Long term? I’d thought that Nikos might be Mr. Long-term Affair but that was when I just guessed, didn’t know. Now…now I was in New York for some excitement. For pushing boundaries, testing limits. Not for anything domestic. I’d sort out LTA later.

His hand stopped. “What?”

“Nothing.” Or nothing I wanted to deal with now. “Can we talk about my crazy cousin? We only have until midnight.”

He frowned down at me. “Why midnight?”

“ Aylmer said vampires are going to be brainwashed into attacking humans in Times Square tonight.”

He sat up, eyes cool and clear. “Tell me everything.”

The taciturn general was back. I should have seen it before. Probably part of why I wasn’t totally freaking out at the two-and-a-half-millennia thing. A Spartan vampire. Incredible, unbelievable. But it fit beautifully with the Nikos I’d experienced. And it sure beat the scenarios I had been dreaming up.

He let me talk without interruption. As I finished he arrowed off the bed for the dresser. The mattress got several inches higher. “I want to meet your cousin.” He dressed quickly, efficiently. Oh yeah, definitely military.

Bruce drove us back to the brownstone. In the lobby of Aylmer ’s building I sorted through the keys he’d given me, but none of them got us in. That giant key ring and we were reduced to flathanding again. I guess with guys it wasn’t size but how they used it. Aylmer ’s huge ring got us nothing.

Nikos’s huge palms got us half a dozen buzzes.

Aylmer ’s apartment looked the same as when I’d left it, a disaster. Smelled the same too, unfortunately. Nikos’s nostrils flared.

I said, “It’s just month-old garbage.”

“No. Blood. Fresh.” His eyes narrowed and he prowled into the apartment, unnervingly like a beast of prey.

I ran after. Fresh blood could mean anything from a paper cut to a bad wound to…dead bodies. “How much blood?”

“Enough.” He caught sight of my face, which must have been pale beneath my perpetual tan, and hooked my chin with gentle fingers. “Not that much.” He kissed me.

“Oh. Good. Where?”

“Bathroom.”

“Probably just bandaging a scrape then, right? Probably…oh, no.” The bathroom was a door off the kitchen.

Through it I saw blood.

A lot of it.

“Don’t look.” Nikos blocked my view by shifting his massive body. “It’s not as bad as you think.”

“That much blood?” My memory splashed drying brown all over the peeling floor, spattered it down one thick plaster wall. “Let me see him, maybe we can still help.”

“ Aylmer ’s not here.”

“What? No, that can’t be. He never leaves his loft.” And with all that blood…my vision wavered.

“Twyla.” Nikos took me by both arms. “I know this is shocking to you, but it’s really not so bad.” He waited while I took a deep steadying breath, then released me to move into the bathroom.

I followed to the doorway. “So Aylmer walked out of here on his own? It only looks like a gallon of blood?” I managed to peek around Nikos’s massive frame, saw he was right. No body lay anywhere in the tiny bathroom.

“He lost one, maybe two pints. Made him dizzy, but didn’t kill him. Ah.” A tink told me Nikos had picked something out of the shower base. “Bullet.”

“ Aylmer was shot? That’s bad. A bullet in the heart…or the brain… Oh, God.”

Hands caught my shoulders, pushed me to the floor. Tucked my head down. “Easy, Twyla. Not the brain. No gray splatter. And pumped blood is a different spray. Leg, probably, or arm. Shh, it’s all right. I’ve got you.”

I shook with cold and shock, my only thought being how damned chatty my vampire got when he thought I was losing it. Personal problems? Relationship woes? Monosyllabic grunts. But get me an inch from crying… I rubbed my prickly eyes and realized I was closer than an inch. I turned my face into his warm chest, let him hold me and rub my back.

When I could sit without embarrassing myself I took a deep breath. Gathered a very tattered cloak of my normal competence around me. “So. What does this tell us?”

“That’s my girl.” Nikos sat cross-legged on the cheap kitchen linoleum, pulled me into his lap and cuddled me close. “Two men were here.”

“Two men? How can you tell? Although…maybe that means it wasn’t Aylmer who was shot. Maybe-”

“Smell tells me there were two. But the blood is your cousin’s.”

“How can you know that-” I remembered that he drank blood for a living. “You tasted it? Oh, yuck. But how do you know it’s Aylmer…wait. It tasted like me?”

A little purr started. “You’re smart.”

“If I’m so smart what am I doing aiding a madman?” I was shaking again. “Why do haughty rich women look down on me? Why is my sister a happily-married brain surgeon and my brother halfway to Marine general while I’m only a glorified secretary?” I covered my mouth. Where had that come from?

“Shock,” Nikos said, answering my thoughts. “And breaking some boundaries automatically felled others.”

Since I wasn’t sure what was going to come out of my mouth, I didn’t reply. And here Nikos was getting downright talky. Like we were learning from each other. Maybe there was a future for us after all.

I had not just thought that. Shock. Yeah, shock was making me weird out.

Nikos laid a light kiss on top of my head. “It takes a lot to rattle my Twyla. I like that.”

My Twyla? Sometimes it only took a few words to completely freak me. “Don’t say stuff like that unless you mean it.” I scrambled out of his lap, rose to my feet. “Who do you think the other person is?”

“Klaus. He’s glib, annoying and far too interested in you.” Nikos frowned. “But he wouldn’t have left the blood.”

“Klaus…from the plane? But why wouldn’t he have left…oh no. Another vampire?” I sank to my knees. “I should be getting used to this. Look, you may be right about Klaus. I saw him here, at the brownstone.”

“What?” Nikos’s fangs shot out and his skin hardened alarmingly.

“But if they’re working together, why would Klaus shoot Aylmer? Wait.” I ran through the sequence of events in my head, from the plane with modelboy Klaus to Aylmer ’s hushed whispers to Aylmer slamming out of the kitchen.

“ Aylmer must have called Klaus to complain that I wasn’t taking him seriously. But in case I did listen, Klaus came here to silence Aylmer.” My knees collapsed. Abruptly I sat back down. “ Aylmer was shot because of me.”

Nikos gathered me into his lap again. “If it helps, I don’t think Aylmer is dead. He would have squirreled away ‘evidence’ somewhere.”

It helped. As I relaxed, Nikos tucked me close. “Twyla, this frightens you, but you’re still fighting. You are a strong warrior.”

“I’m glad you think so.” I burrowed deeper into his strong chest, just for a minute. “I’m not my brother the Marine.”

“A good thing. I would not have enjoyed sex with him.”

I felt the start of a smile and sat up. “See. Not a lot of words but just the right ones. All right, how do we find out where they’ve gone?”

“The boxes in the living room, to start.”

The letter boxes were labeled eMailnXpress. I opened one, pulled a sheaf of papers from it and was surprised when more tumbled out. They were connected, multi-part printouts. I scanned a couple, saw lists of items, quantities and weights. But instead of dollar amounts I saw cities. “What are these?”

“Freight bills,” Nikos murmured thoughtfully. “ Aylmer audits truck lines.”

I tossed the papers back into the box. “How can these help us find them? You know, things were a lot easier when all we had to do was stop my crazy cousin-wait.”

Nikos cocked a jet brow at me. Maybe his version of “tell me more”. He wasn’t as closed off as I’d originally thought.

I picked out a form. “Look at these. Paper, and pin-fed at that. Eighties technology. And Aylmer himself is stuck in the fifties.”