Resurrection (Immortal Soulless Book 1)

by Tanith Frost

  Let Trixie have her pain. I’ll take the pleasure. And to bite him as he came would be—

  He moves his head to catch my lips with his own and thrusts his tongue past them, cutting off my thoughts. The shock of it makes him stop moving, but only for a moment. He’s tasted the venom in my saliva, if only the faintest hint of it, and he wants more. Whatever skills he’s acquired with his fragile human girlfriends seem to be forgotten now in his desperation to get closer to me.

  My left canine scrapes the surface of his tongue. He gasps at the pain, but doesn’t pull back.

  Just a drop of blood. Less than that, even, but it’s enough. Any thought of sex leaves me as the blood lust returns, washing away every other desire in a flood of red. I was right about him. This life, fresh and untouched, is like nothing I’ve ever tasted. There is nothing else. This is life. It is existence. It is everything.

  I pull away before I can bite his tongue off. He’ll never know how close I came.

  He twists his fingers into my hair to hold on to me, but his strength is nothing compared with mine. I could snap his well-muscled neck if I wished, or pin him down and drain him dry. I wonder whether he understands that.

  I can’t wait any longer. I twist my fingers into his thick hair and tilt his head back, exposing his throat. I lower my mouth onto him again and press my fangs to his skin, savouring the resistance of that thin barrier. He cries out as I break through.

  It hurts them. Every time.

  And then my mouth is sealed over the twin wounds, drawing the blood from him. The sounds rising helplessly from him turn to soft gasps of wonder and disbelief as my poison overcomes the pain. His pulse is strong, and his hot blood flows easily down my throat.

  The melancholy that plagued me earlier and the initial uncertainty that I felt in Miranda’s office are gone. I am real, I am present, I am powerful. With his life entering me, I am a fucking goddess. There is nothing outside of this moment that matters.

  It’s only now that I realize why Daniel told me to be careful when drinking this virgin blood.

  It’s going to be very hard to stop.

  5

  Trixie passes out in the back seat of the Challenger before we make it the few blocks out of downtown, and only stirs and stretches when Daniel pulls into the drive-through of her favourite local coffee shop. I roll down my window, enjoying the night air on my skin.

  We’re on our way to the crime scene now, a house in Kilbride. There will be bodies, though no one has chosen to share the details with me yet. I’m not too worried. It’s not like I don’t have experience with death.

  “Little too much of the good stuff there, kid?” Daniel asks Trixie after he’s ordered three black coffees.

  She mumbles something mostly unintelligible that ends in the word “fine.”

  I feel better than I ever have after I’ve fed, even if the effect has already worn off somewhat. I still feel incredible, powerful. Back when I was feeding, I could swear I felt almost alive, just before my rational fear of punishment overcame my wild need to drain my lovely victim dry.

  Trixie must have got it even better, though. She looks like she’s been slapped in the face by a million orgasms simultaneously.

  She’ll definitely be fine.

  “Did you feed, Daniel?” I don’t really need to ask. His colour is good. He looks as bright as I feel, if wilder. He always gets that look after he feeds, and even though I know he’ll never step out of line, I sometimes see something dark and daring under his veneer of civility.

  I’d call it something roguish if that word didn’t have the connotations it has for us.

  “I did. Don’t think that one will be back any time soon, though.”

  “She freaked out, did she?” I’m assuming it was a woman. He likes them small and female, as fragile as I used to be when I was alive.

  The blood’s the same, but the aesthetics do improve the experience.

  Daniel waits until I have a sip of coffee in my mouth before he speaks. “No. She got clingy.”

  I spit my coffee straight out the window, pelting the side of the car with hot liquid. I try to control my laughter, and can’t.

  Daniel tries to frown at the mess, but he knows damn well it’s funny. Every so often we get a human who’s been reading too much vampire romance, who gets a ridiculous crush on one of us and expects to be loved and protected because she’s special or something. Usually a she, though not exclusively. They don’t understand that to a vampire, they’re animals. Entertaining and useful pets at best, to be enjoyed as we wish, and only to be protected because their safety benefits us.

  “She started crying when I was done with her. Ran after me, begging to know my name. Cried about loving me.” He at least has the good grace to seem embarrassed for her.

  “She didn’t know any better.” I cast a quick glance at Daniel, taking in his refined, masculine features and the impressive shape of his body under his button-down shirt. Can’t really blame her for her little crush, especially given what she would have been experiencing under his fangs.

  “She should have,” he says, more seriously. “She’s been around for a while. Not like yours.”

  I smile contentedly and settle back into my seat. Mine didn’t give me any trouble. I left him weak but quite satisfied with his experience, if his dopey smile was any indication. I hope he’ll come back some day. His blood won’t be as strong next time, especially if he feeds someone again too soon, but I wouldn’t mind another taste. I might even follow through on that idea for making him really happy before the bite. That could be fun.

  It doesn’t pay to have regulars, though. Not if you want to avoid situations like what Daniel ran into tonight. When that happens, the club’s enforcers have to clear the stock’s memories of us. It leaves them shattered, disoriented, and depressed, knowing that they’re missing something that runs as deep as their blood but not knowing what it is. It’s an addiction, a deep craving, and they have no idea how to ease the ache.

  Trixie rouses herself as we pull up in front of the house in Kilbride. Duplex, two storey, and both sides look quiet. It would be identical to the other houses on the street if not for its brick exterior—in contrast with the siding on the others—and the fact that it sits on a corner lot, giving it significantly more space on every side. We make our way silently up an uneven, paved driveway crisscrossed with deep cracks, past an empty garden and a dark front window with a sticker on it noting the name of a local company that does replacements.

  Nice enough place. Nothing fancy.

  Daniel leads us around back, where the low light from inside illuminates the deck. “Try not to get in the way,” he orders us quietly. “Stand back, take it in, and notice anything you can. Details will be key, and you’re our freshest eyes.”

  I pause on the bottom step. Something is holding me back, freezing my muscles. My chest tightens. I’ve changed my mind, I think.

  Trixie glances back at me.

  No. I’m doing this. They’re just humans. Corpses, now. There’s nothing in there to be afraid of. I force my legs to push me up the stairs, though it feels like I weigh four hundred pounds.

  I smell the room before I see it, a nauseating mix of shit and dead blood. Though I don’t need to draw breath except to speak, it still creeps its way up my nostrils and into my mind. Daniel’s shoulders tense as he takes in the scene beyond the sliding glass doors, but he doesn’t try to shield us from it. He nods hello to a few vampires who are already here as Trixie eagerly steps around him to get a better look.

  Splashes of blood streak the floors and the walls, a good few reaching the white ceiling. My first thought is that the elders must be wrong about it being rogues. No vampire would be this careless. The blood is dead and congealed now, but not long ago, when it flowed, it would have been unthinkable to waste it.

  I step around Daniel’s broad form, and gag for the first time in years.

  They haven’t removed her yet. I might be familiar with death, but
not like this.

  A woman’s naked body lies on a wooden kitchen table that’s streaked with blood. Her hands and body are covered with it, too. And the soles of her feet, as though she was pushing against the table, struggling to escape even as they cut into her, spreading her blood beneath her in grotesque finger-paint patterns. But there’s nowhere she could have gone. She’s tied to the table with cheap bungee cords that dig into the flesh of her slightly overweight, stretch-marked middle.

  Her lower arms are free, and her legs. She could fight, but she couldn’t escape.

  Bile rises in my throat, bitter with the taste of coffee. I push it back and focus. Details, Aviva. Details.

  Her body is a mess of wounds. Bite marks everywhere, tearing apart my idea that vampires couldn’t be this wasteful. There aren’t just bites, either. Slash marks cover her skin, likely made by the kitchen knives that litter the laminate floor. She’s missing a huge chunk of flesh from her lower abdomen and another from her left thigh. A glob of it, fatty and glistening, rests in a clear glass bowl on the counter next to the fruit bowl. A grotesque still-life.

  Still-death, maybe.

  God, that’s horrible. My thoughts are running everywhere. I need to focus.

  I hope she was dead before they cut her like that, but doubt she was so fortunate. Her face is twisted in a mask of pain and terror and something else I can’t place. Is it normal for a body to hold its expression like that after death, or is that unique to our victims? I don’t know.

  The clarity I felt from my feeding has ebbed completely, replaced by confusion and nausea. Daniel is speaking to a vampire in white coveralls who’s examining the knives on the floor, and Trixie is listening eagerly. All I hear is a hum of conversation, not words.

  I step closer to the victim. Technically, I’m as dead as she is. It took me a long time to accept that, but it’s the truth. What I haven’t fully considered before this moment is that there are degrees of death. This one is as dead as they come, and she’s not going to come back to tell us who killed her. Not even if we wanted her to. I inhale, just slightly. They say that humans with the blood factor that gives them the potential to become vampires have a strange smell that only we can sense. All I get from this body is dead flesh.

  It’s a grim scene. Repulsive. But she’s better off now, wherever those without the blood factor go when they die. Her suffering is over.

  Now it’s my turn. I need to help find the ones who did this to her.

  I can handle this.

  Out of old habit I take a deep breath to calm myself, though death chokes the air.

  It’s okay. I’m not going to let it affect me.

  And then I turn to listen to what an investigator in a black coat is saying about the knives, and I spot three smaller bodies on the floor. Children, drained dry, with their faces frozen in screams.

  I race out the back door and vomit into the bushes.

  6

  Daniel finds me a short while later sitting on one of the saggy-bottomed patio chairs on the back deck, staring up at the stars. I appreciate them so much more than I did when I was alive, now that I can see them clearly. Infinite bright spots against vast, endless darkness. It’s a beautiful night. It might even be a perfect one, if I wasn’t sitting outside of a human slaughterhouse.

  He sits next to me and folds his hands in front of him, resting his forearms on the glass surface of the patio table. He’s taken his jacket off, but the cold night doesn’t seem to bother him. Mine’s gone, too. I shrugged out of it as soon as I finished puking.

  “You all right?”

  His voice is low. Quiet. Concerned. I should appreciate that, but it makes me feel worse. I’m the only one here who seems to need coddling.

  “Yeah. I just needed a minute. Where’s Trixie?”

  “Taking samples with the techs.”

  I lean forward and press my palms to my forehead. I feel like my brain is melting. “Of course she is. No problem, right?”

  The weight of Daniel’s hand rests on my shoulder. I resist the urge to lean into it, and instead focus on the sensation. Daniel’s skin is as cold as mine, quite unlike the living touch I felt when my prey grabbed me earlier. He’s so damn good at hiding himself. Miranda broadcasts her presence, confident in her position and security, but Daniel is a blank to me.

  I relax and take a breath I don’t need.

  There. Just for a moment, I feel him through his hand. Not his personality—or his spirit, maybe, though we don’t have souls—but his power. It’s something deeper and darker than what I’d sense in a human. I feel his essence, as though he’s let his guard down.

  And then it’s gone.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” he says quietly.

  “I think there is.” I push my hair off my face and lean back in the chair, and he moves his hand back to the table. “We’re not supposed to care about them, are we? We have a responsibility to our stock to keep them safe, and we avoid situations like this because to have this happen regularly would cause panic and expose us to the living world. That’s all. We’re not supposed to get upset by this.”

  My voice keeps catching like I’m going to cry. I’m not, though. I’ve at least come that far.

  “Is that what I’ve taught you?”

  “Basically.”

  He sighs, and I turn to look at him. Daniel doesn’t sigh. Daniel doesn’t breathe unless he’s speaking. He controls his motions and expression unless he needs to pass as living. This little reveal is not so small for him.

  I may not be able to feel him most of the time, but I know my trainer.

  “Walk with me?” he says. It’s not quite the order he would usually deliver, but he’s not inviting me to decline. “I think we need to get some air.”

  I don’t point out that there’s plenty of air here on the deck, or that technically neither of us needs it. He descends the steps and I follow, shrugging my leather jacket on as we move silently through the shadows to the front of the house.

  Daniel leans against the car. Trixie and I jokingly call it the Vampmobile, our trusty steed, but it’s Daniel’s baby. I won’t risk leaning on it and leaving an ass-print in the dust the Trans-Canada has left on its normally shining surface. Instead I shove my hands in my pockets and rock back on my heels, waiting.

  He flexes his fingers and crosses his arms. “You’re dead, Aviva. You’re not a monster. I know I push the idea that you’re not human anymore. Maybe too hard, but I have my reasons, especially with you. When I took you from the acclimation facility, the reports on you—”

  “Were bad. I know.”

  His lips narrow. “I was going to say that they indicated specific challenges. Difficulty accepting your new nature. A tendency to cling to your past life, possibly a belief you still had what you thought of as a soul.” There’s no judgement in his tone, but he glances away as he says soul, as though not wishing to embarrass me. “Had I allowed you to think of yourself as even partially human, I would have been encouraging your weaknesses and stifling your potential.”

  I swallow hard and lower my gaze. “I know. You’ve helped me so much.” I caused problems after my death. Refusing to feed. Believing I was dreaming, that my death had been a nightmare. Cutting myself to watch the wounds heal far too quickly, trying to feel anything that might fill the terrible emptiness left by the absence of my heartbeat.

  I made progress at the facility, but I didn’t really start accepting my new self until I made friends with Trixie and saw her thriving. Then Daniel plucked us both from those dark rooms and started our hard physical training, and I realized I hadn’t lost everything.

  When I look up again, he’s watching me. Waiting. “We can’t linger in the past,” he says. “I suspect you were a kind and compassionate person when you lived. Admirable traits in the living, but they can make the transition difficult. If I’d let you cling to who you were, it would have broken you.”

  “I know.” This is why we’re not allowed to stay where we d
ied, why we can’t return until everyone we love is dead and everything that might remind us of our life is gone or forgotten.

  “I know you know.” He narrows his eyes as he studies me. “I’ve tried to make the separation easier for you by telling you it needs to be complete, that you need to care less about the world of the living. And that is what we aim for. We are not human, and the sooner we understand that, the better it is for us. But it doesn’t…” He hesitates, his brow creasing.

  I take a step toward him. “What?”

  “It doesn’t mean you’re failing if you don’t achieve complete separation from the living right away. It can take some time in a case like yours.”

  I glance back at the house. “Trixie died not long after me. She’s not puking into the bushes right now.”

  “Trixie wasn’t murdered.” Daniel’s voice is soft, though his eyes never lose their cold edge.

  His words hit me like a blow to the chest. I don’t know how Trixie died. Or Daniel, or much about who they were in life. It never occurred to me that the people they used to be might still affect them now. I thought it was just me.

  He reaches through the open window to take our half-empty coffees from the car, hands me mine, and starts down the street. There’s not much risk of us being noticed. No one is interested in being outdoors at this hour on a frigid spring night. A dog tied up outside barks at us, and I shoot it a glance that sends it whimpering into its little chipboard house.

  Our kind tend to pass like shadows through the world of the living, as long as we don’t draw attention to ourselves. Maybe the living prefer to be ignorant of the predators among them. Sometimes it’s easier not to see.

  Daniel sips his drink. “Do you remember it at all?”

  “Sort of. I try not to think about it. Why, do you want me to talk about it?”

  “I think it might help. But that’s up to you.”