by Laken Cane
“They will,” Miriam said. “Clayton, you said Jade’s just back from Thomasburg? Go talk to her. Find out everything you can.”
He didn’t say a single word, just slid from his chair and walked to the door, pulling out his cell phone as he went.
“Who’s Jade?” I asked, absently.
“Jade Noel,” Rhys replied, “is the Red Valley supernatural community’s unofficial private detective slash cop. She and her minions were put in place twenty-seven years ago and they try to keep the peace. They also help investigate when a supernatural crime is committed in our lovely city.”
“I’ve never heard of her,” I said, “and six years ago a supernatural crime was definitely committed. Where was she then?”
“That was between the humans and the vampires,” Angus said. “We don’t police either one of those groups.”
I knew that, but still, it irritated me. “Twenty-seven years. How old is this woman?”
“You know we don’t age like you do,” Miriam said, strangely and abruptly deflated. Maybe she was just tired.
“We’ll protect you, Trin,” Angus said. “Don’t worry. He won’t get near you again. You’ll stay with me, and won’t go hunting until we’ve caught him.” He pulled his cell from his pocket. “I’ll call it off with Copas.”
“No,” I said. “You won’t. I’m not going to sit around, hiding behind you until this douche decides to show himself. He could have moved on to find someone easier. We might never see him again.”
“She’s right,” Rhys said. “As long as one of us is with her, she’ll be fine. He ran off when Clay smacked him. We can handle him.”
“What are they sensitive to?” I asked. I really needed to read up on my incubi. “Holy water or silver like the vampires? Incantations? Demon traps? How do we defeat him?”
“Only one way I know to get rid of an incubus,” Rhys said, watching an attractive, older blonde who’d walked in alone. She sat at the table across from us, and when she caught Rhys watching her, she sent him a tiny smile. “We send him back to hell.”
“And how do we send him back to hell?” I asked.
“We call Chuck Norris,” Angus said.
I gave him a scathing look. “This is serious, Angus.”
He laughed. “We don’t have a clue, sweetheart.”
And with that useless proclamation, little knots of guests began arriving, laughing and cheerful and absolutely clueless to the fact that in the supernaturals’ world, death, demons, and despair were a normal part of the dinner conversation.
Chapter Eighteen
Captain Crawford emailed me the vampire’s photo and specifications, including his name. “Gordon Gray,” I murmured, staring down at the photo. “I’m coming for you.”
Gray looked like a teenager. His hair was a little long and messy, his eyes bright and twinkling and alive—in person I could spot a vampire easily. In photos, I couldn’t tell the difference. He had his tongue out, and his teeth were even and white, with no sign of fangs. Only sick vampires lost the strength and control to retract and release their fangs—something that made it more difficult for them to hide their bloodsucking status and usually ended badly for them.
He had his arm around someone, but only a tiny part of her face and a couple of long, thin locks of her hair were visible. Lucy? Probably.
Shane didn’t come in to fetch me. Perhaps he felt that might have seemed too nice. Instead, he sent a text to my phone letting me know he was outside.
And even his words on my screen were reluctant.
I’d offered him half of what the captain was paying me if he’d help me capture or kill Lucy’s killer. At first he’d flat out refused, but he’d called me later to say he’d changed his mind.
I didn’t ask him why. He wouldn’t have told me anyway.
Angus walked me out, unwilling to even let me walk through the parking lot without an escort. He handed me off to Shane with a terse greeting to the other man, then he strode back inside, nodding hellos to the humans leaving their cars.
I knew the supernats had met with Shane earlier, and likely had threatened his life if he failed in protecting me. It was embarrassing and I’m sure it didn’t exactly endear me to him. That was okay. I’d do my best to earn his respect.
Just as he would have to attempt to earn mine.
“Baby hunter,” he said. “Let’s go. Follow my lead, learn what you can, and don’t get in my way. I’ll have this scum in a body bag before midnight.”
I pulled a plastic bag from my jacket pocket. “I have to latch onto his scent.”
He threw back his head and heaved a sigh at the dark sky. “You haven’t done that yet?”
“Obviously not.” And still I held it, strangely hesitant. It was my first time trying to catch someone’s scent. I wasn’t even sure what would happen when I sucked the vampire’s invisible residue up my nose. And if it didn’t work and I was proven a fraud, I was not going to live that down.
“Captain Crawford is going to call me if there’s another dead female,” I told him, delaying the inevitable. “He hopes I might pick up a scent to follow from the corpse before the trail disappears.”
He crossed his arms and leaned against his truck, a battered blue pickup, and simply stared at me.
“The vampire serial killer,” I went on, “is not mad like the one I killed in New Gravel. He doesn’t have the virus. He’s controlled. Deliberate. What do you think he’s gaining from these deaths?”
Shane lifted an eyebrow and remained silent.
I hefted the shirt. “I should wait until we get to the city,” I said.
He leveled a cool look at me. “You’re going to be a pain in the ass. I knew you would be.”
“Shit,” I whispered, then held the shirt to my nose. I closed my eyes and inhaled, deep, deeper still…
Nothing.
I lowered the shirt and looked at him. “Huh. I got nothing. Maybe the scent has dissipated.”
“Or maybe,” he said, disgusted, “we’re going to have to do this the old fashioned way. Get in the truck.”
But then…
The scent hit my brain.
It wasn’t a smell, exactly. It was a…knowing. Something slid into my brain, and Lucy’s killer was part of me. I saw him in the colorful streamers of fog snaking across the ground. His trail was dark gray with swirling bits of off-white weaved into the smooth darkness, like lazily rising smoke from an unmoving cigarette.
I had his scent.
All I had to do was follow it.
When I opened my eyes Shane was watching me with maybe the tiniest bit of interest. It was something other than his usual contempt, anyway.
“Can you track from the truck?” he asked.
“I think so,” I told him. “With the windows down.” Then I shrugged. “We’re about to find out.”
“Get in.” He barely waited for me to sit down before he slammed the door shut and jogged around to climb in under the wheel.
“The trail is dim here,” I told him. “He’s not in Bay Town.”
He grunted. “Just keep your nose to the wind. We’ll have to leave the truck sooner or later but I’ll take us as far as I can.”
I nodded, then reached down to squeeze the comfort of Silverlight at my belt. The trail completely disappeared as Shane pulled out onto the highway, but before I could panic, I picked it up once again.
It would be a hell of a lot easier to track vampires when all I had to do was follow my nose straight to them.
They couldn’t hide from me. Not even in the city.
But the scent didn’t lead into the city. By the time Shane was forced to stop the truck, we were surrounded by swamps, woods, and long, deep hollows. We were still in the county, but the city was miles away.
The gray tracks swirled mistily in the moonlight, disappearing into the woods, and we couldn’t drive into the woods. I lifted my nose to the air and Gray’s scent was there, floating along the ground on those misty colors, urging me o
n.
Shane reached behind the seat after we climbed from the truck, and emerged with a semi-automatic short barrel shotgun. It looked mean—black and sleek and shiny—and he handled it like it was a special friend. It had an attachment beneath the barrel—a detachable magazine with extra rounds. A lot of them, by the looks of it.
As a hunter, he could kill vampires with that shotgun, as long as he shot them through their hearts. And he didn’t look like he’d be the type of guy to miss whatever he aimed at.
The sight of the gun made me feel better, but only marginally. I brought the picture of Gray up on my phone and turned the screen toward him. “This is what he looks like.”
He gave the image a cursory glance, and then we walked to the bed of the truck and Shane threw open the lid of a large, black box. “Take what you need.” He began loading up his belt and pockets with gear. “Flashlight, holy water, stakes, silver…it’s all in here.”
I’d brought my own gear, but I grabbed an extra flashlight. The country was dark.
“Spooky,” I murmured.
He gave what might have passed for a laugh. “Not a country girl?”
I shook my head. “It’s too quiet. Heavy and dark.” I felt that heavy darkness pressing in on me, making it a little hard to breathe, and I took a few deep breaths to calm myself before we began walking.
Vampires were a secretive, mysterious group. They had to be. They made sure their secrets were their own, and not even the supernaturals knew much about them. The humans knew even less. There was much speculation, but not even captured vampires, under torture, gave up their true secrets.
“What is this place?” I muttered as we walked down a gravel road, more to hear my voice than to get an answer. The road beckoned us on, silver and silent in the moonlight. No, not silent. Woods lined the road on either side, and from those woods came the sounds of hooting owls, scurrying animals, and other country nightlife I could not identify.
And Gray’s scent stayed firmly in my nostrils, in my brain, noisy in its own right.
Shane tapped his phone screen. “Raeven’s Road.”
“Should be renamed Long, Scary-Ass Road,” I muttered. My heart tap-tapped in my throat, fast and light, and no matter how many deep breaths I took, it wasn’t slowing.
I shone the beam of my flashlight on the ground. The fog tracks were thick and knee-deep there, and it was more difficult to find the gray in all the others. But I didn’t need to see his tracks. I only needed to smell them.
“This way.” I concentrated on the scent instead of the crushing, smothery darkness, and I began to breathe a little easier.
The gravel crunched beneath our boots and in minutes, I saw weak, yellow light coming through small windows of the first house on Raeven’s Road.
“People live here,” I said, shocked. “Humans.”
“Not everyone loves city life, baby hunter.”
“My name is Trinity.”
He didn’t answer.
A dog began to bark.
No, that was wrong. An entire pack of snarling, rabid canines began to bray and howl and paw the ground, eagerness for blood evident in their strident voices.
At least that was what it sounded like to me.
“Shit,” I whispered. “What do we do now?”
“We keep walking.” He hefted the shotgun. “It’s not the hounds we need to worry about.”
“They’re going to wake everyone in this godforsaken hollow.”
“Doesn’t appear to be a lot of people to awaken,” he said, dryly.
As we passed the house, which was set back from the road, a man yanked open the door and stuck his head out. “Shut up, you damn dogs!”
The hounds continued braying.
“Dear lord,” I murmured. “Things are loud around here.”
“Who’s out there?” the man yelled. “Trevor, that you out there?”
Shane surprised me by answering the man. “Vampire hunters,” he called. “Go on back inside, sir.”
The man muttered something I didn’t catch and beat a hasty retreat, slamming his door shut against the night and the vampire hunters who walked it.
“You’d think he’d be more afraid of the vampires than the hunters,” I remarked.
“He’s got protections against the vampires,” Shane answered. “But not so much against the ones who hunt them.”
I didn’t ask him to elaborate, because just then, I lost Gray’s scent.
I stopped walking abruptly, and Shane took a couple of steps before he realized I’d halted. “I lost his tracks.” I played my light over the gravel, growing more agitated by the second.
The light cut through dozens of swirling tracks, but none of them belonged to Lucy’s killer. I lifted my nose to the sky, but Gray’s scent was gone. I could neither see nor smell him. “Shit,” I muttered. “Shit.”
“Find him.” Shane swiveled his head as he kept watch. “And hurry. We can’t stand here all night.”
“I’m not delaying on purpose,” I snapped.
And a little farther down the road, another dog began to bark. I whirled in a circle, splashing the light over the road, the ditches, the woods.
I saw no gray tracks. They’d simply disappeared.
I lifted my nose to the air and drew it in, desperate.
“Nothing,” I whispered. “Where’d he go? How could the scent just suddenly stop, for God’s sake?”
“Okay,” Shane said. “We need to keep moving until you latch on again. Come on.”
“What’s wrong?” I bent forward slightly as I began a fast walk beside him. “Did you see something?”
Give me the city anytime. The country was messing with my mind. It was freaking me the hell out, honestly.
“You’re going to need to calm down, Sinclair. What’s wrong with you?”
“I don’t know. It feels bad out here.”
“Deliverance syndrome,” he said.
I paused my frantic searching to look at him. “That’s a thing?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Relax. Breathe.”
I forced myself to take slow, deep breaths and concentrated on getting a whiff of Gray’s scent, when Shane spoke once again and shattered my hard won pretense at calmness.
“Someone is watching us.” His voice was so calm and matter-of-fact that it took a few seconds for his words—and their meaning—to sink into my agitated brain.
And when they did, I gave up trying to find Gordon Gray’s tracks, dropped the flashlight, and pulled Silverlight from my belt.
Almost before she cleared the sheath she expanded and exploded into silver light almost bright enough to blind me as she lit up the road, illuminating not just the ground and the tracks and the edge of the woods, but the dozens of vampires who stood there like silent, eerie sentinels.
Watching us.
Chapter Nineteen
“You ready?” Shane asked.
“I’m ready.” I let Silverlight take a practice swipe through the heavy backwoods air. There were vampires to kill, and the excitement of that, the joy of that, was way bigger than the fear.
He glanced at me, as though he felt it—as though my bloodlust was coming from my pores. Or maybe he had the same bloodlust. He was a hunter, after all.
Then the vampires—despite two people standing back to back, one with a shotgun and one with a lethal sword, both with stakes, silver, and holy water—attacked.
We were hunters.
And as much as the hunter lusted after the death of the vampire, so the vampire lusted after the death of the hunter.
It all came down to which of us was the strongest, fastest, and luckiest.
“There are a lot of them,” I murmured, and my voice shook—but with excitement. Not terror.
“Give Silverlight her head,” he said. “She’ll take care of the rest.”
“I know. Still, there are only two of us.”
“Four.”
“What four?”
“You, me, Silverlight, and Be
tty.”
“Betty?”
“My shotgun.”
Then the vampires were upon us, and Betty spoke, her voice echoing through the night as she cut down half a dozen of the advancing vampires.
“Wow,” I said.
“Silver shot,” he replied, proud.
And I thought maybe he wasn’t hating on me quite so much.
Then there was no more time for talking. Only for killing.
When Silverlight sliced through vampire flesh, it was as though I not only held the blade, I was the blade. I swam through blood, hacked through bone, twisted into hearts. I had no fear.
“We call you Death.”
I was hyperaware of everything. Every sound was magnified, every sight was more vivid, every scent was more fragrant.
I found Gray’s scent again, with that extra boost, but he was not, at that moment, high on my list of priorities.
Also with that hyperawareness, I felt him, Amias, watching from the shadows.
Why did he watch? I didn’t know.
But his proximity helped me. Not because he made me feel safe, but because he made me feel savage. I killed with a viciousness I would surely regret later, because it changed me. It made me one of them—one of the revolting, ferocious, killing vampires.
And then, Amias stepped from the edge of the woods. He stood there, in plain view, a challenge, a threat.
A target.
Shane pointed the shotgun at him and started to pull the trigger. And I didn’t hesitate. I screamed a denial and launched myself between the gun and Amias. It was a terrible, instinctive reaction I had absolutely not meant to do, and Shane’s eyes widened as he watched me use myself as a fucking human shield for the vampire I hated, and in that awful distraction, a vampire caught him around the neck. His blood spurted into the air as the vampire punctured an artery, and for one long second, the fight halted.
Time slowed down.
I landed on the ground, rolled, and came up swinging, horrified at what I’d done, what I’d caused.
The vampires caught the scent of that pure hunter blood and sniffed the air. Now they not only wanted to kill the hunters, but they craved his spilling blood.
