Chapter Three

Ivory

Her skirt trailed behind her, darkening with dampness from the snowfall around the graveyard. Ivory held a ball of snow in her hands to sooth the burns from the consecrated ground.

This old-fashioned version of dealing with vampires was new to her. She’d heard there were vampire hunters in the New World, but most of them had stayed farther east. Maybe they thought the vampires would enjoy the colder, darker weather as opposed to the oppressive heat and sunnier days of the far West.

Ivory acknowledged that the persistence of the sun was a problem, but heat never bothered her, and she had the fortune of living in a place where no one looked for her. The only real downside to following the western progression was that she was one of just a few vampires who wanted to leave the European-inspired history of the east, places that looked and felt familiar and connected them to their pasts.

It helped that Ivory was relatively new, twenty years into her undeath. Like the men and families she followed, she had little holding her back.

But damn it all, she’d been lonely long enough.

Her first choice for a mate a few months ago had been a man that everyone had known. She’d been prepared to risk exposure by turning a prominent citizen, since the two of them could have left town in the dead of night. But then the wheelwright—a regular customer and a fine man who could keep up with her and made her earn her control over him—hadn’t arisen.

She’d been devastated. She had chosen him—he had been the man she’d wanted to be with for decades to centuries, sharing meals and sharing love and lust and everything in between, loving life under the moon. Maybe going back east and a little north and living in the forests.

Life and love. Ivory didn’t think she was asking for much.

After the wheelwright, she’d become increasingly desperate. The second man had been a gunslinger, a deputy with a violent streak who had turned meek as a kitten when she’d proven how she could overpower him. That man would have done anything she’d asked of him, kill for her or worship her like a goddess for three straight hours if that were her wish. She’d liked him well enough, had been able to see herself spending the years ahead of them together. God, he would have been vicious, and the thought of what might have been gave her chills in the cold, the good kind followed by a stab of pain when she remembered that he, too, had been buried in this cemetery and had refused to rise.

The rest had been impulse deaths, partly hoping that an out-of-towner as opposed to a local wouldn’t suffer from the same strange malady of staying dead, partly trying to figure if she was doing something wrong. They were men she could willingly follow out of town until she found something better—or who knows? They were all virile, strong, independent but looking for more than simply carnal company, and they all followed her to her room when they could have refused her. That meant something, surely. But none of it could mean anything when something stopped them from rising from the dead to be at her side. No, not something, someone.

Someone who knew her breed and the old ways and weapons. But they obviously didn’t know she had caused these deaths or else they would have gone after her instead of her dead mates.

Maybe it was time to introduce herself. Ivory looked delicate, but her slender, small frame hid a wealth of strength, and her teeth could rip a man into sixty-fourths in under a minute. Whoever thought he could stop her, he was sorely mistaken. She didn’t care how much holy water he carried with him. She’d suffered worse and still healed. All she needed was time and blood.

Lots and lots of blood. Ivory licked her lips and her fangs slid out of their sheaths and pressed against her lower lip.

“Excuse me, ma’am, are you lost?”

Ivory pulled her fangs back in and whirled around, panic intensifying her senses until she could see almost each individual snowflake on the man’s jacket and every eyelash framing the man’s shy brown eyes. He looked to be well out of the apprentice years, but his face had a strange, earnest innocence about it that Ivory found endearing as a whore and as a woman. He stared somewhere between his boots and her skirts, never raising his eyes to the swell of breasts or to her face. And that was how she remembered who he was.

The gravedigger, Fletch Conroy. Neither he nor his father before him had ever sampled from Rue’s establishment, but it was hard to forget their grim purpose in a town like this that had a lot of use for men like him.

Including her. She needed the gravedigger. If her mates didn’t go in the ground, then they couldn’t rise up again. She supposed she could do it herself, but dirt was real trouble to get out of her dress and from under her fingernails. It was bad enough she had to sleep naked in her coffin.

“No, thank you,” she replied to his question. “I was just paying my respects.”

“It’s awfully late,” Fletch said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this far on the outskirts. Do you need an escort back to town?”

Ivory laughed lightly, in deference to the sleep of the dead and the muffled silence of the snow-covered night. “It’s not late for me, Fletch. This is my time.”

The flush that darkened his cheeks made Ivory’s mouth water. The iron from the short metal fence around the cemetery almost covered the delicious scent of his rushing blood, but she relished its smell riding the breeze to her. She breathed it in, and his gaze flicked from the ground to her breasts before he looked away again. Poor boy. She took a step closer so that it was harder for him to look away without turning his head.

“It’s you who I don’t see so often,” Ivory said. “Why haven’t you ever come in? Young man your age, not yet married, surely you want a woman to keep you warm these cold nights.”

“Sorry. I don’t do that, Miss Ivory,” Fletch said. “It’s awful chilly out here and you in nothing but that dress and cloak. If you’d like, you can come into my house and warm up. Or are you sure I can’t walk you back to your, um, home?”

“Only if you promise to accompany me inside,” Ivory teased, almost right up against him so that when he looked down, he saw straight into the shadow of her cleavage. She had never been much of an outright flirt, but Fletch’s embarrassment was just so damn cute. Most of the men that came into the brothel, even the untried ones, weren’t nearly so skittish about a scarlet woman. A man usually spat at them or propositioned them, depending on where he sat in the church pews.

“Sorry, Miss Ivory, I have work to do,” Fletch said, inching back, and she took mercy on him. He’d get himself a wife or a whore—or both—one of these days. He certainly wasn’t one of those bachelors that had no use for carnal nonsense, if that bulge in his trousers was anything to go by.

“So do I,” Ivory replied. “Then I’ll see you soon.”

“Have a good…have a good night, Miss Ivory,” Fletch said, ducking past her.

As he passed her, she realized that the harsh metallic scent didn’t come from the iron fence. Over the scent of healthy human male, something came from Fletch that stung her nose like sniffing in the tips of needles.

On impulse, she grabbed his arm. His biceps were strong and firm, and she thought of all those hours of lifting, carrying and dragging the stone markers and the coffins, then the digging into the winter-hard ground to bury the dead—and winter was a harsh mistress, taking her due as much as the sun of an unforgiving summer.

Everyone had access to the cemetery. Many people paid their respects at various times of the day or night because almost everybody had lost someone. But there were only a few members of this town who had handled the bodies of every single one of her kills besides her—the sheriff, the Reverend and the gravedigger. The Reverend was wicked as a hundred-dollar note—he wouldn’t have the means to use the old rituals. No loving God would listen to him. The sheriff was lean and angry and cared about the cold, hard law and facts of life. He didn’t believe in hokum like ghosts and witches and vampires. Also, he didn’t go out of his way to do anything himself if he could help it.

That left the man who’d put her chosen husbands in the ground, the ground that was now consecrated by a hand other than the good Reverend’s. And who else could have done it but this shy boy whose respect masked the repressed desires common to fervent believers, the people so sure they were doing good no matter who or what they hurt?

And that smell…

Ivory pulled him back in front of her. He complied easily enough, perhaps because she surprised him with the strength of her grip.

“Miss Ivory, I really shouldn’t…” he muttered, but he had to stop talking because she pressed her finger to his mouth. Then she ran the smooth, painted nail against his lower lip. His mouth fell open involuntarily, and he gasped warm breath against her finger.

“Free of charge, Fletch,” Ivory whispered. She only paid board—her clients were her food. She had a good stash of coins and notes where no one would dare look for them, so even if this investigation came to nothing, Ivory wouldn’t mind introducing Fletch to the ways of the world and women for nothing but the goodness of her heart and the firmness of his thighs. In fact, she thought as she trailed her finger down his chin and hooked under it to raise his eyes to hers, I hope it’s nothing. I’ve been wanting a taste of this for years.

It wasn’t corruption she sought to serve, although she knew that’s what the preachers railed against when they condemned scarlet women as servants of the devil. Ivory, like most vampires she’d known, enjoyed pleasure. She was an animal of the senses, a drop of blood as potent as a tongue against her collarbone, and she felt generous enough to return the favor to the humans around her, to make them feel more than just a fuck. For men like this, men that didn’t know the power of their own senses—or feared it—she just wanted to show them there was nothing to fear.

At least not from sex.

“I don’t think…” he started, but she lightly kissed the corner of his mouth, and his words dissolved into a sigh. She slid her hand across the line of his jaw. He kept himself meticulously smooth, and he scrubbed behind his ears like a city boy. But his hands were rough and calloused like every other working man of the town, and her skin sang underneath their warmth and texture as he cupped her elbows under her cloak. Good, large, capable hands.

She smiled against his mouth, then grasped the collar of his jacket and roughly pulled him down to kiss him properly. She angled her mouth to lick across his lower lip where she’d stroked him with her finger. It made him open for her again, and she slipped her tongue in to caress his. She was gentle but not demure, slow but not shy. She gave him little time to adjust to each new sensation, but instead plunged ahead at her steady pace and canted her hips against his to encourage the rising pillar of his sexual imagination to compel him closer.

Meaning she wanted him to start thinking with his cock—more straightforward than the heart and more reliable than the head when it came to letting a man just feel good.

And it worked. Any reservations he might have had crumbled under the weight of the self-denial and frustration he must have accrued over his lifetime, especially with a stick-up-his-ass father like Warner Conroy.

He wrapped his arms around her, enveloping her all at once and lifting her up to kiss her more thoroughly. He was a quick learner, Fletch was, and he swiftly won their mutually satisfactory battle for dominance. He was unpracticed, but he made up for it with unbridled enthusiasm and natural instincts, not to mention an instilled respect—however patronizing—for women, even ones of her station. An uncommon trait in a common-law world.

There was something to be said for a man with a code who was devoted to his work. If a woman could break past the barriers, he could apply that same single-minded devotion upon her.

Fletch startled a gasp from Ivory when he bit her lip, then sucked at the plumped flesh before taking her mouth once again. She wrapped an arm around his neck and hummed in pleasure. God, if he was like this just with his mouth, she’d pay him just to learn what the rest of it would be like.

It was so easy to get into a routine, especially as time went by and neither she nor her situation changed—piano music, find a man, take man to room, get paid, get screwed, feed, man goes off fuzzy—most of the time—and she would die a little in her coffin. She’d never kissed a man outside of Ruby Rue’s before, surrounded by snow and silence and the man’s warmth against the cold, and she’d forgotten what spontaneity and sincerity could make her feel.

She’d also almost forgotten why she wanted to seduce him into a kiss in the first place—besides her curiosity about what a pious young man like that would kiss like, given most of the supposedly ‘pious’ men that made it to Rue’s door had already shed any pretense of respectability. This was different than that. This was a cloistered scholar finding out what he’d been missing in the world outside his cell. It didn’t make him any less innocent in her eyes.

But when her breasts began to burn, she discovered he wasn’t nearly as innocent as he believed he was and that the painful scent did, in fact, come from within his jacket. The metal cross around his neck singeing her skin, the round glass container of holy water in his pocket, the square leather of a ritual book and the long, hard length of a stake inside the pocket of his jacket…these were all things that abhorred her.

She yanked him back by his sandy brown hair.

“So it is you,” she said. Her fangs slid from their sheaths.

“It’s you,” he said back, more dazed than angry until he saw the steam wafting up from the place his cross burned her.

Then he grabbed the silver cross and held it up. She released him and backed away, hissing.

“Stay back, devil spawn!” he yelled. “You murderer!”

“You’re the murderer, you son of a bitch,” she snarled.