CHAPTER ONE
Without meaning to, Camilla Torres had picked a good place to die.
He tracked her to one of those community gardens common in Spanish Harlem, deserted at this hour. Here, the sad yellow light from the tenement windows could not penetrate the dense greenery. On this late-August night, even the salsa music from a local club and the siren of a patrol car sounded a world away from this steamy, fertile urban oasis.
He knew she had hidden herself in the rickety wooden shelter that leaned into one corner of the high, hurricane fencing. The outside was painted a violent, tropical blue that almost glowed in the dark. During the day, older Latin women would sit inside to gossip or their men to play dominos.
He headed toward the shack with a resolute but silent step.
Even so, Camilla sensed his approach. He heard shuffling as she flattened herself against the wall, foolishly hoping to hide from him and escape her fate.
“It’s no use,” he told her, without needing to speak the words. “Come here.”
Fearful but obedient, she stepped out through the small, roughly-cut doorway.
Normally a pretty young woman, she looked terrible now. She had been wearing jeans and a gauzy, short-sleeved top when she’d run out in front of the speeding taxi. Dark blood matted her clothes, and scrapes and bruises covered her face and lower arms.
It should have been much worse, though. Already she had started to heal.
He could not even feel anger, only weariness. Why were the most useful ones also the most difficult to control? These days he tried to be so careful. It frustrated him, though, how often things still went wrong.
“You shouldn’t have tried to escape me that way,” he told her.
“I was afraid…for Frank. I almost–”
“I understand. But now you’ve only made things worse.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and hung her head, tangled, dark hair falling over her face. She knew he was right.
He asked her, “You don’t want to involve Frank in this, do you?”
“No, no!”
“Then let’s finish it. Come with me.”
She did. She knew she had to.
At this time of night the garden was kept locked. Only he, and the likes of Camilla, could have gotten through.
Though trash littered the fringes of the enclosure, its earthen beds flourished with late-summer crops — tall tomato plants, emerald heads of lettuce, bushes of red and gold peppers, neat rows of herbs and even several stalks of corn. Their rich, chlorophyll scent overwhelmed the usual stink of the neighborhood.
One plot lay fallow and piled with tires that the neighborhood kids probably used for seats. It backed up to a dented aluminum tool shed, the door chained and padlocked.
Camilla stood by, trembling, while he tossed the tires aside and broke into the tool shed for a shovel. He worked quickly, because he knew already she was being followed.
Her husband Frank, still blocks away, called her name. Perhaps someone on the street would tell him about the accident. Even so, it should take Frank a while to think of looking in the garden. Longer still for him to gain access at this hour, unless desperation made him try to climb the hurricane fence.
The tall man finished digging and faced Camilla again.
Understanding what was to come, she sobbed once, but knew better than to try to escape. At his wordless command, she knelt on the ground in front of him.
He made it fast.
In fact, there was very little blood to spill. She’d probably left much more at the accident scene. Once he’d buried her body, he replaced the tires on the plot. Then he planted her head beneath a pepper bush several feet away. He cleaned the shovel quickly with some leaves and replaced it in the shed.
Even if both parts of Camilla were discovered and eventually reunited, it wouldn’t matter. The important thing was that the vital connection between them had been severed.
As a precaution, though, he also had taken her heart.
He’d wrapped it tightly in a gauze sleeve ripped from her blouse. Now he held the small bundle close to his chest as he passed easily through the wire fence with its wide, diamond-shaped links. By the time Frank began rattling the garden’s front gate, cursing in frustration, the tall man already had headed East.
He found a spot in the shadow of the Triborough Bridge and, unobserved, tossed his bloody parcel into the rolling murk of the river.
Quickly, he walked the twenty blocks back to his building. In spite of his conspicuously white and affluent appearance, he feared neither criminals lurking on the streets or police cruising by on their rounds. His long-sleeved gray pullover sweater was a bit too warm for the evening, but no one he passed seemed to care about that, either.
The stink of rot from both the river and the tenement alleyways bothered him more than usual that night, and darkened his mood even further.
He regretted the waste of Camilla. He actually had never intended to take her. It was too bad she had shown up at his place that day when she wasn’t expected, and learned too much.
Now, she had become another failed experiment. He had thought she would be strong enough to survive for a while longer. She might have been, if she hadn’t panicked.
Back at in his rooms at the elegant residential hotel, he cleaned a few negligible spots from his dark sweater. By now, he knew how to dispatch a victim with a minimum of gore. There would be no evidence to link him to Camilla’s execution.
Still, it was time to move on. He’d lived here in New York City for three years now–pleasant ones, if that word still held any meaning for him. He had enjoyed proximity to the Metropolitan Museum, the opera, the Philharmonic at Lincoln Center. The public library had proven an excellent resource for researching his histories. And you could hardly beat New York City, with its population of eight million, for anonymity.
But even he could push his luck only so far. Wherever he stayed, eventually there would be too many Camillas, too many failed experiments, arousing too many questions.
He knew that, over the past two months, he was being watched.
Once again, he would have to find a new place. It should be fairly populous, so he could disappear when necessary into the crowd. With convenient public transportation, so no one would question his not driving an automobile. And with at least some decent cultural offerings, to help relieve the maddening boredom of his existence.
By now, he was running out of such places.
Back in his living room, he caught sight of the clock on the fireplace mantel. He almost had forgotten about the television program he wanted to watch tonight.
It seemed trivial, after recent events, but the premise of the documentary intrigued him. His instincts told him it might include useful information. After all this time, he had learned to trust his instincts. They always had helped him do what, by now, he did almost too well.
Survive.
* * *
One Blood, published in 2010, actually is a prequel to my first book, Dance with the Dragon, which came out in 2003.The "tall man" (and apparent serial killer) in this scene is Dr. Jon Sharpay–he resurfaces in DD under a new name. A couple of people who read DD, including one reviewer, said they wished the knew a bit more about how the heroine and hero had met and established their rather unusual relationship. I knew that background very well, and as I saw more dark vampire romances cropping up everywhere, I thought it was time to tell their story. Kat Van Braam, the heroine of both books, does not appear in this first chapter, but I designed her to be a world-weary vampire's dream come true…and worst nightmare. Far from the usual lovesick ingenue, she's the descendant of a slayer and is hell-bent on staying alive, hanging onto her humanity and protecting other innocents. But even Kat takes awhile to comprehend Sharpay's true purpose in seeking her out–it's not what it seems. To find out more, please visit my website, www.efwatkins.com!
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