LITMIR.BIZ

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entire race, and maybe hers, too, if you need some added enticement. Come on.”

      They ducked out the door, and he found it much easier to move with the flow of panicked audience members than against them. Sirens were wailing already as they emerged into the night and hurried up the sidewalk. James looked and looked for the woman whose photo had appeared in the magazine his sister had shown him. The translator. Professor Lanfair. But the crowds and now the cops—who were rushing up and pulling people aside, trying to contain their witnesses—were making it harder.

      “That’s her, J.W. Just came out of the alley, and she’s flying! In heels, too!”

      James looked in the direction his sister was pointing, but there were dozens of panicked individuals on the sidewalk. And then he heard a voice shout, “Hold it right there, lady.”

      He saw one of the men in black leveling a gun at the back of a slender woman in a tweed skirt. He could only see the back of her head, but he felt her.

      Turning wide eyes on his sister, he said, “Why didn’t you tell me she’s one of the Chosen?”

      “I didn’t know. What the—”

      Just then the professor jerked forward, even as James held up a hand, an unthinking reaction. He shouted “No!” but it was too late. The man in black’s gun went off, and the bullet tore through the professor’s body. James saw, as if in slow motion, the blood explode from the exit wound like a mist in front of her, even as her back arched and she slammed facedown onto the sidewalk.

      And then there was no stopping him. He launched into motion, passing by the killer, falling to his knees beside her. Her brown hair was coming loose from its tightly wound bun, and it was glittering, too, with the rainy mist now falling on the city street. He rolled her onto her back, very gently, and his gut-level, genetically encoded need to aid anyone of her kind compelled him to help her. To save her.

      She was one of the Chosen. One of the rare mortals who possessed the Belladonna Antigen and, with it, the potential to become a vampire. Vampires sensed her kind, smelled them, and could not fight the instinct to protect them. He’d inherited that, too. But in the professor’s case, it felt like something more.

      He had rolled the professor onto her back, so the misty rain fell on her cheeks now. Vaguely, he heard his sister trying to hold off the man in black, who was trying to get past her. She was exerting her will, but he was fighting it as if he knew how. Further support of her theory that he was DPI, which would have given him training in dealing with preternatural mind control. Luckily a huge crowd was closing in, too, giving James a heartbeat more time.

      “I said stay back!” Brigit shouted. Her voice in that moment was something beyond human. The power it carried could not be resisted. Even James looked up at her, then from her fierce expression to the dazed faces of the people around them. They’d inexplicably stopped in their tracks and were unable to convince themselves to move forward again. The government man included.

      “Stay back,” Brigit kept saying, holding her hands up, palms out. She was really straining. Her eyes were beginning to emit a soft glow.

      “Easy, Brigit,” he warned. “Don’t go too far.”

      “You handle your gift and I’ll handle mine. Get on with it, J.W.”

      He nodded, looking down at the woman again. Her eyeglasses were crooked and her eyes were closed, thick sable lashes lying on her smooth skin. Upturned nose, full lips, Audrey Hepburn cheekbones. Her life was fading. James turned his palms up and stared down at them, and then he felt them begin to warm. Turning them downward again, he laid them over the exit wound in her chest, ignoring the blood and gore.

      Her blood was flowing as his hands grew warmer, and he sensed very strongly the extremely rare Belladonna Antigen every vampire had possessed as a human. She was almost family.

      The part of his family he had rejected. And yet, he could not turn away from her. Wouldn’t have, even if he could.

      As his hands grew hot, he pressed them between the woman’s breasts. His palms immediately began to emit that familiar, yellow-gold luminescence. He shifted his body and tried to block the light from the spectators around him, and prayed that his sister would be able to hold their attention long enough.

      James felt the professor’s chest grow hot, matching the energy of his palms. He saw the glow of his hands reflected there and knew the healing was beginning to take. He felt that sensation again, the one of his soul sort of reaching out from his body to connect to something more, something bigger, far beyond any individual sense of self. There was a greater whole and it was one, and he was part of it, in those moments.

      His gaze shifted suddenly and without warning to Lucy Lanfair’s face, and at that same instant her eyes flew open. Brown eyes. Staring straight into his.

      “I know you,” she whispered.

      “Easy. Take it easy.”

      “But I know you. I know you.”

      And then her eyes shifted lower, to his hands on her chest, and she saw all the blood—and there was a lot of it. She started sucking in openmouthed, shallow breaths, and he knew she was on the edge of panic. “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God—”

      “It’s okay,” he told her. “It’s okay. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

      “What … what’s that light? What are you doing?”

      The glow intensified, just as it always did at the end of a healing. It grew brighter and then died, just that fast. Like the flash of a firefly on a summer country night.

      “Get the fuck off her, pal!”

      A pair of hands gripped his shoulders, jerking him bodily up and away from her. He’d been unaware, for a few ticks of the clock, of what was happening around him. Other black coats had emerged—some from the studio, others from the dark-colored vans that were lining the street. An ambulance had backed up to the curb, and the medics sprang into action the second James was no longer blocking their way.

      He was weak. He was always a little weak after a healing, and this made two in one night, only a bit more than an hour apart. He felt disoriented, too. Il-logically, he didn’t want anyone else near this woman, and he started to push his way back to her, but his sister touched his arm.

      There’s nothing we can do now, she said, mentally. Too many witnesses, and we don’t want these suits to know who the hell we are, J.W. Not if they’re who I think they are.

       But they’re taking her—

      We’ll get her. We will. But later. This is too risky.

      Even as they carried on the mental conversation, one of the medics looked up. “There’s not a mark on her. I don’t understand. Where the hell did all this blood come from?”

      “Just get her into the ambulance,” one of the men in black ordered, and then he turned, scanning the crowd—in search, James knew, of him.

      The man had a scar running from the outer corner of his left eye, across his cheek, reaching almost to the center of his chin, and eyes the color of wet cement.

      “You,” he said loudly, pointing at James, who was some twenty feet away. “I want to talk to you.”

      Brigit tugged his arm. “We have to go. Now.”

      He knew she was right. But it was killing him to leave Lucy Lanfair. Even as his sister tugged him toward her waiting car, James was looking back, watching them lift the gurney on which the beautiful professor lay, strapped down now, into the back of the ambulance.

      She was looking straight back at him. She didn’t reach out, and she didn’t speak, but she couldn’t seem to take her eyes off him, either.

      And then they closed the doors, and Brigit gave him a shove.

      “I said wait!” Scarface commanded. He was reaching into his coat now, and James had little

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