by Lexi Blake
“Don’t destroy it.” He shook his head because he knew I was perfectly capable of doing just that.
I took the elevator straight down. The doors opened directly into Dev’s office. I had to walk through Ether to get to the parking garage where the car was parked. I opened the door to the office and was assailed by the full-time rave that is Ether. The throbbing beat filled the air as I descended the steps as quickly as my shoes would let me.
A large red demon stood at the bottom of the stairs, dressed in an elegant suit. He tipped his horns forward in acknowledgment. Albert. Dev’s all-in-one, go-to demon. He acted as Dev’s butler, his bouncer, and his second in command. “Mrs. Donovan.”
I was going to try pleasantries but simply snapped my lips shut and started to walk around him. At one point, I thought Albert and I could be friends. Now, he just viewed me as the harlot who was leading his precious master down the wrong path. Seriously, no one can be as judgmental as a demon. They really do know their sin.
“Zoey,” he called out as I tried to get around him.
I turned because he hadn’t called me by my first name in several months. “What do you need, Albert?”
“A moment of your time.”
“If you’re going to give me another lecture on adultery, you can save your breath. Daniel and I have an open marriage.” The open part wasn’t Daniel’s idea, but then the marriage part hadn’t been mine.
Albert ignored me. “Did my master discuss our worries with you?”
“He mentioned something about new vampires in Dallas. I think he wants me to figure out where they came from.” I had to strain to hear him over the noise. I was sure he could hear me. Sometimes it’s difficult to be the only human in the room.
“Yes, we’ve had several new vampires in the club.” Albert raised his voice and inched closer to me when he realized my difficulty. I was happy for the heels because Albert was at least seven feet tall. With the extra four inches, I was all the way up to five eight.
“And Dev said they had been seen with werewolves?”
Albert nodded. “Several of them were seen with weres and shifters. The two-natured were all female, and the vampires were all male. It did not seem like a business relationship.”
Curiouser and curiouser. If vamps and weres didn’t typically do business together, then they really didn’t have relationships. It was more about the weres than the vampires. Vampires have no problem coupling up with anything they find attractive, and were blood is particularly rich. If a vamp could get a pretty were to agree, I was sure the vamp would be thrilled. The werewolf, on the other hand, would be outcast. “Do you have any idea how many new guys we’re talking about? One? Two?”
“I have reports that state at least five new vampires have taken up residence in our city,” Albert explained.
My eyes widened at that bit of news. I really had been spending too much time alone if I hadn’t heard about that. Since we lost Sarah, our witch and my friend, in the last job we’d run, I’d spent a lot of time restoring my house. I’d retreated from the world, but it seemed to move forward just fine without me. “Five vamps have moved into town? There are eight vampires in residence? Can the city even sustain eight vamps for long?”
“You aren’t hearing me, Zoey,” Albert said. “The vampires haven’t moved here. They rose here. Or if they didn’t have their turn in our fair city, then they got here as quickly as they could. None of the vampires appears to be over thirty human years old, and I suspect that is their true age. These are new vampires. I am almost certain of it.”
I shook my head at the thought.
My husband had an awful lot of explaining to do.
Chapter Two
I steered the Audi through downtown traffic, glad that I could make it to Daniel’s with a blindfold on because I wasn’t thinking about the drive. It was difficult to concentrate on anything except what Albert and I had discussed.
Why was the Council sending new vamps to Dallas?
It didn’t make sense. Vampires are very rare. In the course of a decade, maybe five will rise. Almost all of these vampires will be located in the First World. The genetic mutation that causes vampirism seems to be more prevalent in males of European descent. Advanced medicine and health care in the wealthier societies have had an effect on vampire society. In the past, many would die on the battlefield or from disease. Now they mostly died of old age. Old age and vampirism is not a good combination. The thought that five new vampires had risen, and that they had died as young men, was too much of a coincidence.
If such a thing had happened, the Council would certainly not send their precious new fledglings to the same city as Daniel Donovan for training. Quite the opposite. The Council would try to make damn sure Daniel didn’t taint them with his outlaw presence. It was only because of his patron’s influence that the Council hadn’t written an order of execution on him about seven months ago. They should be glad they hadn’t written out that order because Daniel wouldn’t have met the dawn quietly. He would have gone down—if they could take him down, and that’s a big if—in a blaze of glory.
Daniel is the vampire who scares the shit out of the other vampires.
Albert had to be wrong about the vampires being new. It just didn’t happen. If the Council had sent the vampires, then they were here for one reason and one reason alone. They had come to fuck with Daniel.
I pulled the Audi into the parking garage of Daniel’s building, parked and started for the entryway.
“Mrs. Donovan,” the doorman acknowledged as he held the door open for me.
I smiled briefly. I couldn’t get used to the deferential treatment I got whenever I entered vampire society. I’m a companion. It’s the vampire word for wife, dinner, and addiction all rolled into one. Apparently the only thing rarer on the Earth plane than vampires are companions. No one has ever explained to my satisfaction just what it is about me that makes me a companion. There’s something in my blood that makes a vampire stronger, smarter, faster than a vampire without a wife. The flip side is the vampire is completely addicted to companion blood. Even though Daniel and I weren’t living together as man and wife, I donated blood every week to feed him. Many people would love to see Daniel Donovan in a permanent grave, and though I was trying to live apart from him, I could never be the one who made that happen.
I strode to the elevator and pushed the button for the floor that held four large apartments. As far as I knew, only three of the rooms were occupied. The entire undead population of Dallas was supposedly housed in those rooms.
There was Daniel, the youngest, but without question strongest of the three. Michael House looked to be an affable man in his twenties, but he’d died on the battlefields of World War One. And then there was Alexander. Of all the vampires I’d met, Alexander Sharpe was the creepiest. Daniel had reason to believe Alexander had been Jack the Ripper, so I kept my distance.
God, I wished I’d been able to find my shoes. Daniel and I had settled into a nice sort of friendship, and I didn’t want to wave a red cape in front of a bull. Though we had agreed to work on being friends, he still managed to make me feel like a cheating wife sometimes. It wasn’t so surprising. Up until seven months before, I would have done anything to be Daniel’s wife. We’d known each other most of our lives. We fell in love as teens and were engaged at twenty. Before we could get married, he’d died in a car accident. The upside? He’d turned out to be a vampire. The downside? The craptastic Council had taken him away from me for three years and sent him back as a distant stranger with more secrets than I could handle. We’d only gotten intimate again months before, and that was when I discovered all the things the love of my life had been hiding from me.
My blood calls to his, but then it does the same with any vampire. If I’m in a room with a vampire, you can bet his eyes are on me. He doesn’t have to know me to want me. It was only luck that I hadn’t met up with one before or I would have been taken off the street, flown to the catacombs of
Paris, and sold to the vampire with the most money or clout. Daniel’s patron, Marcus Vorenus, had assured me he would have paid top dollar. Daniel, in his post-turn fumblings, had managed to protect me. When the Council had come for him, my blood had been in his body. It was enough to make a claim but not a marriage. That had come later.
I had discovered that the person I loved beyond life, beyond death, returned my love because I tasted good.
Dev might not love me, but I wasn’t actively pursued by every faery I met. He slept with me because it felt good, and he liked me. I was Daniel’s obsession, and that was a heavy burden to bear.
The elevator doors opened, and I stepped out into the quiet hallway. I used my key and opened the door to Daniel’s apartment. I was going to sneak into his bedroom and change clothes when I heard a burst of masculine laughter.
I peeked into the small dining room where five men sat around a table. At first I thought they were playing poker. Dev’s club had lively poker rooms going all hours of the night. Then the dice came out, and I knew I was wrong.
“Take that, dragon lord,” one of the men, and I use that term loosely, said.
I shook my head, looking at the table in front of me. “Seriously, you’re a vampire with unbelievable power, and you spend your nights playing Dungeons and Dragons?”
Daniel smiled up at me, his longish hair in desperate need of a trim and completely perfect for its shagginess. His blue eyes were lit with mirth as he looked over at me and I tried, I really tried, to not let my heart break a little bit. “I’m immortal, baby. Do you have any idea the kinds of campaigns I can run?”
I had to smile back. “Nerd.”
“Back at ya,” he replied. “Gentlemen, for those of you who haven’t met her, this is my lovely wife, Zoey. Don’t let her adult-like disapproval fool you. She’s thrown the dice in her time.”
Yes, I had. I’d played with Daniel. I looked at the men around the table. “He’s pulled you in, too, Michael?”
Since Daniel had come back, I’d had several nice conversations with the WWI veteran. He enjoyed talking about his time in the army, and though he didn’t remember much about the sixties because acid apparently works on vamps, too, he was a veritable fount of twentieth century history. He’d even managed to stop staring at me like I was a particularly juicy steak.
Michael shrugged. “It’s fun. It’s just nice to have some friends.”
I knew it was nice for Daniel, too. He’d spent an enormous part of the last several years keeping everyone at arm’s length. He sat there in his Spider-Man T-shirt, and there was nothing I wanted to do more than go over and sit in his lap and hold him close and show his friends that I was his girl. It was an impulse, and now I knew it had nothing to do with what I wanted and everything to do with blood and biology. So I forced myself to stand there.
Besides Daniel and Michael, there was a vamp I didn’t know and two other males of undetermined species. The vamp I recognized because of the glazed look of desperate longing that had hit his face the minute he got a whiff of me.
“Justin,” Daniel said evenly, reaching over to touch the other man’s arm.
Justin shook his head and forced his focus from me to Daniel. “Yeah?”
“She is mine.” The words were said with no real threat behind them, which was surprising. In the past, Daniel had threatened wretched death on any vamp who looked at me twice.
“Of course.” Justin sighed as though some pressure had been released. That answered one question I had. Justin wasn’t a newbie. Baby vamps struggled with control. It was why the Council ruthlessly handled their training. “I’m sorry.”
Daniel cut him off with a wave of his hand. “You didn’t know.”
“Well, I don’t get it,” said one of the non-vamps, a scruffy looking guy in his mid-twenties. I would bet he turned into some sort of canine. “She’s all right and I wouldn’t kick her out of bed or anything, but I don’t get the drool thing. Dude, you should wipe your chin.”
“You aren’t a vampire, Blake,” Daniel pointed out needlessly. “Think of a really hot alpha female. Would you do just about anything to mate with her?”
Blake’s eyes got heated for a moment. “Oh, yeah, especially when she’s in season.”
“More info than I needed!” I felt myself flush.
“I was just trying to give him a point of reference.” Daniel looked very amused at my embarrassment.
The last male smiled, an open, honest grin. He was the smallest man at the table, with a boyish physique that hadn’t quite filled out to the man he would inevitably become. He looked to be in his late teens, definitely the baby of the group. “Well, I’m a sad-sack human, and I would totally do you. I mean, if you would and if it didn’t mean my horrible death and stuff. I got to be honest, though. I wouldn’t be too flattered if I was you. I don’t have real high standards.”
“You have a human in here?” I stared at Daniel, waiting for a damn good explanation.
As I said, I’m usually the only human in a room. I survived because I’d been surrounded by powerful protectors my whole life. My father, Harry Wharton, was important in the supernatural world and Daniel, well, no one messed with Daniel. I now had the added protection of being considered the property of the Council. To the Council, I was an asset, a plaything to be coddled and protected and sheltered. No vampire would try to take me from my master. To do so would invite a duel, and Danny was far too badass to risk that. That being said, if Daniel wasn’t around, another vampire would be duty bound to provide the ass kicking. It was a testament to my hold on Danny that Michael and Alexander hadn’t tried to take out Dev. It was their instinct to protect what they considered vampire property. It generally meant I could go where I wanted and no one messed with me.
To be a human in our world was to be vulnerable. Without protection, most would never survive.
“Oh, my name’s Nathan,” the human, who would probably be dead soon because he hung out with vampires, said. “It’s totally cool. I know they’re vamps and Blake’s a shifter and you’re a companion. I grew up in this world. You’re totally the first companion I’ve ever seen. My brother and sister will never believe me.”
Michael laughed, and it was such a human sound. It was the sound men make when they’re fucking with each other. “You grew up trying to destroy this world, dude.”
“He’s a freaking hunter?” I practically screamed the question. Daniel had brought a teenaged hunter into his gaming group?
“Ex-hunter,” Nathan corrected me. “I just kind of did it ‘cause it was the family business. Then I tried to hunt and kill Daniel here, and he convinced me I should probably take a different career path.”
I bet he had. The poor little boy had probably tried to come after the most powerful vampire the world had seen in millennia with a stake and a clove of garlic. It should have been a bloodbath that ended with little Nathan as a snack. But as Nathan continued his story, I learned that Daniel had chosen to take the idiot out for a pizza.
“That’s when Daniel got me a job at a comic book store,” Nathan concluded his tale. “I like it. It’s way more relaxing than hunting, and I get a twenty percent discount.”
The shifter, who in my experience shouldn’t be here either, pointed at me. “Hey, you look just like that club owner’s girlfriend. Not exactly, of course. She’s way hotter, but you look a lot like her. You know that guy who runs Ether?”
Michael was the only one who looked uncomfortable besides Daniel. The other three men were trying to decide if I was hotter than me.
“I don’t get that guy,” Blake said, shaking his head.
“What don’t you get?” I wanted to know because Dev didn’t seem to have any male friends. He spent all of his time with me or his half-demon butler. “He’s gorgeous, rich and successful. What else do you need?”
Justin shook his head. “I don’t get what women see in him. How much time does he spend getting his hair to do that? I know he looks all cool and shit, but
he’s that guy who all the other guys think is a douche.”
Nathan pointed at Justin and nodded. “I know just the type. I hate that guy.”
I looked at Daniel, who was smiling under his hand but chose not to comment. “Gentlemen, I’m afraid my lovely wife and I have some business to deal with tonight. I’m going to have to call the game.”
As the boys got together their various pieces of equipment and decided on the next time they would meet, I watched Michael and Daniel exchange a look. I think Michael was trying to make sure his friend was okay.
Daniel showed his group to the door, and I walked down the hall to his bedroom. It was such a change from the way it had looked months ago when Daniel had first brought me here. While it wasn’t a wreck, there was a certain messiness that let a person know the space was lived in. And he’d added a bookshelf. I walked around the room picking up his clothes because they would lay there until I decided to do laundry. I couldn’t stand the thought that he was wearing something he’d picked up off the floor and sniffed to make sure it wasn’t too offensive.
I opened the drawer where I kept a change of clothes. Living in the country could be very inconvenient. I loved my house, but I had to spend time in the city, too. It probably would have made more sense if I had left my stuff at Dev’s, but nothing about this made sense. I had a drawer at Daniel’s, and he had the third bedroom at my house. We’d gotten him light-tight drapes, and I planned on putting shutters on the windows. He didn’t stay there most nights, but it was always there for him.
I eased into blue jeans and a dark T-shirt. I didn’t have any sneakers here. I would have to do this in the heels that Daniel hadn’t noticed yet. I opened the closet because Neil kept a few things here as well. Sure enough, I found a stylish blazer that was only a smidge too big for me. It was perfect to fit around the shoulder holster I put on. When wearing an armory, one really has to consider the fit of one’s clothes. Too small and said armory is easily discerned by bulges and wrinkles in the clothes. Too big and you might find yourself wading through layers of fabric to get your gun. If I’d had to wear something of Daniel’s, it would have devoured me.
