by Holly Ryan
A rustling noise sounded from behind some bushes up ahead, like a plastic bag caught in a windstorm. Close, I realized as I came upon the back of the Appelt mausoleum. A black trash bag had been taped over what had been the stained glass window I’d jumped through, and it rustled in the chilly breeze. The window had been my only way out since that was the day I’d lost my ability to open doors. The doors inside that mausoleum anyway. Could Detective Appelt open them?
Once I’d cleared the far wall of the mausoleum, I peered into the cemetery through the iron fence. My breath hitched. Deep within the shadows near the center hovered two red eyes close to the ground. Had my imaginary cat turned into a vampire? Doubtful. This was a newly risen vamp who was climbing out of a fresh grave.
With my stake, shovel, flamethrower, duffel, and hubcap gripped tight, I sprinted around the graveyard to the front gate, already unlocked since I broke it earlier. Detective Appelt might come back with a new lock, but hopefully not right away. Once inside, I flung down everything in my arms and then slipped the stake free from my bun. My gaze on the vampire, I charged. But before I reached him, his blood was already spraying the ground. A dark figure hunched behind what was left of him, the bloodied end of a sword held high in a gloved hand.
I blinked and then blinked again. This was highly unusual. Last time I’d checked, I was the slayer. Naïve and inept at times, but still the slayer. I got a golden letter informing me of my new duty when I was nine years old, with no return address and no instructions for a confused, terrified child on how to fulfill this “destiny.” But it had explicitly stated there was only one chosen to do the dispatching. So what the fuck was this?
“Who are you?” I demanded.
The figure rose, the head-to-toe black leather creaking. They wore so much of it, I couldn’t be sure if their frame belonged to a man or woman, and their face was obscured by a black hood. I couldn’t even see any eyes to see if they were a vampire who was hunting its own kind for shits and giggles. Or another slayer, as impossible as I thought that was.
He-She-It took one look at me and visibly shuddered in repulsion.
My blood simmered. I didn’t do rude behavior from strangers, especially when that vampire had been mine to bag. “Oh, my sweet summer child, don’t make me ask you again.”
He-She-It strode past me toward the gate, pretending like I wasn’t even there.
“Hey!” I drew two more stakes for maximum flaying, one from my boot and the other from my belt loop, and turned and marched after them.
But they’d already gone. Poof, just like that.
I crashed my back teeth together as I spun in a circle, searching the entirety of the graveyard.
One thing about my nightly patrols—they were becoming increasingly crowded.
Chapter Two
I jerked my thumb in the direction of the graveyard. “Pretty sure I just saw another vampire slayer.”
My three favorite heads shook disbelievingly. We were all gathered in the kitchen, a plate of apple pie and a steaming cup of coffee in front of me. After my patrol, I’d told Jacek who’d been practicing judo in the living room, and once he recovered from the shock, he’d gone to get the others.
“That’s not possible.” Sawyer shook his head from the seat next to mine, his black silky curls flirting with his bronzed jaw. “There’s only been one slayer at a time for as long as I’ve been around. Probably longer.”
Sawyer was almost nine hundred years old, so he should know. Still, I couldn’t deny what I’d seen.
“But there was slaying of vampires, and not by me,” I said.
“Another vampire, maybe?” Jacek asked from my other side.
I swallowed another bite of pie, its cinnamon sweetness delighting every taste bud. “What could a brand new vampire have done in such a short amount of time after rising to piss off another vampire though? The vampire had literally just crawled out from a grave.”
Eddie nodded, pacing away from the microwave while he waited for his mug of blood to finish heating. His white button-up dress shirt had come undone from his black pants and poked out like a tail. “Plus, the fact that this person, whoever it was, was inside the cemetery at night where new vampires tend to congregate. It feels deliberate. As if they wanted to be seen.”
“Or as if they couldn’t help it,” I said, blotting my mouth with a napkin. “Like me. If I procrastinate enough, my stomach starts cramping and my feet start itching unless I get to the graveyard.”
Eddie frowned as the microwave beeped. “We need more information.”
“What did their sword look like?” Sawyer asked.
“Uh.” I hadn’t been as focused on the sword as I had the person carrying it. Closing my eyes, I rewound my memory like a movie reel. “Black steel. It may have had some symbols etched into it. Sharp enough to reduce a vampire to confetti.”
Jacek glanced at Sawyer over my shoulder. “No bells are ringing from the description.”
Eddie strode toward the table, his sinful mouth puckered as he blew into his cup. His wild blond hair fell across his forehead and skimmed his glasses. “Should you see this person again, try to engage them in conversation. Even one detail might tell us who it is.”
“I sort of tried that already,” I said.” The only thing I got out of them was that they don’t think too highly of me.”
Jacek grinned. “All that tells us about them is that they’re an idiot. Hardly enough to go on, unfortunately.”
“I have a feeling I’ll see whoever it was again. I think they were sizing me up.” Kind of the story of my life lately. First impressions probably portrayed me as just some blonde with a messy bun, a wooden stake pushed through it Pebbles-style, and a Duck Tales shirt on. Nothing to take too seriously. Except I was dead serious about my forced role as the slayer, so much so that even Paul hadn’t taken me down. Yet. And I planned on keeping it that way by becoming the monster that could defeat another monster. So first impressions be damned. I was so much more than my appearance anyway, a lesson quickly learned by those on the wrong end of a stake.
Sawyer put his arm behind my back and massaged his fingertips into my shoulder, lessening some of the burden I carried there. “What did your slayer sense tell you about them?”
“That they’re not very impressed with me or what I do. That they could do better if I got out of the way.” I heaved a sigh. All of this made me feel severely off my game when I needed to be right on track. I couldn’t even open the trapdoor in the Appelt mausoleum with the shovel or blowtorch. “That they’re a slayer.”
Frowns crossed my vampires’ beautiful mouths, though I didn’t doubt for one second that they believed me. We had always been honest with each other, and I knew they valued it almost as much as I did.
Eddie started from the room, his mug in one hand, while he pushed his glasses higher on his nose. “I’ll do some reading on it after these damn law students stop asking me elementary questions.”
I smiled after him. Eddie worked as an online law librarian, that sexy brain of his constantly in use.
“Next time they ask a stupid question, insist on answering with an interpretive dance,” I called after him. My boss, Sylvia, and I always joked we’d do that at The Bean Dream next time someone asked if we sold coffee. It’s a coffee shop, people!
Eddie chuckled on his way out, his shoulders bouncing.
Jacek turned to me, wide-eyed. “Did you just make Smiley laugh?”
I grinned as I picked up my mug. “Probably.”
Sawyer rose from the table, taking his massaging fingers with him. “I’m supposed to be on shift right now, but I’ll help Eddie research as soon as I’m finished.”
My grin morphed into a wince. Sawyer worked for a suicide prevention hotline, and I hated that I was pulling him away from such important work. He strode out quickly.
That left Jacek and I sitting at the table next to each other in comfortable silence. Our expressions were both stuck on thoughtful frowns, so he snapped
us both out of it by winking at me. I attempted to wink back, but it probably looked like I had something lodged inside my eye. He laughed, the sound bubbling happiness throughout the warm, cozy kitchen.
“Were we just having a scowling contest before you winked at me?” I asked.
“We don’t hold a candle to Eddie. He wins all the scowling contests unless you’re making him laugh.”
I grinned while studying the handsome cut of his jawline, the curve of his beautifully honed bare shoulders. “So what makes you so happy?”
His orange-yellow eyes crinkled in the corners. “You mean other than you?”
“Yeah.”
“Movement.”
I quirked an eyebrow. “How so?”
“Walking across a room, stretching down to my toes... I can feel every part of my body reacting to a single movement. It’s freeing.” His mouth twisted. “I don’t think I’m explaining this very well.”
I cupped my chin in my palm, elbow on the table, and coasted the toe of my boot up his leg. “You’re doing fine.”
“In that case...” He gave a secret smile down at the tabletop, as if a memory had just played across its surface. “There was a day when I was able to move again after several years. I’ll never forget that feeling”—he gazed up at me, a sudden hardness to his expression—“of simply walking.”
“Move...again...” I swallowed down the hidden question mark in those two words.
Jacek’s past was violently scarred upon his back, and I didn’t know if his moving again was related or if I wanted to know. Someone had obviously hurt him, a man with a gilded smile that stuttered my breaths every time I saw it, and it hollowed out my heart to think about someone willfully looking past that just to torture him. To break him. But it hadn’t. He was the very opposite of broken.
“I was held captive for two hundred fifty years,” he continued. “Chained to the same wall I stared at for all that time. I memorized that wall, the zigzag of cracks, how the cold stone numbed my cheek so much when I passed out against it that I could hardly move my face to speak.”
My throat pulled tight, and I closed my eyes against the images his memories provoked. His back would’ve been left exposed to whatever horror had chained him up in the first place.
“Who?” I whispered.
He searched my eyes, his signature grin gone as well as any sign of distress, which proved a million times over how strong he was. “A slayer named Roseff.”
That truth slammed into me, stealing my breath and shattering my entire world view. Slayers were the good guys, at least according to me and how I saw my duty. If no slayer was supposed to live past twenty-one and survive Paul, then how could a slayer’s brain become so warped in such a short amount of time? I would never dream of torturing a vamp. My kills were quick—I made sure of that. I respected my role and the vamps, so much so that I slept with three of them. Still, though, I wasn’t a...monster. But I needed to be if I was going to defeat Paul.
Shit. Was that what had happened? Had this slayer tortured Jacek in order to survive Paul somehow? Was that what I would become?
“A...a slayer tortured you for two hundred fifty years?” I slid my hand across to the table for him to squeeze, for proof that he was here, with me, instead of chained to a wall somewhere.
He threaded his fingers through mine and held my hand with both of his. “I wasn’t the only one, but yes. Rather than killing us, Roseff would pick us apart slowly, study how long we could go without blood, and see what made us tick.”
“A madman.”
“I actually wasn’t a vampire when he captured me. I was human, twenty-four years old and working for the family business building wagons.” He shrugged. “But instead, I was meant to be food for the other vampires the slayer had captured. A striking case of wrong place, wrong time. There is no casual biting among vampires. We bite to change others or during sex. I consider myself lucky I was changed.”
I could only imagine why he thought that way.
“It was Sawyer who sprang all of us out,” he said quietly, his gaze vacant.
Sawyer had also been accustomed to chains when he was sold into slavery before the Necron Brotherhood “rescued” him. How could either of them function after something like that? It was a testament to their strength, their unerring will to do better than those who wronged them. It was humbling, honestly, that they chose to function around me.
“How do you do it?” I asked, barely able to push the words around the knot in my throat. “How can you sit in the same room with me, a slayer, after one of us did horrible things to you?”
He slid me a sideways look and half smiled. “You’re not my captor. Far from it.”
“Maybe that slayer was good at one time.”
“If so, I never saw it. Ever in that entire span of two hundred fifty years. With you, I see good, more and more every single day, more than I’ve seen in any slayer except...” A shadow crossed his face, another memory from another time, and he seemed to cave in on himself a little.
“Except what?”
He inhaled and let the breath out slowly. “In my two hundred seventy-four years, there has only been one slayer who used that role for cruel intentions. Not too bad, if you really think about it.”
That didn’t exactly answer my question, but I let it slide. For now. I didn’t want to make him relive anything he didn’t want to.
“So this slayer...” I hesitated to even use that word since he’d been anything but. “How did he live so long? What happened to him?”
“Roseff figured out a way to become immortal. A vampire slayer in the most literal way possible. That had been his goal all along, why he kidnapped humans and vampires alike, why he experimented on them, tortured them. He wanted to be the slayer forever, and he found out how.”
I rolled this over in my mind for a moment. “Then how am I here? The slayer?”
“I killed him,” he said matter-of-factly. “As soon as Sawyer set me free, I moved across my cell, driven by freedom and revenge...and killed him.”
I sucked in a deep breath and nodded. I’d never been so happy about someone’s death in my life.
“He’s how we know how to turn slayers into vampires, and why we’re offering that choice to you.”
“I see.” I grazed my fingers over his knuckles, our hands still twined together on the tabletop, as I chose my next words carefully. “I’m not excusing what that slayer did at all, but do you think he was looking for a way to escape Paul?”
Jacek’s expression turned thoughtful. “I suppose it’s possible. He lasted over two hundred fifty years instead of the usual slayer lifespan of dying before twenty-one.”
Which meant he’d survived Paul. But there was only one way to do that, at least that I knew of.
And so the slayer shall seek solace with the devil. Then, and only then, will she live, hell’s rules notwithstanding. For otherwise, she will not survive past the year one and twenty.
That was a passage I’d memorized from one of Eddie’s books. So had Roseff sought solace with the devil? I was guessing he hadn’t had to marry the devil, so what kind of solace was given? But then why did Roseff experiment with immortality and vampirism?
In the end, it hadn’t mattered because he didn’t survive Jacek. Even as an immortal, death could still catch up to you. I proved that every night I went patrolling. Becoming a vampire seemed like a short-term solution in the whole Paul scenario. Sure, maybe it would help me escape him, but was that what I wanted to do? Just escape? Or did I want to give Paul a beat-down to end all beatdowns for picking on slayers for hundreds, if not thousands, of years? Not saying I could, but what if? Then no other slayer after me would ever have to go through this nightmare of trying to survive him.
“I don’t know, Jacek,” I said. “What if becoming a vampire was part of what pushed Roseff over the edge?”
“He was long over the edge before that. But the offer of immortality stands indefinitely.” A heart-stopping gri
n lit up his ochre eyes. “No need to make any decisions today beyond pie or more pie if you don’t want to.”
“No more pie.” I pushed my empty plate away with a shake of my head. “Have you seen where I’ve been putting it all lately?”
“As a matter of fact...I have.” He winked. “You wear pie like nobody’s business.”
I laughed, wrapping my other hand over our already entwined ones. “I like this. Just sitting with you and listening and watching you wink at me.” I snorted softly at how strange that sounded, but it was true.
I could tell the three of them anything without even having to think about it, which was so freeing, so...exactly what I needed. With Mom, it had almost been that way, except for the whole slayer thing, which was an astronomical part of my life. Not telling her had killed me, but I literally couldn’t say a word about it. But with my vamps, everything was easy.
“I like it too.” He pulled me to my feet by our clasped hands. “But I also like whooping your sweet ass.”
The way he was looking at me, exactly the way I imagined I looked at pie, made me sway on my feet. “Whooping or whipping?”
He threw back his head in a laugh. “You play your cards right and there could be both.”
“Nope,” I said. “I play my cards right, and I’ll be the one doing both.”
“Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. Challenge accepted.” He squeezed my hands as he jerked his head toward the living room. “How do you feel about a little target practice?”
“My aim is already excellent.” I leaned in for a quick kiss with the intent to prove my lip accuracy, but then he wrapped his arms around me, holding me flush against his body.
His fist knotted at the back of my head. His eyes blazed red as he dragged my mouth to his again, this time in a long, searing kiss. My blood thrummed underneath my skin, pulsing a sharp ache between my thighs. I ground my hips into his, my whole body seeking release, seeking his hard cock pressing against his athletic pants, seeking all of him.
His tongue lavished my mouth while his hand cupped my ass so he could grind against me too. He sank into his chair again, pulling me on top of him so I straddled his lap. The perfect position to work myself into a frenzy even though I was still fully clothed. Didn’t seem to matter to my body. I writhed against him, moaning at the feel of my own drenched panties rubbing against my slick pussy, and the rock-hard length of him.
