Tempted by Blood

Neon lights from a neighboring building flashed through the narrow window high on the wall, obscuring her features in garish, almost cartoonlike pink shadows. Her shirt was open, her breasts exposed. They didn’t sag much to either side, he noted. Instead, they proudly displayed an unmoving quantity of silicone beneath the taut mounds, too large for her waiflike body.

What would she look like in forty or fifty years? A grandma with Playboy-size implants. He stifled a chuckle and his fangs disappeared completely back into his gums. Humor always had a calming effect on him.

He didn’t want to consider that increased cravings for blood and energy were the first signs a vampire was reverting to the uncontrollable blood urges of his ancestors. No, he wasn’t a damn revert, nor was he in the beginning stages. He’d never killed a human and he wasn’t about to start. He may be a screwup in other ways, but there was no way he was giving in to that. Besides, if anyone suspected a Guardian was reverting, tests would be done and he’d be hauled in front of the Council. The sentencing would be swift, the punishment harsh. Regular members of vampire society got a long stint in rehab. Guardians weren’t so lucky.

Even though it happened more than a century ago, every detail about that night in the catacombs beneath Paris stuck in his memory like black ink on a fresh piece of paper. It was there if he chose to think about it. The moist stillness in the air. The sound of water dripping in one of the adjacent passageways. Hushed whispers echoing off the stone walls. The shuffle of feet as they made their way in the darkness to gather around the man held in chains.

Traitor, someone hissed.

A disgrace to your family.

You’ve endangered all of us.

Then the screams began.

Jackson shuddered. He was a young Guardian in training at the time. But even now, he didn’t want to think about what had happened to the agent who’d reverted and killed several humans, so he forced the memory out of his head.

The Governing Council was more civilized, or so they said. But once you witnessed something that brutal, that unforgiving, it was pretty damn hard to forget.

This was just a temporary hiccup. He’d muscle through it and be fine. What he needed right now was a little more yin to go with his yang.

She tugged at his triceps and made a little sound of protest. It wasn’t a surprise that she didn’t want him to go, but he reached for his coat, anyway. They never wanted him to leave, especially after knowing what his body jewelry could do for them. He enjoyed being someone’s addiction, liked to be needed, no matter how temporary or superficial.

“You’re not going already, are you? But we haven’t—”

“What you need is sleep and a healthy dose of sun tomorrow.” Good luck with that, though. Chances were, in Seattle at this time of year, that golden orb wouldn’t be making an appearance anytime soon.

“The sun? I don’t get it.”

“Just promise me, okay, sweetheart? Rain or no rain. You’ll spend time outdoors.” He considered telling her to take a vitamin-D supplement, but decided that’d sound too weird.

“Um, sure.”

As soon as his boots hit the floor, he leaned over and brushed four fingers over her forehead. “Sex with me was unlike anything you’ve experienced before,” he said, implanting a memory suggestion. “The only thing you’ll remember about me is that I’m an amazing lover and tonight was—” he searched for the appropriate dramatic word “—in-fucking-credible.”

Her eyelids fluttered briefly as the thought took hold. When she opened them, her lashes hung over her eyes in that unfocused, just-had-sex look. “God, that was mind-blowing. The best I’ve ever had. You’ve got a real monster behind that zipper.” Even her voice was thick and raspy.

“Why, thank you.” There had to be a special place in hell reserved for guys like him.

Techno music blared even louder as he entered the hallway, the sound waves tangible on his skin.

In the dim light, Mitchell Stryker was leaning against the painted brick, arms folded, mouth pressed into a tight line, but he couldn’t hide the flicker of amusement in his eyes. Oh, yeah, he could look as pissed off as he wanted to, but Jackson knew better. The guy had a serious case of envy.

Jackson pulled the door shut behind him. “What?” he asked, feigning innocence.

“Dude, you’re on a roll tonight.” Mitch brushed a blond forelock from his face.

“What can I say? When you got it, you gotta use it.”

Even though vampires were naturally more sexually active than humans, any idol worship of Jackson’s sexual habits made things a helluva lot easier. No one suspected he had off-the-chart energy needs and that it wasn’t sex he was after—at least not all the time. They simply thought he was always horny. Who was he to argue?

Doing a little shuffle step, Jackson snapped his fingers and pointed at Mitch. “You seriously need to get laid, my friend.”

Mitch straightened up and adjusted his leather coat with a quick shrug of his shoulders. “Why do you say that? Not that I’m arguing with you or anything.”

“If you have to ask, you’re worse than I thought. You’re way too uptight, banging on my door and shit. You need to be banging something else and let me do my thang.” Jackson elbowed his buddy. “Need some help separating a little filly from the herd out there?”

Mitch shoved him back and laughed. “Don’t you worry about me. I can manage just fine, thank you very much. Speaking of managing, looks like your thang got a little wild in there.” He indicated Jackson’s lip.

Jackson flicked his tongue out and tasted blood. Mitch probably assumed it was the woman’s but he didn’t bother to set the record straight. It wasn’t as if a sip now and then was against the law.

“Is that the second or third one tonight?”

Alarm bells went off in his head. He didn’t want Mitch to think he was taking blood every time he had sex. He shrugged, tried to act casual as he rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand.

Not long ago, he could stretch it out for two or three days before the energy cravings got too powerful to ignore or the need was triggered by something he didn’t expect. And decades earlier, like most vampires, he’d been able to go for weeks at a time without blood. Something inside him was changing, but he sure as hell didn’t want to know why. He’d need to be more careful next time.

“Didn’t you get it on with that curvy redheaded chick when we got here?” Mitch continued. “I saw you guys stumble out all lovey-dovey, your hands all over her.”

He sauntered down the hallway, an extra spring in his step. Goddamn, that chick’s energies felt good. “Couldn’t help it. Got a thing for redheads.”

Mitch laughed behind him. “And blondes and brunettes.”

“Hey, I’m all about equal opportunity. Democracy and shit. I like to spread the wealth evenly among the people. It’s only fair.”

“Sounds like communism to me. Listen. Dom called. He … um … tried calling you directly, but you didn’t pick up. He needs your sweetblood report. Says it’s a week late and that you’re making him look like a lazy ass to Region unless he gets his numbers in soon.”

Jackson stopped and pulled out his cell.

Five missed calls—all from his field team leader. Damn. He must’ve been more engrossed back in that room than he thought.

“How many sweetbloods do you have on your list?” Mitch asked. “If you want, I can do a few of the drive-bys.”

He thought about the latest addition, a young human girl he’d saved at the Night of Wilding party. He’d always thought that keeping tabs on known sweetbloods was a waste of time—Darkbloods or other vampires would get to them eventually. It was a fate most of them suffered, despite the Guardians’ best efforts to keep them safe. Their addictive blood was almost impossible to resist and commanded the highest price on the black market. But the girl reminded him of his little sister who’d died many years ago. Old feelings of regret welled up but he quickly tamped them down. There was nothing he could do about Betsy now. “Nah, I can do it, but thanks.”

He hustled down the hallway toward the main part of the Pink Salon, his boot heels pounding on the floor. Better return Dom’s call from outside and see if he could buy a little more time. Although the guy had mellowed out considerably since marrying Mackenzie and starting a family, Jackson didn’t want to chance it. His field team leader had a bitch of a temper if you pissed him off, for which Jackson seemed to have a knack. Plus, he could hold a serious grudge.

Jackson pushed aside the rows of hanging beads and stepped into the alcove at the side of the dance floor. As usual when someone emerged from the entrance to the ultraexclusive salons, dozens of sets of eyes focused in their direction. He ran a hand through his newly highlighted hair—green and blue streaks this time—and his acute hearing picked up a few female sighs. Yeah, chicks dug the hair. Made picking up women as easy as going through a drive-through.

His eyes locked onto a pretty thing sitting at the bar. He flashed her a smile, making a mental note to head over there on the way out. Clasping forearms with the muscle-bound bouncer who regulated the comings and goings of the salon, Jackson slipped him some green. “Thanks, Rocky. You’re my guy.”

“You bet, man,” the human said, nodding appreciatively at the Benjamin before tucking it away. “Anytime. How was the meeting? Enjoy yourself back there?”

Officially, the Pink Salon referred to them as meeting rooms; Jackson conducted a lot of “business” there. “Always.”

Although the guy didn’t know Jackson and Mitch were vampires, on some level, he had to have realized there was something special about them. Most humans did. They instinctively reacted by giving them a wide berth or going along with shit. Besides, this place was like a home away from home for Jackson. They played his kind of music, and these were his kind of people—fun-loving, always willing to party and not into heavy conversations.

He waited as Mitch brushed past him into the crowd and moved out of earshot. Then he turned back to the bouncer. “Hey, that gal I was with? Make sure her friends know she’s crashed back there.”

Rocky nodded. “You wore her out?”

“‘Fraid so.”

He caught up with Mitch threading his way through the dance floor. “Yo, wait up. What’s the hurry.”

“Come on. We gotta go.”

“I’m not ready to leave yet.”

“Seriously, man.” Mitch flicked his arm with the back of his hand. “Don’t you think you should call Dom first? He’s gonna rip you a new one if he doesn’t hear from you.”

When you know something’s inevitable, why rush it? He considered the list of sweetbloods he still needed to do drive-bys on. Two here in town, one up north and one in an Eastside suburb. Then there was the girl. Mitch was right. He didn’t have time to do it all if he stayed much longer. He’d probably just lose track of time again.

“Yeah, okay. I’ll call him from the road.”

CHAPTER TWO

INTERVIEWING BLAKE AND HIS brother had been a colossal waste of time and now Arianna was late picking up her cousin. She should’ve insisted on meeting Blake at the Devil’s Backbone rather than his house. But because the site was difficult to find and was surrounded by private property, you had to know someone to take you in. Instead, she’d spent the evening trying to pry verbal information from a couple of boys who clearly were better at texting than talking in person.

She glanced at the glowing hands of the clock on the Caddy’s dashboard. Almost midnight.

“Come on, Krystal,” she mumbled to herself as she waited in the car parked outside the apartment building. What kind of teenager studied on a Friday night, anyway?

Warily, she watched the fog advancing off the sound a few blocks away as it searched for low-lying spots in which to settle. In the light from the overhead streetlamps, it took on a gray-green color and, if you blinked once or twice, it was suddenly thicker. There hadn’t been a trace of fog over at Blake’s house. She worried if she had to wait too much longer, visibility would be so bad that she’d have to drive away inch by inch because her piece-of-crap car didn’t have working fog lights.

The two-story apartment building sat at the end of a long narrow driveway less than a mile from where Arianna lived—too far for her cousin to walk home, though she did try to convince Arianna it was no big deal. Maybe Krystal’s mother would’ve been okay with that, but this wasn’t a tiny farm town in eastern Washington and Arianna didn’t have substance-abuse problems. This was the big city and no one walked home in the dark around here.

Her fingers twitched with the urge to blast the horn, but the neighbors probably wouldn’t appreciate that. She definitely wanted to avoid running up to the door—shadows were everywhere. Along the shrubs at the base of the windows, underneath the spindly birch tree in the front yard, next to the minivan parked in the driveway. In an argument repeated for years, her sensible self said this fear was unreasonable, but the memories of her five-year-old self were ingrained too deeply to forget. Most of the time, she was able to push past it—you couldn’t exactly be afraid of the dark and run a blog like Paranormalish. But tonight she felt on edge for some reason.

She texted Krystal again: I’m still waiting. Where are you?

Comingggggg.

U said that already. Hurry. I’m tired.

K. Grabbing backpack now.

Yeah, right. Krystal texted that ten minutes ago, too.

To kill time, Arianna opened her camera phone and flipped through the pictures she’d taken at Blake’s. Two teenage boys sitting on a couch with their grandmother’s colorful afghan behind them. Blake looking scared. His brother looking confused. She deleted some, keeping only a few of the best ones to post on her blog. Then she watched part of the video she’d taken. One boy talking. The other boy listening. Arianna asking questions off camera. Boring with a capital B. The whole interview was. So much for interesting blog content.

She hit Delete and was about to set the phone down, when she remembered that videos were automatically saved to her cloud account, too. Carter had set it up for her in order to save memory on her phone and make them easier for her to access later. Once, when she’d been having all sorts of technical trouble with her website that she attributed to OSPRA, she took a chance and asked for Carter’s help. Since he was always bitching about Xtark—sometimes she wondered why he even stayed on with the company—she’d turned to him, trusting that he wouldn’t rat her out to corporate, and he didn’t.

“Don’t let these bastards dictate your personal life,” he’d said. “You need to maintain some sort of control. If you want to keep something private, then you shouldn’t have to feel you’ve got to turn over your passwords or tell them about your blog.”

“But I don’t want to lose my job.”

He’d rolled his eyes. “Please.”

“Carter, if they find out, I’m toast. And I kinda need this job. My bank account needs this job.”

“Don’t worry, you won’t lose it.”

Then he’d set up something called a proxy account, which supposedly hid her identity from snoops, as well as a cloud account. Thanks to him, she didn’t have to worry about running out of memory any longer.

From her phone, she accessed the cloud online and deleted the boring pictures and video there, as well. With that housekeeping done, she settled back in her seat, again wishing they had explored the sanitarium, instead. Although the charred remains of the building were almost completely hidden, supposedly the ravine where they dumped the bodies of residents who had mysteriously died was haunted. Thirteen steps were carved into the side of the hill, leading to the bottom, thus the Devil’s Backbone. That place would’ve given her plenty of interesting images. Local legend said that when you got to the bottom and turned around, you could see straight into hell. Now, that would’ve been something interesting to post. But at the last minute, Blake had freaked out and didn’t want to go back.

What did that leave her with? Zilch.

When she met Blake, she couldn’t help noticing that he looked a lot like that kid on YouTube who’d signed a big record deal recently. Maybe she could leverage that. Tag the singer’s name, or something. She pictured the blog title: Friend of Tai Simmons Look-alike Gone Missing. That’d garner a few hits on an otherwise boring post, wouldn’t it?

“Ari,” she said to herself, “you’re really stretching it this time.”

She was about to set the phone down when two sets of lights blazed in her eyes, illuminating the interior of the Caddy for a moment, virtually blinding her. She held a hand up to block the light. A jacked-up vehicle with its high beams on, including large yellow fog lights, had just turned onto the street. The driver probably had no clue how obnoxious that was. Or maybe he did. Guys who drove rigs like that dug the attention—good and bad. It was swagger on wheels.

Something darted out in front of her car. A cat. It paused in the middle of the road, staring at the oncoming vehicle.

“Move, little kitty.”

But it didn’t. Not one inch. The poor thing was paralyzed in place, its body a dark silhouette against the lights.

Oh, no, the fog’s too thick.

The Jeep probably couldn’t see it. She jumped out of the car to shoo the cat away, but before she could, the vehicle seemed to speed up, its engine revving louder. At the last moment, the cat shot into the bushes at the side of the road, narrowly avoiding becoming roadkill.

Anger surged inside her. Clearly, those jerks had seen the cat. What kind of idiot would purposely try to run over an animal? She glared into the windows of the Jeep as it drove past, wishing her eyes were daggers. She expected to see a car full of joyriding losers—hats turned backward, liquor bottles being guzzled, but instead she saw two guys in the front seat wearing sunglasses—what the hell?—and staring straight ahead.

They even looked like assholes. Identical ones. There should be a law against trying to run over someone’s pet. She should report them to … to … someone. Remembering the camera phone in her hand, she took a few pictures as the vehicle’s red taillights disappeared into the fog. Like that would make any difference.

Assholes Almost Run Over Garfield

Men in Black Attempt Kitty Killing

Making up ridiculous blog titles for imaginary posts always gave her a small sense of power over circumstances beyond her control. In fact, she had a monthly feature where readers would vote for their favorite outlandish blog-post title. Unfortunately, it hadn’t won her many friends with the other paranormal bloggers. Seemed OSPRA was always on the list. Hell, she’d make her own list with those ridiculous titles.

She sighed and climbed back into the car. Everything always came back to her blog. Maybe she’d skip a day or rerun an old article. People did that all the time. Other than a little ad revenue, it wasn’t as if she was getting paid to do it. She was the boss and if she decided to skip a day, well, then she should be able to do so and not feel guilty.

A slash of light from the apartment building on the other side of the road cut through the darkness. She looked up to see Krystal stepping onto the porch. The teen waved goodbye to her friend, slung her backpack over one shoulder and skipped down the steps.

Finally.

Arianna reached over to unlock the passenger door then opened her camera phone. She couldn’t wait to show Krystal that one picture of Blake. Would she think he looked like—

Movement behind Krystal drew her attention. Two shadows she hadn’t seen before seemed to separate from the darkness alongside the building. Confused, she scanned the area, but saw no one. Just shadows.

Was the fog playing tricks on her? She blinked rapidly, trying to clear her vision. Then the shadows began to advance. Straight toward her cousin.

Arianna’s throat tightened, strangling her airways. She wanted to scream at Krystal, tell her to run, but the sound was stuck in her throat. Just like what happened with her mother twenty-two years ago when the shadows had come alive. But she couldn’t move a muscle—she was frozen. Just like that stupid cat in the road.

The dark forms got to the minivan parked in the driveway and split up, with one going around to the other side. Then, at precisely the same time, they took shape. Gone were the shapeless, shadowy figures. These were flesh-and-blood men.

With their hands in their pockets concealing God knows what, they wore long, dark trench coats that grazed the tops of their boots and although the muted light from a streetlamp cast angular shadows on their faces, their identical expressions were devoid of any emotion. A pair of macabre robots on a mission, just like the two who took her mother.

Something inside her snapped, jerking her to action, and Arianna jumped from the car. “Run, Krystal!” Her voice cracked like a prepubescent frog’s.

“What are you talking about?” Her cousin had been about to step off the curb, but instead, she skittered sideways, looking at her feet as if expecting to see a snake.

“Those men. Behind you. Come on.”

Krystal spun around, dropping her backpack in the process. “What men? Ari, you’re freaking me out.”

How could she not see them? They were less than twenty feet away, coming toward her from both sides of that van.

Arianna felt helpless again. That same little girl hiding under a skirted table at the street fair.

One of the men spun a finger in the air, signifying a wrap-up, and the other nodded. They’d obviously done this sort of thing before. In a flash, they were on Krystal like a pair of jackals, lifting her off her feet and whisking her down the sidewalk.

Arianna tried to scream—surely someone would hear and come help—but she couldn’t catch her breath. It felt as if she’d been punched in the gut. They moved faster than humanly possible, their trench coats billowing behind them. Her cousin struggled, arched her back, but it was no use. A ninety-pound girl was no match against two men.

And neither was a five-year-old girl.

Something stirred inside. She couldn’t just stand here and watch her cousin being taken away by the men from shadows the way she had with her mother. “Put her down!”

In unison, they snapped their heads in her direction as if they were just now noticing they had a witness, but it didn’t halt their stride. She fumbled with her phone, attempted to dial 911, but the picture app was still displayed on the screen, and she ended up pressing the wrong buttons. Shit, shit, shit.

They rounded the corner and disappeared behind a sprawling cedar, its lower branches stretching out across the sidewalk.

Without thinking, she sprinted down her side of the street, past a few parked cars. She thought about going for help, but she didn’t want Krystal out of her sight. If she waited for the police to come or banged on the doors of any of the buildings on this block to get help, no one would believe her when she told them what happened, and her cousin would be long gone. Her only hope was to get some photographic evidence of the vehicle and license plate then call for help. When she got to the corner, she saw them trying to stuff Krystal into the back of the Jeep.

Her cousin managed to kick the shorter one in the face. Arianna heard him grunt. Krystal braced both hands on the door frame, but the other one came up behind her and easily pushed her inside.

She couldn’t just let them take Krystal away without doing a single thing to stop them. Though she’d taken a few martial-arts classes, she now realized, she’d focused too much on self-defense. She’d never thought she’d need to know how to attack someone.