Bite

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Where was Daniel?

  She stopped, scanning the trees on either side of the lane, listening for him. She finally heard his breathing, harsh and labored, and knew that he'd reached the end of his endurance. New vampires needed to feed every couple of hours. He would be weak, sick. The blood lust would be on him like a horse master's whip, driving him forward, driving him to feed.

  This was a difficult time for a new vampire. A test period, during which he would find out if he had the mettle to control the blood-sucking urges, or if he would go rogue and have to be put down by his own kind.

  A farmhouse rose out of a grassy meadow to the south. Potted geraniums on the front porch added a splash of red to the silvery moonlit scene. Daniel stood in the driveway beside a pickup truck, his head turned up to the curtains fluttering in an open, dark, second-story window.

  There were mortals inside. Even from this distance, Deadre could smell them. Ready prey.

  She crept toward the house, willing Daniel away. "Come back to me, little vampire. Back to me."

  But when she broke out of the tree line, Daniel was nowhere in sight. Her stomach clenched. He wouldn't do it. He was a moral man. That wouldn't be lost in the vampire he'd become. He hadn't been able to kill her, he wouldn't kill the mortals in this house, either.

  The blood lust was strong, though, and he hadn't learned control. He might not want to hurt anyone, but he could make a mistake, the way she'd made a mistake so many years ago with that poor old woman...

  She had started toward the house after him, hurrying now, not caring if he heard her, when the bleat of a goat drew her attention toward the barn. She stopped, her senses alert, and heard more animal snuffles, a rustling of hay. Normal barnyard sounds.

  Or not.

  She glided to the barn without a sound and found Daniel on the floor bent over a puddle of vomit, a decapitated chicken in one hand and blood trickling out both corners of his mouth.

  Daniel turned his face away. He didn't want Deadre to see him like this, on his knees, puking his guts up.

  "I was so thirsty," he said. "I couldn't stand it. But the people in the house...I couldn't do it."

  "You need to feed every few hours when you're newly made. Later, you can go longer."

  He shook his head. "Something is wrong. I can't drink the blood. It comes right back up. Maybe I'm not really a vampire. Maybe it didn't work."

  He hadn't heard her move, but suddenly she was crouched beside him. "It's the animal blood. You can't have it. It isn't compatible."

  He coughed, choked, spit. "Oh, God--Ow!--No kidding."

  Gently she pried the chicken from his fist and, holding one wing between her thumb and forefinger, deposited it in a muck bucket next to the horse stall.

  He worked up the nerve to glance her way and was relieved to see she wasn't laughing at him. "You couldn't have told me about this animal thing?"

  "You didn't ask."

  Still on his hands and knees, he laughed sardonically. "Guess there are a lot of things I didn't ask."

  She knelt next to him and dabbed the chicken blood from his lips with the hem of her T-shirt. "There's still time to make up for that. But first you need to feed."

  She sat with her back against the wall and pulled him to her. He was too weak to resist. The barn spun around him like a gyroscope.

  She lifted her T-shirt, but he brushed her hand away from her breast. "Wait, wait. One thing I have to ask first."

  She frowned down at him. "What?"

  "Is it normal for me to get totally turned on when I drink your blood?"

  "Very normal. Although you'll learn you do have the ability to control it, if you want to."

  He thought about that a moment. "Like if I decide to take a nip from a ninety-year-old crone with the face of a weevil?"

  "That would be a good time, yes." He could tell she tried to suppress her smile, but it broke through.

  He was still contemplative, though. "Is it...as good...for you, too?"

  She brushed her hand through his hair. "Not as good as for you, at this point. But when you're stronger, we'll exchange blood, and then it will be."

  He nodded, feeling queer about contemplating a future with her. A future had never been in his plan. He was going to kill Garth, and then himself and Sue Ellen so that they could rest in peace. Wasn't he?

  He thought it would be simple. He would become a vampire, and he'd have super strength and use it to kill Garth.

  Unfortunately things hadn't worked out quite that way. He'd become a vampire, all right, but he was about as strong as a newborn lamb, and Garth was the big, bad wolf.

  Obviously, he had some recalculating to do. Not tonight, though. Tonight, he needed to feed. He needed blood to quench the fire that threatened to consume him. He needed Deadre.

  He rested his head on her shoulder and she beamed such a beatific smile down at him that this time, he extended a thumbnail and opened the wound on her breast himself.

  The scent of fresh blood was like the smell of the ocean to a sailor. It cleansed him. Stirred him. His skin tingled and a low throb pulsed in his sex.

  Lying next to her, he turned to his side and hooked one leg over her, rubbing with his calf, pressing himself into her hip. He smoothed his palm down the soft planes of her belly and under her waistband to the nest of curls between her legs.

  She drew his head down with her hands, offering nourishment, offering her blood, but tonight he wouldn't just take. He would give as good as he got.

  As good and better.

  "HOW long until I don't have to feed so often?" Daniel asked.

  Hand in hand, they walked on a footpath through the woods behind the farmhouse. Nocturnal eyes peeked at them from branches and scrub brush, then scurried away.

  Deadre couldn't remember the last time she'd felt so at peace. When she'd still been mortal, maybe.

  "It's different for everyone," she said. "But most of us are able to sustain ourselves for at least a day or two after the first couple of months."

  His face twisted. "Months?"

  "In vampire years, a month is hardly the blink of an eye."

  "Vampire years. Is that kind of like doggie years?"

  "Yeah, except a lot longer."

  "Hmmphh."

  The path ended at a pond polka-dotted by floating lilies.

  Daniel skimmed a stone across the moonlit surface. "How often do you need blood?"

  "Every few weeks or so. But it's been a little longer this time."

  He had raised a rock for another throw, but he paused. "Am I hurting you by taking your blood when you haven't fed?"

  She shrugged, hoping he wouldn't see the weariness in the gesture. "I'm a little weak, that's all. I'll feel better once we're back in the city."

  In truth, she wished she never had to go back to the city. To face the Enforcer.

  "Once you take a mortal's blood," he said, the words tinged with revulsion.

  "I don't kill my donors. I only take enough to sustain myself without harming them."

  "How do you do it?" He lifted his head. His green eyes looked black, bleak, under the quarter moon. "I tried. I was so desperate for blood, I wanted to go into that farmhouse, drink from whoever lived there, but I couldn't. It made me sick to think about it."

  He sat down in the grass, pulled his knees up and hooked his arms around them.

  She lowered herself next to him, mimicking his position, and grazed her fingertips over the nape of his neck, down his spine. "Eventually you'll have to take blood from someone besides me."

  He stared out over the water for so long that she thought he wasn't going to respond. That he wasn't ready to face that reality. But finally he said quietly, "What if there was another way? Could you give up mortal blood? Would you?"

  "What other way? Snapping the heads off chickens?"

  He winced. "No, no animal blood. That's a lesson I won't forget."

  "Then there is no other way." Daniel sighed, and got such a faraway look on his face
that Deadre wondered where his thoughts had taken him. "Daniel?"

  He stood and brushed himself off, then offered a hand to help her up. "We'd better get back. It'll be dawn soon."

  Deadre's own thoughts did some wandering on the way back to the farmhouse to collect the jacket she'd left in the barn. "Let's don't go back, Daniel. Back to Atlanta, I mean. We can sleep today in the storm shelter, then head out tomorrow night for wherever we want to go."

  She'd never thought about leaving her home city before. Vampires congregated in clans and to be separated from the clan was risky. They supported each other, watched each others' backs. Clans tended to be wary of strangers, especially strange vampires. The clan in a new city wasn't likely to welcome them with open arms.

  More likely they would brand them as rogues, cut off their heads and bury them facedown.

  She'd rather take her chances with a strange clan than with the Enforcer, though. She couldn't go back to Atlanta and face the High Matron and her thug. She couldn't take Daniel there.

  Her excitement grew with every step. "California, maybe. I've always wanted to see the coast."

  "I can't."

  "Or the mountains. What do you think about the mountains?"

  At the back of the farmhouse, he stepped in front of her, stopped her with firm hands on her shoulders. "Deadre, I can't. I have to go back to Atlanta."

  She jerked away. The goats in the pen against the barn bleated. The mommas ran back and forth across their corral, their babies at their heels. The cattle next to them joined the ruckus, mooing and snorting.

  "Because some man stole your house and your car and your work," she said bitterly, remembering his words from the rave club. "And you have to kill him."

  "Because he killed someone I care about. My..." His voice broke. "My fiancee."

  "Your what?"

  "He's not a man, Deadre. He's a vampire. And he...he made her one, too."

  She shook her head, not believing any of this. "So you used me to make you a vampire so you could win her back?"

  "I used you to make me a vampire so I could set her free. She is--was--sweet and gentle. She wouldn't want to live like that. She wouldn't want me to leave her a--"

  "A what?" She raised her hands out to the sides. "A monster, like me?"

  He didn't answer her question. He straightened his back and looked her straight in the eye. "He's a vampire. As a mortal I had no chance against him. He's too strong. Too fast."

  "What will you do if you manage to kill him, huh? Then you'll still be a monster? What will you do then?"

  He looked her straight in the eye, his face solemn and sad. "Then I'll set myself free, too."

  Her eyes went wide. Her stomach pancaked on the floor of her abdomen.

  He'd used her. To find his fiancee, a vampire, so he could kill her.

  And then he was going to kill himself.

  Her beautiful Daniel.

  Her mouth rounding in a silent, "No", she ran around him into the barn and nearly mowed down a sleepy-looking elderly man in a bathrobe and rubber boots. The farmer held a double-barreled shotgun, and her momentum sent him stumbling back. The stock of the gun connected with a support beam. His hand jerked on the trigger. There was a tremendous explosion, then a flash of flame from the end of the gun.

  And two loads of double-ought shot tore through Deadre's chest.

  5

  DANIEL felt the concussion of the shotgun blast all the way outside the barn. He charged through the back door in time to see Deadre sway once, her spine straight and arms at her side, then topple backward like a domino. A red stain the size of a dinner plate bloomed between her breasts.

  The farmer dropped the rifle and backed up until his shoulders hit the wall. His eyes were huge and round, set deep in his face, his complexion waxy. "Whaa--? No. Oh, no. I thought it was those wild dogs in the barn again, botherin' my stock. I didn't know. I didn't mean to do it. It was an accident."

  Daniel stood immobile for a long moment, then dropped to his knees beside Deadre. He was pretty sure a gunshot couldn't kill her, but it was still quite a shock seeing her fall, seeing her lying on the ground, still and pale.

  He checked her vitals quickly. She wasn't breathing, had no pulse. By all outward appearances, she was dead.

  The farmer shuffled toward the door, mumbling. "Nine-one-one. I gotta wake the wife and call nine-one-one."

  "No." Daniel touched Deadre's lips once before he rose, both a plea and a promise. He hoped she heard both in that deep sleep vampires went into when they needed to heal. Just because she couldn't die from a gunshot wound didn't mean she couldn't suffer from one. Feel the agony of torn flesh and splintered bone.

  He needed to get her out of here, take her somewhere where he could help her. Where he could hold her, if nothing else. But first he had to deal with the farmer.

  "You can't call anyone," he said, moving slowly and kicking the gun away as he approached the farmer.

  The man shook like a child who'd played too long in the snow without his mittens. "B--but she's..."

  "She's going to be fine."

  He could see how hard the farmer tried to believe that. But the man shook his head sadly. His voice broke about the same time tears sprung to his eyes. "She's dead."

  "She's not." He advanced on the man slowly, trying not to spook him.

  "She...She's not?"

  Daniel felt his confusion. He was sorry for the old guy, but a call to the cops could cause him and Deadre a lot of trouble. The last thing he needed was the police on his tail when he took her out of here. If they found her, they'd take her to the morgue, do an autopsy.

  He suppressed a shudder. What if they cremated her afterward? Then she really would be dead.

  No, he couldn't let the old man call the cops.

  "You didn't shoot anyone," Daniel said firmly, holding the man's gaze. He wasn't quite sure what he was doing, but there had to be a way to convince the man it was in his best interests to forget what had happened tonight.

  If that didn't work, he just tie the geezer up and leave him for his wife to find in the morning, after Daniel was long gone.

  "I didn't shoot anyone," the farmer repeated. His voice was going flat and his eyes took on a faraway sheen.

  "There was no one in the barn."

  "No one in the barn."

  Daniel raised his eyebrows. That was easy.

  Too easy.

  "It was just a couple of wild dogs bothering your stock. You scared them off."

  "I scared off some wild dogs."

  Daniel waved his hand in front of the guy's face, but he didn't blink. He'd suspected from his research that vampires had some way of mesmerizing their victims, making them forget. Now he knew for sure.

  He just didn't know how he'd done it.

  As long as he had, though, he might as well take full advantage. "I need to borrow your truck," he said.

  The farmer stared off into space with unfocused eyes. "Keys are under the floor mat."

  Excellent. "Go back to the house and go to bed. If your wife is awake, you'll tell her that you scared off the dogs."

  "I'll tell her I scared off the dogs."

  The old man turned to shuffle back to the house, but Daniel called out to him before he reached the door. "Wait!"

  Daniel looked from the old man's slack face, to Deadre's pale one, and back. He figured he had less than two hours of darkness left. Enough time to get Deadre to Atlanta, where he could help her, before sunrise, but he was going to need all his strength to do it.

  Daniel couldn't feed off Deadre. In her condition, he risked draining her dry and killing her. But she'd said he couldn't go more than a few hours without blood, either, newly made as he was. Already he was feeling light-headed and clammy.

  The solution to his problem stood at the barn door in a natty bathrobe and rubber boots. Could he do it? Could he drink the blood of a mortal? A living, breathing man?

  The thought repulsed him at first, but he was also curiou
s. Was he mortal or was he a vampire?

  He couldn't straddle the fence forever.

  He couldn't straddle the fence and build the strength he needed to fight Garth. Not quickly.

  His stomach flipped and he realized his heart was beating, fluttering really, in his chest. He looked back at Deadre, her pale, elfin ears and the way her long lashes lay so still over her cheeks.

  He forced himself to relax by thinking of her. Doing what he needed to help her.

  He began to hear his own pulse in his ears. The blood lust beat a rhythm that couldn't be ignored. With his breath coming in short strokes, his thumbnails lengthening, he turned back to the farmer. He saw fear deep in the man's eyes, behind the veil of the thrall in which he held him, and smiled to ease his dread as he punctured the farmer's jugular and lowered his mouth over the wounds.

  Daniel moaned, lost in the pleasure as the essence of life poured down his throat, sweet as honey with a coppery tang, and he drank long and deep.

  Much to his surprise, he liked it.

  DRIVING south down I-95 toward Atlanta in the farmer's rattling old pickup truck, Daniel suppressed the urge to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand for the thousandth time. He could still taste blood on his tongue, feel the man's pulse beating beneath his lips. He still reeled from the heady rush of heat suffusing his dead heart, his veins.

  He was dead, and yet he felt more wonderfully alive than ever. Taking blood made him strong, invulnerable. Immortal.

  It was a high far beyond anything he imagined cocaine or PCP could induce. If it was like that for all vampires, and he assumed it was, it was a wonder there were any mortals at all left in the world. How easily that kind of trip, that surge of power, could become an addiction.

  He had to respect, if grudgingly, the control it must take for the undead to walk the streets night after night, surrounded by ready sources of that magic elixir, and not go on a rampage, drain the city dry.

  More control than he had, he feared. If Deadre hadn't stirred as he'd been gulping down the farmer's life force, Daniel didn't know if he could've stopped, or if he would have kept drinking until the man had no more blood to give.

  Until he'd killed him.

  But she'd moaned, and her hand had twitched. Her eyes had scrunched in pain, and her pain had called him back from the dark edge he'd been teetering on.

  Thank God.

  Ow!

  He really had to stop doing that.