Knight of the Hunted (Born Vampire Book 1)

by Elizabeth Dunlap

  My work wasn’t finished, even though I was exhausted already. My feet had blisters from walking so far and I could feel Cameron’s blood working on them, leaving me hungry and cranky. I’d only need a sip or two and it would be fixed. The duffle bag didn’t have clothing in it, so I had to purchase all of that myself.

  I drove another hour and then raided a hippy clothing store where the clerk looked so out of it, I bet she didn’t even remember what I looked like. I changed in my car, and turned the Alpha’s bracelet over and over in my hands. A simple act had started all this. But no matter what, I refused to feel regret. The bracelet was made for a large arm, so I wrapped it around my wrist a few times until it wouldn’t fall off. Since I was a few hours away from the Order, I pulled over and looked at everything in the duffle bag. Besides the money baggie, there was a large container of unmarked lotion, which was addressed in the list.

  5. Use this so you’ll look more human.

  The lotion, as I found out, would tint my white skin so I would appear human, so I applied it liberally all over my body.

  6. Dye your hair.

  I recoiled. I didn’t want to dye my hair. Call it pride, but I loved my black curls.

  7. No buts.

  Her list had a few tips on other things, and ended with one line.

  18. I believe in you.

  With a smidge more confidence than I had before, I drove for another hour before going to a beauty parlor. I was already in another state by now, and my route wasn’t a straight line, so I felt safe that I’d lost Arthur for now.

  The beautician gave me a trim before chemically straightening my hair and dying it dark brown. My image in the mirror was a different person. My new clothes felt odd, like I was one of those beachy women who wore loose earthy shirts over a bikini and shorts that barely covered your butt. I felt human. I had to remind myself that this was a good thing.

  So, dressed in earthy, beachy tree hugger clothing with my beautiful curls shortened, straightened, and dyed brown, and armed with my fuel-efficient car that I’d named Excalibur, as well as some killer sunglasses, I carefully found the best place to go.

  Texas.

  It was mostly pack territory, and that worked to my advantage. I didn’t know exactly where the packs lived, but I would know when I got there. They mark their territory, and I’m not using an idiom. They literally piss on it. Yuck.

  The smell was overwhelming.

  And even though I was nervous, scared, and self-doubting, I still felt oddly prepared for this. I’d been living in luxury for more than a century, so using my wit to survive wasn’t needed. Even before then, I’d always relied on other vampires to make the decisions for me, except for my sabbatical. That didn’t really count though, because right after leaving my home in England, I’d met Olivier and then followed her around for decades. It’s a good thing she stopped thinking I was annoying.

  Maybe I’d just been waiting for something like this. Something to finally rip me from my mundane life and force me to start living in the moment.

  Being on the run was invigorating. I’d forgotten how good it felt. The danger of it all seeped into my veins and I felt like I was drowning in adrenaline. As much as I was loving it, I still missed my simple life at the Order. I missed spending time with Cameron. It was comforting to know he was safe, though. I tried to put him out of my mind. I tried to picture him living a normal human life. Getting a job. A house. A wife. He’d finally belong. That was all I wanted for him.

  My new car was adorable. Sleeping in it was not. A quick purchase of a down sleeping bag made the small trunk more comfortable, though my long legs didn’t thank me for it. I slept at highway truck stops and applied the tanning lotion every morning.

  That became my schedule. Wake up, drive. Eat food, drive. Eat again, park somewhere hidden, sleep. Repeat.

  The one thing Olivier hadn’t provided for me was blood. I was starving for blood, but I couldn’t feed. Finding a human wouldn’t work because a human’s first vampire bite took days to heal. If I stole bagged blood from a hospital, which is completely disgusting, the Hunters would find out. Any blip of stolen blood on a hospital record and they’d be on that hospital like a swarm of bees (Olivier put it in her list).

  I needed blood. If I didn’t feed soon, I’d go into a frenzy, and that was a shit storm I’d never escape from. I stopped at a large city that I could blend into, and scoured it until I found a blood drive. It was at a large Catholic church in the parking lot. Groups of old people and families stood outside the little trailer, all sipping juice and eating cookies as they talked amongst themselves.

  The lady at the sign-in table was wearing pastel cashmere, and a big smile that silently promised it would try to convert me later. I signed a fake name and went into the trailer when it was my turn. A nurse stood inside and showed me where to sit. There was an old man next to me who had fallen asleep in his chair. His blood bag was almost full. I tried not to stare at it.

  The nurse tried chatting to me in a friendly way as she gathered some paperwork for me to fill out. I saw an open ice chest of filled blood bags on a tray in front of me and saw my chance.

  I stood up and pretended I was off balance. “Actually, I don’t feel so good. I’m really squeamish, and I was trying to face my fears, but I just-” I dry heaved and put my hand on the side of the ice chest, purposefully knocking it over. “I’m so sorry!” I pretended to try to pick them up, and ‘accidentally’ stepped on a few until they popped. The smell of dead blood shot up my nose. I felt equally sick and hungry.

  I almost felt sorry for the human nurse, having to deal with me standing in a pile of half busted blood bags and heaving like I was about to throw up. I repeatedly told her I was sorry and made sure to look as pathetic as possible. I helped her gather the bags back into the ice chest, and told her I’d throw them away.

  As if.

  I went out the backdoor of the trailer, where the happy humans couldn’t see me with blood all over my hands and shoes, and ran in the other direction. I hid behind the dumpster and took stock of what I had to work with.

  Out of four bags, three were busted and only had a small amount of blood left in them. The fourth bag was fine. All that effort for one bag of blood. It figured. I left them there, dropped the ice chest back off behind the trailer, and went back for my bounty. I stuck to the shadows on my way back to Excalibur, sucking on the busted bags until they were dry. I found a puddle to wiggle my shoes in to clean them. I saw myself in the reflection, blood all over my arms. As much as it disgusted me, I licked myself clean.

  Mission accomplished though. Score for Lisbeth.

  Chapter 7

  Bagged blood is disgusting.

  It’s like having a mug of tea that smells like tea (icky gross tea) and looks like tea, but when you sip it, it tastes like sour lemons. My brain constantly reminded me that this was not what blood is supposed to taste like. Not to mention it made me feel sick. Never throw up sick, but headache and a general lethargy were the main side effects. I honestly had no idea how the turned could live on this stuff.

  After a week of zigzagging, backtracking, carefully timed slow poking, occasional sitting around for hours, I was in Kansas. The bagged blood was making my temples throb, but I continued to ration it to one sip a day. The small cooler I bought to keep it in couldn’t mask the smell of dead blood.

  I was sitting in Excalibur at a roadside park, carefully forcing myself to sip some blood from the pack. It reminded me of when I’d seen humans taking medicine and their faces scrunched up in disgust, but they did it anyway.

  Suddenly, I heard “Heat of the Moment” playing behind me. I recoiled, trying to hide the bag of blood in case there was a human nearby, but I didn’t smell anyone, so I relaxed. “Heat of the Moment” started playing again, and I realized it was coming from the duffle bag. Hidden in one of the numerous side pockets (who needs that many pockets??) was an old-fashioned burner phone and one of those wireless chargers that ran on batteries.
Amazingly, the phone still had a percentage on the battery and wasn’t dead even though it had been sitting in my car for a week.

  As the song started a third time, I answered the phone.

  “Hello?” I had no idea who would be on the other end.

  “Bonjour, Lisbeth.” Renard.

  I sighed with relief. “Renard! Why are you calling me? I’m on the run!”

  “I know. It was Olivier who was going to call you, but…” He trailed off and his silence was deafening. I immediately thought she’d been killed or punished for helping me, but then he wouldn’t be there to call me. “All Hunters have been recruited to find you. Including former Hunters,” he added.

  Oh.

  Olivier hunting me? That was the least amount of comforting information I could’ve ever gotten. She knew me so well. “If she leads them off my trail for too long, they’ll know she’s helping me.”

  “Oui.” He sighed and struggled for words. “I do not wish to compromise your safety by asking this, but please…. protect my lady.” My heart broke for him. To protect her, I would have to use a different tactic, and that meant I could become vulnerable.

  “I’ll do my best,” I promised him. And I would. I was intelligent, I could think of something.

  “How are you doing without blood?”

  I swallowed and took some time to answer. In addition to the bagged blood causing pain, I’d lost weight, and my skin was becoming paler even with the lotion tinting it. My eyes were slightly bloodshot so the stylish sunglasses were becoming a necessity.

  “Fine,” I lied. Lying was stupid, and I knew it. I could hear him silently calling me out on trying to bullshit him. Renard had been with us for a long time. While he’d never seen for himself the side effects of our hunger, he knew well enough from stories we’d told him. Before I could speak, he had to hang up and get back to the castle.

  So. I had to come up with an entirely new plan, one that would protect both Olivier and myself. I took a break from eating gas station food and went to a country café. They had some maps of Kansas and the nearby states, so I bought one of each. While I ate a greasy hamburger with fries and a red soda (it wasn’t blood, but the color was comforting), I plotted out a new route and made new plans. The constant planning and sneaking around was wearing me out. Olivier probably knew that, and would inform Arthur, so continuing with my path was the best option.

  The next night, I was at another rest stop finishing up a few sips of gross blood when I smelled vampires. I pushed my senses out and caught the scent of leather and steel. Hunters. They weren’t close enough to be able to smell me as well, unless they were paying attention. Back at the Order, I wouldn’t have cared to push my senses out in a wider range, so I hoped these vampires didn’t either.

  I drove away in Excalibur and found an unpaved driveway that lead to an empty house with a rundown barn. I parked Excalibur inside the barn and doused the car in a spray that would mask my scent (it was in the duffle bag), then I started running. As before, when I ran as fast as I could, my senses widened automatically without me having to push them out. Running was taxing though. I couldn’t keep it up much longer. My senses were starting to close back in from my lack of blood. I started tripping and struggled to focus. Then I smelled it.

  Blood.

  Sweet fresh blood flowing in a human’s veins. Why did it smell so weird? Humans didn’t smell like that. My need overrode my sense of smell, and a frenzy swept over me. In the days before companions, this kind of frenzy was commonplace, and we did our best to avoid it. There was no stopping me. I would be drinking from this food source whether it liked it or not.

  I got closer and closer to my prey, and found myself creeping up on a small alcove carved into a rock formation. The oddly smelling human had made a camp inside the alcove, complete with a fire and a rabbit cooking over it. I had lost most of my control and was behaving with a primal edge. I growled low in my throat and licked my dropped canines. My prey instantly was alert, somehow hearing me, so I started charging.

  I pounced onto my prey and made a snarling noise. The human tried to pull me off, but I’d sunk my claws into it. Him. The human was male. He backed up and slammed both of us into the wall of the cave. Pain crashed into me and my instincts gave me one final push.

  I sank my fangs into his neck and moaned as his essence filled my mouth. I could hear him groaning too and he stopped trying to buck me off. His blood didn’t taste normal, but it wasn’t a bad taste. It was like eating venison. If I’d been saner during that precise moment, I’d have been horrified about comparing humans to food. Wild Me didn’t care. I drank four times the amount of blood I normally needed. It was only then I regained enough control to pull away and drop the human on the ground.

  He wasn’t dead, I hadn’t drunk that much. He also wasn’t moving, so that wasn’t a good sign. He had thick black hair almost to his neck and his skin was one shade darker than a really good tan, like he had Native blood. My senses returned and my head stopped hurting. It was then I noticed one crucial detail about my prey I’d been too out of it to notice before.

  He was a Lycan.

  Chapter 8

  In my defense, this particular Lycan smelled different than others I’d encountered. I mean, yeah, he had the dog smell. No denying that. But it wasn’t all dog. There was human mixed with it. And the more I studied him, the more human he looked. Maybe he’d picked up the smell from someone else. Why did I think he was a Lycan? Maybe the starvation had messed with my head. I should’ve been instantly alerted to his species, even during a frenzy. I’d only been staring at him for a few minutes when he stirred and instantly jumped away from me.

  “Who the hell are you?” he demanded. His hand went up to his neck and he found the puncture wounds. I hadn’t left any blood on him. Call me greedy. “You…bit me!” He sounded like I’d insulted him.

  “Yeah, umm, about that-waaah!” He cut me off by slamming me into the wall again and calling me some very mean things. “Hey! That’s not very nice!” I complained.

  “Shut up! Who are you?” he repeated.

  I couldn’t resist being a smart-aleck. “I can’t answer, you just told me to shut up.” He glared at me so I spoke quickly, covering all the bases at once. “Lisbeth, Born vampire, over four hundred years old, and I’m not here to kill you, so you can relax. I’m just trying to find a place to hide.”

  He did, and stepped away from me. “I’m Knight.” He gave me a once over and stopped at the bracelet on my arm. He went very still. “Where’d you get that?”

  “Oh. Funny story-”

  Knight quickly clamped a hand over my face. His skin was very warm, almost too hot, and dirty. Gross. I made a small noise to complain at the state of his hand, but he shushed me and pulled me further back into the cave.

  “Answer with a nod,” he whispered into my ear. “Are they here for you?” By “they”, he meant the Hunters that I’d been trying to avoid, who had somehow followed my trail here. Damn it! I’d been so careful! Did I have to spray myself with human sweat? I nodded to him. Knight pushed me onto the floor, covered me with his sleeping bag, and sat on top of me with his probably hairy Lycan butt.

  My voice was muffled by the sleeping bag, but I managed to get out, “I’m going to kill you!”

  “Not with my stolen blood in your veins you’re not!” We both grew silent when the Hunters approached within hearing range. I couldn’t see them from under the sleeping bag so I waited patiently, trusting this wolf with my life.

  “I didn’t know there were dogs in this neck of the woods,” one of the Hunters remarked as he drew closer. He said dogs like I would’ve said disgusting dung beetle.

  “You sure it’s a dog, Mal?” a woman said, her voice jeering and taunting. “He doesn’t smell like a dog.” Speaking of smell, why hadn’t they caught my scent? Hiding under a sleeping bag wasn’t going to stop them from smelling me. Unless Knight’s scent was blocking mine. His sleeping bag was soaked with his odor.

/>   “He smells delicious,” a third Hunter drawled out. She sounded like she wanted more from Knight than his blood. Blood! They’d see the bite mark on his neck! They’d know I was here! I must’ve stiffened, because Knight moved his hand to cover my shoulder. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to be reassuring, or didn’t want to blow our cover.

  “What do you want, bloodsuckers?” Knight’s voice was smooth and warm, the opposite of Arthur’s, though his choice of words were offensive.

  The male Hunter spoke with authority, and apparently was used to being called a bloodsucker. “We’re searching for an outlaw. One of ours. I’m guessing you haven’t seen any of us pass this way?”

  “If I had, your search would be over, and you’d be bringing back a dead body. Well. A dead undead body.”

  “We’re not dead, jerk,” the second Hunter protested. “That’s the turned.”

  Knight sighed like they were boring him. “I don’t care. Are you done? Your scent is making me feel sick.” The Hunters said some rude things, no doubt flipping him off as well, and left. Knight didn’t move off me until I couldn’t smell them anymore. Once he’d slid off me and onto the floor, I pulled the sleeping bag off my face.

  “Do I look undead?” I asked him moodily. I wasn’t exactly pale anymore.

  He chuckled at me. “Lycan humor.”

  I sat up and leaned closer to study his neck. My bite wasn’t there anymore. All traces had already healed. Then I felt extremely awkward as I realized I owed him my life. “Thanks for that. You umm…saved my skin.”

  He shrugged to seem non-committal, but I could tell he hadn’t done it out of the goodness of his heart. “Did you steal that?” He pointed at the bracelet. I shook my head, and he waited a few seconds to discern if I was lying. It’s not like I’d willingly have vampire teeth as a fashion accessory. But then it occurred to me that the bracelet had more meaning than I knew of. “You have an Alpha’s bracelet, and therefore his protection,” he continued, only confirming my last thought. “I’m honor bound to see that no harm comes to you. Though, I’m not in a pack, so technically-”