Remember The Blood

By Vicki Pettersson

New Year's Eve is a night of celebration and remembrance for some … but for others it's a time to forget. While the years might pile up easily behind vampires Ina and Alexander, the memories do not. Forgetting is the price they must pay for the gift of eternal life, but Ina and Alexander will do anything to stay together … and for that they must remember the blood.

Previously published in The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vicki Pettersson
• Release date: May 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781940221007

Vicki Pettersson

Vicki Pettersson is the New York Times bestselling author of the Sign of the Zodiac novels, a six-book urban fantasy series set in her hometown of Las Vegas. Though she'll always consider that glittering dust bowl home, she now divides her time between Vegas and Dallas, where she's learning to like good Tex-Mex (easy) and the Dallas Cowboys (easier than you'd think).

Book preview

Introduction

New Year’s Eve is a night of celebration and remembrance for some … but for others it’s a time to forget. While the years might pile up easily behind vampires Ina and Alexander, the memories do not. Forgetting is the price they must pay for the gift of eternal life, but Ina and Alexander will do anything to stay together … and for that they must remember the blood.

Remember the Blood

Ina moves through the crowd as if leashed and muzzled, careful to make eye contact with no one, to touch no one. Sensuality is her perfume – as it won’t be long now – so she can’t fault the people around her from undressing her with their eyes. She can barely refrain from touching herself. Even knowing better, yesterday she opened a door she shouldn’t have, entered a club packed with people desperate to start their New Year’s celebration early, and paid the price in mounting frustration. Dozens of bodies had ground against her, hands sliding over her waist, across her belly; seeking, too, the outer curves of her breasts, her ass. Fingers had pressed and kneaded, searching for something they’d never possess, begging with wordless, tensile strength, as if Ina were a living talisman.

The crowd tonight is different. No one dares to touch her at a black tie event. Not even at a New Year’s Eve gala, when Dom flows as freely as water. Not even when she’s dressed in silk so thin it outlines her nipples. Not even though she’s so wet she’s sure some of them can smell it on her.

Still, they watch. She feels their thoughts, pretty fireworks going off behind curtained gazes, rising into the air to explode with colored lust and hope and dreams. And that’s just the women.

Being at the center of a desire that borders on worship is hard to describe, and if someone asked her to, the closest Ina could come is this: She is more than woman. She is goddess. There are others like her, but she is uncommon enough to be idealized, the humours at such perfect balance inside her bodily vessel that she is at once both at peace with eternal life and kissing cousins to lumbering death.

And yet, and yet … Ina has found herself unexpectedly living in a world that worships girls. All of a sudden, to open one’s thighs is to

Reviews for Remember The Blood

[ralphd00d-325171 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I have not read any of Vicki Pettersson's books as of yet. I do have a couple lined up to follow through with now. This was a great short story I bought after being directed to it via the author's Twitter feed. Having a couple books that the synopsis read interesting, I was a bit daunted by this tale, mainly because I am not much into the romance stuff. However, I loved the ideal of the story, a different possibility of vampirism, let alone that vampires could 'love' each other rather than the usual vampire/human relationship as in most books. I don't know if I would read this id the author expanded it into a regular book, or series, but I think it a good deal at the price I paid.