by Keary Taylor
“Element of surprise is a beautiful thing,” Smith says, and it’s possible it may be the first thing I’ve ever heard him say.
“And a terrible one,” I say, standing before the three of them. “Do you know who I am?”
“Conrath, Royal Born scum,” the uninjured man spits at me. Literally spits at me. The slick mess lands on my boot.
A swift foot swings forward, and Danny’s boot buries itself in the man’s stomach. He doubles over, crumpled in pain, with probably a slew of broken bones.
“Guess you do know who I am,” I say, wiping the spit from my shoe on the man’s shoulder. “What is it your group has against my family and my kind?”
The woman laughs, an annoying and over the top thing. “You’re kidding, right? Just thousands of years lived in servitude.”
“Yet, as far as I can tell, your leader has put you into that same servitude,” I say, stepping in front of her. “I have eighteen members of my House, and not one of us has any Bitten with a Debt to us.”
This shuts the woman up, but she continues to glare at me with glowing eyes.
“You didn’t answer the first part of my question,” I say, turning to the man with the bloody lip. “What does your leader have against my family?”
He stares at me a long moment, the hatred burning so bright in his eyes. But something tells me it isn’t just hatred for me. There’s a self-loathing there that I’m so familiar with. And I pity this man. He’s had his free will taken from him. Enlisted into a war he probably had no clue about.
“History runs long,” he finally mutters under his breath. “Birthrights should not always just run through blood-”
The man Danny kicked suddenly lashes out, smacking the crown of his head down on the other man’s nose. “Shut your damn mouth!” he bellows.
Anna wraps her hand around the man’s neck, shoving him back up against the wall, buckling the cheap plaster. “No, not another word from you,” she seethes. “Unless you have something helpful to add to the conversation.”
“What else can you tell me?” I ask, squatting down in front of the man with the bleeding lip. I hope my expression is open, soft. That he might feel that he can talk to me and that I won’t hurt him unless I have to.
“Nothing,” he says, hanging his head, shame in his eyes.
“You really think our leader hasn’t covered all the bases?” the woman chimes in again. “You’re a fool to think you’ll get any information out of any of us.”
“For your sake, you better hope that isn’t true,” Ian says, his eyes flashing in anger.
Once more, I turn to the man who is cowering. It’s clear, he wants no part in this. But he also can’t fight the Debt he’s been weighted with. I squat in front of him once more, placing a hand on his shoulder.
His eyes flick up to mine, and the conflict there is so apparent. This is a man in pain. A slave. A prisoner.
“Who created you?” I ask him quietly.
And it’s as if my question has set off a bomb.
The woman instantly thrusts herself backward, shoving Trinity’s stake deep into her chest. The man Anna holds does the exact same thing, impaling himself.
And the man I kneel in front of suddenly lunges at me, his fangs bared. Smith cuts him clean through the chest in an instant, and the man slumps forward onto me, dead.
I shove him off of me, scrambling back a few steps, coated in blood, horror filling me.
It all happened so fast. Over in just two or three seconds. Every single one of them, dead. “What the hell just happened?” I breathe, my voice coming out in kind of a shriek.
“You’re okay,” Ian says, more to himself than to me as he checks me over for injury. I’m fine—just covered in another vampire’s blood.
“They must have been commanded to kill themselves the second someone asked about the leader’s identity,” Anna comments. She removes her stake from the man’s chest, wiping the blood off on his shirt.
“Shit,” Samuel says. He looks a little pale. “That was our one and only lead. And they’re all dead!”
“Cool it, buster,” Danny says. “There might still be clues in here. We’ll find something useful.”
“If nothing else, should be stuff on that laptop,” Trinity says, nodding her chin in its direction where it sits on the table.
“Okay,” Anna says, taking control of the situation. “Trinity, I want you to take that laptop to Lexington right now. We’ve made our move, let’s keep the momentum going. Danny, I want you watching the perimeter. Who knows who’s out there watching us? The rest of you, I want searching this crap can for any clues.”
And search we do. In every cupboard, before removing the cupboards from the walls, making sure there’s nothing stashed behind. We throw them outside to get them out of the way. We go through the bedroom, ripping open every pillow and blanket. Samuel pulls up the carpet. Smith cuts open the couch, ripping out every bit of stuffing and every single spring. Ian starts ripping apart the walls, searching every square inch of the place for a single clue.
The trailer is well lived in. It’s old, rundown. Dirty. I’m guessing one of the three used to live here before being turned.
But we don’t find a single clue left. No evidence, no indicators of the larger picture.
“I don’t think they were here for long,” I say. “I’d guess only a few days, even. And I think it was only the three of them staying here. There’s not enough space, and it’s not…dirty enough for a bunch of people staying here.”
“I’m guessing they’re moving their members frequently,” Anna says, nodding in agreement. “Never staying in one place for more than a few days, turning people as they go and taking over their homes.”
“They have probably never kept everyone in one place, this whole time,” Ian says as he tosses one of the bodies to the foot of the front steps. “Makes it harder to find them, keeps their entire army from being taken out.”
“While we sit in two mansions looking like sitting ducks,” Samuel huffs in frustration as he swings a booted foot at the remaining man.
“Look, at least this is something,” I say, placing a calming hand on his arm. “We’ve had nothing up until this point. Lexington will find something we can use. If we have to keep disabling them, one tiny cell at a time, we’ll do it. They’ve taken ten months to get to this point. We’ll run faster than they can walk.”
He looks at me, and the frustration is still there in his eyes. But he nods, and I see the fight calm in him.
“It doesn’t look like we’re going to find anything.” I observe the mess we’ve made.
“There’s nothing here,” Anna agrees with the shake of her head.
“Let’s get back to the house then,” I say, jumping from the trailer, over the body, and landing on the grass. “No use sitting out here exposed.”
Danny circles back around to us, giving the all clear. And before we walk away, he flicks a lighter toward the leaking propane tank, and the whole thing goes up in a ball of flames.
ANOTHER WAY YOU TAKE DOWN a House?
You turn the town where it’s established against it.
Another rock is thrown, shattering a window in the library. The window coverings still block out the sunlight, but the sound of shattering glass is unmistakable.
“You swear this wasn’t you?” Luke says again as he looks around a window covering, swearing under his breath.
“I promise, Luke, this wasn’t us,” I say, adrenaline surging in my blood. The angry shouts are scattered around the house, growing more intense.
“I kept an eye on everyone at the Institute,” Lillian confirms. “Besides Trinity and Samuel, the other six were with me the entire night.”
“We were tracking the Bitten down,” I repeat. “And then we went home. Everyone was accounted for. I swear Luke, this was not any of us. This is the army’s second move.”
He looks back at me, glaring hard. This keeps happening, over and over. The tactics between me and
an enemy, with Silent Bend caught in the crosshairs and him having to be the mediator in the middle.
“Okay,” he says with a curt nod. “I’m going to take care of this immediate situation, but just know, this might not ever be repaired. They killed Elijah for damn near the same thing.”
“Further proving the point,” Ian says in panic. “That’s exactly what they’re trying to do. Get Alivia burned at the stake!”
The blood has run cold in my veins. It’s true. They killed my uncle once for nearly this very thing.
Luke swears under his breath again and stalks toward the front door. He opens it, letting in a blaze of brilliant sunlight that every one of us shy into the shadows from. But I can’t look away. I have to see how this plays out.
Luke walks to the edge of the front steps. Out on the lawn, I see a dozen people. With rocks in their hands. Guns. Lengths of rope. And death in their eyes. But none of them are looking at Luke.
He pulls his side arm from its holster and fires one shot into the air.
Which immediately grows silent. And, every eye turns to Luke as they all freeze.
“Every single one of you is trespassing,” he bellows, commanding their attention as the Sheriff of Silent Bend. “I know you think you know what’s going on, but this is not what it looks like. You’ll leave, immediately, and I promise you, you will be given answers.”
I see an opportunity. A dangerous one. But one I don’t think I can afford to miss.
I stand from where I’m crouched, taking one small step toward that door at a time.
“Liv, what are you doing?” Ian asks in a panic. He lunges forward to grab me, but I’m fully in the light of the doorway, and he shies back away from it.
And my vision is swimming, my eyes water. Searing agony shoots through my brain and I nearly throw up. But I force myself to push through the pain, just for a few moments. I walk out onto the front porch, with no sunshades, in the full light of the morning.
I can hardly see the people around me through the blinding light. Only blurry movements tell me their positions, as well as my enhanced hearing.
“You all deserve answers,” I say, talking faster than I probably should, but I need to get back into the dark. “I promise to give them. Blunt and honest. I call a meeting at Town Hall tonight, eight o’clock. Tell anyone you think should hear.”
Without another word, I dart back into the House, leaning against a wall, my chest heaving as I press through the searing pain and temporary blindness the sun has caused me.
Ian is immediately at my side, checking me over, even though there’s no injury to find.
“You all heard—and saw—the woman,” Luke says, his own shock apparent in his voice. “You’re not going to find your answers, or justice, this way. Show up at Town Hall tonight and you’ll hear the truth. I catch a single one of you on either Conrath property, you’ll be arrested and you won’t get that one phone call.”
I strain my ears, listening for their retreat. They don’t, immediately. They converse, in shock and disbelief. My name is repeated over and over.
My own legend has begun to be established.
The vampire who braved the light to reveal the truth to the townspeople.
“That was stupid,” Ian says, disbelief clear at what I’ve just done. “Don’t you ever dare do something like that again.”
“Since when did I ever listen to you, Ian?” I chuckle, relief flooding through my body as my vision slowly begins to return. “That isn’t going to change now that we’re engaged.”
He lets out his own annoyed laugh, shaking his head, just before he presses his lips to mine, just once.
This morning, while we were all eating breakfast and waiting for Lexington to finish sweeping the laptop we found, the sound of a shattering window from the upper floor brought out the red eyes and fangs. It was followed just a minute later by another crash from Markov’s bedroom.
Sheriff Luke McCoy showed up just a few minutes later, sirens blaring, pounding on my door.
A young boy of only ten years old walked to school early. He was found just as school was starting, puncture wounds in his neck, blood everywhere. He’d been chained to the flagpole, his newly acquired fangs snapping at the teachers, his glowing yellow eyes searching for his first meal as a newly-turned Bitten.
Ten years old.
Silent Bend went after Elijah because of a vampire child. Something so unnatural and so horrific. Such an innocent life, turned into something they cannot control. Elijah was blamed.
Now it’s my head they want on a stake.
This was a bold move. One that could easily get me offed without the army having to raise another finger.
But I will fight fire with fire.
RATH PARKS THE CAR ALONG the curb, and I look up at the steps leading into the town hall with nervousness. There’s a lot more people here than I expected. I can hear all the voices already echoing from inside, and there’s still a dozen people walking up them to go find seats.
“I’ll admit,” Ian says as he reaches across the seat and takes my hand, “this scares me to death. But only partial truths have been whispered about for too long. It’s time everyone was given the story straight.”
I nod, a swarm of angry hornets flying around in my stomach. Opening the door, I get out into the warm air and the dying light. Ian goes to the trunk and pulls out a huge, heavy duffle bag. Rath joins at his side, grabbing the second one.
Together, the three of us walk up the steps, and my enhanced eyes pick out the individuals hidden in the shadows. Danny, on top of the building. Christian around the corner, hidden, almost invisible, in the bushes. Leigh blending into the crowd as a civilian.
Anything could happen at this meeting. The townspeople could listen to us, could believe the truth. Or they could ambush me, try to kill me before anyone hears a word I have to say. But my House isn’t going to let anything happen to me. If they have to take Henry’s approach to their mob tactics, they will.
No matter how I begged them not to.
The burn in my eyes immediately dies away as we step foot into the foyer, following behind the individuals who surely do not realize who is behind them. Down the hall we go, and finally, we break into the ballroom where Jasmine once held an annual party in which she let her followers feed off the attendants.
Rows and rows of chairs are set up, and there’s probably forty people residing in them. A podium is set at the front of the room, and a short row of chairs sits off to the side. At the end of the row sits Mayor Jackson.
I haven’t seen him since the day I rescued Cameron from his house, where Jasmine was holding him hostage. They’d been feeding off of the Mayor, she and her Bitten, nearly killing him.
The man has every right to hate our kind, and it’s so obvious in the way he looks at us, that he does.
Our presence brings silence to the room, but many of them shift, grabbing hold of hidden guns, sliding out stakes in not so subtle ways.
Ian swears under his breath, his eyes darting around the room, searching for exits and ways to defend us if needed.
The air catches in my throat, my chest is tight. I’m actually scared. Scared for myself. For my House members. But more so, scared for the humans here. If it comes to a fight, they don’t stand a chance against us with their slow reactions and weak bodies.
“Alivia,” Mayor Jackson says as he stands. He does not, however, extend a hand to shake mine. “We are all very eager to hear your address—and make judgments based upon what you have to say.”
The message is clear: if they don’t like what they hear, they will try to kill me.
“Then, I hope we can all keep our heads level and civil,” I say. My throat feels dry.
Not good.
We walk to the front of the room, and Ian and Rath set their bags to one side of the podium, on a table, so that they are in view. And now that the crowd has gotten over the sight of me, their focus shifts to Ian.
“So it’s true,” a
man whispers. “He’s one of them.”
“Heard he died in December. Thought talk of him roaming around town were just ghost stories,” another woman says quietly.
They have no idea we can hear every word being spoken.
My eyes scan the room, and pick out so many familiar faces. Fred, looking very conflicted. The owner of the grocery store. A few of the construction workers from my housing project. Others I’ve only seen, but had no one-on-one contact with.
A few more bodies float into the room, and the hand on the clock on the back wall slides to point to eight o’clock. The room goes quiet, and it’s as if they collectively hold their breath.
My palms sweaty, I step up to the podium, Ian to one side, Rath to another. They do not sit. They stand close to my side, hands folded in front of them, ready to grab weapons at the slightest wrong movement.
“Thank you all for coming tonight,” I begin. “I know doing so must have been done with…conflicted feelings.” The air grows heavier, so heavy I can hardly breathe. So heavy, I hear many of them stop breathing.
“I’ll be upfront,” I say, raising my chin, standing just a little straighter. “I will not keep up pretenses and let talk in the dark continue. I am a vampire.”
A few gasps float through the air, harsh words and curses pass their lips. But truly, most everyone here does not look surprised.
“My father, Henry Conrath, was also a vampire,” I continue. “As was his brother, Elijah, who was hanged for a very similar crime that happened over one hundred and forty years ago.” I swallow hard. Sharing these facts is not easy. And it isn’t going to make life any easier. “You need to be aware of a few facts, in case you do not yet know.
“There are three kinds of vampires,” I continue, not losing any momentum while I have their unwavering attention. “There are the Born. Those of us whose fathers were other Born vampires, who conceived through a human mother. You see him standing before you: Ian Ward is a Born.”
Eyes shift to Ian, but he doesn’t waver under their harsh stares, the questions they’re begging of him with their eyes. He stands just a little taller, shifting slightly closer to my side.