A Kiss of Blood: A Vamp City Novel (5 page)

Chapter Four

Q
uinn sat rigid in her seat in the back of the Jeep Wrangler as she prepared for yet another return to Hell. Zack sat beside her, asleep against the window. Arturo drove with the top up to hide his passengers as much as possible while Micah rode shotgun as the vehicle sped through the D.C. streets toward the Kennedy Center and the Boundary Circle that separated the real D.C. from Vamp City.

The scientist in her began to frown as she tried to understand how the two cities occupied the same physical space. Magic, she knew. But still . . .

She glanced at Arturo. “If you’re outside the Boundary Circle, say crossing into the District from Virginia, how do you choose whether to drive into Vamp City or remain in D.C.? Clearly, the magic doesn’t automatically pull you into V.C., or you couldn’t have reached my apartment.” Or anyplace within the space occupied by both.

Micah was the one who answered. “At the moment that we hit the Boundary Circle, the magic tries to embrace us. We can either push it away and remain in D.C. or allow it to pull us into Vamp City. There are some vamps who can’t push it away, they haven’t the ability, and are therefore always pulled in. They can only travel the parts of D.C. where the two worlds don’t overlap. Humans and weres can’t embrace the magic, so can never enter V.C. without an escort, except for those handful of humans who’ve been slipping in by accident through the sunbeams, and we have no idea why that’s happening. Traders can come and go as vampires can. Or as vampires could before the magic began to fail. They alone are not trapped by the failing magic.”

Quinn’s mind still struggled to wrap itself around the concept. “So how does that work for a car?”

Micah smiled. “You ask difficult questions, Quinn.”

“I’m a scientist.”

“Perhaps you need to think more like a sorceress. Magic is a far more potent force in Vamp City than science.”

As they reached the Kennedy Center, Quinn could see the Shimmers like a faint wall of water vapor sparkling in the moonlight across the grounds. She’d seen them all her life, nearly invisible walls in various parts of D.C. that were always in the same spots, never moving, never wavering. It wasn’t until recently that she’d realized what they were—the boundary of Vamp City. A boundary no other human, to her knowledge, could see.

The sight of it now made her pulse kick, sending a shiver of cold skating over her skin even as a flush of heat dampened the back of her neck. Because they were going in.

Arturo pulled into the Kennedy Center drive as if he were heading for the parking garage, a drive cut straight across by the Shimmer. As they neared it, she tensed. As they passed through it, the hair rose on her arms, the air prickling her skin in a cool, ticklish dance. But they were still in the real world, the Kennedy Center looming large beside her.

“What happened?” she asked.

Beside her, Zack moaned as he had every time he’d passed through a Shimmer since their escape a week and a half ago, which was another reason she suspected the magic of Vamp City was at least partially at fault for his illness.

“Nothing,” Arturo said, making a tight U-turn in the middle of the drive, and suddenly she understood. Her apartment was within the V.C. boundary. To enter Vamp City, they first had to leave it. Which they’d just done.

Now,
they were going in.

Turning off his headlights, Arturo accelerated as he drove back toward the waiting Shimmer. As they hit it, the hair rose on Quinn’s arms a second time, and darkness swallowed her, the true dark of a night world without electricity. A shiver went through her that had a little to do with the air flowing in from the open front windows, air that turned instantly cooler by a good ten degrees, and far more to do with the primal fear of being back in Vamp City.

This time, Zack’s moan sounded less like pain and more like one of relief, as if the magic had finally quit strangling him. She prayed it was true.

The Jeep began to pitch and bounce over uneven ground, leaving the paved streets for an open, rutted field in the vampires’ 1870 version of her world. Thank goodness vampires had excellent night vision. Without headlights, she could see nothing but the dim glow of the vehicle’s instrument panel and its reflected light on Arturo’s profile. His jaw was set, tension radiating down his arms and shoulders. A tension her own body echoed though she hoped his meant he was worried about what would happen if they were caught and not that he was bracing for her reaction when she learned what he really had in mind.

She’d kill him if he betrayed her again, especially with Zack at risk, now, too. “Who does Cristoff think took me?” she asked, needing the sound of voices to drown out the pulsing silence.

“Ivan and his men,” Arturo replied.

“The ones who tried to stop us from leaving?”

“Yes.”

As they’d ridden for the Boundary Circle the day Arturo and Kassius set them free, one of Cristoff’s more vicious guards and his troop had ridden upon them, recognized her, and realized Arturo was trying to free the sorceress. A battle had ensued. Ivan and his troop were dead.

“Cristoff believes Ivan took you and escaped Vamp City.”

“And the rest of his troop?”

“He thinks that they either defected or, like Ivan, were not actually trapped by the magic. It has long been suspected that some who claim to be trapped here are not.”

As her eyes adjusted to the dark, the ghostly, twisted shapes of dead trees began to appear, silhouetted against the moonlit night sky. Even as a thrill of dread crawled along her scalp, she admitted to herself a dark fascination with this night world. She’d always loved the dark. As a child it had been the only place she’d ever truly been able to hide from the stepmother who’d hated her.

“So how many vampires aren’t trapped? How many of you are there in the real world?”

Micah glanced back. “Before the magic began to fail, there were over three dozen of us that I knew of in D.C. alone, about half tied to the kovenas within V.C. Nearly a dozen of them got caught on the wrong side of the Boundary Circle when the magic began to fail, trapping them inside. They’d come in for the Kovena Cup, our annual vampire soccer match. Halfway through the semifinal game, the first sunbeam broke through just outside the coliseum. Several vampires died, and no one who was in Vamp City at that moment has been able to leave since. The magic’s failing was like a switch being flipped. The same switch Phineas Blackstone flipped in the 1870s when he attempted to make Vamp City a death trap.”

She’d heard what had happened next back then, that Cristoff had cut off two of Phineas’s young son’s fingers before persuading the sorcerer to renew the magic and disable his death trap. And once he had, Cristoff killed the sorcerer. Vamp City had remained intact ever since. Until two years ago. Who or what had flipped the switch this time, no one knew. At least, that’s what she’d been told.

“What were you two doing that night?” she asked the vampires, since they obviously hadn’t been at the Kovena Cup.

“Destroying a Ripper nest in Adams Morgan.”

Ahead, she could make out the silhouettes of decrepit houses and row houses. Not until they passed the crumbling corpse of the White House would they start to see signs of habitation. With a lurch, the Jeep flew over a low embankment and onto the packed dirt that passed for roads in this place, as they had in the real D.C. of 1870.

“Are there a lot of Rippers in the area?”

“More now than there used to be,” Micah told her. “With so many Emoras trapped within V.C., there are fewer to hunt them.”

“Is it your job to hunt them?”

“It is, and I take it seriously. Rippers are vicious, without conscience.”

The Rippers, she’d learned, were a different race of vampire, one who fed exclusively on blood, whereas the Emoras, the more prominent race, fed on both blood and emotion. They claimed the Emoras were the more humane of the two races.

Quinn scoffed. “You just described most of the Emoras I’ve met. If the Rippers are worse, God help us all.”

Micah glanced at Arturo, then looked back at her. “You’re right, Quinn. Many of the Emoras of Vamp City have become every bit as bad as the Rippers, but they didn’t used to be. Most of the nearly five hundred vampires that first moved into Vamp City continued to hunt in the human world as they always had—fear feeders scaring their victims as they fed on them, then wiping their minds and sending them on their way. The pain feeders haunting the hospitals, the old folks’ homes, and the neighborhoods, feeding simply by standing outside the bedroom window of a human in childbirth or in pain from disease or injury. And the pleasure feeders . . .” He smiled. “Throughout the ages, the brothels have been our favorite places to feed and hunt.”

So Micah was a pleasure feeder. She’d wondered. “So why did they change?”

“We’re not sure, not entirely. And as with most things, the answer is complicated. We’d always had to remain under the human radar, and suddenly didn’t. A number of the vampires brought in their human companions. And when those humans began to turn immortal, recruiting more humans to serve us became a simple matter of offering immortality. They came willingly and happily. For a time.”

They passed the White House, its abandoned, crumbling appearance the symbol of everything wrong in this place, but Quinn only glanced at it this time, far more interested in Micah’s story.

“Most vampires continued to leave Vamp City at night to feed in the old ways. The coliseum was originally built for vampire sports, not gladiator battle. We held rugby and football matches, among other things. And, if you can believe it, we enjoyed the arts. One night an entire theater company was enthralled and brought in to perform a play, then returned to their beds without any of them the wiser.”

Quinn shook her head, knowing her face was a mask of disbelief. “What happened?”

“Some would tell you we got bored and slowly reverted to our natural inclinations, free of human retribution.” Micah glanced at Arturo. “Those of us who’ve remained outside, who live in the real world, disagree. We’ve watched the changes in those we’ve known for centuries. The magic of Vamp City has had a corrupting effect on many of those who live within its borders, disintegrating souls and consciences.”

“My conscience is just fine,” Arturo muttered.

Quinn snorted. Right.

“You still have one, Ax. Which, considering what’s happened to most in Vamp City, is saying something. Your conscience was always strong. Even so, you’ve not been unaffected. Not by a long shot.”

Arturo lapsed into a brooding silence.

Quinn turned to watch out the window as a horse and wagon passed them on the wide dirt road, driven by a male dressed in Civil War garb. A vampire, no doubt. In the back of the wagon sat three people dressed in modern clothing. New captives? It was hard to tell in the dark, but their hair appeared to lack the phosphorescent glow of Slavas—humans who’d turned immortal, as all humans apparently did in this place if they survived their first couple of years.

Her stomach cramped as she wondered who they’d left behind—wives, children, parents? And with sorrow at what she feared they’d suffer in this place.

“So there weren’t always slaves here?” Quinn asked, skeptical. “Or torturing and killing just for the sport of it?”

“There have always been human servants—humans who willingly, or not so willingly, serve their vampire masters. But the influx of humans solely for sport and food didn’t start in earnest until a few decades ago. Even that didn’t become widespread until a couple of years ago, when the magic began to fail. The depravity since has spiraled out of control, Quinn.” Micah glanced at Arturo. “And even those with honor in their hearts have turned a blind eye.”

Arturo’s jaw tightened, but, again, he said nothing.

Quinn watched the passing landscape, the well-lit houses in the inhabited areas, streets that in modern D.C. were now lined with high-rise office buildings.

“
Cara,
” Arturo said, drawing her gaze to his in the rearview mirror. “If we are stopped and anyone asks, you and Zack are Micah’s slaves. He is leaving you at my house while he helps me search for the missing sorceress.”

“All right.” There was much to be said for getting their stories straight.

They turned onto Fourteenth Street, and she knew they were close to Arturo’s house. She’d been there before and knew it to be on F Street, only about a block from the Treasury. In 1870, F Street had been primarily residential, unlike its twenty-first-century twin.

Several minutes later, Arturo pulled into the alley that ran behind his house and parked the Jeep. Too fast, he was out of the vehicle and slinging a still-sleeping Zack over his shoulder as if her brother wasn’t close to Arturo’s size, as if he weighed nothing.

Micah emerged from the vehicle at normal speed and opened her door for her. As she climbed out, she heard a man’s scream on the wind some distance away. The sound clawed through her, raking open every memory of the terrors she’d known in this place, setting them free like nightmares flying through her mind. No one should ever be made to scream like that.

“Quinn?”

Mike’s voice penetrated the darkness, jarringly wrong in this place. But it focused her, grounded her. Screams were a common sound in Vamp City.

God, she hated this place.

With a shiver, she moved quickly toward the house, preceding Micah through the back door and into a kitchen that was, if not modern, at least a far cry from its 1870s roots. This was the one room within Arturo’s home that was fully electrical, with 1970s appliances and modern, recessed lighting.

The kitchen was empty, the faint smell of freshly baked bread lingering, reminding her she hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. The tension in her back and shoulders eased now that they’d reached Arturo’s home. Oddly, she felt safe here. Arturo might have scared her mindless the first time he brought her here, feeding from her fear, believing he could take her memory of it later. But he’d never attacked her. She’d never been physically harmed in this house. And she never would be as long as Cristoff and his goons didn’t find her here. For all of Arturo’s faults, she believed that. He wouldn’t hurt her. Not physically.