Demon's Kiss

And instead of feeling better, she just felt more pain. Oh, the rage was gone. She’d sated that. Temporarily. But not the hurt. Nothing could ease the hurt. How could she still want him, even while wanting to kill him?

“Maybe I’ll just have to kill him, then. Thanks to that gossipy bitch, I have a pretty good idea where he is.” Unfortunately, there wasn’t time for traveling tonight. It would be daylight by the time she dumped the body in the swamp and made her way to the safety of her home.

She put the car into gear, spun the tires a little as she pulled away from the curb and cranked the volume on the MP3, choosing the playlist she’d named Madder than Hell. The first song to come on was Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughtta Know.” Fitting.

…you told me you’d hold me until you died—till you died—but you’re still alive!

She was going to do it, she thought. She was going to find him, hunt him down and make him pay. Make him suffer the way he’d made her suffer. Sure, she’d been too devastated at first to think of vengeance. But that part was over. Now she was just fucking angry.

She was going to kill the bastard, and while she was at it, she was going to get her money back. Tonight, just as soon as the sun set and darkness fell, she was going on the hunt for Jack Heart, to make him pay for what he’d done to her. No one treated her that way and lived to tell the tale.

No one.

4

Roxanne O’Mally was twisted into what a nonpractitioner would have called a human pretzel when the broomstick standing beside the front door tipped over. Well, tipped over wasn’t really what it did. It hurled itself to the floor as if bent on suicide.

She frowned, then slowly untwisted, rose from her yoga mat and padded barefoot, not to mention stark naked, to the broomstick, bent and picked it up. “Company coming,” she muttered. But the emphatic nature of the message seemed to suggest there was more to it than just the traditional signal of a toppling broomstick.

Roxy would have told herself she was being overly nervous, except that she’d been having odd feelings for days, and bad dreams three nights in a row. An evil spider weaving a web in the middle of a busy sidewalk. A bear trap set and baited in the heart of a wildlife preserve. A sense of someone waiting around a corner, just out of sight, someone dangerous, about to spring, but not on her.

Roxy reclaimed her unfinished drink—a tall glass still half full of her own special blend of vegetable juices and empowering herbs. “Let’s just see about this,” she said as she pulled on a satin robe, slid her feet into matching slippers and scuffed to the table in the middle of her rain forestlike living room. She had filled the place with man-sized waterfall-fountains, tub-sized misters and more plants than furniture. She kept the humidity level at eighty percent in here. God, she loved her home.

Taking a seat, she sipped her drink, then set it down, picked up the tarot cards and began to shuffle as she thought about opening herself to messages from spirits. Then she laid the cards out in a careful pattern.

The Hermit. That card usually indicated an inner journey. But the thought that came to mind when she saw it was of her dearest friend.

The other cards that fell around it, though, didn’t make sense. He was surrounding himself with…family? But he didn’t have family. He was a loner. Someone was conspiring against him. He was in danger in the near future, but also…

“Right now.” Roxy jumped to her feet, raced to her bedroom and pulled on clothes just as fast as she could. A flowing skirt, a clingy Lycra top, a pair of bamboo sandals. She hoped it was a warm night, and pulled on a black felt shawl as she raced outside, deciding the car was a far better option than the van.

She didn’t know exactly where he was. But they had a bond, and she was counting on it to guide her to him.

God, just let it be in time.

Vampires, she thought, rolling her eyes. Sometimes they were more trouble than they were worth.

“It’s going to be daylight soon,” Reaper said. “Can you feel it?”

Seth frowned, and searched his senses. “I feel…something.”

“Describe it.”

“It’s kind of…dense. Heavy.”

“Yes, that’s the lethargy. Be aware of it, always. You must never be caught by the sun’s rays. They’ll burn you alive, Seth.”

“Okay,” Seth said as the vampire steered the car onto an exit ramp. “So we’re gonna find someplace to hole up for the day, then?”

“Yes. Tonight will be soon enough to visit this vampiress.”

“Cool.” Seth supplanted his impatience by conjuring images in his mind of where they would spend the day. Some crumbling ruin, an abandoned warehouse, maybe a crypt in a cemetery. “So tell me something, will you?” he asked.

“I might.”

“How long have you been a vampire? I mean, are you, like, centuries old?”

“Do I seem old to you?”

“Well, you seem pretty wise and pretty powerful, so yeah. I guess that makes you fairly old. That’s not an insult, is it? I mean, to a vampire?”

“Age is power. To call a vampire old is to call him powerful. It’s not an insult.”

“So?”

Reaper looked at him, narrowed his eyes, then nodded once. “I’ve been a vampire for a little more than a decade.”

“Who made you?”

Tipping his head to one side, Reaper seemed to study him, then said, “I suppose I had all the same questions when I was newly made. I wanted to know if the way I’d been brought over was unique or fairly common, what others had experienced, how many of us there were and how far back we went.”

“So? You gonna tell me?”

“I don’t know how many of us there are. I don’t know how far back we go, though I’ve heard at least as far as there has been recorded history, and beyond that, who can say? I can tell you about my transformation, though.”

“Yeah?”

He nodded. “I worked for…the government. In a covert capacity.”

“You said you were an assassin,” Seth reminded him. “Military? CIA?”

“I could tell you, but then—”

“You’d have to kill me.” Seth grinned. “You actually made a joke.”

“Just because I don’t use it often, doesn’t mean I lack the capacity for humor,” Reaper pointed out. “At any rate, I was on assignment in the Middle East, and I was ambushed by a small, disorganized band of extremists. They got lucky. I took a dozen bullets, maybe more. They left me for dead, lying on a dusty street in Syria. The shooting spree had frightened any potential on-lookers into hiding. I was alone and dancing with death right then. And that’s when she came.”

“She?”

Reaper smiled a wistful smile when he said the name. “Rhiannon. Most incredible creature you’ve ever seen. You want old, that one’s old. Her father was a freaking pharaoh.”

“No way.”

“I swear. Her real name was Rianikki, the way I hear it. She changes it every few centuries when she gets bored. And she gets bored easily. She’s got a hair-trigger temper and paper-thin patience and a black panther for a pet.”

Seth smiled slowly, fascinated, dying to hear more.

“So she leans over me, and she says to me, ‘I was honestly having a wonderful evening—it’s open mike night at the Kazbah, you know. But you had to go and get yourself shot, didn’t you? You couldn’t have waited? Even another hour?’