Steal the Day Read Free Page A

concentrate on anything except what Albert and I had discussed.
    Why was the Council sending new vamps to Dallas?
    It didn’t make sense. Vampires are very rare. In the course of a decade, maybe five will rise. Almost all of these vampires will be located in the First World. The genetic mutation that causes vampirism seems to be more prevalent in males of European descent. Advanced medicine and health care in the wealthier societies have had an effect on vampire society. In the past, many would die on the battlefield or from disease. Now they mostly died of old age. Old age and vampirism is not a good combination. The thought that five new vampires had risen, and that they had died as young men, was too much of a coincidence.
    If such a thing had happened, the Council would certainly not send their precious new fledglings to the same city as Daniel Donovan for training. Quite the opposite. The Council would try to make damn sure Daniel didn’t taint them with his outlaw presence. It was only because of his patron’s influence that the Council hadn’t written an order of execution on him about seven months ago. They should be glad they hadn’t written out that order because Daniel wouldn’t have met the dawn quietly. He would have gone down—if they could take him down, and that’s a big if—in a blaze of glory.
    Daniel is the vampire who scares the shit out of the other vampires.
    Albert had to be wrong about the vampires being new. It just didn’t happen. If the Council had sent the vampires, then they were here for one reason and one reason alone. They had come to fuck with Daniel.
    I pulled the Audi into the parking garage of Daniel’s building, parked and started for the entryway.
    “Mrs. Donovan,” the doorman acknowledged as he held the door open for me.
    I smiled briefly. I couldn’t get used to the deferential treatment I got whenever I entered vampire society. I’m a companion. It’s the vampire word for wife, dinner, and addiction all rolled into one. Apparently the only thing rarer on the Earth plane than vampires are companions. No one has ever explained to my satisfaction just what it is about me that makes me a companion. There’s something in my blood that makes a vampire stronger, smarter, faster than a vampire without a wife. The flip side is the vampire is completely addicted to companion blood. Even though Daniel and I weren’t living together as man and wife, I donated blood every week to feed him. Many people would love to see Daniel Donovan in a permanent grave, and though I was trying to live apart from him, I could never be the one who made that happen.
    I strode to the elevator and pushed the button for the floor that held four large apartments. As far as I knew, only three of the rooms were occupied. The entire undead population of Dallas was supposedly housed in those rooms.
    There was Daniel, the youngest, but without question strongest of the three. Michael House looked to be an affable man in his twenties, but he’d died on the battlefields of World War One. And then there was Alexander. Of all the vampires I’d met, Alexander Sharpe was the creepiest. Daniel had reason to believe Alexander had been Jack the Ripper, so I kept my distance.
    God, I wished I’d been able to find my shoes. Daniel and I had settled into a nice sort of friendship, and I didn’t want to wave a red cape in front of a bull. Though we had agreed to work on being friends, he still managed to make me feel like a cheating wife sometimes. It wasn’t so surprising. Up until seven months before, I would have done anything to be Daniel’s wife. We’d known each other most of our lives. We fell in love as teens and were engaged at twenty. Before we could get married, he’d died in a car accident. The upside? He’d turned out to be a vampire. The downside? The craptastic Council had taken him away from me for three years and sent him back as a distant stranger with more secrets than I could handle. We’d