Prologue
MARIS
They say a lot of things in Vesper Point. Always throw salt over your shoulder if you spill, if you hear the twelve bells ring at night, shut your doors and windows. And if you walk the beach at high tide at midnight, you might see the heartbroken ghost of a sailor’s widow walk into the dark waves.
All of these are wives’ tales.
And none of them compare to what they say about me. It’s not a superstition or something the locals say to scare their kids into acting right when company’s over. What they say about me is the truth.
The people of Vesper Point say I’m a murderer.
A killer.
My name is Maris Martinez and for as long as anyone can remember my family has lived and died in Vesper Point. Generations of Martinez’s have worked the frigid waters and built this town brick by brick. We’re one of the oldest families to settle in this area. But for as many of my family that have bled, sweat, and been buried in the six square miles of Vesper Point, there has never been a killer.
I’m the only one.
The first.
God willing, I’ll be the last.
One
JULIAN
The drive to Vesper Point from Seattle is about an hour and a half. Less if I’m pissed and driving faster than I should, like I am today. I grit my teeth and grip the steering wheel so hard the frame groans under my hands.
“Relax,” I order myself. My words come out more of a growl than anything. A reminder that I’m fucking starving. I knew I should have gotten something to eat before I left the city. I force myself to relax my grip before I rip the damn wheel off and end up going through a guardrail.
The roads here are winding and narrow. Hairpin turns that vanish into trees and two lanes with the ocean rising up right alongside roads that rise and fall with the mountains. If you weren’t paying attention it was easy to forget anyone else was on the road with you. Cars just a few seconds ahead of you vanish into thin air from one moment to the next before reappearing again just when you’ve started to pick up speed. A treacherous thing indeed when the weather is bad or a driver distracted while speeding. As it is, I have all three going for me on my journey into Vesper Point.
A flash of lightning breaks through the gloomy sky. If I was human, I’d be in a tight spot. The rain falls so hard and fast it’simpossible to see more than a few feet ahead even for someone going half the speed limit. I’m going at least twenty over. Thank fuck, I’m not human or I’d be dead with how distracted I am.
How did I fuck myself this bad?
That’s the maddening thought pulling my focus off arriving in Vesper Point in one piece. I’m careful, smart, prepared and never, fuckingever, was I dumb enough to trust someone.
So then how did they get the drop on you?
My fangs grow in frustration and the sharp tips bite into my lip. I know how it happened.
I broke one of my rules like an idiot doe-eyed fledgling. I trusted someone.
Not just someone…my maker.
The only soul that had a prayer of getting their hooks in me because their damned hooks had been in me from the second they drained me.
Rosanna.
That heartless, fucking beautiful bitch. She’d snapped her fingers and of course I’d let her ruin my life. In Seattle, I was a respected doctor. A hospitalist. I was the one you called in when not even the specialists had a clue what they were looking at. Flesh-eating diseases contracted through a miniscule cut while slipping near a waterfall in Hawaii? I’d diagnosed it. Identifying heart failure because of hiccups? Yeah, me again. Rushing a patient into surgery to stop aortic dissection? Just another Wednesday morning.
I may have been in Seattle for a minute but I wasn’t bored of the city or my job. Call it a twisted sense of morality but doing good made the centuries pass a lot faster. I’d been alive for three hundred years and before I’d become interested in medicine, the whole living forever thing seemed a bit much. A hospital was a veritable fountain of life and death. A buffet of triumph and sorrow. Every day I was reminded just how thin the line betweenliving and dying really was. When you were a vampire those kinds of things lost their meaning—and when that happened, vampires lost all sense of civility. They reverted right back into the psycho hell beasts they were intended to be. That wasn’t really my thing. It never had been.
I’d much prefer a life of luxury and mental stimulation to mindless feeding and fucking. Besides, there was the real reason I was working in the hospital.
The food.
For a vampire, a hospital is like a supermarket someone’s thrown wide open for a game show, free for all. Instead of a ticking clock urging me to run through the aisles with a stupid cart with a bad wheel, I was able to peruse the menu. All patients that crossed my path were up for grabs but as a doctor I had access to their medical records and blood samples. I could, at my leisure, taste and sample my way through the day’s new arrivals. If one struck my fancy, I’d pay them a visit for a meal.
