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  And it was. She stared down at her knee. The trickle of blood was gone, all the pain was gone … she couldn’t even see the scrape. “That puts a whole new twist on kiss it and make it better,” she said in wonderment. She lifted her hand, examined it in the yellow glow of the porch light. No scrape there, either. “Wow.”

  He smiled as he reached down and gripped her hand and pulled her to her feet. Her knees wobbled and he put his hand under her arm, held her steady for a moment until her balance settled.

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said, feeling embarrassment heat her cheeks because she hadn’t already thanked him; after all, he had saved her life. “He was … he was going to kill me.” A slight frown knit her brow as she looked around. “Where is he?” Was he lying unconscious behind her car? Was he dead? Just … gone? And shouldn’t she file a report, or something? Oh, right, Luca had said she didn’t need the police, so no report.

  “He’s gone,” Luca said. “He won’t bother you again.”

  Well, that was a relief. She barely wondered why she would so blithely take his word for it, then the moment of doubt was gone and everything was okay.

  She couldn’t stand there all night, she thought. Nor was she inviting him inside for a cup of coffee—for one thing, she didn’t want coffee, she wanted to go to sleep, but the main reason was that a thread of unease suddenly ruined her contentment. She didn’t know him; she couldn’t invite him in. She should find her keys, thank him again, and put an end to a very long and upsetting night.

  Where were her keys? They’d been in her hand, so of course she’d dropped them. She sighed as she looked around, but they weren’t in sight; for all she knew, they were somewhere in the shrubbery. “My keys are down there somewhere,” she said ruefully.

  “Here they are,” he replied almost immediately, stooping to pick up something in the black shadow of a bush. He straightened with her keys in his hand.

  She blinked at the dangling keys. “How did you find them so easily?”

  “The streetlight was shining on them just right.”

  She took the keys, smiled shyly at him, and went up the steps to the front door. Her back to him, she inserted the key and turned it, then pushed the door open. She turned to look back at the man who stood at the foot of the steps. “Thank you again, Luca.”

  He went very still, an expression of surprise, almost shock, on his face. “It was my pleasure,” he finally said.

  Saying “thank you” didn’t seem like enough. She needed to do something more, something tangible. “I’m the night-shift manager at Katica, a restaurant down on—”

  “I know where it is,” he said, a trifle abruptly.

  “Come by tomorrow night and I’ll see that you get a free meal.” He still looked a bit taken aback by something, and less than thrilled by her suggestion, so she added, “The chef is really great. I can promise you a meal you won’t forget, and a special bottle of wine.”

  “Thank you,” he said, sounding rather formal. He even dipped his head in a truncated bow. “I’ll stop by if I can.”

  “I’ll look for you, then.” Chloe stepped into her house, then closed and locked the door, set the alarm. She felt remarkably calm, considering all that had happened. She knew she should be shaky, but the horrible details seemed very distant, and all she could think about was maybe getting some sleep—

  “Chloe!”

  “Dammit,” Chloe said as the voice suddenly whispered urgently in her ear. There went the hope of sleep. Something had to be done; this had to stop.

  Standing outside, Luca stared at the door as it closed behind Chloe Fallon. He felt as if he’d been body slammed. She had remembered him. She had not only remembered he was there, she had remembered his name.

  Not only was she not supposed to remember him at all, he’d glamoured her into forgetting Enoch’s attack had ever occurred. He’d healed her wounds—and hadn’t that been an exercise in self-control, he thought wryly. She’d tasted … God, she’d tasted the way he imagined ambrosia would taste, and the scent of her had wrapped around him, gardenia-sweet on a warm summer night. He didn’t understand it. She was pretty enough, not beautiful but definitely pretty: a normal little human working a normal little job, her strength puny, her senses dull in comparison to his—and still he’d had to fight the sudden screaming urge to flatten her there on the ground and take her, body and blood.

  He shook himself, looked around. Enoch was nothing more than a pile of dust lying on the driveway on the other side of Chloe Fallon’s old car. The slight summer breeze was already dispersing him.

  That had been close; if he’d been any farther away, he wouldn’t have been able to reach them before Enoch killed her. He’d heard what Enoch asked her, if she knew what she was, if she’d heard him yet.

  She evidently had no clue, at least not yet, but Luca knew. She was a conduit, and her Warrior was trying to contact her—and the rebel vampires were evidently trying to hunt down and kill all the conduits before the Warriors could come through, to set the stage for a vampire takeover.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  What the hell was going on?

  There wasn’t a simple answer, concerning either Chloe or the uprising, so Luca put the question aside for the moment to concentrate on the necessity of cleaning up after himself. He rounded Chloe’s car to examine what was left of Enoch, which consisted of the clothes he’d worn, a pair of scuffed boots, the heavy gold ring that Council employees always wore, and a handful of dust. Luca scooped up everything but the dust, which would soon enough disperse in the gentle breeze. He’d dump the clothes in a trash bin somewhere; the ring went into his pocket.

  He’d almost been too late for Chloe Fallon. He’d even hesitated a second when he saw Enoch seize her, thinking Enoch was simply going to feed. Then he’d heard what Enoch said, the questions he’d asked her, and realized there was something much bigger going on.

  He was sorry he hadn’t been able to question Enoch, but from the second he’d intervened he’d known how it would turn out. Enoch’s eyes had flared with panic when he recognized Luca, knowing at once what it meant: that Luca knew he had killed Hector and had followed him. For Enoch, it had been a fight to the death, because he would rather die than let Luca take him alive. Unfortunately, he’d taken his knowledge with him.

  This was one time Luca’s reputation had worked against him. If Enoch hadn’t been so frightened he wouldn’t have fought so hard, and if he hadn’t fought so hard Luca could possibly have subdued him. Instead, he’d been pushed to his own limits by the frenzy with which Enoch had attacked, and in the end had had to literally tear his opponent’s head off. Luca was drenched in blood, something Chloe hadn’t noticed thanks to the reassuring glamour he’d used.

  Now he was back to square one. No, worse, dammit: Enoch had been his only lead, so now he had no lead at all.

  The hell of it was, he wasn’t completely unsympathetic to the rebels or their cause. When had the vampire community turned corporate? When had they become more concerned with maintaining secrecy and order than with living their long lives to the fullest? Luca could see how easy it would be for a strong leader to convince frustrated vampires that, with planning, a takeover would be easy enough. Damn, it probably wouldn’t take much of an argument to convince Luca himself.

  The problem was, he could see where such a rebellion would lead. The vampires might take the upper hand, for a while, but it wouldn’t last. Humans had the numbers, and the ability to close themselves in their homes and simply not allow access. Any war between humans and vampires would come down to individual skirmishes across the country—and then the world. The vampires’ natural weaknesses would be discovered, they’d be hunted down and slaughtered when they were at their most vulnerable, and then the few strongest who were left would have to virtually seclude themselves from the world to keep from being found out, emerging only when they absolutely had to feed.

  He’d seen it all before. The outcome had n