THE PERFECT TEN (Boxed Set)

odd feeling dragging at him? What was this strange mood? He looked inward and saw the answer.
    Melancholy.
    His gut clenched. Sweet Jesus. Bring on the mortar shells. Let a hundred enemies rain fire from the sky. But please, God, keep the monkey of depression off his back. Stronger men than he had stepped outside at dawn to witness their last sunrise, impelled by an unrelenting weariness too profound to resist.
    The woman. Ainsley Crawford. That’s what brought it on.
    These past few days, she’d looked on him as though he were an ordinary, if not entirely trustworthy, man. Until that moment in the helicopter. He’d seen the shock, the shift in her eyes when he’d had to seek shelter from the sun.
    What he would give to have her look at him again the way she had before…
    Delano heard the door open behind him but did not turn. That would be Eli, bearing sustenance and a status report.
    Eli came to stand beside him at the window. “Ah, Montréal,” he said, pronouncing it the French way. “Good to be back, isn’t it?”
    Delano sighed and turned his back on the nighttime tableau. “I must be getting old, Eli. The blood doesn’t pump like it used to.”
    Eli looked singularly unconvinced, but said, “It’s been a rough twenty-four hours, I’ll grant you that much.”
    Delano raked his hair, still wet from the shower, back from his forehead. “It was our Czech friend, of course.”
    “Yeah, it was Janecek, all right.” Eli moved away to place the unit of blood he carried in the blood warmer. “Our sources in Prague confirm he was Stateside as of last week, and he was spotted in New York two days ago. And just in case we might have had any lingering doubts, the blast you left for them took out one of his key lieutenants, a merc by the name of Liam Hanlon.”
    Delano whistled. “Hanlon? Are we sure about that?”
    “Absolutely.”
    Janecek would be extremely pissed. As would Hanlon, if he were still around to reflect on his fate. Word had it Hanlon had made a deal with Janecek. When he’d served long enough and faithfully enough, he would be rewarded with his master’s eternal kiss. If nothing else positive came out of last night’s firefight, the world was far better off without a merc-turned-vamp rampaging around it.
    “The body?”
    “Our people let their people retrieve it.”
    “What about police?”
    “Nothing to worry about there. The scene was sufficiently sanitized before their arrival. The HAZMAT team that went in was 100% ours.”
    Always good when the contingency plans one laid so carefully actually fell into place. “The media? How did they characterize it?”
    “Natural gas explosion. No injuries, since you were out of town and your staff had the week off.”
    More good news. “Repairs to the lab?”
    “Already underway.”
    He nodded his satisfaction. “Sounds like everything is under control.”
    Eli coughed, to disguise either a laugh or a snort. “Under control. Absolutely. Except for that little detail that the Butcher of Bohemia is apparently out for your head.”
    “Indeed.”
    Eli shot Delano a hard look. “You know, I can do my job better when I have the full picture.”
    “Point taken. When I have the full picture, I’ll fill you in.”
    Eli blew out an exasperated breath. “Okay, I appreciate it’s a little early for definitive conclusions, but if you had to speculate, what would you say? What’s this about?”
    “If it were just me he wanted, he could have ambushed me any number of times over this past week, but he chose to strike my home, my lab. So I would say I have something Radak Janecek wants. Or perhaps something he wants to see destroyed.”
    “The fruits of your research?”
    “Definitely. Also the woman.”
    Eli’s lifted his left eyebrow, which for him was tantamount to gaping. “The Crawford woman?”
    The Merzetti woman , he thought, but instead he nodded. “Ainsley Crawford, yes.”
    “But why?”
    Delano inhaled, released his breath slowly. It was past time to tell Eli. He was right about that; he couldn’t do his job unless he knew the situation. “Because she’s the key. She can bring it all down, the whole vampire kingdom. And somehow, Radak must have figured that out.”
    This time Eli’s face showed no reaction. “Bring the Kingdom down? How?”
    Delano waved his hand dismissively. “It doesn’t matter how. What matters is keeping her safe. She is now my number one priority, Eli. The research must continue, but above all,