Amnesia Bites (Shady Arcade Book 1)

by Sharon Stevenson

  Chloe sighed inwardly. “No. Nothing.”

  “Sorry,” she said, sounding painfully sympathetic.

  “Its fine,” Chloe said, knowing full-well she made it sound anything but fine. She couldn’t seem to help it. Talking about it was still too hard.

  “I’m sure—”

  “So how are things going with that guy from school?” Chloe cut in before Amira could start a pity party for her.

  She listened to her friend chat animatedly about the hot guy from her business class and wondered how much longer she could go on pretending she was okay with her own love life. It was a redundant question, and she knew it. There was nothing she could do to turn back the clock. So, she listened and she asked questions and she nodded and gasped in the right places, barely even able to keep the girl’s words straight in her head as she gushed on about how amazingly smart and handsome her latest crush was. She glanced out the window when Amira’s dreamy stare seemed to be going right through her. She couldn’t imagine being so wrapped up in someone like that ever again, even if she did let go of her past.

  She left Amira daydreaming about her crush as she headed across to Zack’s agency, her eyes drifting over the name plate on the door—Z. Harrison, Private Detective. It sounded so unremarkable. He didn’t advertise the psychic side of things, but word got around after he’d consulted on some cases for Shady Pines P.D. She ran her fingers over the lettering, knowing she was stalling. The chance that Zack might come out of his office while she was there made her hands shake. She’d been avoiding him as much as she could, but now she couldn’t risk staying too far away.

  Taking a shaky breath, she pushed the door inwards and locked eyes with the blonde vampire sitting behind the reception desk.

  “Chloe,” Bridget said slowly, raising a finely shaped eyebrow as the necromancer closed the door behind her.

  “How’s the thirst?” Chloe asked. She couldn’t help but glance at Zack’s closed office door briefly as she moved towards Bridget’s desk.

  “I’m quite full, but thanks for the offer,” Bridget murmured, smiling tightly at her.

  “You don’t look good,” she said, knowing from the look of her eyes that she was close to the edge.

  Bridget’s eyes looked black, her pupils enlarged. She shuddered as Chloe stopped in front of the desk. Her nostrils flared and she straightened in her seat, her energy suddenly high.

  “I’m fine,” she snapped.

  “Yeah, that’s really convincing,” Chloe muttered, holding her gaze. “You’re not hungry. You hear me? You’ve eaten today, and you’re not hungry anymore.”

  She’d taken more than enough from Larry the night before to last her a week. Chloe knew more than she cared to about these things from her compulsory training when she ‘came of age’ to use her magic. She also knew that feeding directly from humans was a highly addictive thing for a vampire to do. They would crave it constantly no matter how much they drank. Bridget didn’t need more blood, but she wanted it anyway. It was going to be Chloe’s job to make sure she didn’t get another chance at a living, breathing snack.

  “Repeat after me, ‘I am not hungry’.”

  Bridget’s jaw slackened. She spoke with a frown on her pretty face. “I am not hungry.”

  “Good.” Chloe nodded as she broke eye contact.

  Bridget scowled at her as she moved away. “That is not funny.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be. This isn’t a joke. You touch Larry again, or anyone else for that matter, and I’ll report it.”

  She was fairly sure no one really wanted a vampire in their town, least of all the Council of necromancers. They’d tolerated her to keep Zack safe, but if she was stepping out of line, it wouldn’t take much to have them turn on her.

  Bridget snorted. “Larry was just convenient. You didn’t seem to mind at the time or was that just to save your own precious skin?”

  Chloe shuddered at the thought of letting a vampire bite her. She frowned at Bridget. “I mean it. You bite anyone else, and the necromancer’s Council will be down on you like a ton of bricks.”

  Bridget shrugged, slender fingers going to her keyboard. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”

  Chloe shook her head as she left. The vampire would never listen to her threats, not really, but that didn’t matter because she’d already pre-programmed her so she couldn’t hurt Zack. As a necromancer, she could control Bridget, but the vampire seemed arrogant enough to assume that meant nothing more than forcing her to follow orders when she was right there in front of her. She didn’t realise or remember the promise Chloe had forced from her that day. It was the only way Chloe could let her continue to watch over her ex.

  She’d never trust the vampire, but she trusted her own power, and that was enough.

  ***

  Bridget watched the punky necromancer leave, wondering what Zack had ever seen in the girl. Her lips curled as she realised whatever it had been, he certainly didn’t see it anymore. She’d watched him every time they’d walked past her, and he’d never even looked twice. He didn’t remember her, and he certainly wasn’t drawn to her. It was slowly driving the girl crazy, and that was enough to let Bridget shrug off her warnings. Plan B was going to be more fun than she’d initially thought. Her smile widened.

  Timing was going to be the key to the plan. She hummed as she brought up her copy of the details. Deleting the file wasn’t necessary, it being password-protected, so she didn’t need to worry about Zack reading it and it wasn’t as if he was ever alone with her computer, besides. She just needed to choose a moment when the man was at his most vulnerable to disclose the details of his need for her protection. Chloe wasn’t a part of those details, and even if she were she’d be a risk Bridget couldn’t take. As amusing as it was to watch him fail to notice the heartbroken necromancer, there was no way she could risk sparking his curiosity. Chloe was looking too closely for an opening. Bridget could see that in the way the girl refused to keep her distance. She was going to grab hold of the first chance she got to remind Zack what she used to mean to him. That meant she was playing with fire, and she was damn well going to get burned. Bridget would make sure of that.

  She picked up the phone and dialled the number of the least irritating of the necromancers residing in Shady Pines.

  Kenny picked up in three rings, sounding sultry. “Hello?”

  “Hey, Ken, how’s the day job?”

  It was a running joke between them. He slept half the day away to spend his nights watching out for threats to Zack. The hours meant he hardly ever left the apartment building he lived in, his place next door to Zack’s.

  “Ha ha,” he muttered, yawning into her ear a second later. “Did you need something or is this a social call?”

  His tone lightened at the latter suggestion.

  She smiled at the thought, but she knew they couldn’t let themselves get distracted. Not again. “I’ll be taking babysitting duties tonight so you can get a longer lie.”

  “You’ll be… what’s happening? Has a threat been detected?”

  “Nothing like that. Zack took on a case in town. We’ll be looking into it later, so he’ll be home late. I’ll call you when he’s going to get home.”

  “Oh. Right, cool.”

  He sounded suspicious, though.

  Bridget pressed her lips together. The man was too smart for his own good. “I don’t think we’ll be really late, but I’ll let you know.”

  “Okay, great.” He paused, and for a moment, she was sure he was going to call her out on the lie. “Can you stop by after? Ten minutes or something just even.”

  He had that subtle hint of desperation that usually made it hard to deny him whatever he was asking.

  She pulled her lower lip between her teeth. It wasn’t the time to be out having careless fun. Zack’s flat sat right next to Ken’s. It had bad idea written all over it. She shook her head as she released her lip.

  “I can’t.” She grimaced as she said it. Plan B was
already leaving a bad taste in her mouth.

  “Sure, you can,” he said, sounding all husky and naked and persuasive.

  She blinked. “Sure, I can.”

  “Great,” he said, hanging up without a goodbye.

  Bridget put the phone down, cursing under her breath. Necromancers! He wanted something, and she wouldn’t be able to get away without giving him whatever it was. Not that he’d ever used his powers on her for that, but just knowing that he could got her all hot and shaky. His incredible physique didn’t do anything to cool her down, either. No man had any right to look so damned perfect. Or smell so damned tasty…

  “Shit,” she hissed, feeling her fangs lengthen.

  Just thinking about how he smelled was pulling her hunger pangs back into sharp focus. She bit at her bottom lip until it bled, just to have the taste of blood fresh on her tongue. Sweet copper filled her mouth, but it wasn’t enough. She needed more.

  The jangle of Larry’s keys, the echoing fall of his footsteps, snapped her attention to the hall. She knew she had to get out before she broke. One more mistake and Chloe would feed her to the dogs. She got up and darted out, focusing on making it to the fridge in her flat.

  Chapter Eight

  The car park didn’t look menacing in the slightest, but Zack couldn’t help the backward glances every time he took another step closer to the place where the girl had fallen down dead. Every step filled him with dread, the dark night air wrapping around him to stifle his breathing. This had been a bad idea. Why hadn’t he known that?

  He glanced at Bridget. The frosty blonde was gazing angrily into space as she walked, arms folded tightly. She didn’t even look at him as he swallowed and took the last few shaky steps towards the spot he’d been standing in during the first vision. Removing one of his gloves, he crouched on the ground and placed his hand on the concrete.

  The world spun as it tilted and changed around him. The girl was rushing towards her car, keys and purse in one hand. She glanced back, eyes wide in terror. Blood glimmered around her neck. She’d already been attacked. She touched her neck, and he saw the identical puncture marks as she sobbed and moved her hand back. She fell to the ground seconds later, staring lifelessly across the parking lot.

  Zack glanced around, but her attacker was too far away. The vision would break if he tried to go after the guy. He’d be pulling focus away from the girl. She was the important thing here.

  He looked her over. She wasn’t breathing, her eyes blank. His gaze kept pulling to the wounds on her neck. A few seconds went by before he noticed Bridget was kneeling down next to him. He looked at her and the vision faded. The girl had become a ghostly whisper when he glanced back down again. She blinked out of existence quickly.

  “He must have stabbed her in the neck,” he said softly.

  “What did you see?” Bridget straightened herself back to a standing position.

  “She was running. She fell. Her neck was… it looked like a vampire bite.”

  He laughed at what he’d just said. It sounded just as ridiculous out loud as he’d thought it had in his head.

  “Well,” Bridget said. “That’s not good. Did you see the vampire?”

  “Vampires aren’t a real thing.”

  Why wasn’t she scoffing at what he’d said? Surely, she couldn’t possibly…

  “We need to talk,” she told him.

  “Uh, what do you mean?” He was just being paranoid.

  She looked deadly serious. “There’s something you need to know about your condition.”

  “My condition?” Did she mean the amnesia or the weird mental breaks he usually had after a vision? Both would fit the bill.

  “You’re never going to get your memory back,” she told him. “There’s a reason for that. We should talk, in private.”

  “What do you mean, I’m never getting it back?”

  Panic flared at the very thought of it. He felt his chest tighten, and he had to remind himself to suck in a breath. He didn’t think amnesia was such a categorical, definitive thing, so how could she say that? The doctors themselves had told him they couldn’t say for sure if he’d regain his memories or not. Bridget was just a cop; she hardly qualified as a medical professional. He narrowed his eyes. “You can’t know that. Not for sure.”

  She sighed. “Let’s just go to your place, Zack. I’ll explain everything when we get inside.”

  He had half a mind to tell her to get lost. “I didn’t have an episode. Right after the vision.”

  She shrugged. “It was the second time you went into it.”

  “Aye, maybe that’s it,” he muttered, not quite sure what to think. It was the first time he’d felt stable after a vision. Maybe he was getting better. He could only hope.

  Bridget’s words burrowed deeper into his worry as they walked. He’d been so sure his memories would come back, someway, somehow. Never was a fucking long time to be stumbling around not sure of who he was, where he’d come from. He didn’t know how he’d cope with that if it were true. He didn’t even know what had happened to trigger the amnesia. How the hell could Bridget know he wouldn’t get his memory back? Did that mean she knew what had happened that night? What had she been holding back from him? She’d had his blind trust, but did she really deserve it?

  They walked towards his block of flats. He felt weird about having her back at his place. Their relationship had always been strictly professional. This seemed too intimate. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d had a girl in his flat. He snorted at that stupid joke as he let her into the building. For all he knew, he’d been great with the ladies. Somehow, he doubted it.

  “So this is it,” he said, unlocking the door and motioning to her to go inside.

  The door opened across from them. He smiled tightly at the second cop assigned to supposedly ‘protect’ him.

  The guy looked Bridget over and smiled broadly. “How’s it going?”

  She ignored him and went inside. Zack caught the derision on her face and hid a smile of his own. Kenny was a sleaze. He’d known that before he made the mistake of touching stuff in his flat. Everything in the place was swamped in a haze of carnal desire. The guy had sex on the brain twenty-four-seven. Zack was never setting foot in the place ever again.

  He didn’t bother greeting the cop. He just followed Bridget into his own flat and closed the door. She’d found the living room by the time he’d locked the door behind him.

  “Very understated,” she said, motioning to the room as she sat down on the sofa.

  He shrugged, wanting her to get to the damn point. He was irritable enough already.

  “So, what was it you had to tell me in private?”

  Her lips twitched into a small smile briefly before she spoke. “This is going to sound crazy when I start, but stick with me. It gets good.”

  “I’m all ears,” he said, sitting on the armchair. It was lovingly handcrafted using material hand-woven with care, so he took his gloves off and basked in the sense of contentment soaked into the chair as his bare fingers touched the fabric.

  “There’s a reason I was sent here to protect you.”

  He knew that. He’d been given a lot of vague hints about the reason for it as he was being discharged from the hospital under Bridget’s watchful eyes. He’d almost died because he knew something. Something he couldn’t remember now, no matter how hard he tried. The doctors had said the dissociative episodes he was having were his brain trying to keep him from uncovering that information. It was something he couldn’t handle knowing. His mind was protecting itself.

  “Vampires are real, Zack.”

  The deadpan delivery and the absurdity of her words tickled something in him that made him burst into such peals of laughter that he could barely breathe through. When he was wiping the tears from the corners of his eyes, he managed to bark out, “Shut up.”

  “They did this to you,” she told him, not even cracking a smile. She looked deadly serious in spite of his hysterics.
“They’re the reason I was sent here to protect you.”

  A stab of terror hit him and he pushed it back. It wasn’t true. She was a liar. Very funny, Bridget. Get to the punch-line already.

  “This is a wind up. Don’t be such a bitch,” he snapped, taking his hands from the arm rests of the wonderful chair. “It isn’t funny.”

  “It’s not supposed to be funny.” She opened her mouth as if to grin.

  Her teeth sharpened suddenly, her pupils dilating rapidly at the same time.

  What the hell? He stared as she bit her own hand with those crazy-sharp teeth. He wanted to get up and run in the face of such crazy behaviour, but his body felt frozen in place. What he’d just seen wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. This was completely fucked up. He blinked.

  His memory flashed back to the drink he’d spilled on the floor of the office. The red stuff that had looked suspiciously like…“Holy shit!”

  She licked at her lips as she withdrew her teeth from her hand and shoved it in front of him. “Is this what that girl’s wound looked like?”

  He nodded slowly. The wound was virtually identical to what he’d seen. How…? He frowned.

  She rolled her eyes. Her teeth were back to normal when she spoke, but her mouth looked red.

  “It wasn’t me. When exactly do you think I’d have time for that?” She screwed up her nose. “Besides, I don’t bite humans.”

  “But you do drink blood. That’s what’s always in your cup.”

  He couldn’t believe he’d said that out loud…and that she was humouring him enough to not laugh in his face.

  She nodded, her gaze level. “You’re handling this remarkably well.”

  “It only looks like it. I’m freaking out on the inside,” he said, wondering when he’d black out.

  This type of information should have been enough to make his protective brain go into overdrive. Maybe it wasn’t happening because he didn’t really believe it. It hadn’t sunk in yet.

  “It’s bad news that there’s another vampire in town,” she said, bringing her wounded hand to her mouth and sucking on it.

  It was weirdly sexy if he didn’t think about what she was actually doing right now—sucking the blood from her hand. She stopped and gazed at him thoughtfully.