of her heart, failing slowly as Blake continued to suck at her neck until only a negligible thrum remained.
Cold enveloped her body. Weakness. Her extremities became numb and useless.
As Blake finally pulled away, she caught a glimpse of his face. Long, blood-stained fangs extended well beyond his upper lip. The ice blue of his eyes burned with almost phosphorescent brightness and called to her as her eyesight dimmed.
“Sweet Jesus, Meghan. I’m sorry, love. So sorry,” he said, but his words were growing distant, as if she was fading away. Maybe she was.
A part of her brain understood that she was dying and struggled to hold on. To not let go of what little life remained. That consciousness latched onto the feel of him cradling her. Of the wetness of tears on her face and then the saltiness of something warm against her lips.
“Drink, Meghan,” she heard, and knew that he was offering her life. She didn’t know how she knew it, she just did, as if something deep in her subconscious had elemental knowledge of what he offered.
All she knew at that moment was that she didn’t want to die.
She was only twenty-one and she wasn’t ready to die.
She opened her mouth and placed it against the flesh he offered. She drank of the warmth of his life’s blood. With each pull of her mouth and each sip, strength grew in her body. She felt strength infusing each cell until she was able to force herself away from him.
With a brutal shove she drove him from her. As he rose from the floor beside the bed where he had fallen, he gazed down at her with eyes filled with tears, but they created no emotion in her other than hatred. Within her, fury rose with the realization that he had irrevocably changed her life.
She sat up and grabbed at her clothes, and when he would have reached for her, she slapped away his hands.
“Don’t touch me. Don’t ever touch me again.”
“Ever is a long time now, luv,” he said sadly.
“It is forever now, isn’t it? You made me something other than human.”
At his nod, she said, “I’ll hate you forever.”
He morphed back to his human form then and despite her statement, emotion rose up in her at the sadness in his eyes and at the words he uttered next.
“No need to waste your emotion, Meghan. I’ll hate myself on your behalf.”
The Blood Bank, present day
Even before the knock on the door, Foley knew trouble had landed on his doorstep.
Not that he was unused to trouble. Running the Blood Bank included dealing with an underworld of both humans and vampires who thought trouble was just another word for fun. A night didn’t go by when there wasn’t violence of some kind in the club, not that he minded. A good fight with spilt blood always satisfied the darker aspects of his persona.
Amazingly, it was usually the vampires who were the easier ones to control during any kind of disagreement. They knew the rules and that the penalties for breaking them would be swiftly enforced. Justice delayed was justice denied, he thought, as with a last suck he reluctantly pulled himself away from that night’s plaything.
She fell away limply, her eyes unfocused from the blood loss. The bite mark on her neck was vivid against the flush on her skin.
Rising from the bed in the back room, Foley swept his gaze over the young woman’s prone body. It was made for pleasure, he thought. He itched to join her once again and finish both feeding and loving, but another knock came at the door, more insistent than the one before.
That wasn’t what got him moving away from his beautiful dinner companion.
He is here, Foley thought, suddenly sensing the other vampire’s presence and the growing anger. The last thing Foley wanted to do was to piss him off.
In a blur of vampire speed, he dressed and raced out the door to the small office he kept beyond the Blood Bank’s well-known back rooms and beside a larger meeting space, where the vampires sometimes joined into a council to dispense their sure brand of justice.
Foley paused at the door and drew in a breath to steady his nerves. It had been nearly three years since the last time the Blood Bank’s real owner had made his presence known. His visit today could only mean one thing.
Trouble.
Immediately upon entering the room, Foley felt the strength of the other vampire’s power take hold of him. It roughly forced him down to his knees as the vampire said, “I don’t like to be kept waiting.”
“I’m sorry, Sun Tze. I was—”
“Feeding. I can smell her blood. Come here,” he said, raising his hand and, with that movement, pulling Foley back up from his knees as if he were no more than a puppet on a string.
Fear so strong he almost wet himself slammed into Foley’s gut as he obeyed and approached the other vampire. As he did so, he examined Sun Tze Lee, thinking that little had changed about him in the century since they had first crossed paths.
Lee’s dark, almond-shaped eyes glittered with amusement at his dread, and a smile split his full lips, displaying perfect white teeth with a hint of fang that refused to go away. Lee had spent too much time in his vampire state for them to ever be normal again. The broad plains of Lee’s ruthlessly handsome face had a telltale flush of color.
He had fed recently, Foley realized, but he also knew Lee intended to feast on him. Lee’s dining would have nothing to do with satisfying his hunger. It would be all about reasserting the control he had claimed over Foley when they had run into each other during the Boxer Rebellion.
On a lark, Foley had headed to Beijing, then known as Peking, tired of the pickings in Dublin and intrigued by the talk of all the exotic delights he might find in China. He had arrived at the outbreak of the rebellion and realized that the time would be good for feeding and satisfying the demands of his body.
Sun Tze Lee had been there with a horde of fellow Chinese vampires—kiang-shi, as they were called—to drive away the foreigners exerting too much influence on their homeland and to sate their bloodlust in the course of the battle.
The fighting in Beijing hadn’t lasted too long—fifty-five days, to be exact. But in that time, Lee and the other kiang-shi had decimated not only the foreign civilians and soldiers in the area, but also thousands of Chinese Christians in the city and in provinces like Shandong.
Lee had come upon him as he was draining a beautiful Chinese girl just beyond the steps of the Catholic church to which she had been trying to flee. He supposed now, as he took the final step that brought him close to Lee, that he had been lucky in a way. Instead of ripping his throat out for being a foreigner, Lee had decided to feed from him and make him his slave.
For over a hundred years, Foley had done whatever Lee ordered, and so when he’d entered the office and Lee had said, “On your knees,” Foley had immediately
