Serafina and the Silent Vampire by Marie Treanor Read Free Book Online Page A

her. It wasn’t the first friendship she’d ruined through mistrust, and she doubted it would be the last.
    “Are you going alone to meet this Jason?” Elspeth called after her.
    Sera hesitated. She couldn’t imagine any danger occurring in the prosaic surroundings of the C & H car park, and it would do Elspeth good not to be home alone every night. “Want to be my driver?” she asked lightly while Jilly and Jack regarded her with amusement. “Just in case we need to leave in a hurry, you wait outside the car park while I go in and wait for Jason. Start the car if you see me running!”
    ****
    Blair was pissed off. As soon as he opened the door of the Hard Knox pub, he could smell blood and death. Worse, he knew immediately that the vampire whose trail he’d picked up was no longer in there.
    Glancing through the noisy throng, he saw the dead woman at once. Young, blonde, and presumably tasty, she sat more or less upright on one of the grubby, high-backed benches against the wall, her head lolling into the corner. She might have been asleep, except that if you looked closely through the lock of loose hair falling across her cheek, her eyes were wide open.
    A couple sat near her, deep in animated conversation, totally ignoring her. However, it wouldn’t be long before someone spotted that she was dead, and then all hell would break loose. The ensuing panic all over the city would not be conducive to enticing solitary young women outside for a bite. Or even persuading them into a dark corner inside. He’d be reduced to whores and thugs in back alleys, and most of them tasted pretty disgusting.
    Blair strolled on toward the central bar and ordered a malt whisky by the simple expedient of nodding casually at the bottle beside the barman. As he looked around, a rather pretty young lady in red caught his eye and smiled. Blair smiled back from habit, accepted his whisky, and reluctantly broke eye contact in order to stare out the barman instead. It usually worked. Believing he’d been paid, the barman turned to his next customer, and Blair sipped his whisky.
    Right now, he had a choice. He could grab a quick bite of the interested girl across the bar before all hell broke loose over the corpse in the corner. Or he could remove the corpse before it was discovered, as if it was his pissed girlfriend, and thus hide the evidence and avoid the ensuing panic that would so fuck up his comfortable feeding habits. The latter might be more sensible, but it went against the grain to clean up some other bastard’s mess, and doing so wouldn’t prevent the next mess.
    He glanced at the girl in red, who managed to watch him from under her lashes while talking to her friend. Yes, definitely interested. And God knew he was hungry. On the other hand, he couldn’t let this shit carry on. This was his city, and he was damned if he’d tolerate interlopers. It was dusk. Just the time a new vampire might risk the open.
    He drained his glass, gave the girl a rueful wink, and strode out of the pub. He hadn’t gone far when he heard the cry go up. Someone had found the stiff.
    Since there were a lot of people about and it wasn’t quite dark, Blair didn’t take the crow’s route over the rooftops. But walking fast through the streets and running down the steps and through Waverley Station, he made good time to the C & H building where Jason Bell worked. If the little shit wasn’t there, he’d try the father’s house again, risking the garlic and crosses plastered so liberally about the premises.
    In spite of himself, Blair grinned at that. He liked the girl’s style, although he didn’t care for the idea of such a strong psychic poking around the hitherto hidden vampire world, whatever her connection with the strange vampire-cohabiting man in Roseburn.
    The safety of the vampire community depended on secrecy, and in the centuries of his existence, Blair had encountered very few human intrusions, even less threatening ones. The most