Shadow Dancers

By Shirley Howell

Shadow Dancers is a vampire taleno werewolves, no zombies, no witches. Just a small clan of vampires who enjoy residing in colorful, exotic Miami and who are hopelessly addicted to all twenty-first-century technologysmartphones, tablets, computers, flat-screen TVs, and so on. When radiation from super solar flares starts killing them, the clans only hope for survival is a young woman who possesses blood with healing and protective properties. Things grow complicated when Rodrigo, the vampire assigned to watch the young woman, begins to develop feelings for her. After centuries of living in the shadows, the clan is forced to integrate with the human community for help and protection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984526717

Shirley Howell

The Author was born & lived on Long Island NY until she married & moved to Fort Lauderdale Florida where she has a successful career in nursing . She now lives in Orlando near family & has started a new career writing.

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Copyright © 2018 by Shirley Howell.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2018905490

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-9845-2673-1

             Softcover     978-1-9845-2672-4

             eBook           978-1-9845-2671-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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 any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 05/11/2018

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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Thank you to Michael Homs and David Howell for all their support and encouragement.

They said Go for it, we know you can do it.

Contents

Chapter 1 - The Watcher

Chapter 2 - The Clan

Chapter 3 - The Residence

Chapter 4 - Departure from the Norm

Chapter 5 - The Incident

Chapter 6 - The Save

Chapter 7 - The Saturday Detective

Chapter 8 - The Club

Chapter 9 - The Difference

Chapter 10 - Oh Brother!

Chapter 11 - The Meeting

Chapter 12 - The Conversation

Chapter 13 - The Blood Drive

Chapter 14 - Dinner Darling

Chapter 15 - Sunshine

Chapter 16 - Gamer Girls

Chapter 17 - The House Call

Chapter 18 - Losing Friends and Finding Others

Chapter 19 - The Mad Weeks

Chapter 20 - Death and Depravity

Chapter 21 - Fire

Chapter 22 - The Culprit

Chapter 23 - Revenge

Chapter 24 - The Elder

Chapter 25 - The Remodeling

Chapter 26 - The Scavenger Club

Chapter 27 - The Grand Opening

Chapter 28 - The Beat Goes On

Chapter 29 - The Drug Dealer

Chapter 30 - The Old Detective Rises Again

Epilogue

Chapter 1

The Watcher

It was a beautiful, early, sunny morning in Miami, and Rodrigo was standing in the bustling crowd, watching the girl across the street. He didn’t quite know why. She didn’t look exceptional—just an average pretty young girl—but she had to be very special to his brethren, because they wanted her watched and protected at all costs. A strange malady had befallen the vampire community of late. For beings who couldn’t die, they suddenly were. Not really dying but weakening and shriveling up, until almost transparent, and then falling to pieces like dry leaves, crumbling to dust, and gone. Vampires were usually scary, but this malady had them scared.

It had started in Europe with the oldest ones first. They were supposed to be the wisest and strongest, but they had become the most vulnerable. No one seemed to know why. The only thing they knew was this had happened many centuries before. Some elders at that time had blamed it on what they thought were strange signs from the sun, which today were called sunspots. They hadn’t known at that time what the malady was exactly, but they’d known the sun had something to do with it. Even when they were inside and under cover, safe from the light, some of the damaging radiation had managed to seep in. Only those residing very deep underground had survived. They had managed to rebuild the vampire population, but now, the malady was back. The sun’s coronal mass ejections (CMEs), also called solar flares, had become extraordinarily large, and the extra radiation was damaging the vampire world. This type of destructive radiation didn’t happen with every ejection, but when it did, it started a deterioration that put the whole vampire world in peril. Humans, for some strange reason, seemed to be immune, but then, they wore sunglasses and high-power sunscreen. Plus their skin was much thicker. Though Rodrigo did not know why he was watching the girl, he did know why he had been chosen to be this watcher; he among his peers was the only vampire able to go out in daylight, although only in the early morning or at dusk—never at high noon. He was surprisingly tall and thin for a Mayan, but with straight, jet-black hair, lightly tan skin, and high cheekbones, he blended into the multicultural, crowded streets of the city very well. This allowed him to follow the girl to the breakfast bar in the morning and shopping after work. He could follow her anywhere as long as the light was dim and there was a crowd.

The girl, Ellenora Des Coin, was a light-skinned, blue-eyed blonde of average height and weight. She always dressed professionally in a fashionable pantsuit and low stacked heels for walking around the office. Her hair was styled in a tight bun, and her glasses were always the latest designer frames. She had now gone into the building where she worked for a large medical complex. With his superior vampire vision and hearing, Rodrigo could see and hear her even as she walked all the way down the hall to her offices. He overheard her tell a coworker she had brought her lunch, so he would not need to return until early evening, when she left for home. In the meantime, he would report to his elder, the leader of the group.

In the short time Rodrigo had been observing this girl, she hadn’t done much. She led a quiet life. She went to work in the morning and home afterward, ate a small, healthy dinner, and sometimes watched TV. Her evenings were mostly spent reading and listening to soft music. She was a voracious reader; her apartment had books everywhere. She didn’t have a boyfriend, although she did have many friends. Her closest friend was Susan, a coworker who lived upstairs. Susan had a boyfriend named Steve, and Rodrigo could always hear the grunts and moans of their sexual pleasures coming from their apartment; this was a time when heightened hearing could be frustrating. He would wait until Ellenora was settled in bed for the night, then leave, coming back in the early morning when the lovers were asleep.

Twice a month on Friday nights, the three friends would go to a club, where they would meet others for a special evening. Rodrigo would always follow the three, observing his charge as she changed from day to night. Ellenora would wear her hair down, discard her glasses, and exchange her professional wardrobe for high heels, jeans, and colorful blouses. The three friends always took a taxi home around two or three in the morning. Ellenora—or Ellie, as they sometimes called her—would go to her apartment. The lovers would go up to Susan’s place, kissing and fondling each other all the way in the elevator to the upper floor, where they would spend the rest of the night rutting like wildcats. Once Ellenora was safely in bed and settled, Rodrigo would leave as quickly as possible, until the following morning when his watch began again. It was the same routine, rarely varying, and he wondered how much longer it would go on.

Chapter 2

The Clan

Once Ellenora was safe in bed for the night, Rodrigo returned to his clan to report another uneventful day, only to find his brethren in an uproar. There was good news, and there was bad news.

The bad news was that the younger vampires had begun to question the chain of command now that their elder had started to slowly fade. Their small clan had only ten members now. The solar sickness had caused two members to fade away already, and, in addition to their elder, Gaius and Leo were also shrinking a little more every day. A small group could go virtually undetected in the hostile human environment. Rodrigo had always tried to stay out of these political squabbles, as they usually caused more problems than they cured. At this time, he was happy to have his orders to watch the girl.

The good news was that, in Switzerland up in the mountains, the vampire community had found another young girl like Ellenora. The elder explained that neither girl drank alcohol or smoked; they ate well, were healthy, and had the same strange blood, which was very important. The vampires in Switzerland had taken a small amount of this girl’s blood while she was sleeping and given it to their withering elder. It hadn’t cured him, but it had slowed his deterioration. His condition was still tenuous but hadn’t worsened. Perhaps with today’s advanced medicine, they could at least find a vaccine for this lethal malady. They had tried to make a vaccine once using a human boy’s blood, but it hadn’t worked at all. There was something about the female chromosomes that worked where the male chromosomes did not. Both girls seemed to have a mysterious extra molecule in their blood that made it special, so this new girl discovered in Switzerland was being watched and protected the same as Ellenora. Willem, the vampires’ medical adviser, found all these new discoveries and developments intriguing and wanted both the girls protected until he could find a way to use their blood to help the vampires.

The vampires had discovered Ellenora when she had accidently cut herself on a broken water glass while having dinner one night at a small restaurant. The waitress, Sabine, was a vampire, and with her enhanced vision, she had noticed that Ellenoras blood was different. It had seemed to shimmer. Sabine had put the blood-drenched napkin used to stop the bleeding in a plastic bag and brought it to the elder. It hadn’t been enough to stop him fading, but the blood’s odd structure had significantly slowed the progression of the illness. More of Ellenoras blood would be needed, but they had to get it without harming her. Now Rodrigo understood why this girl in his care was so important to his community and why her safety was essential.

If there was another girl in Switzerland, though, there might be more. Having more than one girl was a type of protection that would make quarreling over Ellenoras blood unnecessary. To the vampires, a war among the clans would be devastating. A war centuries before had almost wiped out the clans in Germany. Rodrigo hadn’t been there but had heard the story from other elders. It was horrible when immortals warred on each other, and humans were always casualties. He was glad to be the one protecting Ellenora; she was slowly becoming more precious to him with every day.

Chapter 3

The Residence

The clan’s home was a large two-story house built in the late 1940s on a little hill that was really just a raised outcropping of coral covered with soil. An eccentric heir to a railroad fortune had built the Palm Beach–style house of Florida pine and cypress, two woods that were now nonexistent. The exterior of the house was beautiful—all white stucco and meticulously kept. Inside, it was wood paneled with six bedrooms upstairs. Downstairs, the large dining room looked more like a boardroom with five padded chairs on each side of a long table. At the head of the table was a large glided chair on a slightly raised platform for the elder. Across the hall was a sumptuous living room, and in the center of the house was a wide staircase in a hall that had a cathedral ceiling. The kitchen and pantry were in the back. At one end of the house was a garage big enough for the original owner’s collection of vehicles. The house sat on a ten-acre piece of property that was fenced in with a high wrought iron fence on two sides and the bay on the other two sides. In one corner, about an acre and a half was devoted to a small stand of trees with walking paths and benches for quiet relaxation. Being built on solid coral, the house was one of the few in Florida that could have a wine cellar and a small basement. The original owner had never married, but he had lived a wild life. The beautiful home had almost been destroyed inside from the parties and the hooligans who had spent time there.

By the late 1970s, the aged owner had died, his entire fortune spent on women, gambling, and alcohol, and the house had been foreclosed on for taxes. A mysterious group called the Eclipse Foundation had purchased it through a bank in the Cayman Islands, and the property was still owned by the same group today. When the house was built, it had been in the wilderness, but the city had grown to encompass the property, making it fabulously valuable. Many real estate people and land developers had tried to buy it, but they always received a resounding no. Then things started to happen to the most aggressive bidders—strange accidents, fires, and financial disasters—to the point where the house gained the reputation of being cursed. The final blow came when one particularly nasty developer boasted he