Twilight Guardians

by Maggie Shayne

Emma Benatar wasn’t afraid of vampires. She wasn’t afraid of much of anything. She had swum with sharks in Marzipan Bay, armed only with a waterproof camera. She’d skied among the yaks in Manali and base jumped from the Kuala Lumpur Tower. She always took plenty of photos, and wrote books about them after each trip. It had provided her with a very nice living.

  The reason she was shaking like a dead leaf in a high wind while piloting a small boat just off the Oregon coast had nothing to do with a fear of vampires. It had to do with people, armed, uniformed thugs who answered to no one and played by their own set of rules. Those very kinds of humans were out on the water tonight, too. And if they spotted her, she’d be in trouble.

  The team of men speeding through the waves a few hundred feet farther from shore than she was, were clearly goops–shorthand for Government Operatives. The term had been coined by citizens like her, who were advocating for vampire rights. She was fairly certain, after a lifetime of research, that goops in the employ of the Federal Division of Paranormal Investigations had been responsible for her mother’s disappearance fifteen years ago.

  The night she’d given birth to Emma, Diana Benatar had nearly bled to death. Her blood type was so rare there were no donors on hand and while Emma shared it, you couldn’t take blood form a newborn. But a beautiful vampiress had come to her in the dead of night, and given her what she’d called The Dark Gift.

  From then on, she’d passed as a human with nocturnal tendencies, and had done such a good job of if that even Emma hadn’t guessed how different her mother was until she was twelve. But when Emma asked for the truth, her mother gave it to her. And then she’d gone to wherever it was she went to rest during the day and she’d never returned.

  And those bastards out there, or some just like them, were probably to blame, Emma thought, staring across the waves at them.

  She still didn’t think of her mother as dead. Somehow she couldn’t bear to do that. Her entire life had been devoted to searching for her. The extreme adventures were just an excuse to travel the world, the books just a means to fund her search. And in the process, Emma was learning all there was to know about vampires, and anonymously blogging truths about the Undead.

  One day she would live among them, so she could write their story for the world. And maybe they would help her find her mother in return.

  That’s why she was rowing out into the Pacific in the dead of night. Because they were there.

  Emma’s father Oliver was a serious hacker–as in, the old definition of hacker. Not the kind who could break into your computer and steal your identity, but the kind who could probably tap into communications between the space shuttle and NASA, given the right radio equipment. He’d never given up on finding the love of his life. His involvement with the growing grassroots movement known as ERFU–Equal Rights for the Undead–gave him an outlet for his grief and pain. A focus.

  Earlier, Oliver’s radios had picked up DPI transmissions suggesting that that the Anemone, a research vessel that had been pirated by a gang of vampires, had been sighted near shore, not far south of where Emma was rowing her boat. They’d been heading north and the goops planned to intercept them.

  So she’d come out here in hopes of warning the vamps, and she’d continued monitoring transmissions on a small portable radio that crackled to life so suddenly she almost jumped out of her seat.

  “Strike Team Two, be advised, six individuals have left the ship and are in the water. Repeat, six in the water. Proceed with S & D.”

  Six in the water? Six what? Vampires? Emma leaned forward, snapping up her binoculars to search the waves, as the radio transmitted another message.

  “Strike Team One, stay with the ship. She’s heading west by northwest from last location.”

  Emma set the binoculars down and went back to rowing, but continued to search the horizon for the Anemone or any vampires. All she saw was rippling black water touching a midnight blue sky. Where were they?

  The Anemone had been in the news ever since vampires had boarded her, taken her over, and sent her crew heading for shore in lifeboats.

  Strike Team Two confirmed they were now on S&D for castaways. Emma translated the S in that little code to mean search. And she couldn’t think of anything the D might stand for other than destroy. Which didn’t make any sense. Even bigoted DPI thugs wouldn’t just hunt them down and kill them. Would they? Arrest them, yeah, but kill them?

  She didn’t want to believe that was possible, because if it was, then the chances she might someday find her mother alive were not very good. So it couldn’t be possible.

  Could it?

  A rifle shot cracked the silence of the open sea like a lightning strike. Emma jumped so hard her boat rocked sideways and water sloshed over and onto her feet. She yanked off her headset, and spotted lights speeding across the distant waves. The speedboats of Strike Team Two. Another shot split the night, reverberating in her chest.

  She quickly pulled in the oars and grappled for her binoculars. Then she peered through, and what she saw made her stomach heave.

  Goops were using long poles to pull limp bodies out of the ocean. First one, and then a second.

  “They did it. They just shot them on sight. My God.”

  She put the binoculars down and fiddled with the dial of her portable radio, jumping nervously when it crackled, and remembering belatedly to put the headset back on.

  “We got two of them, Captain.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yessir. Point blank, center mass, no question.”

  “Descriptions?”

  “One male, one female. Dark hair. Similar in appearance. Possibly siblings. Apparent physical age....sixteen to eighteen human years, but with them, who the hell knows?”

  Oh, God. Two dead. Two teenagers shot dead. Executed. And for what? Just for being vampires? Emma’s blood seemed to chill in her veins. She knew the DPI was out of control, but she’d had no idea they were sanctioned to commit cold-blooded murder.

  “Strike Team Two, there were six splashes picked up on sonar. Any other targets sighted?”

  “Negative, sir.”

  Emma was staring off in their direction while listening in, so the odd ripple in the water caught her eye right away. It was like a wake without a boat. And it was heading toward her, disrupting the water like a torpedo might do. She tensed as it drew close. And then it sped past.

  What the hell was that? Something below the surface, moving rapidly and heading north. A high speed submarine? Or a vampire escaping execution?

  The radio came to life again. “Jesus! Sir, they’re waking up–they’re not dea–mayday maydaaaaiiiieee–”

  The scream sliced her eardrums, and she yanked the headset off wide eyed, as another speedboat headed for the one with the two apparently not-so dead vamps onboard.

  But how could they not be dead? They had been shot point blank in the chest, according to what she’d heard. Center mass.

  There were shouts, shots, scuffling as she sat there, riveted, unsure what to do. But then the two boats began heading for shore, one towing the other. She had to get closer, she couldn’t help herself. It was risky, yes, but she was human. Humans had constitutional rights. If caught, she’d play dumb. No one had yet connected her to the anonymous ERFU blog. As far as anyone knew, she was just a risk-taking adventure writer. Not a vampire rights activist.

  So she turned her boat around and headed for a spot on the shore where she would blend in with the trees and rocks along the wild Oregon coastline.

  There were lights and a lot of activity out on the water as those speedboats moved toward shore. She tried to row faster. She’d gone out a long ways, but if she used her motor, they might hear her. If their sonar had picked up the splashes of vampires jumping overboard from a stolen ship, they’d hear a boat motor. And if they spotted her, she could end up in a cell.

  That’s ridiculous. They can’t arrest humans without cause, only vampires. If they spot me, I’ll just dump
the equipment, pick up the fishing pole, and make like I was out for some midnight fishing and wandered stupidly into a government operation. Simple. Besides, they’re in chaos. They’re probably not even monitoring the sonar anymore.

  She started the boat’s motor and headed for shore, but angled north of where the commotion was happening, and made it far sooner than the speedboats, who’d been much farther out, and were crawling their way back in.

  When she was close to shore, she cut the motor and glided into a mass of trees that hung out over the water, their long tendrils dangling in the froth and foam. There, she beached her boat, hitched the portable radio unit over her shoulder by its canvas strap, and put her headset back on again.

  “What the hell is going on out there? Damage report, STAT!” The male voice was angry, or maybe afraid.

  “Sorry, Commander.” This was not the same voice that had been on the radio before. This was a new one. “We have two men dead, two more injured. The prisoners have been tranquilized and bound.”

  “Who told you to take vamp prisoners? Your orders are KOS.”

  Kill on sight, Emma thought.

  “The prisoners aren’t vampires, sir. They’re Offspring.”

  There was a moment of silence, then, “You want to shout that from a megaphone in case anyone missed it? What part of classified do you not comprehend?”

  “Sorry sir. We’re within sight now.”

  “Get them here. Radio silence until you do. Starting now.”

  There wasn’t another sound. Emma watched from the cover of the draping willow’s fronds as the three boats sped toward shore a few hundred yards south of where she was. Offspring. What the hell were offspring? Apparently, it was something that could be shot with a rifle, appear to be dead, and then come back to life powerfully enough to kill two armed, trained militia.

  Quickly, she pulled her headset down around her neck so she would hear anyone approaching, and dragged her boat into a deep pile of brush, making sure it was completely hidden. Then she hurried nearer, composing a cover story in her head as she went. Out walking, heard shots, came to investigate. She lived nearby and was concerned.

  Right, and what do I do when they ask to see my license to verify my address?

  The goops’ voices came to her now. She was that close. She dropped down on all fours and crept closer still. A copse of brush and a few boulders were all that stood between her and the group of armed men. They were carrying their dead out of the boats now, and she strained her eyes to see in the darkness. A van backed up, taillights providing grim red illumination of the dead men. She wouldn’t have known they were men at all. They looked as if they’d...exploded. Their khaki fatigues were tattered, their faces and heads were blood and gore, and one guy was missing an arm.

  The two mangled bodies were handed off to a man who was inside the van, while the wounded men were helped around to a waiting truck.

  Then two more goops came, and they were carrying their prisoners.

  Kids. They were kids. Teenagers, for God’s sake. The girl hung limply in the arms of her captor, her hands bound in front of her. She had a tangled mane of wet, brown hair, elfin features, a small, lithe frame. She wasn’t pale like a vampire. The boy was long and lanky, with shorter hair but just as wild, just as dark. He had the build of a boy, not yet a man. His shoulders, his arms and legs were still in that too lean, teenage phase.

  Offspring. They didn’t look like anything but a couple of innocent kids to her. And yet, if they had done that to the dead men, they were obviously more than that. A lot more.

  Someone’s radio came to life, and she ducked instinctively at the noise, pulling her own headset back into place.

  “No sign of the Anemone, Commander, sir. She just...vanished.”

  “She has a habit of doing that, hasn’t she?”

  As the man answered, Emma watched him, still bathed in the glow of vehicle lights. The commander was tall, muscular, with a face like a hound dog and the paintbrush lashes of a little child. She wouldn’t forget that face.

  “Let’s call it a night,” he said. “Report to me for debrief as soon as you arrive.”

  Arrive where? Emma wondered, willing them to say.

  “Yes, sir!”

  The commander clipped his radio to his belt. He put one hand on the van’s open doors, and stared at the bodies inside. Then, with a disgusted shake of his head, he slammed the doors closed and banged three times on the side.

  The van lurched into motion and the commander walked with a pronounced limp to a nearby truck and got in.

  Soon they were all gone. And she sat there amid the boulders. The waves rushed in, tripping over each other all the way up the sandy shore, then hissing and bubbling back out again. The stars twinkled above. Not a cloud in the sky. It was like paradise. Like she hadn’t just seen the horrors she had.

  She could almost have closed her eyes, gone to sleep, and then told herself it had all been just a bad dream come morning.

  But Emma knew of worse things, things her father hadn’t told her until she was much older. Her mother used to spend her days in a building purchased by a group of vampires for that purpose. It was supposed to be their haven. Diana knew there was danger, even then, before most humans were aware that vampires existed outside of fiction. She wouldn’t spend her days in her home, because she had believed that doing so would put her family at risk. That warehouse had been burned to the ground by some hateful idiot who had known, and who had probably had believed a group of vampires to be asleep and helpless inside.

  And maybe they’d been right. Maybe her mother died that day.

  No, she did not.

  By the time Oliver had gone to search for his bride, alarmed when she didn’t arrive for their usual family dinner just after sunset, all he’d found was a pile of smoldering rubble and ash. When vampires burned, they burned completely. She might have been in there. Or she might not.

  Emma wondered now, whether the bastards she’d just witnessed shooting, drugging and abducting two kids were the same ones who had taken her mother from her. Men who feared and therefore destroyed anything they didn’t understand.

  Emma had wanted to walk with vampires for reasons of her own. To live among them, to ask them directly for information on her mother, and to learn the truth about their lives in their own words, instead of sifting bits of truth from the mountains of bull written about them over the centuries. She would blog the experience at www.ERFU.org, and eventually write a book about it, telling the world the real story, because the world currently had it all wrong. Vampires and humans had been embroiled in an undeclared war ever since the existence of the Undead had become public knowledge.

  Those were her reasons for searching for them tonight, for coming to this place where the Anemone had been sighted. Those reasons and one more. To warn them that the government knew where they were, if she could. But now, finding the vampires was more important than ever. She had to let them know that DPI goops had taken those two kids prisoner. They must have been together aboard that ship. They must have jumped overboard at the same time. She’d seen that torpedo-like wake speeding away from the scene of the attempted execution before the teens had revived. The vampires might not even know the kids were still alive. She had to find them and she had to tell them, no matter the risk. To do otherwise would feel immoral to Emma. It would feel like a betrayal of her mother.

  She knew of only one way to make contact and hoped there was enough of the night left to make it happen.

  So she stashed the radio and headset where she thought she would be able to find them again, away from the reach of the tides, and concealed under rocks and ferns. She was going to get wet–very wet–and she didn’t want to destroy her father’s equipment unnecessarily. She wrapped her cell phone in one of the plastic zipper bags she’d brought along, made sure of a tight seal, and shoved it into her jeans’ pocket. Then she walked back to her little boat, pushed it into the surf, and climbed inside, start
ing the motor and heading north, the same way that torpedo path had been going. She didn’t know how far away the vampires would be. She couldn’t begin to compete with their speed, even with a small outboard motor.

  But she also knew they would come to her if she was in trouble. They had before. One vampire in particular had. Twice in her lifetime. She didn’t think they had a choice about it. She was BD positive, one of the Chosen, just as her mother had been before her. She had the rare Belladonna Antigen in her blood. Only the Chosen could become vampires, and every vampire had been one of the Chosen before the change. Vampires sensed these rare humans, and were compelled to watch over them, to protect them, to help them when they got into trouble. So to make contact with the vampires, Emma had to get herself into trouble. Real trouble. Life-threatening trouble. And if they were close enough, they would come.

  And if they weren’t....

  If they weren’t, she hoped her swimming muscles hadn’t gone to hell since her last triathlon, because she was going to need every one of them.

  Look for THE RHIANNON CHRONICLES in fall of 2015!

  Wings in the Night: Reborn

 

 

  If you liked TWILIGHT GUARDIANS, you might also like

  Eternal Love: The Immortal Witch Series

  Also Available

  Annie’s Hero

  Witch Moon

  Dr. Duffy’s Close Encounter

  Miranda’s Viking

  Forgotten

  Musketeer By Moonlight

  The Bride Wore A Forty-Four

  Fairytale

  Forever Enchanted

  Once Upon A Time

  Everything She Does is Magick

  The Fairy’s Wish

  The Bad Ass Brides Collection

  The Witch Collection

  Gingerbread Man

  Eternity

  Infinity

  Destiny

  Eternal Love: The Immortal Witch Series

  Zombies! A Love Story

  The Texas Brands

  The Littlest Cowboy

  The Baddest Virgin in Texas

  Badlands Bad Boy

  Long Gone Lonesome Blues

  Texas Guardian

  Lone Star Lonely

  The Outlaw Bride

  Texas Angel

  Texas Homecoming

  The Oklahoma All-Girl Brands

  The Brands Who Came for Christmas

  Brand-New Heartache

  Secrets and Lies

  A Mommy For Christmas

  One Magic Summer

  Sweet Vidalia Brand

   

  And MAGGIE’S NON-FICTION

  Shayne On You

  Magick and the Law of Attraction: A User’s Guide

   

  About the Author

   

  New York Times bestselling author Maggie Shayne has published more than 60 novels and 23 novellas. She has written for 7 publishers and 2 soap operas, has racked up 15 Rita Award nominations and actually, finally, won the damn thing in 2005.

   

  Maggie lives in a beautiful, century old, happily haunted farmhouse named “Serenity” in the wildest wilds of Cortland County, NY, with her husband and soul mate, Lance.  They share a pair of English Mastiffs, Dozer & Daisy, and a little English Bulldog, Niblet, and the wise guardian and guru of them all, the feline Glory, who keeps the dogs firmly in their places.  Maggie’s a Wiccan high priestess (legal clergy even) and an avid follower of the Law of Attraction

   

  Connect with Maggie

  Maggie’s Website

  WingsInTheNight.com

  Maggie’s Bliss Blog

  Maggie’s Coffee House Blog

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