Skye's Trail (6 page)

“So you’ve done it with a vampire?” Skye asked.

“Before Mike and I hooked up,” Dawn said then added dramatically, “now I have to live on the memories.”

“What about you?” Skye asked Candy.

The older girl ducked her head. “I’ve just been bitten a couple of times.” She fingered the hickeys on her neck. “Most of them were just wannabes, I could tell after it was over, but one of them was the real thing…I mean, wow, I thought I was going to faint when his mouth was on my neck, only his girlfriend got pissed and he stopped before he actually bit me.”

“Was she a vamp, too?”

“She wishes,” Candy muttered. “No. She works over at the MGM. She’s a maid like me. We both work the day shift.”

“Guess she can’t be a vampire then.” Skye looked around the club. The dance floor was overflowing. People were packed around every table and along the bar. She retrieved the picture of Brittany and put it on the table. “Do you remember seeing this girl at Fangs?”

The two girls exchanged glances. Skye hoped they’d answer willingly, not force her to hypnotize them. “Are you like a cop or something?” Candy asked.

“Or something.” Skye shrugged. “It’s no big deal if you can’t help.”

Dawn picked the picture up and studied it. “I think she was here last week.”
Candy took the picture from her. “Yeah. She didn’t get in though. At least, not that I know of.”

“Was she alone?”

Candy shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“I didn’t notice,” Dawn said.

Mike returned with the drinks. His sister showed him the picture. “Skye wants to know if we’ve seen this girl.”

He swallowed. “Uh, you’re not a cop or anything, are you?”

“No.” She let her senses flow out momentarily. There was just the barest trace of pot in his system. The girls had none in theirs.

“Uh—” he looked back down at the picture, “—yeah, I think she was here one night last week. She hung out in the line but she was behind us. None of the waiters we know were working that night, so we didn’t get in the club.”

“Did you notice if she was with anybody?”

“Is she in trouble or something?” Mike asked.

“No.” For an instant she let him slide into the blue pools of her eyes. “Did you notice if she was with anyone?”

He concentrated, frowned. “I don’t think so. She left before we did. Only she walked. Yeah, I remember that now. I mean, it’s not like we’re even close to a bus stop or anything.”

Skye blinked and released him. “How late do you guys stay when you can’t get in?”

“Three or four in the morning, usually,” Candy answered. “I mean, most of the vamps are probably gone by then. They’ve only got until the sun comes up to do whatever they do.”

“Makes sense.” Skye put the picture back in her pocket then took a long sip of beer. “So how do you tell the real thing?”

“You get a rush just by looking at one of them,” Mike answered. “I mean, if you hadn’t shown up before the sun went down, I would’ve thought you were a vampire.”

Dawn moved closer to her boyfriend, dismayed by his answer. Candy said, “Oh my god, there’s one. He’s got to be one. Look at him.”

Edgy awareness and need rippled through Skye as soon as she glanced up. Pure sex. That’s what she thought when she saw him.

He was tall, filled out with well-defined muscles, his stomach flat. There was nothing underneath the black vest but smooth skin. Matching black pants hugged his body like a sensual embrace as he skirted the dance floor. Long black hair was held away from his face by a leather strap. A deep red ruby glinted from a single earring stud. He had the face of a dark angel.

A mate, her body claimed, sending a pulse of heat to Skye’s cunt, the primitive, internal voice inside of her getting harder to ignore.

“Wow,” Candy breathed when the man disappeared out of sight around one end of the bar.

“Yeah, wow,” Dawn echoed. This time it was Mike who moved closer in a jealous gesture.

“Definitely a vamp,” Candy said.

“Yeah, definitely,” Dawn agreed.

Their comments eased some of the tension in Skye’s body. She hid a smile in her beer mug before taking another sip. Except for the flashes of fang and the uniform all-black clothing that the patrons wore, this club was like a lot of nightspots Skye had been in. “So how’d you find this place, anyway?” she asked idly.

“On the Internet,” Mike answered.

Dawn giggled. “Believe it or not, Mike’s a real computer geek. His boss is
always
asking him to fix stuff on the computer.”

Skye smiled at the boy. These kids were a surprise. She had a laptop and knew how to do searches, but mainly she used it to research locations when she was out of town and hunting.

“Really?” she asked. “What’d you do, search for vampire hangouts?”

Mike grinned at her. “No, there are a lot of newsgroups on the web. We joined some of them. Then found out about a private chat room. Somebody in it mentioned this place and we decided to check it out.”

Candy chimed in, “The Internet is, like, so cool. There are people from all over the country in the chat room. The person who told us about this club was from San Francisco. But they’d been in Vegas with a friend who knew about Fangs.”

“So mainly you just chat about vampire hangouts?”

Dawn giggled. “You must not hang out in any chat rooms.”

“You’re right. So what do people talk about?”

“EVERYTHING,” Candy said dramatically then grinned, “but mainly sex.”

A slow song started to play. Dawn tugged at Mike’s hand. “Let’s dance.” He gulped a swallow of beer to fortify himself and followed her to the dance floor.

Skye watched them dance. The girl next to her sighed. “They’re so cute together.”

“You don’t have a boyfriend?” Skye gently probed.

“No.”

Skye studied the girl. Like her brother, she was battling a case of acne, though hers wasn’t as bad and she’d done a good job with her makeup. Her brown hair was short and spiky, and left her ears with their collection of studs and rings showing. Unlike Dawn and Mike, Candy didn’t have jewelry in her nose or lip. But even with less jewelry and longer hair, she’d always be average-looking.

“This place doesn’t seem like it’d be very good for meeting guys,” Skye finally said. “It looks like there are about five women for every man.”

Candy slowly spun her beer mug on the table. “I know Dawn said the whole thing about being with a vampire is sex and all, but if one of them gives you some of his blood then it’d make you, uh, you know, like, way more attractive to the opposite sex.” The girl ducked her head, embarrassed to reveal so much about herself.

Skye tried to lighten the mood. “I thought you ended up a vampire if they made you drink their blood.”

“Well, yeah, that can happen, too. But they’ve got to, like, totally drain you of blood then give it back to you. It’d be cool to have all that vampire power. That’s what Mike wants. I mean, the cool thing about being a computer geek, you can do that anytime. You don’t have to be up during the day. But I like going out in the sun and stuff. I don’t really want to become a vampire, just maybe have one for a boyfriend, or at least make friends with one.”

Skye stroked her finger down the length of the beer mug. She could feel the pieces of the puzzle beginning to slip into place. “Do you guys talk about dark magic and occult rituals in your chat room?”

Candy gave a dramatic shudder. “Sometimes. But only about how creepy that kind of stuff is and how people who don’t really
know
about vampires sometimes think it’s all the same.”

Skye finished her beer and wondered if this was what Haley meant when she said Jen and Amy were really getting into the Goth scene. Had they come here night after night trying to meet vampires and perhaps become one? Had Brittany Armstrong been looking for the same thing?

It couldn’t be a coincidence that Brittany Armstrong had been totally drained of blood. Had she thought she’d rise with vampiric power, only to end up very, very dead?

Mike and Dawn returned, flushed and sexually stimulated, both with new hickeys on their necks. Dawn giggled and told Candy, “Tom from work just walked in. Go ask him to dance.”

Skye thought again how refreshing these kids were, despite their vampire fantasies. She stood and decided to see if Haley was here with Jen’s picture. “I’ll be back. Keep an eye on the jacket, okay?”

“Hey, sure, no problem,” Mike said.

Skye slipped through the crowd easily and found an opening at the bar so that she could look around. Haley was at a corner table. It was set apart from the other tables in a way that hinted this area was reserved, private, and trespassers wouldn’t be welcomed.

There was another woman at the table and three men. Skye studied them all. She’d assumed Haley’s boyfriend Kyle would be big and muscled, not short and wiry. But there was no doubt in Skye’s mind that the red-haired guy sitting so close to the small woman was her very protective boyfriend. His arm was draped possessively over the back of her chair, his hand covered hers where it rested on the table.

The other woman was tall and beautiful. And like Haley, she also wore a necklace with an old, beautiful pendant on it. Her pale skin and blonde hair were a perfect contrast to the ebony-skinned man next to her. The third man at the table was the gorgeous “vampire.” As soon as Skye focused on him, the edginess returned full-force. She looked away and met Haley’s startled glance.

Consciously or unconsciously, Haley’s free hand began worrying her pendant. Skye turned her head slightly in response to the bartender’s presence and ordered another beer, leaving it to Haley to make the first move.

A few minutes later Haley passed the bar, disappearing down a short hallway and into the woman’s bathroom. Skye paid for the beer, took several sips then followed Haley into the bathroom.

The other woman was nervous but she gave Skye a hesitant smile and retrieved a photograph from the small black purse she was carrying. “Here’s the picture.”

Skye took it, glancing at it briefly. Jen was a younger version of Haley. They could almost have passed for twins, though Jen favored body piercing and Haley apparently didn’t.

The bathroom door opened and the blonde who’d been sitting at Haley’s table walked in. Haley turned quickly, leaned into the mirror as though she was checking her makeup. Skye slipped the photo into her pocket and left the bathroom to reclaim her spot at the bar.

She was halfway through her beer when a familiar scent drifted over her, causing her womb to ripple and her vulva to swell and grow slick. She looked up as Rico stopped next to her. “What are you doing here, Skye?”

Chapter Four

His voice and eyes were all cop, but it didn’t matter to her body. The danger he represented didn’t stop her heart from beating more rapidly, from sending lava-hot blood through her veins, from making her want to rub her body against his and entice him to mate with her.

Skye fought the need and answered, “Just out for a night on the town, Rico.”

He moved closer, unable to stop himself from doing it. His cock was rock-hard, visions of taking her here, now, of pushing her onto the bar and standing between her legs, thrusting into her until she screamed in release washed over him, dampening his chest with sweat.
¡Carajo!
When had he ever wanted to claim a woman in front of witnesses?