Damien. Jacquelyn Frank

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СКАЧАТЬ unlike venom, this would not harm Elizabeth in the least.

      On the contrary. Somewhere, mixed in the chemistry of the coagulants that were quickly stopping the blood from escaping from the wound as he disengaged from her neck, was the antibody she would need to fight off the invader threatening her life.

      There were few Vampires who were old enough or strong enough to take in an infection of the magnitude and complexity of smallpox. However, those like Damien who were powerful enough had the ability to divine and localize the pathogen, extracting it from disease-ravaged cells and forcing their own chemistry to produce the necessary antibody. It was no easy trick, and Vampires who were not up to the task could easily poison themselves with disease. Luckily, they could sense such things on their prey even before they caught up with it.

      The reward for risking this conversion from disease to cure, however, was a pathological memory of the antibody that joined with hundreds of others and was added to the coagulant injected into prey at the end of a feed. Damien had preyed on a victim of smallpox before, and this had allowed his body to create the antibody whose benefit Elizabeth was now going to enjoy. He had not fed on her for the sake of hunger. That had been a small side bonus.

      He had fed on her to help cure her.

      Damien slid away from the Queen, laying her down gently into an abundance of feather-filled pillows. He caught an errant bead of blood on his thumb, pausing only long enough to lick the precious sweetness away.

      His bite was not a miracle cure. It was merely a shortcut that would give her immune system a great advantage. Elizabeth was strong and a fighter. The combination would help her to recover. It would just take some time.

      Damien would go to France, feast with his brethren on the battlefields, and return later, hopefully to find her alive and well and pleased to see him.

      Chapter 1

      San Jose, California, Present Day

      Damien’s head snapped up as he got the sudden sense that someone was very nearby. The sharp turn of his neck caused the braid at the base of his neck to snap like a whip against his throat.

      It was nearly like pitch, the darkness around him was so black and so complete. There was no visible moon, leaving everything like a heavy blanket of suffocating velvet that those who considered themselves vulnerable might feel an urge to run away from. Even the glow of the streetlamps placed few and far between in the California suburb seemed helpless to penetrate this darkness.

      However, the night did not bother Damien. Quite the opposite. It was his natural habitat, all of his senses equipped to work best within its folds. In spite of all that, something blew with alien chill down the back of his neck as this new presence crept within range of his perception.

      He leaned back into the protective shadows of the foliage a little bit more as he realized it was not a human being that moved toward him with such near-perfect stealth. Normal humans were not capable of defying his senses so well that they could come this close before he became aware of them. So the Vampire Prince was left to wonder who, or what, it was that was following so stealthily in his footsteps.

      He first had to determine if this was an accidental or purposeful tail. He exhaled, out of habit rather than a need to, shaking his head with momentary perturbation. All he had wanted to do that night was take part in a good hunt and then return to his holdings in peace. However, in order to have that sort of easy peace, he mused, one had to have no enemies.

      Unfortunately, Vampires had a lot of enemies.

      And the Prince of all Vampires usually had ten times the usual dose of them. Exterior politics and the number of annoying humans or troublemaking Nightwalkers aside, Vampires had an awful tendency to play King of the Mountain with one another. Though most knew better than to match skills with Damien, there were always a few who over-estimated their ability to unseat the royal Vampire from his throne. Theirs was a society where survival of the fittest was at the core of many of their motivations. In the case of the throne, it determined who would lead their entire species.

      He should know, he thought with a sly half-smile that allowed the ivory of one anticipatory fang to glimmer in the darkness. Defeating the previous monarch was how Damien had come to be in his princely position several centuries ago.

      But his predecessor had been something of a jackass, he mused as he waited idly for his stalker to catch up with him, and he had quite thoroughly earned his ritualistic beheading.

      As he turned his senses to the task of making prey of his hunter, he was able to determine that it was not a Vampire that tracked him. All he needed to do to figure that out was flick into place the small nictitating membranes hidden in the anatomy of his eyes. That membrane added the ability to visualize a brightly fluoresced aura that varied with the amount of heat a body was giving off.

      While Vampires did not have a natural circulation to speak of, they did retain the heat of the blood of their victims from one feeding to the next, able to maintain it well, provided they fed within twenty-four hours of the previous meal. However, the flaw to that system was that extremities like fingers and toes lost that artificial heat the quickest. So, in his visual perception, a Vampire who had not hunted yet would have a sort of bull’s-eye effect at this young hour of the night. The heart and chest would be the hottest, flaring bright and white, but in eddying circles that white would fade to a circle of red, then orange, then pink, until the location of hands and feet were almost imperceptible to heat vision, blending in too well with the temperature around them.

      A Vampire who had hunted already would be a uniform red, unlike a human, who was a changing series of white, red, and redder splashes of determining color. Human heat levels were always changing, with movement, effort, sickness, or arousal, and there was a perceptible time period before the human body compensated for those changes, evening them out somewhat. However, those with the sharpest of eyes and skills could easily determine the difference between a flushed Vampire and a mortal being after a century or two of practice.

      The figure that tracked him was neither human nor Vampire, he determined. However, it was potentially a Nightwalker who could emulate any level of body temperature they wished, or it was a Demon. The Demon race was notorious for a body temperature several degrees cooler than most upright walking species on the planet. This was the case in the body that stood in shadow not too far away from him.

      The Nightwalker species were the races that lived only in the night, hiding from a curious variance of negative effects the sun caused them. Of these species, Demons were the second least likely to cause grief or pose a danger for the Vampire Prince. Demons were infamously moral and reclusive, focusing within themselves and upon policing their own, and were very much less likely to venture out in order to cause trouble elsewhere.

      Usually.

      There had been a bit of trouble lately that made anything possible.

      Of course, it could be a Shadowdweller. Those devious little tricksters were the masters of self-camouflage. They were the Nightwalker equivalent of chameleons. They were also an enormous pain in the posterior, Damien thought wryly. They had little to no political structure, wandering around in clans or religious clusters, quite often causing more than their fair share of mischief and trouble. They were like wild children, pestering other Nightwalkers, scrapping amongst themselves and with others, mucking with mortals like they were toys and dolls for playing with.

      Not that Damien failed to see the appeal in that. He had mucked around with humans and others quite a bit in his youth.

      Well, СКАЧАТЬ