Cunning woman, clever, treacherous. Aged with treachery, yet like a fine wine ready to tapped.
An anger mingled with lust and hunger not her own burned within Carolyn Stoddard.
Julia Hoffman had done this to her. Julia Hoffman had done this to both of them. She had to be hurt.
The outrage was almost like that of a betrayed lover wounded beyond the ability to think. Or a friend who’d dared to discover friendship again after being alone for too long, only to have it snatched away by scheming fingers. Fingers which she’d thought belonged to the friend, that first friend she’d revealed a little of her secret self to.
The rational part of Carolyn’s mind wondered at her feelings. Just as it wondered at the almost predatory lust she felt, gazing at the curve of Victoria Winters’s neck, the trembling of her lips. Innocent Vicki, who wouldn’t understand any of this. How could she? Carolyn herself didn’t understand it.
This was Barnabas burning within Carolyn’s blood, blood he’d tasted and used to invigorate himself. Carolyn was one with him now. He tingled within her skin, sizzled within her veins. Changing her. Turning her into a predator.
No. Carolyn Stoddard had always been a predator. All she had to do was think about Willie Loomis, of Joe Haskell to remember that. Barnabas had simply revealed her true nature to her.
The vampire had taken the human predator, overwhelmed her. As was natural. Now Carolyn was Barnabas’s predator. The victims she brought down, she brought down for both of them.
Carolyn Stoddard smiled a vulpine smile which would have made her own mother back away and her cousin run away screaming.
Once realizing this would have bothered her.
Now it just made her smile all the more broadly.