Vampaholic. Harper Allen
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naked and dead and covered in her own blood.”
His tone was so uninflected that for a second the impact of his words didn’t hit me. Then it did, and I drew in a quick breath. “I’m sorry,” I said inadequately. “For talking like such a shallow bitch, as well as for what happened to her. How did she die?”
“Badly.” His gaze on me was unwavering. “The vamp who killed her liked torturing the hookers he picked up before he finally finished them off, and as a former surgeon, his preferred method was a scalpel. He was a real Mozart with it.”
I closed my eyes. “No wonder you made it your business to track down Middleton and stake him. You…you say he targeted hookers. Is that how—”
“I wasn’t one of her johns, I was her half brother,” Rawls said tightly. “When I was sixteen and big enough to stand up to the bastard who was my stepfather, I beat the crap out of him and walked out. The next time I saw Lou she wasn’t a seven-year-old who hero-worshipped her big brother anymore. She was a fifteen-year-old who’d been selling herself on street corners for a year. She told me to go to hell and got into a Mercedes that pulled up to the curb. After searching all night for her and her john in one fleabag joint after another, the next morning I stood in a blood-spattered motel room and vowed to track down the bastard in the Mercedes who’d hacked her to pieces.” His teeth flashed briefly white in one of his nongrins. “When I made that vow, I didn’t know vampires existed, but since then I’ve become an expert on them. The most important thing I learned was that all trails lead back to an original infector.”
“I can’t imagine how you must have felt in that motel room,” I said, still dwelling on the first part of his account. “If anything ever happened to one of my sisters—” I belatedly took in what he’d just said. “Original infector? Are you talking about me?” My laugh didn’t sound as amused as I’d meant it to. “Sweetie, that’s utterly ridiculous! If anyone around here was vamp zero, it was a bitch named Zena, and you arrived in Maplesburg about six weeks too late to—”
“I know,” he cut in, “word travels. Your sister took care of her. I also know you aren’t vamp zero.”
“Such a relief, darling,” I said with a carelessness I didn’t quite feel. He was still cradling his damned nail gun, I noticed, and his finger was only inches from the trigger. “It must be a huge disappointment for you, finding out that Megan beat you to the punch. I’m sure if she’d known Zena was the vamp you’d been tracking for so long she would have let you do the honors,” I commiserated.
“Zena wasn’t the end of the chain, either,” Rawls said flatly.
The man wasn’t just a junkyard dog, he was a junkyard dog with a bone he wouldn’t let go of, I thought in exasperation. “Of course she was. She was a queen and although she was superbly wellpreserved for her age, she was definitely ancient. Whoever the vampyr was who turned her centuries ago, he’s lost in the mists of time.” I slanted my gaze up at him through my lashes. “Now that I’ve cleared up that little misunderstanding for you, would you mind terribly clearing up something for me?” I said carefully. “You said word travels. What exactly is the word on me in the vamp community?”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “That you received the kiss of a vampyr when you were in the cradle. That as the daughter of a Daughter, when you come into your full strength you’ll make Zena’s powers look sick. Even if there hadn’t been a connection between you and the vamp I was hunting, I would have taken the time to search you out and put an end to you. The only reason you’re not dust already is because—”
He stopped abruptly and I narrowed my eyes at him in the same way he’d done to me. “Because I could have killed you when I had the chance. I could have left you to be ripped apart by Claudia and crew. I didn’t do either, and now you’re not so convinced that your information was correct.” But his information was correct, I thought. Or at least, the part about me being marked by Zena was. And if the vamp underground knew that much about me, who was to say they weren’t also right about the rest of it? As the daughter of a Daughter, when you come into your full strength you’ll make Zena’s powers look sick… I wouldn’t think about it until I had that drink I’d promised myself in my hand, I told myself numbly. And instead of a single, it was going to be a double. Make that a triple.
But right now I had Rawls on the ropes, and I had to convince him he’d been wrong about me. The last thing I needed was a vamp hunter hanging around Maplesburg while I continued to go increasingly fang girl.
“Vamps lie like we breathe, Jack. Whoever your informant was, he fed you a line of merde about me and you know it. If you thought otherwise you’d have used that nailer on me by now, so why don’t you give up this wait-until-dawn farce?”
“Because the waiting’s over,” he replied matter-of-factly, looking past me and over the top of his car. “The sun’s coming up over the horizon right now.”
I stared at him in disconcertion. Then I wrenched my gaze away and glanced around, seeing dark gray where a moment ago all had been black. For no good reason my heart seemed to squeeze in my chest, and I scrambled unsteadily to my feet, barely feeling the metal bite around my wrist as I pulled too far from the cuff holding me. As soon as I looked over the roof of Rawls’s vampmobile, I saw he was right.
I’d been sitting in the shadow of the car. Beyond it, the parking lot’s few lights had begun to look sickly and washed-out and beyond that, the dark horizon was rimmed with a pale line. Looking at it, I was suddenly filled with dread.
In a moment that pale line would brim over and spill forth. In a moment it would become the day’s first ray of sunlight, shooting from the edge of the world straight toward me. And judging from my response to Claudia before Jack had staked her, wasn’t there a chance I’d progressed far enough along the path to full vamphood tonight that I might just flash fry as soon as that first ray of sun hit me?
My initial reaction was to duck back down behind the car in panic. I forced myself not to give in to it and went with my second reaction, which was to toss back my hair, moisten my lips and stand up straight. If I was going to die in the next few seconds, I damn well wasn’t going to die cringing in the shadows like a vamp, I decided, I was going to die like the fabulous Kat Crosse.
I just hoped I could pull it off.
“Goodness, I feel all butterflies inside, Rawls.” My hands were shaking, the left one so badly that the gauze I’d wound around it had unravelled and the right one clattering its cuff in a catchy bongo beat against the car door. I gripped the vampmobile’s handle to muffle the noise. “I mean, sweetie, could it be more Romeo and Juliet? Here we are, just you and me and the dawn. Is this what they call sparking out in Nebras—”
“Just you and me and that maniac in the pickup with the smoked windows driving hell-for-leather into the parking lot,” Rawls said, bringing the nail gun into firing position and aiming it at me. “You almost had me fooled the past few minutes, but I might have guessed there was a reason why you weren’t too worried about sunrise. Too bad for you the vamp rescue squad left it so late, though.”
“Vamp rescue squad?” With an effort I shifted my gaze from the sight of the glowing line on the horizon and saw twin headlights cutting through the rapidly dissipating predawn gloom. The red pickup jounced over a bump in the parking lot as it sped toward us and a dark shape flew from the bed of the truck. The shape rolled once when it hit the ground, but instead of continuing to roll it seemed to gather itself and then race alongside the pickup that had just ejected it. As I watched I saw the shape begin to outstrip the vehicle.
“As if I didn’t have enough to worry about right now,” I exhaled. “Rawls, lower your weapon! If he doesn’t think you’re a threat he won’t attack—”
The rest of my warning was drowned out by the stacatto coughing of the nail gun as he opened fire. The gray shape abruptly swerved, but it didn’t change course and when it got to within leaping distance of Jack it launched itself into the air.
“No,