by Raven Hart
Reedreck had torched the classy brothel just for the sake of meanness. I’d financed the prostitutes’ new housewares and wardrobes, held their hands and listened to their troubles. Hell, I’d even painted toenails and braided hair.
“It sure looks like fun,” Werm said. “I’ll bet the girls are offering you all kinds of perks for being nice enough to help them out, you lucky dog.” He punched me weakly on the shoulder.
Truthfully, they’d all offered to show me their appreciation in various ways, but I’d decided to keep things on a professional level. “I’ve got enough stress right now without having jealous catfights break out.”
“Cheryl says you’re the best-built and best-looking man in town. She says she wants to run her toes through your wavy, black hair. I think they are all in love with you.”
“Stop it,” I said.
“And Souxi says she wants to paint her new room the exact shade of blue as your eyes.”
“I’m going to bite you if you don’t hush up,” I said.
“They follow you around like little ducklings.”
I gritted my fangs. Herding whores. This is what I had come to. I wasn’t going to look too tough to the other badasses in this city when they started challenging me for dominance over the territory—especially now that William wasn’t around to back me up.
“Seriously, Jack. I think the bar would be the perfect place for them to work until Eleanor gets back.”
If Eleanor got back. I’m not sure the seriousness of her situation had fully dawned on Werm. Her decision to leave her sire so soon after she was made was a dangerous one.
Unless William released Eleanor formally and in person from the mystical, two-hundred-year bond of sire and offspring, she would start to physically “deteriorate,” as William put it. In other words, she would rot on her feet, return to being the dead thing she was. I only hoped William made it to her in time.
And as a fledgling without her sire’s protection, she was vulnerable to all kinds of predatory vamps. There was no telling what Hugo had promised her to get her to agree to go to Europe with him and the others. But if she chose to trust Hugo instead of William, that might well prove to be a fatal mistake.
“Maybe you’re right about them learning a trade,” I said. “Once the place is finished, I think they’d be better off as cocktail waitresses than carpenters, though. I just doubt if their skills extend to the finer points of construction. Maybe they might be able to spackle the ceiling if they can do it laying on their backs.”
“I can hang wallpaper,” a little voice behind me said. “And I do it standing on my own two feet.”
I turned to see Ginger, one of Eleanor’s whores, standing there in a pair of pink overalls with a sample book under one arm. Oh, man, did I ever feel like a heel.
“I’m sorry, darlin’,” I said. “I just meant—”
“I know what you meant, Jack. But just because I’m a whore doesn’t mean that’s all I know how to do.” She thrust out a pouty, painted lip and sniffed. “I took a correspondence course in interior design.”
I started to ask her if she had to copy a picture off a matchbook cover to qualify, but I bit my tongue in time to stop myself. Ginger was actually one of the brighter of the prostitutes in Eleanor’s employ. Unfortunately, that wasn’t saying much.
“You’re the new decorator?” I scratched the back of my head. So the décor would run more toward contemporary whorehouse than gothic dungeon. I guess that might be an improvement. Either way, this was going to be the craziest drinking establishment in town. In fact, I wanted to get good and drunk just thinking about it. “I’m sure you’ll do a dandy job, darlin’,” I told her.
She smiled a little before her girlish face broke out in a sad look. Werm took the sample book from her. “Listen, Jack didn’t mean—”
“It’s not that,” she said, waving a hand dismissively. “I’m worried about Sally.”
“What about her?” I asked. I’d noticed that Sally, the youngest of the prostitutes, had been a bit nervous and standoffish lately, and her skin didn’t look like healthy living human skin should look. I figured she was just stressed out by losing her belongings to the fire, as well as losing her mentor, Eleanor.
“Promise not to get mad?” Ginger said, looking up at me between fanlike false eyelashes.
I started to make the sign of the cross on my chest in a cross-my-heart gesture before I remembered what I was. You’d think that after a hundred and fifty years I’d remember I was damned. “I promise,” I said.
“She’s on crystal meth,” Ginger said.
“Oh, geez,” Werm exlaimed. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Marlee saw her with a pipe. The kind they make from a lightbulb with the metal end sawed off and the guts taken out. Plus, she’s not eating and she’s letting herself go. Her skin looks terrible. She’s even getting speed bumps.”
“That’s what formication will do,” Werm said, shaking his head.
“It’s not from fornication. If it was from that, all us whores would have it,” Ginger said.
“Not fornication,” Werm corrected, “formication. That’s when a meth addict feels like there’s spiders and snakes crawling under his skin.”
“So they scratch themselves until they’ve got sores all over, like Sally’s done.” Ginger said, understanding.
“How do you know so much about meth addiction?” I asked Werm.
“A guy I worked with at the mall was a tweaker,” he said. “He was messed up.”
“Ginger, are you absolutely sure?” I asked. This was serious. One of the things William had told me to do before he left was to take care of Eleanor’s girls, and I didn’t want to let him down. Much less Eleanor herself.
“I’m pretty sure. But that might not be her only problem. Some guy has been following her,” she said. “We think he’s a stalker or something.”
“Why hasn’t somebody told me about this before?”
Ginger shrugged. “She just told us this morning at breakfast. She says it’s been going on a few days now.”
“Maybe he’s a pusher,” Werm offered.
Ginger shook her head. “She swears she’s never seen him before. He’s tall and skinny and has these parallel scars down one side of his face. Like something with huge claws got hold of him.”
“Meth users get paranoid a lot,” I said. “Maybe it’s her imagination. But just in case, I’ll check out her source. Do you know where she’s getting the ice?” I asked. I could really get off on draining anybody who would sell that poison to people, especially an innocent like Sally.
It seemed strange to think of a prostitute as innocent, but there was something naïve and vulnerable about her that made me afraid for her even before I heard this disturbing news. She seemed to need somebody to take care of her. I guess Eleanor as her madam filled that role.
“She gets it from a gang of cookers that live down by the marsh. There’s a whole family of them. Their name’s, um, Thrasher.”
“Oh, crap,” I muttered.
“Do you know them?” Werm asked.
“You could say that.”
I first met up with that clan in the twenties when they made illegal whiskey and I ran it—that is, delivered it—for them. They tried to shortchange me a time or two, but I could forgive them for that. What really chafed me was when they poisoned a bunch of my friends with some ’shine. They knew it was a bad batch but were too stingy to throw it out. Killing your customers is bad for business any day of the week, but I was particularly sore because I gave that jug of rotgut to those old boys whose lives it took.
We were playing cards one night in a speakeasy out by the river. We all passed out. I was the only one who woke up. That one was tough to explain to the authorities. They didn’t exactly buy my “cast-iron stomach” explanation, but they couldn’t prove I brought in the ’shine since all the witnesses had gone toes-up.
It seemed that the Thrashers hadn’t learned a thing in eighty-something
years. Nowadays the contraband was methamphetamine, hillbilly heroin, the drug of choice in the rural South. And they were still just as willing to ruin somebody’s life for the almighty dollar as their granddaddies had been.
Maybe the worst part was, the stuff couldn’t hurt them. See, they’re werewolves. And any kind of shape-shifter is almost as hard to kill as a vampire. So they could take the stuff no harm done, but their regular steady customers were in for a world of hurt.
I said good night to Werm and Ginger and left them to go over their wallpaper samples. I went out into the frosty night. I had figured this day was coming since the day William left for Europe. I was going to have to take on the monsters who lived in dark places in and around this city to prove I was large and in charge.
It was time to kick some werewolf ass.
Praise for
The Vampire’s Seduction
“Suspenseful…and sexy…This foray into fangoria is atmospheric and occasionally funny.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A real treat…an excellent read!”
—Freshfiction
“An exotic, exciting thriller.”
—Futures MYSTERY Anthology Magazine
“One can almost feel the heat rising from the pages…. A stimulating read.”
—Curledup
“Dark, seductive, disturbingly erotic, Raven Hart drives a stake in this masterful tale.”
—L. A. BANKS, author of the Vampire Huntress Legend series
Also by Raven Hart
THE VAMPIRE’S SEDUCTION
The Vampire’s Secret is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Ballantine Books Mass Market Original
Copyright © 2007 by Raven Hart
Excerpt from The Vampire’s Kiss by Raven Hart copyright © 2007 by Raven Hart
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book The Vampire’s Kiss by Raven Hart. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
eISBN: 978-0-345-49722-2
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