by Laken Cane
Kicking him. In the ribs.
I gaped at her. “Stop it, Miriam. Stop!”
But it was like she didn’t even hear me. She continued kicking him, and I heard his ribs crack.
I wasn’t putting up with that shit.
I grabbed her foot mid-kick and twisted, and when she hit the floor I pulled back my fist and punched her in the mouth. Hard.
“Here,” Angus roared, and grabbed me by the back of my robe. He yanked me to my feet, then jerked me back a few steps, away from Miriam. “What are you doing?” Then he focused on my bloody robe. “What the fuck happened to you?”
Before I could answer, he turned to Miriam, who was wiping blood from her rapidly swelling lip.
“You said Clay could protect her!” Angus roared. “He had her naked in his arms and she’s covered with blood. What the fuck, Miriam!”
“Is that all you can do is yell?” I yelled.
They both looked at me, then turned back to each other.
“I was trying to rouse him so he could explain, but Trinity took offense and punched me in the mouth. You saw her.”
“You were kicking him,” I said, enunciating each word slowly, carefully. “You made him stand still so Angus could hit him, and you were kicking him.” As though she didn’t know. I grew angry all over again and clenched my fists.
“Calm down,” Angus told me. “Miriam knows how to handle him.”
“You’re both assholes.” I knelt once more beside Clayton, unsure. I had no idea what to do for him, but neither Miriam nor Angus seemed overly concerned.
Not with Clayton, anyway.
Angus hunkered down beside me. “Are you okay, girl?” He reached out a hand to pull the bloody lapel of my robe away from my skin. “What happened here?”
I shrugged away his fingers. “It’s a long story—one I’ll tell you after you help Clayton.”
“Sweetheart,” Miriam said, her voice somewhere between arctic cold and the fires-of-hell hot, “you do not want to fight me for this thing.”
I jumped to my feet. “Oh my God. You—”
“I can see you’re beginning to care for him.” She shrugged. “You really don’t want to do that.”
But then Clayton groaned and sat up, and I was saved from having to reply. Care about him?
No.
Definitely not.
No more than I’d care about any other person being abused.
Miriam stood, then leaned over and buried her fingers in his hair. “Up you go.” If he hadn’t stood, she’d have ripped out his hair by the roots.
I wondered why she hated him, but I couldn’t ask. Not then.
I stood as well. Clayton glanced at me, then away.
“Are you well?” Miriam asked him.
He nodded.
She put her hands on her hips. “Explain.”
“I went to get a first aid kit to bandage her wound. When I returned, she was being attacked by a strange man. I pulled him off her and threw him against the wall.” He pointed his chin at the wall, and we all three turned to look at the dented plaster.
“Where is he?” Miriam asked. “Dead?”
He shook his head. “Escaped. I don’t know what he was.”
“So.” Miriam walked slowly around him, her heels clicking on the floor.
He stiffened, but didn’t move.
“How,” she asked, “did you go from fighting off a strange attacker to trying to fuck our little hunter?”
I recoiled, even as Clayton flinched.
In her voice was a dark promise of pain that she didn’t even try to hide. She was raging, but in a way I’d never seen from anyone. A deep, soul crushing, killing rage that meant someone was in trouble.
It meant Clayton was in trouble.
“It wasn’t him,” I said, quickly, despite my embarrassment. “The intruder rubbed something on me. Some sort of sticky lotion. Clayton, what did you call it?”
He blinked at my attempts to protect him. “The Foam of Aphrodite,” he murmured.
Miriam gasped and stepped back, her face paling. It should have been gratifying to see her lose her composure, to show some fear, but it wasn’t. It was just frightening.
Angus gaped at Clayton. “What did you say?”
Clayton nodded. “He hit her with a dose large enough for ten people.” He gestured at me without actually looking at me. “Her entire…chest was covered.”
Miriam walked to me and peered into my face. “How do you feel now? It’s gone, I take it?”
“Mostly,” I said. “Except for…” I swallowed, then hurried on. “Some lingering…um…heat.”
She and Angus traded glances. “I’ve never heard of someone recovering so quickly from even a few drops,” she said.
Angus shook his head, then shrugged. “She’s strong. She’s different.”
I pressed a hand to my poor abused chest, then went to sit on the couch. “I don’t feel strong at the moment.”
Angus frowned down at me. “Come. You’ll see our doctor. You need to be checked out.”
“I’ll be okay. If I can go for a few nights without being stabbed or bitten or bled, I’ll be okay.”
“Let us see the wound,” Miriam told me.
I sighed and pulled the edge of my robe away from the injury. “It’s healing. I need to rest, that’s all. I’ve lost a lot of blood.”
It truly did look better. It was swollen and discolored, red and purple and angry, but the ends were closing and it seeped only a little. Mostly, it was sore.
“The intruder splashed her with the foam and then stabbed her?” Miriam asked, skeptical.
“No,” Clayton replied. “The intruder didn’t stab her.”
“Then who gave her the wound?” Angus asked. He clenched his fists and took a threatening step toward the other man.
When Clayton remained silent, Miriam slid close to him, ran her fingers up his arm, and whispered, “Answer him, you fuck.”
“Silverlight,” Clayton said. “Amias gave her the sword. It tasted her.”
They gaped at him, then me, then him again.
“You lie,” Angus said.
“No,” Miriam disagreed. “He can’t lie to me.” She turned on me. “Silverlight, the sword. You have her.”
I slid my hand down to the pocket of my robe, to where the knife rested, half afraid they’d try to take her from me.
“It has her,” Clayton said.
“The blade accepted her?” asked Angus, doubtfully. “A human? Or,” he added, studying me, “whatever she is.”
“Yes.” Clayton’s voice was steady and deep, but the pallor of his skin remained, and he still looked a little less than steady. “Completely.”
“You can ask me,” I said. “I’m right here. Amias wants me protected. The sword will do that.”
The three of them stared at me, but only Angus’s face held something more than curiosity. ”You’re softening toward the fucking vampire,” he accused.
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell any of them what I’d learned—that Amias asserted some sort of terrible control over me, that it caused me enormous physical pain to hurt him, that I’d been turned on by him.
That he was my master.
Oh God, no. The shame. The awful shame.
My face heated and I looked away from Angus’s probing stare. “I hate him,” I muttered. I did hate him. But that rage, that wonderful rage, was dimming.
Then Miriam took control, and I turned away from the accusation in Angus’s eyes, eagerly grasping onto something a little less disgraceful.
“I’ll help her pack a few things,” she said, crisply. “She can stay with you, Angus, and soon we’ll get her into her own place in Bay Town.”
No one asked me a damn thing, but it didn’t matter. I was exhausted, drained. I had to find another place to live. If they wanted to take control and do all the work, I wasn’t going to argue with that.
“Let me see the sword,” Miriam ordered. She gathered her long,
blonde hair in one hand and shoved it over her shoulder, then gestured abruptly at my robe pocket. “Hurry now. We don’t have much time.”
But I shook my head and backed away. “I’m going to get dressed, then I’ll pack a bag for my stay at Angus’s house.” I began to walk from the living room, but at the doorway into the hall, I turned around.
“Silverlight is mine,” I said, fiercely. “Mine.”
Her smile was puzzled. “I only wanted to see it. I wouldn’t take it from you.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Because if you tried, I would do more than punch you in the mouth. You shouldn’t forget that.”
And from the look on her face—from the looks on all their faces—no one was going to forget anything.
Chapter Twelve
I rested and slept on and off—mostly on—for three days.
Angus and his many children—along with their nannies and housekeeper—took care of me while I recovered from the shocks I’d received to not only my body, but my mind. My spirit.
I had to adjust to the changes, and I needed rest to do that. I needed sleep. But during the times I was awake, the supernaturals visited me. Clayton would stand in the shadows of the room, awaiting Miriam’s command.
I couldn’t look him in the eye.
Part of the reason was because I was ashamed of how I’d behaved, but some of it was because I didn’t want to see him go back to being Miriam’s thing.
I’d seen him as the man he was.
Angus had hemmed and hawed while explaining to me that it wasn’t my fault that I’d gotten hot and bothered and naked and jumped Clayton. Miriam had laughed, but when she glanced at Clayton, I saw him flinch from the corner of my eye.
“She won’t allow it, Trinity.”
Had she punished him because of my lack of control? Because I’d been naked in his arms?
I hadn’t cared at the time—I’d been too far gone on lust lotion. What had he called it? The Foam of Aphrodite. But now…now I cared very much.
They hadn’t explained anything other than the fact that the lotion was a forbidden substance in the supernat world, not because it affected them—it didn’t—but because it would get them all exterminated by the human government.
Because the foam affected humans.
But it even more intensely affected those humans who were…different. Humans with a little something extra inside them. Humans like me.
The supernaturals minded their manners for the most part. They controlled themselves. They didn’t kill humans. They went out of their way to offer something that would make them accepted in our world—protection, money, entertainment.
That’s why they were accepted.
Not the vampires, of course, but that was a whole different thing.
The Foam of Aphrodite would change all that, and it wouldn’t matter which supernatural or group created it.
For that reason, it was more dangerous to the supernat community than it was to the humans.
And they had to figure out who possessed it, and they had to contain the situation.
It wasn’t like the foam was readily available, sold in supermarkets or restaurants and handed out on Halloween. It was nearly impossible to find or create, and not even my little group of supernaturals knew exactly how it was made, though they tossed uneasy glances at each other when I asked.
They might not know how to make it, but they knew more than they were telling me. I got the feeling sex had something to do with the process. Big surprise.
“The question is,” Miriam had said, tilting her head quizzically, “why you? Why does this man want you?”
I’d shrugged. “I’m a fun girl.”
But I had no idea why the stranger had attacked me.
I’d woken up that morning pretty much back to normal, so I’d gotten dressed, gone downstairs for breakfast, and then, it being an unseasonably warm and sunny day, I’d walked out into the large, fenced backyard to sit on the patio and watch Angus’s kids play.
Miriam had joined me half an hour later.
“You’re up early,” I said. I glanced behind her, automatically searching for the hulking shadow of Clayton, but he didn’t appear. That was unusual, as Miriam rarely went anywhere without him at her back.
“I know,” she said, grumpily, and took the chair beside mine. “But we have to sleep less and work more, now that we’ve got this foam hanging over our heads. If word of this gets out, we’ll be rounded up and…” She shuddered, and it took her a minute to continue. “Bad things will happen to us. We have to gain control of the situation, Trinity. Human women are being murdered, and now this.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Do you really know?” Her eyes blazed. “Because you’re one of us now. They will take you, too. Your sad story won’t sway them, not anymore. You’ve left the city and moved to Bay Town. You’re not only working with us, you’re living with us. And when they decide to persecute the nonhumans once again—and they will—you may not be immune from their hatred and fear.”
I swallowed the dread I felt at her words. I was one of them. I’d been stabbed by a magical sword, chomped on by a mad master vampire, and…
“No,” I realized, suddenly. “You’re wrong. I’ll be vital to the humans once they understand what I can do. I’m a hunter. I can kill vampires. I can kill them. No one else can do that.”
“That,” someone said behind me, a bit dryly, “isn’t entirely true.”
I twisted in my chair and craned my neck to look up at the speaker, startled.
“Trinity,” Miriam said, “meet Shane Copas. He’s the hunter I told you about.”
I stood and automatically held out my hand, giving Miriam’s former brother-in-law a nod hello as I looked him over. That would have been impolite except he was doing the same to me.
His grip was hard and firm, not the gentle squeeze most men were inclined to give me, and he didn’t hold my hand a second longer than necessary.
He wore a thin black jacket, a black shirt, and a pair of faded khakis. His boots were dark brown and very scuffed, and he wore a holstered gun at his side.
His hair was dark and very short, and his eyes were beautiful—light blue, ringed with a darker blue, and shot through with bits of silver—but a person had only to look into those pretty eyes to know Shane Copas was a man who used his fists a lot…and liked it.
Scars, mostly small and old, decorated his face. One at the edge of his right eye, like a tiny, silver crescent, a small, almost perfectly round one over his temple, a thin slashing line of scars over his left cheekbone, and a jagged chunk of scar on his chin.
He had a healing cut over the bridge of his nose, a cut dissecting his left eyebrow, and a fading bruise covering his right cheekbone. The knuckles of his right hand were battered, broken, and mottled.
“I guess I should see the other guy?” I joked.
Shane’s cold stare went right through me. “She’s not a hunter,” he told Miriam. “She’s a liability. Find someone else to protect her.”
Shocked by his rudeness, I took a quick step back. What the hell was his problem? He didn’t know me.
“Shane didn’t want to help us out,” Miriam told me. She kept her voice light, but it held a note of eagerness, as though she were spoiling for a fight. She settled back into her chair. “I had to twist his muscled arm to get him to agree to meet you.”
I curled my lip and grabbed onto my anger. “I don’t need his help or his protection. I have my sword, and I have the ability to give the true death.” I turned away, dismissing him. “This man can go home. Or to hell,” I added, snarkily, “for all I care.”
She laughed. “He’s not going anywhere.”
Shane turned and strode away without another word.
“Hey,” Miriam called. “Where are you going? Shane!”
But her former brother-in-law was not her golem, and he didn’t pause. We watched him until he disappeared through the kitchen doorway, and then I turned on Miriam.
“You shouldn’t have brought that banged-up thug here.”
“I knew you two wouldn’t get on,” she said, airily, “but that’s not important. The important thing is that he doesn’t let you die, and you…” She shrugged. “Maybe you don’t let him die, either.”
I left her there with the children and the sun and stomped back into the house. Copas was nowhere in sight when I got there, and I figured I’d probably never see him again.
I slipped my fingers into my jacket pocket and felt for Silverlight, breathing easier when I touched the warm sheath. I’d rested long enough. The urge to hunt was growing stronger, making me impatient and fidgety, and I needed to get out of the house and get some exercise.
And kill.
Maybe I was a little uneasy at the pleasure that thought gave me. Maybe I wasn’t. I wanted to kill the creatures who stole the very blood from unwilling bodies. There was nothing wrong with my need to end them. And if I were a hunter born, then wanting to kill vampires was coded into me—Amias’s attack had just awakened it.
“Tonight,” I whispered, squeezing the sword as I ran up the stairs to my borrowed bedroom.
That night I would take my sword, and I would do what I needed to do. What I craved. I would kill vampires.
I would hunt.
Chapter Thirteen
“I’m not saddling myself with a virgin hunter.”
“She needs help,” Angus said, his voice a low roar—he couldn’t seem to help but roar, no matter the volume of his voice—“and she’s our responsibility.”
I pressed myself against the wall outside Angus’s study, clenching my fists as they discussed me like I was a helpless burden they had no choice but to bear.
“She’s not my responsibility,” Copas said.
“The vampires are going to come after her,” Angus said. “And there’s something else. A stranger attacked her with the Foam of Aphrodite. That’s bad news.”
“Again,” Shane said. “Not my responsibility.”
“She’s one of us,” Angus bellowed. “She’s one of you. Take some pride in what you are, man.”
“Shane,” Miriam murmured, a little less combative, “you won’t have to protect her in the field. Amias Sato gave her a gift.”
