Of Blood and Passion by Pamela Palmer Read Free Book Online Page B

hands to Arturo’s face and Arturo closed his eyes.
    “Will Lukas have difficulty without your help tonight?” Arturo asked Micah.
    “He won’t be able to get the kids out of the city until I get there—I’m the only one he has working with him who can still move between the worlds—but he’ll continue to round up all the kids he can find. I don’t think there are too many of them left. With any luck, I’ll be able to meet him at the rendezvous point before sunrise.”
    “Who’s Lukas?” Quinn asked. Bringing children into this hell world had been a new low, even for vampires.
    “A friend of mine. Lukas Olsson,” Micah told her. “He’s been rescuing the kids being brought in and has amassed a surprisingly large team of vampires to help him. More than fifteen, last count, from kovenas all over the city.”
    “Children do not belong in this place,” Arturo said tersely. “It has always been the law.”
    “They’re all trapped,” she murmured, watching as Arturo’s features began to waver beneath the magic in Micah’s hands. “So they need you to get the kids back into the real world.”
    “Right-o,” Micah said. “I feel for Lukas. He’d been living on the outside, had fallen in love with a human woman, when he got trapped here the night the trap sprung.”
    “Does she know what happened to him?”
    Micah made a sound, a strangled groan. “She does now, though Elizabeth didn’t have a clue until she walked into V.C. through a sunbeam not long ago. Lucky for both of them, Lukas found her before she could be enslaved. She’s back in the real world, waiting for him to be free to come to her.”
    Which meant either Micah or Arturo had gotten her out. Probably. The Traders could still come and go as they pleased, but of the vampires, only Micah and Arturo could hand humans through the boundary circle.
    “It’s too bad you can’t free the trapped vampires the way you can the humans.”
    “Yes,” Arturo said. “But that would have defeated Phineas Blackstone’s plan to destroy us.”
    Truth. “I’m surprised you’re able to rescue so many kids,” Quinn said, “considering it’s the vampires who ordered them brought here in the first place.” They’d been declared fodder for the next Games, essentially vampire gladiator contests.
    “A reprehensible choice by the committee,” Kassius said. “Though if there is an upside, the depths of depravity of this declaration appears to have awakened many a slumbering conscience.”
    “I think it’s more than that,” Micah said. “I think souls are beginning to reawaken. The magic of Vamp City is finally losing its hold on us.”
    They’d all begun to believe that the magic Blackstone had used to create and renew the city had been filled with such hatred that it had slowly poisoned the vampires’ souls.
    “So what do you do with the kids you free, Micah?” Quinn asked. “You don’t just leave them on the streets of D.C., I hope.”
    Micah threw her a look that said she should know him better than that. “While Lukas and the others steal their memories of all they’ve seen, I slip into the real world and steal a vehicle. Last night, I found a school bus.”
    Quinn’s brow rose.
    Micah grinned. “I drove it to the boundary circle, then carried the kids out, two at a time, and loaded them on board, fast asleep. There were more than two dozen of them. I drove them to a residential street, enthralled the first passerby I saw to call the cops, then waited in the shadows until they arrived.”
    “That must have been a sight when they first realized who was on that bus.”
    Micah nodded. “I didn’t wait around, but I’m sure it was chaos.”
    So many people within Washington, D.C. had gone missing of late. The return of so many of the children would have the city euphoric.
    “Are kids still being brought in?” she asked.
    “Not to my knowledge,” Micah said. “Not since the Games were cancelled.” He studied Arturo with