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And so had he.
The crazy fool had actually proposed to her.
She touched her bare ring finger. She could still feel the metal sliding over her knuckle. In her mind’s eye, she saw the ornate gold band and the bloodred princesscut ruby. It had been small. Very small but pretty. His grandmother’s, he’d told her.
She’d smiled indulgently and played along for a while. The way she always did when it came to men.
She was a vampire. Charismatic. Mesmerizing. She could be dressed in baggy sweats, having the worst hair day on the planet, and men would still find her irresistible. It hadn’t been a bit surprising that Garret had fallen so hard for her so fast.
No, what had really startled her was what she’d felt for him.
She’d actually liked him.
He’d been a patriot of Texas. Strong. Noble. Courageous. And from the moment he’d walked into the small saloon where she’d been working, aka feeding, she’d been attracted.
So she’d done the unthinkable—she’d slept with him not once but several times. Even more than the sex, they’d actually spent time together.
They’d gone on moonlit walks, held hands beneath the stars and confided their dreams to each other.
Wild, far-out dreams of love and marriage and kids and a real home.
She’d been a newly turned vampire back then, desperate to ignore the truth of what she’d become. Likewise, he’d been a man eager to escape the death and destruction that lived and breathed all around him.
And so she’d pretended, and he’d pretended.
She’d seen the love swimming in his eyes, and she’d let herself believe it was real.
But it hadn’t been.
Not then and certainly not now.
He was no longer a weak human mesmerized by her vampiric charm, and she was no longer denying her true nature.
They were both vampires, fully rooted in the present. When they had sex again, there would be no soft words between them, no foolhardy talk of happily ever after. No false promises.
Just lust.
Raw.
Primitive.
Savage.
If they came together.
The doubt pushed its way into her head as she climbed behind the wheel of her car and keyed the ignition.
There could be no if.
Sex had to be a sure thing, and the lame excuse she’d given him tonight would work in her favor. Pictures meant more than one. Which meant they wouldn’t be spending five minutes together sharing small talk. It would take hours, maybe even days, for her to set up her equipment—the cameras, the lighting, the back-ground—and get just the right shots. She had no doubt that the more time they spent with one another, the more explosive the chemistry would be.
Because he wanted her as fiercely as she wanted him.
Even though she could no longer stare into his eyes and see his every thought—vamps couldn’t read other vamps the way they did humans—she’d seen the telltale spark in his gaze when she’d sat down at his table. She’d felt the rush of jealousy when he’d come to her rescue.
Something was bound to happen between them.
Eventually.
Before Cruz and Molly caught up with her again?
The question struck, and her survival instincts kicked into gear. She swept a glance around her, drinking in the half-full parking lot. Her gaze sliced through the darkness, pushing back the shadows, searching. Her ears perked, and her nostrils flared, but she smelled nothing except stale beer and cigarettes and her grip eased on the steering wheel.
She was safe. She knew it. She felt it.
For now.
Over the past year, it had taken at least a week or two for the other vampires to track her down once she’d given them the slip.
With the exception of their last encounter, that is.
When they’d left her for dead.
She’d been sensationalizing the latest in a string of serial murders in state courtesy of the Butcher.
The Butcher had eluded police over twenty-nine murders, and he was still on the loose. While true crime wasn’t usually something picked up by a tabloid, the Butcher was the exception because he was rumored to be a Hollywood celebrity gone bad. At least that’s what he’d told the world when he’d left a bloody message on the wall of his first victim’s apartment. Every tabloid was now hot on the trail to discovery his identity first. Viv had been covering his handiwork from the beginning, from his first kill down in West Hollywood, to an elderly couple in Portland, to the recent handful of bodies found in an abandoned cabin outside of Tacoma.
She’d been scoping out the actual crime scene when she’d been discovered by local law enforcement, specifically a hard-ass sheriff by the name of Matt Keller. Keller had been about to grill her with questions—who did she work for, how did she hear about the murders, why was she there—when he’d been called back to the police station. He’d threatened to throw her ass in jail for trespassing and then he’d escorted her off the property. His parting words? “Stay the hell away from here.”
She should have listened to him.
Instead, she’d gone back. She’d been snapping pictures when she’d been attacked by the two vampires who’d been hot on her trail for over three years. They’d staked her out on the front porch of the cabin and left her to fry.
But Molly’s aim had been off. The knife had punctured her at an angle, a scant half-inch to the right. Rather than hitting her heart, they’d stabbed the inner right lobe of her lung. While not life-threatening, she’d still been hurt badly. She’d bled all over the porch, her blood mingling with that of the Butcher’s other victims. She would have burned to a crisp at the first sign of dawn if she hadn’t managed to drag herself through the front door. Inside, she’d hidden in one of the closets.
It was there, as she’d cowered beneath a mound of stale clothes, her St. Benedict medal clutched tightly in her hand, that she’d felt vulnerable for the first time in her life. Hurt. Nervous. Scared.
Cruz and Molly wanted their humanity back and they would stop at nothing in their quest to destroy the vampire who’d taken it from them.
She could still see their faces, the first time she’d met them all those years ago. Eighty-seven to be exact. She’d been in some hole-in-the-wall border town looking for her next meal when she’d happened upon a white slavery ring holed up in a house on the outskirts of town.
Molly had been chained in the cellar and Cruz had been one of her abductors. He’d fallen in love with her and tried to help her escape, and so he’d ended up chained next to her.
After a violent encounter with the one guard on duty (the rest of the slave traders had been upstairs passed out from a case of tequila), Viv had freed a cellar full of prisoners made up of primarily women and children.
Most of the prisoners had taken off up the rickety steps, desperate to get away before their abductors sobered up.
Except for Cruz and Molly.
They’d seen the truth about Viv, and they’d wanted a different means of escape.
The voices echoed in her head, so strong and clear, as if it had been just yesterday that she’d descended into that hell-hole prison.
“YOU CAN’TJUST leave us.” Cruz held Molly’s hand in one of his and a buck knife he’d taken off the guard in his other.
The man’s body slumped in a nearby corner. He was out cold. For now.
“They’ll track us down,” Cruz went on. “They will.” He nodded frantically. His eyes glittered with the horrific memories of being beaten and locked up and humiliated. He’d watched the woman he loved being raped. Over and over. And he’d been powerless to stop it.
He still was.
The truth burned inside of him, feeding the desperation and fear coiling his body tight.
“You have to help us,” he added, his gaze as pleading as his words.
“Leave now,” Viv told him. She couldn’t do what he asked. She wouldn’t doom anyone else to the darkness. Never again.
“You’ll have a good head start,” Viv continued. “Take Molly and go. I’ll stall them for you.”
“Kill them?”
But she couldn’t do that either. While she’d made her fair share of vampires, she’d never actually caused anyone’s death. No, she’d saved them from it.
Or so she’d always thought.
“I can’t do that.” She shook her head. “But I’ll slow them down. That’s all I can do.”
“It won’t be enough,” came Molly’s small, hollow voice. She shook her head, her eyes wide and vacant, as if the men had stolen her spirit right along with her innocence. “They’ll find us.”
“They won’t,” Viv reassured them. “But you have to go.” She motioned toward the rickety steps leading to the dark, cold night. “Now.”
“You don’t know them.” Cruz shook his head, a strange look in his eyes. He let go of Molly’s hand and lifted the knife. “They’ll catch us and make us pay. And I won’t be able to stop them. I can’t. Not like this.”
The blade flashed and before Viv could blink, he sliced through his left wrist clear to the bone. Blood gushed, spurting out onto the floor at an alarming rate.
“Please,” he mouthed, and then he sank to his knees as his life slipped away.
VIV BLINKED AGAINST the sudden burning in her eyes at the vivid memory. She hadn’t been able to stand by and watch him die. Not after the suffering he’d already endured. And so she’d turned him.
And he’d turned Molly.
And then the two newly made vampires had doled out revenge.
But what they’d first seen as their salvation, they’d come to realize was more a curse.
One they now meant to break.
They’d finally figured out that if they killed her, they could free themselves from the chains of darkness that bound them, silence the hunger that ruled their existence and become human again.
It had been eight days since Viviana had crawled into that closet and faced her mortality. She had no doubt that Cruz and Molly knew that they’d failed by now.
They would come for her again. To do the job right this time. And she would let them.
Because along with fear, she’d felt something else, as well, while she’d been holed up in that closet. As her body had healed, her mind had relived the past. She’d spent three days hiding, healing and thinking about her life, about all those people she’d tried to save from death.
She’d finally admitted the truth to herself—despite her intentions, she hadn’t really saved anyone. No, she’d doomed them to a fate worse than death.
The darkness.
The hunger.
No more.
She figured she only had a few days before Molly and Cruz caught up with her again. When they did, she had no intention of fighting them. Rather, she would face her mistakes this time, and set things right. She would give them back their humanity.
But before she submitted to her own death, she wanted to feel truly alive one more time.
One last time.
She retrieved the medallion she’d left hanging from the rearview mirror, slid the gold chain over her head and tucked the warm metal deep in her cleavage. Gunning the engine, she put the car in gear and headed back to the motel.
Chapter 3
SHE WAS PERFECT.
Garret watched the redhead make her way across the sawdust floor. His nostrils flared. The faint scent of strawberry shampoo drifted through the fog of beer and cigarette smoke. Her breaths came quick, her lips parting ever so slightly. Her small breasts bounced with each draw of oxygen.
It had been an hour since Viv had left the bar.
An hour spent thinking and wondering and fantasizing.
He drop-kicked the last thought as soon as it waltzed into his head and focused on the hunger gnawing at his gut. His stomach clenched, and his muscles bunched. Heat clawed low and deep. His throat tightened.
His gaze narrowed, and he fixated on the woman again. He noticed everything about her—from the way her eyes glittered with excitement and fear to the slight sway of her walk, as if she hadn’t pulled out the high heels in a really long time.
And then he noticed that no one else seemed to notice her.
The other men didn’t stare or drool or eat her up with their eyes the way they’d done Viv.
Because there was nothing supernatural about this woman.
She was real.
Ordinary.
And so the men kept drinking and shooting the shit while the woman slid onto a bar stool and crossed her legs.
As if she felt his attention, she turned. Her green gaze collided with his, and the truth echoed in his head.
