Chapter One

The treasure was safe—Laurent wished he could say the same for himself. He was walking down a dark, deserted street, the time was approaching midnight, and frankly, he was lost.

Heading for San Diego had seemed like a good idea when he'd hightailed it out of Colorado with the stolen laptop. But this was not the San Diego he remembered from several decades before. When had he last hung out here? Sometime in the 1940s, maybe? The thirties? The place had certainly grown since then. They'd even built an aerospace museum on the site of the Ford Motor Building he used to frequent during the daytime. It just hadn't occurred to him that what had been a nice, quiet old city would change and grow with the times.

That was one of the problems with being long-lived: sometimes change came up and slapped you on the head when you thought you had a handle on it.

But his sense of displacement wasn't his major problem at the moment; staying alive was.

Justinian, the pack leader of Tribe Manticore, had already put a bounty on his head—and to think that a week ago, Laurent had been certain the old boy didn't even know how to use a telephone.

Of course, there was that telepathy thing….

It wasn't that he had forgotten about their mental powers. It was just that he'd lived in Los Angeles for a long time, where the safest way for a renegade Tribe Prime to survive in the Clan-dominated territory was to stay under the psychic radar.

I should have stayed renegade. It wasn't a bad life. But no, I had to try to make peace with Justinian, with my past. Okay, I was mostly in it for the money, but—

Laurent stopped. He didn't see anyone, but the street no longer felt deserted. Instinct told him that he wasn't alone.

Not again.

Back in the day, San Diego hadn't exactly been a thriving hotbed of vampirism. But ever since he'd blown into town three nights ago, the locals had been all over him. They'd all been Tribe boys, which was why he figured Justinian was involved. If there were noble, snooty Clan types in the area, they were holed up in expensive suburbs like La Jolla just like in the old days, leaving the seedier sides of the city for his kind.

There were at least two stalking him. He couldn't hear their breathing, but when he closed his eyes and concentrated, he picked up the very faint sound of slow heartbeats. Their psychic signatures were masked, but he did pick up a trace of human energy that was not the usual background noise. Was he being tracked by humans, too?

That didn't make any sense, so he'd worry about it later. Right now he had a couple of Tribe Primes to deal with.

"Okay, nobody asked me to do this, but a little documentation might help the cause. I'm going to consider this a blog and rattle off impressions along with facts as I go along."

Eden Faveau paused to take a deep breath before she spoke into the tiny voice-activated tape recorder again. She wanted to yell, but she had enough self-possession to whisper.

"I do not want to be here, or doing this, thank you very much, Dad, and all the other members of the only official vampire-hunting family left in the world." She took another deep breath. "Okay, that's off my chest. Actually, I could be in Hawaii right now, instead of up on a roof waiting for some vampire to show up at the appointed place and time as the oh-so-cryptic message from this Clan woman—local matri, I suppose—so portentously stated. I had my first two-week vacation planned—ever. And what happens? I get called upon to 'take up the mantle of responsibility for the family avocation' and fight evil because Dad and the boys have to be at some security conference in D.C."

Fight evil. Trip to Hawaii. Eden supposed that fighting evil had to be the first choice, but she had this desire to see flowing lava again. Visiting one of the Hawaiian volcanoes seemed like the safest way to do it.

"But we vampire hunters don't do things the safe way, now do we?" she spoke sarcastically to the recorder.

"The term evil has a certain political incorrectness attached to it since we now have open communications channels and temporary alliances with some factions of the supernatural community."

Community, ha! She made a face at her own cautious language. She thoroughly disliked assigning such things as culture and cohesion to the obvious bad guys, but that was the way vampires and other monsters were defined these days. Mainly because they didn't often cause trouble in the modern world. Heck, she had to admit that serial killers took out far more people than vampire attacks in any given year. But that didn't mean that death by preternatural blood-draining monsters wasn't still a possibility that needed to be guarded against.

"The Clan Primes have agreed to a mutual investigation of Tribe activities with the hunters. This preliminary investigation is to be carried out by me and a Prime of the Wolf Clan."

Eden looked at her watch, then down at the entrance to the alley three floors below. Not a shadow was moving down there. She didn't see anything when she checked with her night-vision lenses, either.

He was late.

She hoped this Clan guy wasn't planning on making some sort of dramatic entrance; she was so not in the mood.

Copyright © 2006 by Susan Sizemore