by Laken Cane
“He has no choice,” I said.
“He has a choice,” he replied. “Even if that choice kicks his ass.”
“Such as?”
He stared down his nose at me. “He could ask me to kill him.”
I shivered as his coldness touched my bones. “Would you?”
“Absolutely.”
“Miriam…” I cleared my throat. “Miriam says he can’t die.”
His smile was dark, his voice like gravel. “I can make him die.”
I stared toward Clayton, who’d turned his back to us and was muttering into his phone. “She’d just bring him back.”
When Shane didn’t answer I turned to look and caught a glimpse of him disappearing into the silver and black woods. He wasn’t going to wait for me.
“Clayton,” I urged. “Let’s go.”
But he slid his phone into his pocket and began walking back the way we’d come.
“Clayton! Where are you going?”
He didn’t stop, just strode on, his back stiff. Miriam had called him home. I sighed, hoping she’d let him call a car. It was a long, cold walk back to Bay Town.
I turned and hurried to catch up to Shane, my flashlight bobbing. Miriam and Clayton’s relationship would drive me crazy if I’d let it, so I concentrated instead on doing my job.
“This time,” Shane told me, a few minutes later, “if Amias shows up and you throw yourself between him and my gun, I will shoot you down.”
“All right.” My voice was calm but my stomach was tossing. “I’m sorry about that, Shane.”
He just grunted.
I wouldn’t let him get to me. At least, I wouldn’t let him know he was getting to me. I reached down to touch Silverlight’s warm hilt and got in front of him. “You’re going the wrong way. Follow me.”
Gray’s scent grew stronger the farther we walked, and I began to wade through colorful fog to my knees. Many vampires called those woods home.
With any luck, we’d kill a few dozen of them that night.
And finally, the hunter’s excitement flared to life.
“There you are,” I whispered. “Welcome back.”
“Talking to yourself, Sinclair?”
“Yup.” Then, after a few minutes, I said, “I’m glad you stopped calling me baby hunter. That was annoying.”
He shrugged. “I realized you’re not a baby hunter.”
I glanced at him, surprised. “Thanks, Copas.”
“You have a lot to learn before you can call yourself a baby hunter,” he continued. “Right now you’re just a pitiful girl with a powerful sword.”
Asshole.
Then I stiffened as the air changed. “Feel that? They’re close. If we find Gray, I need him alive.”
“Good luck with that.”
Because he was a hunter, weapons held by Shane would give the vampires their true death, just as mine would—as long as those weapons hit the bloodsucker’s heart. All weapons but Silverlight. She could do whatever she wanted.
It was not going to be easy keeping one of the bloodsuckers alive, especially if we were converged upon by dozens of them. In the heat of battle, they were all the same.
The enemy.
And it was kill or be killed.
The captain would be happier with an animated Gray, but as long as he had proof of the vampire’s death, he’d pay up. Of course, if I hit Gray with Silverlight, I wouldn’t have proof—but with a crowd of vampires trying to tear my head off, I wasn’t leaving her sheathed.
Oh, the complicated life of a vampire hunter.
“Regular or infecteds,” I murmured. “That is the question.”
Shane stopped walking abruptly and lifted his shotgun. “Here they come,” he said. “Full of death for the hunters who can end them.” And he smiled, his face shadowed with sharp hills and deep valleys in the moonlight.
I drew Silverlight and she screamed to life, lighting up the night with a silver light that seemed to grow stronger every time she came out to play.
Then I swung her through the air as the first of the vampires converged upon us. I added my screams of rage to theirs, and the killing began.
The supernaturals had predicted vampires would converge upon Red Valley—upon me—when they got a whiff of my hunter status. And there were two of us. Two hunters. Apparently, that meant twice the number of vampires, because they seemed unending. Perhaps they thought they could overpower us by sheer numbers alone, and I began to believe they were right.
It was as if every vampire in every neighboring city had decided to show up and party. Before everything had changed, I hadn’t even been aware so many vampires existed—just like nearly every other regular human in the world.
But I was no longer a regular human, and the vampires were not shy about opening up their world to me. They were everywhere. They were countless.
At least that was how it appeared at that moment.
Shane depleted their numbers with his shotgun, and I with my Silverlight, but they just kept coming. When he finally emptied his gun, he had no time to reload. He slung her over his back and pulled a wicked blade from the holster at his side, and a long stake from his belt.
And we killed vampires.
Inside me, fear began to join the excitement and rage. Adrenalin made me faster, stronger, and angrier, but fear kept poking me in the ribs, demanding to be noticed.
And there was a sound. A terrible sound.
It was a sound like no other, because it was the sound death made when it came to claim so many.
It wasn’t often that death visited the vampires.
It visited now.
It howled and shrieked like a demented wind filled with eerie, doomed voices, carrying judgment day in its chaotic, swirling midst.
I was not in life. I was in death.
Oh, it was dark.
I didn’t want to live there. I didn’t even want to visit.
But I was swept along, my choices taken away, and I became a fighting, killing nonbeing, somehow. I didn’t fight with death. I was death.
And there was no worse feeling. No worse knowledge.
When the vampires lay empty around us, piles and piles of them, mouths gaping, eyes empty, body parts scattered, Silverlight dropped from my nerveless grip and I fell with her to the ground, my breath escaping in pants and whistles, huge spurts of mad energy still churning inside me.
Shane dropped to his knees beside me, his eyes dark and shining, his horrible smile wide. He was in his element, as I should have been.
But I had seen myself, and I was hideous. I’d seen the rest of my life, and it was unspeakable. I’d seen death, and she was terrifying.
Shane threw back his head and roared, so covered with blood he was unrecognizable, and barbaric, and brutal.
I needed his badness.
I launched myself at him, opened my mouth over his, swallowed his victory. I barely felt it when he slammed me to the ground and covered my body with his, because all I could feel was numb horror. All I could see was darkness, and I was afraid it would never leave.
If I wasn’t able to fling that away, to rid myself of it, I would not survive it. I needed something else.
Shane gave it to me.
He understood. He’d felt it himself, back when he’d first become a hunter.
I wasn’t sure why the realness of it was just now affecting me—maybe because the first time there was no real victory. I’d saved Amias and sacrificed Shane. I’d not felt the win. But this time, this time I drowned in it.
He ripped off the clothes that were plastered to my body, soaked in enemy blood, and my blood, and his blood, and he hurt me with hard fingers and a demanding mouth, with fierce bites and kisses and need, and only when the Foam of Aphrodite had been soaking into my flesh had I felt such soul-shattering lust.
I was bursting with emotions. The wind I’d been inside of was now inside me, and I was too small to contain it. I would explode.
I matched Shane’s crazed p
assion with my own, gripping, biting, clawing, trying to climb inside him as he climbed inside me.
We fucked. Atop hills of dead vampires we fucked. We touched, kissed, cried, celebrated the victory, and fought off the blackness.
Two hunters who’d created an irreversible and unassailable bond then sealed that bond with blood and sex and fate and something older and more mysterious than life.
It had no name.
It didn’t need one.
It just was.
It existed. I existed.
Maybe I was death, but I was also life.
And life was just beginning.
“Bloodhunter,” he whispered, in my ear, and I smiled to hear it.
I’d become the storm, fought the storm, and finally, I embraced the storm.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I couldn’t have been filthier.
I reeked. My boots squelched when I walked. Semen ran down my thighs, sticky and wet. Blood dried on my skin, crusted inside my nostrils, and welled from cuts, scrapes, and bites I didn’t remember getting. Vampire blood and guts had mixed with the dirt upon which I’d lain, creating a smelly mud that coated the entire back of my body, lodged beneath my fingernails, and caught in my hair.
Just barely, I made it to my car without having a breakdown at the gross state of my body. “Eww, eww, eww,” I chanted under my breath, then climbed in and slammed shut the door. I was shivering from the slimy cold, and the second I started the old car, I cranked up the heater.
It blew out cold air and as I waited impatiently for it to heat, I stared out my window.
Shane climbed into his truck and drove away without saying a word.
And finally, the interior of my car was warm and cozy and dark, but there was no way to relax. I’d had sex with Shane.
It would have been fine except we really didn’t like each other. The wild sex didn’t change that. And we had to work together.
“Awkward,” I whispered.
I hadn’t been careful. I hadn’t even thought about things like pregnancy or STD’s.
I grabbed my phone, suddenly panicked, and texted Miriam as I drove. Apparently, I wasn’t careful when it came to most things.
I need the morning after pill.
She texted me back right away. Even at four a.m. most of Bay Town was awake. The supernaturals were night people.
How long before you get here?
Twenty minutes.
It’ll be in your room when you get home.
Thanks, Miriam.
She waited for two minutes before sending another text.
I’ll want all the details. Come find me when you wake up. #girltalk. Lol.
I sighed, then stuffed my phone back into the pocket of Shane’s jacket. My clothes…no way could I have crawled back into those ripped, wet jeans. Shane had cut them off me. They were ruined shreds of fabric, littering the ground along with the clothes from the vampires who’d disappeared.
Shane’s kills hadn’t disappeared—they just dried up into something resembling earthworm casings like the vampire I’d killed behind the bar.
The vampires I’d killed using Silverlight, though, they were gone.
When Shane had silently handed me his coat, I’d taken it gratefully. Then I’d scrambled around on the ground, searching for my belongings. Phone, knife, car keys, flashlights, Silverlight.
It was a pitiful shame, the way I was so careless with her.
I’d found one of my stakes, but the others were long gone. No biggie. I could always get more stakes.
When I arrived at Angus’s house, I sat in the car for a good five minutes, watching the house. The absolute last thing I wanted was to run into Angus in the state I was in. He’d smell the sex. I would never, ever live that down.
I crept up the back stairs to my room, realizing that living with Angus and his brood was no better for me than living in the city. I would start looking for a place of my own tomorrow.
Today.
I didn’t see Angus—he was probably still at the store, doing paperwork. He didn’t need the restaurant, but he’d said it made him legitimate to the humans. They liked a supernatural to have a little something—not too much of something, of course, but a little something. So he’d opened the store in the Bay Town Business Park, and used it to be something closer to what made him and his family a little more acceptable to the humans of Red Valley.
Angus wasn’t immortal, but without being outright killed, he would live a few hundred years. Nearly all the supernaturals lived outrageously long lives. It wasn’t something to envy, he’d told me once.
With long lives came lots of pain. And lots of wealth. The supernaturals had been amassing great sums of money for hundreds of years. It came in handy when they had to pay off the authorities, make people happy, and exist in a world in which they were unable to work side by side with the humans.
And in Angus’s case, it also came in handy when there were dozens of exes and offspring to take care of.
So when I crept up to my temporary room, holding my breath, I counted myself lucky that the only person I saw was Angus’s ten-year-old daughter, a strange little child named Nava.
She glanced at me, then hugged the wall as she hurried by.
I slipped into my room and closed the door. I locked it, then leaned back against it and closed my eyes, sighing.
“Trinity.”
I screamed and shot my eyes open, then gaped. Clayton stood at my bed with his empty eyes and his blank face, his hands at his side.
“What are you doing?” I asked. I’d rather have been seen by Angus than Clayton.
“Miriam sent me with a package.” He gestured at the nightstand. “I put it in the top drawer.”
“Son of a bitch.” I rubbed my temples. Of course she’d sent Clayton. She wasn’t going to deliver them herself.
“You look…” He shook his head. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. I just need to get cleaned up and eat something.” I sniffed the air. “Do I smell…?”
“I picked up a pizza,” he said. “It’s on the desk.”
“Thanks,” I murmured. “That was really very nice of you.”
“I had to leave,” he said.
“I know.”
“I didn’t like leaving you there. Not with…”
I squinted, then drifted toward the bathroom. I really didn’t want to get too close to him. Not smelling the way I did. “Not with what?”
“Copas,” he replied. “Not with Copas.”
I wet my lips, my gaze sliding away from his. “It was fine. There were so many vampires. We killed them all.” I stared at the floor.
He studied me quietly, then, “Trinity.”
“Yes?” I murmured.
“I was a new hunter once. Don’t be hard on yourself.”
My breath caught in my throat. He knew.
Before I could think of a thing to say, he reached into the drawer, then tossed me a small package. “Clean up,” he said. “Eat. Sleep. You will be…”
I stared at him, clutching the package to my chest, and waited.
“Extraordinary,” he finished, finally.
When I turned away, breathless, he stopped me once again. “The vampires will gradually stop testing you. It usually takes a new hunter a couple of years to integrate—if she survives that long. The more you hunt, the quicker the process.” He ran his stare over my body. “It will happen for you much faster than it does for most.”
A tendril of hope snaked through me. “They’ll leave me alone?”
His smile was faint. “Well…no. But they’ll stop coming in droves. Right now they believe they have a chance to destroy you. Because you’re so new, you’re giving off a certain…scent. It attracts them, enrages them, and they will try to destroy you. But they’re dying. You’re proving yourself. They’ll accept you as an equal, or better, and they will stop coming for you.” He shrugged. “It’s a matter of self-preservation and it’s as instinctive as their drive to
challenge you.”
“So all I have to do is stay alive and wait them out.”
“Hunt. If you stop hunting, the cycle will begin again.”
“That’s why Shane can walk around without a bunch of vampires descending with pitchforks and torches?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a relief.”
He nodded. “Soon, they’ll hide from you.”
I hesitated. “You don’t hunt. Why don’t they come for you?”
He stiffened immediately and was quiet for so long things began to get awkward. Finally, he spoke. “I’m no longer a hunter. It didn’t come back when I did.”
And his desolation at that fact was so severe it broke my heart.
Miriam had taken away everything he’d ever been. The killer, the hunter, the man.
There wasn’t anything I could say to that. I walked toward the bathroom. “Goodnight, Clayton,” I whispered.
When I left the bathroom forty-five minutes later, he was gone. I sat on the bed and ate cold pizza, every muscle in my body aching. But it wasn’t a bad ache, somehow. I was getting physically stronger.
I called the captain. I left a message on his voicemail, telling him about the battle of the night. I explained to him that on the way out of the woods I’d still had Gray’s scent. He hadn’t been one of the vampires I’d fought—or if he had been, he’d taken off when things got rough. He was still alive. Still out there.
“I’ll find him tonight,” I promised. Big promise, but I meant well. I could find Gray if the vampires would stop attacking me every time I stepped foot in the woods. And if Clayton had told me the truth, that would happen. Eventually.
I wondered why Shane hadn’t educated me on that fact. Some teacher he was. And then I got a blistering image of him thrusting into me, his mouth buried against the side of my throat, his hands holding me in a punishing grip, and I lay back and allowed that breathtaking, overwhelming memory to take me where it would.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“I need a place to live,” I told Rhys, taking a seat in front of his desk. I didn’t care if real estate were a front for him—all the supernaturals had fronts, and they still took their chosen jobs seriously. “I can’t keep staying with Angus. I need privacy.”
