The Vampire's Betrayal (30 page)

“Ginger the floozy?”

I didn’t think Connie’s half-vampire brain was firing on all cylinders yet. I didn’t know if that was good or bad, but I forged ahead. “She was one of Eleanor’s whores. That was really Eleanor in Ginger’s body.”

Something in those scary eyes told me I was finally getting through to her. “And you can tell when one of these demons has possessed a human being?”

“Of course,” I fibbed again, hoping like hell that a slayer’s powers didn’t include lie detecting. So far so good on that score.

Connie raised herself off me, mostly using the stake, which was against my chest again, to lift herself.

“Ow,” I said. “Ow.”

She hauled me up by my shirtfront as effortlessly as if I were a ragdoll, set me on my feet, and pulled me down to look at her eyeball to eyeball.

“All right. I’ll let you live for now, fang boy. But when we’ve tracked down and destroyed all the demons, then I’m coming for you. And believe me when I tell you—you may not have had the guts to kill me when you had the chance. But I
do
have the guts to kill
you.
” She shoved me so hard I landed in the surf several feet away.

That went well.

I watched her disappear into the darkness, salt water stinging the hole in my chest, which was already healing. I dug my heels into the sand and pushed myself into the ocean to float on my back and look up into the stars.

Well, just
damn.
That was so…
hot.

Epilogue

A Word from the Council

Far beneath London a group of demons argued among themselves as they sat around a cauldron that belched black smoke and a foul stench.

Idly fingering the vivid but healing wound in his throat, the vampire Ulrich stood waiting for them to calm themselves. At his side stood his mate, Diana, who was trying her best not to scream.

He leaned down to whisper in her ear, “Do not worry, my dear. They won’t harm us. We’ll turn their bad news to our advantage.”

Diana nodded, still too petrified to speak. Her most recent plan to impress the Council had failed miserably. William Cuyler Thorne, her human husband of half a millennium, had rescued the magical child she’d promised to make into a blood drinker to honor the old lords. And William had destroyed Hugo, the one they’d planned to sacrifice.

The only thing that had spared Ulrich and Diana the full wrath of the Council was the failure of Damien, the vampire in charge of the Council’s most recent scheme. By the time Diana and Ulrich had freed themselves and returned to the Council, the old lords were more interested in heaping their wrath onto Damien.

Their minion, a diminutive vampire named Mole, had just received a communiqué from Reedrek and delivered to the Council news of what had happened in Savannah. Even now Mole cowered in a corner, evidently fearing the old sires would eat the messenger.

As the Council members calmed themselves, Ulrich said in his most soothing voice, “But gentlemen, Thorne is dead. Surely that is a victory.”

The eldest of the old lords, an ancient blood drinker bearing the reddest, scaliest, and most pock-marked skin, said, “The portal was closed before more than a scant few twice-killed vampires could escape.” He shouted in anger, pounding the earth with his staff.

“It was supposed to have remained open until all the Sluagh made their way to the land of the living,” the demon next to him said.

The unholy hubbub began again, and Ulrich cleared his throat to try to regain their attention. “If you’ll pardon my directness, your lordships, it would seem a boy was sent to do a man’s job.”

The cowering minion gasped at Ulrich’s brazenness, and Diana gaped at him in horror before taking a step to distance herself from him.

Another demon scratched himself with long pointed talons. “Do you think we are so senile as to have forgotten that you failed even more miserably than Damien did, Ulrich?”

The fiend evidently couldn’t reach the right spot, because he beckoned the minion and indicated where the little vampire should scratch. Blanching in horror, Mole did as he was bidden. The demon’s foot thumped the ground a few times and he sighed in relief. Diana looked as if she would swoon.

“At least I am vampire enough to come before you again,” he said. “I hear Damien is in hiding for his life.”

“True enough,” said the first vampire. “We’ll hear your proposal if you have one. And it had better be good, or you’ll wish you were in hiding as well.”

Ulrich nudged Diana, who was frozen in place. He urged her forward until she took a step toward the old lords. Finally she found her tongue. “S-sirs, the vampire who is in charge of Savannah now, Jack McShane, can animate the dead.”

The old sires murmured among themselves. The leader said, “Do you swear this?”

“Yes,” Diana said. “I have seen it. He reanimated a legion of the dead to guard us on our arrival in Savannah. And it was through his power that Eleanor was raised from the underworld. He even found his way back from there himself.”

“And that was without the aid of an earthquake,” Ulrich put in.

“He hadn’t even intended to raise her,” Diana continued. “Think of what he could accomplish if he really tried.”

Ulrich nodded. “We propose to force McShane to raise selected…characters from the dead.”

“What kind of characters?” asked a Council member with an oozing sore in the middle of its chest. “A sorcerer of one of the old religions seems to have fixed it so that no blood drinker can ever rise again.”

“No blood drinkers, perhaps, but there are plenty of others who have proven their ability to wreak havoc on humanity,” Diana offered.

“Serial killers, mass murderers, terrorists. That variety of human,” Ulrich added casually.

“And what makes you so sure this McShane blood drinker, this offspring of Thorne, can be influenced to resurrect these characters?” the leader asked.

Diana and Ulrich exchanged glances. They knew better than to bluff an audience of ancient and bloodthirsty master vampires.

“We believe that without his sire, he will be easily led. The loss of Thorne leaves a vacuum in his life that we will step in and fill,” Ulrich said.

Diana shook her mane of golden hair, tilted her head downward, and looked up, fixing her wide blue eyes upon her audience, gestures she had practiced on men for hundreds of years. “We can be very persuasive,” she purred.

“Very well,” the leader said. “Go to the New World. Make haste. Do your worst.”

“Yes, my lord,” Diana promised, relief flooding her. Emboldened by the knowledge that she would soon be thousands of miles away from the hellhole in which she now found herself, she curtsied and added, “I give you my vow, your excellencies, I know exactly how to make Jack McShane bow to my will.”

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my critique partner, author Jennifer LaBrecque, for helping make this a better book and for keeping Jack honest.

For a sneak peek at Raven Hart’s next novel in the Savannah Vampires Chronicles read on.

Letter from Jack

My so-called life has become a nightmare. Each time I climb into my coffin at sunrise and the deep death-sleep claims me, I think I’ll wake up and things will be normal again. As normal as a vampire’s existence can be anyway.

In my dreams I’m in my old, ordinary life. My maker and mentor, William Thorne, is back again and whole. Connie, the woman I love, is a regular human being, coping with nothing more complicated than being a cop and the girlfriend of a vampire—as if that wasn’t tough enough. Melaphia and Renee, my human family, are as untroubled by their own nightmares and as secure and happy as any young mother and daughter have a right to be.

But when the moon rises and the shadows lengthen to hide the monsters that exist on the fringe of human consciousness, my sweet dreams of normality implode under the weight of the here and now. When I wake, the real nightmare begins.

William, my sire and the friend who had my back for more than a hundred years, is dead, slain by the very woman I’d give my own life for. That leaves me alone to protect Melaphia and Renee, already tortured and traumatized by the most evil of my kind before the crowning blows of William’s death and the revelation of their most deadly secret. As the most powerful mambos of this hemisphere, the daughters of my heart might not be as vulnerable as ordinary humans, but because they bear the priceless voodoo blood that gives vampires otherworldly powers, they are now hunted for their life force by the most evil and determined of fiends.

If that weren’t enough trouble, there’s a whole menagerie of monsters out to challenge the chief enforcer role I inherited from William. I have to ride herd on all things nonhuman that would otherwise be free to threaten the mortal population of Savannah, one of the most haunted places in the world. And for the first time I have to do it without William and his formidable power at my side.

Oh, and let’s not forget the worst enemy of all, a council of the most evil vampires in history who are trying to harness the elemental powers of the universe to enslave peace-loving bloodsuckers like me and turn us into killing machines. Their most recent show of force produced an earthquake that briefly opened a Portal from the underworld, through which dozens of dead but reanimated vampires clawed their way topside in every demonic form imaginable. The only way I was able to convince Connie to let me live was to promise to help her track down and destroy these double-dead demons before they can wreak enough havoc to send the human world into a full-scale panic.

You see, the moment Connie murdered William, she turned into a creature that I barely recognized, part demon, part avenging angel. As a vampire slayer sworn to kill me and my kind wherever she finds us, Connie is the new favorite target for every evil blood drinker on the planet. So I have to try to protect her from them while I protect myself from her and hope to God it’ll be a while before she figures out that she doesn’t really need me to help her kill those demons. She’s lethal enough on her own.

Oh, and incidentally, Connie’s pregnant with my child but doesn’t know it yet. A child that is an abomination of nature and has no right to exist, but whom I love with a ferocity that frightens me. I would do anything to insure the survival of Connie and my baby, even if it means giving them over to the care of another kind of monster altogether. Probably just as well that she hates me now, don’t you think? At least that’s what my rational brain tells my shattered heart.

So as you can see, reality bites. Even worse than I do.

Welcome to the new normal. Welcome to my nightmare.

Chapter One

“Hey! Watch where you’re swinging that axe!” I yelled as the blade whistled through the air, grazing my cheek. “I’m trying to help you bring that demon down, you know. The least you could do is try not to lop off my head.”

The demon, a nasty little number covered with slimy brown scales, ducked but not before Connie’s axe connected with its shoulder. It howled in pain and outrage from the bricked-in corner of the alley we had backed it into.

“Is head-lopping one of the ways you can kill a vampire?” Connie asked. She never took her gaze off the demon, but her eyes lit up with a deadly fervor that made me cringe because I knew it was meant for me.

“Well, yes,” I admitted. “One of the few.” The demon made a break for it, but I caught him in the jaw—if that hump below its mouth was a jaw—with my fist and spun him back into the corner.

Connie sighed. “I have so much to learn. So many vampires; so little time.” She raised the weapon again and swung with almost as much speed and strength as I myself could muster. The demon’s head left its shoulders with a spray of blood, and its body fell forward onto the pavement and turned into a pile of dirt. The smell of it mixed with the sickening-sweet stench of the nearby Dumpster and made my nose twitch with disgust.

“Another one bites the dust, uh, uh,” Connie sang with a little victory dance. I watched her shimmy her shapely booty in awe, not quite sure whether I should be grossed out by her blood lust or turned on by it. I seemed to be a little of both. Maybe I’d inherited William’s death wish along with all his responsibilities.

Connie turned her attention to me, noticing the trickle of blood running down my cheek. Her eyes dilated, the pupils turning into slits, the irises bloodred. She grabbed me by the neck and pulled my face next to hers so quickly it startled me. I searched her eyes for the spark that was my old Connie and didn’t see it. Would it—would
she
—ever be back? Or was she lost and gone forever in the shell of this vicious, half-human killer standing in front of me now?

When she pressed her lips to my cheek, I felt myself go weak in the knees. She hadn’t shown me any affection since…the night I tried to kill her. For her own good, of course.

I quickly realized it wasn’t the hots for me that caused her to move her lovely lips along my skin, sending a shiver down my spine and a throb of desire everywhere else. As a dhampir, she was part vampire, part human, part goddess. She was savoring my blood for its flavor and its power. She was a predator now, and I was her prey of choice. She flicked out her tongue and lapped away the dribble of my blood.

“Mmm. Good to the last drop,” she murmured in a throaty whisper.

Even as I glanced down to see her pull back her lips and reveal her baby fangs, I felt more yearning than terror. She was born to kill me after all, and I swear if it weren’t for Mel and Renee, I would let her. As long as she made love to me one last time.

I closed my eyes, relishing the serrated rasp of those fangs across my skin, and nearly swooned. I know, I know. Kick-ass vampires with superpowers like me don’t swoon. But you don’t know Connie. Her hot breath burned a line from my cheek to my neck.

“Please,” I heard myself beg.

“Please what?” Her tongue probed the hollow of my throat, searing my cold, dead flesh.

I bit my tongue to keep myself from murmuring “Kill me.” It was tempting, but too many innocent people depended on me for their safety. I couldn’t take the easy way out as much as I might want to die in Connie’s arms, at the point of her fangs, and be done with it.