Free night moves - a holden chancery story by sierra dean Page B

home.
    The original negatives were also in his possession now, thanks to his vampire thrall, meaning the photo would never show up in a Mapplethorpe coffee table book.
    Owning the print wasn’t vain.
    Letting it be shown in the first place, that was a hundred percent ego.
    “Felicia?” He had her attention now, having stolen her champagne glass so she couldn’t use it to distract herself.
    “Hmm?”
    “Let’s go.”
    Her heart was beating a mile a minute, but still she pretended not to know what he was talking about. “Go? Go where?”
    He moved in closer, picking up the faint scent of Oscar de la Renta perfume. Oh, yes. She was an excellent choice. He could have easily willed her to come with him by staring at her and telling her she wanted to leave. But baiting women with the thrall wasn’t good sport, and the idea struck him as ungentlemanly.
    “A walk? Drinks? Anything.”
    Felicia was already nodding her assent before he’d finished his pitiful list of made-up suggestions. “Sure. Yeah.”
    She left him to get her coat, it being October and all, and Holden waited for her outside the gallery’s doors. Something in the air caused an uneasy stir in his belly, but he pushed the worry aside.
    Felicia joined him on the sidewalk, not bothering to hide her smile, and he offered her his arm.
    They walked a block in the crisp night air, but in spite of his enchanting company, Holden couldn’t shake the unsettling feeling something was very, very wrong.
    It threw him enough he didn’t notice Felicia’s demeanor shift from bubbly to stone-cold serious in the flash of a second.
    He only figured out things had changed when she sank the knife into his ribs.
     

Chapter Two
     
    Holden gaped at the blade sticking out of his chest, a garish red bloom flowering out from the hilt of the weapon and staining his pristine white shirt.
    “This is Armani ,” he snarled.
    “Vampire scum,” she shot back.
    He pulled the knife blade out, dropping it onto the sidewalk with a heavy metallic clatter. Prodding the hole in his shirt with the tip of a finger, he sighed in disgust. Ruined.
    “You couldn’t have stabbed me when I was wearing Calvin Klein?”
    Whatever response Felicia had been anticipating, this clearly wasn’t it. She was edgy and nervous, but her stance told him she was ready for a fight, and her adrenaline was so high she probably wouldn’t consider the danger she was in until it was too late.
    “Aren’t you going to, you know…bite me?”
    “Was that the goal, here? Because if you wanted me to feed off you, you could have asked politely. Destroying a two-hundred-dollar shirt doesn’t really make my fangs itch, love.”
    His wound was already healing, leaving him only with a bruised ego and a shirt he’d need to burn later. This wasn’t how he’d wanted his evening to go.
    Evidently this wasn’t how the girl had seen things playing out either. “You’re supposed to attack me.”
    Holden buttoned his overcoat and kicked the fallen knife into the gutter. He didn’t need any passing pedestrians asking questions. “Have you ever met a vampire?”
    The blush warming her cheeks spoke volumes.
    Holden sighed.
    “Independent contractors.” With a dramatic roll of the eyes, he jerked his head at her to indicate she should follow him. She snorted. “Girl, if I was going to kill you, you’d be dead.”
    “Unlikely.”
    In a flash, Holden grabbed her by the wrist and spun her around, forcing her face first against the side of a nearby building. He wasn’t trying to hurt her, just show her how easily he could. Tightening his grip on her, he waited until she let out a small yelp of pain before releasing her.
    “If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead,” he repeated.
    This time she didn’t argue. She wrestled her hand away from him, rubbing her wrist, a petulant expression on her face. Good. An annoyed would-be slayer might survive. A cocky one would be dead before sunrise.
    “So you think you’ve got