Vampire's Shade Discounted Box Set

by Vivienne Neas

  “Fine,” I said. I would tone it down. It wasn’t her fault, after all, that I was in the worst mood. “Yes, she knows. I accidentally dematerialized so I’m sure she figured it out a couple of seconds after that.”

  Sonya’s mouth dropped open slightly and she stared at me.

  “Yes, that happened,” I said. I wanted her to quit gawking at me. “So what is it, should I fear her now?”

  Sonya shook her head and closed her mouth without saying anything about what I’d just revealed to her. Point for her. “She’s just a human. Chances are you’ll hear her coming, but she’s using guns and not even you can outrun a bullet. She learned somewhere about silver shot.”

  I sighed and dropped my head into my chest.

  “Yeah, she learned that from me.”

  Sonya shook her head. Silver shot didn’t kill real vampires but it hurt. I wasn’t a full-fledged vampire, so I didn’t know what the silver would do to me. It might eat me alive. On the other hand it might do nothing at all, but if I was that much human, the normal shot would be enough, no matter what it was made of. Either way I was screwed.

  “I really don’t think she’s going to kill you. She doesn’t know…” She let the sentence taper off at the end. So Sydney didn’t know that I’d been responsible. I wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing.

  “If she knows you well enough, she won’t actively hunt you. Not unless she knows.”

  I flashed on what she’d done to the vampire in the alley. He hadn’t even known anything, and she’d killed him. Just because he was a vampire. I had a feeling innocence – or what I had left on it – wasn’t going to stand in my favor. But there was always time to find out.

  “If you stay here she won’t find you,” Sonya said.

  I nodded. “Can I show you to the guest bedroom?” I asked. She was vampire and there was no way she could leave until sundown. Thanks to Connor she was going to have to stay. I accompanied her to the room and then closed the door. I listened, straining my ears, but there was nothing but my own breathing filling the void.

  There was no way I was staying in this house.

  Chapter 6

  I was out of options. Connor thought I was hunting vampires again. My student was a vampire hunter now. She was also Ruben’s daughter. And the only thing I’d been able to do about anything was run away. Or rather, dematerialize away. Great. I couldn’t turn to Joel because he was with Aspen now, and I’d endangered her enough for one lifetime. I didn’t have a lot of people left in my life. My track record was better than it had been before, I’d gone from having no one to having a bunch of people.

  But when it came down to me being stuck, I still didn’t really have a lot of people I could rely on. Why did it feel like not much had changed?

  I got on my bike and pulled the helmet over my hair. I was just about to turn the ignition when I pulled it off again, and dug out my phone. There was only one person that always ended up being uninvolved. He didn’t feel anything or care much about anything. And he was awake during the day, immune to sunlight like any regular human.

  I called Carl.

  “What do you want?” he asked when he answered on the second ring.

  “That’s how you answer your phone?” I asked.

  “That’s how I answer the phone when it’s people I’m not particularly sentimental about.” That remark stung a little even though I knew he didn’t really mean it. People didn’t sacrifice their lives for those they didn’t feel sentimental about. So I let it slide. I took a deep breath instead.

  “I need your help,” I said.

  The line was quiet for long enough that I wanted to ask if he was still there, but then he spoke.

  “I’ll meet you at Fiasco,” he said. I knew the coffee shop well. A lot had gone down there, back in the day when I’d hunted vampires, and the vampires’ cat lady pet was hunting me. I swallowed down the sour taste of bad memories and rolled my bike out of the garage.

  I was there before Carl. I took a table as far away from the one where we’d sat before. I wasn’t generally that bad with memories, I usually dealt with them pretty well, even when I didn’t shoot vampires up anymore. But it had been the table where I’d met with Ruben, and I wasn’t on top of my game.

  Carl found me almost fifteen minutes later.

  “What took you so long?” I asked. He gave me an empty stare.

  “I had stuff to do,” he said. His voice was cold and his face was expressionless when he sat down, and for the first time in two days I finally felt like something was familiar and normal. Carl had always been like that. I liked it. I needed that kind of consistency right now.

  “So what do you want?” he asked again.

  I took a deep breath and explained. I told him about Sydney, the fact that she was Ruben’s daughter. When I mentioned Ruben an emotion flickered across Carl’s face so fast I almost couldn’t catch it. But I did. Carl had been sentimental about one person. Losing Ruben had hurt him the most.

  Maybe that was why he was even harder now than before. The guilt that welled up in me was so strong I felt like I could choke on it. It wasn’t just Sydney that had gotten hurt. There were so many more people.

  “We need to stop her from killing more vampires. She’s taking down civilians and she doesn’t have a good reason.”

  “And you rate our reason was better?”

  I didn’t have an answer to that. Saying that we did it for money, thinking they were bad vampires, sounded almost worse. But we’d fixed that. We’d turned our lives around. At least, I had. I still didn’t really know what Carl did for a living. All I knew about him for a fact was that he dropped by every now and then, and he wasn’t working for Ruben anymore. The latter was pretty obvious.

  “I made a monster, Carl,” I said almost in a whisper. “We have to stop her because I can’t bear to be the reason more people die.”

  Carl reached out across the table and touched my hand. It was a fleeting moment and the moment his hand touched mine he withdrew it again. But it had happened.

  “Let’s go fix this mess,” he said and got up. I silently thanked him for not saying your mess. “Are you here on your bike?” he asked, walking out of the café. I nodded.

  “Of course you are,” he said. “Follow me.”

  I got on my bike and followed his car. He weaved through the city until he parked in the road in front of an apartment block in an okay part of town.

  “Come on up,” he said and fished in his pocket for his keys. I was almost scared to follow him.

  “What?” he asked when I didn’t follow him.

  “You’re taking me to your house?” I asked. “No one knows where you live. You’re like… a phantom.”

  He chuckled and unlocked the door. I followed him through. It was a walk-up and we climbed the stairs. He lived on the second floor. His apartment was neat and very out of character.

  He offered me coffee and everything, and when we were both seated in the lounge, he finally talked.

  “While we drove here I’ve been thinking,” he started. “It might actually help to talk to her.”

  I stared at him. Carl was about as good with guns as any human could be. He’d hunted vampires just like me. He’d been the one that had taught me the ropes. Negotiating had never been part of the job description for either of us, and like me I’d assumed his communicational skill were dismal. But he shook his head.

  “She’s doing this out of simple revenge. And it’s fresh revenge, only a year old. It’s nothing like yours and mine.” Yours and mine. He’d been driven by revenge too? I literally knew nothing about him. I ached to ask him what had happened to him, and he still struggled with it the way I did. But I kept my mouth shut, because there were more important things. And because I knew that asking just wouldn’t work. I wouldn’t have answered if I was asked, either.

  “I’ll talk to her, she might be upset with you,” he said.

  “That’s an understatement. I’m pretty sure she’s pi
ssed.”

  “Right, so I’ll talk to her and tell her about working for Ruben, and what our lives were like as vampire hunters. That might put her off.”

  I shook my head.

  “I can’t tell her. She might want to kill me anyway. She’s upset about it already, and that paperwork that you cleaned up saved our asses but left nothing for the police to work with.”

  Carl nodded and looked like he was thinking about it. After the master vampires had killed Ruben, the office had been ruined, with furniture and paperwork everywhere. All our paperwork, all the stuff that would land us both – but mostly me – in a lot of trouble with the law. Carl had come back after I’d left and cleared everything up before the cops had arrived. How he’d managed it I didn’t know, but I’d always been grateful. I didn’t know what it had cost him emotionally, but I knew he’d offered up something.

  “I won’t mention you, but she needs to know at least where she’s heading,” Carl said. I nodded slowly. It wasn’t much of a plan in my books, but it was better than I’d been able to come up with. I had to go with it if I wanted to do anything. And I couldn’t just do nothing. Not after it was all my fault. Again. It looked like this was the trend in my life.

  “I just don’t know where to find her,” Carl said.

  “I don’t really know her outside of the academy where we trained, but when we went out last night she took us to that club that’s in the building now. It looks like she’s working around that. She knows the owner.”

  “Sydney knows James?” he asked. I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “Why do you know James?” I asked. He waved his hand in the air, telling me it didn’t matter. I let it go. There were a lot of things with Carl I had to let go if I wanted him to work with me at all. If I thought I used to be difficult, Carl was difficult and a pain in the ass.

  “That’s where we’ll start then,” he said. “I’ll meet you just before dark so that boyfriend of yours isn’t up yet.”

  I nodded and got up, getting ready to leave.

  “Adele,” he said when he was almost at the door. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. You might want to suit up.”

  That meant guns and leathers. Bike. The whole thing. I wasn’t sure if it was for safety or so that we would look menacing. It scared me that I didn’t know, but we were going to do this either way. I wasn’t scared of getting hurt. I wasn’t scared of getting into a tough situation. That’s what my life had been all about. I was scared that somehow I would end another life.

  Carl was in front of my house just before it was dark, as promised. I was dressed in my leathers, with my shoulder holster and thigh sheath. It had been ages since I’d felt this comfortable. Carl pulled up in front of the house and I rolled out my bike so we didn’t have to waste time. We drove together to the club and parked in the same parking lot we’d been before. This time I didn’t leave my weapons by the bike where I couldn’t get to them.

  “She was around back the last time,” I said. We walked past the people and tried to avoid the bouncer so that we wouldn’t be caught. It wasn’t exactly private property but being in an alley looking the way we did was bound to raise some questions.

  We reached the spot where Sydney had killed the vampire. The body had been removed and the alley looked like any normal alley would. I glanced at the door that led into the club. We could hear music, but it was still faint. The night hadn’t fully started yet.

  “I think we’re early,” I said. Carl nodded.

  “Not a lot of people out yet,” he agreed. I leaned against the wall and took a deep breath to steady myself.

  “What do we do if we can’t find her here?” I asked. We really didn’t have anywhere else that we could look. I didn’t know anything else about Sydney. I had her home address on file at the academy, but not even that was going to help us.

  “I think we need to—”

  He didn’t have a chance to finish his sentence. The door banged open and Sydney barreled out. She looked terrible. I couldn’t believe it was only twenty four hours since I’d last seen her. She had dark circles under her eyes and her hair was a mess. She looked like she hadn’t slept at all.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked. She wore black jeans and a t-shirt, and a gun was tucked in the front of her pants. She didn’t have a holster. It was careless, but then again, we wouldn’t be here if she’d been careful. If she hadn’t killed anyone.

  If her motive for all of this wasn’t so damn twisted. I think the worst was the fact that it reminded me of myself.

  “We were looking for you,” Carl spoke for me because I didn’t have the words.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  Carl smiled and I’d never seen him so warm. He was showing a side of him I’d never seen before.

  “I’m a friend,” he said. “I was a vampire hunter. Adele told me about you, and I wanted to meet you.”

  Sydney looked suspicious. Her neck was stiff and she looked from me to Carl and back.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here and go somewhere close where we can talk,” Carl said. Sydney hesitated. I didn’t think she was going to agree with Carl at all, but she nodded after a moment.

  “Somewhere public,” she said. I tried to match the girl I was seeing in front of me with the person I’d been training for so many months. She was so different, it was like an evil twin stood in front of me. She was suspicious and distant and careful and she looked like killing was going to be easier than smiling. I felt more guilty than disappointed.

  “There’s a restaurant nearby,” Carl said. “Why don’t we go have a drink?”

  So we all walked across the road. The restaurant was a block down from the club, and not a place that I recognized, but I’d usually been running midnight hours in my past life. We got a table outside so that no one felt trapped. I was surprised at how nice Carl was being. It made me wonder if he was just rude to me, but he was rude to a lot of people.

  “What do you want?” Sydney asked after we’d ordered something to drink. Carl and I got coffee. She only asked for a glass of water. Noncommittal.

  “We just want to have a chat,” Carl said. “I’ve mentioned before that I used to be a vampire hunter. I did it for a job.”

  “Why did you stop?” she asked. Cutting right to the chase.

  “Because I realized it was wrong. And it wasn’t exactly good for me, either. Killing people changes you.”

  “Vampires aren’t people,” Sydney said and she looked right at me. There was so much hostility in her voice it made me shiver.

  “If it’s alive, it has a soul. If it has a soul it’s a person,” Carl said. “But it’s not about what you’re doing to them. It’s about what all this is doing to you.”

  The drinks arrived. I stirred sugar and cream into my coffee. Carl did the same. Sydney didn’t touch her water.

  “Don’t lecture me,” she said after the waitress left again. “I don’t need anyone to tell me how I’m wrong. You don’t know who I am, what I’m going through.”

  Carl shook his head. “I don’t know exactly what you’re going through, but if it’s anything like mine, I get why you want to kill to fix it. We’ve all been down that road before, Sydney. All three of us.”

  Sydney glanced at me again. I didn’t know what she was thinking. I couldn’t read her face at all – the open, sweet girl that I’d known before was shut down. It made me wonder how much of it was just a face, so she could get the training she wanted, and if that face was who she really was and this person she was now was the grief-stricken killer looking for revenger. It also made me wonder what I used to like when I used to kill. And if my face now was more me, if I’d been hiding it or if I’d evolved into it.

  Suddenly two vampires appeared next to. Sydney scrambled back, knocking her chair over and pushing herself into the railing that closed off the seating area. Carl had jumped and even though he didn’t have a weapon in his hands he held them like he was about to draw one. He w
as full of surprises. I wouldn’t have been shocked if he whipped one out.

  The people around us noticed the commotion and screamed, ducking to the floor when they saw the gun.

  “Hey, it's okay, guys,” Carl said, and only then did I realize it was Connor and Sonya. The tightness in my chest relaxed, and I took a deep breath.

  “Jesus, a bit of warning would have been great,” I said. Sonya’s eyes were large, glued on Sydney. Connor looked at me with a calm face but his eyes were on my hands, and only then did I realize I’d unsheathed the knife. I was holding the silver blade low and threatening.

  “Let’s just all calm down,” Carl said. He hung his hands by his side, open and loose. I slipped the knife back into the thigh sheath. But Sydney was stiff and she had the gun pointed at Connor. She shook her head back and forth very fast.

  “Sydney, it’s okay,” I said. “You can put up the gun.”

  “I don’t want to put up the fucking gun,” she snapped. “There are vampires everywhere. There’s no way. You guys tricked me. Let me go or I’ll shoot my way out.”

  Everyone’s hands went up, palms facing toward her. The manager appeared. Sydney swung the gun toward him and he put his hands up too.

  “Let’s not do anything rash,” he said. “Put the gun away or I’m going to have to call the police.”

  “Don’t you dare!” Sydney cried and she was on the verge of hysterics.

  “Sydney, put down the gun,” I said and I tried to sound firm but gentle. She was pointing that gun at Connor’s face now, and I knew she had silver shot on her. I saw what she’d done to the other vampire. I didn’t want anything to happen to Connor.

  “Don’t move!” she cried again. Connor took one step forward despite her order. She wasn’t bluffing. Her eyes were empty. She was going to shoot him, and he was being an idiot because he’d survived me. But Sydney wasn’t me.

  Everything slowed down, time stood still and the world moved so slowly I had time to breathe again. I saw the beads of sweat on Sydney’s face. Her finger curled around the trigger. I could hear the bullet slip into the chamber, saw the fine muscles in her arm contract as she started squeezing the trigger. I bundled up everything I had inside me and lunged for her. I grabbed her around the waist and we both went down just as the shot sounded.