We Own the Night (The Night Songs Collection Book 3) Read Free Page B

into me if he wanted to.”
    Peter was the clan leader in charge of Fire Dancer, the band that my old roommate Lennon’s boyfriend Jacey was in, before Blade killed him. I hadn’t had time to figure out why Blade would want Jacey dead yet.
    “Talis might have had this city by the short and curlies, but Peter is far more volatile. He’ll never be on top, and it pisses him off. He’s been trying to sabotage this clan forever. I didn’t want you hanging around his people, but I knew better than to tell you what to do.” Tristan’s hands had made their way up to my hair, his fingers twirling around my curls.
    This is why I could never win an argument against him.
    “If you had told me the truth, I might have listened.”
    He shook his head and smiled. “Like hell you would have.”
    “Okay, you’re right.” I pulled his hands away from my hair carefully, wrapping my fingers around his and letting them fall in between us. I had to stop letting him distract me, as good as it might feel. “Who has been handling Talis’ affairs since she’s been, um, gone?”
    Tristan shrugged. I tried not to get too annoyed. What else did I expect? “She’s got people to take care of everything. As long as the checks keep coming, they’d have no reason to act differently.”
    “Does anyone know she’s dead?”
    “It’s on a need-to-know basis. No one needs to know. Or else there would be chaos.”
    Fantastic. “So is there any way to get into her offices? Look at her records? See what the hell she’s been doing for the last three hundred or so years?” As if she’d leave me an instruction manual.
    “Well, there’s an easy way, and a hard way. The easy way would be to talk to my dad, and his lawyers, and figure out a way to buy Talis out and opt you in. But that would only take care of things that have to do with the hotel and the band.” Tristan picked his guitar back up, his fingers began to pluck the strings without knowing the story they wanted to tell. “The hard way you’re not going to be able to avoid, beautiful. You have to go before the other vampires and announce yourself.”
    I fell back against the cushion. “And that’s going to be complicated if Blade beats me to the punch.”

T he sun began to rise, closing the chapter on that awful night. I lay in bed against Tristan’s chest, fighting the unconsciousness that pulled me under as regular humans began their day. I hated that I became automatically useless, powerless during daylight hours. My brain didn’t quiet just because my body couldn’t move.
    My day used to be well underway by now, when I lived at home. My family rose before the sun to open the Magnolia Café and help the rest of the island start their day. I never thought I’d miss it. But I just had to walk the tightrope without a net, and I plunged right into an underworld that three months ago I would have insisted wasn’t real. Now morning would forever bring my day to a close.
    I’d been a vampire for a little less than three weeks. It wasn’t like changing jobs. I truly had become a whole other race of being. Sure, I still came in the same packaging, but everything else was different. The way I processed the world, the way I thought, saw, felt, smelled things had all changed. I fed off of energy. Positive, hopeful energy felt like the best cup of coffee ever, while anger or anxiety sent my world into a tailspin. I craved blood, it was a sexual elixir for vampires that drove us into a dimension of bliss that wasn’t even measurable as a human. I don’t have the words to properly describe it because it’s not supposed to exist. I’d had Tristan’s blood many times before I’d changed, which had been a mind-blowing experience at the time, but nothing compared to what I experienced as an immortal.
    I was stronger, I was faster, and I was bound to Tristan, my creator. He could read my mind and draw me in like a magnet. In the vampire pecking order, I was supposed to answer to my