by Tanith Frost
In a sense, my destination is irrelevant now. Refusal is not an option. I’m going wherever the hell they stick me, and I’ll keep my mouth shut even if I don’t like it. I’m not looking forward to this drive, though. Awkward silence. Wondering whether he’s as mad at me as I still am at him.
This would be so much easier if I didn’t give a damn what he thinks of me or why he hasn’t checked up on me in all this time.
God, I hate it when he’s right.
I shove a third pair of jeans into my hard-sided suitcase, then turn and punch the pillow I’ll be leaving behind. I’m a mess, and I don’t know why. It’s illogical. I didn’t expect to stay here forever, and it’s hardly been paradise.
But at least I know who I am here. I’m an outsider, but one who understands how to get by, one who’s learning her own strengths even if they fall outside of what my clan considers acceptable.
Everything is changing now.
Two scarves go into the suitcase, a dozen of the v-neck tees I favour, a heavy winter coat, and three leather belts. I change into sneakers and pack my flat-soled lace-up leather boots. Hair ties. Moisturizer. The thick, smelly sunblock our scientists developed that allows us to go out on the most overcast days, and the wide-brimmed hat that’s still necessary even with that crap slathered on. Underwear, all of it ridiculously expensive and alluring given my solitary circumstances.
But pretty lingerie has always been more for me than anyone else, anyway. We all have our little addictions.
There’s not much else to take. My requests for reading material relating to the history of Maelstrom and vampires have been consistently ignored, and the books of that nature I brought with me were destroyed in the fire. My book collection is all human now. Some romance, more than a little of the better-written smut, classics.
And a few vampire novels. I can’t help it. They amuse me.
I choose an unfinished paperback to tuck into my backpack, throw in the outdated flip phone we all use—smartphone screens being generally irritating to our sensitive eyes—then zip the bag closed. I strip the bed and look the room over.
This isn’t home. It never was. I can’t let myself feel sad about leaving. I need to look ahead to new challenges—and, I hope, new opportunities to make up for mistakes I still don’t regret. It all has to be uphill from here.
When I reach the gravel parking area outside the front door, I’m surprised to find a big black Pathfinder idling with its lights turned low. The trunk’s open, and I hoist my suitcase and backpack in. Both rows of seats are laid flat, leaving a ton of empty space, even with Daniel’s suitcase already taking up its share of room.
Daniel glances back over his shoulder from the driver’s seat. He’s wearing his anti-glare glasses already, which will protect his eyes when we get on the road and face the bright headlights. “I thought you’d have more stuff.”
I shrug. “I’m travelling light these days.”
The vehicle beeps softly, and the trunk swings closed as I duck out of the way.
“Where’s the vampmobile?” I ask as I climb up into the passenger seat, avoiding stepping on the leather satchel on the floor. Daniel’s Challenger is practically a part of him. Seeing him in this beast is a bit of a shock.
He grimaces. “I remembered what the roads are like up here and decided on a rental.”
I smile to myself and settle back in the seat. It took him more than a year, but he finally took my advice. Will wonders never cease?
He pulls away, and I don’t look back. We try not to, generally. Not back at our lives after we’re dead. Not back at anything in the past that won’t help us move forward, and the friendships I’ve found here certainly won’t do that for me.
We don’t speak as the Pathfinder rocks over the dirt roads of the sanctuary. I wait for him to notice a change in my power, but if he does, he doesn’t say anything about it.
Or about anything else, for that matter.
“Need to stop here for anything?” he asks as we near the compound area. The old building he left me at last summer is a burned-out husk that no one has had any interest in since the vampires decided their business here was nearly finished.
“Yeah, just for a sec.”
In truth, almost everything I own was in the room I just left.
I unlock the trailer I’m supposed to have been living in, with its inspiring view of the burnt-out remains of the compound building, and head to the bedroom. I lift a loose panel in the floor and take my gun out. It’s locked in a steel box, along with the silver bullets I could load it with in an emergency. I haven’t touched it since the other vampires left me here. I remember how to load it, how to shoot. I just haven’t seen any need to carry it, and I didn’t think wearing it on my hip like a wannabe law enforcement vampire would do me any favours.
The lockbox goes into the trunk, and I hop back into my seat. Daniel drives away, taking us through the gate that’s never closed anymore, never mind locked.
“How did you know where I’d be?” I ask.
His lips pull into a hint of a smile. “I came here first, but didn’t really expect to find you.”
He knows me well, even now. I kick off my shoes and pull my knees up to my chest, resting my head against the window.
The silence gets heavy as we approach the highway. Daniel seems more tense than he usually does when he’s driving. His fingers clench the gearshift and release like he’s squeezing a stress ball, though the rental is an automatic. I watch the tendons in his hands tightening, the muscles in his forearm hardening, and look away.
“You heard anything about Delvin?” I ask, just to break the silence. No one has updated me on the man who once lived in Bloody Bight and fed us, who was taken to town to meet his destiny and become a vampire.
“Not much. He’s one of us now, adjusting well. In training.”
“Huh.”
Silence again, growing deep between us as the Pathfinder eats up kilometres of dark highway carry us eastward. There’s not much to see out here besides dark trees and bugs hitting the windshield, and matters don’t improve as we travel on. I touch Daniel’s leather bag with one toe. I want to ask what papers he’s got in there for me. I should ask, if he’s not going to speak up. But there are more important things I want to ask about while I’ve got him trapped in a moving vehicle.
“Where have you been?” I ask. Safe enough place to start, probably. I think I can handle anything except hearing that he’s been on the island this whole time.
“Working,” he says, and his shoulders relax a little. “They had trouble with some rogues down in Boston, and Darkwind asked Maelstrom for help.”
Darkwind is one of the stronger clans in North America, and not the kind of vampires I’d care to have to work with.
“I guess you guys are pretty legendary, eh?”
He smiles. “We have a good reputation among the other clans, yes, and things were quiet enough here that we went as a goodwill gesture. We ended up chasing the rogues halfway across the country. Six months before we caught up with them, and then just as long to finish the job.”
I shiver. Tracking rogues doesn’t mean keeping an eye out for credit card transactions and traffic camera sightings, or however humans are tracked these days. It means following a trail of blood, watching for suspicious missing persons reports, and hoping to discover drained human corpses before humans stumble on them. These are vampires who live outside of the clan system, unable or unwilling to access our clubs and stock.
Daniel lives for the hunt, but I’ve never seen him in action. Never wanted to, given the respectful-yet-almost-apprehensive glances I’ve seen him get from vampires at the club who know his reputation better than I do. I suspect that even on his most demanding days as my trainer, I saw a much softer version of Daniel than what rogues face before their execution. He’s never been allowed to kill a human. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t found an outlet for his more monstrous instincts.
He’s fallen silent again. Gue
ss those are all the details I’m going to get.
“So you were always just too busy to call?”
He tenses again. “I could have found time. It was excuses that were harder to come by.” He looks at me for the first time since I got back in the car at the compound. “I wanted a reason to call, but what was there? We don’t work in the same department. Werewolves have nothing to do with me. I’m not your trainer anymore.”
“I know,” I say softly, and he returns his attention to the road. My irritation eases, if only a little.
We can’t be friends. I’m not much use to him as an ally, given his reputation versus mine. It would have looked suspicious if he’d called, like there was more between us than there should have been, and a rumour like that could have ruined him if it made the elders question his judgement or loyalty.
I mean, he made me. In some times and places that would count for a lot, but not here and now, especially when my creation is such a shameful secret. I wasn’t chosen like Delvin was, selected because I would fit in well with vampire society. I was a snap decision Daniel himself doesn’t seem to fully understand, and one I’ve often wondered whether he regrets. I had the blood factor. He saw me die. He saved me… I guess. I don’t know what would have happened to me if he hadn’t.
Another shudder passes over me.
“You cold?” Daniel asks, adjusting the temperature before I can answer.
“Flock of geese must be walking over my grave,” I answer, and wince. Sometimes the idioms of the living don’t translate so well.
I don’t have a grave, unless they buried an empty casket and put up a headstone.
How horrible.
I wrench my mind away from all of that, from my old life and morbid matters.
“Daniel?”
“Hmm?”
I chew my bottom lip for a second and decide it’s better to know where we stand. “If you had been here, in St. John’s or wherever, would you have dropped by?”
He opens his mouth to answer, looking like he’s about to stick to the I would have had no reason to line, then pauses and turns to me. His gorgeous eyes soften behind the faintly tinted lenses of his glasses. He swallows hard before he replies.
“I’d have tried to find an excuse to,” he says, his voice suddenly rough in its deeper tones. “And I’d probably have gone mad if I couldn’t. My assignment was long, arduous, and dangerous, but I was glad of all of that. It kept me from thinking about you too much, from feeling like I should be with you. Even if it killed me to leave you alone, my priority was clear.” His jaw muscles tighten. “And I’m aware of how much of an asshole that makes me sound.”
“Good. I didn’t want to be the one to tell you.” There’s not much edge to my voice. I should probably stay mad, but it’s nice to know I wasn’t the only one suffering. We all deal with shit in our own ways, and he’s still working on proving himself to the elders after everything that’s happened in the past few years.
He smiles, just a little. “I missed you, Aviva.” His fingers twitch like he wants to touch me, but he doesn’t.
I rest my hand on his, just for a second. His skin is as cool as mine, and with contact comes a vague sense of the power that animates him. The void. The same as mine.
Or it was.
I pull away, waiting again to see whether he feels anything different in me, but he doesn’t seem angry or uncomfortable. Or nauseated by the faint, foreign power in me, thank goodness.
“I missed you, too,” I admit. Things ended badly between us, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still care about him more than I should. I guess I wouldn’t have been so mad when I saw him if I didn’t. “It’s probably a good thing I didn’t know where you were or what you were up to. I’d have gone nuts with worry.”
“Likewise. I was concerned about you. When that storm hit in March, and I thought you might not be able to get out to feed…”
“It was fine,” I say, maybe a little too quickly. “The snow wasn’t as bad in our area as it was elsewhere.”
He seems to accept this. “Even so, I wasn’t pleased about the company they left you with.” His hands tighten on the steering wheel again. “I couldn’t say anything to Miranda or the others, but it seemed cruel. Even for vampires.”
He doesn’t say even after what you did, but I can’t help hearing it, whether he’s thinking it or not.
It’s hard not to think about my sins when I’ve spent so much time atoning for them.
“The good news is that you’ll be with vampires again for a while.” The cheer in his voice sounds forced, and I frown at him.
“But?”
The purr of the Pathfinder’s engine fills the cabin again for a few seconds. I wish we had music or something. That tightness is coming back to my chest.
“You’re going to be working with some… older vampires,” he says, apparently choosing his words carefully.
Cold dread pools in my belly. “The elders?”
I can’t even process that idea. Miranda was so disgusted with me the last time we spoke that she could barely look at me, and I’ve never met any of the others save for Katya, and she’s gone now.
“Not elders,” he says. “More like elderly.”
“Just tell me.”
Daniel rarely beats around the bush or tries to spare me from harsh realities. I’m glad that tonight is no exception. “You’re to help look after vampires at a high security location.”
“Are they dangerous?”
“Generally, I don’t think so.” He sounds half certain, at least. “They’re older vampires, ones who have lost their way a little. They haven’t kept up with the changing times, or they don’t fit into the clan system well, so they can’t be trusted out in the world where the living might see them and figure out what they are.”
“Oh.” This idea isn’t much easier to wrap my head around than working with the elders would have been, and it’s even more of an unknown, although I’ve always known vampires like that existed.
While we’re not supposed to get involved in human society, we are expected to fit in. We’re required to wear modern clothes, paid for by our wages from Maelstrom. We’re told to watch TV and movies because it helps us keep our speech patterns and references relevant. And we’re allowed to read for entertainment or education, as long as we’re not getting too wrapped up in the lesser concerns of the living or getting emotionally involved in their stories.
It’s a fine line we walk, one that keeps the living from spotting us when we interact with them—on coffee runs, say, or if we bump into them when they’re out later than they’d dare if they knew what really lurks in the shadows. And as time passes and the pace of progress increases, it’s become harder for older vampires to keep up.
I’ve never really questioned what happens to those who decide to give up the game entirely. But I can see how they could be a danger to the secrecy of the supernatural world on par with the threat of the werewolves revealing themselves. Worse, maybe. People would ask a lot more questions about an elderly lunatic lusting after human blood than they would about a wolf running around the island.
“So that should be—” I begin, and stop myself. I thought my last assignment was going to be quiet, too, and some superstitious part of my psyche is hesitant to say the q-word out loud. Instead I ask, “You going to hang around, or are you heading back to your real job?”
I sound casual. Not like it matters. That’s good.
He glances at me from the corner of his eye, slowing the vehicle as we pass a big bull moose standing in the ditch beside the highway. The massive creature holds his crown of antlers high as his spindly legs pick their way over the uneven ground. I twist backward and watch until he’s lost in the darkness.
“I was actually thinking of staying for a while,” Daniel says, “if it’s all the same to you.”
I whip my head around to face him again. So much for casual. “Really?”
He bites back a smile, one white fang visible in the dim
light. My chest tightens again, and it’s not from anxiety this time. I really did miss him, and I can’t help remembering the feel of his teeth on my skin, his lips on my—
He looks at me again, and our gazes lock. Heat like I haven’t felt in far too long washes over me. “I need a vacation,” he says. “Our destination is on the Bonavista peninsula. I’ve heard the home is on an isolated property by the ocean. Quiet, nice views. Absolutely no werewolves.”
“Sure. Might as well, right? I mean, no objection from me.” My voice cracks, and I touch my tongue to my dry lips. I haven’t worn makeup in a year, but Daniel seems to be enjoying the natural look. He looks hungry, though I’m sure he fed before the trip out to get me.
I should be considering my assignment, figuring out what Miranda’s angle might be in sending me there and what kind of punishment it might turn out to be, but I can’t shake my focus away from Daniel. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent the past year hanging out with off-limits companions and shutting down my desires, but he looks better than he ever has. The button-down shirt he’s wearing is cut in that particularly frustrating fit that gives generous hints of the body beneath while keeping all of its enticing secrets.
“Time away from the city did you good,” he says, looking me over again before turning his attention back to the road.
“I’ve kept up my training,” I say. “Plenty of cross-country runs. I missed my old trainer, though. No one kicks my ass quite like you do.”
I can’t help thinking again of our last drive across the island, the reverse of this route. It was summer then, and the night was too short for us to make any stops along the way.
It’s October now, and just past midnight. Longer nights. Plenty of time if we hurry, and I’m not in the mood for teasing.
“Nice night to pull over and look at the stars,” I say as we approach a dark, unmarked road. I trail my fingers over his forearm.
Daniel spins the wheel hard, barely slowing. The Pathfinder slides a little, complaining as it makes the turn, rear tires teasing the edge of the ditch before Daniel pulls us straight. My hand falls from his arm to his thigh, and I grip tight as the momentum presses me against him.
