A Kiss of Blood: A Vamp City Novel by Pamela Palmer Read Free Book Online

his headlights, Arturo accelerated as he drove back toward the waiting Shimmer. As they hit it, the hair rose on Quinn’s arms a second time, and darkness swallowed her, the true dark of a night world without electricity. A shiver went through her that had a little to do with the air flowing in from the open front windows, air that turned instantly cooler by a good ten degrees, and far more to do with the primal fear of being back in Vamp City.
    This time, Zack’s moan sounded less like pain and more like one of relief, as if the magic had finally quit strangling him. She prayed it was true.
    The Jeep began to pitch and bounce over uneven ground, leaving the paved streets for an open, rutted field in the vampires’ 1870 version of her world. Thank goodness vampires had excellent night vision. Without headlights, she could see nothing but the dim glow of the vehicle’s instrument panel and its reflected light on Arturo’s profile. His jaw was set, tension radiating down his arms and shoulders. A tension her own body echoed though she hoped his meant he was worried about what would happen if they were caught and not that he was bracing for her reaction when she learned what he really had in mind.
    She’d kill him if he betrayed her again, especially with Zack at risk, now, too. “Who does Cristoff think took me?” she asked, needing the sound of voices to drown out the pulsing silence.
    “Ivan and his men,” Arturo replied.
    “The ones who tried to stop us from leaving?”
    “Yes.”
    As they’d ridden for the Boundary Circle the day Arturo and Kassius set them free, one of Cristoff’s more vicious guards and his troop had ridden upon them, recognized her, and realized Arturo was trying to free the sorceress. A battle had ensued. Ivan and his troop were dead.
    “Cristoff believes Ivan took you and escaped Vamp City.”
    “And the rest of his troop?”
    “He thinks that they either defected or, like Ivan, were not actually trapped by the magic. It has long been suspected that some who claim to be trapped here are not.”
    As her eyes adjusted to the dark, the ghostly, twisted shapes of dead trees began to appear, silhouetted against the moonlit night sky. Even as a thrill of dread crawled along her scalp, she admitted to herself a dark fascination with this night world. She’d always loved the dark. As a child it had been the only place she’d ever truly been able to hide from the stepmother who’d hated her.
    “So how many vampires aren’t trapped? How many of you are there in the real world?”
    Micah glanced back. “Before the magic began to fail, there were over three dozen of us that I knew of in D.C. alone, about half tied to the kovenas within V.C. Nearly a dozen of them got caught on the wrong side of the Boundary Circle when the magic began to fail, trapping them inside. They’d come in for the Kovena Cup, our annual vampire soccer match. Halfway through the semifinal game, the first sunbeam broke through just outside the coliseum. Several vampires died, and no one who was in Vamp City at that moment has been able to leave since. The magic’s failing was like a switch being flipped. The same switch Phineas Blackstone flipped in the 1870s when he attempted to make Vamp City a death trap.”
    She’d heard what had happened next back then, that Cristoff had cut off two of Phineas’s young son’s fingers before persuading the sorcerer to renew the magic and disable his death trap. And once he had, Cristoff killed the sorcerer. Vamp City had remained intact ever since. Until two years ago. Who or what had flipped the switch this time, no one knew. At least, that’s what she’d been told.
    “What were you two doing that night?” she asked the vampires, since they obviously hadn’t been at the Kovena Cup.
    “Destroying a Ripper nest in Adams Morgan.”
    Ahead, she could make out the silhouettes of decrepit houses and row houses. Not until they passed the crumbling corpse of the White House