Thieves: Steal The Day Part 10

"Neil's?" I asked, wondering who else had been donating. I wasn't jealous or anything. I really wasn't. I sat down, ready to talk.

He laughed as he placed the thermos in the microwave, setting the timer. There's a reason blood should be at the proper temperature. It tends to coagulate otherwise, and that's just gross. Daniel pulled a shot gla.s.s out of a cabinet and set it down on the table. He poured a shot from the warm thermos and drank it back like we used to shoot tequila when he was alive.

He sighed and poured another, quickly downing it. "That's the stuff. I have no idea whose blood this is, but they drank a s.h.i.+tload of Scotch before they donated. You can buy it at the club. It's strictly black market. Sorry, Z, but I could use a buzz."

"I'm so glad you've found a way to get a little f.u.c.ked up since you've managed to f.u.c.k up all of our lives. Hey, before the Council cuts off your head, do you think they'll let you have a little O pos with vodka?"

Daniel took another shot. "Just ask your questions, Zoey. I promise I'll answer truthfully."

I felt the smallest amount of sympathy for him. His blue eyes were tired, and though his face hadn't changed in six years, for some reason tonight he looked older. I decided to start with the simplest question. "How did you know Chad was a vamp?"

"You mean beyond the fact that he was obviously gay but couldn't resist you?"

"Yes, beyond that." He would definitely have to do better.

He sighed. "Fine. You know how I can feel when a new vampire rises?"

Somehow Daniel could feel the moment when a human began the transition to vampire. He could sense it and where it was happening. It gave the Council time to intervene before the vampire started destroying everything around it. It was a very rare talent and it had kept Daniel alive according to Marcus. "Yes, but I thought you could feel it at the moment of death, not before."

"When I was hauled back to Paris earlier this year, some of the Council members had certain experiments they wanted to try on me. The last king who rose was able to sense latent vampires. Even though the vampire walks and talks in a human body, there are subtle differences. So they wanted to test me. You see the DNA, like all DNA, runs in families, but it skips around a lot. The Council keeps genealogical records that would make the Mormons look like amateurs. Thousands of years of family records from each vampire and still they can't tell who will rise and who will just rot."

Daniel paused, and I knew we were going to get to the nasty part of his tale. "What did you have to do, Danny?"

Another shot and the talking seemed to get easier. "f.u.c.kers brought in a hundred men from all over the globe. They just took them off the street, away from their families and their lives, all because they had the misfortune of being the direct descendants of vampires. They told me to find a latent vampire, one they could turn while he was vital to swell our ranks, to regain our power. I couldn't. So they killed them all and brought in another hundred. This time there was one guy, a guy from Greece. He had two kids. He cried anytime I got near him, but he was different. I can't put my finger on it, but I knew."

"Did they make you kill him?"

"Oh, yes, Zoey. He's why I strongly advocate strangulation," Danny said with a bitter laugh. "He rose and the Council took him. Obviously they just had me kill him, not take him through the actual turn. He doesn't care about his kids anymore. He was the only one I could find, and they killed the rest. I guess there was press about the missing people, so they stopped. I'm supposed to investigate the names they send me and, if I find one, send him to the Council."

The implications chilled me to the bone. "They're building an army."

"Yes."

I shook my head, more than a little confused. "They let you keep Justin?"

"They don't know about Justin, Z. They don't know about William or James or Jean-Marc or Bryan. Now they don't know about Chad. Luckily I'm the only one left who can feel when a vampire rises. I have Marcus to thank for that." Daniel poured another shot. I wondered how I was going to get a drunken, two hundred twenty pound vampire to bed because he looked like he was shooting for pa.s.s-out drunk.

"So you found all these guys and they just let you kill them?"

Danny shrugged a little. "You don't understand what it's like, Z. Chad could explain it better. I never met a vamp when I was alive. Something inside Chad recognized me. The vampire part of me called to the same part of him."

"That sounds a little hot," I joked.

Blue eyes rolled, but he smiled at me. "I don't know if it's because I'm stronger than other vamps, but I don't have much trouble convincing them. That sounds horrible. I'm convincing them to die, but if I don't the Council will figure out something else. I need them, Z."

And those men would likely have lived out their lives and been put down by the Council when they turned during their old age. Daniel had offered them their birthright. I couldn't complain. The way I understood it, persuasion didn't work on latent vampires.

I looked for the problem with the scenario. It didn't take me long. Just because no one else could feel when a new vamp rose didn't make him safe. "They trust you? That doesn't sound like the Council, Danny. They have to have someone watching you."

Danny giggled. There's no other word for the sound. Yep, the liquor was working. "They absolutely have a spy. He sends in a report every week on my activities and has ever since I came home. He's been writing his little reports for almost three years. You wouldn't believe the file he has on me. They think they're so smart. He made his oath to me six months ago. I approve every report he sends out."

There was only one vampire it could be. "Michael."

Daniel nodded. "Yes. And Alexander knows. He doesn't know about all of it, but he knows enough. He's more afraid of me than he is the Council. Michael was willing. He came to me. Marcus came to me."

I caught my breath. Marcus was a Council member, one of the oldest vampires walking the Earth. "Marcus Vorenus made a blood oath to serve you?"

"Yes," Danny said quietly. "He's not as bad as you think, Z. He's been a good mentor. He doesn't want the Council to succeed any more than I do. They've waited centuries for their weapon. They learned their lesson with the last king to rise. They had a plan this time. My training was unique. It was developed to completely break my spirit, to make me a vessel for their will. Most vampires are trained for no more than a year, but they kept me for three. They would have kept me longer if Marcus hadn't taught me how to fool them. He taught me to act the part. I have to appear to be what they need. I'm the weapon they'll use to subjugate the other races, to build our ranks, to make the Earth plane our feeding ground."

The room was silent. I thought about what Felicity had said earlier. If Daniel hadn't come to me that night, their plan might have worked. The Council wanted to upset the balance, and the only thing that stood in their way was Daniel. He took another shot and now his hand was unsteady. I reached out and covered it with my own. He sighed and turned it over, weaving our fingers together. He was so alone.

While the rest of us were living our lives, he was planning a war.

"I'm going to have to sacrifice one of them, Z." His hand tightened around mine. "They're pressing me. It's been months since I started this project, and so far I've delivered nothing. I can't have them getting suspicious. It would out me and Michael and all of us. I'm going to have to send one of them to the Council. I'm not ready to start a war yet. I would lose."

A fierce practicality came over me. "Then you'll pick the strongest, and he'll be our spy."

Daniel nodded. "I believe my blood will hold. I don't think they will be able to turn him if he's strong."

"Promise me something, Danny." Rage and fear curled in my gut, fighting for precedence.

"Anything, baby."

Rage won. "Promise me we're gonna kill them all."

Daniel's smile held not an ounce of humor. "Oh, yeah, baby, we'll kill 'em all."

Two hours later, dawn was near. I knew everything now, and I wouldn't sleep a wink knowing what was coming. Daniel, however, didn't have the choice to sit up and worry. I managed to get him to his feet, steering him toward the third bedroom where Daniel stayed when he slept here.

"You don't want to do that, Z." Daniel laughed as if I'd done something hilarious.

There was a whole lot of moaning from behind that door and something that sounded like a howl. He was right. I really didn't want to interrupt that. Unfortunately, Neil and Chad were in the only light-tight room in the house. "Where am I supposed to put you?"

Daniel smiled and raised his eyebrows suggestively. "Baby, I can think of a few places where I would fit just fine."

I rolled my eyes but had to laugh. He always got h.o.r.n.y when he was drunk. "There's a body bag in my closet."

It was sad but true. Most girls' closets were full of shoes and sweaters, and I had a body bag.

Daniel protested, but I got him to my room and sat him down on the bed. I pulled out the heavy bag and laid it out on the right side of the bed. It was habit. For years I'd taken the left side and he'd slept on the right. I still slept on the left side. I unzipped the bag and turned back to my husband, who was trying and failing to get out of his s.h.i.+rt. I pulled the soft cotton over his head and kneeled down to work on his jeans. He threaded his hands in my hair and pulled back, forcing my face up. He looked down at me, his face flush with desire. I closed my eyes and let him kiss me, his lips molding mine softly, his tongue seeking entry. It felt like forever since he'd been this close. My skin lit up the minute he touched me.

He groaned as I opened my mouth beneath his and let him fill me. My hands found the hard muscles of his chest, and I couldn't help but remember the last time we'd made love. He pulled me up and pressed me close with one hand as the other started to explore, trailing down my neck toward my breast. Gentle and smooth, Daniel treated me like I was made of gla.s.s, precious and fragile. It was so different from the sensations Dev pulled out of me.

I pulled away, pus.h.i.+ng against his chest. Daniel dropped his arms and sat back, a hollow look in his eyes.

"I'm sorry. I thought...I don't know why I thought that. I had too much to drink. G.o.d, Zoey, I can still smell him on you, but I didn't care."

I sat back against the closet, and didn't even try to stop the tears that came. It was so f.u.c.ked up. I loved Danny, and I just realized that there was a part of me that was starting to love Dev. Anything I did, any way I went, I hurt someone. Anything I chose would break my heart.

"Don't, baby." Daniel kneeled down and pulled me into a hug, settling me on his lap. "Don't cry. I won't push anything. I won't mention it again. Just don't cry, Zoey." He held me for a while but dawn was coming, and it didn't care that I needed his arms around me. "I have to go to bed, Z. I hate that. I pray every dawn that I'll wake up and I'll turn over and you'll be next to me. I'll tell you about the really crazy-a.s.s dream I had and we'll laugh. I'll get up and go to cla.s.s, and we'll graduate and get married. We'll have kids and yell at 'em and cry when they leave home. We'll spoil our grandkids, and we'll be happy."

I thought about it all the time. I dreamed the same dreams. My head rested against his chest. "It's a nice thought, Danny."

"It's a comforting lie. I'm never gonna wake up."

He kissed my forehead and lay down in the dark, heavy plastic that would protect him from the sun. I forced myself up.

"That life is dead, Danny. It's gone," I whispered as I started to zip up the bag. "Until we let it go, we can't move on. We have to find a way to move on."

He nodded, but I could see the dawn stealing his strength, his life. His eyes were closing. "I love you, Zoey."

And then he was dead until the night came again. I leaned over and kissed his lips while they were still warm. "I love you, too, Danny," I breathed against his skin.

I zipped him up the rest of the way and prepared for bed. I climbed in next to my husband. I laid my head against the cold bag and let my arms wrap around him. It was the longest time before I managed to sleep.

Chapter Eleven.

"OMG," Neil said from the back of the van. "Then we decided to go to the lake, and you won't believe what we did there."

I would. I could take a big old guess. It involved various s.e.xual practices that Neil was going to go into way too much detail about. Apparently in the last week, Neil and Chad had decided to reenact the entire Kama Sutra, gay supernatural edition, in various semi-public places. And Neil liked to chat. He'd been chatting for the last five hundred miles.

"Should I tell your gay husband a few tales, sweetheart?" Dev asked from the pa.s.senger seat. He didn't actually look at me. He was laid out as languidly as he could stretch his long, lean body in the confinement of the van. He wore jeans in deference to our cover story, his glorious eyes covered by a pair of aviators, and his lips curled into a wry smile.

Since that night when he'd driven his demons out, I saw him differently and it hurt. Loving Dev made him even more beautiful. Maybe I could have handled it if loving him had cut one centimeter of Daniel from my heart, but it hadn't. My heart had an enormous capacity for disaster.

"You should keep your mouth shut around my gay husband if you ever want to do any of those things again." Our little road trip was turning into a game. Who could make the human blush the fastest? So far Neil was leading by a mile, but only because Dev had kept his mouth shut to this point.

Dev turned to me and gave me a look that made more than my heart race. "I haven't had s.e.x in this state. I really want to be able to check that off so I'll hold my tongue, unless you'd like to hold it for me."

"I totally am!" Neil exclaimed. "I'm your gay husband. Does that mean we're involved in a four-way? Or would it be five if we count Chad?"

"We are involved in a no-way." The last thing I needed was more men in my love life.

We'd been on the road since the unG.o.dly hour of seven a.m. Sure, that's when most of the world is heading off to work, but I was nocturnal. My husband was a vampire so no daytime there, and my lover owned a nightclub. Dev wasn't a morning person either. I slanted a curious look at my boyfriend. "Just how many states have you had s.e.x in?"

He thought for a moment, tallying some unG.o.dly number in his head. "Forty-two. But I've done it on all the Hawaiian Islands, and that should count for something."

"Did you and your girlfriend take a tour or something?" It was the first time he'd mentioned any other woman. As the current girlfriend, I was naturally curious about the women who came before me.

Neil erupted in fits of hysterical laughter. I turned briefly to watch him lean back against his dead boyfriend's body bag. We'd bought the van with cash thanks to our lovely two million, which I absolutely rolled around in before putting it in my safe. It was already a good buy. It was perfect for lugging around vampires in body bags. Unfortunately we'd had to take out all the rear seats because we were also carrying our equipment, which included computers, night vision goggles, some really cool motion detectors and, of course, a complete traveling a.r.s.enal. I drove five miles below the d.a.m.n speed limit the entire way because I didn't think highway patrol would appreciate any excuse I came up with for the guns and dead bodies.

Neil continued his laughter, but Dev merely smiled knowingly.

"What?" I was not in on the joke.

"It's the thought of Dev having a girlfriend," Neil said, finally calming down. "You have no idea what his reputation is."

"Was," Dev corrected quickly. "What my reputation was."

"He was a total manwh.o.r.e." Neil settled against the sleeping body again. Chad was smaller than Daniel, so we managed to spread him out a little. Daniel, we'd had to kind of cram in, and then we needed some place to put the luggage.

"Manwh.o.r.e?" I kept my eyes on the road. I wasn't familiar with the phrase, but it didn't sound like a good way to refer to one's boyfriend.

Dev sighed. "Yeah, I guess that would work. Forty-two states, forty-two different women, and like I said, six in Hawaii alone. I don't apologize for my past, sweetheart. I'm part fertility G.o.d. It goes with the territory."

"Wow." I couldn't compete with his breadth of experience, and he knew it. Dev and I had gone over my s.e.xual history, which before him had included only one other man, and he was currently zipped into his daytime coffin.

"Sorry, Zoey." Dev took off the sungla.s.ses, his emerald eyes fixed on me. "I thought you knew. I wasn't real big into exclusivity. When I left the sithein, I enjoyed the human world for a while. I also enjoyed several werewolves, a couple of s.h.i.+fters, and some of the more exotic creatures on this plane. I was just having fun."

"Finding monogamy difficult?" I was more than a little intimidated at that recitation. I knew Dev's little black book was probably bigger than mine, I just hadn't realized it resembled a phone book. The culture he grew up in was different, but maybe I should have put a little more thought into it before I'd jumped into bed. Faeries are very s.e.xual creatures and Dev more so than most given his unique ancestry. It might have been nave on my part to think one woman, and an inexperienced one at that, could keep him satisfied.

"Not at all," he replied intensely. "I told you a long time ago I would give you what you need. You need commitment. I haven't slept with anyone but you since we met. I have no intentions to."

Neil had fallen silent, probably in the belief that the minute I remembered he was there, I would put the kibosh on the entire discussion. He seriously underestimated my need to keep Dev talking. Besides, he was my gay husband, and I'd end up telling him everything later on anyway.

I stepped on the gas as we entered the rolling foothills of the Ozarks. The trees were a canvas of oranges, reds, and browns. The scenery was beautiful, and I didn't really care about a bit of it.

"What if I didn't need commitment?" I needed to set that pothole to see if he would fall in.

His eyes became suspicious slits. "Then I would figure out what it is you do need, and I would give it to you. I still would have no intentions of sleeping with other women. I'm content where I sleep now. I don't need a ton of women, Zoey. I just need the right one."

My hands tightened on the steering wheel. I was happy neither of the boys had wanted to drive. The fact that I had something to stare at was very helpful. "And you treated all your former girlfriends with such kindness?"

Dev grimaced and his hand played with the five-o'clock shadow on his face. He'd started the day clean shaven, but the hours had pulled that s.e.xy beard out of his skin. I loved it. He hated it because it proved him less a Fae than he would like to be. "See, you keep putting an 's' on the end of the word girlfriend. You are trying to be jealous of women who never existed. I slept with a lot of women, but I didn't have relations.h.i.+ps with them. They were fun and I like to think I pleased them, but I never had any intention of permanence with them. Let me make this plain. In the six years since I left the sithein, I've had exactly one girlfriend. Her name is Zoey, and right now she is being a pain in my a.s.s."

I smiled and chose to continue to watch the road. I knew what his expression looked like. It would be that slightly put-out look he got any time I tried to get him to talk about his past. Well, he better get used to it because we were about to spend a lot of time together. I intended to find out a few things. There was a voice in the back of my head sending out a warning. This was why you didn't sleep with the people you worked with. This was why you tried to keep those relations.h.i.+ps on a business level. My father's best friend had been George Donovan, Daniel's father, and a master thief. Dad didn't work with George. I wasn't following my father's sound advice.

"You need to take this exit." Neil looked down at the road atlas. After we bought our trusty new van, Daniel had made sure any identifying marks, including the GPS that came with many new cars, were wiped out. We lived off the grid, and when the grid tried to encroach, we were pretty ruthless about beating it back.

It was another hour until we reached our destination. I pulled the van into the small cemetery we'd found. I spent much of the last week trying to plan a tight heist. I was thwarted by the fact that, while Felicity knew who had the Revelation, she wasn't sure where it was being kept. For someone who, at least according to legend was all-seeing, she really didn't know s.h.i.+t. What we did know was that the Revelation was held by one Mary Jo Renfro. She was the owner and operator of the Hideawhile Bideawhile Bed and Breakfast, situated in a very remote section of the Ozarks. There was next to nothing out here, and that B&B was the only place to stay for thirty miles. They specialized in honeymoons. We came to the conclusion that me, my husband, my lover, my gay husband, and his boyfriend would probably stand out if we decided to ask for a group rate.

It's always easier to have truly excellent intelligence. More likely than not the intelligence a client gathers is c.r.a.p at best, complete lies at worst. There's a reason the client is paying top dollar for services. If the item was easy to steal, the client would more than likely steal it for themselves and save on my rates. In some cases, there's information the client would prefer to keep to themselves. This usually ends in me having to think on my feet. In my line of work, you have to be flexible and you have to do your due diligence. Daniel, while pressing firmly for all due diligence in our collection of information, was not happy about the flexibility required to do so.

Mary Jo Renfro, owner of above mentioned B&B, also owned a small farm four miles north of her business. It was off the beaten track and therefore a fairly decent place to hide one's valuables. The Revelation had to be in either the B&B or on the farm. It was perfectly logical to split our resources in order to pin down the location of the item. The question then had been who would go where? It made sense that Dev and I would book a room, and Daniel, Neil, and Chad would check out the farm. Reason dictated that Dev and I made the only believable newlywed couple as Daniel couldn't be seen during the day, same thing with Chad, and Neil was hopelessly, helplessly incapable of looking like he wanted to sleep with me.

While all of this was the reasonable conclusion, it didn't make my husband a happy man.

His accommodations for the duration of the job weren't going to put him in a better mood. The cemetery was a small place with no more than fifty headstones, all of them from the turn of the century. There were two small mausoleums, each etched with the name of what I suspected would be some local family of note. The cemetery had fallen into disuse and disrepair. It was far enough away from everything that I was sure visitations, even for artistic purposes, were rare. It was exactly what we needed. It would provide adequate cover for our vamps during the daylight hours. That didn't mean Daniel would be happy about sleeping in a graveyard, especially while Dev was sleeping in a heart-shaped bed with me.