Iris Johansen - Blood Game

“I’ve already started. I contacted the Italian police. In the last ten years there have been a number of massive strokes among the cult group that originated in Fiero. What a coincidence.”

“But none that appeared to be anything but natural deaths. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Then you have your answer.” He smiled. “And now, with your permission, I’d like to go inside and say good-bye to Eve and Jane. I feel as if I’ve grown very close to them.”

“When you weren’t using them.”

He nodded. “When I wasn’t using them. I had to strike a delicate balance.”

Joe stared at him in disbelief. “You actually mean that.”

“Of course. You’re a man who sees only one path and forges forward on it to the end. I have to walk many paths, and when I see quicksand, I have to skirt around it.”

“And do a balancing act.”

He smiled. “Exactly. Now may I go in and see Jane and Eve?”

Joe stared at him for a moment, then turned and strode up the steps. “If they want to see you. I’ll ask them.”

“They’ll want to see me.” Caleb leaned back on the door of his car. “They’re two women who like to put a period at the end of an episode. Good-bye is a period.”

“I’LL MISS SITTING HEREand looking at your lake.” Caleb took the cup of coffee Jane handed him and leaned back against the post railing, his hand lazily stroking Toby’s head. “I don’t think that I’ve ever felt quite so peaceful as I have in those moments.”

“Peaceful? You?” Jane crossed to the swing and gave Eve her coffee before dropping down beside her. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I have my moments.” He took a sip of his coffee. “There’s a lake near Fiero that I visited when I dropped in to see Maria. It was a peaceful place too.”

“Maria Givano?”

“Yes.” He gazed out at Joe, who was standing on the bank of the lake several hundred yards away. “Quinn is distancing himself from our little coffee klatch. I wasn’t sure he’d even let me in the cottage.”

“Did you expect anything else?” Eve asked. “He still doesn’t trust you.”

“But you trust me.” Caleb’s brows lifted. “Amazing. Since I haven’t done anything to persuade you.” He paused. “And what you saw in the cathedral wasn’t something that would inspire you to want to draw closer to me.”

“No.” Eve would never forget that horrible scene. Caleb had been like someone who had stepped out of a horror story, the stuff of which nightmares were born. Yet she could not keep herself from separating that man from the Caleb she had grown to know. “And you don’t want me to draw close to you. You want to stand apart. Have you ever been close to anyone, Caleb?”

He shrugged. “When I was a child. My uncle, my parents, my sister. It didn’t seem worthwhile to make the effort with anyone else.”

Jane leaned forward. “Because you couldn’t be sure it would have been a genuine closeness? It was too easy for you to make people like you, even love you. You told me that you had trouble withstanding temptation.”

“What is this?” He tilted his head. “Am I having some kind of psychological evaluation?”

“Yes,” Eve said. “Because you barged into our lives and made a handprint that we can’t erase. Jane and I discussed it, and we decided that we had to get a grip on you before you slipped away.” She smiled faintly. “So I called Megan and asked her questions. She didn’t know the answers but she phoned Renata. She knew if anyone could tell us about you, it would be Renata.”

Caleb nodded. “Yes, our Renata’s a storehouse of information. But she usually keeps everything she knows confidential.”

“Megan and she are very close,” Eve said. “Renata trusts her.”

“And just what did Renata tell Megan?”

“Only what we asked her to find out,” Jane said. “The killing of Maria Givano seemed to be the beginning of everything. We asked why her death was the trigger that set you hunting Jelak.” She paused. “She was your half sister.”

“You could have asked me.”

“But you might not have told us.”

He nodded. “Possibly. Because one question might have led to another.”

“And it did,” Eve said. “She’d married a year earlier and taken her husband’s name of Givano. But her birth name was Caleb.” She shook her head. “But even that wasn’t totally correct. Because the family had changed their name when they’d moved away from Fiero. She would have been Maria Ridondo.”

“Indeed?” Caleb asked mockingly. “Then you’ve put two and two together and come up with the brothers who were the scourge of Fiero, the wicked purveyors of the dark arts, who held the village in thrall for decades.”

“Yes,” Eve said. “How dark were their arts, Caleb?”

He didn’t speak for a moment. “Very dark. Jelak wasn’t far off about the vampire gods.”

“And the power,” Jane said. “I was thinking about what you said about Jelak believing that invisibility was part of the powers he’d attain after resurrection. That was too over-the-top for me to accept. But then I started to think about the way you could move around wherever you wanted. If anyone stopped you, then you just changed their perception. That’s a form of invisibility.”

“Legend has a habit of twisting truth,” Caleb said. “But Jelak had enough truth mixed with legend to fuel that ambition.”

“You’re a member of the Devanez family Megan told us about?”

“Yes, the Ridondo brothers fled Spain during the Inquisition and settled in Fiero. They decided that the only way they could keep themselves safe from informers to the Church was to keep the villagers terrified of retribution.” He shrugged. “It worked, but how much blackness can a soul take? When they decided that they would leave the village and try to start a new life, it was almost too late. They settled, they had children, grandchildren, time passed.” His lips twisted. “With only minor episodes that could be called totally wicked. But the call of the blood never entirely goes away. Neither does the knowledge that the power is there ready to be tapped. Most of the Ridondo descendants found it was safer to become hunters to expel some of that passion and leach away the darkness.”

“As you did.”

“As I did.”

“Your sister,” Eve prompted.

“I was never home much. I was always away from the time I was a teenager. My parents sent me to live with my uncle because they decided that he could handle me better than they could. He was a hunter.” He shrugged. “I don’t blame them. I was showing signs of being a throwback to the first Ridondos and that would have been awkward for them.”

“Yes, I’d describe a tendency toward vampirism as being very awkward,” Jane murmured.

“And they didn’t think I’d be a suitable guardian for my sister, so before they died they set up a trust find and made arrangements for her to go to a series of private schools. I admit I resented that lack of confidence. I loved Maria. I would have seen that she had a good life. But Maria was years younger and very different from me. No darkness about her. She wanted to live life and drain every minute of pleasure from it.”

“You did love her,” Eve said, her gaze on his face.

“Oh, yes. As I said, there weren’t many people that I did care about. Anyway, she met a young man while on vacation in Paris. Carlo Givano. Handsome, charming, hardworking, totally devoted to making her fall in love with him. He persuaded her to elope and took her back to his home, a vineyard outside Genoa.” He paused. “When I went to visit her, I liked him. I went away convinced that she’d made a decent marriage.”