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Excerpt
Chapter 1
His was a life filled only with empty dreams, if one could call those fleeting thoughts in a vampire’s sleepless nights dreams. His existence was without end and ruled by a loneliness that made each day harder to bear than the one before.
High above the crowd, Ryder Latimer smelled the sting of the alcohol as the humans drank and spilled it in copious amounts in their search for oblivion or nirvana. Acrid smoke from cigarettes floated high into the air, and in that hazy cloud were the underlying tones of sweat. Sweat laced with lust, he thought, sniffing the air and detecting the pheromone the humans exuded as they played their pitiful mating rituals.
Scents, he had discovered, were important to a vampire. Musks and other aromas literally brought out the beast in him. He normally avoided the smells, but it was tough to do in a crowd as large as this.
This far up, the sounds of the band and the crowd were garbled. Indistinct. A low buzz, like static, and a heavy thumping vibration from the bass of the music. An insistent lub-dub lub-dub, like the beat of a heart.
Ryder closed his eyes, placed his hands on the metal railing of the catwalk and the vibrations traveled up his arms. He took a deep breath, absorbing the smells. Soaking everything up as if by doing so he could restore a small part of the life he had lost when a strange turn of events during the Civil War had condemned him to this solitary life. It was a fleeting moment, the human scents and sounds racing through him, enervating him as he stood near the ceiling of the club.
In no time, however, Ryder was back to normal, watching like a disinterested deity, bored by the repetition of the activity below. Every night the same scene was replayed. Until tonight.
He had discovered in this morning’s paper that there was some killing going on in that mob of humans. The murderer had struck last week and then a few nights ago. Maybe he would hunt another soon, Ryder thought, glancing down and wondering who might be the next one to be taken.
Who might become another trophy for the psycho stalking his club. The papers hadn’t mentioned The Lair, but Ryder had no doubt it was here that the hunt was on.
Ryder had sensed something different in the last few weeks, that unique smell of blood lust that had made him wonder if another of his kind had come to feed. A club like this would be an excellent place to select a victim and then cull them from the herd.
He looked down once more and he saw her, standing at the edge of the crowd, searching for someone.
It wasn’t possible, he thought as he hurried along the catwalk, keeping the apparition in sight. For nearly a century she’d been in his dreams. Or maybe it was better to describe them as his restless nocturnal musings.
Regardless, Ryder had stopped questioning why the spirit came to him. Sometimes she arrived at times of unrest, the visions she brought portents of things to come. At other times, when the monotony and uncertainty of his existence made him question why to go on, she’d come to soothe his soul and give him the peace he was unable to find elsewhere.
But tonight, she was no longer just an apparition – or was his loneliness deluding him?
He struggled to get a glimpse of her face, but even with his vampire night sight, he still couldn’t be certain his imagination wasn’t getting the best of him.
After all, for more than a century he had been virtually alone with only a human keeper and his apparition to comfort him. Maybe that was why his mind and eyes were playing games with him tonight. It was just a trick, Ryder told himself, and yet he stood, poised on the edge of the catwalk. Watching. Waiting. Hoping.
