“Am I on trial?”
“You have been on trial since before our first meeting in the alley. You have been on trial your whole life. And do not think you can escape me. The world is too small to hide you and my reach too long. I’ll find you wherever you are.”
“And if I kill myself before then?” She hid her gaze beneath her lashes. “Not even you can find me in death.”
“If you were going to do the deed yourself, you would’ve done so before now.” His thumb stroked over her cheek. “Do not be in such a hurry to die. Your life is short enough as it is.”
“Release me,” she beseeched him.
“I cannot.”
“End me. Give me peace. Tell your council what you will about me. I don’t care. If you do it, it will make your job easier.”
“Why do you wish it?”
“Don’t ask that. You have no right.” Jaden pulled away from him. He let her go.
“I am your master, dhampir. I have every right to you.” Tyr’s words dropped and Jaden couldn’t mistake what he meant by every right. His claim on her body burned brightly in his eyes. He was only biding his time until he would obtain her completely.
He isn’t your friend. Jaden reminded herself. You hate him.
“Judge me then, Dark Knight, and be done with it. Don’t wait for your answers. Decide now.”
“Three days.”
Jaden felt him leave before she had a chance to protest. The devilish sensations he aroused went with him, leaving her to a bitter ache of despair. She touched her bottom lip. Her fingers slid onto his mark. She wondered if the puncture wounds would leave a scar. It would be only a small one in her long history of collecting them. She didn’t care. Their maker wounded her more purposefully than a small physical scrape.
She waited until she was sure he was gone. Jaden shook her head, her lips letting loose a trembling sigh. Her body ached, wanting desperately to be held in a tender embrace, to be protected. But she wasn’t the protected kind. She was the warrior, the brave soldier who needed no one.
Asking for death was easier than asking for emotional comfort. She was raised with the concept of death. She’d seen it. She knew its face. It wasn’t bright lights and ever-afters. It was the end, a final sleep. Jaden desperately wanted to sleep. Yet, there was something inside of her that kept her from doing it herself. She wanted to be punished. She wanted to be made to suffer. That’s what she deserved. Suicide by vampire. It was a vampire that made her. It should be a vampire that ended her.
She thought of Bhaltair. Mack had been more of a father to her than that creature. She didn’t want to believe Mack knew the information he’d given her was bad. Yet Tyr hinted at a cruelness in her uncle that she didn’t want to think about. If Mack was not the man she believed him to be, then her life had been a complete lie.
Jaden shivered. When would someone finally discover the shameful truth? That she wasn’t as strong as she pretended to be. She held back a stray tear that threatened to fall from her eye. Tyr was right. Rick would never understand and didn’t deserve to be involved in her disastrous life—not even to be used for physical pleasure. Quietly, she crawled into bed alone. The end was near, she could feel her world crashing in around her. All she could do was wait for it to come.
Chapter Five
The sun streamed in through a crack in Jaden’s curtain. She held still, her eyes closed as she pretended to sleep. The nightmares of her dreams faded into reality. She waited, alert as she listened for another sound. All around her was perfect silence.
Without warning her skin felt alive with fire. Jaden kicked viciously at the covers, rolling over as a blade swished past her ear. Feathers flew up from the pillow floating gently around the bed in the sunlight. Untangling her feet, she jumped onto the floor. Her breath came hard as her eyes focused on her attacker. She had little time to think as a sword flew through the air at her head.
Lifting her hand, Jaden swung to the side, missing the point and catching the hilt. The action spun her about until she completed a circle.
“You’re a little sluggish this morning,” Rick teased. He tossed his matching blade from one hand to the other. “I thought you said we could practice.”
Jaden snarled. Suppressing a yawn, she slowly made her way around the bed. She jutted her chin in greeting, all the time cursing him for his rude awakening. The steel glinted sharply as it passed the stream of light. She pointed it daringly at Rick’s chest.
“You slept in your clothes,” he noticed. His eyes swept over her disheveled hair, her wrinkled attire. His looks said he wanted to grab her up into his arms and cart her away—at least as far as her bed. His blade didn’t move to defend. His hand fell to the side, his chest open and trusting. “Would you like time to change?”
“Coffee,” she growled. With the deadly accuracy of a snake, she flung her wrist, sending the blade flying through the air to stick into the wood of the door. Rick gasped, jumping out of the way. The metal vibrated loudly before settling into its new home.
Rick chuckled as he stood. Lowering his sword arm, he bowed gallantly. “Yes, Jade, coffee.”
“Now,” she hissed, unamused. Spinning on her heels, she strode over to her dresser. She began yanking out her workout shorts and T-shirts and flinging them violently onto the bed.
Rick watched her and gave a humored laugh. As he opened her door, his eyes fell on the blade. It was embedded all the way through the thick wood. “I’ll just leave this here for you.”
He was rewarded with a growl, followed by a curse. He smiled at a maid as she passed by. The woman’s mouth fell open as she witnessed the deadly weapon’s tip protruding from Jaden’s door. Jaden frowned at the woman through the door.
“Coffee for two in the dining room, please,” Rick said to the maid, as he tugged the doorknob so that the weight of the door would swing it closed. His hand struck out to pluck a fresh flower thoughtfully from a vase as he passed. “Miss MacNaughton will be down in a moment. I would stay out of her way if I were you. She’s a little testy this morning.”
“Yes, Mr. Fletcher,” the stunned woman mumbled just as the door latched shut.
* * *
Three days passed and Jaden was exhausted. Mack sent word that he was going to be late and Rick gallantly declared he would stay with her until Mack’s return. Rick not only attacked her by sword, but by fist and knife. She was sure he thought fighting romantic and at one time she might have been inclined to agree with him. But, nowadays, it just wore her out. She had enough fighting in her life. All she wanted to do now was sleep.
Rick never let her out of his sight. Jaden suspected he was wearing her out on purpose to keep her from leaving the apartment. Little did he know that keeping her indoors didn’t protect her. The one she should fear the most proved he had no problem getting to her. There was nowhere to run.
Tyr didn’t return, though he did find himself a comfortable place within her thoughts. Sometimes she would imagine she was attacking him and go at Rick full force. Luckily she remembered the man she fought, though Rick never once asked for mercy, and let up before she hurt him.
Slipping undetected into Mack’s library, Jaden sighed with relief. Rick was out of the house. She sent him on an errand across the city to a small bakery to pick up sandwiches. It was a needless task, but it bought her enough time to snoop through Mack’s library. With the ambiguous directions she gave it would take him at least two hours to find the place and get back.
Jaden ignored the smell of her sweat-drenched shirt. She flipped on the light. Her feet were silent as she moved over the carpet. Coming to the desk, she laid her latest weapon, a knife, on top. Mack was a paranoid man, but also a prudent one. He wouldn’t put cameras anywhere he did business and Jaden wasn’t afraid of being discovered snooping. The servants had finished with the upstairs cleaning that very morning.
Within moments Jaden riffled through his desk, using a small tool set he’d given her for her for her seventh birthday to pick the l
ocks. There was nothing terribly interesting hidden in the drawers. A few folders with weapon speculations—from the mundane to the fantastic—were on top. Financial statements, business proposals, boring rows of number-filled ledgers fitted into the others. Leaving the desk as she found it, Jaden ignored the computer.
Mack only used his computer for research, often claiming not to trust his line of work to the susceptibility of hackers. He was low tech in a lot of ways, preferring paper files that could be burned unless he was in one of his secure facilities. Beyond a few simple email messages, the system would be empty.
Jaden ran her eyes over the bookshelves, freezing as she listened to a maid pass by the door. To her relief, she felt the woman move on without stopping.
Jaden turned to the sundial behind the desk. Running her fingers over the top to look for the secret trigger, she frowned. The safe didn’t open. She continued on over the room, running her hands lightly over the walls and under paintings, lifting the edges of the rug for clues. She even scanned the bookshelf, knowing from the hours that she spent pulling books from it that there would be no secrets hidden there.
She paused in her investigation only to pull down the book on Dark Knights from the top. Within seconds she copied the foreign description of Tyr onto a piece of paper and shoved it in her pocket. She planned on translating it later.
Jaden found nothing else to capture her interest and sank wearily into her uncle’s thick leather chair. Leaning forward, she poured herself a glass of scotch from his decanter and swallowed it in several long gulps. The liquid burned pleasantly down her throat. She blinked heavily to keep her thoughts clear. She refilled her glass and rested it on her stomach as she dug her heels into the ground and turned the chair slowly until she faced the safe.
She eyed the large base carefully, looking for grooves in the plain design. She saw nothing. Then, standing, she took a quick drink before setting the glass behind her. Pushing at the dial, she jumped as it clicked. The top piece was the lock. Jaden smiled. She figured it out. Now all she had to do was think of the combination.
Trying a few numbers and receiving no reward for her effort, she grimaced with sudden insight. Attempting the lock again, she turned the dial around—seven, one, nineteen, seventy-eight. The latch clicked open and the top fell to the side. It was the day her mother had died, July 1, 1978.
Rhona’s death was the whole reason Mack began hunting vampires. Her uncle had never forgiven Jaden’s father for impregnating his sister and ruining her reputation. Mack had been very close to his sister, taking in her only daughter when she died.
Jaden refused to think of the mother she didn’t remember. She had been a year old when Rhona had died. And though she resented her vampire roots, she never blamed the woman for falling in love with her father. A handsome immortal would be a hard thing to resist by a normal mortal woman. Their gaze alone could strike up the most fascinating feelings inside a person. Jaden thought of Tyr and frowned. He was her proof of that.
Her fingers trembled as she opened the top latch. Inside, tucked within the depths of the pedestal, were a bound folder and a box. Jaden pulled them out. Her breath caught in her throat as she felt the smooth box. Her mother’s name was carved intricately in the top of the wood. She set it aside, unable to open it.
With a heavy, slow breath, she placed the folder on the desk. Seeing her liquor, she took another drink. The liquid didn’t burn nearly as bad as the first time. It landed thickly in her stomach, numbing invitingly against the pain that threatened her chest.
She unbound the string around the folder, opening it to the front page. The words were written in French. Jaden sighed in frustration. Her uncle spoke the language fluently, having been raised partially by a French nanny when he was young. She didn’t know why, but Mack had never taught her the language. She always assumed it was because he was too busy training her to be a warrior.
“You never write in French,” Jaden muttered, thinking of her uncle. “What do you have to hide?”
Flipping through the file, she saw scientific charts and graphs and what looked like an endless line of medical sheets and blood work-ups. All was written in French. Halfway through the folder, she paused. Paper clipped to one of the pages was a photograph. The image was turned away, pressed into the sheet. On the back it read, Sydney, 103, 1984. Jaden recognized the slanted fall of her uncle’s precise penmanship.
Jaden slowly turned the photo over. Her heart fell into her stomach. The image was of a young woman tied to a gurney. She looked scared, her eyes frozen in panic as she stared out from the slip of photographic paper. Her wide brown eyes begged for release, for help. At the same time, they admitted defeat. Jaden quickly turned the image back around. She couldn’t look at the wounded stare.
Then, turning to the next page, she saw a manila envelope. The front again bore the number 103 in tight script. Unwinding the threaded latch, Jaden pulled the stack of photos from within. They were of the same woman only with a number of days penned on the edges. The first, bearing the title Day One, showed her neck gouged by familiar markings. She had been bitten by a vampire. As the days progressed, the woman’s cruel change became evident. She was denied blood. Her face contorted with first anger, then tears, and then lunacy until finally, at the end, there was a skeletal figure of the same person. The woman’s eyes still shone with life, an eerie discovery in such a withered and rotted frame. She was tied to the same bed with the notation, Day Forty-three, External Termination.
Jaden pressed her lips together. A sensation of dread overcame her as she put the photos back into their place. Behind the envelope was another picture turned upside down. And, behind that, another envelope filled with photographs. This one read, Henry, 296, 1986. Looking at the pictures, Jaden discovered that it was pretty much more of the same thing, but with other notations as well. The subject had been given a serum of sorts, which appeared to prolong the agony of starvation. But the subject ultimately died the same as the other—by an outside hand and in much pain.
Jaden stared at the skeletal face in horror. It was obvious that Henry had been tested upon most cruelly. Cuts were made on his arms until the wounds no longer had the power to heal themselves. Some of them went as deep as the bone. At one point, the arm had been sawed nearly off above the wrist. The only question was, by whom? And why did Mack have these pictures? What exactly did the experimenters have to gain by such tests? It was already common enough knowledge that it took only a few days for most vampires to go crazy when denied blood. And there was no cure to be had.
Did those who had done this think that they could find a cure? Or was a much worse experiment going on? Without reading the details, it was hard to say. And, the most damning of all questions, why was it Mack’s handwriting on the back of the first photograph?
Seeing that there were more cases behind Henry’s, Jaden refused to look at anymore. She wasn’t sure how long she had been in the library and didn’t want Rick to catch her. Rick was loyal to her uncle and she wasn’t sure if he was to be trusted.
Jaden thought of Tyr. Was this what he thought her uncle to be involved in? No, she couldn’t believe it. Mack might harbor a lot of hatred for creatures of the night, but she had to believe he would never be capable of such atrocities.
Slamming the folder shut, she turned to the box. Her fingers lingered on the carved swirl of her mother’s name. Lifting the lid, she peered into the shallow depths. Inside was a piece of folded parchment, yellowed by age and tattered by time. Jaden lifted it, opening what looked to be a letter. She couldn’t read the finely laid scrawling, not recognizing the language but knowing it to be old. Folding it carefully, she laid it aside. Beneath was a picture of her mother and a locket.
Jaden studied the black and white face that mirrored her own. Rhona had been a beautiful woman, glamorous and feminine in a way her daughter wasn’t. Touching the face, all Jaden could feel was a sense of sadness at never having known the woman. She pressed her lips together and looked
thoughtfully around the room. She had to get the file translated so she could read what was inside. Except whom could she trust?
Jaden thought instantly of Tyr. Surely, having lived so long, he would be able to speak almost every language. He might even be able to translate the letter she found. Her finger’s trembled. What if the file incriminated her uncle? Tyr seemed to have already judged Mack without a trial. Did she dare hand the evidence over to her enemy? No. She would have to bide her time. But then did she ask Mack about what she had found? What would he say? Should she even trust him?
Apprehensive, she laid the picture and locket into the box and placed it back into Mack’s safe. She could trust no one. Going to the bookshelf, she pulled a thick volume from the top ledge. The book looked old and carried with it a small latch that kept the pages together.
She felt only a moment’s regret as she picked up her knife and cut into the binding. Stripping out the pages, she swapped the inside of the book with the inside of the folder. Closing the leather binding over the folder’s contents, she latched up the book and set it aside. Then, taking the folder, she placed it back into the safe filled with the inside pages of the book. She made sure everything else was as she found it.
Hugging the newly rendered book to her chest, Jaden grabbed the yellowed letter before she strode to the door. She clutched her knife in her hand. Pulling the heavy oak open, she froze. Her eyes instantly met with Rick’s. He was on the stairs, his hands laden with a brown paper bag. Tilting his head, he eyed her burden.
Slowly, he continued forward. “I got the sandwiches.”
“Oh.” Jaden hugged the book closer. She forced a smile to her lips. “Good. I’m starving. Why don’t you put them downstairs? I’ll shower and be right down.”
“Need any help?”
“Excuse me?”
Rick laughed, holding up his free hand. “I meant with the book. What are you doing? Research?”
The Jaded Hunter Page 9
