“Me too.” I pulled a chair over so that I was settled between both factions, Than and Myra directly across the room from me. Once I sat, Myra did too.
“Do you know where Ben is?” I asked Than.
“No. He is between life and death, as all of his kind are. To sense his location I would have to either regain my power, or he would have to transition into a state I could perceive: death. He would have to die. I would feel him then, even without my power. The passing of vampires is a heated thing, and all too rare to be overlooked.”
“You said you could find Lavius through the bite that ties me to him, right?” I asked Rossi. “We find him, we find Ben.”
“It could be done,” Rossi said. “But using that tie comes at a cost.”
Of course it did. I resisted the urge to throw up my hands in frustration. Why couldn’t anything be easy and why didn’t anyone let me in on this stuff from the get-go?
“All right. Fine. What’s the cost? Let’s get paying.”
The front door opened and we all paused while Mason welcomed what sounded like a dozen kids and a half dozen adults. He started into the tour spiel and I pitched my voice a little lower so the tourists wouldn’t hear me.
“It’s blood, right? I have to give up some blood to track him?”
Rossi’s gaze was sharp and hungry. I raised one eyebrow, not falling for the deadly vampire routine. I’d hauled him in for indecent exposure for streaking down the beach and through the middle of town three times in the last couple years. I wasn’t afraid of him.
“More than blood, Delaney.”
I waited. We all waited.
Jame got tired of waiting first.
Jame growled, a low, painful sound that snagged and caught somewhere in his chest. “What. Price.” His voice was gravel and sand, eyes glassy with fever, color too green and gray beneath the bruises. Sweat peppered his forehead and ran a thin line down his temples.
He looked like he’d been hit by a truck that had backed up, run him over again, and then pulled a trailer over his bones.
Fawn’s hand on his upper arm held him stiffly propped against the couch. Granny radiated strength and power and protection at his other side.
“It is nothing you can pay, Jame,” Rossi said with more kindness than I’d ever heard out of him.
“I’ll pay it,” I said. I was the one attached to the vampire, it only made sense I’d pay the price of being used as a human GPS unit.
“No,” Myra and Jean both said at the same time Ryder said, “Not happening.”
So, yeah, it was great to have a cheering squad, but I knew how this kind of paying-the-price stuff went down. I could deal with it. It was myplaceto deal with it.
“What price, if not blood,strigoi?”Granny’s voice didn’t carry kindness. Just flinty anger and more than a little hatred for Rossi’s kind in general and Rossi himself in particular.
“Dark magic.”
Okay, that was not what I expected him to say.
“Dark magic is what he wants,” Rossi said. “It is what he has come to our land for, what he has killed for. To find him, we must give him what he will use to destroy Ben, this town, all of us. He will gut us on our own good intentions.”
“We have dark magic?” Ryder asked. “It’s a…thing? That we have here?”
Rossi’s gaze didn’t leave Jame’s. “Yes. I have it here.”
Jame’s shallow breaths turned into a panting, frantic whine. “Pay. Pay it. Pay it pay it pay it.”
It was heartbreaking.
Granny slipped her hand onto Jame’s. She turned his hand over and drew her fingers across his bare wrist. Then she pressed her palm against his, linking their fingers tight enough it looked like it hurt.
“Hush now,” she said so softly, so gently. “Hush. He is yours. He is always and only yours. We will find him. We will put him in your arms. You will feel his heart beat.”
