On a Darkling Plain Read Online Free PDF Page B

those rare occasions when he could be lured away from his amusements and his myriad lovers long enough to paint. She’d intended to arrange for his induction into the ranks of the Toreador, but he’d perished, knifed in a senseless tavern brawl, before she’d gotten around to it.
    He’d left only a handful of canvases behind, and now one of the finest was lost forever. Anguished and outraged, keening softly, the vampire wept tears of blood.
    ONEtTHE PARIAH
    Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.
    — Mother Teresa
    Dan Murdock was trolling one of the beach bars, a crowded, raucous place decorated with circus photos and memorabilia, when he spotted the other vampire.
    One moment, everything was fine. Pretending to sip a Heineken, he was jammed in with the youthful, sun-bronzed mortals watching the limbo contest. The blood thirst beginning to burn in his throat, he was peering about, looking for a drunken girl to seduce. Drunks were easier. He didn’t have to be particularly charming to convince them. His tall, athletic build, arresting gray eyes, shock of blond hair and what one would-be lover had called his “cruel, chiseled good looks” generally did the trick all by themselves. Even more importantly, the drunks rarely understood or remembered what he’d done to them. And he liked the buzz their alcohol-laced vitae gave him.
    Then the hairs on the back of his neck had stood on end. Turning, he had spied the other undead standing across the room, between the door and a calliope, glaring at him. He’d seen her around town before, though he didn’t know her name. She was a big-boned, butch-looking woman as tall as he was, with short, dark hair cut in bangs, and a pug nose. She had a sloppily hand-rolled cigarette smoldering in the corner of her mouth and was dressed in a stained Tampa Bay Lightning sweatshirt, denim walking shorts and flip-flops. Judging from her homeliness and lack of any vestige of sartorial elegance or style, Dan surmised that she wasn’t one of the Toreador who comprised the majority of Sarasota’s vampire population, but rather a Kindred of some other bloodline.
    She arrogantly jerked her head, summoning him outside. He supposed that she wanted to tell him to keep away from prime hunting ranges like the strip of bars opposite the public beach, which “Prince” Roger’s subjects wished to reserve for their own use. Some of her peers had tried to deliver the same message on previous occasions.
    He mouthed the words, “Fuck you,” and began to turn away.
    The female vampire stared at him even more intently. Without meaning to, he took a shuffling step toward her, jostling a young man’s elbow, sloshing beer over the rim of his stein. On the dance floor, the MC lowered the limbo bar another notch. Reggae music tinkled from the speakers set around the concrete-block walls.
    Despite his thirty years of vampiric existence, Dan still considered himself woefully ignorant of the world of the undead. Clanless, transformed and summarily abandoned by his anonymous sire, he hadn’t had anyone to teach him about it; what little he had learned he’d discovered through observation and experiment. But he knew enough to recognize that the woman by the door was mesmerizing him. Exerting every iota of his willpower, he managed to wrench his head to the side, breaking eye contact. His rebellious feet stopped trudging forward.
    Hoping that he’d shaken her confidence sufficiently to convince her to leave him alone, he turned away and moved toward the chiming, chirping pinball machines and the pool tables at the rear of the bar. After a moment, he glanced stealthily back and then scowled in annoyance. The woman was pushing through the crowd. Coming after him.
    He turned and waited for her, trying to look tough and forbidding without quite reestablishing eye contact. Perhaps because of the crowding in the bar, she wound up standing just inches away from him. They could have