Dark Lover (Black Dagger Brotherhood 1)

Wrath dropped his head into the fragrant hollow of her neck. And slowly drew his hips back. The tip of his erection slid into place beautifully, and he sheathed himself in her body with one powerful stroke.

He let out a bellow of ecstasy.

Heaven. Now he knew what heaven was like.

Chapter Nine

In his bedroom, Mr. X changed into black cargo pants and pulled on a black nylon shirt. He was satisfied by the way the meeting with the society had gone this afternoon. Every single lesser had shown up. Most of them had fallen into line well enough. A few were going to be trouble. And a small number of them had tried sucking up.

Which had gotten them nowhere.

At the conclusion of the session, he'd chosen twenty-eight more to stay in the Caldwell area, based on what he knew about their reputations and the impressions he had of them up close. Twelve of this group were on the very top of their game, and those he'd split equally into two prime squadrons. The other sixteen he'd cut into four groups of secondaries.

None of them liked the arrangement. They were used to working on their own, and the primes in particular resented being tied down. Tough. The advantage to the squadron orientation was that he could assign different parts of the city to them, establish quotas, and monitor performance more closely.

The rest he'd sent back to their outposts.

Now that he had his troops aligned and assigned, he was going to focus on the information-gathering procedure. He had an idea as to how to make it work, one he was going to beta test this evening.

Before he headed out for the night, he tossed his pit bulls two pounds of raw hamburger apiece. He liked to keep them hungry, so they were fed every other day. He'd had the dogs, both males, for about five years, and he chained them on opposite sides of his house, one in front, one in back. It was a logical arrangement from a defense perspective, but there was also the matter of expediency. He'd tied them up together once and they'd gone for each other's throats.

He picked up his bag, locked the house, and walked across his lawn. The ranch was an early-seventies nightmare of fake-brick siding and he'd purposely kept the outside ugly. He needed to fit in, and the rural neighborhood's price point wasn't breaking a hundred thousand anytime soon.

Besides, the house was immaterial. The land was what mattered. Ten acres, so he had privacy. Plus there was an old barn in back that was surrounded by trees. He'd turned that into his workshop, and the buffer of oaks and maples was going to be important.

After all, screams could carry.

He fingered his ring of keys until he got to the right one. Because he was going to be working tonight, he was leaving his only extravagance, a black Hummer, in the garage. The four-year-old Chrysler Town & Country minivan was much better cover, and it took him ten minutes to drive the POS downtown.

Caldwell's Whore Valley was a stretch of three dimly lit, trash-strewn blocks over by the suspension bridge. Traffic was heavy tonight down the corridor of iniquity, and he pulled over to watch the action under a broken light. Cars meandered the dark street, brake lights flaring as drivers inspected what was working the pavement. In the thick summer heat, the girls were out in a big way, tottering in their mile-high shoes, their br**sts and asses barely covered by easy-access clothing.

Mr. X zipped open his bag, taking out a hypodermic needle filled with heroin and a hunting knife. He hid both in the door and put the passenger-side window down before easing into the flow of cars.

He was just one of many, he thought. Another schmo, trying to get a little.

"You lookin' for a date?" he heard one of the whores call out.

"Wanna ride?" another said, shaking her ass like it was a can of paint.

On the second pass, he found what he was looking for, a blonde with long legs and a big rack.

Just the kind of whore he would have bought for himself if he'd still had an operational phallus.

He was going to enjoy this, Mr. X thought as he hit the brakes. Killing what he couldn't have anymore carried its own special satisfaction.

"Hey, sugar," she said, coming over. She put her forearms on the door and leaned in through the window. She smelled like cinnamon gum and sweaty perfume. "How you doin' tonight?"

"I could be better. What's it going to cost me to buy a smile?"

She eyed the inside of the car, his clothes. "Fifty will get you off good. Any way you like."

"That's too much." But he was just playing. She was the one he wanted.

"Forty?"

"Let me see your tits."

She flashed him.

He smiled, unlocking the doors. "What's your name?"

"Cherry Pie. But you can call me anything you like."

Mr. X drove them around the corner to a secluded spot under the bridge.

He tossed the money down on the floor at her feet, and when she bent over to pick it up, he drove the needle into the back of her neck and pushed the plunger home. Moments later she slumped like a rag doll.

Mr. X smiled and moved her back against the seat so she was sitting up. Then he tossed the needle out the window, where it joined about a dozen others, and put the van in drive.

In his underground clinic, Havers looked up from his microscope, startled out of his concentration. The grandfather clock was chiming in the corner of his lab, telling him it was time for the evening repast, but he didn't want to stop working. He put his eye back to the scope, wondering if he'd imagined what he saw. After all, desperation could be affecting his objectivity.

But no, the blood cells were living.

Breath left his lungs on a shudder.

His race was almost free.

He was almost free.

Finally, stored blood that was still viable.

As a physician, his hands had always been tied when it came to treating patients surgically and addressing certain labor and delivery complications. Real-time transfusions from vampire to vampire were possible, but as their race was scattered and their numbers small, it could be hard to find donors in a timely manner.

For centuries he'd wanted to establish a blood bank. The trouble was, vampire blood was highly unstable, and storage of it outside the body had always been impossible. Air, that life-sustaining, invisible curtain blanketing the earth, was one cause of the problem, and it didn't take a lot of those molecules to contaminate a sample. Just one or two and the plasma disintegrated, leaving the red and white blood cells to fend for themselves. Which, of course, they couldn't do.

At first it didn't make sense to him. There was oxygen in blood. That was why it was red after leaving the lungs. The discrepancy had led him to some fascinating discoveries about vampire pulmonary function, but had ultimately gotten him no closer to his objective.

He'd tried drawing the blood and channeling it immediately into an airtight container. This most obvious solution didn't work. The disintegration occurred anyway, just at a decelerated pace. This had suggested there was another factor at work, something inherent in the corporal environment that was missing when the blood was removed from the body. He'd tried isolating samples in warmth, in cold. In suspensions of saline or human plasma.

Frustration had kept his mind burning through the permutations of his experiments. He ran more tests and tried different approaches. Retried. Walked away from the project. Came back to it.

Decades passed. And more decades.

And then personal tragedy gave him a very intimate reason to solve the problem. Following the deaths in childbirth of his shellan and infant son a little over two years ago, he'd become obsessed and had started from scratch.

His own need to feed was the driver.

He usually needed to drink only every six months, because his bloodline was strong. After his beautiful Evangaline's death, he'd waited as long as he could, until he had taken to his bed with the pain of the hunger. When he'd finally asked for help, he'd hated the fact that he wanted to live badly enough to drink from another female. And he'd allowed himself to consider the feeding only because he'd been convinced that it wouldn't be as it had been with Evangaline. Surely he wouldn't betray her memory by taking pleasure in someone else's blood.

There were so many whom he had helped that it wasn't hard to find a female willing to offer herself. He'd chosen a friend who was unmated and had hoped he'd be able to keep his sadness and humiliation to himself.

It had turned out to be a nightmare. He'd held back for so long that as soon as he'd smelled blood, the predator in him had come out. He'd attacked his friend and drunk so hard, he'd had to stitch up her wrist afterward.

He'd nearly bitten her hand off.