Dark Awakening
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Tynan MacGillivray crouched in the shadows of the little garden, listening to the mortals rattling loudly around inside the stuffy old mansion. He tried to concentrate on the scents and sounds of the humans, hoping to pick up any subtle change in the air that might indicate a Seer was among these so-called ghost hunters, but so far all he’d gotten was a headache.
This small town gimmick was a long shot, and he knew it. But he’d been everywhere in the last eight months, from New York City Goth clubs to Los Angeles coven meetings. Anywhere there might be a whisper of ability beyond the norm. In all that time, he had found not the barest whiff of a Seer, much less a hint of anything paranormal at all. Just a bunch of humans playing dress-up, trying to be different.
He wondered how they would feel if they should walk into an actual vampire club, and decided most of them would be too foolish to even be frightened for the few seconds their life would last in those places. But they might note that there wasn’t nearly as much black leather and bondage wear in undead society as they seemed to think.
Ty got to his feet, all four of them, and arched his back, stiff from keeping so still in the bushes all night. This was the gift of his bloodline, his cat form, though it was of dubious help in places like this. The house he was staking out sat just off the town square and there were only a few scrubby barberry bushes for cover. His fur was black, yes, and blended into shadow better. But dog-sized cats, when spotted, didn’t exactly inspire the warm cuddlies in passersby.
Hell. It’s no good. Tynan gave a frustrated growl as he accepted the fact that this trip was just another bust. He’d been reduced to combing psychic fairs and looking up what were supposedly America’s most haunted places, hoping something would draw out the sort of human he so desperately needed to find. But soon, very soon, Ty knew he would have to return to Arsinöe with the news that the Seers had, in all likelihood, simply died out. He would, for the first time in three hundred years of service, have to admit failure.
And the Mulo, the gypsy curse that was slowly killing those he was charged with protecting, would continue its dark work until there was nothing and no one left that bore the mark of the Ptolemaic dynasty, oldest and most powerful bloodline in all of vampire society, begun when Arsinöe’s life was spared by a goddess’s dark kiss. No other house could claim such a beginning, or such a ruler. But if things continued, the other dynasties, eternally jealous of the Ptolemy’s power, lineage, and reach, wouldn’t even have a carcass of the lowliest fledgling to feed upon.
The invisible terror had attacked twice more, both sacred initiations of the Ptolemy, both times leaving only one vampire alive enough to relate what had happened. Or in the case of the first atrocity, one nearly-turned human woman. Rosalyn, he remembered with a curl of distaste in the pit of his gut. They had brought her back to the compound, bloody and broken, taking what information they could before finally letting her die a very human death. He doubted she had known how lucky she was.
Ty, used to fading into shadow and listening, knew that all in the inner circle of Arsinöe’s court agreed: it was only a matter of time before the violence escalated even further, and the queen herself was targeted.
The House of Ptolemy, without their fierce Egyptian queen, would fall. Maybe not right away, but there were none fit to take Arsinöe’s place, unless Sekhmet appeared once more to bestow her grace on one of them. If the goddess even still existed. More likely was that there would be a bloody power struggle that left but a pale shadow of what had been, and that petty infighting would take care of whoever the Mulo had left behind, if any. And the Cait Sith like himself, Ty thought, who had been deemed fit only to serve by virtue of their Fae-tainted blood, would be left to the dubious mercy of the remaining dynasties who ruled the world of night.
He could no more let that happen than he could walk in the sun.
Ty pushed aside his dark thoughts for the moment and debated heading back to his hotel room for the night, maybe swinging by one of the local bars on the way to get a quick nip from one of the drunk and willing. Then a back door swung open and a woman stepped out into the crisp night air. At first he stilled to watch because he was merely curious.
Then the moonlight caught the deep auburn of her hair, and Ty stared, arrested, as she turned fully toward him. Utterly unaware of the eyes upon her, she tipped her head back, bathing herself in starlight, the soft smile on her lips revealing a woman who appreciated the pleasure of an autumn night well met.
He heard her sigh, saw the warm exhalation drift lazily upward in a cloud of mist. For him, caught in some strange spell, it all seemed to occur in slow motion, the mist of her breath hanging suspended for long moments above her mouth, as though she’d gifted a shimmering bit of her soul to the night. The long, pale column of her throat was bared above the collar of her coat, the tiny pulse beating at the base of it amplified a thousand times, until he could hear the singular pulse and pound that was her life, until it was everything in his universe. Her scent, a light, exotic vanilla, drifted to him on the chill breeze, and all thought of drinking from some nameless, faceless stranger vanished from his mind.
Ty wanted her. And though a certain amount of denial was woven tightly into the fabric of his life, he would not deny himself this. Already, he was consumed by the thought of what her blood might taste like. Would it be as sweet as she smelled? Or would it be darker than she appeared to be, ripe with berry and currant? Every human had a singular taste—this he had learned—and it spoke volumes about them, more than they would ever know.
She lingered only a moment longer, and her face, heart-shaped, delicately featured with a pair of large, expressive eyes he was now determined to see close up, imprinted itself on him in a way he had never before experienced. Ty’s mind was too hazed to question it now, this odd reaction to her, but he knew he would be able to ponder nothing else later.
Later. Once he had tasted her.
When she turned away, when the burnished waves of her hair spilling over the collar of her dark coat were all he could see, Ty found he could at least move again, and he did so with the ruthless efficiency of a practiced hunter. Like a predator who has latched onto the scent of its prey, his eyes never left her, even as he rose up, his feline form shifting and elongating until he stood on two feet among the straggling bushes.
He breathed deeply, drinking in that singular scent with anticipatory relish.
Then Ty turned up the collar of his coat, and began the hunt.
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