by Rose Wulf
Tobias smirked faintly and replied, “Probably. But, just to be safe, you’ll have to be more specific.”
“You,” she began again, her body frozen in disbelief, “you’re the one who killed him. You killed my father.”
“Ah,” Tobias replied, “yeah, that was me.” His expression darkened even as his grin broadened and he asked conspiratorially, “Want to know a secret? I’m the one who killed his father, too.” He paused, grin fading, and asked, “You did know that Ronnie here was killed on the anniversary of his old man’s death, right?”
For a moment she remained frozen. Terror had seeped into every single muscle in her body and she could barely breathe, let alone react. She had wanted to help find her father’s killer, it was true. And she’d been upset to learn that she wasn’t even likely to still be alive when he was finally caught. But it had never occurred to her that he might come after her. How was she supposed to deal with a vampire who’d been successfully avoiding an entire society of angry vampires for a century?
This is the monster who murdered my father.
In an instant anger replaced the terror and she was lunging forward before she could think better of it, screaming, “Murderer!” She threw herself at him with every ounce of strength she possessed, curling one hand into a fist and throwing it forward, empowered with sixteen years of grief.
Tobias laughed and danced backwards, out of reach, watching her nearly upend herself over the short headstone. “Better be careful, Veronica,” he taunted. “Gregory wants you in one piece.”
Veronica struggled to rush over the headstone, too angry to be either embarrassed or rational. “I don’t care what he wants,” she snapped as she finally found her feet. “You’re not leaving here until I’m done with you!”
“Until you’re done with me?” Tobias asked, a note of amused curiosity in his voice. “Do you really think there’s anything you can do? You can’t even touch me unless I let you.”
“We’ll see about that!” Veronica cried, running at him.
Tobias was chuckling, and he stood still until she was swinging again. As soon as she was committed to her punch he ducked beneath her arm and spun around her, grabbing her wrist and yanking her arm behind her. “You’re kind of entertaining,” he offered as he shoved her to her knees. “But I don’t really feel like playing anymore. You’ll be coming with me now.”
“Get off!” Veronica cried, struggling uselessly in his grasp. His fingers were digging into her wrist and he was straddling her now, preventing her from spinning around in either direction.
“Oh relax,” Tobias said, suddenly sounding bored. “I’m hardly the one you need to be worried about; I don’t even care about what happens to you. I’m just doing Gregory one last favor.”
“Last?” Veronica repeated, the blood slowly draining from her ears and taking with it a lot of her irrational anger.
“Last as in ‘last before I leave’,” Tobias clarified. He reached around her, then, and effortlessly hauled her off of the ground. She struggled again, kicking awkwardly and attempting to roll out of his hold, but he ignored her efforts and flipped her over his shoulder. “Try to hold still,” he called. “I’d rather deliver you with minimal bruising.”
“Let go,” Veronica said, grabbing hold of his shirt in an attempt to knee him in the stomach. “Let me go!”
Tobias caught her incoming knee, shoved it back and clamped her legs against his chest tightly. When her movement was sufficiently locked he said, “In a minute.”
Veronica gasped, the air rushing out of her lungs as he dashed forward. Everything that she should have been able to see from her terrible vantage point barely even counted as a blur. It was just dark and the air was whipping her face and her stomach was trying to roll up and out of her mouth. There was no way this was going to end well.
Chapter Sixteen
Robert’s tip was good, for which Seth was glad. Troy Wilson had definitely been spotted ducking into an old, long-abandoned building on the outskirts of town. Unfortunately the man Robert had in the area could only watch one of the two exits to the building at a time; a detail Troy seemed to have been aware of.
“This is really starting to piss me off,” Jasen growled as he and Seth stepped into the dark, musty building. The floorboards creaked beneath his booted feet, threatening to give way and likely take the rest of his patience down with him.
It wasn’t a sentiment Seth disagreed with, so he said nothing. Jasen was already starting for the back door, intending—he assumed—to try and run their prey down on foot, when Seth’s eyes landed on a piece of yellow lined paper. It was tucked beneath the edge of the rotted window frame, just enough to keep from being blown away too easily, and it didn’t appear nearly old or dusty enough to have been there long. “Hold on,” he called as he adjusted course and made his way to the paper.
Jasen stopped walking and turned enough to keep Seth in his sights but stayed silent.
Up close it was obvious that paper was, in fact, a recent addition to the décor. And something was written on it. Seth tugged it free as he announced, “It’s addressed to me.”
“And?” Jasen pushed pointedly.
Seth’s eyes skimmed the rest of the short note as a pit formed in his stomach. “It says: ‘I’ve got a message for you, but I can’t leave it where just anyone can find it. Go out the back and follow the bread crumbs’.” Somewhere in the back of his mind it occurred to Seth that the handwriting on the note didn’t match the handwriting he’d found in Troy’s apartment. It didn’t match Richards’s writing, either, and Seth had to wonder if Tobias had written the note instead. Tobias was the only one he hadn’t found a good writing sample for.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jasen grumbled as Seth finished reading. “He left you a note to tell you he had something to tell you? That’s fucking stupid.” He spun on his heel as he spoke and resumed his path to the back door.
Seth sighed and tucked the note into a pocket. Once again he found he agreed with Jasen’s point, and later he might stop to wonder what their recurring similarities said about him. At the moment there was still a chance to track Troy.
“Hunter,” Jasen called from behind the building.
Dragging his focus back into place Seth turned and strode forward as he asked, “What is it?”
Jasen was kneeling in the dirt, holding something off the ground with two fingers as he turned a frown toward Seth. “Looks like you were right.”
Seth frowned and glanced at the lightweight object Jasen was holding up for inspection. It was a light blue piece of fabric that looked suspiciously like a woman’s shirt. And it wasn’t just any woman’s shirt, either; it was Veronica’s.
****
It felt like forever before Veronica found herself being casually tossed onto an old, lumpy sofa. Or, rather, what she imagined forever would feel like if it had been crammed into the space of an instant. She had no idea how long it had really taken to get from the cemetery to the average-sized living room they were now in. It was hard to keep track of time—or direction or location or really anything at all—when the night-darkened city was passing, upside down and backwards, at inhuman speeds beneath her eyes. Her head was still spinning, and she had to swallow more than once to assure herself that she wasn’t about to revisit her dinner.
“It’s about damned time,” Richards’s familiar growl declared, drawing her attention to the shadowed figure now pushing off from the far wall.
Tobias shrugged as he slipped his hands into his pockets. “Sorry,” he offered. “She wasn’t where we thought she’d be. I had to find her.”
“Whatever,” Richards grunted. “I sent your idiot brother to detour them. Go meet up with him if you want, or go get laid; I don’t really care.”
“All right,” Tobias said with a half-nod. He turned, flashing a brief, dark smirk at Veronica before continuing toward the still-open door they had just come through.
Veronica was trapped in a confused, frighten
ed silence as she watched their exchange. Is he bipolar or something? That was not the same vampire who had captured her. The vampire in the cemetery had been arrogantly confident and openly controlling. He’d been proud of the terrible things he’d done and the things he probably intended to do. He was dominant in all senses of the word. But this Tobias was none of those things. Now his body language was subdued, his head had been slightly bowed, and he was acting as though he was completely inferior. Is this normal?
She wasn’t afforded the time to wonder about it, as her attention was promptly yanked back to Richards when the vampire wrapped his hand around her elbow.
“So we meet again,” he taunted with a sneer. He was kneeling on the couch and leaning into her personal space, daring her to challenge him.
Her heart shuddered in her chest and she took a breath, but she shoved her fear as far back as possible. Now was absolutely the wrong time to let him get to her. “Let go of me!” She emphasized her demand by trying to yank her arm out of his grasp, but he was too close and she didn’t have the leverage or the angle she needed. All she succeeded in doing was half-twisting her elbow.
“Oh, I will,” Richards assured her. “Just not yet.”
Narrowing her eyes at him, she snapped, “What do you even want with me?”
He met her glare with his own as he replied, “What do you think? I want you dead.”
“Why?” she challenged, stalling. “Because I dared to be eating my lunch in a public place and I have ears? Because you didn’t choose a better venue to discuss the crime you were planning? Or because I had the audacity to defend myself the last time you tried to kill me?”
The hand around her elbow tightened, becoming painfully uncomfortable, and he growled low in his throat. “Maybe it’s because you have such a disrespectful attitude,” he hissed.
Okay, so maybe it’s possible that being snippy in this situation was a bad idea. It was just so hard to keep inside, considering his reasoning—if she was right—was so ridiculous. And then there was the minor detail that she hated him even more than she feared him. “I have a disrespectful attitude?” she repeated before she could stop herself. “I didn’t do anything wrong! You’re the murderer here, you monster.”
His glare instantly transformed into a dark smirk and he said, “You’re right. I am the killer here. It might be good for you to remember that.”
She swallowed her next response as a cold chill seared through her. He had a very good point. Why did I have to drop my purse?
“Tell me,” Richards whispered. “Do you miss your friend? Do you want me to tell you how she died?”
Suddenly the image of Mandy’s mutilated body flashed through Veronica’s mind and anger settled over her for the second time that night. “How dare you!” she exclaimed, shifting all of her weight forward and throwing herself at him without thought. Her momentum and his poor balance sent them tumbling to the floor even as her free hand curled into a fist and pounded on his chest. Hot, angry tears were streaming down her cheeks. “Don’t you dare talk about her!”
Richards grunted when her flailing fist managed to connect with his throat and in the next instant he’d released her elbow and flipped them over until he was above her, one knee pressing painfully into her stomach and one hand wrapped around her throat. “Fucking bitch,” he snarled, his voice a little more gravelly than before, “it’s your own fault that she’s dead anyway, so shut up and hold still!”
Veronica opened her mouth to snap back, refusing to accept the blame from the murderer himself, but his hand pressed a little heavier and she found even breathing was difficult. And then his free hand grabbed one of hers and the next thing she knew he’d leaned down and embedded his fangs into her wrist. It was immediately more painful than any time she’d let Seth feed from her and she reflexively tried to cry out, but her voice was cut off by the hand still pressing into her throat.
Her body burned, but not in the way it did when Seth drank from her, and her heart was slamming against her chest. Her lungs ached, begging for more air than she could give, and more tears began trailing from her eyes. She was pinned. He was stronger than her, faster than her, and he was his own weapon, whereas she was completely unarmed. She couldn’t even scream for help. She had one arm that was free—theoretically she could move it, try to use it to get him off of her—but the lack of oxygen and the already-fading adrenaline in her system was making her weak.
And he was still drinking.
****Thirty-two minutes. It was thirty-two minutes before Seth finally found himself standing in front of an older, unassuming single-story house in a sparsely-occupied neighborhood across town. He and Jasen had split up after discovering Veronica’s shirt, with Seth looking for her while Jasen looked for the enemy. Her car had been gone from his condo, she wasn’t answering her phone of course, and her house had clearly been gone through. It was amazing the kinds of horrific scenarios he’d managed to conjure up in the course of half an hour. But now, finally, with the help of a note conveniently placed beneath the windshield wiper of his car, he knew where to look.
He wasn’t going to wait for Jasen to catch up and he wasn’t going to knock. Veronica was in that house. So were the men responsible for taking her.
Seth was up the steps and through the front door without another thought, not caring if the door slammed against the wall and loudly announced his arrival. But he came up short halfway into the living room, when his eyes landed on Veronica. She was barely conscious, a thin stream of blood dripping off the fingers of her left hand as her arms hung limp at her sides. She was on her feet, being held aloft by Richards, who was standing behind her with one hand braced beneath her jaw and the other arm wrapped around her torso. Richards’s hold offered a perfect view of the bruise forming around her neck, as well as a dark spot around her right elbow.
“I was wondering how long it would take you to show up,” Richards taunted with a broad smirk. “As you can see, I’ve been helping myself to her blood to pass the time.”
Hands curled into tight fists at his sides, Seth growled, “Let her go. I’m the only threat to you here.”
“Right,” Richards scoffed, “because I haven’t noticed that you called in an Enforcer.” He licked his lips and lowered his head faintly until he was almost in the perfect position to sink his fangs into her throat before adding, “Besides, Hunter—she may not be a threat, but I truly hate this woman. I want her dead for my sake.”
A pit forming in his stomach, Seth demanded, “Then why bait me at all? If killing her is your goal, why tell me you have her and then wait for me?”
“To see the look on your face,” Richards replied.
He was going to do it. Richards was going to kill her right in front of him. He bared his fangs a beat later, either intending to drain what blood was left in her system or to tear out her throat. Seth reacted on instinct and lunged forward as fast as he was able. Richards barely got his fangs beneath the surface of her skin before Seth managed to grab him by the top of his head and throw him bodily backwards. The reversed momentum—combined with Richards’s grip on her—caused Veronica to jerk sharply. Seth heard the unmistakable sound of bones snapping and the top layer of flesh at the base of her throat—where it met with her collar—was torn off as Richards was forced to release her.
Richards crashed into the far wall with a grunt, but Seth ignored him. As much as he wanted to tear every limb from Richards’s body his priority remained Veronica. He spun in place and only barely managed to catch her against his chest before she collided with the floor. She was bleeding again—all the worse given her blood loss—and her body was far too limp. He could still hear her heartbeat, but it was struggling. Her chest heaved with the effort it was taking to draw breath.
Seth’s heart clenched tightly in his chest. He’d witnessed enough death to know the sound of a dying heartbeat when he heard it. She had only minutes left before she was lost to him.
“Heh,” Richards grunted from behind him
, “may not be how I’d planned it, but she’ll be dead soon enough. I’ll leave you to say your goodbyes.”
He knew he was supposed to stop Richards. He had been hired to subdue Richards, and he’d sworn to kill him. But fulfilling either promise would mean leaving Veronica alone for her last moments of life, and he couldn’t do that. He was going to have a hard enough time pushing forward without her as it was. So he didn’t even turn his head as Richards dashed from the building.
“S-Seth,” Veronica choked, her eyes fluttering as she struggled to keep them open.
“Shh,” he breathed, curling one hand over her shoulder to hold her in place. His throat was constricting as his eyes started to burn. It had probably been over half a century since he’d cried, but this night threatened to shatter that record. “I’m right here.”
She tensed and shifted, attempting to roll into him, and gasped sharply with the pain of her injuries. Prying her eyes open again she looked up, finding his, and blinked past the tears as she managed, “It’s not…t-too late.” As she spoke she rolled her left wrist over, exposing the bite marks that hadn’t yet healed and the drying trail of blood.
In that instant he knew what she was asking. She was asking him to Turn her, to transform her into a vampire and take her away from the life she knew forever. And, though he’d been steadfastly against the idea only a few hours before, it was suddenly tempting. She was going to die either way; he couldn’t use that argument to stop himself from being selfish. But did she really know what she was asking him to do to her? He knew so many vampires who regretted Turning; he didn’t want her to become one of them. The alternative, however, was to lose her here and now.
“P-please,” Veronica gasped. She swallowed thickly, choking for a moment before adding, “Turn me.”
“Veronica,” Seth murmured sadly. He held her gaze for a second before lifting his hand from her stomach and sinking his fangs into his own wrist. He bit deep, knowing his wrist would heal quickly, and then pressed the bleeding appendage wholly against the wound at her throat.
