“Damn you!” he cried hoarsely, and then he pulled the vampire’s wrist to his mouth again and took his first step into another life.
Chapter 1
The man who had once been Jim Hewitt jackknifed into a sitting position, the nightmare still vivid in his mind. Not for the first time, he wondered why he had been plagued with the same dream since he’d been turned. He was a vampire now and everyone knew that vampires slept like the dead. Yet the nightmare tormented him night after night.
Jim Hewitt had died that horrible night and the name he’d been born with had died with him. Changing his name had seemed like a wise decision for a number of reasons, but mainly because Jim Hewitt had been a vampire hunter who now preferred to remain incognito. He had considered several alternative names before deciding on Travis Black—Travis for the man who had fathered him. And Black for the monster who had turned him. It had been one of Ronan’s aliases. It seemed only fitting to take his vampire sire’s name, as well.
“Travis.” He murmured it out loud, wondering how long it would take before he answered to it automatically. Of course, it was a moot point at the moment, since he was the only one who knew he had discarded the name he had been born with.
If he lived to be a hundred, he would never forget the horror of waking that first night and realizing it hadn’t been a bad dream. Even now, four months later, he often roused from the dark sleep feeling lost and disoriented. He was supposed to track and destroy vampires, not hide from the hunters.
As he did every night on waking, he cursed the vampire who had turned him although, to be honest, he had no one to blame but himself. If he had left the damned, blood-sucking creature and his woman alone, none of this would have happened.
Exasperated, he plowed his fingers through his hair. He had hunted the undead his whole adult life, would have sworn he knew everything there was to know about them. Just proved how wrong a man could be, he thought bitterly, and once again, he cursed Ronan for turning him and then leaving him to fend for himself. A sire was supposed to stay with his fledgling for at least a year to help him adjust to his new life, teach him how to hunt, how to find shelter, how to defend himself, if need be. A sire wasn’t supposed to abandon those he turned.
Travis swore under his breath. Sure, he knew about hunting vampires. He knew how to find them, how to immobilize them, how to destroy them.
What he didn’t know was how to be one.
“Dammit!”
He had lost more than his humanity, he thought bleakly. He had lost his family, too, as well as the few friends he’d had back home in Nevada. There was just no way in hell his old acquaintances, mostly hunters, would accept him as he was now. Being a hunter hadn’t allowed him the luxury of staying in one place long enough to really get to close to anyone other than hunters, male or female.
From time to time, he had thought about contacting Carl Overstreet. Not that he and Carl had been friends, exactly, but they had shared some wildly hairy moments together and survived.
He had met the man while shadowing Ronan and Shannah. Overstreet, who had been a freelance reporter at the time, had written a series of articles titled Vampires Among Us ~ Truth or Legend? for a national magazine. Travis, still known as Hewitt back then, had met Overstreet in a bar late one night where they had struck up an alliance of sorts. They had both been after the same thing, though for vastly different reasons. Travis had wanted to destroy a monster. Overstreet had wanted to interview one. Travis had failed in his quest. The writer had succeeded and then quit the field.
Travis shook his head. If only he had done the same. Hunting sure as hell hadn’t paid much, but he hadn’t been qualified to do anything else. Still, he had been thinking about looking for a more lucrative line of work when he’d gotten a hot tip from another hunter that Ronan was holed up in a little town in Northern California. He had followed the vampire and the woman from a discreet distance for a time and then one night he had followed his quarry into a bookstore where he’d learned that Shannah was a published author. It wasn’t until later that he discovered it was the vampire who was the writer and that the woman merely pretended to be him, though, at the time, he’d had no idea why.
If only he had stayed in Nevada and found some mundane nine-to-five job, he wouldn’t be in this predicament now, a fledgling vampire with less than forty dollars in his pocket and not a single soul he could confide in.
On the bright side, he no longer had to buy groceries. He didn’t have to worry about getting sick, so there was no longer any need for health insurance. Maybe dental, if he broke a fang, he mused with wry amusement.
On the dark side, he still had to pay rent since he didn’t want to take his rest in the ground. He had tried that once, he recalled with a grimace, and he had no desire to do it again. As his old grandmother had been fond of saying—there was no use in crying over spilt milk. For once he had to agree with her. He was what he was and there was no going back.
Or was there?
Rising, he began to pace the bedroom floor. He had never heard of a vampire returning to mortality, but that didn’t mean it had never happened. But if there was a cure, the vampire community was keeping
