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

cramped as she wondered who they’d left behind—wives, children, parents? And with sorrow at what she feared they’d suffer in this place.
    “So there weren’t always slaves here?” Quinn asked, skeptical. “Or torturing and killing just for the sport of it?”
    “There have always been human servants—humans who willingly, or not so willingly, serve their vampire masters. But the influx of humans solely for sport and food didn’t start in earnest until a few decades ago. Even that didn’t become widespread until a couple of years ago, when the magic began to fail. The depravity since has spiraled out of control, Quinn.” Micah glanced at Arturo. “And even those with honor in their hearts have turned a blind eye.”
    Arturo’s jaw tightened, but, again, he said nothing.
    Quinn watched the passing landscape, the well-lit houses in the inhabited areas, streets that in modern D.C. were now lined with high-rise office buildings.
    “ Cara, ” Arturo said, drawing her gaze to his in the rearview mirror. “If we are stopped and anyone asks, you and Zack are Micah’s slaves. He is leaving you at my house while he helps me search for the missing sorceress.”
    “All right.” There was much to be said for getting their stories straight.
    They turned onto Fourteenth Street, and she knew they were close to Arturo’s house. She’d been there before and knew it to be on F Street, only about a block from the Treasury. In 1870, F Street had been primarily residential, unlike its twenty-first-century twin.
    Several minutes later, Arturo pulled into the alley that ran behind his house and parked the Jeep. Too fast, he was out of the vehicle and slinging a still-sleeping Zack over his shoulder as if her brother wasn’t close to Arturo’s size, as if he weighed nothing.
    Micah emerged from the vehicle at normal speed and opened her door for her. As she climbed out, she heard a man’s scream on the wind some distance away. The sound clawed through her, raking open every memory of the terrors she’d known in this place, setting them free like nightmares flying through her mind. No one should ever be made to scream like that.
    “Quinn?”
    Mike’s voice penetrated the darkness, jarringly wrong in this place. But it focused her, grounded her. Screams were a common sound in Vamp City.
    God, she hated this place.
    With a shiver, she moved quickly toward the house, preceding Micah through the back door and into a kitchen that was, if not modern, at least a far cry from its 1870s roots. This was the one room within Arturo’s home that was fully electrical, with 1970s appliances and modern, recessed lighting.
    The kitchen was empty, the faint smell of freshly baked bread lingering, reminding her she hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. The tension in her back and shoulders eased now that they’d reached Arturo’s home. Oddly, she felt safe here. Arturo might have scared her mindless the first time he brought her here, feeding from her fear, believing he could take her memory of it later. But he’d never attacked her. She’d never been physically harmed in this house. And she never would be as long as Cristoff and his goons didn’t find her here. For all of Arturo’s faults, she believed that. He wouldn’t hurt her. Not physically.
    As they started down the hallway, Ernesta, one of Arturo’s servants, bustled out of the living room, motioning with her hand for them to follow. Quinn knew that the matronly, Latino-looking woman wasn’t human, though exactly what she was, Quinn had yet to learn.
    Quinn entered the living room to find Arturo setting a disgruntled Zack on the sofa.
    “I could have walked,” Zack grumbled.
    “You were sound asleep,” Quinn countered. It might be wishful thinking, but she thought he looked a little better, his skin tone less gray, the circles under his eyes a little less pronounced, though the “whites” of his eyes had turned fully silver. “How do you feel?”
    Zack ran a hand