by Rain Oxford
Stephen and his daughter were sitting at the desk while a woman I didn’t know stood next to the window.
Stephen disguised his burgundy eyes as dark brown, and his black hair was short, clean, and styled. He was unnervingly normal. If my intuition didn’t tell me he was one of the most dangerous creatures in the entire world, I would have thought he was human.
His daughter had a little too much flair to blend in, with “currently” burgundy hair and matching eyes. She was beautiful, like Remy, but her beauty was a trap. She was all about the “hunt” rather than satisfying her needs, whether they be sexual or nourishing. To each his own, but I pitied the men and women who would fall for her charms and then wake up alone the next morning.
The stranger was a vampire as well. She had long auburn hair and deep wine-colored eyes. My intuition warned me that she was powerful and dangerous, but I could figure that out for myself. She was tall and slender with a flowing, dark blue dress. Her face was attractive, but stern, and her posture was rigid. There was something very regal about her.
She inhaled discreetly, no doubt sizing me up. Her face showed nothing of her inner thoughts, but my intuition eased, so I figured she approved.
“Good morning, Devon,” Stephen said. “It’s nice to see you again.”
I couldn’t bring myself to return the sentiment, because it was work and I was in the home of vampires. I respected Stephen. I never thought I would be able to feel anything but hate towards them after my parents were killed, but he was a good man. He didn’t let his vampires hurt people or other paranormals. While he was reasonable and fair, he punished rule-breakers swiftly, severely, and without mercy, because he knew how much damage his people could do. However, in a coven of so many vampires, I knew some of them would gladly harm me.
“Good morning. You’re still having a problem with hunters?”
“And they are getting worse. Maseré has to rotate the guard duty of his pack members because the hunters have begun using silver in their attacks. The humans are dangerously close to the edge of our patience.”
I was on Stephen’s side in this matter. If push came to shove, he had to put the lives of his vampires first. The humans left him no choice. “I’ll do what I can to help.”
Stephen nodded and I saw relief in his ancient eyes. He could easily kill the humans that pestered him, but he wasn’t that kind of man. “By the way, I suppose you have not met Jillian.” He held out his hand for her and she took it. I shook my head. “She’s my wife and Clara’s mother.”
I was surprised. I thought Stephen was single, and Clara didn’t act like she had a mother’s influence growing up. I stated this in the gentlest way I knew how. “I wasn’t aware Clara had a mother.”
Clara scowled. “Of course I have a mother.”
Jillian smiled and held out her hand to me. “It’s nice to finally meet you, Devon.” Her voice was deceptively demure and held no accent.
I reached out to shake her hand and my intuition reacted again. She was a lot more dangerous than she looked. Whereas Stephen radiated ancient power, her strength was hidden. She wasn’t threatening me, but I sure as hell didn’t want to cross her.
“I travel a lot for business and rarely get to spend more than a couple of days a year with my family. Clara has spoken quite a lot about you, though.”
Why are there no paintings or pictures of her? I studied her face hard enough that it was rude, but she did look familiar. It wasn’t enough for me to place her, though. It was like I knew her sister or I had seen her picture somewhere. “It’s nice to meet you, too. Have you come because of the hunters?”
“I came to visit and stayed because of the hunters. Unfortunately, short of hunting them down and tearing their throats out in their sleep, there isn’t much I can do to protect my family,” she said. “The very idea that the most powerful coven in North America is being threatened by a handful of frail humans is sickening.”
“That’s why the hero doesn’t always win in real life; he has to follow the rules while the villain breaks them.”
“Devon can get rid of them without killing them,” Clara interjected quickly, as if she was afraid her mother would start killing humans before morning.
“Are you sure it’s worth the trouble?” Jillian asked me kindly. “I could kill them in less than five minutes.”
“We don’t kill humans in this country,” Stephen said politely. “It draws too much attention and is the reason the rest of the paranormal communities shunned us for so long. We are more than animals.”
She nodded and took his hand again. “I know. I just don’t like that humans think they have the right to attack us when we’ve done nothing to them.”
Historically, vampires weren’t innocent. They used to kill humans regularly. Of course, vampires have never killed as many humans as humans have.
“Don’t worry; I’ll take care of the humans without drawing any attention to you.”
“He can make them kill themselves,” Clara bragged.
Jillian’s eyes widened. “Really? That’s impressive. Even our thrall has limits. The human survival instinct is too strong.”
“Destroying a few humans isn’t my plan. More would just crop up in their place. I intend to find out who is feeding them information and crush the root of the operation.”
“I can see why my daughter likes you. From what she has told me, you would make a good vampire.”
I didn’t think Clara had that much to say about me. “Speaking of my abilities, I would like to skim the minds of your coven members.”
Stephen frowned and leaned back, not liking the idea. “Do you suspect someone?”
“No, of course not. I’ve learned how to pick up certain topics in a person’s mind. If someone heard something or saw something, I can find it without invading their privacy. They would probably feel me, though. I think your thrall complicates the matter.” The typical person’s memory was largely inaccurate, but it was still useful.
“In that case, I approve it,” Stephen said. “After you are done dealing with the hunters, I wonder if you can spare a few weeks for scientific research. I would love to discover the similarities and differences between our thrall and your mind control.”
“I’m interested as well, but it might have to wait until a school break. Then Darwin can help.”
“I don’t know about letting the son of John Cross be allowed to read our minds,” Jillian argued.
She knew more about me than I knew about her. “I’m not like him,” I said, trying not to take offense.
Stephen came to my defense. “Devon hated Cross more than we did. He helped Logan take down the corrupt wizard council and defended us against Cross’s accusations. Without him, we wouldn’t have been allowed in Quintessence.”
She hesitated, not convinced, but Stephen’s decision was apparently final.
“In the meantime, I’d like to get set up. This is going to take some patience.”
“Our day guards will be here in about ten minutes,” Stephen said. “I will let them know that they are to follow your orders, but at least one wolf needs to be guarding us at all times. The hunters know not to come inside.”
I nodded. “Are you only using Maseré’s pack during the day?”
He nodded. “We have no need of them at night.”
“Yeah, but it can’t hurt to keep the hunters on their toes.”
“We could hang them by their toes,” Jillian suggested.
Stephen patted her hand to shut her up. “What do you have in mind?”
“They know you can leave at night and they probably know by now how many day guards you have. What about putting some actual wolves on duty?”
“Wild wolves?”
“Yes. Can you handle them?”
“They should fall in line under shifters, but I can talk to Maseré about it. It would require them bonding with us and wanting to protect us, because there’s no human brain to reason with.”
I left them to di
scuss it and figured that Stephen would call Maseré, which was much easier than the wizards’ method of communication. Marcus was waiting for me outside. “I’ll get you set up and logged into the surveillance system,” Marcus said. I couldn’t actually be that close to his computers reliably anymore, but I decided he knew what he was doing.
“I’m more interested in your registry.”
He stopped and frowned at me. “That’s the weird thing. As soon as you called and I told you about the problem, it quit.”
“The server died?”
“No, the problem stopped. I lost all my data, though. You have no idea how violated I feel that someone who wasn’t smart enough to hack a computer was still able to wipe mine.”
“What’s the damage, though? Could they have gotten valuable information?”
He shook his head. “No. It’s literally just a list of names, what coven they belong to, and crimes they committed so that other covens can approve or reject them. It wasn’t even that someone got this info.”
“Crimes?”
He shrugged. “Yeah. Stephen isn’t going to let a vampire in who eats babies or leaves a trail of bodies. Coven masters have a right to know that.”
“Where do you get the list of crimes?”
He shrugged. “The coven masters submit their coven members to the registry, and we pick up all the info we can on rogues.”
“Can you get the information back?”
“I have to put it back in manually and have the coven masters resubmit all the members. It’s fine for a coven of ten or twenty. It took me months to do Stephen’s coven because he couldn’t spare the time.”
“There’s no recovery?”
He scowled. “Do you think I wouldn’t already have it back up again if there was a chance of recovery?” I sighed and he continued leading me to his lab. “What are you thinking?” he asked.
“There are three motives for tampering with computers: stealing data, planting data, and destroying data. If they’ve been around for a while, they could have been doing either of the first two, but if they’re that powerful in magic, they should know they couldn’t run a computer. It sounds like they were out to destroy the registry.”
“But why?”
“To hide a crime, maybe.”
“For a coven member to go to another coven, all it takes is a phone call to the coven master and he’ll share that member’s crimes.”
“Maybe someone wants to go undercover in another coven.”
Marcus nodded. “That’s a good point.”
But I didn’t feel it. “Or… it could have been that you got information on a rogue who didn’t want to be known.”
“That’s a good point, too. Many rogues were shunned from covens because of their deplorable behavior. It’s no wonder they’re the outcasts of the outcasts. Not all of them are bad, mind you, but the ones who are suck.”
“Can you tell me who was the worst?”
He shook his head. “I can’t, no. I’ve put so many names on the registry that I don’t remember any of them, let alone who did what.”
“That doesn’t matter much, though. It’s a wizard who was messing with my system. I told you; magical interference on electronics is like a fingerprint. I know what yours looks like and it’s very different from any other wizard’s. That being said, I don’t believe that nobody in the world has the same fingerprint. Everyone would have to be checked before that could be confirmed. Did you know that snowflakes---”
“Skip.”
He rolled his eyes, but moved on. I wished it worked on Darwin. “My point is that it wasn’t a rogue messing with my computer.”
“No, but it could have been a wizard working with or helping a vampire. How would they hide here?”
“That, I have no idea. I didn’t hear, see, or smell a stranger. But that’s why I want to show you my computer.”
We finally stopped in front of his lab and opened the door. The room was huge, but it was completely filled. It was part mechanic shop, part surveillance screens, part computers. It was a mess, for sure. There was a single, small window with a small telescope in front of it and binoculars hanging from the body of the telescope. There were two worn rolling chairs and a table covered in computer parts, plastic, and metal scraps.
“This is what I really called you about.” He flipped a switch and all of the screens changed to daytime clips of different areas at the coven. In the top right-hand cover of all of them, it said that the time was noon.
“Is this about to show me the hunters?”
“No. This is actually right before the humans started attacking again. We’d thought you had scared them off when you took out their base and freed their captives. You know how sensitive vampires are in their sleep, right?”
“Darwin told me your senses are much more powerful during your sleep.”
“Yeah. It’s been agonizing having all the shifters around. But tell me this. How did not a single one of us hear a car pull up?” he asked, pointing to a screen that showed the front of the mansion.
It was a very ordinary black SUV. The driver was wearing a blue dress shirt, but I couldn’t see his face. Nothing about the truck was identifiable except that there was a dashcam in the window. Then, as a door opened on the rear passenger side, the screen broke up in static and then died.
“The hell?”
“Yeah. Keep watching.”
A moment later, the screen that showed the entrance hallway went black, and then a few seconds passed before the exterior camera turned back on. The car was gone. The cameras blacked out as they followed the wizard through the mansion and stopped on the second floor. They disappeared into a room that didn’t have visual. “Where is that?”
“Stephen’s bedroom. Someone entered his bedroom and he didn’t even wake up. I figured the wizard must have taken something.”
“Could he have used a sleeping spell on you?”
He shrugged. “I’m not Darwin, bro. I know very little about wizards. Keep watching.” The camera went dark again and the blanks followed the wizard right back out the front door. Nothing was visibly changed. “Same exact thing happened on the morning after you called me, except the wizard came here instead of Stephen’s room. I woke up to find my cameras unharmed, but the registry was destroyed.”
Chapter 3
Marcus called some other coven masters as well as members of Stephen’s coven who lived away from the mansion. No one aside from Mellow who didn’t live outside the coven was attacked. Not even members of Maseré’s pack were attacked off the mansion’s property.
“They must have a beef with Stephen,” Marcus suggested.
“But then they would want to take out his coven members.”
“Unless they don’t know who his coven members are.”
“That’s a good point, and perhaps why the wizard was messing with the registry.”
“Maybe the wizard was on our side, trying to stop a vampire from selling us out.”
My intuition was abnormally quiet until he said that. “No. I don’t think the wizard is on our side. He might not be working with vampires or hunters, but he’s not our ally.”
Marcus sent a mass email and text to all the coven masters in North America that they needed to resubmit their members to the registry, but most importantly, he needed all the information they had on every rogue. Needless to say, they weren’t happy, but they owed Marcus for helping them with their own computer systems. He was also quite the inventor.
Marcus had created a unique material that deflected the chaotic magical energy that ruined technology. Unfortunately, he hadn’t used it in the server that ran the registry. “It’s hard to make and I didn’t think a wizard would bother us, let alone go after a list of vampires. I’m still simplifying the process. I’ve only got prototypes.”
It was black cloth, halfway between silk and nylon. “That would make a fantastic phone case,” I said. “I keep frying---” I cut myself off as he held up a black plastic phone case.
“Way ahead of you. If you leave it with me, I might be able to boost your reception and override Hunt’s signal-blocking ward.”
“I think that might cause more harm than good if word got out that I had a working phone at the school.”
* * *
I spent a few hours catching up with Marcus before the sun rose. Vampires weren’t compelled to sleep at dawn like some movies and books suggested. In fact, I knew a vampire who worked at Drake’s club who had insomnia during the day. The sunlight burned their skin, but they didn’t instantly burst into flames, either. I sat on a window bench on the third floor and watched for hunters. Normally, I would conduct my stakeout outside, but I didn’t want to throw off the shifters.
Cody dropped by at one point and we chatted for a while. When I’d found my parents had been attacked, Cody was the cop who found me and became my temporary guardian. He was human then, and I’d thought he died in a car crash. I learned that Astrid had saved him by turning him, but because of my hatred for vampires at the time, he was afraid to tell me he was alive. It was awkward between us because he still looked exactly as he had when I was a kid.
My history with vampires was strange even for a paranormal. “Is Astrid around?”
“She’s traveling Europe.”
“That’s nice.”
“With her new girlfriend.”
“Oh.”
* * *
After dawn, Marcus watched the security cameras while I got a couple of hours of sleep in his bedroom. Fortunately, they were dreamless hours. When I got up and took over, no hunters had arrived, so Marcus went to sleep.
In addition to watching for humans, I scanned the minds of the vampires for any information on the hunters. Stephen’s and Jillian’s minds were blocked, but breaking it would have been the same as an accusation, which I wasn’t willing to make. Unfortunately, although every vampire knew about the hunters, none of them had any information that jumped out at me.
