Dead Is The New Black

I was going to be young and hot looking forever,

all in return for a few minor drawbacks, like not being able to take sunlight – who does, these days? I secretly thought I’d got the best deal of all…until half an hour ago.

That’s when the hunger came over me for the first time.

So here I am, standing in the dark on the bell tower of St Jude’s Episcopalian church. Just one step and the ones I love will be safe from me. But maybe it’s fitting that Jude is the patron saint of lost causes, because I don’t think I can take that last step.

And oh, God…

I can feel the hunger coming on again.

On their twenty-first birthday, the sexy and stylish Crosse triplets discover their mother was a vampire slayer – and that each of them is destined to carry on their family’s legacy with the dark side.

A new mini-series from author

Harper Allen

Darkheart & Crosse

Follow each triplet’s story:

Dressed to Slay – February 2010 Unveiled family secrets lead sophisticated Megan Crosse into the world of shapeshifters and slayers.

Vampaholic – March 2010 Sexy Kat Crosse fears her dark future as a vampire until a special encounter reveals her true fate.

Dead Is the New Black – April 2010 Cursed by her own blood, wild child Tash Crosse leaves her family, only to learn her death might save them all.

Harper Allen, her husband and their menagerie of cats and dogs divide their time between a home in the country and a house in town. She grew up reading Stephen King, John D MacDonald and John Steinbeck, among others, and has them to blame for her lifelong passion for reading and writing.

For Tara

Prologue

One step, and everything’s finished—the pain and the guilt and the cold, sickening fear washing over me, making my grip slick with sweat and turning my legs to rubber. With one step this nightmarish hunger ends, too. But I don’t know if I have the nerve to take that step off this ledge into the darkness. Apparently I’m also a coward, among other things.

Or maybe I’m still in denial. I can’t help thinking that this isn’t the way my life was supposed to turn out, even though I finally understand that whining about fair and unfair is useless. But still. I mean, I should have been Mrs. Dr. Todd by now, right? I should have had the triplet wedding thing with my sisters, Megan and Katherine: summer brides, the three of us, ready to say the vows that would have ensured us the same uneventful life Grammie Crosse has. We would have been on the Maplesburg Hospital committee. We’d have played tennis at the Maplesburg country club. Megan would have hosted parties with her investment-banker hubbie, Dean, Kat would have done the same for Lance as he climbed the ladder at his corporate law firm and I would have played the part of a cosmetic surgeon’s wife to perfection. And if once in a while we lay awake in the middle of the night and asked ourselves if this was all there was to life…well, remembering the nightmares we had when we were kids would answer that question for us.

But instead of getting married a few months ago we ended up having to stake our fiancés the night before Megan’s wedding.

It’s a long story, and in my current position I’m not sure I’ll have time to finish it. I’ll just say that our fiancés were turned into vamps by a bitch called Zena, the Queen Vampyr who killed our father, David Crosse, and Angelica Dzarchertzyn, our mother—for those of you who don’t know, our mother was a Daughter of Lilith, a hereditary vampire killer—when we were babies. Carrying out his vow to his dying daughter, Angelica’s father, Anton, made sure his triplet granddaughters had a normal American childhood by placing us with Grammie and Popsie Crosse.

So for the next twenty years Megan and Kat and I were adored, shop-till-we-dropped princesses in a small upstate New York town. Our closest encounter with a vamp was on a box of Count Chocula cereal and in barely remembered nightmares from our childhood. But then we turned twenty-one and Zena tracked us down to Maplesburg.

Which is when our perfect world was torn apart, never to be put back together again.

As I say, I don’t want to dwell on the dreary details, mainly because I hate thinking about how dumb I was back then. When Anton Dzarchertzyn—Grandfather Darkheart, as he said we should call him—showed up on our doorstep the night we staked Lance and Todd and Dean, and told us the truth about how our mother had lived and died, I was convinced I would turn out to be the Crosse triplet who’d inherited Angelica’s Daughter of Lilith destiny. I was equally convinced that Megan would fulfill Darkheart’s other prediction.

Our mother had died trying to save her babies from Zena. She’d failed. One of us bore the mark of the Queen Vampyr and would turn vamp herself during her twenty-first year.

My theory about Megan being the vamp and me being the Daughter was blown out of the water during our final battle with Zena, when Megan proved herself to be the true inheritor of Mom’s title. So I fell back on theory number two: that Kat, the languidly sexy middle Crosse sister—born half an hour before me and twenty minutes after Kat—was the one Zena had marked when we were babies.

Wrong again. When we went up against Master Vamp Cyrus Kane, Kat learned that her legacy didn’t come from Mom or Zena, it came from our father, a Healer who’d been able to restore the souls of vamps and turn them back into the humans they’d once been. And after that revelation, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who among us was left to turn fang-girl.

Me. Little Tashie Crosse. The shallow sister, the bratty sister, the sister who hadn’t grown up, according to Megan and Kat. The sister who now never would.

I was going to be young and hot-looking forever. I’d never need Botox or have to trade in my Manolos for double-width Naturalizers, all in return for a few minor drawbacks like not being able to take sunlight—who does, these days?—and cringing if some insensitive clod shoved a crucifix in my face. All in all, I secretly thought I’d gotten the best deal of all…until half an hour ago.

That’s when the hunger came over me for the first time and I understood what being undead was really all about.

It’s about killing. Killing for the love of killing, killing for the sheer, unholy joy of it, killing because killing’s better than sex, better than breathing, better than falling in love. I knew instinctively that making the kill last by torturing the victim would notch the thrill up even higher, and choosing a victim close to me would be a rush of dark nirvana.

I wanted to kill Kat. When I’d had my fill of her blood and her body had been torn beyond recognition, I wanted to take on Megan. Daughter of Lilith or no, I didn’t think she’d be able to stake me before I overpowered her. Grandfather Darkheart would have been next, and then I would have contented myself with acquaintances and strangers, biding my time until the two people I loved most returned from the months-long cruise they were on.

Welcome home, Grammie. Your darling Tashya’s missed you, Popsie.

Just for a moment the vision of killing them had been so clear in my mind that it had seemed like I’d already done it, and the horror that rushed through me had beaten back the hunger, breaking its hold on me. But it’ll be back, and when it comes a second time I don’t know if I’ll be strong enough to fight it off again.

So here I am, standing in the dark on the highest point in Maplesburg, which happens to be the bell tower of St. Jude’s, the Episcopalian church where I was baptized. There was no problem sneaking in—Maplesburg churches still remain unlocked after-hours for the benefit of any sinners looking for redemption, and I didn’t have to go through the church proper to get to the tower staircase. I won’t have any problem getting out, either, as long as I can bring myself to do what I have to do.

Just one step into thin air and it’ll all be over. Just one step and the ones I love will be safe from me. But maybe it’s fitting that Jude is the patron saint of lost causes, because I don’t think I can take that last step.

And oh, God…

I can feel the hunger coming on again.

Chapter 1

When I bumped into the muttering derelict with the shopping cart glaring at me through his tangle of matted hair I knew I’d hit rock bottom. Worse yet, I didn’t care. Well, okay, I cared. I was so worried that someone I knew might see me that I was in disguise, which explained the short brunette wig bulging out like the Elephant Man’s cranium where I’d crammed in my own hair. I’d pulled a trenchcoat over the mint-green Beth Bowley summer-weight cashmere sweater and short, tiered silk skirt I had on. I also wore dark sunglasses, although maybe they weren’t the smartest idea, since it was eleven at night and I was in a dim alleyway. In the five blocks from where I’d parked my noticeable white Mini I’d walked into two fire hydrants, almost stumbled off the curb into the gutter and now I’d nearly knocked an old street loony off his feet.

But rock bottom or not, I was so churned up with anticipation and nerves that I was shaking. When the weird cat lady who lives in the apartment above mine had told me about old man Schneider and his after-hours service, she’d warned me he sometimes ran out of product. Actually, as I learned during that same conversation, her name was Kathy Lehman, but I couldn’t shake the habit of calling her Weird Cat Lady in my mind, mainly because she was weird and had about twenty cats. In fact, I’d met one of her feline buddies before I met her.

How it happened was this way: I was just passing the Dumpster behind my building earlier in the evening, wondering whether I should run back into the rundown building I’d been calling home for the past few weeks and change into something less dressy than the Chloé skirt and silk-knit sleeveless top I was wearing. I was also making a mental note to buy a pair of Doc Martens, since the Ferragamo slides I had on, although adorable, definitely weren’t the right footwear for what I had in mind. Then I saw the rat, a husky brute that looked as if it could take on Dobermans and win, and all thoughts of clothes and shoes left me.

It was the first time I’d tried what I was about to do, but desperation made me cunning. I held my breath—a trick that’s become easier and easier lately—and remained motionless. The rat’s whiskers twitched cautiously as he sniffed the air. Then he began scurrying toward the Dumpster. I waited until he was only inches away before I lunged.

I had the sucker, I swear it. I could feel him twisting in my grasp, trying to get his head close enough to my clutching hands to rip some flesh from me. Two red-hot trails exploded down my bare arms and an unearthly yowl split the darkness, startling me so much that I let go.

Mr. Rat streaked toward the hole in the side of the building he’d come out of. I threw myself after him like a baseball player sliding into home plate, my hands outstretched, my silk top shredding on broken pavement and the heel of one of my Ferragamos snapping as I made my leap.

I slammed headfirst into the wall. The mangy tomcat beside me slammed into it at the same time.

“You’ve killed Bojangles!” The screech startled me more than the yowl had, and the apparition that appeared out of the gloom almost stopped my heart. Then I recognized the figure with the frizzy, waistlength gray hair swooping toward the tomcat as my elusive upstairs neighbor.

“I didn’t kill him,” I denied, getting to my feet and preparing to beat a hasty retreat. The last thing I wanted was to answer questions about why I was staking out a Dumpster. “I…I tripped over him. I was just walking along minding my own business and I—”

Bojangles chose that moment to prove he was alive by letting loose with another enraged yowl. He sprang from Weird Cat Lady’s arms and took off around the side of the building.

“See, he’s fine.” I gave his mistress a nervous smile. “Well, it was certainly nice meeting you, but I really must be—” “I should have realized. You were fighting Bo-Bo over a rat.” Her voice dropped from its previous screech, and I thought I could hear a note of pity in it.

“Excuse me?” I hoped my laugh sounded suitably incredulous. “Why would I fight your fleabag cat over a rat?”

“For the same reason I’ve trained Bojangles and the rest of my strays to catch them and bring them to me,” WCL said, the compassion in her tone now unmistakable. “Because you don’t want to kill humans to feed your blood hunger. You’re a vamp like me, aren’t you?”

I opened my mouth to give her a cool brush-off, but the words wouldn’t come. Instead, I heard myself utter a choking gasp. Worse, the gasp was immediately accompanied by the wet feel of big, fat tears welling up from my eyes.

Let’s get one thing straight—with my baby-blue eyes and strawberry-blond curls I may look fragile and sensitive, and I’m not above batting said eyes and tossing said curls at any hapless male who shows up as an interesting blip on my personal radar screen. I’ve also perfected the art of instant tears, Swarovski droplets that tremble on my lashes but never get to the point where they smear my Urban Decay mascara. But—and I’ll totally deny this if it ever gets out—I’m really as tough as old boots, to borrow one of Popsie’s favorite phrases. I’ve had to be, growing up with Megan and Kat as my sisters. I mean, Meg’s beautiful and smart and doesn’t take crap from anyone, and Kat simply sizzles with sexiness. They’re a hard act to follow, and if I had an ounce of fragility in me my ego would have been completely crushed by now.

Which it’s not, thank you very much. Well, not until I dissolved into a weepy pool of tears and clogged nose and embarrassing spitty stuff running from the corners of my mouth as my choked gasps became full-blown howls of misery. I whooped and coughed and shuddered and tried again to speak, but only managed something that sounded like, “Nuh, nuh…nuh fair! Nuh…bell tower! But nuh…nuh chickened out!”

Not my most shining moment. I wouldn’t have blamed Weird Cat Lady for thinking she’d run into someone even weirder than herself and leaving me to finish dissolving by the Dumpster all by my lonesome, but she didn’t. She hauled me inside and upstairs to her apartment, sat me down at her kitchen table while she brewed some tea and waited until I was vaguely coherent again.

“Firstly, you’re not a chicken just because you didn’t kill yourself,” she said, setting a mug in front of me and bending down to stroke the sea of cats twining around her ankles. “Drink this, it’s got goldenseal and Moroccan mint in it. I came up with the basic recipe when I started going through menopause to control my hot flashes, but after I turned vamp I found if I tweaked the ingredients a little it helped with the blood cravings.”

I took a sip and tried not to gag. “Nice,” I said, still snuffling.

She gave me a grin that made me look past her gray hair to the girl she must have been thirty years earlier. “You lie like Nixon,” she declared. “It tastes like hell and I know it, but when my inner thermostat jacks up twenty degrees I’ll gulp down anything to get relief. Same goes for the hunger. It’s bad enough that a vegetarian like me is drinking rat blood, but after all these years of protesting wars and violence, there’s no way Kathy Lehman’s going to take a human life just because some dickhead old boyfriend showed up one night and turned me into a vampire. I’ll walk into the sunlight before I do that.” She frowned. “Which leads me to the question of why you didn’t try that route, instead of jumping from a church tower. And how did you manage to get into a church, anyway?”

I choked down another sip of tea. “Vamphood seems to be working differently on me than it does with everyone else. I can still go out in the day without flash-frying and I don’t appear to be banned yet from entering a church. I guess it’s got something to do with the way I was marked.” I saw the question in her eyes and stifled a sigh. “Queen Vampyr. I was a baby. The curse was supposed to kick in during my twenty-first year, which it did a few weeks ago, but the hunger only hit me tonight.”

“And you immediately wanted to tear your nearest and dearest from limb to limb?” Kathy Lehman said shrewdly. “Been there, almost did that. I fought the impulse and made do with rat blood. But since you’re not a crazy cat lady like me, you might have to go a different route.” She tipped her head to one side. “There are a few of us around, you know—vamps who’ve vowed to find any alternative to embracing the darkness. We’ve even formed our own unofficial support group that meets every Tuesday in the basement of the local union hall. Drop by if you feel the need.”

I tried to keep my thoughts from my expression, since my thoughts were running along the lines of, sweet of you to offer, but I think I’d rather stake myself, thanks. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, trying to wipe out the image I’d just had of myself saying, “Hi, my name’s Tashya and I’m a vampire,” and having a roomful of enthusiastically cheerful strangers chorus back, “Hi, Tashya!”

“You do that.” Again Kathy smiled, as if she could read my mind. “But right now I’m guessing you’d like some more concrete help.” Rising from the table, she turned to her refrigerator and ripped a page from a cat memo pad hanging from a cat magnet. Scribbling something on it, she handed it to me. “Go to this address. It’s a butcher shop and it’ll be closed at this time of night, naturally, but old man Schneider does a booming after-hours business in the alleyway at the back of the store. Try to get there as early as possible because he sometimes runs out.”

I glanced at the scrap of paper in my hand. “Not that I don’t appreciate the grocery tip, but how does buying a couple of black-market T-bones help me?”

“Old man Schneider’s after-hours business isn’t in meat, it’s in pig’s blood,” Kathy said bluntly. “He sells it in quart bags, like milk, at twenty bucks a pop.”

This time I wasn’t able to hide my reaction. “Ewww,” I said in disgust. “Blood in a bag?”

“Would you prefer it free-range from a human?” she asked wryly. “If you think you can handle the hunger any other way, you’re wrong. Sooner or later you’re going to kill—” She broke off abruptly as a thump, like something jumping through an open window, sounded from the adjacent room. The next moment Bojangles swaggered into the kitchen, a dead rat in his jaws. With feline pride he deposited it at his mistress’s feet.

I realized two things simultaneously: one, I didn’t want to see what happened next; and two, the rat didn’t look as unappetizing to me as it should. I swallowed the sudden nausea that rose in me and backed toward the door. “I can see you’re about to sit down to dinner, so I’ll leave you to it,” I said quickly. “Thanks for the advice and the tea and for—”

“Good cat.” Kathy wasn’t listening to me. She scooped the limp gray body from the floor and gave the battle-scarred tom a distracted pat. Her voice sounded thicker and deeper. “I’ll save the head for you as usual, Bo-Bo.”

Her teeth began to lengthen past her bottom lip as she brought the dead rat to her mouth. I turned and fled, clutching the scrap of paper in my hand.

Chapter 2

It wasn’t the scene in WCL’s kitchen that night that made me change my mind about buying take-out blood-in-a-bag, it was the realization that if Mr. Bojangles hadn’t butted in when he had during our tussle by the Dumpster, it could have been me chowing down on a rat hors d’oeuvre. I take back what I said about standing in line in a garbage-strewn alleyway being rock bottom—the alternative would have been worse.

Famous last words.

“It’s okay, Joe, she didn’t mean to barge into you like that,” a girl’s voice behind me called after the old man with the shopping cart. “Hey, Mata Hari, wanna move your butt?” The owner of the voice poked me in the ribs as she asked the terse question.

I lowered my sunglasses at her. “Do you have a problem?” I asked coolly.

She jerked her head at the fast-retreating old man. “Besides the fact that you almost knocked down Crazy Joe? Yeah, my problem is that the line’s moving and you aren’t. I don’t particularly want to get in a rumble with a bunch of wannabes who might think it’d be a hoot to cut in ahead of us.”

“Wannabes?” Frowning, I began to close the gap in front of me, only to realize it wasn’t there anymore. To be exact, it had been filled by four black-clad figures standing with their backs to me.

“Great. Just fuckin’ great.” The girl behind me spoke again, her tone bitterly resigned. I turned and studied her in growing irritation. She looked about my age, but that was all we had in common. She was a few inches shorter than my five-seven, and the vintage punk-rock T-shirt and ripped khaki cargos she was wearing didn’t hide her compact toughness. Her hair was white-blond with dark roots, carelessly hacked into short spikes that stood up like two-tone chicken feathers around her head. Her eyes glared green at me.

“You gonna tell them to get outta here or do I have to?” She didn’t bother waiting for my reply, but stepped in front of me, tapping the nearest black-clad shoulder. “Yo, buddy,” she snapped. “Haul your ass to the back of the line and take your friends with you.”

Slowly the four figures turned to face her, moving apart so that they flanked us. Four pairs of red eyes stared menacingly out of four dead-white faces, and when the one whose shoulder had been tapped spoke, his lifted upper lip revealed razor-sharp fangs.

“We need blood,” he said in a low, emotionless voice that seemed too deep for his Ichabod Cranelike frame. He was older than his companions and it was obvious he was their spokes-vamp. “Force us, and we’ll take it from you, human.”

“Slice the bitch, Viktor!” The teenaged vamp beside him had skanky black hair extensions falling nearly to her waist. She carried through her dubious style sense with a black-and-red bustier that showed way too much bobbing cleavage, leather boots climbing halfway up her non-toned thighs and torn fishnet stockings. The whole ensemble was finished off with a Dead and Loving It tattoo inked on her slightly pouchy stomach. If I’d been feeling more charitable I might have taken her aside and suggested she try a few sit-ups or maybe look into Pilates, but her outburst to Viktor had kind of turned me off the feeling-charitable-toward-her thing.

It had turned punk-girl off, too, and from her attitude so far I was guessing she hadn’t had an abundance of charitable feelings in the first place. She flicked a glance at the teen vamp’s soft midriff and shook her head. “Chickie-poo, I’d find it easier to believe you were a dedicated blood-drinker if you weren’t flaunting that burgers-and-shakes tummy at us. Dead and Loving It? I’m Lovin’ It would have been more appropriate.”

“Hey, nobody talks to my girlfriend, Cindy, like that!” The second female vamp had Manic Panic red hair and a smear of black lipstick on one of her fangs. She was dressed like her friend and I realized that their outfits seemed somehow familiar to me, although for the moment I couldn’t think why. She turned to Viktor. “I know you said we weren’t ready to drink from a human source yet, Master, but if you want to, like, slake your thirst with these vermin, please don’t hold back on our unworthy accounts.”