Tanya unconsciously covered the side of her neck with her palm and walked away from the window. He’d tranced her to come to him and then he’d stood, caressing her throat with the softest kisses that instantly turned into blinding pain. Panic swept through her, but survival instinct kicked in and sent her hand clawing his groin. She was rewarded with a backhanded bitch slap that sent her sprawling across the room to shatter the small oval coffee table by the sofa.
Clearly enraged, he glowered down at her for a moment, her blood staining his mouth. He then cursed at her in a language she’d never heard, and then suddenly he laughed. That’s when she saw his teeth. It was a cruel laugh of unchecked power. His eyes were no longer intense and darkly sexy; instead they were all black, no whites showing. The eyes of a demon. The eyes of certain death.
“You will die tonight, my lovely,” he’d said. “Such a disappointment, I know—especially when you had come all this way to kill me. Ah … the vagaries of fate.”
Tanya squeezed her eyes shut and rested her forehead on the wall, still hearing his voice echoing in her mind. Then he’d lunged at her; she’d used the broken table leg like a knife to defend herself and to ward him off. It gored his heart and left her beneath a pile of burning embers. Everything from that point forward became a blur. She knew she had to move, had to get out. Up in an instant, she covered her mouth to keep from screaming, found her dress and her purse with the gun in it, and was gone.
Fifty large they’d paid her, but that wasn’t enough money in the world for what her life was suddenly to become. Others followed Dimitri, looking for his killer. At first they thought it was another vampire—she could feel them, hear their thoughts. All those he had made were looking for his heir apparent. Everything that Dimitri was and had learned bled into her mind over the days she lay dying in her dark apartment by the bay. Then one night her heart stopped, but her eyes opened. The hunger came, and with her first feeding came the knowledge that she’d never see daylight again.
Everything he’d owned, she inherited, even at times the way his words threaded through her mind and changed her normal patterns of speech. She now owned his made men, too. But in the vampire world that also meant that she owned the late Dimitri Andropov’s problems as well, namely those who had wanted to wrest power from him for a long time. And that meant a nightly vigil against those who wanted to take her down and not knowing whom to trust … not that living that way was any different than her human life had been. But still. The constant paranoia was wearing and she was new to the vampire way of life.
In the vampire world, to the victor go the spoils. This was not the legacy she’d wanted. And for all its opulent, everlasting glory, when the time came for her assassination, all that she ever was would turn into a smoking pile of embers, her memories and knowing suddenly owned by her killer. But for the moment, membership did have its privileges.
Now she understood her kind’s fascination with history and building monuments. She understood why they were so erudite in the arts. For beings that lived for an eternity, knowing that they would disappear from the annals of time by a simple assassination had to be maddening. To be both timeless yet ephemeral, therein lay the paradox.
Tanya glanced back at the small silver digital recorder and then up at the moon. She had to get out of here. Dinner and danger were on the streets.
*
“Pyotr, do not grow arrogant and lose your life for it. Dimitri was a centuries-old vampire and lost his life to a mere mortal.”
“My friend, your words bring comfort that you have my best interest at heart, but this human girl is only a month old to the ways of Vampyre. We will find her. We will kill her. It is already decided and quite a simple task.”