The Vampire's Kiss

by Raven Hart

  “I think they’re all in love with you. 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.”

  “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. It’s really funny.”

  I gritted my fangs. Herding whores. This is what I had come to. Oh yes, I was going to look really tough to the other badasses in this city when they started challenging me for dominance over the territory hereabouts 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, that was. 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.

  Also, as a fledgling without William’s protection, she was vulnerable to all kinds of predatory vamps. There was no telling what Hugo had promised her to make her 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 lying 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 girls, 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 her 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 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 decor 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 said.

  She smiled a little before her girlish face broke out in a sad look. Werm took the sample book from her. “Listen,” he said, “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. I’d figured she was just stressed out by losing so many of her belongings in the fire as well as 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. You’d think that after a hundred and fifty years I’d recollect I was damned. “I promise.”

  “She’s on crystal meth,” Ginger said.

  “Oh, geez,” Werm said. “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, 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 Spencer’s at the mall was a tweaker,” he said. “He was messed up.”

  “Ginger, are you absolutely sure that Sally is smoking ice?” 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.”

  “What else?” I asked.

  “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.”

  Werm asked, “Could he be a pusher or something, or maybe a john who’s obsessed with her? What does he look like?”

  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 could really get off on draining anybody who would sell that poison to people, especially to an innocent like Sally.

  It seemed strange to think of a prostitute as innocent, but there was something naive and vulnerable about her that had 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 had 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 that they knew was a bad batch but were too stingy to throw out. Killing your customers is bad for business any day of the week, but I was particularly sore about it that time because I gave that jug of rotgut to those old boys whose lives it took.

  I sat down to drink and play cards with them 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” excuse, 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 granddaddy 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, left them to go over their wallpaper samples, and went out into the frosty night. I’d known this night was coming since the day William left for Europe. I was going to have to take on the monsters who lived in the dark places in and around this city to prove I was large and in charge.

  It was time to kick some werewolf ass.

  Two

  William

  Did I say that two women had betrayed me?

  Make that three.

  I looked up at the lights in the windows of Olivia’s town house as the freezing mist swirled around me like a damp velvet cloak. The Georgian terrace-style home on Bedford Row had four stories aboveground, plus a basement. Plenty of room for my hand-selected leader of the European Bonaventures and her merry band of vampires to live in comfort. One big happy family.

  We vampires who had chosen to fight the old lords rather than go along with their plans for world domination called ourselves Bonaventures. We’d been convening in Savannah when the plague leading to Renee’s kidnapping had disrupted our planning session.

  This area of Bloomsbury, north of the City of London, was home between the great wars to scholars, artists, and writers like Virginia Woolf. It now had an air of faded gentility. I took a quick glance over my shoulder, but as it was not a fit night out for man nor beast, as the gothic stories go, nobody was there to see me leap the wrought-iron fence.

  Once on the other side, I paused to admire the house. It would be a shame to have to torch it like the one in Russia, but it would give me almost as much pleasure. Olivia had discovered that my Diana was a blood drinker—but she had chosen to keep that fact from me and even worse, coerced Jack to keep her secret. Because of that choice I was blindsided by Diana’s arrival in Savannah and unprepared for the disastrous events that followed.

  I reached the front door and lifted the large brass knocker. But I stopped, deciding that I should give Olivia the same warning of my arrival that I’d had of Diana’s.

  I grasped the door knob and twisted. When it came off in my hand, I cast it aside along with the remaining hardware from the hole it had left in the door. Then I wrenched the door open, splintering the wood away from the series of dead bolt and chain locks that had been attached to it a moment before.

  Inside the entrance hall a staircase led up to a landing where a number of pale faces appeared from behind separate doorways.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” I bellowed.

  A dark-haired female vampire in emerald green satin came out onto the landing. From behind her stepped Olivia in a flowing white silk gown. “Everyone, this is William Cuyler Thorne. He and I have a lot to talk about. Go back inside your rooms. I’ll introduce you another time.”

  Olivia started down the staircase slowly. I could smell her fear of me. Two vampires, ignoring her orders, followed along behind her—the dark-haired female and a male of average height and build with reddish brown hair and beard and vivid blue eyes that spoke of Celtic ancestry.

  When Olivia reached the entryway, she raised her arms as if to embrace me, but the look in my eyes made her think better of it. “William, I’m so sorry about Renee,” she said.

  “Jack called you,” I stated. Of course he had. Jack would do that—keep everyone informed and on the same page, as he would put it.

  No matter. I didn’t care if Olivia was prepared for my arrival. If she had been expecting me, she had clearly not thought out what she would say in her defense. Her gunmetal gray eyes betrayed her indecision and dread.

  Olivia’s platinum hair and alabaster skin against the backdrop of the sheer white gown gave her an ethereal, ghostly appearance. She looked positively delicate now, much different than the first time I met her. Then she was dressed from head to toe in black leather, playing the young tough. I wondered what a vivid slash of red would look like across that lily-white throat.

  “William, I can explain—”

  In one lightning-fast motion, I ripped a wooden spindle from the staircase and pressed the jagged end to Olivia’s chest. A circle of red began to stain the pristine whiteness of the gossamer gown where the sharp point of the wooden shard pierced her flesh.

  “No!” screamed the woman standing on the last step of the staircase. She lurched forward but was caught from behind by the male vampire, who held fast to her.

  “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you,” I rasped, pressing my face close to Olivia’s and extending my fangs to full length.

  “I can give you many,” Olivia said.

  “Come now, mate,” the man said in a forced, jolly tone. His accent held a touch of Aussie twang. “Let’s talk about this, shall we?”

  I ignored him and pressed the stake harder into Olivia’s flesh. The force of my anger raised me off the floor so that I hovered above her, my fangs inches from her face. “Do you know what it’s like to be confronted with the fact that the love of your five-hundred-year existence, whom you thought dead and buried, is a vampire? Imagine, if you will, my horror as I stood on my own dock and saw my long-lost wife and son—blood drinkers both—in the clutches of one of the most vile creatures I have met in my long life.

  “Imagine the shock, the total horror of being unprepared for such a sight, even though the two most trusted of your own bloodline could have warned you in advance. Could have spared you.”

  “I was afraid, William,” Olivia said. “Afraid for you. If I had told you Diana was alive, I knew that you would move hell and earth to go to her. Even if it meant you would be walking into a situation where you would have been vastly outnumbered. I thought if I waited until we knew more about Hugo and how to fight him together, then you would have a better chance of survival.”

  “That’s amusing. I just walked into that very situation in the wilds of Russia and I slew a dozen or more vampires single-handedly. Vampires who had surely been forewarned by their leader, Hugo. And still they could not stop me from spilling their blood and burning them to crisps.”

  Olivia’s eyes widened and I heard the other two vampires gasp. All three of them reeked with fear of me. As well they should.

  “I had just lost Alger!” Olivia said with a hitching breath. “In the few short days I spent with you, you had become my new father. I couldn’t lose you, too, not so soon after I had lost my sire.” One pink-tinged tear escaped the corner of her eye. “I love you, William. I love you like I loved my Alger.”

  She loved me. I was suddenly overcome with a staggering weariness. The events of the last few days—Renee’s kidnapping, Melaphia’s hysteria, my betrayal by Diana and Eleanor, my slaughter of the Russian clan—hit me with the force of a cannonball to the gut. My feet touched the ground and I sagged against an antique grandfather clock.

  Olivia came to my aide, supporting me. I would allow her to believe that her profession of love brought me back to my senses. I would let her believe that I was such a fool for the love of my fellow blood drinkers. After all the betrayals, among my own kind it was only the affection of my offspring Jack that I valued. For reasons I would never understand, I prized his lingering humanity. But for the present I needed Olivia and her coven to help me rescue Renee, so I couldn’t afford to indulge myself by punishing her, even though I longed to. As Jack would say, I needed to get it together.

  I let the improvised stake drop to the oriental rug and Olivia collapsed against me with a sob, throwing her arms around my neck. She clasped herself to me as if I’d just saved her from a horrible fate, instead of almost killing her myself.

  “William, I am so sorry. Please, please forgive me. I will never keep secrets from you again. I swear it on my existence as a blood drinker, on the memory of Algernon.”

  My vision no longer swam with the bloodred haze of my bad intent. Yet I couldn’t quite muster the goodwill to tell Olivia that I forgave her. Because I didn’t.

  But I put my arms around her and hugged her back as if I did.

  They seated me in the par
lor and Olivia went upstairs to change out of the bloody gown while the other woman went into the kitchen to make tea. When the women were gone, the man introduced himself. “I’m Donovan Baird,” he said. “I’m what you’d call Olivia’s right-hand man.”

  I shook his proffered hand and he continued, “Since Jack called, we’ve been making inquiries.”

  “Inquiries?”

  “Into the whereabouts of Hugo’s gang,” he explained. “Our spies on the Continent told us they didn’t go back to Russia. If you’d contacted us we could have saved you the trip there.” He looked away nervously. He was diplomatic enough not to say outright that I had done anything wrong in not informing their coven of my plans. He was a wise man.

  “What else do your spies tell you?”

  “That they’re here in London. But I guess you know that already or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Do you know where they are?”

  Olivia appeared then, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. The other vampires I had glimpsed earlier followed behind their mistress. They entered the parlor quietly, filled the seats on the far side of the room, sat cross-legged on the floor, or stood in the shadows. As far from me as they could get.

  Olivia answered my question. “We think so. Tonight we were going to have a session to plan strategy for approaching them. But first we need to surveil them. See how many are in their party. Observe their comings and goings.”

  “You’ll leave that to me,” I said.

  “Of course. Anything you say,” Olivia demurred.

  The dark-haired one returned from the kitchen with tea and blood on a tray. She left the others to serve me and went to Olivia, putting her arms around her and laying her hand gently on Olivia’s chest where the wound from the stake was healing already.

  Olivia introduced the others while I drank to rehydrate myself. The dark-haired one’s name was Bree. I scanned the room looking from one blood drinker to the next. “How fares the one you sent to spy on Hugo, the one who was so gravely injured by his clan?”