The Last Vampire: Book One
By R. A. Steffan & Jaelynn Woolf
Copyright 2018 by R. A. Steffan
Cover by Deranged Doctor Design
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
ONE
I WAS SIX YEARS OLD when I learned that human beings weren’t supposed to have red, gaping holes through their chests. That’s not the sort of lesson that a person ever wants to repeat—and yet, here I was, staring down at the corpse stuffed into my garden shed like a discarded marionette.
I’d only wanted to mow my freaking lawn. It was supposed to rain later today, and the grass in the back yard already looked ragged and unkempt. So much of my life felt out of control—was it too much to ask for nicely manicured landscaping? Around the edges of my thoughts, I could feel panic swirling, threatening to drag me back to the long-ago autumn day when a little girl lost her innocence and her mother in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
My unease had begun to build the moment I noticed the broken padlock on the shed door. That sinking feeling in the stomach; the realization that someone has been poking around in your stuff and has probably stolen whatever looked most valuable. In this case, that meant my lawnmower. Aside from that and the weed whip, the shed mostly contained a collection of seldom-used gardening tools that had seen better days.
Bracing myself for the loss of a couple hundred dollars’ worth of equipment, I’d opened the door and peered inside. The good news was that the lawnmower was still there. So were the weed whip and the plastic gas can.
The bad news was that my access to them was blocked by the collapsed body of a man with a gaping gunshot wound through his chest. He looked to be in his early thirties, with tousled black hair a bit longer than was fashionable, and a face like something from the artwork of Raphael or Michelangelo. If one of the old masters had sculpted a dark angel, it would have looked like this man—tragic and beautiful and dangerous.
He was wearing black jeans, combat boots, a white tailored shirt with a couple of buttons undone at the neck, and a black leather vest, open at the front. The shirt was ripped and soaked with blood, the stain covering the entire chest area. And the flesh beneath—
I swallowed hard.
I’d like to be able to say that I immediately sprung into action, checking his vital signs and running back to the house to grab my phone and call the police. The truth was that I stood there for a really long time, frozen, my thoughts flying away to PTSD-land like frightened, fluttering sparrows.
There was no one else in sight. Every house in this neighborhood had a privacy fence around the back yard, the blank, six-foot wooden walls giving the illusion of isolation. I could see no sign of how he got here. The gate to the yard was closed and latched. No horrific stains or bloody handprints splattered the wood.
Paralysis finally broken, I crouched down on shaky, creaking knees. I reached a trembling hand out, feeling sick, and pressed it under the dark-stubbled planes of the man’s jaw like I’d seen people do on TV. His skin was cool in the balmy afternoon air. Far cooler than it should have been. I couldn’t detect the telltale throb of a beating pulse, though I made myself feel around the side of his neck thoroughly.
For good measure, I held my hand a hairsbreadth above his nose and mouth for long seconds, checking his breathing. Nothing. The dark angel in my tool shed was long gone, his body cooling to the marble chill of the statue I’d mentally compared him to.
I felt faint. Frightened. Useless. It occurred to me all at once that I might be in danger. Had the killer brought him here to hide the body? Was a madman with a gun even now sneaking around my property, ready to silence any potential witnesses?
My heart, which had been tripping away in a shocked, thready beat, pounded into triple time. I staggered upright, backing away from the shed door, suddenly certain that a murderer was lurking on the far side of the ramshackle structure, just out of my line of sight. I shook my head, trying to clear it, the headache that had been plaguing me all day throbbing in time with my thundering pulse.
I needed to get my shit together. I was losing it, and I had to stop. Whoever had done this was probably long gone. This wasn’t rocket science. When someone dumped a dead guy on your property, you secured the scene as best you could and called the cops. I could do those things. They weren’t difficult.
So… secure the scene.
I closed the door on the grisly tableau inside. The little hinged latch was undamaged. The padlock that was supposed to secure it was broken, but when I threaded the shackle through the latch and twisted it closed, it wasn’t very obvious that it hadn’t locked properly.
I gave a final nervous look around the yard—still empty and quiet. Exercising the better part of valor, I didn’t look behind the shed to see if a murderer was crouched there. Instead, I retreated to the sliding glass patio door and yanked it open, slipping inside before closing and locking it. Why the hell had I never listened to Dad when he’d told me to buy a length of board to jam in the door’s track as an added security measure?
Dragging in deep, steadying breaths, I hurried to the kitchen and grabbed my phone off the counter. Twenty-six years old, and this was the first time I’d ever dialed emergency services, I realized.
“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?” The voice on the other end of the phone call answered promptly. She sounded bored.
“Hello. There’s… uh… there’s a dead body in my back yard shed. I was going to mow the lawn and—”
“Your name, please?”
“Zorah Bright.” I spelled it out, forestalling the inevitable question about the ‘h.’
The woman rattled off my cell phone number from the caller ID and asked me to confirm that it was correct.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Address?” she asked, still sounding like she wished her shift would hurry up and finish.
“Three-eighteen Evian Street, St. Louis, six-three-one-one-eight.”
“Thank you. Do you need an ambulance?”
I blinked. “Not… really. The guy’s dead.”
“Did you check his vital signs?”
“Yes,” I said. “His skin’s cold. No pulse. No breathing. Big hole through his chest.”
My nausea rose, and grayness threatened the edges of my vision again.
“Police and ambulance services are on their way to your location.”
Still with the ambulance. I wondered if they got a lot of people calling in dead bodies that turned out not to be dead.
“Okay,” I said, and hung up.
I felt shaky, but wired. If I tried to sit down, I knew I’d be crawling out of my skin in five minutes flat, so I paced instead. I wasn’t sure how long I’d have to wait. The idea was that they were supposed to get to you in only a few minutes, but I’d caught an exposé piece on the local news not too long ago about how slow police response in the city could be. Sometimes it took them half an hour or more. The talking heads on television had argued back and forth about how much of the problem was down to poor management, and how much was due to insufficient budgetary allocations.
No matter the cause of the problem, the practical upshot was that it might be a while.
Maybe the wait would give any murderers
hiding in my back yard enough time to sneak away, so the ultimate police confrontation could take place somewhere besides my house. Preferably, someplace far, far away from here.
I checked the time on my phone obsessively, still pacing despite my throbbing head and aching body. The seven-minute mark had just passed when I heard pounding noises. I froze, my feet abruptly glued to the worn hardwood floor. It wasn’t the pounding of police officers at my front door. There’d been no sound of sirens, and the sound was coming from the back of the house, not the front.
Heart in throat, I crept toward the sliding patio door. This hadn’t been the noise of a fist against glass. More like noise from a neighbor working on some kind of construction project. But… it had sounded closer than that. I sidled up to the wall next to the glass door, feeling vaguely ridiculous as I darted a peek into the yard.
Nothing.
The pounding came again, and I chanced a longer look, not so concerned now about trying to stay hidden.
Thump.
My eyes were drawn to the shed.
Thump, thump.
The shed door rattled against its hinges ominously.
Crash!
The latch and one of the hinges tore loose, the door half-falling open.
My jaw went slack. I stared like an idiot at the damaged shed, watching open-mouthed as a figure stepped past the twisted remains of the door. Red stained the front of his torn white shirt, drying to a darker shade of rust around the edges. He staggered a bit, catching himself on the doorframe with one hand as he looked around, clearly disoriented.
Unerringly… inevitably… his gaze settled on the glass door, peering directly at me through a too-long fringe of black hair. Even from this distance, I could see that his eyes were the same color as the ice in the center of a glacier—a blue so cold and brilliant that they seemed to be glowing from within.
I stood unmoving as he approached, those eyes pinning me like a cobra mesmerizing prey.
He’d been dead. I was sure of it. He had a freaking hole in his freaking chest, for Christ’s sake. And why wouldn’t my feet move? He stopped on the other side of the door, and we regarded each other through the flimsy barrier of glass. His eyes still glowed with that unnatural blue light.
“Open the door.”
His voice was muffled, but not so much that I couldn’t make out a panty-melting British accent. My hand crept toward the little lever that controlled the lock without conscious thought. I gasped and yanked it back just in time, appalled at myself. I would have staggered backward a step, but my feet were still rooted beneath me.
His brow furrowed as if I’d surprised him, two tiny lines marring the perfect planes of his face. “Right, then,” he muttered, and lifted a hand to the door handle. A single, sharp jerk and the inadequate lock popped open, the sliding door jumping a bit on its track in the wake of the force he’d applied.
He stepped over the threshold, frowning down at me. His skin looked like alabaster, it was so pale.
Run, I thought furiously. Why are you standing here, you idiot? Run!
“Apologies for this, pet.” His voice was low—maybe even a bit distracted. His hand, when it curled around my nape, was gentle. His skin still held that unnatural coolness. “I don’t normally eat and run.”
My skin prickled into gooseflesh as he gazed down at me from a six-inch advantage of height. I opened my mouth, but my voice had fled at the same time as control of my limbs, apparently. I couldn’t look away from his glowing, pellucid eyes.
The fingers tracing the fine hair at the back of my neck caressed my skin like a lover’s. “Don’t fight me. Don’t be afraid. I give you my word—you won’t remember a thing about this once I’m gone.”
I stared at him.
You won’t remember a thing.
No. I refused. I might not have control of my body, but I would not relinquish my mind. I still couldn’t speak to tell him so. What the hell was happening to me?
He slipped around my body like a shadow, keeping a careful inch of space between us. The only point of contact was his hand, the touch sparking heat down my nerve endings despite the cool temperature of his skin. His fingers entwined in the tight, dark spirals of my hair, using the grip to ease my head to the side. My scalp tingled in response to the gentle tug.
Lips closed on the column of my throat from behind. Teeth nipped, searching for the tenderest, most vulnerable skin. A small noise escaped the blockage of my vocal cords. It was the kind of noise shared by both lovers and trapped prey, and not one I could ever remember making before.
Twin points of sharp pain pierced the side of my throat, replaced by drugged heat even before my gasp could wrench free from my lungs. The gasp turned to a moan. I would have swayed, but a second hand steadied me in place. A deep, drawing sensation seemed to pull straight from my neck to a place low in my belly that was growing heavy with liquid warmth.
Stop, I tried to tell my body. You shouldn’t be enjoying this—what the hell is wrong with you?
What’s wrong with you? It was a question I’d heard far too often, and not one that had ever received a satisfactory answer. Right now, I was undeniably getting off on what could only be considered an assault, sliding into a state of blissful lightheadedness reminiscent of a post-orgasmic haze.
A complete stranger had latched his teeth onto my neck and was drinking my blood. I knew what the tableau we made must look like, and I knew how impossible it was for it to actually be what it appeared to be. I also didn’t care.
I didn’t care that vampires apparently existed. I didn’t care that this guy could easily kill me. I didn’t care that I was moaning shamelessly, letting a complete stranger take more and more of my weight as I succumbed to the swirling pleasure of relaxation and acceptance.
I still cared a tiny bit that I was supposed to forget about all of this once the stranger left.
Not happening, I reminded myself firmly.
Vertigo had already started to overcome me when I felt the points penetrating my neck slide free—an unpleasant sensation amongst all the languorous warmth. Lips and tongue soothed the raw wounds, the feeling growing distant as insistent dizziness took up more of my attention.
“Easy, now,” said a low voice. Hands guided me down to a flat surface, though the new position did nothing to ease the spinning sensation. “I’m truly sorry for the intrusion. Just have yourself a nice little kip, and forget I was ever here.”
I was vaguely aware of the brush of fingers pushing my wild curls back from my face.
“No,” I rasped, even as the darkness of sleep—or perhaps unconsciousness—beckoned. I was distantly aware of the sound of the patio door sliding open and shut.
No. I won’t forget.
TWO
“MISS? MISS. CAN YOU open your eyes for me?”
My eyes fluttered open to find two cops crouching over me—a man and a woman. Huh? I let my head flop first to one side, then the other, trying to orient myself. I was… lying on the floor, in what would be my dining room if I actually owned a dining table.
Why was I lying on the floor?
I’d been having some kind of crazy dream—
“Miss?” It was the female cop, an edge of worry coloring her tone.
“Yeah, I’m…” I began, only to trail off in search of the right word. Okay didn’t really seem to cover it, somehow. “… awake,” I finished lamely.
“Are you Zorah Bright?” the woman asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you remember what happened?” asked the male cop. “You called nine-one-one.”
I blinked, puzzle pieces starting to reassemble inside my scrambled brain. Then I sat up abruptly, every muscle in my body protesting the movement. My head swam, and the female cop shot a hand out to steady my shoulder.
The man. In my shed. He hadn’t been dead. He’d broken the door and—
My hand flew to the side of my neck. It was smooth. Unblemished. I rubbed at the skin, not understanding.
/> “Take it easy, Ms. Bright,” said the male cop. “We knocked on the front door but there was no answer. So we did a visual inspection through the windows, and saw you collapsed in front of the patio door. It was unlocked.”
Sirens approached from the road out front.
“That’ll be the ambulance,” said the woman. “Go get the EMTs in here for her.”
“No!” I said quickly, my thoughts whirling. I couldn’t afford an ambulance ride, much less an ER visit. And if I tried to tell anyone what happened, I’d be lucky not to end up in a straightjacket. Did they still use straightjackets these days?
I shook my head, intending to clear it. Instead, it felt like my brain had melted and was sloshing around inside my skull.
“No,” I said more calmly. “I don’t need the EMTs.”
In fact, there was every chance that I did need the EMTs, but I couldn’t go down that path right now.
“You collapsed,” the female cop said gently.
I thought fast. “No, I… think I just fainted. It happens sometimes. Low blood pressure.” I swallowed, my dry throat rasping. “I just need to, uh, sit quietly for a minute.”
The male cop helped me stagger to my feet and deposited me on one of the bar stools by the stretch of kitchen counter I used as a table. “Do you remember what happened?” he asked.
I glanced between them, noting that the woman had pulled out a pen and notepad, ready to take a report. Again, visions of being carted off to a psych ward danced in my head. They even had an ambulance waiting right out front to transport me to crazytown.
A series of knocks pounded against the front door.
“I’ll let them know what’s going on,” muttered the male cop, heading for the front of the house.
I turned to the woman and cleared my throat. “Right. So… like I told the nine-one-one operator, I went out to the shed to get my lawnmower, and when I got close I saw that the padlock had been broken.”
“Was the shackle cut?” asked the woman, pausing in her note taking. “Like, with bolt cutters?”
I shook my head. “No. It had just been… wrenched open, I guess.”
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