Forever Vampire. Michele Hauf

the hell are you?”

      “Miss Santiago’s assistant. I’m sure I spoke to you earlier.”

      “I thought I told you—” The man realized he’d just given up his identity, in a manner.

      “What are you looking for?” Vail asked. He put back his shoulders, flaunting his broad frame and imposing height. The faeries had thought him a freak. Vampires tended to take a step back from him. These two wibs did not. “Did Lyric ask you to get something for her at the apartment? It’s been picked over by her mommy’s thugs.”

      “Damn it,” the one who had lunged said. “I knew we should have come here right away.”

      They were definitely her allies.

      “So where is she?” Vail tossed out. “I didn’t get the final destination.”

      “In the seventh—”

      The bigger one slammed his arm across the smaller’s chest. “You’re not her assistant. That cold bitch ain’t got no friends. He’s working for the old lady.”

      The smaller one, unleashed from the bigger one’s restraining hold, rushed toward Vail, fangs down in warning.

      Normally, Vail got into mortal combat. It kept his adrenaline flowing, and he liked to do damage to people who pissed him off. But exerting himself over these two was a waste of breath. He had a few tricks up his sleeve.

      Vail rubbed his palms together, loosening the faery dust ever embedded in his skin. Tilting his palm flat, he blew dust in the face of the attacker just as he moved within touching distance.

      Faery dust penetrated the vampire’s pores, traveling up his nostrils and into his throat, instantly rocketing him to a methlike high. The vampire grinned widely, staggered—and dropped.

      “You want a taste?” Vail teased the other, who stood with arms out at his sides in bewilderment.

      “What the hell was that? You got some voodoo mojo going on?”

      “Ch’yeah. Here’s a taste.” Vail blew another cloud of dust and the thug batted at it, but succumbed as quickly as his cohort.

      Standing over the two fallen bloodsuckers, Vail shook his head. “Vampires. They’re so weak.”

      He licked his palm and inhaled deeply. Once upon a time he could get just as quick and massive a high. He’d give anything for that high now, but since he’d come to the mortal realm he’d shed the haze he’d once lived in, and was becoming clearer by the day.

      He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

      He bent over the vampires. “FaeryTown is in the eighteenth, guys. You’ll find more of what you now crave there. Tell ‘em Vail sent you. They’ll hook you up with a sweet little number.”

      He straightened and scanned the area. “The seventh?” Across the river, the quarter boasted the Eiffel Tower and the Invalides museum. “Big area to search, but I’m on it.”

      THE TWO MINIONS who’d succumbed to his dust clued him in that something was fishy in Paris. Where would a vampiress who had been kidnapped, or maybe not kidnapped, hide? It had to be someplace close to a food source so when she went out for sustenance she did not risk being seen.

      Of course, that could be anywhere in the vast city of Paris. The buildings were close, the streets narrow and labyrinthine. Easy enough for mortal or vampire to move about unseen. Even if her minions had narrowed it down to one particular quarter, it would take Vail hours to cover it all.

      One thing he had learned since arriving, the vampire tribes, while they kept to themselves, communicated from tribe to tribe in an amazing network. If you were a tribe member, you were accounted for. But even those unaligned with tribes were known. It was in the tribes’ best interest to keep tabs on everyone. A sexy, blonde ice princess like Lyric Santiago would surely be recognized by at least a few.

      He did have a tribal contact, but would give the search a go first. Besides, that’s if anyone knew she was missing. The family was keeping this hush-hush.

      He folded the picture of the vampiress and stuffed it in a back pocket. Appealing to any man with a healthy sex drive, certainly, with her high breasts and come-on-let’s-kiss white teeth and flirty, long-lashed eyes. But beyond the surface glamour, he wasn’t interested.

      Vampires did not appeal to his palate. Sure, that was like calling the kettle black, but he’d grown up knowing that vampires sustained their lives through the heinous practice of imbibing on mortals. They drank their blood!

      Vail would never succumb to such a base appetite. He didn’t need it. Faery ichor sustained him. So why bother succumbing to something that horrified him?

      As if you don’t do the same, his conscience screamed. You sink your teeth into faery necks. How is that different than taking a mortal?

      “They’re filthy and poisoned by their food,” he muttered, and walked onward.

      Thinking of which, he was a bit peckish. It had been over a day since he’d fed. He should have fueled up for what he suspected would be a long night.

      Striding the streets in the seventh arrondissement, he didn’t attempt to quiet the clicking beats of his boots. He wanted to be heard, to be seen tracking through the twilight haze.

      Let them know what they can’t get away from.

      Every so often the street was cobbled, a remnant from Paris’s earlier centuries. Vail liked that. And then he didn’t. He knew his father had been around since the mid-eighteenth century, as had Rhys Hawkes and his mother, Viviane.

      Rhys and Viviane had fallen in love a few years before the French Revolution. Had they walked these very streets?

      “Don’t care. They didn’t care enough about me. I don’t care about them.”

      Jumping and hitting the bottom of a low, rusted tin sign with his knuckles, he set the ancient thing into a creaky swing.

      Eyes followed him as he cut through the twilight; he could feel their regard prick at his spine. Some were mortal, peering out from windows as their televisions blared monotonously in the background. What a mind waste technology was.

      Yet other eyes were Dark Ones, unwilling to test his strut. And woe to those who did employ the bravado to try him.

      “Yippi-i-oo,” he sang lowly. “Where are you?”

      A glimmer in the corner of his eye told him a sidhe lurked in the shadows, slithering along, following his steps. Curious, but not threatening. His hunger stirred. He sensed it was a lower imp or perhaps a sprite. Sprites were nasty and he didn’t care to go toe-to-toe with one of them. Their ichor was acrid, and he always ended up spitting it out.

      Couldn’t be a sprite. Their iridescent sheen never allowed them to blend completely into the shadows.

      As he turned a corner, Vail twisted his head quickly to spy the sidhe before it realized he’d been aware of it. The ointment he wore around his eyes gave him that sight.

      He dashed forward, grabbed the thing about its narrow chest, and sank his fangs into its neck. Just a quick bite, something to take the edge off the jitters he’d felt tweaking his muscles. Hot ichor glittered down his throat and soothed his pangs. He dropped the faery in a collapse of pale violet limbs. It wobbled in a giddy daze from his bite. The swoon was good to mortal, vampire and even the sidhe.

      Thumbing the corner of his mouth, Vail walked on and thanked his ability to see the sidhe. He hadn’t been well loved in Faery, and suspected if any of his former rivals were in the mortal realm of Paris they would not hesitate to call him out. Zett held the top position on that rivalry list.

      “Come and get me,” he muttered—then stopped abruptly.

      Ahead, a mortal male moaned. A pleasurable utterance that curled Vail’s smile smartly. Right out here, in the street, and not tucked inside a