White Nights: A Vampires of Manhattan Novel Read online

  White Nights

  A Vampires of Manhattan Novel

  by Melissa de la Cruz

  Part One: Broken

  At the door of life, by the gate of breath,

  There are worse things waiting for men than death.

  — Algernon Swinburne, The Triumph of Time

  1| King of the Castle

  Someone was following Oliver Hazard-Perry. He knew it without needing to turn around, or even to shoot a wary glance over his shoulder. After eight months on the run, a universe away from his former life of order and luxury, his instincts had grown razor-sharp. Even at this time of the evening, close to midnight, when the sky had turned an inky velvet and the streetlights dotted sickly yellow pools on the sidewalks, Oliver had a sixth sense for menace lurking in the shadows.

  Today was Tuesday, so he must be in Budapest. He’d flown in this morning, and spent a long afternoon wandering the streets on the Pest side of the river and dodging clanging trams, too wound up to pause for coffee at one of the grand old Viennese cafés. He was just trying to kill time until the arranged meeting with his contact at Fisherman’s Bastion, high on Castle Hill.

  The day had been warm for this early in the summer, and Oliver approached the Gothic-looking terrace out of breath and sour with sweat. His pampered old self, body swathed in linen and silk and the finest of wool, wouldn’t recognize this new Oliver, gaunt and disheveled, his shirt yellow under the armpits. He hadn’t taken the funicular up steep Castle Hill in case someone was on his trail. In a small, confined space like that, he would be way too easy to corner. So Oliver had chosen a hike over the three-minute ride – but all that had achieved was to freak himself out even more. There were too many looming trees and dark paths, his own footsteps echoing through the quiet evening. He’d lost so much in his life, but maybe this was the worst thing of all: Oliver realized that he’d lost his nerve.

  The person he was just eight months ago, strong and confident and arrogant, had disappeared. Somewhere along the way, between the swampy stillness of the Amazon basin and the long, bleak stretches of Australia’s Great Sandy Desert, between the dusty squalor of the back streets of Guatemala City and the clamor and crowds of a market in Senegal, Oliver had lost his strut and his certainty – even his health.

  Now he was pretty much the textbook definition of a broken man. He was lean to the point of being haggard, and never felt rested or clean. When he caught sight of himself in a shop window, like the Prada store he’d passed today, Oliver barely recognized himself. His shoulders were hunched; his eyes looked sunken and haunted. These days, he had more in common with the down-and-outs slumped in Wenceslas Square than his former New York neighbors, the denizens of the “Power Tower,” 13 Central Park West. He would never make it past the doorman.

  When night fell, the spires of Fisherman’s Bastion looked like an eerie miniature castle, tree branches casting spidery shadows onto its pale stone. Through the arches, Oliver could glimpse the cathedral on the other side of the river, lit up and sparkling. The old Oliver would have paused to take it all in. The new Oliver had to keep moving, looping back around the Church of St Matthias. Past the late-night lovers, the rowdy stag party, the tourists taking pictures of the Chain Bridge, far, far below. Wherever he went, he knew that someone was following, someone was looking for him. Someone who wanted to kill him, or at least stop him in his tracks.

  Because he was looking for someone as well, and something told him he was getting close.

  Once upon a time, Oliver had been the most powerful vampire in the world. Last summer, he was Regent of the Coven in New York City, on top of the world – almost literally, living the high life in his sprawling luxury penthouse. He’d had a valet to dress him, a chef to cook for him, a chauffeur to drive him. Back then nothing was too expensive or too exclusive for Oliver. It made him laugh now, just thinking of it – a bitter laugh, all he could manage these days. In New York he’d had to go to the gym and swim laps in the Power Tower’s pool to keep in shape. Now he was clambering up hills and trekking across deserts, dirty and hungry, with nobody there to hand him a plush robe or massage his aching shoulders.

  How art the mighty fallen.

  In that old life, Oliver had overseen ten years of peace and prosperity for the Coven, and his reward, he used to think, was the view he awoke to every morning. Not just the grand stretch of park far below his floor-to-ceiling windows, but the beautiful woman in his bed. Seraphina Chase, the love of his life, his human familiar, his mortal beloved.

  Finn, lost and gone forever.

  After eight long months apart, the thought of her still made him ache. In his heart and, even now, his groin. His fangs responded as well, sharp with desire for the soft white skin of her neck, and he bent his head, avoiding the gaze of a middle-aged couple strolling by the golden walls of the church. Not that they could see anything; his fangs were as well-hidden as ever. He just didn’t want them gawping at him, and seeing how desperate he was. How mad he was with desire, and longing, and fear, and regret.

  Oliver wove through a drunken group of young men, shouting and singing their way to another bar, and merged into a straggly tour of Haunted Budapest, gazing up at the giant bronze statue of King Stephen: anything to throw off whoever was following him. The drunk guys weren’t that much younger than him – maybe five years? They acted as though they didn’t have a care in the world. Oliver envied them.

  One of the drunk guys had no pants on, and was dressed in a pink apron, cartoonish lipstick kisses smeared on his cheeks. The prospective groom, Oliver thought, getting tormented and toasted by his buddies before the big day. He and Finn had never had a big day. He’d thought they were happy enough as they were, and that a wedding wasn’t necessary. Not for a vampire and his human familiar: that wasn’t the way things were done in their world. They had a deeper bond, a blood bond. She was much closer to him than a wife could ever be.

  But that was the problem. While he thought that their ten years together were physical and emotional bliss, Finn was thinking something else. He’d discovered, dangerously late, that she wasn’t content with being his consort. Finn had grown tired of living life in a gilded cage, tired of being Oliver’s possession. That was the accusation she’d flung at him, that last terrible night. She’d felt owned and used. She wanted much, much more than Oliver could give her.

  She knew that Oliver was a mortal who’d become a vampire. Why couldn’t Finn do the same thing? She wanted her own shot at immortality, whatever the price.

  Too high a price, Oliver thought, bile rising in his throat. Their perfect life destroyed and god knows what manner of hell unleashed in the world.

  The church bells began to chime, startling everyone on the tour so much they burst out laughing. Oliver didn’t laugh. At long last it was midnight, and the person he was here to meet should be in place. Third arch from the left, smoking. Of course, it could be a trap, like the meeting in Senegal where Oliver had to run for his life. He’d only managed to escape by clinging to the back of a moving truck loaded with squawking chickens, obscured by a choking cloud of dust.

  So now he’d play it safe, hanging around with the tour group, who were all gazing up at King Stephen’s spindly green horse. Even bronze statues looked sinister at this time of night. But maybe everything looked sinister to Oliver now that he knew that Finn was one of Lucifer’s army, her pure soul tainted. The sweetest girl in the world had been corrupted by Lucifer’s silver poison. The fate she’d chosen. No longer a beautiful mortal but a beautiful demon.

  If you come after me, I will destroy you.

  That was the threat she’d made. Oliver thought of it ev
ery day. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe her, but surely she realized that he had to come after her. She was the love of his life. He had to find her and win her back, before she was lost forever in the dark world of demons.

  And what did a threat like that mean, anyway, when Oliver was already destroyed? He’d lost everything: his stewardship of the Coven, his reputation, the woman he loved. At this very moment Venators, the Coven’s own secret police, were on his trail, with orders to bring him back to New York. Oliver still had enough contacts to know what was said about him, that he was a loose cannon, in way over his head. He needed to leave this job to the professionals, because he was just a pampered rich boy, a has-been figurehead who should be drowning his sorrows with cocktails at the Four Seasons, while the Venators got on with the down-and-dirty business of tracking and capturing the wild beast Finn had become.

  It wasn’t only Venators Oliver had to worry about. To the Nephilim, those half-human demons unleashed like mercenaries by the Silver Bloods to fight their dirty wars, Oliver Hazard-Perry was still the Most Wanted vampire in the whole world – even in this pathetic, ragged state. Not only was he the fallen Regis of the Coven: Oliver was the one-time familiar to no less than Schuyler Van Alen – daughter of Gabrielle, The Uncorrupted, the Virtuous, the Messenger, Archangel of the Light. He knew exactly what the Silver Bloods must be thinking. Capture Oliver, and his old friend Schuyler would be forced to come to his rescue, along with her husband, Jack Force – better known in the vampire world as Abbadon, Angel of Destruction. The Silver Bloods and their sadistic Nephalim flunkeys were itching for another violent show-down. After more than ten years of peace, it turned out that the order of the world was only an illusion. Oliver and his allies had only won the battle, not the war.

  That was the talk now, and Oliver heard it everywhere he went – every continent, every city, every dive bar, every train station. His old status, and his allegiance with Schuyler and Jack, meant he still had contacts willing to pass on information. The sympathetic ones told him to keep his head down, to keep moving and running and hiding. The more hard-boiled told him to hand himself over to the Venators for his own safety. Go back to New York and lick your wounds, they said. Let Mimi Force – Azrael, Angel of Death, and the Coven’s all-powerful new Regent – find a way to suppress this latest resurgence of Nephalim activity. Let Mimi and her husband Kingsley Martin, the new Venator chief, locate Finn and reel her in.

  Yeah, right.

  Mimi and Kingsley were thousands of miles away in New York, as out of touch as he used to be himself. Oliver was on the ground in Europe, getting closer and closer: he knew it instinctively, felt it in his gut and in his fangs. He and Finn had spent ten years together, bonded by blood and sex and love. Dazed by the seductive poison running through her veins, he’d drunk her dry. He was the one who’d killed her, only to see her reborn as a vampire herself.

  Oliver was the one who’d driven her to the dark side, so he was the one who needed to win her back. Nobody else could do this. He and Finn had way too much unfinished business for him to just step away, hands in the air, and admit defeat. This was his fault, and his problem to fix.

  His Finn to save.

  The tour group was moving on. Oliver dawdled at its fringes, casting furtive glances at the elegant arches of the Bastion. A man leaned in the third arch, the amber glow of his lit cigarette like a tiny beacon.

  Oliver took a few steps towards him. The wind wafting up from the river brought with it the smells of an over-heated city: grease from vending carts, the fumes of cars down below on the bridge. The metallic tang of blood spilled in a street fight, a bar brawl, a traffic collision.

  Another few steps and he could make out the face of the man waiting for him. He wore jeans and a dark T-shirt, and his narrow face was shaded with stubble. Oliver didn’t recognize him, but something about the man’s posture and expression reminded him of a wolf. The wolves had been good to him, especially when he was out of money and needed to get out of Africa in a hurry.

  He took another step closer, and the wolf backed into the shadows, until he was leaning against the stone balustrade. Behind him, on the other side of the river, the city glittered, its yellow lights reflected in the calm waters of the Danube.

  “Is she here?” Oliver asked, his voice croaky. He hadn’t said a word to anyone all day.

  “Too late.” The wolf stubbed out his cigarette on the pale stone. “We tracked her to Vienna. Tomorrow, at the café in the Hotel Sacher … Uh!”

  The wolf’s mouth hung open and he stared with grim surprise at Oliver for one strange, terrifying moment. Then he slumped to the ground, a glinting blade embedded in his back.

  Oliver’s breath stuck in his throat. He started running, his heart pounding so hard he couldn’t hear anything, not even the sound of his own footsteps hitting the cobbled streets of Castle Hill. He ran as fast as he could, trying to disappear into the darkness of the old city, his body braced for the sharp hit of a blade.

  2| Happy Holidays

  Tuesday was the quiet day of the week for bars and restaurants in New York, and it seemed to be the quiet day of the week for Venators as well. Every day was a quiet day for Venators at the moment.

  Holiday, the Venators’ dive of choice in the East Village, was no exception.

  Edon Marrok signaled the barman: he wanted another frothy stein of beer. Why not? It was a warm night, and there was nothing going on that required him to be super-alert. May as well slump on a bar stool, nibble on chips and some sloppy salsa, and try not to obsess over the news coming out of Europe. His brother Mac, based in Vienna, was pretty jumpy at the moment. Come to New York, Edon liked to tell him. We got a new Venator chief, and a new Regent, and everything’s just as peaceful as can be.

  Edon closed his eyes, trying to block out the flashing Christmas lights strung across the ceiling. The peace and quiet in the New York vampire world should be a good thing, pure and simple. It meant the Nephilim hive they destroyed wasn’t re-forming elsewhere in the city. In fact, nobody had heard a peep from the Nephilim for a long, long time. The War had been won more than a decade ago, and the Coven was still officially in its post-War state, somewhere between order and paranoia.

  That crazy stuff with the dead girls and the pentagrams from last year was over and done with. The even crazier stuff with Sam Lennox, the traitorous old Venator boss, was over as well. Sam was dead and he, Edon, lone wolf in this particular pack, was still alive.

  Edon Marrok and Araminta Scott, the A Team. Out on the town from midnight every day of the week, keeping the streets safe from renegade vampires and demons with the wrong ideas. The fiercest wolf and the most kick-ass Venator, together forever. Well, together as long as Ara put up with him. She was the most dedicated and hardworking Venator he’d ever met, but she was possibly the most halfhearted girlfriend. She wouldn’t let him even say the word.

  Lover – maybe that was the term Ara would prefer, although love wasn’t really her thing. Too scared, too wary, too hurt in the past. Sam Lennox had really done a number on Ara. Used her, betrayed her – betrayed them all. But Ara was the one who felt it the most, and Ara was the one who killed him. When you had personal demons like that, you didn’t need real demons stalking the streets to mess up your life. Work might be quiet, but Ara had a lot of dark stuff to work through. Every day might feel like Tuesday to Edon right now, but he knew that for Ara it was New Year’s Eve and July 4th all rolled up together, every single night of the week. She was on a knife-edge, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

  “Hey, wolf.” It was Ara, back from the bathroom, sliding onto the stool next to his. She looked spikier and grubbier than usual, as though it was already the end of a long week rather than eight PM on a Tuesday. “Buy a girl a beer, why don’t you?”

  “One more, then we’ll go home, OK?” By home Edon meant his place. It wasn’t much, but at least he didn’t live in squalor. Quiet times at work might mean a Venator had some time to spend
more time at home, do some housework, get around to some chores. But Edon suspected that Ara wasn’t spending her downtime laundering sheets or defrosting the fridge in her own apartment. She certainly wasn’t spending time washing her clothes, because he’d seen the same crusty sauce smears on her droopy black sweater last week, and the week before. The only thing she seemed able to take care of was her short white-blonde hair, shaved to fluff like a baby bird at the back.

  “I should go back to my place tonight,” she told him, avoiding his gaze. “I need some sleep.”

  “You’ll have about three hours to sleep,” he pointed out. Their next shift started at midnight. They should have left Holiday already.

  “This’ll help,” Ara said, raising her beer stein.

  “Maybe.” Sitting here drinking would just make tonight’s shift a long one, as well as a dull one. Sometimes Edon longed for a whiff of a Nephilim, just to break up the monotony of the night. Why Kinsgley, the new Venator chief, insisted on him sticking around in New York when Europe was about to kick off, Edon didn’t know. He’d rather be back in the Underworld than kicking his heels around here.

  “Buy me another beer and that’ll help even more,” said Ara, and there was something tight and dangerous in her voice, something that made Edon wary. He leaned close to her, one hand on her thigh, and felt her tense up.

  “What’s up?” he murmured, so close to her that his lips brushed her soft skin.

  “Nothing. Go home. You don’t need to babysit me.”

  “I didn’t think I was babysitting you. I thought I was taking my girl out for a drink …”

  “Your girl? How about your colleague, your partner, your fellow fighter?” Ara sounded indignant. Angry, even. Edon sighed. It was going to be one of those nights.