Well, almost all he could think of. There was the other matter of a few broken ribs, lacerations, assorted contusions and possibly some internal bleeding to occupy a small portion of his mind, but it all seemed far away, as if it were happening to someone else.
He rolled with another vicious kick, came to rest under the whiteboard filled with chemical equations on the far wall and curled his knees up to protect his abdomen. Something had torn inside him that time. His belly convulsed, his insides wringing like a dishrag. His breath rattled in his chest.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked clumsily, his tongue thick, bloody. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“What is wrong with me?” The hem of Garth LaGrange’s black duster swished over his boots as they scuffed the floor just inches from Daniel’s face. He threw his hands in the air and cackled maniacally. “What is wrong with me? Nothing is wrong with me. For the first time in centuries, something is very, very right!”
Centuries? He’d known Garth was a little weird since he’d met him six months ago, but since the man with the penchant for black clothing and late-night business meetings had been the only one who’d stepped up to fund Daniel’s research, he’d been willing to overlook a few…eccentricities. Suddenly he wished he’d taken the time to check out his benefactor more carefully. Looked into a few of the more pertinent details of his life.
Like the fact that he was whacked out of his mind.
Pain speared through Daniel, a lightning bolt that struck from his navel to his spine. He clenched his fist around the leg of the table near his head and rode the wave. “Why are you doing this?” he asked again. “What do you want?”
It galled him to lie helpless while Garth stomped through his lab like an angry child knocking over Tinker Toys, but at six foot eight, the guy had a good six inches on him, and who’d have guessed a man built like an underfed flagpole would have the strength of a bull ox? At one hundred and ninety pounds himself, Daniel was no featherweight, yet Garth had tossed him around the room—repeatedly—without breaking a sweat.
“What do I want?” Garth squatted next to Daniel and grinned wickedly. “I want it all. I want the world at my feet.”
“You’ve lost it.” Shaking his head, Daniel dragged himself sideways, along the wall. “You’re nuts, man.”
Garth’s face darkened. A scowl scrawled across his lips as he tracked Daniel’s progress toward the door. Dropping his arms to his sides, he took a measured step toward Daniel, then another. “You’re right. I’m crazy.”
He leaned over until his pasty face hovered at the end of Daniel’s nose. His breath brought a new wave of bile up Daniel’s throat. “After eighteen months of listening to your constant stream of mind-numbing, medico-scientific mumbo jumbo, I’M A RAVING FUCKING LUNATIC!”
Daniel couldn’t disagree with that, though he took issue with the cause. He tightened his arms over his ribs, expecting another blow, but Garth spun away with a flourish of his long coat.
“Oh Daniel, you’re so smart,” he mocked the praise he’d showered over Daniel so freely in the past. “Oh Daniel, you’re so dedicated.”
Halfway across the lab, he turned. “I cozied up to you. I coddled you. When what I really wanted to do was—”
His face twisted in rage, he made a circle in the air with his hands, as if he were choking an invisible neck, and for the first time, Daniel noticed how long the man’s thumbnails were. Thick and yellow, they curved out two inches beyond the ends of his digits, where they sharpened to pinpoints.
Gross, but Daniel didn’t have time to contemplate Garth’s personal hygiene, because he finally figured out what he should have known all along. Garth had never believed in his research. Never been as excited as Daniel about the potential to help people, to further the greater good.
The man had just been using him all along. “You want my blood.”
Garth teased the rim of his lips with his tongue. “You have no idea how badly.”
“You want the formula.”
“I want what it can give me. Power. Control. A certain…” He flicked his chin up jauntily. His pocked cheeks looked more hollow than ever, his complexion more sallow, yet there was a dull gleam in his sunken eyes that made Daniel’s stomach pitch. “A certain notoriety with women.
“It’s not Viagra, man. It’s blood. Synthetic blood.”
“It’s freedom. It’s life!”
“You can’t have it.”
“I already do.” He pulled a CD case out of the pocket of his coat, opened it carefully. Reverently. “By the way, this is now the only copy. I reformatted the hard drive on your PC and destroyed all the data backups.”
Daniel’s heart kicked on its first spurt of true panic. Getting his ass kicked by a freak with weird fingernails was one thing. Losing the work he’d dedicated his life to, work with the potential to save thousands of lives, was a whole other level of torture.
He could re-create the formula for the first non-organic human blood substitute, but it would take time. Reproducing the tests and documentation the drug manufacturers would insist on seeing before they committed their resources to the project would take even longer. Months and money he didn’t have.
He found the strength to push himself to a sitting position. “You need me. And my medico-scientific mumbo jumbo. You’ll never get a major pharmaceutical company’s backing without me. You won’t get in the front door.”
“I have no intention of trying to get in the front, or any other, door.”
“Even you don’t have enough money to push a product like this to market yourself. It would cost you millions just to get it past the FDA. Tens of millions.”
“The market I’m targeting doesn’t require FDA approval.”
“What market is that, the black market? Africa? Latin America? Where the people are too poor to afford the luxury of asking where their medicines come from, or in too much pain to care?”
Garth cackled again. “Such a humanitarian. But you overestimate my ambition. I was actually thinking of a consumer group much closer to home, and money is not an issue with them.”
Nothing Garth said made sense to Daniel, but then his brains had been pretty well scrambled this evening. All he knew was that the man who had claimed to support his work was trying to steal it, and that the same man was more concerned about his own profit than helping humanity with a medical breakthrough.
Synthetic blood would save thousands of lives. Unlike the products most of the pharmaceutical companies had in development now, Daniel’s brainchild didn’t require any biological components at all. It could be mass produced on demand from simple chemicals, had an unlimited shelf life and none of the threat of blood-born pathogens such as hepatitis and HIV that accompanied the real thing. It had to reach the market—the legal market.
Clutching a set of metal shelves, Daniel dragged himself to his feet. “Bastard. You can’t do this. I won’t let you do it.”
Garth smiled the way Daniel imagined a hunter would smile at Bambi. Right before he shot him. “Oh, do try to stop me. Please.”
Daniel put his head down and charged, only to find himself flung back by an unseen hand. His back slammed into the wall behind him with enough force to knock a man-sized hole in the Sheetrock before he slid to the floor.
How had he done that? Garth hadn’t touched him.
Shaking his head to clear it, Daniel braced his back against the drywall and pushed himself to his feet for another run, only to find himself knocked flat on his face.
Except there wasn’t anyone behind him to knock him on his face. There wasn’t anyone else in the room at all. Except Garth.
Okay, now this was getting spooky.
He raised his head to squint at his benefactor-cum-nemesis through burning, swollen eyes.
“You’re finished. You have nothing left,” Garth spat down at him. “I’ve got the formula. I’ve got the lab. I’ve got your house.”
A groan tore its way out of Daniel’s throat. The
note he’d signed for the research funding. The collateral he’d put up, including the house that had been in his family for over a hundred years…
“I’ve got your car. That pitiful little savings account you call your nest egg.”
Garth stretched his hand out toward the door to the lab, and what little breath Daniel had been able to draw into his aching chest caught in his throat.
Another black-clad figure sashayed into the room. Her leather pants squeaked as she rolled her hips. Her D-cup breasts spilled out of her leather lace-up bustier.
“Sue Ellen?” Daniel rolled to his knees, swayed sickly. Sue Ellen walked by as if she hadn’t seen him. What was wrong with her? Why was she dressed like that?
Garth smiled as she stepped into his waiting arms and rubbed herself against him like a feline. “I’ve even got your girl.”
“Sue Ellen, get away from him!”
But she seemed to have no inclination to run. Instead, she flicked out a long thumbnail, scratching Garth’s neck and scooping up a drop of blood. Then she brought the blood to her lips and licked it off with a dreamy look of enjoyment on her face.
God, what had he done to her? What sort of spell had he put her under?
Daniel watched, frozen in horror as Garth placed his hands around her neck, caressed the line of her jaw, then squeezed. Hard.
She should have struggled. He had to be hurting her, but she didn’t seem to care. She seemed to be enjoying the pain. Eyes glazed over with anticipation, she let her head fall back as if he were caressing her like a lover, not choking her.
Daniel staggered to his feet. “What are you doing?”
Garth drew his thumbs over the column of her throat, licked his lips, and then dug his pointed nails into her flesh.
Daniel charged again, growling. Again the unseen hand stopped him, this time snatching him from behind and lifting him like a dog caught by the scruff of the neck. It pulled him up until he had to stretch to touch his toes to the floor, then beyond.
Garth pulled his thumbs back, and bright red blood bubbled out of the twin wounds he’d inflicted.
Daniel flailed in midair. “Let her go, you bastard. Let her go. I’ll kill you for this. By God, I swear I’ll kill you for this.”
Garth flicked a careless look at Daniel. “You can’t touch me. And neither can your God.”
He winced as if he suffered some sudden pain, then lowered his head and suckled on the punctures he’d made on Sue Ellen’s neck, a thin red stream of blood—her blood—trickling out the corner of his mouth as he drank.
1
AT a corner table in the condemned warehouse that had been converted to a bar, at least for the night, Déadre Rue hunched over her tonic water and watched the throng of sweaty, drunken bodies on the dance floor gyrate to the sound of heavy metal rock with lust in her eyes.
Blood lust.
Sometimes the ache, the desire, the never-ending, sharp-toothed, razor-clawed, freaking craving for blood was so strong she thought she might die from it.
But then, what the hell? She’d died once. It hadn’t been so bad. Infinitely better than coming back to life, actually. Oh, yeah. Rising as one of the undead—now that had been nasty.
Not that living, for lack of a better word, as one of the undead was much better, wandering the streets with a parched throat night after thirsty night, eyeing ready prey on every corner, yet forbidden to stalk it.
Raising her drink in a trembling hand, she drained the glass, but the cool, clear liquid couldn’t quench the fire in her throat that had driven her out of her grave tonight and into the shadowy bump and grind of a rave party. The pulsing music had called her. The sweet smell of blood running just under the thin veil of human skin had drawn her.
And she needed money. Needed some token to bring her superior in order to be granted permission to take what she needed.
Damn the High Matron for putting a ration on human blood, anyway. Just because a few too many exsanguinated bodies had turned up on the streets of Atlanta this last year. Just because the mortals were starting to whisper, getting nervous. The Matron and her Enforcer had the vampires of the city starving themselves for fear of her punishment. Worse, she had them stealing and selling themselves to bring her bigger and better offerings every month, hoping to win her favor and a little larger share of blood. They were like those boys in a Dickens novel, thieving to earn their keep.
Déadre rubbed her right shoulder, which bore the scars of that punishment, inflicted because she’d dared to sip at the wrist of a drunk she’d stumbled over on a late-night walk three months ago.
She’d learned her lesson that night; she hadn’t had a taste of blood since.
It wasn’t fair. The old ones, like the Matron, could go years without feeding. Decades, if need be. But Déadre had only been undead since 1934. Like a kitten, she needed to nurse frequently, at least once every few weeks. She couldn’t die from lack of blood, but she could grow weak from it. Sick. She could suffer.
Even now her limbs felt heavy. She couldn’t gather enough saliva to moisten her lips. The scent of blood, heated by the tight crush of bodies in the club, made her dizzy with need. Her heart, if it were capable of beating, would have been racing, her pulse, if she’d had one, shallow but rapid.
As she watched one particular dancer, a blonde with skin so translucent that Déadre could see the veins in her neck when the girl tilted her head back, swaying with the beat of the music, her thumbnails began to lengthen, thicken. To sharpen to fine points perfect for perforating the jugular.
Déadre closed her eyes, rocked in her mind with the girl. Licked her dry lips. She imagined herself trailing her hands up the column of the girl’s throat, feeling the heady pulse beneath her fingertips, searching for just the right spot—
“You look parched.”
Déadre snapped her eyes open and jerked her hands beneath the table, thumbs tucked into her fists. While she’d been daydreaming, the music had stopped. The band was on break.
The dancers had disappeared, and a man loomed over her. Tall. Lean. Average brown hair gelled up in clumpy spikes. Leather pants, biker jacket with no shirt underneath. Studded dog collar around his neck. Nifty scar running diagonally across his left cheek.
He flashed her an easy smile. “Can I buy you a drink?”
She hesitated, considering. She needed a mark, and by all appearances, he would be easy enough to lure outside and separate from his wallet. All she had to do was return his smile, lean forward, and give him a glimpse down her shirt. He’d follow her anywhere. But something felt wrong about the man before her.
On the surface, he blended easily with the other Goths and punks milling around, but his posture—too straight—and his eyes—too guarded—said he didn’t belong. Whatever he was up to, she wanted no part of it, even if blowing him off did mean losing a chance to beef up the paltry offering she’d gathered for the High Matron this month. Besides, getting close to a strong, vital body like his in her current state of need was not a good idea. She might forget about the High Matron and her blood rationing and suck him dry.
It took all her will to turn away. “No,” she said, and made a point of looking bored, looking at anything but him and his surprisingly broad expanse of bare chest.
She couldn’t look at that chest. Not without thinking of the heart beating inside it. Without hearing the swish of his blood through each of the four chambers, thinking how good it would taste.
He pulled out the plastic chair next to her. The legs scraped across the cement floor the same way his smile grated on her nerves. “Even if it’s a Bloody Mary?”
She gasped at the offer. Her stomach tumbled as her gaze latched onto his. She’d love a Bloody Mary. Or a Bloody Tom, or Henry, or Heather…
She was so lost in her need that it took her a moment to realize he hadn’t meant the offer literally.
Of course, he hadn’t. He was mortal.
But she got the feeling, looking into the serene green of his eyes, t
hat his choice of words hadn’t been a coincidence. “Who are you?”
“Daniel Hart.” He stuck out his right hand.
“What do you want?”
“To get to know you, for starters.”
“Why?”
“You seem like an interesting person.”
He seemed sincere enough on first glance. He had a handsome smile, full of straight white teeth. Even the scar on his cheek didn’t detract from the personable expression he wore so comfortably. But on closer inspection, Déadre noted the fine red web in the whites of his eyes, the strain at the corners of his full mouth.
“Sorry. Not interested.” She shoved her chair back and made for the door, the chain she wore as a belt jangling with every step.
Daniel swore under his breath. Picking up women in bars had never been his forte. Picking up a vampire was proving to be an even more elusive skill. He’d spent weeks researching her kind, finding them. He’d picked her out especially for his needs—a loner, young, female. Vulnerable to a man who paid attention to her, he’d hoped.
So she’d proved a little less vulnerable than he would have liked. He still couldn’t let her go. In the days he’d spent in the hospital after taking the beating from Garth and throughout the weeks of recovery afterward, he’d searched for a way to kill the man—the monster—who had taken Sue Ellen’s life, who held her undead body under his spell. Daniel had studied; he’d read. When he was able, he walked the streets and used the last of his money to buy information.
He knew what Garth LaGrange was, and he knew as a mortal he had no chance against him. There was only one way to win, to free Sue Ellen’s soul, and it all depended on getting Déadre Rue to help him.
If Plan A didn’t work, he’d go to Plan B.
He started after her, giving her space as she worked her way through the crowd and out the door, then caught up to her in the parking lot, where they’d have some privacy.
At least, he thought he’d caught up to her.
He stopped beside the red Jeep Wrangler in the last row and checked the plate. It was definitely hers. He scanned the darkness, the cones of light from scattered streetlamps. “Déadre?”