Page 7 of Blood Gift

I had, however, always been single-minded. Once I set my sights on something, it was mine. No questions asked, no excuses accepted. I only had to turn that single-minded focus back on. But what was there to focus my time and energy on?

“You will build a life for yourself,” I muttered, still staring at the man in the mirror. “You will be successful, as you’ve always been. You don’t need the power to be you. You were always more than your powers.”

I wished I believed it.

What was a sorcerer without his powers? Easy: a human. A pathetic, weak, cowardly, stupid human. I found myself examining my dark brown hair for signs of gray, then chided myself. The aging process wouldn’t speed up by much. I’d look thirty for a long time.

Just not as long as I would have before losing everything that made me who I was.

I closed my eyes and turned away, marching into the bedroom area and flipping on the TV for background noise.

As long as I didn’t feel so lonely, the self-doubt and apprehension didn’t gnaw so hard at my gut.

The nightly news was on, and the normal litany of disasters was being rattled off by the anchors.

Even on the other side of the country, in a hick town in the middle of nowhere, stories were the same. Only the locations changed.

Instead of Sunset Boulevard, it was a heavily-traveled highway winding through the Appalachians. Accidents, missing people, robberies. The story of a trucker whose badly decomposed body was found in the woods, miles from the motel he’d been staying at. He’d gotten in an altercation at a diner with a man that customers later told police seemed supernaturally powerful, and wasn’t seen again after that.

Whoa.

That got my attention.

Supernatural powers?

Humans were so quick to dismiss the obvious. Cops assumed the guy was on drugs which only made him seem strong, but I knew better. That was no human they’d been in the presence of that day at the diner.

I couldn’t blame them, the humans. They didn’t understand, so they tried to connect the dots. They’d long since been brainwashed into believing we were nothing but the stuff of folk tales, invented by ancestors even more hopelessly backward than they were. So they blamed drugs, or strange disorders, or untrustworthy eyes when they witnessed the truth.

There was a very sloppy vampire out there somewhere who had let humans see him for what he was.

He was probably long gone by now—and I wouldn’t want to cross paths with him even if he wasn’t.

Gone were the days of hunting vampires for sport.

Did Dominic still do that sort of thing? I would’ve bet on it. He was one of the most merciless hunters I had ever seen, lightning fast and without compunction when it came to taking down his prey.

I could never keep up with him. Not for lack of trying.

I clicked the TV off and tossed the remote aside.

It was past time to get moving.

Maybe if I drove long enough and fast enough, I could outrun my memories.

New York would be a good change of pace. If there was a city in the world in which I could start again, it was there.

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