Taffeta & Hotspur (27 page)

What was wrong with him? He watched
her sway as she walked to the door, and then she said over her
shoulder, “If you need me … you know where I’ll be, but I don’t
start till tomorrow. I have to get settled first.”

He watched from the side window as she
got into her car and drove off. Then he leaned back against the
wall and blew out air … What the hell?

Like sexy
vampires?

Meet Damon from
ShadowHeart—Slayer

~ Prologue ~

DAMON DRUMMOND STOOD on a rooftop—arms
at his side, legs spread in a wide stance—and stared at the scene
that had just begun to unfold five stories below in an alleyway
only dimly lit by the lights from the various apartments above
it.

At both ends of the alley, New York
City was ablaze with activity and bright with its city lights. Even
at one in the morning the streets were still filled with a flow of
people out on the town.

Damon made quite a picture. His black,
thick hair fell in layered waves and framed his handsome face. The
wind at the top of the building whipped at his shiny locks and at
his tall, rugged body, but he didn’t bother to zip his black
leather jacket closed. He rubbed his cold hands against his jeans
as he watched the red-haired beauty below lure her prey deeper into
the deserted alley.

Damon’s eyes, brightly alert with
interest, were lit in their recesses with gold at a striking
variance with their dark depths. He was keenly intrigued as he
studied her style and took her measure, filing away his
observations as though he were a research scientist observing an
exotic new species. He watched her move and sway and entice her
prey deeper into her web, and he waited for the inevitable. This
was not the first time he had followed her into the
night.

He saw the newbie slink in after her
as the beauty pretended she didn’t know he was coming up behind
her. She put on a grand show. Damon saw that her hand was already
inside her unbuttoned denim jacket, and he knew her fingers were
wrapped around her deadly weapon.

She stopped, turned, and pushed a long
strand of her fire-lit hair away from her provocative features. She
smiled bewitchingly at the young man now tripping with anxious need
and awful, raging blood-lust towards her.

Her voice was disdainful when she
spoke. “Oh—hi there … Are you following me?”

An animal grunt came out of the
newbie’s mouth as his lips drew back, and he bared his fangs. What
happened next went down so swiftly that a lesser person watching
would not have realized the skill and strength it had taken. It
looked so easy … she made it look so easy, but Damon knew
otherwise. A newbie’s brutal strength was derived from the
bloodlust, and no human could withstand its onslaught.

The newbie charged, but she went into
a spin and was lightly, easily, and gymnastically out of his way
and at his back. Before the newly made vamp understood enough to
recover, she had her sharply pointed stake plunged into the nape of
his neck and just as quickly had it withdrawn.

He turned to stare, stunned but not
down. He made an agonized sound and reached back for his neck. His
hand filled with blood, and he stared at his hand as his body
filled with the poison that wood inflicts on a vampire.

She took his moment of confusion and
used it to ram the wooden stake into his undead heart, and he
collapsed in a heap. He stared at her before he whispered, “Your
time … will come …”

She stood back from him for a moment
as though saying a prayer. Then she withdrew the stake, wrapped it
in some kind of cloth, and slipped it into its Kevlar sheath, which
was strapped around her shoulder under her jacket.

Damon’s dark, well-shaped eyebrow
arched with interest as she turned and slowly walked away, leaving
the body in the alleyway. A newbie vampire would not disintegrate.
She didn’t seem to care.

He supposed, as she did, that the
police would list it as they did so many others as an unsolved
case, and it would be filed with the cold cases as time went
by.

The beauty picked up her pace, and
Damon noted the style of her walk was controlled; she was careful
not to use her slayer ability at super-speed.

He couldn’t stop himself from noting
that her butt was perfectly shaped and tantalizing, and he could
see she didn’t give a damn about her looks. She had only one goal,
and that goal was totally at odds with his.

She was confident—probably
overconfident, and that wasn’t good. She was killing at least two
vampires nearly every other night, and one of these nights she
would come across a vampire who knew just how to handle and
overcome her …

However, she was smart, and she had
been piecing the puzzle together. She had discovered bits and
crumbs, and she’d tracked the clues relentlessly. It had Damon
deeply concerned, because she was looking for one vampire in
particular.

The beauty’s name was Nikki Walker.
She was a vampire slayer, and Damon Drummond—well, he was a vampire
…

~ One ~

NIKKI STARED UP at the small inn not
too far from Harcourt Street in Dublin. It was a perfect location.
Quiet, and it seemed to cater to older couples and a few business
sorts. It wasn’t too far from the Temple Bar area, where she would
do her vampire scouting, and so it was perfect for a home
base.

She picked up her two bags and climbed
the high steps that took her inside, where a small but brightly lit
lobby greeted her. A man behind a mahogany counter, with an office
of sorts at his back, caught her attention with his deep, Irish
brogue, and she had to concentrate in order to understand what he
was saying.

He laughed and clipped whatever he had
said into a simple, “Good morn’ to ye, miss.”

“
Oh hi …” Nikki smiled as
she put down her suitcases and moved towards him. “I have
reservations … Nikki Walker.”

“
Ah, yes … ye requested the
top floor … a suite.” He looked to be in his early twenties, and
she couldn’t help but notice that he gave her an interested once
over as inconspicuously as he could before he gently pushed some
papers across the wooden high counter for her to sign and requested
to see her passport.

As she bent to take care of the
paperwork, her long, gold-lit red hair fell about her face. She
pushed it away, looked up, and saw that he was staring. She smiled
amiably as she could see he was about to ask a question.

“
Are ye here on business
then?”

She smiled and said ambiguously, “In a
manner of speaking.”

“
Oh, aye then,” was what he
thought an appropriate response, and Nikki gave him a warm,
friendly smile. It was obvious that he wondered what a young (and
she could see he thought her pretty) woman was doing all alone at a
hotel frequented by the senior crowd on this quiet street in
Dublin. He couldn’t know it was the perfect place for what she had
to accomplish.

Quiet and secluded was everything she
needed.

She wasn’t who she had been, not
anymore. She didn’t feel young and pretty and ready to take on the
world in the normal way young women did. Graduate school was a
thing relegated to another time in the future … friends, love … out
of the picture for now.

What her mother had told her was her
birthright (or bane depending on how you looked at it) had come to
pass. She was a vampire slayer, and she had more than slaying
vampire after vampire on her mind. She wanted one in particular—the
one that had murdered her brother! She knew the vamp was a female
of some years and experience, and she knew that the dangerous
female vamp was known as Deadly Moon.

She and her brother had lost their
parents to a drunk driver when she was sixteen, and her brother had
stepped in and become the sun, the stars, ‘the everything’ she
needed to get through the heartache of their loss. Jack had even
taken over where her mother had left off and did his best to train
her to become the slayer she might one day have to be.

During those early days with her mom,
she had kept her own council. She hadn’t wanted to disappoint her
mother by telling her that ‘slaying vampires’ was not something she
had ever wanted to do.

And then her mother and father were
gone, and she wanted to accomplish all the goals her mother had set
for her. She heard her mother whispering in her ear, “Baby … I know
this doesn’t seem fair … all this extra work, but one day it will
save your life. Want it or not, you are a slayer, and one of them
might come for you …”

Jack wasn’t a slayer by birth, but he
had learned everything he could from his parents and took up the
job of ‘slayer training’ when they lost their parents.

She’d allowed him to put her through
all the trials, the gymnastics, the karate, the wielding of the
deadly wooden stake, but now Jack was gone as well. He was gone
because of a vampire, and she wanted to rip the creature from limb
to limb and feed the pieces to the beasts of hell …

Nikki had money enough. Their parents
had left them comfortably provided for, and Jack had made a fortune
in the computer software business and left everything to
her.

The weeks before she lost her brother,
Nikki had graduated from NYU. Jack had managed to pull on a few
friendship strings and got her started doing little fluff pieces
for a national travel magazine. She had been accepted to graduate
school and had been looking forward to it and the life that went
with it … but, no longer.

She had to find his killer, and she
had the advantage of her slayer abilities. She had questioned the
police about what they knew, but all they had been able to tell her
was that Jack Walker had met an incredibly beautiful woman at some
charity function at Lincoln Center and that they had left
together.

Jack had been found in a suite at the
Plaza with his throat torn and most of the blood drained from his
body.

The police thought it was a serial
killer, but Nikki knew better. She called on her slayer skills and
went to work. She quietly, unobtrusively took on her own
investigation and painstakingly followed where the details took
her.

It was leading her to a vampire of
unusual abilities, and she would have to be careful, because
although she might have super-hearing, super-speed, and
super-strength, she could be killed as easily as any human. She was
not immortal.

The same week that Jack had been
mutilated and killed, she went out looking for information. She
visited the clubs she knew vamps frequented in NYC when they went
looking for easy prey.

She had walked into one dance club and
was surprised to see a great number of vamps mingling with petty,
expectant women. She made her selection and sidled up to
him.

He wasn’t expecting an attack from a
human. He didn’t know she was a slayer because she hid it well. And
so her first encounter went off easier than she had
expected.

It wasn’t difficult to get him into a
position in the dark alley behind the club where she laid him low
with the skill and the strength that was hers as a
slayer.

Some of her success was due to the
shock and surprise he experienced when she threw him hard to the
ground. The rest was the point of the wooden stake held directly
and threateningly to his cold heart. She explained to him then that
she would free him if he told her what she wanted to
know.

He wasn’t a newbie, but he didn’t have
a great number of years or experience as a vampire, so he caved
immediately and told her that the rumor was Deadly Moon had been
with the Walker human. It was the first time she had heard a name
in relation to the dangerous, ‘never seen ancient’
vampire.

He told her everyone in vamp circles
was talking about it because Deadly Moon did not usually make a
spectacle of her kills.

He didn’t know anything more, but
instead of setting him free as she had promised, Nikki had made her
first vampire kill.

Remorse? None. She had not kept her
word—she had not released him when he gave her the information—but
she had no regret. He wouldn’t be able to kill some poor, hapless
human, now would he?

Everything she did from that moment on
was with the intent of finding Deadly Moon, the vampire other vamps
seemed to fear.

Nikki knew enough to be discreet when
she singled out a vampire for questioning … and killing. She never
did so when other vamps could look on and listen in.

Her latest kill, two nights ago, had
won her the information that Deadly Moon was in Dublin. Nikki still
had no description of the female vamp. None seemed to know her,
only of her.

Nikki put aside these thoughts as she
took the key the man at the counter handed her and went to the
small elevator. She had taken the largest suite he had, as she
didn’t know how long she would have to be in Dublin.

She had been to Dublin and the Irish
countryside once before, with her brother …

She arrived at her door, #110, and
opened it wide before she stepped in. The day was misty and gray.
Night would come fast on a day like this. She scanned the place
with more than her eyes as she stepped inside. All clear
…