In the Witching Hour Read online

  The day’s exertions took their toll. Kiana lay back in the mound of pillows and closed her eyes. Just for a moment, she promised herself. Then she’d get up, have some tea, put her jeans in the wash and call it a night.

  A shadow moved against the window. Shear curtains billowed in the breeze. The shadow stepped into her apartment. She should have been afraid. But in this odd dream she felt strangely unafraid. Smiling, she beckoned him closer.

  The bed gave as someone sat down beside her. “I’m tired,” she murmured.

  “I know,” came the velvet voice out of the darkness. “But there is something I really need you to do for me.”

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  “I want you to forget.”

  “Forget?” she asked. “Forget about what?”

  “Forget about me.” The voice grew softer, more melodic. She desperately wanted to do as he said. “There is nothing for you to know, nothing for you to find out. Forget about today. Forget about Frazier’s informant. Have a good holiday. Get out of the city.”

  “Forget,” she echoed. “But I don’t even know your name.”

  “Yes,” he said, as if he’d answered the question. Feather-soft lips pressed against hers. Then there was only the breeze from the open window.

  Kiana bolted upright. It took a moment to place her surroundings. She was in her own bed, fully clothed, still wearing her dirty jeans and T-shirt. Beside her the covers were creased, as if someone had been sitting there. She ran her hand over the tousled sheets and yanked her hand away.

  The door was bolted tight, all three of her locks in place. The sliding glass door that led to her tiny balcony was locked. She pulled back the curtains. The balcony window was shut. She ran her fingers over the window’s lock and found it open.

  She didn’t live in the best of neighborhoods. But the tiny apartment was close to her downtown beat and she loved living in the city’s center.

  Kiana ran her finger over her lips. She had been dreaming, a most delightful dream, the details of which escaped her. Something erotic, her embarrassed mind told her. It had been six months since she’d broken up with the social worker she’d been dating. Six months since a man had touched her. No wonder her subconscious was playing tricks with her.

  She eyed the window suspiciously. She could have forgotten to lock it. Two nights ago, the temperature had fallen dramatically and she’d turned off the air conditioning and let the cool breeze cool the apartment. She could have forgotten about it, but she doubted it. She cast a nervous eye around the apartment. One of the advantages of studio living meant there weren’t too many dark corners to explore. Nothing seemed out of place, nothing was missing. Shaking her head, Kiana locked the window.

  Adrian stared up at Kiana’s silhouette against the window. The vampire’s mythical powers of suggestion were highly overrated. Still, the power of suggestion could work wonders on the unconscious mind. He hoped he’d been persuasive enough. He had no business involving himself in the pretty detective’s life. Even if she made him feel human again. He had to put an end to her curiosity about him once and for all.

  A new vampire had come to town. That much he knew for certain. No one he knew would leave such a blatant calling card. He had to find out who it was.

  Turning away from her apartment, he made his way back to his car. The night was still young enough to stake out the Goth clubs where vampires usually congregated.

  Five hours later he’d been hit on by several young women. The monochrome décor of black paint and the Goth uniform of black lace and black velvet were starting to grate on his nerves. He’d spent a fortune drinking bad red wine, and he was no closer to finding out the identity of the mysterious vampire pirate. There were others he could ask, he thought darkly. But that would mean venturing where he wasn’t welcome.

  Frazier looked up as Adrian strode into his office. “Sorry about yesterday. I wouldn’t have called, except that it seemed to run along the lines of your … specialty. And we still don’t have any leads in this case.”

  “No harm done. I didn’t turn to cinder, after all. And vampires heal remarkably fast.” Adrian leaned against the desk. “But we definitely have a problem.”

  “This vampire pirate … is it anyone you know?” Frazier asked pointedly.

  “No one I know,” Adrian admitted. “It would seem we have a newcomer in town.”

  “Can you look into it?” Frazier questioned. “Ask around?”

  “Already working on it,” Adrian said. But instead of being pleased, the detective was still studying him with a skeptical eye. “What?” he asked finally.

  “You going to tell me about it?”

  “About what?”

  “How you came to have a knowledge of piracy along with your other specialty.”

  Adrian smiled, showing only a hint of fang. “Specialty?” he quipped. Could he trust Frazier with the bizarre truth?

  “Out with it, Adrian.”

  “If you must know, it did dredge up some memories.” He waited a heartbeat, then said, “Of my past life as a pirate.”

  There was a pause, while Frazier absorbed that new piece of information.

  “You were a pirate?”

  Frazier was one breath away from convulsing with laughter. Not the reaction he’d expected. Adrian nodded self-consciously.

  “You mean a swashbuckling, sword carrying, loose shirt, tight pants, boots up to your hips kind of pirate?”

  “You could have the decency not to laugh, Frazier.”

  Too late. There were tears in the detective’s eyes. “You?”

  “Yes, me.”

  “The sword and the loose shirt and everything?”

  “The whole costume. Rest assured it wasn’t nearly as romantic as the books and movies make it. Nothing looked as pretty. Nothing certainly smelled as sweet. Imagine if you will the scent of twenty men who haven’t bathed in several weeks.”

  His description did nothing to wipe the mirth from Frazier’s face.

  “Were you a big name pirate like Bluebeard?”

  “No one quite so important.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  He was still laughing, behind his hand this time.

  “Adrian the Black, actually.”

  His confession drew another peal of laughter from Frazier. “Wait, wait,” he said, waving his hand to keep his mind on the question he wanted to ask. “What about all the folklore that says vampires can’t cross running water?”

  “Really, Frazier. I’d expect better from you, what with your scientific mind and all. Actually, vampires make pretty good pirates. We exist on the fringes of society and we can see well in the darkness. And even though the Great Lakes are shared by two countries, they don’t have the same kind of surveillance that the oceans do. Add in a little human smuggling, and you’ve got ample opportunities for piracy.”

  The detective sobered. “Human smuggling? You mean illegal aliens?”

  Adrian nodded. “A situation where no one would notice if a few people went missing would definitely be attractive to unscrupulous vampires.”

  Frazier was looking paler by the moment. “You aren’t reassuring me here.”

  “Don’t worry. If there is a vampire pirate working Lake Ontario, I’d bet there’s only one. We go to great lengths not to be discovered.”

  The detective considered that for a moment. “Okay, so if it wasn’t notoriety or terror of water, then what ended your career as a pirate?”

  Adrian walked away from Frazier’s desk and stood staring at the citation on the wall of his office, but his mind was centuries away. He turned, looking back at Frazier over his shoulder. “A certain woman.”

  “Ah,” Frazier said. “A woman.”

  Centuries melted away. The institutional-green walls of Frazier’s office faded into turquoise water and gently swaying palm trees….

  The weak morning sun inched above the horizon as they dragged him into the stifling, heavily curtained interior of the cab
in below. Sensing him, she turned into the candlelight. And took his breath away.

  Hair the shade of fire, her skin the shade of alabaster, she had eyes as golden as a cat’s. “Nice of you to join me,” she said dryly. Her voice was low and sensuous. Full lips curved into a smile. It wasn’t a compliment. She drew herself up straight, stared him in the eye. “I have a proposition for you.”

  “A proposition?” Suspicion leached into his tone, despite his desire for her.

  “Yes.” She leaned nonchalantly against the wall of the cabin. “I have been searching for a partner for some time.”

  “You seem to have an able enough first officer,” he remarked. “He certainly seemed able enough when he was trying to run me through with his sword.”

  “My apologies,” she said in that husky voice. “But he wasn’t trying to kill you. My orders were to capture you alive.”

  “Why”

  She took a step toward him. “As I said, I’ve been looking for a … partner for some time.”

  “Why would you trust me?”

  “I don’t. However, I’m sure your loyalty could be … assured.”

  “I have enough money,” he snapped, growing tired of her game.

  “Oh, I have no intention to offering you money.”

  “What then?”

  She smiled. And for the first time he caught a glimpse of the gleaming white fangs nestled between her full red lips. “Something far better,” she whispered, now mere inches from him. “Immortality.”

  He should run, his better sense warned him. He should bolt for the cabin door whether her mates on the other side ran him through with their swords or not. But her golden eyes kept him rooted to the spot.

  “Do you have a name?” he whispered.

  “Moira,” she breathed. And closed her lips on his.

  “Moira,” Adrian repeated against her mouth. He savored her lips. She tasted like honey. Her mouth followed the line of his jaw. He breathed in the faint scent of honeysuckle, as her lips sampled the skin of his throat.

  He moaned, arching his neck toward her. She pulled him closer. Her hands tangled in his dark hair, anchoring him in place.

  Pain shot through him. Agony tinged with ecstasy. He knew nothing else for a long time.

  “So you became vampire pirates together?” Frazier surmised.

  Adrian sighed. “I’ve told you many times. I am not a nice person. I never was.”

  “So you’ve said.” Frazier tapped the tip of his pen against the file on his desk. The file that was growing thicker each day, with no end in sight. “And you think this vampire pirate, Moira, might be behind these lakeside killings?”

  “Oh no,” Adrian. “Moira is dead.”

  “There has to be a point to this story,” the detective prompted.

  Adrian nodded. “Moira and I became more than lovers. Together we became successful pirates. But in time, even I grew tired of Moira’s capacity for cruelty. I thought I could keep Moira as my business partner while I indulged in a more humane relationship. And that’s how I incurred…,” he smiled wryly, “the wrath of Moira.”

  Frazier cocked an eyebrow. “By human relationships I take it you cheated on her.”

  “I fell in love with a human woman named Veronique. But it wasn’t my infidelity that incurred Moira’s wrath.”

  “No?”

  “I fell in love with Veronique, the sister of one of our human associates, Gaston. Moira didn’t really care about my lack of fidelity. It was what Veronique represented that angered her.”

  Frazier waited for him to continue. Adrian tried not to squirm under his penetrating gaze while he revealed the crimes of his past life to a member of the city’s finest. “Challenge,” he said at last. “She saw it as a threat to her dominance over me. Moira made me a vampire. She thought she owned me, body and soul.”

  “Until you started getting notions of your own.”

  “Love was definitely not in Moira’s plans for me. As I gained happiness, she felt it diminished hers.”

  “So what did she do?”

  As he neared the taverns on the wharf, Adrian felt a dark shadow creep over his ecstatic mood. With keen eyesight, he scanned the shadows around him, but his search turned up only a disgruntled mongoose under a bush. Shaking his head, he continued on his route, but the scent of evil closed in around him.

  He quickened his pace, but the overwhelming feeling of wrongness refused to vanish. And then within the creeping darkness, he caught a familiar scent. And all of a sudden he knew that evil, knew it like his own reflection.

  Adrian stopped in a clearing between a row of palm trees and a bush of hibiscus. Moonlight filtered down through the sweeping palms. No use delaying the inevitable.

  He turned surveying the darkness from every angle. And still his stalker baited him, refusing to step out, withholding even the satisfaction of confrontation.

  “Show yourself!”

  His words echoed off the stucco walls of nearby villas. A rat scurried past him in the shadows. The sound of his breathing was barely audible over the rush of the sea and the whisper of the palms.

  Reflexively, his hand closed around the hilt of his sword. Useless against this particular villain. But the cold steel was comforting.

  “You might as well come out, Moira. I know you’re there.”

  Laughter mixed with the rustle of leaves.

  “What do you want this time?”

  He knew the answer to that rhetorical question. To destroy his life. To destroy every morsel of happiness in the darkness of his existence.

  “I won’t let you do it, Moira!”

  Laughter retreated, leaving only the whisper of the wind and the distant rush of the ocean.

  Evening found him in one of the taverns on the wharf. Human bodies packed in close around him. Human smells. Sweat, nearly overpowered by the scent of rum taunted him. The song of their blood thrummed with his pulse. He stared out across the lanterns in the harbor at the sky, dark as his soul. And still no solution came to him. His hand curled around the mug of rum in his hand. A prop to keep up the appearances of being human.

  Around him his crew drank oblivious to his pain and all else. Across the harbor Opportunity’s tall masts bobbed among the dark waves of the Caribbean. In that moment he made up his mind to say farewell to his new love, Veronique, and set sail the following night. Never to return.

  On his way back to his ship to put his plans in motion, he thought he heard Moira’s laughter floating among the dark clouds.

  “Let me guess,” Frazier ventured. “Moira did something horrible to Veronique?”

  Adrian stared blankly ahead, lost in his memories. “Moira did more than that.”

  Just as Frazier was about to ask more, Kiana stuck her head through the office door. Her eyes widened in surprise at finding Adrian in her partner’s office. But she recovered swiftly and addressed Frazier. “Thought I’d pick you up on the way.”

  “On the way where?” Frazier shot a nervous glance in Adrian’s direction. “And you’re supposed to be on holiday.”

  “To the lake. I’ve been called back in. There’s a robbery in progress. On the lake!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Adrian’s Miata screeched to a stop at the docks. Bobbing against the pier, a police cruiser awaited them.

  “Got a call from an island resident that there was some sort of altercation going on in one of the coves on Ward Island,” the officer said, “Thought you ought to ride along.”

  With balance learned from decades at sea, Adrian stepped into the boat. Muscles remembered the pitch and yaw of open water even if his conscious memory forgot. He held out his hand for Frazier to join him.

  “Ah, no.” To his surprise, his friend backed away from the dock.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Frazier swallowed hard. “I get … seasick.”

  “Sea!” Adrian fought the urge to laugh. “This tiny backwater?”

  Frazier coughed behind his hand. “T
hanks a bunch. That makes me feel a whole lot better.”

  “Don’t worry, detective,” said the officer in the captain’s seat. “We won’t shake you up too much. Water’s calm tonight.”

  Frazier glanced again at the waves lapping at the dock. He measured the distance from the shore to the nearby islands and paled.

  “No problem,” Kiana said suddenly. “I’ll go instead.”

  Before Frazier could draw breath to protest, Kiana jumped into the boat.

  The boat kited out from the dock, knocking her back into one of the passenger seats. Bad idea, she realized almost immediately. Her stomach lurched with every roll of the waves. With white knuckles, she gripped the side of the boat and vowed not to embarrass herself.

  Water, dark as ink stretched out on all sides of them, broken only by the silver spray of their passage. Kiana kept her eyes on the glittering lights of houses on the nearby islands.

  The prow of the boat rose and fell with each gentle wave it crested. If this is calm water, I’d hate to see what he calls choppy, she thought with dark humor. Belatedly, she regretted the burger and fries she’d wolfed down at her desk. A mad dash across Lake Ontario in the middle of the night had not been what she’d planned to do with her evening—but she was within arm’s length of Frazier’s informant. And this time she was going to get to the bottom of his many, dark secrets.

  Wind whipped hair into her eyes. On the open water, the temperature fell at least ten degrees, but she refused to pry her frozen fingers from the edge of the railing to brush the hair from her eyes or to rub her freezing arms.

  They skirted Ward’s Island, the boat skimming low on its side. Dark water stretched out beneath her. Kiana debated taking up permanent residence on one of the islands rather than make the trip back across. A clump of trees blocked their view of the rest of the island. The officer cut the motor, the boat drifted dizzily around the bend.

  The roar of an engine shattered the silence. A boat swerved toward them.