“We are the masters of the night, the lords of darkness. Who are you to dare tell us that this city is off limits to our appetites?”

I blinked a few times, trying to process the bullshit I was hearing. “Did you steal that from a movie or something?”

“What?” the long-haired asshole in front of me asked.

I kept forgetting what his real name was – the guy just wasn’t worth the cycles required of my frontal lobe – but he went by the ridiculous moniker of Dusk Reaper. Yeah, I know, pretty fucking stupid, but up until a few months ago that was the norm for the coven of vampires I was in charge of. “You heard me. How the fuck can you even say something like that with a straight face?”

Dusk Reaper glared at me, his fangs protruding ever so slightly from his upper lip. Oh the drama. You’d have thought I’d asked him to pull down his pants and bend over while I retrieved an extra-long mop handle. The reality was, I’d walked in, hoping for a quiet evening of relaxing and maybe ogling the voluptuous females who made up roughly half the coven. Instead, I’d found this fucker along with a dead body he was tearing into like a hyena.

Ignoring that I’d been trying to rein in the coven’s habit of – well, there was no real way to explain it otherwise – being mass murderers when the mood suited them, this dickhead was taking it a step further by making a mess of things. Jeez! You’d have thought he was a toddler with a big slice of birthday cake. It was sure as shit gonna take a bit more than a few wet wipes to clean this up.

The situation was made worse because he wasn’t alone. Eliza, a cute brunette vamp, lay on the couch in just her bra and panties, copious amounts of blood dripping from her exposed flesh. It was obvious I’d interrupted them, cock-blocking before they could engage in what would have probably been some truly disturbing sex.

That last part really ticked me off. I normally couldn’t care less about fetishes, but fuck that shit. I was the goddamned coven master here. All the glory was supposed to be mine, not to mention all the poon ... in theory anyway.

During my first few weeks as leader, it had seemed that would be the case. However, at some point, I’d apparently made a wrong turn and somehow ended up in, well, maybe not the friend zone, but definitely the no fucking zone. And here was Dusk Reaper – a known asshole – about to score with one of the many hotties of Village Coven, my coven. Talk about life, or the afterlife, being unfair.

“Listen,” I said, trying to talk sense into this senseless fucktard, “I know you guys have to eat. Believe me, I’m not trying to starve anyone. But this...” I waved my arms to indicate the scene before me. “This is going a little overboard, especially since the larder is full of bagged blood.”

We were in what was known throughout the coven as the Loft. It occupied the entire third floor of this building and served as a sort of vamp frat house. It also had a special place in my heart being the very spot I had died roughly three months earlier. Okay fine, maybe special wasn’t quite the best word to describe it. Still, if there’s one place that came to mind when I thought about vampires, this was it.

And what a place, possessing all the comforts of home: blacked out windows, reinforced doors, stain resistant carpet, and access to pretty much every cable channel known to man. Below us was empty space, sound-proofing against any screams that might be overheard – something I was also trying to curb. On the ground floor lay a fairly busy techno club, which the coven occasionally used as a convenient hunting ground. When that wasn’t feasible, though, one needed only to walk down another flight of steps to the basement level. That’s the larder I mentioned, a storage room connected to the sewers, housing several industrial sized refrigerators that I knew damn well were fully stocked.

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Dusk Reaper took a step forward, oddly bold this evening. Maybe he didn’t want to look like a pussy in front of his piece du jour. “You would ask that we sate our hunger with mere bagged blood? Do you think us cattle? We are predators, lions stalking the desert.”

“The Savannah,” I corrected – dumbass. When he just stood there, staring blankly at me, I continued. “I don’t care if you think you’re a lion, a furry, or My Little fucking Pony, I don’t want...”

“Have you ever made love in the still steaming blood of a human?” Eliza interrupted, ruining any focus I might’ve had that evening. My earlier plan of popping in to see what was playing on HBO might as well have happened in a whole other lifetime. I glanced away from Dick Raper and toward her, most certainly noticing her idly fingering the flimsy lace that made up her bra.

“Um ... can’t say that I have,” I replied like some sort of idiot. Goddamn it! If I had one weakness – aside from looking like a dumpy nerd, being a relatively young and weak vampire, and having no real fucking clue as to what I was doing – it was women. To say that my dating life was a wee bit barren as of late was an understatement.

“Maybe if you tried, you’d rethink your stance.” Her voice was innocence itself, but it carried an undertone that would have made an experienced whore shiver. Within seconds, my pants began to feel two sizes too small.

Although I doubt he had any intention of helping me, Dusk Reaper’s petty nature saved me from going full retard as I struggled to come up with an answer to her very logical sounding statement. His eyes flashed black and he snarled. “Do not get any ideas, Freewill.”

He spat that last part as if it were meant to be an insult, but I’d been throwing one-liners with my friends ever since my playground days. I could come up with a better zinger in my sleep. Besides, he was right. I was what they called a Freewill – a vampire variant of a sort; the name implying an ability to resist the compulsions of older vampires. It was an ability I was damned glad to have. Stupid name aside, it was a handy power to have in a hierarchy of beings that were used to lording their might over those weaker than them.

In some ways it was nice to be special. A smile crossed my lips at the thought. Unfortunately, the douche-canoe in front of me apparently took it as a signal to continue. “She is mine to use as I see fit this night.”

I locked eyes with him, Eliza’s spell broken, and put a little iron into my tone. “First off, my name is Bill. Second, you two can do whatever the fuck you want, but not this way. Bottom line is I don’t want to see shit like this again. It’s just ... sick.”

With that, I turned away, my plans for the evening thwarted. Even if I’d told those two to scram, it’s not like I’d be too keen to sit on the couch and channel surf while congealed blood oozed through the seat of my pants. Goddamn it. Vampires could be so fucking gross when they wanted to be.

I headed downstairs and contemplated the bar on the ground floor for a moment before moving on. All things considered, it was probably not the best place to show my face. The clientele there was young, even younger than my twenty-four years – this being a tragically hip SoHo joint. Being the sort who enjoyed a weekend of gaming around the D&D table, I’d stand out like a sore thumb.

That in of itself didn’t bother me much, but I also happened to be in charge of the monsters who occasionally prowled down there. All it would take would be one person with a few more brain cells than average to put two and two together and I’d probably end up at One Police Plaza trying to explain that I wasn’t an accomplice to mass murder.

Okay, maybe that’s less likely than I was letting on. I’d been told that the vampire nation kept the higher-ups of this city well-greased for such situations. Still, why bother taking unnecessary chances?

Speaking of the one who’d done that telling, though, I decided that rather than head back home, maybe I’d make one other stop while in coven territory. At the very least, Sally was pleasant to look at, if a total bitch to listen to.