Blood Kiss Read online

  Damn it—learning to be polite to a vamp was almost as hard for me as getting used to being one seemed to be for Michael. I decided we would both just have to muddle through somehow.

  I looked around the cabin, trying not to imagine what Uncle Harry would say if he knew I had just invited a vampire across the threshold of the safe house he’d left me.

  The inside of the cabin was dusty from disuse since no one had been here for four years since Uncle Harry had died. But it still looked much the same to me and I had to fight the urge to go from room to room touching his things, remembering him, his easy laugh, his gentle touch…

  Instead I flipped on the lights—he’d had some kind of fund set up to pay the utilities so I never had to worry about it—and went straight to the book shelf. At the very top, just as I remembered it, was the big black family Bible. I reached for it, standing on tiptoes and then I felt Michael right behind me.

  “Let me,” he murmured in my ear and got the thick, dusty tome down without even straining to do it.

  “Show off,” I muttered, taking the book from him and laying it on the desk beside the shelf. He still stood directly behind me and I found it disconcerting to have him so close—close enough for me to feel his body heat like a line of fire along the groove of my spine. “Give me some room,” I said, elbowing him impatiently.

  “Oof!” He pretended my elbow had knocked the wind out of him and backed off good naturedly. “Fine, I’ll go exploring.”

  “Not much to explore,” I said absently, opening the stiff leather covers of the Bible carefully.

  There wasn’t, either. The cabin had one main living area with a queen sized bed at one end and a fireplace at the other. In front of the fireplace was a long scruffy looking dark blue couch that was wonderfully comfortable if I remembered correctly. It was where I had slept the one time Uncle Harry had brought me up here when I was sixteen.

  On the far wall, opposite the book shelf and desk, was a small door which led to a postage stamp sized bathroom. Beside it was an entryway that led down a single step to the long, narrow kitchen that ran the length of the cabin. That was pretty much it but I figured it should keep Michael busy long enough for me to see if my uncle had left me any secret messages in the family Bible.

  I say I was looking for secret messages but actually, I didn’t expect anything of the kind. Uncle Harry had always been a straight forward kind of guy. He said what he meant and meant what he said—still a trait I valued in a man, or anyone for that matter.

  But instead of a letter detailing exactly what I should do or who I should call if I found myself in trouble, I found a large, stiff piece of parchment. Unfolding it I saw a list of names written in thin, spidery script branching off of one another from a central name at the top. Some of the names had small, painstakingly drawn red crosses beside them.

  “It’s a family tree.” Michael was behind me again, looking over my shoulder.

  “What?” I gave him a look but he just smiled.

  “A family tree. Genealogy was one of my father’s favorite hobbies—he was always trying to trace our family back to Ireland. My mom was mostly Italian but she didn’t care one way or another.” He looked more closely at the parchment. “That name at the top must be the most distant ancestor—and look, it’s a woman. Catarina Cosenza. Hey, maybe she’s your great, great, great, great grandmother or something. Looks like she married some guy named Vittore Morretti.”

  I looked at the top of the family tree where he was pointing. Sure enough, Catarina’s name was joined with Vittore’s with a carefully drawn line and descending from that was another line that listed more names—mostly Italian—that continued down the page. But on the other side of Catarina’s name was another line drawn to the name of what was presumably another man—Niccolo Morretti. There was a single line under that pairing but no name.

  “What’s this?” I said, pointing at the second pairing. “She had two husbands with the same last name?”

  Michael shrugged. “Maybe she married brothers. Not at the same time,” he explained, seeing my look. “Maybe she married one and he died so she married the other. But look—it looks like the children she did have with Vittore kept her last name instead of their father’s. It’s Cosenza all the way down the line. Unusual.” He mused over the parchment for a moment before asking, “Is your name on there?”

  I looked down to the very end of the crackling, brittle parchment. Sure enough I saw myself, Katherine Cosenza, written in tiny, neat script that could only be Uncle Harry’s. My name was listed beside the names of my older and younger brothers with one difference. There was a small red cross beside my name and when I looked for my uncle’s name, Harold Cosenza, there was a cross beside his as well.

  “What do the red crosses mean?” Michael asked, as though reading my mind.

  I scanned the parchment for a minute before the obvious answer came to me. “Slayers,” I said. “There’s only one per generation—see?” I pointed at the names.

  He frowned. “ Really? Only one per generation?”

  I nodded.

  “But how do they—how do you keep up will all the vampires?”

  “Vampires aren’t as easy to make as you might think,” I said. “Only one in every hundred people who gets bitten turns—the rest die.”

  Michael’s face was suddenly pale. “So I should have been dead the moment that vamp in the ER bit me.”

  I thought back to how I had felt when I saw him get bitten—it had been like watching a death sentence being carried out. Like seeing an execution and not being able to stop it. But I didn’t know if I felt that way anymore—at least, not about Michael. Maybe it was because he was different from other vamps but I was having a harder and harder time seeing him as one of the unholy undead.

  “You got lucky,” I said, cutting my musings short. “Well, if you call being a vampire lucky.”

  “Which you don’t,” he said dryly. “But even if only one in a hundred victims gets turned, I still don’t see how a single slayer can keep vampires from overrunning the planet.”

  “It’s because we know who to kill,” I said. “I don’t waste my time with leaches—the newly turned, that is. I go straight for the Elders. You stake an Elder and his entire line dies—everyone he’s ever turned is ashed right along with him the minute the stake pierces his heart.”

  “Seriously?” Michael looked worried. “So if something should happen to the, uh, guy who bit me, I would automatically—”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you,” I cut him off. “The one who turned you was no ordinary leach. He was an Elder, not to mention a tough sonofabitch. I already tried to kill him right after he bit you, remember? Shoved a knife in his eye and skewered his brain like a shish kabob and he still kept coming.” I shook my head. “I think you’re safe.”

  “Thanks for the cheerful thought, Kate.” He frowned. “I guess who you ought to be looking for is the first vampire—the one who started it all. If you killed him—”

  “You mean if I could find him, or her,” I pointed out. “If I even knew who he or she was. That information has been lost—at least among the Cosenza clan, anyway.”

  “Right but if you could find out then…”

  “Killing the original vamp—the one who started it all—would take care of every other vamp on the planet,” I said, finishing his thought.

  “Including me,” Michael said soberly.

  “You are unique as vampires go but, well…probably, yeah.” I didn’t want to think about that so I shook my head. “Anyway, even if I could find the original I probably wouldn’t kill him. Or her.”

  He raised an eyebrow at me. “Why not? To keep from killing me?”

  “Nah.” I nudged him. “Because then I’d be out of a job.”

  He gave me a wry smile and turned back to the family tree. “Thanks a lot. So the crosses show the vampire hunters, huh?”

  I nodded. “Each one shows which child in the family received the mark