Blood & Dominion (Crimson Crescent #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter

One

The blood hits my system like poison.

I know it immediately. The way my veins turn to ice, the way my vision doubles and splits, the way my body rejects what should be sustenance. I'm on my knees in my apartment before I can stop myself, stomach heaving even though there's nothing left in me but the tainted blood I just drank.

Stupid. So stupid.

I bought the bag from a contact in the underground, the same guy who used to set up my fights when I was human.

Rhett. Not his real name, probably, who always smelled like cigarettes and moved cash with the efficiency of someone who'd done it a thousand times.

I trusted him because I didn't have a choice.

Because the blood bank downtown started asking too many questions about my "medical condition.

" Because I've been a vampire for eight months and I still don't know what the hell I'm doing.

The bag sits on my kitchen counter, half-empty, mocking me.

No label. No information about the donor, their health status, or what they might have been taking.

Just blood that's probably been sitting in someone's trunk for weeks, contaminated with God knows what.

Pharmaceuticals. Street drugs. The cocktail of chemicals humans pump into themselves without thinking twice, because they don't have to worry about someone else drinking their blood supply.

My hands shake as I grip the edge of the counter and pull myself up.

The room spins like I've been drinking, which is ironic since alcohol doesn't affect me anymore.

Through my window, the city lights blur into watercolor streaks; Atlanta at night, sprawling and indifferent to the fact that I'm dying in a shitty apartment in East Atlanta Village.

The kitchen floor is cold linoleum under my bare feet. I focus on that. The physical sensation. The realness of it. My martial arts instructor used to say that when you're hurt, when you're overwhelmed, you anchor yourself in your body. Find something real to hold onto.

Focus, Celeste. Think.

I stumble to the bathroom using the wall for support, and catch my reflection.

At least I still have one. That myth turned out to be false.

Though right now, I almost wish I couldn’t see what I’ve become.

My reflection in the mirror stops me cold.

Even in the dim light from the single bulb, I can see the dark lines spreading under my skin like ink in water.

My veins map themselves across my arms, my neck, my face, visible and wrong and getting darker by the second.

The pattern is almost beautiful in a horrifying way, like black lightning frozen beneath my skin.

My eyes, usually a warm brown, the one feature I inherited from my mother, look glassy and dilated. My pupils are blown so wide there's barely any iris left. Just endless black.

This isn't hunger. This is poisoning.

I've been hungry before. Eight months of figuring out how to feed yourself when you don't have a maker to show you the ropes teaches you what real hunger feels like. It's a gnawing emptiness, a craving that builds until your fangs ache and every heartbeat you hear sounds like a dinner bell.

This is different. This is my body at war with itself, trying to process something it can't handle. Like my human body that one time I got food poisoning from gas station sushi. Except now I'm supposed to have supernatural healing, and it's not doing a damn thing.

A wave of nausea hits, and I barely make it to the toilet before I'm retching up black, viscous blood.

It shouldn't be black. Blood should be red, even old blood, even vampire blood.

The wrongness of it makes my skin crawl.

I can smell the chemical tang of whatever's contaminating it, sharp and artificial.

When the heaving finally stops, I slump against the bathroom wall, breathing hard even though I don't technically need to breathe anymore. Old habits die hard. Twenty-seven years of being human don't just disappear because some vindictive vampire decided to make you immortal against your will.

You can't die like this. Not in your bathroom. Not eight months after fighting your way out of that underground ring.

The thought of my old life sends a spike of rage through the haze of pain.

I was supposed to retire. One more fight.

A big one, the kind that would set me up for months, and I'd have been done.

Free. I could have helped my sister Simone.

She's been struggling since Mom died from an overdose five years ago.

I've been sending money when I can for her therapy, her rent.

She thinks I moved to Miami for work. Doesn't know I was fighting in underground rings or that I'm dead now. Just… gone from her life.

Instead, some vampire with a bruised ego turned me out of spite and disappeared into the night, leaving me to figure out immortality on my own.

Her face flashes through my memory. Beautiful in that uncanny way some vampires are, with sharp features and eyes like a predator. She'd challenged me to a private match. Big payout, she said. Just the two of us, no audience, winner takes all.

I should have known something was wrong. Should have listened to my instincts screaming that this woman moved wrong, smiled wrong, looked at me like I was prey instead of competition.

But I needed the money. And I was cocky. Three years of underground fighting, dozens of matches, and I'd never lost. Not once. I was fast, technically skilled, and I had that thing fighters need: the ability to turn off the part of your brain that worries about getting hurt and just fight.

I beat her. Decisively. She didn't land a single solid hit.

And when it was over, when I was catching my breath and reaching for the envelope of cash, she'd smiled with too many teeth and said, "No one humiliates me."

Then she was on me faster than I could process, fangs in my throat, drinking deep while I struggled and failed to throw her off. The world went gray at the edges. I thought I was dying.

I was. And then I wasn't.

I woke up three days later in an abandoned warehouse with an unbearable thirst and no one to explain what the hell had happened to me. Just a note scrawled on the back of a receipt: Welcome to eternity, sweetheart.

I push myself up from the bathroom floor, legs shaking.

My phone is in the other room, sitting on the kitchen counter next to the contaminated blood bag.

For a moment, I consider calling someone.

But who? My sister thinks I moved to Miami for a "job opportunity.

" My old fighting contacts wouldn't believe me if I told them I was a vampire.

And I don't have any vampire friends because I've spent eight months trying to survive, not socialize.

I need help. Need someone who knows about contaminated blood, about what happens when vampires drink from humans who've pumped themselves full of prescription drugs, birth control, antibiotics, and whatever else is poisoning the food supply these days.

Over the last week, I've been asking around, carefully, because apparently saying the wrong thing to the wrong vampire can get you killed. The vampire community has rules I don't fully understand yet. Territories. Hierarchies. Ancient grudges that play out over centuries.

But the same name keeps coming up, whispered like a prayer or a curse, depending on who's talking.

Maximus.

The gatekeeper. The one who controls access to clean blood in Atlanta.

The vampire so old and powerful that everyone either worships him or fears him, sometimes both.

No one seems to know exactly how old he is.

Five hundred years. Six hundred. Some guy at a bar for supernaturals claimed he fought in the Crusades, but that seemed like bullshit.

What isn't bullshit: he's the only one with a reliable supply of uncontaminated blood. And he's notoriously selective about who he helps.

I've been trying to find him for three days.

It started at the Wax and Wane.

I stumbled onto the bar by accident three months ago, following a vampire who'd just fed on a human in Little Five Points. I'd hoped to corner him, ask questions about surviving this life. Instead, he led me to a door behind a laundromat that opened into something impossible.

The Wax and Wane Bar is neutral territory, run by a pack of wolf shifters who enforce one rule above all others: no violence inside. Break that rule, and you answer to the pack. I've seen what the bouncers look like when they shift. Nobody breaks the rule twice.

It's where I learned that vampires aren't the only monsters hiding in plain sight.

The first night I walked in, I nearly turned around and left.

A woman at the bar had eyes that glowed amber, her nails extending into claws as she reached for her drink.

Two men in the corner booth had pointed ears and spoke a language that made my teeth ache.

Something that looked human but moved wrong, too fluid, too graceful, watched me from the shadows with a smile that had too many teeth.

Shifters. Witches. Fae. Things I didn't have names for. All of them real. All of them drinking together like it was the most normal thing in the world.

I spent weeks just watching. Learning. Trying to understand the world I'd been dragged into.

Now, dying from contamination, the Wax and Wane is the only place I know to ask for help.

Three days of nursing drinks I can barely keep down while asking careful questions.

Three days of talking to contacts from my fighting days who've since turned out to be supernatural themselves, shifters who'd been betting on my matches, witches who'd been hiding in plain sight.

Three days of dead ends and cryptic warnings.

"Don't waste your time," a vampire named Daphne told me, her fangs flashing as she spoke. "Maximus doesn't help nobodies. You need connections. History. Something he wants."