Twilight Vendetta

by Maggie Shayne

  “Devlin?”

  Oh, God, here it comes, he thought. “Yes?”

  “What were you, before you were a vampire?”

  It was not the question he’d been expecting. “Human,” he said.

  She tipped her head toward him and made a face. “Is it secret then? Something dark and dire that you’ve never talked about with anyone else, ever before?”

  “It’s not a secret. It’s just not a very pleasant story.”

  “I’d like to hear it, all the same.”

  He shrugged and thought about saying no. He considered telling her that it was none of her business, and that it didn’t matter anyway since they’d be going their separate ways once he helped rescue her father. He, back to the island to continue building the resistance. And she, off to whatever adventures awaited her. He imagined she would lead the way in paving a path toward diplomacy. Organize peace talks and education campaigns to promote understanding between the races. She was a peacenik at heart, despite her recent slip into the dark side.

  He was a warrior. The dark side was his home.

  “Were you always so angry?” she asked.

  He slid a sidelong glance her way. She was still relaxed, still blissfully enjoying their ride, just quietly waiting for him to tell her a story as she watched the stars overhead.

  He found himself complying, despite that he’d already decided not to.

  “I was an ordinary man. I had my own business, liked my life just fine, despite its…challenges.”

  “What kind of business?” she asked, her curious eyes on his face. He could feel them without looking.

  “I hauled goods from one place to another.”

  “Like those truckers we just left?”

  He smiled slightly, nodded only a little. “Except that my horsepower came from actual horses, and my rig was a wagon.” That should be enough to satisfy her curiosity, he thought, hoping she would not ask anything more.

  “That’s right. You lived in a time before the invention of cars and trucks and...everything?”

  “Trains. We had trains. Steam engines. When I would arrive in a location, I would work helping to build the rails while awaiting a load of goods ready to be hauled back again, or on to another place.”

  “Building the rails,” she said it slowly, drawing out the final word. “Swinging a sledge hammer like Casey Jones.”

  “Just like that.”

  “That explains the bod,” she said slowly. “I’d been wondering if you were a professional wrestler or something.” She glanced sideways at him. “All that, from swinging a hammer. Nice.” Then she frowned. “Here in the U.S., yes?”

  He warmed under her praise and nodded. “Yes.”

  She tilted her head to one side, studying him. “And how were you changed? How did it happen?”

  He heaved a sigh and wondered why he was letting her gently tease his story from the deep places where it had been resting quietly for decades upon decades.

  “I was of mixed ancestry. I’ve told you that.”

  “Mm,” she said, nodding. “Native American, Samoan and African. I think that must be why your skin is so beautiful. You’re not pale like other vampires.”

  “I was…less pale as a human.”

  “Oh,” she said, and then. “Oh.”

  “I was held up on the road. Gunmen ambushed me in the middle of nowhere, took everything they could carry. I went for my gun, and they shot me. Left me to die slow with a bullet in my belly. Lucky for me, it was after sundown.”

  He slid a look her way. Her eyes were wide, her attention riveted. It was flattering the way she hung on his every word. And the way she looked at him, her eyes devouring him slowly every so often.

  “What happened?” she whispered.

  “A vampire came along. I was one of The Chosen, so he must’ve heard or sensed I was in trouble. He came to me. Asked me if I wanted to live. And I said yes.”

  “And then what?”

  “When I woke again, a night and a day had passed. It was night again. He spent that night teaching me about my new nature. Showing me how to use my powers. Drilling me on how to stay alive. After that he left, and I never saw him again.”

  “What was his name?”

  He glanced her way. “Damien Namtar,” he said softly. “I didn’t realize until much later that he was one of the first, if not the very first vampire. That’s a story he didn’t tell me, and one I will insist on hearing, should we meet again.” He lowered his eyes. “Assuming he’s still alive.” He saw her gaze turn inward, as if she was searching the memory banks of her mind for that name. He knew she had researched vampires on her many travels, in search of her mother, and thought she was trying to place the name. But then she blinked back into the moment.

  “What did you do after that? Did you have a family to go back to?”

  He blinked in reaction to the word family, but thought he covered it quickly enough. “Let’s save that part of the story for anoder time.” He was fairly certain he’d kept any hint of a quiver from his voice. “It’s going to be dawn soon. It’s time for us to find shelter.”

  She nodded. “My mother had a family. She thought she could keep right on living just the way she did before. Being a wife, taking care of Dad and me. They shifted our lives around, became nocturnal. When I was old enough, I was home schooled by night, and we slept most of the day. I didn’t even think it was all that strange, living the way we did. It was all I knew, really. She’d been transformed when I was still a newborn. And then all of a sudden it hit me that not every kid my age lived their entire lives by night. Even moms who worked the night shift were occasionally seen during the day.”

  He nodded. “It was bound to happen, I suppose. Kids are smart. You can’t keep much from them.”

  She nodded. “You had a family,” she said softly. “Kids.”

  He shot her a look.

  “I saw you flinch when I asked. Did you try to keep living like a human, like my mom did?”

  Emotions quaked down deep inside him. He felt like a fault line under pressure, reminded himself to take care not to let the pressure break free and rip him into pieces. “I did try, for a little while.”

  “And what happened?”

  He met her eyes and thought I’m not going to tell her anything more. Aloud he said, “I confided in my best friend, who was also our town’s only doctor. He was the only person in our town who had treated me…as a person, instead of as a person whose skin was a few shades darker than caucasian.”

  “Was your wife…?”

  “Her mother was Mexican, she was mixed like me. Otherwise, they probably would have attacked us long before they did.”

  She lowered her head, closed her eyes.

  “I thought Doctor Scott, as I called him, could...put me back to the way I was before. Fix this thing that Damian had done to me. He promised he’d look into it, and I believed him. I trusted him. But as soon as I left his side, he went to the sheriff. I didn’t know. If I’d known, I’d have never left home that night.”

  “Oh, Devlin–“

  “A mob of vigilantes came to the house and burned it with my wife and baby son inside. I wasn’t even home, but my wagon was out front so they assumed I was.”

  In his mind’s eye, he saw it again, the image that had seared itself into his memory. The smoldering remains of their little house, blackened, just one wall left standing, partially burned. The ribbons of black and gray smoke writhing up from charred piles of who knew what on the ground. The smell, the pungent, horrid smell of burning bodies. He was a vampire, so the scents were keen to him. He knew which of the acrid smells came from the charred body of his wife, Maria, which came from the remnants of his baby boy, Charles, and which came from his devoted hound dog Bart, who’d died with his family that night. He could also detect the scents of every man who’d been there while he’d been away. Every single one of them. He could conjure their faces in his mind, their physical bodies, their voices. It was as if the scen
t of a man carried strands of his DNA and the vampiric mind could unravel the coils and see the end result.

  He remembered knowing it was his own fault, for being what he was. And he remembered, too, gradually coming to understand that the good folk of Beacon Township had always hated him just for the color of his skin. They’d hated him for his blood. They’d been waiting for an excuse to let that hatred loose.

  He’d left the place that very night. Let the townsfolk believe they’d killed the monster in their midst. Let them sleep peacefully at night. So that when he went back to kill them, they wouldn’t be expecting it.

  “And did you?” Emma whispered.

  Her eyes were swimming with tears and he realized that he’d left his mind open, that she had experienced the memory, the flashback, right along with him. She’d felt every bit of his pain. And she asked him again, “Did you go back and kill them?”

  He met her eyes. “What do you think?”

  She held his gaze and nodded slowly. “I think you did. And I think they deserved it.”

  He lowered his head. “You’ve been talking to me about diplomacy. You said violence only begets more violence. But I have to tell you, it wouldn’t have done my family one bit of good had I gone to the authorities to let them handle it. There was no justice for a dark skinned man in those times. Even if I hadn’t been a vampire, I would not have been believed. For whites to burn out families of mixed heritage mortals wasn’t even unusual. If humans of color couldn’t expect justice, what were the chances a vampire like me would fare any better?”

  Emma shook her head slowly. “You’ve been subjected to ignorant bigotry and outrageous racism all your life. First as a mixed race American. Later as a vampire. I’m starting to understand you a little better now, I think.”

  “With the exception of one brief interlude,” he said, “I’ve known nothing but hate and violence all my life. A man like me can’t ever love, do you understand that? I wouldn’t know how.”

  She didn’t answer, just slid a hand over his on the shifting knob, and relaxed back in her seat, thinking, but keeping her thoughts to herself.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Wolf and Sheena crawled out of a semi-truck’s trailer while its driver was inside at the truck stop diner, probably getting some of that food they could smell from outside. The aromas made Sheena’s mouth water. This was their third “big rig” and their second truck stop. At the first, they’d thought they sensed vampires nearby, and had run far enough away not to be detected, until the vampires’ energy had moved away. The vamps might not be their enemies. But they would try to stop them from going east, to where they could sense their seven-year-old siblings in some kind of distress.

  Sheena was stiff and sore, and she knew her brother was as well. She was more tuned in to Wolf than she was to the other Offspring. She supposed that was because they came from the same parents; who were, the vampires had told them, a pair of The Chosen who’d been treated with a drug designed to create super soldiers in a program doomed to fail. The subjects’ hearts exploded if they got too stressed. Those who hadn’t died that way had been euthanized when the program had been shut down. One or the other of those events had probably been the fate of Sheena and Wolf’s forebears, though they might never know for sure.

  All of this had been explained to the two of them by the vampires aboard the Anemone, along with many other things about the world beyond the ship, about themselves and the other Offspring, and where they’d come from and why they’d been made. They had been told of the true nature of vampires, and that they were not the enemy. And they’d been told about DPI, the evil organization without which, she supposed, she would not exist.

  “It’s not much farther,” Wolf said, after closing the trailer’s door and lowering the bar that kept it shut. “I can feel them. They’re not in the same place they were before, but it’s not far, and I think they’re moving.”

  Sheena nodded. “I felt the same thing. Do you think they know we’re coming?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if they feel us the way we feel them. But I think it’s the Gammas.”

  “Don’t call them that.”

  “The Sevens, then.”

  “They have names now,” Sheena said. “Nikki, Gareth, Ramses.”

  “Names given to them by the vampires,” Wolf said. “I’m glad I, at least, chose my own.”

  “You still hate them, don’t you, Wolf?”

  “I don’t trust them. Devlin left us behind, let them shoot us and take us prisoner.”

  “He came to get us out, though.” Sheena lowered her head. Shame and guilt were not emotions she had experienced before. But she’d felt them when they had left Devlin and the human female Emma to make their own escape. “And then we left him behind. How can the same act be hateful when one does it, and acceptable when another does?”

  “We had no choice. Devlin did.” Wolf lowered his head.

  “Emma said that Devlin thought we were dead.”

  “We don’t die. Everyone knows that.”

  “Everyone can die. That’s what Rhiannon told us on the ship. Everyone can die, just in different ways. And that must be true, because Nikki’s sister....” She closed her eyes, remembering the time when there had been four of the so called Gammas. Two girls and two boys, just like the Elevens and the Twos. She didn’t know where they had been kept before they were put into the empty cages below decks. But when they came, they were very young. Walking, and using the toilets in their cells. Eating on their own, but not speaking more than a few words. One little girl, though, had been very different from her siblings. Her hair was white, her eyes such a light shade of violet that they sometimes seemed pink. She was smaller, more frail than her mates, and her skin had been very pale. She’d become sick, and one day she didn’t wake up. Her body had been cold. Sheena knew because she’d reached through the bars of her cage to touch the child. And then the keepers came and took her away.

  She’d wept. Never before had Sheena felt the sensation of tears filling her eyes and spilling over, but she had that day.

  Her brother’s hunger pangs and then his voice broke into her thoughts. “We should get food and then get moving,” she said.

  He nodded and walked toward the building where all the delicious smells were coming from. Through the windows, they could see a long counter lined with plates, all of them heaped with food. Men sat on stools, their backs to the window, drinking coffee and eating, talking aloud.

  “Let’s go around to the back,” Wolf whispered.

  Sheena nodded, and they moved away from the window unseen, keeping to the shadows and circling around to the rear of the building. There were fewer windows there, smaller ones, and one of them was open, but there was a screen inside it.

  “Ready?” Wolf asked.

  Sheena nodded. They had been practicing their skills, skills they had intuitively kept secret from their captors, and even from their rescuers, the vampires. But since being on their own, they’d been free to wield their powers in private and to test their limits, which they had yet to find.

  Wolf focused on the building, closed his eyes. His arms were at his sides, but his palms were open wide. Within a second or two, the building began to shake.

  “Not too much,” Sheena warned.

  She was watching to see what happened. Soon people were streaming out the front door and into the parking area. Some were shouting, “earthquake!” while others were pulling out their phones.

  Sheena went to the back window, climbed up on a box and removed the screen. Then she looked inside at the kitchen, where several plates of food had been fixed, but not yet served. She focused on those, and as she moved her hands to mimic picking them up, the plates rose from the counter and came floating her way. It took extreme concentration to keep them from tipping to one side or the other, so the plates moved rather slowly and wobbled as she kept correcting by the twist of her wrists, but still, it was working.

  As the plates hovered n
ear the window, she grabbed the two that looked the most tasty, and turned away. The remaining plates crashed to the floor as soon as she took her attention away from them. “Got them, Wolf.”

  He opened his eyes, relaxed his hands, and the shaking stopped. Then he inclined his head toward the brush lot behind the place, and the two of them ran into the foliage so they could eat in private.

  Just at the edge, Sheena turned back and said, “I forgot. Silverware!” She opened her hand, and several utensils flew like missiles through the open window, knives and forks, speeding toward her, blades and tines leading the way.

  “Sheena, look out!” Wolf stepped in front of her just as she realized the danger. She released her power on the utensils in the nick of time. They fell to the ground before reaching her brother, clattering right at his feet.

  He closed his eyes slowly, then turned to her, angry. “You have to be more careful. Those things could’ve stabbed you or gouged out your eyes.”

  She shrugged. “Like you said, we don’t die.”

  “Like you said,” he snapped, “everybody can die of something. We just don’t know what can kill us yet.”

  She bent to pick up two forks and brushed them off. “Somehow, I don’t think it will turn out to be silverware.”