The Last Vampire: Book Four (PAPERBACK)

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ONE

ONE THING ABOUT living out of a suitcase—it made moving from one place to another on short notice a fairly efficient process. Before the latest crisis, I’d felt like I was getting the hang of my new nomadic lifestyle, even considering the few weeks I’d spent staying at Dad’s hut in the titheling village in Hell.

That little jaunt had been akin to some sort of bizarre summer camp, only for humans who’d been kidnapped and replaced by Fae changelings before being bartered to the Fae’s demonic enemies as political chattel.

Before my brief walk on the Damned side, though, I’d been on the run with Ransley Thorpe, seven-hundred-year-old vampire war survivor and part-time white knight. I still didn’t know for certain what had first brought me to Rans’ attention, but for reasons of his own, he’d taken pity on a clueless demon hybrid being hunted by Unseelie Fae. If he hadn’t whisked me away from city to city, providing a false identity and a series of safe harbors for hiding out, I had little doubt that I’d be dead by now.

This particular move felt different, though. Somewhere along the way, I’d fallen for my rescuer, despite the fact that it was a total cliché. I’d done my best to hide the fact, of course. Because what would a powerful supernatural creature like him possibly want with a twenty-something waitress, whose only claim to fame was some seriously unfortunate parentage?

Answer—quite a bit… to my considerable shock. Frankly, I was still pinching myself over that one.

At any rate, now that my secret weakness for Rans was no longer a secret, everything had changed. Everything… and nothing. I was in love with the last vampire on Earth. The difference now was that I’d finally caved and told him so. I was still reeling from the fact that he hadn’t thrown it back in my face.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Rather than the polite rejection I’d expected, we’d spent a soul-searingly emotional night in his remote cottage near York, in England. By letting our guard down in such a way, we’d risked discovery and attack by the many forces that wanted to capture or kill me. But in exchange for that risk, we’d experienced the exquisite rapture of lying wrapped in each other’s arms, with no more lies between us.

And then, once the afterglow had faded, I’d looked Rans in the eye and told him that the demon he’d trusted as a friend and a mentor for centuries had been using him for his own self-serving ends.

Nigellus might have protected Rans after the genocide of the rest of the vampire race, but it now appeared he’d done so for selfish reasons, rather than out of any sense of altruism. For two hundred years, the demons had been collecting a tithe of souls from their Fae enemies in the form of human babies who’d been exchanged for Fae changelings on Earth. It had always seemed an odd form of tribute, to me—especially in the aftermath of the centuries-long conflict that Nigellus had once described as having come to a messy draw.

Now, I knew the reasoning behind it. Just before the end of the war between the Fae and the demons, all of the demon-allied vampires fell to a magical Fae weapon. Or rather… all of the vampires fell except for Rans. My vampire lover had no memory of the war or its immediate aftermath, but Nigellus had seen to it that Rans’ continued survival was a provision of the peace treaty between the two warring sides.

The Tithe to Hell was also a mandate of that treaty. In return for the souls the Fae sent them, the demons ceded control of the human realm to their enemies. It seemed a rather one-sided agreement on the surface. But I thought I understood it, now. The human tithelings were imbued with Fae magic after their time spent living in the Faerie realm of Dhuinne. Meanwhile, Nigellus had been periodically draining Rans of his blood, and erasing his memory after each violation.

That stolen vampire blood formed the basis of a drink that slowed the human tithelings’ ageing to nearly imperceptible levels, allowing them to live for centuries rather than mere decades. And now, Rans and I were reasonably sure that Nigellus and his fellow demons were ‘stockpiling’ those Fae-infused humans for the purpose of raising a new race of vampires… one that would be immune to the magic of the Fae’s vampire-killing weapon.

Nigellus had basically said as much—that the peace between the Fae and the demons wouldn’t last forever. The question was whether he intended to be the person responsible for restarting the war with the help of a Fae-resistant vampire army. And if that was, in fact, Nigellus’ intention, then what sort of timetable was he on?

The worst part of it was, Nigellus wasn’t even our biggest concern right now. Because I was apparently incapable of having fewer than three separate crises going on in my life at any given time these days, there was also the small matter of my incubus grandfather being after us.

Myrial—the gender-swapping sex demon who’d impregnated my grandmother—also appeared to be hell-bent on trashing the peace treaty. Unlike Nigellus’ approach to restarting the war, however, Myrial’s approach involved killing Rans—and thereby breaking the treaty—rather than using him to raise new vampires. I’d managed to escape from Hell to warn Rans about what was happening. But in order to do so, I’d had to leave my father behind with very little protection. To say I was worried about what Myrial might do to him in my absence was putting it mildly.

And as if that wasn’t enough, we had yet another thing to worry about, as well…

I paused in my rushed packing job, looking up as I remembered a message from Rans’ former Fae informant that I’d been supposed to pass on. Albigard had agreed to bring me here to York after I escaped Hell, but he’d asked me to tell Rans something in return. I’d completely forgotten about it until now.