“I’m talkin to you!” The stranger grabbed her elbow, yanking Pearl back so hard her heel broke on the ice. A dumpster hit her back... and everything went wrong.
Everything always went wrong.
Chapter Two
Frantic, Pearl scrubbed her hands together under the tap. She couldn’t get the blood off fast enough. Icy water sloshed, her hands shaking so hard little drops of pink water splattered the cracked sink, leaving a macabre mess on the porcelain.
“You’ve done it this time.” Harshly whispered self-chastisement stuttered past chattering teeth. “You should have just let him have his fun.”
Acid hit the back of her throat. One gag and her stomach emptied.
Tears running from her eyes, Pearl gripped the side of the sink. Red smeared the bowl but it was nothing to the horrid puddle of bloody vomit the drain could not draw down fast enough.
A little whirlpool grew in the mess. Running water diluted the crimson from deep red to a light blush. All the while, hot tears ran down cold cheeks.
The man had tasted terrible.
Mottled bruises marked her cheek where the stranger had struck her. The back of her head was a pulped mush from the impact of the sidewalk. One look in the mirror told her there was more blood... in her hair, around her mouth, saturating the black wool of her only coat.
Torn throats made a mess.
Behind a split lip, a pair of delicate fangs remained distended. She’d been unable to retract them, too upset and far too scared.
Bloodshot from weeping, violet eyes stared back at her. “You have to wash off the blood. You have to wash your coat. You have to clean this room before anyone wakes up. Stop crying.”
A block and a half away, a corpse was being dusted by snow, the same snow that bore a pair of uneven tracks right to her door.
At her back, the communal bathroom door was locked, but it was only a matter of time before one of the other tenants knocked so they might get ready for work. It took over an hour before water off her coat ran clear, for Pearl to wash her hair in the sink, to clean up the cuts and scrapes.
The sun was rising by the time she huddled in her bed. Outside her only window, the storm raged on, and the world looked white and clean.
Pearl knew what was hidden under that snow, and in a matter of hours, so would the rest of New York.
***
Black and white photographs of the sprawled corpse filled front page news. He’d been found frozen solid, mild bruising on his arms and legs, throat torn open—bite marks identified on his neck. Beside the horror was the smiling image of a handsome man of quality reputation. Chadwick Parker: entrepreneur, man about town, and son of the powerful Judge Parker. He glowed with life in that photograph, handsome and chirpy—a real heartbreaker.
One conniving lie of a man.
Good Christian men didn’t attack seemingly defenseless women in dark alleys. They didn’t rape them.
Pearl knew better than to assume she had been the first woman he’d followed home. Over the years, how many others had he hurt?
She wasn’t sorry he was dead… but she could still taste his sour blood in her mouth, could feel him shoving his cock inside her, and felt completely unclean.
Though the man who attacked her would never be able to hurt her again, she was the one left terrified.
The police were looking for the killer. For her.
The boroughs had grabbed onto the story, the press sensationalizing every known fact regarding the grotesque murder. Though the body had not been exsanguinated, it didn’t matter. The official coroner’s report stated that long, sharp teeth had been the weapon—that they had torn through the carotid artery while gnawing a path from left to right.
It did not resemble the bite of any known animal. The bite pattern appeared human, save two fang-like incisors.
The City Daily had been the first paper to use the word vampire.
Illustrious Chadwick Parker’s death was treated as the most vicious murder New York had seen in ages. Keep your children inside after dark, your womenfolk safe. Nightmares lurked in the cold dark. No one mentioned that he’d been found with his fly open, cock out, or asked why he had been on a late night stroll through a shoddy neighborhood during a blizzard.
“Cigarette?”
Every table, every canoodling couple was whispering, boasting, making conjecture on the same thing. Her.
“Cigarette?”
Pearl had never felt physically well a time in her life, but since that man’s fetid blood had pooled in her mouth, she could hardly keep anything down.
More bones than curves in her clothes, her paunchy boss was dissatisfied with what he saw. “You look like shit.”
It wasn’t just her flagging looks. Pearl had been jumping at shadows; she’d knocked over drinks on guests. Her time at the supper club was up, her little room with its window was going to be lost, and once again, any type of life she had tried to imagine for herself had been ruined.