“Goddamn it.”
The Prime stormed out of the interrogation room into the waning night, leaving the corpse of a once-trusted ally in a pool of her own blood.
“I don’t know what happened, Sire,” the Elite who had been watching the cell said, pleading in his voice. “No one went in or out of that room before you arrived.”
David whirled around on him and caught him by the throat, lifting up slightly. “If you’re lying to me,” he hissed, “I will cut out your lungs and feed them to you.”
“I swear . . . I swear, Sire. Question me however you need to.”
He dropped the guard, who looked like he was about to piss himself, and stalked away from the building. He was halfway across the garden by the time Faith caught up with him.
“We searched her while she was unconscious. I don’t know where the stake could have come from, much less how she managed to get it through her own heart.”
He stopped, taking a breath, appalled by his own lack of control. “Have the car brought around. I’m going into town to hunt.”
“It’s getting late—”
“Just do it.”
Faith nodded once and stepped away to call Harlan while David stood brooding beside the driveway.
Helen had deliberately ripped off the sleeve of her uniform to display the Seal of Auren on her shoulder before she’d somehow staked herself, alone, in a locked room with a guard. How long had she been working for the enemy? Almost every attack had occurred somewhere that a patrol unit had conveniently been absent from. She had to have been sending the duty schedule to her masters. But why had they chosen to up the stakes and start killing the Elite now?
Whatever their game, it was working. They were finding and exploiting holes in his security, and by doing so learned where he was weak. He would be impossible to kill outright, but if they kept poking and prodding, they’d find a place to slip in, as he had done with Auren. If they weren’t eliminated, it was only a matter of time. He’d seen the strategy before.
He paused midstride and narrowed his eyes. Seen it before.
“Star-three,” he said into his com.
Faith popped up at his elbow. “Yes, Sire?”
He turned to her. “While I’m in town, I want you to go into the archives and pull all the files on the Blackthorn syndicate.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “You don’t think . . .”
“This is starting to sound too familiar,” he replied. “The feints, the slowly rising body count, starting with humans . . . the Blackthorn took responsibility for Arrabicci’s assassination, and I’m well aware that they hate me.”
“But Prime Deven had them all executed,” Faith insisted. “The entire cult was wiped out. There aren’t any Blackthorn left.”
“Perhaps not. But either a few survived the wars, or someone has been taking a page from their playbook. Regardless, I want to see the files.”
“Yes, Sire. Are you sure you don’t want me to accompany you into the city, things being as they are?”
He shook his head. “Even assuming they can kill me, they’re not going to try yet. They’ll work at chipping away my authority so that when they do take me out—theoretically—there won’t be a huge resistance.”
She didn’t like it, but he didn’t care. He had already fed once tonight, but the energy he’d expended trying to teach Miranda had left him hungry again. He couldn’t think clearly with his veins itching and burning in his throat, and a yawning emptiness in his stomach.
He settled into the car, directing Harlan to one of his usual hunting grounds.
Just before they pulled away from the curb, he signaled for Harlan to wait and rolled the window down, beckoning to Faith.
“Check on Miss Grey when you finish with the files.”
And if there was a knowing little smile on his Second’s face as he rolled up the window, he chose to ignore it, for now.
The myth was that vampires could not catch or carry disease. It was close to truth, but not true.
Their lives depended on speed, ironic considering their lives and physical ages never moved. They could regenerate skin, tissue, even bone within a matter of hours, sometimes minutes, depending on the wound and the strength of the individual. It was that rapid healing that kept them from dying unless their bodies were completely destroyed by fire or sun. Severing the head meant there was no time to heal and no way to focus power enough to recover before death took its toll.
Wood was another matter; something in the cellular structure of wood slowed down the healing process almost to the rate of a human. The heart was the most popular strike because it caused almost instant death, but any major artery pierced by wood could be fatal if the stake wasn’t removed and the bleeding wasn’t stopped fast enough.
By the same token, communicable diseases were killed by their white cells as quickly as they could heal a bullet wound, but if the disease was advanced in the human it came from, it could linger as long as several hours.
Diseased blood tasted bad. That was another way they avoided it. Every human’s blood held layer upon layer of taste and scent, conveying a full profile of the human’s health, living environment, and habits. Many of those same flavors could be scented as well so the predator could avoid tainted prey.
He could tell at ten meters if someone had a cold, allergies, or an unusual diet; vegetarians tasted cleaner, but sometimes a greasy burger was exactly what was called for. He could smell drugs, cigarettes, alcohol. He could taste ancestry as easily as he could taste cancer. They all had their preferences, but there was no reason to be indiscriminate.
Drugs and alcohol worked the way diseases did. He’d fed on a lot of hippies in the sixties just for the high. Everything humans did with their bodies and their energy affected how nourishing they were to his kind.
Sex, too, had its own range of tastes. Vampires drank desire, pleasure, and pain in the blood, often with equal abandon.
He didn’t ask her name. She didn’t ask his.
The club crowds were thinning by the time he got to the city, but there were always places to find suitable prey. The mortal population of Austin had no idea how many of its Sixth Street bars and dance clubs were owned by vampires who set up the perfect hunting grounds for their real clientele. The bouncers let in only the healthy and clean. They provided cheap drinks and kept out the scum. Ignoring the fact that entering such an establishment was likely to end in holes in one’s neck, they were safe places for humans to enjoy themselves . . . with a hidden cover charge.
She was in her midtwenties, shorter than him, with small hands and intelligent green eyes. She had been about to leave after a hard night of partying. Her boyfriend had dumped her that very day and she’d come to get wasted with her friends, hoping to hook up with someone to make her forget.
He was well acquainted with the club. He owned it. He had his own booth and his own private room in the back that he had used at least once a week as long as he had lived in Austin.
It was three hours before dawn when he escorted her into the room, and two hours before dawn when he escorted her out.
She had such soft skin, pale and sweet like vanilla ice cream. Her nails dug into his shoulders as he parted her thighs with an expert hand, teasing her. While he stroked her body, his power caressed her mind, and she cried out, her muscles tightening around his fingers.
She was already sweating by the time he peeled the tight T-shirt from her torso, exposing the flat plane of her belly and the swell of her breasts to his mouth. Too flat, almost . . . he would have preferred she were softer, with more curve at the hip, perhaps fuller lips . . . but she tasted like summer, like a woman who had never seen death or deliberately caused anyone pain, and he drank in that innocence, then drank her blood.
His teeth found purchase in her throat, and to distract her from the pain, he opened her legs again and entered her, the combined pleasure of it almost too much to bear for them both. She wrapped her legs around his waist and lifted her hips to meet his, and thank God, she didn’t bother with the theatrical moaning most human women did. It would take a far greater fool than he not to recognize a faked orgasm.
The real thing, though, was almost as good as blood. Life energy was their true nourishment, and the most usable form for his kind was the blood, but there were other forms that, though lacking in staying power, were far more enjoyable.
He lifted his lips from her throat and licked delicately at the wound to speed its healing, his senses reeling with satisfaction. Everything else simply melted away.
He was so grateful that he brought her twice before finishing himself, then again before releasing her. Women, he had always felt, had gotten a raw deal sexually speaking. It was so easy for men, but women took work, and they put up with a lot from the dicked gender. The least he could do was make it worth their while.
She was breathing hard, the last tiny tremors still running through her body, her eyes shut tightly. Neither felt the need to speak . . . but as he lay on top of her, supporting himself with his arms, he looked down and realized for the first time that she had red hair.