Chasing Shadows(3)
It was a good thing I’d had more than two hundred years to practice my poker face, otherwise I’d have probably burst out laughing. “Vivian Drake? Why does he want me to find her, so he can kill her? No thank you. Diarmid ought to know damn well I’ll never do that.”
Vangie groaned. “Saphrona, come on. She knows too much about us, which means that someone has been feeding her information. That person can only be a vampire. Now, while killing her would certainly satisfy any number of our people, including me, the problem with that is that no one can find her. She’s too carefully guarded.”
My Vivian Drake identity was indeed a very carefully crafted secret. My manuscripts—I’d written three phenomenally successful vampire novels—and my articles in Vampire were all sent in via e-mail. No one connected with publishing my work, not even my literary agent, had ever seen my face. It was for their protection as well as my own, which was why it was so difficult for anyone to find Vivian—no one knew what she looked like or where she lived. Obviously someone had tried to find her, though, given what Evangeline had just told me.
“Vangie, what good would killing her really do at this point? The damage has been done,” I said carefully.
“Unfortunately, Father agrees with you,” my sister said. “But he still wants you to find her so that we can learn who her source is.”
“And what good will that do?”
“The bastard will be killed for betraying vampire kind,” she replied simply. “If not by one of us, certainly the Ancients will take care of him.”
I suppressed a shudder. The Council of Ancients, generally referred to as the Ancients (all of them vampires who were a thousand or more years old), was the equivalent of a governing body in the vampire world. They made—and enforced—all the laws of our society. We weren’t supposed to kill conspicuously, make immortal children, or tell a human the truth about our kind. Anyone who learned vampires were real either had to be made a vampire or made vampire food. Ask a vampire and he’d probably deny it, but I knew my people feared the persecution that would likely follow being exposed, so I understood why some of them might be incensed by my books. My stories were fiction laced with a liberal dose of the truth, and the most recent article in Vampire, written specifically for the October edition because of Halloween on the 31, pretty much spelled it all out.
“Again, I have to wonder what good it will do when the damage has already been done,” I said. “Besides, has anyone ever stopped to think that maybe this Vivian Drake person is simply really imaginative? I mean, for goodness’ sake, she’s a writer—coming up with incredible stories is part of her job description, and as far as humans are concerned, that’s all her books are. Just incredible stories.”
Vangie scoffed. “Are you actually defending the traitor who is feeding her information?” she asked.
“Of course not,” I said, grabbing the coffee mug from the table as I stood. “I just don’t see the point of raising such a fuss. Going after Vivian Drake is sure to draw the kind of attention none of our people want.”
“Which is precisely why we’re not going to kill her,” Vangie said. “But we do need her to tell us who she’s getting her information from, so the traitor can be dealt with.”
“Fine, whatever,” I muttered, walking into the kitchen and over to the sink, where I rinsed out the mug. I noticed I had left the bottle of blood on the counter and grabbed it, putting it back in the fridge.
Vangie had risen and followed me, so I turned to her and asked, “What does hunting down Vivian Drake have to do with me, anyway?”
She rolled her eyes at me as she crossed her arms under her ample breasts. “Surely you can figure that one out for yourself, dear sister. You’re the only person we know of who is even remotely capable of moving around during the daytime safely.”
Actually, that was only partially true. While my human genetics had gifted me with a normal pineal gland, thus allowing me to follow a human sleep cycle, even a full vampire could be up during the day as long as he was well fed and kept blood on hand for when he felt tired. But a little known secret amongst vampires was that they were notorious procrastinators when it came to feeding; a vampire could go as many days as years he’d been turned without blood—not that anyone ever went to that extreme, because a vampire who’d gone even a month without feeding was as ravenous as a newborn. Going an extended period without blood weakened a vampire physically and mentally, so to purposely abstain for years was something I couldn’t even imagine—it would take incredible discipline. Most of the vampires I’d known in my time would never wait longer than two weeks between feedings, and it was foolish to wait even that long in my opinion. While I didn’t have to consume blood nearly as often as vamps did, I’d long ago made a practice of having at least one mug full every morning with breakfast because drinking a little blood every day gave me extra energy. Dhunphyr, of course, had escaped the crutch of backward melatonin production as completely as they had the thirst for blood. They got some of the benefits and none of the weaknesses of becoming a vampire.
But we didn’t know any immortal humans.
This, in turn, explained why Diarmid wanted me to be the one to try and locate Vivian Drake’s whereabouts—because there were so few of my kind, too.
I sighed. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but tell him I’ll think about it. That’s as much as I can give you right now. I’m not sure I really like the idea of leading him to her informant, either. I’d as much as be killing him or her myself.”
Vangie emitted a disgusted noise as she turned back for the living room. “Please spare me your self-righteous bullshit, Saphrona. If you’d get over yourself and accept what you really are, you wouldn’t have that problem, now would you?”
As she spoke, she picked up her jacket and put it on, wrapped the scarf around her head, and picked up her gloves and oversized sunglasses. Turning to where I now stood in the arched doorway to the kitchen, she queried, “Should I give Father and Lochlan your love? Or should I give them your usual sentiments and tell them you said go to hell?”
Boy, my sister could be such a bitch, I mused silently. Another sign of my incredible self control was the evenness of my voice as I said, “Like I told you, you may tell Diarmid that I will take his request under consideration. As for our brother, if you speak to him before I do, you can tell him I’m looking forward to Friday night.”
Vangie’s eyebrows winged up. “Oh? You’re actually going to spend time with a member of your family? Doing what, may I ask?”
Lochlan—whom I affectionately called Loch or Loch Ness—was my older “sibling” (older by about a hundred years), and was the only member of the family I still spoke to with any regularity. He didn’t exactly get my lifestyle either (the only time he ever drank animal blood was when he visited me), but he tolerated it as just another of my eccentricities. He liked having a sister who marched to the beat of her own drum, and he understood my need to get away from Diarmid, who was controlling, and Vangie, who was just a bitch.
“If you must know, we’re going to see a movie. Zombieland premieres Friday.”
A love of zombie movies was something Loch and I shared; he didn’t really share any interests with Vangie, which only served as another reason for her hatred of me.
I knew she wasn’t happy by the way she shoved her sunglasses onto her face and marched stiffly over to the front door. Oh well, she was just going to have to get over it.
“Not that my name is Western Union or anything, but I’ll give them the message. Good day, Saphrona.”
With that, Vangie yanked my front door open and walked through it, slamming it shut behind her. Moments later I heard her car start up and back down the driveway. Shaking my head, I turned back for the refrigerator. I might not like my younger sister, but I did hope she made it home before she passed out again—certainly the blood she had ingested would help her with that—because I so did not need Diarmid coming here pissed at me because she’d gotten injured. Not that it would be my fault. Evangeline was the fool who’d gone out during the day without feeding first. I knew our sire kept vessels, so certainly she could have called one of them and fed before leaving home.
With a sigh, I opened the refrigerator and grabbed the bottle of pig’s blood, unscrewing the cap and taking three long swallows. I’d had some that morning and I really didn’t care for it cold, but Vangie’s visit had rattled my nerves more than I realized. I still had three horses’ hooves to trim and stalls to clean out, so I was going to need the extra energy to get through the rest of the day.
Putting the cap back on, I returned the bottle to the fridge and started for the back door. Just as I was about to step outside again, my phone rang. I groaned and turned back around, heading for the cordless unit on the wall next to the refrigerator. The I.D. screen showed me a number I didn’t recognize, so I answered with a wary, “Hello?”