Dark Blood

by James M. Thompson

  JUST ONE DRINK . . .

  He looked at her with fear in his eyes. “Will it be very painful?” he asked.

  She smiled and shook her head. “No. I’m going to use some psychic commands to make you relax.”

  He gave a weak grin. “Like mental Xanax?”

  “Why don’t you take off your shirt and lie on the bed?” she said.

  He lay back and closed his eyes. She stood next to the bed and concentrated, commanding him to relax and feel no fear.

  His face became soft and peaceful, and he smiled slightly. “Um, this is nice,” he mumbled. “Kinda like the gas the dentist gives.”

  She eased down on the bed next to him and turned his face away slightly so she could get to his neck. She felt herself begin to change as she lowered her face and gently bared her growing fangs.

  When she bit into the skin over his jugular vein, he moaned softly and stiffened slightly, then he went limp as her mental commands caused him to relax once again.

  As his warm, salty blood flowed into her mouth, she drank, feeling her face coarsen and begin to coalesce into her Vampyre persona.

  Within minutes, her skin began to feel hot, then it burned and itched under the influence of the hormones that the feeding released into her bloodstream. Her breasts swelled and her nipples became hard. Her arms went around his shoulders and she pulled his neck tighter against her mouth. She felt him become hard as he pushed his pelvis against hers, his eyes blank and staring as he panted in desire....

  DARK BLOOD

  James M. Thompson

  LYRICAL UNDERGROUND

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  JUST ONE DRINK . . .

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Teaser chapter

  LYRICAL UNDERGROUND books are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2002 by James M. Thompson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the Publisher and neither the Author nor the Publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Lyrical Underground and the L logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  First Electronic Edition: February 2017

  ISBN: 978-1-5161-0407-9

  First Print Edition: February 2017

  ISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0412-3

  ISBN-10: 1-5161-0412-9

  This book is dedicated to Terri and the “boys”—

  Brock, Brent, Travis, Donovan, Darren, and Hunter.

  They make it all worthwhile.

  One

  The body drifted deeper into the inky black waters of the Houston Ship Channel, arms and legs moving slowly in the sluggish current as if in a macabre underwater dance of death. Lights from searching ships passed close but never touched it as the grotesque shape settled slowly into the foul chemical-tainted mud of the channel’s floor.

  The skin and tissues on the edges of the nearly severed neck, pushed together by the body’s position on the channel floor, slowly began to knit together. Microscopic cells, under the direction of the DNA-controlling plasmids coursing through the blood, began to migrate and reattach themselves while capillaries and blood vessels reformed and established new blood paths to supply the new tissue with life-giving sustenance.

  As blood flowed into the brain, which had shut down under the onslaught of dozens of 9mm bullets, neural cells began to fire and discharge. Murky thoughts were generated, bringing to consciousness memories of the preceding few hours.

  Elijah Pike, born in the early 1800s, began to wake. Flashes of barely remembered scenes flickered into being, like images from an old kinescope film being played back.

  Pike dimly remembered a group of men, dressed in black SWAT-team uniforms, daring to invade his lair in the dead of night, drifting through the full moon’s shadows like ghosts as they boarded his ship.

  His body jerked under the water at the recalled fury of this invasion, and his teeth gritted and gnashed at images of him slashing the interlopers with his claws and fangs, killing them and flinging their lifeless bodies aside like empty husks.

  Dank water caressed his bloodless lips; they curled in a grin of satisfaction at the memory of the black man who was their leader and how his face contorted in agony and surprise when Pike ran him through with his katana, the Japanese long sword he’d had for over a hundred years.

  Pike remembered standing over the last of the invaders, his blade pointed down at the man’s heart, when he heard the voice of a friend scream, “No-o-o!”

  As he slowly drifted toward the surface of the frigid water, Pike recalled hesitating and glancing at his friend and colleague, Matt Carter, who was walking through the rain toward him, arms outstretched.

  “Roger, how much is your life worth?” Matt had shouted. “Just how much carnage can you endure just to go on living?”

  Pike had lowered his sword and turned to lean on the rail of his ship, wondering the same thing. How much would I give to let go, let them kill me, and perhaps become human again, even if only in death? he’d thought.

  The last thing he remembered was the sound of an automatic weapon as streams of bullets stitched across his back and neck, almost severing his head from his body before he tumbled over the rail and into the ship channel.

  Pike came fully awake in the water, his body screaming for oxygen, his arms flailing and his legs kicking to drive him upward. As his face broke the surface, he gasped and grabbed a stanchion on the pier. Unmindful of the razor-sharp barnacles piercing his arms, he hung there in the water, rain still coursing down from darkened skies as he let his body finish its healing.

  He floated, swaying on the current, immobile for four hours until the process was complete. The rain was lessening and the ships that had been searching for his body had long since given up and gone back to shore.

  Elijah Pike, now fully alive, grabbed hold of the rotting, barnacle-encrusted timbers on the wharf and laboriously climbed to the top of the dock. The creature recalled that he was known as Roger Niemann, doctor of medicine, and was a member of the Vampyre race. He rolled onto his back on the damp concrete, coughed and choked as he inhaled dank,
sulfurous air drifting inland from over the channel, and wondered not for the first time in his two hundred years if he should be glad to still be alive.

  Niemann slowly looked around, checking to see if the area was clear of the numerous policemen who’d tried to kill him scant hours before.

  The area seemed completely deserted, so, with a grunt of exertion and pain, Niemann rolled over onto his hands and knees, his head hanging down, still too fatigued from his ordeal to get to his feet.

  He gingerly felt the still-ragged edges of his neck wound, his mind filled once again with wonder at the recuperative abilities of his Vampyre body.

  After he caught his breath, still unable to stand, he scrabbled on hands and knees across the wharf until he was in the shadows of the warehouses across the street.

  Keeping his back to the wall, ever watchful for guards or policemen who might have remained on the scene, he moved toward his own warehouse fifty yards away.

  As he inched his way through the darkness, he glanced back across the street. His converted freighter, the Night Runner, was still moored there, seemingly deserted, festooned with yellow crime-scene tape as if decorated for some obscene celebration.

  When he got to the door of his warehouse, he found it heavily bolted and chained, with more of the yellow tape stretched across it. Thankfully, the police must have thought him dead, for there was no guard left to prevent his access.

  Grunting, he grabbed the padlock in his right hand and twisted. The tortured metal screamed as it parted under the force of his grip, and he sucked in his breath, worried the sound might bring unwanted visitors to his former lair.

  The night remained silent except for the throaty gurgle of the ship channel, the creaking and groaning of his nearby ship as it shifted slightly on the current, and the mournful cry of a distant foghorn.

  Niemann opened the door and slipped inside, his eyes seeing clearly in the almost total darkness of what had once been his only refuge.

  He moved silently down the corridor, stopping once to look at the chalked outlines of the bodies he’d left behind during the final assault on his domain by the police.

  He felt a momentary disgust at what he’d done, but it soon passed as he did a quick inventory and found that most of his precious possessions, acquired over two centuries of living as a Vampyre, remained untouched.

  Weak from his rejuvenation, he needed to feed, but there was no time. Moving as quickly as he could manage, he gathered as many of his things as he could and began to move them across the street onto his ship.

  Dawn was only a couple of hours away and he planned to be at sea before the sun came up. He needed to put as much distance as he could between Houston and himself before the authorities discovered that his ship and possessions were gone.

  He chuckled to himself as he carried another load up the gangplank. “The fools will never believe I survived,” he whispered aloud, a habit he’d acquired after many years of solitary existence. “They’ll just put it down to common thievery along the docks, a not unusual occurrence in this area of high crime.”

  Soon he had everything he needed, including his hoard of gold and jewels and cash he would need to set up a new life somewhere else, where the Normals still didn’t believe in the existence of his race.

  After disengaging the Night Runner from the dock, he stood at the helm as he eased it down the channel toward the Gulf of Mexico and freedom. Once on the open sea, he would paint over the name and change it to something else to avoid detection by the Coast Guard once the alarm was raised.

  He took a deep breath of the salty sea breeze and smiled at the cloud-covered moon, wondering what new adventures awaited him on his journey.

  Two

  Steve “Shooter” Kowolski, homicide detective on the Houston Police Department, finished packing the picnic supplies in the trunk of his ’66 Mustang convertible. Shooter, known for outlandish combinations of colors in his clothing, was dressed today in plaid madras shorts, a bright-yellow tank top, and leather sandals for a picnic trip to Herman Park. He heard a door slam and looked up as his girlfriend, TJ O’Reilly, came down the walk.

  As always, the sight of her quickened Shooter’s heart rate and caused a fluttery feeling in his stomach. A confirmed womanizer and bachelor until he’d met TJ, Shooter had fallen deeply in love with the young woman; he was now entertaining thoughts of marriage and children and a life with her by his side.

  TJ, a resident in internal medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, stood five feet two inches and had tousled black hair that partially covered a pretty, gaminelike face. She and Shooter were scheduled to meet TJ’s roommate, Samantha Scott, and her boyfriend, Dr. Matt Carter, in less than an hour.

  “Come on, babe,” Shooter called as he slammed the trunk lid, “we’re gonna be late.”

  TJ, whose expression was typically open and friendly, blinked in the bright glare of Houston’s summer sun and stared at Shooter for a moment as though she wasn’t quite sure who he was. She searched in her purse and pulled out a large pair of sunglasses and put them on, covering her eyes and half her face. After a moment, her face cleared and she smiled slowly as if awakening from a dream. “OK, OK,” she responded with a short laugh, and jogged toward the car. “Don’t worry,” she said as she vaulted over the door without opening it and flounced into the passenger seat. “They’ll wait for us. We’ve got the beer and burgers.”

  Shooter got behind the wheel, started the car, and pulled away from the curb, wincing as the Mustang backfired a couple of times and belched oily black smoke from the muffler. He had a brief thought that the faithful chariot was long overdue for a tune-up, but the thought vanished when TJ put her hand on his thigh and leaned her head back against the seat.

  As Shooter drove, he cast surreptitious glances at TJ. She seemed to have recovered from the strange episode of an hour before, but he was still worried about the way she’d looked as she sat in his kitchen, blood from the raw hamburger meat dripping down her chin, her eyes glazed and unseeing.

  He decided he’d have to say something to Matt and Sam about it, but out of TJ’s hearing. There was no need upsetting her since she apparently had no recollection of the event.

  Since it was Saturday morning, the typically horrible Houston traffic was light, and Shooter pulled to a stop in front of Sam and TJ’s apartment twenty minutes later.

  When Shooter opened the door and got out of the car, TJ glanced at him. “Why don’t you just honk, sweetheart? They know we’re coming.”

  “Uh,” Shooter answered, “I’ve got to run in and go to the bathroom. That beer is going right through me.”

  TJ laughed, throwing her head back and looking like the girl Shooter had fallen in love with. “I told you it was too early to start on that stuff,” she said.

  Shooter’s heart almost broke. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and he was afraid to think about what might be going on inside her even now.

  “I’ll only be a minute,” he said, slamming his door and hurrying up the walk toward the apartment.

  Matt Carter answered the door immediately after Shooter’s knock. “Hey, pal, come on in,” Matt said, turning and walking over toward a large picnic basket on the couch. “Sam’s almost ready.”

  Matt Carter, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, had been Shooter’s best friend since grade school. Nice-looking, with short brown hair, Matt was a little under average height and had a trim, athletic body. He was dressed more conservatively than Shooter in cutoff blue jeans and a white T-shirt that read BAYLOR RUGBY on the front.

  Shooter glanced back over his shoulder to make sure TJ was still in the car before he entered the apartment and shut the door behind him.

  “Matt, we gotta talk,” he said, his voice serious.

  Matt looked at him, still smiling. “Uh-oh. Don’t tell me you forgot the beer?”

  “No,” Shooter answered. “It’s TJ.”

  “TJ?” Matt asked, the smi
le fading from his lips when he saw Shooter’s expression of concern.

  Just then, Samantha Scott walked into the room, still tying her long, reddish auburn hair back into a ponytail for the ride in Shooter’s convertible. Sam, as she was called by almost everyone, was a junior professor of pathology at Baylor and was every bit as pretty as TJ, though her Irish ancestry had given her fair skin and a light dusting of freckles across her cheeks to accent her almost red hair and green eyes. She had on a light summer dress that fell to just above her knees and was low cut enough to have caught Shooter’s attention on any other day.

  “Hey, guys, are we ready to boogie?” she asked.

  Sam stopped when she noticed the serious expression on the men’s faces. “What’s going on?” she asked, walking over to stand next to Matt as she looked into Shooter’s eyes.

  “It’s TJ,” Shooter said. “She’s . . . She’s starting to act weird again.”

  Matt and Sam looked at each other. They’d spent many nights over the past few weeks working together in the hospital laboratory to cure TJ of the blood infection the vampire Roger Niemann had infected her with after kidnapping her. They’d been sure they’d succeeded.

  “What do you mean, ‘weird’?” Sam asked.

  Shooter flung his hands out, his exasperation clearly showing on his face. As a homicide detective, he wasn’t experienced in relating medical signs and symptoms. “Just, weird,” he finally said. “Like, this morning, when we were getting the food ready for our picnic, I found her in the kitchen, sitting there with a mouthful of raw hamburger meat, and she looked like she was in a trance. When I shook her and asked her what she was doing, she kinda woke up and didn’t remember anything about it.”

  Matt put his hand on his friend’s shoulder to calm him down. “I’m sure it’s nothing, Shooter. She was probably just daydreaming or something.”

  Sam’s lips were pursed and her eyes narrowed. It was clear she was taking Shooter’s concerns more seriously. “Was there anything else?” she asked.