Chapter One

Chapter One


Dante smoothed his thumb over sweet female flesh, lingering at the carotid, where the human's pulse throbbed the strongest. His own pulse quickened too, responding to the rush of blood flowing beneath the surface of delicate white skin. Dante leaned his dark head in and kissed that tender spot, letting his tongue play over the fluttering race of the female's heartbeat.

"Tell me," he murmured against the warm skin, his voice a low growl amid the heaving beat of the club's music, "are you a good witch or a bad witch?"

The female squirmed in his lap, her fishnet-clad legs straddling him, black lace-up bustier pushing her breasts up under his chin like a buffet. She twirled her finger in her bright fuchsia wig, then let it trail down suggestively, past a Celtic cross tattoo and into her swelling cleavage.

"Oh, I'm a very, very bad witch."

Dante grunted. "My favorite."

He smiled into her drunken gaze, not bothering to hide his fangs. He was one of many vampires in the Boston dance club that Halloween night, although most of them were pretenders. Humans sporting plastic teeth, fake blood, and various ridiculous costumery. A few others-himself and a handful of males from one of the vampire nation's Darkhaven sanctuaries, hanging out near the dance floor-were the genuine article.

Dante and the others were Breed, a far cry from the pale, gothic vampires of human folklore. Neither undead nor devil-spawned, Dante's kind were a hot-blooded hybrid mix of Homo sapiens and deadly otherworlder. The Breeds' forebears, a band of alien conquerors who crash-landed on Earth millennia past and who were