BLURB

      Vampires in the Sunburnt Country 2

      Kevin Matheson is coming to Brisbane with revenge on his mind. Even for a vampire, there is no time like the present. He has a score to settle with Mira, the sadistic killer who tore his life in outback Queensland apart.

      For Mira's bodyguard, Reece, worn out and fading a little more each day, the present is all he has. He is determined to spend it protecting his mistress, for better or worse.

      But, as the two men head for a collision, the vampires of Brisbane have their own plans - plans that will lead Kevin and Reece down roads they never expected to travel.

      And at the end of the line, at the intersection of loyalty and vengeance, both face the question: who are they willing to sacrifice to win the war?

      To the Harper clan:

      sometimes you do get to choose your family

      PROLOGUE

      Kevin could still smell his mother's corpse on the back seat of the car. A month since, but the reek remained. It'd lain there only a day, under a blanket, in a garage; but a day in the Queensland outback, at the height of summer. By the time he'd returned, there'd been bloat and leakage and that unmistakable smell of rot. He'd taken her down into the ground, his body against hers, cloth to cloth, skin to skin; he still smelled her on him, at odd times, when sleep wouldn't come. He saw the cruel rips in her chest, her arms, her throat. He heard the flies. He imagined their eggs in the torn flesh and the worms chewing at the corruption. But she was gone. Except for the smell. And for the memories — the life taken from her veins, ingested and preserved in the unnatural veins of another.

      His maker, Taipan, had told him that taking something and keeping it were two different things. He'd been talking about von Schiller's goons impounding the Monaro, but the thought still tormented him. His father was well and truly gone, but his mother lingered inside Mira, the Strigoi; Maximilian von Schiller's daughter.

      Kevin still felt Mira's presence at the edge of memory. He had a little of the bloodhag's extraordinary blood in him, fused into his DNA when he'd been in the change from human to vampire. They were linked, he and she; she was seared into his molecules: the sound of her, the feel, the scent. Possibly he even possessed a little of her ability to use blood and the life experiences it contained in almost magical ways. It helped to make him a quick learner, but it also meant he could never get Mira out of his system. He relived Mira fucking him, blood smearing her chest, cruel delight twisting her lips. He couldn't think of her without his cock growing hard, even as the bile rose in his throat. And he thought of her often.

      He thought of his mother, trapped inside Mira, and was revolted.

      Mira knew his mother better than he did.

      But that would change when he killed her. Killing her would set them all free.

      Kevin drove.

      ONE

      He missed his mp3 player desperately. It was long gone, lost in the battle at Jasmine Turner's. Destroyed or stolen, it didn't matter. The coupe's passenger seat was empty, and despite the roar of the Monaro's engine, the thrum of wheels on bitumen, the shake and shiver from passing trucks, that emptiness was deafening.

      Kala and Danica had refused to join him, had tried to talk him out of leaving. Having escaped Mira's net, they were content to swelter in the tropical isolation of Cairns. They'd recruited red-eyes who were happy to feed and guard them in return for the benefits that came from drinking vampire blood: accelerated healing, faster reflexes, greater strength, slower aging.

      At least Kala had given him the Monaro. It's hot,' she warned, they'll be looking for it.' But he didn't care: the V8 coupe was a classic, an Australian icon of the late sixties. This parting gift was all he had.

      It took three nights to drive down the coast to Brisbane, almost 2000 km of cane fields, brown paddocks and towns the highway hadn't bypassed yet, all-night roadhouses smelling of diesel and dust, grease left too long in the hot box. Days were spent parked under whatever shade he could find as far off the road as he could nurse the Monaro. Farm tracks, forestry access roads, gravel pits. Lying on the seat under a tarp, too scared of discovery to sleep, but unwilling to leave the car for fear of finding it gone, this last link to his recent past, his one good thing.

      And the entire way, he was stuck with radio, having to constantly retune as he passed town and city in the night, condemned to playlists of classics and current flavour, interrupted by inane chatter and irrelevant news. What matter to him the latest war, a new casino, the price of the dollar?

      Close to Brisbane, he turned off the radio, the better to concentrate as the lanes grew from one to two to four. As the lights brightened, the stars dimmed. He squinted at road signs, clenched the wheel and peered at the cars closing in on him.

      What if he couldn't find his way? What if Maximilian and his stormtroopers knew he was coming? What if one man — he used the term liberally, clung to it, in fact — wasn't enough to stop them?

      He followed the barest threads of memory, grasped them like a swimmer to rope in an oil-slick sea, and like a float was pulled along in their wake into the city's reach. Through the sprawl of shopping centres, car yards, neon beacons for motel pay TV and air-conditioned rooms; a confusion of signs pointing to places he didn't know, hadn't even heard of. The cloying petroleum stench invaded the cabin; the stars faded behind the bright wash of the streetlights and the city's sickly amber glow.

      It was close to midnight and few vehicles other than buses, taxis and police cars cruised the lanes. Signs told him where he couldn't go, where he didn't want to go, where it would cost him to go. He stop-started through the traffic lights, working his way toward the centre, following the bare clues in his blood, an uncertain second-hand familiarity stale with time and too-little exposure.

      And yet he found it, like a bee to a hive: Maximilian's towering base, Thorn.

      He drove slowly past the dark monolith, feeling small and obvious, bathed in light in the middle of the night. A gate of iron bars in a surrounding wall revealed a wide fan of stairs leading to glass doors. Guards in green uniforms stood at the top. The building loomed, a black marble tombstone carved from a mountain.

      Mira was in there somewhere. She might even be hidden behind the glass, watching him drive past. Kevin clamped down on the vestiges of Mira within him, the elements of her that had hooked into him during the change. Danica had made a putsi for him with blood magic, the amulet warm on his chest even through the leather pouch from which it hung around his neck. He trusted the combination of it and Danica's mystical training would keep him from Mira's sight. If she knew he was here, his mission would be over before it even began.

      He pulled into a cross-street and tried to work out if he could park there. Would he be ticketed, clamped, towed? Would he return to find a ring of Maximilian's soldiers circling the Monaro? Would he turn the key to have the car explode while a cheery assassin wiped their hands for a job well done?

      From beyond the horizon he felt the pull of the plains, calling him home. But home was gone. He saw again his mother, still and pale on the sofa at Jasmine Turner's property; felt again the earth parting around them as he sank in the graveyard soil, bearing her down to final rest. Heard again Mira's taunt:

       She tastes like sunshine

      He forced himself to get out; a snail without a shell, feeling the threat of voracious magpies perched in the shadows.

      Kala and Danica had told him not to come. To stay. To find a new life. But they couldn't tell him how.

      How to forget