by Laken Cane
I should have been terrified. I knew I should have been.
But I wasn’t.
The street was well lit and completely silent. Not even a dog barked. I stood in the cold, listening, watching for movement, and after a few minutes of nothing, I walked to the back of my car.
The rusty trunk lid groaned when I opened it, reluctantly exposing the contents within. I cringed at the noise and darted a look around, but the village remained silent. Unaware. Very possibly afraid.
That could work for me, but then again, cops were bound to be keeping an eye on the place. Not only that, but terrified, angry humans would be sleeping with guns.
I dragged a dusty Kevlar vest from underneath a box of tools, shrugged off my coat and fastened on the vest, then put my coat back on.
I grabbed a couple of stakes and shoved them into my belt to join the other two. Two small vials of holy water followed, then a knife, which I stuck into a coat pocket. I always wore a silver cross around my neck, but I donned an extra just in case. I also wore a silver ring on the middle finger of my right hand. A thin cross stood out in sharp relief on the silver. It would be immensely satisfying to punch a vampire in the throat with that ring.
I left the gun in the car. Killing vampires would be applauded. Killing a human—even accidentally, as I went on some sort of death wish vendetta, would land me in jail.
I slipped across the street and around to the back of the dark building, my heart beating hard and fast. The air grew heavier the closer I got to the scene, and the fine hairs stiffened on the back of my neck. I could feel him…not him, exactly, but the lingering horror he’d left behind.
Amias.
It was a familiar feeling, and not one I would ever forget.
When I finally stood inside the yellow tape, my flashlight playing over the broken, bloody ground, I calmed a little and my mind began to clear.
I wasn’t sure what I’d hope to find but all that remained were footprints from law enforcement and stains I didn’t care to look at too closely.
I flashed the light over the back of the building, into the distant woods, and then back to the ground.
Amias had been there. He’d killed the woman. His scent hung heavy in the air, and his presence was strong.
Maybe he was still there.
Somewhere a couple of blocks over, a dog began to bark, and just that quickly, terror shivered through my body. I clicked the light off and backed toward the building. I was vulnerable. Exposed. If I wanted to take out vampires, I’d have to stay alive to do it.
As my mind filled with doubt—or common sense, rather—I slid the flashlight into my pocket, then grabbed two of the stakes.
Amias’s wasn’t the only presence I felt.
Amias wasn’t the only vampire I would kill.
I shook my head as red agony lit my brain on fire, giving me the worst headache of my life. My stomach churned with the pain of it, and my quiet, agonized groan slid out into the still air.
Someone was there with me.
I felt him.
It.
Vampire.
Of its own accord, my mind opened and reached out through the haze of pain, unfurling like a ribbon into the darkness, searching the night. I lifted my nose to the air and began sniffing; tiny, quick inhalations that pulled the scents into my brain. I stopped, stunned when I realized what I was doing.
Adrenaline stormed my body, and I was ready when the vampire came rushing from the shadows toward me. I clenched my teeth and held out the stakes, as though he might be stupid enough to impale himself upon them in his hurry to get to me.
It wasn’t Amias.
He hissed and was right there, right in my face, and the back of my head slammed against the brick behind me as I recoiled.
Even more pain exploded in my head but I didn’t hesitate. I lunged with the stakes, grimly satisfied when I felt one of them lodge in his flesh. His scream was not loud, but it was…distressed.
He was not terribly old, this vampire. How I knew that, I couldn’t have said, but his youth was like the taste of something green and fresh and steaming on the back of my tongue. I gagged and jerked a vial of holy water from my pocket, striking with the other stake at the same time.
Seconds, that was all it took, because with the adrenaline coursing through me, my movements were swift. But he was a vampire. Though vampires weren’t as strong and fast as those in fiction, they were still extraordinary, and my second stake hit nothing but cold, empty air.
A master was faster still, and crazy strong, but this vampire was no master.
He had not killed Carrie Alden—that woman’s death lingered, covered in the smell of a master vampire. Of Amias.
No, this guy was no master, but he was powerful and he was fast, and he was far from finished with me.
And he was hungry. Starving. He had a certain scent, as well. He reeked of disease. Just like the vampires who’d attacked on Thanksgiving Day.
He was sick and full of rage, an unthinking and deadly monster.
I realized I was about to die two seconds before he barreled into me, knocking the stake and vial from my grip and slamming me into the building.
I bounced from the brick to the ground, my breath whooshing from my lungs, and I began to wheeze an almost silent laugh at my predicament. I was hysterical.
Or I was psychotic.
He fell on top of me, his weight insubstantial, as though he were merely a bag of hollow bones. He plunged his fangs into me, right above my collarbone. The teeth entered my flesh and kept going, like a lidocaine shot to the roof of the mouth.
My entire left arm was affected immediately—I could feel it, but I couldn’t move it. It lay there, pulsing with pain, frozen.
Paralyzed.
I was going to die.
Funny how the thought didn’t scare me.
Scared or not, my instinct for survival kicked in, and I began to struggle. I grabbed his face with my right hand, and my thumbnail popped through his eye. I dug and pinched and shoved, but he barely grunted, and he did not stop sucking the life from my body.
I pulled my hand from his face and fumbled at my belt, where I had two more stakes. I would have reached for the extra vial of holy water but my coat was twisted beneath me, hiding the pockets.
My mind was going dark, calm and hazy as he pulled the blood from my body. Weaker, slower, and almost resigned, I still managed to slide the sharp stake from the loop on my belt.
I lifted the stake high and brought it down hard and fast, plunging it through his bony back, straight into his heart. “Please, God,” I cried, weakly.
I’d had no idea it would be so easy to stake a vampire.
His death was undramatic. He was gone immediately. One second he was chomping on my flesh, pulling my blood into his mouth, and the next he just stopped moving. But as I shoved him off me, trembling like a feather caught in a fan, his body began to shrivel.
I struggled to sit up and then scooted back against the wall, slapping my pockets for my flashlight. By the time I found it and clicked it on, the vampire resembled an enormous earthworm that had been left in the sun, shriveled and gray.
I pressed my good hand against my mouth, holding back dry sobs, unsure now that it was done. I’d killed the killer. Now what?
Then my light flashed over a figure crouched not six feet away, and I screamed. Because the vampire I’d killed wasn’t the horror. The vampire I’d killed wasn’t the terror.
But Amias crouched in the darkness, studying me, and there was the fear.
There was the nightmare.
Chapter Four
I hadn’t learned Amias’s name for eight months after the Thanksgiving Day attack. One night he’d simply appeared and stood in front of me, shuddering and sick, and told me who he was.
“I am Amias,” he’d said. “I am your master.”
I’d lost my shock beneath the fury of my rage, and that had been the first time I’d discovered that trying to hurt Amias would
hurt me.
But right now, I was too spent to fight. Too hurt by the fangs of the vampire I’d just killed.
“Shhh,” Amias said, as though I were screaming. “You must listen to me now. I need you.”
But all I could see was my sister’s blood-spattered face, and all I could hear were her screams before she died.
I welcomed the rage that grew inside me, and I leapt like a mad thing, an unthinking animal, clawing the air with empty hands. He moved almost casually, but still too fast for my depleted body, and I fell to a heap upon the ground where he’d sat a second earlier, watching as a young vampire nearly killed me.
I jumped to my feet, agony streaking through every part of my body, panting with rage as I sniffed the air and found him, then leapt at him once again.
He didn’t move that time. He grabbed me, spun me around, then pulled me against his body. His arms fastened around me like a vice, squeezing the breath from my lungs. He bore me to the ground, and as I sat on his lap, caught in his arms, he wrapped his legs around mine and I could not move.
I gave voice to weak howls of rage, terror, and pain, and I couldn’t remember how it’d felt before he’d created those emotions inside me.
The vampire I hated above all else held me in his arms.
And I couldn’t do a thing about it.
My heart distended with a sort of terror and dread I’d never felt before—not even when he’d attacked me, not even when he’d killed my family. This was something more.
Something worse.
Because beneath the hatred, beneath the agony, and beneath the sorrow, an unthinkable sort of joy sprang to life. I belonged there, somehow, restricted, taught, and mastered by the vampire.
That vampire.
“No,” I screamed, but my denial was a wheeze of expelled breath, loud only in my mind.
“I made you.” His murmured explanation slid into my ear, through my brain, and down into my soul and finally, I understood.
He’d made me.
“I’m a vampire?” I cried. “I’m a vampire?”
“No, Trinity.” And his voice comforted me because it was impatient and irritated. “Not a vampire.”
I’m not a vampire. Of course I’m not a vampire. I don’t need blood. I’m not a parasite. I don’t have vampire strength and speed and—
“You are just not the same. You carry some of me inside you, and that gives you certain…advantages.”
I would have spat on him but I hadn’t the strength. “Advantages.” And I knew that even if he couldn’t hear my scorn, my disgust, my hatred, he could feel it.
As I’d felt him.
“You killed the woman,” I accused.
“Yes.” Then he added, “To end her suffering.”
I stiffened in surprise at his ready admission. “Why did you kill my family?” Because that was really all I cared about.
That was all I would ever care about, surely.
He sighed. “I am a vampire.”
“So?”
“I cannot fight certain things as you have fought them. It took me two years to completely break free of the poison inside me. It took you mere months.”
Three months. The months I’d spent in the hospital, unaware. Unresponsive. Torn apart. That’s how long it had taken me.
“I don’t know what that means,” I said, my voice dull and tired. I couldn’t sustain the rage when I was so beaten. So filled with pain. I couldn’t win. Not against him. I couldn’t bring back my family. I couldn’t make it so the attack never happened.
“I can feed you,” he said, bringing me back from the edge of unconsciousness, and I began to fight once more. But my fight was not enough.
He squeezed me so tightly I couldn’t breathe, and when I thought I would die from suffocation, he eased his hold and continued to speak.
“I can feed you,” he continued, “though it may only upset your stomach. I will allow you to recuperate on your own. There will be pain.” He hesitated, then put his mouth close to my ear. “You are growing stronger. I am proud of you for surviving the sick vampire.”
“Fuck you,” I whispered, or tried to whisper.
“Sleep, Trinity, and heal. We are not finished. Do not attack me again. I am tired of your useless rage. The next time we meet, you…”
His voice faded as I sank down into comforting layers of unconsciousness, and some small part of me prayed that I would never awaken from that sweet sleep.
I woke up—sort of—to Angus swearing as he grasped me under my arms and dragged me from the backseat of my car. There were only flashes afterward. His scent, warm and comforting. Lights, thumps, yells. Voices.
And then, as Amias had predicted, there was pain as my body fought the wound above my collarbone, the blood loss, and something else…the vampire saliva, maybe, that coursed through my veins? I had only Amias’s bite as a comparison, and it felt like that. Only somehow, it was changed.
My mind cleared abruptly, though I had no idea how long I’d been out of it.
“—hospital,” someone said, her voice hard and angry.
“No,” Angus replied. “It will go badly for her if we involve outsiders.”
“Badly for us,” someone else said.
I opened my eyes. “I’m okay,” I said, as much to assure them as to assure myself. I was okay. I moved, flinching at the stiff soreness of my body. Nothing woke up screaming, as it had earlier—I briefly remembered crying out at a pain that seemed unending and unendurable—and I groaned with relief when that particular agony did not reappear.
I stared at the circle of concerned faces above me, then pushed myself into a sitting position. “Where am I?”
“My house,” Angus said, his voice terse, his brows low, eyes stormy. Angus was very, very angry. “What the fuck happened to you, Trinity?”
Miriam stood beside him, her own emotions hidden beneath the brightness of her pretty façade, and beside her stood…
“Rhys?” I murmured, surprised. He and Angus weren’t exactly pals. “Why are you here?”
Rhys Graver watched me, his quick black eyes impassive.
“I brought him,” Angus replied when Rhys remained silent. “I thought you were dying, Trin. I ask you again. What the fuck happened to you?”
I kept my stare glued to the unreadable Rhys. “What are you?” I asked.
A smile, there and gone, lifted his lips. “Nonhuman,” he replied. Nothing more.
“You were bitten,” Miriam told me, and smoothing her skirt, sat down beside me. “But not just bitten for blood. Your wound is—was—torn and gaping, as though a dog attacked you.”
I reached automatically for my neck, pressing the thick bandage I found there. It was only then, when I caught a movement against the wall, that I realized the golem was in the room as well.
I gathered the sheets in my hand and pulled them a little higher on my chest. I wasn’t naked, but Clayton made me feel as though I were.
“Tell us your story,” Miriam encouraged, gently.
I ran my dry tongue over even drier lips. “Can I get some water?”
“Clayton,” Miriam said.
He detached himself from the wall immediately and went to do her bidding. I flushed, uncomfortable. “Don’t do that,” I told her.
Her brows rose. “What?”
“Don’t order him around on my behalf. I don’t like it.”
She shrugged. “Stop delaying, honey. Tell us what happened.”
I blew out a breath. “The woman on the news.”
“The one killed in New Gravel?” Angus asked. “What about her?”
I kept my gaze on Miriam’s. “I went there, to where it happened.”
“You really are insane,” Angus roared. “Why the hell would you do something that fucking stupid?”
And I looked at him then, confused. He thought I was insane? Was that the general consensus among the supernaturals? “I’m not insane,” I whispered, but something dark trickled like slick oil through my mind.
Was I?
Miriam patted my hands. “Of course you’re not.” She shot a glare at Angus. “Keep your mouth shut, you moronic beast, and let me talk to her.”
To my surprise, he dropped his angry stare from mine, shamefaced, and gestured at her. “Go on.”
Clayton slipped into the room and gave Miriam a tall, icy glass. She grasped the straw and guided it to my lips, and I drank long and deeply. The water filled my mouth, cleansing it, and gushed down my throat and through my body, and I widened my eyes in surprise. Nothing had ever tasted as amazing as that icy water.
My throat began to burn from the coldness and at last, I spat out the straw and allowed Miriam to set the glass aside.
I put my fingers to my throat, still lost in the taste of that water, and they all watched me silently. When I looked at them, I saw something in their faces that made me almost afraid.
“What is it?” I asked.
Miriam touched my cheek, bringing my attention to her. “Nothing, Trinity. Continue, please.”
I folded my hands in my lap. “I killed the vampire who attacked Carrie Alden. I killed him.” Suddenly vicious, I repeated it yet again. “I killed him.”
Angus took a step back. “Trin.”
I wasn’t sure why he sounded so sad. The killing made me happy, and confident, and proud.
“Dead?” asked Miriam, quickly, shooting him another warning look. “How do you know?”
“Because he dried up like a raisin and he didn’t move again,” I told her. “He looked like the husk of a worm when I was done with him. He was dead, Miriam. I can promise you that.”
The four supernaturals looked at each other with shock and…wonder, maybe. Or maybe I was misreading everything.
I was sick, after all.
Then they turned back to me, and even the golem looked suitably impressed. I’d done something no lone human woman should have been capable of doing—I’d killed a crazed, murderous vampire, and I’d killed him with a stake and a prayer.
Rhys finally decided to join the conversation. “You gave a vampire the true death.” He didn’t sound like he was convinced.
I leaned back against the headboard, tired, sore, and suddenly, I was ravenous. “True death? Obviously, anyone can stake a vampire. Anyone can kill a vampire. I just proved that. Angus.”