A Drop of Red (2 page)

Kate blinked at that, then decided it was only a turn of phrase.

“I just want to hear her say it,” Whatshername said. “Especially since she gave us that bad-girl story about having skipped away from Mummy and Daddy’s home only to take up with good old Harry. Doesn’t sound so innocent to me.”

Violet raised her brow, daring Kate to contradict them.

But Kate was still back at the part about her father. Earlier, when she had first become warm and pleasantly filled with drink, she had told her new mates that he’d died last year. Kate rarely saw any old friends now that school was done, so talking had been a relief.

Yet now, it was almost as if these girls had brought her father up because, somehow, they’d known it would hurt.

Perhaps it was in the way Violet and the other girl were watching her, their chins lowered. And when Violet’s eyes narrowed so that she reminded Kate of a cat—a purring little thing ready to pounce—the thought only gained credence.

“Oh, yes,” Violet said. “I remember now. Katie told us that Daddy’s passed on. Mummy, too.”

“She’s got a stepmum,” Whatshername said.

“Ah, the mean woman back home who kicked our Kate out because she’s become a touch too hard to handle lately. Nice mothering, that. But luckily, there was Harry to turn to.”

“Good old Harry,” the strawberry blonde echoed.

A cloud seemed to be closing over Kate—a hazy weight from the buzz of her cocktails pressing down on her chest, her head, her vision.

She didn’t want to be here with these girls anymore. They’d been amusing enough back at the club, but now?

Something had changed, making Kate feel mousy and cornered.

Something unnameable but there all the same. . . .

A great smashing sound rent the air, and Kate flinched, once again blinking at what she saw.

Across the room, the dancing redhead—wasn’t her name Noreen?—had . . .

Kate refocused her gaze. Noreen was swinging from a chandelier over seven meters off the floor, whooping and laughing as her quiet friend looked on with blasé interest.

How . . . ?

Kate swallowed. How had Noreen jumped that high? A chair? A table?

With one look round, Kate didn’t discover anything sufficient to have provided such a launch.

Both Violet and the strawberry blonde stood and ran to the action. And when Whatshername crouched, then zinged up to the other side of the chandelier herself, Kate’s jaw dropped.

The girl had jumped from the floor.

The room seemed to dip and sway as Kate grappled with explanations. Just how drunk
was
she?

Crystals banged together in demented chaos, and all of the schoolgirls clapped and urged their mates on.

Violet turned to Kate. “Join us, Katie? Come now!”

Kate couldn’t answer, couldn’t move.

The friendly smile Violet had been wearing melted.

Then, just as Kate’s heartbeat started filling her head, dampening it in cottony, far-removed throbs, she spotted something descending the stairs.

The fifth new friend, Blanche. Her normally alabaster skin was pink against her waist-long raven hair as she wiped her hand over her deep red lips.

It occurred to Kate that Blanche had been gone awhile. Had she been with Harry . . . ?

When Violet saw Blanche, the room went silent except for the music. The chandelier-swinging girls even dropped to the floor with shocking ease, then straightened, cool as the fog that kept muddling Kate’s mind.

But Violet’s bristling posture was far easier to understand as she stalked toward the staircase.

The chandelier kept clanking and rocking.

“Tell me you didn’t, you slag,” Violet said, her voice different, more of a vibration than real words.

A rain of shivers attacked Kate. Go. She should just get Harry and go.

She edged toward the end of the settee, hoping no one would notice.

Blanche paused near the bottom of the stairs. “I was only visiting the lav, Vi. No need to get excited.”

Violet circled to the front of the stairs until her back was to Kate, her face hidden. All the girls’ eyes widened at what they must have seen in their leader’s expression.

But Blanche? She merely rolled her eyes and descended the rest of the way, sauntering across the floor and toward the bar, with all its opened, loitering bottles.

“Vi,” she added, “it’s hardly fair that you should always go first. After Wolfie, I mean.”

When the black-haired girl offered a challenging smile to Violet, her teeth were sharp, gleaming.

Lurching to a wobbling stand, Kate forgot subtlety and headed for the stairs, intent on fetching Harry.

Fangs. Kate had only been imagining them . . . at least that was what she kept repeating.

She stumbled up the first step, falling to her hands and knees as her balance betrayed her. The music seemed to get louder as the girls lost interest in each other and laughed at her, cruel jabs of mirth knocking at Kate’s skull.

“Oh, Katie-luv,” Violet said, coming over to stand at the lip of the staircase.

Her tone was calm now, as if she had set aside her anger with Blanche. “Don’t mind us. We fight; we kiss and make up; we go to the next party. No reason to fret.”

The rest of the group—even Blanche—meandered closer, flanking Violet.

A pack,
Kate thought as she pulled herself to the next stair, her heartbeat shredding her chest into slivers.

“We tend to celebrate a bit madly when we’re away from the school and its silly rules,” Violet added. “And we’re always on the lookout for girls like us. That’s why we brought you here.”

Whatshername placed a hand on Violet’s shoulder, then rested her chin there. “We thought
you
might be open to running at our pace.”

“Yet it seems you’re not an ideal candidate after all.” Violet addressed the girls: “Is she?”

“No,” the lot of them said in the same disappointed tone.

“From all appearances,” Violet added, “I would venture that you’re only on track to give binge drinking a terrible name, Katie-luv.”

Then, as one, they all tilted their heads at Kate.

Fear spiked in her, and that was even before their gazes started to glow.

Now that Kate thought of it, hadn’t their eyes done the same back at the club when she’d first met them and before she’d dismissed it as a trick of the flashing dance lights?

Grasping for something to hold—a stair, carpeting—Kate tried to suck in oxygen. But her lungs were too tight.

She grappled, finally clutching the edge of a step, pulling herself up, but she was too weak, the room spinning too wildly. . . .

Violet’s voice poked into her consciousness, a hollow, faraway sound.

But not far enough.

“So it appears we’ve come to that time of night,” Violet said with a sigh. “Pity you didn’t work out.”

More adrenaline consumed Kate as she tried to crawl just a centimeter more—

Then she heard a whoosh from the bottom of the stairs, felt a pair of hands on her as her body left the ground and she was lifted,
forced
, to the top of the landing, where—

 

 

WHEN
Kate next opened her eyes, gradually making her way out of a mental blank, she was slumped on the lower portion of a massive, white-duvet-covered bed, resting peacefully with a swathed Harry at the other end. Paintings, with their bold, dark strokes, loomed from the pale walls, and a heating vent blew air at the sheer drapery ghosting the night-hushed windows.

She took a moment to regain her bearings, then remembered.

Jumping to a chandelier . . .
fangs
. . .

But now there was only peace. Thank goodness, just peace.

Pulse smoothing out, Kate thought,
Maybe it was only a nightmare.

Had she got utterly pissed, then blacked out and fallen asleep only to have bad dreams?

Mortified, baffled, relieved that she wasn’t truly crawling up a staircase or trying to get away from sharp teeth—what had been in those drinks anyway?—Kate moved farther up the mattress, toward the shape huddled under the duvet.

“Harry?” she asked.

“Mmmm.” A deep, almost growly sleepy sound.

His form rose and fell in a rhythm that comforted her. She had never been so happy to see Harry in her life.

She exhaled, so tired now that she was safe. “You should’ve been in my head earlier. It was Daliesque.”

Moving even closer to him, she lay down, then put her hand against his rising and falling back.

His breathing picked up, and she took her hand away. She never meant to get him going, but somehow she always did.

Hollow, heavy gasps . . . Yet there was also a trace of primal urgency underneath it all.

Kate turned away, preparing to get out of bed and take him with her. Time to get back to his much-less-impressive—yet far-more-welcoming—flat.

But that was when she saw it in the front corner of the room.

Her mouth opened, but the only thing that came out was a croaking excuse for a scream.

A thick glob of blood fell from the gaped mouth of the dead man impaled through the stomach on what looked to be a spike embedded in the floor. The body’s eyes—Harry’s eyes?
Harry’s?
—bugged out of their sockets as Kate tried to scream again.

But just as she had on the stairs, as she had in every childhood nightmare, she couldn’t make a sound.

The form behind her rolled over in the bed, its weight making the mattress dip and shift.

That breathing—excited, ragged . . .

She felt a touch on her back, fingers . . .
claws . . .
snagging her jumper as the nails dragged downward, lower, lower. Her spine arched away, stabbed by chills.

Get out of bed,
she told herself.
Just go,
go . . .

But before she could, a paw swiped her back to the mattress, and the thing behind her loomed over her now.

Feral eyes—

Fur—

Teeth.

Rows upon rows of white daggers fronted by two prominent fangs and stitched together by saliva as the creature opened its mouth to take the bite it had obviously been waiting for.

TWO

THE FEEDiNG

DUSK
closed over the Southwark borough of London like a falling gravestone, casting a November pall that Dawn Madison couldn’t lift.

Maybe it was because a whole year away from the California sunshine had deprived her of verve, she thought while turning away from the window with its parted velvet-curtain view.

Or maybe she was just feeling the weight of her second vampire Underground hunt bearing down on her.

After sitting in a Queen Anne chair near her four-poster bed, she flicked a cigarette lighter to flame, held it under a sharp sewing needle. Then, with the tool sterilized, she deftly threaded it and hitched up the skirt of her nightgown so she could unwind the bandage she’d wrapped around her lower thigh.

Even though she’d already cleaned her gaping cut, she wiped it with an ethanol pad from her kit, clenching her teeth at the sting.

A girl could never be too careful.

“You used to at least wince,” Costin said from the shaded corner near the head of the bed, where the creamy, diaphanous draping hid most of him from view. His voice was deep, scraped, hinting at a foreign inflection that betrayed his roots in a dark country while also revealing a centuries-long weariness.

Dawn smiled tightly, damned if she was going to give in to any pain. “Accidents happen. I didn’t lose much blood because you began healing me pretty quickly. No skin off my back.”

“No, merely layers of skin off your leg. I’m sorry, Dawn.”

“Sorry for what? Needing blood to survive?”

Or sorry she was the reason he was a vampire who, even after a year, was still finding his way?

He sighed. “Specifically, I’m sorry I was not able to heal this injury as well as I manage to erase a typical bite wound.”

This—and other recent nips—was deeper than a normal bite. He’d been getting carried away lately.

“You tried to close the injury up,” she said, “and you came pretty close this time. You even helped me to bring it to a point where I could take care of it myself, but you just need more years on you as a vamp to be a more efficient healer.” She kept sterilizing. “Right now, dealing with something way deeper than a regular bite takes more of your power than your age and inexperience allow. The older you get, the better you’ll be.”

The minute Dawn stopped talking, she realized that maybe she was sounding too mentorlike.

Was
she acting like the cornered hunter who’d once used Benedikte, the most dominant creature in the Hollywood Underground, to become a vampire, herself? Of course, she’d wielded her new powers to save Costin’s fading existence by turning
him
into a vampire and, in unwitting return, become
his
creator. Yet that’s the last thing she wanted to be. His master.

It didn’t matter that she’d killed Benedikte, her own maker, and that the act had directly restored her humanity. But it’d done nothing for Costin, and she’d promised that she would never come off like she was in charge of him, even if a power trip could make up for all the betrayals he’d put her through for his quest.

She heard Costin move away from the wall, probably to offer help with what she needed to do next with her injury—a process she’d already perfected.

“I’ve got it,” she said, working quickly to pinch together the parted flesh of her wound, then slide the needle through the cut’s middle.

She schooled herself to show no pain.