Desire After Dark. Amanda Ashley

as she placed the plate in front of him, then refilled his coffee cup.

      He took a bite of pie and smiled his approval. “You’re right, it is good.”

      With a nod, she moved away from the table.

      Tom Duncan glanced around the diner, noting that he was the only one eating alone. Everywhere he looked there were couples on dates or families enjoying a night out together. Even Ramsey had found a mate.

      Well, he was tired of being alone, he thought irritably. Even vampire hunters deserved a night off.

      His gaze settled on Vicki as she cleared a nearby table. She was a pretty thing. He’d checked earlier, noting that she didn’t wear any rings.

      While waiting for her to bring him his bill, he looked around the diner again. It looked like something out of the fifties, with its black and white tile floor. There was a long counter lined with stools covered in red vinyl. There was a jukebox in one corner that played all the old fifties hits. He’d noted that Elvis was a big favorite. There were old movie posters on the walls. Again, Elvis was prominently featured. There were booths along two of the walls; round tables covered with red-checked cloths stood in the center of the floor.

      When she returned to see if there was anything else he wanted, Duncan took his courage in hand and blurted, “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you’d like to go out with me one of these nights?”

      Vicki started to say no, then thought how nice it would be if she could tell Mrs. Heath that she’d had a date. “I might. What did you have in mind?”

      “Dinner and a movie? Just dinner? Just a movie? I’m easy.”

      “I’m off on Sundays and Mondays.” She slid his bill under the salt shaker.

      “How about Sunday night? I could pick you up about what, five? Six?”

      “Six is good.” Tearing a page out of her pad, she wrote her address and phone number on the back and handed it to him.

      He looked at it briefly, then folded the paper in half and put it in his shirt pocket. “Sunday at six,” he said with a smile. “Of course, I’ll probably see you before then.”

      With a nod, she went to clear table two.

      Duncan whistled softly as he left the diner. It was too nice an evening to go back to the hotel. Instead, he took a walk about the town. It wasn’t a big place but it seemed prosperous enough. The people were friendly. They nodded to him or called a greeting as he passed by. It was the kind of place that reminded him of the old days, when most towns and cities were small and people didn’t bother to lock their doors and everybody knew everybody else’s business. A nice town where people expected to die of old age surrounded by friends and family, not dragged into the woods to be dinner for a hungry fiend.

      He clenched his hands into tight fists as he felt his anger and his hatred rise within him. Vampires. They had been the bane of mankind since time began. The Undead could be found in every civilization known to man as far back as recorded time. Every culture had its own account of vampires, whether they were the tales of the vukodlak in Croatia or the lupi manari of Italy.

      And just as there had always been vampires, there had always been vampire hunters. For centuries, all the firstborn males in Duncan’s family had been hunters. Duncan knew his family was something of a rarity. Most hunters never married. Wives and children could all too easily become victims, pawns in a never-ending war between good and evil. He knew that being a hunter wasn’t something that was passed from father to son in other parts of the world. Being a vampire hunter wasn’t inherited. Rather, it was a calling that might come to anyone, like being a priest.

      Edward Ramsey was the only hunter Duncan had ever known who had been turned into the very thing he had once hated and hunted. He tried to imagine what it would be like if he, himself, were suddenly turned. How had Ramsey reconciled what he had been to what he had become? What was it like to hunt mortals instead of vampires? Did it have the same kick?

      He thrust the thought away and concentrated on his reason for being in Pear Blossom Creek. Three women had been killed and drained of blood. All had been redheads. All had been young and single and lived alone. It sounded like the work of Dimitri Falco, yet Henry Adams claimed that he had destroyed Falco in South America. Of course, it was always possible that Falco was dead and it was just a coincidence that the three murdered women had all been young with red hair.

      Tom grunted softly. He had never believed in coincidence, which meant that either Falco was still alive or another vampire was copying his M.O. Either way, Vicki Cavendish was in danger. And she wasn’t the only woman in town who fit the description of the vampire’s victims. There were Suzie Collins, who worked at the post office, and Rhonda McGee, a nurse who worked the night shift at the hospital.

      Stretching his arms and shoulders, Duncan decided it was time to call it a night. He had done all he could do tonight. Tomorrow, he would continue his search for Dimitri Falco.

      Chapter 8

      Antonio Battista roamed the dark streets, his preternatural senses probing the drifting shadows of the evening for some sense of the other. Lifting his head, he sniffed the wind, his nostrils taking in the scent of cool damp earth and the underlying stink of decay, the wood smoke rising from a chimney, trees and flowers and the myriad other smells and odors associated with mankind, but nothing out of the ordinary. He listened to the sounds of the night—crickets and tree frogs, the rustle of the wind through the leaves, the barking of a dog and, farther away, the faint howl of a wolf.

      He turned toward the sound. Was it a wolf? Or one of the Undead?

      With preternatural speed, he moved through the town, pausing in front of the houses where the other redheaded women lived, his vampire senses telling him that both were safely asleep inside.

      Moving on, he turned down the street where Victoria lived. Her house was dark. A thought took him to her bedroom window. The sound of her breathing, low and even, told him that she, too, was asleep. He felt the prick of his fangs against his tongue as he listened to the steady beat of her heart, the thrum of blood moving through her veins. It aroused a hunger in him like none he had ever known before. Even the hunger he had felt that first night when he awoke as a newly made vampire paled in comparison. How many centuries ago had that been? Five? Six? After the first century or two, time had lost its meaning. He had no need for clocks or calendars. He woke with the setting of the sun, slept when it rose in the morning. The affairs of the world no longer held any importance for him. His whole world had narrowed to only two things—the need for blood and the necessity of keeping his true identity a secret from mankind. Which reminded him that there was a vampire hunter in town. Whether by coincidence or design, he didn’t know. He had seen the man, Duncan, in the diner earlier that night and had felt a rare stab of jealousy when he saw the hunter and Victoria laughing together. It had taken all his considerable self-restraint to keep from storming into the diner and ripping the man’s heart out.

      He grinned in wry amusement. He hadn’t been plagued by a foolish human emotion like jealousy in centuries. But now it rose in him again as he imagined Victoria with another man, and not just any man, but his sworn enemy. He should have killed the man long ago. To this day, he didn’t understand why he had not dispatched the vampire hunter when he had the chance, but there had been something about Tom Duncan, some innate trace of courage and honor that Battista had found himself admiring in spite of himself. And now Duncan was here, on the hunt. The question was, who was he hunting?

      Battista settled down outside Victoria’s bedroom window, prepared to keep watch until sunrise. Sitting there, his back to the wall, he gazed into the darkness, remembering…

      He had been born in Italy. The memory of those long-ago carefree days was sweet indeed. He had been born the youngest son and little had been expected of him. His oldest brother, Joseph, had been given to the church. His other brother, James, would inherit the family vineyards. His five sisters were expected to marry well, but Battista had no expectations to fulfill. He spent his youth in the pursuit of reckless pleasure and he found it in abundance