Maggie Shayne: Twilight Hunger

“If he does, he’ll kill us both,” said another man. “The sun’s gone down.”

“But—”

“We failed. You have to know when to admit defeat and walk away, Raymond. Otherwise you won’t live long enough to try again. After dark, they’re in control. You understand? The night is our enemy.”

Gazing through the darkness, Dante spotted the second man on the shore. The left side of his face, between the cheek and the eye, was mottled and scarred, pulling the eye itself into a grotesque pout. Higher, there was a pink patch where no hair grew on his head.

“Put the light out,” the scarred man ordered.

The other one, Raymond, obeyed. “How can he stay in the water that long? Huh? I didn’t think they could breathe underwater like freaking fish or something.”

“They can’t. But it would take a very long time for one to pass out from lack of oxygen.”

Dante pulled his arms through the water, moving silently, steadily closer, eager to rip out their throats and drain them dry. He’d lost a substantial amount of blood. He could replenish himself at their expense. The two were certainly courting his wrath.

But before he could reach them, they hurried away. He heard doors slam, a motor start up, and then saw the lights of a car as it left him. No longer bothering to move slowly or quietly, Dante swam until his knees dragged in the sand. Then he got to his feet and waded out of the cold ocean. As he stood on the shore, ankle deep in the water, stark naked and cold as stone, he looked back toward the flaming torch in the night that had been one of his favorite homes.

“I’m going to have to kill those two, whoever the hell they were.”

“Dante?”

He knew that voice, and he waited there, dripping wet, his arm screaming in pain, until Sarafina stepped out of the shadows. She was beautiful, as always. Dressed in a full skirt of black lace, scalloped at the bottom. A white peasant blouse pushed down to bare her milky shoulders. Colorful silk scarfs at her waist and in her black, curling tresses, trailing her like comets’ tails whenever she moved. She wore too much makeup. Always had. Thick black liner and dark shadow gave her a menacing appearance, and the long, curling bloodred nails added to that. But she was a Gypsy. She embraced the stereotypical image that went with the blood. It was her gimmick.

She moved closer, gripped his shoulders, making him wince, and kissed his face, his mouth. He felt her warmth and smelled a fresh kill on her breath.

“You’re all right?” she asked when she finally released him.

“I’ve got a hole in my arm, but it will keep. The bastards burned my house.”

“Did you see them?” she asked.

He nodded. “They’re gone now, or they’d be dead.”

“Did one of them have a scarred face?”

Looking at her sharply, Dante nodded. “You’ve encountered them?”

“Him, at least. He was following me one night in Rome. I’d have ripped out his throat if he hadn’t realized I’d spotted him and run like a rabbit.”

Dante sighed. “The man is a pest.”

“The man needs killing.”

Rolling his eyes, Dante managed a smile, in spite of his pain. “You think every mortal needs killing, Sarafina.”

“Thirty of our kind have been murdered in their sleep, Dante. And other fires like this one have come close to claiming more. Someone knows our secrets.”

A chill went through him—at her words, or because of the cold, he wasn’t certain which. “Let’s go someplace where I can get dry,” he told her. “We’ll talk there.”

“Yes. You’ll draw a crowd soon enough, standing out here naked.”

Taking his arm, Sarafina led him to a black limousine that was parked around a bend in the road, put him into the back seat and slid in beside him. Dante almost smiled at the extravagance.

The driver said nothing of the sopping wet, naked man his employer had apparently plucked from the waves. He didn’t even look directly into her eyes when she spoke to him. He was well trained, Dante thought. Very well. Maybe too well. Pushing a button so the glass partition opened just slightly, Sarafina said, “Take us to the apartment, pet. And turn up the heat back here.”

The driver’s only reply was a nod as the glass slid closed again. Then the car was in motion.

Sarafina picked up a large crocheted shawl and proceeded to rub Dante’s shoulders, chest and hair with it. “I think it’s that dreadful DPI,” she said. “They have to be behind this.”

Dante sent her a quelling glance, then jerked his head toward the man in the front.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, love. He can’t hear me with the partition closed, and even if he could, he wouldn’t repeat a word.”

Dante glanced again at the man in the front. He was very pale, very thin. His eyes seemed hollow. He couldn’t see the man’s throat, but the fact that he wore a turtleneck beneath his navy-blue jacket spoke volumes. Dante looked at Sarafina again. “You’re not supposed to use them as slaves, ‘fina. It’s bad form.”

She shrugged. “At least I don’t kill them outright. Unless they displease me. Stop changing the subject. What do we do about this organization?”

He shook his head slowly, debating whether to put the poor mortal out of his misery when the ride had ended. Then again, what good would it do? Sarafina would only find another whose mind she could bend to her will. The more often a vampire drank from a mortal without killing them, the more addicted the mortal became, until he was little more than a mindless subservient worm, like the driver, craving only the feel of his mistress’s fangs sinking into his flesh.

“DPI was destroyed five years ago,” he told her. “The government stopped funding the project after that. It no longer exists.”

“Then who is hunting down vampires?”

He shrugged, looking away.

“More interestingly, who is giving them their information? How do they know where we rest, where we hunt, where we live? Even DPI, with all their research, didn’t have this much information on our personal lives.” She dropped the damp black shawl on the seat between them. “That is the person we need to find, Dante. Whoever it is, we need to kill them … slowly, I think. I’d like to see them writhe for a while first.”

She pushed a button, and the glass between the front and back seats slid open once again. She leaned closer to it. “Your wrist, my pet. Your mistress is hungry.”

Smiling wanly, the driver lifted his arm, poked his hand through the opening. The sleeve of his jacket was already rolled back, and several puncture wounds littered his forearm. Gripping his forearm with both of hers, Sarafina sank her teeth into him and sucked at him for a long while. Dante looked away but couldn’t deny the hunger stirring inside him.

She lifted her head, licked her red lips clean. “Would you like some, Dante? My pet is quite delicious.”

“You’re cruel, Sarafina. Kill him and have done with it.”

She lifted her brows as if wounded, then turned her attention back to her driver. She licked his forearm clean of the trickles of blood left behind and gently rolled his sleeve down again. “Here we are, love. Pull over right here.”

He nodded, pulling the limo to a stop. Then he got out, came back and opened her door.

They were on a highway. Traffic rushed past in a blur of lights and motion. Sarafina didn’t get up. Without so much as looking at him, she said, “I want you to do something for me, love.”

“Anything,” the driver whispered. He was a tall man, Dante noted. Dark hair sprinkled with gray, a thin, angular face and a beakish nose.

“I want you turn around, and walk out into the middle of the highway.”

The driver stared at her, not directly at her eyes, but somewhere below them.