Harker offered a slow blink. “Is this one of those moments when you look like you’re talking to me, but you’re really talking to your other side?”
“Yes,” returned Bram.
“And it’s telling you to kill me…again…isn’t it?” questioned Harker.
Bram sighed. “Kill? No. Sink my teeth into and feed, yes.”
“Oh, that’s a step in the right direction,” added Harker, a teasing note in his voice. “At this rate it will have you making eyes at me from across the pub.”
Bram stared at his longtime friend. “Highly unlikely.”
Harker shrugged. “You’re not my type.”
“Because I’m not a woman?”
Harker grinned. “Right.”
“How are we friends again?” asked Bram with a snort.
“Met by way of a prince who liked to impale things. You might remember him. Big ego. Big castle. Big fangs,” said Harker, waggling his brows.
With a snort, Bram nodded. “I think I recall who you’re talking about.”
“He’s pretty full of himself. Hard bloke to forget,” added Harker.
He wasn’t wrong. Vlad, more commonly known as Dracula, did have an ego that was limitless. It didn’t help that the character he’d inspired in a novel had spawned countless books, movies, and merchandise. Bram was no stranger to the notoriety either, but he didn’t bask in it like Dracula did. Thankfully, the author of the original work, Stoker, had layered in misdirects, taking only grains of truth.
Humans thought they knew the tale. They were wrong. They knew only a version of the story. The actual players were far more deadly, and the evil they’d all faced long ago had come from more than one source. Not to mention, Dracula was hardly the only immortal involved in it all. He was simply the only one who had been somewhat outed.
From Bram’s understanding, Dracula got a big kick out of being a famed fictional character from a gothic horror novel. He was even known to show up at places dressed in what people believed he’d wear—a cap, a top hat, and so on.
Stoker’s book was meant to be something of a cautionary tale. In truth, the book had the opposite effect than intended. Over the years, humans managed to take it, twist it, put a sexual spin on it, and ultimately romanticize the idea of creatures of the night.
Bram snorted.
He was hardly leading-man worthy.
If anything, he was the type of man a woman should avoid at all costs. He was walking death.
Speak for yourself, snapped the demon. I’m what women crave. You are merely the vessel by which I give them what they want. I am the one with the lure and prowess. You are nothing.
“You are merely a pain in my—” He stopped just short of saying it all when he realized how loudly he was speaking.
“You know, I don’t have full-blown conversations with my wolf side,” added Harker with a touch of judgment in his voice. “And I haven’t run into any other vampires who talk to their demon like you do. You know, heart-to-hearts for all to hear. Not even Prince Dick-u-la. And let’s be honest, if anyone of you lot were going to spend forever arguing with himself and thinking he was his own best company—it’s him. You’re a bit of an odd duck.”
“Perhaps you should think about having a heart-to-heart with your wolf, considering you ate one of my Italian loafers while in shifted form last month,” said Bram. “That, or think about letting me collar you and take you for walks while you’re in wolf form to work out your excess energy and teach you to behave.”
Harker snorted. “Nah. I’m fine with my wolf eating your shoes. You’ve got plenty. You do know you have a weird shoe fetish, right? You have how many pairs?”
Bram shrugged. “A few.”
Harker looked at the state of the body nearest him. “What do you think left these bite marks? They don’t look to be animal or vampire related. They look almost human. Except there is some curiously putrid-smelling slime all over them.”
The tone went from light to serious quickly, considering what they were standing in the center of. With all they’d seen in their long lives, Bram and the others like him were somewhat immune to the horrors of the world. That didn’t mean that certain things did not still get to them.
Bram stared harder at the bites and caught another whiff of the rotten-egg smell. It was nearly impossible to deny the evidence before him. “My gut says it was ghouls.”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” replied Jonathan. “Is that smell what I think it is?”
“The rotten-egg one?” questioned Bram.
Harker gave a slight nod.
Bram returned it and, for a brief moment, neither man said a word.
“Damn,” whispered Jonathan, breaking the silence. “All the signs are pointing to Dragos being out and running with this prick again. I mean, we all knew they’d been pals back in the day, but the last time they ran around together was before we came on the scene. Dragos was a bastard to start with. Over the years, we’ve more than come to know Ager is as big of one, if not worse. If they’re in league again, there’s no telling what they’re capable of.”
Chapter Two
Bram
Bram said nothing. There wasn’t anything to add to it all. He merely stared around at the aftermath. Harker was right. If the necromancer and the others were traveling as one again, no one was safe.
“Might be time to send out another summons,” said Harker. “I know you’re normally against pulling that card, and that you only just sent a summons around six months ago, but this is bigger than we first thought. The Order is involved, and if we’re right, so is Dragos. We’ll need all our players on the field.”
“I know,” said Bram. “I’ll do that when we get back to the hotel. It would be unwise for me to tap into my demon side right now—in the middle of all this death and bloodshed.”
Harker regarded him closely. “This is about more than just the blood. You still having issues sleeping? No offense, but you look knackered.”
“I am,” confessed Bram. He had been having issues with sleeping but had only confided as much in Harker. He didn’t need everyone more on edge around him.
“The dreams still the same?” inquired Harker.
Bram glanced around, taking into account how close any other members of the team were. “Yes and no.”
“Oh, goodie,” said Harker with a sideways grunt. “I do love it when you’re cryptic.”
Bram expelled a long breath before speaking. “The woman is still in them.”
“The hot blonde you’re getting down and dirty with in the most biblical of ways but when you wake you can’t remember her face?” asked Harker.
Bram nodded.
“Tell me again why that would make it hard for you to sleep?” Harker snorted. “I’d be all about getting as much shut-eye as I could if it meant when I closed my eyes, I got to shag a gorgeous woman nightly.”
It would be hard to fight that logic, if that was really all that was happening. It wasn’t. The dreams brought a sense of panic with them. A deep-set fear that something was going to happen to the woman. That this mysterious woman, whom Bram couldn’t ever fully remember during his waking hours, was important to him, and that she was in mortal danger. That something evil was hunting her.