Life's Blood (Pulse Book 2) (PULSE Vampire Series) Read online

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  Life’s Blood

  PULSE 2

  Book 2

  kailin gow

  PRAISE FOR PULSE

  I devoured this book. From the moment I received the review copy in the mail, I couldn't put it down until I was finished. Mystery and romance clouded the beginning. The vampire hunks are more than sexy, they're complex. No wonder Kalina can't choose between them. I can see Kalina as a real teenager on the brink of adulthood. Her grief for Aaron's death felt real. Then her elation in finding Stuart, someone close to Aaron, who reminded her of Aaron, felt real. Her discovery of who she is felt real. Some of the situation was comical, especially sensitive topics (Kalina trying to deal with her hormones) was handled with a sense of humor. The ending is wonderful and I would not have guessed it. Again, Ms. Gow has shown an understanding of teenage girls and some of the issues they deal with in growing up. Boys, love, sex, school, friendships, family - she covers it all. It says in my copy PULSE is Book 1 of 5. I can't wait to read the entire series.

  Naya's Girls Night Out Book Picks

  I love this book. From the beginning, you are drawn in by the imagery and the emotions, the sense of longing in the characters as they meet. Right away, there is mystery and romance. The book begins in the rain as a vampire watches Kalina run from her car to the library. There is something very romantic yet primal about Kalina's first meeting with Jaegar, her dead ex-boyfriend's half-brother. Shortly after, Kalina meets Stuart, the other brother. Both brothers are vampires, as was Kalina's ex-boyfriend Aaron. The dialogue, rivalry between brothers, plot twists, and action is so well-planned and carried out, you can visualize this as a movie. If you love young adult vampire romance books with a strong kick-butt heroine, this book series is for you.

  Teen Book Reviewer

  Loved it! Very exciting storyline, can't wait for the next one....

  Ariana, early 20s.

  Pulse is fast paced and intriguing, the story has twists at every turn and the ending leaves you open mouthed and wanting more. Kailin did a wonderful job in creating this vampire world.

  Melissa Silva, The Bookshelf

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  Briony had to move to Wicked Woods, Massachusetts to live with her Great Aunt Sophie after her family disappears on vacation. The woods at the edge of Aunt Sophie’s inn are filled with secrets and inhabitants both seductive and deadly. Among them is a beautiful boy name Fallon who saves her one night in the woods. As Briony gets closer to Fallon, she learns he has a secret, as do most of the residents of Wicked Woods…

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  Life’s Blood

  PULSE 2

  Book 2

  kailin gow

  Life’s Blood (PULSE #2)

  Published by THE EDGE

  THE EDGE is an imprint of Sparklesoup LLC

  Copyright © 2010 Kailin Gow

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For information, please contact:

  THE EDGE at Sparklesoup

  P.O. Box 60834

  Irvine, CA 92602

  www.sparklesoup.com

  First Edition.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  ISBN: 1597489425

  ISBN: 978-1597489423

  DEDICATION

  This book series is dedicated to all the nameless volunteer blood donors, my doctor, and nurses at Las Colinas Medical Center in Texas who helped me pull through when I had suffered extreme blood loss, blacked out, and nearly hit my head on the floor. Your team gave me bags of blood for transfusion, which helped restore me to a level of safety.

  My body craved the blood to keep alive, yet the thought of having to receive the blood from others because my own body couldn't generate it fast enough, made me empathize with vampires like Jaegar and Stuart.

  When faced with death by blood loss, you realize how precious that blood in your veins and that beat in your heart are. Thank you blood donors around the world for providing this pulse for me and everyone who may at one point or another require your gift.

  Sincerely,

  Kailin

  Prologue

  There is a legend, whispered over campfires, etched out into the walls of caves. Its secrets lie hidden in the scrolls of the ancient Library of Alexandria, since laid to waste, and in the splendid mosaics of the palaces of kings. It has remained on the lips of wise men and in the memories of witches for centuries – a secret that treads at the furthest expanses of our imagination, and promises us deadly mysteries. The human defenses against it – the cross, the bulb of garlic, a sprinkling of holy water – at times seem to pale against the enormity of the enemy: the great terror that is signified by the word “vampire.”

  Young women have awoken shrieking from their beds at nights, dreaming of awakening shrieking from their graves. Young men have gone missing by moonlight, only to be seen again years later with the flickering of the night sky – with pale, smooth faces and teeth like spears. And then there are those who do not reawaken, the soul sapped from their eyes; these are the trails of bodies left behind, in the wake of vampires' lust.

  There are some who say vampires have more powers than the merely physical. They are impossibly beautiful, and with a single fixed gaze they can make even the most vigorous youth pray for the ecstasies of death at their hands. They need only to stare, to whisper to the human on whom they have set their wicked sights, and then the human is theirs – as completely theirs as if they have fallen into the deepest depths of love, with these creatures for whom there is no love.

  All these legends are true. Their marble skin; their pricked teeth – the danger in their eyes – all of this is true.

  But there are some vamp
ires – vampires with a particular strength, a particular goodness before turning – who live to regret their own cruelty, enacted as thoughtlessly as a predator seizing upon his prey. They deny the vampiric lore that they are, no longer being human, no longer governed by human laws; they long for kindness – they long for salvation.

  Some glimmer of salvation was found amid the splendors of Renaissance Florence. A vampire called Lorenzo, in a final mocking act at God, attempted to turn the priest Father Botticelli on the consecrated ground of the Duomo.

  But although he could sap Father Botticelli of his strength and of his blood, his soul had already been consecrated to God and Lorenzo could not take that. In the aftermath of his turning, Father Botticelli found that crosses could not affect him; holy water did not burn him. And – perhaps most importantly – he could still whisper the rites, and bless the communion wine.

  As all good Catholics know, according to the mysteries of transubstantiation, the communion wine becomes the Blood of Christ during the service. And – it came to light – if it were true that crosses and water, imbued with the most sacred powers of belief – could harm an evil vampire, so too was it true that the Blood of Christ could sustain a good one. And all those vampires who wished to avoid the taking of a human life participated in this strange mass.

  From the moment that word spread that Father Botticelli was able to produce what came to be known as il vino di vampiro - vampire wine – he was in danger, from vampires no more willing to accept a traitor to their ways of blood and death than they were to bear this affront without fighting back. The wine-drinking vampires – the bibenda – escorted Father Botticelli to safety; among them was Stuart Greystone, who put his family's centuries-old winery to use in the bottling and proliferation of vampire wine.

  And thus were a small, yet powerful group of vampires able to retain their humanity, at the cost of expressing the urges that were not only free and natural, but indeed overwhelming, to all vampires. With Stuart Greystone at the helm of Greystone Wineries, some vestige of human goodness was allowed to remain....

  But this is not the only legend surrounding vampires. Even legends have legends, and for centuries vampires have whispered among themselves – standing perched at gravestones, hidden behind the thresholds of palaces, feasting on corpses – of a story so powerful that it threatened the very essence of their shriveled afterlives.

  Life's Blood.

  It had begun in China (was it China? Some said Japan – others said Anatolia. But it was China, in the end.) A doctor, wise in the ways of herbs and medicines – as wise as any mere human could be – wished to experiment with vampires: to discover their essence, to counter their cruelty with those same powers, used for good. He captured one such vampire and experimented upon him, drawing vials of his blood and storing them in his laboratory – combining the blood and operating upon it in such a way that when he at last injected the blood into his veins, he experienced a few moments of the greatest euphoria he had ever known. He was able to run faster than the winds across the Mongolian Steppe; to race up walls; to jump from tree to tree like a long-tailed lemur, to break down doors with a simple brush of his wrist.

  Ten minutes later he died, his heart overwhelmed by the intensity bursting through it.

  His daughter was reported to have continued his work – a brilliant young woman who, if she had been a man, might have risen to the highest ranks of civil servant in the Empire. She mastered the formula; she discovered how it was that a human could contain within her veins vampire-blood, untempered by the cruelty of vampire magic; her blood became Life's-Blood.

  Legends sprang up around this mysterious Life's Blood, and its inventor. It was said that the woman had fallen in love with a French Vampire who came seeking her counsel – together they bore a child, with Life's Blood naturally running through her veins. It was said that a single drop of Life's Blood, when worn in a ring or amulet, was sufficient to allow a vampire to withstand the sun. It was said that drinking from a Life's Blood vessel was enough to render a vampire not only powerful, but invincible, until the end of time. And it was said that, to mirror that first encounter between the young Chinese girl and the French Vampire, that if the bearer of Life's Blood were to fall in love with a vampire, and were to give her blood freely to him, then such a vampire would be given the greatest of gifts – or the most terrible of curses. He would become human again.

  The Life's Blood vanished over time. There were rumors of carriers every few centuries, but they were quickly silenced by time and space.

  And then there was a baby girl. A girl adopted from an orphanage in Nepal by a pair of missionary doctors, who took her back with them to the sunny wine country of Rutherford, California, and raised her until their deaths – a single improvised-explosive device in Afghanistan. She grew strong and brave, with legs like a colt and skin the color of milky coffee – her eyes French; her lips Chinese, her cheekbones German, her hair Italian – her body telling the story of a lineage of legends, and secrets, and power.

  It was only when another winemaker, Aaron Greystone, caught sight of her – which he smelled within her blood a scent that had driven vampires mad for centuries – that he knew who she was.

  She was the carrier.

  She was the legend.

  It was only three months after Aaron's death, after a six-month romance between them, that Aaron's two half-brothers, Stuart and Jaegar Greystone, visited Kalina and told her the truth.

  And she knew, within her blood, that they were right.

  And she knew that nothing would be the same again.

  Chapter 1

  The guards marched Kalina down the long hall of the villa. The windows had all uniformly been shuttered or painted black to keep out the light; even at the height of day there was nothing here but candlelight to allow her to see.

  “Now now, missy,” said one of the guards. “We'll see what Octavius wants with you!” He snickered; she could glimpse the shine of his fangs even in the flickering candlelight. “He's one lucky vampire, he is.”

  “Don't you get stroppy with Octavius; he'll turn you into breakfast before you can even scream!” The second guard leered at her with black eyes – eyes devoid of soul, devoid of sense. She shuddered.

  I wish to speak to Octavius in private,” she said, trying not to let her voice tremble too much.

  The guard gave her a significant look. “Speak. Right.”

  “In private!” The other guard laughed, drawing out the joke until his companion's grin had soured into a glower.

  They led her down the hall into the bedroom. It was a sumptuous room – decorated as Kalina imagined the villas of the Renaissance age must have been – Romanesque arches denoting doorways, heavy white gauzy curtains over windows she knew had been boarded shut. A fresco was painted over the headboard of the bed.

  She sat down, feeling her skin sink into the silky white sheets.

  She had to put her plan together. She had bought a little time – convincing Octavius that she wasn't the Life's Blood after all, putting just enough doubt into his mind that he wanted to talk to her before he...no, she couldn't think about that now. He knew it. She knew it. If he drank from her without being certain she was the Life's Blood, if he were unable to convince her to love him freely – and she would never, never love him freely, he would lose his hope of being human forever. She had put doubt into Octavius’ mind that she was a virgin – she knew the legend as well as he did. If he drank from her after she had ceased to be a virgin, her blood would turn him not into a human, but into a monster as horrifying as invincible. And for all the cruelty in Octavius’ eyes – for all his anger and rage – she knew he wouldn't want that.

  He wanted what all vampires wanted – whether they admitted it to themselves or not – whether they scoffed at the idea or publicly begged for it: to be human again.

  He couldn't risk it.

  She curled up into the bed, closing her eyes. Her thoughts drifted first to Stuart, then to Ja
egar, back and forth again so quickly until she felt as if she were viewing a composite: Stuart's eyes, Jaegar's lips – their beauty melding together into a single image of the man she loved. They had both been so kind to her – their love twinned with their loyalty to their dead brother – and in return she had grown to love them. She loved Stuart's quiet strength, his melancholy, and his tense efforts to overcome his vampiric nature. And yet – there was Jaegar....

  She thought back to the events of the past few weeks. It had all seemed so easy before then; her life was planned out for her. She had always been bound for success – voted “Most Likely to Succeed” in every student poll for the yearbook. She hadn't been anything special, she knew that. But she'd always worked hard, harder than anyone else. She'd spent hours training to make the cheerleading squad, forcing her naturally slender frame to become hard and muscular, lean and taunt. She'd spent just as many hours poring over her school books, doing every extra credit assignment and optional reading to make sure that the grades that dotted her report card were all an uniform line of “A's.” She was careful; she was strong. But she'd never thought she was anything special. Not until Aaron's death.