Bitter Blood (The Morganville Vampires #13)(2)
And now, it seemed, we were forced to endure yet another would-be avenger.
I felt Oliver’s gaze on me, warm and yet challenging; for all the barriers that had fallen between us, his ambition wasn’t one of them. He demanded more of himself, and thus more of me. It was a dangerous dance, and that was part—if not most—of the attraction.
“Yes,” I said. “If they feel confident enough in their own power to openly follow yet another rabble-rouser, then I suppose we must have our own answer.” And I penned my elaborate signature, all loops and swirls and slashes, to the bottom of the formal document. In true modern-age fashion, this would be photographed, digitized, transferred to bland and simple words on a screen…but the effects were the same. The word of a ruler was law.
And I was now the uncontested ruler of Morganville. All my enemies had fallen; the sickness that had crippled vampires for so very long had been conquered at last, thanks to the intervention of humans, most notably that troublesome young Claire, apprentice to my oldest friend, Myrnin. We had likewise dispatched at last my father, Bishop, that blood-maddened beast. And just in the past few months, the cool, cruel draug, who had hunted us to the edge of extinction, had been destroyed and were no more.
Now, nothing stood between my people—the last of the vampires—and the power and status that were rightly due us.
Nothing, that was, but the too-confident pride of the humans in this town—humans I had chosen, brought together, allowed to grow and flourish and prosper in cooperation and under strict conditions; humans who had repaid me, in large part, with fear, spite, and resistance that grew stronger each year.
No more.
“No more,” Oliver said aloud, and rose to take the decree from my hand. “No more will these vassals think they can slip away in secrecy from their crimes. It’s our time, my queen. Our time to ensure our final survival.” And he captured my hand in his, bent, and touched his cool lips to my equally cool skin.
I shivered.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I believe it is.”
His lips traveled up my arm, in slow and gentle kisses, and found my neck; he unpinned my hair from its heavy crown and let it fall loose. His strong hands went around me and pulled me to him. He was as irresistible as Newton’s gravity, and I gave up politics and pride and status for the sheer, novel joy of being wanted.
And if there was a part of me, a small and hidden part, that questioned all this and understood that the more power I took for the vampires, the more the humans would rebel…well, I buried it with ruthless efficiency. I was tired of being alone, and what Oliver drew from me was pleasant, and in some measure necessary.
The old ways of Morganville…They were my past.
Oliver was my future.
Table of Contents
One: Claire
Two: Claire
Three: Claire
Four: Claire
Five: Oliver
Six: Claire
Seven: Claire
Eight: Amelie
Nine: Claire
Ten: Claire
Eleven: Myrnin
Twelve: Shane
Thirteen: Claire
Fourteen: Myrnin
Fifteen: Claire
Sixteen: Michael
Seventeen: Claire
Eighteen: Claire
ONE
CLAIRE
Claire Danvers was in a rare bad mood, and nearly getting arrested didn’t improve it.
First, her university classes hadn’t gone well at all, and then she’d had a humiliating argument with her “adviser” (she usually thought of him that way, in quotes, because he didn’t “advise” her to do anything but take boring core subjects and not challenge herself), and then she’d gotten a completely unfair B on a physics paper she knew had been letter perfect. She would have grudgingly accepted a B on something unimportant, like history, but no, it had to be in her major. And of course Professor Carlyle wasn’t in his office to talk about it.
So she wasn’t fully paying attention when she stepped off the curb. Traffic in Morganville, Texas, wasn’t exactly fast and furious, and here by Texas Prairie University, people were fully used to stopping for oblivious students.
Still, the screech of brakes surprised her and sent her stumbling back to the safety of the sidewalk, and it was only after a couple of fast breaths that she realized she’d nearly been run over by a police cruiser.
And a policeman was getting out of the car, looking grim.
As he stalked over to her she realized he was probably a vampire—he was too pale to be a human, and he had on sunglasses even here in the shade of the building. Glancing at the cruiser to confirm, she saw the extreme tinting job on the windows. Definitely vampire police. The official slogan of the police was to protect and serve, but her boyfriend called the vampire patrol the to protect and serve up for dinner patrol.
It was unusual to see one so close to the university, though. Normally, vampire cops worked at night, and closer to the center of town, where Founder’s Square was located, along with the central vamp population. Only the regular residents would see them there, and not the transient—though pretty oblivious—students.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and swallowed a rusty taste in her mouth that seemed composed of shock and entirely useless anger. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”