to drink. She’d killed Darcy for this.
Listen to yourself, you sound like Kelley!
Kelley had never stopped believing. He pretended he had, but Kieran and Dillon possessed that triplet intuition and knew damn well Kelley was still chasing vampires long after they’d stopped doing it as a trio.
Liga Vanatorilor de Vampiri had been Kieran’s idea initially. He’d read Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire and was struck with how real they seemed, even in the mystique of their immortality. How human, flaws and all, beauty and all. Even in their depravity, they were relatable. More, that because of these things, they could live in a society with men, blending in, consuming art, exploring nature. They could have homes, desires, families. These vampires were a far cry from Dracula holing himself up in a Transylvanian castle.
It hadn’t taken much convincing with Kelley and Dillon. They were always up for an adventure, and when Aunt Mary offered use of the janitor’s closet at her pub in Carrollton, Dillon had tacked up that old, wrinkled Nosferatu poster with pride. Kieran began assigning them dollar comics and penny dreadfuls as “research.” Even Dillon read them, and he’d never finished a book a teacher didn’t assign him.
Then they’d grown up. By the time they were off to college, their memories of the old cramped, sweaty room with the dangling bulb that only sometimes worked were something they laughed about when they were all home for family dinner.
Because vampires weren’t real.
They’d never been real, no matter how convincing Anne Rice’s novels had been.
Then what would you call that crazy blood-drinking bitch back there?
Kieran funneled his rage into rabbit kicks against the back of the taillights. The psycho may have cut the trunk release, but he’d seen enough movies to know that wasn’t the only way out of a trunk.
They didn’t budge an inch. He screamed his frustration into the dark, musty space.
He tried to remember the crap Kelley used to spew about those crime dramas he loved so much. Whenever they were all home, he aimed these facts on their mother, who was the only woman in the family, and, according to Kelley, still at risk from being nabbed by a serial killer even in her middle age. Never get in the car. Never let him take you to a second location.
Kieran almost laughed. He didn’t fit the demographic Kelley was so certain about, but he’d undoubtedly been taken by a serial killer. And here she was, taking him to a second location. Although he couldn’t see anything from the dark trunk, he felt the familiar ride of I-10. His pride in recognizing where he was immediately replaced itself with the realization that she was taking him out of town.
Away from the bustle of New Orleans, and people who might hear him screaming from the trunk.
4
Elisabeth
The de Blancheforts were land barons. Had been long before they came to Louisiana, from Saint-Domingue, Hispaniola, in what was now called Haiti. Her great-grandfather, Etienne, brought them here, on the eve of the slave revolt that would see the power dynamic shift upon that isle forever. For the better, Elisabeth thought, though it was a tenuous topic in a family that still owned slaves until the government forced them to free them.
Some still owned slaves of another kind. Blood slaves. Lazy, greedy vampires who wanted an endless font of human blood in their own cellar. It was the only way around the rule about killing your prey, so it was enticing to some. Revolting to Elizabeth. She wished she could say she’d never participated.
Their land here, as it had been in the West Indies, was built upon the backs of slave labor. All their great plantations along River Road, like Coquillage, so striking people slowed their cars when they drove past, either not knowing or caring how that beauty was made. Elisabeth cared. Too much, her grandfather said. And not just about this.
She’d never been okay with the killing part. Her grandfather and the others said it was for their own safety and survival, but that seemed a strange argument to be made when it was safety and survival they were stealing from others. Who was entitled to it more? They didn’t need blood the way vampires in the books did. It strengthened them. Emboldened them. If they were fortunate enough to take blood from a magic dealer, it transferred those abilities, albeit temporary, but sometimes in the most unusual and fascinating ways. Drinking blood from a seer sometimes left the