THE PERFECT TEN (Boxed Set)

one who attacked me?”
    If she hadn’t been watching closely, she might have said his flat expression remained unchanged, but she saw the flash of agony deep in his eyes. Good. He deserved to suffer. He’d hijacked her life!
    “Now, your friend Janecek knows who I am. Shit, he knows where I am. And he seems to want me.”
    “We can protect you.”
    Ainsley plunged on, ignoring his assurance. “Could you explain that for me? What is it that suddenly makes me the prize in your deadly little father/son war?”
    Delano brought his hand down on the table with a resounding thump. “Once and for all, he is not my son! I wish to God I’d left him to die, a nine-year-old monster.”
    “I wish you had, too! Because now he’s an adult monster and he wants me. What I want to know is why?”
    “Your blood.”
    Delano rubbed his forehead as though trying to erase a headache. She hoped, rather viciously, that it was a migraine.
    “Oh, yes, my blood. We’re back to that. Okay, let’s have it. What’s so special about my blood that every vampire wants it? For God’s sake, I’m A positive , the same as a quarter of the population.”
    His face darkened. “I’m the one who wants your blood, Ainsley. Janecek just wants you dead.”
    Despite herself, she put a hand to her mouth. “Dead? Why?”
    “Remember I told you about those rare people with the anti-vampire agent in their blood, dating back to the earliest history of vampires?”
    Oh Jesus oh God oh no. “I’m one of them.”
    “I’m afraid it’s worse than that,” he said softly. “I believe you’re the last of them.”
    “No!” She shook her head. “No way. That can’t be.”
    “The gene was confined to the Merzetti family, a small clan with its roots in Sicily. The family was reputed to have been hunted down and eradicated by vampires centuries ago, but isolated tales persisted throughout time of the Merzetti Effect.”
    “The Merzetti Effect?”
    “If a rogue fed on a member of the Merzetti clan, he died.”
    “But I’m no Merzetti. Hell, I’m not even Sicilian! Look at me.” She lifted a fistful of white-blond hair and thrust it toward him. “I can’t be Sicilian.”
    Delano smiled sadly. “All the Merzetti’s of this strain were fair-haired and fair-skinned. I’m afraid it made your ancestors very easy to hunt in your homeland.”
    “No.”
    “Yes. There can be no doubt. You carry the Merzetti gene.”
    Ainsley’s mind whirled. “But you said they were all hunted down and killed. If that’s the case, how do you explain me?”
    “For thirty years, I studied the Merzetti family. I pored over ancient records, studied the local lore. From every angle I examined it, it appeared that one Merzetti female — the teenaged Gabriella — was unaccounted for. I theorized that she’d escaped.”
    “It took you thirty years to figure that out?”
    “I’m afraid we’re talking about an era that predates reliable vital statistics and searchable databases. I had to put it together from family bibles, church records, graveyard markers, old diaries, scraps of gossip, folk tales, you name it. The information I uncovered eventually led me to North America, where I’ve spent a good deal longer than thirty years searching for Gabriella’s offspring. Unfortunately, even as the search tools got better, the trail itself got colder.”
    It brought it all home, somehow, the reality of it all, listening to this man, who routinely made use of gene mapping technology in his high-tech lab, calmly discuss the cruder tools he’d had to work with a century ago. Ainsley wet lips gone suddenly dry. “And the trail got colder why? Because of the sheer size of geographic area to be searched?”
    “That was a challenge,” he allowed, “but not the biggest one. The main impediment was the propensity for the Merzetti women to bear only daughters, whom they have a habit of abandoning, immediately and anonymously, to foundling homes. And those daughters go on to have daughters of their own, which they promptly abandon to foster care. Thus the Merzetti name has long been lost to Gabriella’s descendants. And as a consequence, I’ve had to trace every female foundling abandoned on a church step or shelter in every city, town and village, for the last hundred years.”
    No, no, no! Ainsley put her hands to her ears to shut out the sound of his voice. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t.
    In the next instant, Delano was there, pulling her hands down. “I