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The man had just been using him all along. “You want my blood.”
Garth teased the rim of his lips with his tongue. “You have no idea how badly.”
“You want the formula.”
“I want what it can give me. Power. Control. A certain…” He flicked his chin up jauntily. His pocked cheeks looked more hollow than ever, his complexion more sallow, yet there was a dull gleam in his sunken eyes that made Daniel’s stomach pitch. “A certain notoriety with women.
“It’s not Viagra, man. It’s blood. Synthetic blood.”
“It’s freedom. It’s life!”
“You can’t have it.”
“I already do.” He pulled a CD case out of the pocket of his coat, opened it carefully. Reverently. “By the way, this is now the only copy. I reformatted the hard drive on your PC and destroyed all the data backups.”
Daniel’s heart kicked on its first spurt of true panic. Getting his ass kicked by a freak with weird fingernails was one thing. Losing the work he’d dedicated his life to, work with the potential to save thousands of lives, was a whole other level of torture.
He could re-create the formula for the first non-organic human blood substitute, but it would take time. Reproducing the tests and documentation the drug manufacturers would insist on seeing before they committed their resources to the project would take even longer. Months and money he didn’t have.
He found the strength to push himself to a sitting position. “You need me. And my medico-scientific mumbo jumbo. You’ll never get a major pharmaceutical company’s backing without me. You won’t get in the front door.”
“I have no intention of trying to get in the front, or any other, door.”
“Even you don’t have enough money to push a product like this to market yourself. It would cost you millions just to get it past the FDA. Tens of millions.”
“The market I’m targeting doesn’t require FDA approval.”
“What market is that, the black market? Africa? Latin America? Where the people are too poor to afford the luxury of asking where their medicines come from, or in too much pain to care?”
Garth cackled again. “Such a humanitarian. But you overestimate my ambition. I was actually thinking of a consumer group much closer to home, and money is not an issue with them.”
Nothing Garth said made sense to Daniel, but then his brains had been pretty well scrambled this evening. All he knew was that the man who had claimed to support his work was trying to steal it, and that the same man was more concerned about his own profit than helping humanity with a medical breakthrough.
Synthetic blood would save thousands of lives. Unlike the products most of the pharmaceutical companies had in development now, Daniel’s brainchild didn’t require any biological components at all. It could be mass produced on demand from simple chemicals, had an unlimited shelf life and none of the threat of blood-born pathogens such as hepatitis and HIV that accompanied the real thing. It had to reach the market—the legal market.
Clutching a set of metal shelves, Daniel dragged himself to his feet. “Bastard. You can’t do this. I won’t let you do it.”
Garth smiled the way Daniel imagined a hunter would smile at Bambi. Right before he shot him. “Oh, do try to stop me. Please.”
Daniel put his head down and charged, only to find himself flung back by an unseen hand. His back slammed into the wall behind him with enough force to knock a man-sized hole in the Sheetrock before he slid to the floor.
How had he done that? Garth hadn’t touched him.
Shaking his head to clear it, Daniel braced his back against the drywall and pushed himself to his feet for another run, only to find himself knocked flat on his face.
Except there wasn’t anyone behind him to knock him on his face. There wasn’t anyone else in the room at all. Except Garth.
Okay, now this was getting spooky.
He raised his head to squint at his benefactor-cum-nemesis through burning, swollen eyes.
“You’re finished. You have nothing left,” Garth spat down at him. “I’ve got the formula. I’ve got the lab. I’ve got your house.”
A groan tore its way out of Daniel’s throat. The note he’d signed for the research funding. The collateral he’d put up, including the house that had been in his family for over a hundred years…
“I’ve got your car. That pitiful little savings account you call your nest egg.”
Garth stretched his hand out toward the door to the lab, and what little breath Daniel had been able to draw into his aching chest caught in his throat.
Another black-clad figure sashayed into the room. Her leather pants squeaked as she rolled her hips. Her D-cup breasts spilled out of her leather lace-up bustier.
“Sue Ellen?” Daniel rolled to his knees, swayed sickly. Sue Ellen walked by as if she hadn’t seen him. What was wrong with her? Why was she dressed like that?
Garth smiled as she stepped into his waiting arms and rubbed herself against him like a feline. “I’ve even got your girl.”
“Sue Ellen, get away from him!”
But she seemed to have no inclination to run. Instead, she flicked out a long thumbnail, scratching Garth’s neck and scooping up a drop of blood. Then she brought the blood to her lips and licked it off with a dreamy look of enjoyment on her face.
God, what had he done to her? What sort of spell had he put her under?
Daniel watched, frozen in horror as Garth placed his hands around her neck, caressed the line of her jaw, then squeezed. Hard.
She should have struggled. He had to be hurting her, but she didn’t seem to care. She seemed to be enjoying the pain. Eyes glazed over with anticipation, she let her head fall back as if he were caressing her like a lover, not choking her.
Daniel staggered to his feet. “What are you doing?”
Garth drew his thumbs over the column of her throat, licked his lips, and then dug his pointed nails into her flesh.
Daniel charged again, growling. Again the unseen hand stopped him, this time snatching him from behind and lifting him like a dog caught by the scruff of the neck. It pulled him up until he had to stretch to touch his toes to the floor, then beyond.
Garth pulled his thumbs back, and bright red blood bubbled out of the twin wounds he’d inflicted.
Daniel flailed in midair. “Let her go, you bastard. Let her go. I’ll kill you for this. By God, I swear I’ll kill you for this.”
Garth flicked a careless look at Daniel. “You can’t touch me. And neither can your God.”
He winced as if he suffered some sudden pain, then lowered his head and suckled on the punctures he’d made on Sue Ellen’s neck, a thin red stream of blood—her blood—trickling out the corner of his mouth as he drank.
1
AT a corner table in the condemned warehouse that had been converted to a bar, at least for the night, Déadre Rue hunched over her tonic water and watched the throng of sweaty, drunken bodies on the dance floor gyrate to the sound of heavy metal rock with lust in her eyes.
Blood lust.
Sometimes the ache, the desire, the never-ending, sharp-toothed, razor-clawed, freaking craving for blood was so strong she thought she might die from it.
But then, what the hell? She’d died once. It hadn’t been so bad. Infinitely better than coming back to life, actually. Oh, yeah. Rising as one of the undead—now that had been nasty.
Not that living, for lack of a better word, as one of the undead was much better, wandering the streets with a parched throat night after thirsty night, eyeing ready prey on every corner, yet forbidden to stalk it.
Raising her drink in a trembling hand, she drained the glass, but the cool, clear liquid couldn’t quench the fire in her throat that had driven her out of her grave tonight and into the shadowy bump and grind of a rave party. The pulsing music had called her. The sweet smell of blood running just under the thin veil of human skin had drawn her.
And she needed money. Needed some token to bring her superior in order to be granted permission to take what she needed.
Damn the High Matron for putting a ration on human blood, anyway. Just because a few too many exsanguinated bodies had turned up on the streets of Atlanta this last year. Just because the mortals were starting to whisper, getting nervous. The Matron and her Enforcer had the vampires of the city starving themselves for fear of her punishment. Worse, she had them stealing and selling themselves to bring her bigger and better offerings every month, hoping to win her favor and a little larger share of blood. They were like those boys in a Dickens novel, thieving to earn their keep.
