Pamela Palmer - [Vamp City 02]

by A Kiss of Blood

  Within the hour, she’d be leaving everything she owned behind. Again. But she felt no slam of grief. Barely even a twinge of regret. She liked her job well enough, but it had never been her life. Her friends she’d let slip away as the evidence of her “weirdness,” her magic, had begun to mount. And none of those friends had ever been more than casual acquaintances. Zack was the only family she had. At least he was the only one who mattered. And he was going with her.

  There were things she’d miss, of course. Sunlight. Starbucks. Her cell phone. But otherwise, she would leave little behind of consequence.

  The front door opened and Micah slipped inside. “We’re good,” he said, as if it had been a foregone conclusion. And it probably had.

  “Are you going with us?” she asked.

  “I am.”

  That pleased her, probably because she was still inclined to think of him as her wine-and-dessert buddy rather than Arturo’s vampire spy. Which was a mistake.

  Micah glanced at Arturo, a question in his eyes that had her spidey sense flaring to life. Especially when Arturo nodded.

  “What?” she demanded.

  Arturo was the one who explained. “Micah has an ability to glamour others for short periods of time. A day or two at most.”

  Micah grunted. “Only a few hours today, I’m afraid. I haven’t fed for a while.”

  Quinn frowned, ignoring the feeding comment. “What do you mean ‘glamour’?”

  Micah’s expression gentled. “I’ll essentially place a mask over you, giving you the face of another woman except for your eyes, which cannot be changed. It won’t hurt. You’ll barely feel it, in fact. But no one will recognize you until the glamour wears off.”

  “So if we’re stopped, no one will know me even if they’ve seen me before.”

  “Precisely.”

  Arturo grunted. “Unless you lose control of your magic.”

  Zack leaned forward on the sofa. “This I’ve got to see.”

  Quinn glanced at her brother, then crossed her arms over her chest. The glamour would be an excellent defense if they came upon Cristoff’s men, which they could easily do. But she just didn’t know how much she could trust Micah despite her admittedly biased instincts that, vampire or not, he really was her friend. She hated not knowing. And hated the fact that if she was going to work with them to get the magic renewed without Cristoff’s knowing, she was going to have to trust them, at least to some extent.

  Micah stood before her, studying her. “Your blond hair is too striking, I think. Your features too even, too attractive.”

  Arturo made a sound like that of a jealous male. As if he had any right. But Micah ignored him. Instead, he lifted his hands, touching her cheeks with cool fingertips. She wondered if his vampire coolness was the reason he’d never touched her or made a single move on her when she thought he was Mike. Would she have realized what he was if she’d felt how cool his skin was? She’d like to think so, but she just didn’t know.

  As he stroked her cheeks with the pads of his thumbs, he watched her with kind eyes. Mike’s eyes.

  Her gaze fell to his cheek. “That scar didn’t come from a sliding glass door, did it?”

  “No. It was a gift from the Gauls who slaughtered my family and enslaved me when I was twelve.”

  The Gauls. She stared at him, feeling bludgeoned all over again by the reality of who he was. He might have Mike’s eyes, but this male was a centuries-old vampire. And she’d do well to remember that.

  Slowly, his eyes closed. Cool hands splayed across her cheeks, barely touching her, and suddenly her flesh began to tingle. The feeling spread into her scalp and down her neck, into her body, a sensation that felt odd but not particularly unpleasant.

  “Fuck,” Zack breathed.

  Micah pulled his hands back, the tingling dying away as he opened his eyes and began to smile.

  Quinn turned to where Zack stared at her wide-eyed.

  “You don’t look like you. You look . . . weird, sis.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  Arturo, watching her intently as he did so often, gave a satisfied nod.

  The suspense was killing her, so she found Micah’s bathroom, flipped on the light, and stared at the brown-haired stranger in the mirror. She was no beauty, though she hardly considered herself a beauty in her true form. The woman staring back at her looked, as Zack had said, a little weird. Her features were off. Too small, too close together. The only things that hadn’t changed were her eyes.

  She felt Arturo’s presence a moment before he stepped behind her. “Micah made your features just unbalanced enough to make the eye draw away, which is precisely what we want.”

  “This is all a game to you, isn’t it?”

  His gaze met hers in the mirror. “It has never been a game with you, tesoro. You confound me. You have, in a matter of weeks, upended my well-ordered life.”

  Quinn snorted. “I’ve upended your life?”

  Humor leaped into his eyes, a smile lifting the corners of his mouth. “Touché.”

  His scent, one that had always reminded her of almond liqueur, wafted over her again, reminding her of heat and passion, of strong arms and desire beyond bearing. But that was another time. And she was another woman. One who, please God, was no longer fully dependent upon him for survival. In either world.

  “Explain something to me,” she said, meeting his gaze in the mirror. “Why did you free me when doing so put you in such a dangerous position with Cristoff?”

  His mouth tightened, then twisted. “I could not bear to see you in pain. I did not think past that.” His hands rose to cup her shoulders, his long fingers cool against the skin bared by her tank top. But as he started to pull her back against him, she pulled away, shrugging him off.

  “Cara . . .”

  She whirled on him. “Don’t, Vampire. Just . . . don’t. Don’t cara me. Don’t try to pretend you have feelings for me. Over and over you’ve warned me not to trust you, and I’ve finally listened. I’ll work with you to renew Vamp City and to save my brother, but that’s all. We’re not friends anymore. And we’re not going to be lovers again.”

  She turned away, and he stopped her with a hand on her arm.

  “You are wise to doubt me, tesoro. I have given you little reason to do otherwise. But I will win your trust. I will do whatever I must to keep you safe. You will see.”

  She met that intense gaze, then turned and left the bathroom without replying. What was there to say?

  Arturo followed her back to the living room, where Zack sat, looking far too sick.

  Micah stood. “It’s time to go. I’ll get the Jeep.”

  Arturo tossed Micah the keys, and her onetime neighbor left the apartment, vampire-fast. Zack rose slowly and Quinn joined him as they started for the door, Arturo close behind. Quinn stepped into the hallway, eyeing her closed apartment door, and wondered if she’d ever come back here.

  It would take a miracle to get them all out of Vamp City alive.

  But she’d never been one to give up. And she wasn’t about to start now.

  Chapter Four

  Quinn sat rigid in her seat in the back of the Jeep Wrangler as she prepared for yet another return to Hell. Zack sat beside her, asleep against the window. Arturo drove with the top up to hide his passengers as much as possible while Micah rode shotgun as the vehicle sped through the D.C. streets toward the Kennedy Center and the Boundary Circle that separated the real D.C. from Vamp City.

  The scientist in her began to frown as she tried to understand how the two cities occupied the same physical space. Magic, she knew. But still . . .

  She glanced at Arturo. “If you’re outside the Boundary Circle, say crossing into the District from Virginia, how do you choose whether to drive into Vamp City or remain in D.C.? Clearly, the magic doesn’t automatically pull you into V.C., or you couldn’t have reached my apartment.” Or anyplace within the space occupied by both.

  Micah was the one who answered. “At the
moment that we hit the Boundary Circle, the magic tries to embrace us. We can either push it away and remain in D.C. or allow it to pull us into Vamp City. There are some vamps who can’t push it away, they haven’t the ability, and are therefore always pulled in. They can only travel the parts of D.C. where the two worlds don’t overlap. Humans and weres can’t embrace the magic, so can never enter V.C. without an escort, except for those handful of humans who’ve been slipping in by accident through the sunbeams, and we have no idea why that’s happening. Traders can come and go as vampires can. Or as vampires could before the magic began to fail. They alone are not trapped by the failing magic.”

  Quinn’s mind still struggled to wrap itself around the concept. “So how does that work for a car?”

  Micah smiled. “You ask difficult questions, Quinn.”

  “I’m a scientist.”

  “Perhaps you need to think more like a sorceress. Magic is a far more potent force in Vamp City than science.”

  As they reached the Kennedy Center, Quinn could see the Shimmers like a faint wall of water vapor sparkling in the moonlight across the grounds. She’d seen them all her life, nearly invisible walls in various parts of D.C. that were always in the same spots, never moving, never wavering. It wasn’t until recently that she’d realized what they were—the boundary of Vamp City. A boundary no other human, to her knowledge, could see.

  The sight of it now made her pulse kick, sending a shiver of cold skating over her skin even as a flush of heat dampened the back of her neck. Because they were going in.

  Arturo pulled into the Kennedy Center drive as if he were heading for the parking garage, a drive cut straight across by the Shimmer. As they neared it, she tensed. As they passed through it, the hair rose on her arms, the air prickling her skin in a cool, ticklish dance. But they were still in the real world, the Kennedy Center looming large beside her.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Beside her, Zack moaned as he had every time he’d passed through a Shimmer since their escape a week and a half ago, which was another reason she suspected the magic of Vamp City was at least partially at fault for his illness.

  “Nothing,” Arturo said, making a tight U-turn in the middle of the drive, and suddenly she understood. Her apartment was within the V.C. boundary. To enter Vamp City, they first had to leave it. Which they’d just done.

  Now, they were going in.

  Turning off his headlights, Arturo accelerated as he drove back toward the waiting Shimmer. As they hit it, the hair rose on Quinn’s arms a second time, and darkness swallowed her, the true dark of a night world without electricity. A shiver went through her that had a little to do with the air flowing in from the open front windows, air that turned instantly cooler by a good ten degrees, and far more to do with the primal fear of being back in Vamp City.

  This time, Zack’s moan sounded less like pain and more like one of relief, as if the magic had finally quit strangling him. She prayed it was true.

  The Jeep began to pitch and bounce over uneven ground, leaving the paved streets for an open, rutted field in the vampires’ 1870 version of her world. Thank goodness vampires had excellent night vision. Without headlights, she could see nothing but the dim glow of the vehicle’s instrument panel and its reflected light on Arturo’s profile. His jaw was set, tension radiating down his arms and shoulders. A tension her own body echoed though she hoped his meant he was worried about what would happen if they were caught and not that he was bracing for her reaction when she learned what he really had in mind.

  She’d kill him if he betrayed her again, especially with Zack at risk, now, too. “Who does Cristoff think took me?” she asked, needing the sound of voices to drown out the pulsing silence.

  “Ivan and his men,” Arturo replied.

  “The ones who tried to stop us from leaving?”

  “Yes.”

  As they’d ridden for the Boundary Circle the day Arturo and Kassius set them free, one of Cristoff’s more vicious guards and his troop had ridden upon them, recognized her, and realized Arturo was trying to free the sorceress. A battle had ensued. Ivan and his troop were dead.

  “Cristoff believes Ivan took you and escaped Vamp City.”

  “And the rest of his troop?”

  “He thinks that they either defected or, like Ivan, were not actually trapped by the magic. It has long been suspected that some who claim to be trapped here are not.”

  As her eyes adjusted to the dark, the ghostly, twisted shapes of dead trees began to appear, silhouetted against the moonlit night sky. Even as a thrill of dread crawled along her scalp, she admitted to herself a dark fascination with this night world. She’d always loved the dark. As a child it had been the only place she’d ever truly been able to hide from the stepmother who’d hated her.

  “So how many vampires aren’t trapped? How many of you are there in the real world?”

  Micah glanced back. “Before the magic began to fail, there were over three dozen of us that I knew of in D.C. alone, about half tied to the kovenas within V.C. Nearly a dozen of them got caught on the wrong side of the Boundary Circle when the magic began to fail, trapping them inside. They’d come in for the Kovena Cup, our annual vampire soccer match. Halfway through the semifinal game, the first sunbeam broke through just outside the coliseum. Several vampires died, and no one who was in Vamp City at that moment has been able to leave since. The magic’s failing was like a switch being flipped. The same switch Phineas Blackstone flipped in the 1870s when he attempted to make Vamp City a death trap.”

  She’d heard what had happened next back then, that Cristoff had cut off two of Phineas’s young son’s fingers before persuading the sorcerer to renew the magic and disable his death trap. And once he had, Cristoff killed the sorcerer. Vamp City had remained intact ever since. Until two years ago. Who or what had flipped the switch this time, no one knew. At least, that’s what she’d been told.

  “What were you two doing that night?” she asked the vampires, since they obviously hadn’t been at the Kovena Cup.

  “Destroying a Ripper nest in Adams Morgan.”

  Ahead, she could make out the silhouettes of decrepit houses and row houses. Not until they passed the crumbling corpse of the White House would they start to see signs of habitation. With a lurch, the Jeep flew over a low embankment and onto the packed dirt that passed for roads in this place, as they had in the real D.C. of 1870.

  “Are there a lot of Rippers in the area?”

  “More now than there used to be,” Micah told her. “With so many Emoras trapped within V.C., there are fewer to hunt them.”

  “Is it your job to hunt them?”

  “It is, and I take it seriously. Rippers are vicious, without conscience.”

  The Rippers, she’d learned, were a different race of vampire, one who fed exclusively on blood, whereas the Emoras, the more prominent race, fed on both blood and emotion. They claimed the Emoras were the more humane of the two races.

  Quinn scoffed. “You just described most of the Emoras I’ve met. If the Rippers are worse, God help us all.”

  Micah glanced at Arturo, then looked back at her. “You’re right, Quinn. Many of the Emoras of Vamp City have become every bit as bad as the Rippers, but they didn’t used to be. Most of the nearly five hundred vampires that first moved into Vamp City continued to hunt in the human world as they always had—fear feeders scaring their victims as they fed on them, then wiping their minds and sending them on their way. The pain feeders haunting the hospitals, the old folks’ homes, and the neighborhoods, feeding simply by standing outside the bedroom window of a human in childbirth or in pain from disease or injury. And the pleasure feeders . . .” He smiled. “Throughout the ages, the brothels have been our favorite places to feed and hunt.”

  So Micah was a pleasure feeder. She’d wondered. “So why did they change?”

  “We’re not sure, not entirely. And as with most things, the answer is complicated. We’d always had to rema
in under the human radar, and suddenly didn’t. A number of the vampires brought in their human companions. And when those humans began to turn immortal, recruiting more humans to serve us became a simple matter of offering immortality. They came willingly and happily. For a time.”

  They passed the White House, its abandoned, crumbling appearance the symbol of everything wrong in this place, but Quinn only glanced at it this time, far more interested in Micah’s story.

  “Most vampires continued to leave Vamp City at night to feed in the old ways. The coliseum was originally built for vampire sports, not gladiator battle. We held rugby and football matches, among other things. And, if you can believe it, we enjoyed the arts. One night an entire theater company was enthralled and brought in to perform a play, then returned to their beds without any of them the wiser.”

  Quinn shook her head, knowing her face was a mask of disbelief. “What happened?”

  “Some would tell you we got bored and slowly reverted to our natural inclinations, free of human retribution.” Micah glanced at Arturo. “Those of us who’ve remained outside, who live in the real world, disagree. We’ve watched the changes in those we’ve known for centuries. The magic of Vamp City has had a corrupting effect on many of those who live within its borders, disintegrating souls and consciences.”

  “My conscience is just fine,” Arturo muttered.

  Quinn snorted. Right.

  “You still have one, Ax. Which, considering what’s happened to most in Vamp City, is saying something. Your conscience was always strong. Even so, you’ve not been unaffected. Not by a long shot.”

  Arturo lapsed into a brooding silence.

  Quinn turned to watch out the window as a horse and wagon passed them on the wide dirt road, driven by a male dressed in Civil War garb. A vampire, no doubt. In the back of the wagon sat three people dressed in modern clothing. New captives? It was hard to tell in the dark, but their hair appeared to lack the phosphorescent glow of Slavas—humans who’d turned immortal, as all humans apparently did in this place if they survived their first couple of years.