Blood Calls Page 3

  The human Ryder had been the one to escort Diana to the bar, but it was his demon side now acting with a vehemence and swiftness Diego hadn’t expected. He found himself lifted off the stool as Ryder snared his neck in one strong hand.

  “Why are you doing this?” his friend hissed against his face, his eyes bleeding out to an intense blue-green as a hint of fang slid downward.

  “Woman trouble,” Diego confessed. For the last hour he had prowled Ryder’s vamp-themed club and engaged in dances with an assortment of nubile young women in the hopes of driving Ramona from his mind. When he realized that every female he had chosen reminded him of the eccentric artist, he’d given up and decided to resort to wine to force thoughts of her away.

  Diana laid a hand on Ryder’s arm, urging him to release Diego, which he did. She slipped from her stool and said, “I’ll let you two talk. Be back later.”

  With a quick kiss on Ryder’s cheek, she walked away, leaving the vampires alone. Reining in the anger that had brought forth the demon, Ryder said, “It’s been over a year now. Don’t you think it’s time you forgot about Esperanza?”

  “You can never forget a true love, but actually, this is about someone else.”

  “Someone else? This warrants something stronger than wine, I believe.” Ryder motioned to a waiter. “A bottle of Cuervo and glasses, please.”

  The bartender obliged. He placed a shaker of salt and a small bowl of limes next to the tequila.

  Ryder poured full shots of the liquor, then grabbed his glass. Heedless of the salt and lime, he held it up and said, “To women.”

  Diego shook his head. “Never again, amigo.”

  “But you said—”

  “Woman trouble. As in major mistake never going to happen in my eternal life if I can help it.” With that said, he slugged back a full shot. He quickly refilled the glass, prompting a chuckle from his friend.

  “This is serious. I’ve never known you to have more than one.”

  With a careless shrug, Diego took his time with the second drink, sipping the tequila slowly. He winced at the sharp taste of it, so different than either a glass of wine or a nice nip from the neck of someone willing.

  Like that attractive young woman eyeing him from the end of the bar. She was barely thirty, with long chestnut-colored hair and dark eyes much like—

  Ño. He hated that his thoughts had strayed back to Ramona. After Esperanza’s death, he had assumed he would spend the rest of his eternal life sans partner. That Ramona kept intruding into his psyche troubled him deeply.

  “So tell me, Diego. Who’s the unlucky vamp who’s displeased you so?”

  In the vampire hierarchy in Manhattan, Diego’s age and corresponding power put him high on the pecking order. Those who angered him could be handled without encountering much opposition from the other vampires in the city. Not that Diego took advantage of such rank. If anything, the other vampires considered him a human wannabe because he normally refused to benefit from his powers and his undead state.

  As for Ramona, she knew nothing of his eternal life. Nothing other than the face he presented to the mortal world—that he was a well-off dilettante who had rather successfully dabbled in the art world. He imagined that like most humans, Ramona would not be able to deal with his true self.

  “Diego?” Ryder prompted at his delay in answering.

  “She’s not a vampire. She’s a mortal.”

  Ryder shook his head as if to clear it. “Did I hear you right? A mortal? Like Diana?”

  Diego thought about Ryder’s mortal lover, only Ramona was nothing like Diana. With a shake of his head, he teased, “Amigo, there isn’t anyone quite like your lover.”

  Ryder looked toward Diana, who was busy talking to someone at the edge of the bar. He tarried in refilling the shot glass before bolting back another slug of tequila.

  “Is everything okay with you?” Diego asked, sensing his friend’s suddenly troubled state.

  With a shrug, Ryder said, “Diana has been tired lately.”

  Diego sensed that it went beyond tiredness, but if that was what his friend wished to call it, he wouldn’t worry him more. “I’m sure she’s been working long hours on some case.”

  “I guess desk duty can be difficult,” Ryder said.

  Desk duty would be the death of someone like Ryder’s very empowered lover, he thought. “They still haven’t released her?”

  “No. The review board suspension hasn’t been lifted. But enough of that. Who is this mortal woman who has you so twisted up?” Ryder asked, starting to refill their glasses for a third time. Diego waved him off. “I’m afraid I may need something more satisfying, mi amigo.” Something that would remind him of what he was and why someone like Ramona Escobar was thoroughly wrong for him.

  “I’d go with you, but...”

  Surprised, Diego shot a puzzled glance at his friend. Ryder only occasionally indulged his vampire needs, usually at times of extreme stress, when releasing the beast within helped restore balance.

  It also helped restore the reality of their situation—that they were no longer human. That playing at being so and acquiring human desires and attachments could only bring eternal pain.

  Slipping from the stool, Diego clapped his friend on the back. “Comprendo, amigo. However, a willing neck waits for me at the Blood Bank.”

  Chapter Three

  Diego slipped payment to the vampire guarding the back rooms and walked past him with the young girl in tow. She was medium height, with short red hair and a plain face, but her body made up for it. The black leather she wore exposed womanly curves and alabaster skin. She was much like Esperanza, who beneath her servant’s clothes had been blessed with a voluptuousness that he’d lovingly cherished for five hundred years.

  He opened the door to the first room, one of a series that Foley, the owner of the Blood Bank, kept for those who wanted some unusual enjoyment. As Diego entered, he noted the chains, whips, and other accoutrements on the far wall.

  When the young woman saw them, she let out a squeal of delight and rushed over, selecting a small whip, which she snapped with relish.

  The noise unnerved him, and in a blast of vamp speed, he raced forward and ripped the whip from her grasp.

  She glanced up at his face, her head tilted at what she probably thought was an engaging angle, but which only served to expose the pale skin of her neck and the pulse that beat there.

  “What’s the matter? Afraid of a little pain?” she asked coyly.

  Diego laid a finger on that pulse point and met her gaze. “You know nothing of real pain,” he said, his tone soft but threatening.

  “Really? But I know one thing.” She leaned closer and reached down to stroke him through the fabric of his pants.

  “Yes, you do know.” He sucked in a breath as she undid the zipper, slipped her hand inside and beneath his briefs to wrap her soft palm around his rock-hard erection.

  “You like?” she asked, and at his nod, she dropped to her knees, freed him from his pants and took him into her mouth.

  Dios, Diego thought, enjoying how she satisfied him with her gifted mouth and tongue, while wondering at the same time why modern women debased themselves so quickly in this fashion. In his day, only the street whores would go at a man like this, without prelude or passion.

  But that thought didn’t stop him from holding her head to him until he felt his climax rise to the edge, and with it, the beast who needed satisfaction of another kind.

  Shaking his head, he drove the demon back, wishing to at least pleasure the woman before he allowed his own release and indulged the vampire with a different kind of fulfillment.

  Urging her to her feet, he undressed her slowly, revealing each luscious curve. He paused to caress her generous breasts, which filled his hands, and the large, rosy peaks of her nipples. She moaned as he sucked at them, but with a little love bite, he moved lower down her body until he was the supplicant before her, peeling away her leather pants to reveal the nest of auburn curls between her thighs.

  She gazed down at him then, her brown eyes dilated with passion, her lips full, not that he would kiss her. He never kissed any of his conquests on the mouth.

  Instead he grasped her hips and urged her forward. He nuzzled the curls with his nose and then slipped his hand around and parted her, eased one finger and then another into her while he licked the nub between her legs.

  She gasped in delight and grabbed hold of his shoulders. Her soft moans drove him on, until he could wait no longer. Surging to his feet, he raised her off the floor and drove into her before walking them to the far wall of the room.

  With her back against the rough plaster, she shifted her hips, moving on him, and he hammered into her again and again until she nearly screamed from the force of his thrusts and the pleasure they wrought in her.

  The pulse at her neck beat rapidly. Violently. Blood called him to fulfill another need.

  Diego bent his head and placed his lips there. He licked her skin, finding it slightly salty from the sweat of their lovemaking. Sweet beneath the sweat.

  She shot him a look from the corner of her eye, and he whispered against the side of her face, “You know what I want.”

  At her nod, he surged upward into her one last time, liberating a climax that made her scream.

  Then he finally freed the demon. His eyes bled out and fangs erupted from his mouth. Fangs that he drove deep into the skin at her neck.

  Her body tightened around him, held him closer as the vampire’s kiss created a different kind of hunger within her. Within him.

  He sucked, savoring her blood, singing with the passion from their sex. He felt filled with youthful energy. Her blood charged every inch of his vampire body with renewed strength.


  He could have kept on feeding, as many did, until there was no choice but to turn the human or let her die. Instead, he took only enough to sate the night’s hunger, knowing that tomorrow there would be another willing human or a delicious libation at the Blood Bank.

  Rearing back, he carried the nearly unconscious young woman to the bed. His hands trembled with the energy zipping through his veins from his feeding, but somehow he managed to rearrange her clothing and his.

  As he gazed down at her, she seemed to be peacefully asleep. The bite marks on her neck were already healing. When she woke, she would feel as if she merely had a bad hangover and remember little of their encounter.

  And what will you feel when you wake? the voice inside his head asked. But Diego knew there was no waking from this eternal nightmare. From the endless days filled with only one certain thing. Death. No end to the loneliness that had returned with Esperanza’s passing. Especially not with a human, he reminded himself. With a last look at the woman, he fled the Blood Bank. Though hunger was abated, the encounter had left him unsatisfied. He dived into the night to find a different kind of delight.

  With the energy of the young woman’s blood rushing through his veins, Diego leaped up to the rooftop of the adjacent building. A harvest moon filled the night sky, illuminating the city below, lighting the night for him, as if knowing of his intent.

  A burst of vamp speed had him nearly flying over the rooftops, vaulting from one building to another in his haste to reach his destination. The air rushed against his body, but barely cooled the heat of the demon driving him. With one last, almost desperate jump, he was on the ledge of Ramona’s building, an old converted warehouse in a part of town that had yet to be gentrified. It was probably why she could afford to have the uppermost loft. It boasted skylights at various locations that flooded the space with light so she could paint.

  He imagined her down below, standing before one of her canvases, as he neared one skylight. Imagined her stroking the brush across the surface, and immediately the paintings she had completed came to mind, reawakening his earlier desire. A desire that taking the young woman hadn’t satisfied.

  He suspected only one woman could slake his need tonight.

  Slowly he crept to the skylight and glanced downward. The paintings were there, but that wasn’t what he wanted to see.

  He shifted to the next skylight—smaller than the first, but still generous enough to provide a view.

  She was there, below the glass, lying in bed, the sheets in disarray around her naked body.

  Diego groaned and reared back from the sight, knowing how wrong it was, and yet unable to deny himself this. This was all he could allow himself with her—this distant passion. Anything else would be wrong on so many levels.

  She was human.

  He wasn’t.

  She would die.

  He wouldn’t.

  He couldn’t keep her with him. He wouldn’t turn her and see her change. See all that he admired about her become twisted by the grief that would inevitably follow as the years passed and life went on around them. As loved ones and familiar things were lost.

  He had seen how it had affected Esperanza. How it had touched the lives of Ryder and all his other friends. He had encountered one too many vampires whose hearts had grown cold, or who had gone nearly insane from the loss of those for whom they cared, and all they held dear.

  He wouldn’t visit that kind of distress on anyone else. But he wouldn’t deny himself satisfaction this night, he decided, as he inched back to the edge of the glass and peered down.

  Her breasts were full and as beautiful as he had imagined, with dark coral nipples he hungered to taste. The sheet draped across her body just beneath her breasts, the dark maroon color highlighting the paleness of her skin and accenting the chestnut highlights in her hair.

  She shifted in bed and her long dark hair fell against her breast. She brushed the errant lock away, but then paused, her hand lingering there.

  Diego swallowed back a groan as she touched herself, cupping her breast and fingering her nipple until it peaked to a hard point.

  She was awake.

  With his vamp senses he could detect the rhythm of her heartbeat and breathing, which said she was conscious of what she was doing. He could hear the beat grow faster and see the pulse in her neck jump as she played with the tip, rotating it between thumb and forefinger. Pulling and pinching it as a lover might.

  After their brief interlude earlier that night, was she imagining that it was him?

  At the thought, his erection swelled painfully against his jeans, human desire overriding the demon. As wrong as he knew it was, he couldn’t pull away from the sight of her, couldn’t stop himself from reaching down and imagining it was her palm on him.

  His mouth watered as she moved her other hand downward, past the rounded curve of her hip visible above the sheet. He stroked harder as her fingers found her center beneath the sheets, and the beat of her heart surged in response.

  When her hips raised off the bed, he groaned and closed his eyes, imagining how he might grasp those hips and drive into her. How he might stroke her to a release the way he now pulled at himself, harder and faster as his vamp senses picked up the erratic breaths spilling from her lips. He heard the soft moan of desire followed by a sharp gasp as fulfillment chased through her body.

  He came then, violently and so swiftly he grew light-headed from the force of it.

  Dropping away from the skylight, he sat at the edge, spent. Humiliated at how little control he had exhibited. Only it had been so long since he had felt such need. And it wasn’t just since Esperanza’s death nearly eighteen months earlier. Diego realized that it had been too long since life and passion had filled his being. Since he had truly lived.

  At that, he bent his legs and buried his head in his knees, tears threatening as he realized the emptiness of his life. Of all that had been his existence for five hundred years.

  Just because one woman’s passion had roused him as never before. A woman he could never have.

  With a rough breath, he forced himself to rise and put things to right, but as he did so, he allowed himself one quick look before he left.

  One look too much, he realized, when he saw that she had curled up into a ball and was crying. Her tears tugged at his heart, but before he did something he would truly regret, Diego surged off the roof, the sight of her crying driving him away, since all he could do was bring her yet more tears.

  RAMONA DASHED THE TEARS from her face, chastising herself for her weakness. She should never have given in to the remnants of the dream—one filled with her and Diego making love.

  But she had let her need guide her, and the physical satisfaction she had given herself had been gratifying at first. Then the realization had come of how empty it was. Much like her life. Much the way her life would end.

  Empty and alone.

  She had spent her early teen years struggling to survive in the barrio, joining a small street gang for protection and company. With her dad gone and her mother slowly losing her mind, there hadn’t been anyone else to turn to.

  A bad mistake. Their petty thievery and rivalry with another gang had landed Ramona in juvie for a few difficult months. It wasn’t the time in the detention center that had been hard, it was worrying whether her mother was coping alone. Luckily, a caring counselor had helped her out and provided her mother with a visiting nurse.

  That and an art class during her incarceration had set Ramona on the path to a college scholarship. After, she had devoted much of her later teen years and early twenties to her art, perfecting it at the cost of a social life. Any time not in the studio was spent caring for her mother at home, until the Alzheimer’s worsened and her mom had to be institutionalized.

  Ramona had dated now and again during the last few years, but had found no man she could imagine spending the rest of her life with. No man as attractive as Diego, who had become her patron shortly after her graduation from college.

  Now thirty was just a stone’s throw away, only she wasn’t sure she would reach that age. She had been battling the anemia robbing her of life for almost three years, since the diagnosis that had rocked her world.

  Dying didn’t bother her as much as the thought of dying alone and unsatisfied. Of dying without ever knowing the kind of love she had seen her parents share before her father’s own untimely death and her mother’s illness.