by Laken Cane
Her light was a weapon.
That silver halo shone in a wide arc, and as I swung the blade, the light reached those the sword could not. And it killed them.
They burst into flames, fell down, and disappeared.
She was growing in power. With each battle, she grew. She became more.
My Silverlight.
And as I whirled and hacked and sliced, I lost sight of Clayton. I could only hope he would forge a path through the vampires and reach the only person who could stop his pain. Miriam. The very person who gave it to him.
My entire body was tingling, bursting with energy, and I saw the deadly vampires through a haze of red as the air became stained with flying blood and acrid with the scent of burning flesh.
I was worried about Clayton, but it was a sort of distant worry, because as I fought, my desire to kill overwhelmed all else. I was an animal.
A feral, enraged, unthinking animal.
Pretty much like the infecteds.
And bloodlust was my world.
The more I killed, the less human I became. I felt it. But I didn’t care. I cared only about the blood.
Silverlight didn’t care, either.
She killed in a blur of lethal silver light and razor-sharp edges. She took me over and together, we killed.
I heard Clayton roar in agony, once, over the buzzing in my head. Pain lashed the walls of my mind, there and gone, as the vampires breached Silverlight’s defenses right before she killed them.
Silverlight and I spun through the crowd, cutting and killing everything we touched, but still, we were not enough. There were too many infecteds. It was as though every sick vampire from every city and forest in North America had descended upon Red Valley.
“What happened?” I screamed, as Amias ducked Silverlight’s wicked swipe and tore a vampire off my leg. He ripped the vampire’s head off then whirled to grab another.
“Sickness,” he said. Or maybe he didn’t say it, at least not aloud, but the words echoed inside my mind as though he’d murmured them into my ear.
But whether he spoke or not, it was suddenly as though gongs of doom split the air. Those sounds were inside my mind, as well, but it was a portent I could not take time to ponder. Not then.
I figured I was dead. I was injured, and though the dead lay around me in heaps, I was overwhelmed. Silverlight never lost her glow, but my energy was waning. I wasn’t a machine. She had control of my arm, but the rest of my body was sliding into exhaustion.
And finally, I became slow, sluggish, and weak, and I knew I was going to die.
That knowledge didn’t infuse me with a shot of adrenaline. It didn’t make me stronger. It just made me sad.
Clayton was likely dead, Angus was dying, and I’d done all I could.
Then, as I wobbled and nearly fell and a dozen vampires took advantage and lunged, spearing me with fangs and nails and hunger, I heard something so much better than slithery words and gongs of doom.
I heard the familiar crack of a shotgun. Shane’s shotgun.
My supernaturals had come.
They’d come for me.
Chapter Forty-Two
I saw them then like angels from heaven, and that gave me the boost I needed. I still had fight inside me. I still had death inside me.
Miriam had brought them—and as soon as I thought about her, I spotted her. She wasn’t wielding her switchblades, though. She stood in the bed of Shane’s truck, firing a shotgun into the crowd of vampires on the ground.
I gave Silverlight her head and fought my way toward them.
As I watched, Shane tossed Clayton a shotgun.
He wasn’t dead.
He was just back where he belonged.
I raced toward them, where I belonged, cutting vampires down as I ran. Somehow, I thought everything would be okay if I could reach them.
I just had to get there.
They spotted me, and Clayton’s eyes widened right before Shane lifted his shotgun, clubbing vampires out of his way as he ran to meet me. When he reached my side he gave me a quick grin, and though that grin never reached his eyes, I felt my chest ease just a little.
Back to back, we gave the infecteds a death they couldn’t return from.
And in the end, an entire town of vampires lay dead at our feet, some of them disappearing in puffs of smoke, some of them waiting for true death. And Amias strode toward me, ignoring the guns aimed suddenly and steadily at his chest.
Silverlight sparked once before she slept, and I slid her into her sheath without taking my stare from the advancing master.
The supernaturals stood with me, silent, waiting.
Amias had helped save my life once again, and there wasn’t one among us that didn’t believe his death would mean mine.
Amias stopped, finally, and stood close enough for me to reach out and stake, had I wanted to. Close enough to touch.
“What happened?” I asked him, as I’d asked him earlier.
“We were infected,” he said.
“Red Valley vampires?” Shane asked.
Amias nodded, but didn’t take his dark stare from mine. “I woke up tonight to this. Nearly all of them infected.” He gestured at the dead who lay in bloody mounds upon the ground. The ones Silverlight had killed had already disappeared, but the grim piles of empty and still smoking clothing that remained showed where they’d once been.
There was something in his face, something so stark and despairing and grief-stricken that I wanted to cry for him.
Then in the very next second, I wanted to punch him.
“Had the woods not been heavy with the perfume of your sex and that magical scent new hunters possess,” he said, “the vampires would not have gathered here, and the humans would have suffered.”
I wasn’t sure whether to blush or to pale, and I remained silent as I tried to ignore the looks the supernats were giving me.
“That would have caused some turmoil,” Rhys said, matter-of-factly.
“They didn’t appear to have much in the way of common sense,” Shane noted, then leaned over and drove a blade through the heart of a twitching vampire.
Amias flinched but said nothing. He knew they had to die.
“How did so many of them become infected?” I asked, crossing my bloody arms. “And how could they not have known? Wouldn’t they have been aware of being munched on by one of their own?”
“It’s worse than that,” Amias said, tonelessly. “They were infected by feeding. Animals are now carriers. Humans are now carriers. If we eat, we become infected.” He lifted his stare to mine. “There will be few pure humans left.”
“What will happen?” I asked, too tired to comprehend the hugeness of his words.
“We will starve,” he replied. “Or we will feed and get sick. We will be wiped out. It happened before, centuries ago.”
“Natural occurrence that keeps the bloodsuckers from taking over,” Miriam said. “Exterminated by a disease. It’s a good thing.”
Amias didn’t so much as glance at her. “Those of us who live will need to find pure humans from whom to feed.” He slid his glittering stare to mine. “I am lucky that I already found mine.”
“You haven’t found anything.” I took a quick step back, as though he might suddenly grow hungry and sink his fangs into my neck. Or maybe I was afraid he’d hit me with his irresistible…lust power and I would throw myself at him.
“I could eat for a month by licking the blood from your battered body,” he said.
And it didn’t matter that I was injured and exhausted and had just spent two of the most intense hours of my life in Clayton’s arms.
The master’s voice slid over my skin and stirred things deep inside me, and I shivered with a desire as delicious as smooth dark chocolate.
I might despise him, but the man could make me hot by opening his mouth and caressing me with his words. And that was just wrong.
I swallowed hard and looked away. “The vampires are going to die
. All your food is contaminated.” I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh.
“You’re hysterical.” Amias looked down his nose at the others. “Take her home. Give her a hot bath and something strong to drink.” He started to turn away, then hesitated. “She is mine. Someday, I will destroy anyone who touches her.”
Shane narrowed his eyes and lifted his shotgun. “You don’t want to threaten us, vampire.”
Amias wasn’t far from wrong—I was giddy. But I was stronger. A week ago the battle I’d just been involved in would have had me in the hospital.
I touched Shane’s arm, and was slightly ashamed of the pleasure I felt when the master slid his gaze from Shane’s face to my fingers.
“Let’s kill the rest of them,” I said, “and then we need to talk. Angus is…”
Miriam spoke for the first time since she’d arrived. “Angus is dying, just as the vampires are dying. Everyone is dying.”
But her voice was surprisingly cheerful, and when I finally got up the courage to look at her without blushing, she winked at me.
I couldn’t resist turning my gaze to Clayton, who stood silent and empty at her back. It was hard to look at him. At his blankness. At his captivity.
Without moving, he shifted his eyes to meet my stare. And finally, I had to look away. I’d been willing to sacrifice his freedom to save Angus. He’d have ended up back under Miriam’s rule anyway, and he’d have done it willingly.
I would find a way to free him, despite Miriam’s magical hold. I would. Magic be damned. I would find a way.
When I slid my eyes away from Clayton, Amias was gone and Shane was walking from vampire pile to vampire pile, giving the ones not already killed by a hunter their true deaths.
“Trin,” Rhys said, when I drew one of my stakes and followed Shane. “Are you sure you don’t need to go get patched up? You’re looking pretty grim, my girl.”
“I’ll be fine. The quicker we do this, the quicker we can concentrate on Angus. Rhys, will you call to check on him?”
“I already did. He’s unchanged.”
I left Miriam, Rhys, and Clayton to discuss the ramifications of the vampire infection, and methodically drove my stake into heart after heart. After a while I became comfortably numb and didn’t cringe quite so hard when I had to shove the sharpened stick into another unprotected bit of flesh and bone.
I was a hunter. Eventually I’d grow out of my finickiness. In the heat of battle, I didn’t flinch, but coldblooded, methodical stabbings…that could be a little harsh.
“Are you going to choose one of us?”
I jerked at Miriam’s voice, loud in the silence. “Hush! And I don’t know what you mean.” I stabbed the next vampire a little harder than I had to.
She laughed. “You know exactly what I mean.”
I straightened, and slid my dirty hand through blood and sweat as I wiped it over my forehead. “Leave me alone, Miriam. I’m not in the mood.”
“Apparently anyone in our little group can get you in the mood.” She reached up to wipe something from my cheek, and when it didn’t budge, she licked her fingertip and tried again. “Am I going to be next? You fucked the vampire. Surely I rate higher than a nasty old vampire.”
“He bit me,” I murmured. “And now it’s like…” I shook my head, then shrugged and went to the next vampire.
“Honey.” She followed me, her voice heavy with disbelief. “You let him bite you?”
“I didn’t let him do anything. He just did…stuff. And it felt so good I didn’t have the will to fight it.”
“Well.” She reached out to squeeze my arm. “Don’t let it upset you. Vampires are sneaky and full of magic, but they’re dead, really, so it’s like using a sex toy, right?” She hesitated. “He can’t love you, Trinity.”
I paused with my stake pressed against a female’s chest, and turned my head to gape at her. “Love? Who said anything about love?”
She studied me silently, and her bright, bubbly façade looked like glass that I could break if only I had a heavy enough stone to throw at her.
“Trinity,” she said, finally. “Are you going to choose one of us?” She pursed her lips and amended her question. “One of them?”
“Maybe,” I replied, a bit nastily, “I’ll choose Clayton.”
She smiled. “Do you want to know what I think?”
“I really don’t.”
“I think we belong together. All of us in this little group of supernaturals and hunters. And maybe even the vampire. I think you belong to us, and we belong to you. You feel that connection, don’t you? But those men…” She turned to look at them. Shane had stopped staking vampires and stood with Clayton and Rhys, taking a break to drink the beer Rhys had tossed him. “Those men are going to want you to choose. Eventually.”
I had no idea what to say, so I said nothing. I watched them, those lovely men, covered with blood and moonlight, laughing and drinking beer while dead vampires lay sprawled at their feet. And I did feel a connection. I cared about them. All of them. And I felt like…
I felt like they were mine.
Goosebumps covered my body and I shivered, something shrewd and ancient in the back of my mind, watching. Smiling.
Waiting.
“Son of a bitch,” I whispered.
Miriam nodded. “Clayton belongs to me, though. I know you have feelings for him, and I know he has feelings for you. But he’s back with me, and I will hurt him like you can’t even imagine if he touches you again. You can love him, but you can’t touch him. Do you understand?”
I looked into her eyes, and my grip tightened on the stake.
“Please understand,” she continued into my silence. “I can’t allow the man who tortured my father to feel pleasure. What you did with him when he had his moment of freedom—I can let that go because that will be agonizing for him. He’ll long for that every single day, and it will be just out of reach.” Again, she smiled, widely, happily. “That’s all I ever really want. For Clayton to suffer.”
“Miriam,” I whispered. “You’re so twisted up inside. Don’t you get tired of pain?”
“Yes,” she said, viciously. “I get tired of pain.” She thumped her chest with a tiny fist. “He made this. And watching him suffer for what he created relieves my pain.”
I was the tiniest bit afraid of her, but I took her hand. “No, it doesn’t,” I told her. “It doesn’t at all.”
“You don’t know,” she said. “You don’t know what’s inside my head.”
“I wish I didn’t,” I told her.
I pretended not to see the sad darkness in her eyes and went back to staking vampires—something that was less painful than thinking about Miriam’s need to hurt one of the men I cared about.
Chapter Forty-Three
Everything seemed to have changed almost overnight.
The vampires were in trouble, the incubus was gone—forever? I couldn’t know—and the supernaturals were slowly testing the waters as they wandered out of hiding to face a relieved city that was in the mood to be magnanimous.
But Angus still lay on a cot in a jail cell, awake but unresponsive, nearly killed by human police. His children waited, dejected and worried and missing their dad.
I sat in Captain Crawford’s office, biting my fingernails, waiting for him to arrive for the meeting to which he’d summoned me. Every cop I’d passed on my way to Crawford’s office paused to congratulate me on not only wiping out the hundreds of infecteds in the woods off Raeven’s Road, but killing the incubus.
Obviously, as Red Valley’s first bloodhunter, they wanted to believe I had killed the vampires, I had killed the incubus, and I had saved the city.
And I was theirs.
They gave Shane a smile and a slap on the back, but he wasn’t really one of us. He was an outsider.
The city buzzed with the news of the vampires’ looming annihilation, and what news programs and gossip I’d caught seemed to believe I was somehow responsible for that, as we
ll.
The vampire infection was a strain Amias was unfamiliar with. The newly sick didn’t roam the woods, searching for prey, bursting with rage…well, they did, but after about a week, they fell down and died.
It wasn’t a true death, Amias said. Maybe months from now or centuries from now they’d get back up. So Shane and I searched for them, and we made sure they would stay dead.
Sure, there were some vampires immune like the master, vampires who’d caught the disease, fought it off, and lived to tell about it, but they were few and far between.
Captain Crawford walked in, finally, his smile bright and his face a little less haggard. “Sinclair! You’re looking good.”
I’d seen him only once in the two weeks since the battle in the woods, and only then because afterward, when I’d called to report the fight and the rapidly spreading vampire infection, he’d insisted I join him in an impromptu press conference. He’d wanted me there before I cleaned up.
“The city should see you as you are,” he’d said. “You’re the person who stands between them and the nonhumans. They want a hero. We’re going to give them what they want.”
“No way,” I’d said, flatly. “I’m not—”
“It’ll go a long way toward getting the city to back off the Bay Town supernaturals, Trinity. You want things back to normal? This would be a hell of a start.”
I didn’t really care if they wanted to stick a cape on me, and I didn’t care about the dying vampires. I cared about getting Angus home, and I cared about getting the supernaturals back into the good graces of the humans.
So I’d agreed to be on TV. The city needed to know the supernats were innocent—and I’d hoped it might help me free Angus.
They needed a hero? Fine. I could play a monster, and I could play a hero.
Rhys had handed me half a bottle of painkillers and wrapped some bandages around the worst of my injuries, and I’d stood in front of the cameras and microphones, bloody and scarred and smelling of death. I’d told the city about the fight. I’d made it as frightening as possible, and I’d made sure they knew that without the help of the supernaturals, I’d have died and the infecteds would have infiltrated the city.
