You're So Vein

by Christine Warren

  The enforcer sidestepped the blow, using the handle of the bulawa to block his enemy’s clawing hands and sliding the top of his knife—a long, lethally sharp poyasnie—between two ribs.

  It was almost too easy. The rogue had no idea how to fight or how to defend himself. He just reached out, all teeth and claws, and tried to plow through the opposition, as if acting like an idiot was supposed to frighten his opponent into submission. Of all the frightening things Dima had seen in his nearly eight centuries, this moron didn’t even make the list. Obviously no one had trained him for battle, but who had made him? And when? No vampire over the age of five should be walking around so incompetent.

  Disgusted and unwilling to prolong the fight, Dima braced his mace hand across the rogue’s throat and prepared to draw the poyasnie free. He’d been careful not to pierce the heart, so the vamp would recover, given enough time and enough blood. Dima intended to use that time to ask him a few very important questions.

  “Who made you?” Dima growled, pressing the handle of the mace against the rogue’s throat. “Name your sire.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Not just incorrect, but unoriginal as well.” Dima bared his teeth in a feral grin and twisted the hilt of the knife, shredding skin and muscle with the double-sided blade. “Try again.”

  The rogue growled something unintelligible and spat in Dima’s face.

  Dima lifted the mace from his opponent’s throat just long enough to slam his fist into the rogue’s ruined jaw.

  The vampire screamed.

  “Name. Your. Sire,” Dima snarled, snapping off the words like bullets. He wasn’t prepared for what the rogue did in response.

  Mad, bloodshot eyes locked with Dima’s for an instant before the vampire grasped the knife hilt in his own hand, tilted it down, and thrust the length of the blade upward straight into the center of his beating heart. He continued to stare at Dima, the remaining working half of his mouth curving into a chilling smile as he rotated the blade in his own hand.

  “Yob tvoyu mat.”

  Dima tensed. This rogue was American; his accent and appearance made it obvious. So why was he telling Dima in Russian to have an inappropriate relationship with his mother?

  The knife twisted and tore through the thick meat of the man’s chest, shredding the life-giving organ within. Dima saw the instant the beating stopped, saw the life drain from the rogue’s eyes, saw the corpse go limp and slide from the tip of his blade to fold like a science lab skeleton on the damp asphalt.

  Dima cursed and knelt to check for a pulse. Nothing. The stupid rogue had committed suicide, damn him, and robbed the enforcer of the opportunity to find out what he might know about Yelizaveta’s presence in the city. And he’d left a mess that Dima felt in no mood to clean up.

  He wiped his blade and bulawa clean on the rogue’s clothes, checked quickly to confirm that the vampire’s first victim was indeed dead, then turned to crouch beside the body of the woman in the red coat.

  Despite her struggle with her attacker and the manner of her death, the woman retained a regal bearing as she lay still and pale on the pavement. The belt of her coat had come untied and a button was missing, but other than that and the bite wound on her neck, she appeared almost to be sleeping. Only the unmoving contours of her chest belied the picture she made.

  Dima reached out thoughtlessly and brushed the backs of his fingers against the curve of her cheek. He suddenly needed to know if that pale, dusky skin felt as cool and silky as it looked.

  He jerked back and stared down at the dead woman.

  Her skin burned with fever.

  He pushed the thought aside. It was impossible. Humans—and most other creatures he’d encountered—went cold when they died, the inevitable result of billions and billions of cells suddenly ceasing to function. He knew it had only been a few minutes since the rogue had attacked her, but the woman should be starting to cool. She had stopped breathing. That meant she was dead.

  A thread of unease crawled slowly up his spine, and Dima experienced a very unpleasant kind of premonition. The kind that told him he’d stepped into a very big pile of trouble.

  Slowly, sending up a rusty scrap of prayer, he reached out a second time and laid the pad of his thumb against the woman’s painted lower lip. A tiny bit of pressure shifted the curve down and exposed a set of even white teeth. Not a trace of fang peeped out. The teeth looked entirely human, but Dima wasn’t reassured. Parting her lips farther, he nudged her teeth apart and groaned at the faint pink staining he saw on two of the pearly surfaces.

  Blood.

  The woman had bitten her attacker. Normally, Dima wouldn’t have blamed her. He fully supported a person’s right to use any tool or weapon at her disposal during a fight for her life, but in this case, the sequence of events had gone all wrong. She must have bitten the rogue after he had drained a good deal of her blood, and she had tasted his in return. Only a few drops, it seemed, but a few drops was enough to start her transformation.

  She was turning.

  In a sick sort of way, that was the good news, despite it being an involuntary turning perpetrated illegally by a vampire who clearly had intended to drain her and leave her for dead. The bad news was that being actually dead would probably seem like a blessing to the woman before the next few days were out.

  The rules involved in transforming a human into a vampire were abundant and complicated. They had been created millennia ago in an attempt by the earliest of their kind to safeguard their existence from frightened humans who believed vampires were soulless monsters who should be killed in excessively gruesome ways in order to cleanse the sin of evil from their souls (and, no, no one seemed to see the contradiction in that).

  At that time, so many hundreds of years ago, strict population regulation of the vampire race had been necessary. When settlements had been small and populations scattered, indiscriminate blood exchanges could have led the unwise among them to convert all the inhabitants of a village into vampires, leaving no convenient food source available. And, of course, during the epidemics of plague that had swept through Europe during the Middle Ages, food itself had occasionally become scarce through no fault of the vampires. Today, such matters caused less of a concern, but traditions died hard, and the recent surge of suspicion from humankind, which had accompanied the Unveiling of The Others, gave the European Council of Vampires, at least, plenty of reason to take the old Laws seriously.

  Then, of course, came the concerns raised by the method of transformation itself. First, while most vampires and many humans considered vampirism to be a gift, the Laws had laid down many years ago that the involuntary turning of a human was a crime punishable by death. The theft of free will, identity, and familiarity that accompanied the act of forcing vampirism onto another being ranked among the most heinous crimes of their people.

  The vampires who committed such crimes had likely been the ones to give the transformation such a bad name throughout so many centuries of human folklore and literature. In fact, one could almost liken the process of turning a human to elective surgery: Done properly, it posed very little risk and conferred on the human a greatly desired result—immortality—but done improperly, or by the hand of a careless vampire, it could cause agonizing pain at a level that could, quite literally, drive the human mind to insanity.

  Although turning did not require the death of the human, it did require the mortal’s organs and metabolism to adapt to a completely new physiology. The difference between absorbing the nutrients in a roast chicken and those in a pint of blood meant more than the need for fangs. A person’s internal anatomy actually changed during a vampire transformation. If the person had a responsible sire, the kind who tended to seek permission first, the initial few drops of blood that sparked the change would be followed by regular infusions from the same source over the next several hours or days.

  Just as infants of most species found it difficult to digest any diet other than mother’s milk immediate
ly after birth, so the fledgling vampire found it difficult to digest anything other than her sire’s blood for the brief time immediately following her turning. Had this woman’s change been voluntary and well planned, she would have had an uneventful and likely painless transition.

  Unfortunately, the woman had been shoved forcefully through door number two, and now Dima had to make a decision of his own: Should he try to save her, or end her life now and spare her the misery of an agonizing turning and the wrath of a disapproving ECV?

  If he had been at home, Dima knew which he would have chosen. As cold as it might sound, in Europe it would be better for her to die before she suffered any pain than it would be to live under the constant eye and antipathy of the ECV. Some of its members had lived for almost-two millennia; they knew how to make a girl’s life difficult. But this was America, and from what he’d heard of the local Council of Others, its Feline leader had been called a fair and generous man. While the speaker may very well have meant that as an insult, it indicated that things might be different over here. Maybe in this country, orphans—fledgling vampires abandoned by their sires—were not looked upon with such scorn.

  He hesitated for a moment, watching the woman’s skin drain of color even as the first few beads of blood-tinged sweat broke out on her forehead and trickled across that impossibly smooth skin into her hair. She looked like a marble statue clad in the latest fashion, a Bernini angel stretched unmoving across dirty pavement, but something told Dima she had not been sent from heaven. As he understood it, angels did not walk unescorted through the streets of New York in the wee hours of the morning.

  A faint aroma caught his attention, and Dima lifted his eyes from the woman’s body. He could smell more rain in the air, but more worrisome was the fact that he could see it as well. Dawn was still far enough away for there to be no light in the sky, but the darkness had begun to lift, to soften. At his age, even direct sunlight couldn’t kill him in less than several hours, but for the fledgling, the first fingers of dawn could amount to a death sentence. He needed to make a decision now.

  In the end, it was easier not to.

  Operating solely on instinct and well aware that he might very well regret it in the morning, Dima settled his weapons in the sheaths strapped to his thighs and scooped the fallen woman into his arms. He would let the police deal with the other bodies. They would hardly be surprised. In the past three months—since about the same time as Yelizaveta had managed her escape, in fact—vampire attacks in Manhattan had been on the rise.

  Imagine that.

  Chapter Five

  By the time Dima settled the woman on the king-sized bed in the small loft he had rented for his time in New York, he had to tie her to it to keep her from killing one of them. The transformation had hit her hard.

  She fought him like a rabid badger, all teeth and claws and no sense of surrender. Operating on pure animal instinct, she snapped newly elongated canines at his neck, and he had no doubt that if he’d been slower to jerk his head back, she would have ripped his throat out and lapped up the blood like a butcher’s dog. Fortunately for him, at this stage of her development her bark truly was worse than her bite.

  He could see that her reflexes and movements had already gotten faster, and her strength easily exceeded what even an athletic woman of her size would normally possess, but compared to him, she was still a babe in arms. Actually, she was that compared to most vamps over the age of six months.

  She had no give in her, though, so he proceeded to wrestle her arms above her head and bind them there with a minimum of fuss. As long as he didn’t become suddenly paralyzed while within her reach, Dima knew he had nothing to fear from her, but she posed a very real danger to herself. At this point, she was as likely to gnaw on her own flesh if it got in reach of her mouth as she was to bite anyone else. It would be a while before her sense’s came back on line and her aim improved enough for her to recall the difference between her body and someone else’s. Right now she probably had no awareness of anything other than pain and hunger.

  Cursing the rogue who had left her this way, Dima rose and quickly shed his coat, tossing it carelessly into the corner to his left. His weapons he removed with far greater care, leaving his bulawa neatly propped near the bedroom door and placing the knife in its scabbard on the bedside table. Since the woman was bound as well as half-conscious, he didn’t worry that she could seize it and turn it against him. At the moment, she was too weak to seize so much as a thought.

  He let his gaze drift over her as he tugged off his shirt and threw it aside. Fever had flagged her cheeks with bright spots of color, and beads of bloody sweat formed along her hairline as the transformation worked ruthlessly to reshape her human body into a more efficient, more powerful vampire form. He knew that beneath her smooth, pale-gold skin, muscles were shifting and stretching, cells multiplying to create new, stronger fibers capable of lifting small automobiles with the ease of a circus sideshow performer. Beneath her flat belly, her stomach and intestines had begun to slough off their human lining and replace it with cells specialized for the absorption of nutrients directly from ingested blood.

  And while her heart attempted to seize up and go still under the insult of the foreign blood invading it, the cells of that invader had begun to override the native electrical pulses and squeeze the muscle like a giant fist, forcing themselves along a circulatory-system in revolt.

  Damn it. It shouldn’t have been this way. Dima sat on the edge of the bed and watched a face of stunning beauty contort itself into expressions of rage and torment. This was why the ECV required their kind to seek permission to initiate the transformation of a human—because if the proper procedures were not followed, this would be the result.

  Seeing the woman’s obvious pain, Dima cursed the rogue who had attacked her and wished darkly that he had the criminal in front of him again. Rest assured, if given another chance at the creature, Dima would make sure his death did not arrive so easily this time.

  Putting his thoughts of vengeance reluctantly aside, Dima turned his attention back to the situation at hand. It might be unfortunate that the woman’s change had come about so irresponsibly, but if he wished to see her survive it, he would have to help her through it.

  At another time, the enforcer might have laughed at the image of himself playing nursemaid to a recently human woman half his size, but his sense of humor seemed to have stayed behind in the alley with the body of the other human the rogue had attacked. Now, he focused entirely on business.

  With her hands bound, the woman on the bed would not be going anywhere, but she continued to thrash and fight her restraints in a way that could prove dangerous to her own safety. God knew what position she might manage to contort herself into and what damage it might cause her. Dima would need to tie her feet as well. Unfortunately, he had used the one length of cotton in his suitcase to bind her hands, and the other rope he carried was rough and utilitarian, meant for functions other than restraining living beings. Not that he hadn’t used it for that purpose a time or two before, but never on anyone with such delicate-looking skin, and never on anyone he particularly cared about not harming. If he tied her with the rope he had on hand and she continued to struggle as she was doing, she’d make herself bleed in no more than a few minutes. He needed something gentler.

  He could rip strips of fabric from his clothing, he admitted reluctantly, but he hadn’t brought that much to spare. When on a mission, Dima redefined the concept of packing light. Laundry facilities were never difficult to find, and in a pinch he could always buy or steal new clothing for himself, but he never knew when he would have to move and move quickly in pursuit of the prey he hunted. Such considerations made carrying an extensive wardrobe impractical.

  His gaze swept the room, searching for inspiration and finding nothing. The loft had come unfurnished, and he hadn’t bothered supplying it with more than the basic necessities—the bed, a chair and a desk that held his laptop computer, and a
beat-up and marvelously ugly old sofa he had picked up along with an outdated television at a local charity shop. Neither of the last two items had any but the most basic, functional features, and both suited his purposes perfectly. The sofa was longer than the average, allowing him to stretch out on its surprisingly comfortable cushions while he watched pirated cable service on the television’s twenty-three-inch screen.

  Dima might be a vampire on a mission, but he was still a man, and he still needed to relax occasionally. His favored method of doing so between October and April happened to be watching the televised coverage of America’s NHL season. With luck, the Wings would take it all the way again this year.

  The woman beside him jerked violently and twisted her body hard to the side, nearly throwing herself off the mattress to dangle over the edge by her bound wrists. Shaking off his thoughts, Dima scowled. He couldn’t leave her this way. He had to secure her feet before she found a way to flip herself backward over the headboard and strangle herself on her own forearms. A quick glance at the skirt riding up her slim thighs gave him an idea.

  Swiftly he bent and located the zippers on the insides of her tall black boots. Releasing them, he pulled the footwear off and tossed it out of the way. Beneath the leather, he saw what he’d hoped for—the subtle and familiar sheen of tightly woven black silk.

  Dima slid his hands under the wrinkled wool of the woman’s purple dress and reached for her waistband. His fingertips found nothing like the elastic waistband of modern panty hose. Instead, he felt a smooth band of silk settled just at the flare of very feminine hips.

  Frowning, he slid his hands over the soft curves and told himself the idea that touching an unconscious human in the midst of a painful, forced change couldn’t possibly make his skin prickle like a low-voltage shock. He had probably just mistaken the heat of her fever for something else. Still, his jaw clenched as he skimmed his hands down her hips and found matching vertical bands of rough-silky elastic.