Читать книгу Twilight Hunger - Maggie Shayne - Страница 13

Dante woke in the sour-tasting darkness of his tomb and looked around, seeing everything.

It wasn’t really a tomb. Not exactly, though all it would need to make it mirror one was a rotting corpse or two. The square concrete room was large, windowless, airless. Down here, one inhaled stagnant dankness and mold rather than oxygen. The subterranean room held only a handful of items: a kerosene lantern on a rickety old table and a coffin. And while he found sleeping in the thing to be a laughable cliché, it had its advantages. First and foremost, it would discourage anyone who might somehow find his way in here. Anyone other than a vampire hunter, that was. Secondly, coffins were built to last. This one was as well preserved as it had been when he’d been here last. The padding inside was still soft and intact, if a little less-than-fresh smelling. It sat on a bier that was a rectangle of concrete, rising up from the floor. Built for just that purpose, the bier was the third advantage. Hollow inside, it led to a secondary tunnel. He had never yet needed to use the trap door in the bottom of the coffin, but it was good to know it was there, should he need it.

This place was secure. Safe. But it had never been meant for habitation. It was a last resort, nothing more. That he had been forced to retreat to this place should only spur him to take action that much sooner.

He needed to learn who these new vampire hunters were, where they were getting their information. He needed to stop them.

Smoothing the wrinkles from his clothes, he glanced just once at the cement spiral steps that led up to a solid ceiling. There was a hinged doorway in the floor there, completely invisible from above. But when he’d opened it, curious to see what the woman had done to his house, he’d found a wooden barrier. Someone had apparently laid a new hardwood floor over the old one in his study. Oh, he could have smashed through it easily enough, but announcing his presence was the last thing he had in mind.

Bad enough she had glimpsed him that first night, just before dawn.

Looked right at him and whispered his name. He’d heard her clearly, despite the distance. His senses were honed by centuries of immortality and, he thought, blood drinking. Living blood was raw power to his kind.

She had said his name. And he’d heard her, physically heard her, but also heard her mentally. He had felt that whisper echoing within his mind. And he’d felt the intense yearning that had been wrapped around it. He had even felt an answering tug at his own heart, and yet that made no sense. He didn’t even know the woman. But she, apparently, knew him.

He wondered about that. It ate at him. Had she seen his name on some stray scrap of paper that had been left lying around the house? It wasn’t on the deed—he’d used a false name then.

And if she had simply seen his name somewhere, that did not explain how she could connect that name to the stranger she had glimpsed standing on the shore in the dead of night. She had recognized him. How that could be, he didn’t know.