What did he want? To rape her? Mug her? Kill her?
'Get the fuck off me, you bastard!” she screamed in fury, ineffectually slapping her hands back at his knees.
He pressed her face into the pavement with inhuman strength. Grit and broken rock ground against her cheek, tearing at the corner of her mouth and eye. She gritted her teeth, growling in pain.
Air fanned over her neck, stirring the fine hairs there, sending chills down her spine. A tongue laved her and pulled back, leaving a cooling swath of flesh in its wake.
'What a tender little pig you are,” he said above her, chuckling. His grip in her hair tightened to pain, stretching her scalp until she expected to feel the sharp sting of separation.
Maggie clawed at the hand gripping her head, felt her short nails break the skin. She dug into him, desperate to pry his hand loose. He grunted and tugged her hair harder, ignoring the pain she knew she inflicted. Wrenching her head at an angle, grinding her face across the pavement, he pulled her so hard her neck bone cracked and she felt the tendons in her neck stretch painfully taut.
She ground her teeth, sucking in a sharp breath as twin blades pierced her throat. Dimly, she heard the soft pop of her skin being punctured, felt the hot rush of blood well to the surface to puddle on the pavement beneath her. A slurping, sucking sound pushed past the fog clouding her mind. Lips latched onto her. A tongue pressed into the wound, working the blood out faster.
He was eating her.
It was a nightmare she'd had ever since she'd been a child. A nightmare of cannibalism, of blood drinkers, of the undead converging on the living to devour them ... ever since watching Romero's Dawn of the Dead.
This couldn't be real. She'd been drugged somehow. She felt chemicals traveling through her system, shutting down her body. But her sight and hearing was intact. She could hear him sucking at her neck as though he were eating melting ice cream.
She'd heard of attacks with men and women having their veins slit open and blood drained, with no memory of how it had happened. She hadn't believed it. She hadn't
Not here. Not so close to her home.
Not to her.
Maggie slowly blinked, watching the growing pool of blood her attacker let slip from his lips. It looked black in the darkness, an ooze too distasteful to believe gave her life. She reached for it weakly, as if she could scoop it back into her body.
She felt the man above her stiffen. He stopped suckling at her neck and pulled away, as if studying his kill.
Maggie tried to buck him off, but she could only shrug one shoulder. She felt drugged and knew it had to be loss of blood that had her so weak. It was too much to hope she was only having a nightmare. The pain and horror were too intense to be anything other than real.
Teeth pierced her neck again, sinking deeply, blotting out the fleeting pain coursing through her neck with each heart beat.
Her vision dimmed to a pinprick, no further than her fingertips. She smelled ozone, and then her sight snapped away into nothingness.
Freshly spilt blood wafted on the air like the scent of a sumptuous feast. In his weakened state, its allure was irresistible.
Danior Blake dropped to the ground, his leather duster whipped out in the residual energy blasting around him like the wind.
The vampire feeding looked up at his approach, wiping the blood trailing down his chin with the back of his hand.
'My lord,” he said, bowing his head before standing.
'Zane.” Danior nodded, coming to stand over the body. His fangs lengthened at the spicy, sweet scent, resisting his efforts at control. The battle with the lycan, Raoul, had left him weaker than he'd supposed.
His body still bore the brunt of the fight, for his wounds would not heal completely until he'd fed.
'You have the smell of wolf on you,” Zane said.
'I've been hunting Lycan,” Danior said, meeting his gaze coolly. “You know the council has forbidden the killing of humans in the city. We don't need the attention right now.'
Zane's face did not betray his emotions, but Danior felt the fear in him. “She is different, my lord. I—'
The woman moaned, so softly it was barely a whisper of sound. Danior knelt beside her, frowning.
Humans had no immunity to vampire venom. “Did you not bite her?” he asked, touching her wound.
'I did, twice in fact. It did not paralyze her. I think if not for her blood loss, she would be fighting even now. She will not succumb to mind tricks, my lord. There would be no disguising this attack.'
Danior nodded. It was true. Only through telepathy had they controlled what humans knew of them so far. It was how they'd escaped destruction for hundreds of years.
'Her blood is strong, sweeter than any I've tasted before. She can't be allowed to turn. Will you finish her or should I?'
The council had forbidden the creation of more vampires, as well. The city was overrun with them, and no vampire would leave for fear of showing weakness. Weakness was deadly in these strained times.
“Leave. I'll take care of this mess.'
'Yes, my lord.” Zane bowed and took to the sky, leaving Danior alone with the woman.
Without the anti-coagulant of vampire saliva, the blood flow from the wound at her shoulder and neck slowed to a dribble.
She was a large woman, heavy and sturdily built. He puzzled over why she could resist the venom and why two bites along with the blood drain had not killed her almost immediately.
Her eyelids fluttered as he brushed her hair back, the corner of her mouth twitching as if she would speak. She seemed caught in some unspeakable nightmare, as horrific as reality, he surmised.
If the blood loss did not kill her, the venom coursing through her vitals could possibly turn her. She had an equal chance of either, perhaps better than most, for he'd never once seen a human resist the paralyzing effects of a vampire bite.
It was rare to turn a human. A small bite for normal feeding would result in no more than the feeling of a hangover afterward. Three bites over three days could chain a human to a vampire, leaving them addicted to the bite like a drug, but with some of the benefits of vampirism and none of the worst side effects.
Anything more than small increments was almost inevitably fatal. Those that managed to survive were forever infected with the virus that humankind knew as vampirism.
Some indefinable emotion swarmed Danior. He searched his memory but could not recall its name. Lust and hunger he knew. Anger. Rage. Desire. But this?
He shook his head and scooped the woman effortlessly into his arms.
He was curious to see the limits of her resiliency. The others would tear her apart in this state, though, so he could not take her beneath his club, nor to any other haunt of his kind.
There was only one place they feared to go—a place even he hesitated to go.
Chapter Two
Maggie woke from deep sleep completely disoriented. Her face pressed into the pillow, and she turned her head, wincing at the stiffness in her shoulders and neck. Something had awakened her—she'd heard a sound, something alien and unfamiliar. She held her breath, listening for the noise that had roused her, lying still as she tried to remember where she was.
This pillow wasn't hers. It smelled old, musty with age.
