Hunger Read online

  It was one thing to think a dangerous-looking guy was sexy. Actually doing something about it was another thing entirely.

  She had been jumpy, enacting all sorts of Psycho scenarios in her head, trying very hard to communicate her nerves to her sister. Of course, none of the imagined scenarios came close to the reality of his teeth ripping into her neck. So fast. So furious. And then, so achingly slow as he left her weakened to the point of death to “make” Jayne first. Horrified, she had watched their kiss turn bloody as her sister hungrily took back from Dillon some of what he had taken from them.

  Holly had been too close to death to fight as he’d forced her down and done the same to her, holding her head with both hands to steady her face.

  Afterward, she had gagged and spit and heaved. During, she had been as hungry as Jayne. Her rapidly deprived body instinctively acted to replenish itself with tainted blood.

  Tonight, Holly scrubbed quickly, not giving in to the urge to stand under her usual four-hour blast of water. From scalding to ice, she usually huddled under the spray for as long as possible. The abbreviated shower didn’t matter. She never felt clean. Niagara Falls wouldn’t cleanse away what Dillon had done to her.

  The towel was stale and rough. Did vampires buy fabric softener?

  Again, she thought of the stranger in his rumpled clothes. Vampire killers didn’t own ironing boards. She knew that much. The levity didn’t help. Though the idea that the stranger hadn’t killed her did bring with it a ghost of warmth. He would try to kill her. He might even succeed, but some part of her was buoyed by the fact that he hadn’t…yet.

  No one would ever care for her again. She was a monster walking in a dead woman’s shell, but saving her parents was a worthy goal. She wouldn’t fail them the way she had failed Jayne.

  Holly pulled on another baggy sweater. Spring would be coming soon. If she’d been alive, she would have been hitting the stores for halters and shorts and new bikinis for spring break. The idea seemed foreign. She was always cold and baggy wool hid the way her bones were beginning to show. Right now, she would trade the size-three jeans she’d never imagined she would fit into for a hot loaf of honey-wheat bread and a bowl of steaming veggie soup.

  As she fastened the button that was already drooping way beneath her navel, she almost wept to remember the crazy diets she and Jayne had tried during summers past.

  She had told the stranger she wouldn’t feed, but the hunger was growing worse as her body used up every ounce of its reserve. Dillon was right. She couldn’t starve. When she had fed it had been a compulsion she hadn’t been able to stop. She’d been able to direct her hunger toward an evil man. It didn’t make it okay, but it did stop her from going insane with remorse.

  Dillon was right. The thought spurred her on. For the first time in weeks, she pulled her key chain from its hook. Her parents’ home was in Chesterfield, Virginia. It was a four-hour drive from Hollins University. With the new reflexes at her disposal, she might make it in three.

  ***

  The gated subdivision was deceptively cozy and quiet. Vampires favored noisy, chaotic feeding grounds…dance clubs, bars, concerts, shopping malls at Christmas. Still, big, bad Marshal Dillon wouldn’t be kept out of Dodge by a flimsy gate and an aging security guard.

  Jarvis wondered what Hol—what she had thought when she’d awakened this evening. He still didn’t know what he thought. It was a hell of a time to lose his edge. Right when he’d come upon the strongest freak he’d ever encountered.

  Jarvis held the smoothly polished blade of his favorite knife in his hand. He had gone with wood because it had felt right. The fact that some people would mistake it for a carefully carved replica or a toy didn’t detract one bit from its lethal feel in his hands. He knew what it could do. He just didn’t know what had kept him from doing it to her.

  He had slipped into her room. He had watched for the almost imperceptible rise and fall of her emaciated chest. Maybe it was the illumination from a Tweety Bird nightlight that had stayed his hand. Maybe it was the way liquid detergent had dried her hair into funny little spikes.

  Of course, it could have been that he’d searched her apartment. There were soy burgers in her freezer and tofu in her frig. She had literature from every save-the-whatever organization on the planet scattered throughout the place. He had heard of vampires living on animal blood. He had never heard of abstinence. It wasn’t until he saw what kind of lifestyle she’d lived before the change that he understood why she didn’t at least sip a hamster every now and then.

  A vampire with a bleeding heart. He rolled that phrase around in his head while he waited in the shadows of a once-happy home. There would be death before morning. He would kill the vampires. He didn’t know if he could do a thing to save the Spinnakers, but he knew their daughter was dust walking. In the end, her idealistic philosophy would disappear along with her humanity. In the end, they were all nothing but blood lust and destruction. In the end…would it ever end? Something told him he didn’t want to know.

  Chapter Three

  Holly parked her Jetta by the side of the road. The beat of her heart whooshed in her ears. She was almost home. She could never go home again. Those two thoughts, at odds and heartbreaking, replayed in her brain like a crazy mantra as she headed into the woods.

  She couldn’t drive up to the gate and scare Fred Cooper out of sixty years growth. He was a security guard who was very proud of his badge, despite the fact that his temperament would have been better suited to greeting shoppers at the local department store. He definitely wasn’t prepared for vampires.

  The fence and guard station was more of a panacea against neighborhood paranoia than an actual barricade. She picked an area sheltered by trees and easily climbed up and over the metal links. A frisson of excitement teased up from her feet and across her skin. She was on her parents’ tract of land.

  She hoped Jayne hadn’t told Dillon everything about their childhood. She hoped her sister had at least given lousy directions. His knowing about their home would be another violation. The idea of his seeing her parents and knowing where they slept was almost as horrible as the idea of him hurting them.

  The vampire killer was waiting when she stepped into the backyard. There was no old playhouse or abandoned swing set to greet her. Her parents had moved to a smaller house in a newer subdivision shortly after Jayne had been accepted at Hollins. All the childhood mementos they could carry were lovingly packed and cataloged in Rubbermaid containers in the new garage.

  The man who hadn’t killed her was sitting on her mother’s favorite picnic table…sitting and waiting.

  “No sign of him yet.”

  The fear that she would find her parents already slaughtered eased off to hover at the edge of her senses. Not gone. Not relieved. Just waiting, like the man in front of her.

  “What is your name?” she asked suddenly. She didn’t know if it was kosher to share that information with something you were going to hunt, but she hoped he would.

  “Jarvis Winters. I’m a homicide detective.”

  “They have police for this?”

  “I should have said I was a homicide detective. Let’s say I took early retirement last year.” So much unsaid. He must have a heavy history, one he would never share with her. He was not much older than she was, so he would have been relatively new on the force, but she couldn’t picture the seasoned killer in front of her as a fresh-faced rookie. Her grandmother would have called the scarred Winters an “old soul”. Holly thought his eyes looked ancient.

  “You didn’t kill me.” It was salt in her own wound to mention it, but she did.

  “Yet,” he replied, final and ugly.

  It hurt. His cold, too calculated intention to do away with her hurt. A policeman in her parents’ backyard was ready to kill her…and she had never even gotten so much as a speeding ticket. It had been a month and she still kept forgetting that she was a monster. The hurt of the reminder made her angry. She didn’t need
threats from an ally, even a temporary one.

  “I’ve survived worse than you, Winters. It won’t be easy.”

  She felt stronger, as if she was feeding off of the love emanating from the pretty ranch-style home at her back. That love had been hers at one time. Some part of her wasn’t ready to let go of it.

  “I don’t expect it to be easy. It never is.”

  He was so calm, so confident. In his quiet, purposeful way, he was scarier than Dillon by far.

  “Have you…seen them?” She didn’t like to betray a vulnerability to him, but she needed to know.

  “I’ve spoken with them. They think I’m here on police business.”

  “They think we’re still alive.”

  “Obviously why they haven’t emptied your apartment or even turned off the power. Though I don’t know for sure that they really think it. They hope it. Strongly.”

  “I can’t let them see me like this.” Holly wrapped her arms around herself. She wanted to hide. She needed to hide. But hiding wasn’t an option.

  “It certainly won’t help. You look like hell.”

  Holly looked at Winters. His dark hair was spiked up like an ungroomed Shih Tzu. He had a five-o’clock shadow times at least two and his eyes were ringed with dark circles. His rumpled shirt looked like wash and wear and wear and wear, but even if he’d been perfectly groomed, a slightly crooked nose and the scar running across one cheek would have kept him from being considered handsome.

  Under all those wrinkled clothes, his build might be that of an underwear model crossed with a linebacker—a tackle-slide could tell a girl a lot about a man’s physique—but Jarvis Winters was no prize.

  “And you think you’re a hottie?”

  She thought his lips twitched. She thought she might knock him off his feet. Then, a scream interrupted.

  No. No. No. No. No. No.

  It was a night for mantras.

  Holly hit the backdoor with enough force to send it and her riding it like a bellyboard to the middle of the room. Her parents’ kitchen smelled like peanut-butter cookies and her mother’s White Shoulders perfume. It was also dark and empty and quiet.

  Jarvis jumped over her where she lay stunned on top of the door. He gripped his wooden knife like that guy from Psycho and headed deeper into the house. The scream had been followed by silence, but now a wet, rhythmic thumping beckoned. Holly knew what the sound meant. She made herself follow Jarvis though her first inclination was to curl up on the rough surface beneath her and retreat into a fetal daydream.

  It was too late. Dillon would be finished with both of them. Still, she pulled herself up and followed because Jarvis was no match for her Maker. And Dillon needed to die.

  It was bad. Not the blood. Not the limp bodies. It was the otherwise peaceful den that hurt her eyes. Her father’s basketball trophies, always dusty, were along one wall. The weather channel was on television. A hardback Nora Roberts novel was on the floor beside her mother’s chair. The book lay atop the laminated family tree her mother had painstakingly completed last summer with the help of her daughters and a research trip following their roots all the way to Charleston, South Carolina.

  Her mom had been born into an old Southern family, but she hadn’t seemed to notice until her children left for college and research into the Raveneaux clan filled a void. The book and the family tree were speckled red. Last summer seemed like a dream. And this was a walking nightmare.

  Dillon was reading a flyer he’d obviously pilfered from a stack that had partially toppled on top of the credenza.

  “Proactive progenitors…my kinda folks. I bet they’d love a little reunion.”

  Holly didn’t need to see the front of the flyer to know it was one like the hundreds she’d seen all around the university campus. When she was a kid they’d done the same thing when Toby had gotten lost. The cocker spaniel had turned up safe and sound in a neighbor’s yard. This time there would be no happy reward for their efforts.

  Dillon mockingly used the paper in his hand to wipe delicately at the blood on the corner of his mouth. Dab. Dab. Dab.

  Holly looked. She wasn’t going to. She was going to rip Dillon’s throat out. Maybe tear open his gut to release her parents’ blood. Something, a murmur, a gurgle, made her turn her eyes to the sight she was avoiding.

  Her father’s wheelchair was overturned and she could see where he had crawled to reach her mother’s side. Dillon had flipped him away from the woman he loved to feed on him. His face was tilted too far to the side. His familiar features were contorted in a death grimace. One clear blue eye stared up at the ceiling, stark and startling because it was the only part of him that wasn’t painted with blood.

  Her father, a man who had survived a crippling car accident only a few years ago, was dead.

  She needed to run. If not from the pain and carnage then from the glee on Dillon’s face, but the vampire killer stood in her way. He had come up behind her in fact. She realized that his warm, solid body pressed to her back was the only thing keeping her on her feet.

  “I’ll have to, Holly. I’ll have to…”

  Her name on Winters’ lips sounded strange. As if he used it involuntarily. The wooden knife he’d used to kill her sister was in his hand. Holly thought he meant to plunge it through her back and into her alien heart. The heart that was aching as it sought to regulate its beat to coincide with the heartbeats of the beast who had fed off her father.

  She thought it until the crimson-soaked form of her mother sat up.

  “Holly?” There was confusion in her mother’s voice, a wavering confusion, as if she was a shaken survivor of a plane crash…but crash survivors don’t lick the blood from their fingertips.

  “No.”

  The man behind her tensed as she uttered the denial and Dillon laughed.

  “Now, maybe you’ll admit that you need me darlin’.”

  Before Jarvis Winters could attack, before he could even try to kill her mother, Dillon had scooped up the petite woman and disappeared with a mocking display of speed fast enough to make pursuit impossible.

  ***

  Alan Spinnaker’s funeral had given testament to his popularity in the community. The trampled grass attested to the numerous feet that had passed his gravesite that day. The same people who had described him as the luckiest man on earth when he’d been pulled alive from the crumpled front seat of his small SUV after it was practically flattened by a tractor trailer, found themselves as mourners only a few short years later. Those same people who had marveled at his good fortune must now find themselves perplexed by the circumstances surrounding his death.

  Holly hadn’t been one of them. She sat on a cold stone bench with a small paved road and several rows of grave markers separating her from her father. She hadn’t been there when they’d lowered his coffin into the ground underneath the noonday sun. She hadn’t been able to cry with her grandmother or hold her hand.

  Winters was beside her. If he was the hand-holding type, her fingers would never know it.

  “Dillon’s not here.” He was the type to focus on the job at hand. Holly wiped her nose with a tissue. She might never know about the fabric softener, but vampires did buy Kleenex. “I don’t feel him.”

  Her heart hurt, but only from grief and a stunned awareness that life wasn’t what she’d thought it was.

  “But you do feel him when he’s near. That might help us find him.” Winters shifted away from her and pushed both of his hands into his pockets. Holly crumpled the tissue in her fist and rolled her own hands up in the folds of her sweater. He seemed afraid that she would reach out to him for comfort. She sniffed and rolled the woolen fabric tighter around her fists.

  She wouldn’t.

  “He’ll find me.”

  Dillon wanted her more than any living creature ever would again. The warm, solid man beside her might shy away from her touch, but Dillon, a vicious demon, wanted her. That knowledge curled into a cold, hard ball in the pit of her empty stomach.r />
  Winters was looking at her. Even though she didn’t meet his eyes, she could almost feel the weight of his gaze on her face. They were brown eyes. They were hard eyes, but she noticed without meaning to, a hint of lighter highlights which made them seem a little warmer and very…alive. Suddenly, Holly realized it wasn’t knowledge that gnawed at her stomach. It was hunger. Her hands began to tremble beneath the black yarn of her sweater.

  “It’s been four days.” He wasn’t talking about how long it had been since her father had died. He was talking about the rapist.

  “I know.”

  “I won’t let you feed.”

  “I don’t want you to.” She could hear the desperate tone in her voice and it embarrassed her, but she didn’t take it back.

  “If you starve to death, Dillon might get away. I know you were a vegetarian—”

  “Vegan,” Holly corrected and it felt surreal that she would be stepping into this familiar old conversation, here, now.

  “Not even an egg or a glass of milk.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You’ll die.” He didn’t sound like he cared particularly. More like he was noting a fact, stating the obvious.

  “I’m already dead.” He certainly didn’t need the reminder so she must have been reminding herself.

  “He has your mother.”

  Holly sprang up from the bench and walked toward the end of the cemetery that now cradled her father’s remains in damp, cold earth. Before she’d gone very far, a big hand wrapped around her upper arm and pulled her back. Now Winters touched her. She tried not to feel his body heat, but it zinged through the arm of her sweater as if the sweater wasn’t there. She could feel each warm, strong digit as if his fingers touched bare flesh.

  Hunger rose up in her, climbing out of her belly where she’d kept it hidden away. It was a dark hunger. It urged her to drink that heat, to steal it and make it hers. Worse was the very human hunger to cuddle against his heat and strength and bask in its glow. She was so very cold.