by Sierra Dean
Copyright
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Night Moves
Copyright © 2015 by Ashley MacLennan
ASIN:B016NEU3UI
Edited by Sasha Knight
Cover by Ashley MacLennan
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Sierra Dean. electronic publication: November 2015
Dean, Sierra (2015-03-20). Night Moves (A Holden Chancery Story). Sierra Dean. Kindle Edition.
Night Moves
A Holden Chancery Story
Sierra Dean
For Team Holden.
Chapter One
October 4, 1983
Leo Castelli Gallery, SoHo, New York
Whoever invented the mullet deserved to die a slow, painful death.
Holden stared at a man on the opposite side of the clean, white gallery. The man’s hair was bleached blond and trimmed short on top, but kept long in the back where it was stiff with hairspray. Holden didn’t bother to repress his shudder as he looked away.
In the back of his mind he was already writing a new headline: How to style your hair if you never want to see a woman naked again.
Art Cooper, Holden’s editor-in-chief at GQ, would hate it.
Art wanted stories with depth. He wanted the magazine to mean something and set a standard for a new wave of professional men.
Holden wanted to make the haircut go away forever.
He took a polite sip from his glass of champagne. The bubbles felt nice on his tongue, but the taste of alcohol had long ago stopped having any enjoyment for him. Booze, like all varieties of food, had started to taste more like paper when he lost his humanity and became a vampire.
It wasn’t all bad. The taste of blood had become so much sweeter than any delicacy he could have sampled in his human form.
And considering how poor he’d been as a mortal, the food available to him had been dismal at best.
But these days he faked it around the living, because people tended to find it strange if he didn’t eat or drink. He had to make the rounds with the social elite, and while models wouldn’t blink at someone skipping a meal, the folks who made big advertising investments in the magazine wanted to chew the fat with someone who would, well, literally chew the fat.
Oh, the sacrifices he made.
He finished off the champagne with a long swallow, a buzzy feeling swimming through him before fading completely. He vaguely remembered what it was like to be drunk. He hadn’t known that sensation in a very, very long time.
Holden moved through the gallery like a shark in shallow water. He wasn’t necessarily hunting anyone, but if an easy meal were to stumble into his path, he wouldn’t turn it down.
Every now and again the photos hanging on the walls drew his notice, large black-and-white prints depicting beautiful, naked bodies. Earlier that year Robert Mapplethorpe had caused quite a stir on the art scene with his evocative nudes depicting a female Olympic bodybuilder.
This series, an exhibit mixing old and new prints, was an attempt to capitalize on the photographer’s burgeoning fame. The pictures were so lurid they could be borderline obscene, and around the room Holden could make out tittering giggles and muffled gasps. Not everyone in the room was a seasoned art snob, and the average looky-loo might be shocked by what they were seeing.
Grabbing another glass of champagne from a passing tray, Holden continued to prowl around the gallery. He’d done a lap already, earlier in the evening, and there was a particular section of the gallery he was keeping an eye on.
The figure of a woman stopped in that area caught his attention.
He walked up next to her and paused, taking a sip of his drink and gazing at the huge print in front of her, wearing a bored expression he’d perfected over the decades.
He felt the weight of her glance on him, then she looked back to the photo. He smiled faintly, because though she didn’t respond outwardly, he heard her pulse kick up.
She was excited.
“How well has this worked for you so far?” Her voice was smoky and deep, like Kathleen Turner’s.
“About as often as introducing myself the old-fashioned way,” he replied.
She gave him a once-over, and in spite of her elevated heart rate, she remained totally cool on the surface. Holden liked it when women pretended they weren’t interested. The extra effort it took to woo them made the reward that much sweeter. Literally.
Just like fast food was an easy but often unpleasant meal choice for humans, blood given too readily didn’t have the same lush flavor. He’d never take a meal by force, though he rarely had permission for the actual donation. It was an easy thing, to take blood from a lover and heal the wound before they knew what had happened. With the vampire thrall he could convince anyone, but he only liked it when someone wanted to be with him of their own volition.
There were some people who knew about vampires and wanted to give up their blood and become walking donors. Holden hated that. Willingness and desperation were entirely different things.
Deep down he was still a predator, and part of the joy of the meal was in the hunt.
He wasn’t sure which way this girl would tilt—willing victim or eager lover—but based on the scent of her skin he was betting she’d be worth the work.
“I think this is where you’re supposed to tell me your name,” she prompted.
He realized too late he’d made the common vampire mistake of lapsing into stillness. He’d been so lost in thought he forgot to maintain a normal conversational pace.
“Holden Chancery.” He offered his hand and smiled when she gave it a firm shake.
“Felicia.” She drank a little more then asked, “Holden, like from Salinger?”
He loved the sound of her voice and the way she drew out the O in his name like it was a dirty word used fondly. But he hated the comparison. In the thirty-some years since J.D. Salinger had written Catcher in the Rye, Holden hadn’t gone more than a week or two without someone comparing him to the book’s hero, Holden Caulfield.
Just what he wanted, to have people think of a petulant fifteen-year-old schoolboy when they met him.
He’d hoped the book would be a flash in the pan, but in three decades folks hadn’t yet stopped talking about it. Typical luck.
And now his permanent thirty-year-old appearance made him the exact right age to be named for the little twerp.
“No. It’s an old family name.” He tried to keep his voice light, but the annoyance must have come through because she grimaced in a self-aware way.
“Sorry. You must get that a lot.”
“Probably not as often as someone named Hamlet, but it happens.”
“I dated a guy named Mercutio once.” She twirled the champagne in her glass, her eyes sparkling more than the bubbles.
“Liar.”
“Does this look like the face of a woman who would lie to you, Holden Chancery?”
God, her voice would kill him. Low and husky, like a jazz singer he’d known in the ’20s who might have been better than Billie Holiday if she hadn’t…well. Heroin was a hell of a drug, and things hadn’t ended happily
for her. Yet here was this beautiful creature standing next to him who sounded like she’d stepped right out of a speakeasy.
He must have waited too long to reply, because she returned her attention to the print, and her cheeks took on a rosy hue.
“What was that like?” She tilted her glass towards the art.
He followed her gaze to the portrait. It was a black-and-white nude like all the others, but the subject was much more familiar to Holden, since it was a photo of himself. He pretended to take a drink and contemplated the piece. He was damn near life size with it blown up so large. He wasn’t entirely naked. Robert had strategically hidden his manhood with artfully placed female hands.
Holden repressed a smile when Felicia’s pulse sped up again.
She liked it.
“It was unforgettable.” He relieved her of her empty glass and placed it along with his on the tray of a passing waiter. “And a little cold.”
Her laugh was nervous but edged with excitement.
“Someone bought it.” She pointed to the red dot beneath the information placard.
Sure. He’d bought it. Not out of any self-involvement or vanity, though Holden could admit he was plenty vain. He just didn’t need it hanging in MoMA or some millionaire’s living room. He would eventually drop out of the public eye when his eternal youth started to become too conspicuous, but he’d still want to call Manhattan home.
The original negatives were also in his possession now, thanks to his vampire thrall, meaning the photo would never show up in a Mapplethorpe coffee table book.
Owning the print wasn’t vain.
Letting it be shown in the first place, that was a hundred percent ego.
“Felicia?” He had her attention now, having stolen her champagne glass so she couldn’t use it to distract herself.
“Hmm?”
“Let’s go.”
Her heart was beating a mile a minute, but still she pretended not to know what he was talking about. “Go? Go where?”
He moved in closer, picking up the faint scent of Oscar de la Renta perfume. Oh, yes. She was an excellent choice. He could have easily willed her to come with him by staring at her and telling her she wanted to leave. But baiting women with the thrall wasn’t good sport, and the idea struck him as ungentlemanly.
“A walk? Drinks? Anything.”
Felicia was already nodding her assent before he’d finished his pitiful list of made-up suggestions. “Sure. Yeah.”
She left him to get her coat, it being October and all, and Holden waited for her outside the gallery’s doors. Something in the air caused an uneasy stir in his belly, but he pushed the worry aside.
Felicia joined him on the sidewalk, not bothering to hide her smile, and he offered her his arm.
They walked a block in the crisp night air, but in spite of his enchanting company, Holden couldn’t shake the unsettling feeling something was very, very wrong.
It threw him enough he didn’t notice Felicia’s demeanor shift from bubbly to stone-cold serious in the flash of a second.
He only figured out things had changed when she sank the knife into his ribs.
Chapter Two
Holden gaped at the blade sticking out of his chest, a garish red bloom flowering out from the hilt of the weapon and staining his pristine white shirt.
“This is Armani,” he snarled.
“Vampire scum,” she shot back.
He pulled the knife blade out, dropping it onto the sidewalk with a heavy metallic clatter. Prodding the hole in his shirt with the tip of a finger, he sighed in disgust. Ruined.
“You couldn’t have stabbed me when I was wearing Calvin Klein?”
Whatever response Felicia had been anticipating, this clearly wasn’t it. She was edgy and nervous, but her stance told him she was ready for a fight, and her adrenaline was so high she probably wouldn’t consider the danger she was in until it was too late.
“Aren’t you going to, you know…bite me?”
“Was that the goal, here? Because if you wanted me to feed off you, you could have asked politely. Destroying a two-hundred-dollar shirt doesn’t really make my fangs itch, love.”
His wound was already healing, leaving him only with a bruised ego and a shirt he’d need to burn later. This wasn’t how he’d wanted his evening to go.
Evidently this wasn’t how the girl had seen things playing out either. “You’re supposed to attack me.”
Holden buttoned his overcoat and kicked the fallen knife into the gutter. He didn’t need any passing pedestrians asking questions. “Have you ever met a vampire?”
The blush warming her cheeks spoke volumes.
Holden sighed.
“Independent contractors.” With a dramatic roll of the eyes, he jerked his head at her to indicate she should follow him. She snorted. “Girl, if I was going to kill you, you’d be dead.”
“Unlikely.”
In a flash, Holden grabbed her by the wrist and spun her around, forcing her face first against the side of a nearby building. He wasn’t trying to hurt her, just show her how easily he could. Tightening his grip on her, he waited until she let out a small yelp of pain before releasing her.
“If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead,” he repeated.
This time she didn’t argue. She wrestled her hand away from him, rubbing her wrist, a petulant expression on her face. Good. An annoyed would-be slayer might survive. A cocky one would be dead before sunrise.
“So you think you’ve got what it takes to kill the big, bad undead, do you?” He rolled his eyes. He might not be two hundred years old yet, but that was plenty enough time for him to have seen dozens of vampire hunters come and go. And the way they went was never pretty.
“Blood-sucking assholes.” Her lip curled with disdain.
“Let me guess. Vampire killed your brother or something? You figured you’d hit the streets, hunt some vamps, and kill us all like we killed him. How close am I?”
She fidgeted uncomfortably, and he thought she might avoid the question altogether, but she said, “It was my sister.”
“Come on, then. Let me buy you a coffee and tell you a couple things.”
“Why would I come with you? I just tried to kill you.”
“Tried. And failed spectacularly. If you’d pulled that with a rogue, you would be a husk right now.”
“A rogue?”
Holden bristled. This girl knew nothing. Yet somehow she’d known what he was. Either someone had sent her after him, or she had a natural gift. If it was the latter, she’d need guidance. If it was the former, he wanted to know who had it in for him.
Either way he wanted to talk to her.
“Look, believe it or not I think you’re probably well-intentioned. Stupid, but well-intentioned. I might be able to help you stay alive at this game longer than one night, if you’ll let me.”
“Why would you help me? Especially after…” Felicia nodded at his stomach. Though the wound was no longer visible, he got her meaning.
“Some vampires aren’t such nice guys. And those vampires would have used your inexperience against you. You’d be someone’s midnight snack right now.”
“I don’t know why you care.”
Honestly, neither did he. The girl had tried to gut him. Not the kind of behavior that would typically endear a young lady to him. Perhaps he was going soft in his old age. More likely, though, he knew what might happen to her if word got around that a pretty young thing was out on the streets trying to make a slayer of herself with no training.
He couldn’t let that happen.
Plus, maybe if she survived, she would replace his shirt. It would be the polite thing to do.
Inside a small coffee shop with far-too-bright lights, Felicia shifted uncomfortably on the plastic-covered banquette seat. Holden knew it would take more than a cup of coffee and a short stack of pancakes to earn her trust, but he figured it was a good enough place to start.
“Is Felicia your real name?” he aske
d.
“Is Holden yours?”
He nodded. “Since the day my mother gave birth to me in a South London whorehouseI think it was my father’s last name, but she never told me.”
Felicia winced. Good, honesty and personal details would throw her off. It was important for her to know that drinking blood and having no pulse didn’t make him a monster. He was still a person with a rich, complicated personal history. One that might make most polite people change the subject.
Holden hadn’t always been so metropolitan. He’d spent much of his human life fighting tooth and nail for scraps of bread and kitchen waste, and worked for next to nothing as a farmhand. It hadn’t been a romantic upbringing. The ways of the world had been so mysterious to him, that when he met his sire Rebecca in London, she didn’t even need to enthrall him to make him follow her into that dark alley.
He’d been a lost cause from the second she batted her long lashes at him and purred a bonjour in her rich French accent.
Rebecca was the kind of maker vampires considered themselves lucky to have. Beautiful and poised, and willing to stick around for the ugly parts of the change. She had been the one to introduce him to a lifestyle of wealth and class. But she was also ruthless and violent, and didn’t believe human beings were worth much more than the blood that animated them. She based her siring decisions solely on appearance, transforming the beauties she wanted in her menagerie, and leaving the less beautiful to die.
Several of Rebecca’s conquests had already been cruel when she found them, as pretty people often could be. As a result many of her offspring had a nasty streak that only got worse when they became vampires. Holden himself remained kind, but his closest brother, Charlie, had a soul black to the marrow. If not for the rules of the Tribunal governing what vampires could and could not do in public, Charlie might have a run a killing spree across Europe that would put a plague rat to shame.