Vampire's Shade Discounted Box Set

by Vivienne Neas

  “I owe him a favor,” he said.

  “For what?”

  Blade shook his head again and turned his back to me. He put his hands on his hips and took a deep breath. When he turned around again his eyes were normal and all the anger had bled out of him, like it was a switch that he could just turn on and off.

  “A message came for you,” he said.

  “What message?”

  “If you keep playing games you’ll regret it,” Blade said, quoting the message. “I’m assuming that’s from your killer.”

  I didn’t like Masselli being referred to as my killer. That made me feel like at some point he would succeed. Instead I forced my face blank and looked Blade right in the eye.

  “Where did you get this message?” I asked. Blade lifted a hand and pointed to the door. I walked to it, opened it, and walked out into the dingy hallway. There were words scribbled on the wallpaper across from the door. I hadn’t noticed it when I’d come in.

  “So they know where I stay now?” I asked. “I thought you said they wouldn’t find me here.”

  He shrugged. “I have cameras set up, but it’s easy for a vampire to dematerialize somewhere and not be seen.”

  “But if that was what happened, it means that he was here before,” I said. A vampire didn’t just dematerialize to somewhere he didn’t know. You could end up in trouble that way. Blade nodded slowly.

  “There’s someone on the inside, giving them information,” he said. “There’s no other way.”

  He frowned, tried to make sense of what he was saying. “I don’t understand,” I said. He sat down on the couch opposite the one I’d vacated, and I walked to my seat and sat down.

  “Someone who knows where you are is feeding them information. That means that your position here has been compromised, and you’re not safe.”

  The ‘not safe’ bit flew over my head, all I heard was that Blade was saying someone was actively betraying me. That wasn’t possible. I knew very little people, and the few I did know didn’t know where I was.

  “What now?” I asked. I felt numb. I didn’t understand what was going on, I’d already had a fight this morning, I missed Connor, and now Blade was telling me someone was selling me out. Great.

  “I think you should come out with me tonight,” Blade said. “If we do run into an ambush of some kind, at least I’ll be there.”

  “You would do that? You’d have my back?”

  He nodded slowly but he didn’t look happy about it. “I told you, I owe Carl a favor.”

  Right, the favor that he wasn’t going to tell me about. Well, at least it was nice to know that someone was going to have my back, even though it was someone weird and the stakes had just been pushed up. A lot.

  “Alright,” I finally said and stood up. I didn’t see how I had any other options. I didn’t want to do this, but there wasn’t a lot left for me to do. If they already knew where I was they were better than I thought. Or, like Blade had said, someone was feeding them information. I didn’t even try and imagine who that could be. I just didn’t have traitors for friends.

  Besides, if they were coming for me I didn’t want to be trapped in a matchbox for a house, alone, to fend for myself. Especially not if there were going to be more than one, which I was pretty sure they’d be.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Downtown,” Blade answered. I shuffled from one foot to the other. I didn’t like downtown. But I was going to have to do it. “My bike, or your car?” I asked. Blade glanced at me.

  “I don’t have a car,” he said. “Don’t you dematerialize?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know how. Unless it’s a life-threatening thing I can’t do it. So we’re going to have to make do with travel the old-fashioned way.”

  He scowled, and it would have been almost comical if he didn’t look so serious. But Blade was scary when he was serious, so I didn’t laugh about it. Instead I just let him decide what we were going to do, and how we were going to do it.

  I didn’t like being at someone else’s mercy, but once again, it was better than being dead.

  Chapter 4

  Blade didn’t do bikes. Not if he was going to be the one sitting on the back. And I didn’t let anyone drive my bike. So I was picky, but it was a sentimental thing for me. Besides, there was nothing less badass than being on the back of your own bike. Maybe Blade felt the same way about it.

  Finally, we came up with a compromise. Going into town wasn’t going to be as dangerous as coming out of it, he figured. I didn’t know where he got his facts, but I wasn’t going to argue. I didn’t want to go back to the idea that I was going to sit on the back. Blade said he was going to dematerialize and materialize every couple of hundred feet to keep roughly by my side. I thought that would look dumber than sitting at the back of a bike, but I didn’t say it.

  I also didn’t ask what kind of math he was going to use to figure out how often to reappear, even though I wanted to. Some things just had to remain unsaid. Coming back out of town, Blade said he would ride with me. I wasn’t so sure about that. Time would tell.

  The night was cool when I stepped into it. My leathers were comfortable, sat against me like a second skin and slid my leg over my bike to straddle it. I pulled on my helmet and wiped my hair out of my face through the front of the helmet.

  I had my Beretta in the shoulder holster and I had the Glock at my back. They S&W had stayed home. It was a chunky gun and I didn’t want anyone tonight to know I was armed. We weren’t going up against newbies anymore, and I wanted to have the element of surprise. Blade had watched me suit up with eyebrows pulled up. When I’d asked ‘what?’ he’d just shrugged.

  We went. I drove down the road. The night was eerie. There were dark shadows everywhere, and somehow I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t feel jumpy about them. This used to be my neighborhood. These shadows used to define my life. And now I felt that something was going to jump out of them at any minute.

  The fact that someone out there wanted my head in a basket probably helped egg on my anxiety. Shadows could never harm me before. Now they were continuously shaped like skilled vampires with glinting fangs and my name as a death wish.

  Blade did what he said he would, although it was hard to tell. I was aware of a swoosh, an appearance here and there, a disturbance in the air. More than that I couldn’t really tell. When we reached the edge of Westham’s business district I slowed down and finally stopped. I counted to six before he appeared next to me.

  “Why did you stop?” he asked.

  “Because I don’t know where we’re going. If we keep heading straight we’ll be back in the suburbs, and then out of Westham.”

  He pulled a face at me like I was trying to be funny. I wasn’t.

  “I want to scope out the city, see who’s out tonight doing what. So you can park here, we can do the rest on foot.”

  “No dematerializing?”

  He shook his head. I turned my bike into a parking lot and found a space. I wanted to take my chain with me. I’d put it in the seat compartment. But walking around with a chain looped around my shoulders was asking for trouble. There were enough people that understood what it meant, and enough vampires that would take it as a personal threat. It was asking for a fight, and being in downtown Westham with Blade when there was ‘wanted’ sign above my head was already asking for trouble.

  There were nights when I thought that trouble was just something I would never get away from.

  After I parked and left my helmet with my bike, Blade nodded in a direction and we started walking. I was unhappy about my firepower. I would have been more comfortable with a gun that could pack a punch, but I preferred being discreet, and either way I had silver shot in both guns. I never travelled without it.

  It wasn’t going to make a hell of a difference when the vampire was angry, but it saved my life once or twice before, and that was good enough for me.

  The business district was more like a party di
strict at night. Neon lights coming from businesses that made their money after hours, cast multicolored reflections on the road and it was bright enough that it almost felt like daylight.

  Almost. The amount of vampires all around us made it clear enough that it was nighttime.

  It felt like I could sense them a lot easier. When hunting vampires was my job I had to go and sniff them out. Literally. And I had Joel and Ruben’s paperwork to help me get on the right track. If I were doing that kind of thing now I doubted I’d needed their help that much.

  Maybe it had to do with the fact that I wasn’t on the hung anymore. I wasn’t looking for a specific vampire, so particulars didn’t matter. Or maybe it was the fact that I’d been doing a lot more vampire-related work the last while. I’d given up killing, but being off the job had somehow gotten me in a lot more trouble than I’d ever been in before.

  Or maybe it was just that I was more in touch with my vampire side, and now it was easy for me to spot them or sniff them out. I didn’t have to try so hard, because I was finding my own. If I’d known this before, it would have made my job that much easier back in the day. But then again, if I’d embraced vampires and what I really was back then, I wouldn’t have been doing that job in the first place.

  Life was full of ironies.

  We’d walked about two blocks and I still wasn’t sure what Blade had in mind for tonight, when he held up his hand. We both stopped and he cocked his head to the side, obviously listening. I strained my ears for a sound. As a half-breed I had hearing that was a lot better than any human’s, but I still wasn’t a hundred percent vampire. I would never hear things, smell things, sense things the way they could.

  Blade looked like he’d stopped breathing. That made me nervous. Something was out there. He was sinking into fight mode. I could see it in his eyes, the way the black of his pupils started eating at his light irises until his eyes were creepy pools of black. I wanted to ask what was going on, but I didn’t want to break the silence.

  If there really was danger even a whisper could give us away. It seemed strange to stand silent and still in the middle of the party zone where the thump of music and the laughter of civilians laced the air. But the danger was here.

  My heart beat in my throat. Blood surged through my veins and I tried to swallow without making a sound. I didn’t know if I’d succeeded. Blade glanced at me. It could have been reproach; it could have been a warning.

  The street around us drained of people like we were completely alone. I didn’t know what sent the others away, but it was like the civilians all around us had suddenly decided to go somewhere else. The street was suddenly empty, and besides the pulse of music in the background, which seemed eerie now that everything else was so quiet, there wasn’t a sound.

  They appeared one by one between the buildings. Dark shadows, like they were materializing, but slower. Their bodies were all tall and thin, and some of them looked so much like vampires, so little like people, that it was scary, even for me.

  I’d seen vampires. I spent time around vampires. And still these didn’t look like the kind of vampires I saw on a day-to-day basis.

  Some of them were so thin, skin sunken away until it showed their skulls. Their eyes were hollow and somehow colorless. It didn’t seem possible, but there it was. Their hands were long and bony, and they hung loosely at their sides as if waiting for commands. In fact, they all looked like they were waiting for a command of some sort.

  Blade was alert and ready. I could feel the energy bouncing off him, grazing against me like something I could touch. But they weren’t attacking. They just stood there, staring at us with these empty eye sockets that were so drowned in shadows I couldn’t see their eyeballs, waiting.

  I swallowed hard, and this time I was sure Blade heard it. I was sure all of them did. A sour smell rose into the air, a smell like that of bread that had been around too long. And I knew that it was fear. I was smelling fear – my own fear.

  It was unlike me to be afraid. There were days when I’d thought I was invincible. But those were also the days that I’d thought I was doing a noble thing. I’d thought I was a high-class assassin, doing something for the greater good, taking out evil one vampire at a time.

  Only after it was all over and there was almost nothing left to fight for, did I realize that I’d been fooling myself. I’d been running around, a scared girl with a gun, killing the bottom rung vampires for a man that was too small in the real world to make the mark he wanted to, so he took the money of desperate people and set me on the job. I’d been letting myself believe that I was making a difference.

  Another vampire appeared in front of us, and my chest constricted. This was Zane Masselli. His face had haunted enough of my dreams that I would recognize him anywhere. In real life his features were even more striking than in my dreams. He looked so much like his brother, the vampire I’d killed, it was almost like looking at someone that had come back from the dead.

  It was unnerving.

  And despite the amount of years it had been since I’d seen him, he hadn’t aged a bit. That was normal for vampires, we didn’t show the passage of time the way humans did. But Zane Masselli looked so young it was almost scary. The only thing about him that made me think he was a force to be reckoned with were his eyes.

  He had old eyes, eyes that had seen a lot, known a lot. The rest of him was like a teenager. He had smooth, pearly skin, so light it looked almost like marble. His hair was a deep shade of auburn and fell over his face in a mess. He wore clothes that was style, too big for him and meant to look like it. He wore baggy jeans with a belt that was studded with diamond. A collared shirt that tucked into his jeans and showed how narrow his waist really was, and a blazer that went over it with sleeves he pushed up his arms.

  His shoes were Italian loafers and they looked as expensive as my bike.

  And unlike the other vampires, Zane Masselli wasn’t a puppet. He was the master. He moved and breathed and his eyes stayed on me.

  “We meet again,” he said to me. His voice sounded like a teenager who’d just gone through puberty, but still it made the hair on my skin stand up and try to crawl away. He had power, this one. When he spoke, it crawled over my skin, and it made me want to cringe.

  I was no match for this. I’d never been a match for this. This was never part of the plan.

  I didn’t run scared, screaming like a girl. Besides my own fear – which was either dying down or I was becoming desensitized to the smell – I didn’t show any sign of panic. Point for me. I glanced coolly at Blade. He’d done what I’d done. He’d assumed a laid-back position that didn’t show anything other than relaxation.

  This was all a game. Zane was looking casual too. If it hadn’t been for the animalistic hunger in his eyes, the caution I felt, the deep black in Blade’s eyes, anyone watching us would have thought this was a friendly meeting. But this was everything but friendly.

  “I’m sure you know why I’m here,” Zane said. “I’ve looked for you for a long time.”

  “I didn’t realize you were looking for me. I could have met you somewhere if I knew my presence was wanted.”

  I spoke smoothly with a calm voice. Zane’s face changed. His eyes grew dark and I felt the anger radiate from him.

  “You’re arrogant. I wonder that you’re still alive.”

  I didn’t have an answer to that. The fact was that I wondered about that too, sometimes. And the truth was I wasn’t particularly arrogant. I was just scared and that often came across as arrogance. Talk about the ultimate flight-or-fight response.

  Suddenly Zane had had enough talk. It wasn’t a long conversation as most conversations go, but maybe he’d come here with a goal and talk was distracting him from it. Whatever the reason, he nodded once, and I had the feeling the nod wasn’t aimed at me.

  It wasn’t. The next moment the other vampires were moving, and it was as if Zane Masselli moved to the background. He just faded away, like he wasn’t supposed to b
e part of the next scene, so he wasn’t.

  I didn’t have time to figure out how many of his vampires he’d mobilized. Two of them were suddenly on Blade, and a third one attacked me. Blade had his vampire skills. He was a purebred, after all, and two vampires wouldn’t get him down that easily.

  I knew this, because I knew Carl, and Carl wouldn’t have set me up with someone that couldn’t hold his own in a fight. Even an unfair one.

  I was the one that was struggling. I’d taken on a lot of new vampires, but they’d always been caught off guard. And when I trained, I trained with humans. That meant that I would never be prepared for a purebred with the strength this one had. I gave it my all. I was stronger, faster than regular women. But it still didn’t seem like it was quiet enough.

  Every punch I threw he seemed to block it. I threw my whole body against him, but he was like a wall. He didn’t even try to duck out of the way, although I was sure he would have been able to. He had speed on me as well as strength.

  I had to think. They’d only set three on us, it seemed, and I was losing. I didn’t have a chance to see what Blade was doing, if he was winning or losing. But I had to make a plan. And that plan wasn’t going to be strength. So I rolled my eyes back and crumpled toward the vampire. And instead of letting me crash to the floor like he should have done, reflexes kicked in and he caught me.

  He stood there for a moment with me limp in his arms and I could feel his uncertainty. I could feel him look around, take a breath to say something to the others. It was my chance.

  I jabbed my hand up into his throat. At the same time, I hit him hard beneath the ribs on his right side, roughly where his liver was. Because he hadn’t expected it, he wasn’t ready.

  My hand folded into the flesh underneath his ribs and I felt the connection with something more solid. His liver, if I was lucky.