You're So Vein

by Christine Warren

  Times hadn’t just changed; they’d undergone a metamorphosis that made Jeff Goldblum’s turn in The Fly look like something out of a beauty pageant. It almost made Ava consider cutting off her electricity and exploring the requirement for conversion to an Old Order Amish church. If it weren’t for the fashion limitations …

  Her cell phone rang again. After a quick glance at the caller ID, Ava shoved it back into her pocket unanswered. This time, Missy was calling, of course. People always thought that not even Ava could be so hard-hearted as to ignore the pleas of sweet, sensible, loving Missy. Her friends believed that if Missy asked Ava to take a cab so that Missy wouldn’t have to worry about her friend’s safety, Ava couldn’t say no.

  Well, they could believe anything they wanted, although in this case, they happened to be 100 percent right. Ava couldn’t say no to Missy, which was why she let her voice mail answer the phone. If she picked it up, Missy would convince her to take a cab the rest of the way home and Ava would lose the chance to walk off her mad before she reached her apartment. She’d have to take all of these nasty feelings to bed with her. Already today she’d had a rotten night’s sleep, followed by a lousy morning workout, and without some form of release before bedtime she would probably end up taking her frustrations out on her personal assistant, who barely needed one more frown to convince her to quit her job and leave Ava up a certain nasty little body of water.

  It was better to walk. She’d be perfectly safe. She certainly felt safer than she had in the very swank media room of Regina’s town house, surrounded by the women she still called her best friends. There had been a time when Ava would have sworn that nothing could come between her and Regina. And Missy and Danice and Corinne. They’d been inseparable, best friends forever, together to the end, one for all and all for one. But that had been before Dmitri had entered the picture. Then Graham. Then Mac and Luc. Before their circle had expanded to include werewolves and witches and even a twenty-four-carat, straight-out-of-another-dimension, certified Faerie princess. Before Regina had turned.

  Before Ava had realized she was alone, completely alone, in a room full of monsters.

  Swallowing back the fist that tried to lodge in her throat, Ava stepped up her pace and lifted her chin.

  She still felt a wave of guilt and shame every time she reflexively used the m word. She didn’t want to think about her friends like that. She loved those women like sisters, but she couldn’t deny the truth. They had changed, changed in ways that went beyond marriage and starting new families and growing older and wiser. They had become people Ava barely recognized sometimes. Some of them had even changed species, and as far as Ava was concerned, you could never trust someone who wasn’t quite human.

  It always came back to that, Ava admitted. That fact was really the root of her problem, the thing she couldn’t get used to, the obstacle she just couldn’t get past. How did you relate to your best girlfriends when you realized that some of those girls were no longer human?

  Ava sure as hell didn’t know. Which was why she’d left when the party was in full swing to walk home alone like the reject from the kickball team. It was an unfamiliar sensation.

  People just didn’t reject Ava Markham. All her life, she had been the girl everyone wanted to be or be with, the golden child. Born to wealthy parents, raised in luxury, “discovered” by a modeling agent before she’d even been a teenager, by the time she hit eighteen she had earned more money than most people would see in a lifetime, and she had decided to get out, before her dieting turned into starving and her lack of energy turned into addiction and her success turned into last season’s news.

  After a couple of chic and boring years in Europe, she had opened M and signed some of the biggest names in the business. And that had been before her twenty-fifth birthday. Now, at thirty-four, she occupied a coveted spot at the top of the Manhattan food chain of wealth, beauty, and success.

  Was it any wonder then that she felt angry every time she thought about the way things had turned out? After everything she’d done for her friends, this was how they ended up. How ungrateful could they get? The fantasy fixes they’d dreamed up all those years ago had been intended to set them up with the men of their dreams—the human men—so that they could live the kind of fantasies that most women spent their whole lives only dreaming about. They were supposed to have hot sex, lose a few clothes and maybe a few inhibitions, not their damned minds.

  How could it be that the others didn’t understand how much better off they would have been if they had just done things her way? Especially Regina. Regina she had loved like a sister. She had tried to warn her friend about Dmitri Vidâme, because Ava had known from the beginning that there was something wrong with him. She’d seen it right away. Otherwise how could he have managed to seduce her prudish, uptight, ultra-conservative friend so thoroughly that she blew off her closest friends for him after knowing him for all of twenty minutes?

  And Ava had been right, too. There had been something wrong with Vidâme; there still was, only she had been too late to keep him from infecting Regina with the same disease. He had turned Ava’s best friend into a vampire, and she’d be damned before she forgave either one of them for it.

  Shit.

  “Breathe,” Ava muttered to herself. She had to force her jaw to unclench before she could get the sound out, and then it took another effort of will to draw the crisp night air deep into her lungs without letting it back out in a frustrated scream. If this weren’t a quiet residential neighborhood, she might not have bothered to fight.

  Every time she went over this ground, the anger bubbled up inside her like water in a hot spring, fast and sulfurous. She had trusted Regina and Missy and Danice and Corinne, and Ava Markham made it a point not to trust anyone but herself. She’d learned early on that people could only ever be counted on to take care of themselves. They might talk about love and sacrifice, but when it came down to matters of survival, everyone turned into Darwins. The fittest survived because they didn’t waste time trying to drag anyone else along with them.

  Ava had always taken pride in how well she’d learned that lesson. The cutthroat world of top-tier modeling had taught it to her. She took care of herself and never expected anyone to lend a hand when they could give her the boot instead. Unfortunately, she still hadn’t managed to stop trying to take care of other people. She’d been banging her head against that wall for so long, she should have the imprint of the bricks permanently embedded in her forehead.

  Cursing herself under her breath, Ava crossed the street and hopped up onto the opposite curb. Anger had lengthened her stride until she was practically jogging, the slim knee-length skirt of her dress stretching against her thighs with each step. With her eyes fixed on the shadowed sidewalk in front of her, she saw she still had quite a distance to go before she reached her elegant little row house in Yorkville. Maybe by the time she got there, she’d have walked off some of this resentment.

  Or maybe not.

  Few things (short of a targeted bioweapon and a very public acknowledgment of her efforts on behalf of the friends who had stabbed her in the back) could likely dent Ava’s resentment. After all, she’d had years now to let it build. It wrapped around her as securely as her trench coat, keeping the world out and her focus in. She didn’t realize she’d approached the entrance to an alley until the tone of her footsteps echoed in a slightly lower pitch.

  Unfazed, she pressed on, attacking the sidewalk with misdirected force. Even when her peripheral vision caught a blur of dark movement off to her side, Ava didn’t think anything of it. Manhattan was home, to her and about 8 million other inhabitants, so people rarely made her look twice.

  Unless they leapt at her from the shadows and grabbed her by the throat, dragging her struggling form into the alley with the casual ease of inhuman strength.

  I knew it! her mind crowed even as her instincts drew breath to scream. Can’t trust an Other!

  Which would be sparse comfort whe
n the police discovered her body in the alley. Cold and dead.

  But right.

  Chapter Three

  Dima had been about to pack it in for the night when he caught a whiff of blood on the air, sweet and faintly spicy. It caught his attention and roused his curiosity, but he didn’t think too much of it. America, after all, was a violent nation, and blood was shed fairly frequently on the streets of its largest city. It could be a mugging, a murder, an accident, or even an animal.

  It didn’t smell like an animal, though, he decided, inhaling deeply, and he had definitely not heard a gun or a car crash. And these were the wrong streets for random stabbings.

  Following his nose, Dima turned northeast and backtracked across the rooftops to a building a few hundred feet away.

  He approached cautiously at first, the reflex too ingrained for anything else. With light steps and careful movements he had covered roughly half the distance to the source of the scent when he heard a terrified gasp and sudden surge of motion. The air stirred as if parted by a knife blade, and Dima knew that only one thing could have made that sound and yet not alerted him with its scent—another vampire.

  A rush of adrenaline pumped through him and raised his senses to high alert. He quickened his pace and kept one eye on the street below. This might be nothing more than a vamp with bad table manners, but if it was an actual attack, then Dima couldn’t walk away from it; and if it was his lucky day, the attacker might even be someone who could bring him a step closer to Yelizaveta.

  His keen hearing picked up the sound of a weight dropping to the pavement with a muffled thump. Cursing, he broke from a trot into a run as he approached the alley where he had deduced the vampire was hiding. He had the sinking feeling his intervention would come too late for the rogue vamp’s victim, but he could at least make sure the criminal faced justice. Even in America, the Other authorities could not let such acts go unanswered.

  Gathering himself into a powerful coil, Dima stretched out his arms for balance and leapt across the open space between two buildings in his path, landing solidly atop a four-story structure of redbrick and gray cement cornerstones. Because he kept his gaze forward while he was airborne, he quickly sighted a rather large problem—an obviously human woman who strode down the sidewalk from the opposite direction.

  She wore elegantly tailored, obviously expensive clothing, and carried a handbag of dark Italian leather; Dima could smell it from a block away. She had the carriage of a dancer and the height of a model, though as a man he instinctively noticed that her figure curved beneath her scarlet trench coat in a way no model’s would have. If asked in that moment, he might have said that her figure was her best feature, long and lean and distinctly feminine, but that was before he saw her face.

  At once classic and exotic, she had the clear, refined cheekbones of a princess and lightly bronzed skin that reminded him of the sea and the mountains and the Plaga Catalunya. She had the face of an ancient queen—and the bearing of one—as she traversed the block, her pace brisk and her expression distant.

  His instincts screamed a warning.

  Contrary to all advice for women living in large cities, this one seemed to possess a situational awareness that ranked somewhere close to zero. She’d drifted off into her own little world, and if she wasn’t careful, it would cost her her life.

  With an audible curse, Dima cast his glance around for the vampire. The rogue lurked in the shadows just beyond the mouth of the alley two rooftops away. Dima knew the instant the creature caught sight of the woman, because he melted back into the shadows just as she reached the far side of the closest building. She would be on top of the vampire in seconds, while Dima still had two rooftops to cross.

  He couldn’t reach her in time.

  A growl welled up in his chest as he poured on a burst of speed and raced ahead just in time to see her reach the alley and walk right into the hands of a killer.

  Ava couldn’t scream.

  The hand clamped around her throat felt as tight as a hangman’s noose, and she couldn’t even draw breath, let alone cry for help. Fighting like a dervish, she kicked and flailed and snapped her teeth, hitting anything and everything she could manage, but her blows seemed to have no effect.

  Her fingers curled around her attacker’s arm, struggling to ease the pressure and at least give her room to breathe. Distantly, she felt the slide of metal as the clasp of her necklace broke and the mesh collar fell to the ground. Shock, adrenaline, fear, and anger were combining with the lack of oxygen to make her head spin, and she wanted to keep it on straight just now. Ava might know perfectly well she was going down, but she’d be damned if she’d go down without a fight.

  The walls of the alley seemed to close in around them as her attacker dragged her deeper into the shadows and fully out of sight of anyone passing by. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of something lumpy and motionless heaped against the wall farther inside the narrow space. A body. The son of a bitch had already killed someone and he couldn’t be satisfied with just one victim. Talk about greedy.

  She tried digging her heels into the pavement to slow them down, but the jerk holding her didn’t even have the decency to pretend he noticed. He just kept dragging, leaving Ava with visions of the heels of her boots shredding against the rough asphalt.

  Thousand-dollar European-made Gina boots, and they were going to look like crap when her body was found. That pissed her off.

  Her need for oxygen was growing critical, but struggling to loosen the man’s grip on her throat wasn’t doing her any good. She had known, had sensed, that her attacker wasn’t human the minute he laid hands on her. He was just too fast and too strong to be a garden-variety mugger. Ava pegged him as vampire, damning herself for having spent enough time around Others to even hazard a guess about their species while one of them was trying to kill her.

  Claws grabbed at the knot of hair on the back of her head, piercing through the thick strands and digging into her scalp. She heard the vampire pant in excitement as he jerked her head to the side to expose her throat.

  Vamp or shifter, she thought as she squirmed and kicked and fumbled in her pocket for the can of pepper spray she always carried, you will still die bloody, chica, so stop whining and philosophizing and make the bastard pay for this!

  Releasing her grip on the hand at her throat, Ava momentarily abandoned her search for the small spray tube, fisted her hands together in front of her, and drove her right elbow into the vamp’s solar plexus with as much force as she could muster. It nearly made him grunt. Back when Ava had taken her self-defense classes, the instructor hadn’t thought it would be necessary to factor in being attacked by someone with the approximate physical strength of the boy from Krypton.

  Panic began to join the other emotions crowding Ava’s mind as her lack of oxygen became critical. She could no longer tell if her eyes were open or closed. Either way, a sort of misty darkness began to fill her vision, punctuated by brief flashes of fiery orange light. The sounds of her struggles took on a distant, echoing quality, as if they were bouncing back at her from the bottom of a great chasm; yet they registered at a high volume, so that every shift of fabric as her coat bunched and rustled sounded as if a microphone were amplifying the noise.

  Without her vision, her other senses seemed to fill her awareness. She still couldn’t draw breath, but she knew her attacker smelled of old, oily blood, rotting flesh, and heavily composted soil. The odor settled on her tongue and choked her as surely as the hand at her throat.

  The vampire leaned closer, his cold, hard body pressing tightly against hers and sending her stomach into a roiling knot of fear and revulsion. It felt as if the nausea had allied itself with her killer to choke her from a second direction. And it didn’t help that she could feel his breath, hot and damp and tangibly fetid against the sensitive, bare skin of her neck.

  In the last moment of consciousness, before her brain mercifully shut down at the sharp, burning pain of hard f
angs ripping through skin and muscle and flesh, Ava knew she would die. She knew she would be found in an alley like a common prostitute instead of like the near-legendary modeling executive she had made herself into. She knew she would be remembered by her friends more fondly than by the little family she could claim.

  With the last of her strength, Ava lashed out and sank her own teeth into the arm that held her. As the world went gray, her last wish was that the bastard would wear the scar for the next ten thousand years.

  But even if he did, she knew her friends still wouldn’t acknowledge that she had been right all along. She wished bitterly for one last chance to say, I told you so.

  Then she died.

  Chapter Four

  A cry of fury bellowed from Dima’s chest as he flew across the last rooftop and leapt down into the alley below. He had his long knife in one hand and a short, heavy-headed bulawa in the other, and he descended on the startled rogue like vengeance.

  His first blow with the Russian mace caught the vampire unaware. It struck the side of the rogue’s face and knocked him off of his victim, smashing his cheekbone and sending him reeling to sprawl against the pavement for an instant. Dima used the time to place his body between the woman and her attacker, shifting his grip on the bludgeoning weapon and surveying the damage it had caused with grim satisfaction.

  The right side of the vampire’s face looked as if it had been run through a trash compactor. The weight of the blow had shattered his cheek and jaw into thousands of tiny fragments and the edge of the knob at the top had caught on the skin, ripping open a six-inch gash through which several white shards of tooth and bone protruded. The attacker’s lower right jaw hung slack, dislocated from the joint that no longer existed. His face was covered in blood, both his own and that of his victims, and in his eyes, pain and hatred warred. He stood stunned for the space of a single heartbeat before he launched himself at Dima’s throat.