The Feeder Read online

  “Do you like what you see?” I whispered in her ear as she gasped in shock, her body going rigid in my arms for only a moment before she melted against me.

  “Yes,” came her breathy reply.

  “Is that what you want? To be fucked and bitten at the same time?” I didn’t need her words to tell me the answer. As soon as she heard my words her body stiffened as she tried to move away from me. “Or is it him? Do you want to take that girls place? Be the one sat in Reese’s lap, his fangs in your neck as he rams his cock deep inside you, over and over again?”

  “Yes,” she whimpered as she once again relaxed against me. “I want that.”

  “Well, maybe I could introduce you sometime.”

  “Please. Oh, please do,” she begged.

  Oh yeah, this girl had a big thing for Reese. But first, maybe she would give me just a small taste. “How about we discuss it after a sip or two?”

  As she arched her neck, exposing the tempting flesh in preparation for my bite, I felt the ache in my gum, my fangs lengthening.

  Mouth opened wide, I leaned down, ready to sink my fangs deep into her neck when a blood-curdling scream from above reached my ears. Snapping my eyes up from the feast before me, I met Reese’s gaze across the room. Within moments we were in action, all thoughts of feeding abandoned as we raced through the club, panic gripping me. Because there was only one person that scream could have come from, only one person that had access to the apartment upstairs above the club… Eve.

  Eve

  Sat across from Gideon, listening to him moaning on and on about how much of an inconvenience it was to have Thayne around all the time, I yawned for what must have been the one-hundredth time. And it wasn’t even because of his constant yap, yap, yap about the one person that in the short amount of time that he had been here had sorted out more of the place’s problems and dilemmas than Gideon had in the years that he had owned the place.

  No, it was because of the little amount of sleep I was running on. Between trying to find a permanent cleaning crew for this place and freaking myself out all the time over the creepy feeling of eyes following my every move, I was pretty exhausted.

  When I did manage to get some sleep, if my dreams weren’t full of dark figures and shadows, they were filled with a certain hot and sexy vampire. In my dreams, he would save me from the dark figure, the being that followed my every move, then…

  Well, things would get steamy. I would awake in a high state of arousal and have no choice but to take the edge off, biting my lip in an attempt not to cry out his name as I came. The last thing I wanted was for him to hear me from his room in the cellar.

  That was one of the things that were pissing Gideon off the most right now. When he had offered Thayne the job – thanks to the guys and my persistence – Thayne had stated that he had nowhere to stay for the night. Trent had quickly mentioned that the room in the cellar was unoccupied, and Gideon had had little choice but to allow it. But after a week of kipping down there, it seemed that Thayne was no nearer finding someplace else to stay.

  “He said it would be no problem. Stated that he would make other arrangements,” Gideon repeated. This particular rant had been going on for around about an hour now. Was it too much to ask that he change the record?

  “But he’s still fucking here!”

  “I'm sure he is doing everything in his power to find somewhere else to stay.” But I hoped not. When Thayne had first explained about his sleeping arrangements, I had been worried, scared even. But as the week had worn on and the feeling of being watched worsened, I found myself grateful to have him near. I didn’t want him to leave, now. If he did, there was no way in hell I would be getting any sleep at all, and I was running on fumes as it was.

  “I doubt it. He is up to something; I just know he is.”

  “You're paranoid.” I yawned, rubbing my eyes. “Be grateful that he’s here. Since he started, there have been no major fights or incidents.” Which meant no bodies to dispose of. No police to deal with.

  “I'm not paranoid; I just don’t trust the bastard, that’s all.”

  “Whatever you say.” Fighting to keep my eyes open, I rose from my seat. “Now if you’re done moaning and groaning, you okay if I head up for a bit? I’ve not been sleeping well lately and want to get some shut eye before closing.”

  He looked me over with a frown. “I guess you do look a little worn out.”

  He guessed? Hell, after seeing myself in the mirror an hour ago I’d almost locked myself away in my apartment, afraid of anyone seeing me. Dark circles under my eyes, pale skin, I looked like fucking death!

  “Go and get some kip.”

  Leaving the safety of Gideon’s office – a place I had never thought that I would think of as safe – I made my way down the corridor to my office. I needed to have a chat with Dean but didn’t want Thayne to see me in this state, so I decided to use the intercom system from there. As I walked the short distance to the door, that horrible feeling began to form in my gut. Someone was watching me. My heart rate picked up, blood pounding in my ears as my panic started to build. Picking up speed, I made a mad dash for the door, slamming it closed behind me the second I entered the room.

  What the hell is wrong with me? I thought as I slid down the door, pulling myself into a small ball when I reached the floor. I had never been this scared in my life.

  Well, I had, but not in years. Not since…

  No! I was not going to go there. Those memories belonged buried deep in the past.

  After a few minutes, I pulled myself together enough to ease myself off the floor and over to my desk. I was still on edge, still had the strange sense that somebody was watching me, but the strong sense of evil, of violence that came with it was gone.

  I used the intercom to talk to Dean, letting him know about the delivery that I’d arranged for the next night. With me being the only staff member here in the day – aside from any cleaners – I had to make arrangements for all deliveries to be made at night.

  Hearing a light knock on the door, I replied without thinking, not even bothering to ask who it was before I allowed them to enter. What a mistake that had been.

  Gazing up from the delivery schedule before me, I pulled in a sharp breath, my once panicking heart now pounding away violently once again within my chest. “Vince.” I swallowed. “What are you doing back here?” Shouldn’t he be out in the club with the others? “Why aren’t you at your post?” He’d refused to work with Thayne and the others, to train, so he was assigned to a quieter part of the club each night. At least that way, when he did his usual disappearing act, it didn’t usually matter.

  “My post?” he snapped angrily. “I'm not going to follow that bastard’s orders like those other idiots do. He thinks he’s so high and mighty, walking in here like he owns the place and making all these damn changes. Things were good exactly as they were.”

  “You are kidding me, right?” I blurted out without thinking. For some reason, Vince mouthing off about Thayne just rubbed me up the wrong way. Hadn’t I just sat through hours of Gideon doing the same thing without once feeling even an ounce of emotion, other than boredom that is? “Thayne has done nothing but good for this establishment since the moment he walked through those doors. The world feels a whole lot brighter with him in it.”

  And it did. Didn’t it? Ever since that first evening, I actually looked forwards to getting up and heading down to the club. Life was exciting again.

  Thunder seemed to gather in Vince emerald eyes, and his fists clenched at his sides. “Well, I see where your loyalties lie,” he sieved as he turned and walked back down the hall, a new kind of coldness to his voice that I had never heard before.

  As I was about to leave the room after waiting long enough to know that Vince was gone, the intercom buzzed, Gideon’s voice coming over loud and clear. “Before you head up, can you finish filling out the forms I gave you the other night? It is highly important that they are completed straight away and s
ent off first thing.”

  Sighing heavily, I flopped myself back down behind my desk and stared at the mountain of paperwork that had appeared on my desk. It had grown even more since the week before when Gideon had first ordered me to do it. It looked like I wouldn’t be getting any sleep for some time yet.

  When my eyes were literally in need of matchsticks to keep them open and focused on the boring forms that had nothing to do with the club, and everything to do with the Council of Masters became near impossible, I decided to call it quits. Stumbling out of my office and up the stairs to my apartment, I failed to notice the tell-tale signs that something was very, very wrong. Never once had I not locked the door to the stairwell leading up to the top floor… ever! But as I pushed through the unlocked door and practically crawled up the stairs, I failed to notice the broken lock hanging from the door. But what I did notice as I reached the door to my apartment was its splinted remains.

  Suddenly I wasn’t so tired.

  Heart pounding, breath coming thick and fast, I slowly entered. Looking around, I expected things to be a mess, destroyed, as whoever had smashed their way through my door searched for valuables – not that I had any – but there was nothing. The place was just like I had left it only hours earlier.

  I was right. Someone was watching me; that was the only explanation.

  What if they are still here?

  The terrifying thought worked its way into my head and wouldn’t leave. I tried my best to calm, calm my heavy breathing and thundering heart. Though, if anyone were here they probably would have heard it by now, especially if that someone was a vampire.

  Creeping across the large open living space, I made my way over to the only other door in the room, the one leading to my bedroom. As I did dread began to form deep in the pit of my stomach, the feeling that something bad lay behind the closed door growing with every step. I didn’t remember closing that door.

  Hand shaking, I grasped the handle, sending up a silent prayer that I was wrong and would find nothing on the other side – other than my unmade bed and a pile of dirty clothes. Latch clicking the door swung open, my breath catching for only a moment before a scream of terror and sorrow left my throat and just kept on coming and coming.

  This can't be happening. My eyes had to be playing tricks on me. Because laid spread-eagled upon my bed, the white sheets stained red with blood, was a naked body. The body of Pippa, a young female familiar, and Dean’s lover.

  Thayne

  I found Eve huddled in the corner of the upstairs apartment she lived in, curled into a small ball, her mouth open in a now silent scream as she squeezed her eyes tightly shut. I didn’t need to ask her what was wrong; I could smell it.

  Following my nose, I moved over to the open door on the other side of the room, Eve’s tantalising scent faintly coming from within, telling me that this was her bedroom, but it was barely noticeable under the overpowering stench of blood and death.

  Stepping into the room, I gazed down upon Pippa’s broken body and my heart ached. Her hands were tied to the headboard above her, her legs bound together. Her chest was cut open, her blood soaking into the sheets below. She didn’t deserve this.

  Moving closer, I took a deep breath, pulling in all the scents in the room, trying to detect any that didn’t belong to Pippa or Eve. But I found none. I didn’t scent any hints of sex – which was a relief – but that didn’t help with the question of why?

  Pippa was a regular at the club, one that had actually been very close to being turned if the rumour mill in this place was correct. Why would somebody do this to her? And why here in Eve’s bedroom?

  Hearing the fast approaching feet of others, I made my way out into the main room and moved over to stand by Eve, placing my hand lightly upon her shoulder, relieved when she didn’t bulk at my touch. She was in shock; there was no telling how she would react.

  Gideon skidded to a stop in the doorway, Reese right behind him, nostrils flaring as the scent of blood hit them. Cutting his eyes to Eve, a frown marred his face. “What’s happened?” he snapped glaring at me, his amber eyes full of suspicion.

  All vampires had abilities. The ability to move at high speeds and that of great strength came with the name, but there were others that not every vampire acquired. The colour of a vampire’s eyes could give you a hint of the power held within their body. Amber was the most common, the colour of your average everyday vampire. The fact that Gideon had amber eyes only made me more suspicious about how he became a bloody Master. He shouldn’t have been powerful enough to defeat Denton, but I could sense the strength in him.

  After amber, there was emerald, a sigh of even greater power and speed than the average vampire. The colour was very common among the vampires in my kind of work. Then there was the crystal blue of my eyes, the one that hinted physic abilities. It could be anything from mind reading to creating images in the minds of others. Then there was violet, a rare colour that primarily means ‘you don’t want to fuck with me.’ Then, the rarest colour of all… blood red. And only two vampires were known to have eyes of that colour. And believe me, I was definitely glad to be able to call them friends and not enemies.

  My abilities, while not the strongest of my group, were simple. Every vampire was able to feel the emotions of others, but we were also splendid at hiding them, meaning that it was very hard to get a read on another vampire if they did not want you to… unless you were me. I could pick up on emotion so much easier than others. So much so that it was near impossible to shield an emotion from me, but not entirely. I needed to have skin to skin contact for me to get a truly clear reading of some, but I could still pick up a vibe or two that would give me a clue as to where someone’s thoughts were going. And with Gideon, if I wasn’t mistaken, there was no sense of worry, hurt or sadness for the death he could scent in the room he’d just entered. No, all I sensed coming from him was a great bout of frustration and impatience… all aimed at Eve.

  “Pippa’s dead. Her body was stripped and bound before being left upon Eve’s bed for her to find,” I explained. If I had expected any emotion to appear on that news, anger that someone had killed a human, a familiar within his club and left the body in the manner that they had, I had been wrong. With a brief glance at the door leading to the bedroom and the body of the poor girl, he clipped, “Deal with it,” before turning and walking back down the stairs to his office.

  Anger burned through my veins. How the fuck that bastard ever became a Master I did not know, but I would be damned if he was going to stay in that position for long if this was his attitude. Realising that someone needed to take hold of the situation, I began giving out orders as the crowd gathering on the stairs began to grow. “Reese, check out the body. Look for any clues as to who the hell did this. Chad, get back downstairs and check all CCTV footage and see if you can find anything. Trent, arrange for the removal and disposal of the body.” When the others burst into action but Trent refused to move, I asked, “What?”

  “Someone needs to tell Dean.”

  “I'm sure he will hear about it soon enough.” The vampires in this place were almost as bad as the old ladies that had gathered on the corner of the street by the post box every day during my childhood, gossiping about everyone and everything.

  “No, I think someone needs to tell him in person before it gets back to him.”

  “Why?” I asked, though, I had a terrible feeling that I already knew why. My first night here Pippa had been pretty cosy with Dean, cuddled up to him most of the night, and a few nights since then if my memory was correct.

  “They were together. He was going to turn her, told her so just last night.”

  Fuck!

  “Okay, get him out from behind that bar and into Eve’s office as quick as you can. I’ll be down shortly to talk with him.” Not something I was looking forward to doing, and something I shouldn’t have to be doing.

  It was Gideon’s job, damn it! He was the Master vampire around here. It was his job to
deal with shit like this.

  Trusting the guys to do as I had asked, I looked down upon the small, shaking form of Eve. There was something else I needed to do first before I could move on to telling Dean that the woman he had decided to turn, the woman I was sure he had fallen for as that was the only reason anyone ever turned another – except for being psycho – had been murdered. I needed to get through to Eve, break through the panic and terror to the woman beneath and bring her back to the surface.

  “Thayne?” I heard Trent yell from the bottom of the stair before I could even make a move to helping calm her.

  “What?” I shouted back just as the music downstairs shut off and screams rang out, followed by a large crash.

  “Dean knows!”

  No shit!

  It took almost an hour to halt Dean’s rampage. The bar he loved so much? Smashed to pieces. The people in the club? Fled, screaming in fear. Dean was now out cold in Eve’s office and hopefully would be for some time. I’d left Reese in charge of watching him after we had finally managed to get enough of the sedative in his large frame to knock him out.

  All that time Eve had remained balled up in the corner where I had first found her, shaking more and more every time someone had tried to approach her.

  I hated seeing her like this, so broken and scared. We needed to get her out of here so that we could conduct a thorough search of the place and remove the body. That was something she did not need to see.

  “Eve? We need to get this place cleaned up. Come on, sweetheart,” I said, reaching out for her hand when she didn’t move at my urging. I was expecting her to scramble away from me like she had everybody else that had approached her during my absence, but she didn’t.

  Placing my hand upon hers - that was wrapped tightly in her hair as she rocked back and forth, her eyes forced shut - I was surprised as hell when she suddenly grasped my hand and held it so tight that if I wasn’t a vampire, I was sure it would hurt. Taking that as a good sign, I moved to sit down beside her, once again shocked as fuck when she practically dived into my lap and held on for dear life.