Blood Born by Linda Howard

it. Thanks, but no thanks. How many others have you kept glamoured this long?”
    She shrugged. “It’s been an ongoing project of mine, to minimize the risk we run when we bring food here. The less often it has to be done, the less likely we are to have difficulties. Intense, long-lasting glamour has always been one of my gifts, but for the past twenty years or so—not very long, really—I’ve been fine-tuning my touch. It’s very delicate, like touching a butterfly with a feather. Their minds are so weak, the ordinary glamour is a sledgehammer to their brains.”
    “Is Kristi the only one here?”
    “No, there are a dozen more on site. Male and female, all young, all pretty, and entirely ours. This is the way it was before, with humans serving us the way they should.”
    On the couch, Kristi whispered dreamily, “I can hear the ocean. It’s so relaxing.” She stared at one of the walls as if she were looking out a window at the pounding surf.
    “What did Hector think of this new arrangement?” Luca asked. In the past, donors had been housed here for a few hours, perhaps a day, then their memories were wiped and they were returned to their rightful places in the world.
    Maybe she heard the disapproval in his tone, because she stiffened and her dark eyes narrowed, but she contentedherself with saying, “He saw the logic of the arrangement.”
    Maybe. If Marie could glamour that many people for that long without irrevocably damaging their minds, that would certainly make feeding the Council less of a logistical problem. He shrugged. “I can see the benefit, I guess, but I’m still not interested.”
    Marie shrugged, too, then closed and locked the door. If Kristi was so willing and the glamour so perfected, Luca wondered, why bother with the lock? Marie turned, headed for the stairway with a sway in her hips. “Find whoever killed Hector,” she said without looking back. “I know you’ll be looking regardless of what the Council says or how long it takes the fools to reach a consensus. The murder of a councilman can’t be tolerated, or we’re all at risk.”
    Was her concern genuine, or was she simply throwing up a smoke screen? After all, her insistence that humans should be subservient was in line with the rebels’ way of thinking, but not unusual at all in the vampire world. Probably all of the Council members felt the same way, even though they bowed to necessity when it came to keeping their own existence secret.
    Luca followed her back to the entryway, then let himself out. The hot summer sunlight seemed to eat at his skin, but he didn’t show any reaction as he strode away. When he was out of sight of the building, he checked to see if he’d been followed—he hadn’t—then he began backtracking. He knew who had killed Hector, but not the Council member behind the murder. How deeply did the betrayal go? How organized were these rebels, and how close were they to bringing disaster down on them all? Yes, he was hungry, and the hunt called to him, but he had control over even his most basic needs, and feeding would wait … for now.

CHAPTER
FOUR
Potomac neighborhood
    Her captors left her alone more frequently these days than they had in the beginning. Nevada Sheldon had been twenty years old when she’d been taken, a college student oblivious to the dark world beyond—and yet so close to—her own. She’d certainly had no idea that she was a witch. At first she hadn’t believed them. True, she’d had good instincts all her life, and on occasion small wishes would come true, but she’d never considered those little oddities to be a sign of power. Everyone had things like that happen, right?
    The power she possessed now would have been frightening and unmanageable for the girl she’d been then, but now she had the strength to move forward and make the best of what she’d discovered, what she’d become.
    Nevada didn’t know if the vampires who had taken her and her family almost three