Hunting the Siren
Jeffe Kennedy
Book two in the Blood Currency series.
A vampire queen grown powerful with age, Imogen has protected her band of nightriders through the centuries. When refugee vampires from earthquake-shattered Europe seek shelter and sustenance, she’s honor-bound to feed them, by any means necessary. When her lieutenants dump the vengeful human man Kasar at her feet, Imogen succumbs to his masculine vitality and her overwhelming hunger for his blood—and his body.
Kasar has survived the breaking of the world, only to discover the vampire queen has slaughtered his sister and her unborn child. With the last of his bloodline dead, only his desire for vengeance keeps Kasar alive. He imagines he can pretend to succumb to Imogen’s seduction—not that he has a choice, chained as he is to the foot of her bed—and bide his time until he has an opportunity to kill her. The passion he finds in her arms is unexpected and impossible to resist. But this haven of desire and satiation could easily destroy them both.
Hunting the Siren
Jeffe Kennedy
Dedication
To Laura, for wanting furry boots and yurt sex.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to my critique partners, Marcella Burnard, Carolyn Crane and Laura Bickle, for brainstorming and feedback. You gals rock my world!
To my fabulous editor, Grace Bradley, who keeps bugging me for more stories.
And to lovely new writer friends, Lacey Savage and Fiona Jayde, who luckily turned out to have Russian backgrounds and so were most helpful at the perfect time.
Finally, to all the wonderful readers who loved Feeding the Vampire and asked for more. You all are fabulous!
Chapter One
At least she wasn’t bored.
Imogen tapped her glossy red nails on the carved bone arm of her chair, soothing herself with the rhythm. The hunting team looked nervous. Not a good sign.
“Really? You couldn’t find anyone at all?” She sounded reasonable. More or less.
Terence flicked her a dark-eyed glance, expression inscrutable, but she read his message clearly. Ramp it down, Imogen. They’d formed a strategy to deal with these newbies, allowing them to try new ways of acquiring prey. But what use was being vampire queen if she couldn’t express her irritation now and again?
She sighed. “Explain.”
Mélanie, a lovely blonde with deceptively delicate features, fiddled with her diamond earring. She’d recently joined them after abandoning Paris. The place had always been mostly swamp, anyway. Imogen had never gotten the allure and did not mourn its loss. Now that most of Europe had drowned, more and more of these cosmopolitan types showed up on her doorstep. Most of them couldn’t keep up with the nightriders.
On the vast expanse of the Steppes, no riding meant poor hunting.
For centuries the human tribes had followed the goats and reindeer and the vampires followed the humans. A natural food chain.
“The humans are more dispersed, my Queen, because of the earthquakes and subsequent disasters.”
“I believe I heard something about that.” Imogen’s voice was dry and an amused murmur ran through the gathering in the yurt.
The blonde vampire blushed, her clear white skin suffusing with the telltale evidence that she had found at least one human to feed from. Did she think it wouldn’t be noticed? Imogen didn’t take kindly to being treated like a fool.
“Yes, well—they’re not easy to find. They are all hell-bent on survival. None are interested in dalliances or sensual feasts.” She made a little moue of disappointment. As if her salon-softness would ever have worked here, even in the best of days.
Imogen tapped her nails. “And you, Domino? Did none of the pretty young things succumb to your charms?”
The dashing Italian swept off his beret and bowed. “In a word, no. The things are neither so young, nor so pretty these days. They grow distressingly thin.”
“Sandahr—what of our traditional methods?”
With waist-length black hair, Sandahr, master of the horses, looked grim. “We sweep them up, but many are diseased.” He spat on the floor. “Their blood is thin, weak and they fester with the bacteria and the old plagues.”
She surveyed the room, the grave faces, the intense eyes fixed on her. Waiting for the answer.
“So it comes to this,” she mused. “Thousands of years of careful fictions, maintaining our society with a measure of discretion and now the disasters of our common world will drag us down with the humans. Perhaps it’s meet that we share the fate of the race we were born to be.”
“But…we are immortal,” Mélanie protested. “We cannot die.”
“No?” Imogen raised an eyebrow, scorn filling her like a taste of bitter root. “Shall we wither to immobility for lack of human blood to drink? If the very rock of the earth dissolves beneath our feet, shall we float aimlessly in the cold of space?”
She leaned forward, propping her elbow on her knee and leaning her cheek into her palm, giving Mélanie the wide-eyed, innocent look she’d been named for. “I wonder what happens to a vampire if we drop her into molten lava? Perhaps we should conduct an experiment!”
The blonde quailed, shrinking into herself, stammering. “I—I only meant, my Queen… I thought that—”
“You weren’t thinking.”
Mélanie’s pretty pansy-blue eyes filled with tears. She shook her head.
“After all,” Imogen held the younger vampire in place with her gaze, and rose to trail her sharp nails along the blonde’s throat, warm with blood, “if you were thinking, you wouldn’t walk into my court, fresh from feeding on humans you then claim cannot be found.”
“My Queen,” Domino ventured. “I don’t think she—”
“Observe.”
Precisely, she sliced the flesh immediately over the throbbing pulse. Bright blood welled up, still nicely oxygenated. Less than hours old. Mélanie whimpered as she leaned in, but couldn’t break the paralysis, and Imogen tasted the blood with a flick of her tongue.
“Male. And he’s been eating decently. Not diseased. How does such a mix-up occur?”
She resumed her seat, folded her hands so she wouldn’t tap her nails. The mere taste of the blood sent searing hunger through her, shaking her to her bones. A weakness she could never display.
“Theories?”
Sandahr, brow creased, wound his hand in Mélanie’s long tresses and yanked her head back, ignoring her squeal. He licked up her throat, tasting the blood thoughtfully, like a connoisseur determining an exact vintage.
“Someone new. Not the usual fare. Perhaps she has a blood pet she’s kept hidden.”
“You saw nothing, Domino?”
The effete Italian drew himself up and gave her a charming smile. He, at least, knew better than to antagonize her. “I hope you know I would have reported it to you immediately, my Queen. I have not forgotten the debt of gratitude I owe you and your tribe.” He slid a look of disgust toward the immobile Mélanie. “We parted ways at the edge of the ruins, deciding it better to try our wiles separately. I do not know who she found. However, pickings were slim, so we were not apart long.”
“Who did you meet, my little temptress?” Imogen released the blonde from the paralysis and she crumpled to the floor, weeping at Imogen’s feet.
“No one,” she sobbed. “No one important. Just a dying boy. I didn’t tell you because he died before I could bring him back.”
“A lie.” Sandahr observed. “The blood is a man’s, not a boy’s. A man full of virility.”
“He lies.” Mélanie wept, gazing up at Imogen with doe eyes, then pressing a kiss to her leather boot. “Please, my Queen. Take the blood from me. I didn’t think it worthy of you, so—”
; Imogen caressed the pretty blonde locks. “Oh, you’ll share your spoils, little sweet meat. Terence, please see that she’s shared around according to the current order of precedence. Eke out as much as you can from her. If you drain her, there should be enough for everyone.”
“You should be first, my Queen.” Terence’s dark gaze turned determined.
She waved a languid hand. “I am not hungry. Perhaps I’ll snack from a goat later.”
The nutrition wasn’t the same and not nearly enough, but Terence would never contradict her in front of the tribe.
Sandahr lifted the now-hysterical Mélanie, holding her struggles easily in his stalwart arms, ready to carry her out of the queen’s yurt for the feeding. “And after we have gotten everything we can from her?”
Imogen shrugged. “Nothing else to do but strip her and send her off naked and hungry. Follow her. She might be more willing to give up her blood pet then.”
A white-fanged grin split Sandahr’s sober face. “I look forward to laying him at your feet, my Queen.”
* * * * *
Kasar field-dressed the little goat and started a fire in the pit he’d dug. A hot wind rustled through the dying grasses and he hoped he’d cleared enough space to contain the low flames. A grass fire would just heap another disaster on a land already about to collapse.
He constructed the wooden frame low. Just enough heat and smoke to dry the meat. The goat had been a pretty little thing, with her fringed fawn eyes. He regretted having to kill her and so he’d eat every bit.
The world was hard on all of them these days.
The clouds lowered thick and heavy, but he knew no rain would fall. Ash, most of it, trapping humidity in the sky and in a sultry layer against the ground. Global Climate Change on rocket fuel. It no longer mattered that human-based carbon emissions were down to nearly zero. Mother Nature had played her trump card.
He paused in his work, imagining he heard the thundering of hooves.
It was dark enough for the nightriders to be out. A stormy day like this would bring them hunting on their nearly wild horses. They’d grown bolder as the humans grew weaker. Perhaps they suffered their own brand of desperation.
After all, when the rabbits starved, the coyotes soon followed.
Of course, he’d heard the stories all his life, mostly told by the old uncles and aunties at family gatherings, when they were all fat from feasting and too full of dark, red wine to remember the eager ears of children who shouldn’t even be awake.
They told of the nightriders who swept in on the nomadic tribes, seizing the young and beautiful. Some returned, sometimes weeks later, telling dazed and fragmented tales of dancing and orgies of blood and sensual delights beyond imagining.
No one knew where they lived or who the nightriders were. Sometimes they left gifts—a herd of reindeer unnaturally docile, waiting in a tribe’s path. Some said Genghis Kahn had been one of them and they possessed magical gifts.
The men liked to whisper of the queen, whose wild hair trailed behind her like a cape. They said any man who died in her arms became her immortal lover. And eternal slave.
Kasar no longer gave much thought to these nightmarish tall tales. Now he knew they were true. Now all he thought about was disaster and revenge.
The low rumble threaded through the air and ground again. Like the early days of the earthquakes that eventually tore Moscow apart stone by stone. No one quite believed it to begin with. Or, rather, they’d all expected the crisis would pass as they always did.
Japan was better prepared for the second big Tsunami. The Japanese excelled at long-term planning, after all. He’d watched the efficient response from his apartment in Moscow with a blend of fascinated Schadenfreunde and dreadful hope. All that turned into pure horror when the 5.6 hit, destabilizing three nuclear plants and then the 7.3 that tore the island in half. The news helicopters circled for days, recording each dissolving chunk of the once great nation.
With a grunt, Kasar turned the meat on the spit. This region was as seismically stable as it got. He knew because he’d gotten the company geologists to show him what to look for, even as they told him Moscow should be fine. Should isn’t is, his grandfather always said.
So when the first tremors hit the city, Kasar grabbed the packs he’d prepared and hiked out, back to Znamenka. It wasn’t perfectly stable there either, but he’d find his sister Galeria and her kids, convince her to go with him to find a good place to wait it all out.
He took the rides that people offered, but denied himself a vehicle of his own. Better to learn to do without. More and more, too, the ones abandoned along the roads had been emptied of gas. Then he heard most of the Middle East had either drowned or was on fire. The refineries in China that hadn’t ignited from the waves of quakes and aftershocks had been shut down. The fuel that could be had, could not be afforded.
The farther from the cities he went, though, the less it mattered. The towns scattered through the Kazakhstan countryside had always been timeless, as if you could film a medieval movie in one and change nothing. People there grew their own food, made their own things. They’d watched the civilized world crash from their satellite feeds to the computers and televisions, but that was a disaster movie to them, one filmed far away. Then the electricity gave out, leaving them quietly alone.
So Galeria should have been fine. Should isn’t is. The voice mocked him and Kasar snagged a piece of meat to chew on, to soothe his churning gut, hoping the heat and smoke had killed most of the parasites.
It did it to him every time, to remember walking into a nearly deserted village, so he ruthlessly made himself review it. Eventually the festering wound would close or callous and it wouldn’t hurt so to see his niece and nephew dead in their beds, white and cold, drained of blood. Galeria’s dead husband wouldn’t stare at him accusingly from plague-pussed, glassed-over eyes. And the hole in the world that Galeria had once occupied wouldn’t mock him that he’d been too slow, too late to recognize the danger.
One day, he wouldn’t feel what he did, looking out from the second-story window to see Her.
Like a creature of his adolescent nightmare fantasies, she rode a horse bareback, her lean, naked thighs and high leather boots gripping it as she leaned over to scoop up a running child and drape it over her saddle as if the kid weighed nothing at all. Her hair floated like a cape of silk, catching the light from the torches. She yelled orders at the other nightriders in an old tongue, like some of the nomadic tribes used. One nightrider, a massive male, dragged a young woman out of her house, somehow quelling her screams and leading her to his horse, where she sat docilely on his lap, curling into his broad chest. He leaned over her and fastened his teeth on her neck, a brief moment, like a kiss, then wheeled the horse around, her blood gleaming dark on his lips.
Kasar must have yelled. The wooden frame of the window drove splinters into his hands and he searched for the antique locking mechanism.
But She heard, her gaze whipping up to pin him in place. Her tawny eyes flashed with a catlike glow, her own characteristic eye shine. A predator he’d never looked for in the dark. Frozen in place, he watched her dismiss him and, along with her riders, disappear like smoke into the night.
Galeria and her unborn child were nowhere to be found. They’d taken Galeria. Fed from her and tossed her aside with her baby starving inside her desiccated womb.
He set to tracking them, naturally.
What else was there but to hunt down these predators, the cruel hunters of humanity? His world had emptied of everything else. He chased the stories, the disappearances. The bloody trail led him on, witnesses ready to spill their horror stories. It no longer seemed odd to speak of them, the nightriders. As if the world had cracked open in more ways than geological, the old creatures of myth and cold sweat creeping out into the light of day, their clawed feet crunching over the shards of civilization.
The vampires.
What they’d done to Galeria, he would do to Her. The Vi
cious Queen.
The rumble sounded again. Closer. With a muttered curse, Kasar packed up the meat, the various remains of the little goat, and scuffed dirt over the fire. That rumble could be only the nightriders. He needed to get away.
“Kasar.” The sensuous French accent rolled over his nerves.
Mélanie. His ace in the hole.
She emerged from the tall, whispering grasses. He caught a flash of her pansy-blue eyes before he averted his gaze.
Never look them in the eye.
If he’d learned nothing else that night, he’d learned that. Thirty-seven minutes and forty-two seconds had ticked by on his glowing digital watch before he could move again. Just from a flick of her glance.
“Kasar, my love, my man.” Mélanie held out her arms, milky, smooth—and withered. Her once-lush breasts hung like empty sacks. Her belly sagged with old flesh. Her lips barely covered her teeth, the fangs prominent. “I need you, my man.”
He just figured she did.
This time, though, it wouldn’t be a little drink like she’d had before. It shone in her eyes, the starvation. He knew the beast well now—and the vicious, animalistic lengths it drove people to. That she was no longer human—if she ever had been—only made her more dangerous. Despite her pretty promises yesterday, she’d kill him without a second thought.
Not that he minded dying. Why should he be any different? But it wouldn’t be at the fangs of the French chick. No. When he went down, he was taking the queen with him.
“Back so soon, Mélanie? I thought we were to meet tomorrow before dawn.”
“Things change, mon chère.” She stepped closer, somewhat clumsy.
Surreptitiously, Kasar slid his hand onto the keriss in the grass at his side.
“I must feed.” Her gaze stayed fixed on his neck, where yesterday’s raw wound still throbbed.
“And the queen?”
Mélanie’s mouth twisted, a wrinkled mess of bitterness. “You can’t kill her. No one can. Let’s you and I find another place, where we can be together. Always.”
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