They were gone.
A group of young clubbers came strolling up the steps, one of them playing air guitar while his friends talked about hitting a rave later that night.
"Hey," Gabrielle said, half expecting them to walk right past her. They paused, smiling at her, even though at twenty-eight she was likely a decade older than any of them.
The one in the lead nodded his head at her. "'Sup?"
"Did any of you - " She hesitated, not certain she should be relieved that this was not, evidently, a dream after all. "Did you happen to see the fight that was going on out here a few minutes ago?"
"There was a fight? Awesome!" said the headbanger of the group.
"Nah, man," answered another. "We just got here. We ain't seen nothin'."
They passed by, climbing the rest of the steps while Gabrielle could only watch, wondering if she was losing her mind. She walked down to the curb. There was blood on the pavement, but the punker and his attackers had vanished.
Gabrielle stood under a streetlamp and rubbed a chill from her arms. She pivoted to look down both sides of the street, searching for any sign of the violence she had witnessed a few minutes before.
Nothing.
But then... she heard it.
The sound drifted from a narrow alley to her right. Flanked by a concrete shoulder-high wall that acted as an acoustic aid, the almost lightless walkway betrayed its occupants whose faint animal-like grunts carried out to the street. Gabrielle could not place the sick, wet sounds that froze her blood in her veins and tripped off instinctual alarms in every nerve in her body.
Her feet were moving. Not away from the source of those disturbing sounds, but toward it. Her cell phone was like a brick in her hand. She was holding her breath. She didn't realize she wasn't breathing until she had walked a couple of paces into the alleyway and her gaze had settled on a group of figures up ahead.
The thugs in leather and sunglasses.
They were crouched down on their hands and knees, pawing at something, tearing at it. In the scant light from the street, Gabrielle glimpsed a tattered scrap of fabric lying near the carnage. It was the punker's tank top, shredded and stained.
Gabrielle's finger, poised over the Redial button of her cell phone, came down silently onto the tiny key. There was a quiet trill on the other end, then the police dispatcher's voice shattered the night like cannon fire.
"911. What is your emergency?"
One of the bikers swung his head around at the sudden disturbance. Feral, hate-filled eyes pinned Gabrielle like daggers where she stood. His face was bloody, slick with gore. And his teeth! They were sharp like an animal's - not teeth at all, but fangs that he bared to her as he opened his mouth and hissed a terrible-sounding foreign word.
"911," said the dispatcher once again. "Please state your emergency."
Gabrielle couldn't speak. She was so shaken, she could hardly breathe. She brought the cell phone up to her mouth, but could not make her throat form words.
Her call for help was wasted.
Knowing this with a certain, bone-deep dread, Gabrielle did the only logical thing that came to her. With trembling fingers, she turned the device toward the gang of sadistic bikers and clicked the image-capture button. A small flash lit up the alley.
They all turned toward her now, raising their hands to shield their sunglass-shaded eyes.
Oh, God. Maybe she still had a chance of escaping this hellish night. Gabrielle clicked the picture button again and again and again, all the while making her retreat back up the alley to the street. She heard murmured voices, snarled curses, the movement of feet on pavement, but she didn't dare look back. Not even when a sharp hiss of steel rang out behind her, followed by unearthly shrieks of agony and rage.
Gabrielle raced into the night on adrenaline and fear, not stopping until she reached a standing taxi on Commercial Street. She jumped in and slammed the door. She was panting, out of her mind with fear.
"Take me to the nearest police station!"
The cabbie slung his arm over the back of the seat and turned around to stare at her, frowning. "You okay, lady?"
"Yeah," she replied automatically. Then, "No. I need to report a - "
Jesus. What did she intend to report? A cannibalistic feeding frenzy by a pack of rabid bikers? Or the only other possible explanation, which wasn't any more believable?
Gabrielle met the cabbie's anxious eyes. "Please hurry. I just witnessed a murder."
Chapter Two
Vampires.
The night was thick with them. He had counted more than a dozen in the dance club, most of them trolling the half-dressed, undulating crowds, selecting - and seducing - the women who would Host their thirst that night. It was a symbiotic arrangement that had served the Breed well for more than two millennia, a peaceful cohabitation that depended on the vampires' ability to scrub the memories of the humans on whom they fed. Before the sun came up, a good deal of blood would be spilled but in the morning, the Breed would be returned to their Darkhavens in and around the city, and the humans they had enjoyed tonight would be none the wiser.
But that was not the case in the alley outside the nightclub.
For the six blood-gorged predators there, their unsanctioned kill would be their last. They were careless in their hunger; they hadn't detected that they were being watched. Not when he was observing them in the club, nor when he had trailed them outside, surveilling them from the ledge of a second-story window of the converted church.
They were lost to the high of Bloodlust, the disease of addiction that had once been epidemic among the Breed, causing so many of their kind to turn Rogue. Like these, who fed openly and indiscriminately from the humans who lived among them.