A Drop of Red (3 page)

Stitch, knot, snip the thread.

Stitch, knot, snip.

When she finished, she tried not to act as if she’d been holding her breath. But Costin wasn’t fooled.

A shadow slanted over the top half of his face as he lingered at the bedpost, dressed in a silken black shirt and pants, his arms loosely crossed over his chest, as if to counter the long-suffering sorrow in the topaz eyes that burned out of the near-darkness. Where he used to have scars marking his sculpted face, he now had smooth, pale skin, which contrasted with the dark, lustrous hair that fell just past his neck.

I took away those scars by making him this way,
she thought.
But I gave him injuries that go so much deeper.

Her chest constricted, yet she didn’t know what else to do to assure him that she was a big girl, that she could handle another night of making things up to him.

“Getting excited while you’re feeding is par for the course,” she said casually, hoping it would get them out of this funk. On the wound, she dabbed a smudge of healing wonder gel that a team member had developed once upon a time, then secured a fresh bandage over it. “It happens to all of us.”

“Yes,
all
of us.”

She caught the emphasis on the word “all,” and she knew he was referring to Jonah—the covetous owner of the body Costin had once “rented” so he might carry out his crusade against the Underground vampires. Since Costin was a soul traveler, he had required the aid of a healthy host, but the arrangement had backfired in this bargain with Jonah—the body Dawn had trapped him in when she had made the choice to save him.

Thing was, Jonah’s consciousness was now enclosed inside this vampiric form, too, suppressed by Costin, but every once in a while, the original owner managed to emerge for a short time before Costin tamed him again.

But even from inside, Jonah urged Costin’s hunger, more and more.

“Stop thinking about him.” Dawn eased her nightgown over her bandaged injury, which throbbed with the cadence of a stilted apology. “You’ve managed to keep Jonah at bay for a while. He didn’t crash in on tonight’s feeding.”

“There are reasons other than Jonah for losing control, Dawn. The sensing I felt last night . . . It’s still enough to stimulate, to make me overly excited.”

She glanced up to find a fervent glimmer in his gaze. So that’s what had pushed him overboard—the perceptive twinge that assured him an Underground was active somewhere nearby. He wouldn’t have begun to constantly sense this master unless a rival blood brother was running around above the earth in the London area and the other vampire wasn’t bothering to shield his powers, either.

“Or,” Dawn added hopefully, fishing for more information, “there was that phone message you accessed after waking up?”

“There was that, as well.”

“What was it about?”

He hesitated, still so unused to sharing information with her, even after so much time had passed.

A whole year after that terrible night.

Flashes of seeing Costin crumpled on the floor of Benedikte’s quarters, his borrowed body—Jonah’s body—slick with blood, his soul shut away by the strange bargain he’d made with a higher power so Costin might find a state of grace after erasing each and every Underground in existence.

A soldier with a mission to win back his own soul.

She stood, going to him. It was as if there was a magnetic pull, a link between a master gone human and her progeny.

A force neither of them could fight.

She got so close that heat vibrated between their bodies. Trembles cascaded down her length, melting her under the skin until need pooled low in her belly, pulsing.

Hungering.

Always hungering . . .

She folded her arms over her midsection, as if to contain her constant desire for him. “When I tricked the Master into making me a vampire so I could exchange with you and save you, I really thought it was the only way.”

“I know.” He touched her hair, which she had worn long and loose tonight, just the way he liked it.

Leaning into his palm, she felt his preternaturally soft skin hiding a harder layer beneath.

She closed her eyes. Sometimes it was hard to see Jonah’s face with Costin peering out from behind the facade.

“It sounds like you’re okay with the way things are,” she said, “but remember, we’ve got Awareness—or whatever it is that can open your mind to mine now. Don’t bother sugarcoating.”

He drifted his fingers from her hair to her face, to the cheek where she used to have a blazing scar from a fight with the vampire Robby Pennybaker. But becoming a vampire herself, even for a short time, had healed all the outer wounds except for the ones she’d gotten recently.

Yet the so-called healing had also left behind a stain in her returned soul, a heaviness.

She almost gave in to the slump of it when Costin used their Awareness to come in to her. He was light, drifting through her head like a brushstroke of bright color.

The old Dawn would’ve closed him off, just for the sake of defending what remained of herself, so she fought the instinct.

As he continued easing into her—now a shimmer, now an invisible spark—her muscles went liquid. Yet this wasn’t anything like the times in L.A. when he’d entered her for sexual gratification, when he’d fed and rooted off of her very humanity. The welcome invasion wasn’t as carnal now. It was . . .

What? More intimate?

It couldn’t be. She wasn’t built for intimacy, and she’d spent a long time proving it to herself.

As he went deeper, her heartbeat escalated, pushing at her from the inside out.

“Are you still hungry?” she asked. “You didn’t get much blood earlier.”

Usually when he bit her, he took only a little, just enough to satisfy. Then he’d move on to one of the blood bags he quietly secured from a blood-bank contact.

But Dawn’s own blood did something for him that the others didn’t—he liked the taste, the immediacy.

Maybe even the intimacy.

His fingers skimmed to her eyebrow, where she’d once proudly worn a scar from a stunt gag. A badge from what seemed like another lifetime.

“You are generous for a woman who had to fend off a starving creature less than a half hour ago,” he said.

“I know that you won’t always have to feed so regularly. It’s just another thing we’ll have to trip through.”

He trailed his fingers down to her lips, and she automatically reached up to place her hand over the back of his.

Cool skin,
she thought, knowing how she could heat it up. Desperate to do it.

An ache drilled between her legs. His appetite was her appetite.

“I say we try again,” Dawn murmured against his fingertips.

He started to draw his hand away, but she grabbed his wrist, keeping him where she wanted him.

With every hammering beat of her pulse, memory stamped her, formed from the moment she’d felt him awaken beside her in bed tonight.

As she had slowly stretched to consciousness, he’d checked messages on a cell phone registered to Jonah. Afterward, more excited than usual, he’d kissed her neck, then gone lower, over her chest, dragging up her nightgown along the way. His fangs hadn’t emerged yet, so she’d helped him rev up by squirming under his mouth as he’d tasted the skin of her stomach, her belly, then the slickness of her sex.

Shuddering, she’d encouraged him by parting her legs, her heartbeat thudding so loudly that it had blocked—or maybe welcomed—the danger of having him in such a vulnerable place.

Normally she was good about guiding him to slow satiation, but tonight, he’d gotten more quickly stimulated than usual.

The phone message,
she’d thought. It had to have played a part. . . .

Before she’d been ready, he’d reared back his head, revealing fangs fully primed and aimed at her femoral artery.

But it was the silver fierceness in his eyes that had warned her to dodge out from under him, leaving her with a deep gouge from his fang on her lower thigh.

She hadn’t recognized this level of wildness in him before, even though they’d both been concerned about his appetite getting to this point. That’s why they kept a crucifix under the bed, among other easy-access places around the room. As a newer vampire who was slightly more powerful than one of the lower Groupies from the Hollywood Underground, Costin had found through controlled experimentation that he was susceptible to a holy-item stunning, and it had put the kibosh on this particular feeding.

Now she whispered against his fingers. “Just take a drink. I’ll be okay.”

His body tensed, resisting like he always did. “What if—”

“We’ll deal. But we’ve got too much to do for you to be at low power. Those twinges you had last night are stronger than ever now that we’ve narrowed down a London location. And heck knows that Kiko’s visions—when he gets them—haven’t panned out lately.”

Even though the process of isolating this new Underground was taking forever, she knew that a search usually lasted much longer for Costin. After he’d gotten his first twinge for this Underground—this master must’ve been visiting the U.S., outside his regular area—they had followed the vibes eastward, combing their way from L.A. to the Midwest to New York to Ireland, Scotland, and finally, south to London. Now that they had homed in on this city, the vibes were more solid than he’d experienced with many other Undergrounds. It made them wonder if this one might be relatively careless.

Or if this community might be even stronger than the others.

“You’re sick of waiting, are you?” he asked. “You’re eager for a fight?”

She grabbed his shirt, bringing him closer to her as she leaned back against the bedpost. Its baroque etchings dug into her back, but she couldn’t have cared less—not with his heady presence searing into her.

His mouth was a breath away from hers, and when she spoke, the moist heat of her deflected words made her lips tingle.

“I’m on pins and needles to get this started,” she said, raising her mouth so that her lower lip touched his.

She rubbed it against his mouth as his eyes misted with a hint of the silver he’d inherited from her—from the Hollywood line of vampires.

“Then what are your pugilistic plans for the night?” he asked, slipping one of his hands to her waist.

Lust.

Need.

The contact branded her skin, even with the linen of her gown between them. Her sex throbbed, damp and ready.

“The usual,” she said. “See if Kiko’s mind is clear enough to guide us through a psychic stroll down an alley we haven’t combed before. Maybe get in some physical training. Troll the Internet for more possible subterranean havens.”

“That’s assuming Kiko hasn’t indulged.”

The reminder of how their team’s psychic had gradually gone back to a reliance on pain pills, in spite of all his best efforts, pinched at Dawn.

Costin sensed her distress, then soothed her with a caress of mental warmth.

Let us not worry about Kiko.
He silently spoke via their Awareness.
Not right now.

Wave upon wave of his shared thoughts flowed into Dawn, weakening and strengthening her at the same time, tearing her apart with the agony of wanting him.

When he rested his forehead against hers, she clung to his shirt all the tighter. “I wish I could stop worrying.”

“Tonight you will.”

His slow smile made her slide down the bedpost an inch.

“Why?” she asked.

“The message left for me on the phone.”

He was ready to tell her now, and the knowledge heated her. But if she got too greedy and tried to search his mind for more, he would only block her.

Blood coming to a simmer, she twisted his shirt.

He leaned his forehead against hers. “The caller was a woman who claims to know where the bodies of some vampire victims have been buried.”

She inhaled sharply, then asked, “Underground vamps?”

“Not necessarily.”

Still. “I knew your excitement during the feeding had to be something out of the ordinary.”

“Always picking up on the clues.” He was stroking her neck now. “Your detective work is most worthy.”

“How did this woman know to contact us? We don’t exactly advertise our paranormal leanings. We haven’t even put out a shingle telling people we’re Limpet and Associates. Not that we ever settled on any plans to open up shop . . .”

“Limpet and Associates was a guise that worked well in L.A. I am not in a hurry to repeat the operation so soon. There are other, unofficial modes of investigating.” He rested his thumb against her jugular. “And we shall find out how this caller knows of us tonight when we meet her.”

“‘Meet’? You trust her enough to—”

“Dawn.”

In his clearly building eagerness, he gripped her waist, and something spiraled inside of her. She buried her fingers in his hair then dragged him down to her, needing to feel his mouth, needing to feed as much as he did.

As their lips touched, their thoughts mixed together: a dreamscape of melded colors, textured and separated like thin swirls of paint before spinning together and disappearing into one deep shade that existed only when she was near Costin.

Dizzy, she inhaled the scent of his clothes—those spices from ages gone by, from lands she had only recently started to visit.

Weak,
she thought. He made her so weak.

But there was also strength in knowing that she was his constant sustenance. That it was partly her blood that kept him from needing to hunt in the night.

That it was her availability that controlled the vampire within him—the creature he’d fought and despised for centuries.

Costin sucked her lower lip, ending the kiss, but still cupping her neck with one palm, his thumb nestling against the center of her throat.