Tonight, his job was blueprints. I would need him to draw me a map of the entire inside of the skyscraper, everything he had seen, from memory. I knew that they would have cameras everywhere, and it would be far too suspicious for him to be caught taking photos of any part of the building that he was not being paid to renovate.
The time passed achingly slow. I sat in the hospital, watching over his friend as I had promised to do.
Terrance had been in a medically induced coma, which was something I couldn’t wrap my head around for the life of me. Once again, it was a reminder of how fragile humans were.
Which led me to the inevitable thought that Ryker was just as fragile. He could be killed just as easily, captured just as easily.
I pushed the thoughts out of my mind.
After what felt like an eternity, which was really saying something when it came from someone who lived for an eternity, Ryker was back.
The ruse had worked, and together, we poured over blueprints until long into the night. This went on for days until finally, the plan was formed, and we were ready to execute it.
I wouldn’t kill my old master in a ridiculous blaze of glory. I wouldn’t go in with guns blazing and hell to pay. I would kill him the old way, my way, in the quiet of night like a true assassin. It was a death far better than what he deserved, but since he forced me to be the person I am, it was the most fitting death I could think of.
Three more days passed with us checking over plans, double checking blueprints, and watching Ryker worry over his friend’s bedside.
Terrance would live, but what quality of life he would have and how long it would take him to get to that was a piece of knowledge that was beyond me and something I would never venture to guess at.
“It’s time.” I nodded to Ryker as the sun went down on a dreary Monday. As the humans liked to say, I ‘wasn’t getting any younger,’ and I couldn’t wait any longer to reach my destiny.
Once Genesis was dead, I would be freed from the mental cage I had placed myself in since escaping the assassins.
The night was dark and cold, perfect for death, and Ryker and I walked hand in hand, wearing identical black bags filled with identical weapons. Though I planned to be in and out like a thief in the night, not preparing for a fight would be a fatal mistake.
Up ahead, Genesis’s building loomed like a great horn of a demon, cutting through cloud and sky. His greed and deadly ambition, like his building, would have slashed the moon in half if only they could have reached just a bit higher.
For all of the horrible things that happened in the assassin’s guild, when they realized just how Genesis was receiving his young new recruits, that they weren’t in fact sold to him or freely given by their parents, the guild cast him out. He would have been killed himself if he hadn’t already amassed an army of loyal assassins who helped him escape his fate.
All brainwashed children I assumed, stolen from home and taught to love and be loyal to only him just as I had. No matter, though. His army couldn’t protect him forever, not when so many wanted to kill him.
Over the years since his escape, almost all of his once loyal followers had woken up to his deception and left him. Now, he had only a small army left by his side, and tonight I planned to make it past all of them because I had always been the best of them.
Ryker used a key he had stolen during work to break us into the recording room where a lone security guard watched all of the cameras during the night.
Coming up behind him, I slit his throat quickly, and Ryker took his seat. The headphones the guard had been wearing were placed on the control panel where Ryker could hear from the other guards if he needed to, and he donned his own set of earphones that linked with a pair I wore myself.
He would guide me through the building by watching me on the screens and keeping me away from other guards.
I had to admit, as much as I wanted to hate having a mate, having a partner in a situation like this did come in handy.
With a quick kiss, I was out the door faster than his human eyes could follow.
He led me up the stairs because the elevator was too risky. We couldn’t predict and had no control over who might decide to walk along the hallway at the same time I hit the right floor or who would hear the elevator moving and question it.
Being a vampire kept me from being winded even as I ran up more than sixty floors.
Only once did I have to stop my ascent because a guard, who apparently took his job very seriously, decided to check the stairwell just in case. Good man.
Too bad he worked for a scum lord.
When I got to the top of the stairs, the fight was inevitable. Five guards stood on this floor, and in order to kill Genesis at my own discretion and enjoy taking as long as I wanted to, I would have to kill all of them or risk one of them coming to check on him.
Ryker led me safely through the stairwell and almost entirely up to the first guard. He was leaning against the wall behind him, smoking a cigarette and texting someone on his phone.
I crouched low and came around the corner. Just as he noticed me, I stood up, bringing my blade with me, right underneath his chin and into his skull. I caught the body before he crumpled to the floor and moved it into a room that was currently empty.
Two more guards sat playing cards right outside the elevator shaft. Apparently, they had set up shop while I was running stairs. One more good reason to never take an elevator.
There was no good way to sneak up to them, according to Ryker, so I would have to go with the next best thing: I clicked the silencer onto the barrel of my gun, and in two shots, they were both slumped over, bleeding onto their poker chips.
I left their bodies because I had two more to go, and neither of them were at risk of stumbling across these two.
Silently, I stood flush against a wall, waiting for a man to come around a corner. To me, it felt like too long to wait, but Ryker’s voice in my ear calmed my nerves and gave me patience.
My sword also stood flush against the wall, and when he rounded, I simply moved it out farther so that he walked right into it, impaling himself. Easiest death an assassin could ask for.
Last one, I reminded myself, growing restless.
Normally, it wouldn’t be difficult for me to stay this stealthy for hours on end, but when I was faced with the man who I had dedicated my life to hunting, and he was only a few feet away from me, being silent was a challenge.
I didn’t have the patience to sneak up behind the last guard. I was too tightly wound, so I took out my trusty silencer piece and nailed him in the back of the head as he walked away from me.
Ryker whispered congratulations and words of encouragement into my ear, and while I thought I would cringe from such an emotional display, in all honesty, I found myself enjoying it.
He was turning me into a softy, one sweet southern word at a time.
At last, I faced the door to my prey.
It wasn’t locked, and there was no keypad outside of it. Why would there be with a building full of security? All that stood between me and him was the turn of a knob.
Taking a deep breath, I turned that knob and stealthily made my way into the room. Genesis slept in the middle of a massive fourposter bed, and for a moment, I simply watched his chest rise and fall with the calmness of sleep.
These would be some of the last breaths he ever took.
A tear slid from my eye, and as I wiped it away, I wondered why it was there in the first place.
I sat on the bed, my sword against his neck, and the moment the cold steel touched his flesh, his black eyes opened wide.
He didn’t scream when he saw my face, didn’t try to call for help or reach out for a phone. He simply blinked slowly a few times and then nodded at me as if greeting an old friend.
Perhaps I was an old friend to him, and perhaps he was one to me as well. That could explain the very peculiar appearance of the tear.
“You’re here to kill me,” he stated, not asking
.
I nodded my head, my voice suddenly missing from my throat.
“You made it past everyone inside. You must be very proud.” He smiled at me like a father would a daughter. “You always were one of the best, you know?”
“I know.” I nodded, and felt another wayward tear though this time I did not move to strike it away.
“You’re angry because I took you from your family.” He looked down at his hands but didn’t seem to feel ashamed. “Everyone is. The guild even dismissed me because of it. No one can deny what a knack I have for picking the best, though. And yes, I could have left you with your family in Vietnam. I could have let you grow up to be a housewife or seamstress or something else that would have been a complete and total waste of your talent, but that isn’t why the guild hired me. They hired me because with my magic, I could find the best people in the world to grow and become the best assassins in the world. They had to have known what I was doing, but they overlooked it because of my success rate. Only when so many of you turned your backs on us, and they couldn’t avoid the mess anymore, did they begin to care and turn the tables on me.”
“That’s a very sad story,” I said and nodded slowly. “Unfortunately for you, someone taught me how to keep my emotions out of my kills. I have thought about this moment in over a hundred different ways, and at the end of each one, I still sentence you to death.”
“You always were the best.” He reached out and took my hand then planted a soft kiss on the palm. “If it had to be someone, I’m glad it’s you and not some back alley Reaper.”
“Any last words?” I asked, and another tear fell.
“Thank you for crying for me.” He kissed my hand again. “Thank you for coming for me and being the one to end my life. While it may seem like I’m trying to dissuade you, I’m not. I truly mean only to give thanks, and I hope that when I’m long past and your anger is faded, you can see that what I did was for the greater good. And maybe one day, you’ll stand over my head stone with a small thank you of your own for me.”
“Maybe one day,” I agreed, not quite sure if it would ever happen. “Goodbye, Genesis.”
“Goodbye, darling.” He closed his eyes and smiled.
The blade slashed deep and hard, almost severing his neck completely from his shoulders. He was gone in seconds, and I sat to watch the whole time. Something inside me felt like I owed him that.
When the deed was done and I was ready to walk away, my body moved, but my head stayed in a fog. When I reached the bottom of the stairs and then the monitor room, Ryker was waiting with open arms.
“Do you want to kill them all?” he asked, thinking that inflicting more pain might pull me out of my stupor.
“I just want to get out of here.” I hugged him back tightly and realized I was genuinely happy that he had come and that I had someone I could lean on through this.
“Then let’s get the hell out of here.” He kissed my forehead, and I didn’t hate it.
As silently as we came, we left and were blocks away before an alarm sounded that I recognized to be the one letting everyone know there was an emergency.
We had made it out alive because we had worked together, just like with the witches. In the short amount of time that we had been in each other’s lives, we had gone through an insane whirlwind adventure and came out of it for the better.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked as we walked away in the same direction we had come, hand in hand.
“Us and this psycho adventure that we’re on.” I sighed, half wondering if witches or assassins were going to jump out of the woodwork to kill us just as we thought we were escaping.
“And it’s not over yet.” He smirked down at me, and my stomach did a belly flop. “Don’t forget you owe me a wedding.”
I made a gagging noise, but he ignored it.
“I haven’t forgotten, but I’m not wearing white.” I elbowed him in the ribs. The wedding itself would be about as traditional as he was going to get from me.
“I don’t care if you don’t wear anything at all as long as you say the words ‘I do,’ he whispered and pulled me in to a kiss.
This time though, it wasn’t just any kiss. It was a kiss for our future and our love, and as much as I had hated all of that in the beginning, I knew that I needed it now and, from this point on, wouldn’t be able to live without it.
This kiss and this man were everything to me now.
* 3 months later *
“I’m never wearing a dress again,” I growled low as Ryker met me at the bride and groom’s table.
“That would be a crime against humanity,” he whispered against my lips then kissed me softly.
As we pulled apart, we posed for another photo from another of his mother’s hoard of photographers she had hired. The woman was sweet as pie, but she really may have been trying to kill me via wedding bliss.
Ahead of us was a table roped off for those who had stood in the wedding, all people I didn’t know except for Terrance. We had waited to have this wedding until he was well enough to leave the hospital.
Just as the doctors feared, they were able to remove the scars only so far, and while none of the humans here were able to see them, they shone as brightly to me as the florescent lights above us.
I gave him a small smile, and he nodded back coldly.
He wasn’t the man he was before the witches found him, and Ryker feared that he might never go back to being himself again. It’s not as if there were human therapists who would sit and listen to his claims of being abducted by witches and possessed by demons without locking him away somewhere.
“He’s going to be okay.” I looked over and saw the worry in Ryker’s eyes.
“I’m just glad I have you now to go through life with. I wish I could say the same for him,” he said, nodding to his friend, and for a moment, Terrance’s expression softened.
“There you are!” Ryker’s mother had found me. “You really must have some of my home made peach cobbler.”
“Oh, I did have a piece,” I lied and smiled the most politely I could muster, which probably made me look like an axe murderer. “I couldn’t possibly have another.”
“Of course you could, sugar. You don’t weigh but a thing! Those tiny little bird bones of yours…” She smiled brightly and flopped an enormous piece of cobbler onto my plate.
“Dragon bones,” I corrected, enjoying the confused look on her face. “I’m made of dragon bones.”
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