Vampires Need Not...Apply

Chapter 1

New Year’s Day. New York City

“Save me. Please save me.”

“Dammit. Where are you?” Thirty-four-year-old Antonio Acero frantically searched the dark, empty, cavernous room, helplessly listening to the woman’s cries.

“Time is running out. You must work faster,” she wailed.

“I am doing everything I can,” he called out, his voice bouncing off the bare, smooth walls. “But I can’t get to you. If you just tell me…” Two catlike eyes punched through the darkness, sucking the words from his mind. He wanted to see more of her, to touch her. He felt like he might become the one who needed saving if he did not.

“Save me. Please save me,” the woman repeated. “Time is running out. I have the answers you need, but you must work faster. Destiny—”

Antonio catapulted from his deep slumber, dripping in cold sweat. “Puta madre, ” he whispered and flipped on his stainless steel reading lamp. It had been the same damned nightmare every night for the last month. Ever since he’d found that fucking tablet in Mexico. Or had it found him?

Doesn’t matter. It’s what you were looking for, the answer to your prayers.

“Everything all right, baby?” A silky arm slipped out from beneath the steel-gray satin sheets and rubbed his bare thigh.

“Uh… yeah. Sure.” He looked down at the mop of brown hair. Her face was as obscure as her name.

Mierda. What was he doing? It didn’t matter how many women he brought home, he couldn’t wash her—the woman in his dreams—from his mind.

He slid from bed and plucked his discarded tee and boxer briefs from the floor. On his way to the kitchen, he slipped them on and tried not to punch something.

Dammit. The dreams were only getting worse, more vivid, more frantic with every passing night.

He yanked open the fridge, pushed past the Odwallas and beer, and grabbed the soy milk. He knew this madness didn’t make sense, but what the hell did that matter? The dreams kept coming. Scotch—the good stuff—sex, hypnosis didn’t matter. Every night she came. Every night he woke. Every day he worked and didn’t stop until his mind reached exhaustion. And even then, he couldn’t stop thinking about the tablet.

Or her…

Shit. What was happening to him?

He went to his lab, a room at the back of his sparsely decorated apartment, and flipped on the phosphorescent lights, stopping briefly to remove the black stone tablet from a rat-filled cage. He carefully unwrapped it from the plastic sleeve and shook his head. The damned thing was like a goddamned Mayan Rubik’s Cube.

“You think you can win, don’t you?” No fucking chance, pinche jodida tablet. He laid it down and stroked its rough surface. “You and I, we finish this tonight.”

Yes. He was close to unlocking its secrets. And when he did… then what? Would she be there? The woman with the haunting eyes? The woman he knew in his soul he was destined to meet?

Goddammit, he fucking hoped so.

He placed a welder’s mask on his face and leaned over the tablet, a pair of long tweezers in hand. He reached up and adjusted the overhead light, focusing the powerful beam on the corner of the object. This had to be it, his last test to prove out his theory.

“Steady hand, coño. Steady hand.” He carefully scraped off a tiny particle and placed it on a glass slide. He removed the mask and wiped his brow.

“Coming back to bed, baby?” a silken voice purred from behind. A soft pair of arms reached around his waist and a set of full breasts pushed against his back.

Is she still here? Doesn’t she have her own bed to sleep in? He placed the slide under his microscope. “Yeah. Be right there.”

Yes. Just as he suspected. The black jade had again transformed. He’d left it encased for ten hours with his two most aggressive rats. The day before that, he’d exposed it to his goldenzelle orchid. The day before that, frogs. Each life-form, plant or animal, rearranged the configuration of the microscopic crystals and the hieroglyphs.

“It’s like the damned thing is alive,” he muttered to himself. And now he knew for certain his hypothesis held water. Subjecting the tablet to the right combination of elements would unlock its power and, hopefully, open the portal. A portal that could access any dimension at any point in time.

“I’m alive, baby. And if you come back to bed, I’ll show you how much,” Betsy—or was she Brenda?—whined. He hated whiny women. They were so… whiny.

“Look, Bre—Señorita.” He turned and stared down at the attractive brunette wearing too much mascara and his favorite polo shirt. “I have work to do. If you need to cuddle, my cat Simon is around somewhere.”

Fury flickered in her brown eyes, and she stomped off, mumbling some profanity about Don Juans. “And my name is Belinda!” she screamed from somewhere inside the spacious apartment.

“Mujeres!” He shook his head. Why did women always behave that way? So damned irrational and needy. It wasn’t as if he hid his true colors, either. In fact, he made it a rule to be transparent. “I don’t date anyone but my work, and she and I are happy together. Alone,” he’d say.

Couldn’t get much clearer than that. Yet they always came home with him. They always wanted more. They always left angry.

Well, too damned bad. He knew what mattered: cracking this code, saving his brother from a terrible fate, and if he were lucky…? He would finally meet this woman.

An image of her flashed in his mind. He saw himself in a dimly lit bedroom, the light from a fireplace flickering over the walls as he thrust himself between her thighs and stared at her obscured face.

A loud crackle suddenly came from the microscope. What the…?

He bent his head and looked through the lens. The molecules shifted again, but this time they moved with such fluidity that he could swear it was a liquid, not solid. “Qué diablos?”

The black crystals swirled on the plate and a tiny black hole opened up as if the center had disintegrated completely.

“Caray. It’s amazing,” he mumbled as an earsplitting snap cracked through the air. The tablet vibrated on the table and jumped as if hooked up to a lowrider suspension system.

“Coño!” He lunged as it reached the edge and fell to the floor with a crash. An explosion threw him across the room, the wall breaking his momentum.

Antonio felt his body slide down the wall, the air sucked from his lungs. The room flickered from bright white to red to darkness. But he wasn’t unconscious. No. Not at all. The pain he felt was not a dream.

And he could not see.