by Anna Santos
It wasn’t in my plans to stay there for so long and fall in love, but I realized that Shane probably had the answers to all of my problems. Shane knew everybody in town, and he also had some strange absences. Sometimes I would hear him talking on the phone, making a report to someone above him. One night, he was called to respond to an emergency that, later in the morning, he told me was to catch some young vampires who were making trouble in a city nearby. Now that he knew I was a hybrid and didn’t need to hide that he was a werewolf, things got a little easier. Our conversations were about the town and its daily supernatural events.
However, Shane had his secrets. I wasn’t the only one keeping them. The problem was that Shane acted like he had no secrets. I was scared to ask him and then have him realize that my intentions weren’t noble. I didn’t want to betray him, but I couldn’t betray my objective of helping my brother. I still needed to find a pureblood vampire to save the only direct family I had.
***
Shane
Old girlfriends are like a grain of sand in one’s shoes. Sasha was a good example, but in my particular case, she was a really evil spine in my paw. She came over from time to time to my house to talk and, sometimes, to remember old times. This usually included having sex, and then I’d send her away and tell her for the thousandth time that I didn’t want anything serious with her anymore. We weren’t soul-mates, and she was all but sane. Actually, Sasha was the reason that I had stayed away from relationships before I found Annabel and fell hopelessly in love with her.
In my defense, it had been thirty painful years of having a relationship with Sasha and then twenty more years that we were apart. Yes, we had a history together and Sasha was obsessed with me. She couldn’t or didn’t want to move on. But being a stubborn vampire princess didn’t help my case for making her realize that we were over and I was sick and tired of her possessive control and relentless insistence.
Things were different this time when she came to my home. I doubted that the visit was cordial, like she claimed. James must have told her about Annabel, and she came to see with her own eyes. Thankfully, Annabel was at work, so I invited her in my house. However, she played rough, and I had to be rude and send her away. There was no way I would sleep with her or play her dangerous games. My heart was taken, and Sasha held no appeal to me. She could look like a goddess, walk with the elegance of the vampire she was, but her red lips, doll face, tall and apparently fragile figure were like burning ice to me: nice to see but deadly to touch. She was going to have to deal with the fact that I had found my soul-mate and that there would be no “us.”
I had almost succeeded in sending her away when Annabel arrived. My heart raced in my chest. Not from fear because Sasha was there and she could make a scene or attack Anna, but because my soul-mate was gorgeous and I loved her. Having her next to Sasha made me realize that Anna was fire and love, while Sasha was plain cold, an insipid waste of my time. Sasha was a miserable being who had no idea what real love was. She didn’t understand what it was to feel completed by another being and to want to spend eternity making that person happy.
Sasha looked at Annabel like she was under a microscope. She examined her from head to toe with a grimace on her face that showed she didn’t approve of my mate. But what else was new? And it was not as if I needed her permission or even wanted her opinion. Anna was more than fine! All Sasha was feeling was plain stupid jealousy. She could die green for all I cared.
Anna stopped on the porch, looking at us both. She then smiled at me, eyes sparkling, and tried to greet Sasha. The princess didn’t even bother to look at Anna’s hand. That annoyed me.
“You couldn’t get any lower,” Sasha spat like venom from a snake. “You are out of your mind if you prefer her to me!”
“Sasha, leave! You are not welcome here anymore,” I replied in a harsh tone and cold stare.
“This can’t possibly be your soul-mate! You are crazy!”
I said nothing to that statement; I just glared at her, trying to control the wolf that was going out of his mind from the insult thrown at my mate by that hateful vampire. Because I was not speaking and was staring at her with black eyes, she knew I was not kidding. My wolf was not kidding, either. I would shove her into her limousine if she said anything else insulting to my mate.
Sasha turned to Anna, spreading a little more of her poison. “Enjoy yourself, honey,” she said snidely, with a smirk on her face. “When he gets enough of you, he will come back to me. He always does.”
And with those words, Sasha left and entered her waiting limo. Together with her bodyguards, she left. Anna, on the other hand, was still trying to understand what was going on. And I was left with the problem of explaining myself like Sasha had planned all along. That was why she was taking her time, stalling. She wanted to meet Annabel and make her jealous. She wanted to spread discord between us.
“What the hell was that?” Annabel asked, facing me in search of an explanation.
I sighed and began to explain. “She is annoyed because I’ve sent her away and because she found out you and I are together.”
“Did you used to date that thing?”
“It was long time ago,” I said, defending myself. “It’s been twenty years since we’ve been together.”
“Really? It didn’t seem so. It seemed like she didn’t want to let you go. It was like she thought she owned you!”
“Sasha… is complicated. But she doesn’t own me, and we weren’t dating when I met you. She just came here to try to make you jealous. She’s territorial.”
“Hmm.” Anna just stared at the dust in the road that the limo had left behind.
“You know I love you, don’t you? And we are mates. She’s no threat to you. Are you mad?”
“No, I was just wondering why you even began dating her in the first place.”
“She was different then. And we were raised together. It’s a long story and really complicated. But—we aren’t together, and you are my life. You are my only love.”
The serious look on Anna’s face faded. She sighed deeply and relaxed her shoulders. “She will eventually find her soul-mate and get over you.”
“Yes, yes she will.” I didn’t say anything else about that, so Annabel wouldn’t be scared. However, that’s why things had ended between Sasha and me.
Sasha was mad and cruel. No one in their right mind would find their soul-mate and send someone to kill him just because he was human and not a pureblood vampire or wolf. No one in their perfect mind would choose to spend their life alone instead of getting to know and fall in love with their mate. Instead, Sasha had sent one of her lackeys to kill her soul-mate when he was still a baby! And then she had had the nerve to claim that she had done that because she was in love with me, that I should be her soul-mate and not a fragile human boy. Yes, Sasha was out of her mind, and she would probably try to do something to hurt my beautiful Annabel.
“Sasha is dangerous and jealous,” I said, grabbing Anna’s arm, wanting to share my concern. “She may try something against you.”
“Don’t worry. I can take care of myself. That vamp can’t hurt me.”
“Anna, she’s not just a vamp. She is a pureblood.”
Hybrids could be strong, but purebloods were another kind of predator and enhanced being. Anna was no match for Sasha if she tried anything. Not that I thought that Sasha was crazy enough to try to hurt my mate. But I didn’t want Anna to be left in the dark. I didn’t want Sasha to provoke her, so she had an excuse to harm her.
“Really?”
That question with a smile didn’t make any sense to me. It was really weird. Why would she find that information interesting? She should be scared or worried.
“Be careful, and call me if you see her in town or if you suspect someone is following you.”
“Shane,” she asked, a smirk on her face, “she was so pissed off because you blew her off, right?”
“Of course I blew her off! You are my mate, and I l
ove you.”
“She’s really beautiful,” Anna said, losing her smile and pouting.
“And evil. I don’t like evil girls. Just hot and sexy girls who look like you and taste like you,” I whispered near her face, staring at her lips and grinning widely.
“I don’t want her here again,” she confessed.
“Don’t you trust me?”
“Yes—but… she’s evil, remember. And… she looks like a movie star! Are you sure?”
“Am I sure of what?”
“That you are over her?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I prefer your gorgeous curves and your cherry lips any time to anything she has,” I said, kissing her to prove my point. “You are gorgeous and smart and all kinds of perfect. I love you, and you don’t need to worry about Sasha.”
“How long did you date her?”
“Now you want to know something about my past?” I asked, teasing her. Why was she even feeling jealous of that insipid vampire?
“Is it a secret?” She seemed displeased, but I had the right to keep secrets, since she didn’t want to talk about her past even after she knew we were soul-mates.
“No, but the thing is that you will only know anything about my past if you tell me something about yours.”
“Like what?”
“Place of birth, what happened to your parents and brother,” I said, hoping for some effort on her part to share a bit of her life with me.
She rolled her eyes and puckered her lips. “If I tell you something about my past, you’ll talk about what happened between you and Sasha?” She seemed to reconsider opening up. Guess the jealousy was getting the best of her.
“Yes.”
“Okay! I’ll talk about what happened to my parents.”
She seemed troubled by the fact of having to remember, but I knew that I wanted to know everything so I could understand her better. I would accept anything about her life; it didn’t have to be about her parents’s death. I knew it was the hardest thing she had to talk about. However, if she wanted to talk about that, I wasn’t going to decline. I wanted to know; all that secrecy was making me worry.
“Anna, the mate bond is the strongest bond between two people. I will always do everything to make you happy and protect you, even if I have to—”
“What?” she asked, frowning with interest.
“Even if I have to go against my own kind or my superiors. You will always be first, so whatever you tell me, it will be kept between us. I won’t judge or break your trust.”
“Why are you telling me that?”
My sweetheart was so suspicious. It was adorable how she would pout and stare at me.
“So you understand that you will never be alone again.”
“My parents didn’t leave me, they were taken from me,” she whispered, really sad. “The problem of having a soul-mate, Shane, is that you can also be taken from me, and I couldn’t cope with another loss.”
“You are not the only one to feel scared,” I explained, touched by her words. “After a while of crazy living, fun, and some failed relationships, all I could think about was finding you. I’ve travelled the world searching for you. I almost lost faith trying to find you. And do you know what happens to supernatural beings that lose the will to live?”
“They grow old and die.”
I nodded, kissing her hands. “I’m glad you found me. You know, I’ve never been so happy in my life!”
“Not even with Sasha?”
“Ouch, low blow! And no, not even with Sasha. She was a mistake. Sasha is a cold, mean vampire princess, and you are all I’ve ever wanted. You are even better than I’ve dreamed and asked for. Anna, you are—just perfect.”
“Keep saying that. You have almost convinced me.” She grinned, pleased by my words.
“I can convince you much better inside…” Husky voice and sexual fantasies were going wild.
“I still want to know all about Sasha and you,” she said, thinking I was using sex to divert the subject.
“Oh, don’t worry about it. I’m not planning to hide anything from you, if you are willing to share things with me. Now let’s go inside. It’s getting chilly, and we both have a lot of sharing to do,” I joked, surrounding her shoulders with my arm and taking her inside.
Chapter Fifteen
Anna
Shane acted a bit paranoid over the next few days, after Sasha made her flashy appearance in our lives. In addition, he got really secretive and pensive since I told him how my parents died at the hands of a radical group that was against interracial marriages and hybrids’ existence.
My parents died because of hatred but full of love, because they had protected until the end the whereabouts of my brother and me. Luckily for us, we weren’t home when they invaded it and killed my parents. We were in my Aunt Stacey’s home, Jason’s mom’s.
My father was always concerned about our safety and had our house filled with surveillance cameras, bodyguards, secret passages, and hideaways. I was too young to understand why he never shared his paranoia with me, but he was right to be worried for our safety. After all, we were hybrids. Even if the world had evolved, many were still against our existence. And my father knew that there were groups like the one that attacked our house that chased hybrid kids in order to study them, only to ultimately kill them.
I had the surveillance video tape of the invasion. I’d watched it thousands of times, memorizing how they attacked my home, killed the bodyguards, destroyed the cameras one by one, and followed their leader’s orders to grab the family and find me and my brother. I watched thousands of times: my mom being used to control my father and make him stop fighting and killing the invaders. And then they tortured them, trying to find out our whereabouts. I saw how they used my mom to make my father confess, how my mom begged him not to. I witnessed the grief and hurt in his eyes each time my mom screamed in pain; each time the blade touched her skin, she would still beg him to not say a word. I memorized how that awful evil man whom my father seemed to know, tormented him increasingly until he finally killed my mom. After letting my father scream in pain, he murdered him, cutting his head off. I watched how frustrated he was at not finding us and not being able to make them talk.
I often wake up with my father’s weeping eyes staring at the hidden video camera, mumbling that he loved us before his head flew away and his body fell lifeless on the ground next to my mom’s lifeless body. I would often wake up screaming. I would often cry all night, mumbling my parents’s murderer’s name like a curse.
I knew his name, the man who killed my parents. I knew it because my father screamed his name when he killed my mom. His name was Alaric. And I spent the next eight years knowing that my parents died to protect me and my brother. That was a big burden to carry around; however, their love for us had to be respected and not mourned eternally. I made peace with that, but I also made it my objective to hunt down and make that Alaric scumbag pay for my parents’s death, along with all the other people he killed in the name of some higher good, some radical misconceived idea of race superiority. He had no right to play God and decide who would live and die.
Alaric, as I found out, was an old and powerful pureblood vampire who was against breeding between races. He believed vampires were the superior race and that the others should be enslaved by them. He loathed mating between vampires and other races, so he targeted exclusively those couples. My father being a pureblood vampire was even a bigger crime to Alaric. His radical group had a lot of followers, like most of the absurd radical cults. It had gained importance in America, with cells in Europe that did the same: hunted hybrids and killed them.
Alaric’s group was the one responsible for making a hybrid-killing serum. He was responsible for my brother’s coma. My brother was slowly dying, just resisting longer because of our pureblood vampire genes. Pure vampire blood is the antidote, because Alaric would never build a weapon that could also kill his own kind. Purebloods are immune; scientists believe that they
can use blood transfusions to heal my brother and then synthetize an antidote and a vaccine against it.
But it isn’t easy to find pureblood vampires who are willing to help us and our cause. The ones who exist are hidden and well protected. For pureblood vampires, it’s hard to prolong the species without their mate, and it’s even more difficult to find a mate if there aren’t new vampire children. The probability of mating outside the race is also a problem for them. Many don’t accept that their mate isn’t also a vampire. Many are just too scared to go out of their lair, so they live caged in, surrounded by guards, cubs, and human blood-donors. So finding pure vampire blood is a difficult task.
Well, at least it had been, until I got to that town. Sasha was a pureblood vampire, but she didn’t seem friendly, and I doubted that she would be willing to help me. Shane had called her a princess, therefore I was led to believe that there was a family of Royal Vampires in that village, hidden but working in the shadows to create a place where hybrids and other supernatural beings could live happy and safe. I wanted to believe that there wasn’t more than meets the eye. But his concern with my safety and his fear that Sasha could do anything bad to me made me believe that the royal family wasn’t as nice as I’d wished for.
Shane might be the sheriff, but Sasha was the spoiled bitchy princess who wouldn’t take no for an answer. I knew the type. Apparently, Shane knew it, too, because he was getting paranoid about my safety. It all started when he began wanting to go running with me; then he proposed that he train me so I could defend myself.
Well, I may have neglected to tell him that my dad had done a pretty good job with that. He’d started training me when I was a little kid in all forms of martial arts, sword fights, crossbow tossing, and all types of blade weapons and guns. He’d prepared me as if he’d known that he wouldn’t be there anymore to take care of me and my brother. He also prepared my brother, but his training was completed by me, because he was just twelve when our parents died, while I was fifteen.
