Merrick took one look at the thief taker, and knew he wouldn’t like the man.

“Hi! I’m Savian Bartholomew. You the vamp who’s looking for a mortal?”

For one thing, the man smiled too much. He was downright cheerful, his long face and English accent all but radiating genial good humor.

“Whew, it is hot here, isn’t it? I don’t know how you lot stand going around with those long leather coats and fedoras and sunglasses all the time. Well, the sunglasses I understand, but you must be sweltering under that duster.”

Then there was his chatty nature. He stood right next to Merrick in the shade of the portal shop building, long tendrils of some blooming flowers drifting down from hanging baskets, effectively making a screen from the people shopping and meandering along the streets. Savian chatted away just as if Merrick was a normal person, and not one of the dreaded Four Horsemen. What the hell was wrong with this man that he greeted him like a long-lost friend instead of treating him like he was a pariah?

“My secretary—really my wife, Maura—she’s a dragon, but she’s a whiz at keeping records—told me that you’re trying to track someone who was just down the coast near Genoa. Like to see a picture of Maura? Here we are at St. Moritz last winter. And here’s the sprog. Attractive little beast, isn’t he? Maura insisted he be named after me.” Savian donned an expression that Merrick assumed was meant to imply modesty. “He’s a clever little devil. Gets that from his mama, of course. Well, now! Here we are, and you need my services. Luckily, I just finished up a job in Vienna finding a troll who was wanted for some child support, and was able to take a portal out here. They really need to put in some portal shops in the north of Italy—it would have taken me forever to get here by train. But that’s neither here nor there. Let’s hear about what you’d like me to do.”

It was Tempest, Merrick decided with an odd sort of martyred satisfaction. She was infecting everyone else until soon there would be no one left who feared and shunned the sight of him as was right and proper. “There is a man named Carlo who, until a few days ago, was located in the area near Genoa. We believe he is connected with the company known as the Revelation. You know of them?”

Savian gave a low whistle. “Yes, I’ve heard whispers about them. Not a lot of info is going around, but word on the street is that they’re offering some pretty big sums of money for beings with special abilities to go to work for them.”

“What sort of work?”

Savian shrugged. “No one seems to know. There’s a story going that a mage tried to investigate them, and promptly disappeared. No idea if he’s reappeared or not.”

“Hmm.” Merrick considered this new information. The Revelation that he knew wasn’t trying to lure people in with offers of money—that appeared to be a new tactic. “If you hear of anything more, let me know. Information about the Revelation is worth money to us.”

“Right you are. Now, who is it you want me to find?” Savian all but beamed at him.

Merrick found himself wanting to be back at his villa, where he could accuse Tempest of turning the world against him. Or rather, turning it for him, which was completely unacceptable. “The man is known to us only as Victor, although he might also be appearing as a mortal named Carlo Marcuzzi.” Merrick gave the entirely too-happy thief taker the information he had gleaned from his sources, and the few items Tempest had mentioned.

Savian looked at his watch. “So it’s been, what? Two days since you’ve lost track of Carlo?”

“That’s about right.”

“Hmm. I’ll have my bloodhounds get to work on the trail, but that’s a bit long, even for them.” Savian grinned when Merrick frowned, and added, “Bloodhounds are what I call my team of sprites.”

“You use sprites?” Merrick wondered if he’d made the right choice in calling in this particular thief taker. “The little balls of light?”

“That’s only one of their forms. Most of them look perfectly human, since that’s the preferred form. Attracts so much less attention than a sentient ball of light. I have four sprites around the world who I use to pick up markers on cold trails.” Savian pulled out his mobile phone again and tapped out a text message. “The nearest one is in Paris, but she can be in Italy shortly via the portal.”

“What do you do if the sprites are the ones finding the trail?” Merrick didn’t like the idea of paying a vast sum of money to a man who simply used others to do his own work.

“They just find the signs that I can’t see. Once they identify the marker the individual leaves, then I pick it up and follow the trail.” Savian looked up from his phone. “You don’t know what a marker is, do you?”

“Of course I do,” Merrick said, bristling slightly. “It’s my job to hunt people. Markers are a sign someone has passed by a location.”

“Well ...” Savian rubbed his chin. “Yes and no. In your job, that’s probably right. But for us, for thief takers, we use a different sort of trail. Every immortal has a certain marker unique to them. Dragons have dragon scales; you Dark Ones shed something we call sanguine, which is more or less an arcane-based blood residue. Trolls leave minute plant spores, and demons, of course, trail demon smoke everywhere.”

Merrick couldn’t help but glance down at himself. “I’ve never heard of sanguine, but I know that I do not leave any sort of a blood trail.”

“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong, although I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of sanguine. It’s just the name we thief takers give it, and it’s not something you can see unless you have a sprite pointing out just what to look for. Each Dark One’s trail is unique, hence the need for the sprites.”

“But Carlo might very well be human,” Merrick pointed out.

“Well, if he is this Victor dude, then luck is on our side.”

“How so?” Merrick asked, confused.

“If he’s been around vampires, or any other immortal being, then he’ll have traces of their markers on him. The fact that the marker is changed slightly by contact with him will clue Imelda the sprite into the fact that it’s not the immortal itself who left the marker.”

“So she finds the marker, identifies it to you, and then you follow the trail? Can you do that, considering that Victor left the house two days ago?”

“I’ll give it a shot. If there hasn’t been a lot of immortal traffic in the area, there should be some residue. Of course, the samples degrade over time, so the sooner we get to it, the better.”

Merrick wholeheartedly agreed with that sentiment and, after a few more instructions, sent the thief taker on his way. He found a hotel room, and slept away the daylight hours.

He dreamed, though, dreams filled with images of Tempest that both aroused and enraged him. He woke at one point with an erection, and a determination to cut her out of his life at the first opportunity.

A gnawing feeling reminded him that it had been a while since he last fed, but an odd sort of reluctance gripped him.

“Eat,” he told himself the following evening, scanning the crowd outside the hotel, looking for a likely subject. He prefered feeding from women, since men tended to be more aware of personal-space issues, but today, as he eyed the people outside an artisans’ market, no one seemed appealing.

Except Tempest.

“I don’t need her, no matter what she claims,” he said aloud, garnering him some odd looks from passersby. Fine. If he didn’t want a human, there were animals in the vicinity. He was sure to find some accommodating horse who wouldn’t mind donating a little blood.

He grimaced even as the thought rolled through his head. He’d never before been overly picky about his food source, and now here he was making an issue out of nothing.

“This is just yet another reason why I can’t have a Beloved,” he informed his hotel room when he returned to it. “It provides yet another way someone could use her against me. Well, I’ll have none of it. I simply won’t eat until I get over this uncomfortable phase.”

He wallowed in his righteous indignation for a bit, but distractions soon left him feeling hungry and grumpy.

“I can’t believe you were so close to Victor and let him get away,” Nico, one of his brother Horsemen, said some six hours later. It was almost midnight, and the four men had gathered together on a rare videoconference.

“Because I don’t know for certain who he was,” Merrick explained. Nico, the youngest of all the Dark Ones to belong to the Horsemen, had a notoriously short fuse, and always acted before thinking. “There is a chance that Carlo Marcuzzi is Victor, but it’s far more likely that he’s a front.”

“I agree with Merrick,” Ciaran said, rubbing his face. His blondish red hair stood on end as if he’d just gotten out of bed, which Merrick assumed he had, given the time difference between Nice and Quebec. “We’ve worked too hard to find Victor to rush forward when a little observation will tell us if this man is him.”

“What do you suggest we do, Merrick?” Han asked. Behind him, Merrick could see the naked form of a woman lying in a bed, just barely covered with a sheet. Evidently Han had been dining when the call had come through. The faint sound of feminine snoring could be heard. “Do you want us to drop our lines of investigation and come to France?”

Merrick considered his options. It went against his nature to ask for help, even from his fellow Four Horsemen, but he had to put aside his pride in order to focus on their goal. “I have a thief taker working on Carlo’s trail, but that aside, the informant who set me on to him insists that Victor is still in this region. It might be helpful to have more than one Horseman here. Nico, what trail are you following?”

“One that led to a Slavic genetics company, but it hasn’t gone anywhere.”

“A genetics company?” Ciaran smothered another yawn. “Why would Victor want to meet with them?”

“That’s what my informant told me,” Nico said defensively.

“And you see how well that turned out,” Ciaran responded.

Nico’s face darkened. “My informants are normally reliable, which is why we knew Victor was operating out of France and Italy to begin with. What have yours told us? Nothing, that’s what. I don’t even know why you’re in Canada when Victor is in Europe.”

“Calm down,” Merrick interrupted before the two men got into an argument. “Ciaran is following the Revelation’s movement of money in the States, and Han is tracking down the Dark One who supposedly got away from Victor.”

“And I suppose you expect me to drop everything and rush to Italy now?” Nico asked, his tone still irate.

“I’m not telling you to leave Moscow,” Merrick growled, close to snapping at the younger man. He knew Nico was dedicated to the cause, and had an uncanny knack of telling when someone was being deceptive, but his youth and inexperience rubbed Merrick the wrong way. “I’m simply telling you what I’ve found, and that an extra set of eyes might be beneficial. If you believe your contact will provide you a link to Victor, then pursue it. There’s nothing to say we can’t come at the man from different angles.”

“I’ll go to France,” Han said, glancing back over his shoulder. “I’m done here, anyway. The man reported to us as having escaped appears to be a figment of someone’s imagination. At any rate, I couldn’t find proof he really existed.”

“I can go to Europe, too,” Ciaran said with a yawn. “It looks like the financial information isn’t going to pan out as much as we hoped. I’ve found some references to money laundering through South America, but I suspect the federal officials are watching the accounts, since activity suddenly ceased last month.” Ciaran spent the next five minutes detailing what he’d uncovered regarding transactions involving banks in Belize, the US, and Austria. Merrick disregarded most of the information about the transactions themselves, since it was the people behind them that interested him.

“If all of you are going to meet, then I might as well as join you,” Nico said as soon as Han wrapped up the summation of his investigation. Nico’s tone was tinged with petulance that Merrick thought was unworthy of a Horseman. “Although I don’t see what good having all four of us together is going to do. If Victor isn’t in the area, then all we’ve done is wasted time.”

“If you have a better lead, then follow it,” Merrick told him. “It would be foolish to ignore what could be viable information just to join the rest of us.”

“I don’t want it said that I didn’t do my part,” Nico said with a distinct edge to his voice, and disconnected from the video chat.

“Someone is going to have to talk to him,” Merrick said. “And it can’t be me, because he takes everything I say as a personal attack.”

“He’s young,” Han said, running a hand through his hair. “I’m sure we were all just as fervent as he is when we were that age. Right, I’m off if there’s nothing else to discuss.”

Ciaran stretched, and rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “I have one or two things to tie up here, but nothing of importance. I believe Merrick is correct in saying the Revelation is focused on Europe, since all my leads here have dried up.”

“It could well be that they put out some false tracks for us to follow away from the heart of the organization,” Han added. “I’m inclined to agree that we should be focusing on Europe, Italy in particular. And Merrick knows that ground better than any of us.”

“You wouldn’t know it by my results,” Merrick said, mentally damning himself for not having run Victor to earth by now. Invariably, his thoughts moved to Tempest, and the horror of what could happen should she fall into the Revelation’s clutches.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’ve done more than all of the rest of us put together. You not only found two of their operatives. You were so much of a threat they almost killed you. You’ve done your part and more,” Han said soothingly, and, with a stretch, signed off.

“You all right?” Ciaran asked Merrick, squinting at the computer screen. “You look tired. You’re not still feeling the effects of your run-in with Victor’s men?”

“No.” He thought of simply ending the video call, but Ciaran was the Horseman with whom he was the closest, and some odd little urge prompted him to say, “I met the woman who saved me, the one who gave me blood after Victor’s men dumped me at Christian’s castle.”

“And?” Ciaran asked.

“She thinks she’s my Beloved. No, not just thinks—she demands that I make her my Beloved.”

“One of those,” Ciaran asked, with an exaggerated roll of his eyes. “Ever since Christian started writing those books, women have been crawling all over me to make them my ‘dark consort,’ whatever the hell that is.”

“Exactly! She’s a fan of Christian’s books, too, and is constantly telling me what they say about us.”

“Just like you needed to be told what these books say about Dark Ones. Not that we actually read them.”

“No, of course not,” Merrick agreed quickly, ignoring the spurt of guilt that came with the lie. He told himself it was only one or two of the books that he’d read, so that really barely counted at all.

“Women,” Ciaran snorted. “They eat that drivel up because they don’t know any better.”

Merrick frowned. He didn’t like the implication that Tempest consumed drivel any more than he appreciated the slur against Christian’s books. They might not be great literature, but they weren’t that bad, and certainly Tempest appeared to have enjoyed them.

“I like Christian as well as anyone, but I have never understood why he went out of his way to write those books.”

“Well, we are interesting,” Merrick said, feeling somewhat defensive. “Tempest—that’s the woman who saved me—”

“Fed you,” Ciaran interrupted. “In Christian’s books, it would have been some woman who ‘saved you from your dark self.’ All this woman did was give you blood. We need to keep the line between fiction and reality clear.”

Merrick’s frown grew. “What Tempest did was more than just a feeding. She pulled me back from the brink of oblivion. I was ready to give up until she saved me.”

Ciaran snorted again. “You really must have had some damage to that brain of yours if you think that. No, no, I can see by the way you’re scowling that you’re going to be all protective of this woman just because she fed you when you were desperate. We’ll move past that, even if the woman can’t. I just hope you haven’t given her any encouragement.”

Merrick cleared his throat and studied the wallpaper. “I had to ensure she was safe. I owed her that.”

“Put her on a plane to somewhere remote, and forget about it.”

“I’m not sure it’s going to be that easy. She’s ... she’s fairly insistent that we’ve completed a few of the steps of Joining.”

“Aren’t they all convinced of that!” Ciaran said with a short bark of laughter. “If I’ve heard ‘Oh, Ciaran, bite me and make me your eternal love’ once, I’ve heard it a hundred times. I’d give anything to find just one woman who was intelligent enough to see through Christian’s dreck.”

“Tempest is a very smart woman,” Merrick said firmly, a flash of fire giving his voice an edge that he struggled to smooth. “She is discerning, and there’s nothing wrong with women reading books. Hell, a few centuries ago, women could have been burned at the stake for reading, and now you want to damn the lot of them for having the interest to learn more about us? You don’t deserve a woman like Tempest.”

“Good. I don’t want her.” Ciaran narrowed his eyes. “She sounds insipid and pushy.”

“She is not anything of the sort,” Merrick snarled. “She’s a goddamned goddess, and I’m done with this conversation.” He slammed the lid of his laptop shut, the sounds of Ciaran’s laughter echoing in his ears.

How dare Ciaran judge Tempest’s character? He had no idea what she was really like, none whatsoever. He didn’t see the warm glow that she seemed to exude, or the way her eyes got misty with passion, and the teasing note in her voice when she was saying something outrageous just to get a rise from him.

He spent the rest of the night grappling with a desire to check on Tempest while he dealt with a report that a Dark One in the south of Italy had gone missing. By the time he’d taken a portal to Rome, driven to Pisa—where the Dark One was last seen—and returned to Rome, only to portal back to Nice, it was midday.

That’s when the texts started.

From: Tempest

Hey, you awake? It’s noon, so I don’t know if you are sleeping or not.

To: Tempest

Yes, I am awake. Are you having an emergency?

From: Tempest

Not so much. Well, kind of. We’re wondering what you’re doing?

To: Tempest

Do I need to define the word “emergency” to you?

From: Tempest

Smart-ass. What are you doing? Are you in Nice?

To: Tempest

Yes.

From: Tempest

Good. Um. Any particular spot?

To: Tempest

Who is we?

From: Tempest

Huh?

To: Tempest

You said “we were wondering.” Who are you with? Did you find Victor? You were supposed to tell me if you saw him! Has he harmed you? Is he forcing you to text to me? Why didn’t we set up a duress word? Tell me where you are right now.

From: Tempest

Whoa now, that was like a wall of words. No, I haven’t seen Carlo.

From: Tempest

We is Ellis and me.

From: Tempest

No one is forcing me to text you. Ellis wouldn’t let me drive, so I have all the time to text without killing someone.

To: Tempest

Why are you threatening to kill someone? What the hell is going on?

From: Tempest

Henceforth, my duress word is: windowpane. I think I could work that into a conversation in which I was being forced to text you.

To: Tempest

ARE YOU WITH YOUR COUSIN?

From: Tempest

Such as, “here I am in a windowless van, one that doesn’t even have a windowpane.”

To: Tempest

Did you just use windowpane as an example, or did you use it because you are secretly under duress?

From: Tempest

I am not with my cousin. I told you that I was meeting my friend Ellis in Genoa today. You sound odd. Are you hungry? Are you missing me, but don’t want to tell me that because you insist you don’t need me, but in truth, you’re hungry and crabby and don’t get the humor in someone sending you a faux duress word text?

To: Tempest

Emergency (noun): a situation of dire peril, and not one in which you simply wish to text someone information about the picking up of friends from California.

To: Tempest

Although I will remember windowpane for future situations.

From: Tempest

What are you doing in Nice? Are you hiding from the sun somewhere like a hotel? If so, which hotel?

To: Tempest

I am ignoring all further texts from you unless they are emergency-based.

From: Tempest

OK, how about this, if you were going to recommend a hotel in Nice to someone, which would it be?

From: Tempest

Merrick? Hotel?

From: Tempest

You aren’t really going to ignore me, are you? Because I’d never ignore you.

From: Tempest

Fine. Be that way. You only have yourself to blame for what happens.

To: Tempest

What the hell is that supposed to mean?

From: Tempest

Plbtbtbt.

Merrick sighed to himself. Tempest showed absolutely no respect for him, had no fear for her own situation, and was entirely too caring for his peace of mind. “She’s coming to help me,” he said aloud, and, with a few thoughts about how uncomplicated his life was before Victor’s man dumped him on the steps of Christian’s castle, went down to the front desk of the hotel.