Nightshades

by Melissa F. Olson

  “Hey!” Alex interrupted, to break the spell between them. Both siblings looked over at him. Alex had the muzzle of his gun pointed squarely at Hector’s heart. “You are under arrest,” he said firmly, stepping toward Hector.

  The shade just glared at him and looked back at his sister. “And what of your little friends here?” he asked. “Will you stand by and let him kill me? Or perhaps even help him?”

  Lindy’s posture sagged. With the blades by her sides, she said, “You have to answer for those kids, Hector. I won’t kill you, but I won’t stop Alex, either.”

  Hector’s eyes gleamed. “Alex, huh?” He turned his attention to the BPI agent. “I do not recognize your government’s sovereignty,” he countered. “I am a king. And the stuff of nightmares.”

  The power in his voice sent a shock of fear up Alex’s spine, but Lindy scoffed, limping forward to place herself between Hector and Alex. “You’ve been reading your own press again, brother,” she said. “You are not the monster of fairy tales. You’re just a man with a strange virus and an overinflated ego.”

  Hector’s eyes narrowed. “You want a fairy tale?” he said very softly, taking a step forward. Alex couldn’t see Lindy’s face, but the fury on Hector’s was enough to scare anyone. Alex inched a little bit to the right so he could shoot Hector without hitting Lindy. “I can give you a fairy tale,” Hector taunted.

  Before anyone could react, he blurred away from Lindy—straight at Alex.

  To his credit, Alex McKenna got a shot off.

  Unfortunately, it missed Hector entirely and buried itself in Lindy’s right shoulder. She hissed with pain but still whirled around to follow Hector’s progress. He charged at Alex, stepping into the agent’s extended arm, and raised something—Giselle’s blade, which he’d had hidden behind his back all along. Lindy saw him bring it down in a sweeping diagonal motion that sliced through the agent’s cheek, chin, and straight down to the left subclavian artery in Alex’s shoulder. Then Hector continued right on past him, straight for the exit that Giselle had opened up earlier.

  Lindy screamed a curse and threw herself down beside Alex. Hector had cut deep; the wounds were spurting blood. The agent’s good eye, the one that hadn’t been filled with blood, stared up at her in confusion. More blood streamed down the side of his face and neck. Too much. She slapped her hand down over the artery to seal the wound, then realized that Hector had twisted the blade as it exited, making it nearly impossible to close the cut. “Fuck!”

  He tried to say something, his lips twitching helplessly, but the effort made his cheeks move, and the pain was obvious. Lindy shook her head at him. “It’s okay,” she said, her own voice sounding high-pitched and uncertain. “You’re gonna be okay.” She tore her eyes away from him and looked up at the young female agent, Hadley, who was standing over them with wide eyes and clothes saturated in blood. More blood was splattered on her plastic visor, but she was still standing, and that was all Lindy cared about. “Call an ambulance,” she snapped. “Do not pursue Hector. Take whatever shades you’ve arrested, zip tie the hell out of them, and keep them separated.”

  Hadley stared at her stupidly for a moment, swaying on her feet.

  “Do it, Hadley,” Lindy commanded, putting a little force into her voice. Which made her sound like Hector. The young woman’s eyes snapped into focus and then narrowed, but she scrambled away to follow Lindy’s orders.

  Lindy turned back to Alex. Arterial blood was still pumping out of his shoulder, running between her fingers. She fought against the desperate urge to dip her head down and drink it; shade saliva was an anti-coagulant, and she would only kill him faster. But she needed to get a lot of shade saliva into him quickly without letting it touch the main wound.

  Then she got it. I’ll give you a fairy tale. Oh, for heaven’s sake.

  Lindy bent her head down and kissed him.

  At first she was just focused on getting saliva into his mouth, as gross as that sounded, but after a moment she felt something touch her face and she almost jumped. But it was him: He’d lifted the hand on his uninjured side to brush against her cheek. He began to return the kiss, tentatively at first, then with increasing enthusiasm. His lips were gentle, exploratory, and Lindy found herself getting caught up in it, to her own surprise. When was the last time she had kissed anyone like this? She could have mesmerized someone to make out with anytime she wanted, but that wasn’t who Lindy wanted to be, and now she understood why. This was real. She could feel his attraction to her, like a pulse of electricity jolting across an invisible wire strung between them. She sent the same pulse back to him.

  Behind her, a throat cleared impatiently. She got the impression it wasn’t the first time. Embarrassed, Lindy sat up, her eyes going to the wound on Alex’s shoulder. It was still bleeding, but in a sluggish trail now. The artery had sealed back up. She sighed in relief and turned around to see a slightly amused paramedic. “Okay if we take him now, ma’am?”

  Lindy nodded, rising to make room. Alex’s eyes followed her. As she stepped back she glanced down at her own wound, from the bullet in her shoulder. Some of Alex’s blood had gotten into her mouth, helping her heal, but it was still bleeding. In fact . . . Lindy frowned down at her shirt and then looked at Alex as the paramedics strapped him to the stretcher, comparing the bloodstains. Had her blood gotten into his wound? That didn’t—

  “Ms. Frederick?” The voice was Hadley’s, and although Lindy was pretty sure she’d asked the young agent to call her by her first name, the blank, professional look on her face suggested she wouldn’t be coming over to braid Lindy’s hair anytime soon. Hadley gestured to the prone figure behind her, whom the paramedics were working on. “Agent Wu is dying,” she said matter-of-factly. This was one of the agents whom the shades had practically drained. “Is there anything you can do? To heal her, I mean,” she rushed to add, in case Lindy had thought she was asking her to transmute the agent. That, Lindy would not do.

  “Yeah, I’m coming.” She went over to the paramedics to borrow a syringe. No more kissing.

  Alex McKenna was sent into surgery, and the dental clinic was swarmed by local cops, FBI bureaucrats, and the media. Chase Eddy had driven down to take charge of the scene. He vouched for her, guided her through making a statement, and made sure that everyone left out any mention of Lindy’s status. It looked as if her condition would remain a BPI secret—at least for now.

  In the end, seven of the eight remaining teens were rescued and sent home to their families. They were traumatized and shaken, with armfuls of puncture marks, but in good physical condition: Hector had wanted them healthy for the experiments.

  The body of the eighth teenager was never found, and Lindy suspected that the kid Giselle had drained was not dead, but transmuted now, and had been taken away with the rest of Hector’s people.

  Alex’s team had lost seven agents, one for each of the lives they’d saved. Three of Hector’s shades surrendered and were shipped east to Camp Vamp in armored cars, covered in zip ties. The rest of them either had escaped or were killed. Although Lindy had spotted at least twelve dead shades, curiously, not a single shade corpse was found on-site—they’d been removed by the other shades in the chaos, but Lindy saw more than one newspaper that suggested they’d turned to ash. She knew that Hector was trying to keep the human authorities from having a body to autopsy, and if it fueled the vampire legend, well, all the better.

  When Chase Eddy finally sent her back to the hotel at 9 a.m., Lindy went straight to the hotel restaurant and enticed a jet-legged stranger up to her room for a feeding. She sent him away a little light-headed and convinced he’d had the best sex of his life, which was a pretty big win for someone who was drinking mimosas alone in a hotel restaurant at nine in the morning.

  That afternoon Lindy went to see Alex McKenna at the hospital. She had showered, rested, and fed again, and his good eye brightened when she walked into the room. The other eye was covered by the same bandage that swathed his cheek,
shoulder, and chin.

  “Hi,” she said, feeling a little awkward.

  “Hey, Lindy.” The words came out a tiny bit slurred, dropping the d in Lindy’s name, and she figured the clear liquid in his IV was probably morphine.

  “Hey.” She looked over at the FBI agent seated in the corner of his room. The man had taken possession of Alex’s remote and was flipping through the channels. “Can you give us a minute?” The guard looked at Alex, who held up a weak thumb. The guard shrugged, turned off the TV, and left the room, mumbling something about ESPN.

  Ignoring him, Alex looked at Lindy. The visible corner of his mouth crooked up. “We did it.”

  “Well, sort of.” She sat down in the visitor chair next to his bed. “Hector got away. I let him get away.” She heard the guilt in her own voice, and she couldn’t meet Alex’s eyes.

  “To save me,” he reminded her. “And we got the kids home. And Giselle is dead.”

  Lindy couldn’t help but smile at that. “You should have seen Ruiz’s face when Agent Eddy told him about that,” she told Alex. “He hasn’t forgiven me for being a shade, but for a second there I thought he was going to actually hug me.”

  Alex’s smile widened, until he winced with pain. “Ooh. Don’t be funny.”

  “I promise nothing.” She hesitated a moment, looking over the machines that were currently hooked up to Alex McKenna. Had it been worth it? The fledgling BPI had lost so much. They’d rescued the teenagers, yes, and it was true that they’d put a serious crimp in Hector’s operation by killing his lackeys. Especially Giselle. She had wanted to kill that bitch for years, and Lindy had to admit it’d felt great.

  But now Hector would go underground and begin building his army back up again—this time with her blood to help him experiment. When she had time to think about it, she’d realized that was what he’d been doing during the beginning of the fight—making sure Stella and the blood samples were safe.

  He had to be stopped, and Lindy was the only one strong enough to do it. If the BPI was going to let her do that, great. If not, though, she’d have to get rid of the bracelet and go after him herself.

  Meanwhile, if the morning news was any indication, the bloodbath at the dental clinic had woken the sleeping giant of public opinion. A few weeks ago they’d been happy to ignore “the shade issue,” as though Lindy’s kind was just a flu outbreak in a couple of counties, but today every headline in the country screamed the word Vampires. Lindy had no idea what it would mean for her or for the BPI, but change was in the air. She didn’t like being unsure of her footing.

  It wasn’t the right moment to say any of that, though. “You’re going to have a pretty great scar, huh?” she teased him. “I hear chicks dig the scars.”

  The corner of his mouth turned up, but fatigue was creeping over his pale face. “Oh yeah. That’s me. All about the chicks.” She smiled. “You know,” he added drowsily, “you’re a pretty good kisser.”

  Lindy stood up. “And that’s my cue.” She went over and pecked his exposed cheek, being very chaste about it. “Get better, Alex. I think the BPI is going to need you.” I’m going to need you, she added silently.

  She was almost at the door when his sleepy voice followed her. “I need you, too,” he murmured.

  Lindy froze. She turned around to face him. “What did you say?”

  Epilogue

  Special Agent Chase Eddy didn’t make it back to the hotel until late afternoon. It had been a rough twelve hours of handling the criminologists and the media and Alex’s supervisors, including a very worried Deputy Director Harding. Chase had to spend forty minutes on a conference call with her and Alex’s surgeon before she agreed that she didn’t need to rush out there.

  In the hotel elevator, he leaned his head against the cool metal wall, his body coming down from all the caffeine and adrenaline. He’d been Alex’s second in command for years, and the two of them could switch roles if the situation required it, but that didn’t make it easy. There would still be plenty of repercussions, he knew, but the immediate crisis was finally winding down enough for him to take a well-earned nap.

  Chase staggered down the hall to his door, yawning the whole way. He fumbled out his key card and managed to open the door on the third try. He really was tired.

  Inside the hotel room, he flipped on the lights and pulled his wallet and keys out of his pockets, setting them down on the counter that stood outside the little bathroom door. He set his service weapon there, too, and continued into the room feeling much lighter. He wondered if he should jump in the shower now or just collapse for a few—

  “Hello.”

  Chase jumped. The voice had come from a man leaning against the wall he’d just walked past. He was a blond Caucasian man of about thirty, wearing a rumpled-looking suit, and for a second Chase thought the hotel had put another agent in his room by mistake. Weirder things had happened at these mid-level chain hotels. “Hi,” he said uncertainly. “Um, who are you?”

  The other man gave him a jovial smile. “I’m Hector,” he replied. “And I’m here to make you an offer.”

  Acknowledgments

  I had a blast working on Nightshades, and that never would have been possible without the help of a few wonderful people. Thank you to my husband, who put up with my feverish writing habits, and to my brother-in-law Kraig for the weird drug advice (“Can we talk about meth? Is this a good time?”) I have so much gratitude for my entire Olson and Harms families, who never actually said, “Really, vampires again?” even though they were probably thinking it. They advocate for all my books despite the genre being way outside their comfort zones, and if I didn’t already love them so much I’d love them just for that. Hashtag blessed.

  Thank you to Mark Teppo for the beta read and confidence boost right when I really needed both, and to the team at Tor.com who produced such a great cover and thoughtful edit. My thanks especially to Lee Harris for believing in me—and also for erasing that video from karaoke like he promised he would.

  And this wouldn’t be complete without me thanking the Old World readers who followed my work to Nightshades. I know this is a little different, but I really hope you had a great time with the BPI gang. Or at least a good time. Or a medium-okay time. But seriously, thank you.

  About the Author

  Melissa Olson was born and raised in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and studied film and literature at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. After graduation, and a brief stint bouncing around the Hollywood studio system, Melissa landed in Madison, Wisconsin, where she eventually acquired a master’s degree from UW-Milwaukee, a husband, a mortgage, two kids, and two comically oversized dogs, not at all in that order. She loves Madison, but still dreams of the food in LA. Literally. There are dreams. Learn more about Melissa, her work, and her dog at www.MelissaFOlson.com.

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  Also by Melissa F. Olson

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Begin Reading

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Melissa F. Olson

  Copyright Page

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  NIGHTSHADES

  Copyright © 2016 by Melissa F. Olson

  Cover design by Fort

  Edited by Lee Harris

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor.com Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-8849-0 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-0-7653-8850-6 (trade paperback)

  First Edition: July 2016

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