She had the door open before we could stop her, and the scream she let out was raw and primitive, the kind of bloodcurdling that needled into your brain and hung there long after the screamer had stopped.
“Oh, my God.”
Pike was in front of me, striding into the room. It seemed to be about the size of a matchbox, but I’m not sure if that was because of the three disheveled twin beds shoved against the walls or because of the arc of blood splatter that covered them all. It was still dripping and fresh, and the raw-meat smell of torn flesh was overwhelming. I saw in my periphery Vlad taking a step forward and I pushed him back. “Wait,” I growled.
“Call nine-one-one,” Pike yelled. He was hunched on the floor, and once I tore my eyes from the blood, I saw that he was cradling a young woman. Her eyes were open and cloudy, but her eyelashes fluttered and she was still breathing, each breath ragged and painful sounding. Her hands were pressed up against the gaping wound at her neck and she held something there, too—a blood-soaked pillow or crumple of bed sheet. She was trembling and a light sheet of sweat broke out over her thin body. Her eyes were terrified, skidding from Pike to me to Celeste, a single tear pool and dripping over her cheek. She opened her mouth but Pike shook his head. “No, don’t speak. We’re going to get you help.”
Vlad appeared behind me again, a wisp of ice-cold air coming off his body.
“Ambulance is on the way.”
“Allison! Allison, what happened?” Celeste was in the room, the soaked carpet making a squishing sound as she fell to her knees. “Who did this?” Her little body was racked with tears and I folded down next to her, pulling her to me in my best effort at a comforting hug.
Pike shot me a glance and I knew what he was thinking: There was no way Allison would survive until an ambulance came. Allison herself looked up at us as if she knew, too, her head lolling to one side, her lips working, nothing but tiny, ineffectual gasps of air.
“Wendi,” she finally said, her breathy voice nearly inaudible. “It was Wendi.” Allison’s whole body spasmed and her trembling finally stopped. Her hands fell from the wound at her neck and flopped down behind her, the piece of cloth still balanced in her clawed fingers.
We shut the door behind Allison while we waited for the ambulance to catch up with its siren.
“So Wendi killed her roommate?” Pike whispered to me. “Why? Why not a stranger?”
“Opportunity,” I said. “Trust. And maybe she’s trying to ruin my runway show.”
Pike groaned.
“What? People kill for less every day.”
Celeste was standing in the center of the room, utterly lost. I guided her to the couch where she crumpled, instantly curling herself into Vlad, who had abandoned his quiver and bow and stretched an arm across her shoulders. He snuggled Celeste close and cooed to her, the motion so natural and full of concern that it made my heart hurt, made me wish that Vlad could really feel, could really love someone like Celeste and have her love him in return.
“So that’s what a Halfling can do, huh?” Pike’s face was drawn and slightly ashen.
“That’s only the beginning,” I said, feeling my own stomach start to turn. I glanced back at Celeste, who was crying, her tiny shoulders shuddering, her hands pressed against her eyes. She pulled her feet up underneath her, Allison’s blood dried in smears up her naked calves. “We have to find Wendi.”
I knelt in front of Celeste, placing my hands on her knees. She jerked from me. “Sorry. Your hands are so cold.” She glanced up at Vlad. “Yours, too.”
“Circulation problem,” Vlad and I said in unison.
I pressed my hands into my pockets while Vlad tried to unwind himself from Celeste; she just snuggled closer to him. “It’s okay,” she whispered.
“Celeste, where do you think Wendi went?”
“Wendi?” She blinked. “Why?”
I tried to think of how best to word “your roommate is an undead bastion of hell who will tear the throats out of anyone in her wake.” Turns out, there’s just no good way. “If Wendi did this, she might do it again.”
Celeste shook her head, her dark hair swirling around her shoulders. “She couldn’t have done this. Not Wendi.”
“Please. Can you just tell us where you think she may have gone?”
“I don’t know. I don’t—she wasn’t working, so . . .” She worried her bottom lip. “Maybe Ruby?”
“Who’s Ruby?” Pike asked.
“Ruby is a place. It’s a bar. She has been there almost every night. She met some guy there. His name was . . .” Her eyes rolled upward as though the answer might be on the ceiling. “I can’t remember. Oh, I think the ambulance is here.”
I could feel my cheeks flush—a feat seeing as I hadn’t eaten since breakfast—when I thought of Moyer showing up again, finding me and Pike again.
“We should go.”
Celeste’s eyes grew. “What?”
“Uh, we should go downstairs and tell the paramedics what apartment you’re in.” I stood, Pike following behind. “Vlad?”
He looked from Celeste to me. “I’ll stay here and take care of,” he paused, his eyes flicking toward the bedroom, “things.”
Just before we were about to leave, Vlad joined us at the door and dropped his voice. “Ruby is a lounge up top. Rouge is the lounge on the bottom. I’ll stay here with Celeste and make sure that Allison . . . stays dead.”
I nodded, and Pike and I disappeared down the stairs.
“So, lounge on the bottom?”
“Underground,” I clarified.
“That’s what we’re looking for, huh?” Pike asked as we got into his car.
“Yup. If it’s underground, it’s underworld.”
Chapter Four
We were at Ruby right at lunchtime, when the sidewalks swelled with admins power walking in sneakers, fancy types ambling to three-martini lunches, and tourists trying on every iteration of sunglasses and hat. The neighborhood was bustling with energy but the doors of Ruby were firmly locked. I shielded my eyes with my hands and pressed them up against the floor-to-ceiling windows. It was dark inside, chairs on industrial-chic tables, not a single breath of movement from the inside.
“They don’t open until five,” I said with a frown.
“Well, at least we know where she isn’t.”
I rolled my eyes. “Great, so we can scratch one place off our list of thirty million.”
Pike held up two fingers. “Technically, two. We know she’s not at her apartment.”
“You’re not helping.”
“Yeah, well, you’re on fire.”
“What?” I glanced down at a lazy swirl of smoke coming from my shoulder and started slapping at it. “Oh! Crap! Geez!”
Pike’s arms were around me in an instant, warm and fleshy, and I relished the protective feeling as he gently steered me to the shade. “That better?”
The fire was out, but the sickening smell of ash hung in the air. “Thanks.”
“Well, we know another place Wendi won’t be.”
“Where’s that?”
“Outside. Unless Halflings don’t have the tendency to burst into flame at seventy-plus degrees?”
I plucked my sunglasses from my purse and slid them on, careful to stay in my little umbrella of shade. “After that scene? I don’t think Wendi is a Halfling anymore.”
“So . . .”
“So it’s only going to get worse.” I pressed my fingers to my temples. “I can’t think out here. It’s been a long time since I was new. It’s hard to think about where I’d go.”
My cell phone pinged and the little alarm clock icon let me know that there was now less than twenty-four hours for me to gather up the scraps of fabric and recruit a new model for my runway show. There was also a new tweet from Fashion Fish—@FashFish01: Mystery designer kills it w new gown. Who is this phantom fashionista?
The tweet set my teeth on edge.
“Something about Wendi?”
My head
was starting to throb. “No. I’m just running out of time to get my line finished and there’s this new mystery designer who’s stealing all my thunder.”
Pike swung his head to me and I held up a silencing hand. “I know, I know, a young woman is dead . . . ish, on the verge of decimating an entire city block, and all I can focus on is fashion. It’s my afterlife, Pike, my livelihood. I’m not completely callous, but this is important to me.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
I softened. “Really?”
Pike nodded, then abruptly stopped. “Well, I was actually going to say that all of this sounds like it could best be solved with a cheeseburger and a side of fries.”
I quirked an annoyed eyebrow and Pike scoffed. “What did you think I ate? Birdseed?”
We started to walk. “So, a mystery designer, huh?”
I nodded, the annoyance seeping into my every vein. “No one knows who she is. She just popped on the scene”—I snapped my fingers—“Like that.”
Pike stopped and looked at me. “And you don’t find that odd?”
“I find that exceptionally odd, actually. I mean, this designer comes out of nowhere and bam, not only on the fashion scene but adored by Fashion Fish? Fashion Fish is a legend in the fashion blogging community, and I was her favorite find.” I felt my lower lip push out, my sadness all encompassing.
Pike looked skeptical. “I think by definition ‘legend’ has to be something that’s older than the Internet and not a fashion blogger. That’s not what I meant, though. I meant, this mystery chick comes to town, is getting all this great press, and yet still decides to remain hidden? And then a supermodel is mysteriously dumped on your vestibule floor and turned into a vampire? Maybe the designer is a vampire, too.”
I put my hands on my hips, ready to scoff at his theory—but it wasn’t all that crazy....
“Okay, sure, possibly. But why would this other vamp drop one of her bodies at my feet?”
“Obviously, she knows you’re a vampire, too. Maybe it was like, a peace offering or a sign of respect or something. Don’t you guys do that?”
I narrowed my eyes. “Like when a cat leaves a dead bird on its owner’s pillow?”
Pike glared at me. “I’m just trying to help.”
We ducked into a tiny, dingy café—one that I was sure hadn’t been there yesterday but had enough grease buildup and dried mustard stains to prove me wrong. The beer-bellied man at the counter looked like he’d been standing behind that counter longer than I’ve been made. After Pike ordered his burger, something disgusting and gluttonous with one slab of animal flesh packed on top of another, the counter man looked at me and snorted when I said just water would be fine for me. We sat in a booth at the back of the restaurant, me taking in everything and everyone while Pike drummed his fingers along the cracked Formica tabletop.
“So since Wendi”—he grimaced—“fed off Allison, that makes her full-fledged, then?”
I nodded. “More or less. She’s still got a while before she gains her full strength, but yeah, for all intents and purposes, Wendi’s V-card has been punched.”
Counter guy dropped a plastic basket piled with fries and Pike’s burger just as I finished my statement. He kind of smirked, his forehead shiny with spits of hamburger grease.
I expected Pike to unhinge his jaw and swallow his burger but he just stared at it for a beat before speaking. “Is that what happened to you?”
I was taken aback, a wave of prickly heat racing down my spine.
“When you . . . you know.”
“No. My sire I—he—” It was the vampire equivalent of the “when did you lose your virginity” conversation, only much more prickly as I couldn’t flippantly mention a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon, senior prom, or the back of some guy’s Chevette. We couldn’t share the war stories, the awkward first moments, the silent moments afterward when everything needed to be said, but nothing ever was. We couldn’t swap stories about how underwhelmed we were, about how we thought everything would somehow be different.
Being bitten—being changed—wasn’t something universal. It was definitely a becoming, a changing of everything—body, mind, spirit—couched with the unyielding knowledge that you will never belong again. You’ll never be right again. This was the chasm that divided me from lovers for a hundred years. It kept my breather best friend at arm’s distance and it kept me on my guard, constantly.
And it was exhausting.
“No. I was made by another pure vampire. That means that the person who changed you knew what they were doing. They bite, and while you hover in that state between life and death, you feed from the sire. It’s a circle.”
“Like the circle of life,” Pike said, picking up a French fry.
“More like the circle of death.”
I watched Pike eat his fry, then pause and look up at me. His eyes were serious. “Did it hurt?”
I blinked.
“You know, when it happened. Do you remember? I mean, we turn—become shifters when we hit puberty. Kind of stereotypical, you know, but that’s how it is. But I remember. We had a ceremony and a . . . kind of a party. I guess that really wasn’t the case with you.”
I thought about a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old Pike, celebrating his ascent into manhood, and bird-hood, I guess. I imagined him on some beautiful Hawaiian black sand beach with a clutch of family members whose dark, caramel-y skin mirrored his, all of them dancing, celebrating, exultant that Pike now shared the one characteristic that made him one of them—a familial tie that could never be severed.
“No.” I shook my head, surprised at how soft my voice had gotten. “There weren’t any parties. And yes . . . it hurt.”
I thought I was going to die.
I heard the skin breaking—it was a sharp, quick, popping sound—and then his fangs sank deeper and deeper into my flesh. Searing heat raged from the wound site, and each time he sucked it was like he was tearing out a tiny bit of my soul. His body was pressed against mine, his fingers digging into my flesh as I struggled and tried to turn away. I knew what he was doing. I knew what he was. I knew what I was going to be.
“Non, monsieur. S’il vous plaît.” My voice sounded like it came from somewhere below me, like I was floating above, watching the scene—and I was. I could see my head pressed back, the milky white of my virgin flesh being stained a rich, velvet red. I could see the wound he created each time his lips, glossy with my blood, broke from my flesh. The skin was ragged and torn, puckered and swollen.
His voice was as dark as the night. “Boire de la vie, mon amour.”
Drink of life.
When he was on me, lips pressed against me, the pain exploded through every inch of my body. But when he tore away, the ache was unbearable—pieces of me breaking away, dying.
I wanted him. I needed him. I craved him.
A single drop of blood escaped his hungry mouth and made its way across my throat. I felt it pool in the hollow at my collarbone, then slide across my breast. It stained the pure white of my bodice a heady ruby red, the spot making its way through the lace, spidering through the thread pattern until it was more red than white.
He broke away and I whimpered, the ecstasy of pain thrumming through me. Then my hands were on him, digging at his marble-hard flesh, clawing at his clothing. I had to have him near me. I had to have him in me. I buried my head in the crook of his neck, smelling his sweet night scent, dragging my tongue across his perfect white flesh. And then I bit . . .
“The pain didn’t last long, though. So I guess that’s the good thing.”
Pike pushed his hamburger and fries away, his voice low. “Then what happened? Maybe Wendi will do the same things you did after. Did you go home? Is there like—”
“Like did we all get in a V-formation and fly? Hold hands and sing AC/DC songs? No, that’s not how it works,” I snapped.
Pike looked hurt and I immediately felt bad. I wasn’t mad at him.
“Sorry, I just th
ought maybe we could get some insight.”
I reached out and laid my hand over his, the sheer warmth from his hand shooting goose bumps through me. The feeling was so foreign.
“I’m sorry, I’m just—just nervous is all. About finding Wendi. What did I do after?” I tugged at a lock of my hair and tried to pretend that I was thinking, trying to remember. But I never could forget.
It had been an unseasonably hot summer that year, and the heat and this newfound life pulsing through me made me restless. I roamed at night with Luc, my sire. We waited in his darkened flat until the sun dropped low in the sky, when twilight tinged everything orange and cast long shadows on the Parisians as they walked, our unwitting prey. We paced the windows like caged animals until we found one that we liked, and then we pounced.
A dashing young couple walked by one evening, elegant as petit fours. He well-dressed in an impeccably tailored suit, she in a dress resplendent with exotic spun silk, and I could see Luc’s jaw tighten, the way it did when he lusted for something.
We stole into the shadows until the lovely couple had come to the river’s end. Luc, mesmerizing, stepped out and began talking to the man. I hung back at first, watching. There was something more to the couple and I could feel a nagging, like a shard of memory I was missing at the back of my head. There was a longing, too, something that I hadn’t felt since I first sucked Luc’s blood. I broke from the shadow and the woman sucked in a surprised breath when she saw me. The man looked shocked—and then smiled.
“Sister!” he said.
Everyone had become prey. My brother, my sister-in-law, reduced to sustenance. I reached for Victor—I so wanted that human connection—but the animal in me was greater. I could hear his heart beating, could hear the sound of Cora’s blood as it rushed through her veins. I knew Luc could hear it, too.
The memory sickened me and I shook my head, the smell of Pike’s burger and the lifetime of restaurant grease pungent and nauseating. “Vampires don’t go home.”
Pike continued to pepper me with questions, each time revealing a bit more of himself and his story. I was surprised when the overhead lights clicked on in the restaurant and the darkness began to settle outside.
On the Hunt Page 36
