Page 16 of No One’s Daughter

Others I had no desire to meet.

Self-preservation took priority, so I let my teeth meet his neck once more, messing up my bite marks, leaving his skin torn and my original puncture marks unidentifiable.

Maybe I should have been worried about him having seen my face.

But, I decided it didn’t matter.

​Who would believe him?

​Believe that a vampire attacked him.

​They’d laugh at him, call him a drunk.

​Say he must have been mauled by a dog.

​Part of me enjoyed the thought of him looking over his shoulder for the rest of his miserable life. Forever wondering if he had imagined me or if he’d gone insane.

I didn’t know how I came to be this way, but in this moment, I fucking loved it.

A sad laugh slipped between my lips and for the first time hope swirled in my chest. Maybe I’d be okay.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Davien

I BROUGHT MY motorcycle to a stop, my boot kicking out the stand, then lifted my arm to check the time and exhaled a quiet, irritated breath. It was almost four thirty in the morning by the time we’d made our way to the latest scene. It’s not that vampires needed sleep in the way humans did, I was just so done with this night and I had a knot in my gut about this one. At least the damn drizzle had finally stopped.

We approached the alley in silence, both of us scanning our surroundings out of habit, and it hit me straight away—the scent. Thick. Metallic. Blood. The air had changed before we’d even reached the body. It saturated the space to a degree that would have undone a lesser vampire in seconds, dragging instinct to the surface with little time for control. The scene was a mess.

​Not clean. Not precise. Not controlled.

​Thankfully, Marlette and I were not so easily affected. The blood was everywhere. Splashed across aged brickwork, pooling unevenly along the ground and smeared in erratic patterns that spoke of a struggle. And in the middle of it all lay the body of a middle aged man. He’d clearly been left right where he’d been attacked, twisted slightly, as though whatever had taken him had seen no need to move him afterwards.

He’d been attacked here.

Fed on here.

Left here.

I exhaled slowly, dragging a hand down my face as I took it in. The contrast to the forest scene we’d just come from was immediate. Honestly, it was a little jarring.

This scene was drenched in chaos.

This clearly wasn’t the same perpetrator.

Not even close.

“Do you smell that?” Marlette asked, her voice low, controlled.

I stilled, forcing my focus past the overwhelming scent of blood, filtering through it with careful attention. She was right, there it was, beneath the blood.

There was a scent.

Faint, but present.

I frowned slightly, isolating it further. It was unfamiliar to me. Entirely so. And that, more than anything, gave me pause.

It was vampiric, but I had made it my business to know every vampire within this city and its surrounding territories. There weren’t that many. There never had been. We weren’t native to this place, and the Ninth ensured numbers remained… manageable.