Desire at Dawn

by Fiona Zedde

  Table of Contents

  Synopsis

  By the Author

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  About the Author

  Other Fiona Zedde Titles Available via Amazon

  Books Available from Bold Strokes Books

  Synopsis

  Recently turned from human to vampire, Kylie wants nothing to do with her new life or with the clan that claims her. She certainly wants nothing to do with her mother, Belle, who is completely infatuated with her vampire wife and clan leader.

  To escape her unwanted existence, Kylie befriends a human, Olivia, who has been abandoned by her family. But unknown to Kylie, someone is watching her. An enemy has targeted her as the perfect way to destroy her clan. While battling this enemy, Kylie also grapples with the surprising desires she feels for the human. Desires that she'd once seen as wicked and wrong.

  Fighting for her life, Kylie must confront both the assassins and the beast within her that would do anything to keep her loved ones safe.

  Desire at Dawn

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  http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com

  eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.

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  Desire at Dawn

  © 2014 By Fiona Zedde. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-62639-107-9

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, New York 12185

  First Edition: June 2014

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Cindy Cresap

  Production Design: Susan Ramundo

  Cover Design by Sheri(graphicartist2020@hotmail.com)

  By the Author

  Every Dark Desire

  Broken in Soft Places

  Desire at Dawn

  Dedication

  To all my readers who loved Every Dark Desire and wanted more. This is for you.

  Chapter One

  The human security guards were easy prey, and Kylie took them like a gift. When they attacked her on the roof of the museum, she fought back and laughed. She punched and clawed, gushing blood and breaking bones, twisted away from them, and jumped off the fifteen-story building with their taste still on her lips.

  The falling happened slowly, night rushing up into her face, a million stars burning above her, the floors of the building darting by. The full skirts of her midnight blue dress drifted up around her hips like the petals of a dark flower. Then the ground was at her feet. She landed in a crouch, sprang up, and ran.

  Earlier, she’d been careless. Perhaps deliberately so as she had walked slowly through the museum, allowing the humans to see her, a brown young woman with feral eyes, prettily dressed in the designer frock her mother had gotten for her, but still out of place among the glittering humans in their sequins, pearls, and money worn casually like air. The museum was relatively small. Only a half dozen or so rooms with glassed-in displays of jewels, gold, and other old things that meant more now than they ever did.

  In the gallery where Kylie stood, the light was bright on the square glass cases and over the people walking through the wide room. She breathed in their artificial and human smells. The delicious copper and sunlight flavor of the blood she’d taken from a pair of tourists barely an hour before was still on her tongue when she spotted the necklace she wanted.

  So she’d smashed the glass case, snatched the diamond and ruby necklace from its velvet pedestal, and ran.

  Triumph sang through her. The ruby necklace she’d stolen was a cool weight against her hip, tucked away in the hidden zippered pocket of her dress, a false feeling of security as she sprinted into the cool clutch of evening.

  Buckhead, Atlanta, on a Saturday night. Partiers decorated the streets like silken ribbons. The beautiful and the very much alive.

  She sprinted into an alley and emerged on the other side in a crush of humans. They were laughing, happiness hovering over them like the best and rarest of perfumes. A wedding, a bride and her party, tumbling onto the steps of a hotel, their clothes an explosion of tulle in the night air. An evening wedding.

  Just like the one her mother had had with Silvija. She stopped, the memory of the moonless night almost seven years ago making her stumble. Her mother with a woman. Her mother married.

  Someone bumped into her from behind.

  “Are you all right, honey?”

  A woman’s concerned voice touched Kylie, then hands floated to her shoulders. Kylie flinched away with a growl. She caught the frightened gaze of the woman who snatched her hand back and stared at her with wide eyes.

  As a human, she would have been ashamed of acting like that. As herself, she wanted to tear out the woman’s throat and feel her kindness pouring over her tongue. Even in her most extreme daydreams as a girl in Jamaica, Kylie never thought she’d be this. She pushed through the crowd, darted into traffic, and left the humans’ happiness behind.

  She caught a flash of her reflection in a shop glass. She saw a narrow strip of a girl with wild hair and tortured eyes, the dark blue dress fluttering against her skin in the wake of her own breeze. She stopped. The humans were looking, taking note of her mad dash through the streets, a flush of scarlet in their beige lives.

  Once she’d jumped off the fifteen-story building, the guards from the museum hadn’t stood a chance of catching her. But still, she felt like something was chasing her, a forever feeling of restless anger and fear that only dissolved with the coming of the sun and oblivion. Or when she risked her neck for baubles that didn’t matter.

  She walked slowly now, hips swaying, feeling the brush of the stolen ruby necklace with each step she took. The coolness of a late fall breeze stroked her face and thickly coiled hair as she walked down Peachtree Street—past the glittering high-rise condominiums, the Fox Theatre, an occasional car with Southern rap music blaring from its stereo—to Ponce de Leon Avenue with its feral looking hookers and the Krispy Kreme donut shop. She headed toward Little Five Points, an area of town she’d liked as soon as she saw it.

  Her cell phone rang. She took it out of the hidden pocket where it rested with the necklace, and glanced down at it, although the caller could only be one person.

  She greeted her mother in her most neutral tone. “Good evening.”

  “Where are you, Kylie?” Her mother’s husky voice fluted high with worry. “T
he sun will be up soon.”

  “I’m fine.” But she looked up in surprise at the touches of gray in the otherwise dark sky. Garlic and holy water of vampire legends didn’t affect her at all, but the sun would burn her to cinders. “I’m in Jersey.” The lie came easily to Kylie’s tongue.

  “Then you can make it home before sunrise.”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ll try.”

  But of course, she was nearly six hundred miles away from the clan home. A plane ride. A car. A brisk run. She’d turn to ashes in the sun if she tried to make it back before dawn.

  Her mother seemed to sense something. Kylie could almost see her pausing whatever she was doing, her fingers frozen on the zipper of one of her brightly colored, figure-hugging dresses as she got ready for bed. “Kylie, don’t be careless and expose yourself to danger. Come home. Or find a safe place to rest for the day.”

  Despite the fierce words, her mother’s tone was soft with concern. Kylie wondered if she’d practiced it before calling.

  “There’s no danger here,” she said with the ruby necklace brushing her hipbone. The sky grew even lighter above her. “I’ll be back soon,” she said. “Everything is good.” Then Kylie hung up.

  Mama. A stranger. But still always Mama.

  Sometimes, she didn’t know that stranger who occasionally hugged and kissed her. Her mother was alternately cold and kind, filled to bursting with a guilt Kylie wanted no part of. A distant mother who had all the time in her endless life for Silvija, her wife, but never for Kylie. Not really. She shook the useless thoughts from her head, stuck the phone back in her pocket, and began to hunt for a place to spend the day.

  On the way to shelter, she got distracted by the beauty of night giving way to daybreak around her. It was a time she had loved as a human, darkness drifting away to allow the faintest traces of pink on the horizon, a stroke of the vivid color signifying the stark rise of the light. Kylie squinted against the weak light. She wasn’t like her mother who could stand it past sunrise. Once, she’d seen her sit on the top floor of their Central Park penthouse apartment, hidden in a shadowed corner as the sun rose, its light creeping toward her on cat feet while she watched it all with that smooth and impassive face of hers. Kylie knew her mother had been badly burned before, but Belle was not afraid.

  Her mother was strong. Kylie was not. If nothing else, the sun taught her that.

  Rising dawn. People were still on the streets, their laughter and music leaving Kylie spellbound. It was late, but so many of the humans were about. She thought she would get used to that in New York, a city of endless night and endless activity. Even just before daybreak, the streets were alive with their particular energy and bite. But here in Atlanta, it was different; there was a Southern slowness, a delicious leisure to the streets, the conversation, the voices. There was no rush, simply a meandering with the smell of incense winding through their clothes.

  The pink brightened in the sky, then, slow as a dream, changed to amber. The light brushed her forehead and she leapt back, gasping at its sting, a hornet’s piercing prick. Kylie threw her arm up to protect her face. She scuttled backward until her spine slammed against brick.

  Despite shouting at her mother many times over the years that she wished she were truly dead, Kylie fought for her existence with every sight of the rising sun. Operating on pure instinct alone, she ducked into a nearby alley. She turned and dug fingers into the red brick and climbed up, scrambling up a brick building and to the screened-in second floor balcony. It was locked. She cursed and climbed higher, her fingers and the toes of her flats hooking into the exposed brick.

  Kylie bypassed the fourth and fifth floors, something calling her higher to the top floor of the building. That balcony door was unlocked. She slid quietly in, letting the thick linen curtains fall behind her.

  In the sudden silence, she heard her breath, felt her chest in panic. Kylie’s cheeks prickled with shame, although there was no one around to see it, to see her, a vampire who hadn’t needed to breathe for seven years, get frightened into drawing air. She cut off the unnecessary breathing and calmed herself.

  She realized then that she was in a woman’s apartment.

  The hush of the apartment was loud compared to the grumbling wakefulness of the city down below: the buses already growling through the Atlanta streets, cars zooming past with their lights still on to combat the failing darkness. Across the street, the café already had its shades raised while figures moved behind the glass in preparation for a new day.

  Kylie lifted her head to draw in the scents around her, a habit that Julia, another member of the clan, always teased her about.

  “We’re vampires, not wolves,” the little imp always said.

  She shook away the extraneous thought and focused on her surroundings. She crept deeper into the apartment that was shrouded heavily in darkness. She remembered the lessons that her mother taught her, how to be light, to move so delicately that not even the air was disturbed.

  Although it was a typical lofted apartment, the place was old. What someone else might have labeled antique with its wooden floors and the trapped scent of dozens of lives, many of them decades past.

  It had a large living room with a couch, coffee table, TV, and bookshelves, and a kitchen separated by a breakfast bar and lush, padded stools. Thick tapestries in rich shades of burgundy and tourmaline and gold lined the walls. The stairs lead up one level to the open bedroom fitted with a queen-sized bed. Pillows of various sizes covered one side of the bed, none of them matching, inviting a solitary sleep, not the embrace of two or more lovers. Flowering tiger lilies sat on the bedside table. They exhaled a delicate perfume that trailed through the entire apartment. Everything was in shadow.

  The woman sleeping next to the island of pillows was thin; her body made only the slightest rise beneath the deep orange sheets. Her hair was very short, cut in shining, black coils that framed an interesting rather than pretty face. Redwood skin, high forehead, wide nose. A plump mouth that Kylie imagined might have been used very often for kissing. She looked no older than thirty-five.

  There was a sadness in the room that pulsed against Kylie’s skin. She hissed a silent breath of surprise. Pain like this she understood. Everyone else Kylie had ever known seemed to bury their pain in pretty boxes, putting them under beds or displaying them as antique trinkets on bookshelves. But not this woman. She wore it as plainly as her face.

  Kylie wanted to pull her awake. To tug on the flesh of her face to see if it was real, this pain of hers. But she did not. Instead, she sat hidden in the bedroom until the woman’s sleep was assured, then she walked through the entire apartment, touching the woman’s things, feeling out this stranger with her naked suffering. The woman smelled fragile, of hot female things as well as her delicious sorrow.

  Kylie was sated, her body full of blood and nearly warm from her early evening feeding on two deliciously naïve tourists. Their blood pulsed through her body, a warm comfort like the fresh mint tea of her human childhood. She felt her tamed hunger lying content on its belly and tucked away in a darkened corner. Walking through the strange woman’s bedroom with its tempting smell, she was grateful for her hunger’s rest.

  Despite the flash fire of sunrise beyond the windows, Kylie wasn’t tired. She wanted to further explore the woman’s apartment, explore the woman herself who exuded such a seduction of feeling. But she knew if she stayed awake, her impulsive nature would lead her to do terrible things. So she forced herself to find rest.

  She burrowed inside the woman’s surprisingly large hall closet, finding a space behind a curtain of dresses, thick sweaters, and coats put away for the season. Kylie padded the floor with the thick winter blankets she found and pulled some over her to find some semblance of warmth.

  At rest in the padded darkness, her skin felt uneasy. Cold and itching from the need to be pressed against other skin, another symptom of the sickness her maker had left her with. She needed to sleep with other v
ampires, needed their warmth while she slept in order to rest through the day.

  But because she had no choice, she did without.

  Chapter Two

  At sundown, when the woman left the apartment, Kylie walked out of her closet. The small space was even quieter than before. It was an odd absence of human sound, simply the electrical drone of the refrigerator, a persistent drip from the toilet, and the hum of traffic beyond the closed doors of the balcony. Already, she missed the woman’s soft breaths.

  The balcony was open, with only the screen door pulled to allow in the cool fall breeze and the cacophony of scents from the still-bustling neighborhood. Fresh coffee. Pizza. Hot grease from a nearby fast food restaurant. Spilled beer on the streets. Piss. Vomit. Spilled semen.

  Kylie looked around the room and drew in a deep breath. She drew in the sad scent of the woman that was in its own way more seductive than any perfume, human or vampire. Without stopping to reconsider her actions, she unzipped the ruby necklace from its hidden pocket in her dress and hid it in the closet, slipped it into the floral shoebox snuggled against the quilt on the top shelf.

  Kylie carefully left the woman’s apartment and slid down the building wall that faced the street then she slipped quickly into the alley. Her feet hit the ground, the practical ballet flats connecting with a delicate tap. She straightened, ready to head for the airport, call a taxi, and leave this place that had attracted her simply because of the necklace in the museum. She looked up, seeing the jutting side view of the sixth floor balcony she’d just left. She thought of the ruby necklace she’d hidden.

  Go. Her common sense told her. Go to the airport and go home. Sleep in your bed. Rest with your family. But the woman’s scent haunted her, made her pause in the alley. What was it that made her so unhappy? Like Kylie, did she have a mother at the root of her sadness? At the thought of Belle, she took a calming breath.