“You bitch!” The High Matron stumbled backward into the satin-draped wall. The wall covering ignited. She swatted at the cloth, but only succeeded in tangling herself in it further. Screaming, she spun, and the burning cloth encased her like a shroud. A moment later, her whole body burst into flames and disintegrated.
Daniel’s eyes snapped open as if he’d awoken from a nightmare. His arms closed around Déadre as his lungs dragged in a ragged breath. He rolled with her, away from the fire. Away from the pile of ashes that was all that was left of the High Matron.
“Sue Ellen!” he yelled, but Déadre heard the difference in his voice. The betrayal. “Sue Ellen,” he said once more, quieter, before he pulled Déadre to her feet and down the stairs, out the door and into the fresh night air.
“NICE digs,” Daniel said. He sat on what he supposed doubled as both dining room and coffee table since it was the only table in the twelve-by-twelve crawl space underneath the maintenance shaft to Track 11 of Atlanta’s metro rail system. The walls were bare, the only furniture besides the table was a coffin lined with dirt in the center of the room.
At least the ceiling had some décor. If you could call heavy metal rock posters and stick-on glow-in-the-dark stars décor.
“Don’t be a funny boy.” She spooned a glob of burn medicine out of a blue jar with her finger. “Or I’ll have to mix a little holy water with your salve.”
He leaned away from her approaching finger. “You wouldn’t.”
She daubed the glob on the end of his nose, then swiped it down his chin. “No, I wouldn’t. But it wouldn’t hurt for you to show a little respect.”
“Honey, after what you did to Garth, I’m downright afraid of you.”
Her chin wobbled. “It’s been a long time since I killed anyone. And I’ve never done it on purpose.”
“You didn’t kill Garth. I did.”
She ducked her head. “The High Matron…”
“She was using me. Pretending to be mortal, dressing in prissy outfits and playing sweet and helpless and dumb, when all along I was the stupid one. She was just waiting for me to perfect the synthetic blood. She had to have been working with Garth all along. She’s the one who introduced me to him, said he could fund the research. She would have made me into what he was, eventually.”
He captured Déadre’s chin between his thumb and forefinger and brought her face up to his. “You saved me from that. A fate worse than death.”
“You don’t want to die, now that her soul is free?”
He touched his lips to hers, tasted her fear and her passion, and whispered, “Not when I have you to live for.”
She looped her arms around him and pressed herself into him. Their noses bumped. Burn salve squished across their cheeks and brows as they nuzzled and kissed each other. That didn’t matter. They’d both been burned.
“We have a lot of work to do, getting your blood to the vampires of Atlanta—everywhere, for that matter—so that they can live and thrive without feeding off humans,” she said between biting his earlobe and running her tongue over the crease of his eye.
“I want to get it into human hands, as well. There’s still a lot of need there.”
She wiggled her hips against him. “Maybe we can keep enough for ourselves to keep life interesting at home, too.”
“We’ll keep plenty.”
He felt her smile on the side of his neck. “I love you, Daniel.”
“I love you, too, Déadre.”
He opened his legs and she stepped into his body where she belonged, where the blood lust beat intimately between them.
For eternity.