The Jaded Hunter

by The Jaded Hunter(Lit)

"Get on with it then," she whispered. Her words carried a sinister purpose. "I’ll waste no more of my time on you. I have a real man waiting for me. A man of flesh and blood, a man of fire and heat--"

  "It’s getting late," he interrupted gently, pretending as if her declaration didn’t sting. His thumb ran absentmindedly over the coolness of his own hand. Only after eating did he feel warm. "Maybe we should go."

  "I’m not going with you," she resolved through gritted teeth. Tilting her chin up nobly, she sighed, "Tell me what it is you want from me."

  "What were you doing tonight?" he asked. He thought of Rick. A wave of displeasure crossed over his face. Was that the lover she spoke of? He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. He didn’t like his brain muddled. The long years had taught him that everything works itself out given enough time, and some things would always be the way that fate wishes them to be.

  Jaden wondered at the curious frown. Carefully, she said, "You should know. You were there."

  "Ah," he mused silently, remembering why he was sent for her. "Then you are a part of it."

  "A part of what?" she snapped in scathing aggravation. "Tell me what it is you think is going on."

  "I know what is going on," he murmured. "I just want to know your part in it."

  Jaden shivered. His eyes were no longer kind or placid. They swirled violently as he stared at her. Shakily, though she wasn’t sure she would like the answer, she questioned, "What happened in the park tonight? Do you know where they took that vampire?"

  "Did you ask your uncle about it?" he wondered aloud.

  "He’s gone," she admitted. Jaden forgot her anger as she studied him. Biting her lips meditatively, she ordered, "You tell me."

  Tyr ignored the command. Thoughtfully, he turned from her. He paced to the window to look out over the city. His fingers threaded behind his back. Jaden started to move forward, her hand reaching to touch him from the distance. Catching herself, she pulled back. Her hands balled into fists.

  He isn’t your friend! She reminded herself. You hate him.

  "How long will Mack be gone?" he asked. Jaden heard the words clearly in her head. She wondered if he spoke or merely directed his thoughts at her. She had heard that some of the old had very powerful gifts, though she herself had never experienced such things as mental telepathy. It was said that all vampires could converse amongst themselves by such means, but only some of them with humans. The problem with the facts she had been given was that she never knew when they would be exaggerated as a means to frighten her and others like her.

  "Can’t you tell, o mighty one?" she jibed. Tyr glanced over his shoulder, shooting her an unamused grimace. With a sigh, she answered in dejection, "Three days."

  "Fine. You have three days to find out what you don’t know or to try and hide what you do. But remember, Miss MacNaughton, the vampire council does not need evidence of the deed, only my word in the matter." Tyr came around to study her face. With swift precision, he was by her side, holding her face tenderly in his large hands. His eyes glistened and pulled. "I could be your best friend or your worst enemy. I could bring them your heart and they wouldn’t question it."

  "Am I on trial?" she asked in a whisper.

  "You have been on trial since before our first meeting in the alley," he said softly down to her. "You have been on trial your whole life. And do not think you can escape me. The world is too small to hide you and my reach too long. I’ll find you wherever you are."

  "And if I kill myself before then?" she asked in low tones. She hid her passionate jade gaze beneath her lashes. "Not even you can find me in death."

  "If you were going to do the deed yourself, you would’ve done so before now," he answered logically. His thumb stroked over her cheek. "Do not be in such a hurry to die. You life is short enough as it is."

  "Release me," she beseeched him. Tyr knew what she was asking. Still, he wasn’t sure of why.

  "I cannot."

  "End me," she continued her plea. "Give me peace. Tell your council what you will about me. I don’t care. If you do it, it will make your job easier."

  "Why do you wish it so?" he asked, unable to stop the question. His eyes fell to her lips, watching the birth of her answer. Her eyes clouded briefly.

  "Don’t ask that. You have no right." Jaden pulled away from him. He let her go. Her stomach tightened.

  "I am your master, dhampir. I have every right to you." Tyr’s words dropped and Jaden couldn’t mistake what he meant by every right. His claim on her body burned brightly in his eyes. He was only biding his time until he would obtain her completely.

  Turning her back, she said boldly, "Judge me then, Dark Knight, and be done with it. Don’t wait for your answers. Decide now."

  "Three days," he whispered. His lids fell listlessly over his eyes. When they again opened he was no longer looking at her. Jaden didn’t notice.

  Jaden felt him leave before she had a chance to protest. The devilishly strange sensations he aroused went with him, leaving her to a bitter ache of despair. She said nothing to stop him. On the verge of tears, she touched her bottom lip. Her fingers slid onto his mark. She wondered if they would leave a scar. It would be only a small one in her long history of collecting. She didn’t care. Their maker wounded her more purposefully than a small physical scrape.

  She waited until she was sure he was gone. Jaden shook her head, her lips letting loose a trembling sigh. Her body ached, wanting desperately to be held in a tender embrace, to be protected. But she wasn’t the protected kind. She was the warrior, the brave soldier who needed no one.

  Jaden quivered. When would someone finally discover her shameful lie? That she wasn’t as strong as she pretended to be. She choked back a stray tear that threatened to fall from her eye. Tyr was right. Rick would never understand and didn’t deserve to be involved in her disastrous life--not even to be used for physical pleasure. Quietly, she crawled into bed alone. The end was near, she could feel it. All she could do was wait for it to come.

  Chapter Five

  The sun streamed in through a crack in Jaden’s curtain. She held still, her eyes closed as she pretended to sleep. The nightmares of her dreams faded into reality. She waited. Her lungs filled with soft falls of air, her body alert as she listened for another sound. All around her was perfect silence.

  Without warning her skin felt alive with fire. Jaden kicked viciously at the covers, rolling over as a blade swished past her ear. Feathers flew up from the pillow floating gently around the bed in the sunlight. Untangling her feet, she jumped onto the floor. Her breath came hard as her eyes focused on her attacker. She had little time to think as a sword flew through the air at her head.

  Lifting her hand, Jaden swung to the side, missing the point and catching the handle. The action spun her about until she completed a circle.

  "You’re a little sluggish this morning," Rick teased. He tossed his matching blade from one hand to the other. "I thought you said we could practice."

  Jaden snarled. Suppressing a yawn, she slowly made her way around the bed frame. She jutted her chin in greeting, all the time cursing him for his rude awakening. The steel glinted sharply as it passed the stream of light. She pointed it daringly at Rick’s chest.

  "You slept in your clothes," he noticed. His eyes swept over her disheveled hair, her wrinkled attire. She was sensational. She made him want to grab her up into his arms and cart her away--at least as far as her bed. His blade didn’t move to defend. His hand fell to the side, his chest open and trusting. Her jade eyes were brilliantly alive and on fire. "Would you like time to change?"

  "Coffee," she growled viciously. With the deadly accuracy of a snake, she flung her wrist, sending the blade flying through the air to stick into the wood of the door. Rick gasped, jumping out of the way. The metal vibrated loudly before settling into its new home.

  Rick chuckled as he stood. Lowering his sword arm, he bowed gallantly. "Yes, Jade, coffee."

  "Now," she hissed, unamu
sed. Spinning on her heels, she strode over to her dresser. She began yanking out her workout shorts and T-shirts and flinging them violently onto the bed.

  Rick watched her and gave a humored laugh. As he opened her door, his eyes fell on the blade. It was embedded all the way through the thick wood. Sheepishly, he said, "I’ll just leave this here for you."

  He was rewarded with a growl followed by a curse. Shutting her in with her anger, he smiled gleefully at a maid as she passed by. The woman’s mouth fell open as she witnessed the deadly weapon’s tip protruding from Jaden’s door.

  "Coffee for two in the dining room, please," Rick ordered, as he moved to the stairs. His hand struck out to pluck a fresh flower thoughtfully from a vase as he passed. "Miss MacNaughton will be down in a moment. And I would stay out of her way if I were you. She’s a little testy this morning."

  "Yes, Mr. Fletcher," the stunned woman mumbled before hurrying about her duties.

  * * * *

  Three days passed and Jaden was exhausted. Mack sent word that he was going to be late and Rick gallantly declared that he would stay with her until Mack’s return. Rick not only attacked her by sword, but by fist and knife. She was sure he thought fighting romantic and at one time she might have been inclined to agree with him. But, nowadays, it just wore her out. She had enough fighting in her life. All she wanted to do now was sleep.

  Rick never let her out of his sight. Jaden suspected he was wearing her out on purpose to keep her from leaving the apartment. Little did he know that keeping her indoors didn’t protect her. The one she should fear the most proved he had no problem getting to her. There was nowhere to run.

  Tyr didn’t return, though he did find himself a comfortable place within her thoughts. Sometimes she would imagine she was attacking him and go at Rick full force. Luckily she remembered the man she fought, though Rick never once asked for mercy, and let up before she hurt him.

  Slipping undetected into Mack’s library Jaden sighed with relief. Rick was out of the house. She sent him on an errand across the city to a small bakery to pick up sandwiches. It was a needless task, but it bought her enough time to snoop through Mack’s library. With the ambiguous directions she gave it would take him at least two hours to find the place and get back.

  Jaden ignored the smell of her sweat-drenched shirt. She flipped on the light. Her feet were silent as she moved over the carpet. Coming to the desk, she laid her latest weapon, a knife, on top. Mack was a paranoid man, but also a prudent one. He wouldn’t put cameras anywhere he did business and Jaden wasn’t afraid of being discovered snooping. The servants had finished with the upstairs cleaning that very morning.

  Within moments Jaden riffled through his desk, using the tip of her knife to pick the locks. There was nothing terribly interesting hidden in the drawers. A few folders with weapon speculations--from the mundane to the fantastic--were on top. Financial statements, business proposals, boring rows of number-filled ledgers fitted into the others. Leaving the desk as she found it, Jaden ignored the computer.

  Mack only used his computer for research, often claiming not to trust his line of work to the susceptibility of hackers. Beyond a few simple texts, the system would be empty.

  Jaden ran her eyes over the bookshelves, freezing as she listened to a maid pass by her door. To her relief, she felt the woman move on without stopping.

  Jaden turned to the sundial behind the desk. Running her fingers over the top, she frowned. The safe didn’t move. She continued on over the room, running her hands lightly over the walls and under paintings, lifting the edges of the rug for clues. She even scanned the bookshelf, knowing from the hours that she spent pulling books from it that there would be no secrets hidden there.

  She paused in her investigation only to pull down the book on Dark Knights from the top. Within seconds she copied the foreign description of Tyr onto a piece of paper and shoved it in her pocket. She planned on translating it later.

  Jaden found nothing else to capture her interest and sunk wearily into her uncle’s thick leather chair. Leaning forward, she poured herself a glass of scotch from his decanter and swallowed it in several long gulps. The liquid burned pleasantly down her throat. She blinked heavily to keep her thoughts clear. She refilled her glass and rested it on her stomach as she spun her heels into the ground. The chair turned slowly until she faced the safe.

  She eyed the large base carefully, looking for grooves in the plain design. She saw nothing. Then, standing, she took a quick drink before setting the glass behind her. Pushing at the dial, she jumped as it clicked. The top piece was the lock. Jaden smiled. She figured it out. Now all she had to do was think of the combination.

  Trying a few numbers and receiving no reward for her effort, she grimaced with sudden insight. Attempting the lock again, she turned the dial around--seven, one, nineteen, seventy-eight. The latch clicked open and the top fell to the side. It was the day her mother had died, July 1, 1978.

  Rhona’s death was the whole reason Mack began hunting vampires. Her uncle had never forgiven Jaden’s father for impregnating his sister and ruining her reputation. Mack had been very close to his sister, taking in her only daughter when she died.

  Jaden refused to think of the mother she didn’t remember. She had been a year old when Rhona had died. And though she resented her vampire roots, she never blamed the woman for falling in love with her father. A handsome immortal would be a hard thing to resist by a normal mortal woman. Their gaze alone could strike up the most fascinating feelings inside a person. Jaden thought of Tyr and frowned. He was her proof of that.

  Her fingers trembled as she opened the top latch. Inside, tucked within the depths of the pedestal were a bound folder and a box. Jaden lifted them from the depths. Her breath caught in her throat as she felt the smooth box. Her mother’s name was carved intricately in the top of the wood. She set it aside, unable to open it.

  With a heavy, slow breath, she placed the folder on the desk. Seeing her liquor, she took another drink. The liquid didn’t burn nearly as bad as the first time. It landed thickly in her stomach, numbing invitingly against the pain that threatened her chest.

  She unbound the string around the folder, opening it to the front page. The words were written in French. Jaden sighed in weary frustration. Her uncle spoke the language fluently, having been raised partially by a French nanny when he was young. She didn’t know why, but Mack had never taught her the language. She always assumed it was because he was too busy training her to be a warrior.

  "You never write in French," Jaden muttered, thinking of her uncle. "What do you have to hide?"

  Flipping through the file, she saw scientific charts and graphs and what looked like an endless line of medical sheets and blood work-ups. All was written in French. Halfway through the folder, she paused. Paper clipped to one of the pages was a photograph. The image was turned away, pressed into the sheet. On the back it read, Sydney, 103, 1984. Jaden recognized the slanted fall of her uncle’s precise penmanship.

  Jaden slowly turned the photo over. Her heart fell into her stomach. The image was of a young woman tied to a gurney. She looked scared, her eyes frozen in panic as she stared out from the slip of photographic paper. Her wide brown eyes begged for release, for help. At the same time, they admitted defeat. Jaden quickly turned the image back around. She couldn’t look at the wounded stare.

  Then, turning to the next page, she saw a manila envelope. The front again bore the number 103 in tight script. Unwinding the threaded latch, Jaden pulled the stack of photos from within. They were of the same woman only with a number of days penned on the edges. The first, bearing the title Day One, showed her neck gouged by familiar markings. She had been bitten by a vampire. As the days progressed, the woman’s cruel change became evident. She was denied blood. Her face contorted with first anger, then tears, and then lunacy until finally, at the end, there was a skeletal figure of the same person. The woman’s eyes still shone with life, an eerie discovery in such a withe
red and rotted frame. She was tied to the same bed with the notation, Day Forty-three, External Termination.

  Jaden pressed her lips together. A sensation of dread overcame her senses as she put the photos back into their place. Behind the envelope was another picture turned upside down. And, behind that, another envelope filled with photographs. This one read, Henry, 296, 1986. Looking at the pictures, Jaden discovered that it was pretty much more of the same thing, but with other notations as well. The subject had been given a serum of sorts, which appeared to prolong the agony of starvation. But the subject ultimately died the same as the other--by an outside hand and in much pain.

  Jaden stared at the skeletal face in horror. It was obvious that Henry had been tested upon most cruelly. Cuts were made on his arms until the wounds no longer had the power to heal themselves. Some of them went as deep as the bone. At one point, the arm had been sawed nearly off above the wrist. The only question was, by whom? And why did Mack have these pictures? What exactly did the experimenters have to gain by such tests? It was already common enough knowledge that it took only a few days for most vampires to go crazy when denied blood. And there was no cure to be had.

  Did those who had done this think that they could find a cure? Or was a much worse experiment going on? Without reading the details, it was hard to say. And, the most damning of all questions, why was it Mack’s handwriting on the back of the first photograph?

  Seeing that there were more cases behind Henry’s, Jaden refused to look at anymore. She wasn’t sure how long she had been in the library and didn’t want Rick to catch her. Rick was loyal to her uncle and she wasn’t sure if he was to be trusted.

  Jaden thought of Tyr. Was this what he thought her uncle to be involved in? No, she couldn’t believe it. Mack might harbor a lot of hatred for creatures of the night, but she had to believe he would never be capable of such atrocities.

  Slamming the folder shut, she turned to the box. Her fingers lingered on the carved swirl of her mother’s name. Lifting the lid, she peered into the shallow depths. Inside was a piece of folded parchment, yellowed by age and tattered by time. Jaden lifted it, opening what looked to be a letter. She couldn’t read the finely laid scrawling, not recognizing the language but knowing it to be old. Folding it carefully, she laid it aside. Beneath was a picture of her mother and a locket.