Dark Hunger Read online

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He shook his head. Nothing, he signed. Never mind.

  “Do you sense something?” It seemed impossible that anyone might discover them out there in the middle of nowhere, but then again, one never knew. The Brethren employed a staff of more than forty humans called the Kinsfolk. The Brethren weren’t allowed to feed on these humans, and the Kinsfolk, in turn, helped keep the farms stocked with migrant workers upon whom the Brethren sated their bloodlust. They also managed the primary, day-to-day responsibilities of the Brethren’s combined 1,750-acre properties, so there was always the remote possibility that their duties had taken one or more of the Kinsfolk that far out. “Is someone there, Brandon?”

  His telepathy had been damaged during his attack, like his ears and voice, but Tessa had come to notice over the years that he was often more aware of things than she was. She supposed it was because he had less to distract him, no noises or voices to compete for his attention.

  He shook his head again, then smiled as he moved his hands in the air. It’s nothing. He nodded at the steering wheel once in encouragement. Try again.

  Tessa put the Sentra in gear and turned the key in the ignition. She wondered what Jackson would think if he’d known that Brandon had taken her off the main roads twining through the farm. True, Jackson had said they could borrow the car, but he hadn’t said anything about taking it bumping and jostling through fields. Not to mention letting me grind his transmission all to hell along the way.

  They continued along, bouncing across the rolling hillocks as the grass, blanched from the late-summer sun and nearly as tall as the car’s wheel wells, whispered and slapped against the Nissan’s doors. She did better this time, making it at least another quarter mile before the car died once more.

  Tessa uttered a little cry of disgust, clasping the steering wheel between her hands and giving it a frustrated little shake. “I’m never going to get this!”

  Yes, you will, Brandon signed. It just takes time, that’s—

  There was more, but she cut her eyes away and missed it. Ahead of them, protruding out of the grass, were what looked like the remnants of walls, crumbling heaps of stone nearly buried beneath an overgrowth of weeds.

  Brandon, she thought, forgetting herself in sudden, surprised wonder and opening her mind. Look at that.

  Brandon followed her gaze and the two of them sat there, silent, for a moment. What is it? she thought to him at length, and when he didn’t immediately answer, she turned and tapped his shoulder to draw his gaze. “What is it?”

  He shook his head. I don’t know, he signed.

  She reached for her seat belt, unbuckling it, and he caught her arm as she opened her door. What are you doing? he asked, his eyes wide, his expression inexplicably alarmed.

  “I’m going to get out for a minute,” she said. “I want to take a closer look.”

  Tessa, wait… he began, but she ignored him, stepping out into the bright, warm sunshine, being immediately enveloped in the thick humidity of early September. The air buzzed and thrummed with the overlapping symphonies of crickets and cicadas. She watched grasshoppers the size of her little finger dart away on the wing as she began to wade through the grass.

  Tessa, don’t, Brandon thought, opening his car door and standing.

  Tessa turned long enough to smile at him. “Olive oil,” she said with exaggerated emphasis. It was a long-standing joke between them, one that usually drew at least a smirk from him. Brandon had explained to her once that olive oil and I love you were pretty much identical to someone who was deaf and could read lips. The way a person’s mouth moved to form the sounds were virtually the same. Tessa had seized upon this, and was fond of teasing Brandon good-naturedly with it.

  Today it didn’t put him any more at ease whatsoever. We need to get the car back to Jackson. Come on, he thought. Besides, I’ve got a bad feeling about this place.

  What do you mean? She walked again, undeterred despite the obvious apprehension in his words. She felt drawn to the site somehow, a strange and persistent whispering in her mind, pulling her along. I think these are walls, Brandon. There was a building here or something.

  Which didn’t make any sense. The farms the Brethren called home had belonged to them for well over two hundred years, lands chartered in 1790. The only structures that had ever stood there had been built or sanctioned by the Brethren, and Tessa didn’t know of any that had ever been constructed—much less torn down—in that spot.

  “What the hell is this place?” she murmured to no one in particular as she drew the blade of her hand to her brow, shielding her eyes from the sun’s glare. The closer she came, the more of the ruins she could see. Whatever it had once been, it had been enormous; what remained was an expansive circumference that had once been a creek stone foundation crowned with the toppled scraps of brick walls.

  I think it was a great house, she thought, turning to Brandon. He hadn’t moved; he stood rooted in place beside the car, his dark eyes round and apprehensive.

  It’s just an old barn, Tessa, he signed. One that somebody tore down a long time ago. Come on. We need to get back.

  It’s not a barn, she signed in reply. He knew it, too; she didn’t need to open her mind to sense it. He knew, and it frightened him for some reason.

  The grass stood almost to her waist in places. She could part it with her hands as she cleaved a slim path. Yellow flowers like tinted daisies—ashy sunflowers, they were called—wild blue sage and purple waxweed dappled the field around her in bright color, while scarlet pimpernel stood out in vermilion pinpoints among the fallen stones. Near the crumbled foundation, Tessa caught sight of cut stone among the wildflowers and weeds, a long, rectangular tread from what had once been a flight of steps leading presumably to a porch or entrance.

  The great houses of the Brethren were sprawling, four-story Victorian mansions that had been constructed during the late 1880s, one of the first directives undertaken by Tessa’s grandfather and other Brethren males of his generation when they had been appointed as Elders, the most venerable leaders among the clans. The original houses on the property had been built shortly after the land’s acquisition nearly a century earlier; Tessa knew this because paintings depicting them remained on display in the Grandfather’s study, along with an old, framed daguerreotype of Augustus Noble as a younger man, standing outside of the house that had once belonged to the Nobles. She had always liked that picture, because the Grandfather was a strikingly handsome man—nearly identical in appearance to Brandon, in fact—and reminded her of her brother in the image.

  Was this one of the original houses? she thought, stepping carefully over the ruined stairs and into the circumference of the remaining foundation. I thought they’d just built the newer ones over the old, but maybe they didn’t.

  Not much remained of the building, only the front stairs, the foundation, a few fragments of brick wall and a crumbling chimney left like a listing grave marker to rise from the grass. And yet, to Tessa, it felt as though the air around it tingled, like the broken rocks and fallen bricks were alive somehow, almost electrified.

  What is this place? she wondered again as she carefully cut a diagonal path across the foundation. In a far corner, where the weeds grew particularly thick, she saw a hole in the ground, cut into the limestone. Curious, she drew closer, kneeling down and pushing aside the tangled grass and thistles with her hands. The hole was about three feet in circumference, a gaping pit that led downward into darkness. It had been covered with a heavy iron grate that was rusty enough to be antique, and secured in place with a padlock that was shiny enough to be new. Someone has been out here recently, then, Tessa realized. But why? And why would they bother locking up a hole in the ground?

  And then she knew.

  The Beneath.

  The Brethren farms were reputedly crisscrossed by a network of subterranean tunnels and caverns called the Beneath. All of the great houses were joined by these passageways, and
each supposedly had entrances in the cellars. Tessa didn’t know what lay in the Beneath. No one among the Brethren did, with the purported exception of the Elders. But rumors ran rampant, especially among the younger Brethren like Tessa, her siblings and cousins, about why the tunnels had been built, and what the Brethren kept secreted away in them.

  “It’s the Abomination,” Tessa’s older brother, Caine, had liked to taunt when they’d been children. “The first one of us. They keep it down there, where it lives on the blood of spiders and rats. It’s like an animal itself, gone mad down there in the deep.”

  Caine also liked to say that if they were bad, the Grandfather would punish them by throwing them into the Beneath, where this horrific creature—the “Abomination”—would eat them, bones and all.

  Just as she reached out to touch the padlock, Brandon caught her by the shoulder, startling her.

  “Jesus!” she yelped, scrambling to her feet, wide-eyed. She managed a shaky little laugh and gave him a shove. “You scared me, Brandon. Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

  We have to go now, he signed, his motions swift and imperative, his expression stern.

  “Look,” she said, pointing. “Do you know what that is? I think it leads—”

  Tessa. He finger-spelled her name in its entirety for emphasis, rather than simply folding his index finger over his thumb in a letter T and drawing it against his cheek in his pet sign for her. I mean it. Now.

  He was really spooked. She could see it in his face, his rigid posture. Whatever she could sense about that place, the peculiar, electrical sensation, Brandon could feel it, too, and he clearly didn’t like it.

  “All right.” She nodded, and he relaxed visibly. Not enough so that he walked back to the car first, however; he waited until she heaved a put-upon sigh and tromped past him before turning and trailing behind her. She kept glancing over her shoulder, her gaze drawn toward the hole in the ground with the padlock and grate. What happened here? she wondered, and even though she didn’t mean to open her mind and let her twin be privy to her thoughts, it happened anyway.

  I don’t know, Brandon replied. But I think it was something bad.

  Tessa had asked her grandmother about the crumbled old ruins later that evening, but Eleanor Noble hadn’t known anything, either. “Whatever it was, it’s in the past and not for us to know or care about,” she’d said.

  Tessa hadn’t thought much about it in the four years since that day. She might not have ever thought about it again. In fact, had it not been for the side trip Rene had taken that morning as they’d left New Orleans together, a trip that had taken them about an hour southwest of the bustling city and toward the Gulf of Mexico to a place called Bayou Lafourche. Here, along a rutted, winding back road just past a small town called Thibodaux, Rene had stopped, parking his black Audi TT roadster in a swirling cloud of dust and grit in front of a boarded up, one-and-a-half-story house with a broad front porch and dilapidated roof.

  The house had obviously been abandoned for some time. The window shutters listed, the porch was littered with piles of dirt and leaves and the white clapboard siding was weather-beaten and worn. The yard was a tangled mess of overgrown grass, weeds and wildflowers—much like that Kentucky back field had been years earlier—and surrounded by the twisted remains of old trees, many of which appeared to have been violently uprooted.

  “What happened to the trees?” Tessa had asked quietly, wondering where they were and why in the hell Rene had driven out of their way to reach this place.

  “Katrina,” Rene murmured, opening the car door and stepping out. He moved slowly, grimacing slightly as his legs unfurled. His right leg was prosthetic from midthigh down; Brandon had explained to Tessa that Rene had once been a police officer and had lost his leg after being shot in the knee. Rene hadn’t said anything to Tessa about it, and she hadn’t asked him.

  As a matter of fact, the two of them hadn’t said much to each other at all during their trip to New Orleans, or their limited stay there, as well. Most anything they had exchanged to date had been antagonistic, although before leaving for the Big Easy, they had been at least cordial to each other. That had changed after Brandon and Lina, Rene’s former police partner and the woman with whom Brandon was in love, had hit the road for Louisiana, with Rene and Tessa to follow. In addition to not being able to learn how to drive, the Brethren were also prohibited from leaving their sequestered Kentucky estates. Ever. Brandon had broken that fundamental rule; as a result, the Brethren Elders were hunting for him, to kill him in punishment for his defiance. Because she’d fled, too, in order to help her brother, Tessa had sealed her own fate in the eyes of her people as well.

  She had mentioned something about one of Martin’s cars, a gray BMW sedan, to Rene. She’d taken it when she’d escaped Kentucky, and told Rene she needed to get her suitcases out of the trunk before they left for New Orleans.

  Upon which he’d blinked at her as if she had just sprouted a third eyeball. “Quoi?” he asked. “What the hell do you mean, your husband’s car is here in the city?”

  “How else would I get here?” she’d replied, and he’d rolled his eyes skyward and thrown up his hands with an exasperated little snort. “What? Brandon drove, too. He told me he took one of the Grandfather’s cars and…” Her voice faded as the furrow between his brows deepened. “What?”

  “Why didn’t the two of you just hang a big fucking sign at the city limits saying ‘here we are’?” Rene had exclaimed. “Mon Dieu, woman, when you’re trying to run away from someone, you don’t go stealing cars with goddamn license plates traceable right back to them!”

  Before they could uncover any more of what Rene called “goddamn breadcrumbs” she and Brandon had left for the Brethren to find, Rene had promptly cut short the three week lead time he’d offered Brandon and Lina. He’d pretty much tossed Tessa unceremoniously into his car—without letting her get her luggage—and headed south. Things had only gone downhill from there.

  “Where are we?” she had asked him outside of the ramshackle little house in Louisiana, but he hadn’t replied. He’d left the driver’s door standing open, the little warning chiming alarm beeping inanely as he’d walked toward the remnants of a picket and wire fence that surrounded the front yard. The gate hung at a clumsy angle, loose of most of its moorings, and Rene eased it open on squealing hinges. Beside the gate, a rusted, battered mailbox listed hard to starboard, the hand-painted name LaCroix barely legible on its side.

  “Rene?” Tessa unbuckled her seat belt and opened the car door, following him as he climbed the steps to the front porch. “Rene, wait!”

  He didn’t pay any attention to her. Which, she figured, was pretty much par for the course. When he tried to open the screen door, it fell; he sidestepped in surprise as it crashed to the rotted plank floor of the porch with a thin cloud of dust. Tessa hesitated on the steps. “Rene? What is this place?”

  “It’s home,” he replied without looking back at her as he walked into the house. “Wait for me in the car, pischouette.”

  That was it. Nothing more. He’d dismissed her as he might have a nuisance child, and she stood there for a long moment, her blouse clinging to her back between her shoulder blades with sweat, perspiration beading along her brow, the bridge of her nose. It was hot and humid despite the early hour, and the air was thick and heavy and utterly motionless.

  Home? she thought, looking at the shack in disbelief. Rene was a multimillionaire many, many times over, the sole heir of a fortune his family had earned in crude oil, much as hers had in the Thoroughbred horseracing and bourbon distilling industries. He’s kidding, right?

  She could hear cicadas buzzing, crickets chirruping, tree frogs singing and the fading, resonant sounds of Rene’s footsteps as he disappeared from her view.

  “Rene?” she called, but he didn’t answer. Tessa frowned, closing her fingers into fists against her sweat-dampened palms. “The hell with this.”

  She marched up the stairs,
stepped around the collapsed screen door, and followed him into the house. The cracked and dingy hardwood floor was all but hidden beneath a thick layer of dirt and grime broken only by the ghostlike impressions of Rene’s footprints. The air inside the house smelled stale and musty; in the muted sunlight that filtered in through gaps between the window boards, she could see glinting fragments of broken glass littering the ground along with heavy shrouds of cobwebs, piles of dried leaves and broken branches, old newspapers and other anonymous garbage.

  Her stomach immediately roiled, stirred to uncomfortable nausea as much by the claustrophobic confines of the house as her fledgling pregnancy. She was almost four months along. The ordinarily flat plain of her belly was just beginning to swell, although her morning sickness—which had turned out to be more like any-time-of-the-day sickness—and the soreness in her breasts at last seemed to be waning. Being around Rene of late had seemed to rekindle at least the nausea more frequently.

  Part of the problem was also that she needed to feed. She’d sated her bloodlust before leaving Kentucky, but that had been almost two weeks earlier. Although normally, that should have sustained her for at least a month, while pregnant, she needed to feed more often, and the bloodlust had been stirring persistently within her. Even now, as she glanced around the empty house, she could feel her gums tingling, a dim ache as they swelled and her canine teeth wanted to drop.

  She even imagined she could smell blood, a human from somewhere close at hand. Which isn’t possible, she thought. Look at this dump. There’s no one here but me and Rene.

  And while Rene may have been half human to her full-blooded Brethren, she sure as hell wasn’t going to feed from him. I’d as soon ram a rusty nail through my eye.

  The sound of Rene’s footfalls as he went upstairs, heavy and hollow against the steps, attracted her gaze, and she headed in that direction. What is he doing?

  She rounded a corner and found the staircase. The corridor beside it led to a bathroom straight ahead, a place where the boards on the window had either been pried away or had blown off during the hurricane. Pale sunlight spilled through and pooled on the floor, seeping out into the hall. The ceiling above had been waterlogged from a leaky roof, and plaster dusted the ground like a fine snowfall, crunching in larger chunks beneath her shoes.