Crimson Empress: The Hunter's Forbidden Desire

The night was absolute black. Rain fell in fragments. In the deep dark of an alley, she was being dragged by her ankle across the ground — inch by inch, one brutal pull at a time. The woman wore a black dress. Her long golden hair was soaked through, caked with mud, plastered across her face and over her blood-drenched body, covering her eyes. Those eyes were silver-grey, cold as frozen glass, filled with nothing but cruelty and the need for blood. Where... is this? In her memory, the sky had been dark as the end of days. A storm without mercy. Thunder that didn't stop. She had fallen into the human world in the middle of a lightning strike. Like dropping into a darkness with no bottom. Hungry. Thirsty. Blood. She dragged what was left of her body — held together by nothing but the thinnest thread of survival instinct — and stumbled into a modern city blazing with electric light. Never, not once in all her centuries, had she craved the warmth of fresh blood this desperately. "Thirsty for blood?" From a dark corner of the alley. A tall, slender figure extended one pale, lean finger toward her. Her silver-grey pupils snapped tight. Even in total darkness, she could see everything. She could see, with perfect clarity, the blue-green veins running along the inside of the man's wrist. She bit down without a second thought. Without hesitation. Without anything. CRACK. A cast-iron skillet connected with the back of her skull. She never saw his face. Only in the single second before unconsciousness took her — a glimpse: a shirt so white it was almost snow. And the corner of his mouth, lifting into a fleeting, unsettling smile that vanished the moment it appeared. He must be extraordinarily beautiful, that man. He had about him a powerful, unmistakable aura of death. Dangerous from the first breath. Damn. This man's face looked like someone she once knew. It was enough to make her choke on a gasp of breath at the very edge of dissolving, enough to kick her heart back into motion. Late night. Outside, a soft rain still falling. Inside, under the light. The woman lay soaking wet. She had long, long hair — or what was left of it. Features cold and beautiful beyond comparison, her face so exquisitely sculpted she might have stepped out of an oil painting. A dim, hazy quality to her complexion. Long, thick lashes damp against pale skin. Narrow, finely shaped eyes barely open, carrying a silver light like moonlight broken on water. Lips red as blood. A straight nose that drew no breath at all. Vampires don't breathe. They have no heartbeat. To his eyes, that red could only be the color of blood. Ethan Cross was twenty-four years old. History lecturer at Ashford University. His actual profession: vampire hunter. He'd been born with an ability no one had asked him to have — the capacity to hear vampires. Not their voices, exactly. More like a frequency. A vibration that hummed at the edge of his hearing in the dark, and couldn't be unheard once you knew what it was. So he'd chosen to walk in the dark. To do what came with that. Last night, he'd picked up a woman. No. An ugly woman. She was severely, unmistakably malnourished. Her golden hair was dissolving — strand by strand, disintegrating into dust at the ends. Her face had gone white and hollow, the flesh beginning to recede from her fingers, the bone starting to show through. The old texts said it plainly enough: vampires have no soul, no reincarnation. Cursed by sunlight. Once they go, they become ash. Pure-blood vampires — those born into it, not turned — had a rare and specific gift beyond the ordinary. Every vampire could self-heal. But snap the neck, drive silver through the heart, or let the sun find them, and they became nothing. The pure-blood he'd collected, though — based on her appearance and the speed of what remained of her abilities — she was Seraphina. According to every source he'd tracked down, Seraphina's self-healing was in a different category entirely. Silver didn't touch her. Neither did sunlight. She could regrow bone, flesh, and skin in minutes if she was fed. Dong. Dong. Midnight. The two hundred and some odd wounds across her body — cuts, gunshots, bite marks — were closing at a rate visible to the naked eye. Her hair, unfortunately, had not grown back. This had to be what his mentor meant when he talked about the true-blood line. The ones the old hunters called God-touched. Pure-blood vampires were almost impossible to reproduce — across thousands of years, they'd remained vanishingly rare. If he could take her heart. Use it. There was a chance — a real chance — it could bring Elena back. Provided, of course, he didn't break the code. The covenant between hunters and blood-kin that had held for centuries, and that he had no intention of being the one to break. "Thirsty... so thirsty..." Scattered thoughts. Words coming in fragments. Long lashes trembling. Seraphina opened her eyes. Blinding light. White walls. The sharp, chemical reek of antiseptic. And a heavyset middle-aged man with a short, stubby ponytail, dressed in a beige suit that his figure was doing absolutely nothing for, sitting by her bed with the expression of someone who very much hoped that today would not be the day he got eaten. Seraphina's expression shifted. Her dark pupils contracted. Bloody hell. This ugly, doughy man. Surely — surely — he wasn't the one who had made her heart do that thing last night— She tried to sit up and discovered she was on an IV drip. She stared at it. What exactly was saline supposed to do for her? She reached up and touched her head. Her hand came down. Her face went flat. Right. The hair. All of it gone. She had extraordinary self-healing capabilities. She could not instantly regrow her hair. These were simply two facts that coexisted. The heavyset man, seeing her awake, asked with visible anxiety: "Miss Seraphina? You're awake? Can I get you some water?" "How do you know my name?" Her eyes found him like a blade finding a seam. He flinched so hard he nearly left his chair. "M-Mr. Cross told me." Mr. Cross. She filed the name. He was holding an apple. "Would you like an apple, Miss Seraphina?" "No." She declined everything on principle. Apple. Water. Men. All of it. He was avoiding her eyes now — which was smart of him — and she watched him fumble in the bedside drawer and produce a blood bag with the energy of a man defusing his third bomb of the day. "W-would you like some... blood?" Something flickered in Seraphina's eyes. "Now that," she said, drawing it out, "we can work with." She took the bag from him. Held it up to the light. Took a slow sniff. Are you kidding me. Expired. Well. It was better than nothing. The heavyset man watched her drain the entire bag in one go, and the color left his face in real time. He immediately produced two more from behind his back with both hands raised above his head, an offering to something he very much hoped was merciful. "Please," he managed. "Not mine." Seraphina, working on the second bag, gave him a look of pure, unhurried disdain. That caliber of man? She wouldn't want him if he came wrapped in ribbon. After a while, he asked very carefully: "Did you — was that enough, Miss Seraphina?" "It'll do." She leaned back against the headboard, holding the last unopened bag, the picture of lazy indifference. "What's your name?" He produced a card from his breast pocket. "Max. Max Hunter. I'm Mr. Cross's assistant." "Mr. Cross." She turned the name over. "Is he good-looking?" Maybe this Mr. Cross was the beautiful man from the alley. It was the kind of hope a person clung to. "Yes!" Max nodded with the enthusiasm of someone very grateful to be answering a question that had nothing to do with drinking him. "Very!" Well of course. Different sort of woman, and the first thing she does is ask if the man's handsome— A breeze from behind him. The door swung open on its own. A clean, pale hand came to rest on Max's shoulder. Long fingers. Prominent knuckles. A voice — slightly cool, smooth as drawn thread, clear in a way that was almost musical. "Who are you calling good-looking?"