Staking Claims - Emma Cole

Emma sags against the doorframe of the Crimson Fang Club. Blood trickles cold down her arm to drip off her fingertips, and the left leg of her jeans is soaked, leaving a dark puddle on the stained cement step, shining wetly under the bright red and white neon lights.   She’s the proud new owner of a coven base in Westwood, LA, and she’s got the damage to prove it.
Emma’s barely two years fledged, so to have won against Corbin, the vamp who was holding the building is impressive in its own right. The club sits on the line between two larger covens, and has successfully held its ground against both so far.
Then again, Emma is only one ‘generation’ removed from one of the First Circle, the most powerful vampires in the world. It wasn’t easy, but she’d conclusively asserted her dominance and wrested control of the club from its former owner. He’s not dead, but Emma will be surprised if one of the other covens doesn’t get him before morning. With no safe haven left, he’s easy prey.
He’d underestimated her, and paid dearly for it. But Emma can’t bring herself to care. The club was a front for a rampant illegal hosting ring, and Emma knows of at least one turning that happened here in the past week.
Vamps showing up with human partners, the shadowy upstairs rooms only accessible by mentioning a special code word to the bartender, bodies dumped in alleys just far enough away to throw off suspicion.
The signs were obvious, at least to a former hunter who spent years breaking up host parties just like it.
Okay, so maybe she should have taken the tip to Chimera and let the real hunters handle it. But the chance to take out a hosting ring and claim her own territory in one fell swoop was too good to pass up.
There was no question that the open coven she’d joined in Chinatown would have let her stay indefinitely. But Emma has bigger goals than just surviving her un-life in the shadows. And thanks to her connections at Chimera, she stands a chance of achieving them.
But in order to do that, she has to survive tonight.
While it’s true that the only way to actually kill a vampire is with a stake to the heart, if she goes too much longer at the rate she’s losing blood, she’ll slip into a coma, with the only way out being fed fresh blood. It’s a fate as good as death if she’s found by any other vampires now.
She stumbles into the club, empty now that Corbin’s coven has scattered, and reaches behind the coat rack to the spot where she stashed a backpack before she walked in to challenge the vampire.
She promised herself she’d never do it again. That she was done drinking human blood. But she has to heal, and only genuine human blood will do the trick. Which is why she made a brief stop at the local hospital before coming to the club tonight. She’s not an idiot. She knew she’d need something after the fight. And she’d rather not jump an innocent passer-by and hope she has enough restraint to avoid bleeding them dry.
She pulls out the lukewarm blood-bank packets. She stole the three most common types, just a single bag of each. Still, the guilt tears at her stomach like the claw gashes across her side. She tears open the first at a corner and drinks every drop she can, careful not to spill.
She can feel the wounds on her chest and arms knitting themselves together, and the gash across her cheek closes, tugging painfully at the corner of her lip. She opens the second bag and repeats the process, feeling her stomach and leg gashes closing as well, the deep wounds vanishing as if they were never there.
She shoves the third packet of blood into the fridge behind the bar. She’ll use it if she needs it, but for now, she’s going to wait and see how well the two first packets do their job. She drags a chair out from one of the tables and pours herself a bourbon with synth-blood from the bottles behind the counter.
Light spills across the bar, the moon tearing free of the gloomy clouds that have hung over the city all night. Emma looks up at the bright gleam, the closest thing to sunlight she’ll see again, and knows exactly what she’s going to call this club from now on.
The Luna.