No. Her goal was the bastards that created the conditions. She wanted the men like Bernie Madoff, and bankers, and politicians, and corporate moguls who stole from the poor to give to the rich. Her best feeding grounds were on Wall Street or in the high-rent districts. They also ate a better grade of food and drank top-shelf liquors and wines. Their blood was all the richer for it.
Tanya crossed through the park to save time. Maybe she’d dine in Greenwich, Connecticut, tonight, or even scour SoHo. Tonight was going to be different. No more petty thieves and thugs. The cops could handle them. She’d go after the ones that had enough resources to buy their way out of prosecution. Yeah … it was time to upgrade. But a presence behind her gave her pause.
A tall, lanky man stepped out from behind a tree before her, smoking a cigarette. Although her focus was on him, she could feel a silent but deadly hulking form behind her. Instinct told her they were both vampires. Their feel told her immediately that they’d never belonged to Dimitri. They were enemies.
Seconds clicked by. No words were exchanged. The air around her suddenly became too still. She could feel the one behind her go airborne. She could smell the freshly broken wood he grasped in his sweaty palm.
Tanya went down on one knee as the assassin hurtled over her. She came up with two steel blades in her hands and caught him in the back. But the puncture wounds missed his heart entirely. The second one was on the move, charging her, as the first one pivoted with a snarl and came at her again.
Using the tree for leverage, she ran up one side of it, flipped over them, and caught the lean one in the center of his chest. The huge, burly one hissed his fury as his friend went down on one knee.
“Get up, Pyotr!” he yelled as he got out of Tanya’s kill range. “Feed and it will all be better. Don’t allow this human sympathizer to squander your existence!”
Before she could blink, the stake the thick-muscled nemesis had been holding whizzed toward her like a missile, but she sidestepped it and caught it in a firm grip, and then quickly relay-flung it into the chest of the vampire that was slowly standing up. An explosive plume of embers lit the night around her. Now the odds were even.
She watched the huge vampire before her give his friend’s passing a moment of thought before he launched at her with visceral rage.
Taking him at hand-to-hand combat was out of the question. He seemed almost as ancient as Dimitri had been. But the question was, did he own anything close to Dimitri’s old power? Only seconds would provide an answer. Tanya held up her hands in front of her and sent a black charge of dark energy out from them. The Russian hit it like he’d slammed into a brick wall. She jumped back, winded and feeling slower. The felled vampire looked up at her, eyes completely black as he scrambled to his feet to attack again, but then suddenly burst into flames as his head fell away from his body.
Tanya jumped back and snarled. A presence stepped out of the smoke and calmly tucked a large bone knife into his brown leather jacket.
“Who the fuck are you?” Prepared to battle yet another assassin, she waited, her every sense keen.
“I am Anastas.… It means ‘resurrection’ in my native language. So, you might say, I have come back to see if the rumors were true. And they are.”
Still wary, Tanya circled him slowly, watching him turn with her in a counterclockwise direction. This vampire was definitely dangerous, but why had he helped her? There was no such thing as a free lunch, so what did he want? Maybe the chance to kill her for himself?
She drank in everything about him, trying to place him. He felt familiar, but he wasn’t controlled by Dimitri at all. Odd. His intense dark brown eyes held a bit of a smile in them, and his auburn hair hung about his broad shoulders in an old-world way. His accent had that formal Eastern Bloc ring to it, but she couldn’t place it. Strong chin, strong, solid features. Tall. Maybe six two or three. A hint of five o’clock shadow graced his jaw. Beside his brown leather jacket, he wore an ebony turtleneck, jeans, and scuffed, well-worn brown leather boots. If they both walked out of the park alive, she would not forget him.