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bartenders, was cleaning the bar top when I sat
down on a stool. He slid over a shot of whiskey and smiled, “You
look like you could use that.”
    “You know me so well,” I smiled and then
laughed when he shook his head.
    A slight breeze blew across my arm, as I
sensed Ashby enter the bar. When I turned around, he looked almost
lethal standing there in the doorway. His face softened when his
eyes found me sitting at the bar. The tight feeling in my chest all
but vanished.
    “Hey, doll,” he said, leaning in to place a
soft kiss to my lips. He tasted amazing, like a fine wine made just
for me. His clothes held many different scents, of both male and
female, human and vampire. Something inside my chest pinched, and
all I wanted to do was rub myself all over him so that the only
scent he had on his body was mine.
    “Hey,” I said, instead of dragging him back
to my office for a quick romp on my desk. “How was work?”
    “We can talk about it while I drive you back
to your place,” he stated. Something in his tone told me that he
didn’t like whatever he had to tell me, and I had a feeling I
wasn’t going to like it either.
    Once inside the Krieger Hummer, Ashby
sighed heavily, “We found some information about who attacked you.”
I noticed how the muscle in his jaw ticked at what he had to tell
me.
    “And?” I pushed.
    “Seems that there is a human group that has
been attacking our kind to obtain blood to change themselves into
vampires. The idiots think that they can duplicate the process by
draining the human of blood and pumping our blood into the human
once they reach the point of death.”
    “Well, that’s just stupid,” I laughed. “It’s
not that easy.”
    Our blood had to be delivered fresh into the
human. If they were harvesting our blood and giving it to a human,
they’d have to basically force us to give our blood straight from
the vein. A transfusion wouldn’t do anything. The genetics in our
blood died out seconds after it left our body.
    We consumed human blood for nutrients. Our
blood was different from a humans, thicker. The change was made
when the human body was drained, by the mouth of the maker and our fresh blood was consumed. The DNA in our blood changed the
whole makeup of the human body, because the human’s blood would no
longer be in charge. When you drain a human to the point of death,
there was so little of the human blood left in the system that the
vampire blood kills off what remains during the change. So, in a
sense, the human dies until the vampire blood takes over the body,
giving life to its new host.
    This was why when you become a “maker”, you
have a bond with the human you changed. It’s almost as if you have
given birth to a child.
    “We know that, but the humans who attacked
you don’t,” he sighed. “We found an old abandoned camp downriver
from Port Royal about thirty miles. There was a dead human there
and empty vials of blood…vampire blood.”
    “Any sign of the humans who attacked me?” I
shivered. Ashby placed a hand on my leg and shook his head. I had a
feeling he wasn’t telling me everything, as if the scene they’d
found was more gruesome than just a dead body.
    We arrived at my house, which wasn’t too far
from the Krieger estate, within fifteen minutes. I lived in
a nice modern home that I’d had built about twenty years ago and
had just remodeled it with new carpet, paint and updated kitchen.
Although I never used the kitchen, it would help if I ever wanted
to sell it and move somewhere else.
    “I’ll walk you inside,” he said, looking
around the property. There were about two hours before the sun came
up and soon my Nachtmann would show up to watch my home
while I was in my death sleep for the day.
    Ashby took my keys as we reached the door. I
stood in place when he held up his hand and closed his eyes in
concentration. He spoke in a low whisper only I can hear, “Let me
just check.”
    Suddenly, I felt something move across