The Assassins of Light

by Britney Jackson

  Rose raised up, still straddling Kara’s hips. “I feel like the worst girlfriend.”

  Kara trailed her hands along the curves of Rose’s hips, causing Rose to suck in a sharp breath. “You’re not,” she said with a smile. “Trust me. I’ve had enough girlfriends to know the difference.” She slid her fingers beneath the hem of Rose’s shirt, tracing the softness of Rose’s stomach. Her smile widened as she watched Rose react to her touch. “I think you’re pretty excellent, actually.”

  “It’s hard to think,” Rose moaned, “when you’re touching me like that.”

  Kara raised up, suddenly. She kept her hands on Rose’s hips, so that Rose wouldn’t fall backward when she sat up so quickly. So now, they both sat, face-to-face, Rose straddling Kara’s lap, her breath on Kara’s lips. “Good,” Kara said, tilting her face closer, as if she were going to kiss Rose. “You think too much.”

  Rose narrowed her eyes playfully, and as if to challenge Kara’s statement, she kissed her. She pressed light, teasing kisses along the slender curve of Kara’s neck, along her mostly bare shoulders, just above the low neckline of Kara’s shirt. “Am I still thinking too much?” she asked as she began to tug Kara’s shirt upward.

  “Possibly,” Kara said with a smirk, “but I quite like this line of thinking.”

  28

  Mercy Killing

  Susan Jones left the Senate Chamber as quickly as she could, her shoes clicking through the halls, as she walked as briskly as possible. Occasionally, she’d slow enough to glance in a room or office, searching for a quiet place where she could make a very important phone call. She froze when she heard a familiar voice.

  “Good evening, Senator Jones,” the man said, as he caught up with her.

  Susan turned toward him, desperately hoping that he wouldn’t recognize the distress that flashed in her gray eyes. “Good evening, Senator Thompson.”

  “I was hoping I could talk to you about the coming war,” he explained.

  She laughed, “Aren’t you going to talk to all of us later this week? You and your…friends?” She forced a smile. “I’ll be happy to listen to your side then.”

  “Side?” he repeated, as she turned to leave. His blue eyes narrowed with suspicion. “I don’t see it as sides. You either care about people, or you don’t. Isn’t that right, Senator Jones? Haven’t you built your entire career on that ideal?”

  She looked at him. “I said that in my book. I didn’t realize you’d read it.”

  A friendly smile spread across his wrinkled face. “I did my research.”

  Susan sighed, “Fine. I’ll listen to what you have to say, but not right now. I’m really busy. How about, instead, you and your…team join me at my home for dinner?” She offered him a polite smile. “I’m sure we’ll have an exciting night.”

  “My team?” Senator Thompson repeated, his gray eyebrows furrowed.

  “The other people from your organization,” Susan explained. “The ones who are appearing before the Senate later this week. You can practice your pitch on me. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Because you think I’ll be hard to persuade?”

  He smiled. “You don’t have the best track record for being pro-war.”

  “No, I don’t,” she said sharply. “Maybe you can change my mind.”

  Senator Thompson nodded. “I’ll bring my best,” he told her, and then, he spun around and retreated down the hall, disappearing as he turned the corner.

  “I’m counting on it,” Susan said under her breath. Then, as quietly as she could, she slipped into an empty room and locked the door behind her. She crept toward the corner and pulled out her phone, dialing a familiar phone number.

  Someone answered on the first ring. “Can I help you?” a man said.

  Susan lowered her voice. “Yes, I need to speak directly to…the Wolf.”

  A long silence followed that. “You know that’s not how we do things.”

  “I know,” Susan sighed, “but this is an emergency. I need her. Only her.”

  “It’s the middle of the day,” the man tried to explain. “She’s sleeping.”

  “She needs time to make preparations,” Susan hissed into the phone. She shot a worried look at the door before adding, “It’s about the Assassins of Light.”

  The other spy was silent for a moment. “Very well. I’ll transfer you.”

  —

  Rose awoke to the sound of someone knocking at their door. She opened her eyes, frowning at the time on the clock. It wasn’t even sunset yet. Since when did vampires go around knocking on each other’s doors before sunset? She sighed miserably and turned onto her side to look at Kara. But Kara wasn’t there.

  Rose sat up quickly, clutching the sheets to her chest, to cover her bare skin. She glanced around the dark room, looking for any sign of Kara, but all she spotted were their clothes, scattered across the floor. The knocking continued at the door, and Rose had no choice but to check. She toed the clothes on the floor, checking to see if Kara had taken any of her own clothes, but if she had, it wasn’t the clothes she’d worn earlier. Rose grabbed a pair of pajamas from the drawer and quickly slipped them on, still buttoning her shirt, as she approached the door.

  Rose opened the door hesitantly and frowned curiously at the stranger that stood outside her door. Aside from the natural sense of danger that emanated from any vampire, this man didn’t seem intimidating at all. He was about an inch shorter than her, and his build was slight and thin. She wondered what he must’ve looked like as a human, to still be so small, even as a vampire. His curly, brown hair looked messy and tangled, as if he’d just woken up, and his brown eyes widened, flashing with pure terror, as he stared at her. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  He continued to gape at her, and Rose realized that she could hear his heart pounding violently, faster than she’d ever heard anyone’s heart beat before.

  “Is something wrong?” Rose asked worriedly. “You seem…frightened.”

  “It’s you,” he mumbled as his face took on a greenish tint. “You’re the one from my visions. I thought it was you when I saw you yesterday. I knew it.”

  Rose leaned against the doorframe as she listened. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a mercy killing, really,” he continued to speak, as if he hadn’t heard her. He spoke quietly, as if he were talking to himself, and his brown eyes looked wild and manic. “If you’d seen it, if you’d seen what I’ve seen, you’d understand.”

  Rose glanced out into the dark, empty hallway, but she saw only empty hardwood floors, as far as she could see, on either side. She desperately wished that she knew where Kara had gone. She glanced back at the frantic man, her blue eyes burning with sympathy, as she listened to his rapid pulse. “Do you need me to call someone for you? I’ll call whoever you want. Just let me get my phone.”

  Just as she started to turn away, the vampire suddenly grasped her arm.

  “No,” he hissed, his eyes even wider than before. “I have to do this.”

  Rose glanced down at her arm, where his blunt fingernails dug into her skin, drawing blood. “Umm,” she said nervously, “you’re kind of hurting me.”

  “You’d want me to do this,” he explained, “if you knew your future.”

  Rose looked up at him, her brows furrowing. “I’d want you to do what?”

  Before she could react, the vampire thrusted something at her, so fast that she couldn’t even make out the object, only a blinding gleam as the firelight reflected off of its shiny surface. But the sharp object never penetrated her chest.

  She yelled out in pain as the vampire’s fingernails, still dug into her skin, dragged down her arm, carving deep, bleeding wounds from her forearm to her wrist. When her arm finally came free from his grasp, she looked up, blinking in shock, as she found him in the clutches of a familiar, usually-unfriendly vampire.

  Isaac met her gaze for a moment, his greenish-brown eyes flashing with some kind of emotion—amusement, maybe? But then, his gaze shift
ed down to the terrified vampire in his arms, who seemed even more crazed than before.

  “You have to let me do it!” he cried. “She’s a threat to all of us! I saw…”

  Isaac didn’t let the vampire finish his sentence. Instead, he grasped the short, cutlass sword in the man’s hand—the sharp object he’d tried to stab Rose with—and he twisted it back toward the man, forcing the blade through the man’s throat. Rose stepped back, stunned, as blood sprayed from the beheaded vampire.

  The lifeless body of the strange vampire—now in two pieces—fell at her feet with a soft thud. Rose stepped back, a little disturbed by the sensation of the limp, blood-soaked body on her feet, and then, she slowly shifted her gaze up toward the tall, thin vampire that stood across from her. Tiny, wet droplets of blood covered his thin face and soaked his messy, brownish-blonde hair, but he seemed unfazed by the entire incident. Clearly, he wasn’t new to killing people.

  Rose stared at him, her heart pounding inside her chest. “You saved me.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” he asked coldly. “We’re on the same side, aren’t we?”

  Rose shivered. Not because of the temperature. As a matter of fact, the fire dancing and crackling in the fireplace enveloped the room in warmth. No, it was something else that caused her to shiver, something about the sterile coldness of Isaac’s greenish-brown eyes. “Yeah,” she said breathlessly. “I guess we are.”

  “Rose?” breathed a familiar, lilting voice from the doorway. “Holy hell.”

  Rose shifted her gaze from Isaac to Kara. Kara stood behind Isaac, barely dressed, her hands on her underwear-clad hips, as she stared at the dead vampire on their bedroom floor. “Uh, yeah,” Rose mumbled. “You missed some stuff.”

  Kara looked up at Rose, both eyebrows raised. “I can see that,” she said, glancing sidelong at Isaac. Her eyes narrowed. “What are you doing in our room?”

  He smiled at her—or well, it looked like he was trying to smile, at least, but his lip curled in disgust as he did, which left it looking more like a grimace than a smile. “Saving your lover’s life,” he sneered. “You should be thanking me.”

  Kara glanced questionably at Rose, and when Rose nodded, she shifted her gaze back toward Isaac. “Thank you,” she mumbled, her brows furrowing.

  “He seemed so scared,” Rose said, staring at the body that lay at her feet.

  Kara frowned curiously at her. “What exactly happened? Who is he?”

  “I don’t know,” Rose said, shaking her head. “I’ve never seen him before in my life. He knocked on our door, and then, he kept saying something about a mercy killing, and when I offered to call someone for him, he tried to stab me.”

  Kara’s icy blue eyes flashed with pain. “I’m sorry. I should’ve been here.”

  “He must have been talking about me,” Rose realized. “Mercy killing.”

  Isaac watched her, as if he were waiting for her to realize something else.

  Kara glanced back and forth between them. “He did attack first, right?”

  “Yes,” Isaac said. He knelt a picked up the blood-soaked cutlass sword. “This is his weapon. He tried to shove it into her chest. I killed him afterward.”

  Kara nodded. “Good. In that case, this counts as retaliation. We just need to report it to Talulah,” she said, stepping over the lifeless body. She held a small, black phone in her hand, but for whatever reason, she strode over to the bed and picked up another phone that lay on the nightstand—the phone that Rose usually saw her using. She scrolled through the phone until she found Talulah’s number.

  Isaac stepped back. “Well, since you no longer need me, I’m going to…”

  Kara crossed the room so quickly that all Rose saw was a blur of fair skin and dark clothing. She grasped Isaac by the upper arm and shoved him against the doorframe. “Not so fast,” she growled. “Talulah will need to talk to you.”

  Rose watched them worriedly. “About what? Is something wrong?”

  “No,” Kara assured her, concern burning in her light blue eyes. “It’s just protocol.” She shrugged her bare shoulders. “One of her vampires was killed by one of ours. But it’ll be fine because it was just retaliation. He attacked you first.”

  Rose swallowed uneasily. “And if he hadn’t? What would happen, then?”

  “It’s against the rules,” Kara sighed, “and technically…it’s an act of war.”

  —

  How Talulah managed to look intimidating in a pair of fuzzy, baby blue pajama pants, Rose would never know. But as she stood in their doorway, her shoulders rolled back and her dark, curvy form rigid with shock and anger, she certainly did give off an air of intimidation. Her dark gaze shifted from the lifeless body on the floor, up to Rose, then Isaac, and then, finally, Kara. “I want to know exactly what happened, and if you lie to me, Kara, or leave out a single detail…”

  “Ah, come on, Talulah,” Kara chided. She leaned against the edge of the bed, which inconspicuously placed her between Talulah and Rose—who stood next to the dresser, on the other side of the room. Everything about Kara’s stance looked casual, and yet, in reality, each choice she made was deliberate. “The threats are a bit unnecessary, don’t you think? You and I both know you can’t intimidate me.” She crossed her arms across her chest and flashed a cocky smirk at Talulah. “Besides, if I were going to lie, I would have never called you in the first place.”

  Talulah didn’t look convinced. “You murdered one of my vampires.”

  “She didn’t do it,” Rose said. “She wasn’t even here when it happened.”

  Kara’s intense blue gaze darted toward her, and although she seemed less than pleased that Rose had revealed that detail, she didn’t seem surprised, either.

  Talulah studied Kara with a suspicious scowl. “Then, where were you?”

  Rose cringed a little, as she realized that she might’ve revealed something that Kara didn’t want Talulah to know. She’d reacted without thinking when she heard Talulah speaking so angrily to Kara. She didn’t want Kara to take the blame for something that she hadn’t done. Rose offered Kara an apologetic smile.

  Kara smiled at Rose, as if to reassure her, before shifting her gaze toward Talulah. “I left to answer a phone call, which, I realize now, was a mistake.”

  Talulah’s deep, black eyes narrowed shrewdly. “Oh? What kind of call?”

  Kara smiled bitterly. “One that is completely irrelevant to the situation. And if you think I’m going to start revealing my secrets now, just because one of your vampires tried to murder the woman I love, then, you don’t know me at all.”

  “No one knows you, Kara,” Talulah said. “That’s why I don’t trust you.”

  Kara grinned wickedly. “You trusted me enough to let me in your bed.”

  Isaac scoffed in disgust. “I don’t see why anyone needs me here for this.”

  They ignored him. “That’s not much,” Talulah told Kara in a cold voice. “And I had a weapon hidden within arm’s reach the entire time, just in case.”

  “Between the mattress and the headboard,” Kara said with a cocky smirk. When Talulah’s dark eyes widened, Kara laughed, “You thought I didn’t notice?”

  Talulah’s jaw tightened. “I’ll have to find a new spot for it,” she muttered.

  “It’s been decades, and you still hide it in the same place?” Kara laughed. “Well, that’s your first problem. Habit and routine are like bait to people like me.”

  Rose listened to the sharpness of Kara’s breathy, accented voice, to the way she taunted Talulah, wondering why she seemed so determined to aggravate Talulah. She would’ve assumed that speaking nicely to Talulah would be the most diplomatic strategy, but clearly, Kara had something else in mind. There was also something else in Kara’s voice that caught Rose off guard—a slight edge, almost as if something that Talulah had said had bothered Kara, almost as if Kara were trying to keep her voice light, to hide the shame she felt about something—her job, perhaps? As far as Rose knew, Kara loved
her work, but as she watched Kara, she sensed an emotion, emanating from Kara, that very much resembled shame.

  Talulah scowled. “Just tell me what happened,” she said impatiently.

  “He knocked on the door,” Rose interjected, since she was the only one who knew the entire story, “and when I answered it, he seemed frightened. I have no idea why he’d be afraid of me. I’ve never seen him before. He kept saying…”

  Kara caught her gaze, then, and there an intensity flashing in Kara’s light blue eyes that caused her to stop. “He attacked her,” Kara said, as soon as Rose paused. She shifted her gaze back to Talulah. “What else do you need to know?”

  “The rest of what she was about to say, for one,” Talulah told her. She pinned Rose with one of her dark, intimidating looks. “He kept saying what?”

  “I…I don’t remember,” Rose mumbled. “It just…slipped my mind.”

  “Think carefully before you lie to me, Rose,” Talulah said. “I trust you far more than I trust Kara. For now. But if you lie to me, I won’t trust you again.”

  “If you truly trusted her,” Kara said, “you wouldn’t assume that she was lying. But since you’re already assuming that, I think it’s pretty clear that you’re a liar, too.” A sly grin twitched at the edges of her lips. “But that’s not surprising to me. No one gains the kind of power you have without a little manipulation.”

  Talulah glared at her. “I took my power without bloodshed. Can you say the same about your leader? We all know the horrors that Aaron has committed.”

  Kara shrugged a shoulder. “Aaron’s not the one pretending to be good.”

  “I remember what he said,” Isaac said suddenly. Talulah turned toward him, attentive and curious, and Kara glanced worriedly at him. He straightened. “It was gibberish. None of it made any sense. He was obviously out of his mind.”

  Kara raised both eyebrows, clearly impressed that he was playing along.