Hunger

  Hunger is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Loveswept Ebook Original

  Copyright © 2017 by Jacquelyn Frank

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  LOVESWEPT is a registered trademark and the LOVESWEPT colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN 9780399593178

  Cover design: Carolyn Teagle

  Cover photograph: © Marcos Appelt/Arcangel

  randomhousebooks.com

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  By Jacquelyn Frank

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Halo rolled over and winced as the sun struck his eyes. He sat up, his head ringing and his body slow. He didn’t like it. He’d been drinking last night, more than usual. Energy vampires were notoriously lightweight when it came to alcohol, but his tolerance had always been better than that of the average e-vamp. Better than that of the average human, for that matter.

  He looked around at his alien surroundings and took in the details of the room. He couldn’t remember where he was.

  He didn’t like that either.

  Sure, he played fast and loose with a lot of the e-vamp edicts, skirting the edges of what made for a lawful energy vampire, but Halo was a hunter. He hunted for a living and he was damn good at what he did. The best. He supposed that was why the queen and the authoritarians put up with him. However, not knowing where he was wasn’t smart behavior. It was not the behavior a hunter should be engaging in.

  He looked around again, trying to remember the night before. There had been a woman. Hell, there was always a woman. Pretty much every night when he wasn’t hunting. Halo wasn’t a snob. He loved women—all kinds of women. Most of his fellow vampires regarded human women like humans viewed cattle. They were meant to be food sources. And one did not fuck one’s food. Then there were those who loved humans like a master loves his beloved pet—but still one did not fuck a beloved pet.

  Halo was much earthier than that. Women were women—food or otherwise. As long as they had all the necessary parts that made them women. Vampire snobbery was just that—snobbery. Vampires who looked down on him for his habit of fornicating with human women could bite his rock-hard ass. Or they could try. The bonus with being the best in the hunting biz was that no one dared say anything to his face about his choice in sleeping partners. Hell, they didn’t even dare say it behind his back for fear it would get back to him. Oh, there were those who weren’t afraid of him, those who dared, but Halo couldn’t care less about them if he tried. And he was always up for popping someone in the face for being a gutsy wiseass.

  As Halo sat up the room spun. That was definitely not a good thing. He looked around again and noticed the room was a bit spartan for a woman’s bedroom. There was the queen-sized bed he was lying on, a pair of recliners in front of a wall-mounted television, and a small round table with two chairs pulled up to it. He would have thought he was in a studio apartment, but there was no kitchen. There was a single door leading out of the room, which meant there were no closets. That must utterly suck, he thought. His place in Queens wasn’t much to write home about, but at least he had closet…and a couple of enormous flat screens that put the one mounted on the wall here to shame.

  Halo threw back the covers arranged haphazardly over his hips and realized he was naked. He looked around the room, but there were no clothes to be found.

  Now he was just irritated. He got to his feet and again the room spun, only this time it seriously rocked him and he sat back down again as nausea rushed over him. He swallowed hard, then got back up. He gritted his teeth against any further lurching of his stomach and staggered to the door leading out of the room. He yanked it open and found it led to a bathroom.

  Blinking in confusion he rechecked the walls of the box room for another door. There wasn’t one visible. There was one window covered by heavy, floor-to-ceiling drapes and another long, high one that ran the length of the room on the east side, allowing sunlight into the room. It was barely six inches in height, if that. So he walked over to the floor-to-ceiling drapes, thinking maybe there was an exit behind them. A porch slider or something. But when he pulled the curtains apart, they revealed what had once been a window but was now completely bricked in.

  “What the fuck?”

  Halo felt a sense of dread invade him as he stared at the freshly blocked-off portal. He placed a hand against it and pushed, checking to see if there was any give, any way to get out. It didn’t budge and his feeling of dread intensified. As did his anger. He was pissed. Mad pissed. If what was happening was what he thought was happening, someone was going to die.

  Painfully. Slowly.

  He left the window and began to pace the perimeter of the room. It didn’t take him long to find the seam of what appeared to be a door over on the south side of the room, near where the table and chairs were set up. It also didn’t take him long to realize there were cameras in all of the upper corners of the room, protected by clear, thick plastic bolted into the walls.

  He ignored the cameras for the moment and examined the seam to the hidden door. He pushed at the drywall covering it and knocked on it. It was solid. No sound of an echo or a hint that there might be hollow space behind. He continued all along the walls searching for a hollow sound only to be frustrated by the lack of it.

  He still didn’t consider himself in trouble, however. It would take much more than a sealed room to make him panic. Okay, so a sealed room and being naked and watched was pushing his comfort level, but Halo wasn’t known for being easily ruffled. What he needed to find out was who had put him there, how he had even gotten there, and what the person’s endgame was.

  “All right,” he said aloud to the cameras. “You have my attention. What the fuck do you want?”

  He waited, glaring up directly into one of the cameras.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  After about ten minutes without a response, he began to get antsy. He looked around the room and took in his surroundings again. He walked over to the little table between the two recliners and picked up the remote that was on it. He clicked on the TV.

  To a screen split into quarters. Four different angles into a room as exactly square as his was. In fact, the room was so identical it could have been his…except in this room was a woman.

  She was sitting in one of the recliners in her room, naked with her legs drawn up tightly to her chest. The picture was in black and white, so all he could tell was that she had dark hair and was white skinned…or so it seemed. It wasn’t as though he could see gradations of skin tone. But she definitely wasn’t black.

  “Please…”

  That was when he realized he could hear into the room as well.

  “Please tell me what you want!” she yelled.

  She
was crying. He heard her breath hitch and saw her wipe away tears. Damn it, she looked scared to death. Who was she? Halo could imagine all kinds of reasons why he had been taken captive, but he couldn’t imagine why she would have been. He had never seen her before in his life. The picture was not exactly big or clear so he couldn’t be one hundred percent certain, but he was almost positive she was a stranger. She wasn’t his type—she was far too pretty to be his type. He liked them mediocre and desperate. Made things easier. Pretty women expected too much.

  But she was his favorite body type. Full. Round. Plump. Had he been in a bar under the right circumstances, he might have forgiven her prettiness and gone for her anyway. So maybe she was more his type than he thought. Still, he preferred blondes. Washed out though they may be, he had a thing for blondes.

  She was curled up into herself, hiding her nakedness as best she could. He glanced over at his bed and wondered why she didn’t cover up with a sheet. He narrowed his eyes on the screen and was able to determine she didn’t have sheets on her bed.

  That angered him for some reason. Bad enough they had trapped her like a rat and were watching her, they couldn’t allow her a little dignity?

  She reached out for the remote on the table beside her and flicked on the TV. He watched as she dropped her legs, stood up, and reached out to touch the TV screen.

  “Hello? Hello, can you hear me?” she cried.

  “I can hear you,” he said aloud, guessing that he was on her screen just as she was on his.

  “Oh my god! What’s happening? Why are they doing this to us?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied, frowning darkly. “How long have you been here?”

  “A day. At least.” She then seemed to realize he could probably see her and she hurried back to the chair where she could hide her nakedness behind her legs. “You weren’t there last night. Last time I turned on the TV the room was empty.”

  He absorbed the information. It seemed right. Last night he had been at a bar doing god knows what with god knows who. It was all a little fuzzy.

  “Yeah. I just woke up. Have you seen anyone? Talked to anyone?”

  “No. And I’m really hungry.”

  That gave him pause. It had been four days since he’d last fed. He could usually go a week between feedings, but that time was shortened the more he drank. He didn’t suppose the girl was a vampire. Vampires didn’t get as scared as this girl was unless they were facing down a sycophant.

  Law-abiding vampires drank energy from clean resources—humans who engaged in healthy or organic lifestyles, humans who did not pollute themselves with drugs or other unhealthy things. Sycophants, or phants, were nowhere near as discerning. They fed from anything and everything, searching for the cheap high of feeding off a junkie or some other such thing. Any law-abiding e-vamp could become a phant, but no phant could cross back over the line—once they were lost, they were lost forever. Or pretty much.

  Still she could be a vampire. Maybe a weaker one. But he couldn’t tell through a monitor, and he wasn’t about to ask her. Keeping themselves hidden from the human world was paramount on the list of vampire to-dos. Giving themselves away in any way was at the top of the to-don’ts.

  “Where do you work?” he asked her. Most vampires in New York City worked at vampire central in Midtown. Maybe by asking her that he could figure out who and what she was.

  “What? What does that have to do with anything?” she asked.

  “Humor me.”

  “I work at Felice’s Antiques in Kingston.”

  “Kingston, New York?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Where are you from?”

  “The city,” he said absently. Where was he? Upstate? Still in the city? What the fuck?

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  Niceties. Okay sure, he could do niceties. “Halo.”

  “Like…the game Halo?”

  “Yeah,” he said with a beleaguered sigh. “Like the game.” If he had a dollar…ever since that fucking game came out.

  “I’m sorry. You probably hear that all the time.”

  Well, at least she was keen enough to realize it. And polite enough to apologize. Not that manners meant all that much to him. But he did return her niceness for the moment.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Oh. Sorry. It’s Felice.”

  “As in Felice’s Antiques?” he asked.

  “One and the same.”

  He absorbed that a minute. A small business owner from Upstate New York. What the fuck did a small business owner from Upstate New York have to do with a vampire from New York City?

  “Do you have any clue why you are here?” he asked her even though he was pretty sure he knew the answer.

  But she surprised him. “I thought it was my stalker ex-boyfriend. It seemed a little too high tech and well thought out for him, but I don’t know. What do you do? Why would you be here?”

  He couldn’t answer that. Oh, he could think of a half-dozen reasons why, he just couldn’t tell her those reasons.

  “I’m just as in the dark as you are, sister.”

  “Call me Felice. Please. I need someone to call me by my name. To make me feel human again.”

  “It’s going to be all right, Felice,” he said, even though comforting others was not his strong suit. He rather impressed himself with the attempt.

  “Thank you, Halo, but I’m not sure I believe you.”

  “Yeah. I can see how it sounds like total bullshit. But I’m not the kinda guy who lets others get the best of him. If there’s a way out of here I’ll find it. Then I’ll come for you.”

  “How do you know we’re in the same building? Or even the same state? These could be webcams shooting from anywhere.”

  She had a point. Maybe he wasn’t so good at the comforting thing after all.

  “I don’t know. But I promise you this. If I get out I won’t stop looking for you till I find you.”

  “That’s awful nice of you to say but you don’t owe me anything.”

  “Hey, we’re companions in captivity,” he said, once again walking the perimeter of the room, testing the walls and then the hidden door. “Do you have a door leading into your room?”

  “There’s only one door and it leads to the bathroom. Thank god there’s no camera in there. At least not that I can see.”

  “Did you check around the walls? For a door that blends into the wall? I have one here.”

  She sprang up out of her chair and hurried to the nearest wall. “Where?” she asked.

  “On the wall to your right. Try there.”

  She slid along the wall to the one on her right and her hands began to trace over the drywall.

  “Hey! I didn’t see this before!” she cried in triumph. “I figured there had to be a way in. I mean, we got in here somehow. I just couldn’t find it.”

  “It was easy to miss. I only found it by checking every seam in the wallpaper. I gotta give credit to the guy who had the patience to paper this room, even if the floral pattern makes my eyes hurt. But I think that was deliberately chosen to distract the eye from the seams.”

  “You sound like this is nothing new to you. You sound so calm.”

  He supposed he did. It didn’t pay to get worked up. Anger and frustration only clouded his thinking.

  “I’m not about to kick and scream. I won’t give whoever is watching the satisfaction.”

  “So you think they are watching too? That it’s not just us seeing each other?”

  “Of course they’re watching. That’s half the fun, isn’t it?” He ran a hand back through his hair—his only sign of agitation. But it was enough for her to notice.

  “I’m sorry. That was a stupid question.”

  “Yeah. It was,” he said.

  “I said I was sorry!” she bit out.

  “All right! So you’re sorry. That doesn’t change things. Look, you have to get a grip. There’s no room for being all soft and apologetic. That won’t get the job do
ne.”

  “What job?” she snapped. “And there’s nothing wrong with being polite. You might try it sometime.”

  “I don’t have time to be polite,” he said. “And the job is getting us out of here.”

  “How are we going to do that? Like you said, someone is probably watching our every—”

  She gasped suddenly and lurched back, away from the doorway she was standing near. She scurried over to the chair and ridiculously hid behind it.

  “Someone’s coming!” she hissed.

  “Here’s a clue. They’re going to be able to find you,” he said drily.

  “Shut up! You’re a real—”

  She gasped again, cutting herself off from calling him an asshole. He supposed that was exactly what he was, he thought a moment later as someone all in black opened the portal and stepped inside Felice’s room. Felice screamed as he approached her—and it was a he, Halo could tell by his bulk and the way he moved—and she scrambled to get away from him. But it was no use and Halo knew it, even if in the moment of panic Felice didn’t.

  A second figure entered the room just as the first, the bigger of the two, grabbed hold of Felice. She screamed and fought, her naked body twisting and squirming. Halo’s fists clenched as he watched every second of what was happening with burning eyes. Now he felt frustration. He wanted to leap through the screen to help her. He wasn’t the type to rescue damsels in distress, but he wasn’t the type to ignore them either.

  This was unbearable for him, terrifying for her. He hardly knew her, but he knew he would do anything to switch places with her.

  “You fuckers!” he shouted at the screen. “Why don’t you come after me?”

  She was a fighter, he’d give her that. She kicked out, catching one of the men in the nuts. He grunted and fell to his knees, cupping his abused privates in both hands. That left the meatier of the two men to control the writhing, screaming woman in his hold. Tired of listening to her, he backhanded her. She immediately went silent as her head snapped back, then hung limply. He’d either knocked her out or she’d fainted, he couldn’t tell which through the screen.