Книга - Twilight Hunger

Twilight Hunger
Maggie Shayne


She revealed his secrets to the world. Now he must be her saviour… When writer Morgan uncovers old diaries in her attic, she is swept into the seductive world of Dante, a man who believed himself a vampire, providing the perfect inspiration for her stories. Now Morgan is wasting away. At night she dreams of Dante, a sensual fantasy so real she can feel her life’s blood draining from her. Almost as if he were there… And he is.But the vampire’s nightly visits are about more than just fulfilling his own desires. He is the only one who can protect Morgan from her destiny. But to save her, he must trust her. With his life. With his love. With the promise of immortality.












Praise for the novels of MAGGIE SHAYNE


“The suspense will keep you guessing. The characters will steal your heart.”

—New York Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner on The Gingerbread Man

“Maggie Shayne is better than chocolate. She satisfies every wicked craving.”

—New York Times bestselling author Suzanne Forster

“Fans of vampire romance know that no one is quite as dependable as Maggie Shayne is to provide a powerful tale of supernatural love.”

—The Best Reviews

“Once again Maggie Shayne delivers sheer delight and fans new and old of her vampire series can rejoice there’s more to come!”

—RT Book Club

“… fantastic romantic suspense with a great paranormal twist that kept me guessing right up until the end.”

—Goodreads.com on Love Me to Death


Multiple New York Times bestseller Maggie Shayne is one of the hottest authors currently writing paranormal romance.

Her works are fresh and sexy, carrying the reader into a darkly compelling and fully realised world where vampires are creatures of the heart, not just the night.




Also Available from MAGGIE SHAYNE


ANGEL’S PAIN

LOVER’S BITE

DEMON’S KISS

NIGHT’S EDGE

(with Charlaine Harris and Barbara Hambly)





TWILIGHT

HUNGER







MAGGIE

SHAYNE







www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


This book is dedicated to my editor and my friend, Leslie Wainger, from the bottom of my heart




1


We children were supposed to be asleep….

But we woke, as if in response to some silent summons. We crept to the entrances of our tents and wagons, drawn like moths to the snapping flames of the central fire and the dark, leaping shadows the strange woman cast as she danced.

There was no music. I knew there was none, but it seemed to me that music filled my head all the same as I peered around the painted flap and watched her. She whirled, scarves trailing like colorful ghosts in her wake, her hair, black as the night, yet gleaming blue in the fire’s glow. She arched and twisted and spun round again. And then she stopped still, and her eyes, like shining bits of coal, fixed right on mine. Scarlet lips curved in a terrifying smile, and she crooked a finger at me.

I tried to swallow, but the lump of cold dread in my throat wouldn’t let me. Licking my lips, I glanced sideways at the tents and painted wagons of my kin, and saw the other children of our band, peering out at her, just as I was. Some of my cousins were older than I, some younger. Most looked very much like me. Their olive skin smooth, their eyes very round and wide, too thickly fringed for the eyes of a boy, but lovely beyond words on little girls. Their hair was uncut, like mine, but clean and raven black.

We were Gypsies all, and proud. The dancing woman … she was a Gypsy, too. I knew that at a glance. She was one of our own.

And crooking her finger at me still.

Dimitri, older than me by three years, gave me a superior look and whispered, “Go to her. I dare you!”

Only to prove myself braver than he, I stiffened my spine and stepped out of my mother’s tent, my bare feet covering the cool ground by mere inches with each hesitant step. As I crept closer, the others, taking courage in mine, began to come out, too. Slowly we gathered round the beautiful stranger like sinners come to worship at the feet of a goddess. And as we did, her smile grew wider. She beckoned us closer, a finger to her lips, and then she sat down on a log near the fire.

“Who is she?” I whispered to Dimitri, for he had joined us now, too, ashamed of himself, I thought, not to have been leading us all from the start.

“Stupid, do you know nothing? She is our aunt.” He shook his head disgustedly at me, then returned his enraptured gaze to the woman. “Her name is Sarafina,” he said. “She comes sometimes … though I suppose you are too young to recall her last visit. She’s not supposed to be here, though. When the grown-ups find out, there will be trouble.”

“Why?” I too was entranced by the mysterious stranger as she lowered herself to the log, spreading the layers of her colorful skirts around her, opening her arms to welcome the young ones who crowded closer to sit on the ground all around her. I sat closest of all, right at her feet. Never had I seen a woman so beautiful. But there was something else about her, as well. Something … unearthly. Something frightening.

And there was the way her eyes kept meeting mine. There was a secret in that black gaze—a secret I could not quite see. Something shadowed, hidden.

“Why will there be trouble?” I whispered again.

“Because! She is outcast!”

My brows drew together. I was about to ask why, but then the woman—my aunt Sarafina, whom I had never seen before in my life—began to speak. And her voice was like a song. Mesmerizing, deep, beguiling.

“Come, little ones. Oh, how I’ve missed you.” Her gaze swept the faces of the children, the look in her eyes almost painful to see, so intense was the emotion there. “But most of you do not remember me at all, do you?” Her smile faltered. “And you, little Dante. You are … how old now?”

“Seven,” I told her, my voice a mere whisper.

“Seven years,” she replied with a heavy sigh. “I was here the day you were born, you know.”

“No. I … didn’t know.”

“No matter. Oh, children, I’ve so much to tell you. But first.” She tugged open a drawstring sack that dangled from the sash round her waist, and from it she began to draw glorious things, which she handed around to one and all. Sweets and confections such as we had never tasted, wrapped in brightly colored paper. Shiny baubles on chains, and glittering stones of all kinds, carved into the shapes of animals and birds.

The one she gave to me was a stone of black onyx in the shape of a bat. I shivered when she placed the cold piece into my palm.

When the sack was empty and the children all quiet again, she began to speak. “I have seen so many things, little ones. Things you would not believe. I journeyed to the desert lands, and there I saw buildings as big as mountains—every stone larger than an entire Gypsy wagon! Perfect and smooth they are, and pointed at the top.” She used her hands to make the shape of these wonders in the air before us. “No one knows who built them, nor when. They have been there forever, some say. Others say they were built as monuments to ancient kings … and that the bodies of those rulers still rest inside, along with treasures untold!” When our eyes widened, she nodded hard, making her raven curls dance and her earrings jangle. “I’ve been across the sea … to the land below, where creatures with necks as tall as … as that yew tree there, walk on stilt legs and nibble the young leaves from the tops of the trees. Yellow gold they are, and spotty! With sprouts atop their heads!”

I shook my head in disbelief. Surely she was spinning tales.

“Oh, Dante, it is true,” she said. And her eyes held mine, her words for me alone, I was certain. “One day you will see these things, too. One day I will show them to you myself.” Reaching down, she stroked a path through my hair and leaned close to me, whispering into my ear. “You are my very special boy, Dante. You and I share a bond more powerful even than the one you share with your own mother. Remember my words. I’ll come back for you someday. When you need me, I will come.”

I shivered and didn’t know why.

Then I went stiff at the sound of the Grandmother’s squawk. “Outcast!” she yelled, rushing from her tent and jabbing her fingers at Sarafina in the way that was said to ward off evil, the two middle fingers folded, forefinger and little one pointing straight out. She made a hissing sound when she did it, so I thought of a snake with a forked tongue snapping.

The children scattered. Sarafina rose slowly, the picture of grace, and I alone remained before her. Almost without thought, I got to my feet and turned to face the Grandmother. As if I wished to protect the lovely Sarafina. As if I could. My back was toward the woman now, and as her hands closed on my shoulders, I felt myself grow a full inch taller.

Then the Grandmother glared at me, and I thought I would shrink to the size of a sand flea.

“Can you not tolerate my presence even once every few years or so, Crone?” Sarafina asked. Her voice was no longer loving or soft or kind. It was deep and clear … and menacing.

“You’ve no business here!” the Grandmother said.

“But I have,” she replied. “You are my family. And like it or not, I am yours.”

“You are nothing. You are cursed. Be gone!”

Chaos erupted around us as mothers, awakened by the noise, dashed out of their tents and wagons, gathered their children and hurried them back inside. They acted as if a killer wolf had appeared at our campfire, rather than an outcast aunt of rare beauty, bearing exotic gifts and amazing tales.

My mother came, too. As she rushed toward me I tucked the stone bat up into my sleeve. She stopped before she reached me and met Sarafina’s eyes. “Please,” was all she said.

There was a moment of silence as something passed between the two women. Some message, unspoken, that left my mother’s eyes sad and welling with tears.

Sarafina bent down and pressed her cool lips to my cheek. “I’ll see you again, Dante. Never doubt it. But for now, go on. Go to your mamma.” She gave me a gentle shove and let go my shoulders.

I walked to my mother, nearly hating her for making me leave the mysterious Sarafina before I’d had a chance to learn her secrets. She gripped my arm tightly and ran to our tent so fast that she nearly dragged me off my feet. Inside, she closed the flap and cupped my face in her hands, falling to her knees before me. “Did she touch you?” she cried. “Did she mark you?”

“Sarafina would not hurt me, Mamma. She is my aunt. She is kind, and beautiful.”

But my mother seemed not to hear my words. She tipped my head to one side and the other, pushing my hair aside and searching my skin. I tired of it soon enough and tugged myself free.

“You are never to go near her again, do you hear me, Dante? If you see her, you must come to me at once. Promise me!”

“But why, Mamma?”

Her hand came across my face so suddenly I would have fallen had she not been gripping my arm with the other. “Do not question me! Promise me, Dante. Swear it on your soul!”

I lowered my head, my cheek stinging, and muttered my agreement. “I promise.” I was ashamed of the tears that burned in my eyes. They came more from shock than pain. My mother’s hand rarely lashed out in anger. I didn’t understand why it had tonight.

She knelt now, her hands on my shoulders, her worn face close to mine. “It’s a promise you must keep, Dante. You endanger your soul if you break it. Mark me well.” She drew a breath, sighed, and kissed the cheek she had so recently wounded. “Now, into bed with you.” She was marginally calmer, her voice nearer its normal pitch.

I was far from calm. Something had stirred my blood tonight. I crawled into my bed, pulled the covers over me and let the tiny, cold stone bat drop from my sleeve into my hand. I held it, rubbed its smooth surface with my thumb, beneath the blanket where my mother could not see. Mamma watched over me for a long moment, then blew out the lamp, and curled up—not upon her own bed, but on the floor beside mine, a worn blanket her only cushion.

In the silence, I rolled toward the side of the tent and thrust a forefinger through the tiny hole I had made in the fabric, so I could watch the grown-ups round the fire long after they had sent the children to bed. I tugged the hole a little wider in the darkness. And through that tiny hole, I watched and I listened as the Grandmother, the crone of the band, the eldest and most venerated woman of the family, faced off against the most vibrantly beautiful female I had ever seen in my life.

“Why do you torment us by coming back to our midst?” the Grandmother asked, as the dancing flames painted her leathery face in orange and brown, shadows and light.

“Why? You, my own sister, ask me why?”

“Sister, bah!” The Grandmother spat on the ground. “You are no sister to me but a demon. Outcast! Cursed!”

I shook my head in wonder. What could Sarafina mean? Sister? She could no more be the old one’s sister than … than I could.

“Tell me why you come, demon! It is always the children you seek out when you return. It’s for one of them, isn’t it? Your wretched curse has been passed to one of them! Hasn’t it? Hasn’t it?”

Sarafina smiled very slowly, her face angelic and demonic all at once, and bathed in fireglow. “I come because you are all I have. I will always come back, old woman. Always. Long after you’ve gone to dust, I’ll be coming back, bringing gifts to the little ones. Finding in their eyes and in their smiles the love and acceptance my own sister denies me. And there is nothing you can do to prevent it.”

Before Sarafina turned away, she looked past the Grandmother and right into my eyes. As if she had known all along that I was there, watching her from the other side of that tiny hole in the tent. She could not have seen me. And yet, she must have. Her lips curved ever so slightly at the corners, and her mouth moved. Even though no sound emerged, I knew the word she whispered. Remember.

Then she turned, her skirts flying, and vanished into the night. I saw the trailing colors of her scarves like tails behind her for only an instant. Then the blackness of night closed in where she had been, and I saw her no more.

I lay down on my pillows, and I shivered in inexplicable dread.

It was me. My aunt had come for me. I knew it in my soul. What she wanted of me, I could not guess. How I knew it, this was a mystery. But I was certain to the core of me that she did have a reason for returning in the face of such hatred.

And the reason … was me.

Slowly, slowly, the smoke from the Gypsy campfire thinned. The light thrown by the flames dulled, and the heat—so real she had sworn she could feel it on her face—went cold.

Morgan De Silva blinked out of the fantasy. She was not looking at a Gypsy campfire through the huge dark eyes of a small boy. She was sitting on the floor of a dusty attic, staring down at the time-yellowed pages of a handwritten journal, bound in leather covers so old they felt buttery-soft against her hands. The vision painted by the words that spiderwebbed across the aging pages had been vivid. It had been … real. As real as if she’d been in that Gypsy camp in the distant past, instead of on the coast of Maine in the early spring of 1997.

Morgan turned the page slowly, eager to read on….

The ringing of the telephone, floating faintly from no small distance, stopped her. With a resigned sigh, she closed the large volume and returned it carefully to the aged trunk, atop a stack of others just like it. When she closed the trunk’s lid, its hinges groaned and a miniature explosion of dust puffed out at her. Brushing her hands against each other, then her jeans, she blew out the candles that were the only source of light in the room and hurried down the narrow, steep attic stairs.

She hadn’t expected to find a thing up there other than cobwebs and dust. Exploring more of the ramshackle house had been an experiment in procrastination, not an act of curiosity. If her own work had been going anywhere, she never would have bothered poking around this aging, sagging house at all.

And that would have been a crying shame.

She ran through the hallway, between walls of crumbling plaster, the lath beneath it visible in places, to the next set of stairs. These were wider, but not in much better repair than anything else around the place. The third step from the top was missing a board, and she skipped it automatically and trotted the rest of the way down as the phone kept on ringing.

If it were another lawyer or bill collector, she thought breathlessly, she would hunt them down and kill them.

The wide staircase emptied itself into a huge room that must have been glorious once, a century or so ago. Now it was filled with nothing but heartbroken echoes and a tangle of bare wires sticking out of the domed ceiling, where some magnificent chandelier must have once been. Beyond that room, through a pair of double doors, was her room. Her … office. For the moment, at least. But only until she earned back her fortune and returned to L.A. in triumph.

Pretty much the opposite of the way she had left.

Her heart was pounding from exertion by the time she got that far, and she was out of breath, slightly dizzy, and pressing one hand to her chest. Ridiculous for a twenty-year-old woman to tire so easily, but there it was. She had never been healthy, and she knew she wasn’t ever going to be. But at least her condition hadn’t begun to worsen yet. It was too soon. She had so many things to do.

Finally Morgan snatched up the telephone, which was as antiquated as the rest of the place. The handset weighed at least two pounds, she guessed, and the rotary dial seemed to mock her high-tech tastes.

If her “hello?” sounded irritated, it was because she was dying to read more of those journals up in the attic, to find out more about their author. She might be on the verge of admitting that she was a talentless hack, but she still knew good writing when she read it, and what she had been reading upstairs was good writing. Painfully good.

“Morgan? What took you so long? I was getting worried.”

Her irritation fled at David Sumner’s familiar voice. Her honorary uncle—a title she’d stopped using long ago—was the only person who hadn’t turned his back on her when she had gone from spoiled rich girl to penniless orphan in a matter of hours. He was the one person she didn’t mind hearing from just now.

“Hey, David,” she said. “I was just. exploring. This place is huge, you know.”

“No, I don’t know, never having laid eyes on it. You sound a little out of breath.”

“Two flights of stairs will do that.”

She noticed his hesitation. He tended to worry about her far more than he should.

“How is the place, anyway?” he asked at length.

“It’s a wreck,” she told him, her tone teasing, partly because she was trying to ease his mind and partly because she enjoyed teasing him. “Which serves you right for buying it sight unseen. Who does stuff like that?”

She could almost see his puckered face, the laugh lines around his eyes, his balding head. David had been her best friend for as long as she could remember. “A friend of the family,” her parents had always called him. But it had seemed to Morgan that he’d barely tolerated the family.

Of course, he had known the truth about her parents all along. She had only learned it recently, through tabloid headlines and courtroom vultures.

“I bought it for the location, and you know it,” David told her. “And I trust my real estate guru on such matters. The building is coming down, anyway.”

“Yes, it is,” Morgan said. “As we speak.”

He was quiet for a moment. “That bad, huh?”

She could have slapped herself. Sometimes she could be such a self-centered little … “It’s not,” she said quickly. “I was joking.” She looked around her at the room she had chosen to inhabit. It had been somebody’s library or study once upon a time.

She thought of the little boy she had been reading about and wondered if it had ever been his. In his older years, perhaps, when he had decided to write his memoirs.

From the corner of her eye, she saw him. A dark, broad-shouldered form bent over the desk, with a quill pen in his long, graceful hand. Her heart jumped, and she caught her breath and turned toward him. But there was nothing. No man, no form, no quill pen. Just her computer with its electric blue screen. Whatever she had seen was there and then gone. A vision. A thought form. A little overactivity of her imagination, perhaps.

A shiver worked its way up her spine, but she shook it away.

“Describe it to me,” David was saying.

“What?” she asked, dragging her eyes away from the old desk.

“The house. Describe it to me.”

She flicked her gaze toward the desk again. No one there. Sighing, she tried to comply with David’s request. “It must have been incredible once. The scrollwork around the fireplace mantle is worn and faded, but lavish. I think it’s hardwood. You’re going to want to take that entire piece out before you tear it down. And there’s hand-tooled casing that borders every one of the tall windows. This place has … I don’t know. Something.”

“It’s far from what you’re used to, though,” David said.

“Yeah, well, it’s not Beverly Hills, and we aren’t having movie stars over for poolside parties … but I wouldn’t be getting any work done that way, would I?”

“And are you? Getting any work done?”

Morgan looked at the glowing blue screen of her computer—which had only escaped the notice of the estate lawyers because it had been with her at UCLA when her parents had been killed and the true state of their finances revealed. They were broke, and so far in debt Morgan could barely wrap her mind around the actual numbers. She hadn’t been able to make sense of it, at first. Her father was a successful director, her mother an actress who had reached her zenith a decade ago and had been doing smaller roles lately, but who had still seemed content with her life.

Or so Morgan had thought. She soon learned she had been living in a bubble. The level of cocaine in her parents’ systems the night of the accident was so high the coroner wondered how they had even managed to drive.

They’d been addicts, their entire lifestyle a lie.

The house and everything in it had been sold to pay off a portion of their accumulated debt, and Morgan had to drop out of school. Her tuition had already been months overdue. And apparently her friends were as shallow as David had always tried to tell her they were, because once the truth came out, they had abandoned her like last year’s wardrobe, while those she had always considered beneath her seemed secretly amused by her troubles. The last few days on campus, she had found tabloid pages tacked to bulletin boards in every hall, screaming about the secret, drug-infested life of the famous couple who seemed to have had it all. The nightmare behind the fairy tale, and the poor little rich girl left to pick up the pieces.

She had run from L.A. with her tail between her legs, with nowhere to go and nothing left besides the things she managed to take with her. She’d pulled into David’s driveway with nothing but her Maserati—the registration in her name, thank God—and the stuff she had crammed into its minuscule trunk. He was her last hope, and she had half expected him to turn away from her in disgust, just like all the rest.

But he hadn’t turned away. He’d helped her sell the car, buy a modest used one and pocket the difference. When she said she needed a hideaway where she could go to lick her wounds, he told her she could use this place in Maine, free of charge, for as long as she needed to.

Which wouldn’t be long, she thought silently. She had always intended to become a wildly successful screenwriter. It was just going to have to happen a bit sooner than she’d planned. David was a producer. He would help her make the right connections, maybe even produce her screenplay himself. He’d promised to give her a shot. Help her all he could.

All she needed … was the material.

“Morgan?” David’s voice jerked her away from the path her thoughts had been wandering. “Did you hear me? I asked, how’s the script coming?”

She blinked at the blank computer screen. The blinking cursor. “Fine. Great. It’s coming great.” So great that she had decided to go exploring this ancient wreck of a house rather than continue the battle with the blank screen. The only key on her keyboard getting a steady workout was the one marked “delete.” She’d been producing garbage since she had arrived here. Garbage.

“You know, it’s only natural you might have some trouble getting started,” David said. “Don’t push yourself. You’ve been through a lot. Your mind needs time to digest it all.”

Morgan shrugged. “That’s not it,” she told him.

“No?”

“Of course not. It’s been six months. I’m completely over it.”

“Completely over losing your parents, your fortune, your home, your education and what you thought was your identity?” He made a clicking noise with his tongue. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, I am. And to tell you the truth, finding out I was adopted explained a lot of things. I mean, you know my parents were never all that … involved.”

“That was the cocaine, hon. Not the adoption. Not you.”

She cleared her throat when it started to tighten up, gave herself a mental kick. “As for the rest of it … I’m going to get it all back, David. Everything I lost. And then some.”

She heard the smile in his voice. “I don’t doubt it a bit.”

“Neither do I,” she said, glancing again at the blank screen, feeling those doubts she’d denied nearly smothering her. Damn, why couldn’t writing a blockbuster script be as easy as she had always thought it would be? She used to watch films with the feeling that she could do better in her sleep.

“So when can I expect the screenplay?” he asked.

Licking her lips, she wished to God she knew. “A masterpiece takes time … and it’s … so unpredictable.”

“I need a fall project. I’m saving a slot for you, Morgan. Three months. I need the material in three months. Can you do that? Write it over the summer and get it to me by September?”

Lifting her chin, swallowing hard, she said, “Yes. I’ll have it finished by September. No problem.”

Big problem.

“Great,” David said. “You’re gonna be fine, Morgan. You can get through this.”

“Of course I can.”

“Do you need anything?”

“No, no, I’m fine.”

“Your funds still holding out?”

She licked her lips, forced the lie out. She’d cleaned out her accounts on David’s advice, before the lawyers and creditors could get hold of her money, and she’d had the cash from the car. But while she had no rent here, there were other expenses. The phone, the electricity and she had to eat. Truth to tell, the money in her checking account was dwindling.

“I’m fine,” she said again.

“Good,” David said softly. “Good. You let me know if there’s anything you need.”

“I will, David.”

He was quiet for a moment. “How about your health?”

Drawing a breath, she sighed. “You know how I hate being thought of as sickly.”

“Did I say you were sickly?”

“No.”

“Well?”

She pursed her lips. “The brisk clean air up here is working wonders on me,” she lied. What could she tell him? The truth? That it was cold and dreary and damp here, and that she resented having to think of a sixty-degree day in late April as a heat wave, when she would be basking in eighty-degree heat beside her parents’ pool, working on her tan by now, if she’d been home?

But it did no good to wish for what she couldn’t have.

“I ought to go, David,” she whispered around the lump in her throat. “If I’m going to have this done by fall, I ought to get at it.”

“Okay, hon. You just call if you need anything.”

“I will, David. Thanks.”

Morgan replaced the old receiver on its hook and gnawed on her lower lip. She turned the rickety wooden chair toward the computer screen, assured herself once again that no one was in it, and finally sat down. She poised her hands over the keyboard, told herself to write something, now, today, or else give up for good and go out and find a job. The problem was, she couldn’t do anything.

Writing was the only thing she had ever wanted to do, and she’d been good once. Or … she thought she had. In school, her essays got raves. The theater group had even produced one of her plays. Everyone loved it. The campus critics, the local press …

But that was when she’d been Morgan De Silva, the brilliant daughter of a famous director and a beloved actress, the girl leading the charmed life and destined for success. Now she was Morgan De Silva, disgraced has-been, penniless, homeless, practically run out of town and staring into the face of a future more bleak than she could have imagined a year ago.

Now … now she just didn’t know if her talent had ever been real, or if it had been her name winning her praise all this time. She didn’t know anything anymore, not who she was, or what she was doing or why the words had just stopped coming. It was as if the well inside her had been a part of the illusion her life had been. As if it had dried up when that illusion had been shattered.

She lowered her hands, having put not one word on the screen. Outside, the wind howled; the lights dimmed, then came back. The old house groaned when the wind blew. Probably, if she was as old as it was, she would groan, too, she thought. And then she wondered just how old that was.

Those journals … there had been no dates inscribed, but it was obvious they’d been written long, long ago. At least a century … and maybe closer to two.

That thought brought her back to the one she’d had earlier, about the journal writer. Dante. Had he lived here, that man who’d been a Gypsy boy, entranced by his outcast aunt? Had he been in this very room, perhaps, pacing before a fire, his quill pen lying untouched on some polished antique desk? Had he courted his muse as impatiently as she did, grown frustrated when the words wouldn’t come?

Drawn as if by an unseen hand, she rose and walked out of the office, through the ghostly front hall and up the wide staircase. She traversed the hallway, ignoring the doors that lined either side. She hadn’t even ventured into most of the rooms up here. There were so many.

But her goal was none of them. Her goal was beyond, up the back stairway into the attic, where spiderwebs held court and dust ruled the day. She knelt as she had before and fished the book of matches from her jeans pocket, then lit the candles in the gaudy candelabra she’d found downstairs. As their soft yellow glow spread, she lovingly opened the hand-tooled chest, took out that first volume, stroked its cover and opened it slowly, careful not to break the brittle pages. Turning to the place where she had left off, she began to read. And once again she lost herself in the words.




2


It was fully thirteen years before I saw Sarafina again. Thirteen full years, during which I had learned many things. I had learned that no matter where we went, we would be driven out eventually. I had learned that no matter how honest we might be, we would be called thieves by strangers who knew nothing about us. So I learned to take what I wanted and wish them all damned. I might as well enjoy the fruits of the crimes attributed to me, I reasoned. If I were caught, I would pay for those crimes, whether I had committed them or not. Better I hang for my own offenses than for those of some pale-skinned whelp who pretended honesty and was believed without question, so long as there was a Gypsy nearby to take the blame.

But of all the things I had learned, one bit of knowledge eluded me, though I had sought it without end. I had never learned the mystery of Sarafina. Who she really was, how she was related to us, why she had been ousted from our band. Nor what was the nature of the curse she was said to carry.

Not until the night when my life nearly ended—did end, for all practical purposes. It did end—and a new one began. It was late autumn, and the year was 1848.

I was a young man then. Hotheaded and reckless. My family was about to pack up and move on yet again. Not because we had grown tired of the place but because the locals accused us of stealing livestock, and we knew the law would be on us soon.

Before we left, I had decided I would extract a pound of flesh from our accusers. More than a pound, actually.

The moon was newly born that night; only a strand of silver gleamed in the sky as I crept into the farmer’s barnyard. And even that light was blotted out more and more often as long, clawlike fingers of blue-black clouds reached across its slender arch. I didn’t care what I stole that night, so long as I took something. It was retribution. It was repayment for the slander done to me and mine.

The first animal I came upon was a bearded billy goat. I remember it well … fawn and white, and shaggy. Horns curving back, away from its head. Hooves in sad need of trimming, like the too-long fingernails of an old man.

Slipping a rope around its neck, I led the goat away from the shed where it had been penned. Across the worn ground where, by day, the hens would peck and dig. Now they were roosting along the top rail of the fence and in the scraggly young saplings here and there. The goat came along easily, right up until I passed through the gate and started away from the barnyard. Then it stopped all of a sudden, planting its forefeet and bleating loud and long and plaintively. It was like a scream in the night.

I should have let the animal go. But pride in a young man is sometimes overblown, and in me it was combined with anger and fury and frustration.

So I kept tugging on the lead rope, dragging the animal through the lush green grasses, which were damp with night dew. It dragged its feet, tugging and thrashing its shaggy head from side to side, bawling like a lost calf.

The farmer never called out, never ordered me to stop or release the goat or anything else. I never even knew he’d stepped out of his house. That was how silently death came for me that night. One moment I was cussing at an ornery goat, turning and tugging, the rope over my shoulder and the goat behind me. And the next I was facedown on the ground, my ears ringing from the explosion of the gunshot that had come as if from nowhere.

I could not believe it had happened so easily, so suddenly. Without fanfare or drama. The farmer had simply pulled the trigger of his black powder rifle, sending an earsplitting roar through the night and a lead ball through my back.

Shock and pain screamed in me in the seconds after I hit the ground. I felt, for a moment, the fire of the ball’s path and the rush of the warm blood soaking my clothes. But then something far more frightening than pain came to me.

Numbness.

It began at my feet, as best I can recall. And I wasn’t aware of it as it happened but afterward, when I heard the farmer’s footfalls coming closer. I realized that I could not move, that I could not feel my feet. Within a second of that realization I felt the numbness spreading, creeping up my legs as steadily as a rising tide. My hips and pelvis, my belly. It rose further, and the pain that was like a fire in my back vanished. It simply vanished.

I felt nothing. I tried to move my arms, my legs, but I could not.

I gasped in shock when my body suddenly flipped, for I had not even felt the toe of the cruel farmer’s boot as he used it to roll me onto my back. But I saw the hate in his eyes as he stared down at me, his weathered face like the bark of an aging cherry tree, white whiskers long and unkempt.

“Thievin’ Gypsy scum,” he said. He spat on me, and then turned and walked away, taking his goat with him.

He hadn’t killed me.

The relief of that was soon overruled by the realization that he would have, had he not been certain I would die on my own within a few minutes. I could not feel the blood spreading beneath me, staining the grass. But I sensed it flowing from my body, felt myself weakening steadily from the loss of it. Felt myself … dying.

I heard his footsteps retreating. Heard the door of his ramshackle house banging closed. And then I heard nothing beyond the gentle wind of the night, whispering in the trees. Whispering my name.

“Oh, sweet Dante,” a voice said from very nearby. Not the wind. Not this time. “You’ve brought this upon yourself far more quickly than I would have liked.”

I moved my eyes, turned my head very slightly, but only that. For the most part, my eyes seemed to be the only part of me I was still able to command.

Sarafina stood beside me, silhouetted by the night, like some dark angel. Those black fingers of cloud stretched over the stars behind her. I tried to speak, but the words came so softly, I knew she could not hear them. Then she knelt and bent close to me, and with every ounce of strength in me, I managed to say, “Sarafina … I am dying.”

Her soft hand brushed my dark hair away from my forehead. “No, Dante. You know full well I shall not let that hap pen.”

“B-but …”

“Hush. It is almost time.” She glanced down at my body, and I wondered what she saw. “You’ve nearly bled to death. It will only be another moment.”

My eyes widened, and panic choked me. “Sarafina!” I rasped, fear giving my voice new strength, though it still emerged as little more than a harsh whisper. “Please!”

“Trust me, my darling. You will not die.”

“But …”

“You will not die,” she said again.

I lay there, fading, fading, darkness closing in around the edges of my vision. I realized dully that she looked no different to me than she had when I’d seen her last. No older. No different at all.

“There now. That’s better.”

My eyes opened, fell closed, opened again. My breaths came shallow and sparse, and I could feel my heartbeat. It pounded in my ears, ever slower … slower … slower….

“Listen to me, my special one,” she said, and her voice seemed to come from very far away, as if she spoke to me from the depths of a cave. “You have a choice to make, and it must be made now. There will be no time to deliberate. Do you wish to die? Here and now? Or live, though it will mean living in exile, as I do? Hated by the family, outcast and driven away.”

I felt weak. As if I were becoming a shadow. I didn’t understand her questions.

“Life or death, Dante? Speak your answer. If you delay, the choice will be gone. You will die. Tell me now. Which will it be? Life … or death?”

I strained to form the single word but never heard it emerge from my lips or felt them move at all. It was all I could do to think the word with the intention of speaking it aloud. Life.

“Good.”

She moved. My vision was fading, so that I could not see where she went, what she did. Then she pressed something warm and wet to my lips and whispered, “Drink, Dante. This is the elixir that will make you live. Drink.”

The warm, thick liquid touched my lips, and there was a quickening of my senses, followed at once by a shocking sensation of need. I closed my mouth around the font she offered and nursed at it like a suckling babe. Life seemed to awaken in me, along with a hunger such as I had never known. My arms moved, my hands clasping this bounty, holding it to my face, as I sucked at the luscious fluid that flowed into me.

“Enough!”

Sarafina gripped a handful of my hair and jerked my head away. And only then did I realize it had been her wrist at which I’d been so eagerly feeding. Her blood I had been drinking so hungrily. Even now, she pulled her forearm away, tugging a scarf from her hair and wrapping it tightly around the wound.

Horrified, I felt my stomach lurch, turning my head away from her and lifting my hand to swipe at my mouth.

“It’s all right, Dante,” she whispered. “It is the way the gift is shared.”

I looked down at my hands, red with the blood I’d wiped from my mouth. But alive. Strong. I moved my fingers, made fists.

“What is this?” I asked her softly. “What … what does this mean?” And even as I said it, the numbness was receding down my body. The feeling rushed back into my torso, my legs and my feet, with heightened intensity.

My senses prickled with keen new awareness. My skin tingled at the touch of the very air. My eyes seemed to see more vividly, more precisely, than ever they had. And strength surged through my veins.

She tore my shirt away, making strips of its fabric as she spoke. “It is a gift, young Dante, though the old one calls it a curse. It is a gift I have given to you. You will never die now. Never grow older. And though your family will turn against you, you will never be alone, as I have been. For I will be with you. Always.”

Looking over my shoulder at her, for she was now wadding the fabric and stuffing it into the wound in my back, which caused me immense pain, I shook my head. I did not understand. She tied several strips tightly around me, to hold the wads in place, then reached down, clasped my hand and helped me to my feet, and even as I rose, I saw the old man’s silhouette looming just behind her.

I opened my mouth to shout a warning.

Before I said a word, Sarafina turned with such speed she seemed a mere blur. The farmer’s rifle went sailing through the air, out of sight, firing harmlessly into the woods as it hit the ground. And Sarafina, the beautiful, gracious woman by whom I had been so entranced, gripped the farmer’s shirtfront and jerked him forward. Before I could even react, she had fastened her mouth to his throat.

I heard the sounds…. I saw, very clearly in the darkness now, what she was doing. Drinking … his blood. Gorging herself at his throat. At first the farmer pounded her back and kicked at her … and then … then he simply surrendered. I heard his sigh, saw him close his eyes and even wrap his arms around her. He let his head fall backward, and I saw him grind his hips against Sarafina’s as she continued to suck at his throat.

And then there was no life left in him at all.

She let go his shirt, and the corpse fell to the ground. Empty. A rag-poppet. Utterly drained.

With one of her scarfs, Sarafina dabbed delicately at her mouth as she turned to face me. I gaped at her, my mouth working soundlessly.

“Don’t look so shocked, Dante. Are you telling me you’re only just figuring it out? Hmm? We are Nosferatu. We are undead.” She licked her lips, tilted her head and smiled very slightly at me. “Vampires,” she whispered, and I swore the night wind picked up the word and repeated it a thousand times in a thousand voices.

Vampires.

A breeze from some unseen source made the candle flames leap and flicker. Morgan tore her eyes from the weathered pages and automatically looked behind her. But of course no one was there. Nothing was there. This wasn’t real.

It wasn’t real.

“Oh my God,” Morgan whispered. “This isn’t a diary. These aren’t memoirs. It’s … it’s fiction. It’s incredible, breathtaking fiction!”

Oh, maybe not to the man who had written it. The delightfully insane artist who had crafted this tale had, perhaps, even believed it. Imagine. A man who honestly thought he was a vampire. A man who had, in all likelihood, lived here. Right here. In this house.

Something scraped the window, and Morgan whirled, her hand flying to her chest as her heart leapt. But it was only a tree limb, bent and clawlike, scratching at the glass. Not some creature of the night who called himself Dante, come back to claim his diaries and his house. Of course not. Vampires were not real.

The sudden movement, the scare, left her slightly dizzy and made her chest pound. She waited for it to ease. The rush of breathlessness passed, as it always did. She drew a few deep, cleansing breaths and glanced at her watch. She had been sitting in the dark, musty attic for hours, lost in the imaginary world of a madman. When she should have been working on her own tales of intrigue.

God, how was she ever going to have a saleable script ready for David in three months? Especially now, when all she wanted to do was read more of this incredible tale.

Vaguely she wondered how long it had taken the imaginative Dante to pen his fantasies. Not long, she thought … if every journal in this stack were filled. And even then, she didn’t know how he had managed it all in one short lifetime.

He was dead, though. He had to be dead, because she had finally come upon a date, so there was no doubt. And his words, his tales … they just lay there, untouched. So vivid, so wonderfully written, it was almost heartbreaking that they hadn’t been shared with the world. God, if she had written something this good and it had never been seen, she would have been.

Oh.

Oh. The thought that just occurred to her! This could be her work. For all anyone else knew, it could all be her work. Who the hell would ever know the difference?

“No,” she whispered aloud. “It wouldn’t be right.”

Wouldn’t it? her mind argued. She had just decided it was criminal that this work hadn’t been shared. She had just acknowledged that if she had been the author, she would have spent eternity regretting that the work lay here, undiscovered. The written word was meant to be read, after all. Not hidden away but … shared. Experienced.

She knelt again in front of the trunk, licked her dry lips. What harm would there be, she wondered? Dante was long dead, and no one else could possibly know of the existence of these diaries. Could they? Of course not! If they did, these journals wouldn’t have been left here to molder in a dusty attic.

And there were so many of them!

“My God,” she whispered. “This is a gold mine. I’m sitting on an absolute gold mine here.” And as she sat there, staring down at the trunk full of stories, she knew that they were even more than that. They were the key to getting everything she wanted, to reclaiming everything she had lost. Wealth. Power. Fame. Her triumphant return to L.A. It was all right here. Almost like a gift … left just for her by some long-dead madman who’d called himself Dante and believed himself to be a vampire.

She took the first journal carefully, holding it to her breast like a lover as she straightened, and, turning, she carried it downstairs to her office.

This time, when she held her hands over the keyboard, Dante’s journal was lying open on the table beside the computer. And this time, the words came.




3


Maxine Stuart was watching JFK for about the twelfth time on the little VCR/TV combo in her bedroom, a copy of Catcher in the Rye in her lap, a half-dead can of Coke on the bedside stand, when she heard the sirens. The sound stabbed her in the belly like an ice-cold blade and brought her slowly to her feet, though she couldn’t have said why. She went to the window, pushed the curtains aside. She could see the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles passing on the highway in the distance. Heading south. Her gaze turned in that direction, and she narrowed her eyes on the faint red glow in the distant night sky.

A familiar Jeep bounded into her driveway, and about a second later she heard the front door of the small house open, heard her mother speaking to Max’s friends as she let them in. Maxine shut the TV off, turned and opened her bedroom door as they came hurrying through the house.

Her two best friends came around a corner into the hall and stopped when they saw her standing there. Something was up. Jason didn’t shake easily, and he looked shaken. Storm—her real name was Tempest, but she hated it—was downright pale. Maxine’s mom was right on their heels.

“So what is it, what’s burning?” Max asked.

“It’s Spook Central,” Jason said without even missing a beat. “It’s bad.”

“It’s awful,” Stormy added, and her round jewel-blue eyes were damp. “I don’t think anyone got out alive.”

Spook Central was Maxine’s pet name for the large, nameless government compound just outside town. The main building was huge and sat well back from the road behind a large, electrified fence, surrounded by surveillance cameras and shrouded in secrecy. A research lab—that was the party line, anyway, and so the gullible locals believed. Medical research was done there—they were working on finding cures for cancer and AIDS, stuff like that. Good work. Almost holy. Too sacred to mess with or poke around in. Who would question such a saintly mission?

Maxine had her own theories, as she did about most things, and right now she hoped to God the one she had always considered the most likely—that the place was a military lab working on germ warfare and chemical weapons—was dead wrong.

Nightmare images from Stephen King’s The Stand coiled and uncoiled in her mind until she shook them away and stepped into action. She turned, reaching back into her room to snatch a jacket from the back of a chair. Then she was striding down the hall. “Let’s go.”

“Go? Go where?” her mother asked, falling into step behind the three of them as they headed for the front door. When no one replied, Ellen got around them, stepping right into their path. “Max, don’t you go over there. You’ll just get in the way and maybe get hurt.”

“Come on, Mom, I’m twenty years old. I’m not going to bother the firefighters. I just want to know what’s going on.”

“Then read about it in the morning paper, like everyone else.”

“God, how can you be so innocent?”

Ellen Stuart sighed, looking worried, but also resigned. No one had ever really been able to change Maxine’s mind once it was made up about something, and her mother ought to be getting used to that by now, having experienced it firsthand from the day she brought the three-month-old orphan home for the first time. “Be careful.”

“Always.” Maxine yanked a mini-backpack off the hook by the door. An iron-on patch with the words Trust No One and the X-Files logo decorated its front. She slung it over her shoulder, and the three friends trooped out of the house.

They all piled into Jason’s creamed-coffee colored Jeep Cherokee. He liked to joke that he had picked the color to match his skin. And it did, pretty closely. Maxine took the back seat. Stormy, a pixie-sized psych major with short, spiky, bleached hair, got into the front with Jason, closing her door just as he backed out into the street and headed out of town.

Maxine sat on the edge of her seat, her head between the two in the front. “You can see the fire from here. Look at that.”

They did. Stormy shivered, lowered her eyes. Jason stared as if mesmerized for a moment, then snapped out of it, flicking on the radio, turning the dial. “I knew you’d want to go,” he said. “It came over my brother’s scanner. If he wasn’t a volunteer firefighter, I probably still wouldn’t know.”

“Still nothing about it on the radio, Jay?” Stormy asked. She was nervous; playing with her eyebrow ring was always a sign of that.

He kept flicking the dial, then gave up, shaking his head slowly. “I expected special reports, crap like that, but there hasn’t been a word.”

“They report what they’re told to report,” Maxine said. “Despite my mother’s gullible belief in the system, the phrase ‘free press’ is an oxymoron in this country.”

“I like your mom,” Jason put in.

Max blinked at him as if he were speaking another language. “I like her, too. What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“I just don’t think you ought to be calling her gullible. She wouldn’t like it.”

Maxine closed her eyes, shook her head, then glanced at Stormy for backup.

“He’s right,” Stormy said. “Your mom is cool. You’re so lucky.”

“Of course she’s cool! Hell, I would have gotten a dorm room or an apartment or gone to college out of town if she wasn’t cool, instead of staying home and going to a local school. But this has nothing to do with my mother or how cool she may or may not be! I’m talking about the government here. Cover-ups. Covert operations.”

Stormy shrugged, averting her eyes. Topics like this always made her uncomfortable. But Maxine wasn’t uncomfortable discussing it. She was more uncomfortable having lived practically in the shadow of that huge, fenced in, well-guarded compound all her life, and never once knowing what went on inside.

She knew only one thing for sure. It wasn’t cancer research. She would have given her eyeteeth for a look beyond the tall, electrified fences of that place. Just one look. Now maybe no one would ever know the truth.

Jason drove on, pulling the Jeep over onto the right-hand shoulder before they got to the point where emergency vehicles lined both sides of the road. Highway flares lay across the pavement. Orange and white striped sawhorses with red reflectors were lined up behind them, forming a boundary that was supposed to tell them to keep out. They got out of the Jeep. Flames in the distance licked at the night sky, and Max could already taste the smoke in her mouth with every breath.

“This way.” Maxine walked along the road’s right shoulder, beyond the parked vehicles, and her friends followed. The burning compound was on the left, at the end of a long curving drive. She led the others forward until they were directly across the street from the entrance to the compound. Firefighters were across the street, partway along the drive, facing away from them. They were completely focused on their work, anyway. Maxine crouched near an ambulance, tugging the others down with her.

The fire trucks had apparently driven straight through the gate at the head of the drive. The guardhouse nearby was empty, the gate itself lying flat. The fence to the left and right of it was buckled and broken. The surveillance cameras that had been mounted on poles lay smashed to bits. Volunteer firefighters in yellow jackets marked with glowing silver reflective tape manned huge hoses attached to tanker trucks in the curving paved drive. Every time they beat the flames down a little, the trucks would roll closer, the men pushing farther into the fury.

“I don’t know how they can stand it. God, I can feel the heat from here,” Stormy said, pressing a palm to her face.

“I’m surprised their hoses aren’t melting,” Jason whispered. “If they move any closer …”

“If they move any closer, we’ll be able to get in.”

The other two looked at Maxine as if she had sprouted horns.

“What?” she asked.

“You gotta be out of your freaking mind, Max,” Jason told her, while Storm just shook her head. “We can’t go in there.”

“No one’s watching the entrance. They’re all distracted, fighting the fire. We can get in without even trying.”

“Okay, I’ll rephrase that. We can go in there. But we shouldn’t.”

Now it was Maxine’s turn to gape. “What are you, crazy? I’ve been dying to get behind those gates since I was old enough to see through that lame cancer research cover story they’ve been using.”

“Which was when she was about six,” Stormy muttered.

Max shot her a look but hurried on. “Don’t you guys get it? This is our chance. No guards, nothing. We can finally see something besides the lie.”

“And just what do you think there’s gonna be left to see, Max?” Jason pointed at the place. “It’s completely engulfed in flames.”

“I won’t know until I try.”

He sighed, lowering his shaved head and running a hand over it. No one spoke again for a long time as they crouched and waited and watched. Twenty minutes went by before the firefighters pushed a few yards closer. Max shot to her feet, glanced both ways and ran across the street. Her two friends hesitated, then followed. They crossed the pavement and jogged through the opening, right over the mesh of the toppled gate, past the abandoned guardhouse and into the trees that lined the driveway. There were a lot of them. The better to block the place from the view of casual passersby, Max thought. Pines. Of course they were pines. Year-round-camouflage for whatever went on inside.

They ducked beneath one of the trees, and Max stared ahead. The fire was being steadily beaten down. Those firefighters were something else, she thought, wondering if Jay’s older brother, Mike, was among them. They never gave up, even though they had to realize by now that it was a lost cause.

More sirens came, and Max looked back toward the road to see police cars, cops getting out, dispersing some of the curious onlookers who had now begun to gather on the road out front. “We just made it in time,” she whispered.

“If they catch us in here, our asses will be toast,” Jason said.

“If we get any closer to that inferno, they might be toast anyway,” Stormy added.

The firemen ahead fought on, soaking the place down, beating back the flames and pressing ever closer. The trucks rolled forward a little more, and Max urged her unwilling comrades to do the same. “See that flagpole over there?” she asked, pointing. Jason and Storm looked at it, then at her.

“Once they get up that far, we can cut around the side of the building and make our way to the back.”

“And then a flaming wall can come down on us, crushing us and roasting us at the same time,” Storm said. Her gaze was fixed on the burning building, and the flames’ reflection danced in her eyes.

Max swallowed any second thoughts she had about dragging her two best friends into this, beat them down the way the firefighters beat down the flames. It was for the greater good, she told herself. And besides, they wouldn’t get hurt. She wouldn’t let them get hurt. Maxine Stuart took care of her friends.

Movement drew her attention. “There they go!”

As the fire truck rolled ahead, Max ran forward, cutting off to the left and moving rapidly away from the pool of firelight that spread like an aura from ground-zero. The trees ended there, and she paused at the very last one. She tried not to feel a huge sense of relief when she realized Jason and Storm were still at her side. But she felt it anyway. God, they were loyal.

The distance from the front to the back of the rubble that had once been the main building was at least half a football field, without so much as a shrub for cover. But it was dark. Getting darker with every cloud of thick smoke that wafted from the fire.

“We can make it,” Max said.

“They’re gonna haul our asses to jail for this, Maxie,” Jason said.

“Ready?”

Neither of them answered her. Max licked her lips and trusted them. “Go!” And she ran.

She was never certain they were following until she stopped when she reached what had been the far end of the building and they bumped into her in the darkness. Hands gripped shoulders as they steadied each other. Then they stood for a moment, catching their breath, squinting into the darkness. There were fifty feet between where they stood and the smoldering remains at the rear of the building. It no longer much resembled a building at all. It wasn’t tall or square. It was a heap. Flames leaped up here and there, although most of the real fire had moved hungrily toward the front, having had its fill here, it seemed. There were glowing red shapes forming mounds underneath the charred forms of the skeletal underpinning. There were ashes, smoke. Were there people in there? she wondered. Bodies?

“This is close enough,” Stormy whispered.

Max looked around. “You see that shrub over there? It’s out of the smoke.” She pointed. “You two wait for me there. I promise I won’t be long.”

“Don’t, Max,” Jason warned. He sounded pissed off. “Just … don’t.”

“Five minutes,” she said. “Just five freaking minutes. This is once in a lifetime, Jay.” She didn’t wait for him to argue. She ran, instead.

They didn’t follow this time.

It was hot. Damned hot, and the smoke was burning her eyes and her nose, and she kept trying not to cough too loudly and give herself away. She ran until she reached the rear of the building, and then she moved closer and closer to it, as close as she could stand to get. She figured her hair was probably getting a little singed, and she had to watch where she put her feet to keep from stepping on smoldering embers that would have melted right through the soles of her shoes.

She looked around, squinting through the veil of smoke and the shimmering heat waves. There were several things on the ground in one area. Large broken boxes—computers. Smashed to bits. Some burned and charred, others just smashed. Had someone thrown them out the windows in an effort to save them? Or maybe to destroy them? She kicked at one. What she wouldn’t have given for a hard drive from one of those machines. God only knew what she might find. Bending, she reached out to pick through the pile of rubble, but the pieces were so hot they seared her fingers, and she jerked her hand away, sucking air through her teeth.

“Shit.” She put her burned fingers to her lips, blew on them, drew them away and shook them in the air as she kept on walking. Her foot kicked something that rolled, and she looked down, frowning, looking closer. When she realized she was bending over a charred forearm and hand, she pulled back so suddenly she almost fell over. “Jesus!”

Her breathing quickened now, her lungs sucking in more smoke with every breath, but that couldn’t be helped. She continued her search, spotting other evidence of human remains in the wreckage. More and more of it. Bodies. Parts of bodies. It was as if she had stepped into hell’s dumping ground. Jesus, why hadn’t anyone been able to get out alive? What the hell had happened here?

This was stupid. She had been a fool to come here. She started to turn, to go back, when movement caught her eye. Movement in the smoky distance. She went still, squinting, staring.

Gradually, the movement took shape. A man, his clothes burned, his skin so sooty she couldn’t tell if he was black or white. He was hunched over, walking unevenly, bending and straightening over and over again. It looked as if he was picking things up, dragging himself away from the wreckage and picking things up as he went. She was about to offer to help him when she heard her name shouted from a distance.

The man heard Stormy’s call, too, and he went stiff, jerking his head toward the voice. A tongue of flame leapt to life somewhere near him and illuminated his face for just an instant. His hair had been burned completely away from one side of his head, and the scalp and one side of his face was charred. Black, with pink showing through here and there. She tried to memorize his features, the rounded face, the shape of his chin. He tucked whatever he had been holding into his pockets and ran in a lumbering, uneven gait away from the voice and right toward Maxine.

She ducked down low, held her breath, willed herself not to move. She didn’t know for sure that the man was dangerous, but if he were up to anything good, he wouldn’t be running away. Maybe he was just a snoop, like she was. But probably not. He’d been inside that burning building. That much was obvious.

He limped past her, never even looking down at her as she sat there fighting not to shiver in fear. He moved so close she could smell his charred flesh, and it made her stomach clench reflexively.

Something fell from his jacket. Something—no, two somethings—dropped to the hot, rubble-strewn ground right at her feet. He never noticed, just kept going, dragging one leg, lunging with the other, until he vanished in the smoke.

Swallowing hard, Maxine reached for the items. One was a CD-ROM. The other, some kind of ID badge. She swore every nerve ending in her body tingled with electricity as she tucked the two still-warm items carefully into her pocket and, turning, ran back the way she had come. She refused to look again at the carnage. Refused to look behind her, even when she swore she felt the disfigured man’s gaze burning into her back. She just hurried as fast as she could back to where she’d left her friends and fell to her knees near the shrub where they waited.

“God, thank God, you’re back!” Storm said. She bent over Max, stroking her back. “Are you all right? What happened back there?”

“Did you find anything? What did you see?” Jason asked.

Maxine lifted her head, looked at them. “It’s … there were … bodies.”

“Oh, God,” Storm said, closing her eyes.

Max gripped Jason’s forearm, and he helped her to her feet. “Let’s get the hell out of here, okay?” he suggested.

She nodded. They fell into step together, with Max in the center, her two friends flanking her almost protectively. They had made it almost all the way to the front gate when the sounds of rumbling motors flooded the night and vehicles came roaring along the street and into the drive. They ducked into the nearby pines, watching as camo-painted trucks and Jeeps with spotlights mounted on them bounded past. At least one vehicle had a machine gun mounted on a tripod in the back. Soldiers armed with weapons came spilling out of the trucks and fanned out onto the grounds.

Ten feet ahead of Max, a cop stood with his back to them, looking at the commotion with his head tilted to one side. Her cop, Maxine realized with a rush of relief.

Jason saw him at the same time, squeezed Max’s arm, whispered, “Cop.”

“It’s okay. It’s Lou Malone.”

Jason sent her a frown.

“He teaches that women’s self-defense course I take.”

“You remember him, Jay,” Storm put in. “He used to work our high school dances. He’s the one Maxie always had a crush on.”

“Oh, yeah. That one.” He sent Max a look that asked if she still did, but she just rolled her eyes and looked away.

Someone spoke into a bullhorn, startling her so much that she jerked her gaze away from the back of Lou’s head. “This is a government facility and therefore, a military operation. Local firefighters are to cease all activity at once. No one is to leave this site without clearance. Line up in an orderly fashion near the front gate and you’ll be escorted off the premises. That is all.”

“What the hell is going on, Max?” Storm whispered, clutching Maxine’s arm. “They’ve got guns.”

“They’re not going to use them.” Jason tried to sound confident and sure of himself but missed that goal by about a mile. “I mean, they’re soldiers. They have to carry guns. Right?”

They watched from their pine-scented blind as the soldiers tugged firemen away from their hoses. Some of the firefighters obeyed, moving to form a straggling line by the gate. Those who didn’t move fast enough were searched where they were, then escorted to the front gate and through it. More soldiers searched the fire trucks, and the vehicles in the street, as well.

“Well, I’ll be dipped,” Officer Malone said to himself. “What the hell is all this about?”

Licking her lips, Maxine stepped out of her cover, walked up to Lou and cleared her throat. He turned fast, then gaped at her in surprise. She loved him. Had since tenth grade. And it didn’t matter that his face was hard and lined, or that he was eighteen years older than she was, or that he saw her as little more than a pain-in-the-ass kid with a big imagination.

“Well, if it isn’t Mad Maxie Stuart, my favorite redhead,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “Why the hell am I not surprised to see you here?”

“Hey, Lou. I just wanted to see the fire.”

“Uh-huh.” He glanced at her friends. “Don’t you two know better than to let her drag you into her schemes?”

They shrugged, said nothing.

“Lou, I don’t like this,” Max said. “This whole soldier bit. They’re searching everyone.”

“Yeah, I see that.”

“Just an excuse to grope the females,” Stormy said. “If they think they’re gonna run their hands all over my body, they’d better think again.”

Maxine watched Lou’s eyes slide to hers as Stormy spoke and knew her friend had fallen on the right tactic. “I don’t relish the idea of them copping a feel of my ass, either, Storm.” Even as she said it, a soldier slammed a firefighter who resisted him up against the guardhouse. Lou saw it and winced.

“I’m scared, Lou. I just want to get out of here,” Max said.

Lou Malone pursed his lips in thought; then, finally, he nodded. “It’s not like you kids are any threat to national security. These guys are a little overzealous, I think. Look, there’s a break in the fence, just past those pines. See that tallest one? It’s near that. Go on, get outta here. I never saw you.”

“Thanks, Lou.”

He gave Maxine a worried nod, and, impulsively, she leaned up and planted a kiss on his cheek.

“Get your ass straight home, Mad Max. No more screwing around with grown-up stuff, okay?”

“I promise,” she said. Then she ran off in the direction he’d shown her.

Max waited until Jason and Storm had gone home. She told them nothing about the man she had seen gathering evidence from the rubble. Nothing about the trophies she had recovered. She didn’t want to tell them anything that could put them in danger or make them accessories if what she had done turned out to be a crime. Late that night, very late, she gently wiped the soot from the partially melted plastic of the name badge.

There was a photograph of a man, and the words, “Frank W. Stiles. Security Level: Alpha. DPI.”

She knew what “Security Level: Alpha” meant. She had learned that the first time she tried to uncover the truth about UFOs and government cover-ups. Alpha was the word used to indicate the top-level security clearances in certain agencies under the auspices of the CIA. But in all her years of research she had never once come across any reference to any agency or operation called DPI.

Jesus, what the hell had she stumbled upon?

She was nearly shaking when she washed the soot from the CD-ROM and slid it into her computer, praying the heat hadn’t ruined it.

It hadn’t.

When she clicked RUN, the driver whirred and the screen went black. Red letters lit up the screen.

TOP SECRET DOCUMENTS

of

THE DIVISION OF PARANORMAL INVESTIGATIONS

CASE FILES D145.9—H376.51 Continue?

The final word blinked its question at her, almost daring her to take it up on the challenge.

Stiffening her spine, she clicked on the word and brought up a table of contents. Names. They were simply names.

Damien, aka Namtar, Damien, aka Gilgamesh

Daniels, Matthew

Daniella

Dante

Devon, Josephina

Obviously alphabetical, the list began in the Ds and ended in the Hs. Some were first and last names, some only one name. There were maybe a hundred entries, as near as she could tell without counting. Clicking back to the top of the list, she began scrolling down it. Then she came to one that made her stop in her tracks.

Dracul, Vlad (See full bio for alias list.)

“What the hell?” Curious, she clicked on the name, and a graphic popped up. A drawing, not a photo, of a thoroughly modern-looking man, with long black hair and unusually full lips.

The most well known of the species, he was born in Carpathia and transformed, as nearly as we can tell, in his early twenties. Sired by an unknown enemy soldier, probably a Turk. Most recent sighting, May, 1992, Paris.

“Most recent sighting?” She blinked at the screen, her mind not quite digesting what she was seeing. “Ninety-two?”

Below the graphic, with its piercing eyes and pale skin, were more choices: Known Kills, Known Associates, Known Havens, Full Bio.

“What in the name of God is this shit?” She hit the back button, clicked on another name in the list, and again was brought to a screen with an image of the person, this one an actual photograph labeled “taken before transformation” and a brief bio.

Josephina Devon. Born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1962. Transformed in the summer of her 30th year, June 1992. Sire: R-532 aka Rhiannon. The vampire

“Vampire? “

was captured by DPI researchers in December of the same year. Held at DPI Headquarters in White Plains, NY, USA. Expired in captivity, 1995.

Again, the same choices were offered for further information, this time with one notable addition: “Tests Performed on the Subject & Results of Same.”

This was not real.

This could not be real.

When she clicked on “full bio” she found a document more than a hundred pages long. With details that made her mind spin with the impossibility of it all. When she opened the file that referred to tests performed, she thought she was going to be ill. This person, this woman, had been a lab rat. Held and experimented upon in that very building. In her own town.

But no. It hadn’t happened, because it wasn’t real.

There were no such things as vampires. Much less a covert government agency devoted to researching them.

And yet, here was the proof that there were.

There were.

What the hell was she supposed to do now?

The next day, she still hadn’t decided, when the doorbell rang and she answered it to find no one there. Just an unmarked manila envelope on the doorstep. Her mother was already at work. Most days she left before Max was even out of bed. The odd delivery made Maxine curious, particularly after last night. She looked up and down the street. No strangers lurked anywhere. No suspicious vehicles with tinted windows slid past. The neighborhood was stirring to life. People opening their doors, picking up their morning papers.

Maxine picked up the envelope, looked at it, turned it over. Nothing. Not one word, not a label, not a stamp.

Frowning, she went back inside, closing and locking the door behind her. She took the envelope to the kitchen table, opening it as she walked, and she tipped it, dumping the contents out beside her bowl of corn flakes. Photos. What the hell? She frowned. Polaroids. Three of them. Then she blinked and snatched them up. That was Jason, sound asleep in his bed! She moved it to the back of the pile. The next shot was of Stormy, from the neck up, in her own shower. Maxine swore and looked at the third one. It was a shot of her mother, getting out of her car in the parking garage of the hospital where she worked as an R.N.

The telephone rang, and she damn near jumped out of her skin. Maxine clenched her teeth, dropped the photos on the table and went to pick up the phone.

“Do you like the photos, Maxine?”

The voice was a whisper so cold it sent a chill down her spine. “Who the hell is this?” Maxine reached for the answering machine on the table, jabbed the record button with her forefinger.

“Those shots were all taken in the past twelve hours, you know.”

“Why?” Her hand was clenching the telephone so hard her knuckles were white. She wished it was this son of a bitch’s neck. How dare he? God, he’d been in Jason’s bedroom. In Storm’s bathroom. And in that dark parking garage, alone with her mother.

“To show you how easy it is for me to learn everything about you, and how quickly and effortlessly I can get to the people you love. To shoot them. With a camera, this time, but—”

“You fuck with my family or my friends and you die. Do you understand me?”

“That’s quite the threat, coming from a girl barely out of high school.” He laughed, a deep, low sound that changed into a racking cough.

Max held the phone away from her ear, looking at it as realization dawned. It was him. The burned guy she’d seen at the fire. He must have seen her after all. He stopped coughing, and she put the phone back to her ear. “Why are you calling me? What do you want from me, anyway?”

“I want you to forget everything you saw last night. Pretend you were never there. Tell no one.”

“Fine. I’ll be glad to. If you’ll tell me what happened there last night.”

“I’m not making a bargain with you, Maxine. You’ll do as I say. Forget you ever saw me.”

“But—”

“Listen to me, you nosy little bitch!” She jerked in reaction to the anger in his voice. “If you so much as mention anything about seeing me at that fire to anyone, the next thing you find on your doorstep will be a body. Or a part of one. I’ll just shuffle those photos and pick one at random. Are you following me now?”

“Yes!” She paused, took a breath, her outrage completely smothered by her fear. He would hurt her mother, her friends. “Yes, I … look, I don’t know anything. I’m no threat to you. And I’m the only one that saw you. I didn’t tell them. I didn’t tell anyone. They don’t know anything.” She was shaking. She pressed a hand to the wall because her legs felt so unsteady.

“That’s good. See that it stays that way. I’ll be watching you, Maxine. And rest assured, I know how. I’m going to hear everything you say and see everything you do. Don’t test me.”

“I won’t.”

He hung up the phone.

Maxine wanted to sink to the floor. She looked around her, feeling exposed, vulnerable. She depressed the cutoff, then lifted it again. With a trembling forefinger, she punched the star key, then the six and the nine. Maybe she shouldn’t. Maybe he wasn’t kidding and would know she had tried.

“The last number that called this line was,” the computer-generated voice said. Then it paused as its components worked. “We’re sorry. That number is not available.” It clicked off.

Swallowing hard, Maxine hung up the phone.

What the hell was she supposed to do now? Was he watching her? Could he see her even now? Were there bugs or hidden cameras in her own house? She searched her mind and mentally wondered what Oliver Stone would do.

She told herself to use her head. To think.

Okay. The guy had been in a fire last night. Wounded, burned. Suffering from smoke inhalation, too, by the sounds of his cough. He must have spotted her leaving, maybe even followed her home, and then followed Jason and Storm. He learned where they lived, went and got a camera, sneaked back and took the shots. Then he returned to Max’s home and watched the place. He’d followed her mom to work in the wee hours of this morning and taken that shot of her. Then he’d come back here and dropped the envelope and made the phone call. Not from the pay phone, because that would have been traceable. A cell phone, maybe. She leaned over the answering machine, hit rewind and then play. As the tape played back, she heard traffic sounds in the background and some telltale static.

She stopped the machine, popped the microcassette out. He was on the road, on the move. He would have to be. He would be watching her, yes. If he were CIA, he would know how to plant bugs and cameras. But she didn’t think he’d had the time to do those things yet. He probably figured he could scare her enough to keep her on the straight and narrow until he had all his ducks in a row.

Fine.

She went to her room, saved the contents of the CD-ROM to her hard drive, just in case, then tucked the CD and the name badge into her pocket along with the tape and headed out of the house. It wouldn’t look unusual for her to walk to campus. She had classes today.

She wouldn’t pursue this and put her mother or her friends at risk. She had no doubt the man would carry out his threats and then some. No doubt at all. God knew the government had committed far more serious atrocities and gotten away with them. Especially if the accounts on that CD were true.

But she wouldn’t forget. And she would make sure she had plenty of copies of this evidence tucked away in various places. Because someday she would be older and in a position to blow the whistle. Someday when she was established, with a Ph.D. behind her name, and a law license and some clout of her own. Then she would demand some answers.

But not yet. Right now she was just Mad Maxie Stuart, the twenty-year-old college student with the big imagination.

Imagination my ass, she thought. If she had ever needed proof that the government was up to no good in her hometown, she had it now. If that bastard on the phone thought his threats would put her off the scent, he was wrong. His threats were like the validation that had always eluded her. She wasn’t a nut. She was right.

She had been right all along.

And she could be patient.




4


5 Years Later

Dante woke to the sounds of crackling flames and the smell of smoke. It was so like a fragment of his oldest nightmare that for a moment he believed it was just that, a dream memory come to haunt him, and he didn’t stir. But then he felt the heat and the sting in his eyes. He sensed the angry flames and knew they were real.

He sat up fast, too fast, then had to blink in order to clear his swimming head. Night had not yet fallen, he realized dully. He was still weak with the languor of the day sleep. His limbs felt heavy as he turned himself sideways in the large bed and let his legs fall to the floor. They tingled in rebellion when he put weight on them, but he lumbered anyway, stark naked, across the lush carpet, toward the bedroom door. He didn’t go far. He didn’t have to. Flames snapped and snarled beyond the door, and its gleaming finish began to bubble and sweat.

Dante’s nose burned with the smell, and his mind whirled with questions. This was not a coincidence. He turned toward the window, tugging back the heavy draperies, then ducking to the side as the sunlight seared his exposed skin. It hung low in the sky, that blinding yellow death, but it was there, dammit. If he went outside, he would roast.

If he stayed in here, he would do likewise.

The door groaned ominously, swelling inward before its pregnant belly burst, giving birth to hungry flames. Smoke wafted in like a great black ghost. His flesh sizzled. Growling deep in his throat, Dante tore the drapery from its rod, wrapped it around him like a shroud and dove through the glass.

The ground didn’t give an inch but met him brutally, knocked the breath from his lungs, jarred his teeth and rattled his bones. He rolled, got to his feet and ran blindly as he felt the sun heating his skin through the fabric. There was motion to the left of him, then an impact as he slammed bodily into what felt like a car. Brakes squealed, and someone shouted a curse to the accompanying blast of a horn, but Dante just kept moving. He had to peer through the opening in the fabric to see where the hell he was going. Across the pavement, yes, this was right. He ran flat out, off the road, across the weed-strewn parking lot, his bare feet blistering with every searing step as he raced toward the shore. The sunlight beyond the drapery was beginning to penetrate now, and he could feel his flesh blister. Damn, damn, damn. Head down, bare feet pounding, drape clutched around him like a cloak, he ran.

There was a sound. A whirring sound, and then something skewered his arm. It felt as if a red-hot blade had driven straight through. He stopped dead at the stunning pain, groping beneath the drapery with his one functioning hand and feeling a shaft, like a dowel, embedded in his upper arm, warm, thick blood pulsing from the point of entry.

“I got him!” someone shouted. A man’s voice.

A dead man, Dante thought viciously. He forced himself to keep moving. Then his feet touched water and he pressed onward, sloshing to knee depth, then mid-thigh. The cool salty wetness was like heaven on his flesh. God, he was baking. A few more yards and he pitched himself headlong into the Atlantic and swam deep. He let go the drapery, but it hung, tugging at the shaft in his arm until he tore it free. Pain screamed through him, but there was no time to acknowledge it. He swam, as deep as he could go, and still deeper, until he couldn’t feel the sun heating his skin any longer.

Then he rolled, his body brushing the sand and shells and assorted litter on the bottom and stirring up a watery cloud as he looked above him, toward the surface. The sky beyond the water was still pale, but growing ever dimmer. The water cooled and soothed his heat-razed flesh, but his arm was alive with pain, and in a moment he realized the clouds in the water were taking on a pinkish hue. He glanced down at his arm. High on the outside, halfway between shoulder and elbow, the bolt he’d all but forgotten was still piercing him. Blood oozed steadily from around it, blossoming in the water.

The maniac had shot him with a crossbow.

Dante lifted his arm and saw the bolt sticking out the underside. Lovely.

Gripping the bolt with one hand, he pulled it free, swearing the damned thing was a mile long, grating his teeth at the intensity of the pain as it slid through his flesh. Jesus! Mortals would never know pain like vampires did. Never.

He dropped the bolt to the ocean floor, but the blood still flowed. And it would continue to flow until he bled out, unless he found a way to stanch it. The wound would heal only with the day sleep. If he lived that long.

He reached down to the sea’s bottom, scooped up a handful of the muddy sand and, mustering every ounce of tolerance he had, packed the stuff into the hole in his arm. The pain was excruciating. He howled with it, but in the depths, who could hear? He packed the sand in from both sides of the wound, then plucked a handful of coarse seaweed and wound it around his arm. Using his teeth and one hand, he knotted the rope-like stalks.

He was weak from the pain, his lungs starving for air, and though he would not die for the lack of it, it was nearly impossible to convince himself not to inhale.

When he looked up again, the sky was dark, and he whispered a silent thanks to whatever sorts of angels watched over the undead. He pushed his feet into the ocean bottom, just a little. Slowly, very slowly, he let himself float to the surface. When his head broke through, he sucked in a deep breath. It felt heavenly, filling his lungs, clearing his head. He pushed his dripping hair off his face and scanned the shoreline.

“He’s got to come out sooner or later.”

Dante followed the sound of the voice to its owner, a man who stood on the shoreline, waving a flashlight around over the surface of the water. He was looking seventy-five yards too close to the shore. Thinking like a mortal, applying mortal limitations to a creature who laughed at them.

“If he does, he’ll kill us both,” said another man. “The sun’s gone down.”

“But—”

“We failed. You have to know when to admit defeat and walk away, Raymond. Otherwise you won’t live long enough to try again. After dark, they’re in control. You understand? The night is our enemy.”

Gazing through the darkness, Dante spotted the second man on the shore. The left side of his face, between the cheek and the eye, was mottled and scarred, pulling the eye itself into a grotesque pout. Higher, there was a pink patch where no hair grew on his head.

“Put the light out,” the scarred man ordered.

The other one, Raymond, obeyed. “How can he stay in the water that long? Huh? I didn’t think they could breathe underwater like freaking fish or something.”

“They can’t. But it would take a very long time for one to pass out from lack of oxygen.”

Dante pulled his arms through the water, moving silently, steadily closer, eager to rip out their throats and drain them dry. He’d lost a substantial amount of blood. He could replenish himself at their expense. The two were certainly courting his wrath.

But before he could reach them, they hurried away. He heard doors slam, a motor start up, and then saw the lights of a car as it left him. No longer bothering to move slowly or quietly, Dante swam until his knees dragged in the sand. Then he got to his feet and waded out of the cold ocean. As he stood on the shore, ankle deep in the water, stark naked and cold as stone, he looked back toward the flaming torch in the night that had been one of his favorite homes.

“I’m going to have to kill those two, whoever the hell they were.”

“Dante?”

He knew that voice, and he waited there, dripping wet, his arm screaming in pain, until Sarafina stepped out of the shadows. She was beautiful, as always. Dressed in a full skirt of black lace, scalloped at the bottom. A white peasant blouse pushed down to bare her milky shoulders. Colorful silk scarfs at her waist and in her black, curling tresses, trailing her like comets’ tails whenever she moved. She wore too much makeup. Always had. Thick black liner and dark shadow gave her a menacing appearance, and the long, curling bloodred nails added to that. But she was a Gypsy. She embraced the stereotypical image that went with the blood. It was her gimmick.

She moved closer, gripped his shoulders, making him wince, and kissed his face, his mouth. He felt her warmth and smelled a fresh kill on her breath.

“You’re all right?” she asked when she finally released him.

“I’ve got a hole in my arm, but it will keep. The bastards burned my house.”

“Did you see them?” she asked.

He nodded. “They’re gone now, or they’d be dead.”

“Did one of them have a scarred face?”

Looking at her sharply, Dante nodded. “You’ve encountered them?”

“Him, at least. He was following me one night in Rome. I’d have ripped out his throat if he hadn’t realized I’d spotted him and run like a rabbit.”

Dante sighed. “The man is a pest.”

“The man needs killing.”

Rolling his eyes, Dante managed a smile, in spite of his pain. “You think every mortal needs killing, Sarafina.”

“Thirty of our kind have been murdered in their sleep, Dante. And other fires like this one have come close to claiming more. Someone knows our secrets.”

A chill went through him—at her words, or because of the cold, he wasn’t certain which. “Let’s go someplace where I can get dry,” he told her. “We’ll talk there.”

“Yes. You’ll draw a crowd soon enough, standing out here naked.”

Taking his arm, Sarafina led him to a black limousine that was parked around a bend in the road, put him into the back seat and slid in beside him. Dante almost smiled at the extravagance.

The driver said nothing of the sopping wet, naked man his employer had apparently plucked from the waves. He didn’t even look directly into her eyes when she spoke to him. He was well trained, Dante thought. Very well. Maybe too well. Pushing a button so the glass partition opened just slightly, Sarafina said, “Take us to the apartment, pet. And turn up the heat back here.”

The driver’s only reply was a nod as the glass slid closed again. Then the car was in motion.

Sarafina picked up a large crocheted shawl and proceeded to rub Dante’s shoulders, chest and hair with it. “I think it’s that dreadful DPI,” she said. “They have to be behind this.”

Dante sent her a quelling glance, then jerked his head toward the man in the front.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, love. He can’t hear me with the partition closed, and even if he could, he wouldn’t repeat a word.”

Dante glanced again at the man in the front. He was very pale, very thin. His eyes seemed hollow. He couldn’t see the man’s throat, but the fact that he wore a turtleneck beneath his navy-blue jacket spoke volumes. Dante looked at Sarafina again. “You’re not supposed to use them as slaves, ‘fina. It’s bad form.”

She shrugged. “At least I don’t kill them outright. Unless they displease me. Stop changing the subject. What do we do about this organization?”

He shook his head slowly, debating whether to put the poor mortal out of his misery when the ride had ended. Then again, what good would it do? Sarafina would only find another whose mind she could bend to her will. The more often a vampire drank from a mortal without killing them, the more addicted the mortal became, until he was little more than a mindless subservient worm, like the driver, craving only the feel of his mistress’s fangs sinking into his flesh.

“DPI was destroyed five years ago,” he told her. “The government stopped funding the project after that. It no longer exists.”

“Then who is hunting down vampires?”

He shrugged, looking away.

“More interestingly, who is giving them their information? How do they know where we rest, where we hunt, where we live? Even DPI, with all their research, didn’t have this much information on our personal lives.” She dropped the damp black shawl on the seat between them. “That is the person we need to find, Dante. Whoever it is, we need to kill them … slowly, I think. I’d like to see them writhe for a while first.”

She pushed a button, and the glass between the front and back seats slid open once again. She leaned closer to it. “Your wrist, my pet. Your mistress is hungry.”

Smiling wanly, the driver lifted his arm, poked his hand through the opening. The sleeve of his jacket was already rolled back, and several puncture wounds littered his forearm. Gripping his forearm with both of hers, Sarafina sank her teeth into him and sucked at him for a long while. Dante looked away but couldn’t deny the hunger stirring inside him.

She lifted her head, licked her red lips clean. “Would you like some, Dante? My pet is quite delicious.”

“You’re cruel, Sarafina. Kill him and have done with it.”

She lifted her brows as if wounded, then turned her attention back to her driver. She licked his forearm clean of the trickles of blood left behind and gently rolled his sleeve down again. “Here we are, love. Pull over right here.”

He nodded, pulling the limo to a stop. Then he got out, came back and opened her door.

They were on a highway. Traffic rushed past in a blur of lights and motion. Sarafina didn’t get up. Without so much as looking at him, she said, “I want you to do something for me, love.”

“Anything,” the driver whispered. He was a tall man, Dante noted. Dark hair sprinkled with gray, a thin, angular face and a beakish nose.

“I want you turn around, and walk out into the middle of the highway.”

The driver stared at her, not directly at her eyes, but somewhere below them.

“Sarafina—” Dante began.

“Do it now,” she said.

Dante closed his eyes and swore under his breath. The driver turned and stepped out into the oncoming traffic. His body was hurled about a hundred feet when it was struck. By then, though, Sarafina was behind the wheel and driving away.

She never even looked back.

“I just don’t understand why you won’t move back to L.A., Morgan. You have everything you wanted. You could return in triumph now, just the way you always said you would.”

Morgan paced across the marble tiles of the great room, heels clicking with every step. She wore a loose-fitting teal blouse and matching pants in brushed silk that whispered over her skin when she moved. She loved the way it felt. “I like it here,” she said. “Come on, David, even you have to admit I’ve done wonders with this place in five years’ time.”

“I’m beginning to wish I’d never sold it to you,” he muttered, half under his breath. He eased his large frame into a claw-footed antique chair, looking around the great room as he did. She knew he had to admire what he saw. The plasterwork ceiling had been freshly redone, right down to the cherubic angels in the corners and filling the concave dome directly above them.

She took the seat across from him, handed him a glass of iced soda. Her own glass looked identical, but, despite the early-morning hour, there was vodka mixed with hers. She needed the strength. She loved David, but dammit, she wished he would just leave. She didn’t care about anything except getting back to her journals. To the fantasies and the man who had written them. God, to go a single waking hour, much less a day, without wallowing in his mind was nearly unbearable. She never left the house anymore. She never wanted to. And when she slept—oh, God, it was best when she slept. Because he was so much more real in dreams.

“I have to admit, I’m confused,” David said, taking the soda, sipping it. “I thought it was all decided. You were going to hide out here, lick your wounds, write your blockbuster, make your fortune and come home to reclaim everything you’d lost.”

“Ahh, yes. And restore honor to the De Silva family name.” She smiled just a little.

“If I’d known you could write the way you can, and as quickly as you can, I have to admit, I’d never have let you come out here in the first place.”

Morgan averted her eyes. “I couldn’t write like that. Not out there. I found my … inspiration, for want of a better word, here. In this house. I couldn’t work anywhere else. I can’t, David. I won’t.”

“That’s superstitious nonsense.”

No, she thought. It wasn’t. Dante was here. She felt him here. Her own beautiful madman. God, he—his diaries, at least—had given her back her life. And yet, they had stolen a part of it, too. The man who’d called himself Dante had captivated her mind, her soul, in some dark way she had yet to understand. He was real to her. He was more than a long-dead lunatic who had written down his insane delusions. He was real. He lived … inside her somehow. Inside this house.

But she couldn’t explain any of that to David. Instead she stared up at the crystal chandelier she’d had installed in the great room and wondered how close she had come to the one that was there originally. When Dante had lived here.

It hadn’t been easy to restore the house. And it hadn’t been cheap. But thanks to the box office success of the first two films in her vampire series, she had been able to afford to do exactly what she wanted. And that included hiring period experts to help her plan her restoration, to make it as accurate as possible. Although much, much more luxurious.

Her third film had been out for exactly eight weeks, and it had already made Morgan wealthy beyond her wildest dreams. David, as well. And now they waited to see what other dreams might be realized.

Morgan glanced at her watch. “Isn’t it time yet?”

“Close enough, I suppose. Come on.” David got to his feet, held a hand out to her. She took it and let him pull her up. “God, Morgan, you’ve got to put on some weight. You’re not an actress, you know.”

She smiled at him, hiding the weakness in her legs, the slight rush of dizziness that often hit her when she got up too quickly. “You can’t be too rich or too thin,” she quipped. “Besides, if all goes well, I’ll need to look good in some designer’s idea of a dress in a few weeks.”

Right. As if she would leave this place, even for that.

They walked across the tiles to the double doors that opened into her office. The fireplace had been converted to gas now, and the first thing Morgan did upon entering was turn it on. Lush oriental rugs covered the newly refinished hardwood floor. The desk was a reproduction, the computer state of the art. And the walls were filled with images of Dante. Charcoal sketches she’d done herself, rather than stills from the films. The actor who played him did a wonderful job, of course, but he wasn’t Dante. She knew Dante.

There was a sketch of him as a small boy with huge dark eyes, peering up at a beautiful Gypsy woman who danced beside a campfire. There was another of him sitting at this very desk, brooding over his journals.

“This is almost creepy,” David said, shivering a little as he crossed the large room, took a seat and picked up a remote control. “God, don’t you ever get sick of him?”

Morgan paused near another drawing, her eyes locked with the staring, sightless eyes of the subject. “I know every line and contour of his face,” she whispered. Then, as the silence drew out, she shook herself, forced a smile. “Of course that’s impossible. It’s all what my mind has created from the raw materials in the di—in the screenplays. But it seems real. I see him in my dreams as clearly as if he were real.” She smiled. “I even know the sound of his voice.”

“Writers,” David muttered. He pushed a button, and the antique replica cabinet’s doors slid open, revealing the big-screen television set behind them. He hit another button to flick it on, and one to set the channel. “I’d get sick of him,” he said. “Real or not.”

“I could drown in him and not get sick of him,” she said. “Sometimes I think maybe that’s what I’m doing. Drowning in him.”

When David didn’t answer, she glanced his way, saw him looking at her oddly. Morgan gave a little laugh to ease the worry from his eyes. “We creative types are supposed to be eccentric. Don’t scowl like that, you’ll wrinkle.”

He looked away with a sigh, but his gaze froze on the television screen, and he snatched up the remote, thumbing the volume up higher. “Here it is!”

The famous couple at the podium took turns reading from a list, and Morgan thought the brief spot took longer than any two-hour feature she had ever sat through. She slugged back her drink and waited until they got to the part that interested her.

“In the category of best original screenplay, the nominees are …”

A hum seemed to fill her head, the room, her ears. She couldn’t hear what they were saying any longer, but suddenly she saw her name on the screen along with four others. “Morgan De Silva, for Twilight Hunger.”

David surged to his feet, hugging her hard against him, smiling and laughing and twisting from side to side as he held her. Morgan surrendered to the rush of darkness that swamped her brain and simply went limp in his arms.

She was lying on the chaise when she opened her eyes again. David sat close to her, patting her hand. “There you are. It’s all right. I guess this meant more to you than I realized.”

“It’s not that.” she began. Then she recalled what had just happened.

God, it was true. She was nominated for the top award in the film industry. For work that wasn’t even her own. She had never expected it to go this far. And yet, she had, in a way, known it would. It had to. The stories were too good not to be recognized as such. There was something. transcendent about them. Something that touched the audience on a level that was almost visceral in its intensity.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded but didn’t bother trying to sit up. This was very odd. She had expected to feel … jubilant at this moment. Wasn’t this beyond her dreams? Wasn’t this supposed to fix everything that had been missing from her life? Why did she still feel so empty inside?

“You’re going to have to come back to L.A. with me now,” David said. He pushed one hand through his thinning honey-blond hair, which was getting gray at the temples. “There are going to be parties. Receptions. Interviews. You should be seen.”

The thought of leaving this place set her heart racing. She shook her head quickly, fighting back her panic. “I can’t leave now.”

“But—”

“The new one is at too delicate a point right now, David. I can’t stop working on it without losing my momentum. And I can’t work anywhere else. So I have to stay right here.”

He closed his eyes slowly, as if attempting to digest her words.

“I should be finished with it by the time of the actual ceremony. I’ll be able to come out for that. I promise.”

His eyes popped open. “But you need a dress. And hair and … honey, people plan for months to get ready for this one, special night. God, if this had happened to the girl I knew five years ago, she’d have insisted I fly her to Paris to shop for a gown. And probably would have bought three of them before making a final decision.”

Sitting up, very slowly, so as not to induce the return of her familiar lightheadedness, she met his eyes. “I’m not that girl anymore.”

“No,” he said. “You’re not. You’ve changed, Morgan. And not for the better. You’ve practically become a recluse.”

She banked her anger. He was right, and if she spoke her mind, she would tell him to go home, so she could get right back to her reclusiveness. Crawl back into the velvet darkness of Dante’s world. She hated not being enmeshed in it, missed him like a lover when she went a day without wading through his life, processing it through her own mind and soul, and onto her computer screen. Changing his memories, his deepest thoughts, into lines and stage directions, so that he could come to life on the screen. It was almost as if she were somehow trying to resurrect him from death by giving life to his memories.

Not enough. God, it was never enough.

“I’ve made you angry,” David said.

“No. No, I’m just … overwhelmed.” She smiled up at him. “So are you taking me out for breakfast to celebrate or not?”

Lifting his brows, he sighed. “Yes, of course I am. How soon can you be ready?”

She forced herself to look happy. To play the role of the excited honoree, eager to celebrate the achievement of a lifetime.

The truth was, she just wanted to get it over with and return to her house. His house. To be alone with the nonexistent man who haunted her, day and night. Heart and soul. Who possessed her mind.

Dante.

The man who had written volume upon volume in the first person, and who had, she was convinced, believed every word he had written.

He had believed he was a vampire.

She almost wished it could be true.




5


Dante stood outside in the darkness, the wind in his face, tangling its cool damp fingers in his hair. Just a hint of rain looming. He felt its touch on his skin in that wind. He tasted it. The waves from the sea crashed to the shoreline just beyond the house. His house, or it had been once. Warm yellow light spilled from its windows, as if welcoming him home. But he knew better. Someone was inside. He could feel and taste them the same way he did the rain in the air. A woman.

When he had decided to come here, he hadn’t even been certain he would find the place still standing. Last time he’d seen it, the house had been on the verge of ruin. But no more. Someone had gone to great pains to restore the house he had built over a century ago. The white flagstone walkway that curved up to the front door was just as he remembered it. The lampposts at the far end like sentries. Oh, they hadn’t been electric, of course, as they were now. Nor had the lights inside the house. But the shutters were black, and the paint was white and fresh. And the chimney was the same size and shape, even though the bricks were all brand-new.

The door was different, he noted. It had been white, with four glass panes in a fantail pattern in the top. The new door was far more elaborate, wider, flanked by tooled hardwood borders and a wide mantle arching over the top. Artificial flowers were affixed in that arched mantle. It struck him for a moment, how false that was. How ridiculous. The smell of plastic and silk on the things made a mockery of the beauty they tried to imitate.

Artificial flowers were a sacrilege.

An oval of stained glass stretched almost the whole length of the door, and the handle was gleaming brass. The place looked almost new again. Two cars sat in the white gravel driveway, both of them foreign and fast. Money lived here now. A woman with wealth. And youth. He tasted that on the air, as well.

There was a man. Older. Robust. Strong. While the female had a weakness about her. He didn’t smell sex in the air, so he assumed the relationship was platonic.

He was curious, he had to admit. Eager to see what had been done to the inside of the place. And he couldn’t leave, anyway. Since his near miss with the scarred man, he had found his every haven invaded, his every familiar haunt under watch. The man knew his secrets somehow. So Dante had come back here—to a place he hadn’t used in over a century—to find safety and solace, until he could figure out what to do.

Obviously, he’d stayed away too long. Someone was living here.

Not that it mattered.

He walked around to the rear of the house, found the willow tree still there, but so much larger than before that he had to look twice. God, time passed in a blur. Easily, he leapt onto a low-hanging limb and began to climb. The smooth bark, flexible limbs, the whisper of the dangling greenery, all these were familiar. He’d planted this tree here a hundred years ago.

As he neared the level of the master bedroom, he stopped, tipping his head to one side and opening his senses. He felt something. Not quite a scent on the air. Something else. Something … that stroked his nerve endings to life like a magnet moving over metal shards.

What was that?

He crept closer, climbing from the limb onto the railing that surrounded the balcony, his hand curling around its cool metal. Then he lowered himself down onto the balcony itself and walked closer to the closed glass doors. Sheer white curtains hung in those doors. Sheer enough that he could see through them, into the bedroom beyond.

The woman lay sleeping in a four-poster bed.

Her hair was the color of cinnamon, lush and long, and spread over the pillows. Her skin was creamy white, and as pale as if he had already tasted her. Naked arms rested atop the thin white sheet that he sensed was all that covered her. Her neck was long and slender. Dante licked his lips, and his desire stirred. He didn’t make a habit of sampling innocent blood. He killed, yes. He could live on cold, stale blood stored in plastic bags, as some did. But he didn’t really call that living. So he killed, but mostly only those who dearly needed killing. Other times, he paid for his desires to be sated. There were women who specialized in satisfying needs like his. They were discreet, and paid enough to keep them that way.

This woman … she wasn’t one of them. And yet he was drawn to her, pulled. He wanted her.

He stood so close to the doors that his breath, though cool, fogged the glass. He wiped it away, looking at her, and he wished silently that she would tug the sheet away, so he could see her more fully. Know for sure if she wore anything against her skin, underneath the covers.

Almost before the thought was complete, the woman lifted her hand to the top of the sheet and peeled it slowly away from her body. She was completely naked, as he had suspected. And for a moment all he could do was look at her and drink in her beauty. Small breasts, but soft, their tips rose-colored and plump. She was far too thin, ribs showing clearly beneath her skin. The hair between her thighs was the same burnished color as that on her head.

He let his gaze move up her body again. Let it linger on her breasts, and he thought about tasting them, and even as he thought it, her nipples stiffened. Frowning, Dante watched with some amazement. Could she be aware of his thoughts on some level? He could exercise mind control over a weak-willed mortal, he knew that, but he would at least have to be trying. The odd stray thought shouldn’t.

He shifted his gaze to her face and wondered, should he happen to think about her creamy thighs parting for him, whether she would.

Her legs moved apart. Dante shivered with arousal and hunger, and not a little fear. It was as he was backing away that his mind cleared, giving him the answer he should have seen right away. Suddenly he understood what he’d been sensing earlier, that prickling awareness and attraction.

She was one of them. She was one of the Chosen.

He backed across the balcony, reached the railing and, turning, jumped it without hesitation. On the ground, he stood, looking around him and then out to the sea, as if it held the answers. If he’d had anywhere else in the world to go, he would have gone, and gladly.

But the sun would be up soon. And this place was the only haven he had left. He could create others, but that would take time. No, for now, he could only stay here.

But he was going to have to avoid the woman at all costs. Never had he experienced that sort of mind link with a mortal. Never. Nor had he with others of his own kind. What the hell did this mean?

He walked out toward the cliffs and, at the familiar spot, looked down at the stone ledge, some fifteen feet below. There was a small opening in the stone wall that backed that ledge. It was still shrouded by the vines he had planted ages ago. They sprouted around his feet where he stood and grew from the bits of soil along the cliff-face, draping downward to cover the cave’s entrance like a curtain.

He hoped the passage that ran beneath the earth all the way back to the house hadn’t collapsed by now. And he hoped the rooms hidden beneath the old house hadn’t disintegrated to dust after so much time.

She was dreaming about Dante again.

He stood over her bed, staring down at her. Just stood there. He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t touch her.

She lay there, staring back at him, wishing he would do or say something. Anything. But he didn’t.

She opened her mouth to speak and found she couldn’t. So instead she looked at him. It was odd that she knew his face so well, she thought idly as she perused it in her dream. It was angular, and cruel. Longish and shadowed. His jawbone was sharp, his nose narrow. The eyes set deep, and so dark that he seemed to be looking out at her from somewhere deep within. From his soul, maybe.

He wanted to see her. Her eyes, once held by his, were locked there. And she knew what he wanted. All she wanted was to please him. She lifted a hand, peeled her covers away and lay there, completely naked and unashamed, as his dark, intense eyes burned over her. Every part of her.

Touch me, she thought. For the love of God, just touch me.

She blinked—and he was gone.

Just that suddenly.

Awake now, Morgan lay in her bed. Her covers were on the floor, and her body was alive. But she was alone.

God, these dreams were taking on a life of their own, weren’t they? Maybe she needed to think about some sort of therapy. Not that she hadn’t dreamed about him, over and over, night after night, since she had come to live here. But this time it had been different. It had been. real.

She sat up slowly, ran a hand through her hair and got to her feet. She pulled on a satin robe the color of cream, walked to the glass doors and opened them, stepping out onto the balcony, inhaling the night air deeply. It tasted good.

Then she paused and stared straight ahead.

A man stood on the cliffs, wind buffeting him as it was buffeting her. He was staring out toward the sea, and she couldn’t really see his face. And yet there was something so incredibly familiar about him. The fall of his hair. His stance. Something.

A fist seemed to close around her stomach as clouds skittered away from the moon and, for just an instant, his face was touched by moonlight.

“Dante.” She whispered his name, breathed it.

And as if he had heard her, even though it was impossible from that distance, he turned sharply, looked right at her.

“It can’t be …” Morgan closed her eyes, took three openmouthed breaths as her heart hammered in her chest. “It can’t be.”

She opened her eyes again.

The cliffs, the sea, the wind, and nothing else. No one was there. No one was there at all.




6


Maxine leaned back in the ergonomic chair and blinked her eyes several times. You didn’t blink often enough when you stared at a computer screen all day. She’d read that somewhere. It wasn’t good for your vision.

The front door opened, and Storm came in, a big white bag from the bakery in one hand and the morning mail in the other. “Time to take a break!” she called. “Carbs, calories and cream filling, just what the doctor ordered.”

Max sighed, pushing the chair back. It rolled on its casters from the computer desk to the middle of the floor in what used to be the living room and was now an office. If you used the term loosely. It more closely resembled an explosion in a paper-and-file-folder factory. With computers. Lots of computers.

Storm dropped the bag on her own desk, sat down and peered inside. “Mmm, I got jelly and cream filled, and now I can’t decide.”

“How many are in there?” Maxine asked, lifting her brows.

“Half dozen.” Storm didn’t look up. The doughnuts had her mesmerized.

“Better go for one of each, then.”

She looked up then, brows arched. “You think?”

“Oh, yeah. Far better than the risk of making the wrong choice.”

“I like the way your mind works,” Stormy said, smiling, as she reached into the bag to pluck out a doughnut.

Max got out of her chair and wandered into the kitchen, which was still a kitchen, where she poured two cups of fresh coffee. “Did you ever wonder just how screwed up I must be to be in the same town, in the same house, in the same rut, after all this time?”

“No.”

Max smiled at the sound of the word, because it was doughnut muffled. She carried the two mugs back into the room in time to see Stormy taking another bite and closing her eyes in ecstasy.

Max set Storm’s cup down in front of her and bent to help herself to a doughnut, knowing they would vanish if she didn’t.

“You care to elaborate on that answer, or are you just gonna go with the one-syllable reply?”

Stormy swallowed, licked her lips, took a sip of her coffee. She still had a ring of powdered sugar around her mouth, but what the hell?

“Who wouldn’t be in the same house? Shoot, girl, your mother gave it to you free and clear. You’d have been nuts not to take it. And I fail to see any rut. You’re running not one, but two, businesses. Both turning a profit, I might add.”

“Barely,” Maxine muttered. She sighed, dunked her doughnut and took a big soggy bite. When she finished, she dropped the first of her two bombshells. “Web page design is getting boring, Stormy. To tell you the truth, I’m thinking about dropping it.”

Stormy blinked. “Dropping it?”

“Closing it down.”

Setting her coffee mug on her desk, Storm got to her feet. “Why would you do that? That’s where you earn most of your income.”

“Yeah, but it was never my life’s work. I mean, it’s okay. I’m good at it, but it’s not my dream job. Never was.”

“So what are you telling me? They’re hiring over at Spies-R-Us?”

Max shot her a quick glance. “Don’t even joke about that.”

“Then what?” Storm threw her hands in the air, turning in a slow circle and searching the ceiling for an explanation. “I thought this side business of yours was enough to satisfy your inner snoop, Max. I mean, hasn’t it been?”

“No, it hasn’t. If anything, it’s only whetted my appetite.” Max had kind of stumbled into the realm of Internet crime investigations when one of her Web clients asked her advice in dealing with a cyber-stalker a year ago. Since then, she had helped track down a half-dozen others by tracing them through their super-anonymous, supposedly untraceable screennames. She had even helped to bust up several hoax rings revolving around so-called paranormal sciences. Scam artists who went online hawking everything from psychic readings to ghost-busting powders. Which was perfectly legal until you tied them to their partners, who harassed and sometimes frightened gullible people into believing they needed otherworldly help, then fed information to the scam artist, who used it to convince the client he was really in touch with “the other side.”

All of this had given Max the opportunity to touch base with her favorite cop now and then. Not that that had any bearing on her decision to move into this line of work.

“So what would you say if I told you I was thinking about embarking on another little enterprise?” she asked.

Storm turned to face her, searched her face warily. “A third business?”

“I’m dropping the Web designing services. So it would only be a second business. And, in fact, it would be more like taking the existing one to a new, higher level.”

“What do you have in mind?”

Max wiped the doughnut sugar from her fingers onto her jeans and went to her desk. She opened a drawer, took out a sheet of paper, slid it across the surface. “Take a look at this and tell me what you think.”

Storm came closer, leaned over it, reading aloud. “Maxine Stuart, Licensed Private.” Then she looked up. “Licensed private investigator? Since when?”

“It just came today. I sent in the application months ago.”

“Maxie …”

“Look, I know. It sounds way over the top, but if you think about it, it’s what we’ve been doing anyway. Just in cyberspace instead of real time.”

“They can’t shoot you in cyberspace.” Storm rolled her eyes. “Who else knows about this?”

Max shrugged.

“Maxine Stuart, who else knows?”

Max lowered her eyes. “Well, Lou knows.”

“Lou. Lou Malone. I figured as much. He probably encouraged this, didn’t he?”

“Well, he, uh, helped me with the application process. He was one of my references.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Look, I’m good at this. And Lou’s already got a few cases ready to toss my way.”

“Hell. I don’t know why you don’t just jump that man’s bones and get it over with, Max.”

“I intend to. Just as soon as I can get him cornered.” Stormy’s eyes widened, and Max smiled in sheer nasty delight. “But one thing has nothing to do with the other. If I was doing this just to get closer to Lou, I’d have joined the force. It would have been easier.”

“Yeah. Right. Isn’t the old crock due to retire pretty soon?”

There was a throat clearing, and they both turned to see the old crock himself standing in the doorway. Max couldn’t judge for sure how long he’d been standing there, how much he might have heard. She figured the man’s bones would more easily succumb to any jumping she might attempt if she could sneak up on them. Take ‘em by surprise, that sort of thing.

He was too thin, so his suit looked a little on the baggy side. “Am I interrupting anything?”

Stormy turned her back to him and made wide eyes at Max. Max ignored her. “Come on in, Lou. Did you smell the doughnuts or what?”

He didn’t smile, didn’t tease her in return the way he usually did. “It’s, uh—kinda delicate.”

Frowning, Maxine walked over to where he stood. He didn’t wait. Instead he turned, stepped out onto the porch. When she joined him there and closed the door behind her, he said, “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee. We can talk there. All right?”

“Sounds serious.”

“Yeah. I need your help with something. It’s sorta right up your alley, Max, or I’d never ask.”

“Why not?”

“Why not what?”

“Why would you never ask?”

He drew a breath, sighed heavily. “‘Cause you’re brand-new at this kind of thing, and I sort of had it in mind to start you out with something a little more milk toast. Background checks on suspects, shit like that.”

“Got that much faith in me, do you?”

“You’re a kid.”

“I’m twenty-five.”

“Like I said …”

“Shut up, Lou.” She yanked open his car door and sat beside him. He didn’t take her to the coffee shop, as she had expected. Instead he pulled around the drive-through window of a fast food joint and got two large coffees, one black, one with two creams and three sugars. She smiled as he rattled off the order without asking her. He knew exactly how she liked her coffee.

His bones, she mused, were practically jumped already.

He drove to the nearest parking area, shut the car off and turned in his seat to face her.

“Gee, Lou, if you want to take me parking, maybe we should aim for something just a little more secluded.”

His face colored. “Yeah, right.”

“There’s this old gravel bed south of town where everyone used to go to make out back in high school. You know it?”

He avoided her eyes. “Of course I know it.”

“Mmm. So you’ve been there?”

“Yeah. Shining lights on kids who ought to know better and sending ‘em home to their mammas. Now, do you wanna talk business or do you wanna play, Maxie?”

She wanted to play. With him. Now. But she’d obviously pissed him off. He always got pissed off when she flirted with him, even a little bit. “Fine. Business. Go ahead.” She sat back in her seat and sipped her coffee.

“Okay. There’s this woman. She’s a friend of mine. A good friend.”

Fingernails raked across a chalkboard inside her head, and Maxine sat up straighter.

“Her name is Lydia Jordan. She runs Haven House.”

Max blinked now as her mind filled in the blanks. “That’s that girls’ shelter downtown? For runaway teens in trouble?”

He nodded.

“But I thought that was run by a pair of former prostitutes.”

Again he nodded.

She lifted her eyebrows and stared at him. “This friend of yours is a hooker?”

“Was a hooker.”

“And how the hell is it that you know her so well?” she asked, and she really didn’t care how bitchy it sounded.

He smiled at her. “Hell, Maxie, if I wasn’t old enough to be your father, I’d almost think you were jealous.”

“You’re nowhere near old enough to be my father.” He was, technically, but she wasn’t about to admit it.

He sighed, shaking his head. “I met Lydia the first time I picked her up for soliciting. I was a rookie, and she couldn’t have been more than eighteen. I must have brought her in a dozen times over the years before she finally got herself straightened out. I didn’t know Kimbra as well. But the two of them met on the streets, became best friends and helped each other start over.”

“That’s the partner? The other half of the dynamic duo?”

He nodded. “They got legitimate jobs, took classes, and once they had themselves taken care of, they reached back down to help other girls like them. I think they’d both spent some time at Haven House before they took it over. Anyway, none of that matters right now.”

“Of course it matters. Just how close are you to this Lydia person, Lou?”

He sent her a look she rarely saw on him. An angry one that told her very clearly that she was crossing some unseen, unspoken boundary line and that she’d damn well better back off.

She sighed and looked away.

“Kimbra Sykes is dead. Murdered. And Lydia has somehow got it into her head that some kind of supernatural forces were involved.”

Maxine was unimpressed. “Did a lot of drugs while she was turning tricks, did she?”

“No. But she’s always been incredibly superstitious.” She wanted to ask him why the hell he thought she should care how superstitious this ex-whore might be. She hated the woman. Instantly, automatically hated her. “So what makes you think I can do anything to help her?”

He put a hand on her shoulder. “Max, have I done something to make you mad at me?”

“No.” She didn’t even look at him as she spoke. “Well then, how come you’re sitting there puckered up like a prune?” He only sighed when she refused to answer. Then he shook his head. “I just thought that—hell, you know all about this kind of stuff. Remember that woman who thought her house was haunted, and how she hired that Internet ghost-buster to come clear it out for her?”

“And it turned out he was the one haunting it? Yeah, I remember.”

“You knew. You knew right off the bat it was a hoax. And you were able to convince that woman, mostly because you knew so much about the subject. You went in there telling her that a real ghost would never behave the way hers was—remember? Had her eating out of your hand!”

She shrugged, warming just a little at his praise. “I’m pretty good when I know my subject.”

“And you know this subject. You and your skeptical mind, always having to dig into anything you come upon that doesn’t seem quite right. Learn all you can about it and then proceed to debunk it.”

She shrugged. “It’s not that I don’t believe in the paranormal. I just know that ninety-nine percent of the ghosts, goblins, psychics and channelers out there are con artists. I believe what I can see with my own eyes, not what people tell me. And even when I see it with my own eyes, I don’t believe much of what the government or any other authority figure tells me. If that makes me a skeptic, then I’m a skeptic.”

“You’re a skeptic.”

She shrugged. “I still don’t see what you want me to do for your … friend.”

“I want you to convince her that her best friend was not murdered by a vampire.”

Maxine’s head came up very slowly. She met his eyes, looking for the hint of humor that would tell her he was joking. But it wasn’t there.

“Vampire?”

“Yeah. Is that the craziest freaking thing you’ve ever heard or what?”

She nodded vaguely, but in her mind, she was back at that burned-out building, five years ago, with the soldiers, the lights. Hell. She had always known it would come back to haunt her. She knew things she shouldn’t know. Things no one should know.

“When can I meet this Lydia person?”

“Then you’ll do it?” he asked.

She met his eyes, swallowed hard. “For you? Sure, Lou. You know I can’t say no to you. I just wish you’d get around to asking me for something a little more fun.”

He laughed uneasily, patted her on the head and looked away. Then he started the car up again and drove her back home.




7


Dante woke in the sour-tasting darkness of his tomb and looked around, seeing everything.

It wasn’t really a tomb. Not exactly, though all it would need to make it mirror one was a rotting corpse or two. The square concrete room was large, windowless, airless. Down here, one inhaled stagnant dankness and mold rather than oxygen. The subterranean room held only a handful of items: a kerosene lantern on a rickety old table and a coffin. And while he found sleeping in the thing to be a laughable cliché, it had its advantages. First and foremost, it would discourage anyone who might somehow find his way in here. Anyone other than a vampire hunter, that was. Secondly, coffins were built to last. This one was as well preserved as it had been when he’d been here last. The padding inside was still soft and intact, if a little less-than-fresh smelling. It sat on a bier that was a rectangle of concrete, rising up from the floor. Built for just that purpose, the bier was the third advantage. Hollow inside, it led to a secondary tunnel. He had never yet needed to use the trap door in the bottom of the coffin, but it was good to know it was there, should he need it.

This place was secure. Safe. But it had never been meant for habitation. It was a last resort, nothing more. That he had been forced to retreat to this place should only spur him to take action that much sooner.

He needed to learn who these new vampire hunters were, where they were getting their information. He needed to stop them.

Smoothing the wrinkles from his clothes, he glanced just once at the cement spiral steps that led up to a solid ceiling. There was a hinged doorway in the floor there, completely invisible from above. But when he’d opened it, curious to see what the woman had done to his house, he’d found a wooden barrier. Someone had apparently laid a new hardwood floor over the old one in his study. Oh, he could have smashed through it easily enough, but announcing his presence was the last thing he had in mind.

Bad enough she had glimpsed him that first night, just before dawn.

Looked right at him and whispered his name. He’d heard her clearly, despite the distance. His senses were honed by centuries of immortality and, he thought, blood drinking. Living blood was raw power to his kind.

She had said his name. And he’d heard her, physically heard her, but also heard her mentally. He had felt that whisper echoing within his mind. And he’d felt the intense yearning that had been wrapped around it. He had even felt an answering tug at his own heart, and yet that made no sense. He didn’t even know the woman. But she, apparently, knew him.

He wondered about that. It ate at him. Had she seen his name on some stray scrap of paper that had been left lying around the house? It wasn’t on the deed—he’d used a false name then.

And if she had simply seen his name somewhere, that did not explain how she could connect that name to the stranger she had glimpsed standing on the shore in the dead of night. She had recognized him. How that could be, he didn’t know.





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