Blood of the Dead, page 2
I rocked back on my heels, remembering the moment. I’d been about to tell Jack “Yes!” and mean it, from the bottom of my soul, when I’d felt my Master’s touch beneath the table, his cold hands wrapping around my calves then moving up my thighs, threatening to go higher. The chill had snatched my words away, and I knew there was only one possible reason that he was there, right at that moment.
To stop me.
I’d still wanted to yell it, and then throw myself into Jack’s arms and wait for his bite . . . but if my true Master, the one who had sent me to serve Jack, was there, it would have displeased him.
He wouldn’t have interrupted, otherwise.
And I was scared of him enough as it was. I didn’t want him to be unhappy with me.
“If he makes you,” the shadow went on, its words reverberating in my head with magic, “then you’re nothing to him again.”
“That’s not true,” I whispered. “Jack’s not like that.”
“As a human you’re more frail,” he continued, like he hadn’t heard me. “It makes him feel the need to care for you.” The shadow stepped closer, and a ghostly hand pushed my hair back. I shivered in a combination of horror and desire. I was scared of the power this Master held, but I also wanted to be just like it, so badly. I’d spent so much of my life afraid of truly dying—I never wanted to hurt or fear again. “I watched him, as you healed.”
“I don’t understand,” I confessed.
Cold lips leaned in to kiss at my neck. “Your understanding is irrelevant. Stay with him, now that he’ll keep you—and stay human, or else.” The shadow took a salacious lick up to my ear and then disappeared.
Or else what? I wanted to ask, but I already knew the answer.
Or else I wouldn’t actually get to live as a vampire for very long.
Chapter Four
Jack
I gave Luna a five-minute lead and then headed out myself.
The real reason I was off from Dark Ink tonight was because I’d promised Fran I’d put in some time at her place. She was an old friend, a pro-domme with a very nice dungeon in a nondescript office park, and she’d done me a huge favor recently, so tonight was payback.
It was good timing—I needed to feed, and sex at Fran’s was pretty much guaranteed.
And more than that . . . I needed distraction. Now that Luna didn’t need me, there was nothing to stop me from thinking about Paco.
Where he was.
What he was doing.
If he needed my help.
If he hated me now—and if I was ever going to see him again.
Yeah.
I did not need to be left alone with my own thoughts tonight.
I got into Betty, my 1963 Lincoln Continental, and turned the key.
Fran opened the door to her dungeon herself, surprising me. She was wearing a curly black wig, and was dressed in a black velvet sheath dress, with opera-length gloves and high heels to match. “Jack!” she said, and threw herself at me. “I saw your car on the cameras!”
I caught her and lightly spun us both. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” I asked, after setting her carefully back upright.
She thwapped my shoulder with an open palm. “For being alive!” she said, staring me down. “Did it even occur to you to check in with me? After everything that happened?”
I winced. “If I’m not technically alive, does it count?” I asked her quietly, where no one else could hear.
She blew air through her ruby red lips and rolled her eyes. “You forgot about me.”
“I didn’t, Fran. I just got busy,” I apologized. The last time I’d been here was when I’d needed Fran to hide me when I was dead during the day, and also hide my old boss’s young son from a werewolf army. “Shit got really real after you saw me last,” I said. “This is honestly the first night off I’ve had. And I’m spending it with you.”
“Oh? And not just because you’re hoping for blood?” She produced her phone from somewhere on her body and shook it at me.
I suddenly remembered texting her over a week ago, after Paco had turned, when I was hoping to line up some sex or blood for him when he woke. “Yeah, about that . . . it wasn’t for me.” One of her eyebrows arched as I went on. “It was for Paco.”
“Oh,” she breathed, but she didn’t have to say anything else.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Things were a bit of a mess. And they haven’t really gotten better. Except that Rosalie’s gone now, so there’s that.” I raked a hand through my hair. I’d hoped not having a Mistress looming over me anymore would’ve solved more of my problems, but it hadn’t yet.
“Oof, Jack. That’s a lot.”
“It is,” I said with a nod. “But that’s not why I’m here, although we can catch up later. It’s just that it’ll be easier on me if we get this out of the way first.” I gestured at the back of the building. “Whatever this is gonna be.”
Fran took a moment to consider me. “Are you sure you want to do this? I can take the hit, we can reschedule.”
Did I want to sleep with endless strangers to keep my hunger at bay? Not all the time, no.
But did I have a choice in the matter?
Also no.
And I knew from experience it was better to keep up on things, to have sex when I had the chance and opportunity, rather than roam through a city full of drunken tourists being tempted to bleed anyone who crossed my path.
“It’s not a matter of want. It’s a matter of need.” I brushed off her concern and forced a wolfish grin. “Don’t worry. They’ll leave here happy.”
“If you say so,” Fran reluctantly agreed, drawing me over to her secretary Janice’s desk. Janice always had a stern visage and tightly bunned hair—she looked like she was a flight attendant from an airline that specialized in losing your luggage.
“I’ve got you in room six and then room eight, Jack, back-to-backs, with time for a shower in between,” Janice said, sounding smug. This might have been the first time she’d ever seemed pleased to see me—then again, it was the first time I was coming over here with the sole purpose of helping Fran make money.
“Do you know anything about either of them?” I asked in a leading fashion.
“Does it matter?” Fran asked, bemused, giving me a look that said she knew just how indiscriminately I’d slept around.
“No, I guess not,” I said, glad I couldn’t flush.
Janice gave Fran a knowing look. “First timer.”
My eyebrows crawled up my forehead. “I have slept with people here before, you know,” I said, defending what little remained of my honor.
“Yeah, you have.” Fran patted my shoulder. “But it’s a different when you know you’re up at bat. Those were pickup games. This is going pro.”
And now my eyebrows could not get any higher. I snorted a laugh. “Do I get a jersey shirt after this? And do I get to renegotiate my contract?”
“No and nope!” Fran cackled, then took my shoulders and squared them at the door to my left. “Door six, hit the showers, then door eight! And when you’re done in there and feel more like yourself again, we can talk. Go get ’em tiger!” she said, and swatted my ass.
I pushed the door open and found a hallway full of other doors beyond it. I knew everything in here was soundproofed to hell and back, but I could still hear and feel people with my vampiric senses. The crisp sound of leather hitting flesh. Hot and bothered breathing. Someone crying out in passion.
My hunger pricked up readily, waiting. After feeding at Vermillion, post-carnage, I hadn’t needed to for a few nights, and then when I had, I’d just driven up to my werewolf friends’ place in the woods where I was apparently on some sort of perma-fuck list, which was strange but good. They enjoyed me, I enjoyed them, and it was relatively hassle free; plus, I didn’t have to hide who I was around them, as long as I was polite and kept my fangs in. I’d been avoiding my only other local regular human hookup, Zach, because he was human and right now I didn’t want to hurt anybody else, sheerly by virtue of being me.
Which was maybe another reason that coming to Fran’s tonight was good. Anyone I slept with here was likely to be a one-and-done, from a convention or out of town, no less—I wouldn’t have to think of them again.
I reached a door with an ornate number 6 on it, and paused. I should have at least made Fran tell me how many people were going to be inside. But it didn’t matter.
I may not have been “pro” but I did have professional pride.
Whoever they were, or how many of them there were—they would be leaving happy.
I gathered my absolutely unfair magical charisma around myself, the kind of game I would’ve killed to have back when I was sixteen, and opened the door slowly, so that whoever was inside would know that I was the one in charge.
The room was done in subdued purples—the paint square for it would’ve called it something pretentious like “lilac smoke,” I was sure—and there was a massive bed in the center, with four metal posters softened by streamers of matching sheer silk and tulle sashed on the crossbeams. Lounging beneath these, in the middle of the bedspread, was an elegant Black woman with close-cropped hair, dressed in a crisp all-white suit, looking very pleased with herself for surprising me.
“Sam?” I asked, dropping all pretense at being suave.
“We have got to stop meeting like this,” she said, and then laughed like she’d told the world’s funniest joke.
I closed the door quickly and leaned against it. “What the fuck?”
She didn’t answer, she just kept laughing. Sam was one of the Faithful, some contingent of “pure” magic users I’d only recently learned about, who apparently kept watch over the likes of vampires like yours truly.
“Where does meeting a vampire in a brothel fit on your purity scale?” I waved my hands in between us like I was compressing an accordion.
“Like I said last time—pure doesn’t equal prude.” She tapped her temple. “It’s what you think that counts.” And seeing as I knew she had telekinetic powers, she probably had to control her thoughts more than most people. It didn’t stop me from frowning, though. “If I meet you at Dark Ink, it raises questions,” she went on.
“And this doesn’t?”
She shrugged. “None of the windows here are see-through. And your friend Fran seems to have discretion.”
I took a menacing step forward. “You leave Fran out of this.”
“Easy, pardner,” Sam said, with an amused tone.
“Easy for you to say,” I growled at her with menace. I was not bringing trouble to Fran’s door. I’d done enough damage to my friends lately.
Sam squinted at me and her nostrils flared. The silk and tulle above her started to wave, but she seemed dismayed nothing was happening at the same time as I realized what she was trying to do. “That bed’s bolted to the floor,” I explained to her. “Anything you can fuck on inside this building is. Insurance reasons.” She blinked, finally taken aback, and I hid a grin. “Welcome to my world, pardner,” I drawled. “So. Why now, now that we’re past ‘why here’?”
Her full lips thinned into a serious line, and she snapped the lapels of her suit smartly. “Yes. About that. You remember the thing we found together in the desert?”
“Yeah. One-two-three, that’s your problem now, no take-backs.” I’d been part of a scheme that’d gotten her the deed to a patch of land my Mistress used to own, after a vampire gang showdown at Vermillion that me and mine had been lucky to survive. “We’re even now, Sam. Nothing personal, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for anyone to know I helped you. Past tense.”
“All the more reason to be here, where no one can see, and the bed can apparently be used as an earthquake shelter.” She sniffed. “But, really, Jack—your old Mistress was keeping something awful out there. We’ve had our archivists go back through centuries of files. Something unwholesome attacked the both of us that night, and we need to know what it was so we can hunt it down and kill it.”
“This still seems like a you problem,” I told her.
She gave an exasperated sigh. “Do you know of anything else out there? Any help, or hints?” Her dark brown eyes implored me. “You were there, Jack. You know how dangerous it was.”
I did indeed. I’d taken her out to let her see where one of her fellow Faithful had died, at Rosalie’s henchmen’s hands. Sam had used some magic and then taken . . . ill? Had fainted? Been drained? I didn’t know what verb to use, only that when I tried to pull her out of the shadow she’d fallen into, I knew I was fighting something dark and evil for her life. I could still remember the precise caliber of cold it had made me.
Like . . . astrally so. The cold of space between the stars.
A cold like yearning for forgiveness from a dead man.
“Please?” she asked.
I closed my eyes, already knowing I was going to regret what I said next. “Rosalie called it the Sleeper. She kept it locked down there, and kept it fed.” I’d seen the stone coffin the thing had lived in, and had assumed the grooves carved on the front of it were to channel blood down to whatever lay inside.
Sam ran her tongue across her teeth. “That doesn’t ring a bell.”
“That’s all I’ve got for you.”
Her shoulders fell as she stood up. “I’ll tell the archivists. It’s a start.”
“Good luck?” I guessed, as she walked past me for the door, then parsed everything she’d already said. “Hey—why’re you having to hunt down it if you know where it is?”
Her lips twisted to the side. “Because it’s not there anymore.”
I paused as that sank in. “Before or after we murdered twenty vampires to get you that deed?”
Her graceful hands lifted. “Who can say? We didn’t go check until the land was ours. And, in general, the only good vampire is a dead vampire. Present company excluded.”
“Fuck you,” I said reflexively, and she laughed.
“It’s a compliment, Jack. You’re one of the good ones.” One of her eyebrows arched up, so I knew she knew exactly what that sounded like when she said it. “Well, you and your friend, so far,” she amended.
My jaw ground, and then I realized she was talking about Paco. “How is he?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
“Living clean,” she said, by which I knew she meant so far he’d only fed on sex, not death. “Takes after you. We’ll likely stop keeping an eye on him shortly.”
Questions raced up to be asked, but I reined them back.
Where was he?
Was he okay?
Was he ever coming back?
“Anyhow. I’ve kept you from your evening’s activities for long enough.” She walked straight up to me. “Hold still.”
I was just about to ask her why, when she made some sort of pattern with her hands in front of me, casting stripes of light around like streamers. I threw up an arm to protect my vision. “What the fuck?” I complained.
“Does it burn?” she asked.
“No, it’s bright as shit, though.” When I lowered my arm, she was giving me a strange look. “What?”
“I need to check in with my superiors.”
“Have fun doing that outside. In the parking lot,” I said, shooing her with my hands. “But make sure you tell Fran I did a good job first, and you’d better fucking tip.”
“Already handled,” she said, reaching into her pockets to pull out two tickets and hand them over. I scanned the word “ballet” and gave her a look.
“Cash only,” I said.
“Don’t worry. I’ve already paid for this particular experience, in more ways than one.” Her eyes rolled over me in a desultory fashion, as she plunked the tickets into my chest. “But these are for you.”
I took them. I knew Luna liked ballet, and I knew better than to ask how the Faithful knew that as well—if they had a file on Paco, they certainly had one on her. Luna had been Rosalie’s right-hand human. “Why would you be giving me anything other than a hard time, Sam?”
“You saved my life, Jack. Can’t I just give you something nice?”
“Nice? For free? In this town?” I expressed my skepticism like only the most jaded Vegas local could.
Sam laughed. “I’m the good guy here, remember?” She edged around me for the door. “And, I can’t believe I’m about to say this but . . . do me a favor, will you?” Before I could say no, she went on. “Stay topped up. I think we’ve got upcoming business together.”
I straightened at once, realizing what she meant. “Did you, a pure-ass Faithful, literally just tell me to go get some?”
“Merely pure,” she corrected me. “‘Pure-ass’ is kind of a contradiction in terms. And we prefer the term ‘good.’”
“Answer the question.”
She shrugged lightly. “It’s just a feeling I have,” she said, darting into the hall before I could stop her. “I’ll be in touch.”
She made it sound like I didn’t have a choice in the matter. “I can give you my phone number, you know,” I shouted after her, to stop her from trying to meet me again here, or at Dark Ink.
“I already have it!” she shouted back, tossing back a dismissive wave.
Chapter Five
Luna
There were only two people left when I let myself into Dark Ink—and only one of them I recognized. Nilesh, one of Jack’s new hires to fill in the ranks after Angela’s departure. He was working on a client, and I gave him a polite head bob as I ducked into Jack’s office to get caught up.
I surveyed Jack’s desk dryly. He’d apparently been so sure of my survival he’d left all of the mail in a pile for me to deal with. I sat down in his chair and started going through it, tossing everything unimportant in the trash and listening to the running tattoo machine outside. After that I started going through emails—Jack had at least made an attempt to stay up on these, booking clients for the shop.
