It hadn’t taken much convincing with Kelley and Dillon. They were always up for an adventure, and when Aunt Mary offered use of the janitor’s closet at her pub in Carrollton, Dillon had tacked up that old, wrinkled Nosferatu poster with pride. Kieran began assigning them dollar comics and penny dreadfuls as “research.” Even Dillon read them, and he’d never finished a book a teacher didn’t assign him.
Then they’d grown up. By the time they were off to college, their memories of the old cramped, sweaty room with the dangling bulb that only sometimes worked were something they laughed about when they were all home for family dinner.
Because vampires weren’t real.
They’d never been real, no matter how convincing Anne Rice’s novels had been.
Then what would you call that crazy blood-drinking bitch back there?
Kieran funneled his rage into rabbit kicks against the back of the taillights. The psycho may have cut the trunk release, but he’d seen enough movies to know that wasn’t the only way out of a trunk.
They didn’t budge an inch. He screamed his frustration into the dark, musty space.
He tried to remember the crap Kelley used to spew about those crime dramas he loved so much. Whenever they were all home, he aimed these facts on their mother, who was the only woman in the family, and, according to Kelley, still at risk from being nabbed by a serial killer even in her middle age. Never get in the car. Never let him take you to a second location.
Kieran almost laughed. He didn’t fit the demographic Kelley was so certain about, but he’d undoubtedly been taken by a serial killer. And here she was, taking him to a second location. Although he couldn’t see anything from the dark trunk, he felt the familiar ride of I-10. His pride in recognizing where he was immediately replaced itself with the realization that she was taking him out of town.
Away from the bustle of New Orleans, and people who might hear him screaming from the trunk.
4
Elisabeth
The de Blancheforts were land barons. Had been long before they came to Louisiana, from Saint-Domingue, Hispaniola, in what was now called Haiti. Her great-grandfather, Etienne, brought them here, on the eve of the slave revolt that would see the power dynamic shift upon that isle forever. For the better, Elisabeth thought, though it was a tenuous topic in a family that still owned slaves until the government forced them to free them.
Some still owned slaves of another kind. Blood slaves. Lazy, greedy vampires who wanted an endless font of human blood in their own cellar. It was the only way around the rule about killing your prey, so it was enticing to some. Revolting to Elizabeth. She wished she could say she’d never participated.
Their land here, as it had been in the West Indies, was built upon the backs of slave labor. All their great plantations along River Road, like Coquillage, so striking people slowed their cars when they drove past, either not knowing or caring how that beauty was made. Elisabeth cared. Too much, her grandfather said. And not just about this.
She’d never been okay with the killing part. Her grandfather and the others said it was for their own safety and survival, but that seemed a strange argument to be made when it was safety and survival they were stealing from others. Who was entitled to it more? They didn’t need blood the way vampires in the books did. It strengthened them. Emboldened them. If they were fortunate enough to take blood from a magic dealer, it transferred those abilities, albeit temporary, but sometimes in the most unusual and fascinating ways. Drinking blood from a seer sometimes left the dhampir seeing thousands of years ahead. Her brother once brought a man back to life after drinking his healer blood. Whatever made their victim great made the dhampir greater, for a while.
But though they didn’t need blood, too long without it and they felt somehow less than... less than their best, than themselves. Diminished was the word her grandfather used. And he was right… she often did wait until she was already diminished before drinking, and that made her sloppy. It caused her to choose victims poorly and kill them ineptly. It left witnesses.
The man in her trunk continued his orchestra of panic against the back lights of her car. She wasn’t as worried about that now. They were out of New Orleans, past Kenner, and heading toward the bayou, where she could sort this problem properly.
Her grandfather had emphasized her whole life, both before and after she became a blood drinker, that there were more of “them” than vampires. Dhampir were not like the vampires of myth. They were an ancient race, their life gifted from the font of the Master’s Tree. It was there that dhampir were born, and died. Those two things worked in tandem, as new dhampir could not be created without the end of another. None knew why the Master, whoever he was, kept their numbers finite. Her grandfather seemed to think it was a limit to the magic that made them what they were; that to spread it further would be to dilute it into nothing. But it was only a guess. There were no answers. Only rules.
Too many times she’d threatened to find her own replacement and deliver them to the Master’s Tree, swapping her gift for eternal rest. Each time, her grandfather mistakenly mistook this desperation for loneliness, renewing his search for a husband she could bring into her immortality, unlike her first one.
The other de Blancheforts treated marriage in different ways. Some found mates worthy of the gift, others went through a long line of partners throughout the years. But Elisabeth desired neither. She was horrified at even the thought of bringing another innocent person into the family. For
