Chapter One

There was no sign on the abandoned church, but someone had scribbled “Let us Prey” above the main doors. As a Catholic, I didn’t approve. As someone bent on doing exactly that, it seemed oddly appropriate.

I pushed open the heavy wooden doors and went in. It looked like I’d guessed right in going with office chic when I’d gotten ready for the evening. There were a minority of Goths and some tourist types in the church-turned-nightclub, but most of the crowd seemed to be composed of those recently released from corporate hell.

I fit in well enough, in a blue silk tank top I sweated through within five minutes and a short black skirt. The tank matched the new streaks in my short brown hair; the skirt matched my eyes. I got a beer at the bar and wandered around, looking for trouble.

It didn’t take long to find it. The club was populated mostly by humans, but it was owned by a vampire. A group of the fashionable undead showed up every night for the all-you-can-eat buffet, and from the look of things, the owner was dining early.

He had a pretty brunette in a corner, his hand up her skirt and his fangs in her throat. That was frowned upon by the Vampire Senate, the ruling body for North American vampires, who preferred feedings to be kept nice and subtle. But then, this guy had already proven he wasn’t too concerned about the Senate’s point of view—about a lot of things. That was why I was here. They intended to teach a lesson, and to make it memorable.

The woman was facing out toward the crowd, and by the time I reached them, he’d managed to get her dress open all the way down. She wasn’t wearing much underneath, unless you counted the scrap of black lace he had his hand inside. He did something that caused a quick, indrawn breath and a helpless shift of her hips. One of the bystanders laughed.

There were a dozen of them, all vampires, and at least a few were masters. I’d hoped to catch him alone, or at worst with two or three others. I hadn’t planned on the show, and it complicated things.

He pulled the dress off her shoulders and it slithered to the floor, over skin already so sensitized that every tiny movement was torture. She began to breathe heavily through her nose, trembling like a fever had gripped her. He hadn’t bothered to fog her mind, because it’s no fun if they aren’t terrified. And because his boys wanted to play.

Vampires have a limited ability to project thoughts, and because of my heritage, I pick them up better than most. She wouldn’t meet their eyes, wouldn’t raise her head. But she knew what they saw by the images they thoughtfully kept sending.

From a dozen perspectives, she was bombarded with images of her body, slick and shining under the lights, of the rivulets sweat had carved through the goose bumps on her skin, of her last piece of clothing being jerked down her thighs. And the pictures came in stereo, with every sound that was ripped from her throat magnified a dozen times and sent back to her. The watchers’ emotions leaked through, too: arousal, anticipation and, most of all, rising bloodlust.

That was especially true of the monster draining her, yet still she writhed back against him. And when his hands roamed over her sweat-slick skin, she moaned desperately. She was trapped in the feedback loop of sensation that went with the feeding process. It was better than a drug as it coursed through her veins, tightening her nipples, shortening her breath and siphoning out her life.

I’d assumed that, with so many available donors, he wouldn’t choose to drain her. Body disposal was messy and time-consuming, and prompted investigations that he had every reason to avoid. But he must have liked her taste, because even as her legs gave out and she collapsed, he followed her down.

It’s crazy to interrupt a vampire when he’s feeding, when he’s at his most vulnerable and his most deadly. But then, I haven’t been sane in centuries. The toe of my boot caught his wrist, tossing it away from the girl.

“You want to dance with me,” I told him clearly, as he rounded on me with a snarl.

Odds were that no human had treated him that cavalierly before, and he clearly didn’t like it. He liked even less that some of his vamps had seen me do it. But it intrigued him, too. I was suddenly a tastier dish than the one who lay gasping like a fish out of water, the velvet of her dress crushed beneath her.

“You know, I think you’re right,” he said, flashing me a winning smile with more than a hint of power behind it.

I ignored it and tangled a fist in his shirt so I wouldn’t have to touch him. I dragged him onto the dance floor and he didn’t try to get away. He just followed me with a glint in his eye that promised pain to come.

He had no idea.

He grinned, and his eyes dropped to my hips as I followed the beat. “You look hot.”

Unfortunately, I couldn’t say the same. His eyes were glued to my chest, maybe because it was directly in his line of sight. I’m five foot two inches, and the boots added another three inches, but that still meant he was missing a crucial element of the tall, dark and handsome stereotype. It didn’t matter, since he was missing the rest, too.

Not that he appeared to know it.

“Thanks,” I said.

He laughed. “I meant, you look like you could use a drink.”

“If we can have it in private.”

A blond eyebrow rose. “That can be arranged.”

He took my hand, towing me across the sticky dance floor, scattering the crowd like peasants before royalty. The analogy amused me, considering that he’d been born the bastard son of a pig farmer. Not that I was in any position to talk. I was the illegitimate daughter of a serving wench and a vampire. It didn’t get much trashier than that.

Of course, we’d both come a long way from our inauspicious beginnings. These days, he went by the name of Hugo Vleck and operated a successful club when he wasn’t selling illegal fey narcotics. And as for me… Well, I solve problems of the vampire kind, and Vleck was making my employer very unhappy. My job was to cheer him up. The fact that I was going to enjoy it was just a bonus.

The crowd was five thick around the bar, but we didn’t have any trouble getting served. That wasn’t too surprising since my date owned the club, but he shot me a look over his shoulder, checking to see if I was suitably impressed. I smiled and he put a hand on my ass.

“Cristal for the lady,” he told the young vamp bartender, giving me a little squeeze.

“Will you be drinking, too, sir?”

Vleck grinned, showing off his fangs. “Later.”

He and the bartender exchanged a look, while I tried to appear like someone who didn’t know that a lot of vamps prefer their alcohol straight from a victim’s veins. They say it increases the high they get from feeding, and is the only way to feel the burn with their metabolism. Vleck was clearly calculating how much more it would take to get me all the way to drunk. I could have told him there wasn’t that much booze in the world, but why spoil his evening?

He had so little of it left.

The bartender sat a champagne flute on the bar but Vleck shook his head. “I’ll take the bottle. Wrap it up.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“My place. It isn’t far.”

Wow. He must really plan to get nasty. I draped an arm around his waist, and rested my chin on his shoulder. “I don’t feel like waiting. Isn’t there somewhere we could go here?”

“Naw. The office is too small—you can barely turn around in that thing.”

“So? You’re the boss. Make some space,” I said, smiling seductively and pulling him away from the bar. Like with most crappy clubs, the bathrooms were down a dark hallway. I dragged him into the men’s room and tugged his shirt off.

He chuckled and disengaged long enough to haul a couple of guys out of a stall and throw them out the door, one with his trousers still around his knees. I leaned against a sink while he instructed one of the vamps acting as bouncers to tell everyone that the facilities were out of order. Then he turned and grabbed me by the waistband.

“Let’s see what you got.”

“Thought you’d never ask.” I smiled and shut the door with my foot.

Five minutes later, I emerged, a little out of breath but not too bad, all things considered.

The bouncer caught my eye on the way out. He seemed surprised, maybe because I was still alive. But then he grinned. “Have fun?”

“Loved him to pieces.”

I stopped by vamp central, aka the East Coast Office of the North American Vampire Senate, to get my check. The vamps usually took care of fungus like Vleck themselves, holding each master responsible for his own servants’ behavior. But the system wasn’t as perfect as they liked people to believe.

Vampires could be emancipated from their masters’ control when they reached a certain power level, freeing them from forced obedience. Others were under the control of senior-level masters on other Senates, who didn’t always care about the rules laid down by their North American counterpart. And then there were the revenants, who had had something go wrong in the Change, and ended up answering to nobody but their own twisted minds.

When any of these types started causing trouble, the Senate stepped in. And luckily for me, the current war in the supernatural community had stretched their resources. It had gotten so bad lately that they were even willing to employ a dhampir—that hated cross between a vampire and a human—on the cleanup crew. But I always got the impression that they disinfected the office after I left.

The elevator opened onto a scene of old-world elegance. Shiny cherrywood pillars surrounded a polished table set with exotic flowers, dappled by the light of an exquisite crystal chandelier. Underfoot, an inlaid marble floor in a sunburst pattern in warm shades of gold and amber anchored the scene. It would have been an attractive room, if not for the strokes of too-white meanness propping up the walls.

One of them peeled off to block my path. Waspish and fine-boned, he was wearing a close-fitting coat and knee pants of midnight blue velvet and heels an inch higher than mine. His long, pin-straight blond hair was pulled back into a queue, and he had an honest-to-God cravat. He looked like he’d stepped out of a period movie—the kind where they don’t stint on the costumes—and his expression said he smelled something bad.