Free Laws of the Blood 4: Deceptions: Deceptions by Susan Sizemore Page B

English set fire to it. You felt the need to wander out west, my first true love, but I stayed with the children, with the nest we founded. This is my place.”
    Rose turned back to face him. “The Greek woman came with the turn of the twentieth century, after the Great War. This is not her land. She works for the Council. She’s an ambassador, not an American. She can’t make me leave. She can’t mean me.”
    “She can. She does.” His words were emphatic, final. He put all the regret he could into his voice. “I’m sorry, but she’s ordering you to leave your home.”
    Rose crossed her arms beneath her ample bosom. “Is she?” she asked. Her voice was ominously soft, and for the first time her eyes took on the glitter of a very dangerous animal. “Is she indeed?”
    Bentencourt almost laughed with glee at Rose’s reaction. Satisfied that he had his vampire lover’s attention directed where he needed it to be, he immediately turned his attention to other factors in his plans. He didn’t need to worry about Lora right now. She was in her room, frantically pacing, trying to control the heat coursing through her blood. Lora didn’t have to do anything but seethe with pent-up hormones. All he had to do was wait for Olympias to refuse to let the young vampire take a mate. That should take a few days yet. In that time he would continue to work on Rose.
    He’d also spend the time cultivating the lovely Ms. Sara Czerny. He’d read her vulnerabilities earlier in the day. The slave was going to be invaluable to him. It was going to be so delightful to seduce Sara away from Olympias and use her as the knife pressed to the bitch queen’s throat.
    •••
     
    Alone in his house on a very quiet Georgetown street, with the door to his office locked behind him, Falconer took the tape out of his pocket and tried to decide exactly what to do with it. As he tossed the cassette from hand to hand, every sense he had told him that Grace wasn’t going to give up digging into what they’d recorded on this cassette, despite what they agreed on, despite the orders he’d given. They’d gone someplace they shouldn’t when they’d tried her little regression experiment. Someplace logic told him could not be real. Grace was going to want to go back, he knew that, maybe to prove that it was all a group hallucination. He hoped it was.
    Falconer put the cassette down on the desk in his home office. He glanced at the wall safe and thought about locking away the strange, eerily similar statements made by each of the Walker Project staff. Those similar statements would have been eerie on a normal Walk, though Walking was a psychic phenomenon they were trying to refine into a science. Astral projection had been the term for what they did once upon a time. Then some bureaucrat trying to get funding for a study of the phenomenon had coined more obscure and prosaic terms, which certainly sounded a lot less weird when going begging for funding. The people who became involved in these programs were certainly obscure, and anything but prosaic. With the Walker Project they had gone out of their way to find participants that were psychic but sane. Until today Falconer had thought that he and his loons were basically stable personalities, despite the extra added something that made them special.
    Until today he hadn’t thought he believed in vampires.
    Consciously he certainly didn’t, but his traumatized subconscious had come up with a pair of fanged women who’d fought over him like a pair of bloodsucking bimbos in a B movie. These could not be real memories, of course, but he’d managed somehow to convey his mind’s ravings. Every member of the Walker team had tapped into their own view of the same scenario—him on theground with a huge dog at his throat, while two female vampires, one a small blonde, the other tall, dark, sharp-featured, and utterly fascinating, argued. None of the Walkers had picked up the vampires’ words, audio