by Laken Cane
“What’re you doing out here?” one of them called. “You lost, lady?”
“Is that a sword?” another asked. “What are you doing with a sword?”
I ignored them until their catcalls became too loud and their proximity too suffocating, and then I turned on them. Silverlight expanded when she was freed from her sheath, but she remained quiet and dark in my grip.
“Fuck off,” I said.
They didn’t laugh, didn’t look at each other, just took another step closer to me. “You shouldn’t be out here if you want left alone,” one of them said, and the others nodded in agreement.
I shot a glance at the empty street behind them. I hadn’t exactly prepared for human predators.
“Hey,” one of them exclaimed, suddenly. “She’s the girl from the vampires.” The others looked at him. “Yeah, yeah,” he went on, “she’s that girl from the Thanksgiving Day Massacre.”
They peered at me. “Don’t look like her,” one of them muttered.
“Just skinnier and older,” his friend said. “And maybe meaner. It’s her. Look at the scars.”
“Rumor is,” the guy who recognized me said, “you went crazy. Must be true, you being out here.”
“Go away,” I said gently. “Before you get hurt.”
They cackled and high-fived each other, and another man drifted from the shadows to join them. They didn’t even glance at him.
A group of men was a dangerous animal.
But I was no one’s prey.
Not anymore. They were right. I was crazy—at least a little bit.
I couldn’t fight, not really. Sure, I’d taken self-defense classes and learned to shoot a gun, but classes only went so far and I hadn’t brought the gun.
Then Amias slid from the darkness and stood between me and the men. The men didn’t see him, but I saw him.
Even though I’d known he was there, even though I’d prepared myself, even though during our last encounter I’d softened, my familiar hatred and rage rose up and roared over me.
But I controlled it. I controlled me. Barely.
I couldn’t have done that a week ago.
And Silverlight woke up.
“Holy shit,” one of them murmured. “The fuck is that?”
“Guys,” I murmured, finding it difficult to talk through my clenched teeth.
They tilted their heads, listening. Intrigued.
“Remember the vampire who slaughtered my family?”
“Yeah.” The talkative man nodded. “We just said.”
I smiled. “He’s right in front of you.”
Amias showed himself.
The men scattered like spilled BBs across a hardwood floor.
Amias turned to me, and he was smiling, as though we shared a joke. As though we were friends.
I forgot the men and went for the master with Silverlight leading the way. It didn’t matter if I couldn’t kill him. I had to try. I had no other choice. My control had fled with the humans.
“Like a baby,” Amias murmured tenderly. “But you will grow.”
And then, before Silverlight and I could slice out the bastard’s heart, he was gone.
“Oh, shit,” one of the young men yelled, as he and his buddies milled about, unsure whether to run away or stay and get something to record on their phones for YouTube.
Now that Amias had fled, they saw no threat, and they turned their phones on me and Silverlight.
Silverlight hadn’t dimmed with Amias’s departure. She buzzed in my hand, as though aware of something I wasn’t. Likely, Amias hadn’t gone far.
The sword would kill in a fight and defend against attack, but it couldn’t run after him, and my human legs were just…human legs. They weren’t going to catch a master vampire.
So how was I supposed to catch and kill vampires if they all ran away?
I got my answer in the next few minutes as vampires raced from the darkness, their fangs flashing in the light from the tall streetlamps.
And I had a strong feeling that even though Amias would be watching, he would let me handle it. He would not interfere.
He seemed more inclined to protect me against the humans than the monsters. He wanted me to learn, after all.
He wanted to see what I could do.
Maybe even if it killed me.
Chapter Fourteen
I didn’t have to hunt vampires.
They were hunting me, just as Clayton had predicted. They were coming for me.
I was ready.
Sort of.
I shrieked and whipped Silverlight through the air, and it took me all of five seconds to realize that I needed to stop fighting the sword for control. She knew what to do, much better than I did. So I gave her my right arm.
The vampires surrounded me, darting away, screaming as Silverlight caught one in the throat and sent him reeling—but another took his place immediately. There were at least a dozen vampires, or so it appeared to my terrified brain, but Silverlight didn’t hesitate.
And some of them went after the humans who’d followed me. “Run,” I begged, but I heard their screams, and I knew it was too late for the men.
Adrenaline lent me speed and strength and I whirled, dodged, and leapt, cutting and killing, truly killing, and the vampires I downed did not rise again. As one fell I was already attacking another.
And those still living began to falter.
They’d known I was a hunter, but they’d been sure they could take me out. One inexperienced hunter against a dozen vampires? No hunter would survive that.
But they hadn’t counted on Silverlight.
I heard distant sirens screaming toward us, but I heard them through a filter, and somehow, they weren’t even real. The only things real were the vampires, the sword, and the fight.
I drove Silverlight through a female vampire’s heart and turned to get the one on my left as she fell. At that instant, one of them rammed me from behind. He sank his fangs into the back of my neck, and I felt the pain all the way to the bone.
The success of his attack seemed to give the remaining ones courage, and they all converged upon me at once. Still, I gave Silverlight her head, and together, we fought on.
The vampire biting me snaked his arms around my waist and jerked me off balance, and he began to suck. It was as though a stick, long, thin, and sharp, had gotten lodged in my body and he was pulling it out with his teeth.
It was agonizing.
Another vampire sank fangs into my left forearm, and I could almost hear the bone being scraped. My entire body began to shiver with the pain of it.
I plunged the sword into that one’s head. As he fell to the ground, Silverlight followed him down to enter his heart. Not because he’d come back from the injury to his brain—she was Silverlight, and he wasn’t coming back—but because his heart tasted like a little slice of heaven.
There were stakes in my belt and I yanked one out, grinding my teeth against the pain, but even as I lifted it, another vampire latched on, sinking his fangs into the top of my left shoulder. I immediately dropped the stake as the pain shot from my shoulder to my fingertips and even after Silverlight took his head, the arm still hung useless and unmoving.
The vampire who’d bitten my neck was gone, just abruptly gone, and I had no idea what had happened to him until I glimpsed a very welcome sight.
The new guy, Shane Copas, was fighting with me. He fought like a fierce shadow, fast, strong, and mean, and I could barely take my eyes off him.
And watching him almost got me killed.
A vampire leapt and grabbed me around the waist, trying to bring me to the ground where I’d be less of a threat. Silverlight was ready for him, even if I was not, and a second later, his head was rolling across the pavement.
There were others, but I was not alone, and my reluctant partner fought with experience and speed. He held a long blade in one hand and a stake in the other, and used them like magic wands, dropping every vampire he touched.
&nbs
p; And then there was silence.
The dozen vampires lay spread across the street, dead, shriveling in pools of spilt blood that hadn’t ever belonged to them. Some of it—a lot of it—was mine.
Some of it belonged to the young men who’d followed me. The humans. Their deaths would haunt me, I had no doubt. I hadn’t saved them. I hadn’t even attempted to save them, really. The supernats were right. I wasn’t ready. Lesson learned, though it was a lesson that’d come too late.
But I was alive.
Silverlight gave me back my arm.
I automatically shoved her back into the sheath and breathing hard, I turned to look at Copas.
He snarled at me, then turned and pointed.
Police cars, lights on, screamed to a halt not half a block away. Cops took shelter behind their open doors, guns drawn and trained on the battle scene. On us.
I shook my head to clear it, then reached up with my right hand to clear blood from my eyes. Still breathing a little too hard, I flung the blood away to land upon the pavement.
My shivering intensified as I watched the police. They’d begun to creep toward us, slowly, guns still drawn, silver crosses gleaming from around their necks. I felt for my own cross, but it was gone. The chain must’ve broken. Most likely the vampire had broken it when he’d bitten the back of my neck.
At the thought, the injury from that bite began clamoring for attention. My left arm hung like dead weight, and I realized there wasn’t an inch of my body that didn’t throb with pain.
I groaned. “Dear lord, I hurt.”
Shane didn’t even look at me. “You caused this, baby hunter. You killed the humans and you brought the cops. You deal with it.” And then he turned on his heel and trotted away, fading into the darkness even as the police shouted at him not to move.
It dawned on me that the police weren’t exactly pleased with me only when they began screaming at me to get on the ground.
“What?” I asked, slightly dazed, very tired, and tempted to do as Shane had done and run away. But with my luck, the cops would have shot me dead.
“I said get down,” a cop screamed. “Get down now.”
“Asshole.” I dropped to my knees.
“Hands on your head!”
“I can’t move my arm,” I explained. I lifted my right arm and put my hand on my head, but that wasn’t good enough.
“I said get your hands on your head!”
“And I said I can’t, you fucking moron!” Fury rushed through me, and I would have liked nothing more than to leap at him and beat him to a bloody pulp.
Fortunately for me, I got a handle on the anger.
“Get down!”
I fell to my stomach and put my right hand behind my back, and then they were upon me. I was pretty sure more pain was coming from the unimpressed cops.
I was right.
By the time they slung me handcuffed and controlled into the smelly backseat of a cruiser, I was blubbering like a baby.
And they’d taken Silverlight. They’d taken my stakes, too, but those didn’t concern me. One night as a hunter and I found myself in trouble and missing my sword. It wasn’t my proudest moment.
Policemen walked around the area as I watched from the car, talking and pointing and speaking into mics on their shoulders, and still more cars arrived. The area was taped off, investigators bent over the dead humans and what remained of the shrunken vampires, and still no one drove me away.
No one asked if I needed medical care, or came to talk to me about the fight.
The life of a beginner hunter was obviously not a very glamorous one. It was filled with pain and sorrow and so very many mistakes. Rookie mistakes.
Shane was gone, the street was littered with dead vampires and dead humans, and I was the only one left for the police to concentrate on.
Then someone began screaming, crying, and yelling for God, and I saw the cops holding back a woman who’d burst through the rapidly growing crowd. “That’s my boy,” she screamed. “That’s my boy.”
“No,” I whispered. “Oh, no.”
I’d messed up. I’d messed up badly.
But then I saw something that made me feel a little less alone.
Rhys and Angus strode toward us, anger in every line of their bodies, and it didn’t matter that some of the cops rushed toward them, stopping them before they got halfway to me. It didn’t matter that they couldn’t speak to me, or see me, or take me home.
They’d come for me.
A little warmth spread through my frozen body, thawing the horror. I rested my head against the glass and kept my stare on them until finally, a cop got into the front seat and drove me away.
Part Two
Chapter Fifteen
“I need the restroom,” I said.
“Soon,” the detective promised. “Tell me again what happened out there.”
“I was walking,” I repeated, for the hundredth time. I paused to take another sip of the third cold soda I’d had since they’d parked me in an interrogation room at the Red Valley Police Department. I didn’t want to keep drinking, but I was so thirsty. Every few minutes I had to take a sip so the words could slip past the dryness in my throat.
I’d been there about two hours, but it felt like ten. I could have asked for an attorney, but I wanted to cooperate. They could see that I hadn’t killed those men. That I hadn’t somehow called the vampires—though that was sort of untrue. They’d come out of hiding because of me. Because of my new status. Because every vampire in the vicinity knew a baby hunter was on the prowl, and they wanted to kill me before I got too mean for them.
I squirmed on the chair as the fullness of my bladder became a little more urgent. “I need the restroom,” I said again.
“Soon,” the detective promised. Again. “We just really need to understand everything that happened out there tonight, Ms. Sinclair. The city needs answers. The families of the four young men slaughtered out there tonight need answers.” He leaned forward, his face earnest, his voice gentle. “We need answers.”
“I’m giving them to you,” I murmured. “I’ve been giving you answers since you brought me in.”
“Vampires wouldn’t dare attack in the city.” He sat back and drummed his fingers on the table. “Vampires haven’t attacked since…”
I looked at him. “Since the Thanksgiving Day Massacre, Detective Dunne? I know about vampire attacks. I know all about them. And what happened tonight was just another vampire slaughter. They killed those men. You know that. You saw.”
“We saw something.” He ran his hand over his face. “Mostly we just saw you and your friend—who ran—and we saw four brutally murdered young human men scattered across the street. Why were you there, Ms. Sinclair?”
I wished he’d stop saying Ms. Sinclair like the words were some sort of nasty thing caught in his throat. “You saw the vampires,” I insisted. “They were lying dead on the ground. You examined them. Didn’t you?”
He blew out a hard breath. “We saw some of the fight,” he admitted. “But by the time we were able to examine the scene, there were no vampires on the ground. Only empty clothing.”
I gaped. “What?”
Silverlight.
Silverlight did more than dry and shrivel the vampires as a hunter with a stake would do. Silverlight wiped them out. Erased them.
And that was so not good for me.
But I couldn’t tell him that. I wanted my sword back. My fingers shook with the need to grip her. They would never give her back if I told them what she could do.
They would hand her over to scientists who would study her, try to duplicate her, and destroy her.
She was mine. She was my responsibility and I had to protect her, just as she’d protected me.
Detective Dunne nodded. “There were no vampires.” He met my horrified stare. “The families—the city, actually—will think that you and your friend murdered those men.”
I leaned forward, deep breathing, trying not to pa
ss out. I was injured, bloody, and exhausted. But I was strong, and growing stronger by the day. How else was I physically coping with the devastation I’d put my body through in the last few days?
But then I remembered Shane killing vampires beside me, and I knew the detective was bending the truth a little. Not all the vampires had disappeared. Those Shane had killed would have dried and shriveled up, but they wouldn’t have disappeared.
“So you see,” the other detective said, speaking for the first time, “We’re in a mess here. And honestly, we have no idea how to get out of it. There is no proof vampires attacked. If we tell the city vampires did kill those four young men, imagine the panic, Ms. Sinclair. You see our predicament.”
I glared at her. “Your predicament, Detective Locke?” I didn’t mention that I knew they were lying. I didn’t want to explain how I knew that.
She shrugged. “They’ll want someone to blame.”
I raised my eyebrows, glad the anger was helping me combat the fear. “And I’m it? I’m the sacrificial lamb?” I took another sip of soda, then gasped when I remembered something. “The woman killed behind the bar in New Gravel. Carrie Alden.”
They both narrowed their eyes and leaned toward me at the exact same moment. “Yes?” Detective Dunne asked. “What about her?”
“She was also killed by a vampire. But the vampire who killed her was sick—just like the ones six years ago.”
Neither of them looked surprised.
“You knew,” I realized.
“How did you know?” he asked.
“I went there afterward,” I admitted, whether that was the smart thing to do or not. “I killed the vampire who murdered her.”
They looked at each other.
The door opened, abruptly, and a man walked in. He was a tall, well dressed bald man with an unmistakable air of command.
The detectives stood when he entered. “Captain?” Detective Dunne asked.
“Out,” he told them.
“Sir,” Locke said. “Are you—”
“Out,” he said again, softly.
And with a long last look at me, they went.
He didn’t bother to sit down. Without preamble, he put his hands on his hips and stared down at me from tired eyes. “Are you a hunter, Ms. Sinclair?”
