Good morning! Please welcome guest blogger Katriena Knights. Though I will be away for most of the day, please feel free to leave comments for Katriena and I will post them as soon as I return. Thank you!
~Kate
First of all, thank you, Kate, for sponsoring this guest post on your blog. My new book, Blood on the Ice (buy link: http://store.samhainpublishing.com/blood-on-the-ice-p-73473.html), arrived on June 24th from Samhain Publishing. It’s about a professional hockey player who, on the eve of the Stanley Cup Finals, is turned into a vampire. Travis, who’s spent his NHL career with the Chicago Blackhawks, finds himself thrown into a whole new world, playing for the all-vampire Chicago Cobras and learning how to navigate his life now that he’s no longer human. He also begins to develop a relationship with his new team captain, Marcus Antonius, a former Roman gladiator. In this excerpt, Marcus is musing about his responses to his new teammate as he wanders the streets of Chicago looking for a fresh, hot meal.
I hope you enjoy the excerpt, and I hope you’ll drop by Samhain or your favorite book e-tailer to take a look!
Chapter Ten
Marc was restless. He wasn’t sure why—they’d just split a home-and-home with Boston, one win apiece, and he had two days off until they had to fly to Montréal for Monday’s game against the Mammouth. He should have been relaxing, kicking back, getting mentally ready for the game. Instead he was prowling the streets.
The truth was, he missed Travis. Ms. Pressman had put an end to their extracurricular activity at the beginning of October, both to keep Travis from running into problems with the last phase of his treatment and to keep Marc from being distracted as the season kicked into gear. He’d visited the MAP facility twice during the month of September, while the Cobras were in training camp, but even then Ms. Pressman had been getting twitchy.
Tonight, Marc had gone past twitchy. His early-evening jog had turned into a sojourn through dark alleys, into disreputable bars on the human side of Bucktown and into Wicker Park.
The streets were dark, but far from quiet. New York might officially be the city that never sleeps, but Chicago didn’t sleep much, either, at least in Marc’s experience. Then again, he’d never been in a city where there wasn’t some kind of activity going on after dark. Compared to his Rome, New York City was narcoleptic.
He felt unsettled—hemmed in, claustrophobic—and had for a few weeks. His fangs itched. He wanted blood, and feeding in his usual outlets wasn’t quelling the lurking hunger. Neither was jerking himself off thinking about Travis, the way his new teammate’s blood had tasted on his tongue, the way it felt to pin him, struggling, against the boards. Six weeks had been too long without seeing him, and he had another week to go. He needed something to take the edge off. The donors at the approved feeding stations, even the ones who walked the streets, often selling more than just the bite, were always prepared. They knew what to expect, and they enjoyed what they did. They also took drugs to increase their red cell count. Marc had figured out a long time ago that all these factors affected the taste of the blood.
He was craving something else. Something he hadn’t tasted in a long time. He wanted a wild feed. He wanted to taste blood that wasn’t laced with Procrit. He wanted to taste fear.
You are one sick fuck, he’d told himself when he came to this realization. But he’d slipped out into the streets anyway, because he wasn’t really a sick fuck. He was just a vampire.
It had been a long time since he’d well and truly prowled the streets for food. The restrictions human rules had put on vampire activity made it a riskier proposition than it had ever been before, and frankly it was a pain in the ass to walk around with consent forms. But he knew how to do it. He missed it.
In spite of changes, laws, and restrictions, the rules and the technique hadn’t changed from when he’d first been Turned. You put yourself in a place where desperate people stayed, and you found one desperate enough to give you what you wanted. Not one who wanted to. One who did it out of a need that had nothing to do with the addiction of the bite. A need for money, for security, for some perverted form of love.
He made his way into one of the seedier areas of town. There were plenty of them, some crawling with vampires, some not. Vampires liked these areas, though—they always had. Places where people lived on the edge, usually not by choice, where the enforcers of law didn’t care, and where many deaths went unexplained and even ignored. They offered easy prey.
Marc had never been much for killing his victims outright. There’d been a time when he’d kept a choice selection available at all times, prisoners to his hunger. It had been the thing to do—it was Rome, after all, and his mentor had done it as well. But he’d abandoned that practice long before it had been made illegal. He liked to think he’d grown as a person.
So he wasn’t out to kill tonight. He just wanted blood, fresh and hot from the vein, without the vague aftertaste of blood enhancers. Blood sweet and sour at the same time with the taste of adrenaline. Salty with fear.
Just the thought of it made his cock hard. Between the burgeoning erection and his unsheathed fangs, he was at the mercy of uncontrollable body parts, driven by a potpourri of animal urges.
Whatever. He wanted to eat.
The bar gave off that aura—some mixture of smell and sounds and indefinable energy—that marked it as a place for easy prey. He slipped inside, taking in the stench of sweat, alcohol, and old grease. Someone here would want what he had to offer.
The door hadn’t displayed the symbol that indicated the establishment was approved to sell blood products, but the board on the wall, covered with scribbled chalk drawings and text, bore all the signs of illicit product. Drinks of the day, it said. Long necks, Miller. Local brew—Ruby Wednesday. That would be a blood brew. Probably complete crap. The illicit brews were usually a less-than-appetizing mix of animal blood, water, and food coloring, usually with added gin or vodka. Karasov thought they were spectacular, adding to Marc’s collection of anecdotal evidence that Russians had bizarre taste in pretty much everything.
He wasn’t after the drink for its taste or nutritional properties, though. He just wanted to send a signal.
He moved to the bar and brought the bartender to him with the crook of a finger. “Ruby Wednesday,” he said, letting the barest tips of his fangs show. It was all he’d need for ID here. No vamp card necessary.
The bartender nodded and went into a back room to fetch the drink. While he was gone, Marc scanned the bar.
He’d felt or possibly heard the slight twinge of interest from somewhere in the bar. He wasn’t certain what the signal had been—a release of pheromones, the sound of a body shifting, an intake of breath, or some combination of the above. But he’d definitely
sensed it. Somebody here had reacted to his choice of drink, and that somebody was the most likely candidate to become tonight’s main course.
A pair of eyes met his across the room, and Marc was certain he’d found his target. The eyes were big, liquid, and belonged to a young man, maybe twenty-five tops. Marc smiled at him, and the man smiled back hesitantly and lifted an eyebrow. Without providing any visible response, Marc turned back to the bar.
“Your drink,” said the bartender.
“Thank you.” Marc passed him a ten-dollar bill and waved for him to keep the change. Pleased, the bartender went to tend to other customers. Marc was certain he wouldn’t interfere with whatever transpired.
He looked at the drink in front of him, surprised to discover it wasn’t actually repulsive. The alcohol—vodka, he was fairly certain—had been poured carefully into the layer of blood, making an interesting effect that didn’t bother to disguise the fact the drink wasn’t all blood. And the smell of the blood itself told him it was better quality than most other illegal brews he came across.
A judicial sip confirmed this assessment. Vodka and pure, uncut cow blood. Not bad, actually. He took another drink, then slowly lowered the glass.
The young man had approached and was settling onto the barstool next to Marc. Marc smiled at him, not bothering to withdraw his fangs. This was going to be easy.
“Hi,” Marc said. “What can I do for you?”
“Was thinking maybe I could do something for you.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah.” The young man looked suddenly uncomfortable. Marc waited for him to
collect himself, in the meantime taking him in. He was several inches shorter than Marc, slim and rangy. His jeans had holes in them, and he wore a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. His face was almost beautiful, and his big, gray eyes were even bigger with the mix of fear and excitement Marc could smell as it rolled off his skin.
“You’re a hooker,” Marc stated. There was no question about it. Twenty centuries plus, and the signs were exactly the same.
The man swallowed, eyes narrowing slightly. “Yeah.”
Nonchalant, Marc sipped his drink. “What’s your name?”
“John.” He answered too quickly; it wasn’t his real name. Not that it mattered.
Marc smiled just enough to let “John” know Marc knew he was lying. “So, John,
what is it you think you can do for me?”
“I can give you something better to drink than that swill.”
Marc turned his drink in his glass, watching the blood and the vodka mingle. “I don’t know—this swill really isn’t that bad.”
“It’s not human blood, though, is it?” His words came too fast, as if he were afraid Marc might change his mind, or that he himself might chicken out. “No. It isn’t.” Marc set the glass down, making a show of examining John’s neck.
“You offer this service regularly?”
“No. I…” He stammered a little. “I was just…thinking of branching out.”
“I see.” He bent closer to John, sniffed his neck. “You’re a virgin.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.”
“How much would it cost me?” His eyes widened again. Marc could tell he hadn’t thought this far ahead. “I…um. Fifty dollars?”
Wow. He really hadn’t done this before. Marc nodded. “All right.” Marc glanced toward the bartender, who was pointedly ignoring their conversation. Marc pushed his drink back along the bar, laid down another ten-dollar bill, and stood. “You’ve got a deal.”
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