The Last Vampire: Book One (PAPERBACK)

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ONE

I WAS SIX YEARS OLD when I learned that human beings weren’t supposed to have red, gaping holes through their chests. That’s not the sort of lesson that a person ever wants to repeat—and yet, here I was, staring down at the corpse stuffed into my garden shed like a discarded marionette.

I’d only wanted to mow my freaking lawn. It was supposed to rain later today, and the grass in the back yard already looked ragged and unkempt. So much of my life felt out of control—was it too much to ask for nicely manicured landscaping? Around the edges of my thoughts, I could feel panic swirling, threatening to drag me back to the long-ago autumn day when a little girl lost her innocence and her mother in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

My unease had begun to build the moment I noticed the broken padlock on the shed door. That sinking feeling in the stomach; the realization that someone has been poking around in your stuff and has probably stolen whatever looked most valuable. In this case, that meant my lawnmower. Aside from that and the weed whip, the shed mostly contained a collection of seldom-used gardening tools that had seen better days.

Bracing myself for the loss of a couple hundred dollars’ worth of equipment, I’d opened the door and peered inside. The good news was that the lawnmower was still there. So were the weed whip and the plastic gas can.

The bad news was that my access to them was blocked by the collapsed body of a man with a gaping gunshot wound through his chest. He looked to be in his early thirties, with tousled black hair a bit longer than was fashionable, and a face like something from the artwork of Raphael or Michelangelo. If one of the old masters had sculpted a dark angel, it would have looked like this man—tragic and beautiful and dangerous.

He was wearing black jeans, combat boots, a white tailored shirt with a couple of buttons undone at the neck, and a black leather vest, open at the front. The shirt was ripped and soaked with blood, the stain covering the entire chest area. And the flesh beneath—

I swallowed hard.

I’d like to be able to say that I immediately sprung into action, checking his vital signs and running back to the house to grab my phone and call the police. The truth was that I stood there for a really long time, frozen, my thoughts flying away to PTSD-land like frightened, fluttering sparrows.

There was no one else in sight. Every house in this neighborhood had a privacy fence around the back yard, the blank, six-foot wooden walls giving the illusion of isolation. I could see no sign of how he got here. The gate to the yard was closed and latched. No horrific stains or bloody handprints splattered the wood.

Paralysis finally broken, I crouched down on shaky, creaking knees. I reached a trembling hand out, feeling sick, and pressed it under the dark-stubbled planes of the man’s jaw like I’d seen people do on TV. His skin was cool in the balmy afternoon air. Far cooler than it should have been. I couldn’t detect the telltale throb of a beating pulse, though I made myself feel around the side of his neck thoroughly.

For good measure, I held my hand a hairsbreadth above his nose and mouth for long seconds, checking his breathing. Nothing. The dark angel in my tool shed was long gone, his body cooling to the marble chill of the statue I’d mentally compared him to.

I felt faint. Frightened. Useless. It occurred to me all at once that I might be in danger. Had the killer brought him here to hide the body? Was a madman with a gun even now sneaking around my property, ready to silence any potential witnesses?

My heart, which had been tripping away in a shocked, thready beat, pounded into triple time. I staggered upright, backing away from the shed door, suddenly certain that a murderer was lurking on the far side of the ramshackle structure, just out of my line of sight. I shook my head, trying to clear it, the headache that had been plaguing me all day throbbing in time with my thundering pulse.

I needed to get my shit together. I was losing it, and I had to stop. Whoever had done this was probably long gone. This wasn’t rocket science. When someone dumped a dead guy on your property, you secured the scene as best you could and called the cops. I could do those things. They weren’t difficult.

So… secure the scene.

I closed the door on the grisly tableau inside. The little hinged latch was undamaged. The padlock that was supposed to secure it was broken, but when I threaded the shackle through the latch and twisted it closed, it wasn’t very obvious that it hadn’t locked properly.

I gave a final nervous look around the yard—still empty and quiet. Exercising the better part of valor, I didn’t look behind the shed to see if a murderer was crouched there. Instead, I retreated to the sliding glass patio door and yanked it open, slipping inside before closing and locking it. Why the hell had I never listened to Dad when he’d told me to buy a length of board to jam in the door’s track as an added security measure?

Dragging in deep, steadying breaths, I hurried to the kitchen and grabbed my phone off the counter. Twenty-six years old, and this was the first time I’d ever dialed emergency services, I realized.

“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?” The voice on the other end of the phone call answered promptly. She sounded bored.

“Hello. There’s… uh… there’s a dead body in my back yard shed. I was going to mow the lawn and—”

“Your name, please?”

“Zorah Bright.” I spelled it out, forestalling the inevitable question about the ‘h.’

The woman rattled off my cell phone number from the caller ID and asked me to confirm that it was correct.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Address?” she asked, still sounding like she wished her shift would hurry up and finish.

“Three-eighteen Evian Street, St. Louis, six-three-one-one-eight.”

“Thank you. Do you need an ambulance?”

I blinked. “Not… really. The guy’s dead.”

“Did you check his vital signs?”

“Yes,” I said. “His skin’s cold. No pulse. No breathing. Big hole through his chest.”

My nausea rose, and grayness threatened the edges of my vision again.

“Police and ambulance services are on their way to your location.”

Still with the ambulance. I wondered if they got a lot of people calling in dead bodies that turned out not to be dead.

“Okay,” I said, and hung up.

I felt shaky, but wired. If I tried to sit down, I knew I’d be crawling out of my skin in five minutes flat, so I paced instead. I wasn’t sure how long I’d have to wait. The idea was that they were supposed to get to you in only a few minutes, but I’d caught an exposé piece on the local news not too long ago about how slow police response in the city could be. Sometimes it took them half an hour or more. The talking heads on television had argued back and forth about how much of the problem was down to poor management, and how much was due to insufficient budgetary allocations.

No matter the cause of the problem, the practical upshot was that it might be a while.

Maybe the wait would give any murderers hiding in my back yard enough time to sneak away, so the ultimate police confrontation could take place somewhere besides my house. Preferably, someplace far, far away from here.
I checked the time on my phone obsessively, still pacing despite my throbbing head and aching body. The seven-minute mark had just passed when I heard pounding noises.

I froze, my feet abruptly glued to the worn hardwood floor. It wasn’t the pounding of police officers at my front door. There’d been no sound of sirens, and the sound was coming from the back of the house, not the front.

Heart in throat, I crept toward the sliding patio door. This hadn’t been the noise of a fist against glass. More like noise from a neighbor working on some kind of construction project. But… it had sounded closer than that. I sidled up to the wall next to the glass door, feeling vaguely ridiculous as I darted a peek into the yard.

Nothing.

The pounding came again, and I chanced a longer look, not so concerned now about trying to stay hidden.

Thump.

My eyes were drawn to the shed.

Thump, thump.

The shed door rattled against its hinges ominously.

Crash!

The latch and one of the hinges tore loose, the door half-falling open.

My jaw went slack. I stared like an idiot at the damaged shed, watching open-mouthed as a figure stepped past the twisted remains of the door. Red stained the front of his torn white shirt, drying to a darker shade of rust around the edges. He staggered a bit, catching himself on the doorframe with one hand as he looked around, clearly disoriented.

Unerringly… inevitably… his gaze settled on the glass door, peering directly at me through a too-long fringe of black hair. Even from this distance, I could see that his eyes were the same color as the ice in the center of a glacier—a blue so cold and brilliant that they seemed to be glowing from within.

I stood unmoving as he approached, those eyes pinning me like a cobra mesmerizing prey.

He’d been dead. I was sure of it. He had a freaking hole in his freaking chest, for Christ’s sake. And why wouldn’t my feet move? He stopped on the other side of the door, and we regarded each other through the flimsy barrier of glass. His eyes still glowed with that unnatural blue light.

“Open the door.”

His voice was muffled, but not so much that I couldn’t make out a panty-melting British accent. My hand crept toward the little lever that controlled the lock without conscious thought. I gasped and yanked it back just in time, appalled at myself. I would have staggered backward a step, but my feet were still rooted beneath me.

His brow furrowed as if I’d surprised him, two tiny lines marring the perfect planes of his face. “Right, then,” he muttered, and lifted a hand to the door handle. A single, sharp jerk and the inadequate lock popped open, the sliding door jumping a bit on its track in the wake of the force he’d applied.

He stepped over the threshold, frowning down at me. His skin looked like alabaster, it was so pale.

Run, I thought furiously. Why are you standing here, you idiot? Run!

“Apologies for this, pet.” His voice was low—maybe even a bit distracted. His hand, when it curled around my nape, was gentle. His skin still held that unnatural coolness. “I don’t normally eat and run.”