A chapter of Dracula Unleashed.

3:00 p.m., Geneva, Switzerland

 “Mom, watch this. Mom. Mom. MOM!” Minerva Josephine Victoria Janté chanted her demands for attention in Valerie Tate’s mind. It was a chant that had gone on. And on.

All. Day. Long.

Some mothers took tranquilizers. Others posted on the Internet. Valerie’s own mother had been known to “entertain” good-looking junior soldiers. Whereas Valerie herself craved the perfect combination of sweet and salty, caffeine, and nutrition: blood and coke.

How else was a vampire supposed to deal with the highly advanced psychic powers her child had? Half-angel and half-vampire, Minerva had abilities no one expected from one so young.

“Let me guess. You are going to drop something,” she called from the kitchen.

The baby huffed an indignant breath. Valerie dug her back teeth into her left cheek. No smiling while her child was pouting, even though her daughter’s Cupid’s bow mouth would be pursed like she was spitting out something foul. Such a sour expression on her angelic face.

”But this is cool.”

A familiar clatter told Valerie that Minerva had dropped yet another utensil. Was that her fiftieth or sixtieth of the day? Really, how long could one vampire watch her flatware fall to the floor and treat it like it was the discovery of a new world?

She took a pitcher of blood in one hand, a cold can of soda in the other, and shoved the appliance’s door closed with her elbow. The condensation on the can of cola chilled her sweating palms. Summer in Geneva could be shockingly hot and humid for a place surrounded by icy mountains. She smiled. This beverage would be delicious.

Valerie rounded the divider between the kitchen and the living room. She shook her head in mock awe at the youngest Dracul’s prowess this afternoon. The floor shone with dropped silverware.

Minerva

The game had gone like this: Valerie handed Minerva a spoon. Minerva dropped the spoon. Valerie handed Minerva a fork. Minerva dropped the fork. Valerie did not pick any of it up.

She was familiar with intestine-strewn battlefields, not domesticity. The best she could do was shovel the clinking lot into the dishwasher and push Clean.

Fortunately, her little family owned a lot of forks. Somewhere between the small treasures she had carried, John’s collection, and what Lance had retained from his human life, they were well supplied with more droppables than the average household.

“Here.” She placed the last salad fork on the table in front of Minerva. “Go to town, kid.” She set down her pitcher and can. Her wet hands left pinkish smears of bloody sweat.

Her mouth watering in anticipation of her cool treat, Valerie poured her dinner.

The two fluids mixed together in a swirl of red and black.

Red and black. The colors of Mina Harker’s blood on the hood of Valerie’s ruined car.

Valerie squeezed her eyes closed.

No, she would not remember. She refused to remember. The glass did not tremble in her hand as the vampiress deliberately sipped her drink. Think it through. Apply the coldblooded ruthlessness she was famous for.

Valerie swallowed. Old anger flushed her normally room-temperature body.

It all came back to that book.

That fucking book.

According to Bram Stoker, Mina, a virtuous Victorian miss, had been seduced by a vampire named Dracula. He had bitten her three times, creating a mental connection that had led to his death.

The reality had been somewhat different.

The 1965 Shelby Mustang slammed into Mina Harker’s torso. The woman screamed as the speeding car broke her spine and splayed her halfway across the hood. She lay perfectly centered between the two stripes, Valerie dimly noticed through the pain of her own injuries.

Radu, her little brother, had fallen for Mina the moment he caught her wood-smoke and lavender scent in the dirty London air. Radu pursued Mina for the same reasons Vlad had avoided her.

She was the reborn soul of Ilona, Vlad Dracula’s wife. The woman both brothers loved.

Valerie jammed the accelerator until she crashed into the concrete wall of the impound lot’s main building, pinning the already cooling corpse against the crumbling cement. Mina’s once-white Victorian dressing gown dripped with the waste of violent death. The fabric had spread over the once-mint condition Mustang, highlighting the ruin of the last memorial left of a long-lost love.

Just as Radu had captured and turned Ilona, he stalked and bit Mina. Unlike Ilona, though, Radu did not turn Mina. When she proved to be less fiery in this incarnation, he left her thrice-bitten, near immortal, and with unknown powers.

The dead woman’s glassy eyes filled with blood, her lavender and wood-smoke scent overwhelmed with the mouthwatering, nose-puckering copper scent of hemoglobin. The Mustang’s engine whined to its own final death.

Vlad had refused to let her memory ease. He kept her diamonds in his ears. Every vehicle he had owned, he named for her.

Mina Harker was at peace.

Vampires didn’t need to breathe, but she sucked in oxygen, letting its intoxication ease the discomfort of her injured body.

Mina had gone mad from the centuries after Radu’s bites. Last spring, Lucifer and his Fallen Angels chose to manipulate her insanity to forward their own plans. Their interference backfired. Her powers nearly destroyed Valerie, Lance, John, and the Fallen.

A violent death had been the only way.

Valerie’s past was gone. Her future lay ahead like clean sand on a nighttime beach.

Valerie rubbed her eyes, trying to scrub the flashback from her memory. She had killed in numbers untold. Her name was synonymous with reckless murder. She had seen firsthand the horrors of the Nazi camps.

Why this death? Why this time? Why couldn’t she stop remembering? It wasn’t as if Ilona’s soul hadn’t died before. The first time Ilona died, Radu turned her into a vampire. Years later, Valerie killed her during Napoleon’s failing campaign in Spain.

Valerie sat at the table next to Minerva’s high chair. Valerie watched her drink swirl as she pushed the glass around in small circles. What in the name of Lucifer’s hairy back was going on?

Maybe she was stressed. Much had happened in the last year. Lance Soliel’s love and his angel blood had transformed her from a vampire into something with no name. The surprise of falling in love with John Janté and then bearing a child had cracked her wide open, leaving her adrift in unfamiliar emotional territory.

The muscles between Valerie’s breasts would not relax, no matter how often her husbands rubbed them. The sun blared in through the curtains like a trumpet blast in Valerie’s eyes. She could operate in direct sunlight since she had drunk from an angel, but the brightness fatigued her. The ceramic pitcher of blood cooled her forehead.

Misery held her in jagged iron jaws, twisting her thoughts until sleep was a dim memory.

“Mom, come on. Watch me.”

Valerie’s fingertips dug into the wooden tabletop. Her sharp fingernails cut another round of half-moons to join the collection she had been trying to hide with tablecloths. Soon, her husbands would discover the marks. What would she do then?

The last fork fell to the ground with a discordant crash. The high chair clunked. Minerva must have bounced in her seat.

“Come pick it up,” the half-angel, half-vampire child demanded.

Valerie’s eyes opened. Her fingers dug in harder. No one used that arrogant tone on Valerie. Not since her father had died. The strain of ignoring the memory, the sun, and her own hunger pushed her temper. Instead of giving in to her rising irritation, she took a deep, refreshing slurp of her drink. Easy. It wasn’t Minerva’s fault she sounded just like Valerie’s centuries-dead father. A father who shaped Dracula into the war machine that had terrorized the world since the 1400s. The iron-hard muscles in her back twisted further.

Minerva slapped her little fist on the high chair’s red plastic tray. ”Do as I say.” Pure autocratic Dracul command laced the baby’s mental voice.

Valerie’s temper raged beyond reason or control. Blood hazed her vision. Her teeth grew, her body filled with supernatural power.

She banged her own fist on the table. With a great roar, she flung the back of her arm across the messy table. Empty plates and her half-full tumbler leaped into the air. Blood and cola washed across the floor like a tidal wave. Thin glass shattered against the floor, spraying the room with razor-sharp shards. Rough brown pottery smashed into the walls. A cut opened on Valerie’s temple and more blood poured into her eyes.

Her fangs clashed together inches from her infant daughter’s nose. “I’m in charge. Talk back to me and I’ll kill you.”

Minerva burst into frightened tears. Instead of the normal saltwater drops, the child cried like a vampire. Tracks of blood ran down her baby-round cheeks. The shriek of her cries penetrated Valerie’s miasma of fury.

She shuddered to a halt.

Her own father had said those exact words when she was a child. Now she was saying them to her innocent daughter.

Valerie sat down hard, the chair creaking beneath the pressure. Despite all the ways she had changed since meeting and unofficially marrying Lance and John, she remained, at her core, a heartless, soulless murderer from a family of killers. It would be so easy to destroy this fragile, unique life.

Thank all that lived that Minerva had not so much as a scrape on her.

Perhaps the Creator did have mercy.

Now that love had warmed her dead heart and taught her the meaning of fear, she would not be able to survive if she hurt her own child.

Tears raced down her face. Mother and daughter wept together. After several minutes, Valerie wiped at her own cheeks with the flat of her palm. She dabbed at Minerva’s little face. Crimson smeared over both of them.

“Oh, hell. Baby, I’m so sorry.” She picked Minerva out of her high chair and held the crying toddler close. “Kid, I know shit about being a parent.”

Nothing like this happened when her partners were home.

Her husband John Janté had access to his own mother, as well as the dizzying array of books written for humans. Her other husband, Lance Soliel, the Angel of the Lost, had access to Divine Wisdom.

Valerie had two violent role models from the 1400s and no experience in caring for a child. She’d never given her blood, tears, and sweat to create a new vampire. The responsibility had been too great.

Lucifer’s teeth, she’d never even owned a pet.

“Ah, darling.” She took a dropped butter knife in her hand and stared into the shiny steel. No reflection stared back at her. Instead, she ran her sharp thumbnail along the small scratches that marred the surface. Metal curled away from her nail and dropped on the already trashed floor.

Disgusted with herself, she flung the knife away. It landed, hilt deep, in one of John’s Toulouse-Lautrec posters. A woman who peered coyly over her petticoats now sported a knife handle in the middle of her forehead.

A killing shot. Executed the way her father had taught her.

“Kid, you drew a bad hand when your soul chose me.”

Minerva’s eyes widened at the spectacle. “Good aim, Mom.” She sounded impressed.

The tension between Valerie’s eyebrows eased. Her kid was easily distracted. Maybe she wouldn’t be ruined by her mom’s temper tantrum.

The toddler reached her hand out toward the knife in the wall. She grunted. Small lines appeared between her feathery, dark eyebrows.

Valerie pressed her lips together, curious at Minerva’s unusual vocalization and steady concentration. The baby chattered like crazy in her parent’s head, but had not verbalized.

The knife pulled free from the wall. It lifted in the air and spun like a tornado. The sunlight reflected off the metal, throwing rainbows through the trashed room. With a swoosh, the knife flew.

Twaaaang.

The blade buried itself into a different Lautrec poster, this of a singing woman in a snake-patterned dress. Right into her open mouth.

“Whee!” In a display of unusual coordination, she clapped her little hands in the glee of a good shot.

Valerie’s tears dried in both pride and despair. Her daughter was as dark as her mother. Lance’s angel blood did not negate the Dracul urge for violence and power. John’s ability to guide Fallen Angels toward their true calling did not wash away Minerva’s innate facility for death.

What could Valerie do? Should she punish her daughter, force her to bury this part of herself? Tell her that killing only begat more killing? Destroy her before she grew into an unstoppable monster like her mother and her uncle?

She took a deep breath. In the end, she said the only truth she had. “Good aim, kid.”

Her beautiful daughter grinned, her fangs bright and happy in her bloodstained face.

Perhaps they could both learn to control their drive toward carnage.

“Here.” She tossed a fork in a gentle arc toward Minerva. “Try again.”

Hours later, after her daughter slept and the sun set behind the Alps, Valerie wrapped her arms and legs around her husband John. He pressed the thick head of his penis deeper inside her vagina. Her internal muscles quivered, trying to take him all the way. The tanned skin around his green eyes narrowed as he grinned at her.

“Ahh, chou,” he purred in her ear. “You take me so well.”

She thought of how barbaric she must look, her black hair spread across the white linens of their bed, her mother’s heavy gold and ruby necklace clasped around her neck. Rubies the size of pigeon eggs decorated her ankles and chimed together as she urged him on. Her men liked the look of her draped in the jewels she had carried over the years.

Preening a little, she teased him with the draw of her nails across his bunched shoulders. She’d had her entire life to dream of what kinds of sex she wanted. Her uninhibited partners had met every idea she had thrown at them with genuine enthusiasm.

“Hell, yes,” he muttered, arching into her touch. She scratched him harder, leaving red marks along his ribs.

A groan from the other side of the bedroom heightened their excitement. John and Valerie turned their heads in unison to admire the third person in the room. Their lover, Lance Soliel, struggled against the twining black ropes that held him fast to a wooden chair.

The bondage outlined his muscular shoulders and brick-hard belly. His thighs bunched and pressed against the chair’s seat. Valerie could tell from the movements of his biceps that he struggled against the knots holding his hands behind his back. She flickered her tongue at him through her fangs.

His cock was flushed the same purple as his face, setting his arctic ice-blue eyes aflame. His erection arched toward his belly, and a pool of sweat and pre-ejaculate decorated his flat stomach.

Lastly, a black ring gag kept his mouth open, leaving him only the use of his tongue.

Valerie’s slick pussy testified to Lance’s oral skills. John had taken his turn demanding the wet devotion of Lance’s tongue until the two of them could not resist the need to fuck.

Her dead heart could not swell or heat or grow as humans’ organs did when they felt profound love. But she could trace the warmth that flooded her bones and eased her self-disgust.

John tilted Valerie’s hips up so Lance could get a good view, then penetrated between her flaring labia into the hot clasp of her pussy.

John settled his cock deep inside of her. Rolling his hips in figure eights, he reached for the vibrator on the side table and flicked the switch.

Valerie pushed at him. The loss of self-control frightened her.

“No, non.” He wagged the long white handle like a father would wag a finger at a naughty child. “I like this. I want this. Give it to me.”

She was no coward. She would face the fear of her flashbacks. Valerie closed her eyes.

The vibrator ripped through the barriers of her mind. With a cry like stone cracking, she orgasmed.

After the ropes were undone, after the cuddling, the three fell asleep.

<2l>

John Janté, Valerie’s beautiful Frenchman, leaned against a Cooper Mini, his dark hair matted with gravel. His accelerated healing had already closed the cuts on his face. His gasping breath broke the silence over the now trashed impound yard.

Lance Soliel, their lover, the recently ascended Angel of the Lost, floated in the wet night air. His white feathers shook like knives, cleaning themselves of his own battle. The mind-controlled Fallen Angels were set free.

Mina’s eyes opened. She held out her broken arms. The sweet and musky blood brought saliva to the vampire’s mouth.

“Come to me, my husband,” the corpse crooned, gesturing to Valerie. “Won’t you embrace me as you once did?”

Valerie took the body in her arms and made love to the memory of a lie.

She woke with the taste of old rotten blood in her mouth.

Without disturbing her men, she slinked out the open window.

The disgusting images never stopped. Valerie wanted to dig her eyes out, throw herself on a stake, even beg Lucifer for the ability to forget. She ran faster, pushing the edges of her speed. She sucked in air.

Valerie might have been transformed from a vampire to something unheard of, but oxygen was still an intoxicant. Vampires on oxygen were known to lose control of their judgment. As if she had taken a shot of cocaine directly to her brainstem, her nerves screamed, as raw as though they had been sandpapered. Her eyes bulged.

At three in the morning, Lake Geneva transformed from a deep, cold blue into luscious purples and greens. The urban glow of the city spread like a lighthouse over the water and shed illumination upon the nearly vertical mountains. The bucolic glory of central Europe never failed to inspire awe in any beholder.

The boulders and lichen of the tree line gave way to the edge of the snowpack. Her bare feet made no indentation on the fresh powder.

Valerie wanted to forget. She would erase the memory of Mina’s dying face. But it was acid-etched into the bottomless depths of her sick mind. She flowed across the rooftops of downtown, the colored lights sending aurora-like colors across the water. She jumped from building to building, landing with light feet that never stumbled. Valerie’s undead muscles didn’t burn from the exertion; after all, that required a metabolism. Her body went numb from the brutal pace. Grief gripped her throat as tightly as a barbwire noose. The nausea did not abate.

Valerie shook with unleashed horror that did not let her sleep.

Dracula's Secret, Blood Wings #1
Dracula's Desires, Blood Wings #2
Dracula Unleashed, Blood Wings #3, to be released March 21, 2013