by Sophie Stern
Then again, this is what I signed up for.
“Got it,” I think to myself. I can’t exactly speak with my gas mask on, so I don’t bother trying. Daisy will figure out what’s going on if she hasn’t already. She’s an expert at monitoring things remotely, so she probably already knows about the gas and is going everything she can to turn it off.
I don’t slow down when I go around the corner where the monsters are. Instead, I rush around the edge of the wall and instantly start throwing punches. I block one of the vamps and the other one I kick between the legs. They might be undead, but they still have balls, and that doesn’t feel good for anyone.
One is down for the count and I hit the other one again. I slam my palm into his nose and fight the wave of nausea that washes over me when I hear a solid crack. Gross. He’s holding some sort of rod, like an old-school night stick, and I take it and keep running. I go around another corner and then another.
I make it back to the empty room where I first entered. I can hear the guards running toward the treasure room. I have no idea how long it’s going to take them to find me, but something tells me it’s not going to be very long at all. I take a quick second to bag the knife, shoving it deep in my sack. It’s more of a shoulder bag, really, and I make sure the strap is securely in place.
Then I take off my mask and shades and shove them in the bag, too, along with the night stick. I zip the bag up, making sure it’s tightly closed, and I then I take the most important thing of all: a deep breath.
“You can do this,” I whisper.
“You can,” Daisy echoes. “But you need to move. Now.”
I exit the building and carefully close the door behind me. Then I start walking swiftly toward the main road, but I don’t run. I can’t risk that. If they don’t know who I am and they can’t locate me, then I’ll be able to easily blend into a crowd, which is what I’m hoping for. I move silently, quickly, away from the Mountain. I need to get back to Daisy so we can get this job over and done with.
I’m almost back to where Daisy is hiding with our transport when I hear yelling. Shouting. Instantly, I break into a run, but I needn’t have bothered. It’s not me they’re after. I stop when I see two of the vampire guards from the Mountain beating the shit out of some guy. They’re in an alley to my left and I stand at the entrance, looking at them from the shadows. They don’t even see me.
I know they work in the large building I’m running from because of their distinct uniforms. The red-and-gold coloring doesn’t look good on the vamps, but they wear those jackets with pride. Who the fuck knows why? They’re ugly. Besides, Derek hasn’t done a single damn thing for this city that should give anyone pride.
No one should be proud of what he’s done.
“Hey!” I shout before I have time to think. I shouldn’t bother trying to save this dude, but really? What the fuck are these vamps doing? They don’t have the right to hurt anyone, much less an unwilling victim who hasn’t done anything to them.
The reality is that I don’t know this guy.
Maybe he has done something.
Maybe I haven’t got a fucking clue.
But I’m more than happy to stop and take twenty seconds to chase these monsters away. I’ve had my life saved before and let me tell you: there’s nothing quite as wonderful. Honestly. Having someone who steps on your behalf and defends you even though it’s deadly? There’s no comparison.
Besides, vampires are assholes.
“Leave him alone!” I shout.
Daisy lets off a slew of expletives in my ear, but I ignore her entirely. I’ve gotten pretty good at blocking out the voices in my head over the past few years. Adding one more to the list doesn’t bother me. Daisy is a sweetheart, but she’s also a dreamer. She’s crazy if she thinks I’m about to let this guy be killed by vamps right in front of me.
Instantly, the vamps stop what they’re doing and run at me. The guy doesn’t make a move to escape. Fuck. He’s in a bad way. Hopefully he’s not already dead. I punch one of the vamps in the face and kick the other one, but it doesn’t make much of a difference.
“You can’t fight them! Run!” Daisy’s voice is growing more and more shrill, but I don’t care.
“Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” I growl. I throw another kick and dodge a punch from one of them. One of them grabs me from behind and I thrust my elbow down and back, getting him in the stomach. He loosens his grip enough for me to break free.
Then I remember the knife.
I yank it from my bag and without thinking too much, I shove it deep into one of their stomachs. Instantly, the vamp falls over. Before the other one can respond, I repeat the action, killing him, too. They both drop dead at my feet.
I stare at the knife.
“What the fuck did you just do?” Daisy is screaming and I can’t think. I tap a button on my wristband and shut off the sounds.
“Think, Amy, think,” I say. I shove the weapon back in my bag. How can I make the most of this situation? There is no fucking way I’m getting caught with two dead vamp bodies, so I pull them slowly out of sight from the road. I glance over at the guy.
“Thanks,” he whispers weakly.
“Good, so you aren’t dead,” I say.
“Ha,” he says. “Not yet,” but I can tell he’s not going to last very long if I don’t get him some sort of help. I hurry to him.
“Where are you hurt?” I ask.
“I’m okay,” he says. “They didn’t bite me.”
“Did they tag you?” The vampires have gotten sneakier and sneakier. Now if they don’t kill you, they might tag you. They’ll insert a microchip in your body and then follow you wherever you go. This is how they find where you live. This is how they find your family. This is how they find everything.
This is how they take us out.
“No.”
“Then let’s go.”
“Wait,” the man motions toward the vampire bodies.
“They’re dead,” I say. “I killed them.”
“I saw,” he said. “And I promise to help you with your fighting skills later.”
Really?
What the fuck is wrong with my fighting skills?
“But you need to take their jackets,” he says. “And their pants. You might need them. Those are hard to get.”
I should ask him how he knows all of this, but the truth is that he’s right. I can’t pass over two Mountain uniforms. It’s simply stupid. With a sigh, I hurry to the bodies and carefully take off their jackets. It’s hard to do and vampires smell really, really weird. I don’t know why some people think they’re so fucking sexy. To me they’re just nasty, walking corpses.
I yank the pants from their bodies and bundle them with the jackets. I shove everything under my arm and hope I don’t fucking drop the clothing while I’m running. Then I move back to the guy whose life I just saved and help him to his feet.
“Thank you,” he says. “Guess I’ll be going.”
“Fat fucking chance,” I say. “Those guys wanted to kill you. I want to know why.” He doesn’t look like he was imprisoned. He’s attractive, but not huge. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would go head-to-head with some vamps, so why were they after this dude?
He looks at me warily, but after a moment of hesitation, he nods. Vampires don’t just randomly attack people. Besides, no matter what he’s says, there’s something wrong with him. I know that if I walk away now, he’s definitely going to die.
I’m not about to let that happen.
We have to make it two more blocks to Daisy. I press a button and turn my comm back on.
“What the fuck?” She squeals.
“I’m on my way,” I tell her. “Three minutes out, tops.”
“When this is over, we are so breaking up,” she says.
“I know,” I tell her.
I turn the microphone back off and look at my new friend.
“Shall we go?” I ask.
He takes my hand and nods.
Then we’re off.
Chapter Two
Amy
“No unexpected detours,” Daisy says, shaking her head. “No unexpected detours. I mean, how fucking hard is that, Amy?” She’s pacing in the room, walking back and forth in front of me.
Our safe house is really more of a safe studio apartment. Together, Daisy and I renovated it. Now we spend most of our time at the private place. Daisy doesn’t know where I live when we aren’t together and I don’t know where her family lives, either. It’s better that way. It’s better for all of us. The less we know, the less we can inadvertently betray one another.
The only reason I know she has a family is that last year, she was pregnant for almost ten months. Every day, she’d come in humming a song about angels and demons and mages. It was some sort of nursery rhyme. She’d rub her belly and sing the song, but she’d never say anything about the baby or about her new immersion into motherhood.
One day she came into the apartment and was no longer pregnant. I asked if she was feeling okay and she smiled gently, patting her stomach, and told me she was fine. Whether she has other kids besides the one she had after our partnership started, I don’t know. I don’t ask and she doesn’t tell. Daisy is allowed to have her secrets, just as I’m allowed to have mine.
It’s a weird partnership, but it works for us.
Now Daisy paces the tiny space, which makes it seem even smaller and less comfortable than it did before. The apartment has always felt cold. It’s always felt a little awkward and sterile, but this is a whole level of awfulness. Dressing up the apartment didn’t seem right. After all, it’s sort of a secret base of operations for the two of us. It’s not the type of place we need to add cute cat pictures to.
Daisy’s anger radiates, though. I understand exactly how pissed she is. If this wasn’t our last gig together, then I’d be worried. The reality is, though, that it is our last job. This is it. After tonight, none of us have to see each other again and the fact that I rescued a stray gentleman won’t matter. Besides, he was hurt. Humans have to stand by one another. There are too many monsters out there.
“Look, I’m not going to apologize. He was hurt, and humans take care of our own.” I hold up my hands in frustration, but there’s really nothing else I can say. Besides, Daisy is so far past reasoning with that anything I say will inevitably be the wrong thing.
“I don’t care,” she says. “One last job and then we were done. That was the plan. Now we’ve got a complication.” She jerks her head toward the guy sleeping as if I don’t understand what she’s talking about.
“I wouldn’t say a complication, so much as a chance to not be completely fucking selfish,” I point out. “You’re really saying I should have left this guy to die?” The thought makes me feel sick. The vamps would have killed him if we hadn’t stopped him. There’s no doubt in my mind. He was outnumbered and they had weapons. He didn’t. I don’t know why they had him or why they were hurting him, but he was lucky as shit that I walked by when I did.
Apparently, if Daisy was the one walking by, he’d be dead right now.
“I’m saying,” she shakes her head. “That you need to stop looking at the world around you as something that can be fixed. It can’t. None of it can.”
“I refuse to believe that.”
“And that’s what’s going to get you killed,” she says. She runs a hand through her hair and sighs. Daisy holds the belief that the world has changed, and we need to adapt to that. She’s all about tech and finding ways to beat the system we’re stuck in. Me? I’m a little bit of a dreamer. Few people know that only because few people get the chance to get to know me. Daisy knows me better than most people. We’ve spent a lot of time together and she understands what makes me tick.
That doesn’t mean she approves.
It just means she knows what I’m like.
“Look,” I tell her. “I know this wasn’t part of the plan, but I won’t ask anything of you. We’ll get this blade sold and off to the buyer. Problem solved. Then we can go our separate ways. You won’t hear another word from me, and you don’t need to worry about what happens with Vampire Treat over there. I’ll take care of everything and I will not, under any circumstances, involve you.”
Daisy pauses and looks from me to the dude and back again. If she thinks this is some sort of weird romantic gesture, she couldn’t be more wrong. I’m not interested in love. No thank you. The world is much too shitty for something like that.
Daisy considers what I’ve said for a long minute. Finally, she nods, seemingly satisfied. Then Daisy goes and sits at her computer. She starts typing away, obviously attempting to contact our buyer and let him know that the mission was successful. We have the item in our possession. Now there’s just that pesky matter of payment. Then we’ll be on our way.
My job was the easy part. Getting a weapon? Robbing a sinister overlord? Piece of cake. Daisy’s got the hard gig. She arranges everything, sets the prices, and finds the gigs. She gets everything sorted and working perfectly. That’s what she’s going to do now.
Sitting down in a chair, I look over at the little bed in the corner. It’s a daybed that’s never even been used. We bought it in case we ever needed to crash here, but Daisy and I practically never sleep. We definitely don’t sleep here, or around each other at all. We’re coworkers...of sorts.
We aren’t really friends.
We don’t really trust each other.
And we don’t nap in the same place.
It would be weird.
When we got back to the apartment, the guy instantly passed out. I pulled his shirt off and cleaned his wounds. Most of them were totally superficial, but I think he either ingested some sort of poison or was already sick when they got him. Hell, I’m not a doctor. Maybe he has a concussion. Either way, he had the shit completely beat out of him. He’s going to need to rest for a bit.
Maybe a long while.
We have a little bit of time before we’ll be ready to meet with the buyer. These things can take hours to arrange, as I’ve learned. It’s not like you steal a weapon and can sell it right away. The guy we’re selling to today is notoriously private and paranoid, but that’s okay. It’s best to be careful, for everyone’s sake. None of us want to anger Derek, asshole leader of the vamps.
Fuck that guy.
“King Derek” my foot.
Besides, to be honest, I want a few minutes to spend with the blade. It’s really, really weird. Obviously, it’s important enough that someone is willing to pay a ton of fucking money for it, but there’s more to this thing than all of that.
When I killed those vampires, they shouldn’t have gone down so hard or so fast. They seriously went down hard. I’ve killed plenty of creatures before, vamps included, and they never go down like that.
The idea of vampires turning into dust is...well, to be honest, it’s a little dated. Most of the time, when you kill a vamp, they die just like any other creature. Only, they die for real. Their corpse tends to age to the point that it should have been at after a natural death. So, if something has been a vampire for a year before it dies, it’s going to look relatively normal when it actually dies. If a vamp has been crawling around for 300 years before someone puts it down, it’s going to look a little skeletal. That’s just the way it is.
But no matter what I’ve killed, there’s always been...resistance.
It’s always been a little bit difficult to really get the things completely down for the count.
Tonight, those fuckers went down hard and fast. One stab and that was it. Party over. It was strange, but not necessarily in a good way. Why was the weapon so powerful? More importantly, why does someone want this weapon so badly that they’d pay me this ridiculous amount of money to get it? Obviously, it’s magical, but I guess I didn’t realize just what that would feel like.
I’ve been around magical items before, but what makes this one so fucking special?
&n
bsp; These are questions I should have asked before I accepted the job, but the reality is that money blinds people. I’m no exception. I have bills to pay, just like the next girl, and having the cash for that makes me happy. I hate feeling stressed about my finances. That’s why I got into thievery in the first place. I was a poor kid who grew up on the wrong side of the Mountain. Now I have a chance to get the cash load I’ve always wanted and to finally retire somewhere else.
Someplace outside of the city.
My cabin.
It’s a tiny little paradise I managed to build all on my own over the last year. It took planning and careful consideration, but I was able to build a home in a place where none of the vamps will ever look. The cities are all ruled by different vampire lords. Some of them, like Derek, call themselves kings or queens. They’re all equally terrible people. That doesn’t matter, though. What matters is that this city, the one I live in, totally sucks and I’m getting out.
I’m going someplace new.
I’m going to live off the grid in my own little paradise.
And I can’t fucking wait.
But I’ve got to get paid first. Until then, I’ll wait patiently like a good little thief.
“Stop petting that thing,” Daisy says. “It’s creepy.”
I look down and realize that, sure enough, I’ve been petting the handle of the blade.
“Sorry,” I grunt.
“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “It’ll be over soon enough.”
I nod, but don’t say anything else. I don’t have to. Daisy and I don’t hate each other, but we also aren’t friends. Our relationship was forged out of convenience through a digital partnership. She was looking for a colleague. I was looking for gigs. We worked a trial job together and we ran everything so seamlessly that two years later, we’re still at it. At least until tonight.
There’s a part of me that’s relieved I’m going to be on my own after this.
