Excerpt of Night Born by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

"I've found you, you son of a bitch."

Danika Douglas hadn't stopped to think about whether touching a priceless painting might be committing museum sacrilege, or a crime. She'd been too immersed in the moment to care.

Here he was again. The same face she'd found in a Baroque period painting two days before. Exactly the same face.

Same wide brow and prominent, aristocratic features. Same penetrating blue eyes beneath the tangle of dark hair — here, seen only in profile, and in dashes of color and shadings, but the likeness was exact, give or take the hair style and clothes.

She had just won the bloodsucker lottery.

A telltale tingle of excitement flushed her cheeks and neck with heat. Shivers of apprehension chilled her back. It was always the same dichotomy of heat and cold clashing when her assumptions were correct. She might not yet have inherited her mother's ability to track the vampire in this painting with a Slayer's DNA-based, biologically built-in GPS system, but those powers were agonizingly inching toward her.

She felt him now, as if she had found him for real, and in person. Her gut reaction to his image was strong. His presence in the Renoir was like an icy breath on the back of her neck. She could almost smell him, beyond the aged oils of the artwork and the polished marble museum floors.

He smelled like . . . leather.

Like doom.