By Nell Stark and Trinity Tam

SPREAD THE INFECTION...

This excerpt is from the first chapter of NIGHTRISE, the sequel to nevermore, which will be released in August of 2011.

After an hour passed with no sign of a single vampire, I began to relax a little. Our second round of drinks was hand-delivered by Sebastian Brenner himself, the owner of Luna and one of the most prominent players in the younger generation of shifters. As the estranged son of Balthasar, he had come under recent suspicion. Unlike his father, however, Sebastian embraced his humanity and worked to merge his business and personal interests with those of the mortals who surrounded us. He had proven a valuable ally in the struggle to foil his father’s most recent attempt to destroy the Consortium; in fact, I owed him my life. But now I regarded him warily—not because I was afraid of him, but because he had nurtured an attraction to Valentine for a while. He might have seen her recently.

“Hello, Alexa.”

When he handed me my drink, I clutched at it for purchase and fought the urge to take a long sip. I didn’t want to betray weakness in his presence. “Sebastian. How are you?”

He gestured toward the crowded dance floor. “Business is fine, as you can see. You’d almost think the world had gone back to normal.”

I gazed out over the expanse of writhing bodies. “Some of them probably think it has.”

His mouth twisted. “Then they’re idiots.” He was about to say something more when a commotion broke out near the front of the club—a shout, the sound of scuffling, a slamming door. Sebastian’s eyes narrowed. One of his bouncers, a heavyset man in a dark blue shirt and gray slacks, hurried across the floor toward us.

Sebastian touched my shoulder. “I’ll be right back.” He met the bouncer halfway and they conferred, dark heads close together. Sebastian gesticulated sharply, and his employee took half a step backward as though he’d been struck, nodding all the while.

“What is it?” Karma asked.

“I don’t know.” The man loped back toward the door and Sebastian returned to our table, waving off our concerns before we could voice them.

“Just a group of rowdy vampires, wanting to get in. Apparently, it’s someone’s coming out party.”

My pulse spiked at “vampire,” and I had to work at keeping the panic from my expression. There were a lot of vampires in New York City. What were the odds that Val had come here, tonight, when Luna was off-limits?

“What exactly is a coming out party in this context?” I asked, my head filled with competing visions of GLBT Pride and debutante balls.

 Sebastian rolled his eyes. “It’s an idiotic tradition created by the human hangers-on. They believe being turned is cause for a bacchanal.”

Millions of humans were fascinated by vampires, of course, but only a select few knew of their existence. Usually, they were chosen for their obedience and pliancy. All of them, to my knowledge, hoped one day to be turned. Many died before they ever got the chance, but it was a risk they were willing to take. To someone like Valentine, who had been turned against her will, this tradition must be disgusting. Then again, maybe she felt differently now.

I shook my head, willing the thoughts of her to disperse. There was still some kind of disturbance at the door, and more heads were beginning to turn. I didn’t understand the partyers’ motivations, and I resented their intrusion now. One look at Sebastian’s grim face was proof he shared my feelings.

A different bouncer sought him out, and again he left us. This time, I could hear bits of their conversation. When the man told Sebastian that there were too many in the crowd outside to turn away without risking some kind of incident, Sebastian’s jaw muscles flexed ominously.

“Fine. Let them in. But I want them gone as soon as possible. Find reasons, and boot them one by one so they don’t have critical mass.”

The bouncer was just starting back across the room, when a hush fell over those gathered near the door. And then I heard her voice. It rose in a descant over the heavy industrial throb of the DJ’s beat, and I knew I was in hell.

“Sebastian!” She emerged into my field of view a moment later, and my throat went dry. Dressed in white slacks and a matching tank, her bright gold hair set in jagged spikes, Valentine was a living flame. Slender as a whip and as painful, she crossed to where Sebastian stood and kissed him on the mouth.

“Call off your watchdogs. We only want a drink.”

Judas. That was all I could think. And her kiss had worked; Sebastian’s irritation melted away. He even reached out with one hand to cup Val’s waist in a possessive gesture that forced bile into my throat. She didn’t lean into the caress, but she didn’t pull away either. My panther snarled awake, pushing behind my eyes in search of the danger that had flooded my blood with adrenaline.

I could feel Karma’s hand on my knee, but the rest of me was numb. Frozen. I couldn’t look away. Sebastian had taken Val’s arm and was trying to turn her around. I wondered whether he was worried about what would happen if she saw me. The thought pierced through my numbness, a strange sort of comfort.

Val resisted his pull and sidestepped out of his grasp. And then she went very still, as her gaze met mine. How had she known to look? Was it possible that our connection had survived even the death of her soul?

“Alexa.” She spoke my name like a prayer, and a jolt went through me, raising the fine hairs on my arms and prickling the skin at the back of my neck. In that moment, I despaired at her ability to still affect me so strongly. For almost two months, I had forced myself to stay out of her path, to concentrate on my studies. Moving on—that’s what I’d called it. But I had only been running in place.

She walked slowly toward me, as one might toward a frightened animal. And I was afraid—afraid of the hold she still had on me, and angry that I was granting her such power. Distantly, I felt Karma squeeze my leg, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Valentine. Thirst and desire battled for dominance on her face, and the taut muscles of her arms betrayed her tension. She wanted me. Wanted to drink me, wanted to fuck me. Those desires weren’t new, and it had been my pleasure to indulge her in them, but always because they had been accompanied by her all-consuming love.

That love was absent now. No softness lit her eyes, no tenderness inflected her movements. She was Thirst incarnate.

The revelation broke my paralysis, and I surged to my feet. Surprise flickered across Val’s face, and she paused. We stared at each other, separated only by a few footsteps. Separated by a bottomless chasm.

She cocked her head and looked me up and down. The clinical once-over made me nauseated.

“You look good.”

I almost laughed in her face. My Valentine would never had said that. I was far too thin, and I’d had to liberally apply makeup so as not to look like a walking corpse. My Valentine would have been dizzy with worry. My Valentine would have wrapped her arms around me in a loving embrace instead of stalking me like a hunter. My Valentine would have dragged me home—not to gorge herself on my blood, but to cook me a meal and cajole me into eating every bite. My Valentine was dead.

“Stop.” The word was steady. Pride filtered through the haze of my pain. “I don’t want to hear it.”

It was hard to angle my body away from hers, then, and even harder to walk away. We were connected still, and every step I took seemed to stretch the frail, invisible cord that held me to her. The stretching was pain. By the time I reached the door, my panther was frantic with the need to confront the threat that was causing me such distress. I jostled one of the bouncers in my urgency to get outside and he snarled.

The crisp air knifed down my lungs, bringing with it the jumbled scents of a crowd. I had emerged into the gathering of vampires who were trying to gain access to Luna. Keeping my head down, I shouldered my way through them, desperate to reach open space.

“Alexa? Is that you?”

Kyle Jordan was one of the Consortium’s human servants, who had been raised knowing the secret of vampires and Weres. He was a loyal source of blood to Helen herself. Or rather, he had been. He had been turned recently, his human scent shot through with the wintry chill I’d learned to associate with vampires. And beneath it all, an echo of Valentine’s distinctive fragrance.

The pieces coalesced. Blinded by the hot rush of tears, I stumbled. When he grasped my arm to steady me, I shook him off so violently that he fell to the ground. Kyle smelled like Valentine because she had fed him her blood to turn him. This was his coming out party.

“Alexa!”

Her voice again. The anger pierced me like a knife between the shoulder blades, making it impossible to breathe. My panther clawed her way forward, demanding I shift to face my attacker. I was strong enough to hold her back, but I didn’t want to. I wanted nothing more than to lose myself in the elegant simplicity of her animal brain.

With the last of my strength, I spun to face Val. She was standing at the top of the stairs, incandescent against the dark façade of the club. I wanted to slap her inscrutable face. I wanted to kiss her beautiful mouth. I wanted to fall at her feet and beg her to dig down deeper than the parasite that ruled her blood—to find some small scrap of her former self, and return to me.

I kept my fists clenched at my sides. “Stay away from me, Valentine.”

As I spoke the words, I let the panther take me. Through my transformation, I kept my eyes on Val, despite the hoarse shouts and panicked cries of the crowd. My ears flickered at the cocking of multiple guns, but I refused to be cowed. A low snarl rumbled deep in my throat as I bared my teeth at the shell of the woman I had loved.

And then I leapt away into the shadows.

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