Nightwalker

Seventeen

Every city has a section that police seem hesitant to enter, even ultracivilized London. In my own beloved Savannah, these dark streets, which housed the Docks, were among my favorite to stroll down. In London the dark section was far from Mayfair and Hyde Park. It grew out on the fringes of the city, filled with tightly packed, brick tenements. The air was thick and heavy in the summer heat, filled with ghosts and old, grim memories. I doubted there were many psychics in that part of town; the dead would have given them no rest. But the air pricked my skin and tingled with anticipation. You came here to get problems taken care of, one way or another.

Our taxi driver seemed grateful when we let him drop us off a couple blocks from the pub. He snatched up Danaus’s money and turned his car around, heading back to the bright lights and busy hum of traffic. We continued the rest of the way to the pub in silence, our eyes scanning the area for anything that might offer a potential threat. Beside me, I could feel the gentle throb of power emanating from Danaus. It pushed and brushed against my skin, probing as if it were trying to figure out exactly what I was.

Trying to ignore it, I felt outward with my own powers. While I couldn’t sense the naturi, in this small, six-block region I counted more than a score of magic users, even a couple of full-fledged warlocks and witches. They took note of me in the sense that they were aware of something powerful passing through their part of town, but nothing more. There were only a handful of nightwalkers in the area, all significantly younger than I was. As vampires go, I wasn’t particularly old, but finding those that had walked the earth longer had become more difficult recently. There was something very unsettling about that fact.

Six Feet Under was a dive in the truest sense of the word. It had once been a mortuary with its own crematorium, but apparently the previous owners had moved on. A neon sign flickered over the entrance of a corpse clutching a lily to his chest, a tombstone resting at his head. A bit cliché for a vampire hangout, but who was I to scoff? One of my favorite haunts back home was a vampire-owned bar called Alive One. Its clientele was almost all human, with a few of us stopping by for laughs. Pickings were better next door at a nightclub called Purgatory. Alive One was a place to warm up for an evening of feeding and debauchery.

With a name like Six Feet Under, I expected the normal goth scene of black clothes and pale skin. What I got was wall-to-wall London punk.

We elbowed our way through the crowd outside the club to the front door, where I cleared the mind of the bouncer. I wasn’t about to spend the next hour waiting in line to get into a club while the naturi were lurking. Just inside, I’d pulled my leather wallet from my back pocket when it dawned on me that I was only carrying American dollars. I’d had Charlotte procure me some Egyptians notes before leaving but no other currencies because I wasn’t sure where I would end up.

Before I could say anything, Danaus reached over my shoulder and handed the bored-looking doorman with purple hair a folded twenty-pound note. Enough to get us both in with no questions.

“Don’t worry. I’ll pay for our next date.” I walked into the bar before he could retort.

He and I paused just inside the pub, gazing over the crowd. The people were packed so tightly it was amazing anyone could breathe. It looked as if all the walls had been knocked out of the place, making it into one huge room. A long bar dominated the right wall, with customers lining the edge more than three deep. On the back wall stood a stage where a band was currently screeching and a pale waif of a man screamed into the microphone. I’ll admit I’m no great fan of punk, but fan or no fan, this was just noise.

I let my eyes dance over the crowd, looking for any sign of our prey. Before entering the pub, I had picked up the presence of two nightwalkers, but I didn’t try to identify them. Yet, in this crush, I knew I would have to use my powers to find them. There were too many people here to try to pick out Thorne and Tristan quickly by sight. Stifling a sigh of frustration, I reached out a little. It took only a second and I didn’t like what I found.

“Damn it,” I said through clenched teeth. I couldn’t catch a break.

“What?” Danaus said, turning to look at me. “Did you find him?

“Yeah, I found him.” Tristan had been easy enough to locate. The pale brown-haired vampire was seated in a circular booth off to the left of the stage. He was also the only one I could see in this place who was fashionably dressed, no doubt thanks to Sadira’s tastes for expensive things.

But the other nightwalker was just as easy to spot; I had no doubt that the pale singer clutching the microphone was Thorne. How was I supposed to get him now? I could push my way through the crowd, jump onstage and throw him through the nearest window, but I was trying not to make a scene.

“We wait,” Danaus announced in a low voice after I pointed out the singer in disgust. He muscled his way through the crowd along the back wall. Ignoring the fact that the floor crunched beneath my feet, I followed in his wake, watching the dislodged people look up angrily then sidle away when their eyes touched his face and bulging form. It was an interesting twist. For me, brute force was saved for my own kind. When it came to humans, I needed only sensual allure and a slight threat of something dark and powerful to get them to do what I wanted. But Danaus could stand in a room, and its occupants would begin to squirm. He had become what the humans equated to the grim reaper: walking death.

Ensconced in a shadowy corner, I leaned back against the poster-covered wall with my arms folded across my chest and watched our prey. It was all wrong. I checked again and again to the point that Thorne stuttered in mid-song and scanned the bar. He felt me but hadn’t pinpointed my exact location yet.

A vampire singing on a stage in front of a crowd of screaming fans. How could this have happened? From the moment we are reborn, we are all taught one thing: Stay in the shadows. Never draw attention to yourself. The longer the humans look at you, the more they will see and sense that there is something different about you. They will know you’re not human. They might not be able to comprehend what you are, but they will know.

At the end of the song, Thorne leaned forward, balancing some of his weight on the microphone stand, and hissed at the crowd, pulling back his lips and flaunting his fangs. I lurched forward, but Danaus’s hand stopped me from getting more than a couple steps away from the wall. The crowd went insane, their cheers rattling the windows and pushing me back a half step. They knew what Thorne was and they loved it. I scanned the spectators, taking in their expressions. There was no fear; just excitement and pleasure. It would have been intoxicating if it didn’t seem so wrong.

“They know?” I asked, turning to look at Danaus. The hunter stood beside me, continuing to stare up at the stage as he dropped his hand from my shoulder.

“They think it’s just an act,” he said, nodding to the undulating crowd. I looked back, my stomach twisting. If they knew the truth—that three real nightwalkers stood in their midst—would they still be celebrating? Or would they run screaming from this place that still smelled faintly of death under the layers of sweat and alcohol?

We hung back as Thorne stepped down from the stage. Followed by the rest of the band, he waded through a surge of the crowd, laughing as they ran their hands over his body and reached for him. He settled into a circular booth next to Tristan, surrounded by his fellow band members and a smattering of female groupies. I took the lead this time, threading my way there, with Danaus following close on my high heels. I needed to have this done now.

Standing in front of him, it was still hard to believe Thorne was a nightwalker. Without the slight flow of power leaking from his body, I would have said he was only a sad, thin human. He looked like someone had animated a skeleton and then carelessly thrown a draping of skin over his bones so that they would hold together. His flesh was almost a powdery white, nearly matching the bleach-blond hair that stuck out in all directions on his head. He wore a pair of skintight leather pants that only accentuated his thinness. His chest was bare, revealing every rib and bone.

He wasn’t even bothering to breathe. Any other human would have been winded after singing a full set, but he didn’t even pretend, and the people around him didn’t question it. It was like momentarily slipping into someone else’s dream. A vampire sat, open about what he was, and no one noticed or cared.

On the other hand, Tristan was what I’d come to expect a nightwalker to be. He appeared to have barely escaped his teens when he was reborn. His dark brown hair hung down to brush against his thin shoulders and his pale blue eyes watched the crowd, but his gaze seemed distant, as if his thoughts were somewhere else. He was nicely dressed in Hugo Boss, Ralph Lauren, even a little Armani, in the luxury Sadira swathed herself and those around her. Looking at him, I wondered if I’d had the same grim and unyielding appearance near the end of my first century.

“Bugger off,” snapped one of the band members. My eyes never left Thorne, who had yet to notice me. He was too busy whispering sexual promises to the pink-haired girl sitting next to him. Tristan had looked up and was closely watching me, but no expression had yet to appear on his handsome face.

“Are you Thorne?” I demanded, preferring to ignore everyone else.

The nightwalker reluctantly pulled away from the woman and looked up at me. A broad smile lit his face, revealing his fangs again, as his eyes slid down the length of my body. “For you, I can be anybody,” he said in a thick, cockney accent.

The line would have been far more effective delivered by the likes of Pierce Brosnan or even with a lovely Scottish burr, like Sean Connery’s. From Thorne it was just pathetic.

“Are you Thorne, child of Tabor?” I demanded. That definitely caught his attention. He stared at my face, his eyes narrowing as he concentrated. There was a faint surge of power from him for only a second before his eyes widened.

“Bloody hell, another vampire!” He laughed, throwing his head back. Everyone at the table looked at me in a new light, questioning. They were weighing me, wondering what Thorne had meant. The tension around the table grew slightly, but not enough to indicate any real concern. The bassist narrowed his gaze on me then looked over at another band member, trying to decide if they should be worried. To them, I was another imposter.

“We need to talk,” I said over his laughter. “Now.”

“As you can see, I’m a mite busy.” Lounging insolently in the booth, he linked his hands behind his head and stretched out his legs beneath the table. The pink-haired woman in the ripped white T-shirt leaned over and placed her head against his chest, wrapping her arms possessively around his waist. She shot me a dark, warning look. I wanted to laugh. How could I want some toothpick when I had Danaus hovering in the shadows? Of course, my “plaything” could boil my insides with a thought. But that play date would come only if we survived the next few days.

“Send them away.”

“Who the hell do you think you are, you damn wanker?” he demanded, sitting up.

I leaned forward, slamming my hands down on the dirty tabletop with enough force to rattle the pints of beer. The amber liquid sloshed a bit on the table and everyone jumped backward. “I am Mira, and your better.” He jerked back suddenly, his heels digging into the floor as he half stood. He was trapped between the booth and the table, looking like he was about to start climbing the wall to get away from me.

“Fire Starter,” Tristan whispered in a tone that sounded a touch too much like awe. His eyes widened and his pale lips parted slightly as he stared at me with new interest. I ignored him for the moment. My main concern was that I now had Thorne’s attention.

“My reputation precedes me,” I said tightly. “Get rid of them before I throw your bony ass through the wall.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” he snickered, his eyes darting off toward the huge crowded that danced and screamed behind us. Sticking to the creed of remaining in the shadows would not include throwing a person through a brick wall, but what Thorne didn’t know was that I had a penchant for pushing the limits of the shadow dance we maintained.

“She’ll do it,” Tristan said evenly, his wide eyes never leaving my face.

Thorne hesitated a moment, staring at me through narrowed, beady eyes. “Get out of here,” he grumbled in a low voice. I glared at him, resisting the urge to grab for his throat when he looked over at his companions. “Get out of here!” he repeated. He gave the woman at his side a hard shove, sending two people to the floor. The others scrambled out of the booth, grabbing their drinks as they pushed their way into the crowd.