The Vampire's Ultimatum (Fatal Allure Book 10)

by Martha Woods

  But that wasn’t going to happen without me getting on the move, saying one last goodbye possibly for good to the bunker and closing the hatch behind me. Hopefully, we would get the opportunity to get back out here sometime in the future, it would be a nice winter retreat all things considered.

  “Maybe I can drive my new car out here again as well,” I laughed to myself, shutting the car door and relaxing into the leather seats, fingers squeezing tightly around the steering wheel just to get some semblance of control back into my hands. Here I went again, going off to do something stupid and courageous, or maybe just stupid, to try and save the day when I would much rather be doing literally anything else with my life. Just once I would like to go more than a month without some sort of life changing event happening, just give me a stretch of time where I don’t have to leave bed to do anything except eat, just give me something.

  “Ah screw it, if I die I won’t have to worry about that anymore anyway,” I chuckled, turning the key in the ignition and getting the car moving back along the disused dirt road, “Hey would you look at that, I finally found a positive to this whole situation.”

  And there I went, onwards into danger and fully embracing the foolishness of what I was doing. If I acknowledged how stupid what I was doing was then at least I wasn’t being stupid.

  Right?

  Chapter 2

  It’s times like this that I remember that I never really leave the city that much, sure I drive to the outer districts when someone gets murdered, a depressingly regular occurrence, but it had been over a year since I’d left the actual city limits themselves. Geez, I know that I can get addicted to my work but… do I really have nothing to do outside of that? I love spending time with Damon and Vincent don’t get me wrong, I would trade that for anything in the world, but are they fine with that? With the extent of our adventures together being curling up in front of the tv with some day-old Chinese food?

  The cozy routine was nice of course, and our prospects for travel were… limited when one of us would die in the sun, but surely there was something we could do to liven things up? Even if it was just an overnight trip to the next city over, anything that would let us experience something new that wasn’t confined within the same stretch of the metropolis that we’d become so accustomed to.

  This was the potential mark of a new direction in my life, one free of the trappings of my morbid job and alight with the exciting unknown of the paranormal. I did enjoy my job, don’t get me wrong, the thought that I’d managed to help even one person find closure for the death of a loved one was wonderful, I didn’t regret any of the work that I did for a moment… but immersing yourself in that environment for so long, where the most certain company you had for the majority of your days was a corpse and a binder full of other corpses… that sort of thing gnaws at you, weighs you down until you can’t walk without your nose dragging along the floor. I’d seen it happen to Rick, the ease with which he’d killed a completely innocent person just to have something to frame me with… the Rick that I’d met when I first started this job wouldn’t have been capable of that, no way. While I’m sure that his newfound knowledge of the paranormal pushed him over the edge, he was already standing on the cliffside long before I let him know that vampires existed.

  That’s why I’ve been thinking about leaving for a while now, even before the corruption in our department became a serious known issue to me, I don’t want to end up being one of those burnouts that tosses casefile after casefile into the garbage because I’m just killing time until I can head to the nearest bar, have five or ten drinks and pass out until it’s time to go to work again. I’d seen enough of those in my time at the department, and until recently I had never understood how you could let yourself get to that point, but now I see that it’s so much easier to end up that way when you’ve lost yourself in your work as I had. No life, no relationships aside from those at the department and those who were already dead, sooner or later you would slip and not have anyone to tell you because it just seemed like a natural progression. By the time you’ve started mixing whiskey into your coffee and stopped caring about the next poor person to be laying on top of the morgue table, it was already too late, you would either quit your job to become an alcoholic or keep working as an alcoholic.

  I’m not going to even pretend that I didn’t end up that way because of personal strength, even the strongest material will break eventually if you put it under enough strain. The only reason that I’m here and not at the bottom of a bottle is because I have friends and a found family that loves me, that cares enough about me to call me out on my shit before I can fall too far down the rabbit hole on my bad days, without them I would have lost my way a long time ago.

  And how have they been repaid for that? Being held hostage by some fanatic who seemingly only recently decided that witches were abominations on the same level as vampires and werewolves, strange considering that until recently he was more than happy to make use of our services as long as it served his own ends. To some extent though I… almost understood where he was coming from. Not in regards to empathizing with him, but in knowing how he came to such a warped conclusion of what the right thing to do was. In many ways he is just like so many of the criminals and murderers that I’ve helped put away after finding out whose blood was on their hands, he was so convinced that what he was doing was the right thing to the point of not being able to process anything else lest his mind implode on itself.

  He may not even have started out with the amount of hatred that he has now, even now when he’s not actively trying to kill you he can almost seem… friendly. Well, maybe not, but he at least seems much more human than other times, when he’s not screaming and calling you an abomination against nature. He really, genuinely believes that wiping out people like me is the best thing for humankind, that unless we are all gone and there is no chance of us ever coming back again then the human race is doomed to extinction. Even if I hadn’t come along and ruffled his feathers so badly I don’t have any doubt that he would have eventually turned against witches once all the other paranormals were gone, I just gave him a reason to start hating them sooner.

  He’s actually rather interesting to think about if you took away all the murdering and assault you could see that underneath everything there was a good intention. He wanted to keep himself and the people he cared about safe, that’s something that we can all agree is a noble goal, right? But having a good intention doesn’t make you a good man, and it doesn’t exclude you from being a monster. In fact, throughout history, some of the people responsible for some of the greatest atrocities anyone has ever seen somewhere in all their motives had a good intention. A number of the people who worked on the atomic bomb were pacifists, to the point that they wanted to stop war completely and look how that worked out. One of the blackest stains on humanity’s conscience and a world plunged into a nuclear fear for the next sixty years.

  What must that feel like? Seeing your intentions warped into the very antithesis of what you wanted to happen, to have given birth to something that in many ways is even worse than what you sought to wipe out? Do you know that it’s happened, that because your things are worse than ever and you became a monster for nothing, or do you just block your ears and pretend that everything is all better even though it’s abundantly clear that it’s not, and likely never will be again?

  History kind of shows the latter, and to be honest it’s showing it to me right now. Maybe with enough time and evidence he could be shown the error of his ways… no, no he made his decision, and there is nothing that could be done to make him see otherwise. The only way, the only way that this is going to end is with one of us dead, and if it’s me then he’ll be able to freely kill any paranormals he wants with little in the way of resistance. After all it wasn’t just me that he would be killing, Damon was the best leader material that the hunters that were with us had, Alexis was an incredibly valuable ally, Tariq and Tabitha were essential not just for keepi
ng the witches trained and informed, but for ensuring that the werewolves were still in a position to listen to us and work with us rather than against us.

  Of everyone, the vampires were the only ones who wouldn’t lose any serious leadership, but I’m also almost certain that at least eighty percent of their loyalty to the alliance is due to the friendship that they share with me, without me in the picture anymore… I have no idea what it is that they plan to do with the rest of them.

  “Jesus,” I said to myself, “What a shitshow.”

  At least I could draw myself out of my own mind now that I had passed the city limits and was back in town proper, blocks and blocks of buildings that were just starting to wake up for the day greeting me along the sides of every street that I came across. Not for the first time I was thankful for the tinted windows on this car, otherwise the idea of driving right back into the middle of a town that I more than likely had an APB against me in would have been… utterly insane. Though I suppose one of the top people in charge of issuing those was the person who had framed me in the first place, so I’m pretty sure I’d be screwed either way.

  It’s the same reason as for why I wasn’t just calling Joseph and telling him where I was going to be and when even though it would be so much simpler to just do so. Sure, Tristian had said that they didn’t have the ability to track my phone, especially since it wasn’t my number, but when it came to a situation like that I wasn’t prepared to believe him. Sparing Cara’s life in exchange for mine? Sure, I had an actual reason to believe him judging by his mission to protect humanity and his distaste for Rick shooting an innocent person, but telling me that he didn’t have access to a resource that would allow him to track my whereabouts and listen in on whatever phone calls I was dumb enough to take? No actually, I like to believe that I’m smart enough to smell a trap when I sense one.

  If I picked up my phone right now and told Joseph “I’m going to be on this street, at this time, in this building, bring everyone that you can” I’m completely sure that the only thing waiting for us when we get there is going to be an army of armed hunters and the dead bodies of all my friends, and honestly I wouldn’t have anyone to blame for that but myself. So no, as tempting as it was, especially the closer I got to the police station where hopefully there was someone laying in wait to follow me, I was not going to pick up the phone and reveal all my plans to whoever was listening in. Though I’m sure my way of thinking is going to be expected by at least half of them, considering that the man who had taught me to question everything was the very one threatening to kill me anyway.

  And here it was, looming in front of me like the ghost of terrible nights past, the police station that I had been shot in front of like I was some mad bomber that they had to desperately stop otherwise the world would end, or maybe the guards on duty just decided that it was the perfect opportunity to exercise their right to fantasize about being Rambo, I don’t know. They hadn’t replaced the glass on the front door just yet by the looks of it, nor had they called anyone to repair the front windows of the two stores across the road that they had so carelessly fired into when they were trying to kill me. Jesus if I’d decided to run in the middle of the day some innocent bystander just trying to enjoy a cup of coffee would have gotten a bullet in their forehead for no reason at all, and that would have made me even more furious than getting shot myself. Probably would have made me do something stupid, but whatever I did I hardly think I could be as fucking clueless as to fire at a moving target without checking what was behind it first, were we actually training people now or just giving them an NRA membership and telling them to go nuts?

  A flash of a pair of headlights from an alleyway to my right drew my momentary attention, the faint outline of a car in the darkness making my heart soar. Whoever it was that he’d picked, one of Joseph’s human servants was here to guide them directly to me, however, this next part of the plan went down was in their hands now, all I had to do was show my face and wait for the right time to make my move.

  How unfortunate that I had so little time left to actually mentally prepare myself, and such a brief time to say goodbye to the station potentially forever. For as many bad memories I had with it, definitely counting last night, I couldn’t deny that there were years and years of good memories from within those walls too. My time at the station had helped turn me into the woman I was today, I’d helped hundreds of people find justice when they’d been denied it in life if nothing else I could carry those achievements with me until the very end.

  God, what is it about this drive that’s making me so wistful? I mean, obviously the threat of a very obvious and tragic death, but still… I’m looking out the front windshield at the bakery I used to go to on my breaks and getting emotional over the overpriced donuts I used to buy with a cup of slightly above average coffee, the staple meal for any self-respecting cop for sure, but hardly anything to get misty eyed over. But here we were, sitting in a car passing by every store on the street, the hotdog stand that had somehow been in business with the same owner since I had started at the station, the alley behind the shoe store where I went to cry after one bad case too many, the bar where Cara and myself had gone to celebrate my being hired and decided unanimously to never ever drink there again. I would like to say that maybe I could come back to all of this once this was all cleared up but… I don’t know if I could actually do that, even now?

  I meant what I said before, my old life really was dead and gone, regardless of whether I cleared my name or not. I’d lost faith in my station, in the system as a whole, there was no fixing that at this point, not when I had an option right in front of me that I’d stumbled into and found infinitely healthier for my mind. Ironically consorting with century old murderers was doing more for healing me mentally than dealing with the fresh and unpleasant aftermath of very recent, very disturbed murderers. Maybe it was just the burnout in me talking but… even though by all rights Joseph and the like were all monsters, it was so much simpler just to sit by their side and enjoy a drink, even with the knowledge of what they had done. Vampires in a lot of ways were so much easier to deal with than humans, at least I could pretty clearly pinpoint why they ever did something. If a vampire killed someone ninety-nine times out of a hundred it was because they needed sustenance, alright, still murder and that’s not something I can easily condone, but at least I know right off the bat what the reason was.

  People though? Some of the horrifying things that I’ve seen committed by the most innocuous of people, that scene that was still so fresh in my mind where an ordinary man had slaughtered two witches for… nothing? He’d completely butchered two young, innocent men with all the hope in the world ahead of them for no other reason other than the fact that he wanted to. The killings weren’t a means to an end, he wasn’t gaining life, or power, or even anything that could be measured by any known method. He was just killing them because, and in that his motive was far from unique.

  When it comes down to it I’m just… tired. Tired of evil men getting to act like evil men just because no one can be bothered to stop them, whether it’s laziness, corruption or just plain incompetence. The number of times that I’ve been tempted just to tell Vincent or Joseph or someone to just pick a serial killer and freely eat was too many to count, and once you had the temptation once as a member of law enforcement to willingly break that law you were already on the way out.

  Starting tonight… I’m done, I quit, whatever future there might have been for me in the police is gone, I’m leaving it all behind. That oath that I’d signed to always uphold the law was null and void, and tonight I wasn’t going to let myself be held back in what I did to Tristian and his cronies. I’d never taken a life directly, but if it was what I had to do to ensure that my friends were safe and kept out of harm’s way… then I would personally slaughter a thousand hunters, just for the chance to keep them safe.

  I would have the chance to test my resolve for a task like that out in a second though, with tha
t old warehouse towering ahead of me and a figure very clearly standing on top of the roof, watching over all. A quick glance into the rearview mirror showed me that my tail was still following steadily, a few cars back to ensure that it was blending in, but I would recognize the face of the servant from the mansion anywhere. Nice to see that she was still allowed outside at least.

  When I pulled over to the side of the road in front of the warehouse her speed didn’t waver for a moment, her car driving steadily past me and turning down the next road she came across, no doubt on the way to make a phone call to Joseph letting him and the rest of whoever was gathered exactly where I and the others were. Stage one complete, onto stage two, which apparently involved walking up to the front door where two very burly men were watching me with raised eyebrows and hands resting on the pistols at their sides. Wonderful.

  “Alright, let’s hurry this up,” I said, standing in front of them with my hand tapping impatiently at my hip, “We don’t have all day, right?”

  They nodded to each other, stepping to the side and opening up a space for me to walk between them. I was surprised they weren’t frisking me, considering that everyone involved seemed to be treating this like we were in The Godfather or something, but I guess being a witch was more than enough worry for them already. Judging by the twitchy hands that were still on their guns, they were about ready to blast me if I so much as sneezed weirdly, not sure I should take that as a compliment but… screw it, I will anyway.

  Slowly, they led me through the winding hallways of the warehouse, and wow when Tristian had said this place had been under construction for years he wasn’t kidding. Construction equipment from years ago was still littering the floors, dust that was older than some of the cold cases I worked on caked across every surface that you could see, the air feeling so… thick it was like you could feel yourself choking. What happened here I have no idea about, but this is literally the first time that I’ve heard of this building or of any construction going on in this district, but knowing what I know about the paranormal and knowing how much just one piece of this equipment costs nothing good happened here to make them abandon the project. They definitely weren’t lacking for options on what could have taken issue with them, but whatever it was would likely remain a mystery forever. I certainly wasn’t invested in what had happened here, not when the true reason for me being here was waiting three floors up.