Forever Vampire Read Online Free PDF Page B

contact, but would give the search a go first. Besides, that’s if anyone knew she was missing. The family was keeping this hush-hush.
    He folded the picture of the vampiress and stuffed it in a back pocket. Appealing to any man with a healthy sex drive, certainly, with her high breasts and come-on-let’s-kiss white teeth and flirty, longlashed eyes. But beyond the surface glamour, he wasn’t interested.
    Vampires did not appeal to his palate. Sure, that was like calling the kettle black, but he’d grown up knowing that vampires sustained their lives through the heinous practice of imbibing on mortals. They drank their blood!
    Vail would never succumb to such a base appetite. He didn’t need it. Faery ichor sustained him. So why bother succumbing to something that horrified him?
    As if you don’t do the same, his conscience screamed. You sink your teeth into faery necks. How is that different than taking a mortal?
    â€œThey’re filthy and poisoned by their food,” he muttered, and walked onward.
    Thinking of which, he was a bit peckish. It had been over a day since he’d fed. He should have fueled up for what he suspected would be a long night.
    Striding the streets in the seventh arrondissement, he didn’t attempt to quiet the clicking beats of his boots. He wanted to be heard, to be seen tracking through the twilight haze.
    Let them know what they can’t get away from.
    Every so often the street was cobbled, a remnant from Paris’s earlier centuries. Vail liked that. And then he didn’t. He knew his father had been around since the mid-eighteenth century, as had Rhys Hawkes and his mother, Viviane.
    Rhys and Viviane had fallen in love a few years before the French Revolution. Had they walked these very streets?
    â€œDon’t care. They didn’t care enough about me. I don’t care about them.”
    Jumping and hitting the bottom of a low, rusted tin sign with his knuckles, he set the ancient thing into a creaky swing.
    Eyes followed him as he cut through the twilight; he could feel their regard prick at his spine. Some were mortal, peering out from windows as their televisions blared monotonously in the background. What a mind waste technology was.
    Yet other eyes were Dark Ones, unwilling to test his strut. And woe to those who did employ the bravado to try him.
    â€œYippi-i-oo,” he sang lowly. “Where are you?”
    A glimmer in the corner of his eye told him a sidhe lurked in the shadows, slithering along, following his steps. Curious, but not threatening. His hunger stirred. He sensed it was a lower imp or perhaps a sprite. Sprites were nasty and he didn’t care to go toe-to-toe with one of them. Their ichor was acrid, and he always ended up spitting it out.
    Couldn’t be a sprite. Their iridescent sheen never allowed them to blend completely into the shadows.
    As he turned a corner, Vail twisted his head quickly to spy the sidhe before it realized he’d been aware of it. The ointment he wore around his eyes gave him that sight.
    He dashed forward, grabbed the thing about its narrow chest, and sank his fangs into its neck. Just a quick bite, something to take the edge off the jitters he’d felt tweaking his muscles. Hot ichor glittereddown his throat and soothed his pangs. He dropped the faery in a collapse of pale violet limbs. It wobbled in a giddy daze from his bite. The swoon was good to mortal, vampire and even the sidhe.
    Thumbing the corner of his mouth, Vail walked on and thanked his ability to see the sidhe. He hadn’t been well loved in Faery, and suspected if any of his former rivals were in the mortal realm of Paris they would not hesitate to call him out. Zett held the top position on that rivalry list.
    â€œCome and get me,” he muttered—then stopped abruptly.
    Ahead, a mortal male moaned. A pleasurable utterance that curled Vail’s smile smartly. Right out here, in the street, and not tucked