The Last Vampire- Complete series Box Set

by R. A. Steffan

  Port-au-Prince’s airport was... not like that.

  Instead, it was a collection of really big buildings, really big parking lots full of really small planes, and a runway. Surrounded by fields. That was it.

  The first hint of useful light was finally creeping over the horizon, as morning made itself welcome on the island. Albigard stopped for a moment to get his bearings, and pointed to a building considerably less prepossessing than the glass-and-concrete passenger terminal. The giant rolling doors were open, revealing a handful of small planes and perhaps half a dozen people milling around inside the well-lit interior.

  Albigard strode in as though he owned the place. I watched with undeniable fascination as all eyes gradually turned toward him, the activity in the hangar ceasing. The way the humans seemed helplessly drawn to him twisted something in my gut unpleasantly, and I couldn’t help thinking of Len.

  “We have need of transportation to another island, immediately if possible,” the Fae declared, his clear voice carrying around the building. “To whom should we speak?”

  “Subtle,” Guthrie muttered, sotto voce.

  Several of the people around us exchanged confused looks. Beside me, Rans sighed and spoke a couple of sentences in what I was fairly sure was French. After a bit of back-and-forth, a man who’d been tinkering with the propeller of an ancient-looking plane answered in the same tongue.

  “Come on,” Rans said, leading the way out of the hangar and toward one of the outdoor parking areas. “We’re looking for a woman named Anaica Jeune.”

  Anaica wasn’t hard to find. There didn’t seem to be many women here, and her plain, oil-stained jumpsuit did little to hide her willowy curves. She was unstrapping the wings of a white plane from a pair of iron rings set in the concrete of the storage lot, and looked up warily at our approach.

  Guthrie waved at us to stay back, and walked up to her alone, speaking in rapid-fire French. Her wary expression didn’t clear completely, but it did soften. I was unaccountably irritated by the way her eyes kept creeping away from Guthrie in favor of running over Albigard. She looked at him like someone might look at a freakin’ unicorn they’d unexpectedly stumbled across. It was all I could do to keep from making gagging noises.

  “For what it’s worth, he can’t really help it,” Rans said, the words pitched for my ears alone. “He’s not consciously rolling her emotions; at least, not yet. At this level, it just sort of happens when humans are around him, unless he consciously shields himself from them.”

  Apparently, my look of disgust hadn’t been very subtle. “Yeah?” I whispered back. “Well, it still makes my skin crawl.”

  “Says the succubus hybrid who draws every bisexual, lesbian, and heterosexual male eye wherever she goes,” Rans said, not without a touch of amusement.

  I glared at him and tried not to examine my own hypocrisy. Albigard shot us a wary look, perhaps sensing that we were discussing him behind his stupid Fae back. Rans gave him an insincere smile that was all teeth, and I swallowed a sigh.

  Meanwhile, Guthrie and Anaica seemed to be wrapping up their discussion, based on the handshake and the wad of money that changed hands. A worrying thought occurred to me as I watched the interaction.

  “Is Guthrie going to be okay stuck on a tiny plane with a human?” I asked Rans, still keeping my voice low. “Because, y’know, I’m not keen on plunging to a watery death if he goes ‘full horror movie’ again and rips her throat out while we’re in the air.”

  “We’re admittedly throwing him in the deep end when it comes to learning self-control,” Rans said. “But he just ate, and there are enough blood bags packed to get him through the next forty-eight hours. After the near miss with Len, he’s far more aware of his urges, and he’s doing a bang-up job of keeping on top of things so far.”

  “Okay,” I told him with a shrug. “You’re the expert.”

  I still had the mental image of Guthrie springing at Len playing on a video loop inside my head, but I also remembered his absolute horror when he realized what he’d nearly done. Not to mention the care he’d taken while drinking from Len in more controlled circumstances. Guthrie was strong. He wouldn’t have survived everything that had happened during his long decades of life otherwise.

  The newly fledged vampire in question wandered back to us, hooking a thumb behind him to indicate the plane and its pilot. “It’ll take her thirty minutes or so to complete pre-flight checks, and then there will be a bit of a wait until we’re cleared by air traffic control. It’s about a six-hour flight to the airport on Anguilla, and roughly four miles from there to the port at Blowing Point.”

  “Will the ship still be there when we arrive?” I asked, figuring we were looking at a good eight hours... and that was if everything went smoothly.

  “It’s supposed to be, yes,” Guthrie said. “Worst case, we’ll have to grab a ferry to St. Kitts and catch it there tomorrow.”

  I nodded, since it seemed that the guys had things covered. We stood around waiting while Anaica finished whatever witchcraft was involved in ensuring that her small plane didn’t plummet from the skies unexpectedly. To say that I wasn’t looking forward to the journey was putting it mildly.

  I wasn’t exactly the biggest fan of planes—and the only ones I’d been on were commercial monstrosities with engineering teams and corporate money behind them. This was a tin can with wings and propellers, owned by a woman with a stained jumpsuit and a smear of oil across her cheek.

  “What could possibly go wrong?” I muttered.

  Rans made a noise of jaded amusement. “Look at it this way. This plane is ancient. If it were going to crash, it would have done so long before now.”

  I glanced at him side-eyed. “Not helping.”

  Finally, Anaica waved us over. “Come... come. Get in,” she said in heavily accented English. She pointed at a hatch. “Bags in storage compartment, please.”

  Rans rummaged in his bag before stowing it, pulling out something wrapped in brown paper and handing it to Guthrie, who stowed it inside his suit jacket. I guessed it was a blood bag for emergencies. Once everything was arranged to the pilot’s satisfaction, we went around to the side door with its fold-out staircase.

  As we passed by the fuselage, Rans’ eyes caught on the black writing painted onto the white metal, and he gave a short bark of laughter.

  “What?” I asked him, following his gaze.

  He shook his head. “Just the name of the plane,” he said, his tone turning ironic. “I suppose it must be fate.”

  NINE

  “LOT’S WIFE?” I ASKED, peering curiously at the curvy writing.

  Guthrie gave a soft snort. “Oh, that’s a good one. Either a sign from above, or final proof that the joke’s on us.”

  I frowned. “Someone want to let me in on the punchline?”

  Albigard eyed the plane’s name with his usual faint air of disdain. “Lot’s wife is a biblical character from the book of Genesis. Angels counseled her and her husband to flee from the city of Sodom without looking back, or face divine wrath in the cataclysm that was about to be unleashed on the city. She ignored the directive and looked over her shoulder to see whether her daughters were following behind, at which point she was turned into a pillar of salt as punishment for her disobedience.”

  The story rang a vague bell in my memory, but it still took a moment for the joke to sink in. “Salt. Right. Gotcha.”

  So we would be fleeing our demon pursuers to what we hoped would be a saltwater oasis, using a plane named after a woman who’d been turned into salt. Cool. I followed the others into the cramped cabin and strapped in. Albigard and Rans wordlessly hemmed Guthrie into a seat behind them, ensuring that there would be two people strong enough to overpower him sitting between the new vampire and the pair of human chicks with beating hearts.

  Guthrie didn’t protest.

  I was jittery as we waited for permission to take off, but I tried my best to hide it. When we finally taxied onto the airport’
s single runway, I couldn’t help clutching the metal arms of the seat hard enough to make them creak. The tiny plane was incredibly claustrophobic even for my five-foot, four-inch frame. I couldn’t imagine how the guys were dealing with it.

  I clenched harder as the propellers spun deafeningly up to speed and the plane accelerated, my heart pounding in a way that I hoped wasn’t making things rougher on Guthrie.

  “Eyes on me, love,” Rans said, just loudly enough to be heard over the roar, and I jerked my attention across the cramped aisle. His blue gaze glowed from within. “That’s it. Relax. Just focus on the fact that your drink with the paper umbrella is almost within reach.”

  I tried to let his power slide over me, even though I’d gradually been losing my already limited vulnerability to vampire mesmerism the stronger I got. Still, if I concentrated, I could pretend it was working, at least. With difficulty, I pried my fingers away from the seat arms and took several deep breaths.

  The plane lurched off the ground, leaving my stomach behind as it rose unsteadily into the sky. I tried to keep breathing, swallowing a few times until my ears popped. Eventually, we leveled out, and Anaica shot us a thumbs-up sign without turning around from her controls. Some of my remaining tension bled out, and I settled in for the long haul across the water.

  * * *

  Landing was every bit as bad as takeoff had been. The airport on Anguilla looked like a tiny postage stamp, the runway not nearly long enough to be safe. The plane bumped and skittered on its wheels for several seconds before braking hard enough to knock my knees into the barrier in front of my seat.

  We survived, though—and based on our intrepid pilot’s unruffled demeanor, the jostling and squealing of tires on pavement wasn’t unusual or cause for concern. Pilots, I decided there and then, were a bit screwed up in the head.

  “Anguilla as promised,” Anaica said cheerfully, as the plane rolled to a stop near one end of the small terminal. “Pleasure doing business, mes amis.”

  Unlike the Haitian end of the journey, here we were forced to go through the formal arrivals procedure at the modest airport. Fortunately, there wasn’t all that much to it, compared to the security surrounding departures. Rans flashed his eyes at one airport employee who seemed a little too curious about our plans after Guthrie asked him where we could hire a car. The man’s face immediately went blank, losing all interest in our presence.

  A long wait for a taxi followed by a short drive brought us to Blowing Point, a collection of small churches, unprepossessing stores, and tumbledown shacks dotting a brown landscape broken up by occasional palm trees. Beyond lay a protected harbor and the bluest water I’d ever seen.

  Guthrie tipped the cab driver, who helped us get our luggage out of the trunk and nodded enthusiastically as we thanked him. The large parking area we were standing in backed up to a square-ish white building that, while good-sized, wasn’t tall enough to completely block the shape of the massive cruise ship docked beyond it.

  “Well, it’s still here at least,” Guthrie said. “I assume there’s some plan for actually getting on board, since we’re not currently ticket-holding members of the ‘wealthy douchebag’ contingent?”

  Albigard looked at him with a gaze that was almost pitying. “You’re a bloodsucker now, are you not, Leonides? I believe you’ll find that very few places guarded by humans are closed to you.”

  “Not to mention the fact that while the douchebag qualifier is questionable, you’re most definitely a member of the ‘swimming in money’ contingent, mate,” Rans added dryly.

  “Which reminds me,” I said. “Are there likely to be a lot of people here who’ll recognize you, Guthrie?”

  “Some will,” he said. “But I’m not what you’d call chummy with this crowd. The ones who were pestering me to come mostly just wanted to get me somewhere I’d be a captive audience for whatever their latest scheme happened to be.”

  “Ah. I get why you opted out, in that case,” I told him. “But, hey—at least now you can flash the brights at anyone who irritates you and tell them to fuck off. And they will.”

  If anything, the reminder of his new abilities made Guthrie look queasy for a moment. “Yeah. Great. And I guess if I run into anyone who’s really pissed me off recently, I can always drink their blood as a form of not-so-subtle revenge.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Rans said. “Which reminds me... are you hungry? You should be coming off of the initial need for frequent feedings by now, but it’s still been more than nine hours since Len, by my reckoning.”

  Guthrie looked even unhappier than before. “A bit, but I can control it better than before.”

  Rans nodded briskly. “Good. Now, prove it to me. I gather this place is also the island’s ferry terminal, so there should be people inside. Take someone aside and get them to follow you to a quiet corner somewhere, so you can feed from them. I’ll tag along as backup, just in case—but other than that, you’re on your own. Show me you’ve got this under control.”

  “I still hate you,” Guthrie said in a flat tone.

  “I know you do, mate.”

  * * *

  Albigard and I loitered in the terminal while the two vampires disappeared with an unlucky ferry passenger for a bit of hemoglobin takeout. I supposed it said something that Rans willingly left me alone in the Fae’s company, and without so much as a threat of ear-bobbing or bodily injury to Albigard before he left.

  Considering how much of a stuck-up asshole Albigard could be, I wasn’t sure why fixing the pair’s strange relationship was so important to me—only that it was. I glanced up at his haughty profile, taking in the finely sculpted, elfin lines of his face. The bruise from Len’s fist was long healed, and his blond hair hung in silken waves over his shoulders despite the day of rough travel. His aura of Fae magic crackled against my skin like static electricity, jangling my nerves.

  As though sensing my eyes on him, he looked down at me, his brows drawing together. The expression was as prickly as his magic, and yet he continued to go out of his way to help me whenever I contacted him. I wondered sometimes about his motivations, and about what he truly thought of my situation.

  “What is it?” he snapped.

  I ignored the churlish tone and shook my head. “Nothing, really. Mostly, I’m just wondering how fucked we are right now. I can’t help noticing that no one’s talking about the long term. It’s just a constant scramble to stay one step ahead of the crisis of the moment.”

  He raised an arched brow, the lines of his face softening minutely. “You’ve managed to make enemies of both armies in a war, demonkin. Such a strategy doesn’t lend itself to a positive outcome, generally speaking.”

  “I’d hardly call it a strategy,” I muttered.

  He huffed out a quiet breath. “Indeed not. For what it’s worth, though, no one can see the future, and nothing remains static forever.”

  My mouth twisted down. “I’m not sure whether I’m more shocked by the fact that you’re apparently trying to make me feel better, or by how bad you are at it.”

  Albigard gave an elegant shrug of one shoulder. “You don’t need me for coddling. Not when you have the parasite for such things. Long-term strategy is useless if your enemies find and kill you while you’re distracted by planning it.”

  “I guess,” I agreed. “Though I’d feel better if I thought long-term strategy was even an option for us at this point. Anyway, while I can’t say I’m thrilled that you broke Le—” I cut myself off. “That you broke my friend’s brain with your fairy tricks, I do appreciate you dropping everything to get us out of St. Louis.”

  Albigard blinked at me. “I find your attempts to protect your pet human’s identity interesting, demonkin. I can assure you—after today, I have little interest in further contact with him.”

  “Good,” I said. “Do me a favor and keep it that way.”

  The Fae sniffed dismissively. “As for the rest, it’s a transaction, nothing more. You have information I desire. I
have the means to transport you to this... place.” He looked around, releasing the word as though it tasted bad.

  Right. Well, if the occasional snippet of information was all it took to keep him coming back when I needed him, that was fine with me.

  “Fair enough,” I told him. “The demon Caspian is working with is called Myrial. She’s a succubus, and in addition to reaching across the aisle to the Fae, she also has a history of playing fast and loose with the treaty. She was the one who got my grandmother pregnant with a cambion, and she also tricked Guthrie into a demon-bond in the nineteen-fifties. I have reason to believe she tried to kill Rans recently, as well.”

  “That is... moderately useful,” Albigard replied, showing no other reaction to the revelation.

  “Guthrie can get you that bank account information he promised, as soon as they get back,” I finished. “Will you be coming with us onto the ship?”

  A look of disgust flitted across his finely shaped features. “Certainly not. Gambling... debauchery... I can feel the vice rolling off that benighted vessel from here.” His green eyes fell heavily on me. “No doubt you’ll feel right at home once you’re on board.”

  “Oooh... burn,” I said, miming a strike to the heart. “My fragile self-esteem may never recover, Tinkerbell. Though, you’ve admittedly got me wondering now what the hell kind of cruise Guthrie just dragged us to.”

  “The rich douchebag kind,” Guthrie said, approaching from behind me with Rans at his side. “I did try to warn you earlier.”

  “The wealthy do so enjoy their playtime,” Rans put in, his shoulder brushing mine as he stepped into the space beside me. “Leaving us so soon, Albigard? Whatever will we do without you?”

  “How did the cut-rate Red Cross blood drive routine go?” I asked quickly, before the conversation could start going downhill.

  “Smoothly,” Rans said. “I’m confident our friend here is past the worst of things.”

  The flat look Guthrie gave him clearly conveyed his opinion of that assessment. Then Guthrie shook his head and turned to Albigard instead, reaching into a pocket.