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Praise for the novels of MAGGIE SHAYNE

“The suspense will keep you guessing. The characters will steal your heart.”

—New York Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner on The Gingerbread Man

“Maggie Shayne is better than chocolate. She satisfies every wicked craving.”

—New York Times bestselling author Suzanne Forster

“Fans of vampire romance know that no one is quite as dependable as Maggie Shayne is to provide a powerful tale of supernatural love.”

—The Best Reviews

“Once again Maggie Shayne delivers sheer delight and fans new and old of her vampire series can rejoice there’s more to come!”

—RT Book Club

“… fantastic romantic suspense with a great paranormal twist that kept me guessing right up until the end.”

—Goodreads.com on Love Me to Death

Multiple New York Times bestseller Maggie Shayne is one of the hottest authors currently writing paranormal romance.

Her works are fresh and sexy, carrying the reader into a darkly compelling and fully realised world where vampires are creatures of the heart, not just the night.

Also Available from MAGGIE SHAYNE

ANGEL’S PAIN

LOVER’S BITE

DEMON’S KISS

NIGHT’S EDGE

(with Charlaine Harris and Barbara Hambly)

TWILIGHT
HUNGER

MAGGIE
SHAYNE

www.millsandboon.co.uk

This book is dedicated to my editor and my friend, Leslie Wainger, from the bottom of my heart

1

We children were supposed to be asleep….

But we woke, as if in response to some silent summons. We crept to the entrances of our tents and wagons, drawn like moths to the snapping flames of the central fire and the dark, leaping shadows the strange woman cast as she danced.

There was no music. I knew there was none, but it seemed to me that music filled my head all the same as I peered around the painted flap and watched her. She whirled, scarves trailing like colorful ghosts in her wake, her hair, black as the night, yet gleaming blue in the fire’s glow. She arched and twisted and spun round again. And then she stopped still, and her eyes, like shining bits of coal, fixed right on mine. Scarlet lips curved in a terrifying smile, and she crooked a finger at me.

I tried to swallow, but the lump of cold dread in my throat wouldn’t let me. Licking my lips, I glanced sideways at the tents and painted wagons of my kin, and saw the other children of our band, peering out at her, just as I was. Some of my cousins were older than I, some younger. Most looked very much like me. Their olive skin smooth, their eyes very round and wide, too thickly fringed for the eyes of a boy, but lovely beyond words on little girls. Their hair was uncut, like mine, but clean and raven black.

We were Gypsies all, and proud. The dancing woman … she was a Gypsy, too. I knew that at a glance. She was one of our own.

And crooking her finger at me still.

Dimitri, older than me by three years, gave me a superior look and whispered, “Go to her. I dare you!”

Only to prove myself braver than he, I stiffened my spine and stepped out of my mother’s tent, my bare feet covering the cool ground by mere inches with each hesitant step. As I crept closer, the others, taking courage in mine, began to come out, too. Slowly we gathered round the beautiful stranger like sinners come to worship at the feet of a goddess. And as we did, her smile grew wider. She beckoned us closer, a finger to her lips, and then she sat down on a log near the fire.

“Who is she?” I whispered to Dimitri, for he had joined us now, too, ashamed of himself, I thought, not to have been leading us all from the start.

“Stupid, do you know nothing? She is our aunt.” He shook his head disgustedly at me, then returned his enraptured gaze to the woman. “Her name is Sarafina,” he said. “She comes sometimes … though I suppose you are too young to recall her last visit. She’s not supposed to be here, though. When the grown-ups find out, there will be trouble.”

“Why?” I too was entranced by the mysterious stranger as she lowered herself to the log, spreading the layers of her colorful skirts around her, opening her arms to welcome the young ones who crowded closer to sit on the ground all around her. I sat closest of all, right at her feet. Never had I seen a woman so beautiful. But there was something else about her, as well. Something … unearthly. Something frightening.

And there was the way her eyes kept meeting mine. There was a secret in that black gaze—a secret I could not quite see. Something shadowed, hidden.

“Why will there be trouble?” I whispered again.

“Because! She is outcast!”

My brows drew together. I was about to ask why, but then the woman—my aunt Sarafina, whom I had never seen before in my life—began to speak. And her voice was like a song. Mesmerizing, deep, beguiling.

“Come, little ones. Oh, how I’ve missed you.” Her gaze swept the faces of the children, the look in her eyes almost painful to see, so intense was the emotion there. “But most of you do not remember me at all, do you?” Her smile faltered. “And you, little Dante. You are … how old now?”

“Seven,” I told her, my voice a mere whisper.

“Seven years,” she replied with a heavy sigh. “I was here the day you were born, you know.”

“No. I … didn’t know.”

“No matter. Oh, children, I’ve so much to tell you. But first.” She tugged open a drawstring sack that dangled from the sash round her waist, and from it she began to draw glorious things, which she handed around to one and all. Sweets and confections such as we had never tasted, wrapped in brightly colored paper. Shiny baubles on chains, and glittering stones of all kinds, carved into the shapes of animals and birds.

The one she gave to me was a stone of black onyx in the shape of a bat. I shivered when she placed the cold piece into my palm.

When the sack was empty and the children all quiet again, she began to speak. “I have seen so many things, little ones. Things you would not believe. I journeyed to the desert lands, and there I saw buildings as big as mountains—every stone larger than an entire Gypsy wagon! Perfect and smooth they are, and pointed at the top.” She used her hands to make the shape of these wonders in the air before us. “No one knows who built them, nor when. They have been there forever, some say. Others say they were built as monuments to ancient kings … and that the bodies of those rulers still rest inside, along with treasures untold!” When our eyes widened, she nodded hard, making her raven curls dance and her earrings jangle. “I’ve been across the sea … to the land below, where creatures with necks as tall as … as that yew tree there, walk on stilt legs and nibble the young leaves from the tops of the trees. Yellow gold they are, and spotty! With sprouts atop their heads!”

I shook my head in disbelief. Surely she was spinning tales.

“Oh, Dante, it is true,” she said. And her eyes held mine, her words for me alone, I was certain. “One day you will see these things, too. One day I will show them to you myself.” Reaching down, she stroked a path through my hair and leaned close to me, whispering into my ear. “You are my very special boy, Dante. You and I share a bond more powerful even than the one you share with your own mother. Remember my words. I’ll come back for you someday. When you need me, I will come.”

I shivered and didn’t know why.

Then I went stiff at the sound of the Grandmother’s squawk. “Outcast!” she yelled, rushing from her tent and jabbing her fingers at Sarafina in the way that was said to ward off evil, the two middle fingers folded, forefinger and little one pointing straight out. She made a hissing sound when she did it, so I thought of a snake with a forked tongue snapping.

The children scattered. Sarafina rose slowly, the picture of grace, and I alone remained before her. Almost without thought, I got to my feet and turned to face the Grandmother. As if I wished to protect the lovely Sarafina. As if I could. My back was toward the woman now, and as her hands closed on my shoulders, I felt myself grow a full inch taller.

Then the Grandmother glared at me, and I thought I would shrink to the size of a sand flea.

“Can you not tolerate my presence even once every few years or so, Crone?” Sarafina asked. Her voice was no longer loving or soft or kind. It was deep and clear … and menacing.

“You’ve no business here!” the Grandmother said.

“But I have,” she replied. “You are my family. And like it or not, I am yours.”

“You are nothing. You are cursed. Be gone!”

Chaos erupted around us as mothers, awakened by the noise, dashed out of their tents and wagons, gathered their children and hurried them back inside. They acted as if a killer wolf had appeared at our campfire, rather than an outcast aunt of rare beauty, bearing exotic gifts and amazing tales.

My mother came, too. As she rushed toward me I tucked the stone bat up into my sleeve. She stopped before she reached me and met Sarafina’s eyes. “Please,” was all she said.

There was a moment of silence as something passed between the two women. Some message, unspoken, that left my mother’s eyes sad and welling with tears.

Sarafina bent down and pressed her cool lips to my cheek. “I’ll see you again, Dante. Never doubt it. But for now, go on. Go to your mamma.” She gave me a gentle shove and let go my shoulders.

I walked to my mother, nearly hating her for making me leave the mysterious Sarafina before I’d had a chance to learn her secrets. She gripped my arm tightly and ran to our tent so fast that she nearly dragged me off my feet. Inside, she closed the flap and cupped my face in her hands, falling to her knees before me. “Did she touch you?” she cried. “Did she mark you?”

“Sarafina would not hurt me, Mamma. She is my aunt. She is kind, and beautiful.”

But my mother seemed not to hear my words. She tipped my head to one side and the other, pushing my hair aside and searching my skin. I tired of it soon enough and tugged myself free.

“You are never to go near her again, do you hear me, Dante? If you see her, you must come to me at once. Promise me!”

“But why, Mamma?”

Her hand came across my face so suddenly I would have fallen had she not been gripping my arm with the other. “Do not question me! Promise me, Dante. Swear it on your soul!”

I lowered my head, my cheek stinging, and muttered my agreement. “I promise.” I was ashamed of the tears that burned in my eyes. They came more from shock than pain. My mother’s hand rarely lashed out in anger. I didn’t understand why it had tonight.

She knelt now, her hands on my shoulders, her worn face close to mine. “It’s a promise you must keep, Dante. You endanger your soul if you break it. Mark me well.” She drew a breath, sighed, and kissed the cheek she had so recently wounded. “Now, into bed with you.” She was marginally calmer, her voice nearer its normal pitch.

I was far from calm. Something had stirred my blood tonight. I crawled into my bed, pulled the covers over me and let the tiny, cold stone bat drop from my sleeve into my hand. I held it, rubbed its smooth surface with my thumb, beneath the blanket where my mother could not see. Mamma watched over me for a long moment, then blew out the lamp, and curled up—not upon her own bed, but on the floor beside mine, a worn blanket her only cushion.

In the silence, I rolled toward the side of the tent and thrust a forefinger through the tiny hole I had made in the fabric, so I could watch the grown-ups round the fire long after they had sent the children to bed. I tugged the hole a little wider in the darkness. And through that tiny hole, I watched and I listened as the Grandmother, the crone of the band, the eldest and most venerated woman of the family, faced off against the most vibrantly beautiful female I had ever seen in my life.

“Why do you torment us by coming back to our midst?” the Grandmother asked, as the dancing flames painted her leathery face in orange and brown, shadows and light.

“Why? You, my own sister, ask me why?”

“Sister, bah!” The Grandmother spat on the ground. “You are no sister to me but a demon. Outcast! Cursed!”

I shook my head in wonder. What could Sarafina mean? Sister? She could no more be the old one’s sister than … than I could.

“Tell me why you come, demon! It is always the children you seek out when you return. It’s for one of them, isn’t it? Your wretched curse has been passed to one of them! Hasn’t it? Hasn’t it?”

Sarafina smiled very slowly, her face angelic and demonic all at once, and bathed in fireglow. “I come because you are all I have. I will always come back, old woman. Always. Long after you’ve gone to dust, I’ll be coming back, bringing gifts to the little ones. Finding in their eyes and in their smiles the love and acceptance my own sister denies me. And there is nothing you can do to prevent it.”

Before Sarafina turned away, she looked past the Grandmother and right into my eyes. As if she had known all along that I was there, watching her from the other side of that tiny hole in the tent. She could not have seen me. And yet, she must have. Her lips curved ever so slightly at the corners, and her mouth moved. Even though no sound emerged, I knew the word she whispered. Remember.

Then she turned, her skirts flying, and vanished into the night. I saw the trailing colors of her scarves like tails behind her for only an instant. Then the blackness of night closed in where she had been, and I saw her no more.

I lay down on my pillows, and I shivered in inexplicable dread.

It was me. My aunt had come for me. I knew it in my soul. What she wanted of me, I could not guess. How I knew it, this was a mystery. But I was certain to the core of me that she did have a reason for returning in the face of such hatred.

And the reason … was me.

Slowly, slowly, the smoke from the Gypsy campfire thinned. The light thrown by the flames dulled, and the heat—so real she had sworn she could feel it on her face—went cold.

Morgan De Silva blinked out of the fantasy. She was not looking at a Gypsy campfire through the huge dark eyes of a small boy. She was sitting on the floor of a dusty attic, staring down at the time-yellowed pages of a handwritten journal, bound in leather covers so old they felt buttery-soft against her hands. The vision painted by the words that spiderwebbed across the aging pages had been vivid. It had been … real. As real as if she’d been in that Gypsy camp in the distant past, instead of on the coast of Maine in the early spring of 1997.

Morgan turned the page slowly, eager to read on….

The ringing of the telephone, floating faintly from no small distance, stopped her. With a resigned sigh, she closed the large volume and returned it carefully to the aged trunk, atop a stack of others just like it. When she closed the trunk’s lid, its hinges groaned and a miniature explosion of dust puffed out at her. Brushing her hands against each other, then her jeans, she blew out the candles that were the only source of light in the room and hurried down the narrow, steep attic stairs.

She hadn’t expected to find a thing up there other than cobwebs and dust. Exploring more of the ramshackle house had been an experiment in procrastination, not an act of curiosity. If her own work had been going anywhere, she never would have bothered poking around this aging, sagging house at all.

And that would have been a crying shame.

She ran through the hallway, between walls of crumbling plaster, the lath beneath it visible in places, to the next set of stairs. These were wider, but not in much better repair than anything else around the place. The third step from the top was missing a board, and she skipped it automatically and trotted the rest of the way down as the phone kept on ringing.

If it were another lawyer or bill collector, she thought breathlessly, she would hunt them down and kill them.

The wide staircase emptied itself into a huge room that must have been glorious once, a century or so ago. Now it was filled with nothing but heartbroken echoes and a tangle of bare wires sticking out of the domed ceiling, where some magnificent chandelier must have once been. Beyond that room, through a pair of double doors, was her room. Her … office. For the moment, at least. But only until she earned back her fortune and returned to L.A. in triumph.

Pretty much the opposite of the way she had left.

Her heart was pounding from exertion by the time she got that far, and she was out of breath, slightly dizzy, and pressing one hand to her chest. Ridiculous for a twenty-year-old woman to tire so easily, but there it was. She had never been healthy, and she knew she wasn’t ever going to be. But at least her condition hadn’t begun to worsen yet. It was too soon. She had so many things to do.

Finally Morgan snatched up the telephone, which was as antiquated as the rest of the place. The handset weighed at least two pounds, she guessed, and the rotary dial seemed to mock her high-tech tastes.

If her “hello?” sounded irritated, it was because she was dying to read more of those journals up in the attic, to find out more about their author. She might be on the verge of admitting that she was a talentless hack, but she still knew good writing when she read it, and what she had been reading upstairs was good writing. Painfully good.

“Morgan? What took you so long? I was getting worried.”

Her irritation fled at David Sumner’s familiar voice. Her honorary uncle—a title she’d stopped using long ago—was the only person who hadn’t turned his back on her when she had gone from spoiled rich girl to penniless orphan in a matter of hours. He was the one person she didn’t mind hearing from just now.

“Hey, David,” she said. “I was just. exploring. This place is huge, you know.”

“No, I don’t know, never having laid eyes on it. You sound a little out of breath.”

“Two flights of stairs will do that.”

She noticed his hesitation. He tended to worry about her far more than he should.

“How is the place, anyway?” he asked at length.

“It’s a wreck,” she told him, her tone teasing, partly because she was trying to ease his mind and partly because she enjoyed teasing him. “Which serves you right for buying it sight unseen. Who does stuff like that?”

She could almost see his puckered face, the laugh lines around his eyes, his balding head. David had been her best friend for as long as she could remember. “A friend of the family,” her parents had always called him. But it had seemed to Morgan that he’d barely tolerated the family.

Of course, he had known the truth about her parents all along. She had only learned it recently, through tabloid headlines and courtroom vultures.

“I bought it for the location, and you know it,” David told her. “And I trust my real estate guru on such matters. The building is coming down, anyway.”

“Yes, it is,” Morgan said. “As we speak.”

He was quiet for a moment. “That bad, huh?”

She could have slapped herself. Sometimes she could be such a self-centered little … “It’s not,” she said quickly. “I was joking.” She looked around her at the room she had chosen to inhabit. It had been somebody’s library or study once upon a time.

She thought of the little boy she had been reading about and wondered if it had ever been his. In his older years, perhaps, when he had decided to write his memoirs.

From the corner of her eye, she saw him. A dark, broad-shouldered form bent over the desk, with a quill pen in his long, graceful hand. Her heart jumped, and she caught her breath and turned toward him. But there was nothing. No man, no form, no quill pen. Just her computer with its electric blue screen. Whatever she had seen was there and then gone. A vision. A thought form. A little overactivity of her imagination, perhaps.

A shiver worked its way up her spine, but she shook it away.

“Describe it to me,” David was saying.

“What?” she asked, dragging her eyes away from the old desk.

“The house. Describe it to me.”

She flicked her gaze toward the desk again. No one there. Sighing, she tried to comply with David’s request. “It must have been incredible once. The scrollwork around the fireplace mantle is worn and faded, but lavish. I think it’s hardwood. You’re going to want to take that entire piece out before you tear it down. And there’s hand-tooled casing that borders every one of the tall windows. This place has … I don’t know. Something.”

“It’s far from what you’re used to, though,” David said.

“Yeah, well, it’s not Beverly Hills, and we aren’t having movie stars over for poolside parties … but I wouldn’t be getting any work done that way, would I?”

“And are you? Getting any work done?”

Morgan looked at the glowing blue screen of her computer—which had only escaped the notice of the estate lawyers because it had been with her at UCLA when her parents had been killed and the true state of their finances revealed. They were broke, and so far in debt Morgan could barely wrap her mind around the actual numbers. She hadn’t been able to make sense of it, at first. Her father was a successful director, her mother an actress who had reached her zenith a decade ago and had been doing smaller roles lately, but who had still seemed content with her life.

Or so Morgan had thought. She soon learned she had been living in a bubble. The level of cocaine in her parents’ systems the night of the accident was so high the coroner wondered how they had even managed to drive.

They’d been addicts, their entire lifestyle a lie.

The house and everything in it had been sold to pay off a portion of their accumulated debt, and Morgan had to drop out of school. Her tuition had already been months overdue. And apparently her friends were as shallow as David had always tried to tell her they were, because once the truth came out, they had abandoned her like last year’s wardrobe, while those she had always considered beneath her seemed secretly amused by her troubles. The last few days on campus, she had found tabloid pages tacked to bulletin boards in every hall, screaming about the secret, drug-infested life of the famous couple who seemed to have had it all. The nightmare behind the fairy tale, and the poor little rich girl left to pick up the pieces.

She had run from L.A. with her tail between her legs, with nowhere to go and nothing left besides the things she managed to take with her. She’d pulled into David’s driveway with nothing but her Maserati—the registration in her name, thank God—and the stuff she had crammed into its minuscule trunk. He was her last hope, and she had half expected him to turn away from her in disgust, just like all the rest.

But he hadn’t turned away. He’d helped her sell the car, buy a modest used one and pocket the difference. When she said she needed a hideaway where she could go to lick her wounds, he told her she could use this place in Maine, free of charge, for as long as she needed to.

Which wouldn’t be long, she thought silently. She had always intended to become a wildly successful screenwriter. It was just going to have to happen a bit sooner than she’d planned. David was a producer. He would help her make the right connections, maybe even produce her screenplay himself. He’d promised to give her a shot. Help her all he could.

All she needed … was the material.

“Morgan?” David’s voice jerked her away from the path her thoughts had been wandering. “Did you hear me? I asked, how’s the script coming?”

She blinked at the blank computer screen. The blinking cursor. “Fine. Great. It’s coming great.” So great that she had decided to go exploring this ancient wreck of a house rather than continue the battle with the blank screen. The only key on her keyboard getting a steady workout was the one marked “delete.” She’d been producing garbage since she had arrived here. Garbage.

“You know, it’s only natural you might have some trouble getting started,” David said. “Don’t push yourself. You’ve been through a lot. Your mind needs time to digest it all.”

Morgan shrugged. “That’s not it,” she told him.

“No?”

“Of course not. It’s been six months. I’m completely over it.”

“Completely over losing your parents, your fortune, your home, your education and what you thought was your identity?” He made a clicking noise with his tongue. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, I am. And to tell you the truth, finding out I was adopted explained a lot of things. I mean, you know my parents were never all that … involved.”

“That was the cocaine, hon. Not the adoption. Not you.”

She cleared her throat when it started to tighten up, gave herself a mental kick. “As for the rest of it … I’m going to get it all back, David. Everything I lost. And then some.”

She heard the smile in his voice. “I don’t doubt it a bit.”

“Neither do I,” she said, glancing again at the blank screen, feeling those doubts she’d denied nearly smothering her. Damn, why couldn’t writing a blockbuster script be as easy as she had always thought it would be? She used to watch films with the feeling that she could do better in her sleep.

“So when can I expect the screenplay?” he asked.

Licking her lips, she wished to God she knew. “A masterpiece takes time … and it’s … so unpredictable.”

“I need a fall project. I’m saving a slot for you, Morgan. Three months. I need the material in three months. Can you do that? Write it over the summer and get it to me by September?”

Lifting her chin, swallowing hard, she said, “Yes. I’ll have it finished by September. No problem.”

Big problem.

“Great,” David said. “You’re gonna be fine, Morgan. You can get through this.”

“Of course I can.”

“Do you need anything?”

“No, no, I’m fine.”

“Your funds still holding out?”

She licked her lips, forced the lie out. She’d cleaned out her accounts on David’s advice, before the lawyers and creditors could get hold of her money, and she’d had the cash from the car. But while she had no rent here, there were other expenses. The phone, the electricity and she had to eat. Truth to tell, the money in her checking account was dwindling.

“I’m fine,” she said again.

“Good,” David said softly. “Good. You let me know if there’s anything you need.”

“I will, David.”

He was quiet for a moment. “How about your health?”

Drawing a breath, she sighed. “You know how I hate being thought of as sickly.”

“Did I say you were sickly?”

“No.”

“Well?”

She pursed her lips. “The brisk clean air up here is working wonders on me,” she lied. What could she tell him? The truth? That it was cold and dreary and damp here, and that she resented having to think of a sixty-degree day in late April as a heat wave, when she would be basking in eighty-degree heat beside her parents’ pool, working on her tan by now, if she’d been home?

But it did no good to wish for what she couldn’t have.

“I ought to go, David,” she whispered around the lump in her throat. “If I’m going to have this done by fall, I ought to get at it.”

“Okay, hon. You just call if you need anything.”

“I will, David. Thanks.”

Morgan replaced the old receiver on its hook and gnawed on her lower lip. She turned the rickety wooden chair toward the computer screen, assured herself once again that no one was in it, and finally sat down. She poised her hands over the keyboard, told herself to write something, now, today, or else give up for good and go out and find a job. The problem was, she couldn’t do anything.

Writing was the only thing she had ever wanted to do, and she’d been good once. Or … she thought she had. In school, her essays got raves. The theater group had even produced one of her plays. Everyone loved it. The campus critics, the local press …

But that was when she’d been Morgan De Silva, the brilliant daughter of a famous director and a beloved actress, the girl leading the charmed life and destined for success. Now she was Morgan De Silva, disgraced has-been, penniless, homeless, practically run out of town and staring into the face of a future more bleak than she could have imagined a year ago.

Now … now she just didn’t know if her talent had ever been real, or if it had been her name winning her praise all this time. She didn’t know anything anymore, not who she was, or what she was doing or why the words had just stopped coming. It was as if the well inside her had been a part of the illusion her life had been. As if it had dried up when that illusion had been shattered.

She lowered her hands, having put not one word on the screen. Outside, the wind howled; the lights dimmed, then came back. The old house groaned when the wind blew. Probably, if she was as old as it was, she would groan, too, she thought. And then she wondered just how old that was.

Those journals … there had been no dates inscribed, but it was obvious they’d been written long, long ago. At least a century … and maybe closer to two.

That thought brought her back to the one she’d had earlier, about the journal writer. Dante. Had he lived here, that man who’d been a Gypsy boy, entranced by his outcast aunt? Had he been in this very room, perhaps, pacing before a fire, his quill pen lying untouched on some polished antique desk? Had he courted his muse as impatiently as she did, grown frustrated when the words wouldn’t come?

Drawn as if by an unseen hand, she rose and walked out of the office, through the ghostly front hall and up the wide staircase. She traversed the hallway, ignoring the doors that lined either side. She hadn’t even ventured into most of the rooms up here. There were so many.

But her goal was none of them. Her goal was beyond, up the back stairway into the attic, where spiderwebs held court and dust ruled the day. She knelt as she had before and fished the book of matches from her jeans pocket, then lit the candles in the gaudy candelabra she’d found downstairs. As their soft yellow glow spread, she lovingly opened the hand-tooled chest, took out that first volume, stroked its cover and opened it slowly, careful not to break the brittle pages. Turning to the place where she had left off, she began to read. And once again she lost herself in the words.

2

It was fully thirteen years before I saw Sarafina again. Thirteen full years, during which I had learned many things. I had learned that no matter where we went, we would be driven out eventually. I had learned that no matter how honest we might be, we would be called thieves by strangers who knew nothing about us. So I learned to take what I wanted and wish them all damned. I might as well enjoy the fruits of the crimes attributed to me, I reasoned. If I were caught, I would pay for those crimes, whether I had committed them or not. Better I hang for my own offenses than for those of some pale-skinned whelp who pretended honesty and was believed without question, so long as there was a Gypsy nearby to take the blame.

But of all the things I had learned, one bit of knowledge eluded me, though I had sought it without end. I had never learned the mystery of Sarafina. Who she really was, how she was related to us, why she had been ousted from our band. Nor what was the nature of the curse she was said to carry.

Not until the night when my life nearly ended—did end, for all practical purposes. It did end—and a new one began. It was late autumn, and the year was 1848.

I was a young man then. Hotheaded and reckless. My family was about to pack up and move on yet again. Not because we had grown tired of the place but because the locals accused us of stealing livestock, and we knew the law would be on us soon.

Before we left, I had decided I would extract a pound of flesh from our accusers. More than a pound, actually.

The moon was newly born that night; only a strand of silver gleamed in the sky as I crept into the farmer’s barnyard. And even that light was blotted out more and more often as long, clawlike fingers of blue-black clouds reached across its slender arch. I didn’t care what I stole that night, so long as I took something. It was retribution. It was repayment for the slander done to me and mine.

The first animal I came upon was a bearded billy goat. I remember it well … fawn and white, and shaggy. Horns curving back, away from its head. Hooves in sad need of trimming, like the too-long fingernails of an old man.

Slipping a rope around its neck, I led the goat away from the shed where it had been penned. Across the worn ground where, by day, the hens would peck and dig. Now they were roosting along the top rail of the fence and in the scraggly young saplings here and there. The goat came along easily, right up until I passed through the gate and started away from the barnyard. Then it stopped all of a sudden, planting its forefeet and bleating loud and long and plaintively. It was like a scream in the night.

I should have let the animal go. But pride in a young man is sometimes overblown, and in me it was combined with anger and fury and frustration.

So I kept tugging on the lead rope, dragging the animal through the lush green grasses, which were damp with night dew. It dragged its feet, tugging and thrashing its shaggy head from side to side, bawling like a lost calf.

The farmer never called out, never ordered me to stop or release the goat or anything else. I never even knew he’d stepped out of his house. That was how silently death came for me that night. One moment I was cussing at an ornery goat, turning and tugging, the rope over my shoulder and the goat behind me. And the next I was facedown on the ground, my ears ringing from the explosion of the gunshot that had come as if from nowhere.

I could not believe it had happened so easily, so suddenly. Without fanfare or drama. The farmer had simply pulled the trigger of his black powder rifle, sending an earsplitting roar through the night and a lead ball through my back.

Shock and pain screamed in me in the seconds after I hit the ground. I felt, for a moment, the fire of the ball’s path and the rush of the warm blood soaking my clothes. But then something far more frightening than pain came to me.

Numbness.

It began at my feet, as best I can recall. And I wasn’t aware of it as it happened but afterward, when I heard the farmer’s footfalls coming closer. I realized that I could not move, that I could not feel my feet. Within a second of that realization I felt the numbness spreading, creeping up my legs as steadily as a rising tide. My hips and pelvis, my belly. It rose further, and the pain that was like a fire in my back vanished. It simply vanished.

I felt nothing. I tried to move my arms, my legs, but I could not.

I gasped in shock when my body suddenly flipped, for I had not even felt the toe of the cruel farmer’s boot as he used it to roll me onto my back. But I saw the hate in his eyes as he stared down at me, his weathered face like the bark of an aging cherry tree, white whiskers long and unkempt.

“Thievin’ Gypsy scum,” he said. He spat on me, and then turned and walked away, taking his goat with him.

He hadn’t killed me.

The relief of that was soon overruled by the realization that he would have, had he not been certain I would die on my own within a few minutes. I could not feel the blood spreading beneath me, staining the grass. But I sensed it flowing from my body, felt myself weakening steadily from the loss of it. Felt myself … dying.

I heard his footsteps retreating. Heard the door of his ramshackle house banging closed. And then I heard nothing beyond the gentle wind of the night, whispering in the trees. Whispering my name.

“Oh, sweet Dante,” a voice said from very nearby. Not the wind. Not this time. “You’ve brought this upon yourself far more quickly than I would have liked.”

I moved my eyes, turned my head very slightly, but only that. For the most part, my eyes seemed to be the only part of me I was still able to command.

Sarafina stood beside me, silhouetted by the night, like some dark angel. Those black fingers of cloud stretched over the stars behind her. I tried to speak, but the words came so softly, I knew she could not hear them. Then she knelt and bent close to me, and with every ounce of strength in me, I managed to say, “Sarafina … I am dying.”

Her soft hand brushed my dark hair away from my forehead. “No, Dante. You know full well I shall not let that hap pen.”

“B-but …”

“Hush. It is almost time.” She glanced down at my body, and I wondered what she saw. “You’ve nearly bled to death. It will only be another moment.”

My eyes widened, and panic choked me. “Sarafina!” I rasped, fear giving my voice new strength, though it still emerged as little more than a harsh whisper. “Please!”

“Trust me, my darling. You will not die.”

“But …”

“You will not die,” she said again.

I lay there, fading, fading, darkness closing in around the edges of my vision. I realized dully that she looked no different to me than she had when I’d seen her last. No older. No different at all.

“There now. That’s better.”

My eyes opened, fell closed, opened again. My breaths came shallow and sparse, and I could feel my heartbeat. It pounded in my ears, ever slower … slower … slower….

“Listen to me, my special one,” she said, and her voice seemed to come from very far away, as if she spoke to me from the depths of a cave. “You have a choice to make, and it must be made now. There will be no time to deliberate. Do you wish to die? Here and now? Or live, though it will mean living in exile, as I do? Hated by the family, outcast and driven away.”

I felt weak. As if I were becoming a shadow. I didn’t understand her questions.

“Life or death, Dante? Speak your answer. If you delay, the choice will be gone. You will die. Tell me now. Which will it be? Life … or death?”

I strained to form the single word but never heard it emerge from my lips or felt them move at all. It was all I could do to think the word with the intention of speaking it aloud. Life.

“Good.”

She moved. My vision was fading, so that I could not see where she went, what she did. Then she pressed something warm and wet to my lips and whispered, “Drink, Dante. This is the elixir that will make you live. Drink.”

The warm, thick liquid touched my lips, and there was a quickening of my senses, followed at once by a shocking sensation of need. I closed my mouth around the font she offered and nursed at it like a suckling babe. Life seemed to awaken in me, along with a hunger such as I had never known. My arms moved, my hands clasping this bounty, holding it to my face, as I sucked at the luscious fluid that flowed into me.

“Enough!”

Sarafina gripped a handful of my hair and jerked my head away. And only then did I realize it had been her wrist at which I’d been so eagerly feeding. Her blood I had been drinking so hungrily. Even now, she pulled her forearm away, tugging a scarf from her hair and wrapping it tightly around the wound.

Horrified, I felt my stomach lurch, turning my head away from her and lifting my hand to swipe at my mouth.

“It’s all right, Dante,” she whispered. “It is the way the gift is shared.”

I looked down at my hands, red with the blood I’d wiped from my mouth. But alive. Strong. I moved my fingers, made fists.

“What is this?” I asked her softly. “What … what does this mean?” And even as I said it, the numbness was receding down my body. The feeling rushed back into my torso, my legs and my feet, with heightened intensity.

My senses prickled with keen new awareness. My skin tingled at the touch of the very air. My eyes seemed to see more vividly, more precisely, than ever they had. And strength surged through my veins.

She tore my shirt away, making strips of its fabric as she spoke. “It is a gift, young Dante, though the old one calls it a curse. It is a gift I have given to you. You will never die now. Never grow older. And though your family will turn against you, you will never be alone, as I have been. For I will be with you. Always.”

Looking over my shoulder at her, for she was now wadding the fabric and stuffing it into the wound in my back, which caused me immense pain, I shook my head. I did not understand. She tied several strips tightly around me, to hold the wads in place, then reached down, clasped my hand and helped me to my feet, and even as I rose, I saw the old man’s silhouette looming just behind her.

I opened my mouth to shout a warning.

Before I said a word, Sarafina turned with such speed she seemed a mere blur. The farmer’s rifle went sailing through the air, out of sight, firing harmlessly into the woods as it hit the ground. And Sarafina, the beautiful, gracious woman by whom I had been so entranced, gripped the farmer’s shirtfront and jerked him forward. Before I could even react, she had fastened her mouth to his throat.

I heard the sounds…. I saw, very clearly in the darkness now, what she was doing. Drinking … his blood. Gorging herself at his throat. At first the farmer pounded her back and kicked at her … and then … then he simply surrendered. I heard his sigh, saw him close his eyes and even wrap his arms around her. He let his head fall backward, and I saw him grind his hips against Sarafina’s as she continued to suck at his throat.

And then there was no life left in him at all.

She let go his shirt, and the corpse fell to the ground. Empty. A rag-poppet. Utterly drained.

With one of her scarfs, Sarafina dabbed delicately at her mouth as she turned to face me. I gaped at her, my mouth working soundlessly.

“Don’t look so shocked, Dante. Are you telling me you’re only just figuring it out? Hmm? We are Nosferatu. We are undead.” She licked her lips, tilted her head and smiled very slightly at me. “Vampires,” she whispered, and I swore the night wind picked up the word and repeated it a thousand times in a thousand voices.

Vampires.

A breeze from some unseen source made the candle flames leap and flicker. Morgan tore her eyes from the weathered pages and automatically looked behind her. But of course no one was there. Nothing was there. This wasn’t real.

It wasn’t real.

“Oh my God,” Morgan whispered. “This isn’t a diary. These aren’t memoirs. It’s … it’s fiction. It’s incredible, breathtaking fiction!”

Oh, maybe not to the man who had written it. The delightfully insane artist who had crafted this tale had, perhaps, even believed it. Imagine. A man who honestly thought he was a vampire. A man who had, in all likelihood, lived here. Right here. In this house.

Something scraped the window, and Morgan whirled, her hand flying to her chest as her heart leapt. But it was only a tree limb, bent and clawlike, scratching at the glass. Not some creature of the night who called himself Dante, come back to claim his diaries and his house. Of course not. Vampires were not real.

The sudden movement, the scare, left her slightly dizzy and made her chest pound. She waited for it to ease. The rush of breathlessness passed, as it always did. She drew a few deep, cleansing breaths and glanced at her watch. She had been sitting in the dark, musty attic for hours, lost in the imaginary world of a madman. When she should have been working on her own tales of intrigue.

God, how was she ever going to have a saleable script ready for David in three months? Especially now, when all she wanted to do was read more of this incredible tale.

Vaguely she wondered how long it had taken the imaginative Dante to pen his fantasies. Not long, she thought … if every journal in this stack were filled. And even then, she didn’t know how he had managed it all in one short lifetime.

He was dead, though. He had to be dead, because she had finally come upon a date, so there was no doubt. And his words, his tales … they just lay there, untouched. So vivid, so wonderfully written, it was almost heartbreaking that they hadn’t been shared with the world. God, if she had written something this good and it had never been seen, she would have been.

Oh.

Oh. The thought that just occurred to her! This could be her work. For all anyone else knew, it could all be her work. Who the hell would ever know the difference?

“No,” she whispered aloud. “It wouldn’t be right.”

Wouldn’t it? her mind argued. She had just decided it was criminal that this work hadn’t been shared. She had just acknowledged that if she had been the author, she would have spent eternity regretting that the work lay here, undiscovered. The written word was meant to be read, after all. Not hidden away but … shared. Experienced.

She knelt again in front of the trunk, licked her dry lips. What harm would there be, she wondered? Dante was long dead, and no one else could possibly know of the existence of these diaries. Could they? Of course not! If they did, these journals wouldn’t have been left here to molder in a dusty attic.

And there were so many of them!

“My God,” she whispered. “This is a gold mine. I’m sitting on an absolute gold mine here.” And as she sat there, staring down at the trunk full of stories, she knew that they were even more than that. They were the key to getting everything she wanted, to reclaiming everything she had lost. Wealth. Power. Fame. Her triumphant return to L.A. It was all right here. Almost like a gift … left just for her by some long-dead madman who’d called himself Dante and believed himself to be a vampire.

She took the first journal carefully, holding it to her breast like a lover as she straightened, and, turning, she carried it downstairs to her office.

This time, when she held her hands over the keyboard, Dante’s journal was lying open on the table beside the computer. And this time, the words came.

3

Maxine Stuart was watching JFK for about the twelfth time on the little VCR/TV combo in her bedroom, a copy of Catcher in the Rye in her lap, a half-dead can of Coke on the bedside stand, when she heard the sirens. The sound stabbed her in the belly like an ice-cold blade and brought her slowly to her feet, though she couldn’t have said why. She went to the window, pushed the curtains aside. She could see the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles passing on the highway in the distance. Heading south. Her gaze turned in that direction, and she narrowed her eyes on the faint red glow in the distant night sky.

A familiar Jeep bounded into her driveway, and about a second later she heard the front door of the small house open, heard her mother speaking to Max’s friends as she let them in. Maxine shut the TV off, turned and opened her bedroom door as they came hurrying through the house.

Her two best friends came around a corner into the hall and stopped when they saw her standing there. Something was up. Jason didn’t shake easily, and he looked shaken. Storm—her real name was Tempest, but she hated it—was downright pale. Maxine’s mom was right on their heels.

“So what is it, what’s burning?” Max asked.

“It’s Spook Central,” Jason said without even missing a beat. “It’s bad.”

“It’s awful,” Stormy added, and her round jewel-blue eyes were damp. “I don’t think anyone got out alive.”

Spook Central was Maxine’s pet name for the large, nameless government compound just outside town. The main building was huge and sat well back from the road behind a large, electrified fence, surrounded by surveillance cameras and shrouded in secrecy. A research lab—that was the party line, anyway, and so the gullible locals believed. Medical research was done there—they were working on finding cures for cancer and AIDS, stuff like that. Good work. Almost holy. Too sacred to mess with or poke around in. Who would question such a saintly mission?

Maxine had her own theories, as she did about most things, and right now she hoped to God the one she had always considered the most likely—that the place was a military lab working on germ warfare and chemical weapons—was dead wrong.

Nightmare images from Stephen King’s The Stand coiled and uncoiled in her mind until she shook them away and stepped into action. She turned, reaching back into her room to snatch a jacket from the back of a chair. Then she was striding down the hall. “Let’s go.”

“Go? Go where?” her mother asked, falling into step behind the three of them as they headed for the front door. When no one replied, Ellen got around them, stepping right into their path. “Max, don’t you go over there. You’ll just get in the way and maybe get hurt.”

“Come on, Mom, I’m twenty years old. I’m not going to bother the firefighters. I just want to know what’s going on.”

“Then read about it in the morning paper, like everyone else.”

“God, how can you be so innocent?”

Ellen Stuart sighed, looking worried, but also resigned. No one had ever really been able to change Maxine’s mind once it was made up about something, and her mother ought to be getting used to that by now, having experienced it firsthand from the day she brought the three-month-old orphan home for the first time. “Be careful.”

“Always.” Maxine yanked a mini-backpack off the hook by the door. An iron-on patch with the words Trust No One and the X-Files logo decorated its front. She slung it over her shoulder, and the three friends trooped out of the house.

They all piled into Jason’s creamed-coffee colored Jeep Cherokee. He liked to joke that he had picked the color to match his skin. And it did, pretty closely. Maxine took the back seat. Stormy, a pixie-sized psych major with short, spiky, bleached hair, got into the front with Jason, closing her door just as he backed out into the street and headed out of town.

Maxine sat on the edge of her seat, her head between the two in the front. “You can see the fire from here. Look at that.”

They did. Stormy shivered, lowered her eyes. Jason stared as if mesmerized for a moment, then snapped out of it, flicking on the radio, turning the dial. “I knew you’d want to go,” he said. “It came over my brother’s scanner. If he wasn’t a volunteer firefighter, I probably still wouldn’t know.”

“Still nothing about it on the radio, Jay?” Stormy asked. She was nervous; playing with her eyebrow ring was always a sign of that.

He kept flicking the dial, then gave up, shaking his head slowly. “I expected special reports, crap like that, but there hasn’t been a word.”

“They report what they’re told to report,” Maxine said. “Despite my mother’s gullible belief in the system, the phrase ‘free press’ is an oxymoron in this country.”

“I like your mom,” Jason put in.

Max blinked at him as if he were speaking another language. “I like her, too. What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“I just don’t think you ought to be calling her gullible. She wouldn’t like it.”

Maxine closed her eyes, shook her head, then glanced at Stormy for backup.

“He’s right,” Stormy said. “Your mom is cool. You’re so lucky.”

“Of course she’s cool! Hell, I would have gotten a dorm room or an apartment or gone to college out of town if she wasn’t cool, instead of staying home and going to a local school. But this has nothing to do with my mother or how cool she may or may not be! I’m talking about the government here. Cover-ups. Covert operations.”

Stormy shrugged, averting her eyes. Topics like this always made her uncomfortable. But Maxine wasn’t uncomfortable discussing it. She was more uncomfortable having lived practically in the shadow of that huge, fenced in, well-guarded compound all her life, and never once knowing what went on inside.

She knew only one thing for sure. It wasn’t cancer research. She would have given her eyeteeth for a look beyond the tall, electrified fences of that place. Just one look. Now maybe no one would ever know the truth.

Jason drove on, pulling the Jeep over onto the right-hand shoulder before they got to the point where emergency vehicles lined both sides of the road. Highway flares lay across the pavement. Orange and white striped sawhorses with red reflectors were lined up behind them, forming a boundary that was supposed to tell them to keep out. They got out of the Jeep. Flames in the distance licked at the night sky, and Max could already taste the smoke in her mouth with every breath.

“This way.” Maxine walked along the road’s right shoulder, beyond the parked vehicles, and her friends followed. The burning compound was on the left, at the end of a long curving drive. She led the others forward until they were directly across the street from the entrance to the compound. Firefighters were across the street, partway along the drive, facing away from them. They were completely focused on their work, anyway. Maxine crouched near an ambulance, tugging the others down with her.

The fire trucks had apparently driven straight through the gate at the head of the drive. The guardhouse nearby was empty, the gate itself lying flat. The fence to the left and right of it was buckled and broken. The surveillance cameras that had been mounted on poles lay smashed to bits. Volunteer firefighters in yellow jackets marked with glowing silver reflective tape manned huge hoses attached to tanker trucks in the curving paved drive. Every time they beat the flames down a little, the trucks would roll closer, the men pushing farther into the fury.

“I don’t know how they can stand it. God, I can feel the heat from here,” Stormy said, pressing a palm to her face.

“I’m surprised their hoses aren’t melting,” Jason whispered. “If they move any closer …”

“If they move any closer, we’ll be able to get in.”

The other two looked at Maxine as if she had sprouted horns.

“What?” she asked.

“You gotta be out of your freaking mind, Max,” Jason told her, while Storm just shook her head. “We can’t go in there.”

“No one’s watching the entrance. They’re all distracted, fighting the fire. We can get in without even trying.”

“Okay, I’ll rephrase that. We can go in there. But we shouldn’t.”

Now it was Maxine’s turn to gape. “What are you, crazy? I’ve been dying to get behind those gates since I was old enough to see through that lame cancer research cover story they’ve been using.”

“Which was when she was about six,” Stormy muttered.

Max shot her a look but hurried on. “Don’t you guys get it? This is our chance. No guards, nothing. We can finally see something besides the lie.”

“And just what do you think there’s gonna be left to see, Max?” Jason pointed at the place. “It’s completely engulfed in flames.”

“I won’t know until I try.”

He sighed, lowering his shaved head and running a hand over it. No one spoke again for a long time as they crouched and waited and watched. Twenty minutes went by before the firefighters pushed a few yards closer. Max shot to her feet, glanced both ways and ran across the street. Her two friends hesitated, then followed. They crossed the pavement and jogged through the opening, right over the mesh of the toppled gate, past the abandoned guardhouse and into the trees that lined the driveway. There were a lot of them. The better to block the place from the view of casual passersby, Max thought. Pines. Of course they were pines. Year-round-camouflage for whatever went on inside.

They ducked beneath one of the trees, and Max stared ahead. The fire was being steadily beaten down. Those firefighters were something else, she thought, wondering if Jay’s older brother, Mike, was among them. They never gave up, even though they had to realize by now that it was a lost cause.

More sirens came, and Max looked back toward the road to see police cars, cops getting out, dispersing some of the curious onlookers who had now begun to gather on the road out front. “We just made it in time,” she whispered.

“If they catch us in here, our asses will be toast,” Jason said.

“If we get any closer to that inferno, they might be toast anyway,” Stormy added.

The firemen ahead fought on, soaking the place down, beating back the flames and pressing ever closer. The trucks rolled forward a little more, and Max urged her unwilling comrades to do the same. “See that flagpole over there?” she asked, pointing. Jason and Storm looked at it, then at her.

“Once they get up that far, we can cut around the side of the building and make our way to the back.”

“And then a flaming wall can come down on us, crushing us and roasting us at the same time,” Storm said. Her gaze was fixed on the burning building, and the flames’ reflection danced in her eyes.

Max swallowed any second thoughts she had about dragging her two best friends into this, beat them down the way the firefighters beat down the flames. It was for the greater good, she told herself. And besides, they wouldn’t get hurt. She wouldn’t let them get hurt. Maxine Stuart took care of her friends.

Movement drew her attention. “There they go!”

As the fire truck rolled ahead, Max ran forward, cutting off to the left and moving rapidly away from the pool of firelight that spread like an aura from ground-zero. The trees ended there, and she paused at the very last one. She tried not to feel a huge sense of relief when she realized Jason and Storm were still at her side. But she felt it anyway. God, they were loyal.

The distance from the front to the back of the rubble that had once been the main building was at least half a football field, without so much as a shrub for cover. But it was dark. Getting darker with every cloud of thick smoke that wafted from the fire.

“We can make it,” Max said.

“They’re gonna haul our asses to jail for this, Maxie,” Jason said.

“Ready?”

Neither of them answered her. Max licked her lips and trusted them. “Go!” And she ran.

She was never certain they were following until she stopped when she reached what had been the far end of the building and they bumped into her in the darkness. Hands gripped shoulders as they steadied each other. Then they stood for a moment, catching their breath, squinting into the darkness. There were fifty feet between where they stood and the smoldering remains at the rear of the building. It no longer much resembled a building at all. It wasn’t tall or square. It was a heap. Flames leaped up here and there, although most of the real fire had moved hungrily toward the front, having had its fill here, it seemed. There were glowing red shapes forming mounds underneath the charred forms of the skeletal underpinning. There were ashes, smoke. Were there people in there? she wondered. Bodies?

“This is close enough,” Stormy whispered.

Max looked around. “You see that shrub over there? It’s out of the smoke.” She pointed. “You two wait for me there. I promise I won’t be long.”

“Don’t, Max,” Jason warned. He sounded pissed off. “Just … don’t.”

“Five minutes,” she said. “Just five freaking minutes. This is once in a lifetime, Jay.” She didn’t wait for him to argue. She ran, instead.

They didn’t follow this time.

It was hot. Damned hot, and the smoke was burning her eyes and her nose, and she kept trying not to cough too loudly and give herself away. She ran until she reached the rear of the building, and then she moved closer and closer to it, as close as she could stand to get. She figured her hair was probably getting a little singed, and she had to watch where she put her feet to keep from stepping on smoldering embers that would have melted right through the soles of her shoes.