by Peter Dawes
“As did I.” Rose slithered behind me, taking my coat from my grip and tossing it onto a chair before placing her hands on my shoulders. I felt her fingers run along my back and suppressed a soft groan. “You stayed out so close to dawn. Have you become suicidal or is it another brand of being fearless?”
I laughed. “No, it was that twit, Anthony, from Matthew’s coven.” I let Rose slide my suit jacket from my torso and watched it join my coat on the chair. “I had to finish my business with that pompous piece of trash before I could sate my own needs for the night.”
“So, it is done, then?”
Rose’s hands caressed the blades against my body and I closed my eyes in response, as though she was stroking more than steel with those long fingers. “Yes, it is done. Though there is no doubt in my mind Sabrina will be upset with me. I had at him twice before completing the act.”
“Living life dangerously? You will need a very convincing tale to escape Sabrina’s wrath.” One of her well-manicured nails taunted at a button.
My grin spread further, becoming predatory. “I will tell her I sought a trinket for you,” I said as I turned to face Rose. “Something as beautiful as you, thus giving him an impossible task.”
Rose smiled. Past her parted lips, I saw her fangs lying in slumber. “And now, Flynn flatters me,” she said as she leaned close. Her voice descended to a whisper. “Tell me a story before you seduce me.”
“What type of story?”
“What did you really ask Anthony to retrieve?”
“This is a boring tale with a disappointing ending. He was unable to locate what I requested.”
“Then tell me he thought he had a chance to escape.”
I chuckled at her schoolgirl-like enthusiasm. “Oh, he did.” Reaching up with one hand, I brushed her hair away from her chest and allowed my gaze to drift southward. My fingertips ran along the edge of the fabric lying against her cleavage while my devilish gaze rose to intersect hers again. “I tore his garish clothing, and ran him through his gut while he bled like a stuck pig. Then I sank my blade into his chest and watched the wind carry him away.”
She laughed. “Reduced to a pile of dust.”
“Only ash and nothing more.”
Her lips crashed into mine, our bodies pressing together despite the blades I yet wore. Rose pulled away from the kiss to whisper against my lips. “Tell me another story.” The words dripped with lust. “Who did you kill before Anthony?”
Cupping the back of her head, I nipped at her bottom lip as I responded. “Demetrius, again of Matthew’s coven. One of his elders. The stupid bastard tried to ferret out information from Robin.”
“Stupid bastard, indeed.” We kissed once more. “Tell me you made his death slow. Tell me you made him suffer.”
“He suffered good and proper, Pet.” Stripping off my shoulder holster, I tossed my knives out of the way, and then took hold of Rose again. “I severed his spine before ridding him of the curse that was his head.”
“Soon there will be nothing left of Matthew’s coven.”
“Not when I am through with it.” Our mouths hovered dangerously close. “I will kill them all, one by one. Their blood will run like a river of crimson beneath my feet and I will laugh like a madman as they perish. How does that sound, Rose? Does this fantasy please you?”
Rose threw back her head and laughed before jumping into my arms and devouring me with kisses. We stumbled to my bedroom and fell onto the bed while she popped the buttons from my shirt and raked her fangs across my bare chest. Enraptured though I was, the fatigue of the hour began to make its presence known. So, I rolled on top of Rose and took the reins, exchanging her typically slow, deliberate pace for one of my own.
I was sound asleep by the time she left, comatose within mere minutes of achieving our satisfaction. The scorn of Sabrina awaited me when I woke, but for the moment, the wrath of any being seemed far-removed.
Or, so I thought.
I had been asleep for a while when the premonition returned.
A flash of brilliant, white light threw me into a sterile environment lacking walls or form, something which struck me with a sense of both unease and odd familiarity. The brightness surrounding me should have had me praying for death, but pain remained conspicuously absent, even without my dark spectacles to protect my fragile eyes. Immediately, the solution became apparent; impossible and yet, the only explanation I could think of in the moment.
I had been killed. One of my enemies finally managed past my defenses and caught me in a vulnerable state. Only, I told myself, if I had been sent to the hereafter, I could not help but wonder if the paperwork had been misappropriated. “Hello?” I said, turning around and finding the same, endless room on the other side. “Would anybody care to explain where the hell I am?”
“You know, I think I remember him,” a voice said in response, one I would recognize regardless of how much time had passed. My skin crawled as she continued speaking somewhere behind me. “He wasn’t this ‘Flynn’ person back then, though. He called himself Peter.”
“Miss Davies, it has been a while.” Turning to face Lydia, I scowled at her while her emerald eyes shot defiance back at me. Stripped of the blood-stained clothing she had worn the previous time we spoke, she wore a white dress and showed no sign of the wounds I had inflicted upon her. Rather than appearing as a victim, she had ascended to the level of authoritative force.
I cared even less for her in this state.
“Four years, to be exact,” she said.
“Indeed,” I said, “And I told you then that Peter does not live here any longer. Have you come to bore me further, or do you have something relevant to say?”
Lydia held her gaze even while mine turned sinister. “You looked for my necklace again.” Moving forward, she strolled as though having all the time in the world. “If Peter doesn’t live there anymore, why did that dream haunt you?”
“So, that was you? I should have known that such a saccharine memory had your name written all over it.” Knitting my hands behind my back, I paced around her. “The adulterous wench returns. And she wanted me to remember something as trivial as a necklace. Why is this, Lydia?”
“Who says I was the one who unlocked that memory?”
“These things do not simply happen on their own.”
She smirked. “Are you sure about that? Maybe that meddlesome mortal you think died five years ago is still alive in there somewhere. Have you ever stopped to think about that?”
“No, Dearest, I have been too busy entertaining notions of what I might do with this pendant.” I stopped pacing and smiled, baring fangs at Lydia. “Perhaps I might drape it over the necks of the women I seduce right before I murder them. I could use it as a token to lure them to their deaths.”
My former lover laughed. “Surely you’re much better than that. Needing to dangle cheap jewelry in their faces to seduce them?”
I bristled. “Then what might be a fitting tribute?”
“Not feeling creative?” She raised an eyebrow, her gaze turning deliberate. “Why don’t you just wear it to spite me?”
“Wear your ‘cheap jewelry’, as you put it?” Seeing a dare issued before me, I could not back down from it. “Splendid. Perhaps I will.”
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Shaking her head, she folded her arms across her chest and sighed. “Look at all this swagger. I don’t buy the persona. It’s nothing but a façade.”
“I can show you what a façade looks like.” Walking closer to her, I raised a hand and touched her chin, pointing her neck toward me. Instead of plunging my fangs into her throat, though, I leaned close and whispered in her ear. “How about the façade of claiming to love somebody and whoring yourself behind their back? You stand before me with such self-righteous bluster when you know the sins you have committed. I might have driven a blade through you, but I have never presented myself with as much hypocrisy as you are right now.”
“Are you sure about t
hat? Because I see a man both claiming not to care and expressing anger over being heartbroken.”
“Oh, make no mistake about it, I do not give a shit about your mortal infidelity any longer,” I stepped back, pushing her head away. “I have no lack of lovers. I can pick and choose whomever I please and have my way with all of them at once if I desire. I am merely exposing you as a fraud.” Pausing, I waited for her gaze to return to mine. “Now, it is my turn for questions. Why have you visited me again?”
“Because I want to speak to Peter.”
“And what do you want to say to him?”
Lydia narrowed her eyes. “You’re holding back his gifts.”
I scoffed. “Here we go again. Picking up where you left off,” I said. “I also remember telling you not to carry on with this cloak and dagger bullshit if you have no intention of explaining it.”
“You weren’t ready the last time we spoke.”
“And now I am?”
“You’re getting closer.”
“Fuck you.” My voice rose in volume as my irritation mounted. “Fuck you and fuck that name you keep evoking. Stuff these bloody gifts of yours. If you have answers for me, then I am all ears, but if not, then leave me alone and never come back. I am sick of being touted as some special creature without being let in on the riddle. The last thing I need is you adding your voice back into the chorus.”
My voice boomed throughout the room, a hush falling only as the echoes dissipated. Lydia held my gaze for a moment. We seemed fixed at an impasse until she said, “There are more things going on than you can begin to imagine. Things that have been in existence longer than there’s been a vampire named Flynn. All I can tell you is that the answers are coming.” Lydia frowned. “I only hope there’s enough of Peter left in there to hear them.”
I did not respond. Lydia turned to depart, but something caused her a moment’s hesitation. She looked back at me. “Just remember, not everything is what it seems to be. If Peter is still there, he’ll understand this phrase. ‘The only thing worse than being blind is having sight, but no vision.’” Her gaze lowered to the ground. “And I never stopped loving you. You’re the one who stopped loving me.”
Lydia consummated her departure as though carried off by the wind; there one moment and gone the next. I stood in the white room with nothing but another riddle until the light began to fade. My waking eyes opened to reveal my slumbering body had never left the bed.
The darkness of heavy shades was not enough to fully mask that it was daytime and my retinas were none too thrilled with this fact. The ache rose to a burn, so I covered my face and slid out of bed, carefully maneuvering around the memorized layout of my room and avoiding a collision with several pieces of furniture along the way. ‘Damn Rose,’ I thought to myself. ‘She left my sunglasses next to the door.’ I muttered obscenities until finding the table in the entryway, locating my spectacles entirely by touch.
A sigh of relief punctuated shoving the dark lenses over my eyes, but from there I was unable to settle into sleep again. So, I showered, dressed, and whittled away time staring at Lydia’s necklace, wondering why I was entertaining her words as much as I found myself doing. Sight, but no vision. I remembered the quote as being one of her oft-recited proverbs, although I had no idea why it was relevant to me. “Mortal nonsense,” I said aloud, wrapping the chain around my fingers and allowing the pendant to dangle toward the palm of my hand. “That is all this amounts to.” I shook my head and thrust the offending piece of jewelry into my pants pocket, rising from my chair to find something else to occupy my mind. Ghosts from the beyond, whispering their idle threats and veiled insight, were the least of my concerns on the fifth anniversary of my death.
I had a coven mother to face when the sun set.
Chapter 12
It seemed to take an eternity for the sun to set. I whittled away the hours by alternately reading and testing my newest sword, acquired after visiting an antiques store on the edge of Chinatown. A handsome piece of craftsmanship, the katana had been forged with superior quality steel and its hilt, styled with black and red braiding. I made sure to inform its maker of my approval before I left him dying on the floor of his establishment.
By then, I could recite the three credos Robin had ingrained in me without any effort. ‘Be quick. Be accurate. Do not let anyone see you.’ I held them as dear as a religion and paid sacrifice at the altar of my god each time I drew a blade. As much as I enjoyed my position, though, and relished the sadism it brought with it, being a vampire assassin lent itself to a peculiar conundrum.
After my first target turned to ash, a disturbing notion shattered the high of the experience. And the more I considered it, the more it troubled me. Once my mission had been completed, I had no way of proving I was the one who sent the departed packing from this mortal coil. Vampires were prone to wanderlust, I discovered, and often met their end in a variety of ways. When I set out to make my mark on the city, I wanted to make sure everyone knew exactly what happened to their kindred.
Anthony, of Matthew’s coven, would be no different.
My treasured sword hung at my side when I left my room and strolled down the corridor, headed for my brother Robin’s quarters. Not his original room either, it represented my brother’s recent shift in behavior, taking him further from Sabrina and closer to me. I could only guess what occupied his mind most nights, but, eccentricities aside, Robin continued to provide an ear of counsel. Even if he still took exception with my personal code of conduct.
I approached his door and listened for activity inside his room.
Silence greeted me. I rapped my knuckles on the sturdy piece of oak, but still no sign of life made its presence known. Sighing, I adjusted the black, leather gloves on my hands and pounded on his door much harder. This time, a groan drifted outward and inspired a grin to curl the corner of my mouth. “Rise and shine, brother,” I said. “Sunset waits for no vampire.”
“Flynn,” the groggy voice of Robin answered. “Please do not tell me you are waking me prior to sunset.”
“Sunset passed a half hour ago, Robin.” In a much lower tone of voice, I added, “Perhaps if you acquired a hobby, you might be more aware of the time.”
“I have plenty of hobbies, thank you.” From within his room, I heard his bed creak and the familiar sound of him padding closer to where I stood. When the door swung open, the coven’s second stared at me, disheveled and half-asleep, with his shoulder-length hair hanging loose of its ponytail. Clad in nothing but a pair of pajama pants, Robin otherwise stood bare before me. “You were lying, by the way,” he said. “I looked at the clock. It’s only been about fifteen minutes since the sun set.”
My smirk spread wider. “A half hour, fifteen minutes, what does it matter? It is evening, brother, and once again you are wallowing in sloth.”
“Just because I didn’t bound out of bed doesn’t mean that I am slothful.” Robin opened his door, allowing me passage into his room before shutting it behind me. Immersed in darkness, I lifted a hand to remove my sunglasses, but no sooner did I touch the hard plastic than my brother switched on a lamp and thwarted my plans. “You should know by now that not all the immortal world wakes two strokes past dusk,” he said, walking toward his closet, his voice still hoarse from sleep.
Sighing, I followed. “They should. Night wanes too quickly for us immortals.”
“I hardly think that is why you rose early tonight. I think it has more to do with what day it is.”
“What would that have to do with it?”
Robin scoffed. “Oh, come now, Flynn, I know how the mistress likes to thank you for being her angel of death. The entire coven has their designated moment when she curries favor with them and birthdays are yours.”
“Well, somebody is in a mood.” I perked an eyebrow as Robin picked a shirt and pair of pants out of his closet. “Do you have need of getting laid, dear brother?”
“Are you offering?” Robin shot me a look of annoyance be
fore sighing and bringing his clothing to his bathroom. I lost sight of him, but heard the change in his demeanor when he spoke again. “I apologize. Last night simply wasn’t a pleasant night for me.”
I walked toward a wall and leaned against it. “What happened?”
“Nothing worth discussing. Give me a moment to freshen up. I’ll be out as quickly as possible.”
“Very well.” No sooner did I respond than the bathroom door shut, severing our conversation. I sighed, glancing toward the heavy shades blocking his windows, already feeling the siren song of the night beckon to me. The thrill of the hunt was not all that made its presence known in my consciousness, however. Embers of dread caught fire once more, playing an unfamiliar tune within my normally cool and focused demeanor.
I indulged in a deep, steadying breath just as the bathroom door opened. Robin strolled out, his hair tied back and a dress shirt and pants on his slender frame. Order reigned over his regal appearance once more. “So, brother,” he said, walking back into his closet. “What did you come to discuss?”
“I wanted to ask you a question,” I said, drifting closer.
“A question.” The words were spoken not as an inquiry, but a statement. I watched Robin select a tie from his collection and slide it around his throat, not bothering to tie it before moving onward to fetch his socks and shoes. I began to think him ignoring me until he added, “Well, Flynn, ask your question. I can hardly read your mind.”
“All the better for you that you cannot.” I took one step back, allowing Robin to exit his closet. “Very well, though, to be honest, it might be more of a request than an actual question.”
“How did I know?” Robin walked toward his sitting area. “I don’t suppose this has anything to do with a black rose?”
“As a matter of fact, it does.” I watched Robin sink into a chair, placing his shoes on the floor. “I must report to Sabrina, but while I do, would you deliver a present?”
He sighed and began slipping on his socks. “To where are you sending me?”
