Hunter's Edge

by Shiloh Walker

  Her eyes glittered with a queer light. His slowed heart skipped a few beats, sped up a as they stared at one another. Then, abruptly, she shoved him away and said, “You better go. Dawn isn’t too far away.”

  Chapter Three

  The alarm blared into the silence, the hard, driving sounds of classic Aerosmith blaring from the speakers. Rolling onto her side, Angel Pierson smacked at the snooze button and she ended up knocking her iPod off the docking station.

  “Shit.” Eyes gritty with fatigue, her entire body aching from head to toe, she rolled upright.

  The iPod lay face down on the hardwood floor, numerous little dings and scratches on the shiny silver back attesting to just how often she subjected it to such treatment.

  Angel was not a morning person.

  There’d been a time when she’d loved mornings and sunrises, but it was so long ago, it was almost like another life.

  Hell, it was another life.

  A life with Kel. The way her life was supposed to be. Like a mirage, she saw the memory of old visions flicker before her eyes. A happy life. One where she married the man she loved, the only man she ever would love.

  That life was a fairytale now, something that would never happen. She didn’t want another man. She didn’t want to fall in love, even if she could. She’d spent her life alone and she was just fine with that. Even if it meant growing old alone, because nothing was worth risking the agony she’d experienced when Kel disappeared. Nothing.

  Besides, deep inside, in a place that went even deeper than what she felt in her heart, she knew that she was only meant to fall in love with one man. Trying to make any sort of relationship with another when Kel was all she could think about, how fair was that?

  For years, she’d deluded herself into believing that maybe one day, Kel would come back to her. But that had been just another fairytale.

  He’d been officially declared dead five years ago and his case remained unsolved. The few clues had been worthless to the police, a blood trail that police dogs had followed into the woods a good five miles from Angel’s childhood home, and then the trail went cold. The dogs had searched the woods for a good twenty-four hours trying to find a trail, but there was nothing.

  Inside her house, there’d been plenty of physical evidence that had given the cops hope, but most of the blood had come from her or Kel. She’d learned later, months later, that there had been trace evidence, most likely from the intruder, but somehow every last bit of it had disappeared from the lab, leaving the cops empty-handed.

  No eyewitnesses—not even Angel, because she couldn’t remember much of anything from that night. Neither had her step-siblings or the girl who’d spent the night with Lindsey. The three kids had slept through the entire attack, waking in the morning with no memory of anything.

  Angel’s own memories were so vague, so unclear, they hadn’t been any help. Memories of fear. Memories of pain. Then Kel’s face. Waking in the morning and feeling…something. It wasn’t that he had felt gone, exactly, but she couldn’t feel him the way she’d always been able to, either.

  It had been that feeling that had lulled her into believing Kel would come back to her, that he’d show up someplace, hurt…but alive. But the first week passed, then the second…by the third, she’d fallen into a fit of depression so severe, she’d ended up hospitalized over it.

  The night Jake had found her, he had no idea how close she’d come, no idea that when he knocked on her door, she’d been standing in the kitchen, holding a knife and admiring the way it glinted under the light, wondering how it would look if she pressed it to her wrist and slashed.

  Blood… It called to her and she’d been obsessed with seeing how it would look trickling down her skin, how it would smell, how it would feel.

  When she wasn’t thinking about blood or fighting a deep inner rage, she was caught up thinking about Kel. Thinking about him hurt so much, she’d been willing to turn to anything, just to get away.

  Even her compulsive obsession with blood had been better than the pain. But then, like it had just been waiting for her, that obsession got stronger, stronger, and eventually, it overtook her thoughts. She couldn’t make herself quit thinking about it.

  It had started when Kel disappeared.

  Months later, her obsession with blood had damn near caused her to slit her wrists. Not so much to kill herself, she didn’t think…at least not at that moment. But to see the blood.

  She dreamed of it, both awake and asleep. She dreamed…vivid, consuming dreams of blood, thoughts and needs that felt so alien, intruding on her, overtaking her, overwhelming her until they were all she could think about, all she could see. She’d wake craving the taste of it and with every passing day, she drifted farther and farther away from sanity.

  It was nothing short of a miracle that she’d come back.

  By the time she had finally gotten herself steady, Kel’s case was all but dead in the eyes of the law. It hadn’t been officially closed then, but with nothing but dead ends, Angel had known. Even without the cops coming right out and saying so, she’d known.

  A rash of violence had plagued Greenburg for the two days following Kel’s disappearance. Another teenager nearly died of blood loss after something attacked her and tried to rip her throat out. Outside of town, the police found the body of a dead hitchhiker.

  But after those two days, it had all stopped.

  Just like her life, it seemed.

  A cold, wet nose brushed against her bare calf and she looked down to see a pair of soulful brown eyes gazing up at her over the rim of a blue plastic food dish. “Hey, Rufus,” she murmured, reaching out to scratch the dog behind his ears.

  Rufus was a big, ugly mutt, but as lovable as the day was long. She spent many a night cuddled up against him, her face buried in his thick fur as she cried herself to sleep. He was also a present from her current employer.

  Jake Saunders.

  Sometimes she wondered why she tortured herself like this, working for the father of her dead lover. It wasn’t like she couldn’t find another job. A better-paying one. It wasn’t like she needed the heartbreak.

  But he needed her.

  Kel was gone, and less than two years after Kel had disappeared, Meredith had been killed. In the past twelve years, the man looked like he’d aged fifty years. He’d just turned fifty-five a month ago, but he looked like he was in his seventies. Frail, stooped and bent.

  After a debilitating stroke two years ago, he’d retired from the church where he’d preached for nearly thirty years. The stroke kept him from driving, but not from walking, not from talking.

  Not from hoping.

  Being face-to-face with that hope almost every day was destroying something inside Angel, in what little remained of her heart. But she couldn’t turn away from Jake. She owed him her life, as pathetic as it was, because he’d reached her just before she lost herself completely.

  Even though it was a lonely, miserable life, it had to be better living it as a rational—or mostly rational woman, instead of locked in some mental facility. Or dead.

  Angel was too stubborn to let herself contemplate how much easier things would be, how the pain would have stopped long ago if Jake hadn’t pulled her back from the edge. She might not love her life, but it had a purpose.

  Even if that purpose was just caring for Kel’s dad.

  All in all, it was as good a reason to go on as anything. Jake needed help, and Angel would give it. Because he was Kel’s dad. She couldn’t have walked away from this any easier than she could have stopped loving Kel—dead or not, it didn’t matter. She still loved him.

  Still dreamed of him.

  Still cried for him.

  Still hurt for him.

  Because she loved him so much, she knew she couldn’t walk away from his father. For as long as Jake needed her, she’d be around. Kel wasn’t there to take care of his dad, but Angel was. So she would.

  Driving him to the store, to the doctor’s offi
ce, helping him with his physical therapy, transcribing his dictated notes onto the computer. Whether or not Jake would ever try to publish the long, rather sad story of his life, she didn’t know.

  But telling it was therapeutic for him. She knew that.

  She just wished it was as therapeutic for her, plunking out details about Kel’s life, from his birth to a death that came way too early. Pair that with the fact that Jake still had hopes that Kel was alive, that he’d come back—shit, it hurt.

  Rufus whined and nosed her leg again. Sighing, Angel muttered, “Yeah, I know.” Shoving out of the bed, she shuffled to the bathroom.

  It wasn’t even seven in the morning, way too early for her to want to be awake. But if she stayed in bed too long, she’d never make it to Jake’s before the old man decided to try his hand at making breakfast again.

  She shuddered, recalling the last attempt. Since the stroke, Jake had a problem with short-term memory. He would start breakfast and then wander off. It wasn’t until the bacon would burn, the biscuits turned to charcoal and every smoke detector in the house was going off that he’d remember he’d left the oven on.

  The last time it had happened, she’d walked into the kitchen with Rufus just as a grease fire was starting. Thinking about how close Jake had come to setting his home on fire, Angel had made the decision to start taking care of breakfast, as well as lunch and dinner.

  Sundays tended to be her only days off. God love them, the women’s committee at Jake’s old congregation had settled into a routine where one of them would come for Jake in the morning for breakfast and then church, followed by lunch and usually dinner.

  You should come with us sometime, Angel. It would do you a world of good.

  No, thanks.

  Angel believed in God, but she completely lacked Jake’s steadfast patience. After losing her dad, then Kel…then Meredith, watching as Jake grew old, sick and feeble, Angel decided she was too pissed off at God to consider stepping foot inside a church.

  Not to mention that half of the women there had some freaky idea of trying to pair Angel up with the young preacher who had taken over Jake’s position. Seth Roberts was a nice guy, pretty nice to look at, but he left her cold.

  Every man did.

  With a flick of her wrist, she turned on the shower. As steam started to billow out, she stripped out of the T-shirt and panties she slept in. She climbed into the shower and lifted her face to the spray, let the water sluice over her and wash away the cobwebs.

  Cold. That pretty much described how she felt damn near all the time. The only time she felt warmth was in dreams she couldn’t quite remember. Even now, with the hot pulse of water beating down on her, she was chilled.

  What she wouldn’t give to feel warm and safe again. It was a comfort that had been denied to her since awaking in the hospital to find Kel’s parents at her bedside, watching her with tearful, hopeful eyes.

  She’d dashed those hopes when she told them she didn’t know what happened, that she couldn’t remember the attack, or anything about Kel. She couldn’t explain the blood loss, she couldn’t explain her bruises.

  Her attack was another mystery because she’d been admitted to the hospital for massive blood loss, treated for blood loss—responded to that treatment—but there hadn’t been hardly a mark on her. A couple of punctures at her neck, but nowhere near the jugular and certainly not deep enough to explain the blood loss.

  She didn’t have any answers about her attack or about what had happened to Kel.

  He’d tried to save her. She didn’t need the memory to know that. He’d tried to save her from…something…whatever or whoever had attacked her and it had gotten him.

  Because of her, he was dead. Cold, lonely misery was the least she deserved.

  Slumping against the shower wall, she wrapped her arms around her body and started to rock. “Kel…” Sinking down to the floor, she huddled there and whispered his name again.

  Images that she couldn’t quite make sense of flashed before her eyes. Someplace dark, the pulse of music throbbing, a woman’s face—

  Blood.

  Her mouth watered and for a few moments, the bathroom faded away and she was someplace dark. Some place warm. The taste of blood filled her mouth…

  Outside the shower door, Rufus barked.

  Jerking herself back into awareness, Angel shoved to her feet and hurriedly washed her hair, her body. The spray of water went cold before she finished but it didn’t matter. She was already so chilled it wouldn’t make a difference.

  Nobody knew the bizarre hallucinations that had plagued her after Kel’s death had never completely gone away. Back in the black days that separated her old life from the life she lived now, those dark, awful days plagued by inhuman urges and hungers, the hallucinations had seem too vivid to not be real.

  Now they weren’t so strong, but the fascination was still there. She’d wake in the night to the sound of her own heartbeat, or at least it seemed that way, so painfully aware of the sound. She could be walking through a store and realize she was staring at the throats of the people around her, thinking about the rhythm of their pulse, the warmth of flesh.

  Mindful of how hypnotic those unwanted thoughts were, Angel had taken to wearing a thick rubber band around one wrist. When she realized she was daydreaming about blood, almost running through the woods, chasing after some unknown prey, she’d snap the rubber band. That small, sharp pain helped her clear her head, helped her focus.

  There were days when she’d have red welts on her wrist from it.

  It had been really bad the past few days. Seriously bad. Even the sight of somebody’s throat was enough to have her mouth watering. She’d promised herself last night if it got worse, she was going to make an appointment. She’d stopped going to therapy years ago, but when she found herself this close…

  Oddly enough, though, this morning, it was better.

  Easier.

  Her mind seemed more like her own as she stepped out of the shower and went to inspect her pale, wan face. Her eyes were puffy from her crying jag, but that was nothing new. Sometimes she could go days without crying.

  But then others…

  Time heals all wounds.

  “Not in my book,” she muttered. Time hadn’t healed her.

  She’d never quite managed to get her appetite back after Kel had disappeared and she was still reed-thin, too thin. The ache in her heart hadn’t ever gotten easier to handle and even the years she’d spent taking antidepressants hadn’t helped.

  It was like she just wasn’t capable of letting go.

  And after twelve years, she didn’t expect that to change.

  Chapter Four

  Age 32

  The cool air drifting through the open window dried the sweat on his body. It wasn’t his—but Phoebe’s. Vampires didn’t sweat. They also didn’t get cold too easily. They never got hot. He did like the warm feel of Phoebe’s small, delicate form plastered up against his cooler body.

  “Happy Birthday,” she whispered, her voice soft, drowsy.

  A faint smile curled his lips. “I don’t count birthdays any more,” he reminded her. He’d told her that the first time she’d asked him about his birthday, and the second, and the third…and when she’d finally snooped in his wallet and found the fake ID he carried, she’d asked him if that was his real birthday.

  Pretty much every Hunter had a fake ID. They came in handy. They tried to keep the facts as close to their own personal data as they could, and when somebody at the enclave had gotten the fake ID for Kel, they’d used his birth date…minus ten years. There was no way he could pass for somebody in his thirties. He’d be lucky to pass for twenty-five.

  “It’s the day I was born, but I don’t celebrate birthdays,” he’d told her. Birthdays were for the living…not dead men walking. And no matter what Phoebe said, that was how he saw himself.

  It didn’t have so much to do with the vampire crap, legends of the undead or any of that shit. At
least not as much any more. He just felt dead inside. He didn’t look forward to the beginning of a new day, or the end of one. He didn’t look forward to feeding, he didn’t look forward to sex, he didn’t look forward to life.

  He didn’t have a life.

  Unless he was on the Hunt, speeding down the highway on his bike, or tearing up the sheets—literally—with Phoebe, he felt dead inside.

  It wasn’t really even Phoebe who made him feel alive, either, and she probably knew it. It was the way they pushed each other, hovering just on the edge of sheer madness, the way they used pain to bring that false sense of life.

  After nearly a year of this, Kel had managed to stop feeling so guilty every time he gave in and came to her. She’d become his regular feeding companion, or as much as he’d let himself have one, although he still never came over more than once a month. More often than not, he had to force himself to do it even then, although once he got here and she put her hot little hands on his body, urging him on, he did grow a bit more enthusiastic.

  Kel was still young enough as a vamp that he needed to feed once or twice a week if he wanted to keep the hunger under control, but those feeds were quick and anonymous. Finding a lonely woman in a bar, buying her a few drinks, having a few dances and then coaxing her into the shadows. One thing about Phoebe was that time he spent with her was enough to keep his sex drive under control.

  Under control so that he no longer feared feeding as much because he knew his need for sex wouldn’t get the better of him. He wouldn’t close his eyes and pretend he was making love to Angel, and then drown in the instinctive surge of guilt once he’d satisfied himself, guilt over making love to a woman who wasn’t Angel, guilt over using some anonymous woman and pretending she was somebody else.

  They never remembered him come morning. A vampire’s bite healed quickly thanks to the enzymes in their saliva. Although the bite itself wasn’t gone in the blink of an eye, it healed quicker than wounds generally did and a lightly placed compulsion kept the woman from even thinking about the bite, had her hiding it without understanding why until even the faintest mark was gone. Generally, it just took a few days.