Rachel Lee: Claimed by the Immortal

That was almost something her grandmother would have said. Her initial response was to ignore his suggestion and assume someone might be in here. But then, tugged by some inner working she couldn’t name, she closed her eyes and reached out with those senses she so rarely used.

Shock rippled through her as she realized with absolute certainty that the house was empty. How very odd.

Come to think of it, Damien’s suggestion was odd, too.

He had no way to know she was psychic, but what he said made sense anyway. If she could feel the force, she might feel what had drawn it, or what it had left.

And she could definitely feel that thing that dogged her steps. As she stepped into the house, she felt it strengthen in some way.

She froze.

“What’s wrong?”

She looked at Damien, who looked almost like a ghastly effigy in the indirect glow of the flashlight beams. “It’s getting stronger, the feeling. The minute I stepped in here.”

He turned, facing her. “Not good. Do you want to leave?”

“And be alone outside right now? With this thing flexing its muscles?” She shook her head. “Let’s just get this done. And don’t touch anything.”

“I don’t need to touch anything.”

“What are you going to do? Smell it?”

“Perhaps.”

She felt her jaw drop a little but snapped it shut and followed him. He was already working his way from the kitchen to the front of the house. Interestingly, he passed the ground-floor study and headed upstairs first.

“What I saw happen was downstairs,” she argued as she followed him up the wide, curving staircase.

“But it started upstairs.”

She couldn’t exactly argue about that. The guy had called and said his family was being murdered, and they had all been found upstairs in bed like shattered rag dolls who had been dumped where they had slept.

She was grateful, however, for the thoroughness of the crime unit. Most of the grisly stuff was long gone, taken as evidence or to the morgue. What remained was some spray and splatter, and plenty of fingerprint dust, something she’d seen countless times.

It would still take a special cleaning crew to make this house habitable again, but that was not the concern of city officials.

In each room they stopped for a minute or two. The way Damien sniffed the air was a little unnerving, but Caro forced herself to ignore it and instead stretch her underused sixth sense to see if it could feel anything.

Unfortunately, she recoiled almost at once. Death was very much in the air. Death and pain. It hit her like a blow, and she staggered out of the room.

“Are you all right?” Damien was there, gripping her elbow. His golden eyes almost seemed to gleam.

“Death. Everywhere.”

“I smell it. The pain, too. It’s heavy in the air.”

He could smell it? But why not? she thought miserably. Pheromones might linger as strongly as the stench of blood.

“Stay here,” he said. “I’ll finish looking.”

But she followed him anyway, hovering on the threshold of each room, trying to pick out anything useful from the waves of terror, pain and death imprinted on the space.

She wondered if anyone could ever live comfortably in this house again. Or who would even want to.

At last they descended the stairs, side by side.

“Can you still feel the watcher?” Damien asked.

“Oh, yeah. It’s right behind me.”

He surprised her at the foot of the stairs, telling her to stop. “Just hold still. If Garner could sense it, maybe I can.”

So she waited, curious, frightened and sickened, while he closed his eyes. This time he didn’t sniff the air. He simply stood stock-still as if he was waiting for something.

Suddenly his eyes snapped open. “It’s done here. It left its work behind but nothing else. Let’s go.”

“But you can feel it around me?”

He hesitated. “Yes. I can. I can’t place what it is, but I think I encountered it once before. A very, very long time ago.” He shook his head in frustration. “But still I can’t place it. Now come.”

He’d encountered this before? How was that possible? What exactly was he? Or Jude for that matter. They weren’t like any private investigators she had ever met before.

Most P.I.’s operated to some extent like cops, gathering information for their clients. The difference was they mainly focused on things that were ugly in a different way, things that weren’t crimes, like infidelity, concealed assets and sometimes missing persons.

Messenger Investigations seemed to operate in an entirely different ballpark. But that was why Pat had recommended them, she reminded herself. Because Messenger Investigations handled things the police couldn’t. Like invisible murderers. An unnerved bubble of laughter tried to rise in her throat, but she swallowed it. Laughter would not soothe what had happened here anytime soon.

Outside she drew in lungfuls of fresh air, grateful to be out of that house. Only in returning to the outdoors did she realize how oppressive it had been in there. Suffocating, at least to someone with senses to detect it.

“Is the feeling of being watched lessening?” he asked.

“No.” No, it wasn’t. Not at all. Her neck prickled, and she couldn’t help looking around the darkened backyard, and into the trees and blank windows of nearby houses. Nothing. But something was most definitely watching her.

“Let’s get you home,” Damien suggested. “I need to search my memory very hard. Something is familiar about this. I just wish I knew what.”

So did she. Squaring her shoulders, she marched to the tape line, ducked under it and headed for the car. She didn’t want to let a feeling terrify her, but she had felt, not seen, that thing that had killed a man right in front of her, and she had felt it turn toward her.

Just a feeling wasn’t going to be a good enough reason to dismiss it. Not this time.

Damien grew increasingly irritable. At first it amused him, but not for long. What had he been thinking to accompany this woman? She was driving him insane with Hunger. Every whiff of her breath, every beat of her heart, every one of her scents from fear to moments of arousal when she responded to him.

But here he was, having volunteered for this tour in purgatory.

When they got back in the car, it was he who rolled down the windows this time. Too bad if she froze in the winter temperatures—he couldn’t stand smelling her for another minute in the confined space. He’d lose it. Every bit of the self-control he’d so carefully practiced for centuries was about to desert him. Hunger, quieted for a while in the charnel house, had returned, hard and heavy, pulsing through every vein in his body and threatening to overwhelm him with its power.

And that could not be.

However, he was having a bit of trouble remembering why. After all, he knew without doubt that he could seduce this woman and leave her so content she’d never think of complaining.

What was so wrong with that? Jude kept talking about humans becoming “vampire addicted,” but in Damien’s experience that didn’t always happen, and less so when a vampire was careful about both what he took and what he gave. It was possible to taste paradise in a way that left most humans simply thinking they’d had an extraordinary experience. Nothing wrong with that.

But the Hunger he felt for Caro exceeded anything he’d ever felt as a human, assuming he accurately remembered his human days. Instead of centering heavily in his groin, it filled his entire body with throbbing need that was impossible to ignore. If he didn’t battle it down, eventually it would become so consuming that he wouldn’t hear or feel anything else but the need raging in him.