Page 1 of Vampire's Choice

CHAPTER ONE

You are weak. You should be afraid. You should run.

Her subconscious alarm clock was prodding her from sleep, with its usual cheerful wakeup call.

Ruth opened her eyes. “Fuck off. And bugger off, too.”

If she was using her father’s preferred expletive, she didn’t want to leave out her Irish mother’s.

“Have a good day, motherfucker.”

She added that herself, just to be nice.

Peering up at the night sky through the branches of the tree where she sat told her it was about one in the morning. Her father had been by not long ago. Since vampires had an ultrasensitive radar for one another, she could still detect his energy signature. The realization that she hadn’t been roused by his approach gave that menacing whisper a bonus shot across the bow of her mind. She ignored it, though when she saw her father later, she knew the awareness would be in his eyes. The worry.

Tau lounged in the long grass below the tree. When she shifted against the sturdy branch that had served as her bed, the lion’s ears swiveled and he tilted his head, golden eyes finding her.

“Yeah, about time I woke up, right?” Then she noticed the froth of white scraps around him. Her gaze shot to her lap. Before she nodded off, she’d been holding a book.

“Goddamn it, Tau.”

She wasn’t mad at him. Just herself. The novel had likely bounced right off of him. At least it had been a cheap paperback brought by the supply boat from the Florida mainland. The staff routinely grabbed a bag of them from a used bookstore’s dollar bin. But this one had been pretty good. Maybe the store could find her another copy.

She dropped to the ground next to the lion. The marked human staff weren’t allowed this proximity, because the sanctuary cats weren’t pets. Those who could return to the wild were rehabilitated toward that goal, while the ones too injured or domesticated through captivity were still treated as wild animals. Mal—her father—offered them a life as close to the natural one as they’d had. Or should have had.

Which meant they were as dangerous to humans as they were supposed to be. Ruth, Mal and Adan, her twin brother, were the only ones allowed to be this close. As vampires, they were accepted as predators on par with the cats, but not in competition with them. Mal had given them extensive training on how to establish that balance and the proper level of vigilance.

Her lip curled. He'd been okay with Adan being around the cats a lot sooner than he’d been okay with Ruth doing so, but in fairness, acceptance from the cats that she wasn’t prey had taken longer.

She squatted next to Tau. When he dipped his giant head toward her, she obliged, a glancing face bump, an acknowledgment that came with the brush of musky rough fur and a puff of meat breath. Ruth settled back on her heels, arms crossed over her knees, and tilted her head toward the wind much like he did, scenting what was there.

Fellow predator BFFs or not, her father still frowned on things like the face bump. Probably because Ruth had done it to a cheetah once when she was far less experienced in reading the animal’s language. That had been a few decades ago, when she was in her early twenties. Only her father’s anticipation of trouble and quick reflexes had kept her from getting her face ripped off.

It would have healed, good as new, with time and enough blood intake, but it would have hurt a lot. More importantly, it would have traumatized her mother. Otherwise, Mal might have let the cheetah do it, to hammer home the lesson. He was definitely a tough love kind of sire.

Tau’s ears twitched to forward alert. He straightened out of his indolent recline, his sharp gaze searching the area around them. The two lionesses that shared this section of the preserve were nowhere to be seen, but if they were who he sensed, his body language would have been different. And Ruth wouldn’t be reacting the same way, because she’d detected it, too.

She didn’t rise to her feet, which would draw attention to herself as a target. She stayed motionless, and stretched her senses out farther.

No one could approach the island by air or water, or come through the portals, without triggering security alarms. In theory. Adan was a gifted sorcerer, and he’d told her father that magic was no different from technology. Someone was always trying to figure out a hack. Now that Adan was a Light Guardian, the elite of the magic user world and essentially a cosmic cop—she called him that just to annoy him—he himself could move through the portals without setting off the detectors.

He routinely did “upgrades” to their portal system when he had time to visit, to increase the alarms’ sensitivity.

As routine maintenance, Mal also did plenty of tweaking to keep the sanctuary’s fault line connections and protections running the way they should. Over the past decade, he’d been teaching Ruth how to do it.

“I don’t have your brother’s innate grasp of the magical workings of the universe,” Mal had told her. “But I’ve taken what little natural ability I do have, applied it to practical application, and worked hard to expand that. You can do the same.”

“So you’re saying even if you took away his Harry Potter wand and Gandalf staff, Adan could do all this in his sleep, but we can use the tools and our brains to muddle along well enough?”

Mal had been amused, but hadn’t disagreed with her assessment. For Adan, working with magic at any level was as easy as breathing. Him upgrading the island protections gave her father one less thing to handle.

Ruth’s gaze latched onto a wind ripple through the long grass. It was a couple hundred feet away, but advancing in her direction, bringing a whisper of sound that suggested a language. A shadow came with it, spreading out into a more defined shape over the waving fronds. She had the impression of wings, and a human shoulder? Then the silhouette contracted, like a bird who had turned and wheeled, lifting himself higher into the sky.

That shadow was too big to be any bird she knew. Unless Adan had screwed up the sanctuary’s portals, tapped into time travel, and allowed a pterodactyl to get through. In which case, her father was going to shit kittens and she would have delightful fodder with which to tease her all-powerful brother.

After they figured out how to keep the creature from eating all the animals, including the humans and vampires.

Whatever it was passed above her. She’d taken her hair down while she was reading, and the breeze of that passage brushed the straight long strands against the round part of her shoulder, awakening nerve endings.

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