On the Hunt (33 page)

Decade after decade, I always made a splash.

“Hey, you know you got a supermodel lying on the floor downstairs? The least you could do is prop her up with an Open sign in her hands or something.”

I spun around to face Vlad, my lips pressed together in an unamused pout. He grinned, showing a toothy mouth.

“You’re hysterical. Now help me. I—I don’t know what to do with her.”

Vlad followed me down the stairs and we stood over Wendi.

“I don’t know,” Vlad said, itching his chin as though he had suddenly sprouted a ZZ Top beard. “We could just eat.”

I stomped one Via Spiga peep-toe bootie. “You know we can’t do that! Not just because of UDA bylaws but because—and may I remind you—we’re
trying
to fit in here?”

Vlad, ever the obnoxious and unruly teen, slumped against the door and shot me a look of pure disdain. “Whatever.”

“I suppose I should call the police.” I pinched my bottom lip, remembering the last time I found myself with the dead and law-enforcing living—it wasn’t pretty. “Look, Vlad, everyone in my studio yesterday heard me fire Wendi, and I’m not sure if the fact that I threatened her with death was as private as I thought it was.”

This amused Vlad and he glanced back down at the body. “Go, Auntie. Finally got a little bite in your bark.”

I stomped my foot. “I didn’t kill her! But it could look a lot like I did. I did threaten her and now here she is, dead in my building.” I frowned. “All signs point to me.”

Now, this is the point in the story where I have to break in and remind you that I’m a vampire. While I don’t have any discernable body weight or a soul and can burst into flames on one overly bright day, I do have a modicum of feeling for the freshly dead—especially if their lives were cut short due to someone else’s whim, and yes, even if the dead at hand was rather vapid and annoying in life. Death is death, and in a lot of cases, it’s forever.

He snorted. “Talk about fitting in here.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We’ve been here two years, and how many dead bodies have you rolled across?”

I stepped around Wendi—gingerly, again, my belief in respecting the dead even if I threatened them with death in life. “I didn’t roll across her. I opened my door and she happened to be here.” I pointed down to the body sprawled on my hand-laid vintage subway tiles. “And here.”

“Just like you opened your sewing cupboard and your biggest rival just happened to fall out on you—wearing your scissors as an ornamental chest plate. Never bothered you before if bodies dropped, whether or not all flesh wounds pointed to you.” Vlad grinned smugly and I felt my nostrils flare.

“Sometimes you’ve got to grow up, nephew. Now, are you going to help me with this or not?”

He snapped his jaw. “I told you what I’d do.”

I was about to fly at Vlad, say something about his dorky new ascot that made him look like Count Chocula on speed, but my cell phone rang, shooting out a tropical little ditty that made Vlad’s smug grin positively glisten. I glowered at him and answered.

“Hi, Pike.”

Vlad rolled his eyes and whispered, “Ukulele music for your Hawaiian boyfriend? Isn’t that a little racist?”

“Piss off,” I mouthed back.

“Everything okay?” Pike wanted to know.

Vlad rolled his eyes and waved, then turned on his heel and slunk out the door, a little cold puff of air popping into the vestibule behind him. Then I looked down at the ruined Wendi, her pale skin looking waxy and slightly sallow, her puckered lips rimmed with an icicle blue.

“Not exactly.” I worried my bottom lip. “Would you mind coming over to the studio? Like, now?”

“Sure. Why?”

I did my best to explain about Wendi, then hung up the phone and waited for Pike to arrive. In the interim, I bit the proverbial bullet and dialed 911.

“Nine-one-one, please state the nature of your emergency.”

I turned my back on Wendi, not wanting to face her broken body for another second, and started to pace. “Uh, murder?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, what was that?”

“There’s been a murder. Here, at my studio. A model I work with has been killed.”

“Is she breathing?”

I glanced over my shoulder as though I needed the reaffirmation that Wendi was indeed not breathing—and the phone went clattering to the floor.

“Hello? Hello? Ma’am? Ma’am?” The 911 operator’s nasal voice filled up the vestibule and mingled with Wendi’s ragged breathing as she fought to push herself up. Her hair swung around her and I could see now that the gash at her hairline was topical—certainly not what killed her. No, that would be the gaping flesh wound that started just behind her left ear and ended a half inch above her collarbone.

“Son of a bitch,” I huffed as Wendi blinked at me, the life in her eyes hazy but relighting.

She patted her head. “What happened?”

I clapped a hand to my forehead, feeling something in there start to throb. The only thing worse than supermodels hitting on my boyfriend? Supermodels who’ve had their throats nearly torn out, but not enough to kill them.

Suddenly, I was dealing with a vampire. Supermodel. A vampire supermodel.

If I wasn’t damned before, I certainly was now.

“Well, Wendi, it seems that you’ve been . . .” I was picking my words carefully, trying to come up with the best way to let the little half-dead twit know that she was hovering in that odd space between undead and underdead. If I could get a hold of her and just keep her under wraps and out of vein view for the next twenty-four hours, she would lapse into an honest, soul-to-heaven or Buddha or whatever the religion du jour was death. It would be a tragedy for sure; I could already see the headlines blaring,
Beautiful Supermodel a Victim of Homicide
. But if I let her go and find someone to feed off—or worse yet, gave her the half-second thought of feeding from me—I would have borne a new vampire—one whose obnoxiousness in death could only be compounded in her afterlife.

I couldn’t let that happen.

I watched as she straightened. Even flat-footed, she was a whole head taller than me. Her size, combined with even a few drops of the superhuman strength we vamps possess—and she wasn’t full-fledged, not by a long shot—could be enough to put a flush on my cheeks if we came to blows and would be more than enough to overpower a regular human being.

Wendi opened her mouth and pressed her fingers against her teeth like a kid with a loose tooth. I saw her run the faint point of one of her emerging incisors under her index finger, the skin catching and slicing open neatly. Instinctively, her tongue went to the cut and lapped up the tiny bubble of blood that appeared and instantly, her eyes appeared slightly brighter, her cheeks that much less pale. She was drinking her own blood and she obviously liked the taste. Each sip stole away an inch of her life, but shored up her afterlife. It was an odd, unnatural dance, but it happened this way when a breather became a Halfling—literally a half-bred vampire hovering in the spot between life and death, obsessed with drinking the one thing, the only thing that could save their life. The Halfling becomes a vampire when they choose life force—blood—over their own soul.

I saw the afterlife twitching in Wendi’s facial features and remembered my own becoming. It was like going to sleep in a black-and-white world and waking up in Technicolor. Everything was brighter and louder and sharper; smells were more pungent, sweet, and engulfing. It was like being a child—all the wonder, the hunger, the lust—while being old enough to appreciate it. At that point, you see the body was a shell: Your skin goes from warm and pink to hard and cold with a marble-like sheen. There’s no heartbeat, no breath, but whatever is inside is thrumming at a frenetic pace, awakened to a plain of—of
otherness
that didn’t exist before. It was intoxicating—and terrifying—but at some point I envied Wendi, envied her these moments of newness when everything beckoned and thrived. Being damned seemed like a sweet, sweet gift then, but after years, then decades, then centuries, the colors fade, the smells are sickening constants, the sounds reminders of a life you can emulate but not actually live.

“I feel so good,” Wendi said, her lips stained strawberry red with her own blood. “Everything seems so different.” She reached out to touch me, as if making sure I was there, but I dodged back.

“It is different,” I said to her.

“I feel alive.”

I moistened my lips and started again. “You’re not alive, Wendi. You’re dead.”

Her eyes snapped to me and flashed with hard anger. “I’m not dead. I’m standing right here, right here with you.” She paused, suddenly smiling. “You look so bright.”

I knew her eyes were refocusing, recalibrating the veil that hangs over all breathers. We exist—we vampires, plus all other manner of demon, werewolf, troll, or other—amongst breathers and we always have. It is simply a magical veil and a breather’s logic that makes us “disappear.” You don’t expect to see a Minotaur directing traffic and so you don’t. Your eyes tell you it’s simply a burly police officer and you should lay off the caffeine. Ditto with the paper “boy” whose backward hat and surly disposition hide a pair of horns and the horrific stench of troll.

Now Wendi was seeing the world for what it truly was.

“Everything is different,” she breathed again, holding up her own hands, touching her own skin in wonder. “Why is it so different?”

I pinched the bridge of my nose wondering how I was going to explain the whole thing and toss in the “thanks for playing, but it’s time to go home” phrase when the clatter of the front door stopped me. I spun on my heel and did a mental head slap.

Pike.

“What the—?” He paused in the doorway, eyes scanning the pooled blood on the tile, then taking in me and Wendi. She licked her lips, her newfound hunger palpable, throbbing with every audible beat of Pike’s heart.

“Pike . . .” Wendi’s voice was a near growl, sexy and dripping with want. She took a step toward him and her whole body arched forward, ready to close the distance. I immediately held out my hands, palms pressed outward—one against Pike’s firm, warm chest while his heartbeat thumped against my palm, the other hand on Wendi, her chest lukewarm but hard as granite, her heart struggling to beat from somewhere deep inside, layers under the change.

Wendi’s eyes went to my hand, to my outstretched arm. There was confusion and something like hurt in her eyes. “I want Pike,” she said, her voice like a spoilt child.

“Get out of here, Pike. She’s a vampire.”

Pike stumbled backward a few inches. “She’s a what?”

But the word was snatched out of the air by the sound of Wendi launching herself from the bottom step right across me and directly to Pike. I saw her mouth open, saw the budding edges of those two new fangs cutting through her bright pink gums, her own blood pooling and dribbling over her chin.

I’ve been a vampire longer than I’ve been anything else, and so our speed is more than second nature to me. I sliced in front of the newbie, landing an elbow to her chest with such force that she snapped backward, her bony model back hitting the wall with a solid smack. She slid down the wall in a crumple that lasted only a few seconds. Then she was back on her feet, a blur of blue jeans and bloodstained hair as she whipped by Pike and disappeared out the front door and into the Manhattan morning.

“What the fuck just happened here?”

“I would like to know the same thing,” I said. “But, in a nutshell, someone attacked Wendi and left her for dead. Or undead. Now we have to go find her.”

“Wait. A vampire attacked her?”

I cocked my head, looking at the smears of dried blood that had oozed into my once-gleaming grout. “I’m not sure. The attack may have happened first, the vampire second. If it was a complete vampire attack, there wouldn’t be this much wasted blood.”

I hated myself for it, but my eyes stayed locked on the blood, the little pools that had dripped into low spots in the tile beginning to congeal. I had eaten already but my mouth started to water.

“Nina?”

I snapped to attention. “Yeah, sorry. We’ve got to go, Pike. We have to find her.”

I pushed Pike aside and went to the door, but he stopped me with a hand on my arm. “Hey, she’s a vampire on foot. How far could she have gotten? It’s not like she can fly.”

The smugness in his voice didn’t go unnoticed, but being the bigger person and the better of two supernatural creatures (and vampires are quite fast, let me assure you), I let it go. Instead, I pushed open the door and gestured to the deserted street. “She can be halfway to Brooklyn by now. Come on.”

“Why is it so important we find her? Isn’t she just going to, I don’t know, run out into some sunlight and self-combust?”

I narrowed my eyes. “It’s a wonder your mother didn’t toss you out of the nest when you were hatched.”

Pike let out a slightly audible growl, his eyebrows going low. “I wasn’t hatched. I just meant that aren’t new vampires meant to be a little squirrely?”

“Squirrely, not stupid. And she can do a hell of a lot of damage. We need to find Wendi before she attacks anyone else or goes back to her sire. People can’t just go around making vampires willy-nilly. It’s against the rules.”

“Rules?”

I shook my head, going for the door. “It’s complicated.”

Pike clapped a hand on my shoulder, pulling me back into the vestibule. “No, that’s complicated.”

I glanced to where he was pointing and groaned. I had been so preoccupied that I must not have heard the sirens and now, a police car was stopped in the middle of the street, flanked by a fire truck and an ambulance. I watched in horror as car doors flung open and uniformed officers jumped out, all poised and ready to move, each with guns at the ready.

“How did they know?”

Pike leaned down and snatched my cell phone from the floor. “Nine-one-one?”

“Crap.” I pasted on a sheepish smile and pushed open the smoked glass door just enough to shimmy out but not enough to expose the smears of blood undead Wendi had left behind.

I batted my eyelashes and kept to the shade of the awning over the building’s large windows. “Is there a problem, Officer?”

I hoped my smile didn’t sink, but my heart did when I saw the officer who was striding toward me.

“Oh. Officer Moyer.”

Now, I have nothing against cops. Though I prefer firefighters (mainly for their calendar potential), I have a soft spot for cops, too—I just wasn’t all too keen on running into the same handful of officers over and over again, particularly at crime scenes. Tends to make a girl look suspicious, and the last time I had the good fortune to chat with Moyer, he was examining a pair of wardrobe shears that belonged to me . . . and that were firmly implanted in the chest of one of my biggest rivals.

He really got the wrong impression of me.

If Officer Moyer recognized me, he didn’t comment on it. He was all business. “We received a call about an incident here. Someone called nine-one-one?”

I forced a blush. “I’m so very sorry, that was me. I—it was a scare. I thought I saw someone, turns out I was wrong.”

“You told the nine-one-one operator, and I quote,” Moyer started, pulling out his every-cop-everywhere-has notebook, “
There’s been a murder here at the studio. One of the models that I work with.
” His eyes flicked from the notebook back to me, one eyebrow cocked.

“Yes. Right. I did call and say . . . that, but it turns out she was just sleeping. She had fallen asleep and I thought she was dead. Whoops!” I clasped my hands and did one of those silly-me looks and giggled. “Wendi’s quite the hard sleeper. Supermodels, huh? Who knew?”

I angled myself just enough to block the giant bloodspot while giving myself a sweeping view of the street. I thought perhaps I could spot Wendi banging her head into a plate-glass window or trying to feed off a fire hydrant (the girl wasn’t exactly a brain surgeon in life), but no such luck. The street was empty and there wasn’t a single clue as to which direction she might have gone.

Moyer took a step toward me, his giant cop head blocking my view, his eyes narrowed as though I would throw myself at his feet and confess any and every trespass I’d ever made. I held his gaze until he broke away, edging a chin toward the door behind me.

“That Pike?”

Pike had a history with the NYPD as an occasional crime scene photographer. My mind was ticking, thinking how best to use that to my advantage. All I came up with was a tiny tremor of annoyance that Pike hadn’t come striding out to save the day with some sort of inside joke or doughnut or something.

“Yeah, of course. We’re friends. Acquaintances. We do business together. We’re friends.” I was happy to steer the conversation away from Wendi. So happy that I babbled like an idiot, apparently.

Moyer nodded. “Was he here when you called in the murder?”

I bit down hard, working to keep my expression light and pleasant. “When I called in what I thought was a death? No, no, he just got here. You know, on time, ready to work with Wendi.”

“Why don’t you go ahead and send Wendi and Pike out here, just so I can get everything squared away.”

“Of course I can send Pike out. I’ll do that right away.”

“And Wendi.”

“Wendi.” I blinked, then focused directly on Moyer. I could feel my glamour—a sexy little vampire superpower that is occasionally used (responsibly, of course) when one might need to sway the opinion of a breather in the vicinity—start to ramp up. Immediately, Officer Moyer’s shoulders relaxed, dropping a half-inch from his earlobes. His belly eased out and his back swayed the slightest, his eyes getting the telltale glaze of being wholly under my “spell.”

“I would like nothing more than to send Wendi out to you, Officer, but she’s inside getting ready for her photo shoot. We’re on a really, really tight schedule.” I accented all the right words, seeing Moyer’s jaw go slack each time my lips moved. I kept my eyes on him while I straightened his collar, my long, pale pink nails striking against the blue of his shirt. His eyes followed my every motion, and his breathing went low and ragged. “So you see, I could send her out, but it would really make things hard on me, cutting into my precious, precious time an’ all.”

Moyer swallowed, eyes still wide as saucers, Adam’s apple bobbing slowly in his throat. “That’s fine, then.”

I held the glamour until he turned on the heel of his department-issued boot and locked himself in his squad car, starting a parade of first responders down the street and out of my life.

“Whew,” Pike said, coming up over my shoulder. “Glad that’s done.”

“Yeah, thanks for stepping in.”

Pike didn’t back down, which grated on my nerves but kicked my body into sexual overdrive. “You look like the kind of girl who can handle her man.”

“Oh, I can handle a man. Any man. But now I’m more concerned about a lady. Are you coming with me to find Wendi or not?”