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BLOOD LUST

Vickie Taylor

Prologue

THE silver toe cap on the end of the black snakeskin cowboy boot gleamed under the harsh laboratory lights as it rushed toward Daniel Hart's face. He lurched away, but not before the sharp metal point laid open his cheek. His head snapped back. Blood arced above him, then splattered down on his lab coat like crimson rain as he rolled to a stop on the tile floor.

Bruised and battered, his stomach throwing up into his throat the remnants of the pizza he'd eaten at his desk an hour ago, he shifted to lay flat on his face and planted his palms out beside his shoulders, inhaling the mingled scents of industrial cleaner and blood while he gathered the strength to lever himself up.

Before he could move, another kick flipped him backward. He grunted, and another blow spun him in midair, then another.

His world became a blurry haze of stainless steel tables crashing to the floor, glass beakers shattering, instruments flying overhead in a whirlwind of violence and pain, and yet all he could think about was the work he'd dedicated the last three years of his life to. The delicate tests ruined. The data lost.

Well, almost all he could think of. There was the other matter of a few broken ribs, lacerations, assorted contusions and possibly some internal bleeding to occupy a small portion of his mind, but it all seemed far away, as if it were happening to someone else.

He rolled with another vicious kick, came to rest under the whiteboard filled with chemical equations on the far wall and curled his knees up to protect his abdomen. Something had torn inside him that time. His belly convulsed, his insides wringing like a dishrag. His breath rattled in his chest.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked clumsily, his tongue thick, bloody. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

"What is wrong with me?" The hem of Garth LaGrange's black duster swished over his boots as they scuffed the floor just inches from Daniel's face. He threw his hands in the air and cackled maniacally. "What is wrong with me? Nothing is wrong with me. For the first time in centuries, something is very, very right!"

Centuries? He'd known Garth was a little weird since he'd met him six months ago, but since the man with the penchant for black clothing and late-night business meetings had been the only one who'd stepped up to fund Daniel's research, he'd been willing to overlook a few… eccentricities. Suddenly he wished he'd taken the time to check out his benefactor more carefully. Looked into a few of the more pertinent details of his life.

Like the fact that he was whacked out of his mind.

Pain speared through Daniel, a lightning bolt that struck from his navel to his spine. He clenched his fist around the leg of the table near his head and rode the wave. "Why are you doing this?" he asked again. "What do you want?"

It galled him to lie helpless while Garth stomped through his lab like an angry child knocking over Tinker Toys, but at six foot eight, the guy had a good six inches on him, and who'd have guessed a man built like an underfed flagpole would have the strength of a bull ox? At one hundred and ninety pounds himself, Daniel was no featherweight, yet Garth had tossed him around the room—repeatedly—without breaking a sweat.

"What do I want?" Garth squatted next to Daniel and grinned wickedly. "I want it all. I want the world at my feet."

"You've lost it." Shaking his head, Daniel dragged himself sideways, along the wall. "You're nuts, man."

Garth's face darkened. A scowl scrawled across his lips as he tracked Daniel's progress toward the door. Dropping his arms to his sides, he took a measured step toward Daniel, then another. "You're right. I'm crazy."

He leaned over until his pasty face hovered at the end of Daniel's nose. His breath brought a new wave of bile up Daniel's throat. "After eighteen months of listening to your constant stream of mind-numbing, medico-scientific mumbo jumbo, I'M A RAVING FUCKING LUNATIC!"

Daniel couldn't disagree with that, though he took issue with the cause. He tightened his arms over his ribs, expecting another blow, but Garth spun away with a flourish of his long coat.

"Oh Daniel, you're so smart," he mocked the praise he'd showered over Daniel so freely in the past. "Oh Daniel, you're so dedicated."

Halfway across the lab, he turned. "I cozied up to you. I coddled you. When what I really wanted to do was—"

His face twisted in rage, he made a circle in the air with his hands, as if he were choking an invisible neck, and for the first time, Daniel noticed how long the man's thumbnails were. Thick and yellow, they curved out two inches beyond the ends of his digits, where they sharpened to pinpoints.

Gross, but Daniel didn't have time to contemplate Garth's personal hygiene, because he finally figured out what he should have known all along. Garth had never believed in his research. Never been as excited as Daniel about the potential to help people, to further the greater good.

The man had just been using him all along. "You want my blood."

Garth teased the rim of his lips with his tongue. "You have no idea how badly."

"You want the formula."

"I want what it can give me. Power. Control. A certain…" He flicked his chin up jauntily. His pocked cheeks looked more hollow than ever, his complexion more sallow, yet there was a dull gleam in his sunken eyes that made Daniel's stomach pitch. "A certain notoriety with women."

"It's not Viagra, man. It's blood. Synthetic blood."

"It's freedom. It's lifer."

"You can't have it."

"I already do." He pulled a CD case out of the pocket of his coat, opened it carefully. Reverently. "By the way, this is now the only copy. I reformatted the hard drive on your PC and destroyed all the data backups."

Daniel's heart kicked on its first spurt of true panic. Getting his ass kicked by a freak with weird fingernails was one thing. Losing the work he'd dedicated his life to, work with the potential to save thousands of lives, was a whole other level of torture.

He could re-create the formula for the first non-organic human blood substitute, but it would take time. Reproducing the tests and documentation the drug manufacturers would insist on seeing before they committed their resources to the project would take even longer. Months and money he didn't have.

He found the strength to push himself to a sitting position. "You need me. And my medico-scientific mumbo jumbo. You'll never get a major pharmaceutical company's backing without me. You won't get in the front door."

"I have no intention of trying to get in the front, or any other, door."

"Even you don't have enough money to push a product like this to market yourself. It would cost you millions just to get it past the FDA. Tens of millions."

"The market I'm targeting doesn't require FDA approval."

"What market is that, the black market? Africa? Latin America? Where the people are too poor to afford the luxury of asking where their medicines come from, or in too much pain to care?"

Garth cackled again. "Such a humanitarian. But you overestimate my ambition. I was actually thinking of a consumer group much closer to home, and money is not an issue with them."

Nothing Garth said made sense to Daniel, but then his brains had been pretty well scrambled this evening. All he knew was that the man who had claimed to support his work was trying to steal it, and that the same man was more concerned about his own profit than helping humanity with a medical breakthrough.

Synthetic blood would save thousands of lives. Unlike the products most of the pharmaceutical companies had in development now, Daniel's brainchild didn't require any biological components at all. It could be mass produced on demand from simple chemicals, had an unlimited shelf life and none of the threat of blood-born pathogens such as hepatitis and HIV that accompanied the real thing. It had to reach the market—the legal market.

Clutching a set of metal shelves, Daniel dragged himself to his feet. "Bastard. You can't do this. I won't let you do it."

Garth smiled the way Daniel imagined a hunter would smile at Bambi. Right before he shot him. "Oh, do try to stop me. Please."

Daniel put his head down and charged, only to find himself flung back by an unseen hand. His back slammed into the wall behind him with enough force to knock a man-sized hole in the Sheetrock before he slid to the floor.

How had he done that? Garth hadn't touched him.

Shaking his head to clear it, Daniel braced his back against the drywall and pushed himself to his feet for another run, only to find himself knocked flat on his face.

Except there wasn't anyone behind him to knock him on his face. There wasn't anyone else in the room at all. Except Garth.

Okay, now this was getting spooky.

He raised his head to squint at his benefactor-cum-nemesis through burning, swollen eyes.

"You're finished. You have nothing left," Garth spat down at him. "I've got the formula. I've got the lab. I've got your house."

A groan tore its way out of Daniel's throat. The note he'd signed for the research funding. The collateral he'd put up, including the house that had been in his family for over a hundred years…

"I've got your car. That pitiful little savings account you call your nest egg."

Garth stretched his hand out toward the door to the lab, and what little breath Daniel had been able to draw into his aching chest caught in his throat.

Another black-clad figure sashayed into the room. Her leather pants squeaked as she rolled her hips. Her D-cup breasts spilled out of her leather lace-up bustier.

"Sue Ellen?" Daniel rolled to his knees, swayed sickly. Sue Ellen walked by as if she hadn't seen him. What was wrong with her? Why was she dressed like that?

Garth smiled as she stepped into his waiting arms and rubbed herself against him like a feline. "I've even got your girl."

"Sue Ellen, get away from him!"

But she seemed to have no inclination to run. Instead, she flicked out a long thumbnail, scratching Garth's neck and scooping up a drop of blood. Then she brought the blood to her lips and licked it off with a dreamy look of enjoyment on her face.

God, what had he done to her? What sort of spell had he put her under?

Daniel watched, frozen in horror as Garth placed his hands around her neck, caressed the line of her jaw, then squeezed. Hard.

She should have struggled. He had to be hurting her, but she didn't seem to care. She seemed to be enjoying the pain. Eyes glazed over with anticipation, she let her head fall back as if he were caressing her like a lover, not choking her.

Daniel staggered to his feet. "What are you doing?"

Garth drew his thumbs over the column of her throat, licked his lips, and then dug his pointed nails into her flesh.

Daniel charged again, growling. Again the unseen hand stopped him, this time snatching him from behind and lifting him like a dog caught by the scruff of the neck. It pulled him up until he had to stretch to touch his toes to the floor, then beyond.

Garth pulled his thumbs back, and bright red blood bubbled out of the twin wounds he'd inflicted.

Daniel flailed in midair. "Let her go, you bastard. Let her go. I'll kill you for this. By God, I swear I'll kill you for this."

Garth flicked a careless look at Daniel. "You can't touch me. And neither can your God."

He winced as if he suffered some sudden pain, then lowered his head and suckled on the punctures he'd made on Sue Ellen's neck, a thin red stream of blood—her blood—trickling out the corner of his mouth as he drank.

1

AT a corner table in the condemned warehouse that had been converted to a bar, at least for the night, Déadre Rue hunched over her tonic water and watched the throng of sweaty, drunken bodies on the dance floor gyrate to the sound of heavy metal rock with lust in her eyes.

Blood lust.

Sometimes the ache, the desire, the never-ending, sharp-toothed, razor-clawed, freaking craving for blood was so strong she thought she might die from it.

But then, what the hell? She'd died once. It hadn't been so bad. Infinitely better than coining back to life, actually. Oh, yeah. Rising as one of the undead—now that had been nasty.

Not that living, for lack of a better word, as one of the undead was much better, wandering the streets with a parched throat night after thirsty night, eyeing ready prey on every corner, yet forbidden to stalk it.

Raising her drink in a trembling hand, she drained the glass, but the cool, clear liquid couldn't quench the fire in her throat that had driven her out of her grave tonight and into the shadowy bump and grind of a rave party. The pulsing music had called her. The sweet smell of blood running just under the thin veil of human skin had drawn her.

And she needed money. Needed some token to bring her superior in order to be granted permission to take what she needed.

Damn the High Matron for putting a ration on human blood, anyway. Just because a few too many exsanguinated bodies had turned up on the streets of Atlanta this last year. Just because the mortals were starting to whisper, getting nervous. The Matron and her Enforcer had the vampires of the city starving themselves for fear of her punishment. Worse, she had them stealing and selling themselves to bring her bigger and better offerings every month, hoping to win her favor and a little larger share of blood. They were like those boys in a Dickens novel, thieving to earn their keep.

Déadre rubbed her right shoulder, which bore the scars of that punishment, inflicted because she'd dared to sip at the wrist of a drunk she'd stumbled over on a late-night walk three months ago.

She'd learned her lesson that night; she hadn't had a taste of blood since.

It wasn't fair. The old ones, like the Matron, could go years without feeding. Decades, if need be. But Déadre had only been undead since 1934. Like a kitten, she needed to nurse frequently, at least once every few weeks. She couldn't die from lack of blood, but she could grow weak from it. Sick. She could suffer.

Even now her limbs felt heavy. She couldn't gather enough saliva to moisten her lips. The scent of blood, heated by the tight crush of bodies in the club, made her dizzy with need. Her heart, if it were capable of beating, would have been racing, her pulse, if she'd had one, shallow but rapid.

As she watched one particular dancer, a blonde with skin so translucent that Déadre could see the veins in her neck when the girl tilted her head back, swaying with the beat of the music, her thumbnails began to lengthen, thicken. To sharpen to fine points perfect for perforating the jugular.

Déadre closed her eyes, rocked in her mind with the girl. Licked her dry lips. She imagined herself trailing her hands up the column of the girl's throat, feeling the heady pulse beneath her fingertips, searching for just the right spot—

"You look parched."

Déadre snapped her eyes open and jerked her hands beneath the table, thumbs tucked into her fists. While she'd been daydreaming, the music had stopped. The band was on break.

The dancers had disappeared, and a man loomed over her. Tall. Lean. Average brown hair gelled up in clumpy spikes. Leather pants, biker jacket with no shirt underneath. Studded dog collar around his neck. Nifty scar running diagonally across his left cheek.

He flashed her an easy smile. "Can I buy you a drink?"

She hesitated, considering. She needed a mark, and by all appearances, he would be easy enough to lure outside and separate from his wallet. All she had to do was return his smile, lean forward, and give him a glimpse down her shirt. He'd follow her anywhere. But something felt wrong about the man before her.

On the surface, he blended easily with the other Goths and punks milling around, but his posture—too straight—and his eyes—too guarded—said he didn't belong. Whatever he was up to, she wanted no part of it, even if blowing him off did mean losing a chance to beef up the paltry offering she'd gathered for the High Matron this month. Besides, getting close to a strong, vital body like his in her current state of need was not a good idea. She might forget about the High Matron and her blood rationing and suck him dry.

It took all her will to turn away. "No," she said, and made a point of looking bored, looking at anything but him and his surprisingly broad expanse of bare chest.

She couldn't look at that chest. Not without thinking of the heart beating inside it. Without hearing the swish of his blood through each of the four chambers, thinking how good it would taste.

He pulled out the plastic chair next to her. The legs scraped across the cement floor the same way his smile grated on her nerves. "Even if it's a Bloody Mary?"

She gasped at the offer. Her stomach tumbled as her gaze latched onto his. She'd love a Bloody Mary. Or a Bloody Tom, or Henry, or Heather…

She was so lost in her need that it took her a moment to realize he hadn't meant the offer literally.

Of course, he hadn't. He was mortal.

But she got the feeling, looking into the serene green of his eyes, that his choice of words hadn't been a coincidence. "Who are you?"

"Daniel Hart." He stuck out his right hand.

"What do you want?"

"To get to know you, for starters."

"Why?"

"You seem like an interesting person."

He seemed sincere enough on first glance. He had a handsome smile, full of straight white teeth. Even the scar on his cheek didn't detract from the personable expression he wore so comfortably. But on closer inspection, Déadre noted the fine red web in the whites of his eyes, the strain at the corners of his full mouth.

"Sorry. Not interested." She shoved her chair back and made for the door, the chain she wore as a belt jangling with every step.

Daniel swore under his breath. Picking up women in bars had never been his forte. Picking up a vampire was proving to be an even more elusive skill. He'd spent weeks researching her kind, finding them. He'd picked her out especially for his needs—a loner, young, female. Vulnerable to a man who paid attention to her, he'd hoped.

So she'd proved a little less vulnerable than he would have liked. He still couldn't let her go. In the days he'd spent in the hospital after taking the beating from Garth and throughout the weeks of recovery afterward, he'd searched for a way to kill the man—the monster—who had taken Sue Ellen's life, who held her undead body under his spell. Daniel had studied; he'd read. When he was able, he walked the streets and used the last of his money to buy information.

He knew what Garth LaGrange was, and he knew as a mortal he had no chance against him. There was only one way to win, to free Sue Ellen's soul, and it all depended on getting Déadre Rue to help him.

If Plan A didn't work, he'd go to Plan B.

He started after her, giving her space as she worked her way through the crowd and out the door, then caught up to her in the parking lot, where they'd have some privacy.

At least, he thought he'd caught up to her.

He stopped beside the red Jeep Wrangler in the last row and checked the plate. It was definitely hers. He scanned the darkness, the cones of light from scattered streetlamps. "Déadre?"

He felt a breeze, saw a blur of motion, and found himself flying backward to slam into the Corvette in the next parking space. His feet were on the ground, legs spread, but his back was bent over the rear quarter panel.

Déadre stood between his knees, holding him down with a fist clenched in the collar of his coat. Her pale skin looked as stark against her dark hair as a full moon against the night sky. Except the moon didn't usually scowl so fiercely. "How do you know my name?"

With her hands so close to his throat, now seemed like a good time for the truth. "I've been watching you."

"Why?" Her hands tightened. "Did the Enforcer send you to spy on me?"

"No. I mean, I don't know. Who is the Enforcer?"

"If you're not working for him, why are you following me?"

"I need your help."

"To do what?"

"To—" He hadn't planned to announce his intentions so soon, but he didn't see where he had much choice, at this point. "To become one of you."

For a moment, disbelief held Déadre immobile. He knew what she was. And he wasn't screaming in terror or running away from her.

The warmth of Daniel's body seeped into her. The feel of his firm thighs riding her hips gave her a brief reprieve from her craving for blood and stirred a long-unfed craving for another kind of fulfillment.

Then she whirled away from him. Disgust had her wanting to howl.

It happened once in a while. Mortals with terminal illnesses decided they wanted to live forever. Punks or Goths thought they wanted to do more than play at being creatures of the night. So they sought out a vampire and asked to be converted.

Some vamps were happy to oblige in the first part of the process, draining the mortal's blood to the point of death. But they often neglected the part that caused the conversion, giving some of the blood back.

The fools' corpses were usually found rotting in the gutter the next morning.

Before the rationing, that was. Now, the vampire would be a fool to take human blood without the authority of the Enforcer.

She turned and sneered at the man pushing himself off the car and rubbing his throat. "Go home, little mortal. While you still can."

"I don't have a home anymore. Or a car, or a job, or anything else, for that matter."

"Aw, and you want me to feel sorry for you?"

"I want you to make me a vampire so I can kill the bastard who stole them."

A long moment ticked by.

Petty revenge. He wanted to give up his beating heart, warmth, sunlight, to rise as one of the undead just so he could get back at someone bigger or stronger or smarter than himself.

She shouldn't feel so disappointed. She didn't know the man well enough to have expected anything better of him.

But she had.

Strangely deflated, she turned her back to him and fished in her pocket for her car keys. So absorbed with her disillusionment was she that she didn't hear him move.

Didn't realize he stood behind her until she felt the sting of the needle he plunged into her shoulder.

2

DANDELION fuzz floated on silver beams of moonlight as Daniel sat on a grassy hillside an hour north of the city, Déadre handcuffed to his side. In the distance, the lights of Atlanta blazed like so many earthbound stars. Above them, the moon settled toward the horizon.

He dragged his free hand through the stiff spikes in his hair. It would be dawn soon, and she was still out cold. He checked for vital signs for the thousandth time.

She wasn't breathing. Had no pulse. But then, she wasn't supposed to, was she?

He wasn't sure. All the research he'd done on vampires, and he still didn't know a thing about their basic biology. Apparently no one did, since most of the literature he'd amassed had been based more on speculation and fear than fact, as far as he could tell.

He glanced down at the unconscious woman—at least he hoped she was just unconscious—at his side. A vampire. It was still hard to believe. Not the fact that they existed. Everyone knew vampires were real; they just weren't talked about in polite company. Kind of like venereal disease.

What he had trouble believing was that she could be one of them and still be so beautiful. She had a heart-shaped face with bowstring lips. Her dark auburn hair was thick and shiny and slid through his hands like silk. Even though she wasn't a big woman, her body flowed from one enticing curve to another.

She was the kind of woman who had always attracted him before he'd met the long, leggy Sue Ellen. The kind of woman who still turned his head, though it made him feel guilty every time he did. Except this woman was a vampire.

Jesus, he couldn't have killed her, could he? Only exposure to sunlight, a stake through the heart, decapitation, cremation, or being completely drained of blood by another vampire could do that.

He hoped.

Her pale skin shone like marble. A cool breeze teased her bangs over her eyes and he brushed them back and tried shaking her again.

To his relief, her eyelids finally fluttered. She groaned.

When her eyes opened, he asked, "Are you all right?"

"Wha—What was… ?"

"Holy water." He let go of her shoulders when she stiffened. "Only a couple of CCs. It was just supposed to make you weak, not knock you out."

Wincing and arching her back, she rolled the shoulder he'd stuck with the hypodermic. "It burns."

"Burns? Is it supposed to burn?"

"Ohhhh."

"All right. All right. It burns. What can I do?"

She bit down hard on her lower lip. "Mmmmmmm."

"Okay." He picked her up, curving his shackled left arm behind her back and lifting her beneath her knees with the other. "There's water at the bottom of the bill. Regular water," he added when she looked up at him with alarm.

She was definitely breathing now, shallow little gasps that tore at his conscience. Maybe she only stopped breathing when she slept. How the hell did he know?

At the moment, he didn't really care. He only cared about taking away the pain carved into her ivory-smooth face.

He set her on the creek bank facing land and peeled back her leather jacket, but he couldn't get it off over the cuffs, so he pulled it down her arm and then lifted her shirt over her head to join it.

She gasped and tried to cross her arms over her chest, but surprisingly enough, it wasn't her breasts that had him ogling. It was the jagged scar on her shoulder.

Surely to God he hadn't done that.

Please, don't let him have done that.

"How did this happen?" He reached out to touch the reddened mark in the shape of a cross, but she flinched before his fingers even brushed the puffy flesh.

"Please." Her voice was close to a whimper. "Don't."

He gave her one searching look, but found no answers in her dark eyes. Unable to stand her pain any longer, he leaned her back, holding her just above the water with his left arm and spooning the cool liquid over her back and upper arm with his right hand.

"Better?" he asked.

Her hair drifted on the current. Her face gradually relaxed. "Better."

She started looking around. Cicadas serenaded her from the trees. A toad croaked downstream. "Where are we?"

"Cherokee County."

She frowned and jiggled her wrist as if just realizing she was shackled to him. "Why?"

Avoiding her gaze, he dribbled another handful of water over the cross branded over her shoulder blade. "Because it's a long way from anywhere."

She shifted in his arms. "Did you bring me here to kill me?"

"No."

"Then what do you want?"

"I told you," he said mildly. "I want to be like you."

"No, you don't. Believe me, you don't." She craned her head toward the east. "It'll be dawn soon. You know I can't be out here when the sun comes up, right?"

"I know."

She scanned the hillside, left and right. "How did we get here? You—You have a car somewhere, don't you?"

"Somewhere." And just in case she decided to kill him and drive off in it on her own, he added, "But the keys aren't with it. They're hidden."

"You're going to hold me here?" She sat up, turned and tried to backpedal away, but didn't get far. She jerked the end of the short chain between their handcuffs. Her voice rose an octave. "You said you weren't going to kill me."

"I'm not. You're going to kill me." Tired of chasing her up the hill as she continued to back away from him, he pulled her to him. She wasn't strong enough to fight Yet. "You're going to kill me and bring me back… like you. Then I'll get the keys, and we'll drive out of here together. Before the sun comes up."

Once he had the strength and speed of a vampire, he could fight Garth on equal footing. Kill him and free Sue Ellen's physical body from his evil influence.

What he'd have to do later to set his own soul free he wouldn't put words to.

Not yet.

THE moments before dawn were always the darkest, the quietest, the most peaceful for a vampire. These were the moments Déadre held on to when she thought she couldn't stand being what she was for another night. When she couldn't stand the hunger. These were the moments she'd always hoped would be her last, should her existence ever come to an end.

She pulled Daniel's coat tighter over her shoulders. After bathing in the creek and having gone so long without fresh blood to warm her, she had been chilled. He'd turned his jacket inside out and settled it over her shoulders. The gesture of simple kindness had touched her.

And confused her.

"Do you know what happens to a vampire in the sunlight?" she asked without looking at him. Pine and magnolia and jasmine all mingled on the breeze.

"I have a vague idea."

"The eyes go first. Our night vision makes us so sensitive to light that we're blinded."

A muscle in Daniel's jaw jumped. He jerked a blade of grass out of the ground and rolled it between his fingers.

"Then our skin begins to blister and peel. Our hair catches fire, and our internal organs start to liquefy."

"We don't have to be here when the sun comes up. All you have to do is… whatever you do to make me a vampire, and we'll leave."

"I don't like being used."

He turned toward her. His green eyes looked flat black in the darkness. "How is it using you to ask you to do what comes naturally to your kind?"

"I'm relatively young for one of my kind," she said. "But I've been a vampire long enough to know that I don't like it much. I won't curse another to suffer this existence."

"You'd rather die?"

"I died a long time ago, Daniel." She turned her face up to the sky. The moon was gone. The first pink tinges of dawn seeped up from the eastern horizon. Already she could feel her skin prickling. Soon the heat would replace her never-ending thirst as the source of her misery. "But I'd rather not burn. There are… kinder ways."

His face screwed up as her meaning sunk in. "You want me to kill you?"

"You're already killing me. I'm just asking you to do it mercifully."

"Jesus!" Daniel jerked his hand up to run through his hair, hit the end of the handcuff and winced.

He thought he'd planned for every contingency, taking care to hide the car and keys so she couldn't kill him and take off on her own. So she needed him to survive.

How could he have known she wouldn't want to survive?

Of all the vampires in Atlanta, he had to pick the one with a death wish.

He pulled her close. So close their noses nearly touched. Was her face already turning red from the sun?

"All you have to do is bite me, or cut me or whatever you do to get my blood."

She said nothing, just stared over his shoulder at the blushing sky.

He pushed her to her back, straddled her, not really putting his weight on her, but pinning her down as he fished a penknife out of his pocket.

"Here, I'll help you." He flicked the blade open and, hesitating only a second, gouged his wrist. Blood trickled into his palm in a steady stream.

"Go ahead. Drink." A drop of blood landed on the corner of her mouth. She pressed her lips together. "Drink, dammit! I know you want to."

More blood splattered on her chin, her cheek. She whimpered, and threw her arm up, but it wasn't to push his away.

It was to cover her eyes.

He glanced over his shoulder. The first bright sliver of gold shone from the horizon.

She writhed beneath him, struggling to turn away. He let her, sliding to one side, and she immediately curled into a ball on her side with her back to the sun. A spasm wracked her, then another, harder.

She covered her face with her hands, pulling his hand along, and his fingertips brushed her knuckles. They were hot. Cracking. The shell of her one exposed ear was raging red.

Christ!

He dove over her, wrapping himself around her, cradling her head. "It's all right. It's okay. We're getting out of here."

Taking only a second for one deep breath, he pulled his leather jacket up to cover her head, held the rest of her as close to him as he could, and pushed to his feet with her in his arms. Keeping himself between her and the sun as much as possible, he ran for the car.

Each step seemed to take an hour. By the time he reached her Jeep, the sun felt high and hot on his back. He retrieved the keys from the rock he'd hidden them beneath, then hurried to the Jeep parked behind a blackberry thicket, unlocked their handcuffs and settled her on the floorboard. He tucked his coat around her as best he could, then drove like a madman down the gravel road, dust and rock spewing up behind him like a monochrome rainbow. But where was he taking her? This had been his grandparent's farm years ago, but the house and barn were long gone. There wasn't a neighbor for miles, and even if there was—

"Hang on," he yelled to Déadre, and wondered if she was still coherent enough to hear him. To understand.

He slammed on the brakes at the entrance to the old lane, which had once led to a two-story frame house with gingerbread trim, and skidded into the drive. The house might be gone, but there used to be a storm shelter. A dank and dark concrete hole he'd been afraid of as a kid. He'd told his grandma he'd rather blow away in a tornado than crawl down in that grave.

He rolled to a stop beside the crumbling chimney, all that was left of his grandparents' lives. Twenty yards to his left was the split-trunked oak he used to climb. That meant the shelter should be…

There it was, the cement entry and wood doors nearly obscured by the overgrown grass.

He ran to the passenger side of the Jeep, pulled Déadre out and made a run for it. She was so hot he could feel her burning skin through the leather coat.

He kicked the door open and nearly fell down the stairs. He laid her in the shadows of the darkest corner and crouched over her.

Her chest jerked as she fought for breath. "The door." She moaned. "Close the door."

Cursing, he jumped up and grabbed the pull rope. The door banged shut behind him, plunging them into total darkness.

He felt his way back to Déadre, pulled her close. He couldn't see her, but he could feel her. Her whole body was shaking, her muscles convulsing. He smelled singed hair and scorched flesh.

His heart pounded against his breastbone. Blood and guilt roared in his ears. What had he done? God, what had he done to her?

"Déadre? Stay with me, baby. Stay with me." He rocked her gently but fiercely, afraid to hold her too tight lest he hurt her more. "Tell me what to do. How can I help? Can you hear me?"

She clutched at him mindlessly, clawed at him, practically crawled up his body, her fingernails scraping his shoulders and chest. Then she fell against him, panting, and knocked him back on his elbows, her hot face searing his bare skin.

Her tongue lashed out, swiped over one of the minor wounds she'd caused, and the touch was like a lightning strike in his blood. The heat transference was incredible. Every cell in his body sizzled.

She scraped him again, and again nuzzled the wound. He managed to string two logical thoughts together. "Blood? You need blood? Will it heal you?"

She didn't answer. She was too busy. Her hands were as quick as her tongue. They roamed and glided, scraped and tweaked. Pleasure and pain blurred.

This was what she needed. He could feel her getting stronger. More aggressive.

His body was electric, jumping and twitching at the intensity of the sensations her recovery was causing, and when she swung one of her hips over his to hold him down, he couldn't help but arch up into her as if she'd turned up the voltage.

He reached up to grab her, to pull her close, to hold her back, he wasn't sure which. His blood pounded so hard he thought his veins might burst. His mind overloaded. She ground her pelvis down on his engorged sex and he grunted, thrust as if they weren't separated by two layers of cotton and leather, his and hers. He found the hem of her shirt, slid his hands underneath and palmed her breasts, pinched the stiff nipples.

"Déadre, we've got to stop." But they were beyond stopping. Far beyond.

Some part of his mind knew this was wrong. Accused him of betraying Sue Ellen. Betraying himself, his promise. Betraying Déadre, taking advantage of her when she was out of her mind with pain, with need.

Most of him didn't care.

He bucked and she rode him. Heat poured out of her core and over his erection like a lava flow. Her greedy mouth left a trail of fire over his jaw, his neck. He tensed, as her mouth paused over his jugular, but she traveled on, down his arm, where she snatched his hand and lathed his wrist with her tongue.

His bloody wrist.

Her mouth latched on over the open cut and she sucked as greedily as a newborn. She rubbed herself against him, mewling as she drew down hard on him.

He fought the urge to resist. She needed this; he'd almost killed her. And he wanted this. It was the only way he could kill Garth LaGrange and free Sue Ellen. But now that the moment was here, panic swelled. He could feel the life force being drained out of him by the pint.

His head spun. He felt like a drunk on a three-day binge. The blood loss should have rendered him incapable of maintaining an erection, but he grew harder and thicker than ever and wondered if his stamina was a result of the thrall the authors of his research material had speculated about. The sexual excitement that stole a vampire victim's senses, made him unaware he was being fed upon until it was too late.

If so, he could understand where vampires got their reputation as masters of eroticism.

They'd earned it.

His limbs went numb. His heart stuttered, restarted, stuttered again like an engine running out of gas. He was dying, and it didn't seem to matter. He was almost there. Ready to climax.

Déadre was ready, too. He could feel it. Her thighs quivered on each side of his hips. She tilted her head back and took one long, last draw from his wrist, then dropped the limp appendage. With his blood smeared across her chain and cheeks, her jaw slack and eyes glazed in ecstasy, she sat down on him hard and pushed her pelvis forward, trap-ping his shaft in her body's natural channel. Her upper body stiffened, hung suspended above him for a long moment, then fell forward, kissing him with a gusty sigh, and Daniel let go.

The last living things he knew were the fiery eruption of his body, the sound of her name in his throat, the taste of his blood on her mouth.

He managed to mumble four words against her slick lips. "Bring me back. Please." But in her fevered state, he wasn't sure she heard them.

Then with one final, shuddering pulse, his heart stopped, and his life ended.

Spent.

3

DÉADRE woke up with a muzzy head and a bad case of cotton mouth. She couldn't quite figure out why she was awake at all. It was daytime, even in the dark she could feel the sun in the warmth of the air, the dry heat of her grave.

Except this wasn't her grave. This place was larger, deeper underground, and she wasn't lying on the freshly turned earth of her homeland. She was sprawled across a broad male chest.

A still, cold, broad male chest.

It all came back to her in a rush of pain. Heat. Arousal.

Daniel.

She snapped upright. "Daniel?"

With her excellent night vision, she could see his pallor was gray as stone. Though his lips were parted, she could discern no breath passing through them. She couldn't hear his heartbeat or the blood swishing through his veins.

Terror clawed at her.

"Daniel?" She shook his shoulders, but got no response.

She'd killed him.

No, no, no, no, no. Yes.

He was dead. In her fever, she'd drank his blood until he had no more to give. None to sustain himself.

She'd murdered him.

She scrabbled backward until her shoulders hit the rough cement block wall, and stuffed her fist in her mouth. She hadn't killed a mortal since 1934, when she'd been made a vampire by the elderly gentleman down the row from her to whom she sold milk and eggs twice per week.

One week, dairy and poultry hadn't been enough to satisfy his hunger. He'd taken her blood. And initiated her into the ways of the undead.

When she was strong enough, he taught her how to hunt, to feed. He'd picked victims for her that were weak so that they wouldn't pose a threat, for she believed old Jonathan Rue had loved her in his way. He didn't want her hurt.

In her inexperience, she had taken too much from one old grandmother, a neighbor of Jonathan's. She hadn't realized the woman was bedridden and in frail health even before Déadre had slaked her thirst at the woman's throat. She hadn't realized she was killing her until it was too late.

Jonathan had comforted her, told her they all made mistakes at first, but Déadre would never forget the slack expression on the grandmother's face, the open mouth, as if she'd tried to cry out and couldn't. The lifeless eyes that looked just like Daniel's did now.

She could put life back in those eyes, or a semblance of it.

No. She'd never made a vampire. Wasn't sure she knew how.

It was what he wanted. What he died for.

Daniel, with the body to rival any Greek statue. Beautiful Daniel, with the body cold and gray as stone.

No. Yes. She had to do it. Had to try.

He'd saved her life. He'd fed her.

He'd hurt her. Almost killed her.

He'd come as close to making love to her as any man had in decades, since Jonathan had been staked through the heart by a mob in '46.

She couldn't leave Daniel here to rot. It might already be too late. How long had it been? How long had she slept? She had no way to tell.

"Don't let it be too late," she pleaded to no one and crawled forward. Cradling his head on her lap, she extended her thumbnails and pricked her index finger, then squeezed a drop of blood onto his tongue, then another. "Come on, Daniel. This is what you wanted. You can do this."

She closed his mouth, worked his jaw, simulating a swallow. When she'd repeated the process three times with no effect, she slapped his cheek. "Don't you give up on me, dammit. You started all this. Don't quit on me now!"

She opened a bigger gash on the palm of her hand, let the blood stream freely onto the back of his throat for a full minute, then closed his mouth and worked his throat again.

Tears welling in her eyes, she rubbed his chest, pounded on him with her fist, threatened and begged and pleaded with him to move until his left hand twitched.

She froze, watching, hoping.

His fingers clenched rhythmically. His eyes rolled to white, then back to murky green as his chest bowed. His back arched off the floor as if he'd been defibrillated and he dragged in a deep, rasping breath.

Remembering too clearly the confusion he would feel as he regained consciousness, the pain, the inexplicable rage and the blood lust, she backed away. The next few moments would be worse than death, worse than a thousand deaths, but there was nothing she could do to help him. Not until his rage was spent.

Eyes wide and lips snarling, Daniel rolled to his knees, then staggered to his feet. He rushed the cement block wall of the storm shelter as if it were a demon after his own soul. He pounded the concrete with his fist. The flesh split, bone shattered, but he didn't bleed. He had no blood left.

She hated to see him hurting himself, but it didn't really matter. The pain of transformation was so great that he'd never notice a little thing like a few broken bones, and once he was undead, he would heal quickly.

Eventually his temper died to the point where he became aware of her. He cocked his head and stared at her with insensible eyes. Animal eyes.

She beckoned him with a motion of her hand. "Come to me," she said softly.

He growled and rolled to the balls of his feet, ready for attack.

"Come to me."

His shoulders sagged. He slid one foot forward as if he were too tired to lift it.

"That's it. Come. It will get better soon. I have what you need."

He stumbled forward and fell into her arms. Gently, she lowered him to the dirt floor, their backs against the wall, and opened her shirt. With a flick of her thumb she sliced the side of her breast, pulled his head down and stroked his hair as he fed.

DANIEL had a vague notion that time had passed, though he couldn't guess how much. Time seemed elastic now. Hours rushed by in the blink of an eye. Days were a blur of sleep, warm, coppery drink and soft hands.

The hands were on him now, pressing something cool and damp to his forehead. He opened his eyes and found her studying him.

"Daniel? Are you there?"

Arms shaking, he pushed himself up on one elbow. "Of course I'm here. Where else would I be?"

She wrung out her cloth and laid it across the sports water bottle he remembered from her Jeep. "Never-never land, maybe? Or wherever you've been for the last three days."

"Three days?" He levered himself to a sitting position, leaned back against the block wall. "Jesus, I—"

He winced. It was like someone set off a firecracker in his head. He dug his fists into his eyes. "Christ."

Bam. Bam. Bam. Bright white lights exploded in his vision.

"You might want to choose a non-religious expression," Déadre said. "Vampires and Him don't mix too well."

"Vampires? What do you—" He pulled his hands away from his face and looked down at his chest. Had he always been so pale? For that matter, how could he see his skin tone at all in the dark?

His gaze flew to hers. "Did you… ? Am I… ?"

Biting her lower lip, she nodded.

"I don't feel any different."

Never taking her eyes off his, she walked to him, picked up his hand and laid his palm over the left side of his chest. "Feel that?"

"No."

"Exactly."

He slid his hand side to side, searching. "My heart's not beating."

"You'll learn to make it beat when you want it to, later. Comes in handy when you have to get close to a mortal. I'm sorry."

"Sorry for what?"

She stared at the floor. "For killing you. I didn't mean to. I—I lost control."

He grabbed her by the upper arms, made her look at him. "I asked for this."

Her glistening eyes tore him apart inside. Amazing how his heart could be dead in his chest and still cause him so much pain.

Her bowstring lips quavered, and he couldn't stand to see them tremble, so he stopped them the only way he knew how. He captured them with his own.

She stiffened, but only momentarily, then she leaned into him with a pleading mewl. He slipped his tongue past the seam of her lips and answered with a groan. Then-mouths fused, he tugged the hem of her tank top out of her leather pants and slid his hand underneath.

She might have been a creature of the night, but she felt more like an angel filling his palm. He backed her up to the wall and, pinning her there, slipped a second hand under her shirt.

There were advantages he hadn't thought of to this vampire business, like not having to breathe. He could ply her with kisses endlessly, never breaking contact, while his stealthy hands kneaded her, memorized her shape and texture.

The underslopes of her breasts were soft as clouds, the nipples tight as rosebuds. The tear-shaped sides were—

Bloody. A sticky mess.

He pulled his head back and yanked her shirt up. "Jesu—" he squeezed his eyes shut as a cherry bomb went off in his head. "Ow!"

"I told you—"

"I know, I know." The flash of pain already receding, he squinted at her chest. "What the hell happened to you?"

She hesitated only a moment. "You are a voracious eater."

"I did this?"

"Not exactly. I opened the wounds so you could feed."

Very tenderly, he lowered her shirt and then took a step back. "Thank you. I won't be feeding off you any longer."

He turned his back to her, but she stopped him with a hand on his shoulder before he could walk away.

"Whatever you're thinking, get over it. Feeding is a fact of life for vampires."

He wheeled. "Maybe it's time the facts of life changed."

Already he could feel the hunger gnawing at his bones, though. He was so thirsty he thought he might dry up and blow away like the ashes of a cold campfire. He trembled with raw, powerful need.

Jesu—

Ow!

He had to learn not to do that.

Clenching his fists, he fought the urge to go to Déadre. To take what she offered, no matter what the cost to her. Or to his self-respect.

For the first time, Daniel began to understand what synthetic blood could mean to these people. To him. He began to see why Garth had been so desperate to have the formula.

But if he'd stolen the formula to feed his people, why didn't they have it already? Garth had walked out with the discs more than two months ago.

Garth. Thinking about Garth was good. Anger staved off the hunger. Raised a different kind of blood lust.

He stoked the rage inside him, used it to do what he needed to do. It was time. Time to leave Déadre and time to do what he had to do. He climbed the short staircase to the door.

She called out to him in a high voice, "What are you doing?"

"I have to go."

"You can't."

He bowed his head, telling himself to go on. He couldn't turn back now.

"I made a vow, D. To—" He flicked a gaze skyward.

"Him who shall remain nameless, and to myself. I can't give it up now."

"You're not ready."

"I'll never be ready, if I stay here."

He didn't need Déadre anymore. She'd fulfilled her purpose. He probably should kill her—she was a vampire, after all—but he didn't kid himself. He'd never be able to bring himself to do it. He couldn't stay with her, either, though. It would be too easy to lose sight of his goal. To be distracted by her, by this awful, aching thirst that never seemed to go away.

Rallying his resolve, he flung the overhead door back on its hinges. Cool, night air rushed in, full of the heady smells of summer. The stars shone overhead, each one bright as a moon to his newly heightened senses. He heard a tune playing on a car radio that must have been miles away, felt the strength in his muscles as he sprang out of the shelter and into the grassy meadow in one easy leap and smiled.

It pained him to leave Déadre behind, it really did, but he couldn't think about that now. He was finally ready to fight Garth LaGrange, take back what he'd lost. To free Sue Ellen.

He was a vampire, and at long last, vengeance would be his.

4

Idiot.

Déadre rolled her eyes. Did he really think he could just walk away from her?

She could have tried to explain that he was newly made.

That he was bound to her, at least for a while, as she was to him, but she doubted he'd have listened. Some lessons one had to learn for oneself, and this was going to be a particularly painful one, if Daniel Hart was as stubborn as she believed, which she was sure he was.

He'd left her the car—probably being chivalrous—and out on foot, but she couldn't drive after him. Now that he was undead, he'd hear her coming for miles. Besides, it didn't matter. He wouldn't get far. So she gave him a ten-minute head start and then marched down the road after him.

He wasn't hard to follow. His footsteps sounded like a stampeding herd of elephants to her sensitive ears, which reminded her to keep her step as light as his was heavy.

Even with his new super senses, he wouldn't have a clue he was being tailed.

Poor boy, he had a lot to learn about being a vampire.

She wasn't sure how she felt about teaching him living a life, or un-life, in this case, was a big commitment. The vampire equivalent of having a child. Until he learned the ways of the undead, his safety was her responsibility.

But there was a very un-childlike side to their relation-ship as well. Vampires were, by nature, sensual, sensitive creatures. Biologically speaking, the taking of blood invoked a sudden increase in volume of blood. Increased blood volume meant increased blood flow to the sex organs, resulting in arousal.

Some vamps couldn't get off without gorging themselves. Some couldn't gorge themselves without gorging off. Either way, it made the exchange of blood a very personal, and often intimate, interaction.

So far, Daniel had been too weak to feel the full effect of the blood she'd given him. His body had been focused on survival, but he was getting stronger by the hour. Sooner or later, he was going to want more from her than blood, and she had to decide how much she was willing to give him.

Lost in her thoughts, she didn't notice until she rounded a bend that the road stretched out long and straight before her. Long, straight and empty.

Where was Daniel?

She stopped, scanning the trees on either side of the lane, listening for him. She finally heard his breathing, harsh and labored, and knew that he'd reached the end of his endurance. New vampires needed to feed every couple of hours. He would be weak, sick. The blood lust would fall on him like a horse master's whip, driving him forward, driving him to feed.

This was a difficult time for a new vampire. A test period, during which he would find out if he had the mettle to control the blood-sucking urges, or if he would go rogue and have to be put down by his own kind.

A farmhouse rose out of a grassy meadow to the south. Potted geraniums on the front porch added a splash of red to the silvery moonlit scene. Daniel stood in the driveway beside a pickup truck, his head turned up to the curtains fluttering in an open, dark, second-story window.

There were mortals inside. Even from this distance, Déadre could smell them. Ready prey.

She crept toward the house, willing Daniel away. "Come back to me, little vampire. Back to me."

But when she broke out of the tree line, Daniel was nowhere in sight. Her stomach clenched. He wouldn't do it. He was a moral man. That wouldn't be lost in the vampire he'd become. He hadn't been able to kill her, he wouldn't kill the mortals in this house, either.

The blood lust was strong, though, and he hadn't learned control. He might not want to hurt anyone, but he could make a mistake, the way she'd made a mistake so many years ago with that poor old woman…

She had started toward the house after him, hurrying now, not caring if he heard her, when the bleat of a goat drew her attention toward the barn. She stopped, her senses alert, and heard more animal snuffles, a rustling of hay. Normal barnyard sounds.

Or not.

She glided to the barn without a sound and found Daniel on the floor bent over a puddle of vomit, a decapitated chicken in one hand and blood trickling out both corners of his mouth.

Daniel turned his face away. He didn't want Déadre to see him like this, on his knees, puking his guts up.

"I was so thirsty," he said. "I couldn't stand it. But the people in the house… I couldn't do it."

"You need to feed every few hours when you're newly made. Later, you can go longer."

He shook his head. "Something is wrong. I can't drink the blood. It comes right back up. Maybe I'm not really a vampire. Maybe it didn't work."

He hadn't heard her move, but suddenly she was crouched beside him. "It's the animal blood. You can't have it. It isn't compatible."

He coughed, choked, spit. "Oh, God—Ow!—No kidding."

Gently she pried the chicken from his fist and, holding one wing between her thumb and forefinger, deposited it in a muck bucket next to the horse stall.

He worked up the nerve to glance her way and was relieved to see she wasn't laughing at him. "You couldn't have told me about this animal thing?"

"You didn't ask."

Still on his hands and knees, he laughed sardonically. "Guess there are a lot of things I didn't ask."

She knelt next to him and dabbed the chicken blood from his lips with the hem of her T-shirt. "There's still time to make up for that. But first you need to feed."

She sat with her back against the wall and pulled him to her. He was too weak to resist. The barn spun around him like a gyroscope.

She lifted her T-shirt, but he brushed her hand away from her breast. "Wait, wait. One thing I have to ask first."

She frowned down at him. "What?"

"Is it normal for me to get totally turned on when I drink your blood?"

"Very normal. Although you'll learn you do have the ability to control it, if you want to."

He thought about mat a moment. "Like if I decide to take a nip from a ninety-year-old crone with the face of a weevil?"

"That would be a good time, yes." He could tell she tried to suppress her smile, but it broke through.

He was still contemplative, though. "Is it… as good… for you, too?"

She brushed her hand through his hair. "Not as good as for you, at this point. But when you're stronger, we'll exchange blood, and then it will be."

He nodded, feeling queer about contemplating a future with her. A future had never been in his plan. He was going to kill Garth, and then himself and Sue Ellen so that they could rest in peace. Wasn't he?

He thought it would be simple. He would become a vampire, and he'd have super strength and use it to kill Garth.

Unfortunately things hadn't worked out quite that way. He'd become a vampire, all right, but he was about as strong as a newborn lamb, and Garth was the big, bad wolf.

Obviously, he had some recalculating to do. Not tonight, though. Tonight, he needed to feed. He needed blood to quench the fire that threatened to consume him. He needed Déadre.

He rested his head on her shoulder and she beamed such a beatific smile down at him that this time, he extended a thumbnail and opened the wound on her breast himself.

The scent of fresh blood was like the smell of the ocean to a sailor. It cleansed him. Stirred him. His skin tingled and a low throb pulsed in his sex.

Lying next to her, he turned to his side and hooked one leg over her, rubbing with his calf, pressing himself into her hip. He smoothed his palm down the soft planes of her belly and under her waistband to the nest of curls between her legs.

She drew his head down with her hands, offering nourishment, offering her blood, but tonight he wouldn't just take. He would give as good as he got.

As good and better.

"HOW long until I don't have to feed so often?" Daniel asked.

Hand in hand, they walked on a footpath through the woods behind the farmhouse. Nocturnal eyes peeked at them from branches and scrub brush, then scurried away.

Déadre couldn't remember the last time she'd felt so at peace. When she'd still been mortal, maybe.

"It's different for everyone," she said. "But most of us are able to sustain ourselves for at least a day or two after the first couple of months."

His face twisted. "Months?"

"In vampire years, a month is hardly the blink of an eye."

"Vampire years. Is that kind of like doggie years?"

"Yeah, except a lot longer."

"Hmmphh."

The path ended at a pond polka-dotted by floating lilies.

Daniel skimmed a stone across the moonlit surface. "How often do you need blood?"

"Every few weeks or so. But it's been a little longer this time."

He had raised a rock for another throw, but he paused. "Am I hurting you by taking your blood when you haven't fed?"

She shrugged, hoping he wouldn't see the weariness in the gesture. "I'm a little weak, that's all. I'll feel better once we're back in the city."

In truth, she wished she never had to go back to the city. To face the Enforcer.

"Once you take a mortal's blood," he said, the words tinged with revulsion.

"I don't kill my donors. I only take enough to sustain myself without harming them."

"How do you do it?" He lifted his head. His green eyes looked black, bleak, under the quarter moon. "I tried. I was so desperate for blood, I wanted to go into that farmhouse, drink from whoever lived there, but I couldn't. It made me sick to think about it."

He sat down in the grass, pulled his knees up and hooked his arms around them.

She lowered herself next to him, mimicking his position, and grazed her fingertips over the nape of his neck, down his spine. "Eventually you'll have to take blood from someone besides me."

He stared out over the water for so long that she thought he wasn't going to respond. That he wasn't ready to face that reality. But finally he said quietly, "What if there was another way? Could you give up mortal blood? Would you?"

"What other way? Snapping the heads off chickens?"

He winced. "No, no animal blood. That's a lesson I won't forget."

"Then there is no other way." Daniel sighed, and got such a faraway look on his face that Déadre wondered where his thoughts had taken him. "Daniel?"

He stood and brushed himself off, then offered a hand to help her up. "We'd better get back. It'll be dawn soon."

Déadre's own thoughts did some wandering on the way back to the farmhouse to collect the jacket she'd left in the barn. "Let's don't go back, Daniel. Back to Atlanta, I mean. We can sleep today in the storm shelter, then head out tomorrow night for wherever we want to go."

She'd never thought about leaving her home city before. Vampires congregated in clans and to be separated from the clan was risky. They supported each other, watched each others' backs. Clans tended to be wary of strangers, especially strange vampires. The clan in a new city wasn't likely to welcome them with open arms.

More likely they would brand them as rogues, cut off their heads and bury them facedown.

She'd rather take her chances with a strange clan than with the Enforcer, though. She couldn't go back to Atlanta and face the High Matron and her thug. She couldn't take Daniel there.

Her excitement grew with every step. "California, maybe. I've always wanted to see the coast."

"I can't."

"Or the mountains. What do you think about the mountains?"

At the back of the farmhouse, he stepped in front of her, stopped her with firm hands on her shoulders. "Déadre, I can't. I have to go back to Atlanta."

She jerked away. The goats in the pen against the barn bleated. The mommas ran back and forth across their corral, their babies at their heels. The cattle next to them joined the ruckus, mooing and snorting.

"Because some man stole your house and your car and your work," she said bitterly, remembering his words from the rave club. "And you have to kill him."

"Because he killed someone I care about. My…" His voice broke. "My fiancée."

"Your what?"

"He's not a man, Déadre. He's a vampire. And he… he made her one, too."

She shook her head, not believing any of this. "So you used me to make you a vampire so you could win her back?"

"I used you to make me a vampire so I could set her free. She is—was—sweet and gentle. She wouldn't want to live like that. She wouldn't want me to leave her a—"

"A what?" She raised her hands out to the sides. "A monster, like me?"

He didn't answer her question. He straightened his back and looked her straight in the eye. "He's a vampire. As a mortal I had no chance against him. He's too strong. Too fast."

"What will you do if you manage to kill him, huh? Then you'll still be a monster? What will you do then?"

He looked her straight in the eye, his face solemn and sad. "Then I'll set myself free, too."

Her eyes went wide. Her stomach pancaked on the floor of her abdomen.

He'd used her. To find his fiancée, a vampire, so he could kill her.

And then he was going to kill himself.

Her beautiful Daniel.

Her mouth rounding in a silent, "No", she ran around him into the barn and nearly mowed down a sleepy-looking elderly man in a bathrobe and rubber boots. The farmer held a double-barreled shotgun, and her momentum sent him stumbling back. The stock of the gun connected with a support beam. His hand jerked on the trigger. There was a tremendous explosion, then a flash of flame from the end of the gun.

And two loads of double-ought shot tore through Déadre's chest.

5

DANIEL felt the concussion of the shotgun blast all the way outside the barn. He charged through the back door in time to see Déadre sway once, her spine straight and arms at her side, then topple backward like a domino. A red stain the size of a dinner plate bloomed between her breasts.

The farmer dropped the rifle and backed up until his shoulders hit the wall. His eyes were huge and round, set deep in his face, his complexion waxy. "Whaa—? No. Oh, no. I thought it was those wild dogs in the barn again, botherin' my stock. I didn't know. I didn't mean to do it. It was an accident."

Daniel stood immobile for a long moment, then dropped to his knees beside Déadre. He was pretty sure a gunshot couldn't kill her, but it was still quite a shock seeing her fall, seeing her lying on the ground, still and pale.

He checked her vitals quickly. She wasn't breathing, had no pulse. By all outward appearances, she was dead.

The farmer shuffled toward the door, mumbling. "Nine-one-one. I gotta wake the wife and call nine-one-one."

"No." Daniel touched Déadre's lips once before he rose, both a plea and a promise. He hoped she heard both in that deep sleep vampires went into when they needed to heal. Just because she couldn't die from a gunshot wound didn't mean she couldn't suffer from one. Feel the agony of torn flesh and splintered bone.

He needed to get her out of here, take her somewhere where he could help her. Where he could hold her, if nothing else. But first he had to deal with the farmer.

"You can't call anyone," he said, moving slowly and kicking the gun away as he approached the farmer.

The man shook like a child who'd played too long in the snow without his mittens. "B—but she's…"

"She's going to be fine."

He could see how hard the farmer tried to believe that. But the man shook his head sadly. His voice broke about the same time tears sprung to his eyes. "She's dead."

"She's not." He advanced on the man slowly, trying not to spook him.

"She… She's not?"

Daniel felt his confusion. He was sorry for the old guy, but a call to the cops could cause him and Déadre a lot of trouble. The last thing he needed was the police on his tail when he took her out of here. If they found her, they'd take her to the morgue, do an autopsy.

He suppressed a shudder. What if they cremated her afterward? Then she really would be dead.

No, he couldn't let the old man call the cops.

"You didn't shoot anyone," Daniel said firmly, holding the man's gaze. He wasn't quite sure what he was doing, but there had to be a way to convince the man it was in his best interests to forget what had happened tonight.

If that didn't work, he just tie the geezer up and leave him for his wife to find in the morning, after Daniel was long gone.

"I didn't shoot anyone," the farmer repeated. His voice was going flat and his eyes took on a faraway sheen.

"There was no one in the barn."

"No one in the barn."

Daniel raised his eyebrows. That was easy.

Too easy.

"It was just a couple of wild dogs bothering your stock. You scared them off."

"I scared off some wild dogs."

Daniel waved his hand in front of the guy's face, but he didn't blink. He'd suspected from his research that vampires had some way of mesmerizing their victims, making them forget. Now he knew for sure.

He just didn't know how he'd done it.

As long as he had, though, he might as well take full advantage. "I need to borrow your truck," he said.

The farmer stared off into space with unfocused eyes. "Keys are under the floor mat."

Excellent. "Go back to the house and go to bed. If your wife is awake, you'll tell her that you scared off the dogs."

"I'll tell her I scared off the dogs."

The old man turned to shuffle back to the house, but Daniel called out to him before he reached the door. "Wait!"

Daniel looked from the old man's slack face, to Déadre's pale one, and back. He figured he had less than two hours of darkness left. Enough time to get Déadre to Atlanta, where he could help her, before sunrise, but he was going to need all his strength to do it.

Daniel couldn't feed off Déadre. In her condition, he risked draining her dry and killing her. But she'd said he couldn't go more than a few hours without blood, either, newly made as he was. Already he was feeling lightheaded and clammy.

The solution to his problem stood at the barn door in a natty bathrobe and rubber boots. Could he do it? Could he drink the blood of a mortal? A living, breathing man?

The thought repulsed him at first, but he was also curious. Was he mortal or was he a vampire?

He couldn't straddle the fence forever.

He couldn't straddle the fence and build the strength he needed to fight Garth. Not quickly.

His stomach flipped and he realized his heart was beating, fluttering really, in his chest. He looked back at Déadre, her pale, elfin ears and the way her long lashes lay so still over her cheeks.

He forced himself to relax by thinking of her. Doing what he needed to help her.

He began to hear his own pulse in his ears. The blood lust beat a rhythm that couldn't be ignored. With his breath coming in short strokes, his thumbnails lengthening, he turned back to the farmer. He saw fear deep in the man's eyes, behind the veil of the thrall in which he held him, and smiled to ease his dread as he punctured the farmer's jugular and lowered his mouth over the wounds.

Daniel moaned, lost in the pleasure as the essence of life poured down his throat, sweet as honey with a coppery tang, and he drank long and deep.

Much to his surprise, he liked it.

DRIVING south down I-95 toward Atlanta in the farmer's rattling old pickup truck, Daniel suppressed the urge to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand for the thousandth time. He could still taste blood on his tongue, feel the man's pulse beating beneath his lips. He still reeled from the heady rush of heat suffusing his dead heart, his veins.

He was dead, and yet he felt more wonderfully alive than ever. Taking blood made him strong, invulnerable. Immortal.

It was a high far beyond anything he imagined cocaine or PCP could induce. If it was like that for all vampires, and he assumed it was, it was a wonder there were any mortals at all left in the world. How easily that kind of trip, that surge of power, could become an addiction.

He had to respect, if grudgingly, the control it must take for the undead to walk the streets night after night, surrounded by ready sources of that magic elixir, and not go on a rampage, drain the city dry.

More control than he had, he feared. If Déadre hadn't stirred as he'd been gulping down the farmer's life force, Daniel didn't know if he could've stopped, or if he would have kept drinking until the man had no more blood to give.

Until he'd killed him.

But she'd moaned, and her hand had twitched. Her eyes had scrunched in pain, and her pain had called him back from the dark edge he'd been teetering on.

Thank God.

Ow!

He really had to stop doing that.

One of Déadre's hands clenched his pant leg and he glanced down at where she lay curled up on the seat of the truck, her head resting on his thigh. Her fragile shoulders looked narrower than ever as she hunched them and moaned again. Her eyelids fluttered again.

Daniel tightened his fingers on the steering wheel. She was going to wake up soon, and when she did, she was going to hurt like hell.

She was also going to need blood and lots of it.

Turning his gaze back to the road, he punched the accelerator and sped through the darkness.

By the time he slowed down to cruise by the two-story brick warehouse that had once been his lab, he figured he only had about forty-five minutes left before the sun rose. If he was wrong about the lab still being relatively intact, he wasn't going to have a chance to find another hidey-hole.

Luckily, he wasn't wrong.

The windows had been boarded up to protect against vandalism, but that would work in his favor. The wood would hold the sunlight at bay, give him more time.

He carried Déadre to the stoop, set her down while he easily shouldered his way through the double dead-bolt locks on the door, then lifted her against his chest and took her inside.

He felt disconnected from himself, a sort of out-of-body experience as his Nikes crunched over broken glass and kicked aside a fallen chair. This lab had been his life once. All he cared about. Now the only value that history held for him was its ability to help him help the woman in his arms. To take away her pain and make her whole again.

In the middle of the room, he righted a table and stretched her out on the stainless steel. Her body bowed. She bit her lip and mewled, and he eased her back down.

"Easy, baby. Easy. I'm gonna help you now. Just a few more minutes."

There was no need for lights. His newly acquired night vision allowed him to work in the darkness—it was easier on his eyes, anyway—gathering the supplies he needed and repairing the equipment Garth had damaged. Had it really been eight weeks ago?

It seemed more like a lifetime.

Actually, it had been a lifetime, he supposed. His lifetime.

Sometimes he forgot he was dead now.

As the first pink fingers of dawn crept around the edges of the boards over the broken windows, he stood back and studied his work: a full liter of synthetic blood in an IV bag, and more cooking.

He had the rubber tubing and large bore IV needle ready, but as he listened to Déadre whimper in the dark, her head thrashing side to side, he realized he couldn't do it. He couldn't pump it into her.

He hadn't gotten anywhere near the point of human testing in his research. Even if he had, that wouldn't have proven the synthetic blood safe for vampires. The last thing he wanted to do was cause her more pain.

His decision made, he yanked the tourniquet tight around his left arm by holding one end with his right hand and pulling the other with his teeth, then probed the inside bend of his elbow with the needle until he found a vein, and ran the IV wide open.

He watched as the dark liquid flowed down the clear tube. The synthetic blood hit his body with a sizzle that made him jolt, then made him dizzy.

Whoa. Head rush.

Fire poured through his veins. A sweat broke on his forehead. His vision swam. His insides swooped up to his throat, then plummeted to the pit of his abdomen. It wasn't an entirely unpleasant sensation, just… unsettling. Like riding a roller coaster without being quite sure there really was an engineer behind the controls.

Panting, he lowered his head and went with the flow. It was too late to turn back now. As if he'd want to. The liter bag was nearly empty and every cell of his body felt gorged with life, with oxygen, with energy.

At last he understood why Garth had gone to such lengths to get the formula. It hadn't been for his people, to save them having to take human blood. It hadn't even been about money.

No, it had been about one thing: power.

If Daniel had been stronger after feeding before, he was Superman now.

Smiling, he disconnected his IV and hung a fresh bag.

All he had to do was bring his Lois Lane back to life, and he'd be unstoppable.

6

DÉADRE awoke on the back of a giant black stallion galloping through the dark of a moonless night, galloping straight toward a cliff, the booming sound of waves crashing against rock rising up to her from far below. Her muscles rippled with his. Wind whistled through her clothes, tore at her hair. All she could do was wrap her fingers tighter in his mane and hang on for the ride.

Hooves clattered over stone. She felt his haunches gather for the leap, heard a scream and realized it was her own, then she was flying, soaring through the night, but doomed to fall, to break against the rocks below like the next wave.

She opened her eyes for one last look at the world, the night… and found she wasn't riding a giant horse through the sky, wasn't falling. Daniel held her, safe in his arms.

He sat on the edge of a cold metal table, cradling her head against his chest, rocking her. "Shh. Shh, now. It'll get better in a minute. A lot better."

Her heart was beating, she realized, beating hard without her even trying, and she was breathing without any effort at all. Fresh blood flowed through her system, pooled between her legs and rushed her toward fulfillment.

She clutched at Daniel's jacket, grabbed his hair by the handful and bent him back over the table, her greedy mouth latching on to his, sucking and kneading, while her hands raked over miles of hot, silky skin and hard muscle. He mumbled something that she sure hoped wasn't "stop" because she couldn't have stopped if she'd tried. Even if her life, or her unlife, had depended on it.

Lost in a frenzy that was somewhere between the fury of an erupting volcano and the big bang of a new star being formed, she pulled Daniel to her and rolled. He landed on the floor beneath her with a thud, but she didn't think he was going to complain. He grabbed her T-shirt by the neck and tore it in two as easily as if it had been made of paper. Absently, she noted that the gunshot wound had healed. Her breasts were pink and perfect, bobbing over his face while she pressed her thigh against his erection and rubbed encouragingly.

Not needing much encouragement, he fumbled her zipper down and peeled off her leather pants, then she straddled him.

He brought his hand to her, feathered his fingers through her curls, but she pushed his wrist away. "I can't wait. Can't wait."

She jerked down his fly, pulled him out, squeezed once and then lowered herself until she'd taken him to the hilt.

Her eyes closed. Her head fell back. Her hair brushed her bare shoulders as he put his hands on her hips to hold her down and then bucked beneath her.

She was back on the horse, the black stallion, galloping, the wind in her hair, the night air in her lungs. His muscles rippled with hers. He lifted, she clenched. They both groaned.

She quickened the pace, rode him hard. This time, the crashing she heard wasn't waves against rocks, it was her own blood in her ears. She spurred him on, knowing the dark cliff lay ahead, insane for it, mad with the need to fly off it with him. She urged him faster with her hands, her heels, then leaned over and used her teeth, her tongue.

She wanted more; he gave her more. Another powerful stride. Another powerful stroke. He tensed beneath her, gathering himself. She clutched his mane, holding on. Blind. Deaf. But able to feel. Feeling every shudder, every gasp, every ripple as they catapulted off the cliff together. Fell, arm in arm.

She landed on top of him—again—this time splayed across him like a piece of limp spaghetti.

"If this is how you recover," he said, his warm breath fanning her damp forehead. "I'm going to have to shoot you at least once a week."

She lifted her head weakly and grinned at him. "If this is how I recover, you won't have to bother. I'll shoot myself."

A laugh rumbled beneath the ear she had pressed to his chest. "Maybe we should think about a little less bloody form of foreplay."

"Bloody." Her heart skidded to a stop. "Oh, damn. I've taken blood." No way she could have recovered so quickly—or so passionately—otherwise.

She grabbed his neck and scanned for every inch of earthy-smelling male skin. "You don't understand. You can't give blood yet. If I take too much, it'll kill you." Her hands trembled on his trachea. "How much did I take? Are you okay?"

"You took plenty." He wrenched his head away. "But it wasn't mine."

She looked around the room, not convinced, still afraid she'd hurt him. "Whose? How?"

"No one's. It's synthetic. A product I've been working on for three years. I'm a microbiologist, Déadre. It's what I do."

"A microbiologist." She hesitated, wanting to believe him but not quite daring. If he was trying to protect her from the truth… If she'd hurt him… "And you've made fake blood?"

"Completely non-organic. Doesn't even require human hemoglobin like the products the big drug companies have been working on. It's so simple I'm amazed no one thought of it before. All I did was compound perfluorocarbons."

"Perfluoro-whats?"

"PFCs. Flourine and Chlorine." His eyes lit up and he laughed. "I knew it would work. I knew it would. The PFCs are even more efficient than real red blood cells because they just absorb the oxygen, instead of bonding it to iron the way blood does."

"If you say so."

He clasped her shoulders. The touch zinged through her hyperstimulated nerves.

"Can't you feel it?" he asked. "The PFCs are forty times smaller, so they can fit into the smallest capillaries, literally reach every cell in your body, yet they carry twice as much oxygen. Can't you feel how strong it makes you? How alive?"

She did feel different. Warmer. Not so tired.

He lurched to his feet, fastened his pants and threw her jacket and pants to her. He didn't bother with the ruined shirt.

Pacing, he dragged a hand through his hair while she dressed. "This stuff is powerful mojo. Not only will it help mortals, but it could mean a whole new life for vampires."

She zipped her pants and shoved her arms in the sleeves of her jacket. "New life?"

"No more feeding off mortals. No more killing, accidental or otherwise. And the power it will give us, it's tremendous."

It sounded good, so why was her stomach turning. "You know what they say about power corrupting."

He stopped, turned to her. "Son of a bitch."

"What?"

"That's why you and every other vampire in the city haven't already heard of the synthetic blood. He wasn't going to share it with the rest of you. He wants it for himself. He wants to be the biggest, baddest-ass fucking vampire in Atlanta."

He picked up his own coat and punched his arms into the sleeves. "Well, I've got news for him. He's not the only vampire who can cook up a pot of this joy juice, now. Garth LaGrange is going down. For good."

She dropped the test tube she'd been holding. Glass shattered at her feet. "Garth LaGrange?"

"The one who wrecked my lab and stole my work."

"The one who turned your fiancée."

"Yeah." He looked down at his feet, then raised his head. Color spotted both cheeks as if he'd just realized, as she had, that they'd made love while he was engaged to another woman, but she couldn't think about that now.

"The one you're going to kill," she said flatly, already knowing how he would answer.

"Tonight. Right after I drink so much synthetic blood that an M-one tank couldn't stop me."

Oh, God.

She winced, the pain flaring instantly. Crap! She hadn't done that in decades. Rubbing her temples, she hoped it would be decades, or longer, before she did it again, assuming she was around that long.

Which she might not be, since the vampire she'd just made—the man she loved—was determined to try to kill the evilest, crudest, most powerful being in Atlanta.

Garth LaGrange, the High Matron's Enforcer.

7

IT was a good thing Daniel was dead already, because he didn't think he could live with himself after what he'd done.

Bad enough he'd kidnapped Déadre, used her to make him a vampire and then fed off her while he gained his strength.

But to make love with her, that was an unpardonable sin.

This whole quest was about Sue Ellen. Finding her. Setting her free.

Getting tangled up—literally—with another woman hadn't been part of the plan. Still wasn't.

Except every time he tried to picture his fiancée, to shore up his resolve by remembering her sweet smile, her shy, tinkering laugh, all he saw was Déadre in black leather. All he heard were her moans, her sighs. He felt her hot hands around his—

"You can't kill him," the object of his rumination said stubbornly. "He's like the Terminator on steroids and immortal to boot."

He glanced over to the passenger seat of the borrowed pickup. He and Déadre had passed the day in the basement beneath his lab. He'd cooked up a couple more batches of blood, and now that night had fallen, they were heading west, to an old restored plantation home about twenty minutes outside the city limits. The home Garth had stolen from him.

"Vampires aren't immortal," he said, switching his gaze back to the road. "Not really. They're tough to kill. But they do die."

She cocked an eyebrow at him. "You've been made what, three days, and you're an expert on vampires now?"

"I told you you didn't have to come."

"Oh, and miss seeing all that blood spilled? Are you kidding? Of course, all of it is going to be your blood, but I'll try not to let that spoil the fun."

She crossed her arms over her chest and turned her head to stare out the side window.

Aw, hell. What was he supposed to say? She wasn't going to understand. He wasn't sure he understood anymore.

"If you really think he's going to kill me, all the more reason for you to stay behind."

She turned her head. At least she was willing to look at him again. Her dark eyes burned with angry fire. "I told you once already, life as a vampire sucks. And yes, I mean that figuratively as well as literally. Don't you get it? You're the only thing in my miserable undead existence that hasn't sucked. Why would I want to stay behind without you?"

Of all the things she could have said, things that would have made him stop, force her out of the truck, leave her behind for her own good, that was the one thing that disarmed him.

In her own, ineloquent way, he thought she'd just said she loved him.

Jesus—

I mean, Holy Hell.

He smiled. He was learning.

"Just for the record," he said. "I don't think you suck, either."

Her gaze snapped up to his. "Oh, yes, I do. Take me back to the lab and give me some more of your mojo juice, and I'll show you how hard."

He laughed out loud. That was his girl.

"Hold that thought, okay? Maybe we'll give it a go later. First, I've got a vampire to kill."

Not to mention a fiancée, though he kept that part to himself, because once he put a stake through Sue Ellen's heart, there would be no later for him.

THE thumping in Déadre's chest was slow and sad. Fine time for her heart to start beating on its own, she thought. When all it wanted to do was pound out a dirge.

Her eyes were hot and wet and felt swollen in their sockets. This is what it's like to want to cry, and to force yourself not to, she thought, and the fact that she remembered the feeling from so many years ago, when she'd been mortal, brought more tears to her eyes.

She'd been remembering a lot of things about her mortal years since she met Daniel. What it was like to care about someone else so much that his injuries made her hurt. What it was like to need someone. To love someone.

Now she was afraid she was about to remember what it was like to lose someone.

She swallowed past the lump in her throat and looked at Daniel. He had a strong profile. Noble. Determined.

Stubborn as a jackass in a field full of clover.

She'd tried every way she could think of to talk him out of this fool mission of his without luck. All she could do now was pray, and how was she supposed to do that when she couldn't think—much less say—His name?

"Here we are." Daniel killed the engine and the head-lights on the pickup truck and coasted to a stop in a grove of pecan trees beside a long, narrow drive.

At the end of the drive, a white house rose up from the green turf like the pearly gates from a cloud. The white wooden pillars lining the porch shone like marble in the spotlights turned on the porch. A magnolia tree bloomed in the front yard, scenting the air with the signature smell of a Georgia summer.

"This was your house?" she asked, whispering though she wasn't sure why. Even with super-hearing, Garth couldn't hear them at this distance.

Daniel nodded. "I inherited it. Grew up here. Haven't really lived here since I was a kid, though. It's been in my family since the Civil War, one of the few plantations spared when General Sherman took Atlanta."

"It's beautiful."

Daniel supposed it was. He'd never thought about the house much before. He'd been too busy with his work. His research. His life.

Funny how he had to die to see that he hadn't really been living at all. He'd been holed up in his lab day and night, obsessed with the quest for synthetic blood. He'd told himself there would be time for the rest later. Even when Sue Ellen came along, she'd always been second to his work. It was a wonder she'd agreed to marry him. A wonder he'd thought to ask. But then, he hadn't really asked, as he remembered.

He'd forgotten that until now.

They'd been talking over pizza in bed after an evening of so-so sex, and she'd asked him if he thought maybe he would ask her to marry him someday. "Yeah, sure," he'd said. "Maybe someday."

The next thing he knew, she was telling his lab assistant and the security guard and everyone else they ran into that they were engaged. He'd felt sort of obligated to get her a ring.

Why not? She was good-looking and a nice-enough girl. Who else was going to put up with his weird work habits and obsession with blood? It was what people did, right? Grew up, earned medical degrees and Ph.D.s in microbiology. Got married. Had kids.

Looking back, he could see what a mistake he'd made. How he'd taken the easy way. He felt like a fool for it now, looking at that big front porch and seeing himself old and gray in a rocking chair with Déadre, not Sue Ellen. Déadre's kids and grandkids puttering about, but what was done was done. That future wasn't to be. He'd made a commitment to Sue Ellen. He couldn't abandon her now. He had to put her soul to rest, and once he did, he couldn't go on living himself. It just wouldn't be right.

Wrenching his thoughts firmly back to the here and now, Daniel turned to Déadre. "Looks like Garth's having a party."

Two or three dozen cars lined the circle drive in front of the plantation house, among them several long white limousines and a couple of hearses.

"Not a party." She flicked her tongue out to moisten her lips nervously. "High council."

"High council?"

"It's the end of the month, isn't it? Time to settle affairs, collect offerings, and mete out punishments."

"What punishments?"

"You really don't know much about being a vampire, do you?"

"Apparently not."

The more her fingers twined in her lap, the more his own nerves jumped to life. He had a bad feeling about this.

"At the end of every month, the vampires of a clan—in this case, the clan Atlanta—are called before the High Matron to pay homage. Some bring gifts. Some share the wealth they've stolen from their victims."

"You think Garth gave my formula to this High Matron?"

"Undoubtedly. Whatever he has belongs to her. He belongs to her. He is her Enforcer."

Daniel narrowed his eyes. "What, exactly, does he enforce?"

"The rationing, mostly." She rubbed her scarred shoulder. "We aren't supposed to take mortal blood without permission. They say it's because too many suspicious neck wounds gets the mortals riled up, makes them talk about witch hunts, but I've always thought it was because the less blood we have, the weaker we are."

"And the more powerful they are. The more control they have."

"The landowners starving the peasants so they won't revolt. The bigger the offering we bring, the more blood they give us permission to take."

"Son of a bitch. So that's where he gets his money." He put his hand over hers on her shoulder. "Did he do that to you? Give you that scar?"

"I—I took blood when it wasn't my turn." Her gaze jumped to his beseechingly. "I was so thirsty. I can't go as long as some of the older vampires. I only took a little. I didn't kill the man."

"I know. You wouldn't."

She swallowed, lowered her face. "Garth knocked me down and held me there with his foot on my shoulder."

Daniel's throat closed. "The metal cross embedded in the sole of his boot." So that's what it was for.

"He's so old, as long as there's leather between it and his foot, and as long as he can't see it, it doesn't bother him."

"But he uses it to keep the rest of you in line."

"The rest of us. He'll use it on you, too, if you interfere with him."

He reached into the cooler behind the seat and pulled out two plastic Coke bottles he'd washed out and refilled with his wünderblud. One bottle, he opened and handed to her. The other he kept for himself, then knocked his container against hers in mock toast. "From now on, you can have all the blood you want."

Turning his gaze toward the brightly lit house, he drank deep, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Garth LaGrange is never going to put a hand, or a foot, on you again."

She followed his lead and downed her blood with gusto. When she finished the bottle, her eyes were fever bright. In medical terms, he'd say she was feeling no pain.

She slid her hand over to his lap, and he felt the building arousal in her, and in himself. It would be hard not to feel it, since it was currently threatening to bust the seam on his pants. If they were anywhere else, they'd be going at it like minks already.

"Killing Garth can wait one more night, can't it? He'll be more vulnerable when he's alone. And tonight…" Her tongue curled in his ear. "We have better things to do."

Come to think of it, what did it matter where they were? No one knew they were here. No one could see them.

He took her hand and started to pull her closer, but the headlights of another car sliding past them down the long drive had him blinking and throwing his hand up over his face.

"A late guest?" he said.

"Not likely. No one would dare be late to Council." Raising her head, Déadre watched the car pull up to the walk and stop. Four people got out, two of them huddled together and wearing dark hoods, the other two flanking them on either side.

Daniel's expression darkened. "You didn't tell me this was a costume party."

"It's not." She shook her head. "I guess now would be a good time to tell you that sometimes, when the High Matron is feeling particularly generous, they invite guests to the High Council. Mortal guests." She had to pinch her lips together to keep them from trembling. "Most of the time they don't survive."

8

DANIEL'S face twisted. "They kidnap innocent people and bring them here… to feed on?"

She shrugged, but there wasn't a hint of carelessness in the gesture. "The vampire equivalent to a gang bang. Everyone who's been good gets to take a turn."

"That's sick."

"I told you it was a miserable existence."

He slung the satchel he'd packed full of deadly goodies over his shoulder and reached for the door handle. "We've got to help them."

"There are thirty or forty vampires in there. Are you going to fight them all?"

"If I have to." He swung the door open and jumped out of the truck.

Swearing under her breath, she followed, beseeching whatever deity would listen to her—if any would listen to her—to save her from fools and do-gooders. More importantly, save him.

"Wait." She caught up to him at the edge of the trees, tugged on his sleeve. "They won't get to the… refreshments until after the ceremony. They'll stash them somewhere until they've finished their business."

"Where?"

"Somewhere with only one way in or out so they can't escape. Near the assembly—that would be in the largest open area, probably, so there'd be room for everyone."

Daniel took her hand and skirted along a hedgerow, careful to stick to the shadows. "Sounds like the ballroom."

"You have a ballroom?"

"It's an old house. There's a big pantry between it and the kitchen. No windows. One door into the hall."

"Which will surely be guarded. How will you get in?"

He looked back at her and smiled encouragingly. "I told you this house was built before the Civil War, the slave era. It has service tunnels running all through it. One of them leads right to the pantry close to the ballroom."

"And if they aren't there?"

"Then we'll try somewhere else."

They found a ground-floor window open at the back of the house, the gingham curtains barely fluttering on the still air. Inside, they heard voices. Raucous shouts and pleas for mercy. A few screams. Daniel's jaw ticked and his hand tightened around hers, but he said nothing. Just led her deeper into the mansion. Into trouble.

They entered a narrow passage behind a stairwell and followed it as it twisted and turned around the house. At one point, they were so close to the assembly that she could make out the individual voices: Maximillian and Tomása, Gretchen and Alexi, and Garth's mad screech.

Her breath stuttered and quit. Spiderwebs caught in her hair, and she had to flick something big and black off her forearm twice, but Daniel seemed unaffected, so she stumbled along after him as quietly as she could.

They went down a few stairs, into a cellar. There were racks on the walls. What looked like wine racks, only…

Daniel stopped and stared at the bottles, finally lifted one from its cradle, shook it, squinted at the label and smelled the cork.

"It's blood, isn't it? Your synthetic blood."

He nodded.

"So all this time Garth has been making it and hoarding it. Making the rest of us go thirsty. Punishing us for taking mortal blood while he gorged himself."

Daniel put the bottle back in the rack, gave her a hard stare. "Looks like it."

She exhaled noisily. "Let's get the bastard."

"That's my girl."

They walked on through the musty cellar, finally stopping under an old-fashioned service lift. Daniel pushed the box meant to wench goods up into the pantry from the cellar out of the way and dragged over an old crate to stand on. Stretching up, he wrapped lightly on the ceiling above him.

"Shh," he warned in a harsh whisper. "I've come to help you. Keep quiet."

Then he slid the hatch aside and leaped straight up into the pantry with no more than a mild fluttering of air to mark his travel. Déadre followed close behind.

She pulled the hoods off the young couple curled together in the corner while Daniel untied their hands.

"Are you hurt?" he asked.

The young man's finger flew to his lips. He made the symbol for two and then pointed at the door.

Guards.

Daniel nodded and helped them slide down into the cellar without a sound.

"What now?" Déadre asked when the hatch was back in place above them.

"Take them to the truck," he answered. "Get them out of here."

"What about you?"

His gaze slid up and back to right about where the assembly would be. "I have unfinished business."

"You can't do it alone."

"I can't do it with them in harm's way." He looked from the frightened mortals to her and brushed her jaw with his knuckles. "Or you."

WITH only a few false turns and backtracked steps, Déadre retraced her path back to the truck with the two mortals in tow, shoved the keys into their hands and told them, "Go!"

Damn Daniel Hart to hell and back. He deserved to live the rest of eternity as a vampire for this. But he didn't deserve to die, which was what was going to happen if he faced Garth alone.

Probably what would happen if they faced him together, too, but there was nothing she could do about that. Or about the fact that even if they did survive, by some miracle, he would have his precious Sue Ellen back, and wouldn't need Déadre anymore.

She was head over dead stupid heart in love with the man, so what's a girl gonna do?

Probably get herself killed, too, that's what. But then, it wouldn't be the first time.

As the pickup's taillights disappeared in the distance, she crept back into the shadows, back toward the house.

Back toward Daniel.

If she'd only smelled a little sooner the smoke the guard taking a break by the side entrance puffed out, or stepped a little lighter, so that her foot hadn't snapped that twig, she might even have made it.

DANIEL put the hood the man had been wearing over his head and looped the rope that had bound him loosely around his wrists, then waited. The goings-on in the other room seemed to drag on forever, and he willed the vampires to hurry. With every minute that passed, the advantage he'd gained from the synthetic blood waned, and his chances of success lessened.

Finally, the pantry door opened. He heard footsteps shuffling in, was jerked to his feet.

"Where's the girl?" a man's voice asked. "Where'd she get to?"

Someone else growled. "Take him out. We'll find her." Daniel found himself stumbling along in the grasps of two strong men-vampires.

He felt the press of bodies around him when he entered the assembly, the excited surge of static electricity through the air as he was pulled onto a raised platform at the front of the room. He could almost hear them licking then-chops.

The vampires were hungry, and he was the main course.

A hand yanked off his hood and he found himself staring into Garth's insane eyes. "Surprise," he said.

Shock flashed across Garth's face, then amusement. "Well, Dr. Hart. How nice to see you again."

"Good to see you, too. So I can send you to Hell, where you belong." The room was dim, lit only by candles in the four corners. He scanned the crowd for Sue Ellen, didn't find her.

"Been there, done that. Got the blood-stained T-shirt," he said and laughed. "But I'll take great pleasure in passing the favor on to you, instead."

Daniel's heart thumped like he was alive again. He threw the ropes off his wrists and pulled out the sickle jammed under his coat between his shoulder blades. The crowd of vampires gasped, took a step back as a unit.

"Sorry," Daniel said, flashing the razor-sharp blade in the candlelight and circling Garth. "Not interested."

"Well, well, Daniel. You do surprise me."

"I'm going to do a lot more than that to you." He spoke over his shoulder, keeping one eye on the crowd and one on Garth as he moved. A still target was a dead target.

Garth's hand lashed out at supersonic speed. Daniel dodged left, swiped the blade down hard. It was only a glancing blow, and still it sliced his wrist to the bone. He lifted the bloody limb and gaped at it.

"Yeah, that's right," Daniel said. "I'm as fast as you. I'm one of you. It's a fair fight, now."

Garth screamed out at the assembly, "Take him!"

Daniel wheeled, swung the sickle at neck level, the threat of decapitation—one of the few sure ways to end a vampire's existence—obvious. No one moved.

"He's been holding you hostage with blood and his punishments," Daniel said, his gaze roaming from face to haggard face in the crowd. There wasn't one among them without sallow bags under their bloodshot eyes, hollow cheeks. They were thin to the point of emaciation. "For how long now? How long have you let him torture you, starve you while he has all the blood he needs stored right here in the house?"

"Kill him!" Garth yelled, holding his injured wrist.

No one moved.

"I know where he keeps the blood," Daniel told them. "There's enough for everyone. You don't have to take it from mortals. You don't have to ask his permission."

A ripple of murmurs spread round the room.

"Don't listen to him. He lies." Garth took a step forward.

Just then the double doors to the ballroom banged open and two burly vampires dragged Déadre in.

She lifted her head and looked up at him with ravaged eyes through the hair that had fallen over her face. "I'm sorry."

He jerked his head sharply once. "You have nothing to apologize for."

She'd come back for him. He couldn't quite wrap his mind around that fact. He knew how afraid she was of the Enforcer, and yet she'd come back to help him.

"Ms. Rue. How nice of you to join us. Bring her up here," Garth ordered. "I presume since you're skulking about instead of joining the assembly that you're with him." He jerked his head toward Daniel.

The guards laid her on the floor on her back. Garth lifted his boot over her and she turned her head away, hissing in pain.

"You know what this is?" he asked Daniel without waiting for Déadre to confirm or deny his assumption. "What it does?"

"I've seen your handiwork," Daniel answered.

"Ah, then the two of you have been… close. If I touch the metal cross to her skin, she burns. If I hold it there, it burns all the way through her." He moved his boot until it hovered inches above her chest. "If it burns through her heart, she dies. Permanently, this time."

"Let her go, asshole." Daniel swung the blade, but Garth ducked. "I'm the one who came to kill you."

"Kill me?" Garth laughed. "I eat bugs like you for breakfast, boy. You're not going to kill—"

As he was talking, Garth took his eyes off Déadre. She took the opportunity to slide a small wooden stake out of the sleeve of her coat and jam it upward, right about where his testicles would be.

He swayed, his hands moving to his crotch and his boot inching closer to Déadre's chest. As if moving in slow motion, he leaned. His boot came down.

And Daniel lopped off his head with one clean swipe before he could put his weight on it.

Grabbing her by one arm, he dragged Déadre away from the corpse, which decayed to dust in seconds.

The crowd hushed for a moment. Then one of the vampires fell to his knees, crawled forward and bowed his head, holding on to Daniel's pants leg and calling him "Master."

"Leggo," Daniel said, shaking himself free.

A few of the vampires broke into sobs. Others began to crowd around him. Unsure what they intended, he waved them off with the sickle.

"You said you knew where there was blood," someone yelled.

"Plenty of blood."

"I do," he answered, still backing toward the door, one arm looped around Déadre's waist. "Enough for everyone."

"We need blood."

"We need it now."

"Get ready to run," he whispered in Déadre's ear, and then told the crowd, "It's in the cellar. Bottles of it, and it's more powerful than anything you've known. Once that is gone, I can make more. But only for those who don't abuse it. Only for those who don't take blood from humans, or harm them in any other way."

Then he made for the door, towing Déadre along with one hand. They skidded into the hallway, around a corner, then another, while the mob fought each other to get downstairs.

At the back of the house they ducked out the same window they'd come in, and ran across the lawn, not bothering with the shadows this time, until a voice from a second-story window jerked Daniel to a stop as if he were a dog on a leash.

"Daniel?" Sue Ellen's pretty voice called. "Daniel, is that you? Help me, Daniel. Please, I need your help."

9

"DANIEL, no! You can't go back in there." Déadre tugged on his hand once and gave up, the futility of her efforts written on his face.

It was useless; she'd lost.

"Daniel, please," the sickeningly sugary voice in the window said. She couldn't see the face in the darkness, but Déadre just knew it would be a pretty face. Women with voices like that were always pretty.

"Don't leave me here," the woman called. "I'm afraid."

Daniel turned and walked slowly back to the house. He didn't seem to know where he was, or what he was doing. He sure didn't seem to know Déadre was with him.

She talked to him anyway. "This is crazy. There are two dozen ravenous vampires in there."

He kept walking, one slogging step after another.

"Without the Enforcer to control them, who knows what they'll do. Once they've had a taste of your synthetic blood, they'll be powerful, and they'll be angry at what's been done to them all this time. What they've suffered. Who knows who they'll decide to take that anger out on."

He pulled away, and she let him go. His eyes never wavered from the dark window, the gauzy curtains fluttering around the silhouette of a female form. He stumbled through a side door almost as if he were sleepwalking.

Or… the woman upstairs held him in thrall.

How could that be? She was a vampire, yes, but she was almost as newly made as him. She would had to have had a relationship with him—vampire to mortal—before tonight for her to control him from this distance, with just her voice.

How could that be… unless…

No!

Déadre hurried to catch up with Daniel. She tried to tackle him as he climbed the stairs, but he threw her back. Her head smacked the wall and she had to take a moment to clear the little birdies before she could go after him again.

On the landing, she tried to get in front of him, to block him. "Daniel, she's not who you think she is. She's not what you think she is!"

"Sue Ellen?" he called and shoved past Déadre as if she didn't exist.

"Here, baby," the woman crooned. "Here, Danny. Come to me."

Déadre followed him into a huge bedroom. The walls were draped with black and red satin. Night and blood, the curse of the vampire. The bedcovers and curtains were all dark. Heavy wooden shutters were folded back against the wall on each side of the window, ready to be pulled closed at dawn to block out the sun.

Daniel didn't seem to notice the unusual decor. He stared transfixed at the shadowy figure in the corner until finally, holding out her arms to him, she stepped into the light cast by the gas hurricane lantern on the sconce by the door.

Déadre sucked in a breath, barely resisted the automatic urge to drop to her knees, press her cheek to the floor with her arms out to the side in the position of subjugation. "High Matron," she said, her voice breathy.

The High Matron of clan Atlanta stopped, folded the velvet hood back from her head. "What are you doing here, little girl?" Her voice had lost the sugary tone and taken on the rasp Déadre associated with the queen of the vampires.

"Sue Ellen?" Daniel said as if he hadn't heard either of them.

The High Matron beckoned him with the curl of one finger. Daniel took a step forward.

Déadre stopped him, grabbing hold of the back of his jacket. "You can't have him!"

The High Matron smiled as he pulled free of Déadre's grasp and stepped into her arms. "I already do," she said again in Sue Ellen's sweet voice, and then hooked her thumbs into his throat and lowered her lips to the two bubbling wounds she'd made.

A moment later, she raised her head. Daniel's blood trickled out one corner of her mouth. She swiped the drop away with the tip of her tongue. "Mmmm. Good. Strong. Powerful."

She lowered her head to suckle on him again.

Déadre's arms went stiff at her sides. Her fingers curled into her palms. Her skin went cold and her blood boiled. "You tricked him. You knew about his research all along and you pretended to fall in love with him."

"Of course I did, darling." She lapped at Daniel's neck like a cat at a puddle of spilled milk.

"He loved you. He came here to save you!"

The High Matron raised her head, patted Daniel's cheek. "Did he now? Then I shall have to make him my special pet. With Garth gone, Daniel will make a fine new Enforcer."

No. Déadre couldn't let this happen. Daniel wouldn't want to live like this. She wouldn't let it happen.

She grabbed the kerosene lantern from its hangar on the wall. Before the High Matron could raise her head in surprise, Déadre threw the lantern. Fuel splashed all over Daniel and the woman. Flames engulfed them.

Yelling, "No!" but not sure any sound actually came out of her closed throat, Déadre reached into the flames and pulled Daniel back. She threw him to the floor and slapped at his burning pants leg, the cuff of his coat, smothering the flames with her body. "No. No, no, no!"

"You bitch!" The High Matron stumbled backward into the satin-draped wall. The wall covering ignited. She swatted at the cloth, but only succeeded in tangling herself in it further. Screaming, she spun, and the burning cloth encased her like a shroud. A moment later, her whole body burst into flames and disintegrated.

Daniel's eyes snapped open as if he'd awoken from a nightmare. His arms closed around Déadre as his lungs dragged in a ragged breath. He rolled with her, away from the fire. Away from the pile of ashes that was all that was left of the High Matron.

"Sue Ellen!" he yelled, but Déadre heard the difference in his voice. The betrayal. "Sue Ellen," he said once more, quieter, before he pulled Déadre to her feet and down the stairs, out the door and into the fresh night air.

"NICE digs," Daniel said. He sat on what he supposed doubled as both dining room and coffee table since it was the only table in the twelve-by-twelve crawl space underneath the maintenance shaft to Track 11 of Atlanta's metro rail system. The walls were bare, the only furniture besides the table was a coffin lined with dirt in the center of the room.

At least the ceiling had some décor. If you could call heavy metal rock posters and stick-on glow-in-the-dark stars décor.

"Don't be a funny boy." She spooned a glob of burn medicine out of a blue jar with her finger. "Or I'll have to mix a little holy water with your salve."

He leaned away from her approaching finger. "You wouldn't."

She daubed the glob on the end of his nose, then swiped it down his chin. "No, I wouldn't. But it wouldn't hurt for you to show a little respect."

"Honey, after what you did to Garth, I'm downright afraid of you."

Her chin wobbled. "It's been a long time since I killed anyone. And I've never done it on purpose."

"You didn't kill Garth. I did."

She ducked her head. "The High Matron…"

"She was using me. Pretending to be mortal, dressing in prissy outfits and playing sweet and helpless and dumb, when all along I was the stupid one. She was just waiting for me to perfect the synthetic blood. She had to have been working with Garth all along. She's the one who introduced me to him, said he could fund the research. She would have made me into what he was, eventually."

He captured Déadre's chin between his thumb and forefinger and brought her face up to his. "You saved me from that. A fate worse than death."

"You don't want to die, now that her soul is free?"

He touched his lips to hers, tasted her fear and her passion, and whispered, "Not when I have you to live for."

She looped her arms around him and pressed herself into him. Their noses bumped. Burn salve squished across their cheeks and brows as they nuzzled and kissed each other. That didn't matter. They'd both been burned.

"We have a lot of work to do, getting your blood to the vampires of Atlanta—everywhere, for that matter—so that they can live and thrive without feeding off humans," she said between biting his earlobe and running her tongue over the crease of his eye.

"I want to get it into human hands, as well. There's still a lot of need there."

She wiggled her hips against him. "Maybe we can keep enough for ourselves to keep life interesting at home, too."

"We'll keep plenty."

He felt her smile on the side of his neck. "I love you, Daniel."

"I love you, too, Déadre."

He opened his legs and she stepped into his body where she belonged, where the blood lust beat intimately between them.

For eternity.