E.V.I.E.: 13 Slayers, 13 Missions

by Lexi C. Foss

  I folded my arms. “I can agree to that.”

  Then he said, “Good night, Alex.” I blinked, and in that fraction of a second, he had faded away. Curiously, I approached the spot where he’d been standing and found nothing but empty road.

  “Why do they always do this shit?” I grumbled.

  The walk home seemed longer and colder than usual. I zipped my jacket up as high as it would go and rubbed my hands together. As I blew into the hollow of my cupped palms to warm them, I saw a faint glow emanating from underneath my sleeve. The skin on my wrist tingled. I pushed the cuff up over my forearm.

  The jewel set into my bracelet gleamed softly. Not a whole lot, but enough to cast a weak circle of light. I ran my finger over the band. The delicate metal hummed beneath my hand. My feet stopped moving.

  I looked over my shoulder at the empty street. It would not have surprised me to see Damien standing there once more, watching me with his ghoulish yellow stare. I had the overwhelming sense that he wasn’t telling me everything he knew. His cryptic statement ran in lazy circles in one ear and out the other, over and over. You lost what you were looking for.

  But what was I looking for? Suddenly, I had a feeling Damien knew.

  The dreams I had that night were ominous and dark, full of nebulous, shifting shapes and indistinct voices. They sank into my subconscious like ships beneath waves as soon as I awoke, leaving me to grasp at straws while the sun poured into my room. I couldn’t help thinking of Damien then, hunkered down somewhere the light wouldn’t be able to reach.

  Then I shoved the image aside. He had already taken up far too much of my mental space to be afforded any more just because we had spoken. Much to my annoyance, however, it was quickly evident that he would be a tough nuisance to shake from my head.

  “A Leclair…” Rhys trailed off when I called. “I should have known.”

  “Known what?” I picked at the egg and toast I’d made for breakfast. Nothing about this case had been simple, even from the start. I braced myself for the next big thing.

  “I’m sending you some required reading,” Rhys responded. “Take a look as soon as you can. Now, if possible.” He paused. “And if it turns out there is a relic, please, for the love of all that’s holy, do not let him beat you to it. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.” I was bemused by his sudden firmness, but I had learned not to question Rhys when he spoke that way. “Do you think that’s what we’re dealing with here?” My phone dinged, heralding the arrival of Rhys files.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.” He sounded genuinely worried. “Read the documents I sent you. I think we might be in for a hell of a ride.”

  He hung up without waiting for an answer. “Good,” I deadpanned to no one. “This is exactly what we need.” Sighing, I navigated to the attachments she’d sent. They were scans of some old papers, the text handwritten in ink. And no sooner had I glanced at the first image than my blood turned to sludge in my veins. The phone clattered to the tabletop.

  The paper carried a list that was faded but still mostly legible. I scanned its length in a daze before my eye returned to the top, where a title had been inscribed. Contents of One Relic Vault – E. Leclair.

  As a Brighton slayer, I had been told for years that relics were scattered to all corners of the earth, and that they needed to be collected and kept out of harm’s way. It had never occurred to me that there might be a family of vampires trying to do the same.

  “Damien, you sneaky son of a bitch!” I slapped the tabletop, making my coffee jump. No wonder he had seemed so interested in me. We’d been at odds the entire time. And now that he had my name in his pocket, he was free to confirm who I was beyond a shadow of a doubt. Once he did that, the game would be afoot.

  I had to make sure I wasn’t caught completely off guard. The stakes were higher than I had ever realized.

  8

  Damien

  What I remembered most about the slayer after our first meeting was the color of her hair. It reminded me of blood, but sweeter somehow, not so harsh and violent. She had worn it long and free-flowing, a striking but reckless choice. At any moment during our conversation, I could have seized her by those thick magenta locks and used them to expose her slender throat.

  I didn’t, of course. My family’s name had been sullied by years of ruthless power-chasing, but I was no barbarian. I had the privilege of living at the peak of our underworld reign, and so could see better than most all the ways in which the Leclairs had gone wrong. Were my ancestors tyrants and killers? Well, maybe. Was I about to strike down a girl whose only ambition was to talk to me? Absolutely not.

  I would never say I wasn’t tempted. She had come close enough that I could hear the blood coursing through her veins. Like I said, it would have been easy enough to spill, and to kill a slayer might have won me some merit at home. But she was far less compelling as a pretty corpse. Something about the life in her eyes grabbed hold of me and refused to let go. Who was I to deny her another chance to impress me?

  It was a tough thing to admit for a very long time, but I always had a soft spot in my heart for the slayers and their ilk. The affection was bizarre, and perhaps misguided on my part, the way we so often come to admire things that can only mean us harm. The slayers and their practically nameless organization were our lifelong enemies—a truth as deeply ingrained as the color of the sky. To express any doubt would have been considered the highest form of familial treason, punishable by immediate exile.

  Up until the moment I met Alex Brighton, these flights of fancy had been brief, purely incidental. Every so often, I would see a slayer and have my curiosity piqued, but not in a serious way. She was the first one for whom I felt a genuine, instantaneous fascination. Why that was, I couldn’t have said, precisely.

  She was very forward, almost brash, in her dealings, a trait which I admired, although it amused me. Too many of her colleagues moved timidly among us and could not act on their convictions without being hampered by fear. This girl, Alex, appeared to have no such problem. Her strength of mind was to be commended, at the very least. I wanted to speak with her again, to ask if she was afraid of me. Did she know that I could kill her? Did she care?

  I kept my thoughts to myself as I stayed hunkered down in my room at the manor, waiting out the hours of wretched sunlight. The sun was by far the most inconvenient aspect of my condition, especially when a week-old hunger gnawed my insides like a rabid animal.

  But the thought of emerging to feed after what had recently happened in town was distasteful enough to temporarily quiet the voice in the back of my mind that kept needling for blood. We all knew the police had their guard up, that they’d be looking for strange figures skulking about in the night. A quick dispatch of a single unfortunate victim was one thing; not even I could hope to bring down a squadron of officers unnoticed. Not that the law was much of a threat in Langley to begin with, but still.

  The entire Leclair clan was rankled by the incident at the festival. I had received my share of pointed questions and suspicious side-eyed looks from those who noticed I was gone that Saturday. My father in particular, our venerated patriarch, voiced his veiled displeasure.

  “You’d best be watching your step, boy,” he’d warned one evening, on the rare occasion that we were the only two crossing paths in the corridor. His eyes, more grey than gold with age, bored sternly into mine. “If you should trip and fall, you’ll find no allies here waiting to catch you.”

  I nodded, fully aware that I wasn’t the one who had anything to be concerned about. “Yes, sir.” He kept his gaze trained on me for a long time, holding me to that spot. No Leclair dared to walk away from my father. I stood in silence and looked back at him. When he finally left, it was without another word.

  So, family tensions had been on the rise. My own suspicions mounted with each hour I spent turning the scene from the festival over and over in my mind. I had not seen Caleb arrive or depart, only witnessed what I assumed was the a
ftermath. He was the sole other whose whereabouts I could definitively link to the scene. We had been in that area together minutes before the killing occurred. And I had just happened to lose sight of him.

  Unlike some of my brethren, I had never been delusional regarding the nature of our kind. Despite our somewhat more noble bearing, the Leclairs were beasts of the night like any other. In some ways, the prestige within our history made us colder, meaner, more prone to acts of judgement and brutality. I had witnessed these traits in Caleb before, and I thought I had prepared to acknowledge them again.

  Nonetheless, my heart sank to see his name come across my ringing phone. I paused for a moment, then answered. “Hello, Caleb.”

  “I need you to do me a favor.” Typical Caleb, demanding right out of the gate. This time, at least, he followed up his request with a measure of politeness. “Please. It’s important.”

  “Sounds like it.” I stretched out on top of the bedspread. “Tell me more.”

  “Don’t be a dick about this, Damien. I’m asking for your help.” Caleb’s voice had an unusual edge, on the verge of desperation. He persisted. “There’s no one else I can go to. No one I can trust.”

  I furrowed my brow. This level of pleading, of borderline groveling, was new. Caleb sounded as if it pained him just to be speaking the words. “I’m listening,” I said slowly.

  “Okay. Good. Thank you.” He sucked in a deep breath. “I need you to hold onto something for me.”

  “What kind of something?” Caleb was notorious among the clan for running a little wild across a very thin line. He liked to dip his toes in mortal vices from time to time, in spite of—or perhaps because of—the danger in the game. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t two seconds from sinking up to my neck in his latest ill-advised misadventures.

  If only I had known what he was about to say.

  “It’s…well.” Caleb sort of fumbled around for an answer. At long last, he gave up and sighed. “It’s a relic, Damien. Don’t tell Father.”

  I sat up. “What?” Immediately, my mind began to race. He hadn’t been lying about the damn thing after all, or could he have just gotten lucky? “Where the hell did you—”

  “Where do you think?” he burst out. “I’ll give you one goddamn guess.” There was a pause, during which I could imagine him holding his head in his hands, the phone tucked between shoulder and ear. “Look. In the interest of honesty, I’m going to own up, but only to you. The hit at the festival was me. I did it. I just…” He trailed off helplessly. “I knew he had this thing on him, and I wanted it real bad. That’s about as simple as it gets, right?”

  It took me several moments to find my voice. Then I said, “You didn’t have to drain him, Caleb.” That was the sticking point for all of us. Not the death. Not the taking of an innocent life. No matter how innocent the prey, the predator must eat to survive. No, it was the utter absence of subtlety. He could not have been more obvious if he tried.

  “I know!” Caleb’s tone took on a tinge of near hysteria. I wondered how much of the past couple weeks he had spent wrestling with his demons, being relentlessly haunted by the grim specter of the murder scene he had wrought. “Shut up, Damien. I know. I was weak. I let the hunger get the best of me.” He stopped talking long enough to gather his composure. “None of that matters now. I’ve gotta get this thing out of Oak Harbor.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re under scrutiny already.” I shuddered to think of the hoops I might have to jump through to get Caleb out of his latest batch of hot water. As Leclairs, we had to stick together, and I had no intention of abandoning him if he truly needed help. But he had a singular talent for making things harder than they needed to be.

  “No.” Caleb cleared his throat. “I hope not. Either way, I can’t keep it here. It’s not safe.”

  On that point, we agreed. Oak Harbor was a double-edged sword for us. Under the right circumstances, it could be a stronghold. At other times, it was more like living in a fishbowl, surrounded on all sides by mortal men. If Caleb slipped up, there was no telling what disaster might ensue. We could be forced to flee from our ancestral home.

  “Here’s the deal,” I told him. “If you can get it to me, I’ll hang onto it. No more, no less.”

  “And you won’t tell Father,” he prompted. “Right?”

  I ran a hand through my hair. “And I won’t tell Father. Unless you do something else really, really stupid.”

  “Whatever,” Caleb snapped. And then, “Thank you. I wouldn’t ask you to do this if I didn’t feel like I had to.”

  “Don’t worry,” I replied. “I wouldn’t agree to it unless it was obvious you had no choice. You know what a risk this is. For both of us.” The act of keeping a secret from our father was one of utmost rebellion. I had done it before only rarely, and never with something so significant. But I understood his motives. The instant the relic’s existence was revealed, he would take it away and order it to the vault for safekeeping. Caleb would never lay eyes on his relic again, no matter what it was.

  “I’ll bring it as soon as I can get away for a few hours,” Caleb told me. “In the morning, when I know the old man is asleep. Leave your windows unlocked.”

  I rubbed my hand across my face. “Fine. Be careful. I won’t bail you out if you get caught.” Shades of my father echoed in my words. I chose to ignore the similarities.

  “I don’t expect you to,” Caleb sniffed. “Oh, shit. I have to go. I’ll see you soon.” The line went dead in my hand. Such an exit was par for the course with Caleb, and it left me reflecting on how little I knew about the artifact he was going to deliver. The damn thing could be a bomb for all I knew, or stolen, or marked for collection by any number of pesky bounty hunters.

  But the truth was, the details made no difference. The relic had already fallen into his hands; nothing I said would have made him cast it away. The easiest thing to do now was simply to uphold my end of the bargain, whatever consequences might arise. Sooner or later, I knew Caleb would get what he deserved.

  9

  Alex

  I couldn’t sleep. As the days continued to pass with no movement whatsoever on the Mystery Weekend case, I ran around like a madwoman, collecting everything I could find on Damien Leclair. The documents Rhys had sent were mostly records of various encounters between the slayers of the Org and the Leclair bloodline, and they did not paint the family in a very flattering light. The Leclairs of yore had been ruthless, brutal, literally bloodthirsty predators who never thought twice about instilling terror in the streets. According to the Org, the total number of their victims remained unknown.

  After reading all that, it was hard to believe I’d spent at least fifteen minutes within arm’s reach of the favorite son. But what struck me the most was how deeply their roots were entwined in Washington soil. The Leclairs were more than the dream of the local vampire crop. They were akin to a dynasty. And rumors had been flying for generations that they had a whole hoard of relics stashed away somewhere, far from the prying eyes of enemies and mortals.

  I had to know what they wanted with all of those artifacts. Surely preservation was not high on their list of priorities. Just imagining so many relics in one place, without proper maintenance, made me nervous. No one understood their potential better than me, after all. I reached down and absently turned the bracelet on my wrist.

  That piece of jewelry was the reason I became a slayer. It was fairly nondescript to the untrained eye; an unbroken band of elegantly shaped, pure silver, adorned by a single white stone. Willed to me by my grandmother when I was thirteen, that bracelet had not come off in over a decade. I wasn’t even sure if I could remove it at this point. We had grown together, the bracelet and I. And it had given me strength beyond anything I’d dreamed of.

  I did not want to think about what a relic of comparable power might do for a supernatural wielder. An army of nightwalkers sprang to mind, their speed and strength enhanced by magic artifacts. In a word, it would be a catastrophe.r />
  “I want to confront him,” I told Rhys. “Like, I want to meet with him again and call him out about this secret relic stash they probably have. Because that’s really not okay with me.”

  “Be patient, Alex,” he told me. “If the relics exist, they may not be stable, and we could do a lot more harm than good by running headlong into a bad situation. All attempts to broker a deal, or some kind of exchange, between the Leclairs and our organization have proven ultimately unsuccessful. Perhaps, however, a more personal liaison would do the trick.”

  “If you want me to seduce him, just say it,” I answered. “Honestly, I would consider it. We cannot let them have that much control.” My statement was meant to be joking, but even as I made it, I knew I was at least a little bit serious. Damien possessed a maddeningly tantalizing intrigue. I wanted to know more about him, family tree notwithstanding.

  “That’s a bit of a drastic measure, don’t you think?” Rhys was half smiling audibly through the phone. “I was going to suggest you try and build some sort of rapport with him. See if he’ll open up to you. His behavior is strangely lenient for a vampire of his status, almost passive. It could be a key weakness.” He hesitated, thinking. “At any rate, I believe sustained contact would be beneficial, as long as you’re smart about it.”

  “Right.” My mind flashed back to the training I had received at the very start. “Never turn my back.”

  “That’s right,” Rhys said approvingly. “And keep your intentions under wraps as much as possible for now. The time for honesty may come, but if you can figure out a way to engineer a meeting with as little room for questions as possible, I think you would have an advantage.”

  I grimaced. “I don’t know about that. Pretty sure he’s got me tagged as a slayer.” Every move Damien had made seemed calculated. He was either a man with a constant plan, or extremely good at faking it. Then, suddenly, a brand new thought popped into my head. “Oh God, what if he’s tracking the murderer too?” The last thing I needed right now was a dose of competition.