Sunglasses at Night

by Jessica Lynch

  Of course, then he fell prey to the Nightwalker king’s cruelty and, in late December, he became a Para himself. Between the change, the thirst, and the claws that were a constant reminder that he was different—that he was other—Adam hadn’t even thought twice about taking a woman in ages.

  Well, no, he begrudgingly admitted. That wasn’t exactly true. Since turning, there had been one woman who caused his cock to come to life. Not just a twitch, not just a whisper of attraction, but a full-blown urge to fuck.

  And what had he done? So convinced that the sudden need was bloodlust in disguise, he turned tail and ran, leaving the blonde beauty behind with the headless remains of the Nightwalker he had just saved her from.

  That was more than two months ago and he still thought of her. Her dark brown eyes, the innocent expression, the adorable ponytail that listed to one side as she watched him curiously. He rescued her from a Nightwalker who slapped her and sent her flying, but she never screamed. He brandished his sword and she blinked up at him, her brow furrowed.

  Even as she stared at him, obviously unsure if he’d attack her next or not, she never screamed.

  Adam had bolted, and after his raging hard-on finally deflated, he regretted it almost as much as he accepted that leaving her behind was the smartest thing to do. He might be new to being a paranormal, but he’d heard stories while he was in the Cage. Shifters could only get it up for their mate.

  Was it the same for Nightwalkers?

  He didn’t know, and he wasn’t about to ask anyone to find out.

  No surprise, despite the open interest on the clerk’s pretty face, his cock didn’t even respond. He figured it was better than the fear and revulsion he usually experienced from humans once they realized what he was, but not by much. Feeling her gaze running up and down his fit body while only experiencing annoyance at her ogling didn’t piss him off, but he didn’t like it, either.

  And as her eyes lingered on his sweats, he realized the color choice might have been a mistake.

  Ah, well. He moved forward.

  3

  “Name? Last name first, please.”

  “Wright. First name’s Adam.”

  The clerk shot him a charming grin. She seemed way too pleased to see him and, out of habit, he dipped his chin, peering through his sunglasses at her neck. Unless he was mistaken, he could spot the edge of the familiar tattoo curving around her collarbone.

  Great. Not a Donor exactly—one of the blood junkies who traded their blood for the high only a dangerous Nightwalker could offer—but a donor.

  Same name, but the little d made a whole world of a difference, Adam discovered. If done correctly, a Nightwalker could feed without any pain to the donor. Some donors were paid well for the exchange, and others were rewarded with a feeling of pleasure that had friendly donors turning into addicted Donors eventually.

  The tattoo was a brand as much as a spell. So long as a donor wore that mark, it protected them from crossing from the little d donor to the full-fledged blood junkies. No wonder the clerk was eyeing him closely. She was probably wondering what it would be like if he bit her.

  Ha. As if. Adam was what they called a virgin. Disregarding his once active sex life, being a Nightwalker virgin meant he hadn’t ever fed straight from a donor’s vein before.

  And he never would.

  She ripped her heavy stare away from him for a moment, turning toward her computer, tapping at the keys as she entered his information.

  “Alright, Mr. Wright. What can I do for you?”

  The words were almost dragged out of him, he was so hesitant to admit the truth. “I had a provisional P.I.D. Got stopped by a cop. He told me I had to come down and get a permanent one.”

  She looked at her screen. “Ah. I see. You were turned at the end of December, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Provisionals only last for five months. Yours expired at the end of May. You just missed the cut-off, but that’s alright. I can get you sorted. It won’t be long.” Holding up her hand, gesturing for him to wait where he was, she pulled a few sheets of paper together, attached them to a clipboard, then slid it under the partition. She grabbed a pen and sent that next. “Fill these out, sign the third page, and we can get started. You can do it right here,” she added, giving him a conspiratorial wink. “I wouldn’t want you to have to get back on line.”

  Yeah.

  He bet.

  Picking up the pen, he started to fill out the application for a permanent P.I.D. while the clerk busied herself with something at her desk. He heard the chair creak as she shifted her weight, leaning over to grab another sheet of paper—

  “Oh, shoot.”

  Just because he was bitter at being turned, it didn’t make Adam a complete asshole. At her sharp intake of breath, he looked up from his application. “You alright?”

  She was cradling her finger against her chest.

  The partition was warded. The witches who worked for the government on contracts they claimed through Coventry had thrown enough magic at the glass to make it absolutely Para-proof.

  Para strength, that was.

  The scent still got through. It was rich, it was tangy, it was fresh.

  It was blood.

  Adam’s mouth pooled with saliva. His jaw ached as he adamantly refused to let his fangs lengthen in response to the temptation.

  “It’s just a…” The clerk gulped, obviously reading the torment and struggle that Adam couldn’t quite hide. “A papercut.”

  A papercut. A tiny slice in her finger, barely a drop welling up along the side.

  “I didn’t mean to,” she squeaked out. “It was an accident.”

  That was unlikely, since she wore the donor brand, but based on how frightened she was all of a sudden, she surely regretted it. And she should.

  The thirst was sudden and terrible. He knew the glass separating them was warded. He knew there was no way he could get to her. Still, being slammed with the temptation of a taste hit him harder than he would’ve thought. At that very second, Adam wasn’t so confident that the partition would really stand up and protect the pretty clerk.

  He stepped back, running into the next person in line in his haste to put some space between him and the window. The shifter huffed, building up to a roar as they collided. In the back of his mind, he thought bear, and the situation went from bad to worse when a big paw of a hand slammed into his back, throwing him off his equilibrium.

  Adam wasn’t expecting that, and the vampire he’d been turned into reacted before the rest of him did. He immediately crouched. Baring his fangs, he flexed his fingers, priming his pointed, black claws, ready to swipe out at whoever got closest to him.

  The intercom crackled overhead, a bored, flat voice chiming over the loudspeaker. “In accordance with Ordinance 7304, there is no unauthorized biting inside of the Department for Paranormal Regulation. I repeat, no unauthorized biting. Thank you and enjoy your evening.”

  From the way everyone—from the human clerks to the Para clients—was watching him closely, Adam knew the message was meant for him. How the disembodied voice of the speaker knew what was what, he had no clue, but he pushed his curiosity aside as a different emotion overwhelmed him.

  Unholy embarrassment, followed quickly on its heels by shame.

  His head snapped back to the window, to the clerk who kept her finger folded tightly in her fist now, and the paperwork for the permanent P.I.D. he abandoned. Adam scowled at it, entirely too aware of the points of his fangs digging into his bottom lip, and stormed off of the line.

  Know what?

  Fuck the P.I.D. Fuck the Claws Clause. So what if there were laws and the humans still in charge would be itching for a reason to throw his ass in the Cage?

  Oh, well.

  It didn’t matter anyway.

  He wasn’t planning on being around long enough for it to.

  He was being stalked.

  Adam couldn’t say when he first picked up on the tail. He
was still stewing over having to go over to the D.P.R. in the first place, and the tension over the clerk’s papercut kept him on edge. He needed to shake it off. Maybe stop at the nearest Bloodbucks for a synthetic blood beverage.

  Something.

  Anything.

  The familiar pinch at the back of his throat was super annoying. The thirst was rearing its ugly head again and, no matter how he tried to keep ahead of it, sometimes it caught him off-guard. Between the thirst and how the trip to the D.P.R. messed with him, he was beginning to think one of those artificial smoothies wouldn’t cut it.

  He had a last resort. Though it pissed him off to have to buy bags of blood instead of just sucking it up and opening an account at the blood bank, he refused to register at the Grayson location. And since the Claws Clause had a ridiculous law about that, too, he couldn’t even go out of town. It was his local branch or no branch; Adam chose no branch. Luckily, through his friendship with Shea Moonshadow, he got to know her ex-Donor brother, Hudson, who—to the surprise of everyone who knew him—actually managed to hold down a job at the blood bank.

  Somehow, Hudson went from being a blood junkie to a blood dealer. The irony wasn’t lost on the former cop. But so long as Hudson paid for the blood and didn’t steal it, Adam could justify their arrangement.

  He had to.

  After he left the D.P.R, once he realized that the thirst wasn’t going anywhere, he called Hudson and left a message that he would need to refill his supply. Then, while he waited to hear from him, he decided to head back toward the downtown area of Grayson where Hudson lived.

  He was overly familiar with this section of the city. Close enough to the abandoned trainyard where plenty of city-dwelling Nightwalkers made their nests, he did most of his patrols around this area. For some reason, in the past year, it seemed as if Grayson was turning into a paranormal hotspot. And not just the good, law-abiding kind.

  Then again, maybe it was because, now that he was a Para, he was finally more sensitive to their existence in the rapidly growing city.

  As a Nightwalker, Adam was sensitive to a lot of things that he hadn’t been before. His eyes couldn’t take the bright lights—hence the sunglasses he wore around the clock—and his ears picked up on sounds more than a few blocks away. Then there was this kind of sixth sense he had, helping him become more aware of his surroundings.

  It was that sense that warned him that someone had been tailing him for the last half hour at least.

  He wasn’t sure who it was, or why they were on his ass, but he wasn’t in the mood to put up with it. He kept his weapon low, his hand gripping the hilt so that he could use it if he needed to. So long as he kept it angled at himself, the edge of the blade held a soft silver glow. That made it nearly indiscernible by the humans swarming the crowded streets.

  Perfect camouflage.

  Grayson was Adam’s beat, first as a cop, now as a nighttime protector. He knew every alley, every corner, every street. When it didn’t take much to lose his tail, he figured his stalker wasn’t a local before immediately putting it behind him.

  Another hour went by and he still didn’t hear from Hudson Moonshadow. Giving in to the thirst, he paid six bucks for a small synthetic blood smoothie at Bloodbucks, choking it down in a bid to get past the worst of the ache in his throat. It did its job, even if it left him unsatisfied, and he was just tossing the plastic cup when the familiar, rich, delicious scent of freshly spilled blood wafted past his nose.

  He stopped dead in his tracks.

  Of all of his newly sensitive senses, the one that was the strongest—the one that gave him the most grief—was his sense of smell. As he proved earlier at the D.P.R., it didn’t take much blood. Just a drop triggered a reaction.

  One sniff and he knew that it was more than a drop.

  One sniff and he knew that he’d go to his knees to taste that blood.

  One sniff and he knew that he wasn’t the only one who would react that way, either.

  Lifting his sword, he held the weapon out, watching as the red glow started near the point before covering the entire blade. It crept its way up to the engraved hilt, pulsing in time to his heartbeat, glowing even brighter.

  Just in case, he spared a second to aim the enchanted sword back at his chest. The red immediately bled out, turning silver again. Adam let out a sigh of relief. He didn’t trust himself—not with the thirst riding him—but he did trust the magic in his weapon. Until the night it glowed red when he pointed it at himself, he would know he wasn’t as big a threat as he could be.

  He jerked it, again aiming out into the Grayson streets. It didn’t take long for the red to return. Based on how rich the color was, the man-eating Nightwalker it was pinging had to be nearby.

  The blood carrying on the wind? It was maybe a street or two over from where he was.

  That was as precise a guess as he could make, but between his nose and his sword, he narrowed it down pretty quickly. There was an empty side street, a kind of abandoned cut-through, exactly two cross streets away from the Bloodbucks where Adam had been. When he raced toward it, following his instincts, he appeared at the mouth of the alleyway just in time to discover that another Nightwalker had beaten him there.

  He wasn’t alone, either. The big male Nightwalker was taunting its victim, looming over a cowering human woman who had given up trying to run, her back up against the brick wall, her hands splayed at her side. She had her blonde hair pulled up in a ponytail, wearing a pair of light blue jeans, a simple tank, and a pair of dainty Keds that triggered his memory more than anything else did.

  Adam nearly dropped his weapon.

  It was her.

  As if on cue, his body went tight. Rigid.

  Hard.

  His body, and his cock, too.

  In a heartbeat, he was whisked back to a couple of months ago. When he was first getting used to being a turned human, and when he was first going out on hunts to give himself purpose—and to keep from going completely rogue himself.

  His first real hunt had been a favor for Hudson, saving one of his Donor friends from being a vengeful Nightwalker’s dessert. When he realized that he could still dole out justice while taking his frustrations out on murderous Nightwalkers, going out at night searching for the lost and deadly ones became his new normal.

  He saved her once. Using his enchanted blade as a guide, he had found a Nightwalker about to drain this very same woman. Adam saved her.

  And here she was again.

  To be sure, he moved the red glowing sword from the back of the Nightwalker to the side of the woman. The glow immediately dimmed. No color at all. No gold for a shifter, no silver for an in-control vampire, no blue for a human. Nothing.

  Just like last time.

  From behind the shield of his sunglasses, Adam locked on the woman. He couldn’t help it. There was just something about her. Even if it wasn’t for the strange way his sword reacted to her, he’d recognize her anyway. It was no coincidence that, for the second time since he’d been turned, one glimpse of this blonde woman had him hungry for something more than a fight.

  He’d had twitches below the belt before. He’d seen a beautiful woman and wondered what if? He’d even contemplated taking one of Hudson’s Donor friends up on her blatant invitation to bed once or twice just to prove he still could.

  But when he’d had the one single, solitary erection in all the time since he’d been turned? It had been because of her.

  And now she just gave him his second.

  What made it worse? She wasn’t doing anything to turn him on. It was just… her. Watching the blonde beauty be threatened by the bloodthirsty Nightwalker was enough to have him primed and ready to take her.

  Adam didn’t know what the hell that said about him, but he didn’t like it.

  Ignoring his aching cock, he thought about the machete he wore strapped beneath his undershirt whenever he went hunting. He thought about the holy water injections he kept in his pockets.

 
; When the Nightwalker lunged at the woman, Adam realized there wasn’t time for any of that.

  So he raised his sword and tore down the alleyway, looking forward to working out some of his aggression on the big bastard in front of him.

  Tabby was in trouble.

  Surprisingly, it had nothing to do with the Nightwalker whose fangs were inches away from her jugular. Nope. She’d already picked up on three different weak points and, as soon as she shook off the strangely unsettling—yet somewhat compelling—feeling she got from the second Nightwalker suddenly appearing in the darkness, she’d finish him off easily.

  First, though, she had to wonder if this was really happening.

  Again.

  It was déjà vu or something like that. The last time she was in Grayson, she’d been avenging the death of Aiko Hashinaga. It was one of her first hunts on her own after Boone decided it was time Rosie retired and Tabby took it as a test. If she could prove that she could do it on her own, her uncle would stop with the nonsense about partnering her off with a human this time instead of her beloved hound dog. If she failed, she would be saddled with another slayer.

  And since most slayers went out on their own, as per the Slayer’s Code, anyone agreeing to be her partner would no doubt have an ulterior motive.

  She wasn’t naïve. She knew exactly who that would be. Eddie had been making it clear for a while now that, if she wouldn’t date him, he’d rely on any kind of partnership he could get—Slayer’s Code or no Slayer’s Code—to convince her to change her mind. Desperate to avoid that, she threw everything into that last Grayson hunt.

  It had been going well. With a perfectly positioned slice, she bled just enough to lure her target closer. She’d picked the particular alleyway on purpose, knowing that it was out of sight of the Normies—the humans who had no idea that slayers like her family protected them from the Paras who hunted them—while still being close enough to the populated downtown area to snag the Nightwalker without having to worry about any annoying witnesses.