All of a sudden I was grateful to Jack Rawls.

He’d saved Megan from having to stake me, I thought as I felt more sunlight pour over me. He’d saved me from having to die by my own sister’s hand. I looked down at my arms, sure they were starting to burn now, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe.

A final wisp of smoke drifted and died in the air. The heat bubbles on my skin collapsed without bursting. Even as I watched, my skin became smooth, as if I’d imagined everything I’d seen.

Jack pulled me closer and put his mouth to my hair. “I don’t kill humans, and the only reason I can think of for you not burning is that you’ve still got some human in you. But you and I both know you’re turning, and when you do I intend to finish what I started tonight. That’s a promise, vamp.”

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.

Vampaholic

BY

Harper Allen

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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Table of Contents

Cover Page

Excerpt

About the Author

Title Page

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Epilogue

Preview

Copyright

Prologue

I can’t let anyone know how afraid I am.

It has to stay my secret, one that I’ll die before I reveal. I probably will die, of course. Or maybe I won’t, and that terrifies me more. What it really comes down to is that right now I could use a little comforting…but when a girl’s let herself run out of vodka for the evening and, worse, let herself run out of men for the evening, too, she has to look for comfort where she can get it. Which sometimes means telling herself fairy stories to try to make sense of all the terrible things that have happened.

So: once upon a time there were three beautiful shop-till-they-dropped princesses named Megan, Katherine and Natashya. They were sisters—triplets, actually—who lived in a charming, upstate-New York town called Maplesburg with their grandparents on their father’s side, Grammie and Popsie Crosse.

Although their parents died when they were babies, Megan and Katherine and Tashya weren’t like orphans in other stories. Grammie and Popsie spoiled them rotten and Popsie only occasionally complained about the outrageous credit card charges the girls ran up. Oh, the sisters squabbled among themselves a bit when Megan, who was the eldest by a few minutes, got a tad bossy, or when Tashya, who was the youngest by half an hour, pouted because she couldn’t get her way. The middle sister, Kat, had her adorable foibles, too, if you want to get picky about it. Besides being partial to shoes, she was also partial to cocktails and men, but what girl isn’t?

Anyway, except for the squabbling, the Crosse sisters’ lives were perfect right up until their twenty-first year. The three most eligible bachelors in Maplesburg asked for their hands in marriage, the girls accepted, and three weddings were planned to take place that summer. Megan’s Dean was a stuffy investment banker, Kat’s Lance was a lawyer who would sell his own mother to get ahead, and Tash’s Todd was a philandering plastic surgeon, but princesses these days don’t marry for love—they marry for money and security, no? So the night before Megan’s wedding, the three princesses were looking forward to becoming brides and living happily ever after.

The end.

I’m going to try to sleep now. I’m going to try not to get a splinter in my hand from the wooden stake lying beside me, to ignore the smell of the garlic hanging by the windows and doors, to convince myself that the fairy-tale version is how it really happened. Because if I can’t, I have to accept that this nightmare is the reality.

In the nightmare, Lance and Todd and Dean turned into vampires and tried to kill Megan, Tashya and me. In the nightmare, we learned that our mom, Angelica, had been a vampire killer, but her skills hadn’t saved our father from being slaughtered by a queen vampire, or herself from being infected by the queen. At her own request, Angelica had died at the hands of her father, Anton Dzarchertzyn, who staked her before she lost her immortal soul forever.

She left this life comforted by the belief that she’d saved her babies, at least. Again, everything comes down to needing comfort, doesn’t it?

Even if comfort takes the form of a lie.

Because Angelica didn’t save her daughters. As Anton, our Grandfather Darkheart, told us when he reappeared in our lives, one of Angelica’s babies received the kiss of the vampire queen. That baby wasn’t Megan. Grandfather Darkheart instructed us all in the ways of fighting the undead, but in the final battle between the queen vampire’s army and the Crosse triplets, only Megan proved more than a match for the Mistress of Evil.

Tashya did her best, but she was out of her league. I’ve tried to tell myself that I was, too, but that’s just another comforting lie. I killed three vamps that night…and every time I drove the stake in, I felt as if I were piercing my own heart. Although I lie here in the dark with a stake beside me, I know I’ll never be able to use one again.

That’s why I’m so terrified. That’s why I can’t share this fear—not with my sisters, not with Grandfather Darkheart. The only reason I can think of for my revulsion at killing vampires is that I’m the Crosse triplet who received the kiss of the vampire queen so long ago.

Being tipsy helps a little. Being held by a stranger pushes the nightmares away for a while. But when the cocktails have worn off and the man of the night has gone home and the bedtime stories ring hollow, I lie here in my bed and wonder when the change will come over me.

No one knows how afraid I am.

Of myself.

And of what I might be.

Chapter 1

“Abs to die for,” I purred appreciatively.

On the bar stool beside me, Ramon looked up from the notepad propped on his crossed knees. “Check, boss,” he said, making a tick mark on the page.

“Biceps pumped,” I continued.

One of the carpenters rebuilding the club’s stage began to use a nail gun, and each thunk-whap! seemed to go right through my pounding temples. One of the reasons I’d drifted into the Hot Box Club as late as I had was to avoid the loud construction, but I’d forgotten the double time and a half I’d promised the crew if they worked evenings this week. Of course, the other reason I’d shown up so tardily had been because when my alarm clock had gone off at noon, I’d thrown it across the room and burrowed my head under the pillows again. I took a hasty sip of the cocktail I’d concocted as a hair-of-the-dog remedy for last night’s overindulgence and spoke above the noise. “Sweetie, can you give us a slow turn?”

My first order of business when I’d taken possession of the Hot Box had been to have everything inside it hauled away, most of the chairs and tables having been destroyed in a massive fight on the former strip dive’s last night of operation. The replacement furnishings I’d ordered hadn’t been delivered yet, so right now my new club was little more than a cavernously empty space.

Empty of furniture, that is. In addition to the carpenters working on the stage, a conga line of gorgeous males wearing hopeful expressions and not much else snaked from the vicinity of the bar to the coat check area near the main entrance. The dark-haired Adonis at the head of the line obligingly presented his rear view to Ramon and me.

“Mmm-mmm!” Ramon said for my ears only. “Even covered by tighty-whities, those buns look hard enough to crack nuts.”

“Yours, maybe, if you get fresh with him,” I enlightened him. “He’s not gay, sweetie. That means I get to pick him to play on my team.”

“Wanna bet, chica?” Ramon gave the man a sultry wink and got a faint smile in return. “Please, Kat. Some things a boy just knows,” he murmured.

Instead of answering him, I raised my martini glass at the Adonis. “I think I left out an ingredient, Jean-Paul. The ones you made for me last night tasted just a tad yummier, somehow. Vodka, amaretto, orange juice, a dollop of cherry sorbet and…?”

“Crème de pêche, chérie,” the dark-haired man answered, his smile broadening. “C’est essentiel, non? Without it you do not have a true Baiser de Vampire—Vampire’s Kiss, as you say in English. If you wish, I can come to your place again this evening and show you more of my repertoire.” He gave a glance that seemed to savor every last detail of me, taking in the way I’d pulled my hair into a silver-blond chignon, appreciating how my creamcolored Badgley Mischka slip dress skimmed my curves…and seeming to know that under my sophisticated exterior, I was wearing a deliciously trampy pink-and-black bra and panties. “My bartending repertoire, of course,” he added with Gallic suavity.

“Too tempting, sweetie. Unfortunately I’m otherwise engaged,” I sighed. “But I was impressed enough last night that I’ve decided you’ve got the job. Talk to Ramon before you leave and he’ll go through the details with you.”

“Impressed by what part of his repertoire?” Ramon asked cattily as Jean-Paul strolled out of the room in his tight briefs. “And as club manager, don’t I have any input on who we hire?”

“Of course you do.” I patted his hand. “But for the public to forget the guys-only reputation this place used to have when it was the Hot Box, it’s vital we attract women from the start. That’s the official reason for this pecs and abs beauty contest, sweetie—the fact that you and I adore looking at half-naked men is just a bonus. Trust me, having a bare-chested Jean-Paul shaking cocktails behind the bar will definitely raise female pulses.”

And pulses are another must-have for our future clientele, I reminded myself as I went around the bar to freshen my drink, seeing as how, by the Hot Box’s last night of business, most of its patrons didn’t possess one.

That had been the downside of buying this establishment. Once merely a sleazy strip joint, during its final month it had been owned by the Queen of All Evil—one of the titles my sisters and I knew her by, although on the Hot Box’s unpaid tax notices she’d used the name Zena Uzhasnoye, which my Grandfather Darkheart says translates as Zena the Terrible. But whatever alias she’d gone under, she’d turned the Hot Box into a center of vamp activity…and in the process, neglected such mundane matters as paying the bills. After my sister Megan had finally staked her, it wasn’t long before a notice was tacked up on the door informing anyone who was interested that the place was to be sold to pay off the creditors.

I’d seen the notice at a time when I’d been wondering what I could do with the rest of my life, and the notion of buying the Hot Box and turning it into a trendy club had seemed absolutely inspired. I like cocktails and parties and men. Clubs include all those things. Investigation agencies don’t, and going to work for an investigation agency was the only other option that had presented itself since my initial life plan of becoming Mrs. Lance Zellweger had blown up in my face.

The agency idea had been Tashya’s. “So we’ve whacked the queen vampyr,” she’d said to Megan and me a few days after the final battle at the Hot Box. “What about the ones that got away? We know Zena brought along a few dozen undead troops when she came to Maplesburg, and that’s not counting the vamps she and her buddies created once they arrived. Strolling around at night staking any vampires we might happen to come across is better than doing nothing, but we need to get organized if we’re going to clean up this town. What do you think about Darkheart & Crosse for a name?”

“A name for what?” Megan had asked, stifling a yawn—the result of her strolling around, as Tash put it, the previous night and staking whatever vamps she’d come across. Not for the first time since the battle at the Hot Box I had wondered what kind of toll being a hereditary Daughter of Lilith would take on my sister. For those who don’t know, Daughter of Lilith is the correct term for what Megan is—a true descendant of Adam’s first wife, the one who’s gotten such bad PR over the centuries from Venus-envying men. Technically, Tash and I are daughters of Lilith, too, but the vamp-slaying destiny only gets passed down to one female descendant per family per generation.

Which makes us Megan’s sidekicks, in the staking business at least. As Tash had continued, I’d suspected she wasn’t totally thrilled with being a sidekick.

“A name for our agency, of course,” she’d said. “Say a woman looks out her window one night and sees her boyfriend standing there, except there’s no way he can be because she’s in a third-story apartment with no balcony. Or some poor schmuck walking his dog after dark barely escapes being attacked by a bunch of thugs who have fangs and can fly, or a wife notices a bite mark on hubbie’s neck and the next day finds him sleeping in the basement under a blanket of dirt. Who do they call?” she’d demanded. “Not the cops, unless they want to be labeled nutcases. Which is where Darkheart & Crosse comes in. We set up an office, put out some flyers—”

“And just what do you propose these flyers say, sweetie?” I drawled. “Darkheart & Crosse, Vamp Exterminators?’

Tash had given me an annoyed look. “I was thinking more along the lines of Darkheart & Crosse: Extraordinary Investigations.”

“You know, Kat, I think the brat’s got something,” Megan had said slowly. “Grandfather Darkheart says that in the old country, everyone knows who the local Daughter of Lilith is, even if they don’t talk about what she does. But this is Maplesburg. Maybe we should hang out a shingle.”

It had snowballed from there. Mikhail, Megan’s gorgeous shape-shifting main squeeze—don’t ask, it’s a long story—had thought the idea of an agency made sense, and although Grandfather Darkheart had been dubious at first, Megan’s point about Maplesburg not being Carpathia had finally won him over.

If anyone had asked my opinion about the whole thing, I would have given it. But they hadn’t, so two weeks later I had signed the papers making me the new owner of the late, unlamented Hot Box.

The acquisition had taken a big chunk out of my part of the trust funds Popsie had set up for his three granddaughters, which we’d been able to access when we’d turned twenty-one. I’d written the check without a qualm, informed Megan and Tash about my purchase, and made regretful sounding apologies for not joining them in their Darkheart & Crosse venture.

Only then had the sick feeling that had lodged in the pit of my stomach since Tash had proposed her vampire-hunting agency idea gone away.

Which wasn’t to say that I didn’t still have problems, I thought now as I turned from the bar and narrowed my eyes at the crew of carpenters. I did, but they were the kind that could be solved. Cocktail in hand, I left Ramon in gay heaven interviewing the conga line of beefcake and made my way to the half-built stage on the far side of the room. The crew foreman, bulging biceps revealed by the rolled-up sleeves of his sawdusty shirt—don’t you just love what swinging a hammer all day does for a man’s muscles?—gave a grin as I approached.

“Hey, boss lady, I wondered when you’d get tired of those pretty boys prancing around in their undershorts and check out us real men.” He lowered his voice and a frown replaced his grin. “Why didn’t you call last night, babe? I waited around to hear from you and when you didn’t phone I tried your number but I just kept getting your machine. I know you were home because when I drove by, your car was parked outside and a couple of lights were on in your apartment.”

Gorgeous biceps or not, Terry was the problem I needed to solve. I took a sip of my drink and did so. “Getting my very own personal stalker wasn’t what I had in mind when you and I had our fling last week, darling,” I said lightly. “As spine-tingly and delicious as you made me feel during our naughty little romp, it was a one-time-only thing. So much more romantic that way, don’t you think? You know, ships that pass in the night and all—”

“Cut the bullshit, Kat!” His tone was beginning to attract attention. I saw the dark-haired carpenter nearest to us flick a glance our way before returning to the task of reloading his nail gun as Terry went on. “I fell like a ton of bricks for you and you know it! Who the hell were you screwing senseless last night when you could have been with me?”

I sighed. I’d tried letting him down easily, but some men just can’t accept it when a woman doesn’t rush out to choose a china pattern after she sleeps with them. “If you must know, sweetie, one of those pretty boys over there prancing around in his underwear. His name’s Jean-Paul, and to be perfectly honest, it was a toss-up as to who screwed who more senseless.” I tipped back the final potent drops of my cocktail and gave Terry a wide-eyed look over the rim of the glass. “You know, it really is true what they say about the French knowing so much more about amour. Jean-Paul had me doing things I’d never imagined in my wickedest—”

“Spare me the fucking details,” Terry said tightly. “Before I went out with you I heard stories about what a ball breaker you were, but I didn’t believe them. Now I do.” He grabbed a nearby toolbox. “I quit. Some other sap might have taken my place in your bed, but it won’t be so easy for you to find another master carpenter to take my place on this job, lady.”

Ball breaker? Me? I stared after his retreating back, unaccustomed anger getting the better of me. “You never had a place in my bed, sweetie!” I called after him. “We did it on the floor and the kitchen table and in the shower, but we never actually made it to the bed, remember?”

“I think we’ll all remember now, sis.” I turned to see Megan standing behind me, her eyebrows raised and her arms folded across her chest. She was wearing a tight-fitting sleeveless top with slim black pants, and her shoes were Chanel ballet flats. Very retro–Audrey Hepburn, right up to and including the cropped Sabrina haircut she’d recently gotten. “Didn’t you used to handle breakups more…discreetly?” she asked.

I waved my hand airily. “Oh, pooh, Terry’s not a breakup, he was a lapse in judgment. Although he might have a point about finding someone to replace him on the job,” I admitted, my airiness fading.

“You should have thought about that before you did the floor and table and shower thing with him.” Tashya joined us. In contrast to Megan’s basic black, she was wearing a ribbon-belted Zac Posen bias-cut skirt topped with a cashmere shell in pale lemon that played up the strawberry-blond glints in her curls. In my bitchier moments I compare her to Shirley Temple, but most of the time I have to admit she looks like a Botticelli angel. She’d obviously entered the club with Megan but, being made of less stern stuff than a Daughter of Lilith, she’d been distracted by Ramon’s conga line of hotties. She cast a last, longing look at them. “Not that I’m complaining, but why do they have to drop their laundry to get a job here?”

“Because the staff uniform’s almost as revealing,” I told her. “Think Chippendale dancers. I want to be sure every male working at the new Hot Box is absolutely to-die-for from head to toe. Did I tell you about my idea to—”

“Kat, we didn’t come here to talk about your club,” Megan cut in. She frowned. “Although just as an aside, you’re surely not going to keep the name Hot Box, are you?”

Even a Daughter of Lilith could be distracted, it seemed, but distractability wasn’t a positive when it came in the repressive tone of voice Megan was using. I studied her, trying and failing to see the sister I’d grown up with—the one who’d rolled her eyes with me over Tash’s irritating whininess, giggled with me over how dumb but fascinating boys were and later snickered with me over how dumb but fascinating men were—who’d known all my secrets and told me all hers.

Sometime in the past two months, that sister had left me. She’d been replaced by the seriousfaced woman in front of me—a woman who’d sworn she wouldn’t let anything stand in the way of her hereditary mission to kill vampires.

I suddenly wished I’d made my cocktail a double. I looked at the pink froth rimming my empty glass and said the first thing that came into my head. “God, no.” I gave her a tiny smile. “I’ve decided to call the club The Vampire’s Kiss. Appropriate, yes?”

Megan’s gaze went flat. “Appropriate, no,” she said tersely. “Not to mention tasteless. In case you’ve forgotten, our mother gave her life in the fight against vampires.”

“And either Tash or I received the kiss of the same queen vamp who vanquished her,” I drawled. “Ever notice how we don’t talk about that much anymore, sis? Not since we learned you weren’t the one who got vamp-marked, anyway. I guess it’s a pretty delicate subject, though, with you feeling so honor-bound as a Daughter of Lilith to hunt down and stake any sister of yours who might suddenly turn undead on you.”

I expected a reaction from Megan, but I wasn’t prepared when Tash clamped a hand around my arm and pulled me a few feet away from the group of carpenters. She thrust her face into mine, her voice a furious whisper—furious but unnecessary, since Mr. Nail Gun was loudly at work again. “We don’t talk about it because it doesn’t matter anymore!” she hissed. “Megan killed the queen vamp, and when a vamp that’s bitten you dies before you make your own first kill as a vampire, you’re saved! You know that as well as we do, so either your memory loss is from all the alcohol you’ve been tossing back lately, or there really is something to the phrase ‘screwing your brains—’”

“Congratulations, Tash,” Megan ground out through gritted teeth. “We agreed before we came here that we weren’t going to handle this intervention like a confrontation, and that’s exactly what you’ve turned it into.”

“Intervention?” I stared from one to the other of them. Tash looked ashamed, as she always does when she knows she’s crossed the line. Megan looked upset, and just for a moment I saw my sister, not a Daughter of Lilith, behind her worried gaze. Then she nodded slowly.

“Someone has to make you see what you’re doing to yourself, Kat. As usual, Tash shot her mouth off without thinking, but she’s right. In the past few weeks you’ve gone from indulging in the occasional cocktail to downing them like water, and that scene we walked in on when we arrived just bears out the other part of what she said.”

“That I screw my brains out?” I asked with icy politeness. “Because at least I do it with men, sweetie. Tell me, have you bought a dog license for Mikhail yet?”

Megan paled. I waited for her to scream at me, to insult me back, to give me an angry shove, but what she did was worse than any of those things.

She turned and walked away from me.

“On the bitch-o-meter, that one rang the bell,” Tash said hotly, planting her hands on her hips and tossing back a red gold curl from her glaring blue eyes. “Mikhail might be able to shapeshift into a wolf, but that doesn’t make him one. And for your information, it’s not the number of men you’ve been seeing that has Meg worried, it’s the way you treat them.”

As if by some mysterious signal, the hammering that had been going on all day by the stage suddenly stopped. Then I realized that the signal hadn’t been mysterious at all; the clock behind the bar showed eight o’clock, which meant the crew had put in their agreed-to overtime. On the other side of the room, both Ramon and his conga line had gone, too.

I felt like a drink. I started to push past Tash, but she stepped in front of me.

“I don’t care if you don’t want to hear it, I’m going to say it anyway. You’ve always loved ’em and left ’em, sis, but now it’s different. Your carpenter boy-toy was right—you’ve turned into a ball breaker. You never spend more than one or two nights with the same man, and if they can’t be as casual as you are about it, you make sure you dump them as publicly and humiliatingly as possible. Megan says she can’t figure it out. It’s like you’ve got a hate on for all men. I agree. Only difference is, I have figured it out.”

“What an exciting new experience for you, sweetie,” I said acidly. “Now, if you don’t mind, I really must run.”

“This won’t take long.” Tash took a deep breath. “I know what’s been eating away at you since Megan killed Zena, and why you’ve been acting all ‘Girls Gone Wild’ lately and treating men like Kleenex. It’s because of what that queen bitch said about Dad just as Meg staked her—that he’d been one of her vamp servants and he’d betrayed Mom.” She bit her lip. “If that were true it would mean he betrayed us, too, in a way. We grew up on Grammie and Popsie’s stories about what a great son he was and how much he loved Mom and adored his darling baby daughters. When Zena realized she was going to hell, she saw how she could use our love for him as one final weapon against us, and that’s exactly what she did. But it wasn’t just a lie, it was a stupid lie, because Grandfather Darkheart saw our father’s dead body that night twenty years ago when Zena came for Mom and us. If Dad had been a vampyr, he’d have been dusted, not dead.”

Her words had tumbled out of her like a torrent. Now they abruptly dried up and her gaze burned into me.

I could have said a lot of things. I could have said that even if the son Grammie and Popsie remembered had once been as loving as they said, becoming a vamp would have changed him completely. I could have said that Grandfather Darkheart might well have lied about what he saw the night my mother died, to spare us pain. I could have said that it would be easy enough for a vampire to feign death to fool a desperate old man, and then to disappear into the night, never to be seen again.

I could have said any or all of these things, but seeing the shadowy fear lurking behind Tash’s china-doll blue gaze, I didn’t. I gave a little laugh.

“So touching of you to try out your pop psychology on me, darling, but guess what? I don’t have a Daddy complex or anything complicated like that. I like delicious men. I like having a cocktail or two. Is that simple enough for you, sweetie?”

Tash’s gaze hardened. “Go to hell, Kat.”

“Been there, done that, courtesy of Zena, remember?” I said with a sweet smile. “Or is my little sojourn in the hot place on the night we battled her and her vamp army just another one of those things we’re supposed to forget about?”

“I couldn’t if I wanted to,” Tash said tightly. “Because the woman who came back from there wasn’t my sister anymore.”

She spun on her heel, leaving me alone in the room. That’s when I walked out of the club and practically into the fangs of a vampire, the perfect finishing touch to a day that had turned completely to merde.

Chapter 2

Thank God I was wearing Manolos. Swiftly I slipped off my left shoe and grabbed it up. By the inadequate illumination of the few parking lot lights, the vampire looked to be a teenager. He was moving so fast he almost ran into the spiked heel and staked himself, but he skidded to a halt just in time. He looked at me, astonishment on his acned face.

“Are you fucking kidding? That’s not gonna work.”

“I don’t see why it fucking wouldn’t, sweetie,” I told him. I heard the slight fuzziness in my voice and made a mental note not to drive home if I got out of this alive, but at least the cocktails I’d downed over the course of the afternoon lent me a certain Dutch courage, I realized. The hand that was holding the Manolo against his AC/DC T-shirt was rock-steady. “And you’re not so sure it won’t, either,” I continued. “If you were, you would have rushed me by now.”

He stared at me in frustration, and then the red glow in his eyes faded a little. “Yeah,” he admitted. “Guess I’ll just have to use my glamyr on you.”

The air between us seemed to shimmer. For a moment his adolescent chest took on definition under the dirty tee, his greasy brown hair looked glossy and beautiful and a wave of dark sexuality began lapping around me, drawing me to him. Even his acne-ridden skin cleared up before my very eyes.

Except for the angry red pimple on his chin. I shook my head and took a breath. “Zit-check at six o’clock,” I said, feeling the glamyr dispel abruptly. “Sorry, sweetie, but it ruins everything.”

“Shit!” he swore, his hand going self-consciously to his chin. “For a couple of weeks before I turned, my skin actually looked pretty good,” he said defensively. “I was going out with this girl who worked in Hazlitt’s Drugstore and she gave me these medicated pad things, you know? Then Bitsy and me broke up and I stopped using the pads. Just my crap luck to become undead when I was back in pizza-face mode.”

Megan’s MINI was still parked next to mine. Obviously she and Tash had been delayed in leaving the club. My plan was to keep the vamp talking until they showed up, but something he’d said puzzled me enough that I didn’t have to fake interest “Hazlitt’s?” I frowned, taking care not to relax my grip on my impromptu stake. “I can remember Grammie Crosse taking me there for ice cream when I was about five or six, but they must have gone out of business at least ten years ago. When did you become a—”

Maybe he’d been trying to keep me talking, too, in the hopes I’d become distracted enough that he could risk a lunge at me. But as it had done with me, something in our conversation triggered a real response from him.

“Crosse? You’re one of the Crosse sisters?” His face had been pale before, another indication that he needed to feed, but now it went so white his acne stood out like beacons. He took a step backward. “Oh, fuck, you’re not Kat, are you?”

“Megan,” I lied immediately. “If you’ve heard of my sister, you’ve heard of me, too, so you know you don’t stand a chance against—”

“Nuh-uh.” He took another step back, his eyes beginning to glow red again. “I can smell a Daughter of Lilith a mile away, and you’re not the vamp killer. You were trying to fuck me up! You were trying to get me to bite you, you bitch!”

“I was trying to make you bite me?” I leaned in, astonishment momentarily overriding my fear. “Is this the undead variation of ‘you know you want it, honey?’ Because I don’t appreciate it when human males try to pull that merde on me, and I’m certainly not about to let an underage, undead vampire—”

“Stay away from me!”

His words came out in a high-pitched snarl. As I stood there, my Manolo clutched in my nerveless hand and fear freezing me to the spot, he backpedalled away from me so fast that his feet got tangled up with each other and he tripped. He scrambled up again, his horror-filled red eyes still locked on mine. Then he turned to run.

I think I saw the stake before he did, but I’d swear he had time to dodge out of the way and save himself. Instead, he seemed to run deliberately into its path.

It came speeding through the near-dark parking lot with unerring accuracy, the deadly tip sinking deep into the left side of his chest, right through the DC part of the gothic AC/DC lettering on his tee. His hands flew to the shaft of wood sticking from him, as if he intended to pull it out.

His glowing eyes met mine again, but instead of the terror that had been in them a second ago, I saw an emotion so out of place that I knew I had to be mistaken. His hands fell away from the stake, his lips drew back from his razor-sharp canines in a death-rictus, the red glow in his eyes dimmed.

Then he turned to ash.

In the past couple of months I’ve seen so many vamps die that you’d think I’d be used to it. My sisters are. Megan stands over her kills grimly, as if she wants their last sight on earth to be the Daughter of Lilith who sent them to hell. Tash is the opposite; she all but does a victory dance around the ashes, and once I saw her kick them. Grandfather Darkheart caught that little performance, too, and in his heavy Carpathian accent gave her a stern lecture that I could tell Tashya tuned out before the second sentence.

I feel agonizing pain. The first time I experienced it, I was sure the vamp had somehow turned my stake against me before he’d died and I’d looked down at myself, expecting to see a yew-wood shaft protruding from my body and dark gouts of blood pouring from the wound.

I felt like that now, but I didn’t bother looking for a wound I knew wasn’t there. Instead, I turned to watch Megan sprinting across the parking lot toward me, Tash right behind her. I took a breath and put on my best bored manner.

“Yay, team. Chalk up another one for the good guys, and all that.” Languidly I pumped the hand holding the Manolo into the air before bending to slip my shoe back onto my foot. “Impressive stake-hurling, sis. Ever think of giving up this vampire-killing gig and trying out for the Olympic javelin toss?”

Megan retrieved her stake and shoved it into the strap holster on her left bicep. “You’ve got a right to be pissed,” she said evenly. “I shouldn’t have interfered with your kill. Sorry, Kat.”

“We saw you standing there like a dummy and we thought you were caught up in his glamyr,” Tashya explained. “Either that, or so scared you were about to wee-wee your panties. Which one was it, Kat?”

I raised my eyebrows and hoped my drawl covered the last remnants of my shakiness. “Gawd, sweeties—scared? Whatever gave you that idea? I simply hoped I wouldn’t have to ruin a perfectly darling pair of Manolos by using one of them as a vamp sticker…and as it turned out, I wouldn’t have had to.” I gave an elaborate shrug. “Your reputation’s spread, Meg. I told the little pisher I was you, and he tripped over his own feet trying to get away.”

“I wondered why he was running,” Megan answered. “And like Tash, I also wondered what you were playing at, standing there and talking to him instead of sending him to hell. You sure he wasn’t using a little glamyr on you without you knowing?”

There it was in her voice again, that repressive tone that she’d seemingly inherited with her life mission of vamp killing, but now it was accentuated with a marked coolness. Not surprising, given our recent contretemps in the club, I supposed. I extracted my car keys from my purse.

“Believe it or not, sister dear, the rest of us aren’t totally incapacitated when we’re facing the undead. In fact, I’ve always suspected I’m a little less susceptible to vamp wiles than you are, but to answer your question, no, his glamyr didn’t work on me.” I turned to unlock my car, adding casually, “He seemed so inept all round it’s a wonder he wasn’t staked a decade or so ago. Since he was a local boy, it positively dented my civic pride.”

I began to get into my MINI, but Megan’s hand shot out and clamped around my arm. I stiffened. She removed it but didn’t apologize. “A local vamp who’s been around for decades? Not possible,” she said flatly. “Maplesburg wasn’t infected until Zena arrived here.”

“So we believed,” I answered. “Apparently we were wrong.”

“You’re wrong,” Tash snapped. “That would mean Maplesburg had already turned when—”

She stopped and I finished her sentence for her. “When Daddy lived here, sweetie? Yes, that’s exactly what it would mean.” I looked away from her frozen face and met Megan’s hard gaze. “If you don’t want to take my word for it, use the resources of Darkheart & Crosse to locate a woman named Bitsy. As a teenager she worked at Hazlitt’s Drugstore before it went out of business, so she’d be in her thirties now, at least. Ask her about a boyfriend she had who was into AC/DC and Clearasil.”

“I will,” Megan said coldly. “And if I find out you’re yanking our chain over this, Kat, you’ll be sorry.” She strode to her car and got in. Tash was already sitting in the front passenger seat. Megan started the ignition and then rolled down the window. “Take this,” she called to me, her tone expressionless. “I always keep a couple of spares in the car. You really shouldn’t be out after dark without one.”

I caught the stake she tossed my way. Even as my fingers closed around it, she was revving her MINI out of the parking lot. I saw the car’s taillights flare red as she came to the stop before the road, and then my sisters were gone.

Ten minutes ago I hadn’t trusted myself to drive. Now I was stone-cold sober. I began again to get into my MINI, and for the second time in as many minutes didn’t complete the action.

From the far end of the parking lot came the growl of a car engine starting up. It caught and became a full-throated roar. I heard the solidsounding thunk of a transmission dropping into first gear, heard the roar immediately ease into a deep rumble and then saw a pair of headlights flare to sudden life. Dazzling tunnels of light cut through the darkness and early evening ground mist as the car began slowly heading my way.

It passed under one of the lot’s two feeble lights, and my heart sank. The vehicle’s windows were black—not merely tinted, but blotchy black, as if someone had applied the contents of a can of matte paint to the interior of the windows. That could only mean one thing.

“Shit.” I was too tired to bother translating my comment into French. “Vamp transport.”

It had to be. The car had moved out of the pool of light and was now rolling through the dark again, a hulking, dated silhouette. A certain type of vamp seemed to go for vintage vehicles; probably, as Megan’s Mikhail had once informed my sisters and me, because the trunks of older cars were roomy enough to make a comfortable daytime resting place if necessary. “Also,” he’d added with a significant glance at the matching MINIs that had been Popsie Crosse’s most recent birthday gifts to us, “because those old Detroit tanks can ram most newer vehicles off the road. At that point, sitting in a ditch in your car, you’re the equivalent of a can of Dinty Moore beef stew to a hungry vamp.”

“Which means that making a run for it in the MINI might be a teensy bit rash,” I told myself out loud as the car rumbled closer. “I’ll never make the three miles to town before he catches up with me, so what other options do I have?” I forced a casualness to my solitary conversation, hoping to keep my growing terror at bay. “The obvious one is to stake him. On the plus side, I was Grandfather Darkheart’s star pupil when he was training Megan and Tash and me in the finer points of vamp sticking. On the negative side, when it came down to doing it for real during the battle at the Hot Box with Zena and her followers, I—”

I didn’t finish my sentence, but I couldn’t shut off my thoughts. I had been Anton’s star pupil, so much so that I’d been secretly sure I was the Crosse triplet who’d inherited my mother’s vamp-killing legacy and would be the next Daughter of Lilith. My first kill had ripped that fantasy from me forever.

When Zena had loosed her pack of undead on us that night, I’d taken up a fighting stance like a vampire-killing Joan of Arc, knowing I was fulfilling the destiny that had been written for me long before my birth. The first vamp that had rushed me hadn’t stood a chance. I’d been so confident of my powers that I’d let him come close enough to grab me, but as he’d leaned in to slash at my throat I’d thrust my stake into his heart. In triumph I’d looked into his eyes, wanting to see him die.

Instead, I saw him being born.

It had been like watching a movie, except I wasn’t watching it, I was living it. And although only a split second could have elapsed between the time I staked him and the moment he fell away into dust, I experienced his whole life. I stood in the delivery room as he came into the world. I was on the sidewalk watching him take a tumble from his trike, inside the pet shop as he pointed out the puppy he wanted, with him on his first day at school when he wet his pants and tried to hide it.

I saw him fall in love.

I saw him graduate.

I saw him being attacked in an alleyway one night by the vampire who turned him.

I saw his first kill, his final kill…and then I saw myself standing over him, my hand still on the stake lodged in his body. Terror and agony ripped through me, both overwhelmed by an agonizing sense of loss. In the moment that he turned to dust I knew the truth. His death was mine. Part of me would follow him down to hell.

I forced myself to take on the second vamp who came at me, a female, and went through the whole process all over again, but during my third kill something broke in me and Zena made her move against me. Since her move consisted of sending me to hell, I don’t think it’s too surprising that for the most part I’ve blanked out that unpleasant interlude. I don’t have any trouble remembering what happened when I finally came back to full consciousness, however: the battle was over, Zena had been vanquished and Megan had proved herself to be a true Daughter of Lilith.

I’d received proof, too. I’d walked into the Hot Box wanting only to kill vampires. When I left hours later I finally understood a favorite quote of Popsie’s, one he’d told me he’d read in an old cartoon: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

I’d seen the enemy. I’d felt the blood tie between me and them—a blood tie forged years ago when a queen vampyr had marked a Daughter of Lilith’s baby. I hadn’t turned yet, but if Grandfather Darkheart was correct and the kiss of the vampire bore fruit in her victim’s twenty-first year, I would soon.

But until I did I had to assume I was as vulnerable to being killed by a vamp as any normal human would be.

“Which brings me back to my original problem, no?” I muttered now as I steadied myself against my MINI and thrust all future problems aside to deal with my current one. “If it’s a question of my survival, am I capable of staking the son of a bitch?”

I was about to find out the answer to that question. The vehicle came to a stop about twenty feet away from me, its engine idling with a heavy rumble I could feel through the spike heels of my shoes, its chrome grille glittering ominously. I waited for my gentleman caller—a car like that simply had to belong to a male vamp, I thought—to get out, saunter over to me and flash fangs.

The black-painted driver’s window rolled down. Something projected from it and I shifted position slightly to see what it was.

Thunk-whap!

The metallic sound exploded right next to me and adrenaline kicked through me like a double shot of one-hundred-proof vodka. I’d been set up, I thought hollowly, appalled at my own carelessness. A second vamp had apparently landed on my MINI while I’d been watching the approach of the one in the car. Stake in hand, I whirled to face my attacker.

There was no one on the MINI. A nerveracking possibility flashed into my mind and I dropped to my knees, stake at the ready, my gaze scanning the pavement under the car.

Thunk-whap!

Pain blazed through my right hand, and my stake clattered to the ground. Instinctively I tried to cradle my hand to my body to ease the agony, but trying to move it sent a sickening wave of fresh pain through me. In confusion I looked at my hand.

At first I didn’t understand what I was staring at. My fingers were outstretched on the driver’s door of my car, every tendon on the back of my right hand standing out in sharp relief. Blood ran down my wrist onto the glossy white paintwork of the MINI, and between my index and middle fingers something gleamed silver in the half light.

I suddenly recognized the silver gleam for what it was, and shock slammed the breath from my lungs. I’d wanted a drink earlier. Now I needed one, if only to numb the horror of what I was seeing.

The object spiked through the web of skin between the fingers on my hand into the car’s door…was a nail.

Chapter 3

“Damn.” The low-voiced oath came from the direction of the idling car. I heard the sound of the vehicle’s door being opened and the scrape of shoes on the pavement. After my first sickened glance at the nail through my hand I’d turned away, but now I made myself look at it again.

There’s something about seeing yourself as a carpentry project that makes a girl want to throw up. I forced back the bile that rose in my throat and tried to pull the nail out with my free hand.

It wouldn’t budge. I pulled harder, my grip slick with my own blood, but the nail was firmly lodged into the MINI’s door panel. From the sound of his unhurried tread, the vamp wasn’t in any ravenous rush but even so, I had only seconds to free myself.

I’d lived through Brazilian waxes. What I had to do next couldn’t be more excruciating, could it? I closed my eyes, clenched my teeth and ripped my hand free of the nail.

I’d been right, the pain didn’t beat out Brazilian waxes—not by much, anyway. But in my experience, the agony of a wax is always replaced by a delightfully sleek and sexy feeling after it’s over. Seeing the torn and bloody web of skin between my fingers just made me feel like a rat that had gnawed off its own foot to escape a trap.

Not delightful. Not sexy. And definitely not as conflicted as I’d been a few minutes ago about staking the sadistic undead who’d done this to me. My Badgley slip dress looked like a rag that had been used to mop an abbatoir floor, and my hair was hanging around my face in damp hanks. As I scrabbled under the car for the fallen stake and my knees scraped painfully against the oil-stained pavement, a primal rage surged through me.

He wasn’t playing fair. Vampires had the whole fang and super strength and flying thing going on, and all we humans had were wood and garlic and maybe a splash of holy water if we were lucky. For a vamp to add a nail gun to his arsenal was overkill—and where had he gotten it from, anyway?

Nausea rose up in me a second time. Of course. The son of a bitch had killed one of my carpenters and taken the tool from his dead body. I thought of the crew that had been working all day and into overtime this evening to get the club’s stage rebuilt on schedule for me, and my anger grew. Nailing me through the hand had made it personal, but this made it war.

My fingers closed bloodily around the stake as the footsteps behind me came closer. I jumped to my feet and let my rage out in a scream as I raced toward the approaching vamp.

“Get ready to kiss your ass goodbye, you bastard! When I’m finished with you there won’t be anything left but dust!”

I started to bring my stake up into position—wrist rigid, the power coming from the shoulder, if anyone’s interested—and then I froze.

The man facing me was the carpenter who’d played havoc with my hangover today. On one of the few days when I’d pulled myself together early enough to show up at the club before the cocktail hour I’d seen him taking a break outside with some of the others in the crew as I’d hurried into the building, swathed in a silk scarf and wearing oversized Christian Dior sunglasses to keep the brilliance of the day from racheting up my pounding headache.

Which meant he wasn’t a vamp. That fact wasn’t as comforting as it might have been, because he was still trying to kill me.

“You’re the one who’s going to be dust in a second,” he grunted, using both hands to steady the nail gun. “When you get to hell, tell your pals down there that Jack Rawls sends his regards.”

As he finished speaking he depressed the trigger on the cordless nailer. I barely had time to leap out of the way before a deadly barrage of nails began flying at me.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I yelled as I turned my leap into a dive and slid across the hood of my MINI, losing my Manolos in the process. I fell rather than landed on the other side of my car and crouched there. A metallic pinging like hail on a tin roof told me Rawls was still firing.

“Gunning for a vamp,” he said calmly over the pinging. His flat Midwest accent made his words seem matter-of-fact. “The nails are tipped with silver, and the gun’s been modified to shoot up to twenty feet, so make it easy on yourself and stop trying to run.”

My heart turned over. What did he mean, gunning for a vamp? There was no way he could know my most secret fear—no one did. How had he learned of it, and why was he so sure it wasn’t just a fear, but the truth?

I could hear him walking around the front of the car. Still keeping low, I sprinted to the back of the MINI, ungratefully wishing Popsie had sprung for Hummers instead when he’d bought our birthday presents. “I’m not a vampire,” I said tightly. “You were working only feet away from me most of the day, so there’s no way you don’t know who I am.”

“No way at all,” he agreed, his tone still unruffled. “You’re Kat Crosse, and one of your sisters is the local Daughter of Lilith. I knew who you were before I hit town.” I heard him exhale, and something in the raggedness of his breath made me realize his calmness was eroding. “I can’t fault your sister for not being able to put you down, but I’m not going to lose any sleep tonight after I dust you, lady.”

He stepped around the back of the MINI as he spoke and aimed the nail gun at where I’d been crouching. His head jerked up when he saw I wasn’t there, but his reaction came too late.

I jumped off the car’s roof and crashed into him, falling with him to the ground. Grandfather Darkheart’s weeks of training might not have turned me into a vamp fighter like Megan, I thought grimly as I rammed the point of my stake to Jack Rawls’s throat and glared down at him from my sitting position on his chest, but it definitely gave me an edge in a parking lot brawl like this.

His body went rigid. He stared up at me, and even in the poor light I could see implacable hatred in his eyes as blood traced a thin line from the point of my stake to his collar. “Do it,” he said, his voice hoarsened by the pressure on his throat. “Go ahead and plunge it in. If you don’t I’ll do it myself.”

He moved so fast I almost didn’t have time to react. His head jerked sideways toward the stake, and even as I pulled back my weapon in shock I saw the trickle of blood deepen. I felt him brace himself to repeat the maneuver and I did the only thing I could think of to prevent him.

“Stop that!” The stake was instantaneously reversed in my hand—another move that Grandfather Darkheart’s training had drilled into me—and as I shouted the command at Rawls I smashed the blunt end of the wood into his cheekbone. His head rocked sideways with the strength of my blow, and I sensed him gathering himself to break free of me. I hit him again, ignoring the blazing pain in my wounded hand, and then slammed the solid yew-wood stake against his temple a third time with all the strength I could muster. He went limp, the tension I’d felt in his body extinguished as instantly as a lightbulb being turned off.

“You’ve killed him,” I told myself through numb lips. “That’s what comes of going all altruistic and trying to save a man from himself, instead of sticking with what you know and being a ball-breaking bitch.” I wiped my bloody hand on my hiked-up dress—the fact that I only felt the tiniest pang as I did so was proof of how distracted I was—and pressed my thumb to the side of his neck.

His pulse was slow but steady. Relief swept through me. I peered closer at his neck and saw that the small puncture mark from my stake was closer to his jawline than his jugular, and that the bleeding had already slowed.

“You’re not dead,” I told his unconscious form. “I like that in a man, but what I’d like even more is not having to worry about you trying to kill one or both of us. I guess I could keep knocking you out every time you show signs of coming round, except that would mean I couldn’t ask you questions.” I stood up and looked down at him. “And I’ve got questions, sweetie. Lots of them, starting with how you knew the one thing about me that I haven’t dared tell anybody.”

Stepping over him, I walked to the front of the MINI and reached inside to the console. I popped the trunk and hastened back again, flicking a wary glance at Rawls’s prone body as I passed him. Ask me how long two coats of OPI polish plus a base and topcoat take to dry and I can tell you to the second, but predicting how long a man who’s gone down for the count will remain down isn’t my area of expertise.

However, I did have some handy gadgets relating to one of my areas of expertise in the small overnight case I always carried with me. Minutes later, having used them and a few other things on him, I surveyed the results of my handiwork with satisfaction.

“There’s something about a man in handcuffs that always gets my motor revving a little,” I murmured. “But just because a girl’s got a wicked side doesn’t mean she’s a vamp, Jack—or at least, it doesn’t mean she’s turned into a vamp yet. If you’d known that much about me, we might have ended up using these handcuffs in a completely different scenario tonight.” I’d straddled him as I’d cuffed him to the MINI’s bumper and tied each of his legs with lengths of tough nylon rope to his own vehicle, which I’d moved up behind the MINI. Now I sat back on his chest and narrowed my gaze at him.

When I’d seen him earlier I’d been distracted, first by Terry and then by the confrontation with my sisters, and I certainly hadn’t taken note of his physical attributes while he’d been trying to shoot nails in me. Jack Rawls wasn’t a bad-looking man, I realized belatedly. He was in his late twenties, although by the leaned-down look of his jaw and the sun-squint lines interrupting the tan at the corners of his eyes, they hadn’t been twenty-eight or twenty-nine indulged years. His black hair was growing out from a close trim and I got the definite impression it would be ruthlessly cropped back again the minute it started to get in his way. Not drop-dead gorgeous like Jean-Paul, or all moody and wolfishly sexy like Megan’s Mikhail, I decided, but definitely handcuffs-to-the-bedposts material. Somehow, though, I didn’t think he was the type to go for that, even if we’d met under more conducive circumstances.

“Kansas farmer stock?” I hazarded as I waited for him to come to. “Idaho? From your accent, I’m guessing you’re from one of those flat states where people do Norman Rockwell things like going to potluck suppers and having chores. It’s not only the accent, it’s the whole grim determination thing you’ve got going on, as if staking me is a duty you can’t shirk. Such a shame, sweetie. As I say, these handcuffs could have been put to much better use.”

“I don’t sleep with vampires.” As if he’d been conscious for some seconds and had simply been waiting for the right moment to startle me, Jack Rawls opened his eyes and stared emotionlessly at me. “I meant what I said. Kill me. I’m not interested in eternal life, vamp.”

Without warning he jerked his arms powerfully toward his body and tried to do the same with his legs, like a mustang lunging desperately against restraints. I grabbed two handfuls of his T-shirt and tightened the grip of my bare thighs against his rib cage to avoid being bucked off as he tried to break free, expecting him to continue his fight for a few moments before realizing it was doing him no good. But he surprised me again. Just as suddenly as he’d exploded into movement he stopped—as if, I thought with sharp interest, he’d been in similar situations in the past and recognized when it was of more benefit to conserve his energy than to continue resisting uselessly.

I made a note to add his familiarity with restraints to the list of subjects to explore with the mysterious Mr. Rawls, but my first question was a deliberately distracting one.

“Police issue cuffs, courtesy of a detective on the Maplesburg P.D. who liked playing good cop/bad girl with me,” I told Rawls. “Or was it bad cop/bad girl? Anyway, they’re not toys, Jack, and I got the rope I tied around your ankles from the trunk of your car, so you’re not going anywhere until I say you can. I also ran over your damn nail gun, so don’t bother trying to think of some way you can reach it and use it. Speaking of your car, I’ve got to ask—what’s an upstanding, vampire-hating carpenter like you doing riding around in a vampmobile?”

“I got a deal,” he said tonelessly. “Its last owner died in it.”

When I’d moved his vehicle, I’d turned off the bright headlights, leaving on only its parking lights. My back was toward them but they shone full in Rawls’s face, so I could see every flicker of expression that crossed his features, if there’d been one. But there wasn’t. The only indication of his state of mind came from the cold hatred in his eyes as he stared up at me.

Now, cold hatred isn’t the usual expression men have when they look at me. Unbridled lust, hopeless infatuation, puppy-dog pleading—those are some of the ways men look at me. Even when I’d dumped Terry this afternoon, I’d seen in his eyes that if I’d crooked my little finger as he’d stormed out, he would have turned right around and come back for the chance to spend another night with me. Rawls, on the other hand, had me sitting on his chest with the black lace of my pink panties peeking out under my hiked-up hem and, thanks to the ripped neckline of my ruined slip dress, my breasts practically spilling out of my push-up bra into his face—and still he was treating me as if I was something he’d scraped off his shoe.

I decided that Jack Rawls was beginning to piss me off just the teensiest bit.

“Its last owner being a vampire like you think I am, I suppose,” I said, my patience at an end. “How can I put this so you understand? I’m not undead, I’m a real live female.” A thought occurred to me. “You’ve seen me in the daytime,” I reminded him, clinching the ridiculous argument. “What does the fact that I didn’t burst into flames tell you, sweetie?”

“Fuck all.” If anything, the hatred in his gaze intensified. “I’ve never seen you exposed to the sunlight. Far as I can tell, no one has in a while. Yeah, you’ve shown up here a couple of times in the late afternoon, looking as sick as a dog and wrapped up in scarves and wearing dark glasses. I’ve known a vamp or two in my time who can rise before dusk if they had to and if they take the kind of precautions you do. That hasn’t stopped me from killing them.”

“Then we’d better hope you never run into Tara Reid,” I shot back, pissed by his “sick as a dog” observation, which didn’t take much effort to translate into “skanky wreck.” “News flash, Jack—when a girl’s partied a little too enthusiastically the night before, sometimes she finds jumping out of bed at the crack of dawn and singing ‘Oh, What a Wonderful Morning’ a tad beyond her. She might even reach for the Ray-Bans and be a smidge tardy getting into work. Admittedly, most hangover cures I’ve choked down could better be classified as hangover punishments, but a stake through the heart is going too far, no?”

He didn’t respond. I leaned closer to him, my arms braced on either side of his shoulders. “Okay. If I’m a vamp why haven’t I bitten you by now? For that matter, why did I defend myself with a stake?”

Just as I decided he wasn’t going to answer this time either, he spoke, his jaw clenched. “I don’t pretend to know why you creatures do any of the things you do. My best guess is that you’ll bite me when you’re good and ready, but right now you’re getting a charge out of this.”

“A charge out of what?” I demanded. “Getting nailed to my car?”

His words ground past his teeth. “Out of sitting practically on my face and leaving nothing to the imagination while you’re doing it. Out of seeing if you can make me hot for you by using your glamyr.” He exhaled tightly. “Out of knowing it’s beginning to work.”

I’d had enough. He’d used a nail gun on me. He’d shot my car, destroyed my dress and ruined my whole evening…but all of those were nothing compared to the fact that he’d somehow discovered my greatest fear and dragged it into the light. I still wanted answers from him, but what I wanted more right now was to do to him what he’d done to me.

It was obvious what his greatest fear was. It would be pure pleasure making him face it.

In one smooth movement I pulled my dress over my head and let it drop to the ground. I shook my hair out, looked at Rawls through my lashes and moistened my lips.

“Is it hot out here or is it just me, sweetie?” I purred. Arching my back and squirming my hips against him, I tipped my neck back and began to trail the fingers of my left hand down my body, giving loving attention to the curve of my breasts in my barely there bra. I let my fingers wander slowly toward the lace of my panties. “’Cause all of a sudden I just feel so—”

My throat closed and my words dried up. I pushed a sex-kitten strand of hair out of my eyes and looked across the parking lot at what had caught my attention.

I found my voice. “About running over your nail gun,” I croaked, not taking my gaze from the pool of illumination shed by the farthest parkinglot light. “That might have been a teensy bit rash of me, Jack.”

I heard the tremor in my tone, and all of a sudden I couldn’t keep up the act anymore. I looked down at him. “We’re fucked,” I said flatly. “Three vamps just flew in and landed beside the club. They’re heading our way, Rawls.”

Chapter 4

“I should have known this was a setup,” Jack muttered. “Your undead friends sent you out as bait to catch me off guard, and now the fun begins.” I saw a muscle move at the side of his jaw. “Before the four of you start killing me inch by inch, tell me something, vamp—how long have your kind been tracking me? From the start, or was my trail picked up in Pennsylvania when that son of a bitch insurance salesman got away from me?”

I adore single-mindedness in a man at the appropriate time, but I consider the appropriate time for male single-mindedness to be when he’s doing something exquisitely tantalizing and I can feel waves of shuddery ecstasy rising to a crescendo in me. Since the only thing rising in me right now was pure terror, Rawls’s inability to move on struck me as a major drawback—one that I realized would take drastic action on my part to overcome.

All this went through my mind as I got off him and turned to his car. “I don’t have the foggiest notion of what you’re talking about, sweetie,” I said tensely, not caring that I was giving him a Dita Von Teese-like view of my bottom as I bent over the front seat of his vampmobile. My fingers closed around the handcuff key I’d tossed there after securing him. “I’ll probably hate myself in the morning for doing this, but two against three is better odds than one against three. Besides, if this doesn’t convince you we’re on the same side, I don’t know what—” I turned to face him as I spoke, expecting to see him lying where I’d left him and found myself staring at the business end of the stake I’d dropped earlier.

“We’ll never be on the same side, vamp,” Rawls said with another of those cold smiles that looked like the grimace a Doberman would wear just before it lunged. “I told you, I’m not interested in playing for Team Dead. Maybe I won’t be able to fight off all your pals, but I’m taking out as many as I can, starting with you.”

He thrust the stake toward me with the speed of a striking snake, and I reacted with equal speed. My sideways leap wasn’t as fast as a vamp’s, but it took me out of the path of the pointy piece of wood aiming for me. I didn’t have the opportunity to breathe a sigh of relief, however, since a split second later it was coming toward me again. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the trio of vampires walking across the parking lot, and I realized that doing the life and death tango with Rawls was using up time we didn’t have.

I squeezed my eyes shut against the sight of the stake plunging toward me and held the handcuff key in front of my face, fully expecting to feel yew wood entering me before my heart could take another beat.

“I don’t get it.”

At Rawls’s growled statement I cracked open one eyelid and peered cautiously through my lashes. He was staring grimly past the key to me, the tip of his stake frozen a hairsbreadth away from the skimpy pink satin cupping my left breast. Three thoughts occurred to me almost simultaneously. One: if I’d been a D cup instead of a nicely proportioned C, there wouldn’t have been even a hairsbreadth of space between me and my confiscated stake. Two: the vamps—they were all female, I could see now—were only about thirty feet away from us. And three: Jack Rawls might be a total prick, but he had the sexiest eyes I’d ever seen.

Pure green, pure bedroom and fringed with thick, spiky lashes a covergirl would kill for. Not that any of that was relevant right at this moment.

“You don’t have to get it,” I told him. “You just have to decide whether you want to try fighting those bitches off all by yourself or whether you want my help. The fact that I was about to unlock your cuffs before I knew you didn’t need a key to get free should win me some brownie points with you, no?” Approaching vamps or not, I was unable to hold back my next words. “Just how did you release yourself?”

He stared at me a moment longer and then lowered the stake with a quick, smooth movement, as if he’d come to a decision he wasn’t thrilled about. “This fell out of your hair while you were giving me a free lap dance.” I recognized the small object he tossed aside as one of the bobby pins that had held my now ruined chignon. “And this fell out of the heel of my workboot,” he added without cracking a smile. One-handedly, he closed the gleaming steel of a switchblade and shoved it into his jeans’ pocket. “I used it to cut the ropes around my ankles. Catch.”

He tossed Megan’s loaner stake to me as carelessly as he’d thrown down the bobby pin. I grabbed at it but missed, although that turned out to be a good thing because as I bent to retrieve it I saw one of my Manolos under the MINI. I slipped it on, spied the other lying on its side a few feet away, and speed-hobbled toward it.

I can hear some of you now—God, girl, why waste time over shoes, even if they are Manolos? All I can tell you is that as soon as my heels were elevated to their accustomed four inches above the ground I felt like Wonder Woman with her bulletproof bracelets on. I was even able to face the approaching vamps with something like resigned bravado.

My surface calm vanished as Rawls took his place at my side, cradling the nail gun like an M-16. Before I could ask him what the merde he thought he was doing, he aimed it at the ground.

Thunk-whap!

“It’s not broken,” I said unnecessarily.

“These things are built tough,” he said without looking at me. “I’ll take out the brunette and the blonde, you concentrate on the redhead.”

I hadn’t disabled his weapon. He’d managed to pick the lock of the cuffs I’d secured him with and access a wicked-looking switchblade I hadn’t even known about. Under the circumstances, the three vamps whose unexpected fly-in had interrupted Rawls’s and my personal tussle might be the nearest thing I had to Flora, Fauna and Merryweather, Sleeping Beauty’s fairy godmothers.

If Flora, Fauna and Merry weather had recently had an extreme makeover and now looked like Linda, Claudia and Naomi, that is.

All three were clad in leather. The redhead in the middle wore a bondage-tight pink leather catsuit with pink Christian Louboutin stilettos. The brunette had the whole decadent-schoolgirl thing going on, complete with teensy black leather kilt and thigh-high black stockings. But it was the blonde’s outfit I immediately coveted. Her white leather dress was deliciously do-me, plunging outrageously in front to show off her creamy cleavage, and diamond-encrusted spaghetti straps glittered over the milky skin of her shoulders.

I was suddenly all too aware that my own look was less do-me than been-done, consisting as it did of blood-flecked undies, rat’s-nest hair and a recently nailed right hand. With the I-don’t-get-out-of-bed-for-less-than-$10,000-a-day arrogance of supermodels, the three of them came to a dead stop ten feet in front of Rawls and me just as Rawls aimed his nail gun at the blonde and pulled the trigger.

She shimmered sideways. That’s what it looked like, anyway—as if her image faded and then took form again a few inches to the left of where she’d been. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a vampire move so fast that she seemed to blur, and I knew it was a bad sign. That ability only came with practice or by being turned by a powerful vampyr, and it meant Claudia and her girlfriends weren’t going to be easy to dust.

“You missed, Chack.” Her purr was thickly Teutonic. “You are losing your touch, nein?”

“Either that or we caught him at a bad time,” the stunning redhead beside her said, flaring perfect nostrils. “Who’s your Frederick’s of Hollywood hottie, Jack?”

“Who bloody cares?” The English-accented brunette curled her top lip, her canines dazzlingly white against flawless mocha skin. “Let’s fucking rip them apart and get this over—”

A stuttering stream of nails flew from Rawls’s weapon, cross-stitching its deadly way across the three vamps at chest height—or at what would have been chest height if they’d still been standing in front of us. But they’d levitated upward before the first silver missile could reach them, and as I jerked my gaze up I got a momentary glimpse of their faces, no longer supermodel-perfect, but ugly with fury.

Although Rawls hadn’t seemed to recognize them, from their expressions they obviously knew and hated him. I felt justified in taking that as a second bad sign.

They swooped down at the exact moment that the stuttering of the nail gun coughed and died. I saw Rawls trying to clear the jammed weapon before he was hidden from my view by three leather-clad bodies, and I stood there for a split second, paralysed with horror. Then I turned to run.

The memory of my turning from Rawls and the vamps swarming him has robbed me of more nights than I care to admit. All I can say in my own defence is that I only took two steps before I forced myself to turn back.

I saw leather and flying hair and yanked hard on a long black strand that whipped me across the face, pulling the Naomi clone off balance, but before I could shove my stake at her, the swatch of hair I was clutching parted from its owner. She glanced over her shoulder at me, her gaze a fiery red.

“Extensions, love,” she hissed malevolently. “When we’re finished with the fucking bounty hunter, I’ll strangle you with one of them.”

She turned her attention back to Rawls, who was on his knees now, the useless nail gun still in his hands. Bounty hunter? I thought, grabbing at the nearest piece of leather. It was pink and ended in a clawing hand that had just raked Rawls across his face. Blood dripped from the polished nails of the redhead as she whirled to face me.

“You picked the wrong man to go parking with tonight, honey,” she snarled. “Now you’re going to pay for it.”

Her words were a definite cue to use the stake I was holding. I began to drive it toward her with all my strength and then the very thing I’d feared might happen, did happen.

My grip suddenly went weak and my arm felt nerveless, the way it had once when I’d been partnered with Tashya at doubles tennis and she’d whacked my elbow with her racket. As I saw the redhead’s fangs rushing at me I tried desperately to hold onto the stake, but instead I watched it detach from my hand, falling end over end to the pavement in what seemed to be dreamy slow motion. It bounced once and came to rest by the toe of one of my Manolos.

Time stopped. Or maybe just my heart did. Then it started up again, and as I snapped my gaze to the two razorlike canines slicing toward my neck, my numb-with-terror brain came up with the three words that saved my life.

“Galliano for Dior?”

As abruptly as if she’d run into an invisible wall, the redhead halted. Her glance flicked from me to her outfit and back again. “You know your designers,” she said, surprise edging out the snarl in her tone.

“Oh, please, sweetie,” I demurred, “the man’s a master at cut and detail. He might as well scrawl his signature across everything he creates, no?”

I sounded calm. I even sounded languidly bored. Somewhere deep inside me the real Kat Crosse was gibbering with fear, but the primitive will to survive that exists in everyone had switched me onto fashionista autopilot.

I don’t think I could have stayed on autopilot for long, but as it turned out, I didn’t have to.

“That’s exactly how I feel!” the redhead agreed. “Damn, I almost wish I didn’t have to rip you from limb to limb. But after Jackie boy staked our divine Dr. M, the three of us swore we’d get our revenge. Like I said, honey, you just picked the wrong man to get naked with—”

Her sentence broke off in a sharp intake of breath, and she flung back her head so far that the cords in her neck stood out like garroting wire. I was still on autopilot enough to realize that with tendons as visible as that, Linda wasn’t as young as I’d first thought, and when I noted the nearly invisible line under her jaw, everything fell into place.

I didn’t have the luxury of dwelling on my discovery, however, because the next thing I noticed about the redhead was the silver tip of the nail punched through the pink leather of her catsuit.

And at that point I went off autopilot with a vengeance.

“Frederick’s of Hollywood?” I exploded, thrusting my face close to hers. “Sweetie, I wouldn’t be caught dead in—”

There’s something basically unsatisfying about screaming at a pile of dust, even if said pile of dust is still vaguely recognizable as the bitch who insulted you. I choked off my defence of my lingerie just as the Linda vamp dissolved into nothingness in front of me, revealing the hatefilled expression of the blonde standing behind her.

“You staked my friend!” The Claudia clone didn’t look much like the supermodel she’d been impersonating anymore. As her top lip lifted and her jaws flew open to accommodate her horrifically lengthening canines, I caught a glimpse of the same faint scarring on her milky skin that I’d seen on the redhead, but then she was upon me and I gave up noticing details in favor of fighting for my life.

Except fighting for my life was impossible, with my only weapon—a weapon I hadn’t been able to bring myself to use, although Claudia didn’t seem to know that—lying on the ground somewhere near my feet. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flash of black leather launch itself at Rawls, and I gave up hoping that the Jack cavalry would save me a second time.

The blonde grabbed me by my bare shoulders and went for my jugular. I did the only thing I could and grabbed her by her arms in a vain effort to push her from me.

“No!” The denial rushed from each of us on identical smothered gasps. Eyes as blue as heaven met mine as Claudia and I froze into immobility.

Crimson world. Blood was everywhere…and it was beautiful. Gouts of it flew up from the man who’d abused the child she’d been long ago; fountains of it sprayed from a date-raping fraternity boy; a slow trickle of it ran from the eyes of the dead tycoon who’d married her and then discarded her for his next trophy wife. As a vamp she’d found the power she hadn’t had as a human and even if the price was her eternal soul, she would never, ever give up that pow—

I threw back my head and screamed as whitehot agony seared its way through my flesh. I felt the pain, like a barb of fire, reach the wall of my heart and tear through it as easily as jagged glass slashing tissue paper. It sunk deep and began to tug me down into a blackness that wasn’t really black at all, but the dark, jelled red of spilled blood.

My grip slid away from the blond vamp’s arms. As I felt my backward fall halted by something I saw her screaming jaws turn to dust, but her blue eyes, wide with horror, were still fixed on me. Then they, too, disintegrated and there was nothing but a pile of ash by my feet.

I realized I was sagging against the door of Rawls’s car. I also realized that the terrible pain in my heart had vanished. Shakily I pushed away from the car and looked down at myself, but there was no sign of the bloody nail I’d felt tearing through me.

Something cold and hard clamped around my wrist, sending a spike of panic through me as I belatedly remembered the third vamp. I spun around to face Rawls just as he racheted the other half of the handcuffs onto the door handle of his vehicle.

“Three down,” he rasped. The gaze he leveled on me was partially obscured by the skein of blood running from a ragged gash above his smoky green eyes. “One to go, vamp.”

Chapter 5

“Ever had a wet dream, sweetie?” From my uncomfortable sitting position on the asphalt by the car I looked at Rawls, ten feet away and hunkered over his disassembled nail gun. Giving no sign he’d heard my question, he picked up one of the metal components and began wiping it with an oily rag. I briefly debated with myself whether to make some pertinent comment about phallic symbols and weapons, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

This was turning out to be the longest night I’d ever spent with a man, and not in a good way. When I’d first found myself cuffed to the car, I’d indulged in an impressive but ultimately futile display of outrage. After an hour I’d subsided into cold silence. When I’d realized my silence wasn’t getting through to Rawls, I’d tried reasonable discourse, then shifted tactics and resorted to threats; later still, I’d descended to insults. For the past three hours I’d been mentally maxing out my credit cards at Bloomies, Saks and Neiman’s, but now my fantasy shopping spree had come to an end.

I tried again. “How about a screaming orgasm?” I let the tip of my tongue trace my top lip. “Mmmm…I love those. Then again, I also adore a long, slow screw up against a cold, hard wall, but as a male, you’re probably more partial to a blow job, n’est ce pas?”

Rawls set down the rag and began reassembling the nail gun. I sighed.

“A Long, Slow Screw being made with sloe gin, Galliano and Southern Comfort, of course; and a Blow Job being Kahlúa, Baileys and vodka in a shot glass topped with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry,” I elaborated. “If the cherry stem’s tied into a knot when you set down the empty glass, you get your next drink free. A talented girl can keep the cocktails flowing all night with that trick, as I know from personal experience.”

Jack stood and turned away from me, bringing the gun into firing position and holding down the trigger. I clapped my free hand against my left ear, but even after he quit firing my right ear was still ringing. My earlier fury flared up again.

“Why do you have to be such a junkyard dog, Rawls?” I snapped. “I could have left you to those bitches, but instead I turned back to help you. Next thing I know, you’re telling me we’re going to wait here until dawn to see if I flash fry when the sun comes up because you still think I could be one of them. Aside from nearly getting my throat ripped open by Claudia, what more proof did you want that I was on your side?” I didn’t expect an answer, but he surprised me.

“Seeing you stake one of them. And if you’d never met them, how do you know the blonde’s name?”

I raised my eyebrows. “Merde, sweetie, don’t tell me you didn’t realize who they’d made themselves into, thanks to some expert nipping and tucking.” At his scowl I sighed again, my anger dissipating into resignation. “Naturally you didn’t. You’re a hetero male, and from the Corn Belt to boot, I’m guessing. The only way you might have recognized who Claudia, Naomi and Linda were impersonating would be if they put supermodels on feed-store calendars. And if you never met them, how did they know your name?”

“A lot of vamps know the name of Jack Rawls,” he answered briefly, lowering himself to the ground and extending his jeans-clad legs in front of him. He leaned back against the MINI, closing his eyes and folding his arms across his chest.

I ignored his none-too-subtle hint. “Vamps know of you because you’re a bounty hunter, you mean?” I persisted. “Since the subject’s come up, exactly how does that work? Who pays the bounty when you hunt down a vamp?”

“The families of victims.” He didn’t open his eyes. “They pay me what they can. Sometimes that’s just gas money to make it to the next town.”

“How deliciously Sir Lancelot of you, sweetie,” I said, a trifle acerbically, “but I hope you got more than your mileage for this job. Forget the fact that I came close to being a vamp snack, since you’re convinced I’m going to end up as a big pile of dust anyway, but if that slash over your eye had been any longer or the one on your bicep any deeper, Claudia and her posse would have ended your career tonight.”

I wasn’t totally convinced of what I’d just said. Being attacked by three vengeful vampires would put any other man down for the count, but except for a hiss of indrawn breath as he’d splashed holy water over his wounds from a plastic soda bottle he’d retrieved from his car, Rawls’s demeanor had remained grimly stoic. His dark T-shirt was soaked even darker in places with his own blood, one knee of his jeans was ripped to show pavementtorn skin beneath, and there was a growing lump on the cheekbone under his left eye. True, I had a collection of assorted scrapes and bruises, too, the worst being my hand, although by now the pain had subsided into a dull throbbing. I hadn’t rated holy water, but Rawls had supplied me with peroxide and some gauze to bind it with. The thing was, I had the feeling this was how Jack Rawls usually looked—like he’d just had the shit kicked out of him in a back-alley fight but had left the other guy looking worse.

He really was a junkyard dog—snarling, tough and way too dangerous to pat. A cautious woman would have heeded the conventional wisdom of letting sleeping canines lie, I suppose, but I’ve always found caution and conventionality très overrated qualities.

More important, I needed to keep talking. Talking meant I didn’t have to think about the glimpse of Claudia’s crimson world she’d shared with me just before she turned to ash.

“If the divine Dr. M was their cosmetic surgeon, I can understand why he inspired such fanatical devotion in his patients. Honestly, darling, staking a man with that kind of talent is like staking Mozart. Couldn’t you have made an exception in his case and just put him under house arrest or—”

“Dr. M?” Rawls’s eyes snapped open. “Dr. Middleton?”

I’d finally caught his attention. It was a trifle ego-shattering that my exposed curves hadn’t been able to accomplish that feat, but at least I’d come up with something he found more interesting than sleep. “Linda simply called him the ‘divine Dr. M.’ Apparently, he was one of your past kills, which is why the three of them swore to hunt you down and take their revenge. As I say, I hope the good doctor was one bounty-hunting job that involved more than gas money—”

“Middleton wasn’t a job, he was a link in a chain I was following. That chain started in Nebraska with a girl named Mary Lou Gilly,” Rawls said, something smoldering behind the ice of his gaze. “The same chain led me straight here to you.”

I reacted badly to his statement, I admit. Oh, pooh—I’d been reacting badly all day, whether it had been to Terry’s dreary accusations or to Megan and Tash when they’d tried to pull their high-minded intervention in my social activities. But I was getting tired of being everyone’s favorite whipping girl, especially when I was more than a little stressed out with my own private worries.

Not that I expected to spontaneously combust when the first streaks of dawn showed in the sky. As Rawls had noted, lately I’d been finding it harder to function in the daytime, but that was only to be expected with my party-till-the-wee-hours schedule. I’d yet to have the urge to sink my teeth into a handy neck and I’d felt no revulsion when I’d seen him splashing holy water on his wounds.

So maybe Tashy a was right, and the Crosse triplet Zena had marked had gotten a Get-Out-Of-Vamphood-Free card when Megan had killed her. I wanted to believe that, but I couldn’t, and neither could I believe there was a chance Tash had been marked instead of me. Even if I persuaded myself that my inability to stake vampires was due to paralyzing fear, I was still left with two inarguable points.

One was that I knew I was changing.

I’d first known it a few weeks ago, although I’d told myself I was imagining things. I’d also told myself that my decision to move out of the Crosse mansion and take an apartment on my own was totally unrelated to my fears. But during the past week, the feeling had become an almost daily occurrence—a strange sense of dislocation with my own psyche, my own thought patterns, that came and went instantly but left me feeling oddly invaded. I’d tried to chalk the feeling up to my higher-than-normal cocktail consumption, but when Claudia’s crimson-soaked world had called to me tonight and something in me had wanted to answer its call, my fears became bleak certainty. Zena’s twenty-one-year-old legacy was bearing its poisonous fruit. I was turning into what she’d been.

But I had absolutely no intention of thinking about that particular subject until I had a brimming glass of something numbingly alcoholic in my hand.

Thanks to Mr. Tall, Dark and Pissy, however, I wasn’t going to be within hailing distance of a jigger of vodka for a while. To add insult to injury, he was apparently under the impression that I was linked to the late Linda’s divine Dr. M, whose staking apparently had been a labor of love and not one of Rawls’s bounty-hunting commissions; and to some Cornhusker State female with a name that sounded like it had been plucked straight out of a country and western hurtin’ song.

I take back my mea culpa. Under the circumstances, I think I reacted with admirable control to Rawls’s hostile declaration.

“That chain you followed must have had a broken link, Jack,” I said in my most languid drawl. “All I know about Dr. M is what Linda told me before you dusted her, and as for a Mary Lou…Gilly, did you say?” I gave an exaggerated shudder. “Aside from the fact that I’ve never been within a hundred miles of Nebraska, she doesn’t sound like someone I’d have a lot in common with, sweetie. I mean, the name simply screams big hair, a softer-side-of-Sears outfit and shoes with court heels, no?”

“I wouldn’t know about that.” Rawls got to his feet and looked down at me, his expression unreadable. “When I first knew her, she wore rolled-up jeans and Keds. When I ran into her years later, she’d graduated to crotch-high minis and see-through blouses. The last time I saw her she was naked and dead and covered in her own blood.”

His tone was so uninflected that for a second the impact of his words didn’t hit me. Then it did, and I drew in a quick breath. “I’m sorry,” I said inadequately. “For talking like such a shallow bitch, as well as for what happened to her. How did she die?”

“Badly.” His gaze on me was unwavering. “The vamp who killed her liked torturing the hookers he picked up before he finally finished them off, and as a former surgeon, his preferred method was a scalpel. He was a real Mozart with it.”

I closed my eyes. “No wonder you made it your business to track down Middleton and stake him. You…you say he targeted hookers. Is that how—”

“I wasn’t one of her johns, I was her half brother,” Rawls said tightly. “When I was sixteen and big enough to stand up to the bastard who was my stepfather, I beat the crap out of him and walked out. The next time I saw Lou she wasn’t a seven-year-old who hero-worshipped her big brother anymore. She was a fifteen-year-old who’d been selling herself on street corners for a year. She told me to go to hell and got into a Mercedes that pulled up to the curb. After searching all night for her and her john in one fleabag joint after another, the next morning I stood in a blood-spattered motel room and vowed to track down the bastard in the Mercedes who’d hacked her to pieces.” His teeth flashed briefly white in one of his nongrins. “When I made that vow, I didn’t know vampires existed, but since then I’ve become an expert on them. The most important thing I learned was that all trails lead back to an original infector.”

“I can’t imagine how you must have felt in that motel room,” I said, still dwelling on the first part of his account. “If anything ever happened to one of my sisters—” I belatedly took in what he’d just said. “Original infector? Are you talking about me?” My laugh didn’t sound as amused as I’d meant it to. “Sweetie, that’s utterly ridiculous! If anyone around here was vamp zero, it was a bitch named Zena, and you arrived in Maplesburg about six weeks too late to—”

“I know,” he cut in, “word travels. Your sister took care of her. I also know you aren’t vamp zero.”

“Such a relief, darling,” I said with a carelessness I didn’t quite feel. He was still cradling his damned nail gun, I noticed, and his finger was only inches from the trigger. “It must be a huge disappointment for you, finding out that Megan beat you to the punch. I’m sure if she’d known Zena was the vamp you’d been tracking for so long she would have let you do the honors,” I commiserated.

“Zena wasn’t the end of the chain, either,” Rawls said flatly.

The man wasn’t just a junkyard dog, he was a junkyard dog with a bone he wouldn’t let go of, I thought in exasperation. “Of course she was. She was a queen and although she was superbly wellpreserved for her age, she was definitely ancient. Whoever the vampyr was who turned her centuries ago, he’s lost in the mists of time.” I slanted my gaze up at him through my lashes. “Now that I’ve cleared up that little misunderstanding for you, would you mind terribly clearing up something for me?” I said carefully. “You said word travels. What exactly is the word on me in the vamp community?”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “That you received the kiss of a vampyr when you were in the cradle. That as the daughter of a Daughter, when you come into your full strength you’ll make Zena’s powers look sick. Even if there hadn’t been a connection between you and the vamp I was hunting, I would have taken the time to search you out and put an end to you. The only reason you’re not dust already is because—”

He stopped abruptly and I narrowed my eyes at him in the same way he’d done to me. “Because I could have killed you when I had the chance. I could have left you to be ripped apart by Claudia and crew. I didn’t do either, and now you’re not so convinced that your information was correct.” But his information was correct, I thought. Or at least, the part about me being marked by Zena was. And if the vamp underground knew that much about me, who was to say they weren’t also right about the rest of it? As the daughter of a Daughter, when you come into your full strength you’ll make Zena’s powers look sick… I wouldn’t think about it until I had that drink I’d promised myself in my hand, I told myself numbly. And instead of a single, it was going to be a double. Make that a triple.

But right now I had Rawls on the ropes, and I had to convince him he’d been wrong about me. The last thing I needed was a vamp hunter hanging around Maplesburg while I continued to go increasingly fang girl.

“Vamps lie like we breathe, Jack. Whoever your informant was, he fed you a line of merde about me and you know it. If you thought otherwise you’d have used that nailer on me by now, so why don’t you give up this wait-until-dawn farce?”

“Because the waiting’s over,” he replied matter-of-factly, looking past me and over the top of his car. “The sun’s coming up over the horizon right now.”

I stared at him in disconcertion. Then I wrenched my gaze away and glanced around, seeing dark gray where a moment ago all had been black. For no good reason my heart seemed to squeeze in my chest, and I scrambled unsteadily to my feet, barely feeling the metal bite around my wrist as I pulled too far from the cuff holding me. As soon as I looked over the roof of Rawls’s vampmobile, I saw he was right.

I’d been sitting in the shadow of the car. Beyond it, the parking lot’s few lights had begun to look sickly and washed-out and beyond that, the dark horizon was rimmed with a pale line. Looking at it, I was suddenly filled with dread.

In a moment that pale line would brim over and spill forth. In a moment it would become the day’s first ray of sunlight, shooting from the edge of the world straight toward me. And judging from my response to Claudia before Jack had staked her, wasn’t there a chance I’d progressed far enough along the path to full vamphood tonight that I might just flash fry as soon as that first ray of sun hit me?

My initial reaction was to duck back down behind the car in panic. I forced myself not to give in to it and went with my second reaction, which was to toss back my hair, moisten my lips and stand up straight. If I was going to die in the next few seconds, I damn well wasn’t going to die cringing in the shadows like a vamp, I decided, I was going to die like the fabulous Kat Crosse.

I just hoped I could pull it off.

“Goodness, I feel all butterflies inside, Rawls.” My hands were shaking, the left one so badly that the gauze I’d wound around it had unravelled and the right one clattering its cuff in a catchy bongo beat against the car door. I gripped the vampmobile’s handle to muffle the noise. “I mean, sweetie, could it be more Romeo and Juliet? Here we are, just you and me and the dawn. Is this what they call sparking out in Nebras—”

“Just you and me and that maniac in the pickup with the smoked windows driving hell-for-leather into the parking lot,” Rawls said, bringing the nail gun into firing position and aiming it at me. “You almost had me fooled the past few minutes, but I might have guessed there was a reason why you weren’t too worried about sunrise. Too bad for you the vamp rescue squad left it so late, though.”

“Vamp rescue squad?” With an effort I shifted my gaze from the sight of the glowing line on the horizon and saw twin headlights cutting through the rapidly dissipating predawn gloom. The red pickup jounced over a bump in the parking lot as it sped toward us and a dark shape flew from the bed of the truck. The shape rolled once when it hit the ground, but instead of continuing to roll it seemed to gather itself and then race alongside the pickup that had just ejected it. As I watched I saw the shape begin to outstrip the vehicle.

“As if I didn’t have enough to worry about right now,” I exhaled. “Rawls, lower your weapon! If he doesn’t think you’re a threat he won’t attack—”

The rest of my warning was drowned out by the stacatto coughing of the nail gun as he opened fire. The gray shape abruptly swerved, but it didn’t change course and when it got to within leaping distance of Jack it launched itself into the air.

“No, Mikhail!” I screamed out the command but like my warning, it was ignored. The huge wolf crashed into Jack and the two of them went down. The pickup truck screeched to a halt. Its door burst open and Megan flew out, dressed in de rigueur Daughter of Lilith black. All that was needed to complete this French farce of a scene was a scantily clad blonde, I thought before remembering that I was playing that particular role.

“Megan, call off Mikhail—” I began, but like everything else I’d said in the past minute my words had no effect. Megan shot one appalled look at me and then brought her stake into throwing position. “Don’t!” I yelled.

She froze. I felt a moment’s gratified relief that someone had finally listened to me before I realized that my command hadn’t been what had stopped her.

Mikhail, still in wolf form, stood over Rawls, his bared teeth inches from his neck. Rawls, his face a grim mask, held his finger on the trigger of the nail gun that was jammed into Mikhail’s thick ruff. It was the classic standoff, but how long it would remain that way I didn’t want to guess.

A pale shaft of light had fallen upon Rawls’s upturned face, intensifying the green of his eyes so they looked like blazing emeralds. Megan drew in a harsh breath and slowly lowered her stake.

“Stand down, Mikey baby,” she said hoarsely. The wolf immediately went to her side. Just as swiftly, Rawls got to his feet and Megan spoke again, her voice cold and hard. “You’ve got five seconds to explain why my sister’s cuffed to your car and why you were holding a weapon on her when we drove in. Make it good, because this stake works just as well on human creeps as it does on its usual customers.”

I was beginning to feel invisible. I opened my mouth to tell Megan I was perfectly capable of telling her myself what had happened to me, but the words died in my throat. Slowly I raised my uncuffed right hand and stared at it, horror rising in me like bile.

Where the morning light fell across it my skin was smoking. Even as I watched, a couple of heat blisters bubbled and popped…and the gory rip that had been between my fingers only moments ago was now perfectly healed.

I raised my eyes and saw Jack Rawls looking past Megan at me. “If you need an explanation, just look at your sister, slayer,” he said thinly. “Your vamp sister.”

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