Flashlight and wrench in hand, she was crawling out from under the troupe’s huge touring bus when he first caught sight of her. She was small, almost childlike. At first he was certain she was, at most, a teenager, dressed in baggy overalls, her wealth of red-gold hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her face was grimy, smudged with oil and dirt. Then she turned slightly, and he could see high, firm breasts thrusting against the thin cotton top beneath the bib of her overalls.
Darius stared at her, entranced. Even in the night her red hair gleamed like flames. That he could tell her hair was red stunned him. Dark, predatory, immortal Carpathian male that he was, he had not seen colors, only black and white, in more centuries than he could count. He had not disclosed that information, his accompanying loss of emotion, to his younger sister, Desari, who remained, as she had for eons, sweet and compassionate and everything good that female Carpathians were. Everything that he was not. Desari depended on him, as did the others in their troupe, and he did not wish to distress her with the knowledge of how close he was to either facing the dawn-and his own destruction-or turning vampire, undead instead of immortal.
