Keri Arthur - Embraced By Darkness

"The medics are here now. I'll come with you."

"No hospital," I said again, and wasn't sure if the words hit my lips that time or not. Because everything faded again.

When I finally woke, it was to the smell of antiseptic. Never a pleasant aroma at the best of times, but when it's accompanied by an underlying note of sickness and disease, it just became a gut-churning stench.

I hated hospitals. Always had. But it wasn't just the smells that got to me—it was the death. The feeling that the dead awaited. Even when I couldn't speak to the dead, the awareness of them in places like this had haunted me.

But thankfully, there was another scent overpowering those hospital smells, and it was all warm spice and leather. A scent I could concentrate on, depend on, A scent I'd recognize anywhere.

"Bastard," I muttered, opening my eyes to look at my brother. There were dark rings under his eyes and his lips had that bloodless look vampires tended to get when they hadn't been eating properly. He mightn't be wholly vampire, but he sure as hell looked like one right now. Thankfully, he was never likely to smell like one—even on his sweatiest days. "You took me to the hospital. I told you not to."

"You," Rhoan said tartly, voice sounding a whole lot fresher than he looked, "were muttering all sorts of things, and not one of them made sense."

"You could have guessed. You know I detest hospitals."

"I also knew you needed one. There was blood everywhere."

"Speaking of which—have you eaten recently?"

He gave me the look. Meaning he hadn't. "Don't you start lecturing me, or I'll get the doctors to hold you here longer."

"Bitch." I pushed up into a sitting position, but the sudden movement made my head spin. So, obviously not fully over that whole blood-loss thing yet. "What happened to the vampire?"

"You shot him dead."

"So? Dead is not always dead with a vampire. Didn't Jack mention something about their consciousness taking longer to fade than their body?"

"Yep." He shifted his feet from the bed and reached down into the bag on the floor. I smelled the chocolates before he pulled them out. "I brought you these. Thought you'd appreciate something decent to eat."

"If you think offering me a chocolaty bribe will make me forgive you for dragging me into a hospital… you could be right." I accepted the purple box with a grin, and quickly opened them up. The rich, chocolaty scent drifted up, and I sucked it in with a happy sigh. Not hazelnut coffee, but damn near as good. I picked out a strawberry cream and a caramel, then offered the box to Rhoan. "So did Jack actually get anything out of the shooter before his consciousness left?"

"He was a gun for hire. His calls came in on his business phone and part payment had to be deposited into his account before he'd start tracking down the target."

"He doesn't have caller ID or anything on his phone?"

"Nope. Guaranteed anonymity is part of the deal."

I bit into the chocolate, felt the gooey strawberry filling spill into my mouth. Bliss itself. "Bank transfers aren't anonymous."

"No, But the money for this one came through an overseas account."

"Which are harder to track down?"

"They are when they're opened under false names."

While I had no doubt that the Directorate, with all their resources, would eventually pin down the actual owners, it would take time. And if there was someone wanting to get rid of me, we didn't exactly have a whole lot of time. "So how did he track me down?"

"Bug underneath your car." He picked out several chocolates then handed me back the box.

"Did he put it there?"

"Nope, He was just sent the receiver."

"So someone got close enough to bug my car." Which I suppose, considering I parked either in the street or in public parking lots most of the time, wasn't a hard thing to do. "But I can't think of one person that I've annoyed enough to go to the extreme of hiring a hit man."

"What about Blake? Or Patrin?"

I shook my head. "Granted, they're both angry that I didn't manage to save Adrienne, but they still want me to track down her killer. If they were going to do anything, they wouldn't do anything until after that happened."

And personally, I didn't think they'd do anything afterward. Patrin was a bully-boy like his father, but I'd proved that I could well and truly defend myself against him. And bully-boys tended to back away from situations they knew they couldn't win.

"I'm afraid I tend to agree with you."

The dry note in his voice had my eyebrows rising. "And you've changed your mind because…?"

"Because Patrin and I had a little chat after I saw you safely into the hospital." He shrugged, not looking in the least bit repentant. Not that I really expected him to. He'd been at the receiving end of as many of Patrin's taunts and blows as I had. "He swears he wouldn't waste a bullet on useless half-breeds like us, let alone pay someone else to waste said bullets."

That was the truth if ever I'd heard it. "What about Kye?"

He frowned. "What about him?"

"How many arms and legs did you break before you convinced him you weren't intending to harm his boss?"

"None. He saw the family resemblance, apparently, and refused to intervene." He hesitated. "I have to say, he's fast for a werewolf."

"He's in the protection business, so he'd have to be."

"Yeah, but this more than that. I was moving with vampire speed, and he tracked me. Had his gun on me all the time. That's not normal."

I shrugged and popped another chocolate into my mouth. This one was nutty. Nice. "No, but he's the best for a reason. Maybe he has some sort of psychic gift that allows him to 'feel' where vamps and such are."

"Possibly." He sniffed and reached for another chocolate. "I intend to do a bit more investigation into his past. I've got a feeling we need to know more about him."

"Ah, the family trait of clairvoyance is hitting you, too, huh?"

"No, it's just my nose for trouble. And trust me, that one is." He paused to munch on his chocolate. "So, if it wasn't Patrin or Blake, then who?"

"I don't know. As I said, the only case I'm dealing with now is Adrienne, and that's sort of stalled."

Stalled because I needed to talk to the owners of the club, and hadn't gotten around to it yet. But now that Wilson was contained, I'd have the chance.

But I didn't really think it could be them. I mean, why would they want me dead? They didn't know I'd sprung their little blackmailing operation, and even if they had noticed me at the club, why would they think I was a danger? They couldn't possibly know who I was, and if they had tried to do an identity search on me, it would have come up on the Directorate computers.

Yet that man at the club—the man who had smelled the same as Jared—had appeared to be hunting me after he'd almost sprung me in the camera room. I frowned, and asked, "In your experience, have you ever met two humans who smell the same?"

Rhoan raised an eyebrow. "That's an odd question."

"It's an odd problem." I explained what had happened at the club. "It was the same scent. The exact same scent. But he wasn't Jared."

"Easily explained if he was shapeshifter."

"Jared and the man in the club were both human, not Helki."

"There's no saying Helkis are the only ones who can shift into other human forms. I'm sure there's other nonhumans out there totally capable of shapeshifting. We just don't know about them yet."

"The operative word there is nonhuman. We're talking about humans."

"There's no reason why humans couldn't shift, either."

"They're humans. Humans don't do that sort of thing. It what makes them human, and us nonhuman."

"No, that's DNA. Humans are quite capable of all sorts of psychic skills."