Always the Vampire Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  “A little Lynsay Sands mixed with Charlaine Harris.”

  —ParaNormalRomance.org

  PRAISE FOR

  LAST VAMPIRE STANDING

  “Last Vampire Standing is a mystical novel that had this reader holding her sides from laughing so hard.”

  —Romance Junkies

  “Seeing the world and all its wackiness through this spunky heroine’s eyes makes the adventure just plain fun. Don’t miss out!”

  —Romantic Times, 4½ stars

  “Nancy Haddock is an amazing author who has the talent to mix mystery [and] paranormal and twist it all up with a dollop of comedy.”

  —Night Owl Romance, Top Pick

  “Witty humor will keep you glued to the pages of this delightful vampire romance.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “The second humorous Vampire Princess urban fantasy is an enjoyable, lighthearted thriller filled with tension somewhat abated by the amusing observations of modern life by the heroine . . . Nancy Haddock provides a jocular tale.”

  —Genre Go Round Reviews

  “A wonderful second part to this great new vampire series . . . With a lovely leading lady, a well-written plot, and quirky characters, this has all the ingredients of a great paranormal urban fantasy book.”

  —ParaNormalRomance.org

  PRAISE FOR

  LA VIDA VAMPIRE

  “After reading Nancy Haddock’s debut, I want to live La Vida Vampire. A quirky and fun read.”

  —Erin McCarthy

  “Nancy Haddock had me hooked from page one with La Vida Vampire. The wonderfully charming heroine, sexy-as-sin hero, and fabulously engaging mystery kept me turning pages into the wee hours of the morning!”

  —Julie Kenner

  “A sultry setting, a clever mystery, and strong, sparkling characters . . . Nancy Haddock delivers everything it takes to make a fan out of me!”

  —Jane Graves

  “La Vida Vampire is fun, fun, fun! Nancy Haddock’s fresh and sassy new voice enlivens a well-known genre, and her heroine is one of the most entertaining in years. Readers will enjoy the snappy dialogue, the irreverent tone, the fabulous setting, and the fascinating world. Wonderful!”

  —Kathleen Givens

  “I loved La Vida Vampire! Nancy Haddock has written a delightful blend of mystery and humor with a touch of romance . . . Haddock has moved to the top of my must-read list.”

  —Lorraine Heath

  “I loved it. Distinctive, amusing characters and a brilliant mystery make this one exciting ride. Vampires, ghosts, and shape-shifters all wrapped up in one fun, sexy story. I can’t wait for more! This is one vampire chick I’d love to hang out with.”

  —Candace Havens

  “Bright, charming, imaginative, romantic, sexy, and suspenseful.”

  —Joyce McLaughlin

  “One bite of this sassy story and you will be hooked!”

  —Romance Junkies

  “Funny, witty, and absolutely intriguing . . . A great debut!”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “This funny, clever novel is sure to hook readers and leave them wanting more.”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  Titles by Nancy Haddock

  LA VIDA VAMPIRE

  LAST VAMPIRE STANDING

  ALWAYS THE VAMPIRE

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2011 by Nancy Haddock.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without

  permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the

  author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition / May 2011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Haddock, Nancy.

  Always the vampire / Nancy Haddock.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-51428-3

  1. Vampires—Fiction. 2. Bridesmaids—Fiction. 3. Shapeshifting—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.A275A79 2011

  813′.6—dc22

  2010042083

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This is for my extended family.

  You know who you are,

  and I hope you know

  how very dear you are to me!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First, a belated but sincere shout-out to wonderful author and friend Sandy Blair, who came up with the title for my second book, Last Vampire Standing. Apologies again for the omission last time, Sandy!

  Thanks to my critique group and manuscript readers Lynne Smith (Lynn Michaels), Julie Benson, Sherry Winstead, and Thomas “Tommy” Kerper. They make my work better and my life brighter.

  Leis Pederson is my editor and a special kind of star in my galaxy, and Roberta Brown is an agent extraordinaire and dear friend. I’m blessed to know and work with them both!

  A mega thank-you to all the kind folks who assisted me with research. They include members of the City of St. Augustine government staff, the park rangers of the Castillo de San Marcos, and the officers of the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Department, the St. Augustine Police Department, and the St. Augustine Beach Police D
epartment. Everyone answered my questions with professionalism and humor. Any errors and/or embellishments are mine.

  I must include Elizabeth Topp and Nicole Ritsi of the Nisiotes Dance Troupe in my gratitude. In the midst of the annual Greek festival, they took the time to patiently answer my dance questions, and later demonstrated the fire dance. Awesome, ladies!

  I deeply appreciate my pals at Starbucks (Store 8484) for the caffeine and caring, and my friends at Barnes & Noble (Store 2796) for helping me ferret out books for fun and research. And to the ladies of Second Read Books, you have my heart for all you do and for all you are.

  Never last or least, my abiding gratitude goes to my friends and fans for their encouragement and support. Thank you for sharing your Light!

  ONE

  Maid of honor.

  That phrase may strike stark fear into the hearts of some women, but I’m not one of them.

  Okay, that’s partly because I’m a vampire. Not a scary one, mind you, but caterers and florists hop to when I’m around.

  Of course, it helps that the bride is my mentor and friend, and is usually cool under fire. As an interior designer and home-restoration specialist, Maggie O’Halloran has calmed dozens of fractious clients, from the picky to the pushy to the outright psycho. With that kind of experience, I can’t see her going bridezilla on me, no matter what the provocation.

  Last, I have a secret weapon. I’m locked and loaded with a ginormous binder filled with lists, notes, and phone numbers. Not to mention printouts of every maid of honor scrap of information I could find on the Internet and pages torn from bride magazines.

  Yep, I’m Francesca Melisenda Alejandra Marinelli, the Oldest City’s only vampire, now doing my first and likely last tour of duty as a maid of honor. As Maggie’s retired Army dad said, my mission was to make Maggie’s Victorian-themed wedding perfect.

  The only element of the wedding weekend that veered from the Victorian theme was the rehearsal dinner. Maggie refused to have one. Instead, she and Neil and those of the bridal party who wanted to join them would attend the first night of the annual Greek festival. Why the one-eighty on the Victorian theme? Because her first date with Neil had been at the festival. She was too sentimental to change her mind; no matter that Neil, her dad, and even I had tried to talk her out of it.

  But, hey, I had talked her out of bustles for the bridesmaid dresses, hadn’t I? Winning that skirmish was good enough for me.

  With less than three weeks until the wedding day, I collected my trusty maid of honor binder to head out the door for a meeting with Maggie. The dining room in her restored Victorian home served as Wedding Central, and we were sorting yet another pile of invitation RSVPs.

  Good thing I was leaving, because the perimeter alarm—the one Sam of Sam’s Security Systems was supposed to be fixing—suddenly blared to life yet again. With my vampire hyper-hearing, the darn thing shrieked in my skull, rattled my teeth, and threatened to deafen me.

  A streak of white tore past my feet on a beeline for the laundry room. Snowball—Saber’s cat—taking cover in the dirty-clothes basket.

  Me? I tore out the front door, slammed it on the worst of the noise, and tapped a sneakered foot on the cobblestone patio.

  “Saber,” I yelled to my ex-slayer sweetheart, who was “supervising” Sam’s fix-it job.

  Instead of Saber answering, Neil Benson popped his head around the corner of my carriage-house-cum-cottage.

  “What?” Neil bellowed back.

  “Turn. That. Volume. Down.”

  “Shut. The. Door.”

  “It is shut.”

  Neil, Maggie’s fiancé and my surfing buddy, trotted past my Polynesian-style bar with its tiki carvings, moved me aside, and eyed my door.

  “Hunh. That is loud.”

  “You think? Didn’t Saber tell Sam to fix the volume?”

  “Sam did kill the outside alarm.”

  “I noticed that. Otherwise Mr. Lister would be out here with a shotgun.”

  Hugh Lister was our over-the-jasmine-hedge next-door neighbor. He didn’t seem to like us in general, but when the outdoor siren had whooped, Lister had charged through the hedge, swearing the September afternoon blue.

  My system wasn’t even supposed to have an outside siren.

  “So where are Sam and Saber now?”

  Neil shrugged. “Sam adjusted the volume inside our place, then he and Saber made a run to the hardware store.”

  “Wait. Your place?” I whipped my head to glance across the lawn where Maggie’s home fronted the property. “Why are you running the alarm to the big house?”

  “Remember the sniper? Shooting at you from the oak tree out front? Waking up the neighborhood?”

  I recalled too well being shot at while Jo-Jo the Jester gave me a flying lesson in the shadows of our shared yard.

  “Point taken. Is the noise window-shattering loud at your place, too?”

  “No, but we don’t have to wake the dead.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “I’m underdead, Neil, and I’m going to do something evil to you one of these days.”

  “Right, Fresca,” he said with a cuff on my arm.

  Yes, Neil calls me Fresca. Having a soft-drink nickname is better than being called Cesspool, which is what Neil used to call me. At least Fresca rhymes with Cesca, short for my real name. My usually darling Deke Saber has another name for me. Which reminded me . . .

  “Neil, will you please, please, please tell Saber to disconnect the siren when he gets back? And leave it off until Sam’s ready to do a final test.”

  “Will do. Oh, and remember that when your alarm is set, so is ours. Having it on in the daytime is no problem. We’re gone most of the time anyway, but turn that thing off if you’ll be coming and going late at night.”

  “You got it.”

  He gestured at the binder in my arms. “You off to help Maggie with the wedding mail?”

  “And to go over plans for the bachelorette weekend. Do you have the valet parking under control? And the music? You remembered a Victorian wedding should feature classical music, right?”

  “Stop nagging. I’ve got it covered. Oh, but I think Maggie’s having second thoughts about those poofy things for the bridesmaid dresses.”

  “Poofy things?” I gulped. “The bustles?”

  He smirked as he trotted away.

  Hell’s freaking wedding bells.

  Sure I owed Maggie more than I could ever repay. If not for Maggie buying and restoring the house she and Neil now shared, I’d still be buried in the long-forgotten half basement underneath this very property. Maggie had unearthed me, taken me under her wing, and was now including me in the biggest day of her life.

  But if her big day included big bustles on the bridesmaid gowns? No, I’d just have to change her mind again.

  I sped across the lawn to Maggie’s back door, calling to her as I passed through the mudroom and into the kitchen.

  “I’m in here,” Maggie yelled back. “Walk softly, or you’ll topple my piles.”

  She looked up as I entered, and we shared a grin. We’d both dressed for the September heat, me wearing aqua shorts and a tank top with my hair in a frizzy ponytail, Maggie wearing green shorts and a white T-shirt. With the humidity high enough to drain a body faster than a starving vamp, thank goodness for arctic-level air-conditioning.

  Maggie’s grin turned rueful as she gestured at the dining table littered with stacks of replies, lists, and the bulging wedding-planner binder that matched mine. The few cards resting in the cardboard Regrets box didn’t cover the bottom of it. The piles in the Accepts box were ten inches high, and more haphazard stacks of unopened envelopes rested at Maggie’s fingertips.

  I carefully pulled out the chair on her right to prevent a paper slide.

  “You think I can cram ten more tables and a hundred more chairs in the backyard?” she asked on a sigh.

  “You have that many yeses for the reception? What happened to only half of the people you i
nvited accepting?”

  She snorted. “Obviously I underestimated.”

  “Maggie, you’re an interior design guru, and Neil’s a state anthropologist. With all the contacts between you, I’m not surprised at the responses. Don’t worry; we’ll deal,” I added, patting her hand. “The rental guy is holding double of everything for us, and we’ll order more food when we meet with the caterer again tomorrow.”

  Maggie turned her hand to grip mine. “What if we don’t have enough food? What do I do then?”

  “First, you’ll have plenty of food. The caterer swears people eat less when the service is buffet style.”

  “And if she’s wrong?”

  “Then I’ll put out the call to the Jag Queens and my bridge group. Daphne Dupree is doing your cakes anyway, and the rest of the gang will be happy to help with some last-minute hors d’oeuvres. Now, come on,” I said, extracting my hand. “Let’s open the new batch of RSVPs and get them recorded. Maybe they’ll all be regrets.”

  Maggie rolled her eyes, but we set to work. She read names while I checked them off the master list. The acceptances were accompanied by quiet groans, the regrets with little whoops, and the pile dwindled. Neil walked by, headed to the kitchen, and shook his head as Maggie slit open another envelope and chuckled.

  “You won’t believe this, but Jo-Jo’s coming.” She waved the small rectangle at me. “And he’s offered to entertain.”

  “Damn it to hell,” Neil swore, frozen at the kitchen threshold. “Tell me you did not invite that lame vampire comic.”