Chapter 2
Whitby let out a low complaint in her throat, causing the hairs on Bastian’s arms to shiver.
The aroma of blood made his scalp prickle, and his gut cramped painfully with hunger. The next thing he knew, he was standing five feet from the body, which was strange, because he was pretty sure he wanted to stay as far away from the body as possible.
An image flashed in his mind of his fangs in the body’s throat, gulping down great mouthfuls of rich, delicious lifeblood, a hundred times more satisfying than anything produced by a farm animal.
The scent—copper with an undercurrent of raspberry—made Bastian’s brain fizz.
It lit up his extremities and he felt another dizzying pull forward, an invisible force tugging at his teeth, his body responding almost independently of his will.
Hunger consumed him. It cramped and twisted every part of him.
Drink drink drink—
Pain pierced his ankle and Bastian cried out, his focus shattered. He once more heard the crashing of the ocean, tasted sea salt, and saw Whitby standing by his leg, glaring up at him. She had clawed his exposed ankle.
“What did you do that for?” he asked.
“Get away from the girl, Bastian.”
“Girl?”
As the red haze in his vision thinned, he saw that, yes, it was a young woman.
Her dark hair spread like tentacles across the sand and her head was tipped back, her limbs splayed at odd angles.
She wore a blue-and-white dress and a pair of scuffed white sneakers. She could be no older than twenty-five.
Her throat had been torn out.
Blood glistened like oil on the sand.
A mix of desire and revulsion crested in Bastian’s chest in a frothing wave, and he staggered backward, away from the girl.
Urgently, he whispered the opening lyrics from Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy”—the ones about life and happiness.
He closed his eyes to focus on the words, not the blood. Anything but the blood.
The urgent thumping in his throat lessened. When he opened his eyes again, the red haze had lifted, the hunger dulling, his gut stilling. He was fine. He was in control. He was Bastian again.
“Was it a vampire?” he asked, pushing a hand through his hair, which suddenly felt hot against his skin. He knocked his Wayfarers to the ground and fumbled to pick them back up. “Do you think a vampire killed her?”
Whitby padded closer to the body, sniffing the air around it. “I don’t smell saliva.”
Bastian didn’t either, but that could be because the scent of other things was so strong.
“How long do you think she’s been dead?” Whitby asked.
“An hour,” he said, tucking the Wayfarers into his shirt pocket and trying to steady his hands. “Ninety minutes, tops. The blood around the wound is already coagulating. Plus, the body’s almost cold.”
He didn’t need to touch the girl to know that. He could sense the lack of body heat—a freezer chill that crept toward him across the sand.
Whitby looked at him from the other side of the corpse.
“You went out an hour ago,” she said.
“I went to buy cat litter before the shop closed.”
“You were gone a while.”
“The shop owner was chatty, and I needed to practice my Italian.”
“You didn’t eat your dinner when you got back.”
“I ate on the road, remember?”
He had finished a full serving of pig’s blood, which he’d brought along in his favorite Bonnie Tyler flask, an original from the eighties that he had found in a charity shop.
The refrigerator in the apartment held twenty more pouches of blood, which was more than enough to see them through the next couple of weeks.
They had brought them from London in a chill box to guarantee maximum freshness.
He still felt full, and for a second he wondered if that was because he had dined on the girl and buried the memory, but no, he would remember killing again.
He would feel it, the human blood rushing through his system, as invigorating as jet fuel and nothing like the minimal satisfaction of animal blood.
There was no way he killed this girl.
“Look,” he said, “let’s not start finger-pointing. You just said you couldn’t detect any saliva.”
Whitby’s tail flicked the sand. “Just seems sort of a coincidence that we’ve been in Vernazza less than a couple of hours and already there’s somebody with their neck—”
She broke off suddenly to dig her mouth into her shoulder, then licked the spot vigorously. An itch…or a flea. Despite himself, Bastian’s mouth twitched with amusement. That would be just perfect. A dead body on the beach and Whitby had fleas.
The gravity of the situation descended on him once more, and he cast around them to make sure nobody else was there. So far, the coast was clear.
“We have to get out of here,” he said.
“Yes.” Whitby trotted back to the path. “We’ll go to the apartment and pack and catch the first train out of town—”
Bastian scoffed. “We’re not going back to London. We only just got here!”
Her eyes narrowed at him. “There’s no way we can stay. As soon as word gets out that a woman is dead with her throat torn out, they’ll be at our door with pitchforks and flaming torches.”
“I forgot we live in the eighteenth century.”
“They won’t care if you did it or not, Bastian; they’ll only care about what you are. You’re good at hiding it, but they’ll figure it out sooner or later.”
Bastian’s jaw pulled tight with frustration that threatened to bloom into anger—the kind of anger that had so often escalated beyond his control in the past. But that was before. Now he was calm.
Calm, calm, calm, like a cucumber in an ice-clinking seltzer.
He turned his gaze away from Whitby. You could never out-stare a cat. He looked at the sea, which glittered and winked under the moon.
Whitby’s worries weren’t unfounded. Prejudice against vampires remained rife.
For centuries, they had lived solely in storybooks and fairy tales.
Few humans knew that vampires really did exist. Then, ten years ago, a popular social media influencer named Sabrina X “came out of the coffin” as a creature of the night, and vampires went mainstream.
The world scrambled to deal with them. In Europe, laws were quickly passed to help prosecute “postmortem criminals,” while “stake on sight” orders in other territories empowered police to slay any vampire witnessed attacking a human.
The Accords protected all European tourist destinations from vampires.
So far, only one case had made it to trial in the UK, after a vampire professed innocence in the murder of a female jogger.
The jury never got to deliver its verdict as the vampire in question was burned and staked by a vigilante mob, closing the case with immediate effect.
Needless to say, no proceedings were brought against the mob.
Even now, in the eyes of most humans, corpse plus vampire equaled one thing.
But Bastian had done nothing wrong.
He wasn’t a killer. Not anymore. Leaving Vernazza would be as good as admitting guilt, but he hadn’t sweated and suffered through five years of getting clean just to take the fall for another vampire.
“What’s this?” Whitby said. She prodded an object in the sand.
It caught the moonlight, gleaming silver.
Though he knew they’d been on the beach for too long already, Bastian went over and picked up the object, brushing sand from a pin badge shaped like a number eight.
It took him a moment to realize the two loops didn’t form a number, but something more unsettling.
“It’s an infinity pin,” he said, nearly dropping it in surprise.
He had seen Londoners wearing exactly that kind of badge.
It was a symbol of allyship favored by vampire advocates—humans who campaigned for undead rights, arguing that vampires deserved as much empathy, love, and respect as any living thing.
“Was she wearing it?” Whitby asked. “The girl?”
Bastian pouted in thought. “It could have come loose in the struggle. It’s made of steel, not silver.”
“So, she was a vampire ally,” Whitby said. “Could be why she’s dead. She trusted the wrong set of fangs.”
Bastian studied the object in his hand. “Or she was targeted for supporting vampire rights.”
“You mean somebody wanted it to look like she was killed by a vampire?” Whitby said.
Bastian nodded slowly. It was an out-there theory, but plenty of killers had blamed vampires for their handiwork. They were a convenient scapegoat.
“Don’t move!” A gruff voice echoed across the beach behind him.
Bastian hadn’t heard the man approach. He’d been too distracted by the body. He smelled him now, though. Perspiration and a whiff of salami. The command in his voice told Bastian one thing: poliziotto.
Bastian started to turn, but the officer shouted again, in Italian.
“Put your hands up!”
“Run, Bastian!” Whitby cried.
“Who said that?” the poliziotto shouted. “If somebody else is there, I order you to show yourself!”
Bastian slipped the infinity pin into his pocket and raised his hands.
“We found her, Signore,” he called out in English. “She was like this when we got here.”
He heard the poliziotto wheeze as he approached and calculated that the man was in his fifties.
Heavy footed, the sand compacting under his weight.
He resisted the urge to turn and face the poliziotto, not wanting to alarm him.
The last thing Bastian needed was a bullet in him.
It wouldn’t kill him, but it would hurt. A lot.
“I’ll distract him,” Whitby said, standing on the path by the beach, eyes flashing like mirrors in the dusk.
“No,” Bastian said. “I’ll handle this.”
“Show yourself!” the poliziotto yelled again, and he must have meant Whitby, because at the same time, Bastian’s hands were yanked behind his back. The poliziotto gasped at the contact. He hadn’t expected Bastian’s skin to feel so cold.
“Should’ve known,” the man spat, and the smell of cured meat flooded Bastian’s nostrils.
“Just run!” Whitby yowled, pacing back and forth, her tail whipping like an angry cobra.
“That won’t help—”
Bastian felt cold metal at his wrists and was about to tell the poliziotto that he needn’t bother cuffing him, he wasn’t going to put up a fight, he just wanted to explain, but then the coldness intensified.
It became searing against his skin. His wrists itched and burned, as if the cuffs were fresh from the blacksmith’s forge.
Silver.
The poliziotto was carrying silver handcuffs.
“What the…” Bastian murmured, confused and exasperated. “Please, we just found the body—”
“Silenzio!”
Bastian heard the poliziotto’s heart pumping rabbit fast. He was riled up, ready for a fight.
If the cuffs had been made of anything other than silver, Bastian could snap them in a single move.
He could subdue the poliziotto with a well-placed blow—and he really wanted to, because this had escalated far too quickly.
But the cuffs prevented him. They leeched energy from his limbs, draining him of strength. He already felt exhausted.
“I’ll scratch his eyes out!” Whitby cried.
“No,” Bastian choked. “Don’t make it any worse.”
“Whoever that is, I’ll be back,” the poliziotto yelled. “I will find you.” He shoved Bastian toward a set of steps that led back up to the street.
“Move, vampire!” he grunted, and Bastian was powerless to resist.