Chasing Shadows (A Shadow Chronicles Novel) (2 page)

The farm was also how I obtained most of my own blood supply. I’d taken some veterinary training when I first set up this farm back in 1846, and I kept up with the advances in the field so that I could take care of my own animals. Being trained in veterinary medicine meant I could tap an animal’s vein (only the cows and pigs, as the chickens I used for their eggs and my horses had never been a food source) without having to bite it when I needed blood, and I had a supply stocked in the deep freezer in my house. Of course, there were also times when I needed to feel the thrill of the hunt, so I occasionally went into the woods that bordered my land and hunted game there. Usually it was just deer or rabbits, sometimes the occasional fox or wolf, or any variety of forest creatures with a decent blood supply. If I wanted a real challenge, I went to the places where predatory animals such as bears and mountain lions dwelled.

Running a farm single-handedly, even if one is preternaturally fast and strong, can get tiresome. So when a car pulled up in my driveway and I sensed the presence of an immortal (one of the few benefits of being a
dhampyr
is that I can “feel” the presence of other supernatural beings, such as vampires and shapeshifters), I was rather annoyed, as I was not exactly in the mood to receive company. I had horse hooves to trim and stalls to muck out still.

My annoyance ratcheted up a level when the uninvited guest got out of the car and my dogs started barking in their pen—it was Evangeline, my “sister.” She’d been turned into a vampire by my sire the same year I’d bought my farmland, and though I associated with Diarmid as little as I could get away with, he still favored me because I was his child by blood. Vangie didn’t like that. She’d always wanted to be his favorite, and could not understand why he didn’t simply disown me as I had disowned him.

She was covered head to toe and wore a scarf and a pair of large, dark sunglasses. This made no sense to me as it wasn’t cold outside, and it’s not as if vampires actually burst into flames and turned into piles of ash when exposed to sunlight. That was all a bunch of hooey perpetuated by religious orders centuries ago when humans began to notice that certain people only went outside at night—because only the damned would avoid the sun, which was metaphorically “the light of God.” Nowadays it was the basis of the reason “pretenders” could only work after nightfall. Most vampires who made their living among humans claimed to suffer from solar urticaria, a genuine illness in which exposure to UV radiation and even visible light (notably sunlight) caused severe, painful hives on exposed and sometimes even unexposed skin. Though I’d read that persons suffering from SU lead difficult, isolated lives due to their inability to go outside during the day, it was a convenient excuse to have handy when your neighbors
took note of your unusual habits.

Vangie sprinted into the shade of the open barn and the horses reacted immediately, shying away and whinnying in fear, their eyes going wide. I grabbed Hasufeld’s halter and held onto it, murmuring soothingly—he was the only one of the four I’d gotten done.

“Can’t you quiet these beasts down?” Vangie complained as she whipped off the scarf and sunglasses.

I narrowed my eyes as I looked at her over my shoulder. “They’re afraid of you, Vangie.”

She snickered. “They should be. I could snap their sweaty necks with one hand.”

Hasufeld and his brother, Brego, as well as their parents Herugrim and Hadhafang, all continued to whinny, stamping their feet restlessly. I could hear Moe and Cissy still barking incessantly from the kennel, and I was suddenly glad the cows were already out to pasture and that the pig pen and chicken coop were separate constructs on the outside of the barn at the far end—the birds and pigs wouldn’t react unless she came near them. I was never going to get the horses calmed while she was standing there, and certainly wouldn’t be able to get them out of their stalls. “Could you please go back out to your car so I can get them to settle down?”

She looked at me with no small amount of incredulity. “Are you kidding me? You know what will happen to me out there,” she whined.

I rolled my eyes at her melodramatic performance. “Vangie, I’m just going to put them outside, but I can’t do that with you standing there.”

It occurred to me that I could just leave them in their stalls and
take
her into the house, then come back out to them when she had left, but I was already annoyed just by the fact that she was here. Making her wait for me was a little bit of revenge for her interruption of my routine, even if it was a bit juvenile.

Vangie growled, shoving the sunglasses on and jerking the scarf back into place on her head. “Fine, but don’t be too long. I’d like to go home sometime today.”

I shook my head as she sprinted back out to her car and got in—like I was going to be taking orders from her. Still, I did make quick work of getting my four beauties out of their stalls and out the other end of the barn into the pasture. Not because I was doing it for her, but because I was doing it for them…and because I wanted to get rid of her as quickly as possible. I hurried back through the barn after closing the gate behind the last of the horses and knocked on the driver’s side window of her Lexus. Vangie didn’t respond so I knocked again, this time with more force just in case she was ignoring me on purpose. When she didn’t respond to that, I reached for the handle and jerked the door open.

“Shit,” I muttered, then reached in to grab her. Vangie had fallen asleep—and I was surprised by how quickly she had done so, as I couldn’t have been more than ten minutes at my task. This was the real reason vampires didn’t venture out during the day much: RMPC, or Reversed Melatonin Production Cycle. In normal humans, melatonin was a major component of regulating the biological clock; light inhibited production and darkness permitted it, and because increased amounts of melatonin in the system promoted sleepiness, it was known in the human scientific community as
the “hormone of darkness.”

In vampires however, the pineal gland—where the hormone was produced—worked backwards, producing more melatonin in the light and less of it in the dark. Medical science eventually revealed the cause of vampires’ nocturnal nature early in the 20
th
century; our doctors had discovered that not only was melatonin production reversed, but also that a vampire’s pineal gland produced so much of the hormone during daylight hours he could become all but comatose. As many of my father’s kind had found to his or her detriment over the millennia, this deep sleep was a risk to their continued health and safety because it made one vulnerable to all methods of attack. A vampire could be burned alive if caught unawares in the middle of the day, and history showed that humans had pulled that trick more than once on suspected vampires, until they began convincing themselves they weren’t real after all…

…or were beguiled into forgetting.

Grabbing my sister under the arms, I hauled her out of the driver’s seat and threw her over my shoulder. I kicked the door shut, leaving a dusty footprint she was likely to bitch about later, and hurried into the house. Laying Vangie down on the couch, I quickly removed the scarf, gloves and jacket she was wearing and then went into the kitchen. I pulled a bottle of pig’s blood out of the fridge and poured some into a mug, then put that in the microwave and heated it for about a minute. When the microwave dinged, I grabbed a plastic spoon from the silverware drawer and stirred it, then carried it out to the living room. Perching on the edge of the couch, I took Vangie’s head in my free hand and, holding the cup to her slightly parted lips, tipped it and slowly poured some of the hot liquid into her mouth.

Almost immediately she began to swallow, and after a moment or so she opened her eyes. I pulled the cup away and stared down at the frown she was wearing with a raised eyebrow.

“What is that awful stuff?” she asked.

“Pig’s blood.
From one of my own animals here on the farm,” I replied, holding the cup out to her as I stood.

She waved it away. “No thank you, it’s disgusting.”

I rolled my eyes as I picked up a limp arm and placed the cup in her hand. “Deal with it. Pig and cow is all I have, and you obviously need the nutrition. When was the last time you fed?”

Drinking blood regularly instead of only when they needed to feed boosted a vampire’s resistance to the backward cycle of their melatonin production, a lot like a human taking caffeine pills to stay up at night. Evangeline knew this as well as I did.

Though she continued to make a sour face, Vangie nevertheless put the mug back to her lips and drank as she slowly sat up. “How can you drink this muck?” she asked me after taking a swallow.

I shrugged as I moved to sit on the other end of the couch. “You get used to it. Better to drink animal blood than
be
a murderer.”

Vangie narrowed her eyes at me. “Humans murder animals to feed, Saphrona.
You
murder them to feed.”

I sighed. I’d already had this discussion with her, and it looked like I was going to
have to have it yet again. “First of all, certain animals were put on this planet by God specifically to be consumed—”

“If I believed in God, I might say that humans were put here to feed us vampires.”

“—and second,” I went on, ignoring her remark, “I don’t kill my animals. I draw their blood and store it. And you didn’t answer my question: When was the last time you fed? You should have had something before coming out here, at least.”

“I was planning on going out tonight, Mom,” she said snidely.
“Been thinking of acquiring myself a vessel.”

Vessels were humans who were regularly used as donors. A vampire could bite a human without injecting draculin and making another vampire, but so few of us had the discipline to keep from killing even to do that. Once we tasted blood during feeding, especially human blood, we almost never stopped.

I refrained from lecturing Vangie on why I thought making some poor human a vessel was wrong. If a vampire was actually strong enough to bite but not kill—and didn’t turn the human—then he or she created what was known as a blood bond with that human. The vampire was connected to the human by a form of extrasensory perception, through which he or she could then find their vessel anywhere the human was. The bond’s strength faded over time to the point of dissolving completely, so the vampire would have to feed from the human regularly to maintain it. To me, this was a practice that was much akin to slavery, and I hated it.

Instead of the tirade I so wanted to fire at her, I swallowed my displeasure and asked her, “What are you doing here, anyway?”

Vangie had made it clear countless times that I was not on her list of favorite people, so despite my annoyance at her arrival, I was, of course, more than a little curious as to why she had shown up on my doorstep. Then again, her coming to see me when she disliked me so much meant that she hadn’t done so of her own accord. Diarmid had probably sent her.

“Father wants to see you,” she said, and I could see the words sat as bitterly on her tongue as the pig’s blood.

“Diarmid could have called,” I replied, even though Vangie probably knew that if he had, I’d have ignored the phone—thank goodness for caller I.D. I also had a cell phone like most people did nowadays, but he had yet to get hold of that number because it was unlisted.

As if reading my thoughts, Vangie frowned. “Father knows you won’t answer if he calls,” she said. “So he asked me to come and plead his case for him.”

And I bet you just loved being made his errand girl
, I thought but managed to refrain from saying. “What does he want to see me for?” I asked instead.

Vangie downed the last swallow of pig’s blood, grimaced, and set the mug down on the coffee table. She then gestured toward the copy of
Vampire
I’d been reading last night. “I believe he wants you to track down that Vivian Drake bitch.”

It was a good thing I’d had more than two hundred years to practice my poker face, otherwise I’d have probably burst out laughing. “Vivian Drake? Why does he want me to find her, so he can kill her? No thank you. Diarmid ought to know damn well I’ll never do that.”

Vangie groaned. “Saphrona, come on. She knows too much about us, which means that someone has been feeding her information. That person can only be a vampire. Now, while killing her would certainly satisfy any number of our people, including me, the problem with that is that no one can find her. She’s too carefully guarded.”

My Vivian Drake identity was indeed a very carefully crafted secret. My manuscripts—I’d written three phenomenally successful vampire novels—and my articles in
Vampire
were all sent in via e-mail. No one connected with publishing my work, not even my literary agent, had ever seen my face. It was for their protection as well as my own, which was why it was so difficult for anyone to find Vivian—no one knew what she looked like or where she lived. Obviously someone
had
tried to find her, though, given what Evangeline had just told me.

“Vangie, what good would
killing
her really do at this point? The damage has been done,” I said carefully.

“Unfortunately, Father agrees with you,” my sister said. “But he still wants you to find her so that we can learn who her source is.”