How Not to Be a Vampire Hunter (The Chronicles of Cassidy Book 3)

by ID Johnson

  “So…” I began, feeling her out. “You told me about the Eidolon Festival. “What happened after that?”

  It took her a moment, and I wasn’t sure she was going to answer me at first, but then she said, “Well, Jamie took me home and told me to pack a bag. I had no idea what was happening, but I felt like I needed to do as I was told.”

  “Jamie brought you home from the festival?” I clarified. I hadn’t realized that before.

  “Yeah, but when I got to my room, Aaron was there.”

  I tried to look surprised, like I didn’t already know that, but of course, I did. I had overheard them talking that night. I’d been terrified that something awful was happening. “In your room?”

  “Yeah. I guess he was supposed to answer some questions, but I was just as confused when I left as I was when I got there. But I packed a bag and headed outside. Eliza was there, and she drove me to Grandma’s house.” The way she said Eliza let me know she was just as angry at her ex-friend now as she had been when Aaron had gotten back together with the purple-haired bimbo.

  “And when you got to Grandma’s, she explained everything to you?”

  “She did. She even showed me an old photo album. It was really weird to see pictures of Grandma and Grandpa that are over a hundred years old. I’m sure she’ll show you, too, when she gives you the talk.”

  “Right,” I said, still shocked to think of what those pictures must be like. “Then what happened? What’s this Transformation process everyone keeps mentioning?” I already knew way more about that than I probably should’ve, but she had no idea that was the case.

  “Well, like I said, Grandma is the perfect person to explain all of this, so I don’t want to confuse you, but basically once a person who has the ability to Transform either into a Hunter or a Guardian is in danger from a Vampire, their body starts the Transformation process. Jamie just sped mine along with a shot.”

  I nodded. Had she worked it out on her own, then, that this wasn’t really a choice? I remembered Aaron saying to my parents, way back at the beginning, when he thought I wasn’t listening, that they wanted Cadence to choose to join them. Even if she’d chosen college, she still would’ve Transformed, at least that’s the impression I’d gotten. I didn’t ask that question at this point. “Did it hurt?”

  Cadence let out a loud sigh and brushed her hair back off of her forehead, propping her hand against the back of the couch with her hair sticking up all over the place. “For me, yes. It usually doesn’t, but I am special.”

  “Great,” I muttered. “Hope I’m special, too.” Of course, at this point, I was willing to do just about anything to find out. I definitely thought I could handle some pain if it meant getting to become a Hunter. “And then what? You went to Paris. Why?”

  “Because… remember the Vampire I told you I decapitated at the festival?”

  “Yeah, the one that killed Drew.”

  “Right,” she confirmed. “His name was Carter, and his girlfriend, I guess you could say, her name was Holland, and she was in the process of amassing a Vampire army with the idea of coming to destroy me, amongst other things. So… we went to her.”

  “And you killed her?”

  Cadence nodded. A shadow swept over her face. Her voice dropped, like she was fighting through some bad memories, as she continued. “After I killed Holland, a Vampire informant we’d been using grabbed a gun from a Hunter and used her hand to pull the trigger. He was shooting at Aaron and I, so since they both fired, the bullet could’ve killed either of us.”

  I thought through what she was saying. A Vampire can’t kill a Guardian, but a Hunter can. With normal silver bullets, a Hunter can’t kill another Hunter, though apparently they can with these new titanium bullets, but since a Vampire can kill a Hunter, that bullet was lethal to either target. “What happened?” I asked.

  She swallowed hard. “Aaron protected me, like he was supposed to. He threw himself on top of me.”

  “And did he get shot?” I asked, leaning forward a little bit. I wasn’t overly concerned since I knew he was okay now, but it was still a surprising story. It must’ve been very difficult at the time.

  “Yes,” she nodded. “It hit him in the lungs.” I honestly thought she might start to cry, but she took a few deep breaths and recomposed herself. “Up until that time, that was the most blood I’d ever seen.” She met my eyes. “Vampires don’t bleed. They just turn to ash. And by the time I’d gotten to Drew, there was no blood left, just a few drops. Aaron was bleeding… everywhere.”

  “Oh, my gosh,” I said quietly, scooting over to put my hand on her knee. “That must’ve been horrible to see.”

  “It was. Even though I hadn’t known him very long, I already had feelings for him. Pretty intense ones, too.” I felt like that comment was more for herself than for me. “Jamie fixed him, but it took a long time, and we weren’t sure there for a while. It was pretty terrifying. Of course, it’s not the worst thing that’s happened to me since all of this started.”

  My sister’s eyes were focused somewhere over my shoulder, and I wondered what she was thinking about. While I can imagine Elliott dying had to have been worse than Aaron almost dying, something told me that wasn’t what she was getting at. I didn’t go there, though, not yet. I knew she’d tell me when she was ready, if I could keep her talking. “But, hey, he’s okay now, right?”

  “Yeah,” she nodded, and I thought she was going to cry again. “Listen, Cass, a lot has happened, and I want to tell you all of it, but it’s kind of hard for me to talk about it all.”

  I thought she was cutting me off. The part of my brain that thinks about other people’s feelings wanted to comply, let her off the hook. But this was the first time in months someone was actually answering my questions, fully answering them. Elliott had never been this specific. He couldn’t be. So rather than cutting her off, I said, “That’s okay. Take your time,” and squeezed her knee. “It must’ve been hard to go through that and then come back to find out about Jack.”

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned Jack. She didn’t have any idea that I knew the truth about Jack, or that Elliott had told me about how she’d shot and destroyed him. She also didn’t know that I was aware that she’d gotten shot by another Hunter during that episode. While she might be able to get away with leaving out information about Jack being a Vampire, she would have to tell me about Laura eventually, I thought, because Cadence being shot had led to the discovery about titanium bullets. If I was going to be a Hunter someday, I’d have to know about that. So I patiently waited to see if she would start talking again.

  “Finding out about Jack was really hard,” she nodded. “It was when I went to Lincoln to be with his family and the rest of my friends that Elliott and I went on a hunt together and got a pretty vicious Vampire which solidified our relationship. If that had never happened, I’m not sure Elliott and I would’ve ever become friends.”

  I was shocked to hear that. I’d never imagined Elliott and my sister didn’t get along at first. He always seemed so fond of her. “Really?” I asked, sitting back a bit. “I thought… he treated you the same way he treated me.”

  “Not at first,” she said, shaking her head. “Heck, at one point, he asked Aaron to have me removed from the team. And I was suspended for a few days.” Her eyes wandered off. “That was my own fault, though.” I didn’t ask for clarification. Something told me it wasn’t as important as the rest of what she had to say. “Anyway, we got this old Vampire, nastiest guy I’d ever seen in my life, at least up until then, and from then on we were best of pals.”

  I couldn’t help but smile, thinking about Cadence and Elliott working together to kill some awful Vampire that, in my mind, looked a lot like Bela Lugosi. “Why is that?” I asked, wondering why that was such a crucial event.

  “Well, I didn’t realize he was taking me out there just to scare me. Apparently, this Vampire, Barbarosa, has killed a lot of Hunters over the years. He lived in this creepy old
house out in the middle of nowhere, and it was like a maze on the inside. So, when I wasn’t scared and thought it was just a typical hunt, Elliott tried to talk me out of it. My instincts had already kicked in, though, and I was in full slayer mode. So… I went in after Barbarosa, and chased him all through this labyrinth and out the other side. He was almost out the door when Elliott cut him off. Barbarosa had him by the neck, and while he couldn’t kill Elliott, it couldn’t have been comfortable. I had to be super careful when I fired not to hit Elliott, and I got the Vampire right before he pulled a gun out of Elliott’s waistband and fired at me. It was just one of those things that can bring you together, taking on a monster with another person. It’s sort of hard to describe. You’ll find out eventually.”

  I was already a little tired of hearing about having to wait, but I really did think her story was cool. “So what did it look like?” I asked.

  “Barbarosa? Pretty disgusting. He was very pale and had all these folds in his skin, like really long jowls with pussy, bloody gums, and only little tufts of hair on his head. He looked like he was a couple of hundred years old, but I imagine he was even older than that. His fingernails were super long, like talons. And he smelled like a sweaty old man. It was really disgusting.”

  I had my nose wrinkled up trying to picture him. Then I realized she could probably show me. “Do you have a photo?”

  “Huh? Oh, maybe,” she said, as if she forgot that I knew about her IAC. It took her a minute, but she must’ve found what she was looking for because her face dropped, like she’d seen a picture of Elliott, and then she used her wristband to project a picture of Barbarosa into the air next to us. I was never going to get used to this technology.

  “Oh, wow. He’s… vulgar,” was about all I could manage.

  “I know. I should make a scrapbook of all the monsters I’ve killed,” she said, turning it off. “Seriously, they might give you nightmares.”

  I believed her. It would take me a few minutes to get that image out of my mind. I could tell by the fact that my sister was yawning that she was not going to be up to answering any more of my questions that night. I had made some progress, though, so that was something.

  “The team is going to meet tomorrow to start planning to track down the rogue Hunters involved in the ambush at Sierraville,” she said quietly. “I think Aaron’s already arranged for one of our pilots to take you guys home in the morning.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. The idea of just turning around and going back home first thing in the morning when I still had so many questions and wanted so badly to help had left me speechless. “Is Sierraville where Elliott was killed?” I asked, assuming it was. She still hadn’t told me what happened. I wanted to see if she would talk through everything to that point, but since we were bogged down at Jack’s demise, I realized I wasn’t getting anything linear from her. Maybe she’d see that she owed me an explanation regarding the man we’d memorialized today.

  “Yes,” she nodded. The pain in her eyes was evident; the last thing she wanted to do was relive what happened.

  A patient and kind sister would’ve let her off of the hook. I was starting to run out of patience and my kindness factor was also starting to be irrelevant. “You said a male Hunter shot him? Who was it? What’s his name?” I tried to keep my questions level, like I wasn’t an interrogator for the KGB, whatever that is, but I must’ve been a little harsh. She went from sad to exasperated.

  “Listen, Cass, I know you have a lot of questions. I’m not sure I can go through all of that right now.”

  “I understand it’s gotta be hard for you to talk about, to even think about. I just wanna know how he died, Cadence. I think… I think I deserve that.” I was being assertive, standing up for myself, my rights as Elliott’s former ward, or at least that’s how I justified being so demanding.

  Cadence opened her mouth and then closed it. She rolled her eyes and then closed them, resting her head on her hand again. I thought she was going to ignore me completely but a few moments later, her apartment door opened and Aaron calmly walked in. For a moment, I thought it must be nice to be able to summon the man you love with only your thoughts at any hour of the night or day, but then I remembered why he was there. She must’ve asked his permission to tell me what had happened to Elliott, and I tensed up, avoiding making eye contact with him. My sister’s eyes slowly opened, and she stood, walking toward him.

  If they said anything to each other, it was all internal, and I was growing more and more annoyed. After a relatively quick, silent conversation, Aaron wrapped his arms around her, and she put her head on his shoulder for a second before stepping back away from him. I tried not to stare, but I had no idea what was going on, and it was beginning to annoy me.

  “Hey, Cass,” he said, walking toward me as Cadence headed for the chair Mom had been sitting in earlier. “Cadence said you had some questions about what happened in Sierraville.” He sat down on the sofa pretty close to me, and I wanted to scoot back, scoot away from him, but not only would that probably be rude, there was nowhere for me to go.

  “Yeah,” I said, looking anywhere but his eyes. “I just wanted to know what happened to Elliott.”

  “I think that’s a valid question, and you deserve to know. It’s just… not something that’s easy for either one of us to talk about, as you can imagine.”

  “Right,” I said, shaking my head. “I can understand that. I don’t need… details… or anything. It’s just, that guy who shot him? Who was he? Why would he do that?”

  I expected a whole litany of reasons why he wouldn’t be able to tell me, but instead, he surprised me by being honest. Perhaps this would be the new normal after all. “Well, you know who Laura is, right?” Aaron asked me, his hands folded in his lap and his back to my sister who was now staring across the room in the most catatonic state I think I’ve ever seen her.

  Answering that question was a little tricky for me. I didn’t know why he thought I might know who Laura is. So… I just stared at him for a moment. Part of my inability to speak had to do with accidentally looking him in the eyes. I could see how my sister had become so captivated. It was like I was stuck in his tractor beam, and Chewy wasn’t able to punch anything hard enough for me to break free.

  “It’s okay,” Aaron finally said and kind of smirked, like he was remembering something. “Elliott either honestly wanted me to know he wasn’t wiping your mind the way I’d told him he should be, or he really wasn’t good at keeping secrets.”

  So, not only did Aurora know I had more information than I was supposed to, so did Aaron? “I mean, he confirmed a few things for me, but he didn’t usually outright tell me anything, unless I already knew about it.” In this case, I already knew Jack was a Vampire, so Elliott had told me about my sister getting shot trying to destroy him. And the person doing the shooting had been Laura, Aaron’s ex-girlfriend. I wondered if he might mention that.

  He only nodded at me, like he understood I was trying to protect Elliott. I expected some sort of reaction out of Cadence, but she either wasn’t listening or wasn’t able to process the details of our conversation. “Laura has been angry at me for a long time, and throughout the time that she’s been hating me, she’s been hunting a Vampire named Giovani. Have you heard of him?”

  “Uh….” My head was doing some sort of a mix between shaking and nodding. I really wanted to lie to him but was struggling.

  “Giovani was created by Holland, the Vampire that Cadence killed in Paris. I know she told you about that.”

  “Yes, she did.” That I could confirm.

  “I know you know about Jack.” It wasn’t a question this time, and I also saw Cadence’s head turn, an eyebrow raised. “Giovani considered Jack a brother because they were both created by Holland.”

  “So Holland bit Jack?” I asked, taking advantage of my opportunity to find out even more than I had before.

  “She didn’t bite him; she scratched him. We didn’t even k
now it at the time, and his incubation period, if you will, took a lot longer than it would have if she’d done more than just break the surface.”

  “Wow,” I muttered, finally able to pull my eyes away from his and drop my gaze. “Poor Jack.”

  “I know,” Aaron agreed. “If we would’ve have realized what was going on, we might’ve been able to get to him first and made sure he was properly prepared, but with everything going on with Holland then, well, he sort of slipped through the cracks a little bit. I’ll take the blame on that one.” He said it like he meant it, and like he was used to taking the blame for things whether or not he was actually the one at fault. “Anyway, Laura left that night, the night Jack died, very angry at both me and Cadence.”

  “Why was she mad at Cadence? She wasn’t even your girlfriend at the time.”

  “Cadence is pretty remarkable,” Aaron replied, and I could tell he wasn’t just saying that because my sister is pretty, but he genuinely meant it. “I think there was a lot of jealousy driving what happened, honestly. I also think Laura was of the opinion that if she hurt Cadence, she could get back at me.”

  “You are not very good at breaking up with girls.” I folded my arms and stared at him for a moment, and he actually laughed. “Just saying.”

  “Valid point,” he nodded, not looking at my sister, who had a small smirk on her face as she stared at the wall again. “Anyway, when Laura left here, somehow she managed to join up with three other Hunters who were also mad at Cadence, and me, and Elliott.”

  “Why would anyone be mad at all three of you?” I asked, confused.

  “It’s another sort of a long story, but we were on a hunt a few months before, your sister’s first hunt, where things went a little sideways. I’d promised these three we’d take the Vampire in unharmed so they could interrogate him. Why they wanted to do that doesn’t really matter, but Cadence destroyed the Vampire and the three of them swore vengeance against us.”