Chapter 6

      Vampires were not made for road trips.

      The red Lexus IS F Sport luxury sedan had specially tinted windows to block the sun, climate control, a V-8 engine that did zero to sixty miles in five seconds and a sound system calibrated to please extrasensitive hearing, but it was still a metal box on wheels. Mark needed to be outside, with the wind and sky. Free. Alone. He’d lost a good deal of patience along with his humanity, and what remained had been whittled away by the centuries that followed his Turning.

      Speed was his only consolation, and the 416 horsepower motor of the Lexus was begging to give it. Except there were humans in the car, too fragile to risk on the twisting roads. Bree was dozing in the passenger seat next to him. Jonathan, wide-awake but silent in the back, clutched a stuffed duck.

      Mark hadn’t let on how much he knew, or that he was taking them straight to the Company safe house in Seattle, where they could be protected. Explaining about the Company without revealing the existence of the supernatural was a delicate business, and he wanted the right environment to do it. Bree had to be convinced the safe house, with its guns and rules and guards, wasn’t a jail. If he got it wrong, she might bolt at the first gas station they stopped at, her ailing child in tow.

      Mark cast a glance in the rearview mirror. The booster seat—pilfered out of the hospital lost and found—brought Jonathan just into view. The child met his eyes in the mirror. Mark was struck again by the watchful intelligence in that gaze. The kid didn’t miss a thing.

      He tried to see Prince Kyle in the boy’s face. The dark hair and brown eyes were similar, but that was inconclusive. Maybe the shape of the eyes was the same, or the way his hair fell across his face, but he didn’t exactly have a poster of the Crown Prince of Vidon taped to his locker door. He couldn’t remember every feature.

      Mark made himself smile at the boy and turned his attention back to the road. The sun was up but it was still early, the world fresh and tipped by frost. The rolling land was a rumpled blanket of evergreens patched with gold. The sky was a rich autumn-blue. It was going to be one of those fall days that seemed a parting gift from summer—and all that sun was giving him a splitting headache.

      Mark had used the night to get Larson ready for his flight to Los Angeles and to attend to the files on his desk. Larson would be fine—at least from the bullet wound—but the hospital administration might perish from shock when they saw the completed paperwork the next morning.

      The wait had served two other purposes. It gave Bree and Jonathan a real night’s sleep, and surveillance teams were less likely to see them leave during the morning shift change. Mark had remained on the alert, but had seen nothing suspicious. If their pursuers were watching the hospital, hopefully they’d given them the slip.

      Bree opened her eyes, stifling a yawn. She was still pale with fatigue, the freckles across her nose standing out. “Where are we?”

      “We just passed through Sequim.” He focused his attention on the ribbon of highway, ignoring her soft, female smell. Or trying to. He was getting horny and hungry, and wasn’t sure which impulse was in the lead.

      She turned around in her seat, checking on her son. “We should find a drive-through for breakfast.”

      The scent of woman was one thing. Tantalizing, dangerous, but good. Mark imagined the stench of human food trapped inside the car, and nearly shuddered. “No.”

      “Kids need to eat.”

      “Kids are sticky.”

      “He’ll be hungry.”

      “I’m the driver.”

      Bree gave him a sharp glance that reproached him and acknowledged his position of power at the same time. “Fine. It’s your car.”

      It was. With a dove-gray leather interior. And she’d managed to make him, a centuries-old monster, feel bad about it. He winced. “We can stop at the Gleeford Ferry. There’s better food in town than just drive-through.”

      She sank back, turning her face to the side window until all he could see was her long, waving hair. Even it looked disgruntled. “This road we’re on is barely a highway. Wouldn’t it be faster to pick up the I-5?”

      “Someone put Puget Sound in the way.”

      She made a small noise of impatience. “I guess we’re farther out than I expected.”

      “We’ve only been driving an hour.”

      “It feels longer.”

      He realized she was nervous, but it was coming across as demanding. He stifled a growl. Being alone on his island was much easier. “There are fewer cars here. I can spot someone following us on this route.”

      With no further comments, Bree pulled a magazine out of her backpack and started flipping through it. From the corner of his eye, he saw it was one of those thick fashion rags. Each page turn was a sigh of impatience.

      Flip. Flip. Flip.

      Mark gripped the steering wheel, trying to ignore the sound. To make matters worse, Jonathan was humming tunelessly, thumping his stuffed duck against the car door. He clenched his teeth, summoning inner strength. You are the lion. The hunter that strikes in the night. You have the patience of the leopard in the tree.

      Thump. Thump. Flip. La-la-la.

      I’m not a thrice-damned cab driver. Another few hours, and he’d be alone again. Breathe deeply. No, then he smelled tasty woman. Open a window. Yeah, that was it.

      This was his nightmare. Once before, he had been responsible for a woman and her young. The Knights of Vidon had destroyed them. And I tore the first Nicholas Ferrel and his animals to pieces in retribution. The centuries that followed had been a bloodbath, an endless feud of vampire against slayer as one act of violence demanded payback, then another.

      But Mark had taken a different path since then, one of healing instead of death. He desperately wanted to stay on it.

      Bree stopped turning pages, gazing