One Bite with a Stranger

by Christine Warren

  Duh.

  The only problem Reggie could see now was what came next. What was she supposed to do now that she knew he was a vampire? After all, the love thing was a moot point. She’d already fallen, and somehow her traitorous heart seemed fairly unconcerned with the revelation. According to what it was telling her, he could have been a little green space alien and she would still go right on loving him.

  Talk about an emotional kick in the pants.

  Taking a deep breath, Reggie squared her shoulders and considered her angle of attack. Once she realized the truth of her feelings for Dmitri, it was no longer a question of whether she would try to help him, but only of how she would offer her assistance. She settled on providing a distraction to split Lisette’s focus. Not only was it a time-honored tactic, but it was probably the least likely to end with Reggie’s tonsils being ripped out through her neck.

  With her eyes on the fighting vampires, she began to sidle along the wall, looking for a good place to implement her strategy. She hadn’t planned on being grabbed roughly from behind.

  “Hey, Reggie,” an eerily familiar voice rasped in her ear. “Did you miss me?”

  Gregory.

  Reggie froze. “But you’re dead!”

  He chuckled, a rough, evil sound that made her blood run almost as cold as the feel of his hand wrapped around her throat. “Oh, no, sweetcheeks. I’m a little harder to kill than your average bear. The body your boyfriend thought was me belonged to the poor fellow who thought he’d try to set up camp right above my lair. I don’t take kindly to squatters, you know.”

  Reggie glared at him from the corners of her eyes and wriggled to test his grip. It held firm. “So what do you want? Since you didn’t pay this much attention to me when we were engaged and living together, I’m pretty certain it isn’t me.”

  “You’re meaningless, Reggie,” Greg agreed, giggling almost maniacally. He sounded almost insane. “The only value you have to my mistress is that Vidâme seems to feel some affection for you. If it were up to me, I’d have drained you and killed you already.”

  “And instead?”

  “Lisette is going to drain you while Vidâme watches, and then we’re going to kill him. Once we do that, we’ll be able to bring Yelisaveta here to Manhattan to start over again. She’ll be able to build a new clan from the ground up, and once she’s done that, no council, man, or government will be able to halt her plans.”

  Okay, more than almost insane.

  “Her plans? Which involve what? A worldwide ban on garlic? You can’t mess with peoples’ immune systems like that.”

  She could feel the tension rising in Gregory, spiraling up and up until he fairly vibrated with suppressed madness and excitement. “Shut up, bitch,” he hissed. “Or I’ll tell her I’m draining you myself while she takes Vidâme. We’ll make sure to feed in a way that lets you watch each other die.”

  Heart beating a mile a minute, Reggie reached up to brush away a hair that had fallen from the mass atop her head. “I’m sorry, Greg, but that just doesn’t work for me. How about we try this, instead?”

  With what she hoped was no warning, Reggie reached up, snagged one of the sharp, ornately carved ebony sticks securing her hair, and thrust it hard into the chest of the man behind her. She could only pray that she had hit somewhere in the vicinity of his heart.

  “You fucking bitch!” Gregory howled, his grip softening enough for Reggie to struggle free and run as fast as she could toward the opera auditorium where there were people. Lots and lots of people, who would be happy to summon the police, or the National Guard. Or maybe an exorcist. Whoever you were supposed to call when you and your boyfriend had just been attacked by vampires.

  She had gotten only a few feet when a sharp bellow sounded behind her. She knew it was Misha. Turning around she saw that instead of following her, Gregory had turned and joined Lisette in what looked like her attempts to rip Dmitri’s heart out of his chest.

  “No!”

  Reggie had kicked off her heels and was halfway back down the hall before the echo of her shout even reached the place where she’d been standing. With no thought for anything but Dmitri, she grabbed the second stick from her hair, raised her arm, and ran with the pointy end of the wooden tool aimed directly at Gregory’s glowing red eye.

  She missed. Her ex-fiancé raised his head and turned at the last minute, and instead of shoving the hair stick into Greg’s eye, Reggie was carried by her momentum to the spot where his eye had been a moment before and her stick punctured the back of his neck, driving four solid inches into his brain stem. He crumpled so fast that he pulled her down with him before she could remove her hand from the stick.

  Lisette screamed something in Russian—something Reggie felt pretty sure Dmitri would refuse to translate even if she asked—and turned her attention from trying to rip out Dmitri’s heart to trying to rip out Reggie’s throat. She succeeded at neither. As soon as she turned her attention from Dmitri, the larger, fiercer vampire took instant advantage, grabbing the female’s skull between his hands and wrenching it hard to the side. Reggie heard the popping and felt her stomach give a sick roll in response. Her eyes stayed glued on the blonde’s limp body as it fell slowly to the floor and shattered on impact like thin, brittle glass. Within seconds, nothing remained of the madwoman’s body but a thin layer of ash on the thick hallway carpet.

  For several moments, neither Regggie nor Dmitri spoke.

  Finally Reggie shivered and wrapped her arms around herself to hug in her body heat. A detached voice in her head whispered that this was what going into shock felt like, but she ignored it.

  “What happens to him?” she asked, jerking her chin in the direction of Gregory’s body.

  Dmitri took his cell phone from his pocket. “I will call and have someone take care of it. It is only because he was so newly made that he did not turn to ash like Lisette. Most vampires do after fifty or sixty years.”

  Reggie nodded, as if that made perfect sense. “Right. Well, you go make your call. I’m going to—” She shivered again. “I’m going to go to the ladies’ room.”

  She felt Dmitri’s eyes on her as she walked to the far end of the hall and pushed open the restroom door. As soon as it closed behind her, she felt simultaneous waves of relief and nausea crash over her. Two seconds later, she bolted into the nearest stall and declared the nausea the official winner.

  Chapter 22

  Dmitri found Reggie fifteen minutes later, clinging to the sink and shaking as beads of water dripped off the end of her nose. She looked as pale as milk except for her eyes, which were wide and dilated, and the faint green tinge to her complexion. Meeting his gaze in the mirror, she blinked slowly and shook her head.

  “You’re a vampire,” she whispered, using her palms to wipe away the worst of the water she’d splashed on her face once her stomach had stopped trying to turn inside out. “I screwed a vampire.”

  “Actually, I believe if you wished to be technical, the vampire screwed you.” His expression encouraged her to laugh.

  She didn’t. Instead she grabbed a handful of paper towels and busied herself with not having to look at him. “And we didn’t even use condoms. Does that mean I have some kind of vampire disease now?”

  “You’re perfectly healthy,” he assured her, turning his back to the mirror and leaning his hips against the marble counter. “Not to mention tasty.”

  “How do you—?” Reggie cut herself off, remembering the hickey from the other day, the one her friends had given her such a hard time about. Instinctively, she pressed her fingers to the spot, then pulled them away and inspected them as if she expected to find residual bleeding.

  “Dry as a bone,” he assured her, looking amused. “Even if it hadn’t been days since I last fed from you, the wounds close up almost immediately. I won’t apologize for the hickey though. I could have fed without marking you, but I found the idea of you bearing my ‘love bite’ too tempting to resist.”

  “Ha
r-har.” Reggie stared at him and waited for the panic to replace the numbness of shock. It didn’t happen. Instead, the memory of how it had felt when they’d been together, when he’d sucked at her neck, when she’d found the mark he’d left behind…All she felt when she remembered that was horny.

  Well, horny and wary. He was a bloodsucking fiend, after all, but he hadn’t killed her, and he’d had plenty of opportunities. In fact, he’d actually saved her life at least twice when Lisette had wanted to kill her. So really, the question she had to ask herself was, how did she feel about dating a real-life, genuine, honest-to-goodness vampire? Could she look at him the same way knowing he wasn’t quite human?

  Before she could answer that question, Reggie decided she needed to ask a few questions.

  “Did you turn me into one of you?” she demanded, crossing her arms over her chest and scooting back to put a little bit of distance between them. Less because she was actually afraid of him and more in case she turned into a bat or something. She’d already killed someone today—granted an insane, immoral, violent, murdering fiend, but still—and while she didn’t regret saving Dmitri’s life as well as her own by doing so, it wasn’t exactly a habit she wanted to get into.

  “Of course not. More is required to make a vampire than a simple bite. If that were all it took, the world would be overrun—by us ‘bloodsucking fiends.’”

  He appeared more amused than insulted, but Reggie was distracted by a memory. “That’s why you can read my mind! You’ve got some vampiric power of mind control, or something.”

  Dmitri chuckled. “Or something. I cannot control your mind, milka. I can influence your decisions, but only in the direction your subconscious already wishes to go. If I could truly control you, you never would have attempted to date that Marc person. But I can read your thoughts, and I can speak to you in your mind.”

  “Can you read everyone’s mind? Can I?” Now that would be a useful little skill.

  “You can read only me, unless you have other talents you have been hiding from me,” he teased. “Were you to become like me, your talents would strengthen with time. I can read your mind with true clarity. Some others I can read fairly easily, some barely at all. I do get impressions from most humans though. I am an infallible judge of character.”

  “Too bad I’m not.”

  He reached out and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “I am really not an evil monster, dushka. I am just a man who has lived an unusually long life.”

  “Yeah, and who lives off drinking other people’s blood. That hardly sounds like Prince Charming.” She scowled at him.

  “The prince is a fairy tale. I am real, and I do drink blood to survive. I am not ashamed of it. I do not kill those I drink from, and I do them no lasting harm. I have lived too many years not to be at peace with what I am, Regina.”

  Reggie really wanted to ask how long he had lived, but his talk of “lasting harm” had brought a more pressing issue to her mind. “So you’re sure I’m not a vampire now?”

  He grinned. “Positive. In order to become a vampire, you would need to drink from me as I have drunk from you. Unless that happens, you remain my very human, very stubborn, very adorable Regina.”

  “Flattery is not going to sweep this all under the rug, bucko.” She humphed to cover up the warm fuzzies his words gave her. “You are a vampire. That’s big news in my world. I don’t generally date the living dead.”

  “What sort of dead do you usually date?” He ducked her punch and laughed. “I‘m really not all that different from any other man. I have the needs any man has.”

  And then some, she thought, remembering their nights together. “Other men don’t drink blood,” she insisted.

  “No, but among human men there are those who are greater monsters than I am. That Martin fellow was a perfect example. The reason he was so evil as a vampire is because those traits existed in him even when he was a man. He hurt you then, did he not? I would never betray you, milaya, and I would die rather than cause you harm. You are precious to me.”

  That brought the fuzzies back, but she ignored them. One thing at a time. She needed more information. “You could hurt me though. You’re really strong, and fast as hell. I’ve seen you move.”

  Dmitri shrugged. “I am a man. I could have hurt you when I was human. But yes, being a vampire does give me additional strength and speed. Still, these are things I would never use to harm you.”

  “What else can you do?”

  “Am I a trick pony?”

  She scowled. “You know what I mean. Like, are you going to turn into a bat or something?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Why would I want to transform myself into a disease-carrying, winged rodent?”

  “How should I know? I can’t understand why you would want to drink blood.”

  His eyes fastened on the curve of skin bared by her neckline, where her neck met her shoulder. Suddenly his expression turned from lazy amusement to heated interest. “Ah, but your blood is intoxicating, milaya. Shall I describe for you its sweetness? Its warmth? The way it goes to my head like aged whisky?” He met her gaze, and his eyes filled with wicked intent. “Shall I describe the cries you give when I drink from you?”

  Reggie remembered coming apart in his arms perfectly well without that look of heated sin he was giving her. She blushed. “Don’t change the subject. I’m trying to get some answers. I want to know exactly what I’ve gotten myself into here.”

  Dmitri sighed and folded his arms across his chest. He wore a long-suffering expression as he closed his eyes and began to recite facts.

  “You have watched too many movies and read some lurid novels,” he said. “Vampires are not the monsters humans like to portray us as. We are different by our very natures, but we are no better and no worse as vampires than we were as men. We are stronger and faster, this is true. Our senses are also keener, and our lifetimes can be prolonged indefinitely. In order to survive, we must drink blood. But we are not harmed by crosses or garlic or holy water or any of that nonsense. We can be killed if you destroy our hearts, for that is the organ that supplies our bodies with the blood we consume. And, of course, if you behead us or severely injure our brains, we will also die. I know of few things that could live without their heads.”

  “Few?” Reggie squeaked, floundering for a grip on reality and therefore able to focus on only one statement at a time, and that was the last one. “You mean there are things that can?”

  “I always assumed politicians could do so. They so seldom seem to use them.”

  Her jaw dropped open for a second, until she noticed how intently he watched her reaction to his teasing. She closed her mouth with a snap and glared at him. Somehow the things he told her actually reassured her. She couldn’t understand why, but her reality had just shifted and found a new foundation. Her belief system had made room for an unexpected addition, and now things looked to be getting back to normal.

  If you could call having a flaming affair with a vampire “normal.”

  Reggie took a couple of hesitant steps forward and raised her chin defiantly. “Wooden stake and sunlight?” she asked, her tone now more curious than frightened. “I think I missed Gregory’s heart that first time, so I couldn’t tell.”

  “If you drove a wood stake through the heart of any living thing, I imagine it would not live much longer,” he said. He didn’t touch her, but somehow she felt the intimacy of his company. “And sunlight is painful, but not usually life threatening. We cannot absorb the melanin in the blood we drink,” he explained. “And we do not produce our own. Therefore, we burn easily. But I have yet to burst into flame.”

  She humphed. The man had a way with sarcasm. “So, basically you’re telling me you’re a totally average guy with superhuman strength, the ability to read my mind, and a very selective diet.”

  He grinned at her. “Precisely.”

  “And you’ll never grow old or die.”

  “It is unlikely to happen for a ve
ry long time.”

  “Don’t you get bored? I mean, after a century or two, I’d think you’d have seen it all.”

  “I have many varied interests that keep my attention,” he informed her, still grinning. “Human culture is a fascinating thing. It evolves constantly and with dizzying speed. And if you wish to know my age, you have only to ask me.”

  Apparently, her fishing hadn’t been as subtle as she’d thought. “Fine. How old are you?”

  “I was born in Novgorod, as I told your date this evening”—his eyes met hers, and that damned eyebrow quirked again—“in the year 1199.”

  Reggie shrieked and leaped backward. “You’re eight hundred and five years old!”

  Misha clearly decided to ignore the fact that she sounded like a fishwife. He merely raised that eyebrow and reached down to give a light tug at the hair that had tumbled over her shoulder. “Eight hundred and four,” he corrected calmly. “The anniversary of my birth is not until October.”

  “Oh, well, pardon me. That makes everything perfectly all right. Those few months are incredibly important to me. I’d hate it if I broke my rule of not dating older men by that wide a margin.”

  “Sarcasm does not become you, milka. Besides, what does my age matter? Do I look eight hundred and four?”

  “Of course not. But that…that’s not just old—not just dead—it’s compost!”

  He sighed, beginning to look impatient. “And I am very much alive and very much desirous of touching you again. Come, let us go home. It has been a difficult night.”

  “I’m not ready to.” She scowled, all but digging her heels into the tile floor. “I’ve still got questions.”