by Lexi C. Foss
Not to mention the inevitable fallout resulting from destruction of relics on that scale. Some of the pieces housed in the vault possessed inestimable potential. That amount of unbound energy could do untold harm to everything in its path if not properly controlled. And after the dust cleared…who knew where the world would be, or what it would look like?
I was also painfully aware of where the blame would really fall. Regardless of Caleb’s recklessness, I had been the one to pass the relic into my father’s hands. Thus, I would take the fall for anything that happened as a result. Praise would be mine to claim, but then, so would condemnation.
“This is the last favor I’ll ever do for you,” I growled into the phone. “You’d better pray to whatever god is out there that I can get it back in time. Otherwise that pound of flesh is coming out of you.” Once more, anger swelled, and I ended the call without giving him a chance to answer. He had thrown the very fabric of our lives into jeopardy and made it my mess to clean up.
I just needed to figure out how to do that. The beginnings of a headache throbbed at my temples. I closed my eyes and imagined my father taking the relic out of his drawer, sealing it into a box, placing it into a driver’s hands. I imagined the car winding its way north toward the vault, the relic being carried toward its final resting place. No one had any reason to doubt a delivery that came straight from the Leclair estate. The door of the vault would be opened without a moment’s hesitation.
And then what? I opened my eyes, feeling like a chunk of ice had been dropped into the pit of my stomach. There was a chance that Caleb was only paranoid, that nothing would happen after all. And yet, the risk of any other outcome was much too great to take.
Somehow I needed to get the relic back. And I regretted ever laying eyes on Alex Brighton.
15
Alex
The ride into the city from Whidbey Island was a little over three hours, including the ferry across Puget Sound. I sat on the bus with my chin in my hand, watching the urban landscape roll by. There were a lot of reasons I didn’t miss the city as much as everyone seemed to expect me to. It was loud and cramped and crowded. My building hadn’t had an elevator. The sound of traffic was more or less constant.
But what I did miss was the proximity to our Pacific Northwest cell headquarters. The long trek was a pain in the ass to make, and I did my best to avoid doing it regularly. Rhys, to his credit, was usually really good about not calling me to the office. In fairness, he hadn’t done it this time either. There was just no other way to access the information I needed. Langley’s teeny public library didn’t exactly have a reference section on vampire history.
This office, as I heard they have a couple I believe in the city, took up a floor near the top of a Seattle high-rise, sandwiched in between at least a dozen more conventional businesses. Visiting there had always been a sort of surreal experience, just knowing that we were existing so calmly under the radar. Each time I walked through the doors into the lobby, I wondered if someone would call me out. My recent run-ins with Brina had only inflated this paranoia.
She had to know about the office. The thought of seeing her there made my chest tighten. I was in no mood to pass her on the street, let alone inside my official workplace. As the bus pulled up to my stop, I searched for her and found no sign. I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead. No room in my mind for her nonsense today. I had a job to do.
The large, high-ceilinged lobby was empty when I entered. I made my way quickly to the elevator bay and pressed my thumb against the button. The longer I waited, the more acute my nervousness became, until I started thinking wild, unreasonable things. Like what I would do if I walked in and saw her talking to Rhys, or saw her when the elevator doors opened. Would I be able to resist the urge to pick up where our fight had left off?
Fortunately, the lift that arrived was empty too, and I rode up to the eighth floor with no companionship other than my own musings. The entrance to the offices was permanently locked, accessible only through a biometric reader mounted on the right wall. I placed my hand on it and looked into the retina scanner above.
A soft chime sounded. The locks disengaged. As I crossed the threshold, I glanced toward Rhys’ door. It was open.
He looked up from her desk, arching his eyebrows. “Alex? Are you all right?” The genuine concern on his face and in his caring voice threw me for a loop, as if he knew something I didn’t.
“Yes,” I said. “I mean, I think so. Should I be worried?”
He laughed a little. “No, no. I just understand how much you don’t like to come into Seattle if you can help it. I thought something might be wrong, that’s all.” He swiveled his chair to face me. “What’s up?”
I hesitated for a fraction of a second. “Can you…do you think you could open up the records for me?”
“Oh?” A little smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Don’t tell me you’re actively asking to study up.” With his right hand, he reached back to his keyboard and punched in a few things. “That case must really be getting to you.”
I grinned sheepishly. “It’s in my head, yeah.” Wisely, I chose not to say that it was actually Damien who had gotten under my skin. Try as I might, I could not stop thinking about him. The short time I had spent in his presence kept playing on an infinite loop in my mind’s eye. And, of course, the kiss. If I concentrated, I could practically still feel it.
“I know that look.” Rhys sighed and shook his head. “You’re in deep, Alex. Just make sure you’re not over your head.” Then he made me turn around so he could enter the codes that would open the records room. “Okay, you should be good to go. I’ll check on you in about an hour if you haven’t resurfaced.”
“Thanks, Rhys.” I started to leave, but stopped myself at the last moment. “Hey, just out of curiosity, is there anything specific I need to know about the Leclairs?”
His azure eyes sharpened almost imperceptibly, striking against his black hair. “So that’s who you’re scoping out. In that case, you’ll be down there a while. They’ve been holding down the vampire fort on Whidbey Island for a long time.”
“Did they have a dog in the gang fights?” Strangely, I couldn’t remember ever hearing that name, even during the height of the bloody battles.
“Not to my knowledge.” Rhys chewed his lip, thinking. “If you ask me, they were the smartest about it. They jumped ship to the island and never looked back. And by the time others tried to follow, they had already staked their claim. Now it seems like they pretty much own it. But why no one’s ever challenged them, I couldn’t say.” He looked at me. “Maybe that’s a question you ought to tackle if you really think they’re involved.”
It was a salient point. Much of vampire culture was built on the back of conflict, of blood feuds and long-held grudges. Why hadn’t anyone tried to take down the Leclairs? Perhaps there were a couple of old, heavy skeletons lurking in the closet, and I was about to try to bring them to light. I just hoped it wasn’t a move I’d come to regret.
Our on-site records occupied the whole back half of the eighth floor; they were the entire reason Rhys had needed so much space. His library paled in comparison to the one across the country at the master headquarters in New York City, but as far as local dirt was concerned, it was the first place to look. The automated doors closed and locked at my back, effectively shutting me into the looming rows of stacks.
I took a deep breath of the papery, slightly musty air. The library was quieter than a graveyard, cushioned by a hush so thick I could have cut it with my knife. A lonely place, not often visited by the contingent of fighters it was created to serve. But I took a guilty pleasure in being there, surrounded by nothing but books.
Unless Brina had decided to tail me here, too. Instead of fully relaxing like usual, I kept my guard up, prowling among the shelves like a predator on the offensive. If she was lying in wait, I’d have to be ready to strike first. Every so often, the vigilant eye of a camera caught mine. At least her
offences wouldn’t go unnoticed.
She hadn’t shown up by the time I reached the section labeled local history, and I forced myself to chill out a little. It wasn’t fair or productive to allow obsession over her whereabouts to rule my life such that she dictated everything I did. No one said I had to appreciate her presence, but at the end of the day, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like I could fix the chasm she had opened between Damien and me.
His face swam into focus while I ran my finger along dozens of old spines. Some were marked, some not, and I had to palm a lot of the blank ones just to see what they said inside. There were star charts, genealogy tables, volumes of newspapers dating as far back as two or three hundred years. I carried a few of those to the nearest table. They were so big it was easier to stand and read them.
I found the first mention of anyone named Leclair in the form of a stunted family tree that took up half a sheet of paper awkwardly inserted where an original page had been ripped out. A woman named Claudina Leclair had married one Samuel Highwater from Seattle. I pursed my lips, interested in the fact that hers was the surname that endured. Using that partial family tree as a starting point, I leafed my way through an impossibly thick ledger containing all manner of public records from that time.
There was her marriage certificate to Sam Highwater, faded but still legible. The original matriarch—as I assumed her to be—of the Leclair bloodline was a teenaged bride who had soon given birth to the first of five children. I tracked down their records as well, skimming line after line of dry legalese. Then one thing stopped me briefly in my tracks.
The family of Claudina’s second son had been investigated privately on suspicions related to possession of something I couldn’t read. The last word on that section of the official report was heavily blacked out, such that even holding the page to the light did nothing. As I kept reading through the Leclairs’ history, I noticed more and more instances of blacked out words, sometimes whole sentences, and once or twice, an entire paragraph. The redacted passages almost always had something to do with “possession” or knowledge thereof.
Drugs? Possible. But no arrests were ever made. Indeed, none of the historical Leclairs had ever incurred a criminal record, not even for minor transgressions. And yet, they were questioned more frequently than most about matters that could not be publicly disclosed.
I sat back in my chair for a moment. The pocket watch Damien had brought to the beach flashed in my memory. An unexplored relic, almost certainly. He had told me himself that his family harbored an interest in these things. I tried to imagine how many they might have by now, and where they were kept. Not around here. I was sure of that much. It was far too dangerous with all these slayers around.
The minutes in the library began to turn to hours. I waded through book after book, giving up when the density became impenetrable. In one, I found an official roster of the airmen stationed at the Whidbey Island naval base up in Oak Harbor. The discovery was odd for one big reason: vamps tended to shy away from areas with high concentrations of human law enforcement. It was too easy for their ruse to be uncovered once someone started running ID numbers.
Imagine my surprise, then, upon coming across one T. Leclair, hidden among the names. I stared at it for a long time, unsure whether or not to believe my eyes. A quick cross-reference between tables backed up the idea that a soldier in Oak Harbor had also been a vampire. I was stunned. How had he pulled it off?
My phone vibrated on the table next to me. It was Rhys. “Hey,” I said. “Guess what I just found?”
“What? Also, it’s been three hours. Let me know if you want to come up for air.”
“I found a link between Whidbey Island Naval Air Base and the Leclairs,” I told him with a touch of pride. “This family’s got some major balls, Rhys. They’re not afraid of anything.”
“That is unusually bold.” He paused. “You know what that means. Never, ever let your guard down. If they’ve integrated into human society before, and so close to a system that would love to catch and kill them, they’ll do just about anything to get what they want. Including targeting a slayer.”
It did explain some of Damien’s powerful confidence. Apparently, that brashness was a family trait. I wondered if it meant he had been the one to kill a man in broad daylight after all.
To Rhys, I said, “Noted. I’m coming up soon. I think I’ve gotten just about what I needed.” For the first time, I felt like I could clearly see the scope of what I was dealing with. It would have been daunting, except for the fact that I was already neck deep. And I didn’t need to be told there was no easy way out from here. Damien Leclair had already seen my face. He knew who I was, and where I lived. He had kissed me with more passion than I’d ever received from a mortal man.
I had passed the point of no return a long time ago.
16
Damien
The passing of time had turned palpable now that I knew it mattered. Realistically, I only had a day, two at most, before the relic was on its way north. After that, the chances of recovering it in time grew astronomically slim. I was pissed. And stressed. Part of me wanted to go straight to Caleb and fight him in the street, just to alleviate some of this tension.
But an endeavor like that would only soak up hours I didn’t have. At first, I tried valiantly to resist the urge to slip out into the night and sate my mounting hunger. It had gotten to the point where the craving for blood drove me to distraction. I couldn’t concentrate. All I thought about was the relic, and Alex, and blood.
Only one of those things was currently within my reach. I held fast as the next day crept by, but after dusk had fallen, I let my instincts take over. The night shrouded my feverish hunt for sustenance along the quiet, picturesque, half rural streets. No one crossed my path for an agonizingly long time—weeks after the killing, fear still lingered. But then I heard a heartbeat coming closer.
The unlucky woman jogged along the side of the road, earphones in, singing under her breath to music I could not hear. She was tragically pretty in a way that reminded me a little bit of Alex. Maybe she’d thought it had been long enough since blood stained the pavement in Langley. Maybe she thought she was safe.
She only screamed for an instant, right after I seized her. Her hands clutched vainly at my arm and shoulder as she attempted to writhe her way out of my grasp. Those efforts were cruelly futile. I made sure she never had the chance to see my face.
It took moments for her body to go limp and sag down toward the grass into which I let her fall when I was done. Her once healthy skin tone had gone grey, robbed of its rosy undertones. The smallest trickle of blood ran from the vicious wound in her neck. I hadn’t meant to deface her quite to that extent.
“I’m sorry,” I told her, wiping my mouth. “Yours is a necessary sacrifice.” Nothing about that was a lie, but on my way home I couldn’t help wondering what Alex would say. Would she tell me to subsist on raw, thawed steaks? To buy animal blood from a butcher? Both crude and insulting alternatives.
Letting Alex into my mind soon proved to be a mistake. Within minutes, the straight path back to my home had turned into a meandering trajectory into town. Specifically, into the part of town where she lived. I didn’t even really have to think about it very hard—it was like I just looked up, and there was the street that led to hers.
A small voice in the back of my head warned against proceeding. Surely no good could come of loitering in her neighborhood. We had nothing left to say to each other as far as I was concerned. My problem was that I found myself entirely unable to get rid of her. The notion that somehow I had become emotionally attached to a person who fundamentally could never have my best interests at heart was equally depressing and unsurprising. I had always been a bit of a nihilist.
Plus, I wanted to see her, for the pure fact that she turned me on. The way she had kissed me on the beach was maddening, intoxicating, addicting. Even a shadow of that intensity would be worth the work to make it happen.
/> “Fuck it,” I muttered. “Just this once.” As I started down the street, a bus rumbled up to the corner and jettisoned its load of passengers onto the sidewalk. I darted into the nearest deep shadow, waiting for the knot of pedestrians to disperse. The last one off the bus reached up and pulled her hat off as she stepped down onto the pavement. The bright fall of magenta hair made me wince and roll my eyes. Of course she had to be here, on this night, at this time.
And she was headed straight for me. I knew escaping her detection was going to be a matter of luck and good timing. If I moved too much, she’d sense me. If I didn’t move enough, she’d eventually sense that, too. I had accidentally fallen into a situation much like that of the king on a chessboard. Limited places to go, and none of them all that great.
Alex had her head down, her face illuminated by her phone. Her hair cascaded down in front of her face, and blessedly, she let it hang there. It kept her from seeing me melt a little further into the darkness. But there was only so far I could go. In another ten steps, she’d be nearly level with me. All I could do was backpedal further down the street.
I did that, for about a hundred feet, my eyes trained on her. Eventually she slipped her phone into her pocket, adjusted the bag on her shoulder, and picked up her pace. In the process of matching her speed, I forgot to watch where my feet went. One of my heels caught on a stone and launched it into the street.
Game over. Alex stopped in her tracks. Her eyes, wide and alert, swept the surroundings. She tilted her head, listening carefully. I watched her breathe in and out.
“Who’s there?” The call was low but very clear, her voice strong. She betrayed no hint of anxiety, though I heard her heart tick up. Once more, she gazed around. It was slower this time, more deliberate. On my side of the road, she took even more care. The girl was onto me.
