Page 1 of Thicker than Blood

CHAPTER 1

Geordi

Wailing sirens shatter the silence of night, startling me out of a deep sleep. I shoot upright, rubbing my eyes and groaning from the headache caused by too much celebratory birthday champagne hours earlier.

Awareness grips my chest. The sirens. Fuck.

Launching myself out of bed, I grope around the floor for my jeans, tugging them on just as my phone buzzes across the nightstand.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Hopping over on one leg, I grab for my phone and press the button to answer. “Geordi.”

“Get your ass over to the city center, stat.” Meredith, my boss at the research center, sounds panicked in a way that makes my heart race even faster.

“Already getting dressed. I’ll be there in less than ten.”

“Bring your camera.”

The call ends, and I shove my phone into my back pocket before finding a shirt and sliding my foot into my boot. I hobble to the living room, still wrestling with the second boot, but I don’t have time to sit down and dress properly like a normal person.

This is an emergency.

I’m out the door minutes later, my camera bag on my shoulder over my bulky coat. It must be twenty degrees outside, and as I make it to my car in the apartment building lot, I’m silently thankful for the forecast being wrong and the snow stopping hours earlier than planned. I don’t have time to brush my car off.

Not waiting for the car to warm up, I tear off, patting my dashboard. “Sorry, old girl. I’m in a rush.”

My beat-up sedan sputters down the snow packed street, but I know Brenda’s a reliable car no matter how hard I push her. Luckily, it takes less than five minutes to get to the city center since there’s virtually no traffic at this hour.

As I pull into the lot adjacent to the park, the sight that greets me makes my stomach plummet. I exit the car, moving in stunned slow motion.

Oh no. Not this.

Meredith sees me, her normally smiling face creased with concern, and waves me over. She’s standing with the mayor, Luci Ferguson, and the chief of police, Bernard Canales. At their feet is a body.

“Vampire attack,” Meredith says when I reach them, entirely unnecessarily.

Given that I research vampires for a living, I’m intimately acquainted with what an attack looks like. Throat torn open, flesh and blood staining the pure white snow, the victim’s eyes forever open and frozen in terror. Nothing else kills like a vampire.

But then Meredith squeezes my shoulder and gestures to the park. Through the dark, my eyes focus, and I gasp. Bodies litter the ground, the fluffy white snow soiled by splattered blood and flesh. There must be…

“Forty-two people,” Meredith says.

A shiver goes down my spine and I’m positive it’s not the cold causing it.

“Why? Do we know?”

She shakes her head. “Not yet, but this is clearly a message.”

A wave of phones buzzing and pinging drowns out my thoughts and we all look down at the same time as notifications light up our screens.

Photo after photo of parks and streets, just like ours, pop up on the news channels, more bodies frozen at the moment of their death.

I shake my head as the reality of what’s happening grips me. “Mere.”

“Fuck,” she mutters. “Why are they doing this? The treaty…”

“Someone doesn’t give a fuck about the treaty,” Bernard replies through gritted teeth. “The vampires have gone rogue.”

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