A Drop of Red

by Chris Marie Green

  “No,” the lot of them said in the same disappointed tone.

  “From all appearances,” Violet added, “I would venture that you’re only on track to give binge drinking a terrible name, Katie-luv.”

  Then, as one, they all tilted their heads at Kate.

  Fear spiked in her, and that was even before their gazes started to glow.

  Now that Kate thought of it, hadn’t their eyes done the same back at the club when she’d first met them and before she’d dismissed it as a trick of the flashing dance lights?

  Grasping for something to hold—a stair, carpeting—Kate tried to suck in oxygen. But her lungs were too tight.

  She grappled, finally clutching the edge of a step, pulling herself up, but she was too weak, the room spinning too wildly. . . .

  Violet’s voice poked into her consciousness, a hollow, faraway sound.

  But not far enough.

  “So it appears we’ve come to that time of night,” Violet said with a sigh. “Pity you didn’t work out.”

  More adrenaline consumed Kate as she tried to crawl just a centimeter more—

  Then she heard a whoosh from the bottom of the stairs, felt a pair of hands on her as her body left the ground and she was lifted, forced, to the top of the landing, where—

  WHEN Kate next opened her eyes, gradually making her way out of a mental blank, she was slumped on the lower portion of a massive, white-duvet-covered bed, resting peacefully with a swathed Harry at the other end. Paintings, with their bold, dark strokes, loomed from the pale walls, and a heating vent blew air at the sheer drapery ghosting the night-hushed windows.

  She took a moment to regain her bearings, then remembered.

  Jumping to a chandelier . . . fangs . . .

  But now there was only peace. Thank goodness, just peace.

  Pulse smoothing out, Kate thought, Maybe it was only a nightmare.

  Had she got utterly pissed, then blacked out and fallen asleep only to have bad dreams?

  Mortified, baffled, relieved that she wasn’t truly crawling up a staircase or trying to get away from sharp teeth—what had been in those drinks anyway?—Kate moved farther up the mattress, toward the shape huddled under the duvet.

  “Harry?” she asked.

  “Mmmm.” A deep, almost growly sleepy sound.

  His form rose and fell in a rhythm that comforted her. She had never been so happy to see Harry in her life.

  She exhaled, so tired now that she was safe. “You should’ve been in my head earlier. It was Daliesque.”

  Moving even closer to him, she lay down, then put her hand against his rising and falling back.

  His breathing picked up, and she took her hand away. She never meant to get him going, but somehow she always did.

  Hollow, heavy gasps . . . Yet there was also a trace of primal urgency underneath it all.

  Kate turned away, preparing to get out of bed and take him with her. Time to get back to his much-less-impressive—yet far-more-welcoming—flat.

  But that was when she saw it in the front corner of the room.

  It.

  Her mouth opened, but the only thing that came out was a croaking excuse for a scream.

  Drip . . .

  A thick glob of blood fell from the gaped mouth of the dead man impaled through the stomach on what looked to be a spike embedded in the floor. The body’s eyes—Harry’s eyes? Harry’s?—bugged out of their sockets as Kate tried to scream again.

  But just as she had on the stairs, as she had in every childhood nightmare, she couldn’t make a sound.

  The form behind her rolled over in the bed, its weight making the mattress dip and shift.

  That breathing—excited, ragged . . .

  She felt a touch on her back, fingers . . . claws . . . snagging her jumper as the nails dragged downward, lower, lower. Her spine arched away, stabbed by chills.

  Get out of bed, she told herself. Just go, go . . .

  But before she could, a paw swiped her back to the mattress, and the thing behind her loomed over her now.

  Feral eyes—

  Fur—

  Teeth.

  Rows upon rows of white daggers fronted by two prominent fangs and stitched together by saliva as the creature opened its mouth to take the bite it had obviously been waiting for.

  TWO

  THE FEEDiNG

  Nearly One Night Later

  DUSK closed over the Southwark borough of London like a falling gravestone, casting a November pall that Dawn Madison couldn’t lift.

  Maybe it was because a whole year away from the California sunshine had deprived her of verve, she thought while turning away from the window with its parted velvet-curtain view.

  Or maybe she was just feeling the weight of her second vampire Underground hunt bearing down on her.

  After sitting in a Queen Anne chair near her four-poster bed, she flicked a cigarette lighter to flame, held it under a sharp sewing needle. Then, with the tool sterilized, she deftly threaded it and hitched up the skirt of her nightgown so she could unwind the bandage she’d wrapped around her lower thigh.

  Even though she’d already cleaned her gaping cut, she wiped it with an ethanol pad from her kit, clenching her teeth at the sting.

  A girl could never be too careful.

  “You used to at least wince,” Costin said from the shaded corner near the head of the bed, where the creamy, diaphanous draping hid most of him from view. His voice was deep, scraped, hinting at a foreign inflection that betrayed his roots in a dark country while also revealing a centuries-long weariness.

  Dawn smiled tightly, damned if she was going to give in to any pain. “Accidents happen. I didn’t lose much blood because you began healing me pretty quickly. No skin off my back.”

  “No, merely layers of skin off your leg. I’m sorry, Dawn.”

  “Sorry for what? Needing blood to survive?”

  Or sorry she was the reason he was a vampire who, even after a year, was still finding his way?

  He sighed. “Specifically, I’m sorry I was not able to heal this injury as well as I manage to erase a typical bite wound.”

  This—and other recent nips—was deeper than a normal bite. He’d been getting carried away lately.

  “You tried to close the injury up,” she said, “and you came pretty close this time. You even helped me to bring it to a point where I could take care of it myself, but you just need more years on you as a vamp to be a more efficient healer.” She kept sterilizing. “Right now, dealing with something way deeper than a regular bite takes more of your power than your age and inexperience allow. The older you get, the better you’ll be.”

  The minute Dawn stopped talking, she realized that maybe she was sounding too mentorlike.

  Was she acting like the cornered hunter who’d once used Benedikte, the most dominant creature in the Hollywood Underground, to become a vampire, herself? Of course, she’d wielded her new powers to save Costin’s fading existence by turning him into a vampire and, in unwitting return, become his creator. Yet that’s the last thing she wanted to be. His master.

  It didn’t matter that she’d killed Benedikte, her own maker, and that the act had directly restored her humanity. But it’d done nothing for Costin, and she’d promised that she would never come off like she was in charge of him, even if a power trip could make up for all the betrayals he’d put her through for his quest.

  She heard Costin move away from the wall, probably to offer help with what she needed to do next with her injury—a process she’d already perfected.

  “I’ve got it,” she said, working quickly to pinch together the parted flesh of her wound, then slide the needle through the cut’s middle.

  Sh-iiiittt.

  She schooled herself to show no pain.

  Stitch, knot, snip the thread.

  Damn it, damn it. . . .

  Stitch, knot, snip.

  When she finished, she tried not to act as if she’d been holding her breath. But Cost
in wasn’t fooled.

  A shadow slanted over the top half of his face as he lingered at the bedpost, dressed in a silken black shirt and pants, his arms loosely crossed over his chest, as if to counter the long-suffering sorrow in the topaz eyes that burned out of the near-darkness. Where he used to have scars marking his sculpted face, he now had smooth, pale skin, which contrasted with the dark, lustrous hair that fell just past his neck.

  I took away those scars by making him this way, she thought. But I gave him injuries that go so much deeper.

  Her chest constricted, yet she didn’t know what else to do to assure him that she was a big girl, that she could handle another night of making things up to him.

  “Getting excited while you’re feeding is par for the course,” she said casually, hoping it would get them out of this funk. On the wound, she dabbed a smudge of healing wonder gel that a team member had developed once upon a time, then secured a fresh bandage over it. “It happens to all of us.”

  “Yes, all of us.”

  She caught the emphasis on the word “all,” and she knew he was referring to Jonah—the covetous owner of the body Costin had once “rented” so he might carry out his crusade against the Underground vampires. Since Costin was a soul traveler, he had required the aid of a healthy host, but the arrangement had backfired in this bargain with Jonah—the body Dawn had trapped him in when she had made the choice to save him.

  Thing was, Jonah’s consciousness was now enclosed inside this vampiric form, too, suppressed by Costin, but every once in a while, the original owner managed to emerge for a short time before Costin tamed him again.

  But even from inside, Jonah urged Costin’s hunger, more and more.

  “Stop thinking about him.” Dawn eased her nightgown over her bandaged injury, which throbbed with the cadence of a stilted apology. “You’ve managed to keep Jonah at bay for a while. He didn’t crash in on tonight’s feeding.”

  “There are reasons other than Jonah for losing control, Dawn. The sensing I felt last night . . . It’s still enough to stimulate, to make me overly excited.”

  She glanced up to find a fervent glimmer in his gaze. So that’s what had pushed him overboard—the perceptive twinge that assured him an Underground was active somewhere nearby. He wouldn’t have begun to constantly sense this master unless a rival blood brother was running around above the earth in the London area and the other vampire wasn’t bothering to shield his powers, either.

  “Or,” Dawn added hopefully, fishing for more information, “there was that phone message you accessed after waking up?”

  “There was that, as well.”

  “What was it about?”

  He hesitated, still so unused to sharing information with her, even after so much time had passed.

  A whole year after that terrible night.

  Flashes of seeing Costin crumpled on the floor of Benedikte’s quarters, his borrowed body—Jonah’s body—slick with blood, his soul shut away by the strange bargain he’d made with a higher power so Costin might find a state of grace after erasing each and every Underground in existence.

  A soldier with a mission to win back his own soul.

  She stood, going to him. It was as if there was a magnetic pull, a link between a master gone human and her progeny.

  A force neither of them could fight.

  She got so close that heat vibrated between their bodies. Trembles cascaded down her length, melting her under the skin until need pooled low in her belly, pulsing.

  Hungering.

  Always hungering . . .

  She folded her arms over her midsection, as if to contain her constant desire for him. “When I tricked the Master into making me a vampire so I could exchange with you and save you, I really thought it was the only way.”

  “I know.” He touched her hair, which she had worn long and loose tonight, just the way he liked it.

  Leaning into his palm, she felt his preternaturally soft skin hiding a harder layer beneath.

  She closed her eyes. Sometimes it was hard to see Jonah’s face with Costin peering out from behind the facade.

  “It sounds like you’re okay with the way things are,” she said, “but remember, we’ve got Awareness—or whatever it is that can open your mind to mine now. Don’t bother sugarcoating.”

  He drifted his fingers from her hair to her face, to the cheek where she used to have a blazing scar from a fight with the vampire Robby Pennybaker. But becoming a vampire herself, even for a short time, had healed all the outer wounds except for the ones she’d gotten recently.

  Yet the so-called healing had also left behind a stain in her returned soul, a heaviness.

  She almost gave in to the slump of it when Costin used their Awareness to come in to her. He was light, drifting through her head like a brushstroke of bright color.

  The old Dawn would’ve closed him off, just for the sake of defending what remained of herself, so she fought the instinct.

  As he continued easing into her—now a shimmer, now an invisible spark—her muscles went liquid. Yet this wasn’t anything like the times in L.A. when he’d entered her for sexual gratification, when he’d fed and rooted off of her very humanity. The welcome invasion wasn’t as carnal now. It was . . .

  What? More intimate?

  It couldn’t be. She wasn’t built for intimacy, and she’d spent a long time proving it to herself.

  As he went deeper, her heartbeat escalated, pushing at her from the inside out.

  “Are you still hungry?” she asked. “You didn’t get much blood earlier.”

  Usually when he bit her, he took only a little, just enough to satisfy. Then he’d move on to one of the blood bags he quietly secured from a blood-bank contact.

  But Dawn’s own blood did something for him that the others didn’t—he liked the taste, the immediacy.

  Maybe even the intimacy.

  His fingers skimmed to her eyebrow, where she’d once proudly worn a scar from a stunt gag. A badge from what seemed like another lifetime.

  “You are generous for a woman who had to fend off a starving creature less than a half hour ago,” he said.

  “I know that you won’t always have to feed so regularly. It’s just another thing we’ll have to trip through.”

  He trailed his fingers down to her lips, and she automatically reached up to place her hand over the back of his.

  Cool skin, she thought, knowing how she could heat it up. Desperate to do it.

  An ache drilled between her legs. His appetite was her appetite.

  “I say we try again,” Dawn murmured against his fingertips.

  He started to draw his hand away, but she grabbed his wrist, keeping him where she wanted him.

  With every hammering beat of her pulse, memory stamped her, formed from the moment she’d felt him awaken beside her in bed tonight.

  As she had slowly stretched to consciousness, he’d checked messages on a cell phone registered to Jonah. Afterward, more excited than usual, he’d kissed her neck, then gone lower, over her chest, dragging up her nightgown along the way. His fangs hadn’t emerged yet, so she’d helped him rev up by squirming under his mouth as he’d tasted the skin of her stomach, her belly, then the slickness of her sex.

  Shuddering, she’d encouraged him by parting her legs, her heartbeat thudding so loudly that it had blocked—or maybe welcomed—the danger of having him in such a vulnerable place.

  Normally she was good about guiding him to slow satiation, but tonight, he’d gotten more quickly stimulated than usual.

  The phone message, she’d thought. It had to have played a part. . . .

  Before she’d been ready, he’d reared back his head, revealing fangs fully primed and aimed at her femoral artery.

  But it was the silver fierceness in his eyes that had warned her to dodge out from under him, leaving her with a deep gouge from his fang on her lower thigh.

  She hadn’t recognized this level of wildness in him before, even though they’d
both been concerned about his appetite getting to this point. That’s why they kept a crucifix under the bed, among other easy-access places around the room. As a newer vampire who was slightly more powerful than one of the lower Groupies from the Hollywood Underground, Costin had found through controlled experimentation that he was susceptible to a holy-item stunning, and it had put the kibosh on this particular feeding.

  Now she whispered against his fingers. “Just take a drink. I’ll be okay.”

  His body tensed, resisting like he always did. “What if—”

  “We’ll deal. But we’ve got too much to do for you to be at low power. Those twinges you had last night are stronger than ever now that we’ve narrowed down a London location. And heck knows that Kiko’s visions—when he gets them—haven’t panned out lately.”

  Even though the process of isolating this new Underground was taking forever, she knew that a search usually lasted much longer for Costin. After he’d gotten his first twinge for this Underground—this master must’ve been visiting the U.S., outside his regular area—they had followed the vibes eastward, combing their way from L.A. to the Midwest to New York to Ireland, Scotland, and finally, south to London. Now that they had homed in on this city, the vibes were more solid than he’d experienced with many other Undergrounds. It made them wonder if this one might be relatively careless.

  Or if this community might be even stronger than the others.

  “You’re sick of waiting, are you?” he asked. “You’re eager for a fight?”

  She grabbed his shirt, bringing him closer to her as she leaned back against the bedpost. Its baroque etchings dug into her back, but she couldn’t have cared less—not with his heady presence searing into her.

  His mouth was a breath away from hers, and when she spoke, the moist heat of her deflected words made her lips tingle.

  “I’m on pins and needles to get this started,” she said, raising her mouth so that her lower lip touched his.

  She rubbed it against his mouth as his eyes misted with a hint of the silver he’d inherited from her—from the Hollywood line of vampires.