’t gotten lost on the way, and stopped for lunch to boot. Stormy inched Belladonna’s shiny black nose into the first part of the driveway and stopped at the arched, wrought-iron gate that had the word ATHENA spelled out in its scroll work. The gate was closed, but there was a speaker mounted on one of the columns that flanked her on either side.

She got out of the car and headed for the speaker. The big iron gate hung between two towering columns of rust-colored stone blocks. The entire place was surrounded by a ten-foot wall of those same hand hewn stones, and beyond the gate, Stormy could see that the house was built of them, as well.

Giant stone owls carved of glittering, snow-white granite perched on top of each column, standing like black eyed sentries to guard the place. Those glinting onyx eyes gave Stormy a shiver. Too much like Elisabeta’s eyes, she supposed. And the notion of them sparkling from her own face, the way witnesses had said they did, sent a brief wave of nausea washing through her.

A speaker with a button marked Talk was mounted to the front of the left stone column. Stormy poked the button. “Stormy Jones, from SIS, here to see Melina Roscova.”

“Welcome,” a feminine voice said. “Please, come in.”

The gate and swung slowly open. Stormy went back to the car, sat down on her black seat covers with the red Japanese dragons on them, which matched the floor mats and the steering wheel cover, and waited until the gate had opened fully. Then she drove slowly through and followed the driveway, which looped around a big fountain and back on itself again. She stopped near the mansion’s front entrance and shut the car off. Then, stiffening her spine and hoping to God that Melina would admit to having stolen the ring herself, she got out and went up the broad stone steps to a pair of massive, darkly stained doors that looked as if they belonged on a castle, right down to the black iron hinge plates and knobs, and the knocker, which was held in the talons of yet another white owl.

The doors opened before she could knock, and Melina stood there smiling at her. “I know we didn’t discuss a fee before, but I’ll pay whatever you ask. I’m just so glad you changed your mind.”

She continued babbling as Stormy’s stomach churned, and she led the way through the house’s magnificent foyer into a broad and echoing hallway, and along it into a library. As they walked through the place, they passed other women, all busy but curious. All between twenty and fifty, Stormy thought, taking them in with a quick sweep of her well trained eyes. All attractive and fit. Really fit.

“You certainly work fast once you make up your mind,” Melina said, as she closed the library doors, and waved Stormy toward a leather chair. “Did you bring it?”

Stormy walked to the chair but didn’t sit. Instead, she turned to face Melina, her back to the chair, and asked as calmly as she could manage, “Did I bring what?”

Melina’s smile showed the first sign of faltering. “The ring, of course.”

Disappointment dealt her a crushing blow. So much so that Stormy sat down heavily in the chair behind her and lowered her head. Dammit, she’d been hoping, but she didn’t think Melina was acting. She drew a breath. “I don’t have the ring, Melina.”

“Well, what did you do with it?”

“Nothing.” She forced herself to lift her head, to face the woman, who was, even then, sinking into a chair of her own, looking as deflated as Stormy felt. “So it’s safe to say you didn’t break into the museum and steal it last night,” Stormy said.

“I didn’t.” Melina closed her eyes briefly. “I assumed you had. Figured you’d had a change of heart or…something.”

“I didn’t,” Stormy said, echoing Melina’s own denial.

“Then that means—”

“It means someone else has the ring,” Stormy said.

Melina rose slowly, walked to a cabinet and opened it, then poured herself three fingers worth of vodka. Stolichanya. Good shit. She downed it, then turned and held the bottle up.

“No, thanks. I’m driving.”

“Not for a while, I hope.”

“No? Why wouldn’t I be?”

Melina grabbed another glass and poured, then refilled her own. She capped the bottle and put it away, then walked across the room to hand the clean glass to Stormy. “Because I need your help. Now more than ever, Stormy. You have to agree to take the job.”

“The job was to steal the ring,” Stormy said. “Someone’s already done that.”

“Yes. And now the job is to find out who has it and take it from them. Before it’s too late.”

Stormy was pretty sure she knew who had the ring. And she didn’t look forward to going up against him, although it seemed she wasn’t going to have a choice about that. Maybe with the money and resources of this Sisterhood behind her, she would have an edge. A shot, at least. God knew she couldn’t let Vlad decide what to do with the ring. She didn’t know what sort of power the thing possessed, but she sensed, right to her core, that whatever it was, it might very well destroy her.

Melina sighed. “I have to let my Firsts know what’s happened, so we can begin the search.”

“Your Firsts?”

“My…lieutenants, for want of a better term. Not to mention my superiors.” As she said that, she lowered her head and wiped what might have been a bead of sweat from her forehead. “Stay for dinner. As soon as I have things squared away, I’ll tell you everything I know about the ring. Everything, Stormy. Although…”

Stormy lifted her brows, and when Melina didn’t finish, she prompted her. “Although?”

Melina shrugged. “I get the feeling you already know as much as I do,” she said softly. “Why is that, Stormy?”

Stormy shrugged. “I never set eyes on that ring until yesterday, Melina. I think your imagination is working overtime.”

Melina studied her for a long moment, then seemed to accept her words with a nod. “Will you help me?”

“You keep your word and tell me all you know—and I mean everything, Melina—and I’ll do my best to find and…acquire the ring.”

Melina smiled. “Thank you, Stormy. Thank you so much.” She clasped Stormy’s hands briefly.

Stormy felt a little guilty accepting such senseless gratitude from the woman. After all, she hadn’t said anything about giving the ring to her. And she didn’t intend to.

When the sun went down, Vlad rose from the crypt where he’d spent the day. The crushing devastation that returned the moment his mind cleared of the day sleep was nearly enough to send him sinking to his knees. But he fought it. All was not lost. It couldn’t be.

To be so close—so close to having the ring—and then to lose it that way…

He could only reach one conclusion. Tempest. She must have the ring. She had come for it, just as he had. And she’d beaten him to the theft.

So there was still a chance. He need only find her and—

She’s gone.

The knowledge seeped into his mind, as real and as palpable as air seeping into a mortal’s lungs. Tempest had left the city.

No matter. There was nowhere on earth the woman could go where he would be unable to follow. To find her. To feel his way to her. She would never escape him.

So he followed the trail she had left. A trail of her essence, woven with her yearning for him. And he found her.

She was behind the walls of a mansion, beyond a stone barrier and an iron gate marked by the word ATHENA.

He recognized the place for what it was—it wasn’t the first he’d seen—a base for the Sisterhood of Athena.

They were involved with Tempest? With the ring? By the gods, how? Why? Why would Tempest entangle herself with the likes of them?

Vlad planted himself outside the tall stone wall that surrounded the place, though he could easily have leapt it. He didn’t need to. His power over Tempest was strong enough that he could crawl inside her mind, see everything she saw, hear everything she heard. He could feel her thoughts.

And damn the repercussions. She’d stolen the ring and…what? Brought it to these meddling mortals? How dare she betray him that way?

No, he would do whatever was necessary to get to the bottom of this, to find the ring and get it back. So he made himself comfortable in the darkness beyond the walls of the mansion, and he slid as carefully as he could into his woman’s mind.

3

Dinner was late at Athena House, but well worth the wait: a tender glazed pork loin with baby carrots and new potatoes. Enough side dishes to satisfy anyone, and the promise of dessert later on.

As she ate, Stormy tried to match the names she’d been given to the faces around her, but she determined she would never keep them all straight. There were three she knew for sure. Melina, of course. Then there was Melina’s apparent right-hand woman, Brooke, with sleek, shoulder length red hair parted on one side, as straight as if it were wet. She looked as if she’d stepped off the set of a Robert Palmer video and was so thin Stormy wondered if she ever ate anything at all. She wore a tweed skirt that hugged her from hips to knees, with a buttoned-up ivory silk blouse. And third was Lupe, a shapely Latina who reminded Stormy of Rosie Perez every time she opened her mouth. She was five-two, way shorter than her two cohorts, and curvy as hell. She had full, lush lips and copper-toned skin. Her hair was longer than Brooke’s, jet back, and curled as if it had been left out in a wind-storm, and her brown eyes were like melted milk chocolate. She wore designer jeans and a chenille sweater that had probably cost more than Stormy’s entire wardrobe.

Those three she remembered. And those three were the ones who went with her into the library when the meal had ended. And yes, Stormy thought, Brooke had eaten—about enough to feed a baby bird.

A fourth woman brought a china tray with matching coffee pot, cups, cream pitcher and sugar bowl into the room, set it down and left without a word.

“This place is…odd,” Stormy said.

“Is it?” Melina poured coffee into four cups, took one and sat down. She took it with cream, no sugar, Stormy noticed. Smooth but strong.

“It feels like a cross between an army barracks and a convent.”

“Because that’s what it is,” Lupe said with a grin and a combination Spanish-Brooklyn accent. She took her own cup, added four spoons full of sugar and sat back. Hot and sweet, but dark, Stormy thought.

She eyed the room. It was large, a towering ceiling and four walls lined with books and bound manuscripts, many of which seemed very old. The scents of old paper and leather permeated the place. At the farthest end of the room there was a table that stood about desk height. It might have been a desk, for all Stormy could tell, since it was hidden under a purple satin cloth. Antique pewter candle holders with glowing tapers stood on top, to either side of an aged leather book.

Stormy eyed the book, watching only from the corner of her eye as Brooke took her own cup of coffee, adding nothing to it at all. Dark and bitter.

She took her own with just enough cream to mask the bite, and just enough sugar to lull her into forgetting that caffeine could kick her ass. She smiled a little as she fixed it and thought that you could tell a lot about a person by the way they took their coffee.

Melina said, “We first learned of the ring in 1516, when a member of the Sisterhood acquired the journal of an alleged mage who’d lived a century earlier.”

“The Sisterhood of Athena is that old?” Stormy asked.

“Older.” Melina watched her staring at the book.

“So this is the one? The old journal?” Stormy asked, stepping toward the book on the table.

“Yes.”

She set her coffee cup down and moved closer, then reached for the book, only to pause when Brooke put a surprisingly chilly hand over hers. “It’s very delicate. Be careful.”

“Like she’s planning to rip off the cover?” Lupe asked with a toss of her head. “Give it a rest, Brookie.”

There was no question, the nickname was not a term of endearment.

Stormy looked from one woman to the other. They were opposites and maybe equals. There was tension there. But that wasn’t her problem. She steadied herself and touched the book with great care, opening its leather cover and staring down at the brittle, yellowed pages within.

Words flowed across the pages in some foreign script, where words were even visible. Many had faded to mere shadows. She wanted to turn the page, but didn’t dare, for fear it might disintegrate at her touch.

“It’s not in English.” After she said it, she realized she had stated the obvious.

“No,” Melina said. “Many pages are missing or only partly there. Many more cannot be read, but we’ve translated those that can. It’s written in a long-forgotten language, so some of the translations are piecemeal or educated guesses. But the journal does speak of ‘The Ring of the Impaler.’”

Stormy nodded. She didn’t bother trying to feign surprise. She’d never been a good actress. “Meaning Vlad the Impaler, aka Dracula.”

“That’s the conclusion we’ve reached, yes. The timing would have been right, and since it was found in Turkey, and the Turks were at war with the Romanians during Vlad’s reign, it makes sense.”

Stormy felt herself shiver. This was the ring Vlad had referred to sixteen years ago in the words that had so recently echoed in her head. If there had been any doubt, it was gone now. It was the ring he’d been seeking for more than five centuries. She forced herself to retrieve her coffee, to sip it slowly and not tremble visibly.

“And this journal…it says something about the ring?” she asked.

Melina moved past her to the aged book and opened it to a section marked with a blood red ribbon. “This is the reference,” she said. “If you prefer, you can copy it out and take it to your own translator. But I can assure you, you won’t find a more accurate interpretation than ours. We use only the best linguists for this sort of thing.”

“I believe you,” Stormy said. “But if it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to copy it. Or better yet…” She dipped into her backpack, which she’d slung over the back of her chair, and pulled out a state of the art digital camera, tiny and light and packing 8.5 megapixels. “May I?”