A Taste of Crimson

by Marjorie M. Liu

  “How much do you know?” Michael turned in her arms. “Do you know what will happen to you if the others find out? Do you know what you’re risking? This can’t last, Keeli. Are you willing to give up everything just for … for …”

  “A fling?” Keeli stepped away from him. Her hands curled into fists. Hurt, angry—but that was not right, that was irrational, because he was just a vampire, and she … she …

  Something hard moved through his face. “Not a fling. Just … the unknown.”

  “I don’t run,” Keeli reminded him. “Not even from the unknown.”

  “And is this worth fighting for?” There was a terrible hunger in Michael’s eyes, so much need that Keeli felt breathless with it.

  “You tell me.” She closed the distance between them, not touching, but close—so close that just a breath would bring her lips in contact with his throat.

  “Please,” Michael whispered. “I am trying to be a good man.”

  Keeli smiled. “You’re a vampire. Don’t be something you’re not.”

  He made a sound, low in his throat, and Keeli suddenly found herself surrounded, drawn tight against a cool hard chest. Michael buried his fingers in her hair.

  They did not talk. Keeli had nothing to say that wouldn’t sound trite, and really, the situation was too strange to pretend normalcy. It was like being on a roller coaster, and she remembered the only ride of her life with crystalline accuracy: stomach in her throat, heart racing, battling an uncontrollable urge to scream, laugh, and vomit.

  Yup, it was the Plunge of Death all over again. But this time she wasn’t ready to step off the ride.

  “What am I going to do with you?” Michael stepped back just far enough to look down into Keeli’s eyes. His expression made her dizzy.

  “Fight crime,” she said. “I hear it makes a great first date.”

  He laughed, and it was strange and wonderful seeing his eyes warm, the darkness in them swallowed by something gentler, more peaceful. He brushed back her hair and pressed his lips to her forehead.

  “So we’ll fight crime,” he said. “And then what?”

  “You expect me to have all the answers?” Keeli thumped her palm against his chest. “Step up to the plate, man.”

  “I’m too comfortable where I am.” He smiled, and the roguishness of that smile—so unexpected, so gentle in its humor—made her heart ache. Keeli raised herself up on her tiptoes and brushed her lips against his mouth. It was difficult not to do more.

  “I don’t understand this,” she whispered. “It’s freaking me out a little.”

  “I think it’s going to freak everyone out.” Seriousness crept back into his eyes. “But you’re not alone. I won’t leave you alone.”

  “You sound like a stalker.”

  “I sound like a man who takes care of his friends.”

  “Friends, are we?” she said lightly. Michael kissed her.

  “Oh,” she breathed raggedly, several minutes later. “Maybe just a little more than friends.”

  He looked just as shaken. Which was gratifying. If he had been smug, she might have had to kick his ass.

  “I need to go,” he said. “You should come with me.”

  “Just to help fetch your clothes? Nice try,” she replied. “But someone needs to stay here and keep this investigation going.”

  Something tight moved through his face. Struggle, maybe. He said, “I don’t want to leave you.”

  Keeli wondered how much it cost him to say those words. She knew how challenging it would be for her to say the same thing, no matter how strongly she felt.

  And admit it: you’re close to that line now. Too close.

  She touched his cheek, tracing the golden design inlayed into his skin. He caught her hand and pressed his lips to her palm. She shivered.

  “Will you come with me?” he asked.

  “I want to,” she said, before she could stop herself. Truth—it was becoming the truth with this man, always. She hesitated, watching Michael’s face. He nodded, gently squeezing her hand before letting go.

  “But you cannot,” he said. “All right, then. I will not be gone long. When I get topside I’ll call Jenkins and have him send over some DNA test kits. We need to get samples from Jas, Estella, and Jonathon.”

  “I don’t think they murdered anyone.”

  “Maybe not, but someone killed Walter Crestin and six other vampires. We need to find out who—or at least, rule out the wolves—before the negotiations are completely ruined.”

  “Maybe they already are.”

  “I hope you’re wrong.”

  Michael began to reach for the blue shirt and stopped himself. Keeli handed it to him, stifling the surge of heartbreak that accompanied the feel of rough cotton in her fingers. Michael watched her carefully as he shrugged on the shirt.

  “Why do you care?” she asked softly, staring at the fabric lying flush against his pale skin. “What does it matter to you if these negotiations fail? It’s not like you owe anything to the vampires. Or us werewolves.”

  Michael stopped buttoning the shirt. “I wasn’t born a vampire, Keeli. I was made one. I asked for it. I wanted a better life.”

  “And did you get it?” Keeli suspected it was a cruel question, but she had to ask. She had to understand him, and she sensed this might be a rare opportunity, one that might not come again.

  But she kicked herself for it as all the warmth fled Michael’s eyes. “I got what I deserved, Keeli. And three hundred years later, I’m still paying.”

  She swallowed hard. Michael stepped close. He brushed her lips with his thumb, resting his cool palm against her neck.

  “I have been an outsider for my entire life,” he said quietly. “Always looking in, separate and unequal. Even when I was human, I was alone. Unwanted. So I see things differently from the rest of my kind. I see the halos and the horns, the light and the dark. I see that we are all the same, none of us better or worse than the other. Humans, vampires, werewolves—it doesn’t matter. In the end, it makes no difference. The only things that matter are the choices we make, the actions we build our characters on. That’s why I care, Keeli. Because I am nothing more than a man who happens to be a vampire, just as you are a woman who happens to be a werewolf, and to not care, to do nothing and let there be war and death …” He stopped, and Keeli leaned into him.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “I want to be a good man,” he said, an echo of his previous words to her. “Not just a good vampire. A good man.”

  “And that means doing the right thing, no matter what?”

  “Depends on your definition of ‘right,’ but yes. That is it.”

  He looked so serious, so full of pain, and all Keeli wanted to do was smile. So she did, and held his face between her hands.

  “What are you waiting for?” she asked him. “Go out and be good.”

  He stared at her, wonderment creeping into his eyes, and then he bent close and kissed her.

  And it was good.

  Chapter Twelve

  The police cars were gone by the time Michael returned home, but just in case any individual cops were still in the halls, he took an alternative route up to his apartment. Broad daylight, but Michael did not worry about being seen. No one in this neighborhood cared whether a vampire lived amongst them. They had worse problems to deal with.

  Up and away, he thought, floating through the air to his fire escape. He touched down, light as a breeze amidst his roses, savoring their sweet scent in his nose, the softness of petals rubbing his skin.

  Keeli’s skin felt softer. Her scent was even sweeter.

  He thought of her as he slid through his open window, and the memory of her lips and smiling face, that tousled pink hair, was both wonderful and dissatisfying. Dissatisfying, because his apartment no longer felt like home. Not even a shadow of home. He stood in the middle of the tiny studio, and all he felt from the cracked walls was a lonely emptiness, as if everything that had allowed him to pre
tend this place was his—his, and enough—had been carried away by Keeli’s existence.

  It isn’t such a bad thing to want more from life, he told himself. But how he was going to manage it, was another problem entirely. Michael sighed. Ten years in this city, the longest he had ever spent in one place. Almost one hundred years previously, he had been sent to America in the wake of a vampire migration. Sent to clean up the messes of those few who thought to make this country a feeding ground.

  The prospect of another long boat ride spent cramped and starving in constant darkness had prevented Michael from returning to Europe. He did not mind. America suited the sensibilities of his youth: movement, change, unstructured borders and wild freedom.

  Now, though, another upheaval.

  Not that he was complaining.

  He wondered how Keeli was doing—questioned his decision to leave her behind, to face all her people alone. He had promised he would not do that.

  But Keeli isn’t the kind of woman you protect against her will. She’s strong. She’s been taking care of herself long before she ever knew you existed.

  It still felt like a risk, though. Michael knew how violently friends and loved ones could turn against their own. Sudden, shocking, without warning. Michael did not know much about Keeli’s life, or werewolf clans, but he was certain she had been raised in a community of common bonds, straightforward action and thought. There would be very little room for deviance. For deviant behavior.

  Michael sighed. In three hundred years, he couldn’t remember worrying this much—if at all—about anyone but himself. The circumstances did not make it any easier, either. It was clear to him now that if he and Keeli continued doing … whatever … her people were not going to be sympathetic or disinterested. There would be a price to pay, and Michael did not want to contemplate what that might be.

  So are you going to give up? Are you going to pretend there’s nothing between the two of you, and just leave her when this is over?

  It would be better for Keeli if he did. Better for him, too. If he could bring himself to do it.

  He took off the blue shirt and carefully folded it. He did not know what had happened to Keeli’s father, only that seeing the shirt had caused Keeli and her grandmother pain. He thought of Keeli, crumpled in the tunnels, sobbing and sick, and knew that whatever had happened down there to cause all those empty homes had been terrible indeed.

  Keeli Maddox—the mysterious granddaughter of Crimson City’s Grand Dame Alpha, and the sole survivor of a vicious attack that destroyed most of that infamous bloodline …

  The words of the newspaper article filled his mind. So. Keeli’s family had been murdered. But who would do that? Was it the humans? Certainly not the vampires. Could it be other werewolves?

  She and her grandmother are the last of Maddoxes, Michael realized. If Keeli doesn’t take up the mantle of leadership—which seems likely—then Maddox will be no more. The clan will take a different name.

  Michael wondered if it would be clan Mack. Grand Sire Alpha, Jas Mack.

  He did not like the sound of that.

  He went to the refrigerator, pulled out two bags of blood, and put them in the microwave. Set the timer and stood back to wait for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He was getting low on food, would have to place an order soon with the local supply chain.

  The prospect of spending money reminded him of the payment Celestine had brought with her that morning. He found the briefcase right where she dropped it and carried it to the kitchen counter. He cracked it open.

  Five thousand dollars in fresh crisp twenties smiled at him. Michael did not smile back. This was small change, pennies almost, to the men and women who paid him. He did not mind being poor—it was what he was used to—but every time he received payment for his work it reminded him that, in this, he was not free. That he would never be free.

  Just like almost every other man and woman on this planet. You have to work for a living.

  Yes. But most people probably didn’t feel like killers-for-hire every time they got paid. They probably weren’t killers for hire.

  The microwave pinged. Michael closed the briefcase and set it on the ground. Wouldn’t do to get anything dirty. He ate quickly, sinking his teeth into the blood packet. Warmth flooded his throat, and with it, strength.

  This is what it’s like for humans, for others of my kind. What it used to be like for me. Food is simply food. The same litany, chanted again and again in his mind, trying so desperately to stave off the—

  Michael shuddered, squeezing his eyes shut as memory wracked him. He tore the blood packet from his mouth, spraying the floor with crimson droplets.

  Remember, whispered a voice in his mind, familiar as his own, but dead. Dead.

  Michael remembered. He remembered the cold chains strapping him down inside his hole in the ground, the slow torture of blood—one drop per hour—into his parched mouth. His skin, cracked and peeling with starvation, and Malachai—golden, cruel—standing above him with his long white teeth and blazing eyes, taunting him, torturing Michael into something worse than animal.

  And then setting him loose. Setting him free. Starving. Frenzied. Insane.

  Michael sank to the floor, sick with the taste of blood.

  You have to eat, he told himself. You have to stay strong.

  He forced himself to pick up the seeping blood packet. Michael took a deep breath, and licked the plastic clean. It helped that the blood was not straight from a human. It helped a little. He fit his teeth into the holes he had already made, and drank the packet down to the last drop. He did the same with the next packet, and after a time, his nausea subsided. He could not enjoy his meal, but at least he was able to keep it down. That was all that mattered to him. Survival. Taking in enough food to retain control.

  Michael felt better, too. He glanced at his rib wound, noting the skin healing over. Keeli’s bite marks were almost gone, as well. He stroked them. Werewolf bites took extra care. Nothing out of the ordinary, beyond blood and rest, but without those two things, Michael would be very uncomfortable for the next several days. He had enough on his plate without walking around in pain, half-healed. Especially for what he planned to do tonight. The other vampires at The Bloody Pulp would smell his injuries if they were too severe. And there was going to be enough trouble without anyone thinking he was in a weakened state.

  Michael’s shoulders tingled, a shiver of unease. He turned around. His window was still open, roses swaying gently in a breeze. He was completely alone. He slipped over to his weapons and grabbed a dagger. Held the blade flat against his thigh as he glided toward the window. When he was close, he stopped and listened. Took another step, stopped. His roses beckoned, bright as sunshine, canaries, sunsets.

  He looked closer, and went completely still. A small budded stem near his window hung limp and broken from the main branch.

  Michael knew his roses. He loved his roses. That little stem had not been broken when he returned to his apartment.

  Which meant that someone had just been on his fire escape, watching him. Someone large and very quiet.

  Michael crept close to his window, took a deep breath, and stuck out his head to look around. He did not see anyone. The sky was empty, as were the alley and fire escape. He pulled back into shadow, his skin tingling from the light. He needed to put on more sunblock.

  Michael shut the window and locked it. He looked at his roses for one minute, thoughtfully tapping the dagger blade against his leg.

  Who would be spying on me?

  The idea of a vampire peering in through his windows was laughable. Michael couldn’t imagine anyone being that stupid.

  Unsettled, he returned to the table to examine his weapons: a collection of daggers, swords, and stakes. He did not use anything high tech when he killed. It seemed wrong, somehow, like he wasn’t giving the other side a fighting chance. Not that he was supposed to. He was the executioner; his victims were always criminals. The most heinous kind. They
were murderers, rapists—or at the worst, necrophiliacs who desecrated the bodies they drained. Even Michael thought himself an idiot, giving those rogues a chance to fight back—but he knew what it was like to be helpless, to be faced with the inescapable, and he did not wish that on his worst enemy.

  Nor did he ever want himself to get used to an easy kill. Death without consequences. He remembered that, too.

  Michael sorted out what he wanted to take with him: a sword, several throwing knives—two of which were tipped in oak—and several stakes concealed in arm sheathes. Collecting everything helped him focus, got his thoughts away from pink hair and soft lips. He dressed himself with a Kevlar plate over his heart and left shoulder blade, as well as a wide iron collar under his black turtleneck.

  His phone rang just as he was ready to leave. He stretched out on the mattress as he answered the call. There was no greeting from the other end.

  “Michael,” said a deep voice. “We will need your services again tonight.”

  Michael closed his eyes. “I won’t be available to guard the envoy, Frederick. Your own men should be enough. I don’t believe the werewolves plan to ambush you.”

  “Are you sure of that? There’s been a murder.” Frederick sounded so displeased, Michael instinctively looked at his weapons.

  “I heard,” Michael said cautiously.

  “I thought you had, working as you do with the humans.” The last word was spit out. “You know, then, that the crime was committed by a werewolf.”

  “Maybe not just a werewolf,” Michael said, deciding that this was information he could share. “A vampire could have been present, too. This is a complex situation, Frederick.”

  “Make it less complex,” Frederick said. “You know what’s at stake.”

  “We are,” Michael said, unable to keep a trace of cold humor from his voice. “I’m doing my best to find out what happened. Do you know anything?”

  “No,” Frederick snapped. “My hands are full enough trying to keep this from destroying the negotiations. I’m only thankful the victim was Walter Crestin, and not someone of higher … stature.”