by Ann Jacobs
Cover
Owning the Night
Determined to honor the memory of her lost lover, Mara Leone has dedicated herself to tracking down the vicious vampire Louis Reynard. When the trail leads her to Alexandre d’Argent, Mara feels a hunger she hasn’t felt in years. Struggling to protect her heart even as she surrenders to the undeniable passion that flares between them, Mara must decide if she’s ready to let go of the past for a sensuously erotic future.
Alexandre has followed Reynard to the site of his latest killing spree, but before he can lay his trap and slay the sadistic vampire at last, he meets the gorgeous and alluring Mara. She is the first woman in centuries to reawaken his deep sensual nature, and Alexandre knows he must protect her from Reynard if he’s to have any hope of making her his for all eternity.
As Alexander indulges Mara’s every burning desire and seduces her with the promise of eternal vampire life, he must expose himself to draw Reynard into their final battle. But like all hunted creatures, Reynard is even more dangerous when he’s cornered, and Alexandre must destroy him before Reynard destroys Mara and any chance they have for eternal love.
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Copyright
Beyond the Page Books
are published by
Beyond the Page Publishing
www.beyondthepagepub.com
Copyright © 2016 by Ann Jacobs.
This is a fully revised edition of a story first told in Eternal Victory, copyright © 2007 by Ann Jacobs.
Cover design and illustration by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs
ISBN: 978-1-940846-77-4
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Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Hunting the Dark Lord Series
The Oil Barons Series
About the Author
Prologue
The night cloaked him in moist black velvet. Wild waves pounded in the ocean below him. Rhythmic slapping sounds ricocheted off his ears as he propelled himself through humid air. The dampness increased as he moved south-southwest toward Miami Beach and the evil vampire who was his nemesis, and his queen’s continuing nightmare.
I’d have sworn the old bastard never left his lair, until another body turned up on the beach last night with a white rosebud clutched in her lifeless hand. Alex heard the frustration in Philippe’s voice loud and clear, even over the whistling of the wind.
“Fuck.” The epithet slipped through Alex’s lips, a guttural cry that echoed against the heavy air that surrounded him. You’re certain?
Reynard landed right outside the gate to this deserted estate on Biscayne Bay and went inside. There’s only one way out, and I’ve been watching it. I swear he hasn’t gone anywhere unless he’s found a way to slip through stone walls. But since he’s been in Miami, three women have died. His work. I’m sure of it, though I don’t know how he gets in and out.
Most vampires, Alex included, could move with stealth when circumstances demanded it. But Alex had been studying Louis Reynard since his pattern of serial killings began, and he’d never observed that the bastard could cloak his presence from fellow vampires—or that he could move through solid walls the way Alex and his clansmen could if they were sufficiently motivated. Still, the wily vampire had obviously managed to sneak out from under Philippe’s watchful eye. Three times so far.
It became more evident every time Alex encountered Reynard that while he might be old and battered, even for a vampire, he possessed an unequaled arsenal of powers. Alex shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, Louis had been honing his supernatural abilities for evil since centuries before Alex had been born.
What should I do? Philippe’s tone broadcast his frustration, a sentiment Alex echoed.
It’s all right, my friend. I should be there very soon—assuming the winds don’t change direction. Damn. He, Stefan and Claude shouldn’t have expected a made vampire, no matter how well Philippe was motivated, to be able to destroy Reynard or even keep him under surveillance once Reynard had sensed his presence. They themselves had failed to end the serial killer’s life, and they’d been three against one. Alex let out another oath as he broke through the clouds and zeroed in on the bright lights of Florida’s Gold Coast.
No. Reynard still lived to wreak havoc on mortal women. And to horrify and terrify Alina, his cousin and the d’Argent clan’s beloved queen. Alex concentrated hard, cut through the damp air with a satisfying whoosh and sped toward his destination with hardened resolve.
This time he wouldn’t fail. Louis Reynard would die. And d’Argent honor would be restored.
• • •
Mara Leone woke screaming, drenched in her own blood. No, not blood. Sweat. It wasn’t Dante returned once more from his grave, but another vampire, one exponentially more evil than the one who’d seduced her then been destroyed after feeding on the wrong mortal victim. Yes, as much as she hated to admit it, Dante had been a killer. But he’d gone berserk with bloodlust and taken one victim. One. Not three and counting.
For three precious years she’d loved him, believed he was benign. Until that fateful night just before dawn when he’d gone out to feed, not far from their house in Coconut Grove, only to return not as the affable lover she’d known but as a stranger.
I killed my victim, he’d admitted, his eyes dark, dead as he hunkered down beneath the covers on their canopied bed. The hunters will be coming after me with a vengeance now . . .
Mara had cringed when she realized she was harboring a murderer—her sworn duty for the past few years had been to serve and protect her fellow humans from all comers—but she hadn’t been able to turn Dante in.
She hadn’t had to turn him in, because the vampire hunters had found him the next time he went out to feed. When she’d gone out to look for him, she’d felt his aura in a smoldering pile of ashes—and a scrap of the paisley silk ascot she’d given him during happier times.
That night had been the first when the nightmare haunted her sleep. It had been the first of many such lonely evenings, and each one solidified her need to make amends for having loved the vampire she’d been unable to destroy, yet incapable of saving from his well-deserved fate at the hands of relentless vampire hunters.
Those hunters had pretty much scoured Miami of its vampire presence—that is, until the beach killings had started, renewing the city’s paranoia about a killer vampire the hunters had so far been unable to destroy.
I still miss Dante, she thought, recalling the good nights when they’d lain in each other’
s arms . . . the days when she’d looked forward to leaving mortal concerns behind, joining him in his lair and becoming part of his shadowy world. Mara tamped down her bittersweet memories, concentrated on the here and now. All her instincts told her the bastard doing the recent killings on South Beach was on the hunt again, somewhere on her turf. Tonight, unless she missed her guess, another woman would become his victim.
And since he did his thing and promptly disappeared, there wasn’t a thing she could do to prevent it.
But she could try, and she would. Moving quickly, she pulled on her clothes, ran a brush through the shoulder-length tangle of her hair and headed for the station. A crescent moon lay high in the ink-black sky, its light a faint beacon above the neon lights of the South Beach clubs.
The sort of sky she’d lain under with Dante all those years ago, before he’d shed his cloak of humanity and reverted to the nature he’d no longer been able to deny. Fuck it, she had no business thinking of him. He’d been dead for years, destroyed by the vampire hunters who’d given him no chance for escape, no time to explain why he’d killed a mortal—if indeed there had been an explanation that might have saved his life.
Pity those hunters hadn’t had similar success getting rid of the scourge she was now charged with bringing to justice. Her responsibility now was to put a stop to this current rash of vampire attacks. If she didn’t, she’d be busted back to beach patrol and spend the rest of her career handing out parking tickets.
Not my idea of upward mobility, she thought wryly as she hurried into the busy South Beach station.
“He’s hit again, Lieutenant Leone,” a uniformed patrolman called out as they passed on the stairs.
Why should she be surprised? This wasn’t the first night Dante had visited her in her nightmares . . . or the first time the nightmare had foretold tragedy.
Chapter One
Another death by vampire. As she headed across the beach toward the site of the latest murder, Miami-Dade Homicide Lieutenant Mara Leone wished her bosses hadn’t known about her long-ago liaison with one of the vamps who mingled, mostly unseen and unnoticed, among the humans on whom they depended for their sustenance. If they hadn’t, she might have been able to escape revisiting so many old, painful memories.
But she’d had no such luck, and now she had a vampire serial killer to stop—as if she could do that with her very mortal team of detectives.
The beach patrolman who’d found the body had been right when he called the murder in as being another vampire attack. Mara stared down at the dead blonde illuminated by the harsh light of the uniformed cop’s flashlight. Probably a showgirl, she surmised from the heavy makeup that almost but didn’t quite manage to conceal the pallor of death. The marks on the woman’s throat looked suspiciously as though they’d been made by the same vampire fangs that had punctured the other women’s throats, but the pathologist would have to make that determination by measuring the angle of penetration and the distance between the two marks. What Mara found even more telling was that this woman, like the others, didn’t appear to have been sexually molested or to have put up a fight.
Seduced by vampiric compulsion yet not seduced in the usual sense of the word. Strange. Her gaze settled on a freshly cut white rosebud the killer apparently had laid on the palm of the victim’s outstretched hand. Its pale beauty provided a macabre contrast with spatters of darkening blood that marred its petals. Just as it had at the three previous crime scenes.
Mara had to turn away when bile began to rise in her throat, threatened to spill over and splatter over the crime scene. What the hell was going on?
This made four women found dead on the beach in less than two weeks, all apparently victims of one crazed vampire who drained them of their blood and left a fragrant, creamy rose as his calling card. Who knew when the killings would end?
Soon, if she wanted to keep her job. Her bosses had started getting nervous after they’d found victim number two. This pattern of similar murders didn’t do much to boost the tourist traffic on Miami’s famed South Beach, and it was damn hard to keep a lid on such titillating albeit gruesome news as a spate of vampire serial killings.
“How long has she been dead?” Mara asked Joe Krill, the assistant coroner, who’d arrived right behind her and now knelt beside the body.
“Not much more than an hour, I’d say. Body’s still warm. Looks to me like another vampire bite.”
Yeah, Mara had figured that out for herself, and she didn’t have the letters “M.D.” behind her name. “Got any new ideas where we might find a vampire with a fetish for white roses and blonde bimbos, boys?” Not that she expected them to know. If any of the assembled cops had come up with a clue about where a suspicious-looking vamp might be hanging out, they’d have been on him like stink on shit. Her team members were nothing if not devoted to their jobs. “Come on, don’t you all start talking at once.”
“Damn it, Louis Reynard’s the vampire we’re looking for. I don’t care if everybody thinks that fiend who went around the world killing women on the full moon has been put out of commission. Or that our murderer isn’t following a pattern of doing his dirty work only on the full moon. There are too many similarities. No signs of rape or attempted rape, or of the victim trying to escape. The white roses. He’s at it again. Here.” Rookie detective Ben Braunstein had an earnest look about him that kept Mara from ripping him a new one. He’d been arguing the same theory ever since the first of their victims had turned up dead, based on research he’d done on an unsolved killing in Atlanta a little over a year ago.
Yeah, Ben had done his homework, but Mara had listened to him state his opinion at least one time too many. Especially since she was beginning to believe his hypothesis—that the vampire serial killer had miraculously recovered from injuries he’d supposedly suffered at the hands of three vampires from a rival clan, and settled down to wreak more havoc on her turf. “You’ve told me at least a dozen times that you think this killer is Louis Reynard. You’ve also mentioned that some of his fellow vampires damn near killed him in Chicago a couple of weeks after the Atlanta attack.” She paused and nailed the rookie with a look she hoped would shut him up. “What makes you think Reynard might suddenly have recovered and settled in here?”
“How many vampires have the balls to leave their calling card?” Ben gestured toward the rose.
“I can’t imagine him being able to do this if he was hurt as badly as Ben said.” The coroner looked up from the corpse, his expression dubious.
Mara shook her head. “It’s not outside the realm of possibility that it’s Reynard. The creatures heal fast. And they can’t be trusted.” She recalled how Dante had drawn her in and made her trust him, back when she’d been on the force less time than Ben. She’d been so young, so fucking gullible. And so much in love that thinking about having lost him to those hunters still made her want to cry. “Watch out. If you should ever run into an actual vampire, he or she will charm you out of your weapons before you can figure out what hit you.”
Ben shrugged. “I’ve seen some. I even saw a vampire earlier tonight at a bar a mile or so down the beach, near the big hotels. He didn’t strike me as the sort of guy who’d attack a female. Doubt he’d need to—the women were swarming around him like hungry mosquitoes who didn’t know their potential victim was an even more effective bloodsucker than any of them.”
Mara had learned the hard way that vampires had an uncanny ability to seduce mortals without putting forth any obvious effort. She supposed the fiend they were looking for possessed a knack for seducing humans to do things they ordinarily wouldn’t have done. After all, he’d apparently found it sickeningly easy to lure his victims, including the blonde now lying at their feet. “So this vampire you met seduced you into thinking he’s a good one? I’m not surprised. Come on, I want to meet this paragon with fangs before another woman turns up dead.”
She turned to Joe. “Go ahead, transport the body. I’ll want preliminary autopsy results on my
desk by the time we get back to the station. The rest of you, secure the scene and comb the area for clues, in case the killer left some hint as to who he might be.” Mara doubted he had. The other three crime scenes had been as clean as any she’d ever worked, and she was becoming more certain every minute that these murders were the work of the same out-of-control vamp that had left a string of bodies peppering the globe over the past couple of years.
That didn’t keep her from getting annoyed with Ben every time he put forth the Reynard theory. Or frustrated that she had no clue as to how they were going to bring the bastard to justice.
• • •
Apparently Reynard’s near-death experience had fucked his mind up royally. According to Philippe, Louis had done in three blondes—two showgirls and a tourist—in the few days since he’d arrived and set up housekeeping in a previously deserted stone fortress on Biscayne Bay. Alex clenched his fists. Whatever it took, he’d put an end, once and for all, to the old bastard’s murderous adventures.
Enjoying the kiss of a soft breeze off the Atlantic, Alex took up the same spot at an open-air watering hole for mortals that he’d noticed before checking in at one of the high-rise hotels dotting South Beach. It offered a convenient vantage point to scan up and down the beach, looking for a sign that Reynard had once again come out of his hole. Idly, he stroked the short Van Dyke beard he’d cultivated back in Paris after his barber had shorn his usually longish hair into an almost military-looking cut a few weeks earlier.
So far, he’d had no luck. Philippe hadn’t seen Reynard leave his fortress, and Alex hadn’t spotted him hunting along the stretch of beach where blondes had been turning up dead. That didn’t necessarily mean the son of a bitch was sleeping off his most recent kill, however. The Fox, as Reynard was often called, had always had an uncanny ability to slip past his observers.
