Chapter One
“I bet this never happened to Dracula,” muttered the man—now vampire—hanging upside down after falling off the roof of the Savannah riverfront hotel. He watched his keys and wallet fall out of his pockets and plunge to the street several stories below.
Again.
Hunter Evans was having a bad damn day.
Night.
“This vampire thing is not for weaklings,” Luke told him, his voice filled with laughter. “The first thing you learn is to keep your pockets empty.”
No. The first thing you learned was that the thirst was everything. All-consuming.
Fire.
They—the vampires who had Turned him—had promised that this would pass. That soon the thirst would be manageable. In time, it would be a mere background presence in his life. That he’d be able to eat normal food again. Drink a beer without gagging.
Be normal.
Almost normal.
He laughed, a sound so bitter it rasped like the screech of rusty nails being pulled from metal. Who was he kidding? He’d never be normal again.
Luke sighed. “I know, man. Believe me, though. It gets easier.”
Luke Calhoun had been Turned decades ago. He’d had plenty of time to adjust. Hunter had been a vampire for all of three weeks. Nothing at all was easy or even getting easier.
Most evenings, when he woke up out of a sleep so heavy he may as well have been dead or in a coma, he was afraid he’d actually turned feral, like a lion maddened by starvation. He woke up wanting to rip and tear and rend.
To drink.
Most of all, to drink.
“Why don’t you go back to the house and find a few more bags of blood? I know they keep plenty in the walk-in refrigerator in the basement,” Luke said in a crooning, singsong tone that sounded like what Hunter might have used with a rabid dog.
Before, when he was the man, not the rabid dog.
“I don’t want more bagged blood,” he growled. “I want it fresh and hot and pumping out of the vein that I sink my teeth into. And I’m disgusted by myself for wanting it. How can I ever get used to this? How can it ever get easier?”
Luke hopped down lightly onto the balcony of a darkened room. Hopefully an unoccupied room, or some tourist was going to get the surprise of a lifetime. Then he held out his hand and a tiny flame appeared above his palm.
“It gets easier,” he said again. “When I first became a vampire, this fire-starter power was so far out of my control that I nearly burned down an entire town. Nearly killed myself and my family. Ironic, a fire starter teaching a firefighter how to be a vampire, isn’t it?”
“Former firefighter, it looks like.” With some effort, Hunter managed to right himself and climb onto the balcony. “And you said you nearly killed your family. Meara and Bane?”
Luke’s laugh was as bitter as Hunter’s had been. “No. Not this family. My human family.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing I plan to share,” Luke said flatly. “I’m tired of this. You’re on your own the rest of the night. Try not to kill any innocent humans.”
“What happens if I do?”
Luke hopped up onto the balcony railing and turned his head to look at Hunter. “If you do, you’re a murderer. Do you want to spend the next few hundred years with that on your conscience?”
Hunter’s throat tightened. “Few hundred years?”
But Luke just shook his head, leapt out into the dark night, and was gone.
Hunter blew out a frustrated breath and headed down to the street to find his keys and wallet. This time, though, he walked through the empty hotel room and out the door and then punched the button for the elevator. Nothing in the vampire handbook—was there even a vampire handbook? If not, should he write one?—mandated that he had to climb back down the outside of the building for twelve floors, although Luke or Bane would probably have something to say about it. He had been climbing around rooftops, learning the patrol routes, because part of his job now was to help his new family protect the city.
“Like Batman.” His innate sense of humor kicked in then, and he grinned a little. Batman. Bats. Vampires.
Heh.
The elevator door opened just then, empty except for a man and a woman who both looked like they were about a hundred years old. Hunter nodded politely and stepped in, pressed the Lobby button, and thought about flashing his new fangs just for fun, but it would probably send them into cardiac arrest. He wasn’t sure his attempt at CPR—something he’d done hundreds of times as a firefighter—would work all that well, since he still wasn’t completely in control of this new vampire strength.
And there were probably cameras in the elevator, so the news would be something like:
Missing Firefighter Crushes Elderly Couple’s Ribs for Fun
And wouldn’t Bane have a cow about that. Vampires were a big damn secret, after all.
“Freaking elevator music,” he muttered, the thirst squashing his momentary amusement.
The old man scowled at him, but, to Hunter’s surprise, the old woman peeked at him from behind her husband and flashed a cheeky grin. “If I were twenty years younger—”
“You’d still be old enough to be his grandmother,” the man grumbled, putting a possessive arm around his wife.
Hunter couldn’t help but grin a little, even sunk in a foul mood. When they reached the lobby, he stepped back for them to exit first, and the woman winked at him. “Whoever she is, she’s a lucky woman,” she whispered, chuckling when her husband snorted.
Right. How lucky a woman would have to be to meet a man whose main desire was to drain her dry.
Maybe he would have been better off dead.
As he started to step out, an odd-looking dog raced in front of him and darted inside the elevator.
“Marigold!” a woman’s voice called. “Marigold! Stop!”
Hunter looked up to see a flurry of color as a woman rushed down the hallway toward him. Or, presumably, toward the dog.
“She’s inside. She’s not going anywhere,” he said, moving to block the entry to keep the animal in, surprised to find himself amused for the second time in ten minutes. For only the third or fourth time in the weeks since he’d died.
“She might push the button for a floor, and then where would I be? Chasing her all over the hotel all night?” The woman, a colorful whirlwind of purple silk, wild red curls, and flashing green eyes, ducked past him and bent down. “You naughty thing! Hotels are dangerous! What if somebody tried to eat you?”