Bad Blood (Aurora Sky: Vampire Hunter, Vol. 3)

by Nikki Jefford

  Aurora Sky

  Vampire Hunter

  Vol. 3, Bad Blood

  By Nikki Jefford

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or the author has used them fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2014 Nikki Jefford

  All rights reserved

  www.NikkiJefford.com

  Cover design by ©Phatpuppyart.com - Claudia McKinney

  Cover model photographed by Teresa Yeh Photography

  Cover model: Gabriella

  Cover typography by Bookish Brunette Designs

  Table of Contents

  Fifteen Minutes

  To Kill a Vampire

  Home Is Where the Heartthrob Is

  Cohabitation

  Two’s Company

  Extra Credit

  Dressed for Suck-cess

  The Lodge

  An Unusual Suspect

  Blood Rush

  Sex Games

  Trouble in Paradise

  Fight or Flight

  Target

  Suck Fest

  The Red Fury

  Hostages

  Partners

  Worst Day Ever

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Final Words

  For the real life heroes of the world who stand up for who they are and what they believe in every single day.

  1

  Fifteen Minutes

  Tonight I had to kill a vampire.

  I had yet to hear the details, but once I passed this final field test I could leave boot camp and go home.

  Jones, one of the female drill sergeants, entered the mess hall shortly after dinner. Five of us sat around a table playing “Go Fish” with a deck of cards. I had three sevens and I knew exactly who had the fourth because she’d asked Amber for it and was told to “Go fish.”

  “Sky,” Sergeant Jones called in her megaphone voice.

  Now? Really? I looked at her over my hand of cards.

  “It’s time to get ready.”

  The ladies at my table pounded the surface in unison. Amber whistled. The women playing dominoes at the next table joined in the ruckus, banging their table with their fists.

  “Stake that sucker, Sky!” someone yelled through the din.

  “All right, that’s enough,” Jones said. “Sky, come with me.”

  I set my cards face down.

  “Hey, Sky,” Donna called from across the table. “Catch a big one.”

  Easy for her to say. She’d killed a vampire yesterday and had only to pass the time before going home next week. I did have an advantage over everyone in our group, though. They had only killed one vampire in a locked room during initiation, whereas I had killed four out in the real world. Marcus really ought to count as ten, but who was keeping track?

  Donna mimicked flinging a fishing rod across the table, reeling it back in with gusto. The girls tittered.

  I blew them a kiss before following Jones out. The mess hall wasn’t big. There were between fifteen and twenty of us girls at any given time, which meant lots of one-on-one with the sergeants and instructors.

  Jones supervised our warm-ups in addition to random inspections inside our sleeping quarters. She walked me there now.

  “Your clothing for this operation has been laid out on top of your bed,” she said at the door.

  The barracks felt more like one long hallway than a room. Florescent lights hummed above the dingy laminate floor and two rows of metal-framed beds on either side. The hall was empty save for two newbie recruits sitting on top of their beds, textbooks open, cramming for written exams.

  They had beds on opposite sides of the hall, closest to the double-doors that remained open until lights out at eight o’clock.

  Jones stopped in the doorway.

  “Be ready in ten,” she said.

  The two recruits looked up briefly before sticking their noses back in their books.

  I approached my bed at the end of the hall.

  I’d gone six whole months without shedding blood or being bitten. Boot camp was no picnic, but it had been a necessary respite from my old life even when it felt like it would break me.

  Now I had one final test before I could go home. Obviously I couldn’t carry out an assignment in army greens, but the outfit waiting on top of the bedspread stopped me in my tracks. Jones had done her best to fold a skimpy pink halter top and denim mini skirt. A pair of black stilettos crowned the thin pile. The halter top looked obnoxious compared to the olive green cotton T-shirt I’d grown accustomed to wearing day in and day out. I took it they weren’t sending me to the suburbs. This outfit screamed club or worse… escort.

  I unlaced my boots and dressed quickly. I needed all the extra time I could spare to practice walking in heels. Before putting the stilettos on, I eyed the shoes and wondered if my assignment would involve stabbing a vamp to death with the heel.

  God, I hoped not.

  After folding my pants and T-shirt, I set them neatly inside my locker, propped against the wall beside my bed.

  I took my first tentative step, followed by the next, trying not to wobble past the rows of single beds. Five steps in, I concluded that walking in high heels belonged on the long list of physical tortures I planned to avoid at all costs in the near future.

  So this was what it was like to walk on stilts. I had to remind myself I was getting ready for a mission, not a circus act.

  I attempted to glide gracefully across the room, but the floor threatened to connect with my ass every time my heel landed on the ground.

  How in the world did my instructors expect me to kill a vampire while wearing five-inch stilettos without first breaking my neck?

  I wouldn’t know the assassination details until the last minute. Donna said Sergeant Hansen gave her an icepick right before he instructed her to take out a vamp operating an ice cream truck in the suburbs of Portland.

  I’d come to boot camp willingly, but now I wanted out. My first semester of college started in just over a week, and I needed to move into the house Agent Melcher had secured near campus. I wanted my privacy and freedom back, to say nothing of the stifling heat I’d suffered through all summer.

  Melcher had sent me to the high desert. If this was his way of getting me to appreciate the Far North, it was working. I felt like I couldn’t breathe in this inferno. And forget about sleeping. People wondered how we slept with the continual light all summer long in Alaska. It was called tinfoil! But how did people sleep in over ninety degree temperatures? Air-conditioning, I guess, but no, not at boot camp. No, sir. Let the recruits suffer. It built character.

  At least I didn’t have to worry about a draft in this mini skirt.

  It was bone cold when I first arrived at the end of February. My camp tenure had been twice as long as normal recruits. Melcher made special arrangements to get me out of town after killing Marcus, one of Anchorage’s most prominent vampires.

  Jones recommended I graduate with the summer recruits. Until that time, I’d practiced drills with a handful of informants and assassins-in-training who came and went throughout the spring.

  That said, I ought to be double prepared to do whatever my instructors had planned for me… just so long as I didn’t fall down face-first.

  The sharp tips on the stilettos clicked as they stabbed the ground on my practice circuit across the hall.

  “You look nice,” the new recruit with Shirley Temple curls said from her bed by the doors.

  I flipped my long black hair over my shoulder. “Thanks,” I said in my most self-assured voice.

  Everythin
g I’d done at boot camp was to prepare me for tonight, and if I couldn’t act confident in front of a rookie, I wasn’t ready to take on my final assignment.

  “I wonder what kind of weapon they’ll give you,” the girl mused.

  I straightened my shoulders. “Maybe they won’t give me any weapon at all. Maybe I’ll have to take the vamp out with my bare hands.”

  The girl’s eyes widened. She tugged on a curl.

  I straightened my spine, paying attention to my weight distribution as I shifted on my feet. “I don’t care how they want me to kill him. He’s as good as dead.”

  The girl gave an enthused nod.

  Oh god, they wouldn’t ask me to kill a vamp with my bare hands, would they?

  The tempo of my heels started anew as I made another go down the narrow space between beds.

  A loud sigh came from the second recruit.

  “I don’t know why I’m supposed to care about all these different kinds of vampires and their diseases,” she said, addressing her curly-haired comrade on the bed across the hall. “In the end, aren’t we going to kill them all anyway? What does it matter if they’ve got rabies or tuberculosis or whatever medieval disease they’re carrying?” She placed a finger inside her Vampire Forensics textbook, flipped through to the end and back to her spot with a groan.

  I stopped at the foot of her bed. “I think it’s fascinating.”

  The girl squinted at me right before lifting her book and reading aloud.

  “Porphyria had its day before giving way to pellagra. First recognized in 1735, pellagra is a result of a niacin and tryptophan deficiency, typically a result of a diet dependent on corn or maize. These crops were planted widely across southern and eastern Europe, and that’s where pellagra became pandemic.” She lowered her book and frowned. “How are corn crops fascinating?”

  My lips twisted into a smile. “Turn to page sixty-six.”

  The recruits in my class actually referred to it as page “sexty-sex.” Hey, we had to get our kicks somehow out here in the bone-dry desert at a women-only camp.

  The curly haired girl who had spoken to me first flipped to it on cue. “Got it! Page sixty-six.” With spark like that, she might just make it through boot camp. “Want me to read something?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Paragraph three.”

  Her chest rose as she readied herself to read aloud.

  “Rabies may supply an explanation for a vampire’s nocturnal habits,” she began eagerly before pausing. “And those of their erotic pursuits.”

  I fought back a laugh, knowing what came next.

  “Go on,” I said.

  The girl sat up straighter. She was determined. I’d give her that.

  “This is because the disease affects the part of the brain that regulates sleep cycles and the sex drive, keeping the afflicted up the entire night. Some reports conclude that rabies vampires have intercourse up to thirty times per night.”

  The girls exchanged glances.

  “That’s messed up,” the girl who’d complained earlier said. Maybe, but she was suddenly flipping through her textbook with a lot more enthusiasm.

  “Be glad you’re not an informant,” I said. “Or that could be you spending quality time with a rabid vampire thirty times a night depending on your assignment.”

  The girl stopped turning pages and swallowed. “I am an informant.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sucks to be you.”

  I didn’t have much love in my heart for informants. Not after working with Noel and Valerie. As far as I could tell, they enjoyed all the sucking and sleeping around. It wasn’t like they had to worry about pregnancy or disease. None of us did: hunters, informants, and vampires alike. We couldn’t procreate. We were barren. Sterile. Individually diseased, courtesy of the agency.

  We couldn’t spread our illness thanks to the government’s controlled virus cocktail created especially for AB positive and negative recruits. It worked similar to the way a disease activated and remained contained inside a vampire’s immune system. Vampires weren’t contagious. Most didn’t mind an affliction that promised everlasting life.

  I’d only just learned I was infertile at camp. Melcher failed to mention it during orientation. I wondered what else he’d failed to mention.

  I never trusted him. Once I found out he knowingly employed a vampire, I was downright suspicious, but getting the truth out of Melcher would take more than high kicks and kung fu moves.

  Heavy footsteps interrupted my thoughts as Sergeant Jones entered the dormitory. Her combat boots looked a heck of a lot more comfortable than the spikes I had to wear. She stopped near the double-doors. “Sky, Sergeant Hansen is ready for you.”

  Maybe I wasn’t ready for him. Did they ever think about that?

  Probably not.

  All of my bravado instantly abandoned ship, leaving me to sink or swim on my own. I lifted my chin for show and headed for the door. Surprisingly, the click of the heels managed to boost my confidence a fraction.

  “Good luck,” the cheerier of my dorm mates called after me. That one had to be a hunter.

  I stopped and turned. “You, too. Don’t study too hard. And remember to get plenty of shut-eye.”

  The girl chuckled, earning her a stern look from Jones. She turned to me. “Sergeant Hansen is waiting.”

  Yeah, yeah. I was walking as fast as I could on mini stilts. Good thing there was no ice in the desert. I’d slip and break my neck in five seconds flat. All I had to worry about now was not getting the shiny black heels dusty.

  Damn desert.

  After tonight, I’d be headed home and wouldn’t look back. Boot camp had served its purpose. It had gotten me away from the mess I’d made at the palace. It had saved me from having to see or speak to either Noel or Fane after they ripped my heart apart and destroyed any trust I’d ever felt for either of them by hooking up right under my nose. And it had prepared me to deal with Jared—the reason I was here to begin with. The reason for everything I’d gone through since my accident. All of it! Everything that was wrong with my life. My dad leaving. My dreams of attending Notre Dame crumbling to dust. Losing my virginity to that ass hat, Scott Stevens. Transferring high schools in the middle of senior year. Not even getting to attend graduation!

  If Jared hadn’t run me down on the road, I wouldn’t have needed a transfusion in order to live. I wouldn’t have been recruited. I wouldn’t have to kill. And most importantly, I wouldn’t have ever lost my heart to that rat bastard vampire, Fane Donado.

  I would have gone on thinking he was King of the Freaks, a loser in a black trench coat with terrible hair.

  I’d pushed Noel and Fane out of my head, but now that my time at camp was ending, they were shoving their way back inside my brain.

  At least I had a renewed sense of disgust for vampires. It helped on mission.

  I followed Jones outside to a waiting SUV. I had to hold both arms out to balance myself over the uneven ground and use my upper body strength to pull myself into the back seat. Sergeant Hansen was buckled into the seat beside me. He had on a beige pair of pants and a matching military-style jacket that blended into the landscape, turning him into a commanding chameleon with a crew cut.

  Once I was inside, the vehicle drove forward.

  This was it. All I had to do was kill a vampire, and I could go home. It’s not like I hadn’t done this before.

  “Congratulations on making it to your final assignment,” Sergeant Hansen said in his gravelly voice. “Your target goes by the name of Jeremy Phillips. Here are several photographs taken of him for you to familiarize yourself with on the drive.”

  Hansen handed over three snapshots. From the photos, I saw that the vamp was Caucasian, approximately twenty-two, had brown-eyes and brown hair that curled at the edges. In one of the photos, he was wearing a tank top that showed off his muscled arms. He could probably break my bones with his bare hands. Just great. At least he had a narrow frame.

  Once I’d shuffled thro
ugh the pictures a few times and set them on my lap, Hansen resumed speaking.

  “Tonight Jeremy is hosting a large house party. A young woman died at the last house party he threw, two more before that.”

  Hansen reached into his coat pocket. He flattened his palm, presenting me with a tightly wound phone cord. My heart dropped as though I were in free fall.

  “Take it,” Hansen said.

  There was no other option. I took the cord.

  “After you get Jeremy alone and he has bitten you, you will need to strangle him with this cord.”

  I clenched and relaxed my fist around the cord, studying the thin red indents it made in my skin.

  “This will be a timed exercise,” Hansen continued.

  I loved how he called it an exercise rather than what it really was—an assassination.

  “You have fifteen minutes to complete your mission. Every minute after fifteen will add an extra day to your training, and you will have to perform another field test.”

  “What if I finish early?” I asked. “Do I get to leave an extra day for every minute before fifteen?”

  Hansen locked eyes with me. “Just concentrate on getting the job done in fifteen minutes.”

  “Won’t it look weird for me to wander in uninvited?”

  Walking into a house party unannounced made me about as nervous as the mission at hand. What was I supposed to do? Pretend that a friend of a friend had invited me?

  “No one will notice,” Hansen said. “His house is near a community college and a lot of kids end up wandering over.”

  “What city is this in?”

  “Bend.”

  Bend, Oregon. Not like driving from Anchorage to Fairbanks, but still a good couple hours in the car with Hansen and our driver. Plenty of time to stress over my assignment.

  I loosened the phone cord and wound the ends around each of my palms, pulling it taut. I’d stabbed vampires in the past, so I wasn’t sure why strangulation seemed more gruesome. Perhaps because stabbing, when done correctly, was swift—over and done with in a flash. Strangling a vampire meant pulling and choking him as he fought for breath until slumping back, lifeless, in my arms.