“Any idea where Bastien’s lair is?”
“None. There’s been no sign of him either. It’s almost as if they all dropped off the face of the bloody earth.”
Sarah watched Roland’s scowl deepen and wondered if perhaps he and Marcus had killed them all.
If all of his henchmen and fellow vampires were dead, would Bastien flee or stay and rebuild his numbers?
“What about missing persons?” Roland asked Chris. “Could he be busy recruiting?”
Chris shook his head. “No new missing person reports since he torched your house. And my men at the county morgues said there haven’t been any new feeding deaths camouflaged as car crashes, shootings, suicides, or farming acci-dents. As Marcus said, any vamps in the area are finding their nourishment elsewhere.”
So maybe there were no more vampires left, she thought hopefully.
Chris seemed to be following the same train of thought, because he leaned forward and braced his elbows on splayed knees. “Is it possible you killed them all and Bastien is on the run?”
“No,” Roland immediately responded. “This guy has it in for me. He isn’t going to give up after just three skirmishes.”
Inwardly Sarah shook her head. Three skirmishes in two days. Three days of training. All together it seemed as though months had passed.
Marcus nodded. “I agree. Whatever this is, it’s personal. He isn’t going to give up that easily.”
“As to that”—Chris flipped the file open—“I’ve been doing some digging and trying to find out who the hell this guy is. Since you said he looked to be about thirty and is lucid enough to organize and maintain a small army, I figured he had to have been transformed within the past ten years or so. Unfortunately, every Bastien or Sebastien, first or middle name, born in England in the past fifty years has been accounted for. I expanded the search to include Scotland, Ireland, and Wales and came up with the same results, which means it’s an assumed name. He’s going to be hard to track down.”
Vampires were usually fairly easy to trace because, unlike immortals, they tended to keep the names they were given at birth. They might try to change it once or twice to avoid suspicion, but inevitably reverted to the first once the madness kicked in and it became more difficult to arrange and keep up with aliases.
Roland glowered. “So you’ve got nothing?”
“Not exactly,” Chris said, unfazed by Roland’s ire and Marcus’s growing irritation. “Like you immortals, when vampires use assumed names they usually use family names because they’re easier to remember. I put the genealogy geeks on it and they found this.”
Rifling through the papers, Chris chose three, turned them upside down, and slid them across the coffee table to Roland.
Sarah, Roland, and Marcus all leaned forward to peruse them.
It looked like something printed off of various Web pages. One said something about the House of Lords. Another was the passenger list of a ship. She couldn’t tell what the third sheet said. The writing was too small. However, there was an old sketch, displayed near the top, of a man who resembled Bastien.
“The only Sebastien we could link you with is this man,” Chris said, pointing to the sketch, “Sebastien Newcombe, Earl of Marston, born 1783.” It couldn’t be Bastien then. Roland had said vampires rarely even lived one century. “Now, you and Marston were both in London for much of the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Marston died in 1815 under mysterious circumstances. His body was never recovered. That’s a quote and, as you know, a red flag.”
“They can’t be one and the same. Vampires don’t live two hundred years.”
“True. But I wonder if you might’ve killed Marston and all of this is a vendetta handed down father to son to today’s Bastien. Thanks to a flood destroying a few pertinent records, information on Marston’s bloodline becomes a bit sketchy in the twentieth century, right around the time your man would have been born.”
“So Marston was a vampire I hunted?”
“Either that or a human.”
Roland’s voice turned chilly. “Immortals do not kill innocents when they feed.”
“I’m aware of that,” Chris said. “But you do kill minions and minions tend to procreate.”
Marcus frowned. “You think Marston was a minion and Bastien is his descendant?”
Chris shrugged. “Marston wouldn’t be the first member of the nobility to run with the wrong crowd. Nor would your Bastien be the first to be recruited, then later turned by an ancestor. We’ve seen the virus make its way down through family trees before. Remember that vamp in Virginia who turned both of his grandsons a few years ago?”
Sarah nibbled her lower lip as Roland picked up the paper and studied the sketch more closely.
“I don’t know,” he pronounced slowly. “I don’t recall encountering him in London.” He handed the paper to Marcus. “Do you?”
“No, and minions tend to linger longer in my memory because we have to dispose of the bodies.”
Uncertain whether they would be irritated by her pointing out the obvious or appreciate her input, Sarah slowly raised her hand.
Roland glanced over at her with a furrowed brow, then smiled. “We aren’t in a classroom, Sarah. If you have something you wish to say, you don’t have to raise your hand.”
The other two men grinned.
Shrugging, she returned their smiles. “Well … I was just thinking you might be overlooking something….”
Chris frowned.
“I mean, I could be wrong. It just seems so obvious….” She trailed off.
“What does?” Roland asked, reaching out to touch her hand.
Holding his gaze, she said, “Maybe Bastien isn’t a vampire at all. Maybe he’s immortal. And the reason Chris couldn’t find any information on him is that he isn’t a descendant of the Earl of Marston. He is the Earl of Marston.”
Roland and the others stared at her.
“That isn’t possible,” she heard Marcus say.
Sarah continued to hold Roland’s gaze. “You told me yourself not half an hour ago that all immortals share similar physical characteristics. When he landed on the hood of Marcus’s car—”
“Is that what happened to it?” Chris said in the background.
“—I got a good look at him, Roland. He has black hair, dark brown eyes, and is over six feet tall. If he stood next to you and Marcus in a crowd, people would think the three of you were brothers.”
Chris shook his head. “He can’t be immortal, Sarah. Immortals don’t fraternize with vampires, they kill them. And they sure as hell don’t try to kill other immortals.”
Roland turned to look at Marcus.
Both remained silent.
“Has an immortal ever later turned vampire?” she asked uncertainly.
“No, never,” Chris insisted. “Once their bodies mutate the virus, they’re safe from the madness forever. And while there might be one or two immortals I would classify as assholes, they’re never evil the way vampires are. Immortals are good guys. They don’t turn bad no matter what the incentive.”
“Oh.” Discouraged, she returned her attention to Roland, who still stared at Marcus.
“Could Seth have missed one?” he murmured, his expression grave.
Marcus looked ill. “He never has before.”
“Not to our knowledge. Or his.”
“Oh shit.”
Chris’s eyes widened. “You aren’t serious, are you?”
Roland met his disbelieving gaze. “It makes the most sense.”
“But he tried to kill you! Three times!”
Roland laced his fingers through Sarah’s. “If Seth didn’t find him after he was transformed and no other immortal happened upon him and took him under their wing, he will have learned everything he knows from vampires.”
Marcus dragged a hand down over his face. “He probably doesn’t even know he is immortal and thinks he’s a vampire. No wonder he’s so bloody fast and strong.”
Sensing how troubled Roland was by the notion, Sarah surreptitiously inched closer to him.
He squeezed her hand. “This changes everything.”
Marcus nodded. “We sure as hell can’t kill him now.”
“Uh, I hate to sound like a broken record,” Chris said, “but he—tried—to—kill—you. And if he’s been living as a vampire, he’s probably killed a lot of humans in the last two centuries and transformed who knows how many others.”
Marcus emitted a huff of annoyance. “No shit, Sherlock.”
Sarah decided to leap in again before Chris could spout a caustic rebuttal. “You don’t know that. If he’s immortal, that means he isn’t a slave to the bloodlust, right? So maybe he feeds the way immortals did before blood banks came on the scene. Maybe he takes what he needs without killing his victim. He could’ve killed me when they attacked en masse in my front yard, but didn’t.”
“He told his men to,” Marcus reminded her.
“No, he told them I was Roland’s weakness.”
“Then chased after you when you tried to get away,” Roland pointed out.
She chewed her lip. “If he thought you cared about me, he might have thought I would be useful as bait.”
Roland swore and dropped his head back.
Marcus frowned. “What?”
“When his minions were dousing the house with gasoline, one of them told another Bastien had said not to light it until they got Sarah out. I assumed he intended to … I don’t know … punish her for helping me or use her to get to me if we managed to escape. But the minions never specifically mentioned taking her back with them.”
Chris shook his head. “You aren’t actually suggesting he was protecting her, are you?”
Marcus cocked a brow. “If he doesn’t kill humans …”