“And some of ’em are sick freaks who get off on playing with their prey.” Not all, though. Not all were like that. Dee would learn that truth. Eventually. “They want to break Dee. Not just kill her. By setting her up, they rip her out of her nice, safe world.” Not that Dee was much for safety. “They tear her away from her friends, isolate her—” He broke off, shaking his head. No, he couldn’t say any more.

“I was fighting a pack of vamps behind Onyx.” Dee’s voice was flat. She crossed her arms over her chest. “My head hit the pavement, and the next thing I knew, I was in some stinking, dark room. Blood was all around me and your victim—”

“Lisa Durant.”

“Was dead.” Her shoulders tensed. “I don’t remember anything that happened in between that alley and that room. I just remember—”

“I was there,” Simon spoke, holding the cop’s gaze and daring him for a challenge. “I saw the vamps kill the woman. They left Dee in her blood. I saw it all.”

“Bullshit.” Tony stepped forward. “I don’t buy that—”

“It’s my story.” A brief pause. “The one I’ll tell everyone I see if you so much as even think about hauling Dee away from here.” Not going to happen. His temples throbbed in a sickening, painful rhythm.

No one could threaten Dee. She was too important.

“Oh, so you’re just gonna fucking out the vampires?” Disgust had Tony’s lips tightening.

“They outed themselves.” Maybe it was time for the whole world to stop pretending. Feeding rooms were cropping up in most cities—and dumb humans were stumbling inside, some quickly getting addicted to vamp bites. Some never making it back out. Lucky for the vamps, they’d perfected the body ditch over the years.

“There’s a Born Master coming to town,” Dee said and she tilted her head. Simon’s eyes narrowed. Yeah, that was his mark on her neck and he knew the cop saw it. No blood drawn, no bite since Dee didn’t like that. But a sweet suck had done the trick. “I’m the best vampire hunter at Night Watch. You take me out of this game, and there’s no telling what hell will come to the city.”

Tony’s eyes widened. Ah, so the dick hadn’t ever come across a Born? Then he didn’t know what hell looked like. “You can’t kill Borns the way you can most vampires.” No, they were so much harder to slay. He’d once heard of a Born who’d survived a stake to the heart and a partial beheading.

Their bodies were tougher. They healed ten times faster than the Taken. When you were changed into a vampire, you brought some of your human weaknesses with you.

But when you were Born a vampire…

There was no weakness for you. Not once the powers kicked in and the bloodlust began.

“Who are you?” Tony demanded again.

“Ease up, Tony. Simon’s not the bad guy here.” She unfolded her arms. “He knows what I’m up against. He can help me.”

“And I can’t?”

“No.”

Tony flinched.

“You’re a cop. You protect innocents.” She shook her head. “But your job isn’t to kill vampires.”

“Some days it is,” he fired back.

Simon’s brows shot up. So the cop had some bite, did he?

“I know things look bad right now,” Dee said.

“You ran, Dee. Innocent people don’t run.”

Okay, his fault. Simon rolled his shoulders. “I didn’t give Dee much choice. When I hauled her out of that pit, she was barely conscious. Sirens were wailing—I just couldn’t risk her.”

“You couldn’t, huh?”

“No.” Nothing more to say on that. “The woman on the floor was dead. Dee wasn’t. My priority was getting her to safety.”

“Yeah, cause getting in her pants had nothing to do with it, right?”

Fuck him. Simon attacked. In a second’s time, he had the cop pinned to the wall as his fist twisted the front of Tony’s shirt. “Don’t…talk about Dee like that.”

A tap on the back of his shoulder. “Ease up. Tony just turns into an asshole when he’s worried.”

“He needs to watch that tendency. It’ll get him into trouble soon.” He held the cop’s stare. “Real soon.” He unknotted his fingers.

“Christ, Dee, where’d you find him?” Tony muttered, straightening his shirt.

“In an alley, one littered with bullets.” She pushed in between the two of them. “Same place I found you a few years back.”

A grunt, then his lips started to curl, just a bit.

“Tony, we were attacked right before dawn. Some guys in ski masks found us at Simon’s house. They shot up the place.” Her hand lifted to her shoulder. To the wound Simon had all but forgotten when he’d had her in that bed. “We were lucky to get out alive.”

“Hell.”

“Yeah, that’s where we are.” She swallowed and Simon heard the soft click. “But I’ll be damned if I stay here. I’m not going to keep hiding out, waiting for the vamps to strike. We needed to rest. We needed to recover—done that.”

Simon knew where this was going. Knew, and didn’t like it.

“Now it’s time to hunt these bastards,” she said. “Because I really don’t like it when jerkoffs try to kill me, especially when I’m already down.”

“Can’t say I like it much, either,” Simon added.

Tony’s gaze snapped to him, then back to Dee. “You really think you’ll be able to find the vamps?”

A little shrug. “It’s what I do.” Her chin was up. The woman was cute when she was promising death. “I was weak before, I’m not now.”

Yeah, um, humans didn’t recover that fast from concussions and gunshots. Maybe she was feeling all good and vampire-pumped-for-killing, but the woman still wasn’t 100 percent.

Neither was he.

Not yet.

“Brass is leaning on me like a tree about to fall.” Tony blew out a hard breath. “It’s those witnesses who say they saw you fighting with the vic at Onyx. They’re nailing your coffin shut.”

Her gaze darted to Simon. “That part’s right, Tony. Lisa…met me behind the bar. She was working for the vamps.”

“A lure?” the cop asked.

“More a messenger,” Simon said. “You know, the cheery kind that comes and says You’re going to die. Beg for death. Blah. Blah.”

Tony blinked.

Dee gave a little shrug. “She pissed me off. I lost my temper.”

“That’s the problem.” Lines of worry tightened the cop’s face. “Too many folks know about that temper of yours. It’s not a leap to think you met up with the woman again, and got angry one more time, so angry you didn’t stop yourself when the stake came out. After all, it’s easy to kill, isn’t it? So easy.”

The guy sounded like he was speaking from experience. As if he could ever compare. “Give us time and we’ll prove Dee’s innocent.” The words snapped out. Not what he’d been planning. Simon rubbed his temples. The throbbing was getting worse. The sleep hadn’t been enough for him. To recover fully, he’d need so much more.

“The DA knows the score about this town,” Dee told them. “Pak told me, after Erin Jerome’s case…the DA knows.”

Erin Jerome. Simon knew the name. Erin was the assistant district attorney. She was also involved with one of the Night Watch hunters, Jude, the shifter.

“Figured the bastard knew more than he let on.” Tony ran a hand through his hair. “Too many cases that seemed to disappear before court date.”

“This one has to disappear, too.” Dee’s body vibrated with tension. “I’ll bring you a witness. I’ll bring proof that I’m innocent, and I want Clark to make this thing vanish.”

“And the vamps?”

“I’ll make them vanish.”

Big promise. Real tough to keep.

Tony stared at her. Too deep and way too long.

“Tony, give me this time. You know me.”

Too well it seemed.

A grim nod. “Forty-eight hours.”

“Tony—”

“It’s all I can do. I’m not the only one on this case and I won’t be able to hold the others back longer than that.” A muscle flexed along his jaw. “Forty-eight hours—and you bring me a vamp who’ll convince Clark you’re clear or else I’ll have to lock you up.”

She whistled. “Not giving me much time to work, are you?”

“I’m giving you all that I can.” He stepped toward her, cupped her cheek with his palm, and very nearly lost a hand. “The last thing I want is to have to take you in, but I might not have a choice.”

Simon gave him a long, level look. “There’s always a choice.” Always. Might not be the right choice, and that was the problem.

Tony dropped his hand. “Guess you’re gonna be her backup?”

“Guess so.”

“Then you’d better take care of her or I’ll be coming to kick your ass.”

Doubtful.

The cop headed for the door. “Better hurry out of here,” he tossed back, “the way I figure it, two squad cars will be pulling up in about thirty minutes.”

Dick.

“You sent the uniforms after me?” A whistle. “Damn, man, you really did come to toss me in jail.”

The dick in question glanced back at Dee. “No.” A hint of sadness there. Regret. “I came to give you a chance, one I knew the others wouldn’t. And that’s why the uniforms won’t be arriving until you’re gone.” A flash of white teeth. “So move that sweet ass, Dee. Get out there and find those vamps.”

“So where the hell are we headed?” Simon asked, and tightened his fingers around the leather steering wheel. They’d been staying to the back roads, trying to fly under the radar as they headed back to the city, and the silence—thick, heavy—was getting on his last nerve.

Was Dee having regrets? Maybe seeing the old boyfriend had made her hesitate. That jerk had the worst timing.

“There aren’t any feeding rooms in Baton Rouge.”

Feeding rooms. His back teeth clenched. The places set up to look like bars but, deep inside, they were just all-you-can-eat buffets for vampires. Folks went inside and some never came back out. Others got addicted. They became controlled by the vamps, and they would do anything to go back into the rooms.

“Why aren’t there any?” he asked. “I thought those places were in damn near every city now.” Some said they were safe houses for vampires. And those some just really knew how to bullshit.

Not a safe house. More like a slaughterhouse.

Even though humans were the preferred prey in the feeding rooms, the vamps never had to worry about the humans turning on them and shouting to the authorities about the new night club that served up blood. After all, one bite, and a vampire could link with a human’s mind.

A link meant control. You didn’t turn on those who controlled you.

For the humans, it was all too easy to get hooked on the thrill of the bite.

If the vamp wanted the victim to feel pain, the bite could hurt more than a knife wound or gunshot.

The bite could also feel better than sex.

It was all up to the vampire. Pleasure or pain.

Simon slanted a quick glance at Dee’s still figure.

Almost better than sex.

“I’ve made a point of shutting down any feeding room that tries to spring up.”

Oh, yeah, he bet she had. “So where do we start then?”

He felt her eyes. Didn’t have to look, just knew those chocolate eyes were on him. “I thought you had vamp contacts in this town.”

Careful now. “Ah, the vamps I know scattered when word came down about the Born Master.”

“Why? If they weren’t linked to him, there’d be no need to flee.”

The link. The screwed family tree that connected vampires. A Born Master took a victim, and formed a psychic connection with his prey. But if the Master turned that prey into the Taken, and the new vampire took another victim, the Born Master’s connection would trickle into the new prey, and keep trickling down through every blood exchange. Like freaking tentacles, reaching out for minds and spirits.

A Born Master wasn’t just stronger physically than other vampires. He was like a psychic black hole, sucking in all the prey he could find.

And controlling them.

A Born Master didn’t just pick up the thoughts of those in his link. He could whisper his thoughts to them. Compel them.

Rule them. His army of helpless minions. Good, bad, everything in between. All his for the taking and for the killing.

The Taken were never truly free. Not until the Born Master who’d started their blood lineage was dead.

Never an easy feat.

“Huh. Well, if your contacts are out, then I guess we’ll just have to do it the old-fashioned way.”

Simon knew he was not going to like this. “And that would be?” He braked at a Stop sign, one that had been spray painted a garish yellow. They’d reached the edge of the city. The part where the good folks never visited. Too many criminals. Too much darkness.

Too much evil.

Simon glanced at Dee. Yep, her eyes were on him. “We find the perfect prey,” she said simply. “Then wait for the vamps to take the bait. When they come up for a bite, we nail their asses.”

“Interesting plan.” His fingertips pounded a fast, hard beat on the steering wheel. “You really think it’s going to work?”