Vamps and Vendettas (Star-Crossed Chronicles #3)

Before

Greenthorn Indoctrination Center, Vampire Tribal Lands

Ophelia sat on a hard plastic chair, clenching a mangled pamphlet between her sweaty palms. The silence in the stark, cream and beige waiting room was beyond oppressive.

She’d been there since six that morning, and the hour hand on the clock above the frosted glass door had made almost a full circuit.

She riffled her hair. The wait was fucking ridiculous.

What the hell was going on back there? All her forms had been completed, every legal requirement satisfied.

She’d even taken the intro course to their bullshit religious instruction and been blessed by one of their preoti.

This part should’ve gone faster, especially after her more-than-generous donation to the cause.

Fucking bloodsuckers.

God, she just wanted to burst through that stupid door and get this over with.

Damn it. No. Breathe. She struggled to bite back her temper.

Be contrite, Phe. Try to channel fucking worthiness.

She snorted. Like that was hard. She was a hell of a lot farther up the food chain than the rest of the losers that’d shown up to volunteer.

Throughout the day, seats filled with indigents and the dying had slowly emptied to the right and left of her until only herself and two other people were in the room.

One of them was laid out on a hospital gurney.

Bags of saline and Lord knew what else hung from an IV stand beside him.

The other, a woman and presumably the infirm man’s caregiver, slowly flicked through her tablet.

By the way she was chewing her lower lip and shifting in her seat, whatever she was reading was juicy.

Ophelia scowled, hooking the long, jagged bangs of her pixie cut behind an ear. What the woman should be doing was reading up on how to properly care for the soon-to-be-corpse’s colostomy. Even across the room, the stench of shit was eye-watering.

What a cunty little campfire scout, all prepared for the wait.

Ophelia flicked her nails and picked at the black gel tips, begrudgingly admitting that she’d been too confident she’d be one of the first volunteers called and hadn’t thought about how to pass the time.

Normys looking to join the vampiric tribes and subscribe to their fucked-up religion were usually either vagrants, on death’s door, or some special kind of desperate.

Ophelia was a very healthy twenty-nine, a rising star in the litigation world, and fell squarely into the last category.

She was also positive that her soon-to-be-husband would completely lose his shit if he knew she was here, and every second that ticked past increased the probability of him figuring out where she was.

Ophelia wiped her sweaty palms against her thighs, all too clearly imagining him bursting through the door, full-on gargoyle.

Her eyes flicked to the clock. These assholes needed to hurry the fuck up.

The bullshit work conference she’d invented wasn’t going to hold up to close scrutiny, but it was the best she could do on short notice. The approval for her to join the tribes had come through almost immediately, and she needed that goddamned virus.

She slowly exhaled and flipped open the mangled pamphlet for the umpteenth time, smoothing it over her bespoke, tailored slacks. Glad her phone had died after the first few hours, nixing any temptation to call Deo and come clean about what she was doing.

Fuck around and find out never went over well with him, but that—and his abs—were one of the many reasons she was head over heels for the guy.

No one else had ever cared enough to call her on her shit.

She chewed a nail, knowing exactly what he would say about all this, but screw him.

He wouldn’t understand. How could he? He was a supe and she wasn’t.

This needed to happen. She could feel it in her bones. It was the next step.

She couldn’t lose him, couldn’t think about him with someone else after the fact, and her mortality guaranteed that was gonna happen.

Yeah, over her undead body.

Her gaze dropped to the pamphlet. Rereading it was stupid. At this point, she could recite it verbatim.

“Vampirism is a sacred gift.”

Ophelia didn’t quite snort, but damn, that line got her every time.

Bit of a stretch there. Though, she had to admit, the tribes had a killer marketing team.

She did snort at that, running a hand over her face.

God, she’d been here too long, but Vampiric Syndrome wasn’t a gift, sacred or otherwise.

It was caused by a virus carried by gravers, a rare species of centipede from the eastern continent that fed on dead bodies.

Gotta love nature, right? Gross, but nothing special. Well, unless they chowed down on someone that hadn’t quite passed into the hereafter. That was unfortunate, and probably unpleasant if said undead were a supe, but if one had the questionable honor of being born a normy like her?

Hello, vampire.

Ophelia put a hand to her churning stomach. She wasn’t particularly looking forward to ingesting one of the fucking things, but if the Victorians could down tapeworms to drop a pound or seventeen, how bad could this be? Granted, tapeworms didn’t have twelve rows of razor-sharp teeth, but…

Fucking A. Who was she trying to kid? It was gonna be horrible.

God, stop being such a pussy. To be with Deo forever, she’d chase the fucking thing with a shot of broken glass if that’s what it took.

Ophelia blew out her cheeks and slumped, her tailbone throbbing from the hard plastic. It was a serious bummer she’d been inoculated for Vampiric Syndrome as a kid. Before the Purge, all you had to do was bang someone already infected to contract VS.

Which was what had kicked off the Purge, the development of the vaccine, was the reason all corpses were now cremated, and a whole host of other shit.

Including the tribes’ need for volunteers to maintain their population.

A shadow moved behind the frosted glass.

Ophelia sat up as a brunette vamp with a severe bun and a nurse’s uniform straight out of the 1940s pushed through with a clipboard.

A name tag at her breast read “Crake,” and the tatuaj around her eyes radiated to her temples like a spider’s web.

The markings looked like a tattoo but weren’t.

It was how the virus presented itself and was the basis for their fucked-up caste system.

“Ms. Diamondé?

It was about goddamn time. “Here,” Ophelia said, raising a finger before she stood. She wiped her palms on her slacks and grabbed her purse.

Nurse Crake tongued her cheek, her unnaturally red lips pressed together. She looked Ophelia up and down before checking off something on her clipboard and gesturing for her to follow.

The hallway beyond was as stark as the waiting room had been. White walls, sanitary molding, doors with stainless steel kickplates. All of those had bars dropped across them, moans and thumps coming from within. One of the long fluorescent bulbs flickered above.

“Birthdate?” the nurse asked, her dark eyes on the clipboard.

Something hit one of the doors as they passed, and Ophelia adjusted her purse higher onto her shoulder. “Uh, November third, 2015.”

“And you’re here because…?” The nurse flicked through a bunch of papers, and Ophelia caught a flash of her signature at the bottom of one of the many consent forms she’d signed.

She wet her lips. “Vampirism speaks to me,” she bullshitted, though it wasn’t totally a lie. The part where it extended one’s existence indefinitely was absolutely calling her name. The rest of it could fuck off, but if she had to eat a bug then drink blood to make that happen, so be it.

Nurse Crake glanced at her askance like she knew Ophelia was full of shit. Well, at least she wasn’t stupid. She stopped at a door and pushed it open, gesturing for Ophelia to go in.

The room beyond looked like every other doctor’s office she’d ever been in. Padded, papered table, crappy cream and blue wallpaper, a wheeled, stainless steel table, and a little laminate counter area with a tiny sink and canisters of swabs and cotton balls.

“Remove your clothes and put them and the rest of your belongings in here,” Nurse Crake said, handing over a clear plastic drawstring bag with Ophelia’s name scrawled on it. “There’s a gown on the table, ties in the back. The doctor will be with you shortly.”

The door clicked shut behind her, and Ophelia took a deep breath before beginning to undress.

Her hands shook as she unbuttoned her slacks and wriggled out of them.

Deo. Think about Deo. A visual of the mountainous, gruff blond man flashed across her mind’s eye.

The way his stubble glinted on his square jaw, his intense turquoise eyes…

“It doesn’t matter how much time we have together, Phe. We’ll make the most of what we have, and I’ll love you until the end…”

But it did matter. She flicked a hand across her cheek.

The thought of growing old while he stayed eternally young—there wasn’t a fucking chance she was going to subject him to mashing up her food and changing her diapers.

And he would, damn him. No. This would take all of that off the table.

It was the only way they could be together without her fucking mortality hanging over them like a shroud.

She tied the gown and sat on the table, paper crinkling beneath her.

Her pulse raced. He was going to be so angry with her, but he’d get over it…

right? He always did. And then they could be together forever.

With her credentials, whatever tribe she was assigned to would give her a dispensation to work outside the tribal lands.