Demon's Kiss. Maggie Shayne

and cried out, forming the word yes on her agonized scream. When it died, she lay there on the cold stone floor, shaking uncontrollably. “Yes,” she whispered. “I’ll try.”

      “Good. I’ll give you an hour to recover. And if you make me torture you again, Vixen, it’s going to be something a hell of a lot worse than the prod. Understand?”

      Vixen nodded, the motions jerky and tight.

      “One hour.” Briar turned and walked away down the echoing stone hallway, taking the light with her. Vixen heard her feet ascending stairs, and then the slamming of a heavy door. She was alone. Her senses wouldn’t deceive her about something so simple. She was alone, here. The only prisoner of these cruel sapiens.

      And yet, she wasn’t alone.

      There was a mouse family living on the other side of the room. They’d made a nest in one of the deep chasms in the stone, and they huddled there out of sight whenever one of them came into the dungeon. But they would come out for her. Oh, they wouldn’t get too close. After all, she’d spent a good many hours of her life as one of their natural predators. But despite that, they sensed her animal nature, and her pain and distress. They were curious.

      They came out now, though she’d felt them coming even before she saw them. She heard their little squeaks as they conversed and began hunting the floor for any crumbs, shooting looks her way as they went.

      You won’t find any crumbs around here. Those ones don’t eat food. She thought the words at them, as images and ideas, not as a language. And she knew they understood. They hurried across the floor, to the loose board in the bottom of the door that led outside, and squeezed their tiny bodies through it.

      She hoped they would gnaw it some more as she had tried to convey they should. If she could shift, she would need the board to give a bit more to allow her to squeeze through easily—though she might be able to fit even now, if only she could change.

      Even when the mice were gone, she still didn’t feel entirely alone.

      There had been someone else. She’d sensed him all at once tonight, when one of the drones had taken her outside for a well-guarded and far too short walk. Gregor wanted her healthy—weak, and half-starved, but basically sound—until he figured out whether he could use her or not. So she was granted a nightly walk. And tonight, she’d felt him. A male. A kind one. He had seemed so very real, and so near that she had even lifted her head, sniffing the air and feeling with her senses to try to locate him, even identify him. Human or animal or vampire—she couldn’t be sure. And then she had realized that he wasn’t close to her, not physically. But in some other way, he was. Incredibly close. And he was coming—coming to help her. She had felt it, known it.

      He had told her so, somehow.

      She had closed her eyes and focused on that feeling with everything in her. “If you’re coming to me,” she’d whispered, “please hurry. If I have to stay here much longer I’ll die. Please hurry. I need you.”

      And just as suddenly as it had arrived, her sense of that other person, the male, faded entirely the moment she was ushered back inside, through the cellars she thought of as dungeons and into her cold cell.

      She hadn’t sensed him again since then. She wondered now if she had only imagined him, and she sank to the cold floor, lowering her head as despair crushed her.

      But she didn’t allow it to hold her in its grip. She lifted her chin, and she vowed that she would escape these creatures who held her. She was smarter than they were, more cunning, and more in tune with her senses and her instincts. If they were right, and she could shift back, then it would not take her long to make her way out of here. She would slip away at the first opportunity.

      And then she would be free. Free to run and play and live again.

      But even then, it would never be the same. She could never go back to what she was before. She knew it, sensed it. In a very real way, her life was already over.

      Seth opened his eyes and lay very, very still, because damn. Everything was different.

      “Ah, you’re awake,” the vampire said.

      Seth blinked, amazed, because, yeah, the guy was a vampire, and it was real and now he was…he was…

      “What’s wrong, Seth?”

      “Your voice. Dude, it’s like I can hear every vocal cord vibrating when you talk.”

      “I know.”

      “I can feel the air touching my skin.”

      “You can probably hear the grass growing, if you listen for it,” the vampire said.

      “So I’m either tripping on acid, or I’m…”

      “You’re a vampire. Your senses are heightened. Magnified. Everything is impacted. You’ll feel both pleasure and, unfortunately, pain, at levels almost beyond endurance.”

      Seth closed his eyes. “What a trip.”

      “An endless one,” the man said.

      Seth lifted his head, realizing he was in a car, and that the other man was driving. The road was dark before them, the lines flashing by at an alarming speed. “Where are we going?” A little voice deep inside told him he knew damn well where he was going. He was going to her. He didn’t know how, or exactly why, but he felt it. He was getting closer to her with every mile.

      “North Carolina. I was on a mission when you interrupted me, Seth. I don’t have any more time to waste.”

      “I interrupted you? By what, almost dying?”

      “Exactly.”

      Seth searched the vampire’s dark face, awaiting an explanation he seemed reluctant to give. Finally, the man nodded as if he’d decided on something. “There are a lot of things you’re going to need to learn in a very short time, Seth, and this isn’t the most important among them. But I’ll try to sate your curiosity all the same.”

      “Gee, thanks.”

      “You don’t need to thank me. I’m your maker, your sire. Your father, in a way. It’s my duty to educate you.”

      “I was being sarcastic, pal. You don’t have much of a sense of humor, do you?”

      “I’ve never seen the need for one.”

      “You ever…make any others?”

      The vampire frowned at Seth briefly, before returning his gaze to the road. “You have a rare blood type, Seth. It contains an antigen called Belladonna. Humans with this blood type tend to grow weak and die young. They also tend to bleed excessively.”

      “I’ve always had the bleeding thing. I knew about the antigen—makes transfusions tough to come by. I didn’t know I was gonna get weak and die young, though.”

      “You would have, eventually. Now you won’t. But you know that. What you don’t know is that only humans with the Belladonna antigen can become undead, Seth. Such mortals are known among us as the Chosen. All vampires had the antigen as mortals. And all vampires sense mortals with the antigen, and are compelled to aid and even protect them.”

      “You’re kidding me. Hell, that’s why you’ve shown up before. Helped me out when I got into trouble.”

      “That’s why.”

      “But…why you, why not any others? I mean, there are others, right?” He sat up straighter in the seat, surprised that the movement didn’t hurt him. Last he remembered, he’d been beaten within an inch of his life. “How many of them—of us—are there? And where are they? Are we going to meet them? Is there some kind of a—”

      The driver actually smiled, and it was such a stunning thing to see that Seth went silent. That dark, morose expression faded for just a moment. But then it returned so swiftly that Seth almost wondered