by Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, MaryJanice Davidson, Angela Knight, Vickie Taylor
The underslopes of her breasts were soft as clouds, the nipples tight as rosebuds. The tear-shaped sides were—
Bloody. A sticky mess.
He pulled his head back and yanked her shirt up. "Jesu—" he squeezed his eyes shut as a cherry bomb went off in his head. "Ow!"
"I told you—"
"I know, I know." The flash of pain already receding, he squinted at her chest. "What the hell happened to you?"
She hesitated only a moment. "You are a voracious eater."
"I did this?"
"Not exactly. I opened the wounds so you could feed."
Very tenderly, he lowered her shirt and then took a step back. "Thank you. I won't be feeding off you any longer."
He turned his back to her, but she stopped him with a hand on his shoulder before he could walk away.
"Whatever you're thinking, get over it. Feeding is a fact of life for vampires."
He wheeled. "Maybe it's time the facts of life changed."
Already he could feel the hunger gnawing at his bones, though. He was so thirsty he thought he might dry up and blow away like the ashes of a cold campfire. He trembled with raw, powerful need.
Jesu—
Ow!
He had to learn not to do that.
Clenching his fists, he fought the urge to go to Déadre. To take what she offered, no matter what the cost to her. Or to his self-respect.
For the first time, Daniel began to understand what synthetic blood could mean to these people. To him. He began to see why Garth had been so desperate to have the formula.
But if he'd stolen the formula to feed his people, why didn't they have it already? Garth had walked out with the discs more than two months ago.
Garth. Thinking about Garth was good. Anger staved off the hunger. Raised a different kind of blood lust.
He stoked the rage inside him, used it to do what he needed to do. It was time. Time to leave Déadre and time to do what he had to do. He climbed the short staircase to the door.
She called out to him in a high voice, "What are you doing?"
"I have to go."
"You can't."
He bowed his head, telling himself to go on. He couldn't turn back now.
"I made a vow, D. To—" He flicked a gaze skyward.
"Him who shall remain nameless, and to myself. I can't give it up now."
"You're not ready."
"I'll never be ready, if I stay here."
He didn't need Déadre anymore. She'd fulfilled her purpose. He probably should kill her—she was a vampire, after all—but he didn't kid himself. He'd never be able to bring himself to do it. He couldn't stay with her, either, though. It would be too easy to lose sight of his goal. To be distracted by her, by this awful, aching thirst that never seemed to go away.
Rallying his resolve, he flung the overhead door back on its hinges. Cool, night air rushed in, full of the heady smells of summer. The stars shone overhead, each one bright as a moon to his newly heightened senses. He heard a tune playing on a car radio that must have been miles away, felt the strength in his muscles as he sprang out of the shelter and into the grassy meadow in one easy leap and smiled.
It pained him to leave Déadre behind, it really did, but he couldn't think about that now. He was finally ready to fight Garth LaGrange, take back what he'd lost. To free Sue Ellen.
He was a vampire, and at long last, vengeance would be his.
4
Idiot.
Déadre rolled her eyes. Did he really think he could just walk away from her?
She could have tried to explain that he was newly made.
That he was bound to her, at least for a while, as she was to him, but she doubted he'd have listened. Some lessons one had to learn for oneself, and this was going to be a particularly painful one, if Daniel Hart was as stubborn as she believed, which she was sure he was.
He'd left her the car—probably being chivalrous—and out on foot, but she couldn't drive after him. Now that he was undead, he'd hear her coming for miles. Besides, it didn't matter. He wouldn't get far. So she gave him a ten-minute head start and then marched down the road after him.
He wasn't hard to follow. His footsteps sounded like a stampeding herd of elephants to her sensitive ears, which reminded her to keep her step as light as his was heavy.
Even with his new super senses, he wouldn't have a clue he was being tailed.
Poor boy, he had a lot to learn about being a vampire.
She wasn't sure how she felt about teaching him living a life, or un-life, in this case, was a big commitment. The vampire equivalent of having a child. Until he learned the ways of the undead, his safety was her responsibility.
But there was a very un-childlike side to their relation-ship as well. Vampires were, by nature, sensual, sensitive creatures. Biologically speaking, the taking of blood invoked a sudden increase in volume of blood. Increased blood volume meant increased blood flow to the sex organs, resulting in arousal.
Some vamps couldn't get off without gorging themselves. Some couldn't gorge themselves without gorging off. Either way, it made the exchange of blood a very personal, and often intimate, interaction.
So far, Daniel had been too weak to feel the full effect of the blood she'd given him. His body had been focused on survival, but he was getting stronger by the hour. Sooner or later, he was going to want more from her than blood, and she had to decide how much she was willing to give him.
Lost in her thoughts, she didn't notice until she rounded a bend that the road stretched out long and straight before her. Long, straight and empty.
Where was Daniel?
She stopped, scanning the trees on either side of the lane, listening for him. She finally heard his breathing, harsh and labored, and knew that he'd reached the end of his endurance. New vampires needed to feed every couple of hours. He would be weak, sick. The blood lust would fall on him like a horse master's whip, driving him forward, driving him to feed.
This was a difficult time for a new vampire. A test period, during which he would find out if he had the mettle to control the blood-sucking urges, or if he would go rogue and have to be put down by his own kind.
A farmhouse rose out of a grassy meadow to the south. Potted geraniums on the front porch added a splash of red to the silvery moonlit scene. Daniel stood in the driveway beside a pickup truck, his head turned up to the curtains fluttering in an open, dark, second-story window.
There were mortals inside. Even from this distance, Déadre could smell them. Ready prey.
She crept toward the house, willing Daniel away. "Come back to me, little vampire. Back to me."
But when she broke out of the tree line, Daniel was nowhere in sight. Her stomach clenched. He wouldn't do it. He was a moral man. That wouldn't be lost in the vampire he'd become. He hadn't been able to kill her, he wouldn't kill the mortals in this house, either.
The blood lust was strong, though, and he hadn't learned control. He might not want to hurt anyone, but he could make a mistake, the way she'd made a mistake so many years ago with that poor old woman…
She had started toward the house after him, hurrying now, not caring if he heard her, when the bleat of a goat drew her attention toward the barn. She stopped, her senses alert, and heard more animal snuffles, a rustling of hay. Normal barnyard sounds.
Or not.
She glided to the barn without a sound and found Daniel on the floor bent over a puddle of vomit, a decapitated chicken in one hand and blood trickling out both corners of his mouth.
Daniel turned his face away. He didn't want Déadre to see him like this, on his knees, puking his guts up.
"I was so thirsty," he said. "I couldn't stand it. But the people in the house… I couldn't do it."
"You need to feed every few hours when you're newly made. Later, you can go longer."
He shook his head. "Something is wrong. I can't drink the blood. It comes right back up. Maybe I'm not really a vampire. Maybe it didn't work."
He hadn't heard her move, but suddenly she was crouched beside him. "It's the animal blood. You can't have it. It isn't compatible."
He coughed, choked, spit. "Oh, God—Ow!—No kidding."
Gently she pried the chicken from his fist and, holding one wing between her thumb and forefinger, deposited it in a muck bucket next to the horse stall.
He worked up the nerve to glance her way and was relieved to see she wasn't laughing at him. "You couldn't have told me about this animal thing?"
"You didn't ask."
Still on his hands and knees, he laughed sardonically. "Guess there are a lot of things I didn't ask."
She knelt next to him and dabbed the chicken blood from his lips with the hem of her T-shirt. "There's still time to make up for that. But first you need to feed."
She sat with her back against the wall and pulled him to her. He was too weak to resist. The barn spun around him like a gyroscope.
She lifted her T-shirt, but he brushed her hand away from her breast. "Wait, wait. One thing I have to ask first."
She frowned down at him. "What?"
"Is it normal for me to get totally turned on when I drink your blood?"
"Very normal. Although you'll learn you do have the ability to control it, if you want to."
He thought about mat a moment. "Like if I decide to take a nip from a ninety-year-old crone with the face of a weevil?"
"That would be a good time, yes." He could tell she tried to suppress her smile, but it broke through.
He was still contemplative, though. "Is it… as good… for you, too?"
She brushed her hand through his hair. "Not as good as for you, at this point. But when you're stronger, we'll exchange blood, and then it will be."
He nodded, feeling queer about contemplating a future with her. A future had never been in his plan. He was going to kill Garth, and then himself and Sue Ellen so that they could rest in peace. Wasn't he?
He thought it would be simple. He would become a vampire, and he'd have super strength and use it to kill Garth.
Unfortunately things hadn't worked out quite that way. He'd become a vampire, all right, but he was about as strong as a newborn lamb, and Garth was the big, bad wolf.
Obviously, he had some recalculating to do. Not tonight, though. Tonight, he needed to feed. He needed blood to quench the fire that threatened to consume him. He needed Déadre.
He rested his head on her shoulder and she beamed such a beatific smile down at him that this time, he extended a thumbnail and opened the wound on her breast himself.
The scent of fresh blood was like the smell of the ocean to a sailor. It cleansed him. Stirred him. His skin tingled and a low throb pulsed in his sex.
Lying next to her, he turned to his side and hooked one leg over her, rubbing with his calf, pressing himself into her hip. He smoothed his palm down the soft planes of her belly and under her waistband to the nest of curls between her legs.
She drew his head down with her hands, offering nourishment, offering her blood, but tonight he wouldn't just take. He would give as good as he got.
As good and better.
"HOW long until I don't have to feed so often?" Daniel asked.
Hand in hand, they walked on a footpath through the woods behind the farmhouse. Nocturnal eyes peeked at them from branches and scrub brush, then scurried away.
Déadre couldn't remember the last time she'd felt so at peace. When she'd still been mortal, maybe.
"It's different for everyone," she said. "But most of us are able to sustain ourselves for at least a day or two after the first couple of months."
His face twisted. "Months?"
"In vampire years, a month is hardly the blink of an eye."
"Vampire years. Is that kind of like doggie years?"
"Yeah, except a lot longer."
"Hmmphh."
The path ended at a pond polka-dotted by floating lilies.
Daniel skimmed a stone across the moonlit surface. "How often do you need blood?"
"Every few weeks or so. But it's been a little longer this time."
He had raised a rock for another throw, but he paused. "Am I hurting you by taking your blood when you haven't fed?"
She shrugged, hoping he wouldn't see the weariness in the gesture. "I'm a little weak, that's all. I'll feel better once we're back in the city."
In truth, she wished she never had to go back to the city. To face the Enforcer.
"Once you take a mortal's blood," he said, the words tinged with revulsion.
"I don't kill my donors. I only take enough to sustain myself without harming them."
"How do you do it?" He lifted his head. His green eyes looked black, bleak, under the quarter moon. "I tried. I was so desperate for blood, I wanted to go into that farmhouse, drink from whoever lived there, but I couldn't. It made me sick to think about it."
He sat down in the grass, pulled his knees up and hooked his arms around them.
She lowered herself next to him, mimicking his position, and grazed her fingertips over the nape of his neck, down his spine. "Eventually you'll have to take blood from someone besides me."
He stared out over the water for so long that she thought he wasn't going to respond. That he wasn't ready to face that reality. But finally he said quietly, "What if there was another way? Could you give up mortal blood? Would you?"
"What other way? Snapping the heads off chickens?"
He winced. "No, no animal blood. That's a lesson I won't forget."
"Then there is no other way." Daniel sighed, and got such a faraway look on his face that Déadre wondered where his thoughts had taken him. "Daniel?"
He stood and brushed himself off, then offered a hand to help her up. "We'd better get back. It'll be dawn soon."
Déadre's own thoughts did some wandering on the way back to the farmhouse to collect the jacket she'd left in the barn. "Let's don't go back, Daniel. Back to Atlanta, I mean. We can sleep today in the storm shelter, then head out tomorrow night for wherever we want to go."
She'd never thought about leaving her home city before. Vampires congregated in clans and to be separated from the clan was risky. They supported each other, watched each others' backs. Clans tended to be wary of strangers, especially strange vampires. The clan in a new city wasn't likely to welcome them with open arms.
More likely they would brand them as rogues, cut off their heads and bury them facedown.
She'd rather take her chances with a strange clan than with the Enforcer, though. She couldn't go back to Atlanta and face the High Matron and her thug. She couldn't take Daniel there.
Her excitement grew with every step. "California, maybe. I've always wanted to see the coast."
"I can't."
"Or the mountains. What do you think about the mountains?"
At the back of the farmhouse, he stepped in front of her, stopped her with firm hands on her shoulders. "Déadre, I can't. I have to go back to Atlanta."
She jerked away. The goats in the pen against the barn bleated. The mommas ran back and forth across their corral, their babies at their heels. The cattle next to them joined the ruckus, mooing and snorting.
"Because some man stole your house and your car and your work," she said bitterly, remembering his words from the rave club. "And you have to kill him."
"Because he killed someone I care about. My…" His voice broke. "My fiancée."
"Your what?"
"He's not a man, Déadre. He's a vampire. And he… he made her one, too."
She shook her head, not believing any of this. "So you used me to make you a vampire so you could win her back?"
"I used you to make me a vampire so I could set her free. She is—was—sweet and gentle. She wouldn't want to live like that. She wouldn't want me to leave her a—"
"A what?" She raised her hands out to the sides. "A monster, like me?"
He didn't answer her question. He straightened his back and looked her straight in the eye. "
He's a vampire. As a mortal I had no chance against him. He's too strong. Too fast."
"What will you do if you manage to kill him, huh? Then you'll still be a monster? What will you do then?"
He looked her straight in the eye, his face solemn and sad. "Then I'll set myself free, too."
Her eyes went wide. Her stomach pancaked on the floor of her abdomen.
He'd used her. To find his fiancée, a vampire, so he could kill her.
And then he was going to kill himself.
Her beautiful Daniel.
Her mouth rounding in a silent, "No", she ran around him into the barn and nearly mowed down a sleepy-looking elderly man in a bathrobe and rubber boots. The farmer held a double-barreled shotgun, and her momentum sent him stumbling back. The stock of the gun connected with a support beam. His hand jerked on the trigger. There was a tremendous explosion, then a flash of flame from the end of the gun.
And two loads of double-ought shot tore through Déadre's chest.
5
DANIEL felt the concussion of the shotgun blast all the way outside the barn. He charged through the back door in time to see Déadre sway once, her spine straight and arms at her side, then topple backward like a domino. A red stain the size of a dinner plate bloomed between her breasts.
The farmer dropped the rifle and backed up until his shoulders hit the wall. His eyes were huge and round, set deep in his face, his complexion waxy. "Whaa—? No. Oh, no. I thought it was those wild dogs in the barn again, botherin' my stock. I didn't know. I didn't mean to do it. It was an accident."
Daniel stood immobile for a long moment, then dropped to his knees beside Déadre. He was pretty sure a gunshot couldn't kill her, but it was still quite a shock seeing her fall, seeing her lying on the ground, still and pale.
He checked her vitals quickly. She wasn't breathing, had no pulse. By all outward appearances, she was dead.
The farmer shuffled toward the door, mumbling. "Nine-one-one. I gotta wake the wife and call nine-one-one."
"No." Daniel touched Déadre's lips once before he rose, both a plea and a promise. He hoped she heard both in that deep sleep vampires went into when they needed to heal. Just because she couldn't die from a gunshot wound didn't mean she couldn't suffer from one. Feel the agony of torn flesh and splintered bone.