Suzanne McLeod - The Cold Kiss of Death

She pursed her lips, then nodded as if coming to a decision. ‘That’s what I like about you, Genevieve, you don‘t allow what’s in your blood to distract you from what’s important.’ She reached back and stroked her fingers down Darius’ smooth, muscled chest. ‘It’s something else we share.’

I clenched my hands to stop from reaching for her, not sure if I wanted to smash my fist into her face, sink my teeth into her neck, or offer my own throat to her fang-pet. ‘What. Do. You. Want?’ I said, struggling to keep my voice even.

‘To do you a favour of course.’ She smiled. ‘As a friend .’

‘I told you, we are not friends. So why would you think I want another of your favours?’

‘The last one worked out well enough, didn’t it.’ It was a statement, not a question. ‘If not for me, you wouldn’t be here, Genevieve. You would no longer be master of your own destiny. Instead, you would be blood-bonded to a vampire, your blood and your body and your magic his to use as he willed.’

Okaaay , now that was stretching things. A lot.

The Mr October mess might have ended up with the vamp whose blood-bond I’d taken dead, and nothing left but scattered ashes, but other than the ‘drinking her blood’ favour—and how much help that had actually been was still debatable—Hannah hadn’t had much to do with it. Still, it wasn’t worth the argument; she was just warming up her sales pitch, after all. We both knew that.

‘Just get on with it,’ I said, resigned. ‘Then go.’

She leaned closer. ‘You’ve got 3V, Genevieve. Everyone’s talking about it—the vamps, the witches, the blood-pets—and those that didn’t see you get bitten last month heard about it. And without a regular shot of venom—’ She pulled a sympathetic face. ‘There’s the constant headache, the hot flushes followed by agonising stomach pains, the incessant need to scratch, the heavy labouring of your heart, the extreme fatigue ...’

She sounded like one of the hard-hitting infomercials for HOPE.

‘... and that’s not even the worst, is it?’ She pointed at my new pets swimming lazily in their goldfish bowl, her face screwing up in disgust. ‘I mean, ew! Leeches! Then what’s going to happen when the cravings get too much for you? When you suffer a stroke or a heart attack? You’re sidhe, your body won’t die, it’ll recover eventually, but the cravings will shatter your mind and send you insane. Is that truly what you want?’

Did she really expect me to answer that?

‘And these aren’t the solution either.’ She placed a packet of little black pills on the counter between us; no doubt pinched from my bathroom.

She was right, taking the G-Zav—the vamp-junkies’ methadone—might work on humans, but my sidhe metabolism is too fast; the reason why I was popping the pills like they were going out of fashion.

‘Of course,’ she carried on, ‘unlike everyone else, you and I know you’ve had 3V for, oh, ten years, isn’t it now?’ She tapped the tablets. ‘And while you might be fooling them into thinking these are how you’re coping, I recognised the spell-tattoo on your hip; we both know how you’ve been satisfying your needs.’

Ri-ight! She’d seen the tattoo when she’d done me the ‘blood-drinking favour’. I’d bought an all-singing, all-dancing, all-blood-sucking Disguise spell from the Ancient One, a sorcerer who’d been around a lot longer than Hannah. Venom is so addictive that even vampires still need a regular fix, usually from other vamps—or secondhand from a convenient blood-pet—so using magic to give myself all the attributes of a vamp in order to hunt Sucker Town in safety had seemed like a good idea at the time. Trouble was, the spell might’ve been solving my venom-cravings for the last three years, but lately I’d discovered it had turned out to be not so much a disguise as a whole new body—one that already belonged to someone, a vampire called Rosa.

It was another problem on my to-sort-out list, after the vamps, my neighbours, Cosette—and now Hannah.

It was getting to be a long list.

‘But here’s the dilemma,’ Hannah continued, lowering her voice. ‘Now that Malik al-Khan has discovered you’ve been borrowing the body of his beloved Rosa, he’s not going to let you continue with that little charade, no matter how closely yours and Rosa’s bodies are entwined.’

She wasn’t wrong. Malik had threatened to kill me over Rosa’s body. But since he’d thrown away the opportunity when he’d had the chance, and had now done a vanishing act, Hannah’s assessment of my problem was out of date, as was her knowledge. It also meant he hadn’t sent her here in his place.

‘Okay, Hannah,’ I said, drily. ‘We’ve done the doom and gloom bit, so why don’t you show me the light at the end of the tunnel.’

‘Here’s your light, Genevieve.’ She reached up and cupped Darius’ face. ‘Young and handsome and so recently Gifted that he’s both biddable and controllable. And he has no master, no one to tell tales to, so no one need ever know what you do with him.’

No master? I frowned at him. That wasn’t possible, was it? Unless—? Well, maybe shacking up with an evil sorcerer had its compensations.

‘Doesn’t Darius have anything to say about it?’

She smiled up at him. ‘Do you?’

‘Yes,’ he grinned, enthusiastically flashing his fangs.

Now I remembered: Darius was a man of few words and that was his favourite. If it wasn’t for the predatory intelligence lurking in his eyes, I’d have thought him simple.

‘Think about it,’ she said softly. ‘No need for tablets, no need to be at the mercy of any vamp that takes a fancy to you, no need to do any deals with them. Freedom, independence and control of your own life. And look at him, he’s the icing on the cake.’

She could be reading my mind with her offer—in fact, I wasn’t sure she wasn’t—but even as I considered her little scenario, I knew it wouldn’t work, not in the long run. Darius might not belong to a master vamp now, but as soon as one of them found out I was using him as a venom-pet that would change. Never mind that even contemplating the role reversal bit was giving me a queasy feeling in my stomach; I was anti being a blood-slave myself, so no way did I want to own one, however willing he appeared. Then there was the other, Hannah-sized, fly in the ointment: Darius might not have a master vamp calling his shots, but he did have her—a sorcerer. Whoever she was working for, herself or someone else, she wasn’t here for my benefit.

‘So how do you think this would work then?’ I said slowly. ‘Do we split the week between us and give him the seventh night off?’

‘If that is what you want.’ She smiled.

‘I’m kind of more interested in what you want, Hannah. Like, what you were looking for and didn’t find when you searched my flat?’

She patted Darius’ chest. ‘Looks like we’ve been rumbled, my pet.’ She glanced round before giving me a rueful smile. ‘There wasn’t much to search, though—oh, don’t get me wrong, I like what you’ve done with the place, but wouldn’t you like something more—Well, some place where Darius could pop by and no one would notice, somewhere that belonged to you that wasn’t dependant on the charity of the Witches’ Council?’

Now we were getting to the cherry on top. ‘Okay, now I’m biting.’

Satisfaction flickered in her eyes. She leaned forward, eager to close the sale. ‘You were given a present from the Earl’—London’s big-cheese vamp, the vamp I’d given my blood-bond to, the vamp now thankfully waterlogged ashes—‘he gave you a Fabergé egg containing a sapphire pendant. It was one of the earliest, made in 1886 in Saint Petersburg as a gift from Tsar Alexander III to Tsarina Maria Fyodorovna, and is, according to records, now lost.’ She held her hands out. ‘All you need to do is sell it.’